Asian Games Report : Road to Olympics Has as Many Turns as Mt. Sorak Road

Over breakfast one morning in Seoul, Bud Greenspan, the Olympic film maker, said that, although most of Asia is focused on the sporting events, the only thing the rest of the world will remember about the 10th Asian Games is the terrorist bombing at Kimpo Airport that killed five people and injured more than 30 others.

I disagree. From looking at the news service photographs in the international newspapers, I believe the rest of the world also will remember the numerous student demonstrations.

Reuters had a photograph the other day of several Yonsei University students, wearing surgical masks as protection from tear gas, throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails at police. The students’ form was excellent, indicating that they have been practicing long hours for the Asian Games.

If those are the images that linger after Sunday’s closing ceremony, it is unfortunate because, after being in Seoul for almost three weeks, I believe that most of the people in the city support the Asian Games and the 1988 Summer Olympics, also scheduled for Seoul.

This is reflected in the polls, if they are to be believed. According to a survey by the Korea Herald in February, 8 of 10 people in the Seoul area had an intense interest in the Asian Games. A more recent poll, conducted by a Yonsei University professor, revealed that only 8.2% of the people in all of South Korea are negative toward the Asian Games.

My own research is hardly scientific. But in an effort to discover how the people outside Seoul feel about the 1988 Summer Games, and also to gain relief from one of the world’s most populous and hectic cities for a few days, I recently went to Mt. Sorak National Park on South Korea’s East Coast.

It was not the best day to travel. Even though Mt. Sorak is only about 100 miles from Seoul, the trip takes at least four hours by car, primarily because the last 25 miles are along the “99 turns of Taekwan Pass.” I don’t know who counted the turns, but I took his word for it.

By the time we arrived there, we were seven hours into the trip, having left on the first day of the Chusok holiday, South Korea’s Thanksgiving. Of 10 million people in Seoul, official estimates were that half left the city on that day.

Just to get to the tollbooth on the Kyongbu Expressway, normally a 20-minute drive, took more than two hours. While waiting for a chance to inch forward, adults left their cars to talk with each other, while their children kicked soccer balls along the highway shoulder.

I was traveling with Paul Kim and his wife, Jung Eun. Paul was born in Seoul but became an American citizen after moving to Atlanta, where he worked part-time for the Braves. His ambition is to become commissioner of Korea’s professional baseball league.

He returned two years ago to Seoul, where he has turned his business acumen loose on the Olympics. The bigger the better is his feeling about the Games.

Jung Eun is more reserved. She owns a Korean restaurant in fashionable Yoido, an island in Seoul’s Han River, and does not expect her business to be affected by the Olympics. Her menu includes beef, but the specialties are soups, rice and vegetable dishes.

“From what I’ve heard, people can get better Korean food in Los Angeles than they can here,” she said. “I don’t think our diet agrees with people from the West.”

Near the end of the trip to Mt. Sorak, we stopped at one of Naksan Beach’s raw-fish houses, where the customers use nets to fish for their own meals from tanks and then hand their catches to the proprietor to prepare.

When I asked Paul to find out whether the proprietor thought the Olympics would help her business, he predicted that she, like his wife, would answer negatively because most Westerners he knows like raw fish only if it is in aquariums. She surprised him.

“After the Olympics, people will want to come back to Korea as tourists,” she said. “When they come to Mt. Sorak, we all will be very busy. I have heard that people everywhere now are eating sushi. So they will eat here.”

Behind her restaurant, the Sea of Japan was illuminated by the full moon, and also by searchlights. The South Korean military was, as always, on the alert for small boats carrying intruders from across the border in North Korea, about an hour away by land and less by sea.

In Seoul, there is an unannounced air-raid drill once a month to prepare people for a North Korean attack. But even while driving through some of the most remote farm villages, it is impossible to ignore the threat.

Because some of the villages we passed through were along the route for the torch run, there were banners above the main streets that said, “Welcome to the Asian Games.” In each village, there also was a guard station, where cars were stopped by Korean soldiers and inspected for suspicious passengers. I wondered how they would identify North Koreans from South Koreans, but I didn’t ask.

We did, however, ask a couple of Korean soldiers who were walking down the street in the small town of Wontong their opinion of the Olympics. They said they were looking forward to watching the events on television, especially taekwondo, a martial art that is one of South Korea’s favorite sports and an addition to the Olympic program in 1988.

