Jeju Erotic

The Jeju are the people of Korea's largest island, a volcanic mass of basalt and wind off the peninsula's southern coast, and they have long thought of themselves as islanders first. Their origin story skips the mainland entirely: three founding ancestors, forebears of the Go, Yang and Bu clans, rose out of the ground at Samseonghyeol, a site still honored in Jeju City. The language keeps the same distance. Jejueo belongs to the Koreanic family, but most mainland Koreans can't understand it, because it holds onto words and grammar that faded from standard Korean long ago. Official Korea long treated it as a dialect. Many linguists now call it a separate language, and UNESCO lists it as critically endangered, with fluent speakers mostly elderly. History pushed the island around. It was the kingdom of Tamna until the Goryeo court absorbed it in the twelfth century. Mongol rulers later ran it as horse pasture, and the Joseon dynasty used it for exile, then barred islanders from leaving for nearly two centuries. The sharpest modern wound is the April 3 Incident: a 1948 uprising brought a counterinsurgency campaign that dragged on until 1954 and killed an estimated 14,000 to 30,000 people, most of them civilians. The subject was close to forbidden for decades, and a South Korean president apologized only in 2003. Many who escaped went to Osaka, joining a Jeju community rooted there since the 1920s, whose descendants remain a recognizable part of the city's Korean neighborhoods.

Jeju calls itself the island of eighteen thousand gods, and it means it. Many villages keep a shrine, often little more than a stone enclosure beside an old tree, and shimbang, the island's shamans, still lead gut rites for fishing households and the dead. The Chilmeoridang Yeongdeung Gut, held in the second lunar month to welcome and send off the wind goddess, is on UNESCO's intangible heritage list. Buddhism, Christianity and Confucian ancestor rites run alongside all of it. The islanders outsiders know best are the haenyeo, women who free-dive without breathing gear for abalone, conch, sea urchin and seaweed, many of them still working in their seventies and eighties. The whistling breath they let out when they surface, the sumbisori, carries along the coast, and their diving culture joined the same UNESCO list in 2016. An old saying holds that Jeju has plenty of wind, stones and women, and no thieves, beggars or gates. In place of gates, households set wooden poles across stone posts, the jeongnang, and the number of poles told neighbors how long the family would be away.