Jason Kim tells a story about a people haunted by its memories and delves deep into Seoul’s very own Heart of Darkness in a former colonial prison.
It is one of those many ironies of life that Independence Gate (Dongnimmun) is only a few steps away from Seodaemun Prison. One landmark is celebratory, proudly asserting the sovereignty of the Korean nation. The other structure is a foreboding gray-bricked monument to a people’s agonizing past.On the basis of being a human being and as a professional historian, I believe that the horrors of Japanese colonial rule over Korea from 1910-1945 should be openly commemorated and made accessible to the public, yet I could not help but feel strange after visiting Seodaemun Prison.I’m pretty certain that a prison is just about the last place someone might visit on a trip of leisure, but I’m also pretty sure it wouldn’t be such a bad idea for the purpose of going beyond the regular humdrum of glorious facts, events and artifacts.
This much, at least, is true: you can learn a lot about a time, people or place by looking at how the governing authority treated what it considered to be the scum of society. This was true at Abu Ghraib, and is continuing to be true at Guantanamo Bay.
I came upon the prison on a dreary day plagued by constant rain. The rather plain buildings and walls that made up the prison added to the unsettling ambiance. The bricks were a dullish gray-white, much like the formless clouds hanging ominously overhead. And so the walls surrounding the complex were oddly unassuming in this way, yet they were just high enough to instill in the onlooker the unmistakable feeling of hopelessness.
As I walked through the main prison hall, staring at the neat rows of cells to the side and just above me, I could not help but cringe at the eeriness. Every shadow, every inch of the place told stories of death and horror in hushed and subdued tones. It was as if I had been walking through the sanctuary of a church where Misery was God, each cell a pew containing a penitent soul. There was certainly the same feeling of reverence mixed with fear.
Just as I was approaching the prison’s basement, I heard several odd sounds. It sounded carnivalesque: a muffled mass of indistinguishable noises that could either be laughter or a blood-curdling scream. I would quickly realize that it was actually both.
The basement houses several displays of animated mannequins re-enacting various forms of torture. Sounds, including shrill screams of inexpressible suffering, could be heard. The Japanese officers’ voices are merciless, psychotic even. I stand in bewilderment as I hear what are supposed to be Japanese officers laughing sadistically at the sight of a bleeding woman having a bamboo splinter driven into her fingers, with her feet and head writhing in indescribable pain.
I’m not sure why I was smiling to myself, but I knew Elaine Scarry was dead wrong.1 Pain isn’t world-destroying. Rather, pain creates worlds, and I had just stepped into one.
It is obvious that the museum incarnation of Seodaemun Prison was made with this goal in mind: the re-creating in the minds of visiting Koreans the suffering of their ancestors, and ultimately, inflicting the same pain and suffering upon the living Korean witnesses, creating a kind of “post-memory”2 in order to galvanize Korean nationalism and bolster anti-Japanese sentiment.
This brings me back to the use of life-like automatons. The reaction of the on-lookers and myself were the same: we treated the mannequins as real people, and for a few seconds, particularly as the horrific screams were heard, those mannequins did in fact become real. The bodies on display become your body, their agony becomes your agony, and the screams you hear are your own thoughts made audible, even if you can’t quite understand what’s going on.
What I’m describing isn’t empathy though, oh no. It can only be sheer, unadulterated horror.
Image: Seodaemun Prison, Front Gate. <http://www.lifeinkorea.com/Travel2/seoul/322 >. Last Accessed Aug. 20, 2007.
- If you’re interested, read her excellent The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, 1985. [↩]
- A “post-memory” is a kind of memory that outlives the original survivors of some traumatic event, and thus, the memory of the event perpetuates itself in the memories of the descendants, making these descendents “survivors” in their own right too. [↩]
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