The Blank in the List

The Dictionary of Pro-Japanese Collaborators contains 4,389 names. Ahn Sang-ho is not one of them.

In August 2026, when an actress spoke fondly of her great-grandfather on television and the name surfaced again, that was the first rebuttal offered. He isn't in the dictionary.

The Institute for Research on National Issues issued a formal statement. One sentence in it is where this entry begins.

The absence of a name from the Dictionary cannot serve as an absolution meaning "there was no collaboration."

The record the institute published

The list in that statement spans eighteen years.

Two of these carry particular weight.

The first is the 1912 Annexation Commemorative Medal — given by Japan to those who had served the annexation. An earlier entry here called peerages and cash grants receipts rather than honours. A commemorative medal is a document of the same kind. It tells you less about what the recipient did than about what the giver was paying for.

The second is Daejeong Chinmokhoe. The institute describes it plainly: advisers Yi Wan-yong and Min Yeong-hwi, president Jo Jung-eung. "A gathering of pro-Japanese elites beyond dispute," functioning "around the time of the March First Movement as an instrument of spiritual and social collaboration, promoting the legitimacy of colonial rule and blunting the will to resist."

Those names are already written down here. Yi Wan-yong appears among both the Five Eulsa Traitors and the eight of 1910; Jo Jung-eung among the eight. The man who was in that room in 1905 and the man who signed in 1910 sat in 1916 as adviser and president of one association. Ahn Sang-ho was one of its twenty-one councillors.

So why was he left out?

The institute's criteria run along two lines: the voluntariness, repetition and continuity of the conduct, and the holding of specific positions within the colonial apparatus — peer, Central Council member, senior official, police officer, army officer, or officer of a pro-Japanese organisation.

The decision on Ahn was this:

On the materials the institute had accumulated at the time of the 2009 publication, his record fell short of the selection criteria, and the compilation committee therefore held his inclusion in abeyance.

Held in abeyance. Not acquitted — deferred. And the reason for deferral was not his innocence but that this was as much material as we had at the time.

Why was the material thin?

The institute wrote that compilation proceeded "amid limited materials and manpower," and that "many individuals remain deferred for want of manpower and sources."

Where that limit came from is already on the record. In December 2003 the National Assembly struck the entire 500 million won research budget. Citizens raised that same amount online in ten days the following year, and donations passed 700 million. With that money, roughly 3,000 kinds of sources were combed into a database of 2.5 million biographical records, from which 4,389 names were drawn.

It is the product of citizens paying, by subscription, for work the state should have done. That such a list has blanks in it is not strange. What is strange is reading those blanks as proof of innocence.

The dictionary is not a finished object

Not a completed result but an ongoing scholarly undertaking, continuing through supplementary and revised editions as sources are found and verified.

Newly surfaced gazettes, newspaper articles and membership rosters are to keep feeding that verification. The eight entries above are precisely such a list, drawn back out now. In 2009 they lay scattered.

The state-certified list of 1,006 is narrower still, confined to the conduct types enumerated in the special act. To be absent from both is to have slipped through two differently woven nets — not to have stood outside them.

What a blank means

Compiling a list looks like the work of filling names in. It is equally the work of leaving blanks. And blanks arise for two reasons: no one was there, or no one could reach that far.

The two are entirely different and look identical on the page. So a list always asks one more thing of its reader: which kind of blank is this?

In Ahn Sang-ho's case the institute answered directly. The second kind. So the only thing his absence supports is this: it was not confirmed in 2009. Nothing more, nothing less.

An earlier entry said the responsibility for leaving things unknowable is ours. It is now possible to say what that responsibility consists of. Cutting the budget. Letting a public subscription fill the gap. And then treating the list so produced as a final verdict. All three are things we did.

Sources

• Institute for Research on National Issues — statement on the Ahn Sang-ho controversy
• OhmyNews — why was Ahn Sang-ho omitted?
• Ajunews — "absence is not absolution" (14 Aug 2026)
• Encyclopedia of Korean Culture — Dongminhoe