Photo: Adobe Stock / LicensedChecked against official sources · updated · Takumi Yamada
Busan is a Korean port city, the one Korean day on most Japan cruises, and the city that was all of free Korea for most of 1950. People come for Gamcheon, a hillside of stepped pastel houses built by wartime refugees, and for Jagalchi, Korea's largest fish market, run by women for seventy years. Most ships dock at North Port, a 10–15 minute covered walk from Busan Station and the metro.
Between 1607 and 1811, Korea sent twelve grand embassies to Japan — four to five hundred people at a time, escorted across the country as a spectacle. Every one of them sailed from Busan. And in Busan itself, Japan kept a walled trading settlement so large it makes Nagasaki's famous Dejima look like a car park.
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In August 1950 the Republic of Korea consisted of Busan and a defensive line drawn around it. The government moved here, the refugees came here, and the city they improvised in those three years is the city you are walking through.
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The men were at the war or at sea or dead. The women sold the fish. Seventy years later the Jagalchi ajumma are still the ones behind the tanks, they will still shout at you, and being shouted at is part of the transaction.
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Busan's signature dishes are not old. Almost all of them were invented in the 1950s by people who had lost everything and were cooking with whatever the port and the American aid shipments provided. They are among the best cheap food in East Asia and every one of them has a reason.
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Busan started a film festival in 1996 with borrowed money and a district of old cinemas. It is now the largest in Asia, it has a building with the longest cantilevered roof in the world, and the square where it started is named after it — which is why you are eating a seed pancake in a place called BIFF Square.
Read the storyCruise seasons run spring to autumn, but the port changes underneath them.
Blossom arrives around the start of April here — later than Kyushu, earlier than Seoul.
Dry, mild, clear. Everything outdoors works, including Taejongdae and the coastal trails.
Comfortable everywhere before the humidity. Milmyeon season opens in earnest.
Heavy and concentrated. Jagalchi and the covered markets carry the day.
Haeundae in August is a domestic holiday crowd. Go early or skip it.
Late September turns pleasant and the cruise calls stack up.
Clear, mild, and the film festival runs for about ten days. The best time to be here.
Autumn colour on the hills, hot eomuk on the streets, and no crowds.
Warmer than Seoul but genuinely cold. This is when gukbap and street eomuk make sense.
