The Shrine and the Toothless Woman (2002)

I was able to enjoy a couple of days off last week. I was originally going to go up north to a small town near Daegu.  In the end, however, I decided against it because it was Chusok.  I’ve read that this holiday can be a crazy time to travel here.  Imagine a population larger than all of Canada, in a country the size of south-eastern Ontario, all travelling at the same time.  On a much less efficient highway system, I might add.  Actually, I found an article, “Korea’s Traffic Hell”, which talks about this.  To paraphrase, it said that on a normal weekday you can drive from Seoul to Busan in about 5 or 5.5 hours.  But on a weekend or a holiday, it can take between 2 and 6 times as long to make the same trip.  During the 1992 Chusok holiday period, the 492 km. drive took about 10 or 12 hours.  The following year the drive took about 21 hours, and in 1994 some travellers reported that it had taken them 29 hours!  I’ve seen pictures and cars were bumper to bumper all the way to the horizon, not even moving.  It’s insane how many cars there are here, and I still haven’t gotten used to it.

Apparently the problem began in the late 1980’s, when Koreans started to get rich enough to buy their own cars.  Until that time, cars were considered to be luxury items, but today a car is thought to be a basic necessity of life.  No one anticipated that Korea would develop so fast.  In 1985 nobody could have imagined that just 10 years later the roads would be clogged with so many privately-owned vehicles.  Although road construction has been continuous, it hasn’t been able to keep up with the number of cars being added to the roads each day.

Anyways, I decided that I would do something here in Busan instead.  I’ve been here for three months, and apart from exploring the city districts, I hadn’t really done anything as a “tourist”.  There are all kinds of historic parks, monuments, and temples to visit in Busan.  So, I woke up early and headed out on foot.  I’m now equipped with a camera that I bought a couple of weeks ago.  It’s a Pentax 1000 (the same model that Mom has), and apparently one of the best amateur photographer camera’s ever built.  I was able to find three of them in the entire city, or least in the area’s I looked, and I grabbed the best deal.  I plan on buying a wide-angle lens next month.  I was looking like a complete dork with my big camera hanging from my neck and foreigner clothes, but I don’t care.  My first destination was Chungnyeolsa (Shrine).

Chungnyeolsa is dedicated to those patriotic Korean fighters who died resisting the Japanese aggressors during the Japanese invasion of Korea (1592-1599).  The Japanese invasion was an aggressive war through which Hideyosi Toyotomi, who had unified the feudal domains of Japan, attempted to satisfy his desire for a wider territory and for a more stable political regime.  Toyotomi was Shogun, and bloodthirsty.  There is a park, in Kyoto I believe although I’m not sure, that contains huge hills that are dozens of meters tall.  These hills contain over 50,000 Korean skulls that were piled in the old capital of Japan during this period as a trophy of Toyotomi’s conquest.  At this time the population of Japan and Korea was larger than all of Europe, with twice the life expectancy.  When Toyotomi invaded Korea, unprepared Korean troops, joined by volunteers, fought and died heriocally in battles against the numerically superior Japanese troops armed with advanced matchlock guns. 

Here in Busan, at Busanjin Fortress, General Jeong Bal led the desperate fight against tens of thousands of swarming Japanese soldiers.  Civilian forces as well as military forces put up fierce resistance under his command.  In the course of the fighting, Japanese dead bodies formed at least three small hills.  Although inferior in numbers, the Korean defense was so strong that the Japanese troops became enraged.  After overrunning the stubborn Korean defense, they ruthlessly killed even dogs and cats, claiming a sacrifice to the Japanese god of war.  I’m not so sure this is true, because the Korean’s hate the Japanese there is a lot of propaganda in their history.

At Dongnae Fortress (just down the road from where I live, although forbidden to visit), the Japanese made a demand to the Korean troops to surrender without fighting and make way for the Japanese advance.  Song Sang-hyeon, Governor of Dongnae, renewed his resolution to defend the fortress to the last breath.  He had this message written on a wooden placard, “To die fighting is easy, but to surrender to the enemy is more difficult.”

Chungnyeolsa is a huge shrine covering 93 399 sq. meters with a main hall and 15 subsidiary structures.  When I arrived there wasn’t another soul in the place.  Instantly, the curator approached me and began giving me a history lesson, most of which I’ve described above.  There are three sets of stone stairways that rise up 100’s of feet to the main shrine at the top of the hill.  The East stairwell is for climbing to the top because the sun rises in the East.  The West stairwell is for descending because the sun sets in the West.  The center stairwell is only for royalty and I was expressly forbidden to use this one.  Seriously, it was cordoned off and everything.  I got the tour of all the shrines and statues, and at the top he showed me how to place the incense in the burning bowl and bow silently to pay my respects to the dead.

I left the shrine and continued on my way towards Kumgang Park.  I stopped and bought a juice and some sandwiches at a food stand and walked in the direction I thought I was supposed to go.  I ended up in a market area and I was being stared at like these people hadn’t seen a foreigner in these parts in a long time.  I was way off the beaten path, in an area that was teeming with Koreans hawking everything from jalapenos, fish cakes, doughnuts (they deep-fry them fresh right there and you buy them hot), socks, shoes, and just about anything you can think of.  I sat down on the sidewalk to eat my sandwiches and drink my juice.  All of a sudden an ancient Korean woman with a big toothless smile squatted down in front of me and just stared at me eating.  I was feeling like an ape in a zoo, but decided not to get mad.  After all, if I’m going to travel the world I’d better get used to being stared at, and sometimes laughed at, for looking different.  I smiled at her and grabbing my camera I asked her (using sign-language) if I could take her picture.  She had this mad grin on her face and started clapping and freaking.  I took her picture and then she bowed several times (a sign of respect here), and left very happy.  I got up and started on my way…