Introduction
From white cable cars teeming with happy tourists to pastel-colored love padlocks adorning a soaring N Seoul Tower to leisurely strollers ambling its winding trails, Namsan offers a joyful and idyllic haven away from the bustling capital city below. It is unsurprising then that few know and even fewer remember Korea’s violent colonial and postcolonial past haunting its lush and polished grounds. For this was where the Annexation Treaty was signed, where the colonial Governor-Generals took up residence, where the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) set-up myriad offices, where students, laborers, and politicians were tortured, maimed, and killed, and where such traces were quietly but efficiently expunged. Under the aegis of extirpating ignominious remains, first the authoritarian state and later the Seoul Metropolitan Government (SMG) worked to beautify and remake Namsan as a city landmark and tourist spot.
While this reputation has only grown with the global rise of “K-culture” and its attendant hyphenations (beauty, cinema, drama, food, pop), it was also accompanied by efforts from various civic organizations to illuminate the hidden sides of Namsan. Memorial cobblestones, plaques, trails, ruins, and museums now dot the landscape and complicate Namsan as merely a commercial tourist site. But what distinguishes Namsan from other tourist and memorial spaces is its utter mundanity. Almost 75,000 vehicles travel across Namsan daily as commuters move between north and south Seoul, and the neighborhoods—both commercial and residential—at its foothills weave Namsan into the ordinary rhythms of urban life.1 How, then, might we position Namsan as a memoryscape? What experiences, memories, knowledges emerge within the interstices of Namsan as a simultaneously tourist, memorial, and quotidian site?
This paper explores how tourism, memory, and affect interact at Namsan. Alena Pfoser and Sabine Stach suggest that there is much to be gained by considering how positive memories are produced in tourism, particularly at non-institutionalized sites.2 Tourists are not, they argue, passive recipients, and their diverse modes of reception can lead to critical reflections that expand the scope of memory production. Building on Pfoser and Stach, I seek to broaden their discussion to what I deem accidental tourism. My focus is not so much on tourism proper, but rather the juncture at which tourism encounters memory unwittingly. That is, what happens when individuals stumble upon historically charged sites without intending to participate in memory-work? What happens when leisure and recreation of the present collide with memories and traumas of the past?
My rationale for examining these questions in the context of Namsan is twofold. One is to complicate the oft-presumed binaries between legitimate/illegitimate, educational/entertaining, and authentic/inauthentic and to depart from the predominant focus on anguish, pain, and trauma within memory studies in and beyond South Korea. Undoubtedly, there is still much work to be done in understanding how practices of memory help with working through historical injustices, including horrors not yet resolved and even now ongoing. Nevertheless, as Ann Rigney advises, it is also necessary to move past the “apparently natural link between memory and trauma” and consider alternative roles played by memory.3 When fun is preferable to pain, how might the lighthearted act of tourism lead to a “better” understanding of the past and the present?
The other is to consider the significance of Namsan as a place. Theories in cultural geography offer productive means to think about how place is entwined with memory. Tim Cresswell argues that place-making involves a wide array of acts that invest space with meaning.4 To read Namsan, then, is to trace the various actions, relations, and tensions played upon its space. This approach also resonates with Doreen Massey’s call to rethink place in terms of relations.5 Located in the heart of the nation’s capital, Namsan has long been a battleground where competing powers have vied for dominance. The mountain thus presents a telling case of how places acquire shifting meaning through the specific ways they are interconnected to and, in turn, shape other places and peoples at particular moments.
