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B R

B R

— 3 min read

2 May, 2023 | Seoul, South Korea

Short post for once! Kinda!

My major stop today, as mentioned previously, is a prison.

The front gates. Much of the former prison has been dismantled.

Or, rather, a former prison. Seodaemun Prison History Hall is now a museum, principally featuring (1) the Japanese colonial government that constructed it in 1907, and (2) the Korean independence movement that fought them tooth-and-nail for 35 years.

Exploding politicians and capitalists was all the rage at the turn of the 19th century and frankly I have very little sympathy for almost any of the targets I’ve read about.

Couple of things to note on the content of the museum.

  1. Moderately graphic torture scenes were displayed with mannequins

    Waterboarding is a particularly popular form of torture, employed widely by inquisitions, brutal totalitarian regimes, and of course imperial powers fighting insurgencies

  2. It was basically just me and wave after wave of school classrooms

    Honestly it seems kinda harsh but I guess they should have studied harder.

  3. They kept using the prison right up until 1987, when they actually started doing a democracy (yeah, it was really pretty recent). Unrelatedly, the museum skips from 1945 directly to 1960.

    The timeskip jumps directly to trying to get rid of Syngman Rhee. After decades in the US, he was flown back to Korea in 1945 by the OSS (today the CIA) and gained power basically by (1) being the only fluent English speaker in the provisional government and (2) his distance from the infighting that characterized the independence movement. This guy was a real treat, just a total demon.

I capped off the day with a city wall hike. A lot of the Fortress Wall of Seoul was destroyed during Japanese rule, but chunks are still around.

I’m a big nerd and I tried hard, but I could not find a battle or war where this wall was ever successful at keeping out an army. It’s the longest city wall in the world.
It wasn’t long before I passed by some workout equipment. Note the weird banana like man in the corners - I was told that’s the city’s mascot. Similar to Japan, everything has to have some cute mascot.

The end of the trail was some distance from the transit line to get home, so I sat down and tried to use the city’s bikeshare app again.

So machine translation does leave something to be desired but look at this. It’s almost a work of art.

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