KAESONG, North Korea — It takes barely an hour to drive from downtown Seoul to the other side of the demilitarized zone, but the culture shock is such that you might as well be commuting to the moon.
Mobile telephones, newspapers, books, videos, laptops, magazines, MP3 players and many other appurtenances of 21st century life have to be checked on the south side of the border.
Also best left behind are any wisecracks about the North Korean regime, in particular those involving its leader, Kim Jong Il.
"You've got to watch what you say," said Kim Yi Gyeom, a South Korean telecommunications worker standing in a long line of Monday morning commuters waiting to go north. "The spirit of openness has not come to North Korea yet."
In the boldest experiment in inter-Korean cooperation to date, nearly 500 South Koreans are working side by side with more than 6,000 North Koreans in a year-old industrial park just north of the DMZ.
South Korea is assuming all the financial risk, having invested more than $2 billion.
The South would like to reduce political tensions and reap the benefit of cheap North Korean labor so its manufacturers can compete with China.
For the North Koreans, the experiment is a way to build their economy with only the most limited dose of openness to the outside world. But the North is also bearing all the political risk: Contact with the better-fed, better-clothed South Koreans could endanger the government's grip on power.
"It is natural that there is a culture gap," said Hwang Boo Gi, director of the Kaesong Industrial District, who led a group of foreign journalists through the park Monday. "We are talking about the difference between capitalism and socialism."
Or as a North Korean official, Han Cheol, said diplomatically, "We like to emphasize what we have in common, like our heritage, and not our differences."
Nevertheless, the contrast is particularly glaring when coming from Seoul, the high-tech, neon-lighted capital of the world's 12th-largest economy. Around the industrial park, which lies outside the center of the city of Kaesong, there is little but desiccated rice paddies and yellow hills denuded long ago by people scavenging for firewood. Nearby is an abandoned agricultural college, its crumbling facade decorated with a faded red sign trumpeting the achievements of the North Korean Workers Party. Scrawny goats graze outside two-story whitewashed houses with windows covered in plastic sheeting.
