Security on the Peninsula

How despite the risk of nuclear annihilation, I feel much safer here

When just last week, North Korea’s supreme leader, Kim Jong-un, captured headlines by once again rattling the ol’ saber, most folks here in South Korea (including my very jaded wife) reacted with a collective shrug. After all, they’ve seen and heard it all before, and even though there have been some lethal flare-ups over the years, the Korean peninsula has remained (largely) at peace since the signing of the armistice in 1953, despite the fact that the deal never graduated into an actual peace treaty. 

This time, however, the rhetoric shifted into more ominous territory. Chairman Kim announced that the North was abandoning its long-avowed policy of unification with the South, reversing what had been a cornerstone of the DPRK’s official doctrine since the state’s inception.

This comes on the heels of several actions that have been seen as provocations on this side of the DMZ: missile launches, live-fire artillery drills, and—perhaps most symbolically significant—the destruction of the Arch of Reunification, a monument constructed by Kim’s grandfather and DPRK founder Kim Il-sung. The arch was described as an “eyesore” by KJE, a diss of the older generation so flagrant that Koreans of both stripes surely cringed when they heard it. Does such a violation of cultural mores hint that he’s serious this time?

Korea watchers—those academics, journos, and think-tankers who make up the professional managerial class of Westerners who officially comment on issues in this corner of the globe—began to chatter. Some even claimed that KJE—like gramps in 1950— had already made the decision to go to war. Cue the Fear!

As a Korea-based writer specializing in—ahem—softer topics. I have run across some of these guys, and while I’m certainly no expert on the geopolitical winds blowing across the Land of the Morning Calm, I also can say with certainty that drawing media attention as a Korea expert can equal not just job security, but advancement. That means I’ve learned to take what these sometimes-hucksters say with a mouthful of salt.

Still, despite the fact that the North has cried wolf so many times during my sojourn here, KJE’s recent upping of the ante admittedly had me sweating, at least for an afternoon. After all, North Korea does possess at least a small arsenal of actual nuclear weapons, and I live smack dab of the South’s second largest city, which is surely in the regime’s crosshairs.

If things do kick off, I—along with my Korean family, my pack of rescue animals, and all my friends—could quickly be toast. As a kid growing up in the 80’s I had nightmares of perishing in an atomic conflagration (The Longest Day, anyone?), and now I find myself having thrown roots down in a place that, if I were a betting man, has some of the best odds on the planet of getting nailed by a nuke.

* * * 

I moved to South Korea on an impulse in 2004 to take a teaching job, and once I washed up on these shores, I never really looked back. A few of the people close to me back in the States expressed worry at my decision to emigrate, citing the supposedly erratic behavior of North Korea as their chief concern.

My response was always to explain that they were watching too much TV, that compared to the United States—with its street crime, gun violence, drug addiction, and me me me culture—South Korea was surely one of the safest places I could be on the globe.

This notion has largely played out during my nearly two-decades on the peninsula. In fact, the safety and security of life in South Korea is probably its greatest selling point. Despite the reality that this is a very imperfect nation where issues such as stress and discrimination and alcoholism take a great toll, it’s also a society based on the kind of basic trust that you just don’t see in the USA. In fact, whatever trust we once had back home seems to have been eroded to the point of near nonexistence, at least as evidenced by my visits home over the years.

I’ve commented on this many times before, but street crime is basically unknown here. Sure, there are some unruly old drunk guys and women still need to exercise additional caution at night (like much of the world), but I’ve never once heard of anyone robbed, and actual physical violence is exceedingly rare.

In fact, the public places are so largely crime-free here that any “street sense” I once had has long-ago evaporated. When I go home I have to quickly reconstruct the eyes in the back of my head and non-eye-contact glare, even in the once-peaceful streets of supposedly small-town Olympia, Washington, which has attracted packs of sometimes-aggro drug addicts.

In fact, when I took my wife back to the States some years back, we played a game, our own update of “Slug Bug,” the VW Beetle-watching game kids played on roadtrips in the 70’s and 80’s. We called it “Spot the Tweaker!”

I live in a city of 3.5 million souls, and the parks here are pretty much immaculate. There are no tents, no needles, no public restrooms full of skeevy people doing skeevy things. Just lovely, clean places maintained through public money and most importantly: public trust. 

That’s not saying there are no homeless people in Korea. There are. They tend to be older alcoholic men who congregate near the big train stations in the big cities (Seoul Station in particular gets a bit unsavory around the seams). There are also folks with untreated mental health problems muttering to themselves and gathering bags and sometimes even lashing out in physical ways in the streets and subways of the country. Mental health treatment has a long way to go here, and plenty of people slip through the cracks.

That said, these tend to be isolated cases, unlike back in the US, where so many of our public places are now occupied by people who seem to have no stake in civil society, people who have either been pushed or volunteered to place themselves outside the margins. It’s a class of untouchables that most regular citizens just do their best to avoid every time they leave the house, an underbelly that has grown from a kind of shameful spare tire into full-blown obesity.  

And then there are guns.

Despite the fact that South Korea is a garrison of sorts (due to the threat up north it’s militarized and armed in a way most people don’t realize), the general public isn’t allowed firearms here. While it’s technically possible to get a shotgun, there are so many hoops to jump through that most can’t be bothered, and if you manage to score a license, you must store the firearm at the police station and check it out when you wish to hunt.

This means civilian gun violence almost never happens here, though there are cases of those with access to guns (cops, soldiers)losing their shit and shooting things up accordingly.

Make no mistake: South Korea is a high-competition, high-stress society where people crack all the time. This may help explain why it has the highest suicide rate among OECD countries. The fact that regular Joes can’t buy guns here is a blessing, because given the pressure cooker that this country is, if the public had regular access to guns, I’m convinced there would be a mass shooting at least once a week. Probably more.

I could go on and on, but you probably get the picture: the trains and buses are spotless, the libraries don’t smell like urine, and you only see tents in actual campgrounds. And despite the fact that you may get harangued by old drunks and suffer overzealous proselytizing by whackjob Christian cults, people will otherwise leave you alone, and almost no one is going to steal your shit. 

Every week I see my friends back in the USA posting about being victims of theft: home invasions, stolen vehicles, pilfered storage units, and sadly, for my many musician compatriots, swiped gear.

To call it an epidemic would cheapen the word, and I inevitably deflate when I read the news of yet another robbery, secure in the knowledge that it doesn’t have to be that way. There are plenty of places in this world where you don’t need barbed wire, cameras, and handguns to make sure your things don’t walk away. There are some societies where basic trust is still a thing.

I realized this about South Korea very early on. I was in the subway station when nature called. It wasn’t going to wait, so I clenched my teeth and sighed in resignation as I approached the dreaded train station bathroom. Surely it would be a nasty, vomit-inducing catastrophe.

Instead I was greeted by a well-scrubbed space that mildly smelled of disinfectants. There wasn’t a single piece of shitty tag graffiti on the mirrors or walls, and the stalls themselves offered complete privacy—-none of those awful half-doors ubiquitous to public toilets in the States, where the restroom’s very architecture mocks you: We can see you! We don’t trust you! Behave, because we know you’re probably up to no good!

As I sat there in a clean, seal-off space, I felt my muscles loosen and was able to do my business free of stress or weird prying eyes. I knew deep down that something was different about this place. This was a country where the people largely abided by the rules—rules  I was only beginning to learn—rules so understood that they felt no need to display them on shouting signs tacked onto the wall of the entryway. 

I knew at once that I’d be staying for a very long time, even if I risked being one day vaporized in a hot, atomic flash.

I mean, we all gotta go out some way, right?