Rhee Kun-hoo

Rhee Kun-hoo was born in Daegu in 1935, during the last decade of Japanese colonial rule over Korea. He later said wartime schooling filled him with propaganda and hatred he did not yet understand. Liberation in 1945 forced an identity reckoning. When the Korean War broke out he was a teenager in Daegu, a city that became a refuge as fighting raged along the nearby Nakdong River. His father's food business collapsed; the family lost its home and moved through poor apartments. His father fell ill and died at 49. Rhee recalled injured soldiers treated at his school and volunteering to move corpses laid out in a square. Relatives were abducted, killed in battle, or murdered in the Geochang massacre. Those years left anger and grief, but also a lifelong interest in how people endure.

He attended Gyeongbuk High School and earned his medical degree from Kyungpook National University College of Medicine. While a student he co-founded the Gyeongbuk Student Mountaineering Federation in 1957 with Kim Ki-moon, helping lay groundwork for organized student climbing in Korea. He later described studying for medical exams inside a tent on Palgongsan. Decades afterward, at age 76, he enrolled at Korea Cyber University's Department of Cultural Studies and graduated as the program's oldest valedictorian, a public emblem of his belief that learning need not end with a first career.

After prison and army medical service, Rhee entered psychiatric hospitals that struggled to recruit doctors. He turned that constraint into reform. At Ewha Womans University he taught neuropsychiatry from 1973 to 2001, led the department's clinical work in the 1970s, and introduced an open-ward model that rejected routine restraint. In 1974 he initiated psychodrama therapy in Korea with playwright Oh Young-jin. He served as president of the Korean Neuropsychiatric Association and the Korean Academy of Forensic Psychiatry around 1990-1991, and helped found the Korean Academy of Psychotherapy. From 1989 he organized annual Ewha medical missions to remote Nepal, continuing after retirement and supporting a hospital in Dolakha. Korean media nicknamed him the Schweitzer of Nepal for that long commitment.

Rhee met Lee Dong-won as a child; friendship later became marriage. They raised four children (two sons and two daughters) and from about 2002 shared a multi-unit family home near Bukhansan in Seoul, with independent apartments under one roof. He insisted on mutual non-interference: sharing roughly ten percent of life, he argued, could be enough happiness if parents stopped invading the other ninety. Son Myung-Hyun Lee became an astronomer and later compiled a book of his father's late reflections. Grandson Danbi Lee publicly recalled the advice to live joyfully until death. Despite losing sight in one eye and living with several chronic illnesses, Rhee kept an office routine, lectured, and wrote with assistance when needed.

Rhee taught that happiness is ordinary, not a mirage of grand permanent bliss. In a 2024 Korea Herald interview he said happiness arrives when something small you want comes true. He urged people to drop unattainable desires, forgive resentment (including his own postwar hatred of police and jailers), and build a "lifeboat" of personal values rather than other people's expectations. He disliked the word "best" when it meant exhausting every reserve, preferring small pleasures that leave seed for tomorrow. Community, volunteering, and reaching out first were, for him, practical medicines against isolation in old age.

His legacy spans clinical reform, Himalayan medical volunteering, family education through Family Academia, and a shelf of essays that made late-life psychology conversational for Korean and international readers. "If You Live to 100, You Might as Well Be Happy" carried his voice into English and many other languages. Colleagues and readers remembered a doctor who had seen tens of thousands of patients and a writer who insisted aging could still be fun. The Schweitzer of Nepal nickname tied his mountain ethics to concrete clinics far from Seoul.

Public obituaries emphasize roles rather than a single prize list: presidency of the Korean Neuropsychiatric Association, leadership in psychotherapy and forensic psychiatry societies, chairmanship of the Korean Stone Buddha Culture Research Association from 1982, board service for Gwangmyeong orphanage welfare work, and national recognition as a pioneering open-ward psychiatrist and Nepal volunteer. His commercial success as an essayist, including sales of hundreds of thousands of copies of his 2013 bestseller, became its own form of cultural honour.

Professional titles included works on psychoanalysis and clinical psychiatry. Popular essays included "I Want to Have Fun Till the Day I Die," "How to Age Happily Until 100," "If You Love, Show the Evidence," "Men in Crisis," Nepal culture and stamp books, and the late compilation "Father, I Ask You About Life." He appeared in long Korean interview series such as Sebasi Talk and Jisikin Inside, ran the YouTube channel 이근후 STUDIO, and spoke with The Guardian, The Hindu, and The Korea Herald about ordinary joy. English readers met him chiefly through the Penguin / Union Square translation of "If You Live to 100, You Might as Well Be Happy."

Rhee's early imprisonment after the April Revolution was political, not a personal scandal, yet it redirected his career and barred overseas study for a time. In later interviews he also discussed clinical regret: a patient he believed safe for release died by suicide, prompting his counsel that doctors and elders must survey unintentional harm. He described learning optimism deliberately after prison hatred, choosing hope without denying that the world is imperfect.

Rhee died at home in Jongno-gu, Seoul, on 21 September 2026, around 10:10 p.m., aged 91. His family announced the death the next day. Obituaries in Yonhap, the Korea Herald, Chosun Ilbo, JoongAng Ilbo, and others recalled the Schweitzer of Nepal nickname and his bestselling essays. A funeral hall was set at Sinchon Severance Hospital, with the procession on the morning of 24 September 2026. Cause of death was not made public; he had lived with multiple chronic illnesses while remaining active in writing and conversation until near the end.