Sorok Island residents recall Korean leper colony's history of internment and isolation

Home > National > Social Affairs

Sorok Island residents recall Korean leper colony's history of internment and isolation

Published: 09 Dec. 2025, 07:00 Updated: 09 Dec. 2025, 08:11

CHO JUNG-WOO
[email protected]

Audio report: written by reporters, read by AI

Signs at Sorokdo National Hospital in Goheung County, South Jeolla, restrict visitor access on Nov. 6. [PARK SANG-MOON]

GOHEUNG, South Jeolla — The blue sea glints under the sun along the coast of South Jeolla as waves lap against Sorok Island's pine-lined road. In the stillness, an automatic wheelchair whirrs as it carries its occupant toward Sorokdo National Hospital.

A large stop sign soon appears on the path.

“Tourists banned from entering the village,” the sign reads. “Entry and filming are limited from here as it is a living area for residents.”

Beyond this border lie six villages, home to the remaining residents of Sorokdo, an isolated island in Goheung County, South Jeolla, long associated with one of Korea’s most painful histories.

A sign on Sorok Island in Goheung County, South Jeolla, restricts visitor access to the residential area on Nov. 6. [PARK SANG-MOON]

This remote place, nearly 340 kilometers (211 miles) from Seoul, is where thousands of Koreans with leprosy were once forcibly sent and isolated. It remains the site of Korea’s only national hospital dedicated to leprosy.

The 4.4-square-kilometer (1,087-acre) island, once reachable only by boat, has been connected to the mainland since a bridge opened in 2009. Public transportation, however, still doesn't go there. Entry to the island is restricted to visiting hours between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., and a security checkpoint stands at the entrance.

Once home to more than 6,200 residents after being designated as a leper colony during Japanese colonial rule (1910–45), Sorok Island has grown quiet and sparse. Just 324 people live there now, with the average age over 79. All recovered from the disease long ago.

The island where they spent their youth has become, for most, the place where they now expect their lives to end.

But for some still on the island, Sorok Island has been the only home they have known since childhood.

“I came here alone when I was 13,” said Nam Jae-kwon, now 84, sitting in his residence in a village on Sorok Island, where he lives with his wife.

Nam, who lost one of his legs to complications from leprosy, has spent about 71 years on the island, but not by choice.

“I didn’t volunteer,” he said quietly. “I was basically recruited.”

A mural of Sorok Island residents, including people who overcame leprosy and staff members, is displayed on a wall on Sorok Island in Goheung County, South Jeolla. [PARK SANG-MOON]

A century of isolation

Nam, who uses an electric wheelchair, rolled past tightly clustered neighboring residences and stopped at his own door. Inside, the house was tidy and modest, with a small kitchen and a living room. One wall was entirely covered with photographs of Nam and his family.

Nam Jae-kwon, 84, speaks during an interview with the Korea JoongAng Daily at his residence on Sorok Island in Goheung County, South Jeolla, on Nov. 6. [PARK SANG-MOON]

“There were groups of people who went around once or twice a month to gather those like us,” Nam said, recalling how he was taken by police and the head of his village from his home in Gwangyang on the mainland of South Jeolla.

During Japan's colonial rule over Korea, the Government-General founded Jahye Hospital, the predecessor of the current Sorokdo National Hospital, in 1916, forcibly sending leprosy patients to the island for isolation.

People sit and walk along a corridor at Sorokdo National Hospital in Goheung County, South Jeolla, on Nov. 6. [PARK SANG-MOON]

Nam’s recruitment to the island followed the arrival of Western missionaries who began treating leprosy patients in Korean cities such as Busan, Gwangju and Daegu in the early 1910s. The Japanese administration, wary of those missions, chose instead to establish its own segregated facility.

“My mother kept me home because she knew I was ill,” he said. But at 9, he went to school anyway, determined to live like other children. He lasted only a single day.

“The teacher noticed immediately,” Nam said. “Word spread through the village. After that, I stayed inside for three years before being sent to Sorok Island.”

Nam was never formally diagnosed before being sent away.

“I never saw a doctor,” he said. “Coming to Sorok Island was considered the diagnosis.”

Leprosy, now curable with multidrug therapy, primarily attacks the skin and peripheral nerves and can lead to permanent disabilities if left untreated. The disease is believed to spread through prolonged exposure to droplets from the nose and mouth of an untreated patient carrying the bacterium Mycobacterium leprae, though it is not transmitted through casual contact. Once treatment begins, patients quickly become noninfectious. The disease is not hereditary.

In Korea, fewer than 10 new cases have been reported each year since 2008. Last year, five were recorded, all involving foreign nationals, according to the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency. Under World Health Organization standards, which define elimination as fewer than one case per 10,000 people, the country eliminated leprosy in the 1980s.

Nam Jae-kwon, 84, speaks during an interview with the Korea JoongAng Daily at his residence on Sorok Island in Goheung County, South Jeolla, on Nov. 6. [PARK SANG-MOON]

Nam later recovered after being treated with dapsone, an antibiotic medication also known as DDS.

In 1941, a new drug called Promin, the first drug to cure leprosy, was introduced in the United States. It was introduced in Korea in 1947. By 1982, a more effective multidrug therapy, a combination of rifampicin, dapsone and clofazimine, came into use.

But for Nam, his body had already been irreversibly damaged. He said he believes the paralysis that led to the loss of his leg began after he unknowingly cut the sole of his foot on an oyster shell.

Even after Korea’s liberation in 1945, forced “recruitment” continued for years, Nam said.

