‘Versions of Hell’: Squid Game and S Korea’s historical homeless centres | Investigation News

Seon-gam Island, South Korea – Two men stand at the entrance to a forest surrounded by tall pine trees on an island south of the capital Seoul.

In the middle of the forest there is a large clearing and an excavation site.

The words written on a safety notice reveal what this forest hides: “Seon-gam Academy Graveyard Recovery Operation”.

Chun Jong-soo and Pak Sung-ki were just boys when they were among thousands cleared off the streets by South Korean authorities for alleged vagrancy, and held for years as inmates at institutions like Seon-gam Academy.

Seon-gam island was only accessible by boat when Chun and Pak were first detained in 1965 and 1980, respectively.

Fighting to control his trembling voice, Chun says he remembers the burial site now being excavated here. He was among the young detainees forced to bury the bodies of his fellow inmates who died trying to escape. Chun told Al Jazeera how they would recover bodies that washed up on the island’s shores and bury them at this forest cemetery.

“It was meant to show us the consequences of trying to escape,” Chun said.

“Memories of seeing those bodies still haunt me in my sleep.”

Hundreds and possibly thousands died amid the forced labour, violence and sexual abuse that prevailed in the group homes and detention centres – like the Seon-gam Academy – that were established across South Korea during the country’s decades of heavy-handed rule from the 1960s through to the 1980s.

Among the most notorious was “Brothers Home”, a so-called welfare centre that was once located in the southern port city of Busan, where thousands were enslaved and abused in a state-sponsored programme to punish vagrants and clear the homeless from South Korea’s streets.

While police did most of the seizures, Brothers Home employees were also allowed to patrol the city in trucks to do the kidnapping themselves. Children, people with disabilities, and the homeless were rounded up, detained and forced to work at the home where survivors recounted witnessing people beaten to death by staff or left to die from injuries.

‘Real hell’ v TV drama

The existence of these brutal institutions in South Korea has come to wider attention as Netflix’s Squid Game gains global attention.

Season two of the South Korean drama kicked off late last year by racking up the largest audience ever for the debut of a TV series by the online streaming service.

In just three days, the dystopian drama about down-on-their-luck South Koreans playing life-or-death games for a jackpot prize of millions amassed 68 million views.

Across social media, the Squid Game hype has been prompted by reports the show was based on the real-life horrors that took place at such places as Brothers Home and Seon-gam Academy.

Images purportedly of the Brothers Home have gone viral online, showing eerily similar interiors to the colourful, Escher-esque facility depicted in Squid Game where people compete at children’s games and the losers are killed violently.

One Facebook user with more than a million followers shared images of dimly-lit, derelict hallways painted in the TV show’s iconic pink and green. Only later were the photos identified as fakes, generated by AI tools online, according to fact-checking organisations.

South Koreans have also criticised comparisons with the TV show, some saying Brothers Home was worse in ways than the fictional island prison of Netflix fame.

“Fiction can’t keep up with the horrors of reality,” wrote one South Korean social media user, who said life was “real hell” in the homes compared with that in the TV show game.

In 2022, South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, an independent investigative body, confirmed that 657 people died at Brothers Home in Busan between 1975 and 1986. Testimonies from survivors of the home recounted horrific conditions that included intense forced labour, physical assault, systemic sexual abuse and pervasive cruel and degrading treatment.

“On paper, these facilities were established out of the need to provide relief to impoverished welfare recipients,” said Ha Geum-chul, an investigator for the commission.

Hidden was the true function of such centres, Ha said.

“Contrary to their stated goals, the forced detention of welfare recipients against their will, human rights abuses, and forced labour in the centres were vastly problematic,” he said.

According to Ha, such centres were part of a “unified system of nationwide vagrancy enforcement and detainee management” established by the Ministry of Interior and enforced by police officers who earned “job rating” points for each child apprehended and admitted.

“General arrests gave officers up to three points while an admittance to Brothers Home was worth five points. This suggests that police officers performed excessive crackdowns to improve their job performances,” Ha said.

‘Escape this place at all costs’

Visiting the site of the Seon-gam Academy with Al Jazeera, Chun told how he was captured by authorities while hanging around Seoul’s train station when he was just 11 years old.

“I was on my way to my sister’s house when government officials took me in their van. Afterwards, I rode a boat with 40 other captured inmates when we entered the island,” he said.

“Every day, we woke up at 6am, assembled in front of the grounds, and worked in the fields all day. They would only give us lunch after we hauled 25kg (55lbs) of rice,” he recounted. “Even then, lunch only consisted of a fistful amount of rice and salted shrimp.”

