31

The "Real Enemy" of the Nation: ExhibitingNorth Korea at the Demilitarized Zone1

Roy Richard Grinker

The Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) is perhaps themost popular tourist attraction for visitors tosouth Korea,2 but south Koreans are them-

selves barred from the area. The DMZ draws hundredsof thousands of tourists each year, the vast majorityfrom the United States and Japan, including majorAmerican political figures and celebrities (e.g., in1989 the list of visitors included then Vice PresidentDan Quayle and the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders).Much of what is in the DMZ has been left untouchedsince the armistice in 1953; thus, in addition to ex-pansive military bases, the visitor sees decaying build-ings, roads, locomotives, and farmland. As a tourdestination, the DMZ has become a kind of "livingmuseum" of the Cold War (Cumings 1992) that, quiteexplicitly, represents the north Korean state as anembodiment of evil ("the real enemy," as one Ameri-can military officer expressed it to me), and the northKorean people as automatons who blindly follow thecult of "Kimilsungism." The DMZ is, like many ruins,a fragment that has come to stand for a particulartotalizing discourse on national division. It is here inthe DMZ, rather than anywhere else in Korea, thattourists expect to hear the complete story of Korea'stragic division. And, it is here that the differencesbetween the north and south are forcefully and ex-plicitly represented by the United States military andthe United Nations Command.3

The DMZ stands as an important exhibition forcritical analysis because its focus on difference (thedivided nation) rather than unity (the Korean nation)appears to oppose the prevailing tendency in southKorean discourse on north Korea, which attempts tominimize difference in order to emphasize unity. Overthe past forty years, since the Korean War and parti-tion, the two Koreas have indeed developed different

political, economic, and social systems. Yet, both thenorth and south Korean people and governments arededicated to the belief that they are a single nationthat must be reunified. Despite the many differencesbetween the two, Koreans commonly state that Kore-ans are one people, "one race" (kat'un tongp'o). Everysouth Korean presidential administration has sup-ported reunification as a sacred goal, south Koreanchurches have reunification prayer circles that rununbroken twenty-four hours a day, and the northKorean government has said that its people are willingto die in another civil war for the sake of unification.In a post-Cold War global society, in which the variousnations of the world are increasingly interconnected,politically and economically, the split between northand south Korea seems an anomaly. Little is knownabout how this remarkable rift, and a persistent visionand hope for unity, are written into the consciousnessof ordinary citizens—in part because there are fewplaces in south Korea, other than the DMZ, where thenorth is explicitly and publicly represented.

Although visits to the DMZ are usually permittedonly to non-Korean citizens and the Korean militarystationed there, south Koreans are well aware ofimages that are widely available in the media and inbooks. Certainly, the thousands of Korean militarypersonnel who serve in the DMZ understand its pur-pose, and all Koreans are acutely conscious that theDMZ marks the border between north and south.Because the ordinary citizen has no access to theDMZ, and no communications whatsoever with thenorth (including letters, telephones, telegrams, radio,and television), south Koreans are all the more recep-tive to propaganda and to the Cold War discourseframed by the military at the DMZ. In this situation,the DMZ, along with the absence of south Korean

Museum Anthropology 19(2): 31-40. Copyright © 1995, American Anthropological Association.

32 MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY VOLUME 19 NUMBER 2

public representations of the north, threatens to al-ienate Koreans from their national history, and fromthe reunification process, and to usurp their power torepresent themselves.

The DMZ poses a challenging classificatory prob-lem in the emerging anthropological literature onmuseum exhibitions (Karp and Lavine 1991) and,more specifically, "living museums" (Gable and Han-dler 1993; Kratz and Karp 1993). As a museum, theDMZ is difficult to classify because it has been con-structed by foreigners for foreigners rather than forcitizens, and because it exhibits the nation and na-tional division solely by the detour of the Other. TheDMZ also defies the conventional temporal characterof national museum representation. Steiner (this is-sue) has noted that national museums fall roughlyinto two types. The first, forward-looking, projects animage of a technologically advanced future (for ex-ample, the National Air and Space Museum, or, inKorea, the Taejon Exposition); the second, backward-looking, projects an image of a glorified past (forexample, the many national museums located at an-cient palaces in Korea). The DMZ defies such a clas-sification because it seems to be an anti-national,rather than national museum. National museums ex-ist because nations exist; the DMZ exists because thenation no longer exists. It looks neither to a GoldenAge (unless one harbors a nostalgia for the Cold War)nor to a bright future, but rather to an ongoing tensionbetween a series of oppositions, between "Kimil-sungism" and the free world, between communismand democracy, whose resolutions lie only in theirextinction. What we can say with certainty is that theDMZ could not exist without the concept of the na-tion, or more accurately, the divided nation.

