Hmmm, don't quite get the last bit...

Dear Nanchan,

I'd like to help you enjoy this excellent film a bit more, so here's my description of the reasons behind North and South Korean hatred.

The whole of Korea (united, at the time) was invaded by Japan in 1910. The Japanese stayed until the end of World War II and behaved cruelly towards the local population. The Korean language was publicly banned, Koreans were all given Japanese names and when World War II broke out, Koreans were forcibly drafted into the Japanese Imperial Army. Thousands of Korean women were also abducted from their homes and sent to the front to serve as sex slaves for Japanese soldiers (Japan still has great difficulty admitting to this).

In 1945, when Japan was defeated, the same sort of "liberation race" that had taken place between the US and the Soviet Union in Europe happened in Korea. The Americans ended up liberating the south and the Russians the north. In preparation to restore an independent government in Korea, each side administered their own side during the post-war interim period. It was agreed that nationwide elections would be held in 1948.

But they never happened. North and South Korea disagree very strongly on who reneged on their promise first, but the offshoot was that North Korea ended up "electing" its own separate government, based in Pyongyang. South Korea followed shortly afterwards from Seoul. In any case, both elections were rigged. In the North the Korean Workers Party headed by Kim Il-sung took power with the support of the Soviet Union, and in the South the Americans deliberately appointed a puppet regime headed by Syngman Rhee, a borderline fascist right-winger and fierce anti-Communist. Both sides of the newly divided country looked at each other with hostility and distrust. Something had to give, and a few years later it did.

In June 1950 North Korea (with Stalin's approval) crossed the 38th parallel which unofficially divided the two countries and launched a massive invasion of the South. Southern forces were routed and the country was quickly overrun. The United Nations (at the initiative of the US) responded swiftly and this became known in the West as the Korean War. Headed by General McArthur, the mostly American forces launched a brilliant surprise counter-offensive and managed to roll back the North Koreans all the way across the border. Dizzy with his success, McArthur surmised that he could also topple the North Korean regime in the bargain (in contravention of President Truman's orders) and kept heading north, with the result that American troops ended up dangerously close to the Chinese border. It is not known whether McArthur wanted to actually try to overthrow the newly-established Communist regime in China as well. Certainly, he failed to ever take the Chinese seriously and never for one second accepted that the Chinese Communists were a legitimate government with wide popular support - which they were.

In November, Chinese troops poured over the border into North Korea, officially in assistance to their Communist neighbours but also to repel what they saw as a threat to their own security. Through a combination of sacrificial offensives and imaginative guerrilla tactics, the Chinese managed to push the American army back over the border once again. The war lasted for another three years but no one made any significant gains (Seoul, for instance, suffered enormously because it kept being captured by one side or the other). During this time the US indiscriminately bombed the whole of North Korea, resulting in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths. Negotiations started in 1953 to try and end this stalemate and it was finally agreed that a "ceasefire line" would be drawn between the two countries based on the current location of the frontline (which ironically was almost exactly around the 38th parallel - back to square one). Thus the war effectively ended. But it is important to note that THIS WAS ONLY A CEASEFIRE, NOT A PEACE TREATY: the two Koreas remain officially at war TO THIS DAY, and neither side recognises the other's government.

With the war ended, both Koreas went their respective ways. A demilitarised zone (DMZ) was established around the ceasefire line and it is still the world's most heavily defended border. The DMZ is 4 kilometres wide with an electrified fence in the middle. The entire territory is heavily mined - the reason why the US never signed the Comprehensive Mine-Ban Treaty, indeed, is that this would have forced them to withdraw their mines from the Korean DMZ. Both North and South Korea patrol their own side of the DMZ relentlessly, day and night. In the middle of the DMZ, the village of Panmunjom, where the ceasefire negotiations took place and discussions between the governments still occur, was made into a Joint Security Area. The border runs right in the middle of the negotiation barracks and each delegation sits on their side of the table. I have been to the JSA and can attest that the film's depiction of it is completely accurate.

Both Koreas, still being officially at war, remained hostile to each other and continued to try and undermine each other's government at every opportunity, sending spies and agitators over to the other side and getting into occasional military skirmishes - I knew a South Korean guy handpicked during his military service to serve as a special undercover commando into the north, and he was the only one in his platoon to make it back alive. The North Koreans also dug several infiltration tunnels into the south, and attempted several times to assassinate South Korean government figures. Both Koreas remained dictatorships, each supported by their respective superpower - the US cared little that South Korea was not democratic so long as it was reliably anti-Communist. Even today, all South Korean males have to serve in the military for 3 years and 37,000 American troops are stationed in a huge base in the middle of Seoul (which is only an hour's drive away from the border) to deter any further North Korean attacks.

