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This paper explores the dynamics of forgetting and silencing surrounding the memories of the Korean War as revealed by the rise of “security tourism” in Cheorwon, a small city on the North and South Korean border. Located just north of the 38th parallel, Cheorwon lies between the 1945 border that initially partitioned the Korean peninsula into the Soviet-occupied North and the US-occupied South and the inter-Korean border as it currently stands today, which was consolidated after the Korean War. From the South Korean perspective, Cheorwon is therefore a “recovered territory,” wrested from the North during the war. The checkered past of the city has given rise to different senses of place—Cheorwon is at once a fierce battlefield of the past, a city on the frontline in the present, and a site of the complex history of recovery. Each coordinates a different type of memory, associated in turn with a different actor: the soldiers who fought in the battlefields of Cheorwon during the Korean War, the native residents who witnessed their hometown turn into these battlefields, and the new residents who moved to Cheorwon after the war. Moreover, the city’s historical character as recovered territory has generated a unique dynamic of silencing, leading the residents to hide their identities for fear of reprisal or discrimination in postwar South Korea. By focusing on the changes that have occurred in the lives of these bearers of Korean War memory, the essay explains the paradox of security tourism and discusses how attending to the historical reflection occasioned by Cheorwon’s ruins can heighten our sensitivity to the project of peacemaking. Taken as an allegory rather than a symbol, Cheorwon’s ruins can inspire new life and revitalize a message of peace.