As a "living museum" the DMZ's representation ofthe "real" justifies national division—and, therefore,the continued existence of the DMZ—by presentingtourists with those aspects of nations and states thatare seldom explicitly exhibited in national museums.The "real" Korea at the DMZ is not the idyllic past, orthe "distinctive flavor" of another culture, but fear,risk, danger, power, aggression, and enemies. Manyliving museums, from colonial Williamsburg in theUnited States (Gable and Handler 1993) to the Ko-rean Folk Village Oust outside Seoul in Kyonggi-do),highlight the pleasures of national histories and citi-zenship, and the DMZ is no exception. But the DMZreinforces national identity by the negative. Thepleasure of the tour lies in its reminder that visitorsare not north Korean or south Korean, and in its

implicit acknowledgement and legitimation of thepowers under which the visitors live and which pro-tect them from the evils of other countries. The DMZlinks war and patriotism, evil and good, violence andnationalism. It leads us to conclude that this exhibi-tion, like many exhibitions of "other" countries (seeKratz and Karp 1993:36), tells us more about thevisitors than about the visited.

One final difference to ponder: whereas the WaltDisney Company, and other creators of exhibitionsand living museums, acknowledge that their muse-ums are representations (Wines 1994), the DMZ ispresented as "reality" where visitors can see the "realenemy." The appeal of "reality" is so great that whenDisney recently proposed an American history themepark in northern Virginia, the idea was quickly criti-cized as synthetic history, a fantasyland of repre-sentations. Robert Stern, an architect who sits on theboard of the Walt Disney Company, defended thepark, saying:

You go to see where your congressman and senatordo their work, and in that sense your trip is anexperience of the actualities of government.... Butyou also spend time looking at monuments which ofcourse are representations. Then you go to museumsin which you see real things—paintings, sculp-tures—but they're not just for themselves but asrepresentations of the power and might and imagi-nation and whatever of American culture. (Quotedin Wines 1994:24)

Stern is only half right. A more important questionis whether American visitors to museums and livingmuseums are prepared to acknowledge that the con-cept "reality," as one finds it in the DMZ, is itself arepresentation.

The state and the peopleChoi Jang Jip writes that immediately following

national division in 1953, Korean nationalism "be-came transformed into a statism that privileged anti-communism over unification" (1993:23). Untilrecently, national security laws and anti-communiststatutes in south Korea inhibited free speech (andpress) about the north; south Korean governmentsbolstered their power by promoting a Cold War dis-course that vilified the north as the enemy and thusjustified a strong authoritarian state that censored theflow of information to its citizens. In part as a resultof south Korean government propaganda, the Koreanlanguage literature on national division was influ-

EXHIBITING NORTH KOREA 33

enced by the anti-communist notion that the state isthe sole independent variable in determining northKorean history.4 In south Korea, any suggestion thatit is the "people" of north Korea who create differencesbetween north and south might be considered ananti-national act because it legitimates the north as adistinct and separate country. Why talk about the"north Koreans," or exhibit them as a separate people,when they and south Koreans are culturally one andthe same? Political scientist Glenn Paige thus acceptsthat Korea was divided into two equally "matched"test groups that were then "subjected to differentkinds of political stimuli. .. because of its high degreeof social homogeneity, [Korea] offers the social scien-tist an instance of quasi-experimental conditions ona vast scale rarely observable outside the experimen-tal laboratory" (1970:152). The split between thepeople and the state has made it possible for southKoreans to develop a discourse about the north thatattributes agency and power only to the state andexplains differences between the people of the northand south as products of one man, Kim II Sung. SouthKoreans have been able to emphasize the unity of thepeople by stressing the differences between the states.As a result, people have been virtually erased fromsouth Korean discourse on the north, and the UnitedStates military and United Nations Command at theDMZ have become a central vehicle through whichthe media gets information on north Korea. For thisreason, nearly all images of the north that appear inthe south Korean media fit well into the Cold Wardiscourse about the evils of the north Korean state.

Media critics in the more liberal Korean newspa-pers complain that, even today, when one occasion-ally hears something about north Korean people, italmost always comes from defectors who are un-equivocally anti-north and wish to publicize theirloyalty to the south Korean state. These defectorsperpetuate the view that north Korean ideas andbehavior are wholly determined by the actions andideology of the Kim II Sung state (Yong Muk Choi1993:9). One famous example of the synecdoche inwhich north Korea is collapsed into the state is offeredby President Roh Tae Woo's decision, in April 1989,to pardon Kim Hyun Hee, the north Korean womanterrorist who was convicted of planting the bomb that,in 1987, killed 115 passengers of Korean Air Linesflight 858. Roh said that she was an innocent victimof a state that brainwashed its people, and that re-sponsibility rested with Kim II sung and Kim Jong il(see Hyun Hee Kim 1993:173).

