Busan Citizens Park

This guide to Busan Citizens Park follows the ground beneath your feet from its start as the Choson Racing Association's Seomyeon Racecourse under Japanese colonial rule, through its seizure by American troops in September 1945, to the visiting sailor whose memory of a Florida track supposedly gave the whole base a new name. It traces the more than forty years the site spent as a fenced-off American garrison, invisible to the city growing up around it, before its return to Busan in 2010. Walk the paths today and you're moving through streams, ponds and over a million trees planted where the old track once ran.