Ahn Jung-geun Memorial in Harbin

In 2014, the Ahn Jung-geun memorial was inaugurated in Harbin railway station, China. Its
purpose was to commemorate the Korean patriot who assassinated the Japanese statesman Ito
Hirobumi in 1909, in this very station, as an act of resistance against Meiji Japan’s imperial
expansion. The memorial, constructed with the joint endorsement of the South Korean and
Chinese governments, was objected to by the Japanese government, whose official rhetoric
insisted on Ahn’s criminality from a legal standpoint and rebuked nationalist hostility towards
Japan. This case study traces the controversial history of the 1909 incident in the national
narratives of these three countries, and the contestation of the memorial as situated within East
Asia’s contemporary geopolitical complexities and unresolved colonial past.