Kim Ji-ha’s Seoul Road, and a forced departure

The notes open on a verse from Kim Ji-ha’s poem Seoul Road: “I go, do not cry, I go, over the white pass, the black pass, the thirsty pass, down the hard Seoul road to sell my body.” The poet, they write, repeats the lines, and the grief in them is sharp. The poem belongs, in their telling, to the late 1960s and the 1970s, when industrialization was speeding up. The speaker is being pushed out of the village toward the city, and is sad. “The hard Seoul road,” they write, shows that Seoul is not a place one chooses; it is a road one is forced to take, and one cannot even be sure of coming back.

In the late 1960s, they add, when the government put industrialization at the top of its tasks in the name of growth, Kim Ji-ha sang the village life that was disappearing. The industrialization people were living through, he warned, could take away a traditional rural life and a beautiful way of living. Farming, the notes write, has always been a structure of working together and sharing, and it grew on a sense of community.

A 1960s bargain, and a gap inside the village

Agriculture in Korea, they write, is in serious collapse. The gap between the city and the farm is widening, and the village’s order and its community are in crisis. When ranks and inequality deepen inside a national community, or inside the village itself, they call that polarization. The collapse of the countryside, they say, is not only a rural problem. The village had kept a sense of community that held its social structure together; as the village falls, that sense disappears too, and in a time of money-worship and individualism, social troubles grow more serious. Barely a hundred years ago, they write, the village was still the ground of people’s lives; as industrialization rushed on, it was slighted and ignored. Most people now live in cities and pay the countryside little attention, and society does the same. That neglect, they say, is itself one cause of the collapse.

When economic policy was carried out in the 1960s, Korean farmers were asked for cheap rice, cheap labor, and low wages, and they bore that quietly. Once the economy had grown, the notes write, agriculture was treated as a declining industry, a thankless leftover. Then people who already had land and property appeared as rich farmers, small farmers fell, and a sharp gap opened inside the countryside itself. With that ranking, the community feeling that remained began to fade. A country whose villages collapse, they write, is liable to become a weak country; but the village had already lost the power to stand on its own, and the farm problem has become a large problem for Korean society. Poverty among farmers, against city people, only deepens, and people suddenly adrift have little room even to work their way out.

Why the village still matters, in their telling

Some people, the notes write, argue that investment should go to industries that actually create more wealth than farming, and that rather than protecting agriculture one should introduce freedom and raise competitiveness. The notes want, instead, to look closely at the collapse and to look for a way through. After liberation, they write, Korean agriculture went through a long stretch of poverty, and it bore the role of supplying food and labor cheaply. Agriculture, they add, is a life industry for the country; the fall of the farm economy also means that the country’s survival is threatened.

The absence of a sense of community — in how the state and city people look at the village — is, they write, a crisis for the national community, and should be faced first. Before a remedy, they say, one has to see what situation the village is actually in, and what troubles follow from it. Polarization, in their account, sits at the center of the country’s gap between rich and poor. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. The notes’ account of rural collapse, including Kim Ji-ha’s poem Seoul Road and a 1960s policy of cheap grain

Last updated: 14 November 2026