K-Scar
K-Scar: A Journey Along the Korean Division
K-Scar is a documentary project on internet by journalist Roland de Courson exploring the inter-Korean border, its history, landscapes, and the people living in its shadow.
Airspace Scares
Blurry Seas
Wildlife Paradise ?
Landmine Hell
A Mass Grave of Unknowns
Border Defense
Border Subversion
Border Tourism
Looking North
Click on locations on the map or choose from the list below.
Baengnyeong
Baengnyeong’s beaches have signs reading “North Korean defectors, we welcome you — press the button.” Behind them: minefields, artillery caves, and 6,000 civilians, on South Korea’s most remote island just a stone’s throw from the enemy.
Yeonpyeong
Every road leads to a Marine base. Air-raid shelters are always stocked. And in 2010, the island burned for hours after a North Korean artillery strike.
Gyodong
Through a telescope on Gyodong Island, you can read “Long Live Socialism” on a North Korean hillside. The other bank is 2.6 km away — and forever unreachable.
Han River Estuary
A Starbucks opened facing North Korea in a restricted military zone. Since then, tens of thousands of tourists have come to photograph their latte with a view of the North.
Odusan
On the left, farmers working in the fields beneath red flags and barren hills. On the right, forests of high-rise buildings in the suburbs of Seoul. Odusan is the North Korea observatory closest to the capital.
Jayu-ro
Every morning, commuters scroll their phones as North Korean watchtowers slide past the bus window. A drive along South Korea’s strangest motorway.
Imjingak
You cannot see North Korea from Imjingak. Yet more than a million people come every year for the thrill, the souvenir shops, and the selfie spots near real minefields.
Camp Greaves
The powder magazines are now art galleries. The bowling alley is an exhibition hall. A Cold War combat base 2 km from the DMZ, arrived by Peace Gondola.
Abductees Memorial
North Korea abducted a 13-year-old girl from a Japanese beach, a film director in Hong Kong, and 95,456 Korean civilians. A little-known memorial near the DMZ.
Dora & Third Tunnel
North Korea blasted a tunnel under the DMZ designed to move 30,000 troops per hour into the South — then painted the walls black and claimed it was a coal mine.
Unification Village
One of the few civilian villages inside the border buffer zone, where residents farm under military regulations — with a direct view of a giant flagpole flying North Korea’s colours.
Joint Security Area
A death waiver to visit. A defection mid-tour. Donald Trump crossing to North Korea by foot. The JSA has always been stranger than fiction.
Swiss & Swedish Camp
Swiss and Swedish soldiers have been slipping reports into a letterbox in the DMZ since 1953. North Korea no longer picks up the mail. They keep writing anyway.
Enemy Cemetery
There are no signs to find it. Intelligence reportedly hided cameras there to spot communist sympathizers. Yet someone keeps leaving flowers and booze bottles on the North Korean soldiers and spy’s graves.
Jan. 21 Infiltration Place
In 1968, 31 North Korean commandos crossed the DMZ here with the aim of reaching Seoul to assassinate the president. No action movie comes close to matching the intensity of their bloody saga. A bizarre diorama is there to remind us of it.
Yeoncheon
Just below a military ridge 800 metres from North Korea, thousands of Seoulites stroll every Autumn in a flower park planted along the barbed wire fence.
Cheorwon
The same fields where 15,000 soldiers died in 9 days now shelters thousands of endangered cranes each winter, protected by the border.
Workers Party H.Q.
The very embodiment of evil in the eyes of some, the North Korean Workers’ Party headquarters in Cheorwon has been left exactly as the Korean War left it — bombed, roofless, and steeped in the tragic memory of those who were tortured to death there.
Central Frontline
You have 30 minutes to drive 25 kilometres along the DMZ on National Route 5. Stopping is forbidden. Every car is checked. The landscape is beautiful. There is not much else to see.
Peace Dam
A dictator invented a North Korean “water bomb” threat to silence protests before the 1988 Olympics. South Korea spent millions building a dam against a flood that never existed.
Punchbowl
After the armistice, veterans were given land in the Punchbowl to farm. Many were killed or maimed clearing it. The mines they missed are still there — marked on the hiking trail maps.
Eastern Frontline
The Korean DMZ ends where the mountains meet the sea. From Goseong Observatory, the barbed wire runs down a ridge, into the water, and stops. Beyond it, Mount Kumgang and North Korea.
Kim Il Sung's Villa
The founder of the Kim dynasty in the North vacationed here with his family before the Korean War. Afterwards, his mortal South Korean enemy Syngman Rhee built his own summer cottage just down the road.
Abai Village
On Christmas Eve 1950, a cargo ship built for 60 passengers sailed from North Korea with 14,000 refugees aboard. A small handful of them—and their many descendants— still live in Abai Village, Sokcho.