The Public Funeral for Lee Sang-jae in 1927 and the Ceremony of National Solidarity

This study aims to clarify why the public funeral(Sahoejang) for Lee Sang-jae in April 1927 was the only successful one among a series of public funerals held for Kim Yun-sik, Lee Sang-jae, and Lee Seung-hoon in the 1920s. Following Lee Sang-jae’s death, the leadership of the Singanhoe headquarters took the initiative in organizing the funeral, intending to represent the entire Joseon society and to portray it as a ceremony conducted solely by Koreans. The goal was to promote national solidarity and invigorate the national movement. Koreans used the public funeral as an opportunity to speak about national issues and to spread messages of the national movement.<br/>Through ceremonies, Koreans fostered national consciousness with speeches, manjang(funeral banner), and banderole, while also sharing emotions of mourning and a sense of national identity. The leaders of the funeral attempted to nationalize the public funeral by performing memorial ceremonies, filming and screening the events. Through these efforts and strong public engagement, they sought to transform the fervor of public mourning into momentum for the national movement. As the sole public funeral of the colonial period, the public funeral for Lee Sang-jae functioned as both a project and process of the national movement. It reflected the flow of the national movement from the mid-1920s, a movement that had been pursued for national solidarity.