Operation Homebase
So the reason Yuki and I went to Korea this year is because her dad wanted to go. Yuki’s dad was born in Korea 77 years ago before the second world war when Korea was a Japanese Territory. Her dad wanted to travel Korea and go back to the place he was born.
I was, admittedly very skeptical about our chances of finding his house as it has been 70 years since he left. He’d talked to Yuki quite a bit about how important this mission was and we knew that he was born in Taikyu, Shinonome-cho. That’s not a lot to go on especially since it’s in Japanese.
I figured we’d need someone that spoke English, Japanese, and Korean; and probably was a historian. That’s a tall order considering that most people we met didn’t speak very good english, if any at all.
In his excitement, Yuki’s dad talked to the hotel front desk who only spoke Korean. They put him on the phone with a Japanese speaking person who directed him to city hall. Using his map book, we walked the wrong way from Daegu station but eventually got on course and found that city hall includes a tourist information centre.
At the centre, we met a young student who speaks Korean, English, and Japanese. It turns out, Taikyu is the Japanese translation of Daegu. Shinonome-cho didn’t get us very far so we were kinda stuck. Then Yuki’s dad said that he was born near a school called Dongin Elementary school.
That surprised everyone because Dongin Elementary school was about a kilometre away down the road. The young student was really nice and printed us a map. We ended up walking around the back side of the school before finding the front.
Lo and behold. 1 kilometre from Daegu city hall on a very busy 6 lane street is the elementary school where Yuki’s Dad went to school until he was 7. He said that this area use to be all farms and his house was nearby, up or down the main road and not too far. Mission Success!
It’s crazy to me that he was born so close to the centre of Daegu around some farms and that the school still has the same name. And we found it! How cool is that!
After mission success, we found that we had a lot of time left in Daegu (3 days) so we decided to do some tourism. We visited Donghwasa Temple which wasn’t really anything special but another temple.
