Yongsan Legacy Newsletter - Aug 2023

Mapping is a simple exercise that combines your memory and cognitive skills. And when combined with social dimension of sharing your very own image of Yongsan Garrison, that's when magic happens!

We love mapping!

The Yongsan Legacy project initially started as a mapping project. Even our first Yongsan Legacy website was based on a map where we encouraged people to pinpoint a place to write down their memories. We organized a series of meetings with GIs who spent time on Yongsan Garrison with a map of Yongsan Garrison trying to write down their memories with geolocation coordinates. However, the team quickly realized that people don’t remember a place using a map.

The team learned that we were actually interested in the exercise of “mapping”, not the physical output as a map. When we sat down with people who tries to recollect their memories from Yongsan Garrison, we were awaking their memories that may seem haphazard and random at first. But what we realized is that all the memories are a part of social interactions and values that we wanted to capture in the first place.

In this edition, we feature a couple of examples where the exercise of “mapping” served to connect and re-connect people around a place that we want to commemorate: Yongsan Garrison.

Of course, we still would love to finish our “map” of Yongsan Garrison with your stories and recollections, but the Yongsan Legacy Project will always be about the social interactions and compilation of personal values that exist on the site.

With this month’s edition of the Yongsan Legacy Newsletter, we want to encourage you to initiate a “mapping” project on your own with your friends or family. And your initiative will bring people whom you never met but may have crossed paths at Yongsan Garrison to add to your memories of Yongsan.

We share three posts that “mapping” became magic moments for people who participated.

Mapping Yongsan Garrison and the Surroundings

A series of correspondences between two GI's who never met in person describes raw images of Yongsan Garrison and Yongsan Area in the 60's and the 70's captured in their memories.

Rich Kent took this photo of Yongsan Garrison and Han River from Namsan in 1969. Photo Credit: Rich Kent

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Action in the Yongsan Commissary

The new Commissary didn't replace this one until well after the early 80s... remember the banana fights...

Yongsan Commissary 1972. Photo taken by Scott Forrey

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Co-incidences from 1958

Almost 60 years later, two GIs find out their mystery photos are looking right at each other; one from Itaewon and the other from Hannamdong. "I'm looking at you right now!"

Photo taken by Paul Black in 1958 and graphics added by Coco Cugat (Photo Credit: Yongsan Legacy)

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We will add more stories about mapping projects in every week for the entire month of August.

If you want to start a new mapping project as a part of this edition, please email your story with images to yongsanlegacy@gmail.com. We are looking for stories from different decades from the 50s all the way up to recent memories of now mostly closed and emptied Yongsan Garrison. No matter what year, your stories and memories of Yongsan Garrison are important and valuable.

And don’t forget to share this post with your friends or colleagues or family to spread the word.

We look forward to hearing from you. Thank you!