The people of north Korea are also absent fromsouth Korean fiction. Novels, poems, and short storiesthat fall under the category pundan munhak (divisionliterature) do not explicitly represent north Korea orthe people of north Korea, but rather dwell on thetragic consequences of division for south Korean life.5

The absence of images and exhibits on the north andthe Korean war is remarkable for a country whose"paramount goal" (chisang kwachae) is the reunifica-tion (t'ong-il) of the nation. Nations often trace theirhistories and ideals persuasively through museums,exhibits, ruins, and sites of pilgrimage and festivalthat contain the fragments of past tragedies. But insouth Korea, visitors do not see any bombed or burnedbuildings, and except for some photographs, muse-ums show few visible fragments of the Korean War.6

Indeed, the south Korean government opened anexhibit specifically on the Korean War only in June1994, as part of a large museum devoted generally tothe long history of military conflicts that involvedKorea within or outside the peninsula. In 1989, thenPresident Roh Tae Woo had attempted to pass throughcongress a plan to build a large museum to the KoreanWar in Itaewon, but was temporarily prevented by anoutpouring of public opinion against its construction,expressed in various media, especially the more lib-eral newspapers and journals. A museum with a sec-tion devoted to the Korean War was eventuallyapproved, and completed on June 10, 1994, but theproject is still a very contentious issue.7

Most Koreans are ashamed of their civil war andnational division, and this shame extends to suchthings as north Korean terrorism and human rightsviolations. They still feel that, for all die differencesthat have come about over the past forty years, northKoreans and south Koreans are both Koreans—onepeople, one race (kat'un tongp'o, han kyorae). Thisshame was evident in the public reaction to the pro-posed Korean War Memorial, which people felt woulddemean the Korean heritage by glorifying war and themilitary. Moreover, nearly all south Koreans think oftheir country of citizenship not as a nation but onlyas one state (perhaps the only legitimate one) in anation that is still one. Division is thus an aberrationof more than "half of ten thousand years" (pan mannyori) of unity, as well as a non-Korean, imperialist,Cold War construction. Many Koreans would lookupon any exhibition of the processes and conse-quences of national division as an acknowledgmentthat the division is final. And, because ruins invokethe past, any display or memorializing of ruins would

34 MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY VOLUME 19 NUMBER 2

transform what many feel is only a temporary divisioninto a permanent one. In a sense that would be true,for in fact north and south Korean have not officiallyended their civil war, but only continue to recognizea 1953 armistice agreement to withdraw their mili-tary forces behind a Demilitarized Zone. As JonathanBoyarin puts it, in another context, "this past whichis not yet mastered is not over" (1994:33).

For Koreans, the past is still happening, and divi-sion is not an event that once happened, but is anongoing and creative process of construction. Yet, ina significant way, the DMZ is implicated in that proc-ess as an apparatus of production whose repre-sentational claims are powerfully made to hundredsof thousands of tourists each year at the border be-tween north and south.

"The scariest place on earth"The distance between one place and another often

depends on the ability to move between them. Formost south Koreans, north Korea seems far away eventhough it is only seventy kilometers from Seoul. A visitto the DMZ corrects that impression. When, in 1993,President Bill Clinton referred to the DMZ as "thescariest place on earth" {Korea Herald, July 11, 1993,sec. 3:1), he was perhaps referring to the thousandsof north Korean troops poised only one-and-a-halfhours by car or, as Koreans sometimes say, by tank,from Seoul.8 The foreigners who go to the DMZ, andthe many Koreans who travel to its entrance, and whoare well versed in the geography of Korea, are usuallyastonished by the proximity of the DMZ to downtownSeoul. The proximity evokes fear, and this adds to theexcitement of the tour and justifies the high prices(U.S. $55.00) and the long waiting-lists tourists mustendure in order to go to the DMZ. As travelers takethe short trip from Seoul, they pass under bridgesrigged to explode and block the road in the event ofan invasion by the north. Tour bus operators, readinga script provided by the state-run Korea Travel Bu-reau, remind them that, without the blockades, northKorean tanks could sweep into Seoul in a flash. As onenears P'anmunjom, just five kilometers south of the38th parallel, the buildings of Seoul's outskirts giveway to vast stretches of land, and the story of Korea'sdivision takes on a deadly serious tone.

