South Korean honored as Indonesian hero

JAKARTA (JP): A South Korean citizen, Yang Chil Sung, who joined Indonesia's independence struggle and died at the age 30 during an armed clash with Dutch troops in West Java on Aug. 10, 1948, was honored as an Indonesian hero on Saturday.

The ceremony to honor Sung at the Hero's Cemetery in Garut, West Java, was led by Brig. Gen. Rachmat Mokoginta, chief of staff of the West Java Military Command, the South Korean embassy said.

In 1942, Sung was forced to join the Japanese forces in Indonesia and to change his name into Yanagawa Shichisei.

After the Japanese surrender in August 1945, he and two Japanese soldiers joined Indonesia's forces to fight for independence. Sung later adopted Komarudin as his Indonesian name.

According to the South Korean embassy's press attache, Chung Bong-Hyup, Sung's real identity was uncovered only after the publication of a book entitled Korean Activity Under The Equator by a Japanese writer, Ushumi Aiko in 1980.

The book said that Yanagawa Shichisei alias Komarudin, who was buried with two Japanese soldiers in the Garut Hero's Cemetery on Nov. 18, 1975, was not a Japanese nor an Indonesian, but one of the thousands of Koreans who had been forced to join the Japanese forces in Indonesia.

Since then, many South Koreans who were in Indonesia together with Sung in the 1940s, as well as officials and businessmen, had lobbied Jakarta to allow for the change of the gravestone and the name of Komarudin into his original South Korean name.

The ceremony in Garut over the weekend was held to change the gravestone and the name on the gravestone at Komarudin's grave to his original Korean name, Yang Chil Sung.

Chung said the ceremony, which was attended by Indonesian and Korean officials, including House member Kim Kwang Soo, and Choi Gye Wol, Chairman of the Kodeco Group from Seoul, was full of emotion due to the presence of 20 Sung's family members and his son Edi Kambey.(vin)