Indeed, the situation here on the Korean peninsula is bizarre by any measure. Perhaps one of the most bizarre things of all is that life in South Korea is now so normal, despite the fact that the capital city lies only 30 miles from a highly militarized, delusional, dictatorial state that is technically at war with the South and has over 1.2 million men under arms.
Most of the time one is hardly aware of this state of affairs. It is forcefully brought home if one visits the DMZ (the demilitarized zone separating North and South Korea, 휴전선 休戰線). And in certain areas one sees a heavy military presence and defensive fortifications, like the ones I described in a recent post. But generally speaking this does not feel like a militarized society, or one that is concerned about the possibility of war. No one worries that living in Seoul is dangerous because of its proximity to the border, as the housing prices here will attest. One can travel the country freely, without showing ID or being stopped at military checkpoints. I only occasionally see young men in military uniform, and never in large groups.
It wasn't always like this. One of our teachers recently described what things were like in her childhood in the 1970s, when South Korea was still essentially under military dictatorship (under strongman Park Chung-hee 발정희 朴正熙, who ruled from 1961 to 1979). The anti-North Korean government propaganda machine was in full flower. Our teacher said that she truly believed that North Korean leader Kim Il-sung 김일성 金日成 had the face of a pig, as he was always depicted that way. She used to have nightmares about being attacked by wolves, which is how the North Korean soldiers were described.
She also said that mini-skirts shorter than a certain length were illegal, as was long hair on men. The police used to walk around with rulers, which they would whip out in order to measure skirt and hair length. Offending women would be arrested, offending men given an instant haircut on the street. In addition to the usual lack of political freedoms found in any dictatorship, South Korean civil society was itself highly militarized. Men were expected to look like soldiers.
To me, from the perspective of life in South Korea today, this all seems paranoid and ridiculous. (Though I don't mean to downplay the real possibility of a North Korean attack on South Korea at that time.) But I imagine that living through it must have been no joke. So what's surprising to me is that the teacher described all these recollections with great amusement; far from being bitter about the experiences, she seems to view them from a detached and comfortable perspective.
I am deeply impressed by the way that, since the late 1980s, the Koreans have peacefully transformed their society from a repressive military dictatorship into a free, open, and prosperous democracy. This has happened in Taiwan as well, but it's especially impressive here because it all happened under the unchanging shadow of the proximate North Korean threat. (The collapse of the Soviet Union, the major supporter of North Korea, certainly helped make it easier to change the political climate. And it should also be pointed out that mandatory universal military service for men is still the law here.)
All that being said, the utter absurdity of the political situation on the peninsula does occasionally leak through into daily life here in subtle but jarring ways.
Here's a simple example. A few weeks ago I decided to buy a large map of Korea to hang on the bare wall above my bed. I wanted one of the whole peninsula, both North and South. At the bookstore I found the map section; the folded maps were on a bookshelf, stored in cardboard envelopes which had the map titles printed on their spines. I kept seeing maps that said "Republic of Korea 대한민국 大韓民國", which is the official name of South Korea. (North Korea is the "Democratic People's Republic of Korea 조선민주주의인민공화국 朝鮮民主主義人民共和國". )But nothing was labeled in such a way to indicate a map of the whole peninsula, and I didn't want to buy one of just South Korea. Eventually, I opened one of these South Korean maps to see what it would look like, and realized that it was in fact a map of the entire peninsula. (I now suspect that it's not possible to buy a map of just South Korea, any more than you could buy a map of the southern half of the United States.)
Here's what my room looks like with the map up. As you can see, I've also put up some pictures of me and Erma from London, Venice, and Hong Kong.
If you are so inclined, you can compare the picture above with ones taken soon after I moved in, on this post.
So here's what the map looks like. It shows the peninsula as a single, undivided country, labeled "Republic of Korea". But surely, I thought, this map can't really be as delusional as it appears. The existence of North Korea must be acknowledged somewhere?
There are in fact two clues to the existence of North Korea on the map, but they take a practiced eye and a bit of interpretation to spot and understand. One is the small inset map on the lower left in the picture above, just above the map legend. It's labeled "Pre-1949 administrative units of the north Korean area". (The Korean alphabet lacks an equivalent distinction to upper vs. lower case, and there is no conventional way of signaling proper nouns in the orthography. I've chosen to translate the Korean phrase 북한지역 as "north Korean area" rather than "North Korean area" -- the difference is important. But I'm not sure if this aspect of my translation is correct.)
The other clue is a small dotted red line that runs across the center of the map. It cuts clean through the middle of Gangwon Province (on the east side, in green). In the image below, I've marked the beginning and end of the dotted line with arrows.
I've also highlighted Seoul and labeled Ganghwa Island, which I talked about here.
Although the dotted red line is clearly the boundary line between North and South Korea -- or, more technically, the armistice line -- it is neither labeled on the map nor identified in the legend.
In other words, this map -- and all others that I've seen here -- presents the illusion of a unified Korean peninsula under the government of the Republic of Korea. This strikes me as absolutely bizarre, as well as pointless. Is this meant as propaganda -- if so, who is being fooled by it? Or is it an expression of the citizenship's idealized hope for a reunified peninsula?
I wonder what maps of Korea in North Korea look like.
I tried to find some propaganda posters on the web depicting Kim Il-sung as a pig and his soldiers as wolves, but no such luck. The most interesting South Korean propaganda poster I could find was this one:
It's labeled "Communist Aggression" and depicts Russia (oddly not "The Soviet Union") as the force ultimately behind the aggression of the North Korean foot soldier, who looks to me like a somewhat sympathetic pawn in this image. I don't know anything about the provenance of the poster.
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