A video of bare-chested North Korean soldiers performing extreme stunts in the country’s latest show of force has gone viral, creating a buzz online in South Korea and beyond.
The North’s leader Kim Jong-un and his sister Kim Yo-jong, seated among top military generals, smiled and clapped as the well-built, fierce-looking soldiers unfurled a sequence of performances that stunned some foreign audiences but reminded South Koreans of their own military’s martial arts displays in the past.
The video released by the North’s state media started with three soldiers, all shirtless, putting their bare hands on bricks before uniformed colleagues hit the top of their hands with mallets. The bricks shattered but not their bones, sparking applause from the audience.
The next scene shows soldiers with bricks on their stomachs or on their heads. Hammers shatter the bricks but the troops escape unscathed.
Two soldiers are then seen facing each other and pushing an iron bar between them with their necks, until the bar yields and bends.
The most dramatic stunt involved a soldier who broke out of a chain, broke two bottles and lay bare-chested on the glass shards, and then had a cement block placed on his stomach, which was smashed by a mallet.
“These soldiers, embraced and raised by our party, have demonstrated to the whole world the strength, bravery and morale of the Korean People’s Army,” newsreader Ri Chun-hee commented over the footage.
Their strength was “bestowed upon them by our dear leader Kim Jong-un”, she said.
The performance was conducted at the opening ceremony of the North’s rare exhibition of weaponry that took place on Monday, where Kim vowed to build an “invincible” military to counter what he called the US “hostility”.
The show of muscle power sparked incredulity among some Twitter users commenting on the video clip which was shared by North Korea-focused journalist Martyn Williams.
Soldier in blue outfit generates ‘Captain North Korea’ buzz on social media
For others, it was a reminder of the global interest in the workings of the hermit kingdom and its leader Kim and his sister.
There has also been interest in portrayals of North Korea in K-dramas produced by the South, such as the implausible love story Crash Landing on You, which stars celebrity actor Hyun Bin as a North Korean soldier who falls in love with an heiress from the South. The Netflix show was a hit in South Korea and across Asia.
Some South Koreans were less enamoured by the North’s latest demonstration. “North Korea’s got talent!” tweeted Pennsylvanian19.
One user, mylo**** wrote on the Joongang Ilbo daily news website that the stunt reminded him of mystic martial arts shows performed on South Korean television in the 1970s and 1980s.
Another internet user, rije***, wrote on the same news website: “Martial arts is North Korea’s future warfare!”
Korea has a long tradition of martial arts, and breaking is part of its indigenous sport of taekwondo, which was developed by a South Korean general who later fell out with the South’s military-backed dictator Park Chung-hee and became a frequent visitor to Pyongyang, where he died in 2002.
It is now often used by the North to symbolise its military prowess.
A South Korean military official said the country’s soldiers had regularly staged martial arts performances in the past which were intended “to show off their muscle power and morale” in addition to military hardware.
“We’ve stopped doing that kind of performance since 2010 as the country has in general outgrown such things,” the official told This Week in Asia on condition of anonymity.
Additional reporting by Agence France-Presse
