Gwangju Uprising

In August 1997, police responded to an emergency and found a woman unconscious in a pool of blood. Thirty-five meters away, behind a temporary construction wall, her coworker Go Chun-ja lay beneath a zelkova tree undiscovered until the following morning. On the other side of Jeju ...  Show more

On January 24, 2007, a man was stopped at Ansan Station dragging a heavy suitcase that was leaving a fresh trail of blood across the floor tiles. When a station worker confronted him, he claimed the bag just held 40kg of pork. When he wasn't allowed to board the train, he abandon ...  Show more

There were strikes and student protests across South Korea in May 1980. The military government responded with a brutal crackdown in the city of Gwangju and elsewhere striking workers faced arrest and even torture. Heongjun Park has been hearing from one of those strikers, Bae Ok ...  Show more

Park Heongjun takes us back to May 1980, when a strike in the city of Gwangju became one of the most divisive moments in South Korea’s history and led to the imprisonment of activist Bae Ok Byoung. She worked in a factory making wigs and along with other female employees, went on ...  Show more

The final part of our four-part podcast miniseries about the May 18 uprising in Gwangju, South Korea, in 1980 against the US-backed military dictatorship of Chun Doo Hwan. We speak with Kim Yong Ho, David Dolinger and Jeon Yong Ho, who took part in the events, as well as research ...  Show more

In 1968 and early 1969 university students across Japan fought pitched battles with riot police after they barricaded themselves into their lecture halls and went on strike. They were protesting about the poor quality of their education and the inequalities of Japanese society in ...  Show more