The narrative of Korean history recited by tourleaders effectively groups north Korea with all pre-vious invaders of Korea. North Korea appears as thefinal invader, following some nine hundred previousinvasions led by the Chinese, Japanese, and others.North Koreans started the Korean War, we are told,

killing three million people and destroying Korea'sautonomy and integrity as a nation. We are remindedthat 2.2 million people (including several thousandKoreans) died in nine years of the Vietnam War,whereas three million people (mostly Koreans) losttheir lives in just three years of the Korean War. Sincethe armistice, the narrator goes on to explain, northKoreans have continued to murder Koreans fromnorth and south, including seventeen south Koreanministers and government officials as the result of anorth Korean bomb planted in Rangoon in 1983, and115 civilians killed in the 1987 terrorist bombing ofKorean Air Lines flight 858. At the end of the litanyof terrorist acts and human rights abuses committedby the north Korean government, the narrator reportsthat more than twenty-five percent of Seoul residentsare wolnam-min (literally "people who came to thesouth"), who must see their relatives again, and thatKorea will be reunified, no matter how long it takesor what sacrifices must be endured.

The DMZ extends far to the east and west ofP'anmunjom, where foreign tourists enter the zone.Korean citizens are prohibited from entering the DMZ(unless they obtain a special government pass that isseldom issued for fear that visitors will defect) andtravel instead to Paju, where they can look into theDMZ across the Imjin River. The DMZ is 240 kilome-ters long and four kilometers wide, divided in half bythe military demarcation line. Ironically, the arealabeled "demilitarized" is, in fact, inhabited by alarge number of military personnel and weapons.P'anmunjom, also called the United Nations Com-mand Security Force—Joint Security Area (UNCSF-JSA), contains expansive military bases, withhundreds of personnel from twenty nations, aboutsixty percent of whom are Korean soldiers. Militaryanalysts believe that most of the military forces andequipment on south and north Korean soil—some5,000 tanks, 1,200 jet fighters, and 1.7 million sol-diers, north and south combined—are located near oralong the DMZ (U.S. Department of Defense 1990;Byoung-Lo Philo Kim 1992:157). The soldiers sta-tioned in the JSA are reputed to be the toughest of allKorean and American military, having served in spe-cialty sections such as Delta Force and Ranger Units.Soldiers in the Quick Reaction Force, stationed closestto the truce line, are said to sleep in their fatigues andboots, and eat evening meals under infrared light sothat their eyes will need no readjustment in the eventof a north Korean attack. More than 30,000 U.S.military personnel are based throughout the rest ofsouth Korea.

EXHIBITING NORTH KOREA 35

With the exception of the JSA and two small vil-lages, Taesong-dong south of the military demarca-tion line, and Kijong-dong, north of the line, the DMZand its immediate surrounding area are unoccupied.About forty-seven families whose parents and grand-parents owned land in the DMZ before the KoreanWar live in Taescmg-dong (called Freedom Village bythe JSA staff) and are permitted to enter the zone tocultivate their farms of rice and ginseng. The Koreangovernment has placed some special restrictions onTaesong-dong residents: they must return to theirtown at sundown, where they have an 11:00 p.m.curfew; only those people who live in Taesong-dongfor 240 or more nights per year are permitted tocontinue living there; and women from Taes5hg-dongwho marry men from outside the village are prohib-ited from bringing their husbands there, though menwho marry outside the village may bring their wives.

According to JSA staff, although there are fifteento twenty workers who travel daily to do maintenancework in Kijong-dong, no one actually lives in its manytwo-, three-, and four-story buildings. The JSA staffrefer to the village as Propaganda Village because,until Kim II Sung's death in July 1994, there was aloudspeaker atop a large tower in the center of thevillage, which, after sunset, broadcast speeches byand about Kim II Sung. Because there are few peoplein the DMZ, it has become a sanctuary for endangeredspecies, like the Manchurian crane and other rarebirds.

P'anmunjom is divided by the military demarcationline. The north Korean government building, P'an-mungak, stands on one side of the line; on the otherside is the south Korean Freedom House, which servesboth as a lookout post for tourists and as the forwardadministrative offices of the Republic of Korea's RedCross. Between the two buildings are several confer-ence houses where negotiations were conducted be-tween north and south Korea, and between northKorea and the United Nations Command; they arenow frequently used for daily meetings of the jointobserver team. The truce line runs through the centerof each house, where conference tables are placed.Microphones are placed in the center of each confer-ence table, and the microphone wires run directlyalong the truce line.

