nanoomi

By R.M. Adamson

Pt. 1

By R.M. Adamson

The woman frying up the bin dae ddeok in front of me doesn’t mind that I’m taking her picture, and several times she even stops her work to pose for me a bit. She’s had her picture taken here before. The banner behind her displays still shots from an SBS-TV segment featuring her tiny shik tang here at the edge of Ahyeon Market, and she’s wearing enough make-up today that she might be expecting to be under hot lights again. (Not to worry, I seldom use the flash on my little point-and-shoot, and almost never with people. Too distracting, and rarely yields results that are kind.)

I do get the impression that it’s her shop, and the other two women are her employees. They are all dressed in black tees under bright red aprons, but she carries an air of command about her, proprietary and confident. I also suspect, but cannot prove, that the women working alongside her wear similar amounts of cosmetics at her insistence, or at least her instigation, and I wonder if it happened because of the TV spot.

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I’ve mentioned before the plans to build a ‘waterfront town’ in Yongsan in conjunction with the Han River Renaissance Plan, and a week or so ago new renderings of this plan turned up. Previous renderings looked like this (from 2004):

More recent renderings, linked to the Han River Renaissance Plan, show the planned ferry terminal…

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The Joongang Ilbo published an article the other day about covering and modernizing outdoor traditional markets:

[M]any of the 1,550 traditional markets around the country have gone through [...] renovations during the past decade.

Leading the effort to transform Korea’s regional markets are the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and the Korea Federation of Small and Medium Business, or Kbiz. The two collaborated to launch a project to transform traditional markets into more than just retail spaces and is trying to add “culture” to the mix.

The project is called Culture-Tourism Markets, and it was launched in 2008 with initiatives for 18 traditional markets in Korea worth up to 20 billion won ($17.1 million). Both the government and private sector are investing in each market, and the Agency for Traditional Market Administration, under Kbiz, is handling the actual execution of the projects.

As part of the mass-makeovers, markets introduced cultural programs like merchant theater groups that perform inside the markets. In addition to remodeling the exterior and interior of the markets, famous regional tourist attractions have been specially branded and connect to the markets.

It also has a nice photo of Jjimdalk cooking in the Andong market – a dish which makes it well worth visiting.

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I’ve written about the destruction of Gindeung Maeul, the first part of the Banghwa New Town to go ahead, several times before:

Exploring Gindeung Maeul
The Disappearance of Gindeung Maeul
More of Gindeung Maeul being destroyed

Google Earth/Maps has a shot of the area that now shows the destruction from above:

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…in 1968.

(From Seoul Through Pictures 4)

You can read the original post at Gusts of Popular Feeling.

From the book I mentioned here comes photos of the interior of the Bando Hotel (seen above). The hotel was built in the late 1930s or early 1940s (anyone know when exactly?) as the Hanto Hotel, and was the tallest building in the city for years. It was used as the US Embassy from 1948 to 1962, and was demolished to make way for the Lotte Hotel in the late 1970s.

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A few months ago I stumbled on a book at Yonsei University Library which presented readers with images and maps of Seoul, places to visit, and future plans – all from the 1950s. Or so I think; I forgot to write down the book’s name, and no date was visible.

There are a few clues, however. If you look at the photo above, of Namdaemunno, you can see the Bank of Korea on the left, and the old post office – built in 1916 – on the right (here’s a photo from a similar view taken during the colonial era).

Now, this may be an older photo, taken years before the publication of the book. The reason I say that is because the post office was heavily damaged during the Korean War (it was shelled and burnt out, though its walls still stood intact), and I’m not sure when it was finally demolished (a shame, as it was a beautiful building, but understandable, as reconstruction, not preservation, was the goal of everyone at the time). One little thing I noticed in the photo above are the jeeps.
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Looking around the FIFA website, I found the above photo of and an article about the fan fests around the world where people can gather at outdoor venues to watch the World Cup games in front of giant screens:

More than 400,000 fans celebrated together at the 16 official FIFA Fan Fest™ venues yesterday, as the 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa™ got underway.

The Opening Match between South Africa and Mexico was followed by 300,000 enthusiasts at the official FIFA Fan Fests in the host nation, while, between them, Rome, Paris, Berlin, Sydney, Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro had 100,000 supporters.

Another article adds that:

Official public viewings events were first launched by FIFA in 2006 as part of the official programme under the name of “Fan Fests”. During June/July 2006, more than 18 million fans gathered at the 12 official events and transformed Germany into one of the greatest fan parties of all time.

