Seoul is just 20 kilometres south of the DMZ (Demilitarized Zone) and we drive north on a grey overcast morning, against the inbound flow of commuter traffic, to Imjingak, just south of the DMZ.
The industrial drabness is broken up by a proliferation of nursing homes, built here due to the cheapness of land due to proximity to the DPRK, North Korea. We pass a forested hill that in the 90s was a garbage dump. The driver talks of ‘waste burglars’ and a seedier past. We pass burning in the forest. Old men burn waste despite the public service warning I have just received on my phone against forest fires.
We don’t see any forest fires but neither do we tanks. Pedal, my guide, explains, “There is little provocation from North Korea at present so we probably won’t see tanks.”
In spite of his assurances, the temperature cools, both literally and metaphorically. Grey military bunkers dot the route as do abandoned fox holes. Barbed wire fences make a menacing appearance.
We arrive at Imjingak, a ‘Civilian Control Zone’ that is 7 kilometres south of Panmunjom (where Trump met Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, in 2019) and the DMZ.
The DMZ in Korea is one of the most heavily fortified borders in the world, yet ironically, it’s called ‘demilitarized’. The Korean Demilitarized Zone is a 250 kilometre long and 4-kilometre-wide buffer zone between North Korea (DPRK) and South Korea (ROK) established at the end of the Korean War in 1953, through the Korean Armistice Agreement, which roughly follows the 38th parallel.
After Japan’s defeat in WWII, Korea — previously under Japanese colonial rule — was divided at the 38th parallel with the North occupied by the Soviet Union and the South by the United States. The split was meant to be temporary, but Cold War tensions hardened it. So much so that in June 1950 North Korea invaded South Korea, crossing the 38th parallel in a surprise attack. Their goal: unify the peninsula under communism.
The death toll is staggering — and still debated — but general estimates are three to four million.
The DMZ is thus a stark symbol of the division between South and Noth Korea and it draws the crowds. On this morning several large groups, corralled by flag-bearing guides, seemed most interested in purchasing tacky DMZ memorabilia and getting selfies in front of the Friendship Bridge, an old bombed out tank or with the DPRK as a backdrop.
I don’t mean this to be or sound self-indulgent but the experience of the DMZ that I had from the DPRK side in 2011 was more personal, more intense, more moving. But perhaps that was because Instagram had only just started and more importantly your mobile phones were ‘confiscated’ on arrival in DPRK. Different perspectives.
However, what did move me was Pedal’s family story. It is by no means a unique story but I am thankful to Pedal for his candour and insight into what happened to his family.
Pedal’s grandfather was the youngest of three brothers that grew up in Kaesong, which is now in the DPRK. However, when Korea was partitioned along the 38th parallel at the end of World War II, Kaesong was south of the line and thus within South Korea.
However, with the Battle of Kaesong-Monson at the end of June 1950, one of the first battles of the Korean War, the brothers crossed the Imjin River and fled south to Seoul.
As the North Koreans and Chinese forced their way south, Pedal’s grandfather was captured by the North Koreans and conscripted to serve their effort. At some point he managed to escape and flee further south.
Pedal’s father’s middle brother, fighting for the South Koreans, and possibly against people that he knew, was killed in the Battle of Triangle Hill in October 1952. Or at least they think he was. No remains have ever been traced or found.
Details are scratchy, not least because Pedal’s father is a taciturn man.
“My father is a quiet man. He does not talk much. Mum knows more about my father’s history. She is curious and talkative. She comes from the South.”
“When my father did talk to me a little about the war and his father, I was bitter and did not sleep for three days.”
“I have family in North Korea but have no information on them.”
The Koreans are a people divided but not by any choices of their own. How did this happen? What circumstances led the same people to live in such starkly different conditions? There are no genetic differences between the Koreans in the north and the Koreans in the south to account for this disparity in development. Is this what politics can do to a people and country?
Both north and south celebrate National Foundation Day on October 3rd to commemorate Dangun’s establishment of the country in 2333 BCE. Both Koreas have become well known globally, albeit for very different reasons. One is about K-pop bands, films and tv shows, the other about nuclear tests, tirades and economic poverty. Korea’s history is its geography. It is a peninsula that is 680 miles long and 220 wide attached to two great powers in Asia, China and Russia, and across the sea from Japan. The geopolitical designs of the great powers have dominated Korea.
How did the divide come about?
In late August 1945, concerned that Moscow would take the entire Korean Peninsula, the US proposed a division into two separate occupation zones to which the Soviets agreed. The decision as to where to bisect the country was left to a junior colonel named Charles Bonesteel. Bonesteel could not find a readily identifiable geographic marker so choose the 38th parallel, arbitrarily dividing families, farmland in south but fertiliser production in north, manufacturing in south but raw materials in north.
After a little over three years the fratricidal Korean War ended where it started, at the 38th parallel, but with no victory and tremendous cost. The capital cities of Seoul and Pyongyang changed hands in the war a total of six times. The entire peninsula had been bombed or burned into oblivion. It had a dire effect on the economies of both countries and cost the lives of millions. The Korean War fundamentally changed the assumptions of US geo strategy, as it led to the adoption of limited war doctrine and the domino theory.