Division and the politics of fear and risk9

Before touring the conference houses, Korean tourguides, who are not allowed into the DMZ, are re-placed by American military officers who lead thetours and distribute waivers that must be signed by

all tourists before entering the DMZ. This waiverprohibits them from litigation in the event that theyare wounded or killed in P'anmunjorn. The document,called "Visitors Declaration" (UNC REG 551-5), is longand contains passages that clearly express the dangerand risks of the DMZ:

The visit to the Joint Security Area at Panmunjomwill entail entry into a hostile area and possibility ofinjury or death as a direct result of enemy action.... Although incidents are not anticipated, the UnitedNations Command, the United States of America,and the Republic of Korea, cannot guarantee thesafety of visitors and may not be held accountablein the event of a hostile act. . . . Fraternization,including speaking or any association with person-nel from the Korean People's Army/Chinese People'sVolunteers (KPA/CPV) side, is strictly prohibited . .. Visitors will not point, make gestures, or expres-sions which could be used by the North Korean sideas propaganda material against the United NationsCommand. . . . If any incidents occur, remain calm,and follow instructions issued by security personnel.

All visitors are then shuttled into a hall for athirty-minute lecture on the history of the Demilita-rized Zone, where they are again told about thehistory of north Korea's aggression. The lectures,standardized for all tourists, trace the general politi-cal history of East Asia and the Korean War, but themain emphasis is on stories of north Korea's brutalityand aggression: the P'anmunjom axe murder of 1976,the shooting death of PFC Chang Myung Ki by northKoreans when he tried to help a Soviet defector crossto the south in 1984, the "unlawful" crossing of theborder by a female south Korean student, Im SuKyung, and the discovery of four tunnels constructedby the north Koreans between 1974 and 1989. Manyof the words and phrases used are provocative, suchas "no man's land," "the brainwashed and aggressivenorth Koreans," and "the enemy." This sort of languageis meant to alarm visitors and heighten the entertain-ment value of P'anmunjom; it is similar to the lan-guage used in published tour guides and articles ontravel to Korea. For example, a travel article publishedin Modern Maturity, the main organ of the AmericanAssociation for Retired Persons, starts: The KoreanDMZ has its allure—and its chills—for risk-takingtourists out to experience a 'tingle of reality"* (Barnard1989:63).

After the lecture on one tour, we were taken to abridge that connects the two sides of the DMZ, calledby the JSA the "Bridge of No Return." It has served as

36 MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY VOLUME 19 NUMBER 2

a primary entryway (or exit) for former prisonersof war, political prisoners, and defectors in variousUnited Nations transfers, such as Operation BigSwitch and Operation Comeback. Looking out fromthe bridge across the DMZ and toward the hills andmountains of north Korea, tourists witness one aspectof the opposition between north and south: the sym-bolic violence of dueling representation. From thesouth Korean side, tourists can see large whitewooden Korean characters facing the posts of Koreanand United Nations military personnel. The slog- ansread: panmikuguk ("Anti-Americanism will savethe nation!"), namchoson-un mikuk shikminji ('Thesouth is an American colony!"), and ryonbangkuk-kach'angsol ("Build a confederation!"). Tourists are nottold that south Koreans also taunt the north. BruceCumings, who has seen the DMZ from the side of thenorth, tells of a south Korean billboard, placed in viewof the north Korean military, depicting a half-cladwoman standing next to a new Hyundai automobile(1992:226).

The power of the north-south division is so strong,and the role of the cardinal directions to constitutenotions of difference in the "geographic imagination"is so taken for granted (Duncan and Ley 1993:13),that, as one looks out from the bridge, or from anypoint in the DMZ, the impression is always that oneis looking north. Although, just to the east of thebridge, the truce line running east-west takes a morethan ninety-degree turn to the south as it proceedsthrough P'anmunjom's conference houses, visitorsperceive that eastern portion of the DMZ to be north.The gaze to the north is, perhaps, meant to empowerand delight viewers because they can feel secure whilelooking into a forbidden place. But empowerment inthe DMZ is certainly illusory. I am reminded here ofLouis Marin's essay on the view from atop the SearsTower of Chicago (1993:400-2), in which he remarksthat, while the tower leads the spectator to assume adominating position from which he can cast a collect-ing and totalizing gaze, he is constrained to see thecity only from the cardinal directions, and to see thetower itself as constituted only by an above and abelow. In the imaginary mastery, or panopticon, of theobservation deck, the spectator remains the object ofanother gaze. The tourist at the DMZ comes to believethat he is the agent of the gaze, that he is alwayslooking north, and that there is no one on the otherside looking back. As in many societies, the dominantwant to believe that they can see others but that theothers cannot see them (see hooks 1992:340).

