Democratization Movement Kim Ji-ha, author of the poem 'Five Thieves' This article is supported by Kyunghyang Daily News. On May 16, no sooner had the tanks led by Park Chung-hee and his followers crossed the Han River than Ham Seok-heon regarded it as a coup' de tat without any loss of time. He denounced it as an undeniable crime not because "they set foot in Seoul fairly and squarely on broad daylight but because they got there at the point of the bayonet under cover of darkness". It was a poignant voice vented by a conscientious intellectual. The truth is that Park Chung-hee and the younger officers following Park in the military were unquestionably 'the gang of those who turned a deaf ear to the natural law or the voice of people'. In October 1969 when a super legal dictatorship by Park Chung-hee lasted for almost 10 years, a letter from Seoul was sent to Gwangju. Kim Ji-ha addressed the letter to Kim Jun-tae. Both of them were novices who had just made their debut by contributing their poems to a nameless literary magazine. Some 10 letters which had corresponded with literary tyros ever since contained any groping and tension on the eve of a storm ascribable to literary luminaries between lines. The letter was written in passionate tone uniformly and surprisingly, the words "folk arts" and "resistance" stood out. "Any stock or bloodline should be found in a 'form of resistance' amid in folk arts. The way alone is the key to all problems. But it has to transcend the limits to folk arts and the way to go beyond it is can be opened up in a direction which we express dynamically the present social realities, contradiction and diseases, troubles and struggles, criticism and strife, setback and sorrow and so on". If the letter had been disclosed in an atmosphere at that time, nobody could have paid attention to it. Few could predict that the asthetic passions of mere literary youth might lead the Korean society somewhere. However, "resistance" and "folk arts" which had bloomed through 1970s to 1980s spread widely not only to literature and arts, but also to performance arts such as plays and yard plays, as far as pop music and they became a routine genre on campuses, at workers' workshops and on the spot where any demonstration was staged. Free Kim Ji-Ha The ballad 'Five Thieves' appeared in the May issue of 'Sasanggye(Thought World)' in 1970 was not only a flash point of the life-and death Armageddon between the Park Chung-hee regime and the democratic forces but a symbol of the practical spirit offering resistance to an iron-fisted rule. The 'Five Thieves' was a bitter satire on the depravities and corruption of the mainstream group who were dominating the then ruling class such as business giants, assemblymen, high-ranking officials, ministers or vice-ministers and the military generals. The poem sparked an anti-establishment front against the Yushin regime. Due to the poem, Kim Ji-ha was taken into custody on June 20, 1970 on charges of violating the Anti-Communist Act and was released on bail on September 8 that year, which had been a prelude to a long struggle between the democratic and anti-democratic or dictatorial and ant dictatorship camps that lasted over a 20-year period until the Park Chung-hee regime was overthrown by a military coup' de tat. Starting his career as a Weonju Parish planner in July 1971, Kim was booked without custody in violation of the Anti-Communist Act once more by carrying a ballad 'Beer' in the April issue of 'Changjo(Creation)', a Catholic general magazine in March 1972, but he was hospitalized at Masan national hospital by force instead of imprisonment. The poetic imagination of Kim Ji-ha, who resisted by war of words or writing, without any other's help, the iron-handed rule of the Park Chung-hee military dictatorship which had aiming at taking power perpetually through the Yushin regime and Chun Tae-il's burning himself to death were becoming a storm center awakening the intellects and workers of the country to the realities. Kim Ji-ha went into hiding for some 6 months after he announced 'a Declaration on the Situation for Restoring Democracy' for the purpose of abolishing the Yushin regime prepared by 15 names including artist Cheon Gwan-woo, bishop Ji Hak-sun and reverend Kim Jae-jun on November 5, 1973. On April 25, 1974 next year, Kim Ji-ha, who had been arrested at Heuksan Island, the location where a film directed by Ha Gil-jung was shooting, was sentenced to death by an emergency court-martial in violation of breaking Nos. 1 and 4 of the Emergency Measures. The charges of wire pulling or mastermind and instigating a rebellion involving the so-called Democratic Youth and Student Alliance case as well as the Declaration on the Situation drove him to death penalty to extremes. But such death sentence gave Kim another horizon and became energies showering thunderous predictions and courage on the intellects of the day. The pain and despair of Kim Ji-ha in prison were like energy sources supplying power for the anti-establishment front of those days. At last, on the occasion of sentencing him to death in 1974, the seeds of democracy sown underground had begun to sprout on the surface. Aspirations for human dignity and freedom spread to every walk of life such as the intellects, workers, the religious, and journalists bud and any organized resistance movement or something began to