Korean Reunification

Here is our Korean tour guides insights into the likelihood of reunification of North and South Korea.

When the guide was a little boy, he lived with his extended family in Korean tradition: father and grandfather’s families. One night the little boy noticed that the gate to the yard had been left unlock, so he locked it. When the grandfather discover it, he asked who did it, and got angry with the little boy (but did not explain why).

The boy’s father died before his grandfather. Since the boy was first born, this meant that when the grandfather died, the little boy would become head of the household. At this point he learned the reason the grandpa had gotten upset at the gate issue. The little boy had 2 uncles that he had not realized existed. They had disappeared during the Korean war, and the grandpa wanted the gate open in case the uncles returned any night.

This situation is typical for South Korean families: some family member dying young or missing (perhaps in North) during the war. For these older South Korean’s, reunification of North and South for them is a matter of the heart, not a matter of the head.
The younger Korean’s take a different view. They see how costly the reunification of East Germany was for West Germany. They realize that Korean reunification would be even more costly than the German reunification was. Thus, as time goes on and the older Koreans die off, the opinion is likely to shift away from reunification.

Having said all this, our guide believed that reunification will occur within the next 20 years. He believes that the overarching effect is the flow of information into North Korea. He said that when a new song becomes popular in South Korea, it then becomes popular in North Korea within a week. While the North’s government tries to block information inflow, they become increasingly less able to deal with what technology has done to increase info flow.