As for what he remembers most about his nine years at the so-called welfare centre, Chun says everyone was beaten daily for the smallest of offences, such as being too chatty.

“They just couldn’t bear to let us be kids,” said Chun, who is now 69 years old.

“They made us use our excrement as fertiliser and didn’t even care if someone collapsed from heatstroke. That’s why so many of us dreamed to escape this place at all costs,” he said.

Inmates would team up in small groups and devise plans to flee. The young boys would practise swimming in a reservoir on the island in the hope of one day making it to the mainland under their own strength across the sea.

Many would die trying to undertake the long swim to the shores of Incheon, or the infamous swamps on the island would drown them in their depths before they got very far, Chun said.

Chun told how his wife often asked why he still screams in his sleep.

“The trauma is something that I will have to carry with me until I die,” he said.

‘A permanent dent in me’

Pak Sung-ki’s time at Seon-gam Academy was shorter than other inmates such as Chun.

Yet what he faced at the institution traumatised him for life.

“Even if I can forget about the punishment I received at the hands of the government workers, being sexually assaulted has left a permanent dent in me,” he said.

Before his time at Seon-gam Academy, Pak lived in a middle-class family. Their home had the only television set in his neighbourhood at the time.

But his life took a drastic turn when he was picked up at random by government officials while he walked around downtown Seoul as a 15-year-old.

Released from Seon-gam after a year and a half when it was shut down in 1982, Pak was never able to return home. His family, like the families of other inmates, did not know what had happened to him. They filed missing person reports at the police station but he was not found.

When Pak was eventually released from Seon-gam, he went to his old house but no one was home as his family had moved. It was only when Pak’s family revisited the police one last time to see if they had any news of their lost son – before they moved to the US – that they heard he was in prison.

Pak was reunited with his family for the first time in years, but prison walls now separated them.

“After I came out [of Seon-gam], I couldn’t work anywhere as I didn’t have any skills. I didn’t have anywhere to go,” Pak said.

“So, I lived on the streets and worked as a paperboy and a scrap man just to make enough to buy food. One day, I got caught trying to steal a plate of food from someone. That became my first time entering prison,” he said.

Pak’s family moved to the US shortly after he was reunited with them. He could not follow due to his criminal record and they never were able to fully reconnect as a family. They would live separate lives and only communicate through international phone calls.

Pak told how he spent time in and out of prison until he was 45 years old.

“I’ve frequently visited the psychiatric hospital,” the now 59-year-old told Al Jazeera, revealing he had tried twice to take his own life.

“I’ve only recently found happiness,” he added, telling how he had taken up painting in an effort to “give hope to others”.

Several of Chun and Pak’s fellow inmates from the academy have not been so lucky – they have simply gone missing and some have also taken their own lives.

‘I have a dream now’

The remains of Seon-gam Academy’s welfare centre and its associated buildings are still intact on the island.

It is one of the few – if not only – welfare centres from that period in South Korea’s history that plans to restore what is left of its dark past and turn it into a site of commemoration for victims and survivors.

Gyeonggi provincial authorities are on board to assist the survivors’ committee in their push for more work to be undertaken on the cemetery excavation site. Work is also under way to transfer what is now a temporary Seon-gam museum to a permanent location, and to restore buildings that once served as what Chun and Pak frequently refer to as a “version of hell”.

In one corner of the museum are Pak’s paintings of his time at the academy. Painting now serves as a form of mental and emotional therapy, he said, recounting how he learned to draw through YouTube videos and it had opened a new chapter in his life.

“I have a dream now. It’s to draw paintings for kids at youth shelters,” he said, explaining how young people in orphanages and other institutions remind him of himself and how he wants to show them to develop their own artistic skills.

For Chun, it has only been four years since he first opened up about his experience at the academy to those closest to him.

Now he wants that openness reciprocated.

If it was South Korea’s regimes of the past that led Chun, Pak and thousands of other young people to be detained against their will, the brief declaration of martial law in December by South Korea’s current and impeached President Yoon Suk-yeol has brought further misfortune for Soen-gam’s survivors.

The political turmoil caused by Yoon forced the cancellation of a planned meeting between the island’s survivors, the country’s minister of the interior and safety and the governor of Gyeonggi Province.

“We’re angry and frustrated,” said Chun, who serves as the vice president of the Seon-gam Academy survivors committee.

“They were supposed to come here and offer a formal apology in front of the survivors,” he said.

“Now, we are still waiting for one.”

