"History of Blood, Sweat, and Tears"... Korea Captured by a Japanese Photographer in His Nineties

[Anchor]

Modern Korean history was a scene of turbulence rarely found anywhere else in the world. There is a Japanese photographer in his nineties who has captured that blood, sweat, and tears for over half a century.

Reporter Lee Joo-hyoung met with him.

[Reporter]

University students staging a silent protest against the South Korea-Japan talks.

Shackles along Cheonggyecheon, which were once the living quarters of urban the impoverished.

Soldiers departing for the Vietnam War visiting with their mothers just before leaving.

These photos were taken not by a Korean, but by Japanese photojournalist Shisei Kuwabara.

This reporter first met him back in 2008.

Meeting him again after 18 years, he was still active in the field despite being in his nineties.

A Korean documentary film has been released that turns him—someone who always chased his subjects—into the subject himself.

Kuwabara, who gained fame for his photographs exposing the mercury poisoning known as Minamata disease to the world, has actually taken his most extensive body of work on modern Korean history.

Since his first visit to Korea in 1964, when even the road from Gimpo Airport to Seoul was unpaved, he has traveled back and forth to Korea about 100 times, taking over 100,000 photos.

[Shisei Kuwabara / Photojournalist: Because I had a deep interest in the flow of society and the movement of history, I consistently visited a turbulent Korea over a long period.]

Even while facing criticism asking why he only photographed Korea's dark sides and enduring derogatory slurs, he continued to record modern Korean history on film.

One of the unforgettable scenes he picked out is the women of the US military camp towns on the outskirts of Seoul.

[Shisei Kuwabara / Photojournalist: I think back when the Korean economy was difficult, they contributed foreign currency to the country, whether large or small. It made me feel like crying.]

The history that the nonagenarian photographer ultimately wanted to capture last in Korea may remain unphotographed.

[Shisei Kuwabara / Photojournalist: I thought there might be something like the integration of the South and the North, and I intended to conclude my coverage of Korea with that, but now I think national unification is realistically somewhat impossible.]

Kuwabara summarized the modern history of Korea that he witnessed as follows.

[Shisei Kuwabara / Photojournalist: (All of it) is truly too painful to even utter. I would like to say it was a history of Korea's, well, blood, sweat, and tears.]

(Video footage by Lee Byung-joo and Choi Dae-woong | Video editing by So Ji-hye | Design by Hwang Se-yeon)

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