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Time Magazine
19 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Time Magazine
The True Stories Behind 'Echoes of Survivors: Inside Korea's Tragedies'
At first glance, Netflix's The Echoes of Survivors: Inside Korea's Tragedies doesn't have a clear, specific framework. The eight-episode docu-series is a follow-up to 2023's In the Name of God: A Holy Betrayal, expanding its focus beyond Korean cults to examine other horrific events that continue to cause trauma and pain in Korean society today. However, as the series goes on, a loosely overarching theme becomes clear: an examination of the lengths people will go for money in a society that allows for, encourages, or rewards the accumulation of wealth above all else. The eight-episode series covers four different events in Korean history—including Busan's Brothers' Home, a follow-up on the legal cases connected to JMS church, the 'Chijon family' gang murders, and the Sampoong Department Store collapse—through interviews with survivors and witnesses, as well as dramatic reenactments of the crimes and footage from news coverage of the events. At times, the series tips into what feels like unnecessarily exploitative behavior, such as dressing the survivors of the Brothers' Home facility in the same tracksuits they were forced to wear as abused children or in the episodes that recount the Chijon gang murders, also known as the Jijonpa serial murder case. In the latter case, justice has been served and it is unclear what purpose watching the sole survivor of the gang's crimes relive the most traumatic event of her life serves, other than as trauma porn. For a series that is ostensibly working to examine the dangers that come within systems that prioritize the accumulation of wealth over human life, these moments feel like a misstep. The cases examined in The Echoes of Survivors will all be familiar to Korean audiences, but perhaps not to global audiences. Most of the cases presented took place during the 80s and 90s in Korea, before the internet, streaming video, and mobile devices kept us so apprised of manmade horrors being perpetrated on the other side of the world. For those who aren't familiar with the subjects covered in Echoes of Survivors, here is a brief explanation of each event. (Content warning: This contains descriptions of child abuse and sexual violence) The history behind Brothers Home Brothers Home, or Hyungje Bokjiwon, was an internment camp operating as a 'welfare facility' in Busan, Korea's second-largest city. It operated from 1975 to 1987, and was propped up by anti-vagrancy ordinances, put in place in the 1960s and ramped up in the lead up to the 1986 Asian Games and the 1988 Summer Olympics. At the time, Korea was under a military dictatorship, which was overthrown in 1987. Brothers Home was owned and run by Park In-geun, a retired military man and a Christian social worker. During this 'social cleansing' period in Korea's history, these 'welfare' facilities were given subsidies from the government based on the number of people they took in. More residents meant more money, so facility management would kidnap people off of the streets, whether or not they fit the description of a 'vagrant,' or someone without a stable job or home. According to Korea's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, those illegally detained off the streets included 'office workers who had fallen asleep outside after drinking too much, children waiting to take trains to visit relatives, teenagers on their way home, people with disabilities, and hospital patients.' Echoes of Survivors focuses on some of the children who were forced into the facility, in many cases kidnapped off of the streets by police officers, many of whom were incentivized by Brothers Home bribes and/or performance score points. Inside the facility, violence was perpetrated daily. This included physical and sexual abuse against women and children. Infants were sold through adoption agencies. Detainees were forced to perform unpaid labor, often with very little food. An estimated 657 people were killed. In total, an estimated 40,000 people were confined at the group residence over the course of its operation, with more than 3,000 people held at once at the facility's 'peak.' The second episode that covers Brothers Home shifts to a search for greater accountability. Ultimately, Park In-geun was found guilty for only embezzlement and corruption, and served just 30 months in prison. He was never found guilty of any human rights abuses, seemingly at least in part due to his political allies in President Chun Doo-hwan's administration and the Busan mayor's office, and died in a nursing home in 2016. In running the facility, Park In-geun appointed loyal family members as directors, including his wife, Lim Sung-soon; her brother Lim Young-soon; and Lim Young-soon's brother-in-law, Joo Chong-chan. Echoes of Survivors sees producer Jo Seong-hyeon and