I begin by surveying multiple intersecting tensions—between state and society, borders drawn and transgressed, histories erased and recollected—from the colonial period through authoritarian dictatorship to the present. This serves as a conceptual framework through which I then examine how Namsan is experienced, felt, and understood depending on the social “situatedness” of individuals.6 That is, how do visitors, whether tourists, passers-by, students, engage with what has gathered on the surface of Namsan? What do they effect through their encounters? I use a site-based analytical approach combining secondary source research with in situ observation. The former includes historical works, tourist materials (brochures, websites), and public voices (news reports, open letters, social media posts, student commentaries); the latter is based on seven visits to Namsan between 2022 and 2024—three solo trips and four field trips with undergraduate students in my memory studies courses.7
Drawing on these diverse sources, I argue that the meeting of idle and commercial activities with historically charged spaces creates opportunities for new forms of memory-work that speak with more relevance to contemporary urban life than traditional memorial practices. Not only do accidental encounters offer a more democratic entryway into historical consciousness than didactic, institutional impositions, but they reveal further ambiguities and tensions that prompt us to rethink our present relationship to the past. Amid the city’s relentless push to respatialize Namsan as merely a tourist spot and green space, this paper makes a critical intervention by examining how people’s relationships with the place shape their understanding of South Korea’s past and possible future.
Between Place-Making and Memory-Making
Several reasons account for why Japanese officials chose Namsan as a central site of governance. Not only was it considered geographically auspicious, having served as a sacred ritual site for the royal family during the Chosŏn Dynasty (1392–1910), there was a burgeoning Japanese settlement around its northern foothills since the mid-1880s.8 If constructing the Government-General Building and Governor-General’s Residence at Namsan was to exert political dominance—enjoying unobstructed views of the Korean Royal Palaces and rising above Chongmyo Shrine where ancestral tablets of Chosŏn kings were enshrined—creating a modern recreational park and erecting an official imperial Shintō shrine along the central mountain was to collectivize the Japanese and showcase colonial authority and legitimacy.
While compatible on the surface, these aims did not always align. Parks worked well enough for the Japanese authorities. Historian Kim Taeho notes how the process of claiming and sprucing park space was one way through which the Japanese wielded influence: first came the cherry blossom trees (replacing the extant pine trees), then green squares replete with baroque fountains and Victorian bandstands, and then the Shintō shrines.9 As cherry blossom festivals, memorial services, and Shintō processions were staged in Namsan, throngs flocked to revel in the free brass concerts, shimmering electric lights, and flower-adorned trams on display. Restaurants, cafés, bars, and brothels proliferated around the slopes, and Namsan became synonymous with modern progress and leisure.
Shintō shrines, however, posed more problems for the colonial state. While built to assimilate Koreans into dutiful and loyal subjects of the emperor, ethnocentric priests did so reluctantly and only in pointedly subordinated ways. Shintō shrines were exclusive spaces to bolster Japanese identity and colonial privilege vis-à-vis the “uncivilized” ethnic Other.10 For example, when a reservoir was constructed below Seoul Shrine (Kyŏngsŏng sinsa) at Namsan in 1903, what was Seoul’s first modern water facility supplied drinking water exclusively to Japanese residents in the area.11 Following the March 1 Movement in 1919, embracing the city’s disgruntled Korean population became more urgent. Hence, the Government-General decided to erect Korea Shrine (Chosŏn sin’gung) housing the deities of the Japanese goddess Amaterasu and the first modern monarch Emperor Meiji atop Namsan.
In Assimilating Seoul, Todd Henry recounts how the “spiritual control of Namsan” became a struggle among colonial and spiritual leaders.12 The lofty placement of the government’s official shrine above Seoul Shrine did not go unnoticed by its custodians. Concerned that they might be relegated to a satellite shrine or abolished altogether, the leaders of Seoul Shrine toiled to retain their spiritual community by performing wedding rituals and installing native Korean deities, like Tan’gun, into their pantheon.13 When Korea Shrine was completed in 1925, competition only grew fiercer between the two shrines, fighting over pilgrimage routes, complaining about each other’s infractions, and upstaging one another with more elaborate and extravagant festival celebrations.
It is important to point out that such excessive displays of colonial authority and progress at Namsan did not represent the reality of Japanese rule. Even as Koreans climbed the 382 steps to Korea Shrine as mandated, most of them had little direct contact with Shintō and lacked any reverence for its rituals. They remained “alienated” “onlookers” who were more engrossed in the spectacle than in the spirituality offered at Namsan. Experienced as a popular tourist and recreational space, Korea Shrine drew colonized residents out for its festivities, views, and romance—some with kisaeng escorts on “nighttime pleasure rides.”14 For more impoverished Koreans, the lavish Shintō gatherings became occasions to fill their pockets with petty thieving while for others they proceeded as painful reminders of all that they lacked.
