The New Life

Six months after his junta took over South Korea in an almost bloodless coup, Lieut. General Park Chung Hee, a puritan in olive drab, is making an unprecedented effort to clean out his country's age-old corruption and laxness.

The U.S. is watching with interest because--despite the attention now being showered on South Viet Nam--South Korea remains an important stronghold in the chain of defense against Red China. The large South Korean army retains its importance, and the U.S.'s investment in the country, both in terms of economic aid ($3 billion) and the 33,629 American lives lost during the Korean war, is massive enough to warrant continued protection. Reforms are long overdue in South Korea, and the efforts of Park* and his 27-man junta go deep, reaching down to the smallest details of life.

Female Charm. The transformation is being pressed by an unending blizzard of decrees. The junta's latest is an order to bars, cabarets and nightclubs to install lighting bright enough to discourage any hanky-panky between male and female customers. In Seoul, at the dance halls that still remain open, the fee per hostess per evening has been cut from $5.30 to $2. Said one male customer: "How can any government fix the degree of my appreciation of female charm?"

But the junta is doggedly unsentimental. Engagement rings and dowries are out. Funeral services may no longer be pompous, lengthy and expensive as in the past, but should be brisk, cheap and austere; among other things, the custom of bowing three times before the funeral altar will be streamlined down to a single bow. Newly forbidden is the use of wooden, disposable chopsticks in Korea's 11,676 restaurants and teahouses--the government wants to conserve the country's dwindling timber reserves; instead, the use and reuse of plastic chopsticks is urged.

October was proclaimed "The New Life Month"; at principal Seoul intersections loudspeakers alternated martial "reconstruction music" with sermonizings ("Hello, beloved people of our city, we would like to offer you some advice on our New Life"). South Korea's 200,000 civil servants have been pledged not only to live "model lives of austerity and respectability" but also to wear austerity suits, if they are men, austerity dresses, if they are women. A drab example of this junta-imposed new fashion--mostly executed in coarse corduroy--garbs a female dummy displayed in one of Seoul's main squares.

Deep Shock. The ferocity of the junta's reforming zeal may have toned down some of the country's bad habits--Seoul's normally dirty streets are now perceptibly cleaner, the once chaotic traffic is almost miraculously smooth--but there have been harmful side effects. In the first angry flush after the coup, the ill-paid officers of the junta slapped immense fines on prosperous businessmen and merchants for "illegal profiteering." Many of the fines were later reduced, but the business community remains in deep shock. In one district of Pusan alone, 400 shops have closed. The junta-imposed embargo on virtually all imports remains in force. Coke and U.S. cigarettes are out, and domestic "reconstruction cigarettes" now lead the field. The import restrictions are theoretically necessary to redress South

Korea's chronically unfavorable trade balance ; before the coup the country imported ten times as much as it exported. But the ban on imports has also denied shopkeepers the wares they need to stay in business, and backward domestic industry is incapable of filling the void.

Trouble is that plastic chopsticks, austerity weddings and import restrictions cannot cure South Korea's most deep-rooted troubles: it is overpopulated, under-industrialized, short on natural resources, but has an overabundance of sapping responsibilities, such as the need to keep a standing army of 600,000 for a population of 25 million.

40,000 Arrests. To cope with such problems, a firm hand is clearly needed. But even the army, which has taken charge of the country,, is divided by officers' cliques, formed according to military academy classes, regional derivation and family ties. The powerful South Korean Central Intelligence Agency (secret police) headed by lean, tough Colonel Kim Chong Pil, 35, who is married to General Park's niece, wields almost limitless authority, can toss almost anyone in jail for almost anything.

Up before a Seoul court last week went ex-Lieut. General Chang Do Yung, onetime leader of the junta now headed by Park. Among other things, the defendant stood charged with "obstructing the military takeover." Translation: Chang had only belatedly agreed to front for the rest of the military plotters, and then solely upon threat to his life. Further, after the coup, he had failed to lock-step with bamboo-tough little Park. Since the junta's takeover, some 40,000 people have been arrested, and though most have been released, the police remain capricious. Recently, when a Korean professor invited some of his students out for dinner at a restaurant, cops arrested him. The charge: illegal assembly.

Privately, the country's articulate minority--teachers, university students, journalists--complains of repression. But the country as a whole does not share this fear. Reports TIME Correspondent Donald Connery from .Seoul: "The mood at the moment is not necessarily antigovernment. There is a realization that the nation was approaching chaos or Communism before the military coup. Measures taken against corruption are widely approved, as is the crackdown against the black market and at least some of the efforts at improving the economy."

Aid Posture. To assist staunchly anti-Communist General Park, the U.S. has already recast its aid program. The former multiplicity of projects has been slashed in favor of an austere accent on the basics that the Korean economy still lacks--more and improved transport, communications and power facilities. Whatever reservations the U.S. may retain about dealing with South Korea's ruling junta--it did, after all, come to power by deposing ex-Premier John Chang, a good friend of the U.S.--Park himself seems anxious to be accommodating.

He is scheduled to visit the U.S. in mid-November. Presumably building up for the trip and his meetings with President Kennedy, Park fortnight ago held his first press conference since August, announced that elections would be held in 1963 and the country turned back to the civilians. Corruption has been rooted out of the South Korean civil service, he declared, and the creaky governmental machinery totally overhauled. Said he: "Our aid posture is superior to any previous time."

*The accepted transliteration of the name was Pak Chung Hi until changed to the new form at the general's request.

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