Written by jh
Tuesday, 09 February 2010 00:00
by Jim Huntington It is March 29th, 2022. It is the tenth anniversary of Korean reunification.
People are remembering, and celebrating, in Jeju, Chongjin, and everywhere in between. President Park Moon Su is giving speeches in Seoul and Pyongyang. In the latter city, the Citizens Starvation Memorial is covered in flowers. In Seoul, American president Marco Rubio will address the crowd as well. For most Korean children, Reunification Day is a peaceful Spring holiday.
Many remember the events of 2009 and 2010, when in the months prior to Kim Jong-il’s death, some journalists were pessimistic about world reunification reaction. In News Blaze, commentator Ivan Silic asserted that major powers wanted the peninsula to stay divided. A Korea Herald editorial took a milder view, opining that while American interests would be served by reunification, Chinese and Japanese ones would not. Neither mentioned the possibility that the country could become reunited as soon as it did.
When Kim died of pancreatic cancer in May 2010, his youngest son Kim Jong-un, as expected, assumed power. Although the Reuters news agency had previously recorded his description as an “intelligent and thoughtful man,” Western observers did not know to what extent that was true. During the younger Kim’s Swiss education, he had seen the modern world, become aware of the misery caused by his father’s regime, and vowed, secretly, to free his country to the extent his opportunities allowed. He successfully concealed this attitude until after he was installed.
In July 2010, “Brilliant Comrade” Kim Jong-un announced that all North Korean citizens with close relatives in the South could cross the border to visit them. The logistics were chaotic – over a million people with claims of varying legitimacy applied in person in Pyongyang alone – but within a week chaos at the new Temporary Journey Offices had died down, helped by Kim’s deployment of thousands of People’s Armed Forces soldiers to facilitate the process. In August, the Republic of Korea welcomed half a million, who became the summer’s news story. The effect on the South went beyond the 500,000 guests – there were so many family reunions that work absenteeism reached all-time national highs. Yet all but the most severe employers took a remarkably relaxed attitude.
All visitors were required to return by October 1. Some returned sooner, and told all the people they knew about life on the other side. Many returned that day. Some did not. By then, though, the mood of the North Korean people had changed permanently. They were ready for freedom they not only knew was nearby but could now graphically describe and understand. Although the military continued to guard the borders, their resolve was weakening, as even soldiers are human beings with families, ears, and relatives. On October 5, to the roaring applause of hundreds of Pyongyang University of Science and Technology students, Kim announced that radio and television access to the outside world would now be allowed. He also stated that citizens visiting South Korean relatives could stay abroad indefinitely.
The next few weeks were, to that point, the headiest in national history. Between radio, TV, and reports from travelers, almost all North Koreans knew what they had been missing. They organized protests about their living conditions, and almost held a general strike. Students marched in the streets for Internet access. Everybody wanted more food. The army was called out to maintain order, but when Kim was told some students had been shot, he ordered that no soldier shall fire on unarmed citizens. Photographs of that time are reminiscent of those of American 1960s student protests – one young man even reenacted what Berkeley students had done over 40 years before, by putting flowers in soldiers’ rifle barrels.
So where would the food come from? On November 18th, one week before the American Thanksgiving holiday, Kim called President Obama and made a bold offer: In exchange for $2 billion in aid, made up of $1 billion in food and $1 billion in seeds, plants, and farm equipment, North Korea would destroy its entire nuclear capability in front of international inspectors. After five days of working out specifics, the American Congress approved the bill, with the Senate voting 100-0 and the House, with one member very ill, concurring 434-0. Deliveries started before Christmas, were distributed by the North Korean army, and saved an estimated 10,000 lives that winter and many more in the years to follow.
Changes continued during 2011. Kim Jong-un announced 50% reductions over the next two years to the People’s Armed Forces and the Ministry of People’s Security. Many soldiers were assigned to farm duty. North Koreans with good work records were allowed to apply for exit visas. Government torture was banned. And late in summer, with exceptions only for a few sites Kim considered offensive and inflammatory, Internet access was legalized. That year Kim also survived two assassination attempts. The first, at the Triumphal Arch, involved two disaffected soldiers with machine guns approaching Kim and his personal guards. Twenty meters away they were questioned, and started shooting – only fast action by Kim’s guards stopped the effort, which ended with both assailants dying on the scene. The second, also on the street, was a poorly planned knife attack which was easily aborted, and two days later the attacker was publicly hung.
Early next year it became clear to Kim that the best for the people would be a merger with the South. In February 2012, he traveled to Seoul to meet with President Lee Myung-bak. He offered Lee his country. Lee, and the National Assembly, agreed within days. The announcement was made, the details were worked out, and on March 29, 2012, the Republic of Korea had nine new provinces. The maps and globes all over the country, in schools, in government buildings, and on paper, showing Korea as one nation, were finally correct.
