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| Actress Song Hye-kyo / Captured from Instagram |
By Dong Sun-hwa
Actress Song Hye-kyo and Professor Seo Kyung-duk ― an active promoter of Korea ― have donated 10,000 Korean/English guidebooks to Utoro Peace Memorial Museum, Japan, in celebration of Oct. 9 Hangeul (Korean alphabet) Day. Utoro is a neighborhood near Kyoto where some 1,300 Koreans were forced into labor for Japans' military during World War II.
Seo, a professor of general education at Sungshin Women's University, delivered the news about their donation on his Facebook account, Sunday.
"The guidebooks will be placed on the first floor of the museum, which opened in April," he said. "We produced these books for the convenience of visitors and they are available in English as well. We believe people of all genders and ages will be able to understand the history of Utoro with the help of our books."
The professor added that he and Song made the contribution to preserve Utoro's history.
"Two years ago, we donated a bulletin board that is currently at the entrance of Utoro village and this time, we made guidebooks about Utoro," he said. "I believe we should pay more attention to our historical sites abroad as they are not in their best conditions due to the COVID-19 pandemic."
This is not the first time that Song and Seo have teamed up to preserve and promote the historical sites of Korea. In 2020, the two donated 10,000 Korean/French guidebooks to the Korean Cultural Center in Paris in a bid to provide information about Korea's independence fighters like Seo Young-hae (1902-56), who were active in France.
