ASIA / PACIFIC
Page 4 n THE ASIAN REPORTER
April 20, 2015
Survivors of South Korean ferry
tragedy struggle with guilt
By Youkyung Lee
The Associated Press
A
DRAMATIC DEVOTION. Filipino penitent Ruben Enaje (top photo,
right) is nailed to the cross for the 29th time during Good Friday rituals at
Cutud, Pampanga province, northern Philippines. Several Filipino devo-
tees had themselves nailed to crosses to remember Jesus Christ’s suffer-
ing and death, an annual rite frowned upon by church leaders in the
predominantly Roman Catholic country. In the bottom photo, a hooded
Filipino penitent plays with his son after his flagellation during Good
Friday rituals to atone for sins. (AP Photos/Aaron Favila)
Filipino devotees nailed to
crosses in Good Friday rites
By Joeal Calupitan
The Associated Press
S
AN PEDRO CUTUD, The Philippines —
Screaming in pain, Filipino devotees had
themselves nailed to wooden crosses to mimic the
suffering of Jesus Christ on Good Friday in Asia’s largest
Roman Catholic nation.
Church leaders have spoken against the annual
practice mixing Catholic devotion with folk belief, but it
still draws big crowds, particularly in northern Pampanga
province.
Painter Ruben Enaje, 54, was among half a dozen men
whose hands and feet were rubbed with alcohol before
locals dressed as Roman soldiers hammered sterilized
nails into his flesh.
He has repeated the same act for the last 29 years as
part of giving thanks after surviving a fall from a building.
This year, he added a gadget — a small microphone near
his mouth, although a technical glitch made it difficult to
hear him utter Christ’s last words.
The reenactment of Christ’s crucifixion at a dusty
mound in San Pedro Cutud village drew at least 4,000
spectators and tourists, dozens of them foreigners. Unlike
in the past, organizers this year banned foreigners from
being nailed to crosses to prevent the event from
“becoming a circus,” said councillor Harvey Quiwa.
After they were lowered from the crosses, medical
workers carried the devotees on a stretcher and made sure
there were no complications from their injuries.
“I think it takes an incredible amount of dedication and
commitment to really go through something like that,”
said American tourist Tracy Sengillo. “It’s really
fascinating.”
Devotees undergo the crucifixions in the belief that such
extreme sacrifices are a way to atone for their sins, attain
miracle cures for illnesses, or give thanks to god.
Similar re-enactments were held in other villages
around Pampanga and in other provinces, but San Pedro
Cutud attracts most crowds.
Before the crucifixions, hundreds of barefoot devotees
walked the streets whipping their bare backs with
bamboo sticks dangling from a rope.
“I started doing this when my mother got sick, kidney
problem. I vowed and prayed to god so that she could be
cured,” said electrician Marvin Tao, 25, who has been a
flagellant for nine years.
Associated Press writer Teresa Cerojano in
Manila, the Philippines, contributed to this report.
AP Photo/Lee Jin-man
AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon
NSAN, South Korea — “Field Trip” is still written
in big letters on a calendar hanging on Yang
Jeong-won’s old classroom wall.
The letters cover four days in April last year and mark
one of the highlights of the year — a trip, by ferry, to a
southern resort island. The sight still manages to shock
Yang, one of the few students to survive a disaster that
continues to horrify South Korea.
For many of the second-year high school students, the
trip marked a last bit of freedom before nearly two years of
gruelling preparation for college entrance exams.
Teachers and other students waved at them from school
windows as 17-year-old Yang and her classmates boarded
busses at Danwon High School in the city of Ansan, about
an hour drive south of Seoul.
Girls sang along to loud music and took selfies as they
drove to the port of Incheon. Once heavy fog cleared, the
Sewol, a 6,852-ton ferry, set off with 476 people on board,
including 325 students and 14 teachers from Danwon.
That night, Yang and her classmates threw a surprise
birthday party for a beloved teacher, Kim Cho-won, who
turned 26 on the ship. A few minutes before midnight, the
students lured Kim to a cabin and greeted her with a
birthday cake, a happy birthday song, and a picture.
Several hours later, on the morning of April 16, 2014,
the ferry listed, flipped upside down, and sank. More than
300 people died, many of them students trapped in cabins
because the crew ordered them to stay put, even as the
captain and others jumped onto an early-arriving coast
guard boat. As the ship listed, Yang smashed into a wall.
Students screamed and called their parents, cabinets
falling onto them.
Yang, who had on a life jacket, managed to get to an exit
and called out to rescuers, who saved her.
Out of 35 people in the birthday photo, she was one of
only eight who lived. The teacher, Kim, didn’t make it.
A year later, Yang still can’t believe what happened to
her friends. She’s now in her final year of high school,
studying design and animation, part of a senior class that
shrank from 338 to just 88 students.