After spending the evening in a hotel at the Sorakdong tourist village, we went to buy tickets for the 3,650-foot cable car ride to the top of the mountain, where there is a fortress that dates to the Silla Empire, which ruled from 700 to 1000 A.D.

The waiting room was filled with people playing video games. I sat next to a Korean teen-age girl, who was wearing a UCLA baseball cap, eating French fries from Wendy’s and drinking Ginseng-Up. I had entered the Silly Empire.

It was more serene at the top of the mountain, which is why the Buddhists have maintained a temple there for 1,300 years. It has an expansive view of the mountain range, called the Alps of Asia, and the Sea of Japan.

When we walked past the temple, the three monks invited us inside. We took off our shoes, lit a candle and sat down on the floor in front of them. Incense burned in the background.

They peeled a pear, offered it to us and then waited for us to ask the meaning of life.

Paul flinched when I said I wanted him to ask if Buddha approved of the Olympics.

“Everyone in Korea should favor the Olympics, even Buddha,” one of the monks said. “Even Jesus Christ.”

The next day, on the return trip to Seoul, we stopped in a small grocery store with a thatched roof at a bend in the Soyangho River. The owner was shy, and we had to follow her as she swept the porch. Her children sat in a corner and ate rice and kimchi, a spicy, pickled vegetable dish that Koreans have with every meal.

“I will not have more customers because of the Olympics,” she said. “My store is too small. But perhaps my regular customers will have more money because of the Olympics, which will help my business. I think everyone in Korea will benefit.”

About 30 miles outside Seoul, we stopped for the last time at the Korean Folk Village, this country’s equivalent of Williamsburg, Va.

During dinner, which we ate while sitting on the floor, Paul asked the man who was dining next to us about the Olympics.

“I think they can do for Korea what the 1964 Olympics did for Japan,” said the man, who is from Seoul. “Japan was an emerging nation, but the rest of the world didn’t know much about it until the Olympics. We are in the same situation.

“I don’t think the rest of the world separates us from North Korea. But when the Olympics come, I think everyone will see we are different from the North Koreans.”

The man then appeared to become angry and would not answer more questions.

When I asked Paul about it later, he said the man accused him of being from the government and did not appreciate being interrogated. I wondered if the man had been sincere about his feelings or had said what he thought the government wanted to hear.

There is no question the Asian Games and the Olympic Games are of utmost importance to the government, which considers them advertisements for the country’s progress since the Korean War ended 33 years ago. President Chun Doo Hwan repeatedly has stressed during public appearances that all citizens should support the Games, the same message they hear every day in public service announcements on television.

That has become the party line, even for the opposition party. It rarely agrees with the ruling party, but it also has endorsed the Games.

Perhaps the best indicator that people are buying the appeal is that they also are buying tickets. Through the first 12 days of the Asian Games, 67% of the tickets had been sold, even though many events are held during the day and virtually all are televised.

Most negative reaction has been mounted by students, whose demonstrations have forced 8 of Seoul’s 15 universities to be closed at one time or another during the Asian Games.

Since the demonstrations are confined to campus, you have to be looking to find them. Noting the presence of tear gas in the air one morning near Dongguk University, a veteran Far East correspondent said: “You don’t see demonstrations in Seoul; you smell them.”

Student leaders complain about the $3.1-billion price tag on the two sporting festivals, saying the government could better use the money for social services. They also claim that Seoul, as host city, is further alienating North Korea, thus decreasing the possibility of reunification.

Government officials claim that the protesters represent a small minority of students, who are being agitated by North Korean infiltrators. Student body left, if you will.

Ironically, the students might not have been able to demonstrate legally against the government were it not for the Asian Games and the Olympics. Many longtime Korean observers say that because of the attention focused on the country, President Chun restored the students’ right to protest, to demonstrate his democratic principles.

No one talked about democratic principles when the police announced here last week that there had been 263,564 arrests in the previous three months in an effort to tighten security for the Asian Games.

Among those arrested, police said, were hoodlums, robbers, pickpockets, rapists and murderers. The police said they formally charged 48,333, sentenced 76,312 to up to 29 days in jail and are questioning 16,004. They released the others with admonitions.

The total number of people arrested represents one of every 150 South Koreans. It must have been like “Casablanca,” the movie in which Claude Rains says, “Round up the usual suspects.”