Amidong Tombstone Village (아미동 비석마을)

Clinging to a hillside in Seo-gu, Busan, this village was once the site of a Japanese cemetery during the colonial occupation. When the war ended and the refugees came flooding in, the only building materials left to them were the grave markers.

Tombstones became steps. Offering tables (床石) became foundation stones. Even now, if you glance down at some alley floor, half-buried Chinese characters (漢字) catch your eye from within the cement—someone's name, someone's year of death.

Among the residents, a saying has circulated for as long as anyone can remember. If you are climbing the steps at night and a cold current rises from beneath your feet, there is a stone below you whose name has not yet been worn away. As long as the name remains, the stone remembers.

People still live in the village today, and its narrow alleys and brightly painted murals have been dressed up as a tourist attraction. Yet some visitors report discovering something only later, in their photographs—the moment when the characters carved into the cracks of the cement catch the light and rise to the surface, just beside the murals.

In a village where the homes of the living and the resting places of the dead have become a single body, perhaps the boundary was never drawn to begin with.