On 18 May 2026, Starbucks Korea launched a marketing campaign for a reusable summer tumbler called the “SS Tank” and told customers to prove its durability by giving it a “tak on the table!” This became a different kind of strange when people noticed that “Tank Day” fell on the anniversary of the Gwangju Uprising. On 18 May 1980, paratroopers moved down Geumnam-ro, opened fire on pro-democracy demonstrators, and kept firing until upward of 200 of them were dead, per the official count. Tak has a history of its own. It was the word police used in 1987 to explain the death of the activist Park Jong-chul in a Seoul interrogation room: Park went into cardiac arrest, they said, after the officer “hit the desk with a tak”. A Starbucks spokesperson explained that the marketing copy had been generated by an AI tool. The machine had fished these ghosts out of the data stream; the humans only wanted to sell merchandise. Still, the chief executive was dismissed, and every branch closed for an afternoon so staff could receive social sensitivity training and a lecture on their history.

The corporate apology cycle ended, and soon enough share prices recovered. Every store reopened, including the chain’s most singular outpost, near the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ), where you can enjoy your coffee watching military exercises through a high-powered telescope. Of all the improvisations late capitalism has made on the sublime, this might be the strangest – the espresso bar as forward operating base, the flat white as détente. I skipped it for the ordinary tour, the one without the Starbucks stop. For £41, you can spend the day inside a war.

The Korean War – or the Fatherland Liberation War

if your tour starts in Pyongyang, the Forgotten War if it starts in Washington – began in 1950 and killed somewhere between three and four million people, mostly civilians. It ostensibly ended in 1953 when the Armistice Agreement drew a military demarcation line through the peninsula, flanked by two kilometres of buffer on either side. The DMZ was designed to stop movement, and it was supposed to be temporary. But with no peace agreement yet in place, today it stands among the most artilleried and surveilled strips of earth in the world. And so the DMZ tour exists in the suspended animation of war without shooting.

The tour sells a hyper-scheduled loop of tunnels, checkpoints and escalators that go up and down, in a minute-regulated sequence of ascents and returns. You do not move through this landscape so much as you are moved by it. You enter through the exit, leave without ever arriving, and navigate dead ends made of concrete and glass. It is a day constructed from contradictions: a hard border transformed into a product, and the thrill of being near a hostile place without any of the danger. The tourist isgiven the strange sensation of travelling great distances to stand before a line they will never directly encounter, let alone cross.

The tour does not welcome improvisation, and our guide – I’ll call her Hana – made the reason for that very plain with a parable. In July 2023, a twenty-three-year-old American private named Travis King joined a DMZ tour and ran across the line in the Joint Security Area (JSA) into North Korea. He spent two months in Pyongyang before North Korea decided he wasn’t worth the trouble and sent him home.The JSA closed to tourists indefinitely and, according to Hana, nearly got all tour licenses revoked. Hana said his name the way a preacher invokes the Flood: “Do not be Travis King.” He was what happened when movement exceeded its permitted form.

Twenty of us boarded the bus at 7am. Hana stood at the front checking our passports, because to enter the Civilian Control Zone, you must prove who you are, and that your reason for being there is legitimate, meaning ticketed and scheduled. She told us not to photograph the soldiers and to stay close to the group, and in that instruction, the day’s choreography set its terms. The tourist moves to look around. The guide moves to keep the schedule. The soldier stands ready for war. Everyone in the DMZ is in motion, but nobody advances.

We sped up Jayu-ro (Freedom Road), a major South Korean arterial motorway, past holographic Christmas trees in spring and greenhouses with nothing growing inside them to a car park the size of an airport. We were given 40 minutes at Imjingak Peace Park, which appeared on the horizon as an empty fairground, with a motionless carousel, a pendulum swing stuck halfway down. Further inside, the colour drained by degrees – pinwheels sat beside a rusting locomotive, cartoon figurines guarding the Bridge of Freedom. There was a pond of carp donated by the president of a mattress company, with a plaque describing the fish as “a tribute to the reconciliation, harmonious coexistence, peace, and reunification of North and South Korea” – the vocabulary of atrocity again handed to someone whose job is selling something else.

Imjingak is as far north as civilians can go without a checkpoint, which is why its pavilion holds Mangbaedan, an altar built for families divided by the war, with no way back to each other beyond the symbolic. No letters, no calls. Tourists buzzed around families laying out flowers, for relatives whose graves sit on the other side of a line most of them will not live to cross. Near the altar stood a bronze statue commemorating the victims of Japanese military sexual slavery, with an empty chair beside it. A young woman took the seat while her boyfriend stepped back to take her photograph. She threw up a backwards peace sign.

The next stop was the “North Korea Defector Meet-up”, purchasable as a £7 add-on in the North Korea Experience Hall. The defector wore patent kitten heels that clicked against the laminate floor. She did not give her name. Through a translator, she described swimming toward China along a route that was kept deliberately vague. In China she could not work without papers, and under Chinese law she was an economic migrant rather than a refugee, which meant she could be arrested and sent to a labour camp. She said she watched a K-drama and decided she wanted to live in Seoul. She was smuggled across the border for a fee, and what followed was less a passage from darkness into light than a transfer between two contrastingly precarious lives. She said that she missed her husband and children very much. Nobody said anything.

