It appears Yun Dong-ju was too principled to turn a blind eye to what he saw as the most flagrant injustice in his time: his own people suffering under the control of a foreign country. This has put him squarely in a stance of going against the will of the Imperial Japan, which was one of the greatest military juggernauts in the world. Japan operated with an ambition to take over the whole East Asia, wielding its power as the Asia-Pacific half of the Axis powers of World War II. Standing in the way of such a powerful empire would have meant a certain destruction even to an entire tribe or nation, let alone an individual, and Yun must have agonized under the weight of this predicament. In great distress and having few friends who could help him, it was perhaps only natural for him to turn his eye to Jesus Christ, the archetype who fought such a life-and-death battle, albeit in a vastly different scale. The poem shows, in rather plain words, how the young man desperately sought to draw strength from the model of Christ, knowing all too well that he might have to go the way of the Christ in his own small way, as it indeed came to pass.
Tony's Web
