Japanese Yun Dong-ju Researcher Yanagihara Yasuko Visits Yonsei Title: A Poem Easily Written As night rain whispers outside the window, my little room becomes a foreign country. Though I know being a poet remains a sad fate, But shall I write a poem? … They say life is hard, Then it’s a shame that a poem is written this easily. Yanagihara Yasuko, a Japanese scholar researching Yun Dong-ju’s life in Japan for the past 20 years, has located the Tokyo room rented by the poet, the “little room” of his resistance poem “A Poem Easily Written.” Yanagihara’s discovery of the room lived in by Yun was reported in The Kyoto Shimbun, a Japanese daily, on January 15th. Korean media outlets also picked up the story. “A Poem Easily Written” was composed on Rikkyo University notepaper while Yun was a student there, and the manuscript remains intact today. Yanagihara, who also studied at Rikkyo, explained that he got to know about Yun through the Japanese poet Ibaragi Noriko. He said: “I was deeply saddened to learn that he died in prison in Fukuoka and I wanted to pay tribute to Yun in a spirit of atonement.” Yanagihara is a member of “Finding Yun Dong-ju’s Homeland,” a group of Japanese scholars who study Yun’s life and organize the annual Rikkyo University Yun Dong-ju Memorial event (last year it attracted over 200 participants). During his visit to Korea in late February, Yanagihara said that “many Japanese are interested in the poet Yun Dong-ju, and even The Tokyo Shinbun prints stories about his life and works. The Japanese people have gradually started to learn the truth about their country’s colonial past through Yun’s poems.” He expressed sadness, though, that many “Japanese people are not sufficiently educated about what actually happened during the Japanese Occupation of Korea. I hope that the Japanese can come to terms with this past and embrace peace through Yun’s poems.” A great deal of research remains to be done on the life and works of Yun Dong-ju. The members of “Finding Yun Dong-ju’s Homeland” who joined him on the trip praised Yanagihara as a modest and devoted scholar, a man who possesses “an intense passion for the poet [Yun].”