Park Kyung-won was a pioneering Korean pilot who died in a plane crash in 1933, but she is not entombed anywhere in South Korea. Even her alma mater there won’t talk about the aviator.

In her homeland, Park is still known as a “woman who sold her soul to Japan.”

Park’s short life of pursuing her dreams and facing discrimination in Japan is featured in a video made by Lee Yu-bin, a 23-year-old from South Korea, when she was a student studying in a lab seminar under Ryoichi Matsuno, a professor of media studies with Chuo University in Tokyo.

The video is about 30 minutes long and available for free public viewing online.

Lee came to Japan at the age of 7 because of her father’s work. She graduated from Chuo University in spring after completing the video and is currently working for a broadcasting station in Kyushu.

She said she found similarities between her upbringing in Japan and the life of Park.

Park was born in 1901 in what is now South Korea. Her dreams of becoming a pilot started after she watched stunt flying in Busan on her way to Japan when she was 16.

At that time, the Korean Peninsula was under Japanese colonial rule, and Park traveled back and forth between Japan and Korea to work and save money.

At the age of 24, she was enrolled at an aviation school in western Tokyo.

After seeking financial support from her compatriots, including through an article in Korea’s Dong-A Ilbo newspaper, Park became only the third female to gain a Japanese second-pilot license.

She applied three times to pilot a “friendship flight” from Japan to Manchukuo in northeastern China designed to promote unity between Japan, Korea and the Japanese puppet state.

Such flights traversed the skies over the Korean Peninsula.

Her first application was for a flight project sponsored by the Nagoya Shimbun newspaper, one of the predecessors of today’s Chunichi Shimbun. But it required a first-pilot license, which was available only to men.

The Japan women’s association of aviation picked a Japanese woman, four years Park’s junior, for its own flight program.

On her third try, Park was chosen to pilot a flight to Manchukuo in 1933 for cheering up troops of the Japanese Imperial Army.

Due to foul weather, however, Park’s plane crashed into the mountains in Atami, Shizuoka Prefecture, only 50 minutes after takeoff.

Lee set about making her video three years ago after reading “Koerarenakatta Kaikyo” (Uncrossed strait), a biography of Park written by Mikiyo Kano, a researcher of women’s history, at Chuo University’s library.

Lee herself had a hard time when she arrived in Japan because of the language barrier.

“In a sense, I projected myself on Park, who surmounted difficulties in realizing her dreams in Japan,” Lee said.

She ran into difficulties at the start of her project because relations between Japan and South Korea were again becoming strained over wartime issues.

Park’s alma mater in the South Korean city of Daegu refused interviews and filming.

“I have nothing to say,” Lee quoted the school’s principal as telling her. “I have no idea if Koreans would think well of somebody who pursued a pilot’s career in Japan.”

South Koreans have an aversion to Park presumably because she studied in Japan during the 1910-1945 colonization period.

In addition, the friendship flights were conducted as a symbol of “Japan-Korea-Manchukuo unity,” a catchword that showed off Japan’s hegemony in East Asia.

Lee relied on available documents and testimonies to unfurl the developments that led Park to do what she did.

“I think it was an inevitable choice at the time,” Lee said of Park’s participation in the flight. “Park probably tried to send a message about her dreams to her compatriots by fending off discrimination against women and ethnic discrimination.”

Residents of Atami’s Kami-Taga district, where Park’s plane crashed, have been holding annual services for the aviator beside a memorial monument at the site. Lee accompanied them and filmed scenes of the service two years ago.

The residents braved steep mountain slopes to get to the site, where they offered a can of beer and an orange and joined their hands in prayer.

Lee said she felt relieved to learn that people in the community still remember Park.

In September, her video received the top education minister award in the social education division of the Japan Audio-Visual Education Association’s national contest for self-made teaching materials.

“I hope my work will be used by a broad audience as a teaching aid so both Japanese and South Koreans will learn about Park’s character and the strength of her will,” Lee said.

The video can be viewed on the Matsuno lab seminar’s “Tama Tankentai” website at http://www.tamatan.tv/archives/20210427_post-57/.