YEONPYEONG ISLAND, South Korea ― Just down the hill from a South Korean Air Force helipad here sits the air base’s barber shop, encased in glass. The front wall is floor-to-ceiling windows displaying shattered toilets in the men’s room and a gaping hole in the ceiling, wires and rebar still dangling.
This barber shop was one of about 30 buildings damaged or destroyed in a North Korean rocket attack in November 2010. Now it’s a museum of sorts.
You might think South Korea is keeping this and other carefully preserved attack sites to help convince visiting world leaders of North Korea’s perfidy. But no, the primary audience is actually South Koreans ― young people, roughly one-quarter of the population, who regard the North Korea conflict as an irrelevant artifact of the past.
In fact, said Park Ji-eun , an undergraduate at Yonsei University in Seoul, “people of our generation are quite indifferent. We’re just not affected by it.”
Han Ji-yoon, another undergraduate, differed with her colleague only slightly.
“I think it’s that we have issue fatigue. People don’t care because we’ve had this issue all our lives, and there are no significant solutions coming from our government.”
South Korea has a new problem. Since the end of the Korean War almost 60 years ago, all eyes here have been fixated on the North, home to a hostile, belligerent, nuclear-armed nation that has never accepted the South’s right to exist. For decades, it has repeatedly demonstrated that with threats, assassinations and attacks.
But in the meantime, South Korea has grown into a prosperous, successful First World state whose largest exports are semiconductors, cell phones and automobiles. The average per-capita income is about $32,000 ― and rising. So now South Korea’s third generation since the Korean War “is not really interested any longer,” a senior official in the Unification Ministry told me. (Like so many Korean officials, he declined to be further identified.) “They have their IT devices, cars and comfortable lives. We have to inspire them” to care.
Five university students sat at a conference table to discuss North Korea and related issues with me. Every one of them casually placed a smart phone on the table. Two pulled ear buds out as they entered the room.
Most young South Koreans “don’t want reunification” with the North, said Choi Jisu, a junior studying Korea’s relationship with India. “We think of them as a different people in a different country. We don’t really share anything with them anymore.”
So, the young say, just ignore North Korea so we can get on with our lives.
That widespread attitude has given the military and government a new mission. At another military base, this one just outside Seoul, the navy carefully built a display of the Cheonan, a South Korean warship that a North Korean submarine torpedoed and sank in March 2010. The ruins now stand on iron legs 20 feet off the ground. The ship’s two halves, shorn apart by the torpedo, are separated, displaying the tangled innards.
“This is to raise the awareness for the Korean people of the security issues,” explained 2nd Lt. Jang Eun-ji. Another officer said the primary audience is “thousands of students and young soldiers” bused here to see the ruins.
South Korea has universal military conscription for young men, and it’s highly unpopular.
“I don’t want to go,” 20-year-old Kang Il-chan told me in a desperate tone. He’s about to be drafted. “Most people my age don’t care about North Korea and unification, and I don’t either.”
Here on the island, Navy Lt. Park I-sung said: “We have to instill the proper mentality” in new recruits. “Our young just aren’t aware of the North and South Korea situation.” So here, too, the military base’s spokesman said, “we bring many young soldiers here. We make them understand the reality that North Korea really is the enemy. Most of them didn’t know that, and they are surprised.”
Around this island, every building damaged during the attack is still marked with a large red flag. Some people who lost their homes are living in prefab houses so their former homes can be put on display for the young.
Still, when North Korea issued another of its bellicose threats last month, claiming it would soon take “special actions” to reduce South Korea’s government to ashes, one cheerful 27-year-old acknowledged that she did happen to notice.
“I put it on my Facebook so my friends could see,” she said with a blithesome smile.
By Joel Brinkley
Joel Brinkley, a professor of journalism at Stanford University, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning former foreign correspondent for the New York Times. ― Ed.
(Tribune Media Services)