Every hour Seoul TV stations update the coronavirus body count in South Korea, China - and Japan.
South Korea is at the crossroads, flanked by China and Japan.
Geography is destiny - and since Korea is a peninsula of China, the coronavirus epidemic has South Koreans on edge with constant media coverage that vacillates between reassuring public service information, and reports that inspire fear and loathing.
There is North Korea on the political map, yet in reality the country does not exist. It is merely a gangster state operated by the third-generation of the Kim Family, a pretend Communist dynasty that survives off slave labor, human trafficking, the drug trade, illegal arms sales and cyber espionage to include bank robbery.
For perspective:
- from Seoul to Shanghai is 868 km - or 539 miles,
- from Seoul to Beijing is 958 km - or 595 miles,
- from Seoul to Tokyo is 1,153 km, or 716.
Whether going to China or Japan. flights from Seoul clock in at around 2.5 hours, and a round-trip ticket on a cut-rate airline is around $250.
Every weekend for the past several years, an army of largely female Chinese tourists has invaded downtown Seoul - brandishing credit cards and carrying small travel suitcases for the shopaholic experience. The economic impact on Seoul has been immense.
This all came to a sudden halt nearly two weeks ago.
By then it had become alarmingly obvious that several people in Wuhan, a Chinese port city of 11m people in the central Hubei province were infected with an unknown virus, traced to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market.
Now identified as the coronavirus, it is believed to have resulted from people working at the market in late December.
On December 31, the Chinese government notified the World Health Organization (WHO) of an unknown virus in Wuhan, and the Huanan Market was shut down the next day.
The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market also does a brisk business in selling live animals for food consumption, and it is generally viewed that the coronavirus was passed to humans by eating live bats, birds and mice.
The Korean YouTube channel features multiple clips of people at the Huanan Market eating small bats and enjoying snacks of baby mice dipped in sauce.
None of these YouTube clips feature professional wildman Ozzy Osbourne ripping off a bat’s head with his mouth at the Huanan Market, but there are plenty of Chinese savoring this cuisine.
Allegedly, eating live small animals is a long-standing tradition in Central China - and perhaps other areas of the country.
As of this writing, the confirmed death toll of the coronavirus has surpassed 1,017 people in mainland China. The number of infected people in China is now at 42,708. - with 393 in 24 other countries.
As of Tuesday, February 11: 43,101 people were infected worldwide.
With 99% of cases in China, this remains very much an emergency for that country, but one that holds a very grave threat for Korea, Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines - with Manila considered the most densely populated city in the world, and the countries immediately south of China - primarily Singapore.
Right now blame for the health crisis is irrelevant compared to a quick and thorough solution.
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I’m a retired American living in Seoul because it is safer here than the United States, the food is great, and Korean women are some of the most beautiful in the world. What’s not to like?
I walk these streets.
On most Saturday afternoons you may usually find me at my office - which is Namdaemun Market in downtown Seoul. Near the Old South Gate to the city, Namdaemun Market first opened in 1964, and is the largest traditional market in Korea with over 10,000 retailers, vendors, and wholesalers.
The market is ideal for street photography.
By Saturday, February 1, the coronavirus had begun to dominate Seoul media coverage - without reaching a panic level. Yet as soon as I stepped onto the subway for the 20-minute ride to Namdaemun, it was obvious that the impact of the health crisis was sinking in because there were so few passengers. On Saturdays, the downtown subway here in Seoul is similar to the Shinjuku evening rush hour on the JR subway in Tokyo … wall-to-wall people.
When I arrived at Namdaemun Market it was clear the impact of the coronavirus discouraged a lot of people from being in public, and especially mingling in crowds. There were people in the market area, but the numbers were nearly cut by half.
Seoul has a classic four-season climate, but the weather on February 1 was sunny and inviting with temperatures around 7C, or 45F … a good time to be outdoors after a decidedly cold January. And yet many people were keeping a low profile.
The photographs I took that day were no different than any other day - and yet there was no denying the significance of face masks.
In the Orient, which is to say China, Japan and Korea - people with respiratory ailments commonly wear a face mask to help minimize infecting others when coughing and sneezing.
