[Drama 2006] Seoul 1945 서울 1945

[Guest nadtn]

Ok, I've finished! My husband's quite annoyed at me for spending all this time watching, so now I need a break from watching these dramas.

It was so riveting that I couldn't stop! There are so many twists and turns, and you really don't know what to expect next, where the storyline will go, I mean I had an inkling about the ending, but that's about it. I thought all the characters had a lot of depth to them. RSY is such a great actor, I thought this was his best performance of all his dramas that I've watched, and he looked the best in this drama too.

By the way, someone else had mentioned this, but I thought the egg throwing scene was hilarious, I thought it was ridiculous to have her throw eggs at him one by one like that...wonder how the director came up with that idea! I wish I can watch the NG's on that scene.

I'd like to discuss the ending once you're done, what you thought about it...

[Guest anachronista]

I thought all the characters had a lot of depth to them. RSY is such a great actor, I thought this was his best performance of all his dramas that I've watched, and he looked the best in this drama too.

The role of Choi Oon Hyuk is the only one for which RSY has ever won an award, as far as the information I've seen goes. If you haven't seen it yet, check out the clip from the KBS 2006 Drama Awards where he's recognized for his part in Seoul 1945. Should be in the Veoh account and maybe on YouTube.

I'd like to discuss the ending once you're done, what you thought about it...

DT and I have seen the end, but I don't think Michelle has. (???) Anyway, if you still want to discuss while it's fresh on your mind, we can use spoiler tags.

[Guest nadtn]

Did you like how it ended?? Because of how history played out, I guess that was the only way it could have ended...

That ending was so sad, I still feel sad now thinking about it, but I guess that was the only way the drama could have played out, Oon Hyuk had to die. He didn't belong in the south or the north, and being the kind of patriot that he was, he would never be able to leave his country, or just live out a quiet life in the north with just Kehee.

So where do you think Kehee ended up, did she go to the north or go to a different country? From the scene in the classroom it looked like she went back to Hamheung and was visiting a school there, or maybe it was just any random school, I wasn't sure. How about the scene with Dong Woo and Suk Kyong in the end? I couldn't really tell if they were going somewhere together or just saying good bye, it didn't look like they ended up together either...Either way, I don't think Kehee would ever go back to Dong Woo...she only truly loved Oon Hyuk and she would never do that to Dong Woo again, and also, he would remind her too much of the sad past.

Anyway, such a great drama...I'm not Korean, but I'm really glad I got the chance to understand a little bit of the history of Korea at that time.

[Guest anachronista]

I suppose so. You wish it were different, but after watching enough dramas, you recognize the doomed characters. Highlight to read below.

It really was sad. Oon Hyuk had become disillusioned with North Korean communism and would probably have been purged out like Moon Dong Gi very soon had he returned. It's just a guess, but Dong Woo may have intended to arrange it so that Oon Hyuk could stay in the south safely and had just talked him into making the right decision when that idiot fired his gun. Suk Kyung ended up showing some humanity, but I still hate her for not helping Oon Hyuk. To be truthful, I think all he really wanted in the end was that quiet life as a teacher with Ke Hee. If he had lived, though, he might have been part of that forced repatriation to the north.

Ke Hee went to Japan first, but that last scene of her at the school was puzzling. It could have been Hamheung, but the South Korean flag was flying over the school and Hamheung is in North Korea. So I guess it must have been either a random school or a really glaring technical error. It was really scary to see her wading out into the water! I was afraid she would commit suicide! I always wondered what was written on that little paper boat.

In the last scene with Suk Kyung and Dong Woo -- I think she had plans to take up with him again and he wasn't interested. He'd learned his lesson about her by then and I'd say they definitely didn't end up together. Not in that lifetime. There's nothing to back this up, but I always pictured him trying it once more with Ke Hee now that Oon Hyuk was gone. He really loved her, and she liked him well enough if nothing else.

It could also be interpreted in a broader, more symbolic sense. Ke Hee symbolizing South Korea longing and waiting for reunification, Dong Woo as the modern Korean leaving behind the old ways along with his aristocratic family and rejecting a Suk Kyung who represents Korea's Imperial Japanese past. When you look at it that way, whatever actually happened to the characters becomes less important and it truly becomes an allegory of Korea's history.

[Guest nadtn]

I'm having major RSY/Oon Hyuk withdrawal!!! I feel so sad now that it's over I've been pathetically going through old forum posts just to read up more info on the guy...yes, I've become an obsessed fan!!!!

