Congrats to Robert Neff who is well known in the K-blogosphere for being featured in the LA Times:

Historian Robert Neff at the Yanghwajin Foreigners' Cemetery in Seoul. "If you want to talk about Korean history at the expatriates that influenced it, this is the place," he says.

Reporting from Seoul – For years, on the anniversary of his wife’s death in 2000, Peter Underwood sought the solace of the tiny hillside cemetery not far from this city’s bustling downtown.

He laid flowers at her grave site and paid his respects to four generations of his family who are buried here — mostly Western missionaries who first arrived in Korea more than a century ago. There’s even a plot for Underwood himself.

But the 54-year-old consultant no longer visits this sanctuary. He says he feels harassed here — shadowed by the new stewards of a cemetery that offers a hallowed history lesson in Korea’s expatriate past.

“I have visited the cemetery since I was a kid. It’s part of my family’s heritage,” said Underwood, who came to Seoul as an infant. “But I can’t face going there now. It no longer gives me peace.”

The Yanghwajin Foreigners’ Cemetery lies at the center of a bitter controversy between two competing churches as well as the descendants of the 600 or so people buried here.

One Sunday morning in August 2007, a newly established Korean church took over the cemetery chapel, forcing out the predominantly foreign congregation of the Seoul Union Church, many of its members allege. The church was co-founded by Underwood’s great-grandfather in 1886.

There have been recriminations, lawsuits over muddied ownership rights and rumors that the new caretakers, the 100th Anniversary Memorial Church, plan to exhume the graves of deceased they say do not belong here.  [LA Times]

Read the rest, but this case has been particularly disturbing.  I believe that Robert Neff was the first person to report on the shenanigans going on at Yanghwajin and it is great to see this story getting the increased media attention it deserves  This media attention is probably the only thing stopping some of the graves in the cemetery from being exhumed.