SEOUL - The road that leads to the Dragon
Moors, an alpine wetland, is a rutted two-track
lane that goes past a rainbow-trout farm fed by a
rushing cold-water creek. The dirt road winds its
way up the forested valley and, judging from a
tour map provided by Inje county and a
store-bought driving atlas, it is accessible to
the general public.
The road gets narrower
and is lined with brush. A rock bashes the
undercarriage of the car and the driver curses
viciously in both English and Korean, and then a
weathered sign appears. "No entrance," it reads,
and states that if one wants to visit the area,
one must receive official permission.
Entering without permission could lead to
a 200,000 won (US$212) fine. You wouldn't know it
from the maps, but the
Dragon
Moor is within the Mintongseon, or the
Civilian Control Zone of the Demilitarized Zone
(DMZ) between North and South Korea.
The
DMZ is the world's most heavily fortified border,
with 1.2 million land mines on the South Korean
side and thousands of soldiers facing each other
across mountain valleys. The DMZ is composed of
multiple parallel lines; some are invisible, and
others are chain-link fences crowned with
concertina wire. The boundaries are real, but they
are left unmarked on maps produced in South Korea.
On a roadmap produced by the Ministry of
Construction and Transportation, it appears that
one could hop in a car and cruise up Highway 1 to
Gaeseong in North Korea and visit the joint
North-South factory complex. Try it and the
soldiers at the army checkpoint before the Imjin
River would laugh as they turned you back south.
Similar maps were distributed by the Korea
National Tourism Organization during the World
Cup. On these maps, the DMZ doesn't exist, and
Korea is not a divided country.
A
semi-honest map is produced by the Yanggu county
government. The DMZ is marked in bold red letters
on a perforated line. There is a parallel shaded
area to represent some kind of restricted space.
Dutayeon, a scenic waterfall within the Civilian
Control Zone, appears to be just another tourist
site. It is open to travelers, but one must be
accompanied by an official tour guide after
signing documents and producing identification.
The road to the waterfall is strewn with
barbed wire, tagged with triangular land-mine
signs. At the entrance checkpoint, all cameras
must be surrendered to the soldiers for security
and safekeeping; however, this tends not to stop
crafty South Korean tourists with digital-camera
cellular phones.
The maps of two counties
that abut the DMZ, Hwacheon and Cheorwon, are
especially deceitful in their misrepresentation of
the DMZ boundary lines. The DMZ don't exist on
these Beetle Maps, and it all looks like open
country. The maps tend to flaunt their proximity
to historical sites within the DMZ, yet those same
sites are as inaccessible to the average visitor
as the mountain villas of North Korean dictator
Kim Jong-il. If one had the notion to cruise up to
the Sanmyeong Reservoir and watch the migrations
of white-naped cranes, one would hit a dead end at
a military barricade.
The purposeful
obfuscation isn't limited to the DMZ region. Ask
any expatriates living in South Korea what they
would do if a second Korean War broke out, and
most answer that they would rush to the nearest US
military base - if they could find one. US
military bases don't exist on the vast majority of
Korean maps, yet they occupy extremely significant
portions of major cities.
The
highest-profile base is the Yongsan Garrison, a
walled compound ringed with barbed wire and rimmed
with riot police. Home to about 7,000 American
soldiers, the base sits on 265 hectares in the
middle of Seoul. It is a patch of land redolent of
foreign military domination starting with Chinese
forces of the Qing Dynasty, then Japanese colonial
soldiers, and the US troops since the end of the
Korean War.
The nearby neighborhood of
Itaewon is well populated with US military
personnel and associated civilians, and at a
tourist kiosk near the fire station, one can pick
up a free map of the Yongsan area. It is extremely
detailed and useful, but the location of the US
military bases is left as a bizarre empty space
with no remarks. Likewise, other maps, such as
Escort Seoul and official government maps, show
Yongsan as dead space. It might be a shameful
insult to Koreans to have thousands of foreign
troops stationed in the capital, but it is an
equal insult to the intelligence of thousands of
visitors who stare at blank spots on maps and
wonder where they are.