Back at the center of P'anmunjom, the officer shat-ters that vision and by doing so actually creates thedesire to escape the gaze. On one tour, he led us tothe central conference house and pointed to the truceline, about fifteen feet in front of him, and said, Thereare north Koreans looking at you now." As the viewersnow realized they were also the viewed, the officercontinued: "You cross that line and there's nothing Ican do for you. You'll have to face them. You comehere at your own risk. You cross that line and you'regone." After the tour, at a lunch at Camp Boniface, theUnited Nations base camp in the DMZ, I was seatedwith two Italian priests who reflected on the soldier'swords and remarked on how easy it would be to defect(escape?) to the north. Remarkably, we discoveredthat we had friends in common, Italian priests I hadmet while doing fieldwork in central Africa. Onepriest referred to our friends still living in the Iruriforest by saying that their work as missionaries is allabout going into isolated and distant places whereothers refuse to go. Why not go to north Korea? Weall agreed that the tour leader had at once boththreatened us not to go to north Korea, and dared usto do so. If we stepped across the line, we did so atour own risk.

Our "own risk"? The phrase conveys an importantmessage about the power of the military, and thepower of borders, over citizens. It exerts the soldier'sauthority, and that of the establishment he represents,by defining its parameters. We are encouraged toacknowledge the dangers of north Korea, and the risksinvolved in crossing borders, and especially to appre-ciate the powers that currently protect us. But toassert the possibilities of the soldier's power to protectis also to assert its limits. By assuming that we couldstep over, the soldier recognizes the power of theindividual to transgress the boundary, clearly placingresponsibility on us (You cross that line. You'll have toface them. You come here). Once we crossed over,however, we would find ourselves in another realmof state power where our bodies would no longer beprotected. Entering into a realm in which we wouldbe "gone" means more than a national death; it meansexchanging a familiar form of control over our bodiesfor one that is completely unknown. And, it is un-known for the very reason that the state has the powerto bar communications between people, states, andnations: the north is like a black hole, a place whereone could disappear forever.10

Part of the DMZ's appeal lies in its mixture of fearand the mastery of fear, like a frightening amusement

EXHIBITING NORTH KOREA 37

park ride; one Japanese woman said, They wouldn'tbring us here if it were too dangerous, would they?"What is the risk of coming to the DMZ? The chief risk,as articulated by the American tour guide, is thatsomeone will "cross over." Thus, the risk lies not infear of being shot or abducted but in the fantasy anddesire to cross over, to see what lies behind the line,and to witness the consequences. The excitement oftraveling to the DMZ is achieved through the dual actof fantasizing about, and restraining oneself from,defection. The pleasure of the fantasy of defectionsatisfies the desire to test the limits of freedom andmilitary authority; the act of not defecting is pleasur-able to the extent that one exercises mastery overtemptation. In both confrontations, the tourist has thepleasure of exercising resistance—against authorityin one case, and against desire in the other.

Fear is perhaps most explicitly created by the mili-tary tour guides at the tunnels. Tours given in 1993would normally have led to the runnels, where athirty-man Tunnel Neutralization Team currently em-ploys seismic equipment to determine if the northKoreans are continuing to dig and blast. Unfortu-nately, for reasons I was not able to discover, thetunnels were closed during my visits. So far, fourtunnels have been discovered, in 1974, 1975, 1978,and 1989. The U.S. military estimates that tunnelstwo, three, and four were wide enough to deploy30,000 soldiers per hour (Breen 1993:7). Althoughwe are told that no explosions have been detected inrecent years, even the absence of explosion createsfear. Does this absence mean that the north Koreanshave stopped tunneling, or is all the tunneling com-plete? In a symbolic gesture, one of the tour guidesmade a serpentine gesture with his right hand, sug-gesting that the north Koreans are not just automa-tons blindly participating in the cult of Kim II Sungbut are, like vermin in our homes, invisible intruders.The north Koreans could be under our feet at that verymoment.

The tour of the DMZ ends with a visit to the giftshop, where tourists can buy golf balls imprinted withthe word "Panmunjom," sunglasses, hats, T-shirtsprinted with the JSA-UN insignia and the U.S. militaryslogan "In Front of Them All," and nearly anythingelse one might find at a duty-free store. If there issolemnity here, it is hard to find, for in this Disney-likelandscape, the DMZ appears to capitalize on the en-tertainment value of the suffering of the Korean peo-ple. Travel writers have rightly expressed theirconfusion at the celebratory tone of the DMZ tour(Becker 1989; Lee 1992; Potts 1992; Shapiro 1990).

