jpatokal

SEL

"DAE-HAN-MIN-GUK!" (tatan-tatantan) "DAE-HAN-MIN-GUK!" (tatan-tatantan)

Korea! I've meant to visit for the longest time, but my plans have always been foiled by something or the other. My previous attempt was in 2002 during a month-long trip to Japan, of which I'd planned to spend a week in Korea... only it was the season of the 2002 Football World Cup, jointly hosted by the two countries, meaning rabid hordes of fans shouting Great Han People's Country (see above) had commandeered all the planes and ticket prices were 2-4x the usual. So until this day, the closest I had ever been was two airside transits at Incheon, where all I could do was buy gift packs of kimchi and gaze mournfully out the window.

Korea is, in many ways, the forgotten country of East Asia. China has always made its presence known by its sheer size, lately also in the economic sphere, while you can say "Japan" to any inhabitant of the Western hemisphere and they'll rattle back a string of Japanese stereotypes and cultural concepts: sushi Sony samurai Toyota geisha Hello Kitty kamikaze Nintendo kimono Hirohito zen cherry blossom... but ask the same person to think of something Korean, and odds are they'll draw a blank, unless perhaps they know where Hyundai cars or Samsung LCDs come from. Those who actually know some Koreans, perhaps second-generation kids in America, might be able to recall that they have a reputation as fearsomely dedicated students and even more fearsomely well-honed arcade and PC game players... but what else? With North Korea hiding in self-imposed seclusion and South Korea reduced to a virtual island behind it, only in the last few years has Korean culture made any impact even in its Asian neighbors, with the Hallyu (Korean wave) spearheaded by TV drama "Winter Sonata" converting millions of housewives to the worship of its mild-mannered bespectacled star Yong-sama.

My preconception of Korea was "like Japan, only different" and my initial reaction was to be surprised at (for once) how correct this conception turned out to be. This works both on the superficial big-scale level -- high-tech, great infrastructure, polite and reserved people who don't speak English very well -- but, more surprisingly, also in tiny details like the vending machines on the streets, the rounded corners and pastel colors of public buses, the signage in the subways, and even the rows of onigiri (rice balls wrapped in seaweed) on the convenience store shelves, only here they call it gimbap. But is it parallel evolution, Korea copying Japan, or -- gasp -- Japan copying Korea? More on this later.

For me, personally, the big if rather obvious difference between Japan and Korea is that the Japanese speak Japanese (which I understand), while the Koreans speak Korean (which I don't). Linguists still fight about it, no doubt with a few nationalist hatchets waved about in the process, but to my ear it seems obvious that the languages are related, with similar diction and features like insanely complex verb politeness levels, particle-based SOV syntax and vowel yotalization -- this being my new favorite linguistics term, denoting 'y'-sounds slipping into some syllables: ma/mu/mo becomes mya/myu/myo, etc. Knowing also that it can be tough to get around Japan without knowing Japanese, I figured it'd be a wise investment to attempt to wrap my brain around hangul, Korea's native writing system. On first sight, especially of the handwritten variety, you'd be well excused to think it looks about as comprehensible as Klingon: it was designed by a committee from scratch and is about as abstract as possible in appearance, consisting just of lines at right angles with some circles thrown in.

The code starts to crack when you realize that every bit in a block of hangul represents a sound and that the bits are all logically and phonetically related, with various rotations and transformations of a single character meaning that the vowel changes, or the consonant is aspirated, or the diphthong is yotalized, etc. After perhaps 4 hours of hacking at Declan Software's ReadWrite Korean, I think I can safely say that I can now read Korean better than Thai, which I've been studying on and off for two years! I hereby tip my hat at King Sejong's committee, now if Kim Jong Il could just reform the distinctions between aspirated/unaspirated/tensed consonants and front/back/wide/low vowels out of the language then I'd be speaking like a native.


After the last night's muggy rain the next morning was crisp and clear. I started off my tour with a bang, although I was hoping it wouldn't be of the literal kind: this morning's destination was the Joint Security Area (JSA) in the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) separating South and North. This is certainly one of the more unusual places you can go as a tourist and indeed, for all their Internet savvy, the Korean companies I contacted seemed to do their best to dissuade me by not replying to any of the reservation forms I sent from their webpages nor my follow-up emails. I finally bit the bullet and called up Panmunjom Tour, who could get me on... but only onto a Japanese-language tour, which was fine with me.

The division of Korea into North and South is one of the great pointless tragedies of the 20th century, surpassed only by the murderous lunacy of the North's hereditary dynasty and its willingness to starve, torture and slaughter its own people in its determination to cling to power. I've followed events in the North with a morbid fascination for as long as I can remember, but have also resolved not to prop up their regime with a single won. As soon as the long-awaited collapse finally comes, I'll be on the first plane to Pyongyang -- but for now, all I could do was get as close as possible.

