Korea wanted its own exotic island. Then four bodies were found

Jeju is a cursed island, say today’s podcasters and YouTubers who have been poisoning the information landscape in South Korea for years. For centuries, South Korea’s most exotic island – some 90 kilometres off the southern coast, dominated by Mount Halla (1,950 metres, the country’s highest peak) and situated midway between the Korean Peninsula, Japan and China – has been steeped in a rich mythology of ghosts, shamans and legends of death. But politics, too, has played its part over time in turning Jeju into a cursed island. Except that now traditional culture is intermingling with current events – and, above all, with crime news – in a narrative that is difficult to control through government press releases and denials. The facts: on 15 May, a 37-year-old woman, Jang Mi-ran, went missing. She had been living on Jeju for about ten years with her partner, and was staying at a property in the Hallim area, in the western part of the island. Her family contacted the police, and the case was assigned to a 35-year-old officer from the local police force’s missing persons unit. A few days later, the officer rang Jang’s family and told them he had managed to speak to her, that she was safe, and that the case was closed. Two months after the initial report, the family returned to the police because the woman had still not been in touch; someone else took over the case and discovered that the officer had fabricated the entire story, including the record in the case file of a phone call with the victim that had never taken place. Jang’s body was found last Monday, about one kilometre from where she lived. Two days earlier, the body of another person who had gone missing in July had also been found; that case had been closed by the same officer, who had made the same false statements to the family. During the searches carried out in recent days – and in a coincidence that has helped to fuel online hysteria – a total of four bodies of people reported as missing have been found on Jeju, and the causes of their deaths have not yet been disclosed. Meanwhile, however, the story has made national headlines and sparked public debate on several fronts: regarding the accountability of police officers – the officer who had falsified the first two cases has been arrested, whilst four of his superiors have been suspended from duty – regarding the legal system and procedures for handling missing persons cases, and, of course, regarding Jeju itself.

Over the last ten years, the island has changed shape and appearance dozens of times – whilst always retaining that magical and exotic aura which has contributed to its success, and perhaps also to its decline.

Until a decade ago, much of the island’s economy was based on Chinese tourism. Visitors from the People’s Republic arrived in their millions, encouraged by the special visa-free entry scheme, and filled hotels, casinos, duty-free shops and restaurants. Then, in 2016, the South Korean government decided to accept the deployment of the US THAAD anti-missile system. China reacted with an unofficial but effective economic boycott: travel agencies stopped organising group tours to South Korea and Chinese tourists virtually disappeared overnight, particularly on Jeju. To offset the shortfall, the government in Seoul responded with its secret weapon: the Korean Wave. Series such as ‘Our Blues’ and, above all, the recent international hit ‘Quando la vita ti dà mandarini’ (citrus fruits are the island’s iconic product) have transformed Jeju’s landscapes, its famous haenyeo female divers and its villages into one of the new exportable images of Korean pop culture. Except that recent news reports risk changing everything once again: dozens of conspiracy theories are circulating online about various serial killers being covered up by the police, strange stories about tourists disappearing from resorts, white vans reeking of bleach, and propitiatory rituals at sunset. The South Korean media are talking of nothing else: whether the new ‘Jeju horror story’ will provide material for new screenplays that will bring even more fortune to the island, or whether the curse of South Korea’s paradise has struck again.