Apr 8 03:29 AM US/Eastern
KYOTO, April 8 (AP) - (Kyodo) — A Japanese citizens group called Thursday for searching the trial dossier on a patriotic Korean poet who died in prison during World War II after his arrest by Japanese police on suspicion of participating in an independence movement for Korea, then under Japan's rule.
The citizens group, which says it is a committee to build a monument of poet Yoon Dong Joo, filed the request with the Kyoto District Public Prosecutors Office.
Yoon died in prison in Fukuoka in February 1945 at age 27 after being arrested on suspicion of violating the now-defunct public peace preservation law for writing poetry in Korean in Japan. The law was used to suppress dissenters before and during the war.
The citizens group is planning to build Yoon's monument in Uji, Kyoto Prefecture, some 15 kilometers south of central Kyoto. Yoon's last picture is known to have been taken in Uji.
The group said some of Yoon's poetry works may be kept somewhere as they were seized after he was arrested in Kyoto in 1943.
Naoki Mizuno, an authority on modern Korean history and a professor at Kyoto University's Institute for Research in Humanities, who joined in filing the petition with the prosecutors, told reporters that it would significantly promote literary research if parts of Yoon's works could be found.
Yoon, who was born in former Manchuria, or northeastern China then also under Japan's rule, studied at a predecessor school to Yonsei University in Seoul and then at Rikkyo University, better known as St. Paul's University, in Tokyo.
He is known for writing lyric and resistance poetry against Japan which ruled the Korean Peninsula from 1910 to 1945.
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