Grandpop, Day 3 - Memorial

Yesterday we went up to Yongsan. I showed him around the electronics market briefly and then we took a taxi to the War Memorial of Korea.


This is the hall of Korean names. Whether they were casualties of just the Korean War or the war and the Japanese Occupation I'm not sure.


The statue is of a South Korean soldier reuniting with his North Korean younger brother. I haven't seen the movie Taegukgi yet, but I think the movie has a similar scene.

Here's a bust of Korean Admiral Yi Sun-Shin. He developed the 거북선 [fixed], or turtle ship, in response to the Japanese invasion of 1592. In those days, ship combat was mostly decided by large boarding actions, not cannon fire, so Admiral Yi put iron spikes across the top of his ship, resulting in an unpleasant end for those sailors unlucky enough to be forced into jumping onto the Turtle. In one battle, he brought 12 ships against 133 Japanese, and sunk 31 ships before forcing a retreat. Before the ironclads of the 19th Century, there were the Geobuksan.

In the hall of the Korean Marine Corps, I saw this plaque talking about their values. I thought they were interesting because they relfect a lot of Confucian values that, while respected, aren't really talked about in the West.