Joseon People whom Japanese Envied

Among the Koreans envied by the Japanese during its colonial rule over Korea were marathoner Sohn Kee-chung(손기정) and butterfly researcher Seok Ju-myeong. Seok, in particular, was a highly respected scholar.

Japan’s Mainichi newspaper spotlighted Seok’s visit to Japan in 1941 under the headline “World-renowned scholar of butterflies arrives in Tokyo.” Revered senior professor Esaki Teizo at Kyushu University praised the Korean scholar, saying “He is the most outstanding of all butterfly researchers. No onecan deny the excellence of his ‘Synonymic List of Butterflies of Korea,’ which is unprecedentedly prefect.” Today, compared to marathon hero Sohn Kee-chung, Seok is practically unknown. But why is that he was so applauded by the Japanese even during the times when the rest of the entire Korean population was under Japan’s oppressive rules?


Showing Interest in Biology

Seok Ju-myeong was born in Pyongyang on November 13th, 1908. He grew up in an affluent family. He was even given a typewriter by his mother as a gift, at a time when it was more expensive than an ox.

Seok graduated from Jongro Public Elementary School in 1921 in Pyongyang and entered Soongsil High School. When the students boycotted classes the following year, Seok quit school and transferred to Songdo High School established by educator and independence activist Yun Chi-ho(윤치호). That was the turning point in his life.

At the time, famous ornithologist Won Hong-gu(원홍구) taught natural history at the school. Influenced by Won, Seok began to take interest in nature. In 1926, he became the first Korean student to be admitted to Kagoshima College, one of the most prestigious agricultural schools in Japan. There, Seok gained the favor of Professor Okajima Kinji, who had served as the president of Japan’s Entomological Society, and showed interest in the studies of insects.

Seok graduated from the school in 1929. The next year, he became a biology teacher of Songdo High School where he had attended and began to study butterflies.


Butterfly Research

Seok initially intended to engage in biology-related work. But he became more interested in entomology due to his poor eyesight. He decided to collect butterflies, which was regarded as the first step to study insects.

Fortunately, Songdo High School provided a good research environment. Established in 1906 with the financial support by Warren Candler, Chancellor of Emory University in the U.S., the school was even larger than Waseda University in Japan. It was equipped with a lecture theater and laboratory facilities.

The school had the nation’s best specimen room, lab, storeroom and classrooms in its museum with two stories above ground and one below. There, Seok devoted himself to the studies of butterflies for 11 years. He traveled around the country whenever he had time to collect 750-thousand butterfly samples. During the summer, students from all over the country brought him butterfly specimens.


New Era of Butterfly Taxonomy

In the early 1930s, when Seok started his butterfly studies, researches on Korean butterflies by foreign scholars had already been accumulated for some 50 years. Until then, butterfly researchers collected and examined only a small amount of specimens and then announced the discovery of ‘a new subspecies’ or ‘a new variant’ whenever they found even slightly different forms, and give these new scientific names after their own names.

However, Seok believed that a considerable amount of the foreign scholars’ researches on Korean butterflies was incorrect. He collected incomparably larger numbers of specimens than those collected by foreign scholars and proved that the butterflies that had previously been recorded as specimens of new species or subspecies were actually mere individual variations.

By species, he clarified the range of individual variation and began to eliminate the incorrect scientific names. Previously, Japanese scholars classified 844 butterfly species. But Seok removed many wrong scientific names posted by Japanese scholars and finally classified Korean butterflies into 248 species in [A Synonymic List of Butterflies of Korea] in 1940. That signaled the beginning of a new era of the taxonomy of Korean butterflies.

[A Synonymic List of Butterflies of Korea] was the first Korean book to be owned by the British Royal Society Library, with Seok joining the ranks of the world’s prominent scholars.


Dr. Butterflies

Seok gave numerous new names to butterflies. It’s no exaggeration to say that his life was all about butterflies. The Korean War broke out in 1950, but he did not leave Seoul to protect the 750-thousand butterfly specimens he had collected at the National Science Museum. He was heading to the bombarded museum on October 6th, 1950, when he was shot dead.

It was unfortunate that Korea lost this eminent butterfly researcher amid the chaos of war. Seok would travel all the way to Pyongyang from Seoul to discover a rare butterfly, and such devotion and enthusiasm surprised the international biology community, and Seok is revered as a pioneering entomologist who brought scientific fame to Korea, the small country in the East.