The line of segregation

Unlike Nam, Kang Seon-bong, 86, arrived on the island as a boy with his mother, who suffered from leprosy.

“I was brought here in 1946, when I was 8,” Kang said. He now lives in a single-person unit, having moved there after his wife died three years ago.

Kang Seon-bong, 86, speaks during an interview with the Korea JoongAng Daily at his residence on Sorok Island in Goheung County, South Jeolla, on Nov. 6. [PARK SANG-MOON]

Sorok Island offers three types of residences for its inhabitants: single-household units, family homes and hospital-based care.

“I finished everything here — elementary school, middle school, high school and even a medical training institution,” Kang said.

But spending childhood on Sorok Island was not kind. Children of patients were kept separately in a segregated nursery.

Kang saw his mother just once a month, and even then, only from several steps away.

“There was a meeting place called sutanjang,” he said, referring to the long path of pine trees that now greets visitors.

A person in a wheelchair travels along the pine-lined Sutanjang road on Sorok Island in Goheung County, South Jeolla, once used for monthly reunions between leprosy patients and their children. [PARK SANG-MOON]

Sutanjang, which roughly means "a place of groaning" in Korean, was once the island's emotional fault line.

During the 1950s and 1960s, Sorok Island was strictly segregated: patients on one side, staff and children on the other. The long road of pine trees became the literal division line between them. Parents and children were allowed to meet only once a month, standing on opposite sides of the road, forbidden from touching one another due to concerns about transmitting the disease.

In reality, leprosy isn't easily transmissible.

Kang says he contracted leprosy later, after he recovered from a long period of frostbite.

“I was young,” he said. “I didn’t really understand what it meant when I first learned I had leprosy.”

Unlike some, Kang had a chance to escape, eventually building a life outside Sorok Island.

“I left in May 1962, before the construction of the Omado project,” he said. “I started a new life in Jeju. I realized nothing in life is impossible.”

Sinsaeng-ri, a residential village on Sorok Island in Goheung County, South Jeolla [PARK SANG-MOON]

The Omado land-reclamation project, which ultimately linked five nearby islands, began in July 1962 and stretched into the 1980s. Throughout the summer of 1964, patients from Sorok Island participated in the construction, hauling rocks and doing backbreaking labor.

The project held out a promise of a new life on newly created land and a long-delayed return to society. But as political interests overtook the project and control shifted to the South Jeolla provincial government, that promise quietly collapsed. The participants were ultimately barred from relocating.

Decades later, after he was diagnosed with rectal cancer in 2010, Nam returned to Sorok Island.

“I got cancer, and I got old,” he said. “I had nowhere else to go.”

Today, Sorok Island is administered by the Ministry of Health and Welfare. Residents receive housing and daily meals and, when needed, medical care at the island hospital, mostly covered by the state.

For many who no longer have the means to support themselves, Sorok Island has become not a temporary refuge, but the only place left to return to.

A final home

Kang’s cluttered room is filled with his own paintings — vivid, expressive and deeply personal. He is a writer and artist who has published essays, poems and artwork.

Kang Seon-bong, 86, speaks during an interview with the Korea JoongAng Daily at his residence on Sorok Island in Goheung County, South Jeolla, on Nov. 6. [PARK SANG-MOON]

“I clean, I write, I draw when I get bored,” he said. “Religion is also a big part. I go to church and attend services with the residents.”

Most days, he works at the Sorokdo National Museum, which opened in 2016 to mark the hospital’s centennial. Tourists may visit only certain areas, including the sutanjang road, the museum and a central park.

“I work as an oral historian,” he said. “I tell people about the past. I tell them there are residents here with disabilities caused by an old sickness, and that we are preparing for the end.”

He paused. “Sorok Island is like a dimming light.”

Shortly after taking office in June, President Lee Jae Myung and first lady Kim Hea Kyung visited the island, where they met residents and pledged to work to eliminate social discrimination.

“We’re just ordinary people,” Kang said. “People who were once sick, and now cured.”

“I hope people understand that it's just people with disabilities living here,” he said.

“And that this is a place marked by deep scars — scars from the past.”

The Sorokdo National Museum in Goheung County, south Jeolla [PARK SANG-MOON]

Nam also shares his memories with visitors at the museum.

“Some people cry after hearing our stories,” he said. “They cheer for us now. You can’t compare it to before. It’s day and night.”

But not everyone welcomed visitors. Some residents kept their lives closely guarded.

“Some people cut contact with their families to live here quietly,” one resident said, declining an interview.

Nam said he welcomes guests — cautiously.

“It’s a privilege that I’m still alive,” Nam said with a faint smile.

“I just hope people don’t think of this as a tourist attraction,” he said. “It’s a hospital. It’s where older people live.”

BY CHO JUNG-WOO [[email protected]]

More in Social Affairs

Inmates' teenage children allowed visitation when accompanied by younger siblings

Samsung foundation-sponsored research helps children with brain tumors lead longer, better lives

Gwangjang Market restaurant owner denies claim that employees regularly reuse ice from trash

'Pokémon Mega Festa 2026' suspended following overcrowding concerns

Woman loses 29-week pregnancy after being unable to find a hospital to perform an emergency delivery

korea joongAng daily

Home > National > Social Affairs

Sorok Island residents recall Korean leper colony's history of internment and isolation

Related Article

Sorok Island's lonely monuments quietly tell former leper colony's tale of suffering

President Lee takes hands-on, reciprocal approach during first town hall in Gwangju

More in Social Affairs

Related Stories

You might also like