Past Forward
	After decades of prosperity and protest, the nation suddenly finds itself with no major target to throw rocks at. So the search for a new identity begins
	By Anthony Spaeth

Originally published Augst 17, 1998

It's hard to imagine Seoul, South Korea's busy capital, without its commanding statue of Admiral Yi Soon Shin, a 16th century warrior who repulsed the Japanese navy by plating a fleet of junks with sheets of iron--the world's original ironclad war vessels. The Admiral's 16-m-high bronze figure stands on a pedestal in the center of the city, and rightfully so: after 400 years he remains an apt national symbol. First, of a country whose tragedies and incredible triumphs have invariably come through contacts with the outside world--from colonization, wartime devastation, miraculous recovery via international trade, all the way into the depressive economic spiral of the past 13 months. The bearded Admiral Yi, portrayed in pugnacious stance, symbolizes too a people whose first impulse in adversity is not to complain or even to rally, but to don the hardest and heaviest of plating.

But 50 years ago this week, when the Republic of Korea was created in the same superpower arm-wrestle that divided postwar Europe, there was no statue and little to commemorate. True, the 38-year Japanese occupation was over, and four years of world war. But the division of the Korean peninsula created two highly dubious entities. Five years later, after Korea's own costly conflagration, both countries barely existed. Commentators described Seoul as a "dead" city, and their dispatches displayed no expectations of rebirth. North Korea, backed by China and the Soviet Union, was ready for more war. So too, and very insistently, was South Korea's first President, Rhee Syngman.

It's miracle enough that war hasn't broken out in the past 50 years. Almost beyond imagination is the story of a scarred, small land situated on one of the world's most incendiary flashpoints making itself affluent, largely middle-class and, in yet another unexpected miracle, democratic. In the 1950s, South Korea led the world in sending orphans abroad. Today, its factories flood the world with steel, cars, microwave ovens and memory chips. It has been underrated as the Japanese miracle reborn. But Japan was an industrial power when Koreans, with their horse-hair stovepipe hats, were the Amish of the Orient. Tokyo has never had combined Soviet and Chinese forces massed just 42 km from its Imperial Palace.

South Korea's tale is one of toughness in impossible circumstances, an attitude that, unfortunately, can be reexperienced in current-day Seoul. The collapse of the country's currency last year has again shown Korea that the outside world can be cruel, while exposing alarmingly wide chinks in the design and construction of formerly shiny Korea Inc.

But if the past 50 years have shown anything, South Korea won't look for an easy way out. American soldiers in the Korean conflict were amazed by local troops because they rarely complained. (Soldiers who don't complain?) Founding President Rhee was nicknamed The Walnut, even in his 80s. His successors, to a man, were equally tough nuts. So are the people they govern, with their contrary abilities to tolerate and cooperate, rebel and howl for retribution. Retirement for all but two of Korea's presidents has meant exile, assassination or jail terms. (One exception is Kim Young Sam, who stepped down safely in February but is widely excoriated for the economic crisis; one of his cabinet ministers and a senior presidential adviser are facing criminal charges for the meltdown.)

Hard and heavy, as Admiral Yi foreshadowed, is the Korean way. A global economy might require a gentler attitude toward the outside world, and an economy more flexible and entrepreneurial, less iron-clad and warlike. That's a big challenge for a people born and raised in the shadow of war--but whose greatest triumph has been unlikely survival and continual, amazing change.

If World War II was America's "last good war," as is sometimes mourned, the Korean War was its first bad one. After three years of fighting, mass destruction and 2.4 million deaths--including 150,000 American soldiers and 400,000 South Koreans--the peninsula was returned to the same divided state as at its start. So unsatisfactory was that conclusion that top U.S. commanders hesitated to sign the armistice of July 1953 for fear of being investigated by a disgruntled Congress. Most of the war's mistakes would be replayed in Vietnam a decade and a half later. The main difference, of course, was that South Korea wasn't lost to the communists. But by war's end, victory was hardly discernible: South Koreans were cooking in discarded margarine cans and wearing rags secured by copper wire.

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