Jeju Island Arrival

First thing I noticed on arriving at Jeju this time was the tsunami shelter. Is it even possible for a tsunami to form between the Korean Peninsula and Jeju?

Here is the April 3rd Peace Park, where there is a big monument.

The woman closer to me is our guide/interpreter, Ga-yoon.

A ritual was performed with incense. The woman doing it here is a former Korea Times reporter.

Inside, this has the names of people who died in the massacre.

It was a media trip.

One attempt at a group picture.

We went out back in the cold rain, where we visited graves of the people who couldn't be recovered.

I wandered ahead.

They're catching up.

Andy Salmon asks a question.

Jeju Island is marked with random walls here and there, built of volcanic rocks, just intended as windbreaks.

The girl in orange is our reporter.

And the woman in green is the formidable Brenda Paik Sunoo.

By the time we got here, we were all freezing and running through.

Heading for shelter.

This guy I think runs this center, and he had some things to say to us. Note the Korean flag in the background; it was pointed out to me how any of these events or stages or exhibits, you'd see the South Korean flag: the people affected have needed to show their loyalty to South Korea.

Heading down into the exhibit through a faux cave entrance.

The map on the wall there shows what Jeju looked like under the Japanese occupation, when they were loading it up in case the Allies attacked Korea during WWII.

She was part of our media group and I got drunk with her later that night. But this is one of the best photos I took this weekend of people.

I like the use of the term "red devils" which now has a very different connotation.

So-book Youth Association was basically a bunch of North Koreans who had probably been sympathetic to Japan who fled south after the end of WWII, and were sent to Jeju Island, where they didn't have much they could do economically, so they became basically volunteer police and murdered and raped their way to a better life in the name of opposing communism.

I like this shot.

I got to this room later than everyone else and missed out on the opportunity to get a good picture juxtaposing living people with the dead.

In this room, this cube played a clip of Roh Moo-hyun apologising on behalf of the ROK government for the Jeju Massacre, something that never really led to any concrete action, and that was basically undone when Koreans voted in Lee Myung-bak who closed all sorts of inquiries into past tragedies. Not sure why any single Korean person thought this was an improvement.

At this point, Donald Kirk started questioning the narrative that the US military occupational goverment was responsible for the Jeju Massacre. They certainly were in charge early on, and the purges certainly forwarded their interests, but it seems pretty clear to me they didn't exactly envision the sadistic genocide that followed.

I went ahead and took pictures of pictures.

I could hear on my translator machine what was being said, and I waited here to get pictures like this.