Twenty-five years ago, Seoul was a grim industrial town in a country ruled by martial law. What a difference a generation makes. Today, South Korea's capital is one of the most vibrant, wired, and innovative cities in Asia, with an edgy new art scene and energy to burn. Norimitsu Onishi gets pumped in Asia's next hot spot

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All anyone could talk about in Seoul was baseball. It was the World Baseball Classic, and the South Koreans, not known as a baseball powerhouse, had made it to the semifinals, beating the United States, Japan, Mexico, Chinese Taipei, and China along the way, and compiling the only undefeated record in the series. It promised to be a big game, so on a chilly Sunday morning in March, I took the subway north to City Hall in downtown Seoul to see for myself.

The circular, grassy public square that fronts City Hall is the nation's most famous—the epicenter of the capital's massive celebrations, protests, and rallies, as well as an enormous collective outdoor living room. By the time I arrived, it was busy with thousands of people—families, young couples on dates, churchgoers still in their Sunday best—all of them assembled to watch the game being broadcast live from San Diego on a giant TV screen. The crowd was united in its ebullience and optimism. It roared with each hit and groaned with each out, dozens of moments of collective tension and joy.

By the seventh inning, though, it had become clear that South Korea wasn't going to make it to the finals, and people began to leave. But as disappointing as it was, even the team's loss couldn't dissipate the sense of pride, of an accomplishment made more extraordinary by its very unexpectedness. The loss didn't matter, said several people I talked to. It was a miracle that South Korea had come so far.

As I followed the crush out of the square and up the city's most historic thoroughfare, Sejongno, in the direction of the fourteenth-century Gyeongbok Palace, I found myself thinking that that comment—it was a miracle that South Korea had come so far—summed up the country itself. Nine years ago, South Korea was mired in a crippling financial crisis, one so devastating that it triggered a wave of suicides. But that year, South Korea began reinventing itself, shaking off its old severities—the six-day workweek, the ghosts of its nearly three-decades-long military government—to find for itself a place in the new Asia. It would have been difficult to imagine the morning's gathering just two decades ago, when the streets were better known as battlegrounds for the ferocious clashes between pro-democracy students and the government. And yet here, in front of City Hall, were the citizens of the new South Korea, residents of the new Seoul—buoyant at long last.

I hadn't walked far—in the distance, I could make out the statue of Yi Sun Shin, the admiral who had repelled Japanese invaders in the late sixteenth century and is considered Korea's savior—before I encountered a physical manifestation of both the new Seoul and its ability to correct the mistakes of the past: Cheonggyecheon, or Cheonggye Stream, a popular gathering place for many Seoulites. Six hundred years ago, the stream wound through the heart of Seoul, dividing it into the northern half, where the nobility and government officials lived, and the southern, where the commoners lived. Over the centuries, major roads were built around Cheonggyecheon, and in the 1960s, in the country's rush to industrialize, the stream was buried beneath an expressway.