Kim Jong-un vs Lady Gaga

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Kim Jong-un vs Lady Gaga

Mark Willacy reported this story on Sunday, May 6, 2012 07:02:00

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ELIZABETH JACKSON: One sports an all black Mao suit, the other also likes to wear black, although she's more famous for wearing a figure-hugging dress made of prime slabs of beef.

Recently the two halves of the Korean peninsula put on very different shows featuring very different stars.

As usual, the new leader of the North, Kim Jong-un, starred in the festivities in the closed, impoverished communist state, watching and clapping a military drill involving tanks and fighter jets.

The very same week, the pop star Lady Gaga played to a sell-out audience of young people in Seoul.

Unfortunately, our North Asia correspondent Mark Willacy, who was in Seoul, didn't have a ticket. But, as he reports here, the two shows are a stark example of how the two Koreas have taken very different paths.

(Sound of North Korean military propaganda)

MARK WILLACY: On one side of the border it was the usual cacophonous celebration of the young general. All bombs, bombast, and goose-stepping soldiers.

While on the other side of the world's most fortified border...

(Music plays: 'Poker Face' - Lady Gaga)

꿻hey were going gaga over the world's biggest pop star.

Tens of thousands packed the former Olympic stadium to watch a gyrating diva put on the biggest show seen on the Korean Peninsula since Kim Jong-il's funeral last year.

Unfortunately I wasn't in Seoul for Lady Gaga, rather I'd come to the South Korean capital to film a story for ABC TV's Foreign Correspondent program.

And it just happened to be North Korean Freedom Week, when activists, defectors, and politicians gather to discuss what is probably the world's most repressive and brutal state.

(Sound of shouting in protest)

There was the usual burning of effigies of the North Korean leader who is now the third generation of the Kim family; the well-fed, western-educated, basketball-loving 28 or 29-year-old Kim Jong-un.

One protestor even cut the head off a Styrofoam Kim Jong-un that spurted what looked like blood all over the ground.

It was confronting stuff on the streets of Seoul, but it hardly raised an eyebrow among commuters and passing workers. In fact, the only people really attending this macabre display were North Korean defectors.

The average Joe, or more accurately Kim, Park, or Lee, has seen all this before. They've also lived a lifetime of threats, tirades, and venom from Pyongyang.

They recently watched the North launch a long-range rocket near their west coast. A rocket which, it has to be said, was a bit like a failed firecracker, which broke up and plunged harmlessly to earth.

They're now living with the threat of a third North Korean nuclear test. So it struck me as odd that one day during my stay in Seoul the top story on the online site of one of South Korea's top newspapers was an expose about how women were spending loads of money buying padded underwear and girdles to make their bottoms look bigger and firmer.

It appears that sagging buttocks are of much greater concern to many South Koreans than sagging North Korean missiles.

Another story to gain prominence while I was in Seoul was about how tourists were flocking to South Korea for plastic surgery, with about 1,700 plastic surgeons now operating in this looks-conscious half of the peninsula.

So doesn't anyone in Seoul care about a possible North Korean nuclear test?

Well of course they do. But they also have jobs to go to, families to care for, bills to pay, and lives to lead.

And if they spent their lives worrying about Kim Jong-un and his repressive regime, well, they'd probably go more than a little Gaga.

(Music plays: 'Poker Face' - Lady Gaga)

This is Mark Willacy back in Tokyo, from Seoul, for Correspondents Report.

(Music plays: 'Poker Face' - Lady Gaga)

http://www.abc.net.au/correspondents/content/2012/s3496189.htm