It Wasn’t Cannons, It Was Proximity: Speaking of Jeju 4·3 in Boston
By Suyeon Yang (President, Walden Korea, and Jeju 4·3 Memorial and Victims’ Families Association in the U.S. )
It Wasn’t Cannons, It Was Proximity: Speaking of Jeju 4·3 in Boston
By Suyeon Yang (President, Jeju 4·3 Memorial and Victims’ Families Association in the U.S.)
In 2021, after seven years of preparatory work in Washington, D.C., we formally launched in Boston a U.S.-based Jeju 4·3 victims’ families association and memorial organization. We began in a deliberately restrained manner. Before any grand declaration, what we needed first were records and procedures, and programs sized to what a small operational team could carry, repeated consistently and built carefully over time.
Over the past four years, we have sustained annual seminars and memorial services, along with roundtables, educational programming, and public outreach. When people ask, “How far have you come?” I often answer this way: we are not yet at the stage of celebrating “results.” We are still building, one by one, the conditions that allow memory to be maintained socially and institutionally.
The Goal Is Not “Attention,” but Procedure
Our overarching aim is clear: to press the United States to participate in a fact-based process of truth-finding regarding Jeju 4·3, and to move, based on those findings, toward responsible recognition and an apology through accountable public procedures.
This is not an outburst of emotion. It is a task that can be translated into the language of human rights and transitional justice. For decades, Jeju 4·3 was reduced, within legal and administrative speech, to a mere “incident.” Yet the accumulation of official investigations and scholarship has already demonstrated that it involved large-scale civilian casualties and state violence.
Korea’s related special law defines Jeju 4·3 as the armed conflict and the suppression process that unfolded on Jeju Island from March 1, 1947 to September 21, 1954, during which residents’ lives were lost.
The Most Common Barrier in Boston: Not Politics, but the Frame of Imagination
When speaking about 4·3 in Boston, the wall I most often encounter is not “political stance,” but a default imaginative frame. For many American audiences, the word “massacre” tends to be stored as an image of distant killing, bombing, artillery, air raids. So they first ask what weapons were used.
One day, a thoughtful and well-prepared American audience member asked me:
“Were cannons used in Jeju at the time? If so, then children and women could have been targeted indiscriminately, right?”
The question was sincere. What he likely meant was something like this: “If this was truly mass violence, there must have been technical means, and then civilian casualties would have been unavoidable.” He was trying to understand violence primarily as equipment.
I do not want to condemn that interpretive habit. International discourse has often analyzed tragedy through weapons systems and chains of command. But Jeju 4·3 contains a core reality that this framework misses.
“No.” It Wasn’t Cannons, It Was Proximity That Did the Work
I answered: “No.” At least in the records I have encountered, survivor testimony, families’ accounts, and Korea’s official investigations, the central scenes repeatedly point to something other than cannons.
The problem was not weaponry. It was proximity.
Not destruction falling from afar, but death carried out up close. Not anonymous targets, but neighbors in a community where people knew names and faces, where individuals were pulled out one by one, identified, separated, and punished at close range.
That is why Jeju 4·3 is not only a matter of many deaths. It becomes a question of how social relations were dismantled, what forms of fear, suspicion, and enforced silence were installed inside ordinary communal life.
I watched the audience member’s expression shift. A moment of disorientation crossed his face. I remember it clearly, not as guilt, but as the reaction that appears when someone’s default image of violence is shaken.
And in that moment I became certain: speaking of Jeju 4·3 in the United States is not about amplifying sorrow. It is about correcting a familiar translation of violence.
Numbers Matter, But Numbers Alone Cannot Convey Proximity
Numbers matter. But numbers alone cannot transmit that proximity.
Korea’s official truth-finding report, The Jeju 4·3 Incident Investigation Report, confirmed and publicly announced 14,028 victims. Among them, figures have also been presented indicating 814 children aged 10 and under, about 5.8 percent. Meanwhile, estimates of the total scale of loss vary depending on sources and methods, but English-language contexts often repeat an estimate of around 30,000 deaths, sometimes described as roughly 10 percent of Jeju’s population at the time.
Listing these numbers is easy. The harder work is translating what those numbers mean, the texture of life they point to: which homes emptied, which village routines stopped, who survived and what they were forced to keep silent about, into public language that can carry dignity.
Where “The United States” Enters, and Why Accuracy Matters
This is also the point at which the word “United States” inevitably enters the conversation. The story is often split into two simplistic positions: one insists that the U.S. commanded everything, while the other evades responsibility by saying it was purely Korea’s internal affair.
Our demand is neither. What we ask for is a record-based examination of the period when U.S. governance and support structures were in operation, and of the continuities that followed.
Historically, U.S. military government in South Korea, USAMGIK, ended on August 15, 1948, when the Republic of Korea was established and governing functions began transitioning. Jeju 4·3 unfolded and expanded across this boundary between the military government period and the early state-building period.
This is precisely where accuracy is required. What did U.S. authorities know? What policy priorities were operating? What command, training, and advisory systems influenced realities on the ground? These are not agitational questions; they are questions for verification.
And verification need not damage the U.S.-Korea alliance. Properly conducted, it can clarify the human rights standards that an alliance should share.
Procedure Before Probability
Running a victims’ families association in Boston, I often find myself resisting the habit of consuming this issue as political debate. American audiences sometimes ask, “So if the U.S. apologizes, is it over?” Korean audiences ask, in a different key, “Is there any chance the U.S. will apologize?”
Both questions are realistic. But for me, what matters before probability is building procedure and language. Apologies do not arrive suddenly as gifts. Apologies are reached through a system: accumulation of records, formation of a public sphere, protection of victims’ dignity, and institutional commitments that prevent similar violence from recurring.
Speak the Numbers, But Do Not End With Numbers
In that sense, I want this column to do two things.
First, not to leave Jeju 4·3 as merely an island tragedy, but to expand it into a universal question: in the formation of postwar governance, policing, and anti-communist security regimes in East Asia, how can civilians become targets, and through what mechanisms?
Second, not to evaluate commemoration by emotional intensity, but to ground it in precise language and minimally disputable facts. We will speak the numbers, but we will not end with numbers. We will speak of violence, but we will not speak in a way that erases the proximity through which violence operated.
That question, “Were cannons used?” left me with a principle.
When we speak of Jeju 4·3, we must deliver the concrete mechanics of how violence functioned more accurately than any dramatic scene meant to shock the imagination. Not cannons, but proximity. Not technology, but relationships. Not only gunshots, but the architecture of silence left behind after the gunshots.
And the work of dismantling that architecture is…
▪ Why we built this resource ▪
We are families of Jeju 4·3 victims living in the United States. As fellow Americans, we don’t want this history to remain invisible simply because it happened far from here. We built this page to offer a clear, evidence-based introduction to Jeju 4·3 in English—without sensationalism and with respect for human dignity.
Our work includes:
Creating public education resources in English
Publishing the Walden Korea Journal
Fundraising for a Jeju 4·3 Memorial Monument in the U.S.
Sharing a consistent message of peace, coexistence, and respectful remembrance
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