offer. Students, professors, the religious and journalists began to join a storm center. There is no naming all the dignitaries or figures at home and abroad who were related to Kim Ji-ha according to his chronology of a storm blown up by him. They included Kim Su-hwan, Yun Bo-seon, Kim Dae-jung, Ham Seok-heon, Yun Hyeong-jung, Yang Il-dong, Jang Jun-ha, Ji Hak-sun, Kim Jae-jun, Mun Ik-hwan, Cheon Gwan-woo, Lee Yeong-hee, Baek Nak-cheong, Hwang Seok-yeong, Sin Gyeong-rim, Go Eun, Kim Byeong-geol, Yeom Mu-ung, Im Jae-gyeong...., Billy Brandt, Jean Paul Sartre, Norman Bailey. That was a roaring current and was like a wonderful mural painting of the day. His folk arts and resistance spirit, not his poem, which touched off a broad intellectual movement in every social field such as politics, education, publication, journalism, religion, was charming enough to shock all the existing cultural paradigms and had also a strong asthetic persuasion. It was the time when Kim Ji-ha had been in department of asthetics at Soul National University that he began to approach an intellectual movement which had groping and seeking to respond the circumstances boiled down to the dependent modern which had no subject hood nor identity, drastic industrialization in parallel and military dictatorship which found a pretext for them. Through 'Study Society for Korean Culture' in which Lee Du-hyeon, Sim Woo-seong, Yun Dae-sung, Baek Gi-wan, Gu Jung-seo were participating with Jo Yun-jae and Jo Dong-pil taking the lead, Kim Ji-ha got the knack of Korean folk arts for the first time. The genre of folk arts which he learned let him contain 'Five Thieves' in a pansori genre but his practice of resistance sent him to torture and prison. Kim Ji-ha's majestic stalk showed us terror of violence and a good example of mental magnitude braving such violence as well. He showed that writing poems was not mere thought or perception but an adventure emitting their whole existence. Kim Ji-ha saw through it certainly that for the internalization of a sorrow of the day, much literariness and mental sternness which modern reason was finding its exit aimed mainly at weakness them, but did not pinpoint the culprits of social contradictions. He found the reason why they were only ideological in the intellectual petit bourgeois character. And a way which he had worked out to tide over it was the very popular art of the conventional age and its practical resistance. He had recourse to asthetics of folk arts to exceed the historical limits in the form of existence which our modern poems had. "To combine the stream of Kim Su-yeong and pansori, critical realist poetry and national popular art is a vital mission of our age, our generation and us"(On April 1, 1070). The point or place which this one sentence should hit is a destined and pivotal experiment which the Korean national literature or intellectuals are expected to undergo in process of future movements. He did not budge an inch backward in confrontation with the Park Chung-he regime from start to finish and he was faithful to the spirit of the times (Zeitgeist) calling for touching a string in contemporary readership's heart. He experimented on genres without a break and immersed himself in finding a whole form and style in our lyric poetry. We can know from his vestiges that such doings let him know his lyric poetry did not express the dynamics of traditional popular asthetics and he craved for a more naked verse style. We can know such fact through works written in poetic notes when publishing 'Castor New Wind'. We can know that his experiment did not center merely on political oppression and lack of freedom but pursued generalization or wholeness. But part of student movement activists denied 'Through Feeling Thirsty" after the May Struggle on May 18, 1980. It was due to the extreme skepticism of the type of democratic personnel 'giving democracy cheers in secret at back streets at daybreak'. The students wanted the type of fighters and they sang 'your pretty breast cut like a tofu (bean curd)...' So he had almost no other way but one. It was to make a long march of thought in search of a more lengthy and essential role. Perhaps he wrote 'Heavy Snowfall" from that perspective but the writing had limits that 'it lacked the spirit of the times(Zeitgeist) calling for touching a string in contemporary readership's heart' and 'it created an unexpected genre not based on the intervention and consensus of readers'. At that point, he finally got out of the focus which had attracted the whole context and literary circles in our movement history for the last 10 years. In such course, he broke down asthetic and political distortions and inertia initiated in the process of dependent modernization after our country's division. His ballads and thoughts did not succeed in part because of their failure to secure a stable genre style but any socially problematic consciousness live to affect continuously. That formed a giant stream of mass cultural movement in the 1980s, caused a debated such as disbanding genres, co-creation and the mass subject theory and made us reflect on our modern genre styles formed with our mass' creative intervention excluded after its introduction from the West. Kim Ji-ha's asthetic and practical energies opened a passage for constructing a subjective and new modernity in this way by passing through all history in the 1970s and 1080s.