Feature: Fairy tales overcome nightmares at S.Korea's militarised border town

Shinsegae

26/07/2017 01:00

By Hyunjoo Jin and Haejin Choi 
    SEOUL, July 26 (Reuters) - A half-hour's drive north of 
Seoul, along a highway lined with barbed wire, lie two shopping 
malls the size of several football stadiums, a stone's throw 
from the world's most militarized border. 
    The malls are in the city of Paju, gateway to the U.N. truce 
village of Panmunjom, where military officers from the 
combatants of the 1950-53 Korean war discuss armistice matters 
-- when the two sides are on speaking terms, which they aren't 
these days. 
    "Fairy tales come true in Paju", is the advertising lure 
from the Korean Tourism Board. But it was nightmares that were 
all too true here during the Korean war, when Paju featured some 
of its fiercest battles. Paju is home to the country's only 
"enemy's cemetery", where the remains of Chinese and North 
Korean soldiers are buried.  
    That's all but forgotten history now. On the rooftop of the 
Lotte Premium Outlet, children and their parents can view North 
Korea across the Imjin River through binoculars. The mall also 
features a merry-go-round, cinema, and a mini-train. 
    At Shinsegae Paju Premium Outlet, about a dozen children 
jump and scream around a fountain inside the mall on a sizzling, 
July summer day. Just a couple miles away is a village modelled 
after France's tourism centre of Provence, where restaurants, 
bakeries and clothing shops are decorated like a children's 
playbook. 
    Elsewhere in Paju, kids carved wood to make Pinocchio dolls 
at a museum, while adults tasted wine made of meoru, a Korean 
wild grape, at a farm.       
    Paju, indeed, shows little signs of the tensions that have 
arisen since North Korea marked the U.S. July 4th holiday with a 
successful launch of what it said was an intercontinental 
ballistic missile. The missile test prompted the United States 
and South Korea this month to conduct air force bomber exercises 
in the skies near here. 
     
    LITTERING LAND MINES  
    But at Paju's Provence Village, Kim Ki-deok, a 41-year-old 
office worker from south of Seoul and father of a 4-year-old 
boy, said he doesn't feel any more danger from being close to 
the border. 
    "If North Korea really wants, they can shoot missiles far 
away," said Kim. "I feel refreshed and would like to come here 
again." 
    The sense of insouciance can even be seen at the U.S. 
military's Camp Bonifas on the outskirts of town, home to a 
three-hole golf course that Sports Illustrated once called the 
"world most dangerous golf course" because of the Korean War 
vintage land mines littering the area.  
    The Korean War, in which the United States fought alongside 
South Korea and China with the North, ended in a truce that has 
yet to be replaced by a peace agreement and has left the two 
sides technically at war. 
    It means South Koreans have long grown accustomed to living 
in a doomsday scenario, one that includes up to 10,000 artillery 
guns pointed toward the South and capable at any moment, in the 
words of North Korea's propaganda machine, of turning Seoul into 
a "sea of fire" and a "pile of ashes."  
    For 30-year-old Park Chol-min, it's nothing more than empty 
threats. 
    "It's just a show or performance. I think North Korea has a 
lot more to lose than to gain by turning Seoul into a sea of 
fire," said the video game producer from Seoul, visiting the 
Shinsegae mall with his girlfriend to buy her a birthday gift. 
       
    DEFENCE MECHANISM 
    Paju stepped up North Korea-related tourism in the 2000s, 
when liberal governments launched a "Sunshine Policy" of 
engagement with North Korea. Foreigners and locals flocked to 
Panmunjom to see stony-faced North Korean soldiers on guard and 
an underground tunnel built by the North, and to Imjingak, which 
houses the Bridge of Freedom, where prisoners of war were traded 
at the end of the war. 
    The tourism push took a huge leap late in 2011, when two 
massive premium outlets run by South Korean retail giants 
Shinsegae  004170.KS  and Lotte  023530.KS  opened. More than 12 
million visitors went to the two malls last year -- more than 
Seoul's population of 10 million. 
    It was not long after the malls opened, though, when North 
Korea dramatically stepped up the pace of missile and nuclear 
tests under Kim Jong Un, who took power in Pyongyang when his 
father Kim Jong-il died in December 2011. 
    "The tests have not dented visitor interest at all," said a 
Paju city official in charge of tourism, who asked not to be 
named. "It has become just part of a daily life, although it is 
sad to say so."  
    Normalising the North Korean threat is part of a "defence 
mechanism" for South Koreans, says Kwak Keum-joo, a psychology 
professor at Seoul National University. 
    "I feel anxious about North Korea when I travel overseas. 
Once I return to Korea, I forget it," Kwak said. 
    That's not so easy for 74-year-old Woo Jong-il, who lives in 
a small village of Manu-ri, just south of the Imjin river that 
divides the two Koreas. 
    Woo built a bunker in his backyard, one of several residents 
in Manu-ri who did so in the early 1970s, when bullets fired 
from North Korea wounded several in his village and damaged a 
house next door. 
    "I don't think this is obsolete even now," he said, showing 
a visitor around a dark basement shelter just big enough to 
accommodate his seven family members. 
    "I feel anxious. How can I not be? We are at the front so we 
can be victims. If the relationship with the North worsens 
anytime, this bunker makes me feel safe."  
 
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Map of border area    http://tmsnrt.rs/2psVCLX 
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 (Additional reporting by Heekyong Yang,; Editing by Soyoung Kim 
and Bill Tarrant) 
 ((soyoung.kim@thomsonreuters.com; +82 2 3704 5640; Reuters 
Messaging: soyoung.kim.thomsonreuters.com@reuters.net)) 
 
Keywords: NORTHKOREA MISSILES/PAJU (FEATURE, PIX, TV, GRAPHI