From North Korean party headquarters to holiday homes and cemeteries, 70 years after the Korean War began its legacies line the demilitarized zone (DMZ) that marks where the fighting came to a standstill.
A few kilometers from the DMZ’s eastern end, a small stone villa stands on a cliff overlooking the white sands of Hwajinpo Beach in Goseong County, South Korea.
It lay in the North’s territory before the outbreak of war, when it was the summer home of its founder Kim Il-sung, grandfather of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.
Photo: AFP
Next to the stony steps leading up to the villa — now a museum — is a reprint of a faded 1948 black-and-white photograph showing five children, among them Kim Jong-un’s father and predecessor Kim Jong-il.
Goseong, along with a swathe of what is now South Korea’s Gangwon Province, is north of the 38th parallel line of latitude where the US and Soviet Union divided the peninsula after Japan’s surrender ended World War II and its colonial rule over Korea.
Surrounded by mountain ridges, the peaceful farming village of Haean was the site of some of the most fierce and bloody battles of the war, nicknamed the “Punchbowl” by a US war correspondent who said the area resembled a cocktail glass.
“The South Korean and UN forces had to cross our village in order to advance northwards,” said Lee Byeong-deuk, a tour guide and villager.
Pointing to a faint North Korean mountain top in the distance, Lee, who was born and grew up in Haean, said that his hometown was also used for propaganda: A 1970s government housing project combined every two homes into one to make them look larger — all of them facing north.
Cheorwon County, 60km north of the 38th parallel, also changed hands after the 1950-1953 conflict ended with an armistice.
On a nearly empty road leading to a military checkpoint stands the concrete shell of a three-story building — once the regional headquarters for the North’s ruling Workers’ Party of Korea.
“Where we are standing now used to be North Korea,” tour guide Gim Yong-sun said.
Before the war, she said, the building was a site for questioning and torturing those accused of anti-communist activities.
Hundreds of North Korean troops who never made it home lie in a field outside Paju, the only cemetery in the South for enemy combatants.
Many of the graves hold multiple remains, their simple granite markers saying only the number of they contain, while just a few are named.
At Panmunjom, the truce village in the DMZ with its emblematic blue huts, their successors on both sides come face-to-face.
In the past few years it has seen a series of summits bringing together Kim Jong-un, South Korean President Moon Jae-in and US President Donald Trump.
Yet the armistice has never been replaced by a peace treaty, leaving the peninsula technically still at war, and inter-Korean relations are now in a deep freeze with nuclear negotiations between Pyongyang and Washington at a deadlock.
At the western end of the DMZ, barbed wire fences surround the border island of Gyodong, less than 5km from North Korea.
Barber Ji Gwang-sik was 13 when he fled Yonpek, his North Korean hometown, at the height of the conflict.
It took “less than 30 minutes” for his family to travel across on a wooden boat, Ji said, but for nearly 70 years he has been unable to return.
Now 82, he still waits for the day he can return.
“Only those who had the same experience understand the pain,” he said.
Through the noise of rushing papers and whirring belts at a print factory in Kyoto, two creators watch their photo essay come to life in broadsheet form — part of an effort to win new audiences in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). Despite the decline of the publishing industry, self-publication and handmade “zine” magazines are growing in popularity in Japan, reflecting the nation’s enduring love of paper in the digital era. While speaking to Agence France-Presse at the plant, his hands black with ink, one of the creators, Kazuma Obara, said: “I think [paper] is a medium that engages all five
‘CROSSING THE LINE’: China’s embassy in Seoul criticized US Forces Korea Commander General Xavier Brunson, asking if his ‘hostile’ remarks were authorized by Washington South Korea and the US are in talks over recent public remarks by the commander of US Forces Korea, Seoul’s presidential office said yesterday, after the comments drew sharp criticism from China. In a recent podcast interview, US Forces Korea Commander General Xavier Brunson described South Korea as “the dagger in the heart of Asia” from China’s east coast, prompting the Chinese embassy in Seoul to say that he had “truly crossed the line.” The interview came amid growing speculation that Washington might seek to expand the role of US Forces Korea in countering the growing regional influence of China, a key
Australian researchers have trained lab-grown brain cells on a silicon computer chip to play the 1990s shooter game Doom and said they are just scratching the surface of what the neurons could be capable of doing. It is the science-fiction work of biotech boffins at Cortical Labs, who researched and developed the technology that harnesses the workings of the brain’s networking system. Each so-called “biological computer” contains about 200,000 living human brain cells, grown from stem cells that were harvested from blood donations. Having mastered the simple computer game Pong, where a paddle is moved up and down to send a ball
France experienced its hottest spring on record, the French weather service said on Tuesday, after an exceptional early heat wave that also broke highs for the season in England and Wales. Meteo-France said the average nationwide temperature over March to May was 13.8°C — about 1.7°C above the norm, and surpassing records set in 2011 and 2020. “The warmest spring since records began in 1900,” it said in a bulletin. All three months were warmer than average, but the onset of an “unprecedented heatwave” late last month pushed the mercury to highs typically seen at the height of the summer. “Our country had never
RSS