Port town, once a Japanese autonomous zone, under restoration

The street, on which Incheon Jung-gu office plans to restore the Japanese style buildings

Aiming for tourist influx, Incheon says it will remodel 70 structures in old style

South Korea’s western port city of Incheon announced on February 22 that it will remodel an area where Japan was granted extraterritoriality about a century ago, in a style that reflects the area’s architecture from that period.

The buildings in question, which contain mostly single homes and stores, are not the original Japanese-built structures from that period, but date from between 20 to 50 years ago.

Incheon’s Jung-gu district office said it will "restore" the buildings in the area using Japanese construction techniques from the era in question. Of 92 buildings in the area, the district office has so far restored 14 buildings with help from a local government subsidy of 400 million won (US$425,000).

"We started remodeling the structures using Japan’s old construction techniques in order to attract tourists and to revive the area’s economy," said an official at the district office. Over the next three to four years, the ward office plans to rebuild about 70 buildings in the area.

However, some experts pointed out that the project has failed to reproduce Japanese-style structures from the era, as the district is using brass-colored metal tiles instead of the clay tiles used by the Japanese at that time.

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