Cresswell asserts that “places are active forces in the reproduction of norms.” That is, place functions as a surrogate for power and is produced by practices that adhere to beliefs about what is “appropriate” for a place. Acting “in place” reproduces and reinforces these conditions while behaving “out of place” violates spatial norms and provides “potentials” for resistance.15 Following Cresswell, the “out of place-ness” of the colonized at Namsan can be judged as transgressive. At times improper and illicit and almost always distanced and excluded, their uses of the shrine spaces produced the unintended consequence of upending what was intended to be a place of spiritual assimilation, modern leisure, and colonial docility. That even spiritual members of the colonial state defied orders further reveals how spatial economy remains in flux between meanings imposed from above and those created from below.
Spatial tensions at Namsan were further complicated after liberation as place-making became entwined with memory-making in the nascent nation. Denis Byrne, a scholar of heritage studies, notes the role played by place in the transmission of affect. Referring to Sara Ahmed’s notion of “sticky” objects, Byrne claims that landscapes become charged with affect by their associations with significant events from the past.16 Consider, then, how Namsan was experienced anew post-1945. A Tong-A Ilbo article from March 4, 1946 describes the euphoria of celebrating the March 1 Movement at Namsan: “To cry ‘Tongnip manse!’ from where Korea Shrine stood until recently is a miracle … Our enjoyment of this day is the reward for having shed blood with one heart and one mind.”17 Archival photographs depict Koreans sledding happily on the massive steps to the Korea Shrine in 1948.18 Invoked in these two examples is how places are remembered and refigured through various affective registers, such as pain, shame, joy, relief, resentment, vindication.
The dynamics between place, memory, and affect became more volatile as South Korea transitioned into authoritarian rule under Syngman Rhee (Yi Sŭngman) and then Park Chung Hee (Pak Chŏnghŭi). Without delving into South Korea’s failed historical project of decolonization under US patronage, suffice it to say that colonial pasts were left intact or untended throughout Rhee’s regime.19 Namsan returned to public consciousness when a towering statue of Rhee was unveiled at the former site of Korea Shrine on August 15, 1956. Standing at 25-meters and lionizing Rhee’s “dedication to national liberation,” the statue was widely criticized—by journalists, politicians, and writers alike—as tactless, wasteful, and self-aggrandizing.20 Less than four years later, the statue was pulled down by angry hands immediately after the April 19 Revolution.
This bottom-up reckoning is meaningful as a democratic “de-commemoration” whereby the public declares that the contested memory must be done with and takes it upon itself to destroy or remove the offensive monument from public engagement.21 While de-commemoration has the ironic effect of confirming the memory as significant, albeit disgraced, it becomes less about erasing meaning and more about interacting with the past in the present in a particular way. The act of toppling Rhee’s statue thus recharged Namsan with hope and possibility by challenging monuments and landscapes as everlasting and consoling mnemonic spaces and by clearing the path for more public memory-making.
