One of the paradoxes about a place like South Korea is its combination of great modernity with what your average Westerner has traditionally described as “Oriental inscrutability”, a term according to which people like the Japanese, the Koreans and especially the Chinese are considered to be comparatively uncommunicative, and indeed my own sojourns, first in Taiwan (with brief hops over to Hong Kong) and then in Korea, showed that in societies where communication was usually vertical, the more necessarily horizontal transmission of verbal information between peers is shockingly inefficient. An anglophone going to places like this experiences isolation, being surrounded by a wall of silence, and strange encounters, due to being an object of fascination and fantasy at the same time.

Korea’s relationships with both its direct geographical neighbours and countries farther abroad seem very ambivalent, but given the “isolationist” stance taken for so long (Korea was long known as the “Hermit Kingdom”), the “Confucianist” attitude imported from China long ago, plus the suffering inflicted not only by the latter but also marauding north Asian tribes in antiquity and of course the Japanese in more modern times, perhaps it is hardly surprising that an otherwise friendly and hospitable people should become rather taciturn, and possibly unco-operative, when confronted with strange, smelly foreigners for the first time, a reticence which is often misinterpreted. But this behaviour is exactly what you see anywhere, not just in Korea; the oldest find foreigners the hardest to handle, whereas the youngest find it easiest to adapt. It’s really no different in my own England.

Koreans are notorious among foreigners for styles of behaviour which are both ostensibly and factually rude. This is attributable primarily to the Korean historical experience, which has been horrendous. Korea has mainland China to the north and west and Japan to the east, and in ancient times had repeated invasions from marauding northern tribes (who, incidentally, also gave the Chinese quite a run for their money). That anything remotely and identifiably “Korean” should survive over the last 5,000 years is no small miracle. Their resilience allowed them to recover from Chinese domination, Japanese occupation and then their own uncivil war of global involvement (which has yet to be resolved, see below) and economic crises to produce a high-tech, high-income capitalistic state.

The innate stubbornness inherited from their forbears has proven to be an essential survival tool, but it also manifests itself as a great social and diplomatic hindrance. For example, being deeply inculcated with the concept of “face” and being also about ten times more “Confucian” than even the Chinese means that a resolution of the “Korean Problem” will remain difficult. To the southerners, the North Korean regime has always represented the worst aspects of Communism, despite the fact that their UN (read: US) “defenders” have themselves often committed atrocious violations against their human rights (example: Noh Gun Ri); on the other side, Kim Il-sung led the Communist North into a ruinous war, with the connivance of China, effectively against the rest of the world, a war which came to a grinding halt when the Armistice was signed and which, technically if not in fact, is really still in progress. Kim was able to present himself as the “Great Leader” who fought the American invader and won (but in the strange world of Communist lore, inconvenient truths are simply ignored). Neither side is willing to back away from its oppositional stance regarding the other for fear of “losing face”. Even the Chinese, who maintained NK as a convenient “buffer zone” against the naughty Yank for so long, have awoken suddenly to the presence of a nasty little nuclear state emerging on their own doorstep, the unthinkable sequelae of which might be the ultimate destruction of 5,000 years of China in about, oh, five minutes?

And here, perhaps, we see the most perverse twist in Korea’s tortured history. China fomented unrest across north- and south-east Asia for decades and left a trail of death and destruction which still haunts the area today. Vietnam, for example, remains a Communist country although it is trying, as the Chinese themselves are, to “modernise”, although one might expect eventual regime collapse as people become more affluent and restive. As China now becomes both a major economic producer and consumer, it will find that it is its economic advantage which will create or destroy a peaceful status quo in East Asia. China could not continue to be a Communist state, and under Chairman Deng Xiaoping, the slow process of modernisation began.

North Korea is now increasingly isolated, surrounded by wealthy and powerful neighbours, and unable to depend for assistance on former Communist allies, who (apart from China, and perhaps Vietnam and Cuba) have essentially disappeared. During the Cold War it was able to tap the likes of the Soviet Union for things like fuel, but since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet empire, even China felt the chill winds of change and realised that it was inevitable. For North Korea, those winds are blowing very chilly indeed.

During many conversations over the last couple of years with the new generation of well-educated, young modern South Koreans, consciousness of what they term the “historical imperative” of reunification is evident, but the practical obstacles are an order of magnitude greater than they were in the only similar case, which was the reunification of Germany. Chancellor Willy Brandt’s policy of “Ostpolitik” led to the Fat Hen pouring large piles of Deutschmarks into the East, with the result that when the Wall was torn down, it was in fact the most affluent of the Eastern European economies. Although problems remain in East Germany, the lesson for South Korea is that reunification will involve massive amounts of everything, especially money. With an essentially collapsed economy, poor agriculture, power shortages and long-term mass malnutrition, NK looks bad and may well go out with a bang. The South will be the primary donor, and it will be bled dry.

Perhaps the Chinese have started to realise that their idea of having a like-minded ally state to buffer them from the naughty Americans was wrong all along; after all, the American presence on the peninsula is basically in response to the North – remove the North, establish friendly relations with the new unified government, and with the new stability the need for US personnel, at least in Korea, would evaporate. Of course, the Chinese are not stupid and I am sure that they can see this, too. Even the South Koreans would be happy to wave goodbye to the naughty Yanks forever. Instead, and for the foreseeable future, they have a former ally who is a parasite with a dynastic ruling system, something not tolerated in other Communist countries, who in most cases liberated themselves from precisely such rulers by force.

Anyway, the point of this article is that if the Koreans seem to the visitor to be less than forthcoming on a number of issues, perhaps it is not nearly surprising. Having been in a succession of historical situations in which their only real options may have been either to fall back on their traditional loyalties or face annihilation, they chose loyalty, and that is why they are still here. Their continual loyalty to one another has bred a kind of heightened insularity of attitude, which they find tough to break out of – after all, it’s kept them going for five thousand years, so if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. The "in-group" is the most important entity of Korean society and Koreans network fanatically, for they depend upon their contacts in times of adversity, such as the loss of their job or a generally bad economic situation.

The visitor, then, in East Asia generally but in Korea in particular, needs to exercise continuous forbearance. The Koreans still need time to understand, for example, that not all white-skinned “weigugin” are actually Americans – they may be Russians, French, Italians, even English teachers from England. You meet them all here in Changwon! ^_^

It is the battering of the cruel centuries which creates the walls behind which peoples such as the Koreans feel most secure, which exist in their minds and are therefore so much harder to tear down, and these will only crumble at last when they feel as secure on the outside as they do on the inside. Perhaps this is something that the current US administration in particular must realise.