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Try reading that Time quote again. The reason Namdaemun was not saved was the fault of the CHA not lack of sprinklers. Even without sprinkers the firefighters arrived on the scene very quickly.

Focusing on sprinklers ignores larger structural problems. Korea doesn’t really care about its cultural hertitage because it does not provide adequate funding and resources to take care of it, and at the end of the day it is the developers who have the real power in this country.

Sprinklers are cheap and easy to install. (Hell, every motel room in this country has smoke detectors.) I really don’t think that’s the main problem here, do you?

Wonder what would have happened if he wrote something negative in the AWSJ?

As I pointed out, his piece contained the words “Sea of Japan”, full stop, with no parenthetical reference to the “East Sea”.

How much more negative can you get?

Ironically, the reason the arsonist torched Namdaemun is precisely because a developer had seized his home from him without proper compensation, and the gov’t had ignored all his subsequent formal complaints.

Does the old saying, “Chickens coming home to roost” make sense to anyone else out there?

Abuse of Eminent Domain is not limited to Korea and is a separate issue from the need to provide better protection for precious historical and architectural treasures.

Sorry, the print page used to be the back door into the WSJ, but I guess they fixed it.

kiwijip –> kiwa-jip

incompentent –> incompetent

“Firefighters dispatched to the scene battled desperately to combat the blaze, but to no avail–five hours later, the second floor of the two-story wooden infrastructure collapsed on the first floor, leaving the once proud national monument in ruins.”

Compare that statement with what Time magazine (along with many others) reported on Feb 13th:

“The firefighters say they were told by the Cultural Heritage Administration, a body charged with the care of the nation’s national treasures, to temper their aggression in fighting the fire, in order to make sure Seoul’s oldest wooden structure was left intact.”

The problem is not, as you argue in most of the article, that most of Korea’s cultural properties do not have adequate sprinkler systems or smoke detectors. The problem is that the CHA wouldn’t let the firefighters do their job properly, and were hence incompentent. Just as many of Korea’s governing bodies have been asleep at the switch as much of Korea’s cultural heritage has been destroyed by developers and their cronies in the goverment. Just recently, for example, the former prince’s residence of Uich’in in Insa-dong was turned into a giant parking lot by Chongno Guch’ong, but when I mentioned the matter to Seoul Shich’ong’s Department of Cultural Heritage, they didn’t even know about it. The largest kiwijip in Insa-dong was turned into a parking lot and they claimed to have no clue about it!

Thus, the problem is not fire alarms or sprinker systems. The problem is that the developers in this country have too much power and local governing bodies are often unwilling to keep them in check. Which is why your statement in the article that “the whole of Korea is a vitural outdoor museum” made me wonder if we were even living in the same country. Maybe it is in the pages of Seoul magazine, but not in the country that I’ve lived in for over a decade.

Ironically, the reason the arsonist torched Namdaemun is precisely because a developer had seized his home from him without proper compensation, and the gov’t had ignored all his subsequent formal complaints.

Does the old saying, “Chickens coming home to roost” make sense to anyone else out there?

http://online.wsj.com/article_.....83715.html