Such hopes were quickly dashed when Park Chung Hee staged a coup d’état on May 16, 1961, and established the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) atop Namsan—at spaces previously occupied by the colonial government—to consolidate power and control. Throughout his dictatorship, Namsan came to symbolize terror and oppression as more than forty KCIA offices were scattered across the mountain, and tunnels were drilled to provide the KCIA directors and their arsenal of agents (and, at times, tanks) easy access to the Blue House (Ch’ŏngwadae) and to the main thoroughfares of downtown Seoul. These KCIA buildings looked unassuming and commonplace from the outside, belying a web of interrogation rooms in their damp, cavernous basements.22 Phrases like “Let’s go to Namsan” and “Taken to Namsan” struck fear and were deemed death knells, for once taken, one was unlikely to leave Namsan whole if at all.23
As the heavy pall of the KCIA loomed over Namsan, records of what happened to the colonial vestiges there were lost to history. Some buildings were repurposed and reused by the KCIA, but the fate of others, especially the Governor-General’s Residence, remains unknown. Yi Sunu, a cultural heritage scholar, dates the last known record of the Residence to September 20, 1960, when plans for renovation were discussed by city officials. Once the KCIA settled into Namsan, however, it closed the area to the public, and the Residence is believed to have been demolished shortly thereafter.24 It is perhaps unsurprising that Park, whose formative years were spent in colonial military institutions and was an exemplary “offspring” of the Japanese Empire, would conduct de-commemoration invisibly.25
Rather than looking to Namsan’s wounded pasts, Park turned the public’s gaze towards a regenerative future befitting its centrality in the nation’s modernizing capital. His regime had, from the outset, developed cultural policies to inspire loyalty, patriotism, and national belonging. One result of this was the Committee for Patriotic Martyrs Statues (Aeguk sŏnyŏl chosang kŏllip wiwŏnhoe) inaugurated in 1966 and responsible for placing fifteen statues of national heroes, such as Yi Sunsin, Yu Kwansun, and Yun Ponggil, across the nation in less than four years.26 Of the fifteen, nine were erected at Namsan, recasting the mountain with a gloss of duty, triumph, and sacrifice. Statues of prominent independence leaders Kim Ku and An Junggŭn were deliberately placed at the former Seoul Shrine site and cast in the heroic style of traditional monuments to project strength and prompt aspiration—consistent with the regime’s ideology of militarized modernity.
An even more visible and viable diversion came to Namsan in the form of tourism beginning with the Namsan Cable Car in 1962 and ending with N Seoul Tower in 1975.27 Noteworthy is how the Park regime involved children and First Lady Yuk Yŏngsu in their plans to rewrite the mountain. With the proclamation of the National Education Charter (Kungmin kyoyuk hŏnjang) in 1968, there was a push to inculcate children as diligent and healthy citizens through science, industry, and education. Government officials (rightly) believed that the First Lady’s soft, elegant demeanor smoothed out her husband’s cold, militaristic image, and a natural conclusion was to provide educational resources for children under Yuk’s maternal patronage.28 This is how the Namsan Children’s Center (Namsan ŏrini hoegwan), replete with a theater, library, gymnasium, swimming pool, science laboratories, and rooftop observatory, was established in 1970, where Korea Shrine had once stood.29
Newspapers actively circulated headlines like “Dreams are nurtured at the Children’s Center” alongside pictures of merry parents and their children at Namsan.30 Hit songs like An Tasŏng’s “Seoul’s Lovers” (Sŏul ŭi aeindŭl, 1965), crooning of lovers walking arm in arm “past the neon lights of Myŏngdong” and “up the streets to Namsan,” also popularized the mountain as a site of urban leisure and romance.31 Undoubtedly a part of the regime’s plans to produce and maintain a docile and aspirational urban middle class, Namsan was effectively recreated as a children’s paradise, urban oasis, and, tourist destination in the 1970s. Traces of imperialism were swept away while signs of oppression were buried under the veneer of Namsan as a place of marvel, urbanity, and leisure.
Transformations at Namsan in the 1960s and 1970s reveal how public place-making can be troubled under authoritarianism. In her study of visitor responses at the time, Yi Haesu describes how citizens keen to preserve their memories of joyful diversions and leisurely family outings at Namsan demanded that the city remove “delinquents” and the urban poor around parts of its foothills for the sake of a safe and “healthy” Namsan. So aggressive and persistent were they that the government eventually installed streetlights and hedges demarcating “proper” park space to appease them.32 It is possible to read this as an instance in which the public worked as ideological conductors of the state in their policing of Namsan whereby those who seemed “out of place” were punished—a sobering reminder that the public is neither immutable nor monolithic.
