Lindsay Maizland

Published on Vox.com when I interned with their Foreign team in Summer 2017.

Americans are afraid of war with North Korea, even though the United States probably wouldn’t be the first target if North Korea were to attack.

South Korea is a different story.

Seoul’s 25.6 million residents are in direct firing range of thousands of pieces of North Korean artillery already lined up along the border. And around 70 percent of North Korea’s ground forces are within 90 miles of the border, ready to move south at a moment’s notice. One war game convened by the Atlantic magazine back in 2005 predicted that a North Korean attack would kill 100,000 people in Seoul in the first few days alone.

But unlike in the US, few in South Korea seem panicked over the possibility of an impending war with North Korea. Instead, they are unfazed. The South Korean government even said on Thursday that it has “no sense of urgency” about North Korea.

So what gives? Are South Koreans just braver than Americans? Or have they simply gotten so used to living under the threat of annihilation that they’ve become numb to it?

To find out, I called Haeryun Kang, the managing editor of Korea Exposé, an English-language magazine and website based in Seoul. Kang told me that it all comes down to South Korea’s complicated, and contradictory, relationship with the North.

“In South Korea, it’s deeply personal, and it’s deeply complex. You don’t encounter North Korea just as a foreign country. It’s supposed to be your brother, your family, that one day you’re supposed to reunite with,” she said. “This kind of familial attachment coexists simultaneously with this aversion to North Korea because it’s a military threat.”

What follows is a transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for clarity and length.

Lindsay Maizland

Do people in South Korea care about the rising tensions between North Korea and the US? Are people worried about this?

Haeryun Kang

That’s actually a pretty difficult question. If I can speak for myself, I care because I’m a journalist. I have to know this stuff. Everyone around me cares, so I’m kind of in this bubble.

When you go out to the larger public, you see that life goes on as usual and a lot of people are pretty unfazed by what is going on. There’s a certain level of fear about what’s going on, if this or that were to happen, but on the whole, there’s not a hugely palpable sense of fear. Certainly not as much as what I encounter when I go abroad.

People abroad ask me, “What do you think about North Korea? What do you think about Kim Jong Un? Do you think he’s crazy?” People certainly don’t have that level of interest here.

Lindsay Maizland

The article you wrote for the Guardian earlier this week was titled “In South Korea we’re scared but we’ve normalized the fear.” Can you explain what that means?

Haeryun Kang

I guess the headline for the article is a little bit misleading. That’s not necessarily what I intended to say. It’s not normalized fear. What I mean to say is normalized indifference. There’s years and years of indifference, of not really talking about North Korea that much and not showing too much interest.

And behind this normalization of indifference is fear — fear about North Korea as this malicious other, fear that people are going to judge you if you show too much interest.

So there’s stigma and ignorance and all these complicated feelings behind this indifference. The way South Koreans experience the idea of North Korea is extremely different from the way everyone else experiences it, for example, in the US.

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