Brothers Home survivor Choi Seung-woo travel to Australia, where some members of the Park family moved after the atrocities of the Brothers Home were made public. They confront some of the living members of the Park family about the wealth they have inherited. Jo also confronts a member of the Park family still living in Korea about his alleged role in the human rights abuses. These scenes make for some of the most powerful, productive moments in the series. Did Brothers Home inspire Squid Game? The Brothers Homes facility has been posited as inspiration for Squid Game in the past. The production perhaps intentionally plays up the aesthetic connection between the real-life atrocities of the Brothers Home and the fictional horrors of Squid Game by having survivors wear tracksuits like the ones they were forced to wear as children while giving interviews. However, Squid Game creator Hwang Dong-hyuk has never directly cited Brothers Home as an inspiration for the series. The JMS cult case When In the Name of God: A Holy Betrayal hit Netflix in March 2023, it shook Korean society. The docu-series, which examines abuses perpetrated by four different religious cults, leads with a focus on Christian Gospel Mission—also known as Providence and as Jesus Morning Star, or JMS. Jung Myeong-seok is the founder of JMS and a self-proclaimed messiah to his tens of thousands of followers across Korea and the world, including in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, and Australia. After being convicted of rape in 2008 and serving a decade in prison, he was indicted again in 2022 for the sexual assault of two female followers. The story of these two survivors, Maple and Amy, were told in the first season of the Netflix documentary. At the time, producer Jo noted that he wanted to tell this story because members of his family have been victims of a pseudo-religious cult. Echoes of Survivors uses two of its episodes to expand on how Jung Myeong-seok's pattern of sexual abuse was kept secret for so long, and the measures to which the organization went to try to keep In the Name of God from being released. Part of this is delving into the role Jung's second-in-command, Jung Jo-eun, played in allowing his abuse of female followers to continue. Last year, she was sentenced to seven years in prison for her role in the abuses. Jung was sentenced to another 17 years in prison in 2024. The docu-series also alleges that members of JMS who are also police officers abused their positions to try to keep Jung out of jail. It wonders just how many Korean institutions include loyal members of JMS. The episodes end with Maple, who is now married to former idol and Olympic swimmer Alex Fong. The couple is expecting their first child. The final JMS episode leaves viewers with this message from Maple: 'To every woman out there going through the same pain as me, let's stay strong.' The Chijon family murders The 'Chijon family' murders, also known as the Jijonpa serial murder case, refer to a series of crimes that took place between 1993 and 1994. The 'Chiwon family' was a gang organized by convicted rapist Kim Gi-hwan, motivated by class anger. Kim convinced six other working class men, aged 18 to 23 at the time, to join him in targeting rich people for extortion and murder. He came up with the idea for the gang after watching a news report about university entrance exam corruption. The gang planned to collect one billion won (roughly $1.25 million at the time). They killed five people, including one of their own members who tried to leave the group. The episodes are built around an interview with the sole survivor of the gang's kidnappings, Lee Jeong-su. In her 20s at the time, she was kidnapped alongside a man she was casually dating. The two were not wealthy, but were driving a Hyundai Grandeur, a car that was considered a sign of wealth at the time. Lee was held by the gang for seven days and was forced to kill several of their targets, including her boyfriend. Upon Lee's escape, facilitated by one of the members of the gang, she reported the crimes to the police. They apprehended the members, who were later sentenced to death. In the episode pair's final act, Echoes of Survivors makes a rushed, incomplete effort to place the murders in a more systemic context. Most murder is informed by broader systemic injustices and true crime media often fails to contextualize its horrors, leading to narratives that contort perpetrators into monsters rather than products of our flawed social systems. Echoes of Survivors makes an attempt to contextualize the Chijon gang's crimes, but it feels hollow after so much of the runtime presents sensationalized media coverage and dramatic reenactments of the crimes without deeper analysis, especially in a docu-series ostensibly focused on survivors' stories. The Sampoong Department Store collapse The final two episodes of The Echoes of Survivors examine Korea's worst 'peacetime' disaster in history: the Sampoong