South Korea developed and eventually democratised in 1988, but North Korea stayed staunchly Communist and totalitarian, and remains so today. In fact it has reacted to the end of the Soviet Union and the collapse of most Communist regimes by shutting itself in even more, and today it is arguably the world's most closed up country. Norh Koreans are of course not allowed to move abroad. As for foreigners, the only ones in North Korea are diplomats from a handful of countries and officials from aid agencies. North Korea very occasionally issues tourist visas but during their stay these rare visitors to the "hermit kingdom" are accompanied by two government guides at all times, they are not allowed to go wandering on their own and their every action is monitored by the security services. The country is permanently geared to a high level of paranoia, and society is heavily militarised - the only ones nowadays who can expect to always eat properly are soldiers.

At the time of the Korean war, the North was in far better shape than the South. It had a larger and much better educated population, all the industrial infrastructures and a large portion of the country's natural resources. The South, by contrast, had always been considered as Korea's rural hinterland, its population was far poorer and most of the territory's economic existence relied on subsistence farming. But as South Korea adjusted to market economics and adopted a series of intelligent strategic measures to become globally competitive, the scales were gradually tipped. North Korea sank into slow ruin because it stuck to an unrealistic state-planned economy. The collapse of the Soviet Union also dealt North Korea a huge blow since it meant the end of considerable financial aid and subsidies. Starting in 1994, a series of famines struck the country and it is estimated that hundreds of thousands have died since then. Made desperate, thousands of North Koreans have braved danger and death to sneak across the border into China (naturally, escaping directly to South Korea through the DMZ is not an option!). Nowadays, the North Korean economy is only barely kept alive by virtually free prison labour (up to 200,000 people are estimated to be locked up in labour camps throughout the country), the occasional financial aid provided by friendly countries and international agencies, remittances sent to relatives by ethnic Koreans in Japan (most settled there for generations) which are then embezzled by the authorities, and the black market.

North Koreans are subjected to an endless stream of propaganda by their state-controlled media - those North Koreans who are caught with clandestine wireless sets trying to eavesdrop on South Korean radio stations can expect to be sent to labour camp, possibly along with their families. The North Koreans therefore believe that it was the US who struck first in the Korean War, not the North (North Koreans refer to the Korean War as the "fatherland liberation war"). They are taught that the South is nothing but a puppet regime of the United States (which, to be fair, it originally was) and that the US could attack them again at a moment's notice. The North Korean media seemingly only broadcasts reports on four distinct topics (to see some samples of these often tragically hilarious soundbites, you can visit the official North Korean news agency at www.kcna.co.jp, possibly the only North Korean-run website in existence):

1. How the US is an evil imperialist force trying to divide the people of Korea;

2. How the South is a despicable stooge of the US and its citizens are continually misled and oppressed;

3. How Japan is a puppet of US imperialism bent on recolonising Korea; (both Koreas harbour a strong resentment against Japan for their horrific treatment of Koreans during their 35-year annexation of the country, but North Korea is much more fixated on it, possibly because resistance to Japan was always more intense and organised in the north, and this gives North Korea another reason for claiming it to be the "true" patriotic Korea)

4. How Great Leader Kim Il-sung and Dear Leader Kim Jong-il are the Light of all Humanity on this planet and every world leader wants to pay respects to them.

In particular, the cult of personality engineered around the personalities of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il (his son) is extraordinary in North Korea, and transcends even the ones in other bombastic Communist states like Maoist China, Stalinist Russia or Cuba. Everyone has a portrait of either one or both leaders in their home and Kim Il-sung has been made president for "all eternity" even though he has been dead for 12 years now. As years passed and totalitarianism tightened, the two Kims were credited with more and more extraordinary achievements and inventions - just like the Party's claims to have invented the helicopter and then the aeroplane in George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four". It is now claimed, for instance, that Kim Il-sung defeated Japan almost single-handedly: no mention is made of the US's central role in the Pacific War, nor of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki - North Korea would of course never want to incite the slightest measure of sympathy towards the Japanese, nor hint that it had ever been anything but a US ally. Nowadays Kim Jong-il is said to have been born at the top of Mount Paektu, coincidentally the birthplace of the Korean people according to traditional mythology, whereas all evidence indicates that he was actually born in the Russian town of Khabarovsk. The state-controlled media insist that "brilliant white horses" and other angelic figures were seen in the sky at the time of his birth.

I hope I've helped in showing you why North and South Koreans still have a strong animosity towards each other. Both want reunification, but neither recognises the other officially (maps printed in both South and North show all of Korea without hinting that any border exists between the two). Reunification may yet take a while: no one is innocent in the tragic history of this country.

Cheers,

Cedric

Excellent observation aka-ed. I never thought of that. That ties in well with Park's later films.

Most Recent film I've seen:
Othello (1952) by Orson Welles 8/10

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