Prison. Fo' Lyfe.

Good morning, America! I'm back in action for a minute. I know, it doesn't quite make up for the absence you've felt in your heart lately. I've got enough juice for a few posts so as my final week of classes wrap up and my materials for Winter camp come to a close, I'll have a void in my life where productive things used to be. Thus, you are my new productive thing, World Class Flaneur.

First, let's do a post dedicated to those who lost their lives during the Japanese occupation from 1910-1945. Last Saturday, I made a trip up to Seoul and had the pleasure of visiting Seodaemun Prison. You usually don't put "pleasure" and "prison" in the same sentence, but this is Korea, after all. It doesn't anymore, but it used to look like this:
Now it looks like this:
...which doesn't really tell you much, but they didn't have a tidy little model for the present prison and you obviously can't see it all from any one point except the guard towers where you're not allowed to go.

The prison was designed to house the anti-Japanese dissenters and Native English Teachers who got low scores on their open classes. It was surprisingly not overly depressing. It doesn't quite compare to the Holocaust Museum or the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum in that scope. It was almost like a Tower of London type of thing where you see the torture devices and they have a silly little program wherein they take your mugshot and place it on a prisoner in a video. They then show you going to prison and getting tortured and screaming for freedom in your cell.
Obviously, this was a terrible place where atrocities against man were committed. I never forgot that. But, as with most things in Korea, they have a way of defying expectations and warping your percieved feelings on something. The room with pictures of all the prisoners who died actually was quite moving. However, instead of letting solely the pictures tell the story, they had to have a digital touch screen floor computer in the middle of it to cheapen the experience and make every child who passes through the room 90% more annoying.

One thing I learned while there that is not something normally advertised in the "woe is me" themed musuems is that the prison was still used until 1987. Anyone interested in Korean history will most likely know that South Korea was effectively a military dictatorship until that very year. You can most likely guess the similarities in its use both during and after Japanese occupation. The best part? The leper building in the back. It offered the best views of the "campus" and it's where friggin' lepers were kept. You don't see those much anymore.


Anyway, it was an interesting and educational little tour in an area of Seoul that I had not previously ventured to. Also, we found a Quiznos. The first one I'd seen since leaving.