We head out on our bikes along the Peace Path, a newly created cycle and walking trail that broadly follows the line of the DMZ. We navigated narrow farm tracks and single-track roads raised up above the brown stubble of rice fields. The landscape is flat and brown. If I were to come back in August, the rice will be golden.
There was a profusion of polytunnels, spring onions were growing everywhere and roosters crowed. Dogs barked in excited surprise as we meandered past.
We climbed small hills to see the pink of the early flowering Korean Rhododendron, the only colour in the leafless forest of Mongolian oaks. A man from Seoul passed us by, bowing gently in greeting, his steps steady on his journey along the entire trail. So too a local man, older and slower, out for a stroll as opposed to a trek, a small transistor radio blaring out Ppongjak, the rousing patriotic old school music not listened to by the younger generation. Down in the river below, a crab fisherman worked alone — a solitary job, but well paid, supplying the restaurant perched on the hillside above.
Every few hundred yards, we came across concrete tank bunkers, barriers and fox holes.
“In my childhood, I talked to my friends in Seoul about the barriers and bunkers but they did not understand,” explained Pedal.
In a bunker faded Korean characters advocate the importance of a strong first strike. Ammunition depots with the helpful warning of not to smoke. But with the diminished threat of a Second Korean War many of the bunkers have been abandoned.
That having been said, signs warn that well intended balloon parcels of rice for the North Koreans can trigger aggressive reprisals from the DPRK. Others caution against swimming in the Imjin River: it originates in the DPRK and floating mines have been released to drift downstream into South Korea. Mines – and there are many many thousands of land mines in the DMZ – make the theory of reunification very difficult in practice.
An armoured vehicle drives alongside the adjacent field. Security not to stop invaders but individuals fleeing the regime of the North.
We stop in a small village at a local restaurant, leaving our bikes unlocked. “My grandmother used to talk about this restaurant, but it is more local than I thought.”
Unremarkable from outside, we walk in, remove our shoes, and are pleasantly surprised by a small smart space of some fifty covers and the smiling welcome of the owner.
Intrigued by this hidden gem, I ask “Do you see many tourists?”
“Yes,” was the disappointing reply.
“Chinese, Singaporean and Taiwanese – business delegations from nearby industries,” he continued, improving my mood.
The restaurant is named Jangdan Kong Dubu Jip, Jangdan Soybean Tofu House, and specialises in tofu dishes made from the famous Jangdan soybeans, a local specialty of the DMZ area in South Korea.
Food is hugely important in Korean culture – not just for nourishment, but as a deeply social, symbolic and emotional experience. It reflects everything from history and geography to values like community, respect and health. Here it was about geography and the local speciality.
The sign informs us that we are entering the village of Wondang and that it is a ‘silver zone’, i.e. that it has an elderly population.
“My grandparents moved here in the 1970s. There was no infrastructure then – there is not much more now – but they were offered a free house and land.”
“It was a ‘propaganda’ village to settle this area and keep the region alive.”
Tractors rust outside small houses. Three mobility scooters are parked outside a small community hall.
“A small store used to be here. Twenty years has passed and everything changed.”
We stand in front of his grandparents’ house. An old woman of less than five foot tall remembers his grandmother. Pedal’s grandmother moved away from the village in 2012 and died in 2022. The old lady remarks that she was “waiting for the call”. The old lady nods goodbye and wheels a heavy bag of earth uphill, refusing all offers of help.
“In comparison with the rest of South Korea, this is very rural,” Pedal says with a smile. “Very empty.” In the 1920s 29% of the population lived in urban centres, but now it is 81%.
Google this area and it is all blanked out but we cycle past a dairy farm, fields of solar panels and fields of barley. Old women bent double by a lifetime of labouring tend small plots of cabbages and radishes. There are family graveyards at the base of small hills. There is history and life.
We leave our bicycles unlocked and visit Horogoru fortress in Yeoncheon. A fortress with commanding views of the Imchin River and a reminder of a unified past, as opposed to the fractured recent history of today.
We cross a bridge. Pedal gives me insight from his childhood, “The bridge was not so big when I was younger – this is a modern construct – but there was a border post and my impatient uncle always got frustrated at the time we had to spend here as bored army guards examined our identity cards.”
In the distance we hear the constant wailing of a siren. Pedal identifies it as North Korean ‘noise pollution’. “When I was younger and in Wondang with my grandmother, I used to hear the constant broadcasts from North Korea. But they have been silent for a while. I feel sorry for our soldiers.”
We cycle on the Peace Path alongside the river and the noise recedes into the distance. I can’t help feeling that such ‘noise’ is outdated and outmoded and if there is a different noise that might win through? There are stories of K-pop being smuggled into North Korea from China and that it is inciting the young, undermining the regime’s propaganda and eroding support for Kim Jong-un. Let’s hope that is so and that floating mines and noise pollution are no match for the digital revolution.
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