For a perspective on population:
Seoul has 10m (metro area: 25.6m)
Beijing has 20m (metro area: 24m)
Tokyo has 14m (metro area: 38m)
In such large metro areas, especially with people in enclosed areas like subways, public bathrooms, elevators, cinemas, restaurants and some stores - wearing a face mask when experiencing respiratory problems is simply a common decency.
However, a face mask offers zero protection if someone without one sneezes in your vicinity. Yet panic breeds panic, and people in Seoul have nearly eliminated the face mask supply. It has not helped that the Chinese who have still entered Korea in the past two weeks have walked into downtown stores with their suitcases and cleaned out the inventory - to take back home for their protection, or to sell on the black market.
Film of the Chinese in Seoul jamming their suitcases with health related-items to take home is played on local TV almost like the mandatory Two-Minutes of Hate in Orwell’s 1984.
As geography is destiny … a phrase attributed to Napoleon before his Grande Armée of 650,000 left Poland on June 24, 1812 to invade Russia … the Koreans are wary of both the Chinese and the Japanese.
Keep in mind the bad history involving China, Japan and Korea during the last century.
China and Korea refuse to forget the suffering they experienced at the hands of the Japanese Empire from 1905-1945. Now the Japanese and Koreans must find common ground to maintain an uneasy alliance against the rise of China as a potential superpower.
Since China is the Mother Culture of the Orient, the language, architecture and religion of both Korea and Japan are derived from China. It is likely that a great many Koreans - and no doubt Japanese, have some Chinese DNA.
The only other region in the world that has a comparable history to the Orient may be the British Isles, with the up-and-down relationship of the English with the Irish, the Scots - and even the Welsh.
I have lived in the Orient for nearly 15-years, and can distinguish the physical differences between the Koreans and the Japanese … and the Japanese and the Chinese, but I cannot always tell the difference between the Koreans and the Chinese.
My longtime Korean girlfriend cannot always distinguish the Chinese on the subways or in the downtown Seoul department stores. If she can’t make the call, then I should get a free pass.
Amidst the Chinese and Japanese tourists that routinely flock to downtown Seoul, one should not be surprised if there are a few spies in the crowd. The world of espionage so vividly described by British writer John le Carré may seem passé, but field agents still serve a purpose - and Seoul is at the crossroads.
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On February 5 - three days after I was at Namdaemun Market, Korean health officials shut it down to fumigate the area against the coronavirus. Men in strange, pseudo-space suits covered every area of the market, spraying some cocktail of pesticide or something more exotic, or maybe just plain home brew from the supervisor’s bathtub - like Depression era bootleg alcohol in America. Some times symbolism is more important than substance.
On February 6, a Chinese woman was hospitalized in Seoul, diagnosed with coronavirus. Through interpreters she was able to account for her path of travel through the city. This included the Lotte Department Store in trendy Myeongdeong - not far from Namdaemun Market. The store shut down the next day so health officials could have several days to fumigate the 15-storey building.
The official name of South Korea is: The Republic of South Korea - yet the country is also known as The Republic of Samsung, because the company - diversified well beyond electronics, is extremely powerful.
To better understand South Korea, it’s helpful to know the concept of “chaebol,” which refers to a large family owned business - or conglomerate. In South Korea, there are five such chaebols: Samsung, Hyundai, SK, LG and Lotte. These five conglomerates are comprised of just 33 people in total, and they have a major voice in government business policies and Korean society.
Now instead of the serfs reporting to the castle to walk the wheel all day for the Lord of the Manor, wage-slaves leave their generic high-rise apartments in Seoul to ride the subway to corporate headquarters, and chase the empty bait like their ancestors in past centuries. Who said feudalism was dead?
For the Lotte Department Store - the flagship store specifically, to shut down over the coronavirus is a big damn deal. The loss of revenue is significant, and speaks obvious volumes to the broader impact of this health crisis, which not only affects deeply personal loss, the staggering cost of medical care and what this means to insurance companies, the interruption in the supply chain that starts on the factory floors of China, to whether political leaders can withstand the unexpected winds of change - especially Xi Jinping, the President for Life in China, a hard-core Mao totalitarian.
