For years, South Korean actress Ha Young has spoken proudly about belonging to a family of doctors stretching back four generations. Her great grandfather, she said, had even treated Emperor Gojong, the monarch who ruled Korea as the country struggled to preserve its independence in the face of expanding Japanese power.
Now another patient from her great grandfather’s past is drawing far more uncomfortable attention.
Historical records show that Ahn Sang Ho, Ha Young’s great grandfather, was among the physicians who treated and helped save Yi Wan Yong after a Korean independence activist tried to assassinate him in 1909. Yi survived. Less than a year later, he played a leading role in the process that culminated in Japan’s annexation of Korea.
The revelation has turned what might otherwise appear to be an obscure piece of family history into a controversy in South Korea, where memories of Japanese colonial rule remain deeply sensitive more than a century later.
The dispute can be difficult to understand without the weight that the loss of sovereignty carries in modern Korean history. Americans have their own national story of breaking away from imperial rule, but Korea’s experience took a different course. Korea was already an independent state when Japan progressively stripped away its sovereignty and formally annexed the country in 1910. Japanese colonial rule continued until 1945 and eventually included efforts to assimilate Koreans into the Japanese empire.
That history helps explain why Yi’s name carries such significance in South Korea. He is not remembered simply as a politician who favored Japan. He became one of the country’s most enduring symbols of collaboration because of his involvement in agreements that surrendered Korean sovereignty to Imperial Japan.
Ahn’s connection to Yi emerged in a 1992 study by the late historian Park Young Seok, a former history professor at Konkuk University, according to the Korean History Database maintained by South Korea’s National Institute of Korean History.
On Dec. 22, 1909, Korean independence activist Lee Jae Myung attacked Yi with a knife after Yi attended a memorial service for the Belgian king at Myeongdong Cathedral in Seoul. Yi was seriously wounded and underwent surgery. He remained hospitalized for 53 days before being released.
Park’s research said Yi survived with treatment from some of the leading physicians of the era, including doctors at Hanseong Hospital and Daehan Hospital as well as Park Jong Hwan and Ahn Sang Ho.
The sequence of events gives the episode much of its historical resonance today. Lee had risked his life trying to kill a man he viewed as helping surrender Korea’s independence.
Doctors including Ahn saved Yi. Yi recovered and became closely involved in the events surrounding Japan’s formal annexation of Korea in August 1910. Lee, meanwhile, was arrested after the attack, sentenced to death and executed on Sept. 30 of that year at age 22.
Treating Yi as a physician, however, is not by itself the basis for the broader controversy surrounding Ahn. A doctor providing medical care to a wounded patient is fundamentally different from actively supporting colonial rule.
Other historical records have therefore become more important to the dispute.
Ahn’s name was found on a list of council members of the Daejeong Friendship Association, an organization associated with pro Japanese activities during the colonial era. Records also show that Ahn appeared in an interview with Maeil Shinbo, a newspaper controlled by Japan’s colonial government, in which he promoted Japanese style living and naeseon ilche.
Naeseon ilche was an assimilation doctrine promoted under Japanese colonial rule that sought to portray Japan and Korea as one unified people. Such policies became part of a broader effort to weaken a separate Korean national identity and integrate Koreans into the Japanese imperial system.
The records have complicated the family history Ha Young, whose legal name is Ahn Ha Young, had previously presented publicly. The actress had described herself as a member of a four generation medical family and highlighted her great grandfather’s connection to Emperor Gojong.
The same ancestor is now being examined through a very different historical lens.
Ha Young’s representatives initially said that parts of the allegations concerning her great grandfather’s pro Japanese activities were inconsistent with the facts. The response changed a day later.
On Aug. 11, her agency said it had confirmed that a record listing Ahn as a council member of the Daejeong Friendship Association did exist. The agency apologized for having dismissed the allegation as unfounded before conducting sufficient verification.
The episode illustrates why a family record dating back more than a century can still carry consequences in South Korea. The country’s colonial period is not remembered merely as a distant change of government. It was a period in which Korea lost its sovereignty, independence activists were imprisoned or executed, and questions over who resisted Japanese rule and who cooperated with it became part of the country’s historical memory.
That does not make descendants responsible for the actions of their ancestors. But public claims about an admired family legacy can receive very different scrutiny when historical records reveal another side of that legacy.
For Ha Young, a story once centered on a great grandfather who treated an emperor has now become entangled with one of the most reviled figures in modern Korean history. The physician who was remembered in the family for treating Gojong was also among those who saved Yi Wan Yong before Yi went on to help usher Korea into Japanese colonial rule.
