Day 196

SEODAEMUN PRISON

Today I finally awoke from my hibernation, left my apartment, and went out into the world.  Where did I go?  Prison!

No, I wasn't arrested.  (Yet.)  I visited a former prison in Seoul that was turned into a torture facility for independence fighters during the Japanese colonization period.  This prison, called Seodaemun Prison, is now used exclusively as a memorial/museum that tries its best to portray the horrifying atrocities committed by the Japanese.

I've mentioned the barbarity, salacity, vileness, and depravity of the Japanese before--and I'd like to add a few other choice words but this is a family-friendly blog, remember?--but in case you've forgotten, let me remind you again.  Japan might be known today for its abundance of old people, bizarre game shows, and horrifying adult entertainment, but before we crushed them like bugs in WWII, they were the Big Bad Wolf of the Pacific.  They invaded multiple countries and did unimaginable things to the people.  If you've got a strong stomach, google "Rape of Nanjing."  If you don't have a strong stomach... you might not want to keep reading.

Your face after reading about the Rape of Nanjing.

Your face WHILE reading about the Rape of Nanjing.  (Also: your face, should you ever be so
unlucky as to stumble upon any Japanese 'adult entertainment' videos.)

Anyway, back to Korea.  Japan had been advancing on Korea for years, but the Koreans were barely managing to stay afloat.  The beloved and feisty Queen Min (officially Empress Myeongseong) tried to make a deal with Russia to protect her nation from the invaders, but she was brutally assassinated in 1895.  In 1910, Japan finally sealed the deal and annexed Korea.  They ruled until 1945, when they were forced to surrender after a sound defeat in World War II.

Queen Min ain't foolin' around.
Queen Min will mess you up.
(Queen Min's full title is The Filial and Benevolent, the Origin of Holiness,
the Proper in Changes, the Uniter of Heaven, the Immensely Meritorious, and
the Sincerely Virtuous Grand Empress Consort Myeongseong.)
I like Queen Min.

As you may have guessed, the Koreans weren't overly happy about being colonized.  The Japanese weren't exactly benevolent rulers, either.  Korean citizens were shipped off to Japan as forced workers, many of whom died horribly.  Worse still, somewhere between 20,000 and 410,000 women (numbers estimated by the Japanese and Chinese respectively--shocking, right?) were kidnapped and forced into a prostitution corps that serviced the Japanese military.  Not all of them were Korean; most of the "Comfort Women" were taken from Japan, Korea, China, and the Philippines, although women have come forward from several Southeast Asian countries as well.  Their stories are actually really interesting and might merit their own post on this blog someday, but in the meantime, you can read all about them on the wikipedia page.

Oh, right, and we can't forget the imprisonment and torture of independence fighters!  After all, that's what this whole prison visit is about.  Thousands of protesters and resistance leaders were captured, questioned, and tortured.  Hundreds died, mostly due to their torture injuries.  I would like to reemphasize at this time how glad I am that Japan no longer has a significant military presence.  Now let's go to prison.

Here's the entrance:

Not very scary looking, I guess?  It probably looks scarier if you've been beaten and handcuffed by Japanese policemen.

Men and women in these tight-around-the-butt uniforms were milling around with briefcases.
I REALLY want to know what they were doing!  What's in the briefcases?!

A map of the current prison.  

A map of the old prison.  Note that there are a few more buildings in this one.

Many of the prison buildings were torn down, but I think the remaining ones are mostly original.  Like, at least 30%.  (Hey, that's a lot around here!)  The first building is mostly informational signs propped up on prison-esque metal walls with low lighting, so points for ambiance.

The lighting seems a lot brighter in this photo.

However, they lost those points pretty quickly because of the tour.  The website stated that there were free English tours every Sunday at 2pm, so that's when I showed up.  After asking several employees whose English was about as good as my Korean (read: awful) I was led to believe that there was no English tour today.  This was very disappointing, but most of the signs had adequate English on them, so I went alone.

The best sign of the day is pictured below.  The lighting was horrible so here's a transcript:

"Dead-body Pickup Room
This mock structure is a real-scale model showing the dead-body pickup room located at the basement of the execution ground in Seodaemun Prison.  Many independence activists during the Japanese occupation, as well as many innocent people who demanded democratization after liberation, died here."

Yeah, thanks, but no explanation necessary here.  I got all that from the name.

Basically, the person about to be executed sat on a chair (hey, at least they didn't have to stand, right?  No?  That doesn't make it better?  Oh.) as a noose was tied around their neck.  The chair was on a pull-down platform, and when the platform dropped, so did the poor guy in the chair.  This picture is taken in a mock-up of the basement of the execution building, which I visited but was not allowed to take photos in.  See the noose and pull-down platform?

Surprisingly realistic.

Now here is something truly sad as well as timely.  Pictured below is Kwan-sun Yu, known as the Korean Joan of Arc.  She was just 16 years old when she was arrested during what is now known as the March 1st Movement for independence.  Both her parents were killed by Japanese policemen during the demonstration, and Kwan-sun herself died a horrible death due to torture injuries after nearly two years in prison.

