The Marmot’s Hole

Now doesn’t this just suck - courtesy the Chosun Ilbo:

Seun Sagga and Cheonggyecheo 8-ga, in Seoul’s Jongno-gu, were known from the 1970s to the mid-90s as a shopping Mecca for porno. Yet the pornography market has been shrinking fast over the last four or five years, as the online market for illicit material grown with the rapid spread of Internet use in Korea.
“Kim” sells video tapes at Seun Sangga. “Look around you,” he says. “People have to come if I’m going to do good business.” Here and there one sees merchants in the halls smoking cigarettes, talking to each other.

“I sell two or three a day at best. These days there’s porno everywhere. Who would come all the way down here to buy it? You can see a whole month of it on the Internet for W10,000. Who wants to pay W10,000 for three videos?” asks Kim. He says it’s older people, who don’t know how to use the Internet or who won’t subscribe to adult cable channels because they’re worried what the younger members of their families will say, who purchase the few videos he manages to sell.

Read the rest of this tale of sorrow on your own.