Border Stories: A Journey to Korea’s Joint Security Area
Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 09.14.07 | 12:01 PM ET
North Korea and South Korea meet at just one place, the Joint Security Area (JSA) at Panmunjom, about 40 miles north of Seoul. The demilitarized zone, the mine-riddled buffer between the two countries, doesn’t extend there. Instead, “on the demarcation line itself stand five huts,” writes the Telegraph’s Alex Bellos about a trip to the JSA. “In the middle one, which tourists are allowed to enter, the line bisects the middle of a shiny, wooden negotiating table. Meetings between the two nations still go on here. Once in the hut, you can walk round the table—thus stepping a few yards into North Korea.” Bellos provides a brief but insightful look at the JSA, with some telling details about the efforts of both sides to control the propaganda war tourists are inevitably sucked into.
Bellos writes:
“Does anybody have the jeans with the holes?” asked the tour guide. “Is anybody wearing slippers?” Those on the bus shook their heads. We were in South Korea, driving towards the frontier with North Korea—the most fortified border in the world.
Ripped jeans are banned from the trip, explained the guide, since we will be in photographable distance of the North. A picture of ragged trouserwear could be used as internal propaganda by the world’s most isolated state: look how poor the rest of the world is compared with us. They cannot even afford proper trousers.
Slippers are banned, Bellos writes, in case tourists have to run from a “hostile enemy act.”
Related on World Hum:
* Border Stories: Why Do Nations Build Walls?*
* Trains Cross Between North Korea and South Korea For First Time in 56 Years*
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Michael Yessis is the cofounder and coeditor-in-chief of World Hum.
