Ever since coming to live in Japan I’ve felt there is a certain tension that arises when conversations turn to the subject of Korea. The older people I’ve met generally seem pretty hesitant to talk about it. After having visited Seodaemun Prison, I think I finally understand why.
Seodaemun Prison is basically a monument to the ugliest aspects of the Japanese occupation of Korea in the early 1900s. It’s a site where political prisoners were held, tortured, and executed under colonial rule. From what I understand, there’s been a lot of denial from the Japanese government concerning what happened in places like Korea and Manchuria over the years, so the purpose of the prison’s preservation is to preserve the memories of the people who suffered and died there.
The exhibitions in the prison are neither enigmatic nor sugar-coated. The first room in the main museum contains shackles that the prisoners wore and straw executioners’ hoods that the prisoners wore, as well as pictures of the prisoners wearing them.
There’s also an area called the “Dead-body Pickup Room” [sic], which is a dark, cramped space that serves as a recreation of the underground chamber where corpses were collected after being hanged. There’s even an upstairs room with a trap door and a noose that visitors aren’t permitted to enter. So, visitors are more or less given the experience of viewing the execution room from the perspective of the executed.
One of the last rooms in the museum is truly the most affective in the entire complex. It contains mug shots of the prisoners who were held there, pasted from floor to ceiling, on every wall. Visitors are able to see the faces of a large number of prisoners who were arrested, who suffered, and were executed. Most of the photos are of men, but if you take a close look you can see that there are also many women and even boys or girls who look to be as young as thirteen or fourteen years old. Perhaps this area affected me so deeply because one of the younger boys looked a lot like one of my students. It’s very surreal imagining a boy that young being arrested for political activity.
Most of the museum is in Korean, so I’m not sure what the specific crimes of the inmates were. Some of the English information outlined armed revolts, mentioning violence perpetrated by both the Korean citizens and the Japanese rulers of the time.
In the basement of the museum there are wax recreations of things that happened in the “Underground Torture Chamber”. This was the site of interrogations, and each of the recreations is based on actual methods of torture. One of them was water torture, during which a prisoner would be bound by his or her feet, with his or her arms bound behind their back. The prisoner would then basically be water boarded with a bucket of water. Another method was “box torture”. The guards would place a prisoner in a box just big enough for him or her to crouch inside, and that had large nails facing inward something like an iron maiden. The guards would then kick and shake the box so that the prisoner was repeatedly speared.
There are also recreations of the cells where prisoners were kept, which were horribly cramped. They were about the size of a large closet, and multiple prisoners were crowded into a single cell. Near the torture box, there’s a recreation of an interrogation room with nooses hanging from the ceiling and in which thumb screws were used.
Finally, before leaving the torture chamber, visitors are able to see to the solitary cells. These were likely where the more unruly prisoners were kept, and each is about the size of a coffin.
There are multiple buildings in the prison complex. Once finished with the museum, visitors can move from the recreations of the cells to the actual cells themselves, which are still standing. The original cells are just as small as the recreations, with the exception of the communal cells. The communal cells are about the size of a small bedroom, and there would sometimes be as many as twenty people crammed into one. None of the cells had toilets.
Most of the buildings in the complex were dedicated to either cells or factories. The prisoners were made to work for the Japanese war effort constructing various goods that the Japanese government needed. By that point in time Japan had been more or less stripped of resources because of its military activity and the government was using colonies like Korea and Manchuria for their resources.
There were more buildings, though, like the execution house where prisoners were, well, executed. In front of the execution house there’s a tree called the “Wailing Poplar”, so named because prisoners about to be executed would often cling to it and cry out in sorrow over their nation’s fate.
There was also a small building called the “leper house”. Three guesses what that was for.
Finally, there’s a small building near the museum that served as the women’s prison. Women in Korea at that time had to deal with not only ethnic discrimination, but gender discrimination as well. This area is sort of a high-tech exhibition hall dedicated to the women prisoners of Seodaemun.
Before visiting Seodaemun Prison I had known that Korea had been occupied by the Japanese and that they were not treated very well, but I didn’t know many of the specifics of what happened there. Of course, Seodaemun was a political prison, so chances are it wasn’t indicative of the everyday lives of the Koreans under Japanese colonial rule, but it was still pretty sobering to see. It’s an important part of Korean and Japanese history and I think it’s important to preserve the memories of everyone who suffered and died there.
Nihonglish 