Seodaemun Prison

It's no news that there's bad blood between Koreans and Japanese. After my visit to Seodaemun Prison, I understand why. The 35-year Japanese colonization is referred to as a hellish period where Koreans were given new Japanese names, forbidden to speak the Korean language or teach Korean history. Schools were closed and a brutal, iron fist governed the small country until the end of WWII.

But before that, a 17-year-old girl named Yu Gwan-sun tried to create a wave of change by organizing a 2,000-person demonstration with the mantra, "Long live Korean independence!" For her efforts, she was sentenced to seven years in Seodaemun prison where she died in 1920 from torture. Now she is remembered on the anniversary of the demonstration, March 1, Korean Independence Day.

I'd always heard about how the Japanese were infamous for creating torture methods, and at the prison I saw the proof. The prison was a mini-concentration camp that packed so many prisoners into cells that they had to sleep in shifts for lack of room. Beatings, sexual torture, hangings and starvation were regular punishments for independence activists. They may have beat the Gulf Coast to electrocution and definitely the rest of the world to the "nail under the fingernail" technique. Also, there's the kind where prisoners sit in a box full of sharp spikes and guards kick the box around. Below I'm standing by a secret tunnel in the back of the prison where Japanese guards passed out bodies of dead prisoners to avoid public scrutiny of the number killed.