Jaman Mural Village sits on a hillside just across a single street from the Hanok Village. Its origins have nothing romantic about them: during the Korean War, refugees with nowhere else to go settled on this hillside, and the neighborhood grew up around them. The place became widely known in its current form only in 2012, when a "Green Trail" urban improvement project brought murals to the walls of roughly 40 houses along the back alleys.
What's genuinely interesting is what got painted. On the walls of a neighborhood born from wartime displacement — alleys that once carried the memory of the Korean War — you'll now find Totoro, characters from *Spirited Away*, Doraemon, and a mix of Western and Chinese-influenced figures like Alice in Wonderland and Kung Fu Panda. There's no real narrative connection between the neighborhood's history and the content of the murals; the choices seem to have come down mostly to what looks charming and photographs well. As a result, most people who visit today snap photos in front of the Totoro mural with no idea the neighborhood started as a refugee settlement. War memory and anime characters now hang, quite literally, on the same wall.