[Guest mujisan]

I've just started to watch this drama on my local Korean station. I'm really enjoying it and thanks to all who provided historical information.

[Guest piano_lady]

Dramawiki entry has been revised. Thanks to nadtn for the summary

[Guest anachronista]

I was lucky enough to spot this article on the MSNBC web page tonight. For those of you who remember that it was said that Choi Oon Hyuk and Kim Hae Kyung were based loosely on actual people, Lee Kang Kook and Kim Soo Im respectively, this should be interesting.

Truth emerges too late for Kim Soo-im

South Korean executed as communist spy; son seeks to restore reputation

updated 5:15 p.m. CT, Sat., Aug. 16, 2008

SEOUL, South Korea - She was "The Korean Seductress Who Betrayed America," a Seoul socialite said to have charmed secret information out of one lover, an American colonel, and passed it to another, a top communist in North Korea.

In late June 1950, as North Korean invaders closed in on this panicked city, Kim Soo-im was executed by the South Korean military, shot as a "very malicious international spy." Her deeds, thereafter, only grew in infamy.

In 1950s America, gripped by anticommunist fever, one TV drama told viewers Kim's "womanly wiles" had been the communists' "deadliest weapon." Another teleplay, introduced by host Ronald Reagan, depicted her as Asia's Mata Hari. Coronet magazine, under the "seductress" headline, reviled her as the Oriental queen of a vast Soviet "Operation Sex."

Kim Soo-im and her love triangle are gone, buried in separate corners of a turbulent past. But in yellowing U.S. military files stamped "SECRET," hibernating through a long winter of Cold War, the truth survived. Now it has emerged, a half-century too late to save her.

The record of a confidential 1950 U.S. inquiry and other declassified files, obtained by The Associated Press at the U.S. National Archives, tell a different Kim Soo-im story:

Col. John E. Baird had no access to the supposed sensitive information. Kim had no secrets to pass on. And her Korean lover, Lee Gang-kook, later executed by North Korea, may actually have been an American agent.

The espionage case, from what can be pieced together today, looks like little more than a frame-up.

Her colonel could have defended her, but instead Baird was rushed out of Korea to "avoid further embarrassment," the record shows. She was left to her fate — almost certainly, the Americans concluded, to be tortured by South Korean police into confessing to things she hadn't done.

Historians now believe the Seoul regime secretively executed at least 100,000 leftists and supposed sympathizers in 1950. This one death, for one American, remains a living, deeply personal story.

Personal quest

Wonil Kim — son of Kim Soo-im and Col. Baird — is on a quest to bury the myths about his mother, a woman, he says, "with a passion for life, a strong woman caught up in the torrent of historical turmoil, and drowned."

The son, a theology professor at California's LaSierra University, was the first to discover the declassified U.S. documents. Now he has also found an ally, Seoul movie director Cho Myung-hwa, who plans a feature film on Kim Soo-im.

"He betrayed her," Cho said of Baird. "He could have testified. But he just flew back stateside to his American family."

The soft-spoken theologian, 59, and the veteran moviemaker, 63, both say that to grasp the Kim Soo-im story one must understand that young, educated Koreans of the 1930s and 1940s largely favored recasting their feudal country in a leftist mold once rid of their Japanese colonial rulers. But the U.S. Army's Lt. Gen. John R. Hodge, taking charge in southern Korea at World War II's end, vowed to "stamp out" the communists.

An educated elite

Kim Soo-im, born in 1911, was among the educated elite. An orphan, she was schooled by American missionaries, eventually graduating from Seoul's prestigious Ewha women's college.

In 1936, as a female office administrator, she was featured in a Seoul magazine article on the new generation of liberated young women. Smart and fashionable, with a circle of sophisticated, politicized friends, she later met an older married man, Lee Gang-kook, a German-educated intellectual active in Seoul's leftist movement.

She became his lover, and Lee rose to political prominence after Japan's defeat. But within a year of the U.S. takeover, he faced arrest as an alleged security risk and fled to communist-run northern Korea.

Kim Soo-im's fluent English, meanwhile, had made her valuable to the U.S. occupation. She was hired as an assistant by Baird, the Americans' 56-year-old, Irish-born military police chief. Baird secured a house for her and took to spending nights there, according to Korean and American witnesses in the declassified record.

