From April 13 to 23, the Cheonggyecheon Cultural Center in Majang-dong is exhibiting photos of the Cheonggyecheon taken in the early 70s by Japanese social activist Monura Motoyuki. Some 880 photos of the old slum area have been donated to Seoul Metropolitan City.
In case you needed to be reminded what the neighborhood looks like today, see here.
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I’m amazed at how long some of those kinds of neighborhoods have continued in Seoul. For example, the hill to the east of Hyehwa (Daehangno), before they built that park on top of it had four or five “houses” up there. Very shantytown-esque hovels, with extension cords and hoses bringing power and water up from the residential neighborhood just over the old wall.
If something like that could exist in the heart of Seoul five years ago, just five minutes from one of the city’s hippest neighborhoods, I assume there are still more “taldongnae” like it scattered around here and there. And, of course, there are those dying, dilapidated apartment blocks on the top of many hills.
These neighborhoods exist because the owners (who may or may not be the residents) are anticipating that the area will be redeveloped at some time in the near future (within five to ten years). Therefore there is little incentive to keep up the buildings, and the places fall into disrepair and start to look like crap. The value of the place is not building, but the land on which developers will build expensive high-rises.
Many of Seoul’s development projects from the 1960s and the 1970s (even the 1980s) are starting to be redeveloped, so it’s not just the shantytown-like neighborhoods that are falling victim to this wait-and-develop-rather-than-maintain-and-enjoy attitude.
In some sense, the proximity to an already expensive area exacerbates the problem even further.
Interesting how also these photos were taken by a Japanese, just like the classic (?) shots of Cheonggyecheon and its people in the 1960s by Kuwabara Shisei. People who lived there didn’t have much cameras back then, and those Koreans who had didn’t often see any point in photographing there. (There were of course exceptions like Choi Min-sik - see his homepage - and Kim Ki-chan.)
As mentioned in the article, the pics are from the downstream closer to the Han river (perhaps from Ttukseom?) and not quite from the downtown part which has been the main target of the recent “restoration.”
He is more than a “social activist.” The Japanese man in question is a “reverend,” a Christian 목사, and a Japanese Christian clergyman doing any work in Korea at all certainly makes him unusual.
I was going to bring up Kim Ki-Chan as well - I just bought a couple of his photo books the other day. Shots of farmers looking on in gangnam as apartment buildings sprout around them are fascinating. A gallery of his golmok photos is here.
Dirt poor, and yet they look happier than most Koreans I see on the street in Gangnam………
Robert, Antti, Bulgasari: Thanks for the links. I never get tired of seeing old photos of Korea, be they from the 1890s or the 1970s.