The "Real Enemy" of the Nation: Exhibiting North Korea at the Demilitarized Zone

The Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) is perhaps the most popular tourist attraction for visitors to south Korea, but south Koreans are themselves barred from the area. The DMZ draws hundreds of thousands of tourists each year, the vast majority from the United States and Japan, including major American political figures and celebrities (e.g., in 1989 the list of visitors included then Vice President Dan Quayle and the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders). Much of what is in the DMZ has been left untouched since the armistice in 1953; thus, in addition to expansive military bases, the visitor sees decaying buildings, roads, locomotives, and farmland. As a tour destination, the DMZ has become a kind of "living museum" of the Cold War (Cumings 1992) that, quite explicitly, represents the north Korean state as an embodiment of evil ("the real enemy," as one American military officer expressed it to me), and the north Korean people as automatons who blindly follow the cult of "Kimilsungism." The DMZ is, like many ruins, a fragment that has come to stand for a particular totalizing discourse on national division. It is here in the DMZ, rather than anywhere else in Korea, that tourists expect to hear the complete story of Korea's tragic division. And, it is here that the differences between the north and south are forcefully and explicitly represented by the United States military and the United Nations Command. The DMZ stands as an important exhibition for critical analysis because its focus on difference (the divided nation) rather than unity (the Korean nation) appears to oppose the prevailing tendency in south Korean discourse on north Korea, which attempts to minimize difference in order to emphasize unity. Over the past forty years, since the Korean War and partition, the two Koreas have indeed developed different political, economic, and social systems. Yet, both the north and south Korean people and governments are dedicated to the belief that they are a single nation that must be reunified. Despite the many differences between the two, Koreans commonly state that Koreans are one people, "one race" (kat'un tongp'o). Every south Korean presidential administration has supported reunification as a sacred goal, south Korean churches have reunification prayer circles that run unbroken twenty-four hours a day, and the north Korean government has said that its people are willing to die in another civil war for the sake of unification. In a post-Cold War global society, in which the various nations of the world are increasingly interconnected, politically and economically, the split between north and south Korea seems an anomaly. Little is known about how this remarkable rift, and a persistent vision and hope for unity, are written into the consciousness of ordinary citizens—in part because there are few places in south Korea, other than the DMZ, where the north is explicitly and publicly represented. Although visits to the DMZ are usually permitted only to non-Korean citizens and the Korean military stationed there, south Koreans are well aware of images that are widely available in the media and in books. Certainly, the thousands of Korean military personnel who serve in the DMZ understand its purpose, and all Koreans are acutely conscious that the DMZ marks the border between north and south. Because the ordinary citizen has no access to the DMZ, and no communications whatsoever with the north (including letters, telephones, telegrams, radio, and television), south Koreans are all the more receptive to propaganda and to the Cold War discourse framed by the military at the DMZ. In this situation, the DMZ, along with the absence of south Korean