Photos of gatherings in front of outdoor screens in Berlin and Frankfurt attest to this, and it was these gatherings that helped Germans feel that it was okay to be patriotic and be proud of their flag again. Similarly, a friend of mine told me that the outdoor cheering in Sydney saw different minorities – who would often be cheering their own teams – come together to cheer for the Australian team in its first World Cup appearance in 32 years. The FIFA site adds that:

Enabling fans to experience the ‘FIFA World Cup feeling’ in their own country was certainly FIFA’s aim when it unveiled Fan Fests in Rome, Paris, Berlin, Sydney, Mexico City and Rio – and the results have been spectacular. Within the first two weeks alone, more than three million fans had packed out the 16 domestic and international venues, with those outside South Africa accounting for 50 per cent of this mammoth turnout.

Germany, whose wholehearted embrace of the Fan Fest concept in 2006 provided the spur for this expansion, have again led the way, with a record 305,000 coming together in Berlin’s Olympic Square for their group decider against Ghana. Even elsewhere, where the fluctuating fortunes of Australia, France, Italy and Bafana Bafana might have been expected to deflate the atmosphere, festivities have continued unabated.

I find it interesting that this history of the fan fests goes back only to 2006, to the first official fan fests, and that no mention is made of their obvious inspiration:

I can’t find it now, but in 2006 I read an interview where the mayor of one of the German cities hosting the World Cup described the outdoor screens and said that “of course” the idea came from South Korea. Now it seems Hyundai is taking the initiative in colonizing not only street cheering in Korea, but around the world:

Hyundai Motor Company, one of the official top partners of the FIFA 2010 World Cup, has officially kicked off the Hyundai Fan Park, a street cheering event, with the opening match between South Africa and Mexico today in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Hyundai will be offering soccer fans around the world the opportunity to enjoy the World Cup in a fun and safe environment by providing venues and large screens in 32 cities from 19 countries across the 31 days of the event. Giant screens will relay all the action from South Africa, while group cheering boosts the festive mood.

Actually, further reading at FIFA’s Hyundai site makes it clear I spoke too soon – it turns out the “Fan Fests” FIFA describes on its website as taking place in South Africa are actually Hyundai Fan Parks – so that’s what is seen at the top of this post.

At any rate, while such street cheering led to patriotic feeling in Korea, Australia, and Germany, that use of public space also influenced the organization of and specific spaces occupied by anti-American candlelight protests six months later. Of course, such dark sides of “patriotic” mobilization may only be found in Korea, due to the history of occupying urban space during protests here, something which of course informed how the street cheering was allowed to occur in Korea in the first place (as compared to Japan, where despite the plethora of large outdoor screens in urban areas, street cheering did not take place).

Above is a shot of a house in Guryong Maeul, with the Tower Palace, Korea’s tallest building, in the background. This article has more information about the village:

Against the backdrop of Tower Palace and other luxury residence complexes in affluent southern Seoul, tiny, shoddy shacks unevenly built with boards, vinyl and cloth stand side-by-side.[...]

Located at the foot of Mt. Daemo in Gaepo-dong, Guryong Village is one of the largest unlicensed shack clusters. Currently, some 1,300 households are in the village of about 491,000 square meters, according to the local district office.

The village was created around 1988 when the government removed illegal houses under redevelopment projects ahead of the Seoul Olympic Games. The people who lost their houses were driven into the village and built their shacks on private land owned by others. [...]

These unregistered houses don’t have addresses and mail doesn’t reach them. The residents pay their water and electric bills together and share toilets.

The village may be redeveloped at some point in the near future, as the rest of the article notes. At the moment, a year after the article was published, it’s still standing.

You can find Matt’s original post here.

The Joongang Ilbo has an interesting article about the desire in Korea for apartments. It gives some interesting statistics:

According to the city, about 80 percent of the newly constructed buildings in Seoul were apartments in 2008, while this year about 56 percent of the city’s households lived in apartments, 13 times higher than in 1970. The number of houses and apartments in smaller buildings – known here as “villas” – fell by about 10,000 over the same period. [...] In a survey of 3,560 people conducted by the country’s top lender Kookmin Bank in 2009, 73.8 percent of respondents said they wanted to live in apartments.

We’re also told that “Seoul’s very first apartment building appeared in 1962 in Mapo, near downtown.” This isn’t true. Other apartment buildings had appeared before this; Mapo was the first apartment complex (or the source of its apartment complex), which I’ve looked at before here.

The article also mentions some of the attempts being made to move away from apartments, such as the Seoul city government-backed Human Town Project:

The project was designed to improve the quality of life of residents living in“villas,” by adding neighborhood facilities often found inside high-rise apartment complexes, such as security offices, surveillance cameras, parks, parking lots and senior citizens centers.

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