This national
psychology of ignoring uncomfortable landmarks in
South Korea finds a perfect echo in the unfinished
and vacant Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang, a
105-floor monolithic tower that is visible for all
tourists to see. It is a failed enterprise, and
North Korean tour guides deny its existence.
Naturally, it is omitted from the city maps.
An enormous number of maps were produced
for the 2005 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation
(APEC) conference in Busan, many of them of good
quality, even listing obscure tourist sites and
back-alley markets. Camp Hialeah, in the middle of
Busan and home to 2,500 US service members, wasn't
denoted. It was just another blank spot. Likewise
for Daegu, the fourth-largest city and the home of
Camps Walker, George and Henry that sit on more
than 80 hectares in the metro limits. If you are
driving on some of the Daegu highways, a handful
of road signs point the way to Camp Walker. The
extremely detailed map provided free from Daegu
Metro doesn't list these locations.
To be
fair, South Korean military bases are not listed
on maps either. Along the Seohwa River that flows
out of the DMZ, unmarked army camps nearly
outnumber farms. Even notable institutions such as
the South Korean Naval Academy, a scenic campus in
Jinhae that opens once a year to the public during
the local cherry-blossom festival, is not listed
in most atlases. A map produced by the Jinhae
government marks it on a peninsula that appears
free and accessible, looking like a nice place to
have a seaside picnic. However, the peninsula is a
walled military compound that is also neighbor to
a small US naval base. Its location is hardly a
military secret. A North Korean spy could simply
visit the academy's website and get a good idea of
its location and facilities.
The
'national security' mantra Ask anyone why
these facilities go unlisted and you get the same
answer - "national security". So the release of
Google Earth, free satellite imaging software,
caused some consternation for South Korean
government officials. It was deemed a threat to
national security, since it could display military
facilities of the South Koreans, Americans, and
the North Koreans, too. South Korean officials
contacted US authorities to grouse about the
situation, but nothing came of it, since Google is
a private entity. It was more of a matter of
insecurity, for it was the first time South Korean
officials could not control the true
representation of the Korean landscape to the
public.
The national-security mantra
became a moot point long before the advent of
Google Earth. Pyongyang has had the last 50 years
to pinpoint every strategic locale in South Korea.
With basic technology, numerous infiltrations,
both known and unknown, along with North Korea's
fifth columns, they know the landmarks they need
to know, and they won't be resorting to tourist
maps or travel atlases or freeware in the event of
a preemptive strike.
Maps and the
realities and non-realities they reflect are
regularly used to further the official South
Korean agenda. In the dispute over the naming of
the body of water between Japan and Korea as
either the Sea of Japan or the East Sea, numerous
maps have been trotted out to support various
claims. Last year, an 18th-century English map
that purported to replicate Marco Polo's ambiguous
travels marked the disputed sea as the "Eastern
Sea", and thus "proved" Korean claims.
In
the similar dispute of the Liancourt Rocks (Tokdo
of Korea or Takeshima Island of Japan), a
19th-century French map labeling Tokdo as Korean
territory was used as tangible evidence to defy
Japanese claims. The map sold for $9,460 at a
Seoul auction. Two other Japanese-drawn maps were
produced, one from 1785 that labeled the rocky
isles as Korean territory and bore the Chinese
ideogram for "east" in naming the contested sea.
The other 16th-century Japanese military map
marked the isles as Korean turf.
In 2004,
ancient maps were dusted off when China set its
eyes on the Manchurian borderlands of Jiandao to
list the capital cities of the ancient Goguryeo
Kingdom as a UNESCO (United Nations Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization) World
Heritage site. Korean scholars produced European
maps of the Gando region from the late 1700s
marking it as Korean territory, along with a
couple of 19th-century maps of German and Russian
origin. South Korea still doesn't have a
national atlas, although one is supposedly going
to be published late next year. It is promised to
include a huge amount of geographical information.
One would hope that it will include the DMZ, one
of the most significant land boundaries in the
world.
By redrawing maps, the history of a
nation is altered. Omitting uncomfortable
landmarks is like excising an embarrassing passage
of a history textbook. The maps produced in South
Korea are partially helpful for understanding the
lay of the land, but are much better used to
understand the geography of the Korean psyche.
James Card is a freelance writer
in South Korea. He can be contacted at
www.jamescard.net.
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