Images of hard times long ago
A photo exhibit on the first floor of Seoul City Hall provides graphic evidence of how Seoul and the area up to Panmunjeom looked in that bleak period before the Korean Armistice Agreement was signed on July 27, 1953. The exhibit is all the more remarkable because the images were taken on old-fashioned Kodachrome film that’s long since fallen into disuse in an era of digital cameras and mobile phones.
These images were shot by a U.S. Navy officer named George Fowler while he was with the U.N. Military Armistice Commission during the two years the Americans, North Koreans and Chinese were negotiating the truce. South Korea’s President Rhee Syngman wanted no part in talks that he believed would result in the permanent division of the peninsula. Fowler died after returning to the States, leaving his rolls of undeveloped film to Navy friends, who eventually gave them to his long-lost Japanese girlfriend, Kimi Nagai. Eventually, she contacted Koichi Yamamoto, a Japanese photo journalist, who in turn got in touch with a Korean, Shin Kwang-soo, then with the Japanese news agency Jiji Press.
Fowler took many of the pictures from lumbering helicopters that were introduced for the first time in warfare in Korea. Shin and Yamamoto, getting the film developed decades after Fowler's death, have put them together in a sumptuous picture book as well as the exhibit in City Hall. The book includes black-and-white images that the late Horace Underwood of Yonsei University fame, an interpreter at the negotiations, gave Shin as well as images that Yamamoto shot during visits to North Korea. Among these are scenes from the April 1995 Pyongyang Sports and Cultural Festival that I also attended. One shot shows the Japanese wrestler Antonio Inoki fist-pumping the boxer Muhammad Ali, crippled by Parkinson’s disease, whom I had spied high in the stands.
These are not gruesome portrayals of war. Instead, they capture negotiators amid the tents and flimsy structures on the line at Panmunjeom and of Korean life as Fowler observed it from the air and on the ground. Among the most arresting shots are rows of ramshackle shacks from which office buildings and apartment blocks have miraculously sprung. Beyond the modern structures, trees now cover what then were ugly splotches of barren red-brown dirt.
A familiar sight is Tapgol or Pagoda Park, birthplace of the March 1, 1919, uprising against Japanese rule. The circular park, with the multi-sided pavilion at the center and the spire-like Wongak Temple monument on one side, remains a memorial to lives lost in a bloody revolt against imperialism. Surrounded by rows of shops and homes as seen from Fowler’s helicopter, Tapgol survives as an oasis of reverence in a sea of soaring skyscrapers. Not far away, the ponderous Japanese governor-general’s building, built in neo-classical Greek or Roman style and torn down in the 1990s, is shown blocking the view of Gyeongbok Palace ― another reminder of Japanese rule.
The title of the book and exhibition, “The War That Still Has Not Ended,” does more than evoke the tragedy of those dark days. It’s also a warning of the flames that might again envelop the country, undoing the civilization, culture, business and industry that has burst into bloom during the past 70 years of peace, prosperity and finally democracy in the South since the signing of the armistice.
The latest outbursts from Kim Jong-un north of the demilitarized zone are reminders of the fragility of the truce that emerged from those talks in Panmunjeom. The faces of stern-looking generals in some of the photographs in this remarkable book betray the frustrations ― and the danger of the country again plunging into chaos. The next time, if Kim lives up to his threats of a nuclear holocaust, the tragedy will be infinitely worse, the ruins far more devastating.
Not least, Fowler’s camera caught scenes that reveal the mood of a people who had seen and heard the sights and sounds of war. The Koreans in these pictures are serious, unsmiling. Nobody is waving, mugging for the camera. The children, girls in rough hanbok, boys in baggy pants, look as grim as their parents. Occasional traces of fun shine on their faces, but mostly they reveal the hardships of a time when food was scarce and death never far away.
Nobody is smiling other than occasional American officers, feigning politeness in breaks from talks that stopped the bloodshed but not the war.
Donald Kirk (www.donaldkirk.com) has covered war and peace in Asia for years.