Gold Medalist in ’36 Waited for Reward : Korean Marathoner Won the Race, but He Was Wearing Japanese Uniform

The opportunity to speak with Sohn Kee Chung is the opportunity to hear a lesson in 20th-Century Korean history, and that is what he gave as he entertained guests at his modern sixth-floor apartment in a middle-class part of the city.

Outside, although it was Saturday morning, children who were dressed in uniforms walked with various degrees of enthusiasm toward school for a half-day of studies, and street vendors sold Heinz ketchup, Smuckers jam, Velveeta cheese and other U.S. products, leading one to wonder about the trade deficit.

His wife served ginseng tea and coffee, then put the pots back on the burners because a West German television crew was scheduled to visit later that morning.

This is an exciting time for Sohn, 76, whose athletic exploits have been rediscovered since the International Olympic Committee chose Seoul seven years ago as the site for the 1988 Summer Olympics.

At the invitation of the bid committee, Sohn was at that 1981 IOC meeting in Baden Baden, West Germany, and could not hold back the tears when Seoul was announced as the winner over Nagoya, Japan.

That, he said, was a considerably more triumphant occasion than his own victory ceremony at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, where his victory in the marathon enabled him to become the first Korean to win a gold medal. On that day, it was the Japanese who celebrated and he who returned home feeling defeated.

Sohn’s story transcends sports, entailing the Japanese occupation of the Korean peninsula, which began two years before he was born; the Korean War, which destroyed his home and most of his possessions, and the aching of a country divided, which separated him from much of his family and made him all too aware of how painful it is to be told that you can’t go home again. “Whenever I think about my hometown, I am weeping inside,” he said.

‘YOU MUST ENDURE’

Sohn was born in 1912 in Shinuiju, the last Manchurian Railroad station before entering China and a city now forbidden to him because it is in North Korea.

His father was a peasant, a farmer who also managed a small store when he wasn’t otherwise occupied. “He was more interested in having a drink and a good time than making money,” Sohn said.

But the family’s poverty contributed to Sohn’s development as a runner. He ran almost 2 miles every day to buy bread for his family from a distant market because the store closest to his home was too expensive.

Unable to afford ice skates, he participated in his friends’ winter races on the frozen Yalu River by running in the snow along the bank. In the summers, when his friends raced on their bicycles, he challenged them on foot.

In a chapter about Sohn in “The Games Within the Games,” a book about preparations for the Seoul Olympics, author Vincent Ricquart writes that British and U.S. missionaries were impressed with the young man who could “run so fast in a country where people walked so slow.” For Koreans, the custom of taking each step with dignity signified stature within society.

His mother tried to discourage him from running. She wanted him to concentrate on his studies, but he entered races at his elementary school without telling her. After hearing from others of her son’s talent, she sneaked into a race and rewarded him for his victory with a cherished pair of new socks.

“If you really like to run, do what you must,” she told him tearfully. “But if you begin, you must endure all of the pains to succeed.”

THE NEW WORLD

Sohn also was influenced by a fifth-grade teacher, who often represented the Pyonganpukdo Province in distance races and recognized the young runner’s potential. Sohn could not afford to pursue further education after finishing the sixth grade, but the teacher, who moved to Japan, wrote him letters during the following years, encouraging him to continue running.

The letters also were important to Sohn because his mentor taught him lessons in a subject not broached in Korean schools of the day, lessons about imperial Japan, “the country that stole our country.”

He wrote of the 1895 assassination by the Japanese of the popular Korean Queen Min, leading to the eventual end of the 500-year-old Choson Dynasty; the Koreans’ armed resistance against ever-increasing Japanese control, and, finally, the annexation in 1910 of the country by Japan, which began to dominate every aspect of Korean life--education, religion, agriculture and industry.

But Sohn’s mentor also wrote that Japan represented the “new world,” and that if he wanted to achieve success as a runner, he would have to do it through the Japanese system.

Sohn traveled to Japan when he was 16, the fare paid by his teacher, and worked as a waiter, but the long hours left him too spent to train. He returned home six months later.

His next trip to Japan, four years later in 1932, was more rewarding. By then, his running accomplishments were recognized throughout the province, and the father of a friend paid Sohn’s tuition to the Yang Jung High School in Seoul, widely known for its track teams.

Sohn felt awkward in the classroom, since he was starting seventh grade at age 20, but he was liberated while running. In his first appearance for the school, at a prestigious road relay race in Tokyo involving 20 high schools from Japan and Korea, Sohn led Yang Jung High School to victory.

HUMBLING THE JAPANESE

If not necessarily applauded, the Koreans at least were respected in Japan for their distance running. Two of the three runners who represented Japan in the marathon at the 1932 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles were Koreans. Kim Eun Bae finished sixth, and Kwon Tae Hu was ninth.

They believed they might have fared better if they hadn’t followed the instructions of the Japanese coach, Seiichiro Tsuda, who also ran in the race. He told them to run ahead in an attempt to lure the other runners into a fast pace, and that he would stay behind until everyone else was exhausted and then bolt ahead of the field to the finish line.