"She had a baby by Col. Baird," Kim's friend Nancy Kim would later tell U.S. interrogators. "We all knew. He slept in the house many times. The baby looks like the father."

'Witch-hunting'

When the U.S. occupation army withdrew in 1949, succeeded by an advisory corps, Baird shifted to assisting the national police, and his American wife joined him in Korea.

Finally, on March 1, 1950, Kim, no longer U.S.-employed, was arrested by South Korean police, joining thousands of others ensnared in President Syngman Rhee's roundups of leftists.

"It was witch-hunting," said historian Jung Byung-joon, who has studied the case. "The South Korean police and prosecutors hated her because she was the lover of Lee Gang-kook, and then of Col. Baird, and nobody could touch her. They waited for their chance."

On June 14, 1950, nine days after Baird sailed from Korea, Kim Soo-im faced a five-judge South Korean military court and a long list of alleged crimes, including obtaining vehicles from the colonel that she lent or sold to "communist" friends, and transporting Lee Gang-kook to the northern border in 1946 with a U.S. Army jeep.

The most serious charge accused her of eliciting the classified 1949 U.S. withdrawal plans from Baird, and relaying them to the northern communists.

As her court-appointed lawyer noted, the government presented neither material evidence nor witnesses to back up the charges. But on the trial's third day, according to a summary in the declassified U.S. file, Kim Soo-im confessed and was sentenced to death.

Just weeks after her execution, however, and across the Pacific, U.S. military investigators reviewing Baird's role were hearing confidential testimony from Army officers indicating Kim's conviction was a contrivance of the Seoul authorities.

On point after point — alleged illicit use of jeeps, an Army truck, a radio and other items for "communistic activities" — Baird denied such dealings with Kim, and the Army inspector general's office repeatedly found that "the evidence does not substantiate the allegation," according to the long-secret record.

On the espionage count, officers up to Gen. Hodge himself testified Baird had no access to classified details of the troop withdrawal. Besides, the withdrawal's outlines had been reported in Stars and Stripes, the military newspaper available to all.

'Out and out torture'

The investigators concluded there was only a "remote possibility" Kim Soo-im used Baird as alleged — one that couldn't be fully disproved, since she was dead.

Col. William H.S. Wright, head of the Korea advisory group, testified that her confession was probably forced through "out and out torture," probably near-drowning, or waterboarding, as it's now known.

A Korean source backs this up. In a 2005 Seoul TV report on Kim Soo-im, longtime government propagandist Oh Jae-ho said he learned from a police official that the defendant had to be carried into the courtroom to confess.

Wonil Kim believes his mother gave in because otherwise "they would send her right back to the torture chamber."

The year-old orphaned boy was adopted by a church administrator and his wife, a head nurse at the hospital where Kim gave birth. In 1970, the Korean family moved to the United States, where Wonil Kim eventually earned a Ph.D. in Old Testament studies.

He was told about his birth mother as a teenager, and her old friends later informed him about his father, to whom he bears a strong resemblance. The painful legacy never left his mind.

Not long before Baird died in 1980, at age 90, Wonil tracked the old colonel down at a Rhode Island nursing home. Baird rejected his illegitimate son, speaking instead of a "Mr. Smith" as the father, Wonil Kim said. But after his death, Baird's family was "very warm and accepting."

Crucial questions remain unanswered in the declassified files — about the mysterious Lee Gang-kook, for example.

A profile drafted by Army intelligence in 1956 said Lee reportedly was employed by the CIA. And, in fact, the North Koreans executed Lee as an "American spy" after the Korean War ended with a 1953 armistice.

Historian Jung, who discovered that declassified profile at the National Archives in College Park, Md., still believes with other historians that North Korean leader Kim Il Sung had Lee and other southerners executed to eliminate potential rivals.

The isolated document remains a puzzle, nonetheless. Wonil Kim suspects that his mother, entrusted with a U.S. military vehicle, did help her lover Lee get to northern Korea in 1946, a time when it was still easy for intelligence operatives to cross the 38th Parallel. Was Lee somehow linked to the Americans?

This June his quest for the truth led Wonil Kim to a surprising figure, a feeble, 88-year-old Seoul lawyer who as a young army officer was one of five judges who sent Kim Soo-im to her death.

After meeting the son, elderly ex-soldier Kim Tae-chung spoke briefly with the AP, defending the long-ago verdict, but saying he'd told Wonil that Kim Soo-im "to me didn't look like a bad person."