With South Korea’s transition to democracy in 1987, contending with its authoritarian past added another layer to the task of grappling with its colonial past. Not much occurred at Namsan until President Kim Young-sam (Kim Yŏngsam) initiated his Namsan Restoration Project in 1994. Aimed at restoring the mountain’s “natural beauty” and “returning green spaces back to citizens,” the project began with the public spectacle of demolishing the two Foreigner Apartments (oein ap’at’ŭ) built during Park’s reign, then relocating the intelligence agency, and creating a botanical garden in their place.33 Long considered an eyesore and an emblem of ruthless development, the explosion drew crowds who applauded heartily as the buildings fell successively in under three minutes.34
As liberating and satisfying as such overt demonstrations may have felt, in hindsight, they seem to have marked the beginning of a swift and uncritical manner of dealing with the past from the top—and with it a growing emphasis on sanitizing historical spaces for the purpose of tourism. Rather than engaging the past more critically, it established a pattern of addressing historical complexity through sweeping but ultimately superficial gestures whereby national pride became the affective thrust. This approach now defines how Namsan’s layered histories are presented to and experienced by visitors today. The question, then, becomes: when tourists, passers-by, and students encounter all that has gathered on the surface of Namsan, what do they actually see, feel, and understand? To what end?
Accidental Tourism and Memory-Work
It is impossible to conceive of Namsan today without the overwrought term “K-culture.” While a highly curated, hyper-commercialized, and media-driven construct, K-culture is what drives tourism to South Korea—especially to Seoul and to Namsan. VisitSeoul.net features K-pop sensation BTS in its header image and highlights N Seoul Tower atop Namsan as the first of its “Premier Things To Do.” Whether in K-dramas, K-films, K-pop music videos, or K-beauty advertisements, the mountain and its soaring tower appear ceaselessly in sweeping aerial shots and as romantic backdrops. This establishes Namsan as an essential destination in the so-called “K-culture pilgrimage” and creates a narrative geography that draws tourists seeking to recreate moments from these images.
Searching for Namsan on Instagram and TikTok reveals a plethora of similar posts showing panoramic views of Seoul, happy poses by the love locks, images of the tower at night, and colorful bric-a-brac souvenirs. Striking are posts reenacting scenes from Parasite (Kisaengch’ung, 2019) and popular dramas Dear Haeri (Na ŭi haeri-ege, 2024) and My Lovely Samsun (Nae irŭm ŭn Kim Samsun, 2005) at the “108 Stairway” (108 kyedan) and “Samsun Steps” (Samsuni kyedan).35 These are usually followed by pictures of coveted cosmetics and goods purchased at the Olive Young and Musinsa Standard flagship stores in Myŏngdong, and a dazzling array of street-food consumed in the vicinity. At first glimpse, Namsan encapsulates common critiques regarding global tourism as “superficial experiences of other peoples and other places.”36 Tourists appear largely unaware of where they stand and end up participating in and reinforcing a fun and carefree way of seeing and experiencing.
Marita Sturken criticizes this tourist stance for transforming historical sites into spaces where visitors engage the past from a comfortable distance and through consumption.37 When sites are designed to provide comfort rather than to encourage difficult questions, she argues, the result is a mode of engagement that prioritizes comfort over confrontation, consumption over reflection, and emotional security over critical understanding. With its sleek design, shiny observation plazas, rotating Michelin-starred chef restaurant, beautifully landscaped trails, and five floors of cafés, eateries, and shops, this certainly rings true of Namsan. Nothing at the summit indicates any historical connection to Korea save for the octagonal pavillion P’algakjŏng in front of which samulnori troupes perform to traditionally remixed K-pop and han-bok-clad vendors sell talgona candy from flower-adorned carts.38
Offering a smattering of K-culture and false nostalgia, Namsan actively encourages visitors to sit back, admire the view, engage in the latest trends, and experience “Seoul, My Soul.” Rendered in playful typography (with a heart for “o,” exclamation point for “y,” and happy face for “u”), the new logo is meant to signify “love from locals and global visitors, the city’s inspiring diversity, and its wide array of fun attractions.”39 Indeed, social media posts by visitors, many more international than local, show their encounter with Namsan to be lighthearted, pleasant, and comforting. It, thus, reaffirms tourists as “mere observers” and “innocent outsiders” who consume carefully selected experiences that elicit uniform sentiments so they may disavow others.40
Upon closer look, however, Namsan rejects so singular a view regarding tourism. Places, after all, necessitate encounters between a subject, whether intentional visitor or casual passer-by, and site. When multiple tensions play out across vast terrains as they do in Namsan, as lengthily discussed, disruptions, or accidents, are bound to occur. For the tourist not only brings past knowledges but also present emotions that circulate and add to an already dynamic space. Consequently, even as tourism has been the propulsive force behind changes at Namsan since the early 1990s, it has never been effected as projected. In that sense, tourism becomes a contemporary expression of older unresolved tensions regarding place and memory at Namsan. I unpack this through two specific sites: the Ground of Memory and Namsan Yejang Park.