Department Store collapse. In 1995, five years after its opening, one of Seoul's most luxurious department stores collapsed, killing 502 people and injuring another 937. More than half of the victims were employees. Many of the customers in the building at the time of collapse, in the early evening, were women shopping for dinner groceries. The episodes include interviews with some of the survivors of the incident, including then 18-year-old store clerk Yoo Ji-hwan, who was pulled from the wreckage almost 12 days after the initial collapse. The docu-series also includes interviews with some of the people who lost family members in the disaster, and people who assisted in the rescue efforts. The collapse came about as a result of shoddy construction that knowingly broke safety requirements in place at the time. The company originally contracted to build the massive, flat-slab structure left the project after Lee Joon, chairman of the Sampoong Group's construction division, demanded changes to the design that would allow for a more spacious floor plan. Subsequent investigations determined the building was not structurally sound, and was bound to collapse. As much as two months prior to the collapse, employees had noticed a large crack on the roof of the top floor, where the building had begun to crumble. On the day of the collapse, the structural damage became more obvious. As the docu-series recounts, department store management held an emergency meeting at 3pm, roughly three hours before the collapse, to determine if they should close down and evacuate the building. Led by Lee, they voted only to close the fifth floor, wanting to wait until after work hours to inspect the building. Lee didn't want to lose business. Emergency alarms were sounded at 5:50pm, and employees started evacuating shoppers. Two minutes later, the roof and fifth floor of the south wing collapsed, triggering a catastrophic collapse all the way to the basement floors. Lee was later found guilty of involuntary manslaughter and served seven years, six months in prison. His son, Lee Han-sang, who was also president of the store, was convicted of corruption and accidental homicide. Two city planners were convicted of taking bribes. Two months after the collapse, Lee Joon and Lee Han-sang offered the entirety of the Sampoong Group's wealth to help compensate the victims and their families. The former site of the department store houses a luxury high-rise apartment building, despite requests from the victims' families that a memorial be built. Impeached president Yoon Suk-yeol lived in the building before and after his truncated term as president. Echoes of Survivors' builds some connective tissue between incidents like the Sampoong Department Store collapse and more recent Korean disasters, including the Sewol ferry disaster, as preventable manmade tragedies driven by greed. Like other moments in the eight installments, it is left to the viewer to decide how effectively the docu-series walks the line between civic-minded investigative journalism designed to hold power to account and the sensationalization of tragedy for entertainment value.
Al Jazeera
01-03-2025
- Al Jazeera
‘Versions of Hell': Squid Game and S Korea's historical homeless centres
Seon-gam Island, South Korea – Two men stand at the entrance to a forest surrounded by tall pine trees on an island south of the capital Seoul. In the middle of the forest there is a large clearing and an excavation site. The words written on a safety notice reveal what this forest hides: 'Seon-gam Academy Graveyard Recovery Operation'. Chun Jong-soo and Pak Sung-ki were just boys when they were among thousands cleared off the streets by South Korean authorities for alleged vagrancy, and held for years as inmates at institutions like Seon-gam Academy. Seon-gam island was only accessible by boat when Chun and Pak were first detained in 1965 and 1980, respectively. Fighting to control his trembling voice, Chun says he remembers the burial site now being excavated here. He was among the young detainees forced to bury the bodies of his fellow inmates who died trying to escape. Chun told Al Jazeera how they would recover bodies that washed up on the island's shores and bury them at this forest cemetery. 'It was meant to show us the consequences of trying to escape,' Chun said. 'Memories of seeing those bodies still haunt me in my sleep.' Hundreds and possibly thousands died amid the forced labour, violence and sexual abuse that prevailed in the group homes and detention centres – like the Seon-gam Academy – that were established across South Korea during the country's decades of heavy-handed rule from the 1960s through to the 1980s. Among the most notorious was 'Brothers Home', a so-called welfare centre that was once located in the southern port city of Busan, where thousands were enslaved and abused in a state-sponsored programme to punish vagrants and clear the homeless from South Korea's streets. While police did most of the seizures, Brothers Home employees were also allowed to patrol the city in trucks to do the kidnapping themselves. Children, people with disabilities, and the homeless were rounded up, detained and forced to work at the home where survivors recounted witnessing people beaten to death by staff or left to die from injuries. 