The Voice of Korea's Quakers

"War is the most extreme luxury."
Ham Sok-Hon
1901-1989

Mr Ham was often called a Korean prophet or a voice in the desert. His prophecies were not for the future but what he believed to be the will of God. He was like John the Baptist who dies shouting for righteousness. During his almost 90 years he managed to keep to one path, giving helpful advice to the Korean people. He spoke once or twice daily and until he breathed his last. He said, "There is nothing I hope to spare."

Today, to many Koreans, he is known as Teacher Ham. He has noted that in Osan, where he was teaching, he had no access to a big library or reference books and he had to draw data from Korean books that were "given to exaggeration" and Japanese books that were "distorted and disdainful." His writings resulted in his imprisonment by Japanese occupiers. He came to feel that the West Gate Prison in Seoul was his university. After the liberation, the writings appeared as a book, this time with portions added that could not be included in the time of the Japanese censor.

When he began writing he was convinced that Christianity was the single true religion, essentially to be found in the Bible. But in his prison "university" his thinking broadened and deepened. He wanted to perceive things for himself, to have his own thought and faith. The Christian faith was no longer for him the one true religion nor the Bible the whole truth. His attitude was altered by the development of a cosmopolitan and scientific view of the world, He was fascinated with Laotzse, Chuangtse and other Oriental philosophies as well as the Bible but he reached the stage where he feels that all religions can be integrated into one.

Ham Sok-Hon insisted that all social, political and economic problems, both national and international, can be solved if the power of religious truth is applied. He believed that life only became meaningful when it is open to these truths. He proclaimed the purpose in life is to find unity in the midst of diversity. By 1983, Teacher Ham was eighty-two years old, vigorously active, still teaching and travelling. His prison "university" has been revisited by reason of sentences against him in the post-liberation period of dictatorial rule in Korea.

Ham Son-Hon was born at Yongchon, Pyengahn Pukto Province in 1901 and encountered Christianity when Presbyterian missionaries introduced it in his seaside village when he was around seven years old. He graduated from Tokyo Teachers College, majoring in history. Teacher Ham became involved in the "no-church movement" which was the spiritual focus of his life for thirty years. Teacher Ham taught in high school in Korea from 1928 to 1938. He was imprisoned several times by the Japanese before liberation in 1945. When he was released from prison, the Japanese did not allow him to teach. He took up farming and adopted the traditional Korean dress which he still wears. He returned to education when the Japanese left and was acting as a provincial education director in 1945 when the communists took control of North Korea. He soon was in jail again when a group of students protested the communist rule. In 1947 he went to South Korea and encountered Quaker relief workers following the Korean War. In time he became a Quaker, a member of the Religious Society of Friends.

In 1958, during the regime of Syngman Rhee, Ham Sok Hon went to jail again for articles critical of Rhee. His last jail term was in 1979 when he protested military domination of the government following the assassination of President Park Chung Hee. He now lived in Seoul where he was a leader of the Korean Quakers and an inspiration to those who struggled for the achievement of democracy in Korea

He was a religious philosopher and writer all of his life. Except for a period of 10 years as a teacher at the Ohsan Middle School he held no professional position. (Ohsan has often been called the cradle of the independence movement for liberation of Korea from Japan.)  He lived in Seoul, Korea until his death in the 1989 where he received many visitors.  Though widely known as an active lecturer, he once remarked to an interviewer while walking through his flower garden, "How happy I should be, if I could only grow flowers at home alone and quietly."

— Han Young Sang, 1984, and
John A. Sullivan, 1985
(updated by Tom Coyner, 1998)

Full works by or about Ham Sok-Hon found at this web site:
Full text of this interview, "War is the Most Extreme Luxury"by Ham Sok-Hon
"Meditation at Pendle Hill - Dialogue" by Ham Sok-Hon
"Kicked by God" by Sok Hon Ham
"Sok Hon Ham's Understanding of Taoism and Quakerism" by Sung Soo Kim

Updated 5th Month 1, 1999

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