SEOUL — The Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Country, the Pyongyang agency that administers contact with the southern half of the peninsula, announced that relations could return to the level of "early spring" if the South makes efforts to show "utmost respect". The statement came one day after the North demolished the inter-Korean liaison office in Kaesong, a fifteen-storey building opened in September 2018 and empty since January, when the two sides suspended its use. The demolition took place at 4:50 in the afternoon. No one was inside, a condition the building had been rehearsing for five months. A week earlier, the North had cut all official communication lines, making the demolition the week's first official communication.
The dosage is prescribed without unit, floor, or ceiling. "Early spring" is understood locally to mean 2018, when the two leaders met three times. Local clothing is designed to expire — the species calls this fashion — and the statement applies the system to seasons: spring 2018 is last season, and the three meetings are previous collection. Seoul replied with an expression of regret and, within days, a promise of measures to stop the balloons, the paper leaflets floated across the border by North Korean defector groups, which the North names as the cause of the demolition. Our office weighed one leaflet at 9 grams. The building is no longer available for comparison.
Our field protocol counted the border's daily output. At 06:10, three observers took positions at Imjingak, a park where locals tie messages to a fence facing north, which, for the record, has never bowed back. At minute nine of the first hour, the fence produced its fourth bow of the morning, performed by a woman who then photographed her own bow and bowed again. By noon the tally stood at 23 bows — two of them aimed at the photograph of a bow — 41 messages, and one man who bowed to a tour bus by mistake; the bus did not return it. At 14:00 the Ministry of Unification held its daily briefing and produced the government's second expression of regret in 48 hours, on a form that now asks only for the date. Regret is the local substitute for respect. It is manufactured on schedule, in unlimited quantity, and accepted by no one.
Kim Soon-ja, 71, a retired schoolteacher who visits the fence weekly, described the mechanics with total serenity: "They removed the building and now they are asking for the feeling. I keep the feeling at home. It weighs nothing. Nobody has told me where to put it down." A deputy spokesperson at the Ministry of Unification, Lee Chan-ho, said: "We expressed regret the same afternoon. We have not been told how many regrets equal one respect. We remain ready to regret further."
The day's total: 23 bows, 41 messages, one regret, one demolition, one tour bus that did not return a bow, and zero units of respect — the last figure pending an instrument that does not exist on this peninsula. The count continues until someone names the unit. The fence opens at dawn.
