Lovely Runner | Choongang High School — Jagam High, Twenty-Two Years On

Jagam High School does not exist. Its gate, corridors and classrooms are Choongang High School in Gye-dong, Seoul — the same campus that played Yu-jin and Jun-sang's school in Winter Sonata twenty-two years earlier.

That is the fact worth standing on this pavement for. Winter Sonata put Japanese tour buses on this street in 2003 and turned the stationery shops opposite the gate into souvenir shops. Two decades later a time-travel romance about saving a boy's life brought a new generation to the identical spot. If you hold the Winter Sonata memory on this Blox, it is the same gate, the same shops, and a completely different audience.

Choongang is unusual among Korean filming schools in that productions get inside it — corridors, classrooms, the central courtyard — rather than borrowing the facade. That is why so much of Jagam feels specific rather than generic, and it is also why the school carries a real burden.

It is a working high school with hundreds of students in a residential lane a few hundred metres from Samcheong-dong. Residents have been vocal about visitor volume since the Winter Sonata years. Stay outside the gate, come at a weekend, and do not photograph students.

Stand across from the entrance and think about the interval. The drama is about going back fifteen years to change what happened to someone. This gate has been photographed by two entirely separate waves of people doing something adjacent to that — returning, at a distance, to a version of being seventeen.

Cover photo: Choongang High School main building, by travel oriented, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.