Against their better judgment, but bound by a sense of teamwork, the Koreans carried out the strategy. It didn’t work. Tsuda finished fifth. Kwon passed out at the finish line, waking up in the hospital to learn that Tsuda was blaming the Koreans for his failure.

When the Olympics ended, the embittered Kwon refused to leave with the Japanese team, remaining in Los Angeles and enrolling at USC.

But he stayed in contact with the man he considered his successor as Korea’s premier marathoner.

“He sent me letters many times to advise and encourage me to run the marathon in order to humble the Japanese pride,” Sohn said.

Sohn set the world record in November, 1935, running the 26-mile 385-yard race in 2 hours 26 minutes 42 seconds, and was favored to win the marathon the next year that would determine the Japanese team for the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin.

In an attempt to prevent more than one Korean from making the team, Japanese officials told Sohn, the obvious favorite, that he would be selected if he finished second or better but that fellow Korean Nam Seung Yong, must win.

The Koreans devised a plot of their own. Sohn set a furious pace, dragging Nam along with him, then slowed near the finish line so that Nam could pass him. Nam finished first and Sohn second.

Travel to Berlin for the Japanese team was an ordeal, beginning two months before the Olympics on a ship from Tokyo to Pusan on the southern tip of the Korean peninsula, then switching to a train through Manchuria and the Soviet Union to Berlin. The trip lasted 12 days in the height of summer, and there was little water fit to drink.

Sohn recalled that when the athletes tried to exercise at the railway station in Moscow during a stop, Russian government officials, still sensitive about their defeat in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05 and sensing the oncoming World War, ordered them back onto the train, accusing them of espionage.

In Berlin, the team was met by the Japanese ambassador to Germany, who demanded to know why there were two Koreans representing the country in the marathon. Team officials told him that the team was not set, that the first four runners from the trials would run an 18-mile race 10 days before the Olympic marathon to decide which three would compete.

Sohn said that the Japanese were so determined to leave one of the Koreans off the team that they instructed the better of the two Japanese runners to take a shortcut and finish first. Japanese officials denied the allegation, but it mattered little because Sohn still won and Nam finished second. When the Japanese runner who was believed to have cheated crossed the finish line in third place, Nam slapped him.

“The general atmosphere was not favorable,” Sohn said, certainly an understatement.

KITEI SON

If Sohn could have read the German newspapers, he would not have been pleased.

First, he would have been offended by the name they called him. They referred to him as Kitei Son, which is the Japanese version of his name.

Then, they questioned his world-record time of the previous year, wondering if perhaps the course had been short. Although they listed him among the contenders in Berlin, they did not consider him the favorite.

That distinction belonged to Juan Carlos Zabala, the Argentine who won the gold medal four years earlier in Los Angeles. In the absence of a German contender, he became a local favorite when he moved his training headquarters to Berlin several months before the Olympics.

As 51 marathoners from 27 countries approached the start line Aug. 9, a day on which the temperature reached a 10-year high of 94 degrees, Sohn decided to follow Zabala’s pace. That thought evaporated as quickly as the morning dew.

“He ran a dreadful speed,” Sohn recalled in his autobiography, “My Fatherland and My Marathon.”

“I thought, ‘These are marathoners, and they are running like it is a much shorter race. Is the information that I am the world’s fastest marathoner false?’ When I counted from behind, I was No. 1.”

While lagging behind in last place, he began to reconsider his goal. After telling himself before the race that he could win, he decided that he would be satisfied with fifth place, because that was one place higher than another Korean, Kim Eun Bae, finished in 1932.

“With this change of mind, I felt comfortable,” Sohn said. “I decided to run at my own pace.”

After 3 miles, though, so many runners had wilted that Sohn was in fifth place. He decided to make his move 3 miles later, at the 10-kilometer mark, but another runner, Great Britain’s Ernie Harper, using hand signals, advised him against it.

“Slow, slow,” Harper cautioned him.

Sohn pointed ahead to Zabala, a gesture captured in Leni Riefenstahl’s highly acclaimed film, “Olympia.”

But when Harper gave no indication of quickening his pace, Sohn decided to run alongside him. They were not the most compatible running partners because the 5-foot 4-inch Sohn’s legs were so much shorter than the lanky Harper’s. But Harper had a calming effect on Sohn, and, 11 miles into the race, they moved into second and third places.

Zabala still led at the halfway point, but his pace was considerably slower and it was apparent that he was struggling. At 17 miles, he was passed, first by Sohn and then Harper. Zabala fell, got up, tried to continue and finally quit a little more than 2 miles later.

Sohn began to pull away from Harper and ran the final 5 miles unchallenged, except by the heat and the hills. When he entered Olympic Stadium, he heard the roar of the crowd.

“The last 100 meters, it was like I was flying,” said Sohn, whose finishing kick was timed in 12 seconds.

As sports columnist Arthur Daley described it in The New York Times:

“There was no sign of stress or strain on his features as he came into view. His face was expressionless as a marble mask. He looked neither to the right nor the left, having such a singleness of purpose that even the tremendous ovation from the crowd could not disturb him.”

