To an alternating soundtrack of country and western and hip-hop played at near-ear-bleeding volume, amid empty beer cans and half-finished grilled steaks, a miniature girl is hanging off the arm of a hulking man in a vest. Look around and the scene is repeated everywhere in the room: waifs, sometimes nervous, sometimes complacent, caught in a sweaty embrace that suggests ancient stills from Godzilla. The girls are South Korean and the men, nearly all of them, American. This is inner-city Seoul; or, to be specific, Itaewon, the prime hang-out spot for the American GI in South Korea.
Over the past half-century, this smallish area just north of the river Hangang has been utterly transformed, to the extent that it has long since ceased to bear any relation to the rest of Seoul. This can be explained by the proximity of the country’s two largest US army camps. Each evening, the massed ranks of soldiers are allowed, briefly, into the downtown area: to dance and flirt in bars specifically catering for a western clientele; to salute the US flag at midnight in one of the dozens of ersatz jazz bars; to drink the local soju (firewater); and to have their groins stroked by Korean women – up until an early curfew, which adds urgency to their scrambling efforts.
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