Cartoon Street

Cartoon Street
Cartoon hill wall, November 2015.
Korean name
Hangul

Cartoon Street (Korean: 카툰 거리), also known as Zaemiro (Korean: 재미로), or the "street of fun," is a street in the central part of Seoul, South Korea, which extends 450-meters from Myeong-dong Station to the Seoul Animation Center on the hillside of Mount Namsan. The area, created by the Seoul Metropolitan Government, is an open-air cartoon gallery of graffiti-like paintings, comics' quotes and short stories; with small parks and a multipurpose cultural hall.

Cartoon Street, "the street of manhwa", or Zaemiro, which is also spelled Jaemiro, was opened in December 2013 by Seoul's city government to promote the "imaginative industry" and boost tourism and the local economy.

The street connected Namsan Mountain and Myeong-dong, both busy tourist areas that welcomed approximately seven million tourists annually, but it had been overlooked for many years, having been used long ago during Japanese colonial rule (1910-1945), and was the area where the Korean CIA was founded in 1961. The Mount Namsan area had become increasingly popular with tourists who visited, then posted photos and videos on social media. On October 31, 2015, over 30,000 people visited during the Namsan Halloween Festival.

The major sights added to the .28-mile street include five small parks or manhwa culture stations: "Sangsang Park" in front of Exit 3 of Myeongdong Station; "Manhwa Samgeori" in front of the Pacific Hotel; "Sayeon Post Office" where artists displayed the stories of citizens on the walls of a public parking lot; "Jaemi Sports Ground" in a convenience store parking lot; and "Manhwa Hill" on Namsan Ongbyeok (retaining wall). Other new additions included a four-story building with galleries and shops for comics, and some 70 famous local cartoonists contributed their work to walls and buildings along the street. A Manhwa Neighborhood Meeting was held to include the opinions of locals, and both the name of the street "Jaemiro", and the name of the manhwa culture space, "Jaemirang" were selected from an SNS-based citizen competition and local votes.