Lee Soo-hyun’s dream of bridging South Korea and Japan has been kept alive over the two decades since his tragic death despite bumpy bilateral relations.

Lee, a student at Korea University in Seoul, lost his life at Tokyo’s JR Shin-Okubo Station on Jan. 26, 2001, when he attempted to rescue a Japanese man who had fallen onto the tracks. Shiro Sekine, a Japanese photographer, and the man the two tried to save also died.

The 26-year-old, who came to Japan only a year earlier, was studying Japanese and English at Akamonkai Japanese Language School in Tokyo’s Arakawa Ward.

Lee once said his dream was to “connect people” by using Korean, Japanese and English. A teacher remembers him as “a serious and diligent student and a man of great activity.”

Oh Seung-hoon, a 24-year-old from South Korea, is studying at Akamonkai on a scholarship established in 2002 by donations from Lee’s parents and from Japanese volunteers.

“I am here because I like Japan,” he said. “I have talked to Japanese people, and none of them, as it turned out, speaks ill of South Koreans. I think I owe that to Lee’s courage.”

Oh, a fan of Japanese manga, applied for the scholarship to study design and other subjects and hopes to work for a Japanese video game company as a designer or illustrator.

The LSH Asia Scholarship, originally called the Lee Soo-hyun Memorial Scholarship Foundation, offered scholarships to 998 students from 18 countries and regions in Asia between 2002 and 2020. The number of beneficiaries is expected to reach the 1,000 mark this year.

WORN-OUT DICTIONARIES

Nobuko Tanaka, one of Lee’s teachers, retired from Akamonkai, her workplace of 30 years, last spring.

For 19 years on end, Tanaka, 74, made it a rule to take up an article about Lee as a discussion topic in English or Japanese during her class on or around the anniversary of his death.

“He took action solely for the sake of a human life without giving any thought to nationality,” she said. “I hope as many people as possible will draw some lessons from his action.”

Tanaka remembers Lee’s bashful response when she asked about his goals during an English language class in summer 2000.

Lee was good at sports, and the FIFA World Cup soccer tournament co-hosted by Japan and South Korea was only two years away.

“I want to study Japanese intensely and volunteer to be an interpreter during the World Cup,” he said. “I hope to land a job someday that links Korea and Japan.”

Lee started out at a beginner’s level in Japanese, but he made so much progress that an advanced level was well within his reach in only six months. He always had two thick, worn-out Japanese and English dictionaries spread open on his desk.

Shin Yoon-chan, Lee’s mother, could not travel to Japan on the anniversary of his death due to the novel coronavirus pandemic. She had paid tribute at a memorial ceremony at JR Shin-Okubo Station on Jan. 26 every year.

Shin, 70, recently presented a Japanese book about Lee’s life at the Busan cemetery where her son and her husband, Lee Sung-dae, were laid to rest.

In South Korea, a book, the first of its kind, that describes interactions with Japanese people prompted by Lee and his dream has also been published.

“The past 20 years went by so quickly,” Shin told The Asahi Shimbun in a telephone interview. “I feel much less distressed now thanks to many Japanese people, including those who wept with me at the site of the tragedy, those who gave donations for the scholarships and those who continue to write to me. I only have gratitude for them.”

However, ties between Japan and South Korea have only worsened over the two decades, and Lee’s dream will have to wait longer before being fully realized.

“Soo-hyun would grieve if he were to look at the current state of bilateral relations,” Shin said. “What he did is at odds with an ‘our country-versus-your country’ mentality. I want people of both nations to love each other.”

DREAM YET TO BE REALIZED

Junichiro Koizumi visited the controversial, war-related Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo six times during his stint as prime minister between 2001 and 2006, and South Korean President Lee Myung-bak in 2012 landed on one of the disputed Takeshima islets in the Sea of Japan, which Seoul calls Dokdo.

More recently, South Korean courts ordered Japanese companies and the Japanese government to pay damages to wartime Korean laborers and Korean “comfort women,” who were forced to provide sex for Japanese soldiers before and during World War II. Korea was under Japan’s colonial rule from 1910 until Japan’s defeat in 1945.

In fiscal 2019, only 26.7 percent of Japanese said in a Cabinet Office survey that they have a sense of affinity toward South Korea, down from 50.3 percent in fiscal 2001, immediately after Lee’s death.

Some 71.5 percent of Japanese said in fiscal 2019 that they don’t have a sense of affinity toward South Korea, up from 45.5 percent 18 years earlier.

“Soo-hyun’s self-sacrifice generated mutual sympathy, but we have failed to foster that sentiment and ended up with bilateral relations hitting rock bottom,” said Lee Joon-gyu, who served as South Korea's ambassador to Japan from 2016 to 2017. “I feel too ashamed before him.”

Still, cultural interactions have increased between the two countries. South Korean TV dramas and pop music remain popular in Japan, while Japan’s anime and manga have made their way into South Korea.

Another former South Korean ambassador to Japan suggested that citizens can put aside differences over political issues even if governments and other institutions remain apart.

“Most South Koreans have positive feelings toward Japan,” he said. “Boycott campaigns may arise temporarily when they are fanned by politicians and civil advocacy groups and when national sentiment is stirred by events that have to do with wartime laborers and comfort women, for example. But they seldom last long.”

(This article was written by Toshiya Obu and Senior Staff Writer Yoshihiro Makino.)