Daley acknowledged that Sohn was Korean-born but referred to him as “the little Nipponese.”

Sohn’s time was 2:29:19.2, an Olympic record at the time, and more than two minutes faster than the time run by Harper, who, despite a blister on one of his feet that filled his shoe with blood, held off the other Korean, Nam, for second place.

But Sohn’s tears of joy soon turned bitter.

As he stood on the victory stand during the medal ceremony, he said that the realization struck him that, in his honor, the Japanese flag would be raised and the Japanese national anthem played.

“It was unendurable humiliating torture,” he said. “I hadn’t run for Japan. I ran for myself and for my oppressed Korean people. I could not prevent myself from crying. I wished that I had never come to Berlin.”

IRON-STRONG LEGS

If Sohn’s victory ultimately resulted in sadness for him, that was not the case in Korea, where children gathered in the streets upon hearing the news and began running in imitation of the national hero.

One Seoul newspaper, Dong-a Ilbo, published a wire service photograph of Sohn on the victory stand but used paint to white out the Japanese Rising Sun on his shirt.

The colonial government suspended publication of the newspaper for 10 months and forced the resignation of 10 employees involved in the incident, including the company president.

The magazine Shin Dong-a, a sister publication to Dong-a Ilbo, published a picture only of Sohn’s legs but escaped punishment because of the editor’s quick thinking.

According to Sohn’s autobiography, the editor said: “When Sohn defeated the world, what did he do it with? With his real bright mind? With his heart? Or with these iron-strong legs? In order to double the effect of the photos, I showed the legs.”

RETURN FROM OBSCURITY

Some historians look to the period of Japanese occupation between 1910 and 1945 as the darkest in Korea’s 4,000-year history. To be sure, relations with Japan have warmed considerably since, but although Koreans might or might not have forgiven, they definitely have not forgotten.

When a Kabuki acting troupe makes an appearance in Seoul at the Olympic Arts Festival, it will be the first time since the colonial period ended 43 years ago that Japanese artists have been allowed to perform in South Korea. Korean government officials emphasize that it will be an exception, not an end, to the prohibition against Japanese music, television shows, movies and other forms of artistic or cultural expression.

Organizers of the Asian Games in Seoul two years ago were relieved when Korean spectators at the opening ceremony greeted the Japanese team with cheers instead of jeers. A recent Dong-a Ilbo poll revealed that only 14% of South Koreans think kindly toward the Japanese.

For the last 52 years, Sohn’s gold-medal performance in Berlin has been a source of pride for Koreans. Considering the hardships he had to overcome to make the team, they believe it was not a victory for Japan but a victory over Japan.

As for Sohn, he vowed to himself on the victory stand in Berlin never to run again under the Japanese flag, and he kept his promise, retiring at 24. He returned to Seoul, got a blue-collar job in a warehouse, helped his wife raise five children and occasionally contributed in the training of other distance runners. Since 1936, Korea’s best finishes in the Olympic marathon were fourths in 1952 and 1956.

Sohn was prepared to live the rest of his life in obscurity until the IOC’s decision to award the Olympics to Seoul revived interest in him. Not only has he become a member of the Korean Olympic Committee and the General Assembly of the Seoul Olympic Organizing Committee, he gets a lifetime pension from the government. In return, he serves in public relations for South Korean sports.

Last year, he told a Japanese television crew that he had signed his name in Korean instead of Japanese in the official signature book that was brought to him in his quarters the day after his marathon victory. The network dispatched the crew to IOC headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland, to confirm the story, and found that it was true.

“I wouldn’t be able to summon up any courage at all to relive this moment if I had signed in Japanese,” Sohn said, relaxing in his favorite easy chair. “That was the only way I could express my self- respect.”

In its official records, the IOC still identifies him as Kitei Son of Japan. But he has received satisfaction in other areas of the world. Two years ago, in a ceremony attended by Sohn at the Culver City Veterans’ Memorial Building, a bronze monument honoring Olympic marathon champions was changed to reflect his proper name and country.

A few days later, Sohn was in Berlin to receive a priceless 2,000-year-old Greek warrior’s helmet that was promised to him in 1936 for winning the marathon. But after the IOC ruled that it would violate rules of amateurism for him to receive it, the helmet was donated to the Charlottenburg Museum in Berlin.

Sohn said that he had forgotten about the helmet until a few years ago while being interviewed by a Dong-a Ilbo reporter. When the reporter asked for a picture of him in the Olympic marathon, Sohn explained that most of his mementos were lost when his home was destroyed during the Korean War.

“I fortunately had one picture, which was of me holding the helmet,” he said. “I didn’t know what it was, but the reporter reminded me that it had been presented to me as a prize. Then, I began to be interested in finding out where it was.”

It is now in South Korea’s Independence Hall Museum, where it is classified as a national treasure, the only foreign artifact to be so designated. After years of negotiations, the helmet finally was awarded to Sohn on Aug. 17, 1986, two days after South Korea celebrated the 41st anniversary of its independence from Japan.