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The hostel in central Seoul has so much to advocate it. The rooms are tidy and inexpensive sufficient for Okay-pop fanatics on a price range and households in want of a number of area on trip. It’s perched on the base of Namsan, the scenic, leafy mountain peak within the coronary heart of city. There’s even a rooftop with panoramic views of town.
Simply don’t attempt to go to the basement.
Namsan, with its winding trails and springtime cherry blossoms, has lengthy been a prime vacation spot for vacationers in Seoul. Not way back, although, “going to Namsan” meant one thing totally different, one thing sinister.
The phrase was usually used throughout South Korea’s postwar authoritarian years as a euphemism for bringing pro-democracy protesters to the Korean Central Intelligence Company headquarters and interrogating them. Torture was frequent, and one of many most popular venues was the basement of the Seoul Municipal Youth Hostel, which as soon as housed the Okay.C.I.A.
The constructing now stands as a logo of the nation’s tangled relationship with the previous and the current, although its shameful status hardly appeared to register with visitors who milled about within the foyer on a current afternoon, requesting toilet towels from reception and taking cheery group images.
The nice, shaded path towards the hostel is lined with delicate, easy-to-miss nods to Korean historical past. A small plaque on the bottom is engraved with the phrases “Path of Nationwide Humiliation,” a reference to the close by location the place the Japanese resident-general of Korea lived throughout Japan’s occupation of the Korean Peninsula, which led to 1945.
The Sixth Bureau Constructing, one other Okay.C.I.A. torture web site, can be within the neighborhood. That constructing, with its distinctive crimson exterior, has a mock interrogation bunker that guests can view as an audio monitor performs ominous voices overhead.
In Korean, the quantity six is pronounced yuk, which is one other phrase for meat. “They are saying that individuals had been taken to the Sixth Bureau to be butchered like meat,” mentioned Yang Seung-phil, a former supervisor on the hostel.
Through the Korean Conflict, South Korea was nearly leveled, and like a dragon rising from a ditch — an outdated Korean saying — a brand new nation was born. Observing what stays and what has fallen to destroy or been destroyed — or revived — is an train in understanding the nation’s nationwide identification.
“Historical past is just not with out phrases; it’s only when it isn’t spoken of that it’s silent,” reads a brochure for the Sixth Bureau Constructing memorial web site.
In Seoul, gleaming high-rise buildings tower over meticulously maintained ruins courting to the Joseon Dynasty, whose rulers ruled Korea from the 14th century till the start of the twentieth, when the nation grew to become a Japanese protectorate. The occupation lasted for greater than three many years earlier than Japan surrendered to the Allies on the finish of World Conflict II.
Korea was then rocked by a civil struggle between the communists within the North and the U.N.-backed forces within the South. The violence left the peninsula cleaved in half.
Within the South, nationwide monuments burned and strafed through the Korean Conflict had been rebuilt with precision and constancy as symbols of nationwide satisfaction. However remnants of Japanese colonial rule had been intentionally demolished in South Korea as just lately because the Nineteen Nineties.
The Okay.C.I.A. headquarters, nevertheless, the place screams as soon as echoed by means of hallways, has been allowed to face. Some see it as a mandatory reminder of the nation’s flirtation with autocracy, others say it represents a bitter chapter that many would quite overlook.
When Kang Yong-joo was a medical pupil in his early 20s, he was accused of distributing pro-communist materials and tortured at Namsan in 1985. He mentioned many survivors of the Okay.C.I.A. undergo from post-traumatic stress and repressed reminiscences. It’s not unusual for victims to “really feel sick once they see Namsan,” mentioned Mr. Kang, who has seldom revisited the mountain.
The Okay.C.I.A. was as soon as probably the most highly effective establishment in South Korea, established in 1961 with the assistance of the American authorities after a profitable coup led by the South Korean dictator Park Chung-hee. A State Division official as soon as described the company as “a mix of the Gestapo and the Soviet Okay.G.B.” Its practices additionally included extortion, lobbying American lawmakers and intimidating Korean immigrants in america.
The headquarters on Namsan had been in-built 1973. That very same yr, Choe Jong-gil, a regulation professor at Seoul Nationwide College, was tortured to dying throughout interrogation. Some historians consider he was the primary sufferer to be killed on the web site. The precise-wing authorities maintained that he triggered his personal dying by leaping from a window.
“Within the case of Namsan, it’s actually type of promiscuous the best way the previous and the current work together,” mentioned Bruce Cumings, a historian and the writer of “Korea’s Place Within the Solar.” “The biggest Japanese Shinto shrine through the colonial interval was on Namsan. It obtained destroyed instantly after liberation in 1945.”
As a replacement, the Korean authorities constructed a big statue of An Jung-geun, the Korean nationalist who assassinated Japanese prime minister Ito Hirobumi in 1909. “So that you had a alternative of a Japanese image with one of many greatest symbols of Korean resistance to the Japanese,” Mr. Cumings mentioned.
The Okay.C.I.A. underwent a collection of modifications after South Korea’s pro-democracy motion and is now referred to as the Nationwide Intelligence Service.
On the hostel, workers members are fast to smile and greet visitors, and the unfussy rooms with naked partitions and bunk beds make it tough to think about the struggling that after came about in these identical quarters. Most guests are blissfully unaware of the historical past.
The native authorities, which owns and operates the hostel in collaboration with a nonprofit, took pains to make the constructing a welcoming place for younger folks, starting in 2006. Through the pandemic, the constructing was was a therapy heart. Extra just lately, renovations had been made to modernize the rooms as vacationers flocked again to Seoul.
The basement is now run by the Seoul Emergency Operations Middle and is strictly off limits to civilians.
Han Hong-gu, a historical past professor at Sungkonghoe College in Seoul, mentioned he desires the hostel to be was a museum devoted to the democratization of South Korea. In 2009, when the Seoul Metropolis Authorities thought-about destroying the previous Okay.C.I.A. buildings on Namsan, Mr. Han, 63, organized a marketing campaign opposing the plan.
“Some buildings needs to be saved to show the later generations classes of historical past,” he mentioned. “A web site of darkish historical past needs to be preserved.”
Close to the doorway of the hostel, a nondescript mailbox invitations guests to write down letters reflecting on human rights. Hwang Eui-sun, who used to work on the hostel as president of the nonprofit, mentioned the mailbox didn’t have any actual operate nowadays, however was there as a “image of remembrance for the street to democracy.”
Cobwebs have gathered round it.
Jin Yu Younger and Choe Sang-Hun contributed reporting.
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