TV REVIEW : ‘Korea Rising’ Offers Sweeping Portrait of a Growing Country

Everybody who drives a Hyundai should watch “Korea Rising,” an hourlong documentary on KGTV (Channel 10) tomorrow night. They may learn something about the country that produces their inexpensive little cars.

The program, part of Channel 10’s “Signature Series,” is a sweeping portrait of a country about to be turned into the world’s largest three-ring circus.

Korea, the program tells us, is an “Asian miracle in the making.” The Olympics will provide the country with “a day in the sun, a chance to show how fast the country is growing up.” Clearly, using the ’84 Olympics in Los Angeles as a model, Korea is going to milk “The Games” for all their worth, which should be quite a bit.

To its credit, the program, scheduled to air at 8 p.m., goes beyond the predictable Korean Tourist Bureau rhetoric. It gives viewers a glimpse of the contrasts of modern Korea, the paradox of huge cities, bustling centers of world commerce where tanks battle rioting students just a few miles from villages where women wash their clothes by hand in drainage ditches.

The pace of the program picks up when hostess Lisa Kim takes “a Seoul train to Pusan.” Traveling through the countryside, the Channel 10 crew wanders into the village of Saemi-gol, interviewing poor farmers and villagers, detailing their day-to-day lives. The Koreans don’t seem overly thrilled about an American camera crew tromping through their village--maybe they’re already accustomed to it--but that gives the show a touch of reality often lacking in shows of this kind.

As a rather bizarre, unexpected touch, Kim visits her own grandfather’s grave, accompanied by her 76-year-old grandmother and other family members. It lends a personal quality to the program’s otherwise stiff, formal presentation.

The tour continues with a stop in Pusan, a large fishing city. There are lots of shots of pails of dead fish being dragged around the streets. It looks like the world’s biggest outdoor fish market; in other words, it looks like the place must stink.

Moving on to Seoul, the program examines Korea’s booming economy. In factories we see television sets bounced through assembly lines in what is certainly an efficient manner, even if it does look like the Three Stooges playing catch with televisions.

As a nice touch, the producers tie Korea’s economic resurgence into the influence Korea businesses are having locally, discussing the Korean companies with maquiladora operations on San Diego’s border, including talks with local Koreans. The Channel 10 people obviously were thinking about what they were doing, and it provides the program with a much-needed local angle, besides Kim’s family ties.

The wandering program returns to Korea for the next segment on the continued hostilities between North and South Korea. It turns its cameras on the demilitarized zone, the border between North and South Korea. The last Americans to cross “The Bridge of No Return,” Kim says, were the crew members of the U. S. Pueblo, taken prisoner by the North Koreans in 1968. As another nice touch, Channel 10 took the time to interview the Pueblo’s skipper, Lloyd Bucher, a local resident.

Without venturing too deeply into the politics, “Korea Rising” paints a picture of the tension that permeates the border communities, illustrated by a monthly air-raid practice taken very seriously by the residents of a nearby city.

As part of the “Olympic security” segment, the show does superficially dip into the complicated internal politics of South Korea. Without delving too deeply into the hows and whys, the program presents some of the more amazing aspects of the country’s quirky political structure. Ninety percent of Korea’s registered voters voted in the last election, the first direct presidential election in 16 years, Kim says. Students provide a glimpse of the militant side of the country, although Kim is quick to point out that not just radical students are upset with the Korean government.

Closing segments on places to stay and shop in Korea suggest that maybe the program is a travelogue for Korea after all. A look at Korean night life, where men dance with men and women with women in the discos, also made the program seem dangerously tourist-oriented. But Kim’s obvious connections and insight into the country, and the clear attempts to make the program balanced, save it from turning into a come-to-Korea video.

With the Olympics on the horizon, this may be the last special on Korea viewers will be able to stomach before the avalanche of Korean hype.