South Korea: The New Life

Six months after his junta took over South Korea in an almost bloodless coup, Lieut. General Park Chung Hee, a puritan in olive drab, is making an unprecedented effort to clean out his country's age-old corruption and laxness.

The U.S. is watching with interest because—despite the attention now being showered on South Viet Nam—South Korea remains an important stronghold in the chain of defense against Red China. The large South Korean army retains its importance, and the U.S.'s investment in the country, both in terms of economic aid ($3 billion) and the 33,629 American lives lost during the Korean war, is massive enough to warrant continued protection. Reforms are long overdue in South Korea, and the efforts of Park* and his 27-man junta go deep, reaching down to the smallest details of life.

Female Charm. The transformation is being pressed by an unending blizzard of decrees. The junta's latest is an order to bars, cabarets and nightclubs to install lighting bright enough to discourage any hanky-panky between male and female customers. In Seoul, at the dance halls that still remain open, the fee per hostess per evening has been cut from $5.30 to $2. Said one male customer: "How can any government fix the degree of my appreciation of female charm?"

But the junta is doggedly unsentimental. Engagement rings and dowries are out. Funeral services may no longer be pompous, lengthy and expensive as in the past, but should be brisk, cheap and austere; among other things, the custom of bowing three times before the funeral altar will be streamlined down to a single bow. Newly forbidden is the use of wooden, disposable chopsticks in Korea's 11,676 restaurants and teahouses—the government wants to conserve the country's dwindling timber reserves; instead, the use and reuse of plastic chopsticks is urged.

October was proclaimed "The New Life Month"; at principal Seoul intersections loudspeakers alternated martial "reconstruction music" with sermonizings ("Hello, beloved people of our city, we would like to offer you some advice on our New Life"). South Korea's 200,000 civil servants have been pledged not only to live "model lives of austerity and respectability" but also to wear austerity suits, if they are men, austerity dresses, if they are women. A drab example of this junta-imposed new fashion—mostly executed in coarse corduroy—garbs a female dummy displayed in one of Seoul's main squares.

Deep Shock. The ferocity of the junta's reforming zeal may have toned down some of the country's bad habits—Seoul's normally dirty streets are now perceptibly cleaner, the once chaotic traffic is almost miraculously smooth—but there have been harmful side effects. In the first angry flush after the coup, the ill-paid officers of the junta slapped immense fines on prosperous businessmen and merchants for "illegal profiteering." Many of the fines were later reduced, but the business community remains in deep shock. In one district of Pusan alone, 400 shops have closed. The junta-imposed embargo on virtually all imports remains in force. Coke and U.S. cigarettes are out, and domestic "reconstruction cigarettes" now lead the field. The import restrictions are theoretically necessary to redress South