After hearing about the skirmish between North and South Korea on Tuesday that left two South Korean Marines dead and more than a dozen injured (plus an unknown number of casualties on the North Korean side), I emailed some friends in South Korea to express my concern and to see how they were doing in the face of this new tension. The responses I received were all pretty unanimous in their shared sentiment: we’re fine and we’re not really worried about anything.
Really? The two sides exchanged artillery, people died, there’s talk of escalation and armed conflict and you’re not worried? Here’s one of the responses I received to this question:
Kim Jong-Il is like that crazy old man who occasionally runs out to the front yard wielding a garden hoe to scream at the neighborhood kids to get off his lawn. He may look dangerous to strangers who may not know him, but the neighbors eventually learn the guy is more bark than bite. You’re not going to ignore him when he does that, but it’s not a big deal either.
OK, I get this to a point. I visited Korea in 2006 shortly after North Korea launched “illegal” nuclear missile tests and followed that with threatening remarks. To read about that incident in the U.S. press, you’d think the Korean peninsula was on the brink of nuclear war. Several people here even suggested I cancel my trip until the danger had passed. But when I actually got to Korea, I realized none of the Koreans I met actually seemed to be worried. It was a non-issue for them and it did seem that the rest of the world was indeed freaking out about something the Koreans themselves found almost blasé.
Of course, the other explanation for this reaction could be that the Koreans were just as worried as everyone else, but simply expressed their feelings in other ways. For example, condom sales rose dramatically in South Korea during this period and psychologists theorized that Koreans were subconsciously finding comfort in sex as a way to deal with the uncertainty and stress. Well, either that or, as I’ve suggested before, the thought of nuclear annihilation just makes Koreans really, really horny.
Still, the danger with thinking that your crazy, old neighbor is essentially harmless is that you’ll be caught off-guard if he does genuinely snap one day and inflicts real damage with that hoe. And while I hope my Korean friends are right and this is just another example of Kim Jong-Il huffing and puffing and waving his garden hoe around (Kim supposedly went on a tour of a soy sauce factory in the wake of the incident so who knows where his head is at), people lost their lives this time around. And there’s nothing blasé about that.
Funny place. My general feeling (based on being stationed on the DMZ for a year, and meeting South and North Korean officials during an event) is that they really think one day they will be one country again. And that it will be peaceful. No idea when, but they never talked about each other being the enemy, as much as they described Japan as the “real” enemy. My experience was also over 10 years ago, so things may have changed.