Author: !Epic Tomorrows

by YOON JAEMIN

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There is a certain “myth” about Korean geography and climate, passed down among those born and raised in Korea, though one senses its meaning gradually fading with age. “A peninsula surrounded by seas on three sides.” “A climate with four distinct seasons.” These are deeply familiar notions of the homeland’s nature and landscape for those born and educated in the south of the Korean Peninsula in the latter half of the twentieth century and after. From early childhood, Koreans were taught to recognize the Korean Peninsula and its surrounding islands—the constitutional territory of the Republic of Korea— as “our country,” likened to the shape of a rising tiger. We believed that the 365 days of this fierce tiger-shaped land, roaring toward northeastern China with the Taebaek Mountains as its spine, were painted in the ever-shifting colors of spring, summer, autumn, and winter. The “distinct four seasons of the complete Korean nation-state,” stretching from Mount Paektu to Mount Halla, formed one of the foundational images of nation and landscape in the minds of Korean children.

To a certain extent, this was grounded in reality. For more than eighty years, the two governments on the Korean Peninsula have regarded each other with hostility while each claims the tiger-shaped peninsula facing the continent as its homeland. The climate, too, is severe and mercurial. In the central region of the peninsula where I was born and have lived for nearly forty years, every year brings heavy snow and bitter cold during the year’s end and beginning, followed by summer heat soaring well above 30 degrees Celsius from June through August. Such cycles have long shaped the rhythms and lifeworlds of ordinary Koreans like myself. Spring and autumn—the transitional periods between winter and summer—were relatively mild seasons, moments of temporary recovery for bodies and minds exhausted by the brutality of the extremes.

Yet Koreans, myself included, also know that this “myth” is slowly collapsing. Our actual lived experience as Koreans educated and raised in Korea increasingly compels us to doubt it. As is well known, the practical territory of Korea for most Koreans is limited to the land south of the Military Demarcation Line, which stretches in a wavering curve from Baengnyeong Island in the west to Goseong County in Gangwon Province in the east. We were taught to regard Mount Paektu, rising 2,744 meters along the Yalu River bordering China, as “the sacred mountain of our people” and “the highest mountain in our country.” Yet from South Korea there is no way to visit “our territory” on Mount Paektu directly. The only possible route is through China, and even then one may only stand on the land outside the territory effectively controlled by North Korea. For this reason, many South Koreans, myself included, tend in practice to think of Mount Halla on Jeju Island, standing 1,947 meters above sea level, as the nation’s highest peak. The collective imaginary geography of a fierce tiger peninsula divided by the Military Demarcation Line often diverges from the actual geographical sensibilities of Koreans like myself. For South Koreans, whose human and material exchanges with North Korea are completely severed, the Republic of Korea is effectively an island.

There is equally much to say about the climate. “Four distinct seasons”? Controversial though it may sound, I increasingly feel that spring and autumn are disappearing from Korea. The 365 days of the year seem to be collapsing into the two brutal extremes of summer and winter. This is not merely a personal impression. According to the Korea Meteorological Administration, the average annual temperature of the Korean Peninsula rose by 1.6 degrees Celsius over roughly a century, from 1912 to 2020. The rate of warming, moreover, continues to accelerate. Over the past thirty years (1991–2020), summer has lengthened by an average of twenty days, and the trend is expected to intensify further. Rising temperatures have caused spring and autumn to converge into summer. As a result, unlike in the past, we now experience the year as though we pass abruptly from summer into winter, having lost the buffer zones once provided by spring and autumn.

What was it like in the past? Consider Monsoon (1935), a work by the celebrated modernist writer Yi Tae-jun (1904–1978) from colonial-era Korea. The story unfolds at the threshold of summer after spring has passed, during the humid and sweltering season Koreans call the ‘Jangma,’ the East Asian monsoon rains. Traditionally, the monsoon season has been difficult for Koreans to endure. Premodern living spaces on the peninsula, designed primarily to survive the harshest period of the year—the winter—were ill-suited to withstand a hot, humid climate that brought nearly thirty percent of the annual rainfall. The narrator, “I” (effectively Yi Tae-jun himself), feels the same. For a man drifting through colonial Korea under Japanese rule without any real occupation, passing his days idly, the monsoon season is unbearable in every sense. Each morning he must wake to the damp smell of mold clinging to the bedroom, bedding, and bookshelves. His wife suffers as well. The oppressive humidity filling the house aggravates her already frayed nerves over their meager household finances. It is hardly surprising that arguments erupt between them. Irritated by his wife’s nagging, “I” has little choice but to leave the house and wander the streets.

Yet he has nowhere in particular to go. He merely drifts endlessly through the humid, sweltering boulevards of colonial Seoul. Thus “I,” as an anonymous urban subject, surrenders himself to the fluid dynamism of metropolitan space, wandering aimlessly in thought. He hopes to run into friends such as Yi Sang and Gubo—modernist writers of colonial Korea, much like Yi Tae-jun himself—men who share his circumstances. But the city does not permit such encounters. There is no special reason for it. His small gamble of going out that day simply fails. Nothing changes. It is only an ordinary afternoon during the monsoon season, much like all our urban walks.

The reality of Korea in the mid-1930s was deeply complex. The Great Depression had made ordinary life even more difficult. Meaningful employment for Korean intellectuals—second-class citizens within the imperial order—was extremely scarce. The narrator’s wandering through the city captures the unremarkable everydayness of that era. His groundless optimism that he might accidentally meet fellow Korean writers in similar circumstances forms the other side of the same coin as his powerlessness before reality. In Gyeongseong, the colonial capital of Korea and a forward base for the Japanese military’s invasion of China, Koreans endured each day under intensifying ideological repression and growing intellectual humiliation.
And yet, the worst had not yet arrived. The people of colonial Korea were unknowingly waiting for the total-war era of the 1940s that would soon descend upon them. Of course, neither the narrator nor anyone else knew the fate awaiting them. But while strolling through a colonial Seoul outwardly more glamorous and bustling than ever before, “I” suddenly voices a reflection that seems almost prophetic of the catastrophe to come:

“I transferred to the streetcar at Anguk-dong. It may be Anguk-machi now, but it still feels right to call it Anguk-dong. I cannot help but resent how every dong and ri has been entirely transformed into machi. To regulate culture solely according to the efficiency of business is a misguided importation of Nazism. (…) At this rate, in a few years they may even decide that names like Lee, Kim, Park, and Jeong are too disorderly, and find some way to control citizens’ personal names as well.”

Remarkably, this did in fact come to pass only a few years later. Under the military regime’s radical expansionist policies and in the name of Pan-Asianism, the people of colonial Korea were mobilized into the total-war system and forced to adopt Japanese names in place of their Korean ones. Seen in this light, the narrator’s insight is astonishing. Yet he did not seriously predict the future. It was merely a passing thought during an idle urban stroll.

Now, nearly a century later, in the year 2026, I often walk through the old downtown districts of Seoul where Monsoon was set whenever I feel restless. A brutal winter during which I suffered badly from influenza has finally passed, and I am writing this essay at the threshold of a summer that seems to grow shorter every year. Korea will soon enter the monsoon season again. The monsoon is not the harshest season for Koreans. It is unpleasant and melancholy, but it is not the worst. The worst is yet to come. That is what I feel now. Nor is it merely a premonition about the climate. Like Yi Tae-jun before me, I stand at the threshold of the monsoon and sense keenly that the world’s worst days have not yet arrived. What will become of the world ahead? I pray for everyone’s well-being.