Gunsan’s Time Travel Festival can look, at first glance, like a straightforward retro event: period costumes, street performances, missions and photo opportunities in an old downtown. The more useful way to read the 2026 edition is to notice that the organizer does not describe the city’s modern history as neutral decoration. The official festival introduction says Gunsan is a city marked by the pain of colonial extraction and by resistance to it. That matters because much of the old downtown’s built environment comes from a period when the port was deeply tied to Japanese colonial economic structures. The festival’s own language asks visitors to remember that history rather than treating every surviving building as charming scenery. The 2026 program carries that framing into participation. From October 3 to 5, the “We Are All March 5 Independence Movement” program invites people to march and shout for independence at 15:05, recalling the local 1919 movement. Other missions use independence declarations, Taegeukgi imagery and resistance narratives, while the festival also includes concerts, markets, costumes and family activities. That mixture is not automatically historically rigorous. A game or costume experience can simplify difficult history, and the festival’s promotional style remains playful. We have not independently audited how much historical interpretation is provided at each activity or how foreign-language visitors encounter the context. That is why the nearby Modern History Museum and other heritage sites remain important companions rather than background props. For visitors, the practical structure is relatively clear. The festival runs around the former City Hall square and Time Travel Village, and free shuttles operate every 30 minutes from 10:00 to 21:00 on two routes that connect transport hubs, parking areas and the Modern History Museum zone. The current event runs through October 5. The best reason to cover Gunsan now is therefore not nostalgia by itself. It is the tension between entertainment and memory: a city using a festival format to invite participation while still naming the extraction and resistance that shaped the places people are walking through.