During those two years she was tortured horribly, and reportedly her final words were "Even if my fingernails are torn out, my nose and ears are ripped apart, and my legs and arms are crushed, this physical pain does not compare to the pain of losing my nation.  My only remorse is not being able to do more than dedicating my life to my country."  She's something of a legend here and a few Koreans have admitted to me that they don't entirely believe the story, but there it is.  Even if it's not all true, it's still pretty tragic and incredible.  She now has a statue and a national holiday, Independence Movement Day, on March 1st.  

I have to say, Korea has produced some tough ladies.
I'd certainly never want to fight an ajumma.

Next up is a room wallpapered with the mugshots of thousands of arrested independence activists.

Many of these people died...

...so naturally the thing to do is get a happy picture in front of their mugshots.
For some reason, Korean kids never smile in photos.  I don't know why.

Let's get a little closer.

Closer!

I think the really interesting ones are the women.

This guy looks like a young teenager.  :(

This photo was not taken by me, but by skuehlhorn@blogspot.com.

After the boring building, it was time to move onto the torture recreation scenes.  The ones with the mannequins weren't that scary, but I guess that was probably good, since there were a lot of kids there.  The ones without mannequins were actually scarier, they left more to the imagination.  Anyway, let's see some torture.

This is apparently emotional torture.  Prisoners were forced to listen to a Japanese guy yell at them.
In a video interview, a survivor laughs at this scene and says this shouldn't have been included in the
exhibit because it was so much less serious than the other forms of torture.

A man being subjected to what is essentially waterboarding.

The Japanese employed the usual torture techniques we think of today, such as waterboarding and beating.  However, much like with their adult toys today, the Japanese liked to get creative.  One popular method of torture was insert sharp needles made of bamboo or wood (basically a sharp chopstick) under the fingernails of the prisoners.

This is the scariest one for me.  There's no mannequin, just a needle and blood on the table.

Ewwwww, blood!

These were sticks used to beat people up.  They're pretty boring, but the reason I included this picture
is because of the witty, informative English caption: "Stick".  Wow, thanks.

This cell was dark, but my flash revealed this creepy doll in the corner.  :(

Prisoners were put in this box, which is lined with sharp sticks.  The box was shaken to injure the prisoner.

Ouchies.

These were confinement boxes.  A person can barely stand in here.

"Honey!  Get in there and let me lock you in and get a photo of you!  Haha!"
And that little boy is in the process of shoving his baby sister into a box.  Adorable?

Not a lot of room in there.

Now, I noticed on the website that a few of their photos depicted torture scenes I never saw.  I didn't miss a building; they've modified the exhibits.  But thanks to the power of the internet, here are some older photos that I've borrowed from other visitors.

This woman is undergoing fingernail torture.
Photo taken by waegook@wordpress.

The men in the back are being beaten, the guy in front is getting electrocuted.
Photo taken by waegook@wordpress.

The Japanese weren't real big on chivalry.  Ladies got tortured too.
Photo by Mark Wu @ mangovine.net.

Yikes.  That's the bloodiest mannequin I've ever seen.
Photo by Mark Wu @ mangovine.net.

Not my idea of a good time.
Photo by Charlene C. @ koreanmuzterchen.blogspot.com.

Guess what kind of torture this is.  :(
Photo by Charlene C. @ koreanmuzterchen.blogspot.com.

Several more people getting waterboarded.
Found this one in a few places, not sure who to credit it to.

There were a few more types of torture employed that were (fortunately) not depicted, but described in a video by former inmates.  Apparently various 'sterilization' torture techniques were practiced.  I won't get into the details but suffice to say that sharp sticks were used for the ladies and molten led was used on the men.  (And even that pales in comparison to some of the stuff the Japanese did to Chinese citizens during the Rape of Nanjing.  Seriously.)

I took a few stills from the survivor interview video, which was fairly interesting and would probably have been very poignant and moving if they hadn't used the theme song from Pirates of the Caribbean as the background music.

This guy was stuck in Seodaemun Prison for a while.

His hands still look like this.

This lady was really interesting.  And tough as nails.

And here are the three wings of cells that you may have noticed in the map/diagram earlier:

Pretty long.

At this point I discovered a lone foreigner being guided by a volunteer English-speaking Korean docent.  I joined their little tour group and was happily surprised at my guide's English level.  I never understand it when non-native speakers say their English is bad, because hey, all I can say in your language is "where is the bathroom?", so you're not gonna hear any complaints from me.

Cell door.

There is a mannequin in here--the very last cell--that screams when you walk by.  It got me, I jumped.

There were a few boring rooms about prisoner labor and how they made bricks and clothes and pottery, but my tour guide rushed me away from those, presumably because there was no English on the signs.  Finally we made it outside!  This little building on a hill was actually the cells for prisoners suffering from leprosy.