The Ground of Memory lies along a bend towards the Namsan Cable Car. During my last visit in November 2024, the site was cordoned off by black-and-white plastic scaffolding. Between the slats, however, it was possible to make out a gray stone amid gashes of dark hollowed-out earth: a marker stone with the words “Former Governor-General’s Residence Site” (T’onggam kwanjŏ t’ŏ) inscribed in thick calligraphy.41 No trace of the residence remains, and overgrown trees planted during the Park regime make it difficult to identify the place from archival photographs. What was another grassy knoll became an important site of memory when the Center for Historical Truth and Justice (Minjok munje yŏn’gusŏ) located the former colonial site and planted the stone marker in 2010.
When the Center decided to “come together as citizens to record this shameful history and ensure that we never forget the humiliation of losing our country 100 years ago,” the SMG balked at commemorating “an unproud chapter in history” and expressed concerns about potential “public aversion.”42 They suggested marking it as “Site of Nokch’ŏnjŏng” (Nokch’ŏnjŏng t’ŏ) to memorialize a Chosŏn-era pavilion instead.43 This pavilion had been destroyed to make way for the Japanese legation building which became the Resident-General’s Office after the protectorate and then the Governor-General’s Residence after annexation. Civic groups and academics denounced conservative Mayor O Sehun and asserted that history can only be overcome “by reflecting on the past” with “courage.”
A few months earlier in March 2009, near the end of his first term, Mayor O had announced his ambitious Namsan Renaissance Project (NRP). Clearly modeled after Park Chung Hee’s Namsan Development Project and inspired by Kim Young-sam’s Namsan Restoration Project, O’s NRP sought to “recreate Namsan as a leisurely space for citizens and a landmark attraction of Seoul for tourists” by “restoring its ecology and historical-cultural heritage.”44 It was soon revealed that O intended to demolish “gray” buildings—those occupied by the former KCIA—to create “white” hanok villages and “green and blue” parks and waterways. The NRP faced strong resistance, but it was only upon O’s resignation from office that these plans were rescinded.
Thus was the tug-of-war between tourism and memory, official and vernacular, top-down and bottom-up ignited anew as the small grassy knoll evolved into a memoryscape of the colonial period, aptly named the “Ground of Memory.” In a statement titled “History Not Remembered is Repeated,” the Citizen’s Committee for the Ground of Memory (Kiŏk ŭi t’ŏ chosŏng ch’ujin wiwŏnhoe) announced that it would be dedicated to remembering the “comfort women.” Drawing a straight line between the annexation treaty and the plight of these young women, they emphasized the in-situ significance of the site and proclaimed that it would solidify how “the public’s memory knows no defeat.”45
When the Ground of Memory was unveiled on August 29, 2016, it featured two memorials: “Eye of the Earth” (Taeji ŭi nun) and “World’s Navel” (Sesang ŭi paekkop).46 The former was a black marble wall in the shape of a single open eye, suggesting vigilance, upon which were marked the names of 247 former comfort women, testimonial excerpts, and survivor Kim Sundŏk’s iconic drawing “Taken” (kkŭllyŏgam).47 A few steps away, between three small grave-like mounds, “World’s Navel”: a large, flat circular stone, with the words “History Not Remembered Is Repeated” engraved in Korean, English, Japanese, and Chinese, surrounded by rocks of different shapes and sizes.
