Potted history, distilled culture

I’m not quite sure what my preconceptions of South Korea were. Perhaps I still remember 1987 news footage of tear gas and pro-democracy rioting against an authoritarian government. Perhaps the phrase “Korean War” had made me look a little askance. Perhaps my prejudices owed more to the hegemony of Samsung and Hyundai and Daewoo. I don’t know. In any case, they were shattered and it serves me right for having them.

Given the recent history of this Asian powerhouse of 51 million people, it’s hardly surprising how proud people are of their post-independence economic success. Maybe there’s something about facing a daily mortal threat that makes one obstinate and proud. Colonised brutally by Japan in the early 20th century, Korea was then split and occupied by the Soviet Union and the USA after the Japanese surrender in 1945. It quickly became a theatre of nuclear posturing, with China joining the fray and the subsequent war, with Kim Il-Sung backed by Stalin’s Soviet Union and the might of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army on one side and a joint force of the USA and a UN coalition of 21 countries on the other. From 1950 to 1953 almost 5 million real people, soldiers and civilians, died as a result of this conflict of ideologies.

I found South Korea correct, proud, and genteel, keen to do the very best it can in the world, but the sadness of  separation at the plight of the starving relatives and countrymen just over the border is not far from the surface, at least in older people. Younger generations place less importance on history, apparently, and are proud of South Korea’s international profile. There’s such a dichotomy between conservative, traditional culture and a modern industrial power. On the one hand this finds expression in the refinement of the traditional culinary canon, with several little dishes of pickles offered to accompany the main work; the tea ceremonies; the removal of shoes before entering a traditional restaurant; the pristine streets; the way that the entry fee to the royal palace is waived on Sundays  for people wearing traditional Korean dress, avidly taken up. On the other, fast food thrives, a fusion of the best of Korea, the West and the frying pan. The obsession with skincare, and beauty (and facial plastic surgery) is only partly accounted for by the dessicating climate. The gadgets and the KPop boy bands, and the way I saw at least one young couple daring to cross-dress their traditional outfits would point to a less traditional manifestation of Korean culture.

Visit to the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ)

Aware of the gawking, negative connotations of conflict tourism, I was nonetheless anxious to place my appreciation of Korean history in context. We took a tour, accompanied by a cheery young guide who gleefully pointed what a money-spinner the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) was for him and the economy in general. More contrasts manifested themselves here: it was Korean Children’s Day and parents and grandparents urged their young charges to post messages on ribbons up against the “border” barbed wire and have their pictures taken grinning and making funny faces. In fact, the beautiful Imjingak Park with its azaleas and historic monuments, is near the southern border only of the DMZ, a strip of land 4km wide that runs along the ceasefire border between the two Koreas, the hermetic and the developed.

Through the military border checkpoint, which reminded me Cold War border crossings before the fall into irrelevance of the Iron Curtain, and the lush forests of as yet uncleared land mines, marked with red triangles, we ventured into the Third (of four) Infiltration Tunnel, where tourists and wizened, elderly Koreans mingled, and struggled to climb the steep slope back to ground level having viewed the cramped, damp tunnel blasted through the border granite by North Korean conscripts. The story goes that, responding to South Korean diplomatic protests on discovering these tunnels, North Korea claimed a newly-discovered coal seam, and even painted a small part of the tunnel black as their evidence.

Souvenir shops at these poignant sites were packed with badges of Korean and US flags; with machine gun badges and, to me an abomination, camouflage wear for toddlers. North Korean cranberry wine and handmade soaps were on sale too. It’s not quite a glorification of the war and the continued rupture of a country, more a pragmatic realisation that the many diplomatic initiatives have been false starts, shining specks of dust in a transient sunbeam. Who knows if they will ever succeed? Two days before our trip, Kim Jong-un’s forces fired another rocket in a sabre-rattling reminder to the world that he could blow us all up if he chose. Will the two Koreas ever realise their dream of reunification? Increasingly it seems that there’s not much real interest in this stated goal from any of the main parties.

We continued to an observation point where we looked through binoculars across to the treeless North, their “propaganda village” where no-one actually lives but occasional cycles can be glimpsed as a sign that all is not dead, to the futile ideological willy-waving exercise of the competition between the two countries to hoist the highest flag, which ultimately ended with the North Korean flagpole being the fourth tallest in the world, as bleak as a long-forgotten Carry On film.

Our final stop on this tour was Dorasan station, built using donations from separated families, hoping that the train that did actually run through here for a while would serve to reunite the long-lost. The donors’ names are etched in a steel sculpture, a gesture of the survival of hope. Dorasan station has a ticket office and a display showing the next train to leave the station. Wall maps depict the glorious start of a Trans-Eurasian Railway, starting here and running across China and Russia, connecting with the Trans-Siberian, European and eventually the Eurostar network to London, the propaganda of hope as fake as the jingoistic firing of missiles and the many and glorious achievements of Kim the Great over the border.

Sorry for the poor quality of the flag photo. It was windy and hazy up there but if you click to enlarge the photo, you can just make out the two Korean flags in the distance, marking the border. Credit to John Beecroft for the two photos of Dorasan Station.

In among the gleeful, gurning selfie-takers, we were overcome with a sadness that few others around us seemed to share. I suppose most of those there were much younger than us. Having perhaps learned the history only at school, the Cold War, the nightmares, the CND marches and threat of nuclear annihilation were more theoretical than personal for them. A student memory floated back into my consciousness: the North Korean girls in our Beijing Hall of Residence, who were strongly discouraged in their daily education meetings from associating with the rest of us, who wore uniforms and Kim Il-Song badges; who ate lunch in a separate canteen. Yet their mournful accordion music floated along the concrete corridor into our rooms in the evenings transcending that invisible barrier. I wonder what happened to them.