Korean Job Discussion Forums

[mithridates]

I was in Jamshil the other day and came across this sign:

http://www.pagef30.com/2010/07/sign-in-jamshil-seoul-south-korea.html

[ttompatz]

Photography was not very big pre-1905.

You will be hard pressed to find many if any photos prior to the occupation.

Those that may have existed would have had a hard time surviving to the present for any number of reasons not the least of which were the occupation itself and the Korean war after that.

Try the national archives. They may have some on file or display.

.

[notafbiagent]

http://kr.blog.yahoo.com/seosu3/MYBLOG/yblog.html?fid=0&m=lc&p=9&tc=422&tt=1273264220&pc=5
has some really old pictures of Seoul pre-during-after Japanese occupation. Although most of the pictures do not depict people's walking tendencies, they clearly show, much like today, most people didn't really care and walked which ever side had less traffic, or at least in keeping with the direction others had chosen. Traffic, is traffic, and people generally tended to go with the flow.

The whole leftside is the wrongside thing is fairly recent and I wouldn't put much faith in the whole "unnatural" aspect of it. I say it has more to do with Koreans just not liking anything from the Japan occupation era. That and it's true most western countries standardized rightsided traffic and I don't see why Koreans, who've adopted the rightside traffic wouldn't want to implement it universally.

While it is true that the Japanese introduced leftside traffic, this is only because that's the way Japanese people organized it back in Japan and it was only natural for them to implement the same system in which ever country it happened to be occupying at the time. Leftside traffic was pretty popular in those days and utilized by a lot of the world powers of that time.

Personally I feel that those signs would have more merit if they slanted less to the "i-hate-imperial-japan" angle and more to the "lets all walk in a system since it's way more efficient" angle.

[Xuanzang]

bluelake might be able to help.

[hagwonnewbie]

A while back I found some good images of the Korean war on Flickr.
Very few during the occupation.
Nothing pre

[Captain Corea]

[The Gipkik]

Try this site for some really old, even barbaric, photos of old Seoul:
http://www.seoul.go.kr/life/life/culture/history_book/picture_seoul1/

http://www.seoul.go.kr/life/life/culture/history_book/picture_seoul2/

[schwa]

[djsmnc]

Walk on the left side of what? All I see in the pre-colonial era photos is space between structures, but not roads

[Hobophobic]

The Japanese hadn't stolen and sold the idea for Henry Ford's model -T from the Korean's yet....get ye to a museum.

[mithridates]

Looks like pictures alone aren't going to solve this; as djsmnc mentioned the roads in these pictures are barely roads at all and they seem to show people adhering to both the left and the right. Either that or more or less open squares where there is no danger of people bumping into each other in the first place. Tentative conclusion: Koreans walked wherever before the occupation, after the occupation tend to go to the left but still don't have a general rule.

[oldfatfarang]