On this date in 1932, Korean nationalist Lee Bong-chang was hanged at Ichigaya Prison for attempting to assassinate Japanese Emperor Hirohito.
The would-be assassin under arrest.
Remembered now as a patriotic hero, Lee on January 9, 1932 chucked a grenade at an imperial procession in Japan as it passed the imperial palace’s Sakuradamon Gate — the aptly-named Sakuradamon Incident. Korea at that point had been directly ruled by Japan since 1910.*
Lee’s hand grenade targeted the wrong carriage, and didn’t even kill the occupants of that conveyance — it just injured a guard. A second grenade failed to explode altogether.
Three months after Lee’s attempt, another Korean, Yoon Bong-gil, also tried to murder Hirohito with a bomb. Both men are interred with garlands at Seoul’s Hyochang Park. A statue of our man Lee, poised with a grenade in hand, stands in the park.
* Newspapers in China — also under Japanese occupation — expressed regret that Lee’s attempt had missed its mark; this impolite language helped to catalyze a Japanese show of force later that month known as the January 28 Incident or the Shanghai Incident.
On this day..
- 1614: Magdalena Weixler, "my innocence will come to light"
- 1983: Waldemar Krakos, Dekalog inspiration
- 1796: Claude Javogues
- 1989: Jimmy Chua and his Pudu Prison siege accomplices
- 1783: Jacques Francois Paschal, rapist monk
- 1867: Not Santa Anna
- Corpses Strewn: The Streltsy
- 1698: The Streltsy executions begin
- 1987: Eshan Nayeck, the last executed in Mauritius
- 1707: Johann Patkul, schemer
- 1800: Prosser's Gabriel, slave rebel
- 1923: Susan Newell, the last woman hanged in Scotland
- 1911: Several revolutionaries on Double Ten Day
Yoon did not target HIrohito, but a gathering of Japanese military officials in Seoul celebrating Hirohito’s birthday. He too was sentenced to death and executed in Dec., 1932.
(Correction: it happened in Shanghai, not Seoul.)