A new bridge to Sorok Island is opening this Fall, during Chuseok and for the first time it will easily connect the leper colony, founded in 1916, to the rest of South Korea.
As per the article from Norimitsu Onishi (Lee Su-hyun contributing), Sorok Island has changed only a little since the Japanese Colonial Period:
. . . Roughly 100 of 130 colonial-era buildings are still being used on Sorok Island, which is about 1.3 times as big as Central Park. Even a Japanese Shinto shrine still stands on a small hill near one of the islet’s main intersections.
Apparently its history include suffering under the administration of the Japanese who founded the leper colony there as well.
For more of this interesting article, please go here.
13 Comments
The hospital director who treated the patients like his family. Was he Japanese or Korean ? Every reader would be interested to know. Onishi does not say anything about it though he mentions about the cruel Japanese commander. Because of his always scathing(and often biased) views of Japan, Onishi is rumored to be ethnic Korean although he has a Japanese name. If the kind hospital director admired by the patients was Japanese, the rumor is most likely to be true.
hello, tocchin, the director’s name was 花井善吉 hanai jenkichi(japanese), he wasn’t like the other directors, so when he died, all about 700 patients mourned his passing as if he was their own, and collect money and built the cenotaph, also those patients had buried the cenotaph to protect in secret place for a long time
the cenotaph has finally been replaced in its original place on 1988
he’s known to korean as ’schweitzer of sorok island’
Well, it didn’t take long for the “Onishi the Zainichi” meme to raise its head…
No, it didn’t, Robert. I’ll agree that Onishi has his biases and cherry picks like mad, but this knee jerk reaction to every word he writes is insane.
Tocchin, you can’t possibly be serious. Are you seriously saying that ethnicity determines political views? The American Onishi takes the Liberal view of Japan’s unsavory past, so that means he can’t possibly be of Japanese descent, right? Because no person with actual Japanese blood in his veins could ever be critical of Japan, right?
The particular case you bring up is not only somewhat racist, but spurious in the extreme. Is Onishi required to mention the nationality of everyone about whom he writes?
What if the doctor was Japanese? Maybe an editor took it out, maybe Onishi left it out to satisfy his own nefarious agenda, maybe Onishi is as evil and horrid as his detractors claim.
That makes him Korean?
Pull your head out of that posterior orifice and cram it into a logic book.
That’s weird, your little tracker has me in Australia, it seems. Never been there in my life and I’m not using a proxy.
Garrett — Couldn’t tell why you’re getting the Aussie flag. Odd.
PS: I really enjoyed TPR’s interview with Debito. And there’s nothing wrong with liking Duran Duran.
Chonju bibimbap gets trashed and Duran Duran worship is defended: This is an upside-down world I want no part of.
Anyhoooo….it was a fascinating article. And it was clear from the context that the hospital director who was remembered so fondly was Japanese.
If the lepers’ privacy is to be respected, I guess we won’t be seeing a Marmot photo essay from the island any time soo, though, which’d be a shame, if the architecture has been preserved so intact.
When you realize that leprosy (Hansen’s Disease) has been successfully treated with antibiotics since the early 20th century, and therefore its patients don’t need to be isolated from the general population (discrimination is another issue), you see that Korean civilians were not very high up on the list of priorities of the Japanese government.
‘Onishi does not say anything about it though he mentions about the cruel Japanese commander….’ tocchin
‘Life during Japanese rule sometimes verged on the surreal. One notoriously brutal hospital director had a 31-foot statue of himself built and forced patients to bow before it each morning. Another, remembered to this day for his kindness, treated the patients like his family so that after his death here, they pulled together their savings and built a cenotaph in his honor….’ onishi, nyt
mr onishi didn’t say the brutal hospital director was japanese. and yet, you were able to see that he was.
think, man!
Yes Onishi did say that.
Our Japanese commander’s name was Sato, he said, He carried a big bat and would hit us whenever we rested. He was very viciuos.
#9 It was in 1943 that the medicine for leprosy was first introduced in the US. This information was brought to Japan soon after that by a German submarine during WW2.
Glad you enjoyed the Debito interview, Robert.
http://article.joins.com/artic.....id=2286938
Here’s the name.
The novel 『This paradise Of Yours』was well sold and I also read it.
I do not guarantee the correctness of the column; they tend to be lazy in searching for materials in order to be correct.
Suho Masato(周防正) is written as one of them in the column.
Lepers were not always victims. The child at a mountain in an island heard a legend that a leper had killed a child and eaten its liver to be cured from Hansen’s disease. Bad knowledge, bad faith. Grownups hushed that that horrible thing had happened nearby. Maybe an intimidation.
Well, I think there’s necessity of gathering them in one place to protect and care them.
Here’a poem of which motif is the bad faith: excellent but not pleasant.
서정주
해와 하늘빛이
문둥이는 서러워
보리밭에 달 뜨면
애기 하나 먹고
꽃처럼 붉은 울음을 밤새 울었다
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[...] As a bit of an intro, here’s his photos from the leper colony on Sorok-do, which was introduced recently in the New York Times. [...]
[...] As a bit of an intro, here’s his photos from the leper colony on Sorok-do, which was introduced recently in the New York Times. [...]