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After his mission failed, Rhee stayed in the U.S., went on with his Western education. He got an A.B. from George Washington University and an M.A. from Harvard, then went to Princeton to get his Ph.D. When the dean of Princeton's Graduate School questioned his academic qualifications, Rhee stated that he had studied Latin for one year, which seemed to him to be enough, asked to be excused from the usually required study of German and Greek. Wrote Rhee with ill-concealed annoyance, "Beside my own tongue, in which I am known to be a good writer ... I have a knowledge of Chinese literature, classics, history, philosophy and religion . . . Japanese, English and French are also to be counted as my foreign languages." Rhee was admitted, earned his degree with a thesis on "Neutrality as Influenced by the United States."
In 1910, the year that Japan deposed the Korean Emperor and openly annexed his kingdom, Syngman Rhee returned to Korea as a Y.M.C.A. worker, doing a bit of political agitation on the side. The Japanese, who distrusted all Christians, were doubly distrustful of Syngman Rhee. They assigned as his permanent shadow a police agent named Yoon Piung-hi, one of the most notorious of the "hunting dogs," i.e., Koreans in the Japanese secret service. A specialist in a kind of primitive psychological warfare, Yoon Piung-hi assiduously spread rumors about Rhee. On one occasion Rhee spent the night away from home, sleeping in a small room he had rented at the Y.M.C.A. "The next . morning," Rhee relates, "my father came to the [Y.M.C.A.] building with tears in his eyes and asked everybody he met, 'Do you know what happened to my son? They have tortured him and broken his legs. Yoon Piung-hi told me.' "
Yoon Piung-hi's activities made it clear that it was only a matter of time before the Japanese would decide to imprison Rhee, perhaps to dispose of him permanently. In 1912, with the help of missionary friends, Rhee got permission to leave Korea for six months. He sailed for Hawaii, settled down as a leader of the territory's small Korean colony.
Confucianism & a Coffin. Though gone from Korea, Rhee was not forgotten. Many years later he wrote, "Raised in a Confucian family, I was naturally a man of peace." With the coming of World War I, Rhee's Confucian pacifism, reinforced by Christianity, led him to subscribe wholeheartedly to Woodrow Wilson's idealistic visions of a world without violence. Rhee became convinced that a passive uprising in Korea would win his people recognition both from America and from the League of Nations. In 1919 resistance leaders who had remained in Korea met secretly in Seoul to plot a revolt. Swayed by secondhand reports of Rhee's views, the conspirators distributed to every village in Korea a copy of a Korean Declaration of Independence and a set of orders:
"Whatever you do
"Do not insult the Japanese
"Do not throw stones
"Do not hit with your fists
"For these are the acts of barbarians."