Lantern Festival
The Seoul Lantern Festival was organized just in time to celebrate the 'Visit Korea Year 2010 to 2012'. It was decided to hold the Seoul Lantern Festival annually, and in response the city of Jinju criticized the festival severely. They said that the Seoul Lantern Festival was a copy of their Jinju Namgang Yudeng Festival, which itself is annual and had begun earlier, in 2000. It had been started in that year as a public requiem, and also as an occasion for a Korean prayer rite in honour of about 70,000 soldiers and civilians who had died in the historic second battle at Jinju Castle in 1593. More than 20 Jinju associations asked for the Seoul Lantern Festival to be discontinued. There was a one-man protest in front of the Seoul city hall and an assembly at the Seoul station. As a result, the city of Seoul and the city of Jinju agreed to change the Korean name of the Seoul Lantern Festival, and thus differentiated the Seoul Lantern Festival from the Jinju Namgang Yudeng Festival.