Lee, along with Kim in the new position of Reunification Minister, directed the integration. Former Northern citizens were allowed to exchange their KPW won for KRW, which, although suffering on the foreign exchange market by reaching 1,711 to the US dollar in 2013, reached its pre-unification level of 884 three years later and has been slowly strengthening ever since – at press time, about 650 won buys one dollar (or 1,242 for one euro, and 1,626 per pound).
The largest Korean reunification-related endeavor involved one of the largest military construction brigade efforts in history. With no significant foreign threat, the country needed nowhere near the combined total of 1.9 million active armed services personnel, not to mention 9.2 million reservists, but before mustering them out, they put three-fourths of them to work in the North, where for the rest of their tours they built roads, motorways, subways, sewers, railroad tracks, cellular phone towers, and much more. Most prominent were the extension of KTX service to Pyongyang, Wonsan, Hamhung, and Chongjin, completed ahead of schedule in 2015, and the first maglev train segment, between Busan, Seoul and Pyongyang, in 2020..
State-sponsored reunification work kept unemployment rates for the combined country around 4% for the decade, compared with America’s and the Eurozone’s 9.8% and 9.2% respective figures. In contrast to the continuing American and European problems of discouraged jobless, people unhappily choosing non-working lifestyles, and part-time jobs for people wanting to work full time, few Koreans could not find full employment in the 2010s. The government also used its formidable bully-pulpit power to encourage those in the South to “eat less – send it north instead”; they did, and by 2015, between that effort, improved farm outputs, and more imports, starvation in the North dropped to American levels. In what was rumored to be a rare near-unanimous decision, Kim Jong-un received the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize.
Major countries have reacted consistently positively to reunification. The United States, which signed a lease to maintain two Korean bases, is rid of a dangerous destabilizing country, freeing military and humanitarian resources for elsewhere. China, which in no uncertain terms told the changing North Korea it did not want refugees streaming over its border, now has no threat of war or nuclear incidents from the other side. Japan has expanded trading with the new larger Korea, and appears to hope that in a generation or so, helped by its symbolic 2016 official concession of Dokdo, it can be in a true friendship with this country, with which it has more in common, geographically and culturally, than any other. Russia was never concerned with the previous order too much, as Korea borders only 16.5km of its remote northeastern territory (in fact, in 2011 an unnamed Russian diplomat, after enjoying Jack Daniels at an American embassy party, was said to joke that a nuclear attack on Vladivostok would “much improve it”), but now it has a growing trading partner that much closer.
So how were such commentators as Ivan Silic wrong? They looked to the past, not to the future. Silic claimed the combined army would bother other countries, without realizing Korea would not need one anywhere near that size. Silic and the Korea Herald staff both claimed China preferred North Korea as a buffer, and indeed China was providing it significant aid, but how much of a problem would a liberal democracy, also a major trading partner (including 25 million Korean cars sold in China in 2019) and a country with a far smaller military force than before, be?
Silic also wrote that America could have easily displaced the North Korean government. That did not happen since its rise as a true threat coincided with American disgust over the trauma of Vietnam. When that mood had faded, Kim Jong-un’s father had formed a very well-defended and well-armed country, more akin to Switzerland than anything that could be dislodged in a “matter of hours.” Silic also did not realize that what he called North Korea’s being “something like a good friend to the US,” as shown by former president Clinton’s 2009 visit to negotiate freedom of two captured American journalists, had always been solely an effort to placate such an intractable and dangerous country, similar to America’s conferring Most Favored Nation trading status on the USSR during the late Cold War. Indeed, the American State Department had been known to do much more than that to rescue its citizens from trouble abroad, many times.
As for the territorial designs Silic saw Japan having on Korea, he did not see that Korea was, for decades before reunification, already “very hard to control and impossible to invade.” Additionally, 2022 marks the 77th year since any two industrialized countries have gone to war; if Japan actually did such a thing it would get a very poor response from, among many others, its critical trading partner and military ally across the Pacific. While the Korea Herald staff may or may not have judged correctly in saying Japan preferred a split peninsula, they did not mention Japan not only would take no action against reunification but would profit financially from a larger republic. As for Germany, when Silic mentioned that country’s indifference to Korean issues he must have forgotten that since about 1980, over forty years ago now, continental European countries have consistently ignored most actions, both good and bad, of other countries. As it turned out, German attitude actually went the other way; as Germany, which experienced its own reunification with similar joys and problems, has been closer to and more appreciative of Korea.
