Honour the dead and protect the living

Spring has arrived here in Korea! One of the loveliest signs of its arrival is the flowering of azalea  or Korean rhododendron blossom on the hillsides. The azalea is a very inconspicuous shrub that merits no attention for all of the year except during a few weeks in March and early April when across the wooded hillsides the deep pink blossoms emerge in scattered profusion.

Here I am with our dog, Bomi, posing with one example:

 And here is a detail. The flower is extraordinarily delicate, and it’s hard not to feel joyful when looking at it.

What you don’t see in the photo of me and Bomi are the nearby pill box and trench. But I can’t show these, because of the security regulations near to the DMZ. Taking photographs of military installations can land one a hefty fine or a stretch in jail, and recently, I’ve noticed more signs have been going up blocking entrances to some of the more ‘scenic’ and accessible places where such installations exist.

As I’ve mentioned on more than one occasion, one of the  unsettling dimensions of living near the border with North Korea is the fact that everywhere around here is defensively fortified. Now this might seem anomalous, a tragic deviation from the norms of civil society, but actually, I think that what the presence of all this overt military infrastructure does is remind one that any place that enjoys peace and is relatively free,  depends on such defenses. It just that you don’t see them so overtly like you do here.  

The distressing truth - painfully obvious in Ukraine nowadays - is that sometimes you have to defend and be ready to fight for freedom. This is for the simple reason that there will always be bad agents seeking to steal or suppress it, a truth that is a major problem for pacifists, who, quite rightly, deplore war.

Another bizarre feature of the environment around here is that one often comes across grave plots right next to military emplacements.

One day, a couple of years back, we happened to be passing these graves when the families of the deceased were paying their annual respects during Chuseok, the mid-autumn harvest festival when families visit their home towns and the graves of ancestors. This particular family’s home town is Kaesong, which lies across the DMZ and was once a major city, and where for a while there was a joint North-South industrial zone. This means these graves are sited as as near as the families can get to where their ancestors come from. In fact, this is why there are so many graves around us on the hillsides. They belong to North Korean families who fled south before or during the Korean War.

As I mentioned in a previous post, the graves are always located in auspicious locations – auspicious in terms of Pungsu-Jiri, the Korean equivalent of the ancient Chinese system of geomancy, Feng-Shui  - which literally means ‘wind-water-earth-principles-theory’, and is all about receiving positive gi - in Chinese, qi (sometimes written ch’i) energy – the vital life force suffusing everything. There are two forms of Feng-Shui – Yin (negative energy) and Yang (positive energy) Feng-Shui. Yin characteristics are the feminine, passivity, negativity, darkness, the earth, the moon, the night, clouds, water, moisture, softness, slowness, and coldness. Geographically, Yin is present in north-facing slopes. Yang is the masculine, activity, positivity, brightness, heaven, the sun, the day, heat, fire, hardness, dryness, restlessness, production. Geographically, it is present in south-facing  slopes. Koreans, like the Chinese and Japanese, depend on Yin Feng-Shui to ensure their ancestors’ tombs are located in auspicious sites. This is important because the location affects the wellbeing not just the dead but also the living descendants – for example, in relation to the wellbeing of offspring. The goal is to balance gi so as to  provide a restful site for one’s ancestors, so it is literally a last resting place.

Ironically, around here, the military is also interested in the kind of sites that have auspicious gi energy, but for very different reasons. These locations are often places with very open and wide prospects, characteristics that are obviously important strategically because they function as points of observation and/or as potential strongholds. They are both prosects and refuges. Evolutionary speaking, the ability to see without being seen was a crucial  intermediate step towards the satisfaction of many basic  biological needs, and such geographical sites remains vital today for the same reasons, only now mediated by complex social conventions that often conceal their origins in deep human history.

It seems to me that when one sees an army pill-box nearby a grave, one is witnessing in very concrete terms the two pillars upon which all human societies are founded: respect for the dead and protection for the living. These values arise from the fact that the living  will always have an overwhelming interest in what happens to their dead bodies. Respecting the dead therefore also entails protecting the living. This is basic anthropology and sociology made manifest here next to the DMZ.