Little leper jail.

This is a monument to the people who died here.  Their names are engraved on the bowl.

Seriously, it's a giant bowl.  Maybe because they made pottery?

Those are names in Korean.

Now to the execution building.

There it is!

Side view!

This is a big tree that prisoners apparently grabbed before being taken in for their execution.

It's called a 'wailing poplar,' apparently.

Now, I get what this sign is saying, but I have to politely disagree.  I have no argument that these people were martyrs and that they were very brave and patriotic and died for their country.  I do not, however, believe that the reason they 'wailed' on their way to their own execution was because of 'deep resentment for their unachieved independence.'  No, I'm pretty sure it was because they were on their way to their own execution.  But hey, maybe that's just me.

Very poetic, though, I must admit.

Photography isn't allowed inside the execution building, and I try to respect no-photography rules.  People died here.  I can honor their memory and not paparazzi it up.  However, that code of honor doesn't prevent me from using pictures from their website, or photos that some rule-ignoring jerk took.

Inside the wall is a little wooden building.  Inside the building is a stage with a trapdoor and some seating.  It's not that different from a modern execution room.  The prisoner sits on a chair on the trapdoor, the noose goes around his neck, then the trapdoor falls.  The room has a basement where bodies are collected (Dead-body Pickup Room, remember?) and then transported to a secret body-removing tunnel.

It's small.  There's nothing I can do.
(From the official website.)

Here's the stage with the chair on the trapdoor.
I found this a few places, not sure who to credit it to.

Just outside the back entrance of the execution building is this tunnel.  It was originally about 200m long and connected to a cemetery.  The Japanese covered it up and it wasn't rediscovered until 1996, according to my docent.  The cemetery has since been covered up with a large apartment complex; when they found bones while making the parking lot, they apparently thought it was a sign of good luck.

♪♪♪ Secret tunnel, secret tunnel! ♪♪♪

♪♪♪ Through the mountain, secret secret secret secret tunnel!  Yeah! ♪♪♪
(That was inappropriate.  I apologize.)

Last but not least is the exercise structure.  It's basically a fan-shaped wall of bricks with several divisions inside so that prisoners could walk back and forth for a few minutes.  You know, exercise.

Standing at the tip of the fan, the prison guard could see everybody.

Interesting structure, very efficient.  Assuming you don't like to exercise much.

Just a few wide shots to take us out of the park!

Massive apartment complexes in the back.

Beautiful mountains behind the prison!  Too bad those prisoners couldn't see them.

The prison is surprisingly pretty now.

There are too many sunspots on this panorama.

Oh, did I mention the prisoners made bricks?  Here are a few.
They're stamped with the first part of the prison's name in Chinese characters.

Okay!  We're officially done with Seodaemun Prison.  Just outside the prison walls is a monument with some uplifting stone engravings.

Oh, this looks nice!  Let's get closer.

Still nice!  Look at all those Korean flags!

And let's get a close-up of those stone engravings!  Did I say uplifting earlier?  I meant soul-crushing.  My bad.

A fine day for hanging around.

Women fighting, right before they're imprisoned underground.

Shackled and hooded and beaten, what a day.

Right, well, not so cheerful.  What did you expect?  Here's a gate that's modeled after the Arc de Triomphe.

It's pretty.

Let it cheer you up.

The sign says those stone things in front were moved from somewhere.
Korea moves an awful lot of artifacts.

And one more non-smiling Korean child getting his photo taken.

That about sums up the Seodaemun Prison experience!  Lest you think the Koreans have forgiven the Japanese, keep in mind that Japan has never apologized for or even acknowledged their horrible war crimes.  Each week, Koreans hold a demonstration at the Japanese embassy.  I'm hoping to attend one of these weekly demonstrations at the embassy soon.  The Comfort Women are especially vocal in demonstrations these days, and while there are less than a hundred left in Korea, they're very active.  The Comfort Women aren't alone, either.  Theirs has become a national cause.  Korean hostility toward the Japanese hasn't been helped by the recent duel over Dokdo island, either.

These guys are standing in a very inconvenient spot at the subway station, but it's for a good cause.
Those signs they're holding are educating the public (and foreigners, there's English!) about the
Japanese atrocities, and the goal is to make the Japanese government apologize.
This was taken today, but I see people like this, as well as permanent signs, all over the place.

While the Japanese government has thus far refused to apologize for the atrocities they committed against the Koreans (and everybody else in Asia), it's apparently very common for Japanese tour groups to visit this prison as well as the embassy demonstrations.  My docent told me that Japanese citizens are usually shocked, because their history books tell the story with the Japanese as the heroes, bringing science and technology and general civilization to wayward lands.  She said that they are very apologetic, and older women often cry because they never knew and feel horrible that their nation did such awful things.  The internet tells me that the same sort of thing happens often at the embassy demonstrations.  Here's hoping I find out for myself soon!


Cheers,
Ashton