At the DMZ, the atrocities and tragedies of the KoreanWar seem forgotten, but it is more likely that they aresimply not known. Most visitors have little conceptionof what Cumings (1992) has called the "UnknownWar," and even those who participated in the KoreanWar, or any war for that matter, may suffer an amnesiaof sorts, or a selective memory that focuses on themachinery of war rather than on its evident conse-quences.

ConclusionThe DMZ patterns national division through a se-

ries of interrelated oppositions. At the DMZ, the op-positions are quite explicitly of a Cold War character,offering a critique of totalitarianism so general andtotalizing that it might just as well be directed atStalin or Hitler. Like any museum, the DMZ choosesits representational forms to make particular state-ments about themselves and "Others" by selectivelydrawing into its fold those representations that canbe fitted into a preconceived ideology. Visitors to theDMZ need not fear that the Cold War, and the oppo-sition between communism and democracy, haveended; the DMZ is testimony to its continued exist-ence. North Korea becomes one of the last forbiddenplaces, one of the last vestiges of communism. TheDMZ permits visitors to glimpse the north, to reenterthe Cold War and feel its excitement. If visitors wereallowed to go to north Korea, the DMZ would havelittle appeal. As Ann Anagnost says of exhibitions, "themode of display which reveals while it veils andwithholds manufactures desire" (1993:591). Desireat the DMZ emerges partly from the tension betweenthe visible and the invisible, but partly also from thedangers associated with the invisible. It involves thenotion of what geographer Stacy Warren calls a "land-scape of leisure," in which the elements of fantasyserve as "conduits for examining from a 'safe' perspec-tive the real social conditions that appear in fantasti-cal guise" (1993:181). In creating and fulfillingdesire, the DMZ provides all the pleasures of risk, fear,and safety that one might find in an amusementpark.11

One must remember that it is the American mili-tary, not the Korean people (or even the Koreanmilitary), that represents Korean history to foreignvisitors,12 a good many of whom are presidents, vicepresidents, secretaries of state, senators, and con-gressmen—people who shape and implement foreignpolicies that effect directly the present and future ofKorean history. The DMZ enacts the Cold War as aform of entertainment that, through a series of related

38 MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY VOLUME 19 NUMBER 2

oppositions, evokes the pleasures of Western hegem-ony and threatens to undermine Korean effortstoward an autonomous subjecthood, and perhapsalso reunification, the "paramount goal" (chisangkwachae) of all Koreans. In many ways it is in theinterests of the DMZ, as an entertainment industry,and as an employer of thousands of military, to pre-serve itself: after all, 30,000 to 40,000 U.S. militarypersonnel are stationed in Korea at a time whengovernments throughout the world are dramaticallyreducing the size of their military and their fundingof the defense industry. We cannot expect that theUnited States military will promote peace and unifi-cation in Korea without some ambivalence. Also, ofcourse, the DMZ is a good source of income for theKorean government whose official travel bureau hasthe monopoly on the DMZ tours. We can only guesshow many tourists come to Korea, and spend theirmoney on hotels, food, and souvenirs, primarily be-cause they want to visit the DMZ.

It might be argued that the DMZ and its discourseon difference will disappear after reunification, sincethe DMZ is, as I suggested earlier, an anti-nationalmuseum—i.e., it exists because the nation is notwhole, and it should disappear after reunification. Yetthe DMZ may persist as the imagined border betweengood and evil. One Korean political scientist has pro-posed that the DMZ (the space of which amounts toabout one half of one percent of the territory of northand south Korea combined) be developed into an"ecological balance zone" or "global park" (Ha 1993:426), an unpolluted sanctuary that can serve as amodel of environmental protection for the rest of theworld. And Kwak Young Hoon, an architect who hasreceived the endorsement of Yi Hong Koo, PrimeMinister and former Minister of Unification, has pro-posed an elaborate "Unipeace City" (Clifford 1990:32)consisting of a conurbation of four towns—two to thesouth of the DMZ, one to the north, and one betweenthe DMZ and the Imjin River, near what is now P'an-munjom.13 One Korean executive advocated a themepark, with trains and rides reminiscent of Disney-land.14 In the end, the DMZ may prove that nothingcan truly be destroyed unless its ruins are destroyedtoo. •:•

1 Research in Korea during 1993 was supported by a grantfrom the Social Science Research Council/American

Council of Learned Societies Joint Committee on KoreanStudies.

2. To avoid the implication or assumption that the twoKoreas are separate and legitimate nations, I use thelower case to write the words "north" and "south."

3. I do not know the history of how the DMZ became atourist attraction, and, so far as I am aware, no publishedmaterials in the United States or south Korea detail thathistory.

