On June 30, 1983, a live program aired in South Korea that was supposed to last an hour and a half but ended up running until November 14 of that year, for a total of 453 hours and 45 minutes. The title of the show was translated into English as “Finding Dispersed Families” and was designed to give visibility to people who had lost track of their family members after the division between North Korea and South Korea in 1948 or during the Korean War fought in the early 1950s, with the aim of finding them again.
The program was immediately a huge success, even outside the country. For months, people gathered in front of the television studios where it was being filmed, either to attend or even in the hope of meeting their long-lost relatives there. More than 50,000 people were shown on video and more than 10,000 gathered with family members. “Finding Dispersed Families” immediately became a piece of the country’s history and assumed great importance as a testimony to the devastating effects on the population of the division of the Korean peninsula into two states.
When after World War II the United States and the Soviet Union divided Korea into two different countries by drawing the border along the imaginary line of the 38th parallel, many families were divided between North Korea and South Korea and many people moved from the former to the second.
Korean refugees alongside an American SUV, 1951. (Photo by Central Press/Getty Images)
Two years later, in 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea and the Korean War began, which continued until 1953. Between 3 and 4 million people died, mostly civilians, and about 10 million of people had to separate from their families. It was impossible for those in the South who had family members on the other side of the border to find them, but many remained separated even inside South Korea simply because they did not know how to find each other. Between the two countries, 100,000 children were orphaned.
In 1983, on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the signing of the armistice that suspended the Korean War, the management of the South Korean radio and television station KBS decided to insert a column into a television broadcast that aired in the morning to facilitate reunification of those families who, after the war, had not yet found each other. With no records of missing family members at the time, much less computer systems or the internet, for many who knew or suspected they had family members in South Korea, this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and requests to participate were many. The broadcaster therefore decided to dedicate more space to it and transformed it into a separate broadcast, lasting 90 minutes, which would be broadcast at 10.15 pm on Friday 30 July 1983.
For the first installment of Finding Dispersed Families 850 people were selected, who told their story holding in their hands a sign with a number and a summary of their story on it. KBS phones began ringing and many went personally to the location where the program was being recorded, in the south of Seoul, the capital. The broadcast was extended by another two and a quarter hours, and already within the first day 36 people reunited with lost family members as they were filmed by television studio cameras.
An original Finding Dispersed Families program sign belonging to Yoo Yeon-sook, a woman who was looking for her missing brother-in-law (National Museum of Contemporary Korean History)
The broadcaster decided to renew the program and in the first week of transmission Finding Dispersed Families continued for 12 hours a day, especially at night. The hours of broadcasting then became 13 a week, between Friday evening and Saturday.
During the summer of 1983 Yeouido Square, in front of the KBS recording studios, was constantly filled, day and night, with people with their placards looking for missing relatives. It was not uncommon to see people sleeping on the street, waiting to be accepted and placed in the program. There were too many, though, so those who couldn’t talk on the television scrutinized every sign they came across in the vicinity. The latter were posted everywhere: inside and outside the television headquarters, on walls and trees in the square, even on some of the buildings around the area. Along with the people in the square there were also many journalistsfrom 25 different countries.
An aerial photograph of the KBS headquarters and the plaza in front of it, in Seoul (KBS Archive / YouTube)
The request to participate in the program, in addition to personal information, also included other questions. For example, the place and date of separation from the family member or a summary physical description including some particular sign. KBS staff members helped those in difficulty fill out the forms, including anything other than what was required that would facilitate reunification. After filling out the form people waited their turn and then appeared on television. At best, someone might notice and contact them.
During the months of broadcasting, KBS studios received an average of 60,000 phone calls a day. To satisfy the public’s requests to review some parts of the broadcasts, 24 televisions were set up, which continuously broadcast reruns. Screens were placed inside and outside the KBS headquarters, including on the roof, and the entire building became the set for the broadcast, with cameras following the reunions live.
Some people sleep outside the KBS headquarters during the broadcast of Finding Dispersed Families (National Museum of Contemporary Korean History)
When Finding Dispersed Families ended on November 14, 1983, a total of 53,000 people had managed to tell their stories during the broadcast, just over half of the 100,000 who had submitted requests. Over 10,000 people, all living in South Korea, reunited with their families of origin. Reunifications between people residing in the two different countries, however, were limited in the years following the war.
Many reunions shown on TV were particularly exciting and emphatic, with people yelling and hugging for several minutes in a row. The transmission became very famous in the rest of the world also for this reason. The merit The main thing that is attributed to her is to have increased public awareness of what had happened during the Cold War and the Korean War, as well as the consequences that the two conflicts had had on the civilian population of the country. At the time Finding Dispersed Families was broadcast, in fact, over two-thirds of the 40 million people residing in the country at that time were under the age of forty, and had little or no memory of the war.
On the Youtube channel of KBS several of the more than 20,000 recordings of the program are available, while the 463 videotapes that contain the transmission, together with all the other objects used during filming, are found in the archives of the issuer in Seoul. In 2015 the archive that contains the original hours of footage of the program was selected by UNESCO to become part of the “Memory of the world”a project to safeguard and make available throughout the world the documentary material that is considered fundamental to the history of humanity.
– Read also: What place is the “Joint Security Area” between the two Koreas