A symbolic demolition blasts at Seoul's past

Insight on the News, June 19, 1995 by Willis Witter

The Japanese-built former capitol is a blight on the landscape to many South Koreans -- a stark reminder of Japan's brutal colonial rule: `It has to go because it is eating away at the Korean spirit.'

South Koreans are known for airing grievances with a theatrical flourish and President Kim Young-sam is promising a marquee performance of his own. Before his five-year term ends in 1998, he plans to tear down South Korea's colonial-era capitol -- a structure as distinctive to the thriving city of 11 million as the White House is to Washington. The reason: The Japanese built it.

"I announce the reclamation of light through the destruction of the former colonial building," proclaimed a well-known South Korean actor at the ceremony symbolically kicking off demolition of the magnificent granite structure with its distinctive green dome.

Former President Chun Doo-hwan turned the building into Korea's national museum nearly a decade ago. Apart from the anti-Japanese symbolism, Kim apparently hopes its destruction somehow will represent a cathartic break with South Korea's postwar succession of military dictators, including Chun.

Jackhammers won't begin pounding away for another year, but the decision to raze the 1926 building appears to have broad public support. "It has to go because it is eating away at the Korean spirit," says Kim Hee-oak, 39, who runs a bookstore in Keum-chon, a town of 30,000 north of Seoul. Won Hee-suk, publisher of the Paju Journal, agrees: "We've been liberated from the Japanese for 50 years. That building should have been torn down a long time ago."

Koreans and Japanese have hated each other for centuries -- an enmity stoked by repeated Japanese conquests including Japan's 1910 annexation, which began a particularly brutal period of colonial rule. Before Korea's liberation in 1945, Japan tried to eradicate Korea's culture and language to assimilate its people. It forced thousands of Koreans to work in factories in Japan and thousands of Korean women into sexual slavery in military brothels throughout Asia.

Though the governments in Seoul and Tokyo are on friendly terms today, any Korean politician able to mine the vast reserves of anti-Japanese sentiment stands to gain and many South Koreans look forward to the capitol's destruction with the relish of revenge. Government officials, however, explain the demolition as part of a larger effort to recover a lost cultural heritage. They criticize their own postwar leaders, who pushed economic development and modernization but made little effort to preserve cultural assets. Bureaucrats still try to defend Korea from cultural pollution by banning Japanese pop singers.

With mountains on three sides, the building physically blocks the late 14th-century Kyongbok-kung Palace and the ruins of the adjoining royal compound from the rest of Seoul. The Japanese chose the site to seal off the palace from the nation. "How would you like it if the Japanese came and stuck a ring through your nose? Would you let it just stay there?" asks Choung Jea-joong, assistant director of the museum. "If the building was someplace else, we would continue to use it. But this location represents the spirit, the face of the Korean nation."

Officials held a ceremony launching the building's demolition on March 1, the anniversary of a 1919 uprising by Korean students inflamed by the ideal of "self-determination of peoples," one of President Woodrow Wilson's "14 Points" proclaimed the previous year as American aims in World War I. The upper part of the building's dome is scheduled to be removed in a ceremony on Aug. 15, the 50th anniversary of Korea's liberation from Japan.

To celebrate its 600th anniversary, Seoul recently blew up two high-rise apartment buildings because they were built for foreigners by the late dictator Park Chung-hee. The nation watched with fascination as authorities dynamited the two 1971 buildings containing 427 apartments. City officials said they wanted to restore the natural environment of Namsan, or South Mountain, another cultural treasure, but few people believed them. Nearby stand the Seoul Hyatt Hotel and a number of other buildings, including a tower on top of the mountain.

Unlike the apartments on Namsan, which crumbled in seconds, demolition of the Capitol will take at least 10 months. The government plans to make a documentary preserving every exquisite detail as workers pull the structure apart stone by stone.

Despite the surge of nationalism, many South Koreans view the demolition as bizarre. "We're just having a temper tantrum," says Wong Sukchung, a 19-year-old high-school senior touring the museum with classmates. "It doesn't erase the years when we lived under Japanese." Others view the demolition as an expression of national anguish that combines a quest for the lost past clouded by pessimism about the future. The nation is prosperous, but South Koreans feel threatened by North Korea as well as pressure from longtime allies, including the United States.