'Real hell' v TV drama The existence of these brutal institutions in South Korea has come to wider attention as Netflix's Squid Game gains global attention. Season two of the South Korean drama kicked off late last year by racking up the largest audience ever for the debut of a TV series by the online streaming service. In just three days, the dystopian drama about down-on-their-luck South Koreans playing life-or-death games for a jackpot prize of millions amassed 68 million views. Across social media, the Squid Game hype has been prompted by reports the show was based on the real-life horrors that took place at such places as Brothers Home and Seon-gam Academy. Images purportedly of the Brothers Home have gone viral online, showing eerily similar interiors to the colourful, Escher-esque facility depicted in Squid Game where people compete at children's games and the losers are killed violently. One Facebook user with more than a million followers shared images of dimly-lit, derelict hallways painted in the TV show's iconic pink and green. Only later were the photos identified as fakes, generated by AI tools online, according to fact-checking organisations. South Koreans have also criticised comparisons with the TV show, some saying Brothers Home was worse in ways than the fictional island prison of Netflix fame. 'Fiction can't keep up with the horrors of reality,' wrote one South Korean social media user, who said life was 'real hell' in the homes compared with that in the TV show game. In 2022, South Korea's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, an independent investigative body, confirmed that 657 people died at Brothers Home in Busan between 1975 and 1986. Testimonies from survivors of the home recounted horrific conditions that included intense forced labour, physical assault, systemic sexual abuse and pervasive cruel and degrading treatment. 'On paper, these facilities were established out of the need to provide relief to impoverished welfare recipients,' said Ha Geum-chul, an investigator for the commission. Hidden was the true function of such centres, Ha said. 'Contrary to their stated goals, the forced detention of welfare recipients against their will, human rights abuses, and forced labour in the centres were vastly problematic,' he said. According to Ha, such centres were part of a 'unified system of nationwide vagrancy enforcement and detainee management' established by the Ministry of Interior and enforced by police officers who earned 'job rating' points for each child apprehended and admitted. 'General arrests gave officers up to three points while an admittance to Brothers Home was worth five points. This suggests that police officers performed excessive crackdowns to improve their job performances,' Ha said. 'Escape this place at all costs' Visiting the site of the Seon-gam Academy with Al Jazeera, Chun told how he was captured by authorities while hanging around Seoul's train station when he was just 11 years old. 'I was on my way to my sister's house when government officials took me in their van. Afterwards, I rode a boat with 40 other captured inmates when we entered the island,' he said. 'Every day, we woke up at 6am, assembled in front of the grounds, and worked in the fields all day. They would only give us lunch after we hauled 25kg (55lbs) of rice,' he recounted. 'Even then, lunch only consisted of a fistful amount of rice and salted shrimp.' As for what he remembers most about his nine years at the so-called welfare centre, Chun says everyone was beaten daily for the smallest of offences, such as being too chatty. 'They just couldn't bear to let us be kids,' said Chun, who is now 69 years old. 'They made us use our excrement as fertiliser and didn't even care if someone collapsed from heatstroke. That's why so many of us dreamed to escape this place at all costs,' he said. Inmates would team up in small groups and devise plans to flee. The young boys would practise swimming in a reservoir on the island in the hope of one day making it to the mainland under their own strength across the sea. Many would die trying to undertake the long swim to the shores of Incheon, or the infamous swamps on the island would drown them in their depths before they got very far, Chun said. Chun told how his wife often asked why he still screams in his sleep. 'The trauma is something that I will have to carry with me until I die,' he said. 'A permanent dent in me' Pak Sung-ki's time at Seon-gam Academy was shorter than other inmates such as Chun. Yet what he faced at the institution traumatised him for life. 