The Late Min Won-sik: A Worker for Unity with Japanese: The Disguised Aegassin By Rodney Gilbert, Peking, March 2.
The inside story of the assassination of Min Won-sik in Tokio on February 20 has just reached Peking through Korean mediums of communication. Min Won-sik was the foremost Korean pro-Japanese propagandist and the seriousness of the loss which Japan suffered when he was murdered in the Tokio Railway Hotel by a Korean dressed in Japanese clothes, is evinced by the fact that Premier Hara and the majority of the Cabinet members attended the funeral ceremonies incidental to the shipment of his remains to Korea.
Min Won-sik's family name was Lo and he was the son of a poor farmer in Western Korea. As an orphan boy he was taken into the aristocratic Min household in Seoul as a servant and was eventually adopted into the Min family, whereupon ho changed his surname. He was subsequently educated in Japan and became such an ardent devotee of all things Japanese that after the annexation of Korea he spent much energy in propaganda among his fellow-countrymen advocating assimilation with the Japanese. In his work he received strong Japanese support and made many powerful Japanese friends. The intensity of the hatred borne him by the revolutionary Koreans was in direct proportion to the esteem in which he was held by the Japanese.
His life has long been in danger and this year when he went to Japan with a petition signed by 3,000 influential Koreans asking for a system of government which would culminate in assimilation—which the revolutionaries of course say was forged—he was closely followed and was tracked to Tokio by Korean agents.
On the evening of February 20 a man who was ostensibly a Japanese of the student class entered the Railway Hotel, was divested of his wooden clogs by the porter, who provided him with a pair of slippers, and proceeded to spend something less than a half hour with Min Won-sik. There was no outcry and no scene, but after the visitor's departure a maid employed in the hotel had occasion to enter Min's apartment and stound him dead' with two knife wounds in the abdomen. The Tokio police immediately arrested more than 80 Korean students but could produce no evidence that would implicate any one of them. There is therefore no clue te the identity of the assassin and while the detectives are on the case the Japanese papers are prohibited from printing any report of the murder.
The average European would regard this as a minor criminal case,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.