4. Scholars are beginning to recognize that the separationbetween state and society is a local model to be explainedrather than simply appropriated at face value as a validanalytical distinction (see Koo 1993).

5. Korean fiction seldom contains imaginative or specula-tive representations of north Koreans. Two notable ex-ceptions are Yi Ho Ch'ol's "P'anmunjom" (1988/1961)and Choi 11 Nam's "KumKil kwa Malgil" (1989). A veryrecent multi-volume novel, Kim II Sung, by Yi Han Koo,which I have not yet seen, apparently includes somefictional accounts of everyday life in north Korea. In thepast few years, however, carefully selected radio andtelevision broadcasts from north Korea have been airedin south Korea CNamPukui ch'ang" (North-South Win-dow) and "T'ongil chonmangdae," (Observatory of Unifi-cation) giving south Koreans a chance to glimpse someof the official images of north Korean citizens crafted bynorth Korea's state-run media. North Korean defectorsappear on radio and television to answer questions aboutnorth Korea (for example, the MBC radio program "Namkwa Puk" (south and north) hosted by Kim Yong; theshow had a large audience but it was unexpectedlycanceled early in 1994.

6. Victims of the Korean War are remembered on MemorialDay (Hyonch'ung-il, June 6) when many Koreans paytheir respects at the national cemetery, Tongchak-dongkuknip myoji. In addition, students have begun in recentyears to eat a ritual meal, 6.25 umshik mokki, on theanniversary of the start of the war, consisting of grains,kkongboripap and kaeddok, that are usually eaten only inperiods of severe food shortage.

7. Since the 1992 election of a new president, Kim YoungSam, democratization in south Korea has led to a greaterdiversity in public images of the north. One example isthe exhibit mounted by a Seoul department store in July1993, the first of its kind, called Pukhan Saenghwal(North Korean Lifestyle) in which some 2,000 northKorean everyday objects, such as household goods, bat-teries, jewelry, toys, and clothing, were displayed. Morethan 200,000 Koreans attended the exhibit within threeweeks of its opening (Grinker 1995).

8. U.S. News & World Report entitled its June 20,1994, coverstory on north Korea, The Most Dangerous Place onEarth."

9. There is an extensive literature on the subject of risk andrisk recreation participation in the disciplines of psychol-ogy, social psychology, and leisure studies that use quan-titative measures to determine the relationships betweenconcepts such as "risk," "engagement," and "motivation."See, for example, Ewert 1994; Mclntyre 1992; and Ewertand Hollenhorst 1989. These studies, however, are be-yond the scope of this essay.

10. Visitors to north Korea, and defectors to south Koreafrequently refer to the "darkness" of the unorthern side";see, example, Shin Sang Ok's (1988) Chokuk-un chZmSlri(My Country Far Beyond those Skies).

11. Yi ho Ch'61 (1988 [1961]), in a short story entitled"P'anmunjo'm," represents P'anmunjS'm by the metaphor

EXHIBITING NORTH KOREA 39

of an infection that is resistant to forms of treatment; itsowner decides to ignore the infection, but then later, asthe infection grows larger, exhibits it as a fascinatinganomaly: " . . . This infection came to carry its absolutemaximum weight as days passed, and even became atourist attraction." In a series of other passages, Yi pointsout that, jSm, the final syllable of the word P'anmunjom,can be taken to mean "store," or "market," thus suggestingthat P'anmunjSm is a commercial enterprise.

12. See Chung-Moo Choi (1993) for a persuasive argumentthat colonial and neocolonial powers have alienated Ko-reans from their own history and usurped their power torepresent themselves.

13. Fortified areas along the shore would be turned intobeach resorts, and the cities, surrounded by parks andforest, would become models of the harmonious integra-tion of architecture and ecology. Some of my informantsthought the DMZ should be nationalized in a unifiedKorea to prevent competition and litigation among peo-ple who make land claims.

14. Interestingly, similar ideas have been proposed in Ger-many, where, as one example, an entrepreneur namedFrank Georgi has received financial backing for an EastGerman theme park. Visitors would have to remain in thepark for a full day and would be prevented from leavingby a high wall. Restaurants would have poor food, thewaiters would be surly, and the only rental cars availablewould be Trevantes and Volgas. People who worked forthe park would circulate to find unhappy visitors whowanted to leave early, and would help them escape. Ifcaught, visitors would be imprisoned for up to two hours(Newman 1994: 33; National Public Radio, "MorningEdition," November 16, 1994).

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ROY RICHARD GRINKER is Assistant Professor ofAnthropology at George Washington University.