In September 2023, the two memorials were razed overnight when their creator, famed minjung artist Im Oksang, was charged and convicted of sexual assault.48 Pleas and petitions for discussion notwithstanding, the SMG claimed that “a sex offender’s work” could not “properly commemorate victims of wartime sexual violence” and unilaterally decided upon their removal.49 As bulldozers came rumbling up the usually quiet road, activists, women’s organizations, concerned civilians surrounded the Ground of Memory. To no avail, the memorials were gouged out, and the ground was leveled and planted with a colorful motley of flora. The site was closed again in July 2024 until it reopened with a new comfort women memorial in January 2025.
There is, in the Committee’s statement, an assumption that meaning is as fixed as its place in the landscape. What unfolded at the Ground of Memory hearkens back to James Young’s claims that memorials and their significance are contingent on the political, historical, and aesthetic realities of the moment.50 The SMG’s outright refusal to heed public concerns and hasty commissioning of an entirely new comfort women memorial raise questions about who controls meaning and how but also about what meaning is produced. The new memorial, called “Beams of Light” (pitchulgi), is comprised of 247 lavender rods, each bearing a survivor’s name. It is abstract and, by extension, safe—consistent with a project that limits “historical-cultural heritage” to hanok villages. Beyond safe, it is sanitized to the point of apathy and meaninglessness; any emotion and meaning is derived from the place alone.
This was illustrated during a visit with students on a crisp, sunny November in 2023. Students get emotional, some even bursting into tears, at the Ground of Memory. Reading the testimonials, however truncated, they forge empathy: “I think of how they were younger than me”; “Being here, seeing this, you just feel for them. What they went through … and nobody cared when they returned”; “You try to imagine what it must have been like for them, but you can’t. Not really.” During the 2023 visit, insofar as the students knew they were visiting memory sites at Namsan, no further instructions were given. The site was glittering silver grass and bright flowers save for the Governor-General’s Residence marker at the time, and they barely registered the place as more than “a pretty little part of Namsan.” Yet they collectively spoke of feeling “sad” and “moved,” remarking: “It’s really emotional just being here” and “This place feels so creepy because there’s nothing here and everything’s so shiny!”
Being tasked with memory-work (alongside their professor no less) surely engendered such responses; however, the students also took on the affective registers of the place—wittingly and unwittingly. That is, the embodied experience of being at Namsan, wading through layers and layers of history, produces intense feelings, from sorrow to indignation, which prompt interest in a place that had not previously mattered much before. Namsan is charged; its entangled histories, tensions, meanings have made it “sticky,” to borrow from Ahmed. When this charge connects with subjects, be it students, passers-by, tourists, they find themselves drawn into relationships with pasts they did not come seeking. This is, for me, the potential for accidental tourism.
To demonstrate further, I turn, finally, to Namsan Yejang Park. Located at the former site of the Governor-General’s Residence, which in turn became the KCIA’s Sixth Bureau, the place was categorized as “gray” under mayor O’s NRP and set to be completely overhauled to make way for a sparkling new gondola up to N Seoul Tower. O’s plans were met with fierce resistance by citizens then stalled upon his resignation. O was succeeded by Pak Wŏnsun, a progressive politician who had been a human rights lawyer and founding member of the Institute for Korean Historical Studies (Yŏksa munje yŏn’guso) prior to entering politics. Pak announced his plans to proceed with the creation of Yejang Park, while vaguely assuring the public that “gray” spaces and structures would be “repurposed” as memorials.51
Against public petitions to memorialize in the original buildings, the SMG demolished them, citing “dilapidated facilities” and “faulty structures.” During the demolition process, however, it was reported that remnants of torture victims and materials from Shintō shrines were discovered.52 Demands for preservation grew louder, and the SMG pacified the disapproval with vows to preserve—showcase—the subterranean interrogation rooms and colonial remains on-site. Not all pledges were kept, but granite and bricks from the colonial-era residence are carefully arranged in the courtyard along with six columns salvaged as ruins from the KCIA’s Sixth Bureau.