A laminated card on the wall offered questions to ask her. What do you like to do on the weekend? What is your favourite thing about South Korea? She said she loved driving a car and going on holiday. We applauded, and she posed for photographs afterwards, shaking everyone’s hand at the door. I understood she was scheduled to give the same testimony that afternoon to another room of strangers who would also never see her again. Her escape had become piecework. Outside the North Korean Experience Hall, a building-sized advertisement offered a virtual reality simulation of the war tour we were already on.

War tourism is not new. A week after the armistice in November 1918, the British War Office released a statement telling grieving families they could not yet come: the old front was still, it said, off limits “owing to military reasons” – filled with the unburied dead and live ordnance, not fit for visitors. Within months, two distinct trades had sprung up – one selling the wealthy a day out in private cars, the other run by church charities so relatives could visit a loved one’s grave. The bereaved were called “pilgrims”; everyone else “tourists.” The DMZ is an established form of war tourism pushed into a newly capitalist state. Checkpoint Charlie has a gift shop. Hiroshima has a gift shop. The DMZ has many gift shops, selling child-sized combat uniforms, salmon collagen, chocolates, honey, North Korean banknotes with no official exchange rate and a lime-green cap that a girl in our group called “brat”. There was a length of wire, labelled on its tag as authentic DMZ issue, mounted on a ceramic tile.

Much of what the tour also sells is the limit itself – the photography permitted downstairs, forbidden past the escalator; the time limits; the militarised, absolute boundary. This is made most literal in the controlled descent toward the Third Tunnel of Agression, one of at least four the North dug to the South beneath the DMZ. You can go down it in a hard hat, phone locked in a box in reception. The descent is 70 metres, bent double, moss blooming under emergency lighting, gas masks hung six in a row.

Twenty minutes in, the line stops moving; everyone waits their turn at a concrete window the size of an A4 sheet of paper, giving onto more concrete doors with no windows. Some bowed to it, others grimaced at whoever was behind them. That point is 170 metres from North Korea, but you cannot see North Korea – only how far you are permitted to go, even with your passport and lanyard. So you climb back up, away from a door that would not open, to a country you cannot enter.

At the Dora Observatory, the rules changed again; there was a photo booth with backdrops of the Seoul skyline and the DMZ plains, but everywhere else photography was forbidden. “This is the best view you get without being arrested,” Hana said, admitting all her groups loved that joke. Upstairs, the wide glass front made the farmland below appear like an enclosure, rice and ginseng harvested and sold nationwide at a premium. It wasn’t until Hana pointed out the watchtower that I realised we were the ones being watched. She lent me her binoculars. When I adjusted the focus, I saw a soldier with binoculars of his own, trained back on the platform where I stood holding a stale macadamia-nut cookie: a café-shaped frame over the garrison. Nothing that far away looks like it’s moving, but even at full magnification, he was exactly as still. Everyone else that day moved compulsively inside the loop built for them – the tourist’s itinerary, Hana’s set speeches, the defector’s testimony – but not the soldier. It appeared that freedom of stillness increased with rank.

Hana pointed north to Kijong-dong, the so-called Propaganda Village, and explained that its windows are lit on a timer, and that the North Korean flagpole nearby was built to 160 metres for the sole purpose of standing taller than the South’s, a few kilometres off. From that distance, the two poles looked the same height. On the South side, the near side, Daeseong-dong keeps its last residents with a tax exemption and a release from military service – “because without them,” Hana said, “why would you stay?” The state that holds the line by force also holds it by incentive. Half the country lives in Seoul; many rural villages are emptying out, farmhouse by farmhouse, reclaimed first by weeds then later, more slowly, by forest.

That emptying is also why rare animals and birds like long-tailed gorals and golden eagles thrive in the DMZ in numbers unthinkable anywhere people can still walk. Hana pointed at a white heron flying north. A woman said, “Oh no.” As the Korean poet Kim Hyesoon wrote: “Terrified or not, birds fly because they can.”

Back on the coach, Hana counted our lanyards against her clipboard and cheered when the number came out right. We were driven back exactly the way we had come. I gave her five stars later because she said that the stars were how her manager decided whether she would get more work. The tour site promised “paradoxical peace in the world’s most dangerous region”. It is a clear phrase, and an honest one: a rare bird flying over a minefield, observed through the glass as your name is called from the counter.

A bird crossing a political line is symbolic. A corporation crossing a political line costs a Starbucks chief executive his job, and the company an afternoon of national sales. South Korea became a capitalist democracy recently (and violently) enough that it has had to build fast machinery to absorb historical violence into public life. Some of that machinery is built with real care. Some of it misjudges the short distance between a tumbler and a souvenir cap. .