So now, with no significant enemies and the most potent list of friends of any country on the planet, Korea is entering its Golden Age. It is prosperous and on the technological forefront. It is education-based, with foreign English teachers, accepted by the vast majority of Koreans, now all over the former North as well. It is also benefiting from America’s reverse brain drain in other fields, and interest in Korean language and culture at American business schools trails only Chinese. The border with China is functioning, with less pressure on the other side now that Liaoning and Jilin provinces have been named China’s latest Special Economic Zones. Tourism is increasing, as word of low prices, cities and sights undiscovered by Westerners, and tolerant, friendly people has reached the rest of the modern world, along with its rail connections with the rest of Eurasia.
Currently, it is time for Koreans to look inside to their culture of stress and overwork, and avoid making the Japanese mistakes of insularity, economically unneeded jobs, and too little consumption. Yet the 23 million person gulag, outlasted only by Cuba as a Cold War remnant, is consigned to history. And as they celebrate today in Seoul, Pyongyang, and elsewhere Hangul is spoken, the world is cheering with them.
Jim Huntington is a former project manager and adjunct business professor now teaching at Wanju County elementary and middle schools.
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Written by dc
Tuesday, 02 February 2010 04:26
Movie Review – “The Book of Eli”
by Dean Crawford
The fourth collaborative outing from Albert and Allan “Menace to Society” Hughes, is “The Book of Eli” starring Denzel Washington and Gary Oldman. It promised to be an exciting affair for several reasons. One, the film appeared to deal with many themes including the role of religion in the future. Perhaps this would encourage some serious debate, as the presence of religion in society is a topic on most people’s minds right now. It also appeared to have some exciting action sequences and I found the idea of Denzel Washington as a sword wielding religious bad-ass to be quite appealing. It was also the newest in a line of post-apocalyptic movies to be released here in the UK, and it came only a week after “The Road”, which is superb. Now, for me to make comparisons between “The Road” and “The Book of Eli” would be unfair, as they are two totally different films with very different directors. Well, sometimes life just isn’t fair so I’m going to anyway! First, the outline of the film.
“The Book of Eli” centres around Denzel Washington’s character, Eli, who has been charged with the heavy duty of carrying the last remaining Bible on Earth. Eli is our main protagonist and our hero. He has been walking for over 30 years and all he knows is that his job is to carry the bible West to put it into the hands of people who will know what to do with it. This task is not as easy as it seems as the roads are filled with gangs that are willing to do anything to find scraps and leftovers.
This world is lawless. People rape, people kill, people eat each other. Sound familiar? After using his holy sword of justice to destroy a group of mercenaries, their boss Carnegie, played by Gary Oldman, tries to persuade Eli to join his gang. It just so happens that Carnegie is on his own holy pursuit to find the book but for totally different reasons. He intends to use the bible to corrupt. He sees the book as a weapon. So it’s lucky for Carnegie that Eli spends a night in his “hotel” and subsequently realizes that Eli is carrying his much sought after item. What ensues is an all too predictable game of cat and mouse in which Eli and his female companion try to stay one step ahead of Carnegie. They encounter strange people on the way. They almost get caught. Eli kicks arse. They run away. They almost get caught again. They blow sh!t up. They run away again. You think they are giving away the book. They are not. You think they aren’t going to make it out West. They do. There is one genuine twist in the film which I won’t give away, but it doesn’t affect the outcome of the film in the slightest.
At times, “The Book of Eli” is visually stunning. It has a stylish sepia, almost as if the contrast has been turned up so high as if to make you feel like the characters in the film, who are constantly under the threat of being blinded by the sun. It is not 100% confirmed what caused the world in which they live to become the way it has, but we do know that it was a war that started it. Because of the bright, stylized nature of the film, possibly a nuclear as the toned up bright lights reminds me of The Matrix or Highlander Part 2 where wars or science burned holes in the sky to which people must now protect themselves from. The action sequences at times are equally impressive. Denzel does a good job with the fights, though sometimes they feel quite laborious and his movements lackadaisical and highly staged. Obviously they are choreographed fight sequences, but you don’t want to realise this during the film ruining the illusion. He is also helped by the way the directors choose to stage the action. Whether is be filming them in shadow, or making numerous cuts so as to not linger on Denzel too much. One action sequence in particular is quite breathtaking. Eli and his companion are inside a house and Carnegie is outside, and all hell breaks loose. Guns blaze, rockets fire and things get blown up. The camera goes in the house, outside the house. Through the letter box. Through bullet holes. Think one particular shoot out in “Bad Boys 2”, only more impressive. And what makes this scene so impressive is that it appears to happen in one take. Gary Oldman is his usual brilliant self, seamlessly mixing smooth criminal and manic psycho in one fell swoop. The rest of the film, however, is less impressive.
