Spiked Mountain

Over at Korean Media Watch there’s a post from a while back, that I’ve run across again since I’m adapting my bookmarks to the del.icio.us format. It’s an interesting debunking of the allegation that a photo proves the story that the Japanese colonials spiked the mountains of Korea in an attempt to geomantically ruin the Korean spirit. Actually, if you ask me, it doesn’t sound so far-fetched, whether or not it happened—Japan’s geomantic superstitions were certainly still extant at the time! I have no compunction using this legendary project (true or not) in a short fiction story I’m now working on. Anyway, for the curious, this is the picture:

Turns out, according to Bevers, that it was probably a table leg, and not a spike at all, and that the Japanese, who also considered Baekdusan holy, were praying there.

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