Independence Park

Dongnimmun Gate

This was our goal yesterday when we set out for our walk. We departed the house at noon and returned home close to 8pm. Not sure how long we walked but we did manage a great workout--complete with 'stairmaster' workout as almost every street crossing required walking down into the subway underpasses just to cross to the other side. Can you say tired??? On our way to Dongnimmun, we ventured through an interesting market—produce, pork products, fish—including live squid, sea cucumbers, conch, sea squirts and some other ‘sea’food we couldn’t readily identify.

Dongnimmun is Korea's Independence Park. It houses this gorgeous gate that resembles Paris' L'arc de Triomphe. I thought that a bit odd but then I noticed it was designed by a Swiss man who was part of the Swiss delegation to Korea at the time. The gate symbolized open diplomatic relations between Korea and its foreign friends. What is ironic here and quite symbolic is that they created Independence Park upon the grounds of a prison that the Japanese built to imprison the Korean Independence fighters in the early 1900s after they conquered the Korean peninsula. I'm sure they built this park, purposefully, on this spot.

The Japanese interned the Korean independence fighters on these prison grounds and subjected them to brutal torture sessions. Typically, prisons don’t interest me much but this one struck a chord with me in that my grandfather also was imprisoned by the Japanese during WWII--for 3-1/2 years as a POW and Bataan Death March survivor. I decided to tour the prison grounds and was impressed with their unique approach to preserving a ‘gruesome’ part of their history. "Lest we forget" really seemed to drive the entire museum here. The grounds included several prison buildings, a leper building and an execution hall. The odd thing is that in one section they included ‘visual’ aids for the types of torture that occurred on these grounds. I couldn't imagine that these graphic displays would be 'welcome' in the US. It certainly drove the point home to us how brutally these political prisoners were treated. The Koreans are fiercely patriotic, as they should be. They've spent their entire history defending their homeland from invaders from the North & the South. It's nice to see such a fitting tribute to their patriots!