So bright and early in the morning I subwayed my way to the Lotte Hotel, a 1300-room monolith in the heart of the city, and found my tour bus, packed with a rather motley bunch of Japanese and a solitary Italian who didn't speak Japanese or very much English either. Our young chirpy tour guide, inevitably named Ms. Lee, started a non-stop patter in almost (but not quite) accentless fluent, idiomatic Japanese that by turns described the DMZ's history and sights and did her best to scare the bejesus of the Japanese tourists, who loved it. ("And remember, every moment when you're in the JSA, a North Korean sniper has a rifle aimed at your head!") It's well over an hour by expressway to the DMZ, so she had plenty of time to talk, and once she started retelling the story of the Korean War I zoned out and started looking around. As I'd already seen on the bus from Incheon, the roadsides were protected by barbed wire and guard towers, many with soldiers standing at attention, and the defenses got more and more elaborate as the border loomed closer.

Our first pitstop was Camp Bonifas, the US/ROK camp "In Front of Them All" guarding the entrance to the DMZ. Here we had our passports checked twice, changed buses to a UN-operated model and signed the waiver quoted above. Nutshell summary as provided to me: the DMZ is a buffer of 2 kilometers to each side of the demarcation line marking battle positions at the end of the Korean War -- or, rather, the status quo as South Korea never signed the armistice and the war is, in legal theory, still raging. There's nothing at all in the DMZ except two showcase villages, one by the South and one by the North, and the only contact point between the two sides is the former village of Panmunjeom, now turned into the JSA, a 800-square-meter patch of land jointly policed by both sides. And this was where our trip would be taking us today. Stay with the group at all times, the group moves in two files, no photographs without explicit permission, no pointing of fingers, no jeans, no sleeveless tops, no miniskirts, no sandals, no kidding.

And then into the DMZ. A triplicate barrier of barbed wire and some anti-tank barriers ready to detonate at a flick of a switch, a final checkpoint and UN-blue signboard, and then we entered a sun-dappled forest of buzzing insects and chirping birds. After driving slowly through it and entering the JSA, the bus pulled up at the South Korean "Freedom House" and with military precision we were split into two groups and marched off. Mine headed straight for the conference rooms, where a carefully aligned line of microphones divided the meeting table and its countries in two. Stern-faced South Korean guards in clench-fisted taekwondo poses stared grimly ahead as Japanese tourists posed for shots, everybody proceeded to hop, skip and jump between North and South, and I almost caused an international incident by placing my lens on one of the side tables (eek! don't touch!). Suddenly a flurry of activity and I felt a chill run up my spine: a line of North Korean soldiers in brown was marching past and took up positions outside the conference room. But unlike the South Koreans, who can hide behind their glasses and thus look menacing even if they're dozing, the North Koreans have no protection and thus looked downright human, blinking and dodging our looks as everybody oohed and aahed and snapped away through the glass. Certainly the bizarrest zoo exhibit I've ever seen.

"Mina-san, jikan desu" ("Honorable everybody, it's time"), cooed the guide, and the group was shepherded out and to the next sight, the nearby Peace Pagoda that affords views over the JSA. Turns out there was a tour group on the North Korean side too, waving at us and us back at them. To the west, you could see the North Korean village of Kisong-dong, equipped with a 160-meter flagpole (the world's tallest and duly in the Guinness Book of World Records) to trump the 100m flagpole on the South Korean side. The village looks large, with multi-story concrete buildings and all sorts of facilities, but as nobody actually lives there -- no lights, no smoke, no laundry -- it's dubbed the Propaganda Village.

"Mina-san, jikan desu", and our 15 minutes were over. One more loop by bus to another sightseeing point with better views of the village, then a drive-by of the site of the 1976 Axe Murder Incident (where a group of American and ROK soldiers trimming a poplar tree were attacked by DPRK troops) and the Bridge of No Return used to return POWs after the war, and that was it, total time less than an hour. One final stop in Camp Bonifas before lunch: the inevitable gift shop, where you could pick up chunks of barbed wire from the original demarcation line (a steal at W25,000) as well as chocolate-covered ginseng. A hasty lunch of bulgogi later we headed back to Seoul.

I'd planned to hit the royal palace of Gyeongbokgung in the remaining hours of the day, but a discussion with the Italian guy convinced me that the less well known Changdeokgung was a better shot, and it was 5 min away from my guesthouse to boot. It can only be visited by guided tour, but I made it in time for the last English tour at 3:30 PM, and was very glad I did: the place is gorgeous. More colorful and ornate than the austere Japanese palaces and temples, yet simultaneously more restrained and subtle than Chinese ones, the palace has recently been given a thorough work-over and looked absolutely splendid. (The first row of pictures earlier were all taken at Changdeokgung.)

Then it was time for dinner at Sadongmyenok, a famous little dumpling shop buried in the alleyways of Insadong, and I walked past it around three times before realizing that the Lonely Planet map was useless. I strained my hangul-recognition skills to the limit, spotted a sign pointing into an alley, and hit the jackpot with a soup of the three of the largest dumplings I've ever seen (these things are almost as big as my fist) and a vast spread of banchan (side dishes) served up for all of W5000 ($5). Lip-smacking good. Then, as my final assault before succumbing to jet lag, I set out to duplicate a gorgeous nighttime photo of Namdaemun Gate in my guidebook; turns out you need to clamber on some office building's door to get it, but with a tripod and some creativity you can still manage a decent shot or two.

Goodnight Seoul -- I'll be back, but not on this trip.