The Soul of Seoul

Inside the wardrobe of my hotel, next to the laundry bag, there is a plastic box containing two gas masks and an emergency skyline, with which, apparently, I am to escape from my room on the tenth floor of my hotel, by making a bungee jump, to where I’m not quite sure, in case of a gas attack from North Korea. We are only fifty kilometres from the frontier, and only four of the fifty tunnels which have been burrowed under the Demilitarized Zone have been discovered. And the two countries are still officially at war. The 1953 ceasefire was just that, and no formal peace agreement has ever been made.
Trips to the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), two kilometres on either side of the “border” are a must for the tourist. You may go with the vision that you will find some austere military checkpoints and outposts. But these ideas are soon allayed. At the various stops there are the convenience stores and souvenir shops, with the usual tack of t-shirts, fridge magnets, bottle openers, postcards and mouse pads, manufactured by DMZ (Demilitarized Zone) Products. A four-inch long piece of rusty barbed wire, mounted on a shiny metal shield, takes my fancy, but at US$50 seems a little dear. The main tourist attraction is one of the four discovered North Korean tunnels, into which we are able to walk some 150 metres. In the Face Capitalism, says one of the other members of the tour. Its walls have been painted black, apparently to give the impression it was a disused coal mine.

We stare over the lookout point into North Korea. The trees have been cut down for fuel, we are told. In the distance we see a Hyundai factory. The founder of the company, Chung Ju-yung, was born in North Korea before the division, and wanted to help his homeland. Of course labour there is much cheaper…

The Sunshine Policy of President Rho Moo-hyun from 2002 to 2007 stressed greater contact and humanitarian help. The cross-border train line was reactivated, and mutual visits to relatives in the other country took place. North Koreans would arrive at the Dorasan Station to find possibly the shiniest, most polished and gleaming station on the planet. With the election of the conservative government of Lee Myung-bak in 2007 this policy was discontinued. Pyeongyang is still there on the destination board, but there are no trains at the moment.

Bussing back into Seoul along the estuary of the Han River we are told that small North Korean vessels have been found drifting up the river with the tidal flow, and the soldiers are ordered to shoot any moving object in the river on sight up to quite near Seoul.

A two-year period of military service is obligatory for all young men either after school or after the second year of college. In North Korea it is ten years. South Korea has an army of 600,000 for a population of 45 million; the North has one million soldiers for its 22 million people. A group of scholarly looking young cadets, mostly wearing glasses, accompany us down the enemy tunnel.

And there is always Uncle Sam to help. I’m staying in Itaewon, the gringo zone, near the US Hangsan Military Headquarters, an area of some 4 sq km in central Seoul. I look out of my room onto the Israeli Embassy, one of many in the area. It is near the main Seoul mosque. The North Americans, Europeans, and a lot of Indians ply the main drag, which is a bit pasteurized, with the usual cafés, boulangeries, Czech Bier Hauser, Italian trattorie, and tapas bars, and a few find their way into the side streets to see a bit of Korea with people eating and drinking outside at small improvised tables and then go up the hill towards the public sauna past the beckoning painted ladies outside the whorehouses or transvestite bars.

And the other model is Japan, with which there is a constant love-hate relationship. Used as a bridgehead for the Japanese occupation of Asia, Korea was occupied by Japan from 1910 to 1945. Japanese was the language of education and administration, and all independence movements were brutally put down. On Liberation Day, 15 August, I visit Seodaemun Prison History Hall to see the confined cells in which Korean prisoners were held. Many were tortured and executed. Most striking is the nearby 1992 monument, visually depicting Japanese soldiers beating Korean prisoners. I try and fail to think of a World War II monument with similar scenes. But, unlike Germany, Japan has never made a formal apology for its war crimes and has never formally admitted the existence of the comfort women, read sex slaves, in Korea .

But Japan is the economic model for Korea, which, like Japan, has invested highly in the infrastructure of trains, roads and utilities, and now high technology. The streets often look Japanese. There are the demure office ladies, and at night you find similar drunken salarymen. The same convenience stores; the excess of neon. Everything working to clockwork. Down to the smallest details: the heated toilet seats and computerized flushing systems, depending on quality, texture and age, or at least that’s the impression I get from the pictures on the toilet touch panel.

Koreans like to tell you that their society is the fastest changing society in the world, from the poverty of the post-war period to today’s high-tec society. A Korean American speaker at the conference says that when his family emigrated in 1966 there was no running water in their apartment. We ask the way in the centre of Seoul, and our informer immeadiately gets the Google map of the district on his blackberry. On the metro more than half of the passengers are reading or watching something on their personal entertainment systems. Newspapers are just for old people.

I wander into the Bank of Korea Museum in a 19th century building in downtown Seoul. It is full of groups of four and five-year-olds on tours, taking each other’s pictures in front of the stashed (pretend) banknotes in the vault. The Seodaemun Prison Museum is also a place to take the kids. And the children in National Museum of Korea seem fascinated by the ancient Korean Paleolithic tools and axes as they fill out their quizbooks. Education, knowledge, is the panacea, the way ahead. Last night we ate and drank our milky sake wine, makgeolli, at a table on the pavement in the centre of Seoul, run by a middle-aged couple, who grew up in the poverty-ridden fifties and sixties. It is quite likely that the profit from this small business was being invested in the education of a son or grandchild possibly now at the MIT.