Was she tortured? the AP asked. "All I know is what happened in the courtroom," Kim Tae-chung protested.

Wonil Kim said he found the old judge "a very gentle kind of soul" who "believes he did the right thing." Their hour together proved "cathartic" for both men, he said.

And for a son on a sad, dutiful mission, it proved essential.

"I just needed to be with someone who was in the courtroom with her," he said — to talk about his mother, to summon up the memory of Kim Soo-im, before that memory slips finally, forever into the grave

Wow.......

[Guest nadtn]

Wow, how fascinating. What a tragic time for Korea and its people during that time.

The writer did such a wonderful job with this drama. I was so captivated the whole time I watched.

S1945 is probably my favorite Kdrama so far, and most definitely Oon Hyuk is my favorite RSY role.

[Guest star]

I can't believe the ending. ;~;

Wow. Just wow. I know this drama was made to be

along of a more historical main idea portraying korea's history

but still. I can't help but think of it as a regular drama with an

ultimate sad ending...TT__TT

[Guest anachronista]

After a long hiatus, screenshots from Episode 40

A lot of ideological stuff hits the fan and it seems like Oon Hyuk makes the right decision.

My favorite line from this episode:

"They say it's easier to quit womanizing than to quit gambling and easier to quit gambling than to quit politics."

Poor Oon Hyuk!

[Guest debratan]

So nadtn, you are still at episode 41/41++??

I will watch episode 41 and do a post tomorrow.

Talking about the drama. Oon Hyuk is still one of my top fav character, RSY is so convincing in that role that I have always treated OH as a real person who have once lived.

So much so that whenever there is any major new on N.Korea, especially those reunions between the two side people have always caught my attention.

[Guest nadtn]

Well hello ladies!!!

So nadtn, you are still at episode 41/41++??

I will watch episode 41 and do a post tomorrow.

No, I already finished S1945 and rewatched the entire thing a couple of months ago! But I'll comment along with you guys.

[Guest nadtn]

My favorite line from this episode:

"They say it's easier to quit womanizing than to quit gambling and easier to quit gambling than to quit politics."

Poor Oon Hyuk!

Yeah, poor thing! Watching it the first time was so nerve-racking...with 30+ episodes left, I knew that it wasn't going to be smooth sailing, but somehow I still hoped he wouldn't get into any more trouble.

[Guest debratan]

Ok, I've finished! My husband's quite annoyed at me for spending all this time watching, so now I need a break from watching these dramas.

oh sorry.. you have said so ..

My snap for epi 40 .. these two, although they are friend but seem to be always on fights since young

I actually forgot that KeHee have ever said "I Love You" to Oon Hyuk

Little sister is giving Big Brother headache ..

Oon Hyuk wanted to marry KeHee and it took him almost a day to decide to quit the party .. too bad that Teacher died at the wrong time

[Guest anachronista]

Oon Hyuk wanted to marry KeHee and it took him almost a day to decide to quit the party .. too bad that Teacher died at the wrong time

Yeah, it's at that point that I want to yell: "Just forget about your sunsaengnim, Oon Hyuk, and marry Ke Hee! If only they'd gotten married and had a baby on the way. I'll bet Oon Hyuk would have never given politics another thought again.

Great screencaps, DT!

[Guest debratan]

Come to think of it, sunsaengnim is the reason that Oon Hyuk choose to be in politics.

He had always been concerned with his country and his people .. but he really sunk into politics after he met sunsaengnim.

Pretty KeHee in gown

Handsome Oon Hyuk in frown

closing snap for epi 41

Preview snap for epi 42, can't resist this

[Guest nadtn]

Preview snap for epi 42, can't resist this

Ooh, love that pic!

[Guest anachronista]

Great pic, DT!

Screenshots from Episode 41

Disregarding the angry look on his face, I really love RSY's hair in this part of the series.....

[Guest debratan]

Disregarding the angry look on his face, I really love RSY's hair in this part of the series.....

I actually like it when Oon Hyuk got angry, especially with PCJ.

But Oon Hyuk is really really very stubborn and selfish (in a way) isn't so??

He choose to go north instead of apologise in the press, and risking so many people life by doing so

DW is a true friend, how come I don't seem to realise that, the first time when I watched the drama?

And I nearly forgotten that how much SK had loved Oon Hyuk once, and how much he had hurted her, can't really blamed her for wanting her revenge for her father