“I sometimes wonder if some of the other students are
still in the classroom, but no, this is all we have now,” she
said.
Yang, a freckled, short-haired girl, takes medicine for
anxiety. The feeling of the tilting ship still traumatizes
her, and when she was on the 11th floor of a hospital last
year, she felt like the building was leaning to one side. She
grabbed her younger brother’s hand and ran down the
steps to the first floor.
“If I had known this would happen, I would have tried to
be better friends with more kids,” she said during a
two-hour interview with The Associated Press.
She feels guilty about surviving.
“I came out of this alive, but my friends didn’t,” she said.
“I once dreamed that relatives of those who died came to
kill the survivors.”
Jang Dong-won, the father of another student who was
rescued, said surviving students are still traumatized by
memories of their friends during the last minutes of the
sinking ship.
“One child missed a friend’s hands as the person was
swept away by waves,” Jang said. “That last glance by the
student who couldn’t move as a vending machine fell on
them.”
They also are made to feel guilty by those around them.
“If they smile even just a little bit, they hear, ‘How can
you smile”’ when most of their friends were killed, he said.
The ferry sinking also has dramatically changed the
lives of siblings of victims.
After Choi Yun-ah, 24, lost her 17-year-old sister,
LINGERING LAST MINUTES. Park Bona, sister of Danwon High
School student Seong-ho, who died on the sinking Sewol ferry, prays for
her brother at the cathedral near the group memorial alter in Ansan, South
Korea. After Park’s 17-year-old brother died on the ferry, Park stopped
caring about the things most other 20-something South Koreans are ob-
sessed with. The Sewol ferry sank on April 16, 2014, killing 304 people
including 250 Danwon High School students on a school field trip. In the
bottom photo, survivor Yang Jeong-won, a student who was rescued
from the ferry, puts her head on her desk inside a classroom at Danwon
High School in Ansan, South Korea, which has become a memorial for
her classmates who were killed.
Yun-min, in the sinking, she quit her office job. She then
reached out to other siblings of ferry victims from
Danwon. Siblings, she says, often have no one else to turn
to because they are afraid of putting more of a burden on
their grieving parents.
“Siblings are victims too, but no one in the world knows
about it,” Choi said. She has made art out of messages
from 51 siblings to their dead sisters and brothers.
She has also overcome her previous reticence and
become more vocal about the sinking.
“Kids died because they were asked to stay still,” Choi
said. “If I stay obedient and listen to what grownups tell
me to do, it will damage me, so I now speak my mind.”
After Park Bona’s 17-year-old brother died on the ferry,
Park stopped caring about the things most other
20-something South Koreans are obsessed with.
“After I lost Seong-ho, working at a big company,
graduating from college, making a lot of money — it all
became meaningless to me,” Park said as she sat in a
makeshift church near a memorial altar for the victims.
“What does it even mean to get married in a country that
can’t even protect my brother?”
Park, a 21-year-old who was majoring in Korean
language and literature in college, is now preparing to
transfer to another university. She wants to help society
remember the dead teenagers and to make the country a
safer place.
Yang, meanwhile, is still wrestling with why friends
who could have been saved had to die.
She feels angry at the ferry operator. The ship became
top-heavy after a redesign added more cargo space. She
blames the government for not regulating ferry operators
more carefully.
Yang is also enraged by the ship’s crew, who escaped
when students were trapped because they were told to
wait inside.
“They should be punished as heavily as possible,” she
said. “It would be very hard for me to forgive them.”
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South Korea lifts travel ban on Japanese journalist
By Hyung-jin Kim
The Associated Press
EOUL, South Korea — South
Korea has lifted an overseas
travel ban on a Japanese
journalist charged with defaming the
South Korean president, according to
officials.
Tatsuya Kato had been banned
from leaving South Korea since last
August while prosecutors investi-
gated his article about rumors that
President Park Geun-hye was absent
for seven hours during the ferry
S
disaster that left more than 300
people dead last year because she was
with a man.
Seoul
prosecutors
eventually
indicted Kato, a former Seoul bureau
chief of the conservative Sankei
Shimbun newspaper, last October.
The indictment raised questions
about South Korea’s media freedom.
The Seoul prosecutors’ office said
the Justice Ministry had accepted its
request to lift the travel ban. Hours
after the announcement, Kato was
seen by reporters at a Seoul airport
ahead of his departure to Japan.
A senior prosecutor said the
decision was made after judges
determined that Kato’s report was
inaccurate and that he had promised
to attend the remaining sessions in
his court case in Seoul. The
prosecutor, speaking on condition of
anonymity because the case is still
ongoing, said the fact Kato’s aging
mother is sick was also a factor in
allowing him to return home.
The prosecutor said he had no
information about when the court
case would end or when a verdict was
expected.