In my recent review of the Road, I mentioned how impressed I was with the look of the characters. In that world, the remaining people who survived have nothing and it really showed. The people looked dirty. I mean, really dirty. However, in “The Book of Eli”, despite living in a post-apocalyptic world where water, let alone soap is like gold dust, many individuals still manage to have a certain sex appeal. Some of the woman’s clothes are horrifically dirty, yet are luckily ripped just in the right ways as to show a nice amount of cleavage or lie tantilisingly high above the knee. Even some of the men manage to get matching outfits and look like trendy cyber punks. In “The Road”, people wear a mish mash of garments and simply make do. “The Road” has a magical way of reminding us to not take things for granted by the intense pleasure they take in the small things, such as a cigarette or a can of peaches. It is subtly done. In Eli, we have Denzel Washington spell out to his audience what went wrong in the past.
“In the world before, people had more than they needed and had no idea what was precious. We threw away things that people kill each other for now” – Eli.
I know this is nitpicking and like I mentioned earlier, it is totally unfair for me to compare the two films as they are unique and each director had their own individual visions on how best to portray their worlds, but I believe it’s the little touches like this that make the difference between average filmmaking and great filmmaking.
Another fault I found in the film was the crass way in which it tries to make a statement. On the one hand, we have Eli who is walking across the country on blind faith alone. A voice inside told him where to find the book and what to do with it, and he is protecting it with his life. He lives his life by the words inside and in this brave new world, this appears to make him one of the last few decent people in America. We could deduce it is his faith that allows him to act this way. So, are the filmmakers trying to say “look what happens in a world without religion? People loot, people kill, people pillage, people eat other.” If so, then we should bring religion back right? Well, contrary to this opinion, Eli suggests that religion might have well been the cause of the war. And take Gary Oldman’s character Carnegie for example.
“It’s not a book, it’s a weapon! A weapon aimed at the hearts and minds of the weak and desperate. They’ll come from all over to hear it’s words and they’ll do whatever I tell them…it’s happened before.” – Carnegie.
He is quite clearly the representation of the darker side and religion and how some new radicals can take the words of religious texts, whether it be the bible, the Koran, the Tora, and use it’s message for destruction and self gain rather than peace. He is the total antithesis to Eli. Both points of view are put through to the audience so it is hard to know what side of the fence it sits on. If, like Eli suggested some people believed, the bible was the cause of this apocalyptic event, why not simply leave it be? Wouldn’t the war he described simply happen again? If there are people out there who are willing to rape, kill and pillage to get their hands on it to spread it’s message for that of selfishness and their own interests, why not just destroy it too, or bury it so no one will be able to manipulate it’s message ever again. The answer is obvious, of course. And I am sure that by presenting such strong cases for each case, the directors want the audience to make up their own minds, but I just see it as a way of dumbing down an audience so you don’t necessarily have to think about it too much and just focus on the ass-kicking.
Ultimately, what could have been a well thought out movie that infers the role of religion in the future and what role that can play on our lives, ends up in a none-too-original popcorn action flick. Instead of subtly trying to engage in debates and let us try and make weigh up the pro’s and con’s of each character by their actions alone, we are bashed about the head with a shovel full of contrasting opinions. “RELIGION IS GOOD!” “NO, RELIGION IS BAD AND CAN CORRUPT!” RARRRRRR!! And what also could have been a slick action movie with great pacing, merely dragged along from one formulaic narrative point to the next. I wouldn’t say that “The Book of Eli” is that bad, it just isn’t that great either. I would say that the directors missed a great opportunity. They would probably say they just wanted to see Denzel Washington as a sword-wielding religious bad-ass. In that respect, they reached their holy grail. Amen.
Dean Crawford is a Jeonju veteran, with an infectious enthusiasm and multifaceted experience in film."The Book of Eli" should reach Jeonju cinemas soon. To see more of his reviews, visit http://thekinkyafro.tumblr.com/
The Wolfman is a film I have been interested in seeing for a long time, but not for entirely positive reasons. The Wolfman is a remake of George Waggner’s 1941 original The Wolf Man, and by all accounts was due to be released in cinemas in 2007. Then in February 2009. Then in November 2009. Finally being released this month. The scheduling conflicts were not the only problems for The Wolfman. The films original director, Mark Romanek, left only 4 weeks before the start of principal photography to be replaced by Joe Johnston. Johnston’s last film was 7 years ago. Add to this the need to film extensive reshoots due to gaping holes in the plot, all did not look good for The Wolfman.
Matthew White (Georgia, USA) teaches English at Woosuk University. 
David Van Minnen is Editor of 