'Even if I can forget about the punishment I received at the hands of the government workers, being sexually assaulted has left a permanent dent in me,' he said. Before his time at Seon-gam Academy, Pak lived in a middle-class family. Their home had the only television set in his neighbourhood at the time. But his life took a drastic turn when he was picked up at random by government officials while he walked around downtown Seoul as a 15-year-old. Released from Seon-gam after a year and a half when it was shut down in 1982, Pak was never able to return home. His family, like the families of other inmates, did not know what had happened to him. They filed missing person reports at the police station but he was not found. When Pak was eventually released from Seon-gam, he went to his old house but no one was home as his family had moved. It was only when Pak's family revisited the police one last time to see if they had any news of their lost son – before they moved to the US – that they heard he was in prison. Pak was reunited with his family for the first time in years, but prison walls now separated them. 'After I came out [of Seon-gam], I couldn't work anywhere as I didn't have any skills. I didn't have anywhere to go,' Pak said. 'So, I lived on the streets and worked as a paperboy and a scrap man just to make enough to buy food. One day, I got caught trying to steal a plate of food from someone. That became my first time entering prison,' he said. Pak's family moved to the US shortly after he was reunited with them. He could not follow due to his criminal record and they never were able to fully reconnect as a family. They would live separate lives and only communicate through international phone calls. Pak told how he spent time in and out of prison until he was 45 years old. 'I've frequently visited the psychiatric hospital,' the now 59-year-old told Al Jazeera, revealing he had tried twice to take his own life. 'I've only recently found happiness,' he added, telling how he had taken up painting in an effort to 'give hope to others'. Several of Chun and Pak's fellow inmates from the academy have not been so lucky – they have simply gone missing and some have also taken their own lives. 'I have a dream now' The remains of Seon-gam Academy's welfare centre and its associated buildings are still intact on the island. It is one of the few – if not only – welfare centres from that period in South Korea's history that plans to restore what is left of its dark past and turn it into a site of commemoration for victims and survivors. Gyeonggi provincial authorities are on board to assist the survivors' committee in their push for more work to be undertaken on the cemetery excavation site. Work is also under way to transfer what is now a temporary Seon-gam museum to a permanent location, and to restore buildings that once served as what Chun and Pak frequently refer to as a 'version of hell'. In one corner of the museum are Pak's paintings of his time at the academy. Painting now serves as a form of mental and emotional therapy, he said, recounting how he learned to draw through YouTube videos and it had opened a new chapter in his life. 'I have a dream now. It's to draw paintings for kids at youth shelters,' he said, explaining how young people in orphanages and other institutions remind him of himself and how he wants to show them to develop their own artistic skills. For Chun, it has only been four years since he first opened up about his experience at the academy to those closest to him. Now he wants that openness reciprocated. If it was South Korea's regimes of the past that led Chun, Pak and thousands of other young people to be detained against their will, the brief declaration of martial law in December by South Korea's current and impeached President Yoon Suk-yeol has brought further misfortune for Soen-gam's survivors. The political turmoil caused by Yoon forced the cancellation of a planned meeting between the island's survivors, the country's minister of the interior and safety and the governor of Gyeonggi Province. 'We're angry and frustrated,' said Chun, who serves as the vice president of the Seon-gam Academy survivors committee. 'They were supposed to come here and offer a formal apology in front of the survivors,' he said. 'Now, we are still waiting for one.' 'Purifying the streets' Author of Between Extermination and Regeneration: A Sociology of Brothers Home Workhouse, Park Hae-nam, a professor at Keimyung University, said there are thematic similarities between Squid Game and the institutions established to imprison the socially and economically marginalised in South Korea. If participants in the fictional Squid Game were tools for entertainment, inmates at South Korea's welfare centres were 'tools for labour', Park said. 'Inmates were not in a condition to talk and socialise with each other, and they were not able to become members of society once they came out of the centres,' he said. 