NOKDO, South Korea (Reuters) – At the age of ten, Lyoo Chan-hee wishes he was not one of the last three schoolchildren left to play on the beaches of Nokdo Island.
“It would be great if I had more friends here because I can have more options to play,” Chan-hee said. Instead, he often plays with 66-year-old Kim Si-young, and one of the last 100 inhabitants of a fishing village that was once vibrant and emblematic of the demographic crisis unfolding in South Korea.
“He (Kim) always calls me and shares whenever he has something delicious,” Chan-hee told Reuters one windy day earlier this month as the couple shared grilled oysters.
“That’s not a lie,” Kim said. “I also play ball and badminton with Chan-hee. But I always lose. “
Away from the beach and Chan-hee, Kim flipped through a photo album showing a school day splashed with sunshine: images of hundreds of people toasting children with rice wine that brought tears to her eyes. The prints are 40 years old and fade, as do Nokdo’s prospects, about a 75-minute ferry ride from South Korea’s west coast.
After decades of national urbanization, and a lost contraceptive control, the Nokdo school has long been closed. “I cried a lot (when the school closed on the island in 2006),” Kim said.
“I want to protect Nokdo, but it’s depressing to see fewer and fewer people here.”
The decline of Nokdo encompasses the demographic decline of the fourth Asian economy. According to the World Bank, it has become the oldest society in the world with the lowest birth rate by 2020.
“There are many small cities at risk of extinction,” demographic researcher Choi One-lack told the Korea Institute for Economic Research (KERI). “The pace of aging and birth reduction is the worst here among the OECD.”
FAMILY PLANS
The nation’s fertility rate dropped to just 0.84 in 2020 from 4.5 in 1970, according to data from Statistics Korea. Amid the nation’s economic growth since the 1970s, producing world-class manufacturers such as Samsung Electronics and Hyundai Motor, more women began to join the workforce as family planning campaigns, including sterilization, came into force in the 1970s and 1980s. “When we went to do military training (national service), some of us used to have a vasectomy to slow down population growth,” Kim de Nokdo said. “Some got their wives to do it.”
More recently, high house prices in the Seoul metropolitan area, home to nearly half of the nation’s 51 million people, have been blamed for fewer babies in the country, while last year’s coronavirus pandemic it also discouraged couples from marrying and having children. The Bank of Korea expects the nation to surpass Japan as the world’s oldest society by 2045 (its previous projection) as its “fertility rate declines at a much faster rate than expected” amid of the pandemic, the bank said in December report.
Some predict serious labor shortage problems.
“The loss of labor will be a greater success for countries like South Korea, than Australia or other resource-rich countries, because the backbone of the growth engine here has been labor and technology.” , said Choi, of KERI.
To replenish the workforce, the government plans to encourage more women and the elderly to work and create new visas to attract foreign professionals.
“HEAVENLY PLACE”
Back in Nokdo, Chan-hee’s father, Lyoo Geun-pil, 42, is one of the youngest residents of the island and has been working as a pastor at the island’s only church since 2016.
Lyoo described Nokdo as a “heavenly place,” as his three children can run freely, worrying only about finding wild goats or seagulls to chase, rather than looking into the traffic.
He plans to stay in Nokdo as long as his pastoral position allows, but he knows the family can’t stay here forever, especially because the learning facilities are restricted to a single makeshift mini-classroom and a teacher sent of the continent.
“I am also concerned that this place may disappear soon,” he said, expressing the sense of foreboding that worries hundreds of rural cities across South Korea.
“My cousin (Chan-hee) needs to go to middle school in two years … I want to give some hope (to the people of the island) by finding a way to educate the school average to Chan-hee from here, ”Lyoo said.
For Chan-hee, Nokdo is the ideal place, even without additional friends.
“Seoul is very busy, noisy and the air is not good,” Chan-hee said. “Nokdo has no traffic, is not noisy and the air is clean. I can play outside more actively, so I like it here ”.
($ 1 = $ 1,126,1500 earned)
Reports from Hongki Kim to Nokdo and Cynthia Kim to Seoul; Edited by Kenneth Maxwell