Should you visit the DMZ?

Visiting the DMZ, or the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea seems to be a pretty common tourist attraction when foreigners come to visit Seoul. I don't know how I feel about it.

It's a complicated tourist attraction for sure. For starters, it's complicated logistically. You must have a military escort to even get into the DMZ, so it's not the sort of spot you can just roll up to whenever the weather is good. You have to book with a tour company, and usually the spots are pretty limited so you're best off booking in advance.

Often times, when relations between the North and the South are particularly tense, your tour might just be cancelled with no warning. Usually you are not refunded. In fact, until about two months ago, visitation to the DMZ was entirely suspended, for all civilians. And if you do get to go, your passport is registered and the tour bus you come in on is searched.

But there's other, more emotional reasons why the DMZ is complicated.

The DMZ is part of a larger type of tourism sometimes called dark tourism. Places like Chernobyl, Dachau, and the Parisian Catacombs are talked about as unusual curiosities, and tourists often couch their visits in terms of exploring "off the beaten path" and finding "less-popular historical gems." I understand intellectually that these kinds of sites—sites of disaster, war, death, and some of humanity's greatest tragedies—will always hold a weird fascination. Fascinating yes, but commercialized. Let's not forget that some people are making money out of it.

If you actually do go to the DMZ, you'll find it is remarkably commercialized. There's souvenir shops everywhere and big restrooms, and hundreds of Chinese tourists led by tour guides with flags and microphones, just like every other major tourist spot. There are photo zones. You can go to the Joint Security Area (JSA), standing in the North Korean side of the meeting room, and take a photos with a soldier. Once you get past the military checkpoint, touring the DMZ is oddly like going to a theme park.

I'd be lying to you if I said I didn't feel weird about it. For one thing, you won't find many Koreans around because tourists holding a Korean passport aren't allowed in the JSA at all. For another, to me there's something a little perverse about buying a ticket to see something like you would a movie, and taking a selfies at a place built to commemorate the darkest hours in our collective past.

The buffer zone between North and South Korea is demilitarized, yes, but the two sides are still in a state of conflict. All those pictures you're taking there? That's commemorating conflict. When you show them to your friends back home? You're showing off one of the most painful and sensitive parts of Korean history. Some tourists even call it cool. Cool!

Not everyone thinks this way, of course. Plenty of people look at tourism in the DMZ as a good sign, one that shows relations between the North and South are friendly enough that everyone feels comfortable letting civilians in by the busload. For every person that thinks DMZ tourism positively affects the economy, there's another person that thinks tourism in the DMZ is just commercializing Korean national pain.

There’s many reasons why people want to visit theses type of places involving pain and death (hello, dark tourism). I'm not trying to condemn them. We do need to commemorate all parts of our history, no matter how shameful, and try not to repeat them. But I will sit out this trip.