Guryongpo Japanese House Street

Character

After Japanese residents left Guryongpo in 1945, local residents covered old Japanese inscriptions on the park stair monuments with cement, turned some stones around and later carved Korean names on the reverse. The street carries regime change in its masonry

The strongest surviving house belonged to Hashimoto Zenkichi, who made his money in the fresh-fish transport business. He built the two-storey timber residence in the 1920s with materials brought from Japan. Korean residents used the house for decades after his family returned to Japan; Pohang bought it in 2010 and restored it as the Guryongpo Modern History Museum

That sequence makes the district more complicated than a preserved “Japanese street.” Buildings made for a migrant fishing elite were absorbed into a Korean port town, altered, lived in and eventually turned into evidence

The experience

The old quarter follows the shape of the harbor. A Journal of Architecture and Planning study maps a main street running parallel to the coast with short perpendicular lanes, producing narrow and sometimes trapezoidal plots. Forty-seven Japanese-style wooden buildings survive in the district today

The street fronts are the immediate attraction: tiled roofs, timber facades, narrow shop widths and upper-floor windows sit only a few minutes from working fishing boats and seafood businesses. The park stairs then lift the view above the roofs toward Guryongpo Port, making the connection between settlement and fishing ground physically obvious

The former Hashimoto house gives the exterior architecture an interior. Its surviving details include a butsudan, kotatsu, ranma, fusuma and tokonoma, alongside Japanese joinery and railings

Filming for *When the Camellia Blooms* added another layer of visitors. The drama locations now sit inside a port district whose architecture predates the television version of the town by almost a century

History

Japanese fishermen began moving into Korean waters after the late-nineteenth-century opening of fishing rights, and Guryongpo developed into one of the major modern fishing bases on Korea’s east coast. The settlement was not simply residential: fishing capital, transport, processing and the street plan grew together

Korea Tourism Organization describes the surviving district as a place where Japanese settlers increased control over East Sea fishing while Korean fishing rights were restricted. A National Folk Museum of Korea study of colonial Guryongpo traces a Japanese migrant fishing colony whose housing, road pattern and labor relations grew from that colonial economy

After liberation, the Japanese population departed but the built fabric did not vanish. Korean residents reused houses, changed monuments and continued the fishing-port economy. Pohang later began preservation work, retaining dozens of timber structures rather than reconstructing an entire streetscape from scratch

The result is an unusually legible piece of colonial urban history because the evidence does not sit in one monument. It survives across house plans, street geometry, altered inscriptions and the harbor that made the settlement profitable

Before you go

A harbor-side start followed by the old main lane, the former Hashimoto residence and the park stairs keeps the port, houses and altered monuments in one continuous sequence. The upper view also clarifies how tightly the historic street sits against the working waterfront