‘Purifying the streets’

Author of Between Extermination and Regeneration: A Sociology of Brothers Home Workhouse, Park Hae-nam, a professor at Keimyung University, said there are thematic similarities between Squid Game and the institutions established to imprison the socially and economically marginalised in South Korea.

If participants in the fictional Squid Game were tools for entertainment, inmates at South Korea’s welfare centres were “tools for labour”, Park said.

“Inmates were not in a condition to talk and socialise with each other, and they were not able to become members of society once they came out of the centres,” he said.

“And the fact that a lot of people died in these facilities, that’s something that was also shown in Squid Game,” he added.

According to Park, the origins of institutions for the homeless goes back to Korea’s liberation from Japanese colonisation in 1945.

“As four million displaced Koreans returned from China and Japan, they started to overpopulate areas in the two major cities – Seoul and Busan. With the start of the Korean War a few years later, even more people crowded cities and started to cause daily disturbances. The country just didn’t have the infrastructure to accommodate such a big population,” Park explained.

“Newspapers in the 1950s were full of voices that wanted these so-called vagrants taken care of. The government’s answer was to tuck them away somewhere ‘safe’,” he said.

With the emergence of Park Chung-hee’s regime in 1963, the Seoul Metropolitan Rehabilitation Centre became the first of these so-called “vagrant asylums”.

The military rule would later sign off on ordinance No. 410 in 1975, which gave authorities the power to send people found on the streets to facilities without an arrest warrant. The initiative was carried out under the banner of “purifying the streets”, Park, the sociology professor, said.

“Even if their physical bodies survived, people inside Brothers Home were murdered as members of society,” he said.

“They were domesticated and made into beasts so they wouldn’t be able to live like humans [afterwards],” he added.

Park said such institutions – whether fictional or historical – symbolise how becoming poor in South Korea “could lead one to extreme misery”.

Rather than Brothers Home or the Seon-gam Academy, Squid Game creator Hwang Dong-hyuk said he was inspired more by dark Japanese manga such as “Battle Royale” and “Liar Game”. Economic class war also underpins his characters in Squid Game, Hwang has said in interviews.

“I wanted to show that any ordinary middle-class person in the world we live in today can fall to the bottom of the economic ladder overnight,” he said in 2021.

But when Hwang first floated his Squid Game script in 2008, it was rejected on the grounds the story was considered too violent and too unrealistic to be taken seriously. A decade later, when Hwang circulated his script again, the world had apparently changed and his dystopian scenario no longer seemed so outlandish to the decision-makers at Netflix.

“The response that I got after 10 years was that it was, in fact, very realistic – that there are probably people playing this game somewhere in the world,” Hwang told The Hollywood Reporter in 2021.

“The fact that this story was no longer not realistic, that it was no longer absurd, but that it was something that was very in touch with reality after a decade, it saddened me a little bit as a person, but it also brought me joy as a creator,” he said.

Recovery efforts continue

The practice of detention without warrants was ramped up under the military rule of President Chun Doo-hwan, who oversaw South Korea’s preparation to host the 1986 Asian Games and the 1988 Seoul Olympics – including rounding up the homeless and beggars.

Local prosecutors, however, found in 1987 that only 10 percent of inmates at Brothers Home were in fact homeless.

On paper, the people who were sent to “welfare” facilities should have only been detained for a year, after which they had to be released back into society. But most would not be so fortunate, spending many years toiling and living under brutal conditions.

Last year, South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission released its first comprehensive report into conditions at the welfare centres. In addition to the estimated 3,100 people that were held inside Brothers Home in Busan, the commission found 5,000 people who were known to have been kept inside four other major facilities.

But the actual number of such facilities set up across the country and their total population has still to be fully determined.

In the case of Seoul Metropolitan Rehabilitation Centre, which was active for over two decades, according to the Truth and Reconciliation Committee, more than a quarter of its estimated 1,900 residents were found to have died while in detention.

On Seon-gam Island, the commission undertook a second recovery operation in 2023 at the forest graveyard. The search uncovered 210 human teeth and remnants of 27 items of personal effects. Most of the bodies that were buried in the forest had decayed, leaving little behind.

Most were children under the age of 15.

And while the official number of bodies recovered so far has come to a total of 24, former inmates such as Chun and Pak believe that figure will climb much higher as excavations continue.

“There are even bodies buried in deeper parts of the mountain,” Pak said.

“More than 400 bodies may be uncovered by the time excavation efforts are finished,” he said.

“Our fellow inmates have been confined in these small graves for more than 50 years. I’m counting down the days until all the bodies are uncovered so I can comfort their souls and pray for them.”