'And the fact that a lot of people died in these facilities, that's something that was also shown in Squid Game,' he added. According to Park, the origins of institutions for the homeless goes back to Korea's liberation from Japanese colonisation in 1945. 'As four million displaced Koreans returned from China and Japan, they started to overpopulate areas in the two major cities – Seoul and Busan. With the start of the Korean War a few years later, even more people crowded cities and started to cause daily disturbances. The country just didn't have the infrastructure to accommodate such a big population,' Park explained. 'Newspapers in the 1950s were full of voices that wanted these so-called vagrants taken care of. The government's answer was to tuck them away somewhere 'safe',' he said. With the emergence of Park Chung-hee's regime in 1963, the Seoul Metropolitan Rehabilitation Centre became the first of these so-called 'vagrant asylums'. The military rule would later sign off on ordinance No. 410 in 1975, which gave authorities the power to send people found on the streets to facilities without an arrest warrant. The initiative was carried out under the banner of 'purifying the streets', Park, the sociology professor, said. 'Even if their physical bodies survived, people inside Brothers Home were murdered as members of society,' he said. 'They were domesticated and made into beasts so they wouldn't be able to live like humans [afterwards],' he added. Park said such institutions – whether fictional or historical – symbolise how becoming poor in South Korea 'could lead one to extreme misery'. Rather than Brothers Home or the Seon-gam Academy, Squid Game creator Hwang Dong-hyuk said he was inspired more by dark Japanese manga such as 'Battle Royale' and 'Liar Game'. Economic class war also underpins his characters in Squid Game, Hwang has said in interviews. 'I wanted to show that any ordinary middle-class person in the world we live in today can fall to the bottom of the economic ladder overnight,' he said in 2021. But when Hwang first floated his Squid Game script in 2008, it was rejected on the grounds the story was considered too violent and too unrealistic to be taken seriously. A decade later, when Hwang circulated his script again, the world had apparently changed and his dystopian scenario no longer seemed so outlandish to the decision-makers at Netflix. 'The response that I got after 10 years was that it was, in fact, very realistic – that there are probably people playing this game somewhere in the world,' Hwang told The Hollywood Reporter in 2021. 'The fact that this story was no longer not realistic, that it was no longer absurd, but that it was something that was very in touch with reality after a decade, it saddened me a little bit as a person, but it also brought me joy as a creator,' he said. Recovery efforts continue The practice of detention without warrants was ramped up under the military rule of President Chun Doo-hwan, who oversaw South Korea's preparation to host the 1986 Asian Games and the 1988 Seoul Olympics – including rounding up the homeless and beggars. Local prosecutors, however, found in 1987 that only 10 percent of inmates at Brothers Home were in fact homeless. On paper, the people who were sent to 'welfare' facilities should have only been detained for a year, after which they had to be released back into society. But most would not be so fortunate, spending many years toiling and living under brutal conditions. Last year, South Korea's Truth and Reconciliation Commission released its first comprehensive report into conditions at the welfare centres. In addition to the estimated 3,100 people that were held inside Brothers Home in Busan, the commission found 5,000 people who were known to have been kept inside four other major facilities. But the actual number of such facilities set up across the country and their total population has still to be fully determined. In the case of Seoul Metropolitan Rehabilitation Centre, which was active for over two decades, according to the Truth and Reconciliation Committee, more than a quarter of its estimated 1,900 residents were found to have died while in detention. On Seon-gam Island, the commission undertook a second recovery operation in 2023 at the forest graveyard. The search uncovered 210 human teeth and remnants of 27 items of personal effects. Most of the bodies that were buried in the forest had decayed, leaving little behind. Most were children under the age of 15. And while the official number of bodies recovered so far has come to a total of 24, former inmates such as Chun and Pak believe that figure will climb much higher as excavations continue. 'There are even bodies buried in deeper parts of the mountain,' Pak said. 'More than 400 bodies may be uncovered by the time excavation efforts are finished,' he said. 'Our fellow inmates have been confined in these small graves for more than 50 years. I'm counting down the days until all the bodies are uncovered so I can comfort their souls and pray for them.'
