Welcome to Season 6 of K Drama Chat! In this season, we will recap and analyze Gyeongseong Creature!

Today, we’ll be discussing Episode 1 of Gyeongseong Creature, the hit K Drama on Netflix starring Park Seo-joon as Jang Tae-sang, Han So-hee as Yoon Chae-ok, Wi Ha-jun as Kwon Jun-taek, Kim Soo-hyun as Lady Maeda, Ji Woo as Myeong-ja, Jo Han-chul as Yoon Joon-won, and Kim Hae-sook as Nawol daek. Gyeongseong Creature was written by Kang Eun-kyung, directed by Chung Dong-yoon and Roh Young-sub. The first seven episodes were released on Netflix on December 22, 2023. The last 3 episodes dropped on January 5, 2024. We discuss:

• The song we feature during the recap, Time by Baek A.
• How the setting of this show is personal to both of us because our parents were kids in Asia who lived under the Japanese occupation during WWII.
• The Japanese Army retreating from Harbin, China. Turns out Unit 731 of the Japanese Army, which was based in Harbin and was later discovered to have been doing human experimentation and biological weapons manufacturing. This is absolutely horrifying!
• After the war, the US basically hid the atrocities and pardoned the researchers in exchange for their data because the US was doing its own biological weapons research.
• How Korea had been under Japanese rule officially since the annexation of Korean in 1910.
• The characters who are introduced in this episode, specifically:
  • Jang Tae-sang, the self-made man and owner of the House of Golden Treasure, a successful pawn shop in Bukchong, a fancy neighborhood in Gyeongseong (what we now know as Seoul).
  • The three staff members of the House of Golden Treasure: Manager Gu, Mrs. Nawol, and Beom-o.
  • Police Commissioner Ishikawa, husband of Lady Maeda, who is the daughter of General Maeda.
  • Hospital Dr. Ichiro and Colonel Kato, who look like they run the hospital and are in charge of the human experimentation.
  • Sleuths Yoon Joon-won and Yoon Chae-ok, who are known to never give up when looking for missing persons.
  • Painter Sachimoto, the man that the two sleuths are looking, because he has some kind of connection to a missing mom.
  • Kwon Jun-taek, a nationalist who is also the son of a successful businessman.
• The central plot line of this episode, which is that Commissioner Ishikawa wants Jang Tae-sang to find his mistress Myeong-ja, who disappeared a week before.
• The human experimentation that appears to result in the creation of a scary creature that threatens painter Sachimoto at the end of the episode.

References

• Unit 731 in Wikipedia
• The cast of Gyeongseong Creature
• US Response to Japanese Wartime Inhuman Experimentation