In keeping with the twin currents of colonialism and authoritarianism, Namsan Yejang Park opened on June 9, 2021, with the Yi Hoeyŏng Memorial Hall (Yi Hoeyŏng kinyŏmgwan), a memorial plaque marking the former Governor-General’s Residence site, and the KCIA Sixth Bureau reborn as Memorial 6 (Kiŏk 6).53 By this time, O had returned, but Yejang Park failed to attract visitors. During my several visits, I spotted only a handful of people—a drastic difference from the bustling crowds just a few steps below in Myŏngdong. Two years later, O announced that construction on the Namsan Gondola would resume at Yejang Park in order to “develop Namsan as a tourism resource.”54
Despite its lack of foot traffic, students are most invigorated at Yejang Park—specifically by the bright-red semi-cylindrical building known as Memorial 6.55 Small and located away from the park’s entrance, it is neither imposing nor inviting. However, entering Memorial 6 offers a very different experience. A narrow room with thick concrete walls, its interior is smaller, darker, and colder than expected. It is also unsettling as unsynchronized images and sounds compete for attention. In one, a grainy black-and-white video, a middle-aged man, with his back turned, speaks nonchalantly of the KCIA’s heydays “when Namsan soared above Paektu Mountain”; in another, a digital installation, a prism of words fall in undulations then wispily fly away to the steady beat of dripping water sounds.56 The bright colors belie the chilling words that struggle to form and disappear: “I’m scared,” “I can’t breathe,” “I was tortured,” “Let’s go to Namsan.” At the far end, the room drops dramatically to reveal an underground interrogation room “restored to its original location and appearance.”
The visceral and sensorial experiences offered on-site account for the students’ engagement:
“I can’t believe I didn’t know about this place. I come to Myŏngdong all the time!”; “It’s so peaceful outside, and then baam! Everything inside hits you. I’m in pain. Is that right? I feel … pained? But can I?”; “The interrogation room was so far down. Do you think they did this on purpose? To block out the sound of cries? Ugh, I have goosebumps”; “I can’t believe all this went on in Namsan!”; “Can I still say ‘Let’s go to Namsan’?”; “I don’t know what I’m feeling. I’m so lost…”; “I think I’ll return here with my mom. She’s coming to Korea, we can stop by before we go to Myŏngdong kyoja.”
Memorial 6 demands that its visitors reckon with multiply triggered bodily responses. In doing so, it produces what Gilles Deleuze calls a “sensuous encounter.” This embodied response to a sensuous stimulus, he asserts, is the critical first step toward the production of new knowledge and political consciousness.57
For Deleuze, what differentiates this affective experience is how its makeup of divergent reactions—disbelief, curiosity, pain, horror, helplessness, indignation, bewilderment, acceptance—prohibits it from being immediately reabsorbed into self-same narrative frameworks and knowledges. As affect theorist Brian Massumi stresses, affect resists complacency by pressing us to grapple with what occurs around us, and consequently becomes a catalyst to action.58 Memorial 6 performs the fragmented, conflicting, and layered nature of memory, and makes it impossible to grasp the past as totality. Combined with the emotional tensions and layers already gathered in situ, this creates an intense experience for those who visit.
In that sense, I half-heartedly welcome the changes at Yejang Park. The gondola is projected to open right beside Memorial 6; perhaps happy tourists on their way to and from the summit will be more keen to learn about this curiously red building. Maybe they will be unsettled and discomforted by their accidental encounter with this and other like spaces in Namsan and join in the fraught but necessary processes of “collected memory” production.59 Most will pass by unattuned. For others, these spaces may stop them in their tracks. And in their unexpectedness, they may be jolted from complacency and prompted towards the possibility of reflection and empathy.
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