After Seoul pleasantries – something somber: prison history to remember. | Nota Bene: Eugene Kaspersky’s Official Blog

After our walk around central Seoul – next up: something wholly unusual: a prison! And this particular prison tells a very sad tale…

From 1910 to 1945, Korea was occupied by Japan, which was extremely heavy-handed in Korean territory – and that led to spontaneous protests and the emergence of organized resistance.

Naturally, the Japanese authorities fought the Korean underground, tracked down and caught Korean “partisans”, killed some on the spot, and sent the survivors off to this here prison set aside specially for political prisoners ->

Seodaemun [former] Prison (now a museum) – I’d normally write “welcome to…”, but no – not this time…

Still, in we went anyway, because reading about history – including that of global cataclysms – in books or on the internet is one thing, while walking around the actual places where the events take place is something else entirely: it gets deeper into your brain and hits your emotions harder and more vividly. It’s a bit like looking at a photo of a red chili pepper online – and actually chomping on one in real life. Anyway, that’s why we went in…

// It immediately got me thinking: what prisons had I already been to? Well, two, I think, and that’s quite enough:

(i) Old abandoned Gulag barracks in Yakutia:

(ii) An Australian prison museum on the island of Tasmania.

Everything here was somehow different. It seemed more… civilized – but only until you saw what was down in the basements. Still, I won’t get ahead of myself. This is the cozy architecture that awaited its “guests”… // I felt like putting “guests” in quotation marks, so I did.

Inside, things were somehow hard to make sense of.

What does “80 years of freedom and peace” mean here – what exactly is that referring to?

But in any case, history needs to be read, learned from, and respected. Both the history of one’s own country and that of your neighbors – both near and far. That made a walk around Seoul’s prison museum the right thing to do.

As a prison for political inmates and protesters against the Japanese regime, this place existed for no less than 35 years (1910–1945)!

The scale, of course, wasn’t Gulag-level, but still…

A hall with somber photographs…

Not everything is genuine, but they honestly state this:

Next – down, into the basement…

But… ->

Still – down there, I somehow didn’t feel like photographing anything at all. Because in this basement were the torture chambers. And it was full-on brutal. All kinds of devices for maiming arms and legs, for locking a person in a cramped box with sharp spikes on all sides – all shown. Vertical “little coffins” where you could only stand, and nothing else…

Now, when such things are shown from the Middle Ages or even further back, you kind of accept such barbarity as “of the times”. But when that very same barbarity is shown to have happened less than a hundred years ago – so, your great-grandmothers and great-grandfathers could actually have ended up here (if they were Korean, etc.) – that feels completely different (just as it does in Russia, too). And you look at such scenes in a totally different way.

We moved on…

Turns out they didn’t shoot people here – they hanged them instead. In this unassuming building:

No photography here either:

Not that I would have wanted to take snaps. Let me describe it simply: a small room, spectator seating, a stage with a drop floor, an execution chair, and a noose. Simple and utilitarian.

Exercise yard:

Technological:

The guard always saw everyone and everything.

All pretty eerie. And puzzling: can’t be nice having a window view of this place from one’s modern apartment:

The tour of the prison was creepy and scary – but something, IMHO, you need to know about and see. If only as an antidote for humanity making the same mistakes…