Legacy of sadness and survival on Sorokdo

The statue of an angel stands on a monument honoring survivors of Hansen's disease on Sorokdo. /Courtesy of Kyung Ok-hwa

By Richard Pennington

Last weekend, I took a trip down to South Jeolla Province. My purpose was not to visit the arts district of Gwangju, meander through the tea fields of Boseong, surf at Namyeol beach or savor the bamboo forest of Damyang.

I was drawn instead to Sorokdo, an island off the southwest coast of the Goheung peninsula.

Since it had no hotels, I got a room in Nokdong, a fishing village with boats jamming the harbor. Until a bridge was built 10 years ago, the only way to reach Sorokdo was by ferry. It was isolated and intentionally kept so.

Allow me to summarize the history of this small (4 1/2 square kilometers) island, currently home to just 1,000 people. Soon after the Japanese takeover in 1910, they brought all sufferers of leprosy ― scientific name: Hansen's disease ― to Sorokdo and instituted rigorous measures of quarantine.

That disfiguring nerve and skin ailment had long caused stigma and prejudice, compounded by the Japanese' haughty assumptions of superiority over the natives. Sorokdo had all the ingredients for cruelty and blatant human rights abuses. Several former residents called it “hell on earth.”

Their hopes for better days with liberation in 1945 vanished because the Korean administrators and doctors who moved in, with some exceptions, were just as bad. Not until the 1960s did significant improvements come.

Part of that process was the arrival of two Catholic nurses from Austria, Marianne Stoger and Margareth Pissarek. These blue-eyed angels stayed 43 and 39 years, respectively. They treated the patients with love, procured medicine and oversaw the construction of much-needed facilities.

I took a bus to the island and was informed by a guard as to just where I could and could not go. In fact, tourists like me were not allowed to see much since the privacy of the patients (now fewer than 500 [down from a peak of 6,000 in the 1940s] with an average age of 76) was paramount.

I was able to visit a couple of brick buildings that made my blood run cold despite the summer heat. One was an H-shaped detention center, and the other was where operations and autopsies had taken place.

I met another tourist, a Korean woman named Kyung Ok-hwa. She and I walked through Sorokdo's Central Park ― built under compulsion by the patients in the 1930s and early 1940s ― and an informative museum. It depicted not just the unfathomable mistreatment the people endured but the various ways they sought to forge a community.

They published a literary magazine, wrote Chinese poems, had athletic contests, gave musical concerts, married (only after the authorities, believing incorrectly that leprosy was an inherited disease, performed sterilizations) and provided each other with burial services. Even under such miserable conditions, these people were not completely docile. Protests happened occasionally.

One imperious Japanese administrator, Masato Suo, had a statue of himself built and ordered the people to bow before it. He also carried a stick and did not hesitate to beat men, women and children if he thought they were malingering.

Well, in 1942 a patient named Lee Chun-sang had enough and stabbed Suo to death. Needless to say, he was quickly executed. Suo's statue is gone, but one of Lee is today given a position of prominence at Sorokdo.

Ok-hwa and I left the museum and saw a man sitting in a motorized wheelchair. The only patient I encountered during my visit, he may have been there for a purpose ― hoping to catch the eye of tender-hearted visitors. I had no problem with that and was pleased when he accepted the 5,000 won bill I proffered.

Of course, I wish I could have seen more of the island and the people living there, but I understood the need to show them respect and courtesy. I would like to have seen how they live and talk to them. How I yearned to hear their stories, if they chose to open up. Much of it is beyond sad, it is heartbreaking.

Had I been allowed to move freely, I also would have gone to the western tip of the island. Still there, I am told, is a Shinto shrine, a remnant of the Japanese. It is the last one left in Korea from the colonial days.

Perhaps it is improper to speculate about Sorokdo's future, but I wonder what will happen. As stated above, the average age is 76 and the time is coming when the last patient dies and the hospital closes. This, formerly one of the largest leper colonies in the world, will have lost its reason for existence.

I hate to think of hotels, pensions, restaurants, coffee shops, convenience stores and so forth being built on this island, sanctified by the hardy people who have called it home over the last 110 years.

Richard Pennington (raput76@gmail.com), a native of Texas in the U.S., works as an editor at a law firm in southern Seoul. He has written 21 nonfiction books, including “Travels of an American-Korean, 2008-2013.” He is the director of an NGO, the Committee to Bring Jikji Back to Korea.