The Cleanest Race (2 page)

The official worldview is not set out coherently in the leaders’ writings. These are more often praised than read.
⁴
So-called Juche Thought functions at most as an imposing row of book-spines, a prop in the personality cult. (A good way to embarrass one’s minders in the DPRK is to ask them to explain it.) Unlike Soviet citizens under Stalin, or Chinese under Mao, North Koreans learn more about their leaders than from them.
⁵
It is not in ideological treatises but in the more mass-oriented domestic propaganda that the official worldview is expressed most clearly and unselfconsciously. I stress the word
domestic
. Too many observers wrongly assume that the (North) Korean Central News Agency’s English-language releases reflect the same sort of propaganda that the home audience gets. In fact there are significant differences. For example, where the DPRK presents itself to the outside
world as a misunderstood country seeking integration into the international community, it presents itself to its own citizens (as I will show later) as a rogue state that breaks agreements with impunity, dictates conditions to groveling U.N. officials, and keeps its enemies in constant fear of ballistic retribution. Generally speaking the following rule of thumb applies: the less accessible a propaganda outlet is to the outside world, the blunter and more belligerent it will be in its expression of the racist orthodoxy.

The following chapters are based on my own extensive research of as many different forms of domestic propaganda as I could find at the Unification Ministry’s North Korea Resource Center in Seoul. (This is, ironically enough, a better place to study the stuff than Pyongyang, where a foreigner’s requests for anything more than a few months old are met with suspicion.)
⁶
From nightly news reports and television dramas to animated cartoons and war movies; from the white-papered
Rodong Sinmun
, the Workers’ Party organ, to women’s and children’s magazines printed on rough, gray paper; from short stories and historical novels to dictionaries, encyclopediae and school textbooks (these last printed, semi-legibly, on the worst paper of all); from reproductions of wall posters, oil paintings and caricatures to photographs of monuments and statues: these are the sources I have spent much of the past eight years studying.
⁷
In the interest of brevity and variation—and in emulation of Alfred Pfabigan’s practice in a perceptive travelogue entitled
Schlaflos in Pjöngjang
(1986)—I will occasionally refer to the body of myths espoused in this propaganda as the Text, though the reader is not, of course, to imagine a closed set of books.

Why would such a secretive country export propaganda that lays bare the true nature of its official ideology? There are many reasons. One is that the DPRK has never relinquished its dream of fomenting a nationalist revolution in South Korea. Another is that it can earn hard currency by selling these materials at a high price to one or two licensed distributors, who in turn sell them to research libraries abroad. Perhaps most importantly, the regime rightly assumes that almost no one hostile to the DPRK will ever bother to look at these materials. (I can count on one hand the times I ever saw a Western visitor take a North Korean book from the Resource Center’s shelves.) Finally, and unfortunately, the more sensitive content is kept out of mass-produced, “hard copy” propaganda and confined to outlets intended exclusively for domestic eyes and ears. A current example is the on-again, off-again glorification of Kim Jong Il’s putative successor Kim Jong Ŭn, a mainly oral campaign carried out at party lectures, factory assemblies and the like, and through unprepossessing posters hung in display cases far from tourist sites. Fortunately a sharp-eyed Taiwanese business traveler managed to photograph one of these posters, thus affording the outside world some insight into the nature of this budding personality cult. Regardless of whether Kim Jong Ŭn actually ends up taking power, I regret not having been able to include more about his myth in these pages.

* * *

This book is divided into two parts. The first recounts the historical development of the official culture, starting with
its origins in colonial Korea. In the second part I will discuss each of the Text’s main myths in turn, from those of the Korean child race and its motherly leaders to the myth of the “Yankee colony” to the south. Each chapter in part two contains an italicized section in which I take the liberty of condensing the relevant myth to a page or two, telling it sans excursions and in strict chronological order—admittedly, a very un- Korean thing to do. This way the reader can check the main assertions of anti-American propaganda, say, without necessarily having to bother with my ensuing evaluation of it. (These sections were written with a view to the many people who have complained to me about the unreadable diffuseness and repetitiveness of the few North Korean books available in English.) Although I have written these sections in a prose meant to replicate the effusiveness of the original propaganda, I do not want anyone mistaking them for direct quotes; hence the italics.

In closing, let me make perfectly clear that in this book (if not in my last book on North Korean culture) I am more interested in thematic content than aesthetic form.
⁸
I also focus more on propaganda that sheds light on North Korea’s relationship to the outside world than on propaganda regarding, say, the land reclamation project. If this constitutes “essentializing,” to use a trendy pejorative, so be it. Anyone interested in a discussion of the DPRK’s literature as literature, or art as art, is advised to look elsewhere. So too are readers who want to know how the propaganda apparatus is organized, how the broadcast networks operate, and so on.

The McCune-Reischauer system is used throughout this book, with the customary exceptions for names (e.g. Kim Il
Sung) and words (e.g. juche) better known in other spellings. Finally, I would like to thank Dongseo University for supporting my research, and Ms Eunjeong Lee for helping me track down certain North Korean materials. Responsibility for all errors in this book is mine.

B.R. Myers, Busan, South Korea, October 2009

Korean schoolchildren in North and South learn that Japan invaded their fiercely patriotic country in 1905, spent forty years trying to destroy its language and culture, and withdrew without having made any significant headway. This version of history is just as uncritically accepted by most foreigners who write about Korea. Yet the truth is more complex. For much of the country’s long history its northern border was fluid, and the national identities of literate Koreans and Chinese mutually indistinguishable.
¹
Believing their civilization to have been founded by a Chinese sage in China’s image, educated
Koreans subscribed to a Confucian worldview that posited their country in a position of permanent subservience to the Middle Kingdom. Even when Korea isolated itself from the mainland in the seventeenth century, it did so in the conviction that it was guarding Chinese tradition better than the Chinese themselves. For all their xenophobia, therefore, the Koreans were no nationalists. As Carter Eckert has written, “There was little, if any, feeling of loyalty toward the abstract concept of Korea as a nation-state, or toward fellow inhabitants of the peninsula as ‘Koreans.’ ”
²
It was not until the late nineteenth century, and under Japanese sponsorship, that a reform-minded cabinet undertook measures to establish Korea’s independence and imbue the people with a sense of national pride.

The Japanese freed the peninsula from China only to take it for themselves. In 1905 Tokyo established a protectorate over Korea, assuming control first of its foreign, then its domestic affairs. Annexation of the peninsula followed in 1910. Public opposition to Japanese rule grew until patriots read out a declaration of independence on March 1, 1919 in Seoul, setting off a nationwide uprising. The authorities responded with a brutal show of force before relaxing some of the repressive policies that had inflamed their subjects.

Although nationalists took advantage of new Korean-language newspapers to canvas support, they were no match for the colonial propaganda machine, which now sought to co-opt Korean pride instead of stamping it out. It asserted that Koreans shared the same ancient progenitor, bloodline and benevolent ruler as the Japanese themselves; both peoples thus belonged to one “imperial” race morally (if not physically and intellectually) superior to all others.
³
The dominant slogan of
the day was
naisen ittai
or “Interior [i.e. Japan] and Korea as one body.” While intent on undermining their subjects’ sense of a distinct nationhood, the authorities emphasized that
naisen ittai
did not mean the end of Koreanness, and even posed as champions of a culture that had languished too long in China’s shadow. Koreans were encouraged to cherish their “region” and its “dialect,” even its yin-yang flag (which was printed in school maps and atlases right up to liberation), as long as they remembered that the peninsula was but one part of a greater Japanese whole.
⁴

A postcard from the “Japan and Korea as one body” campaign of the 1930s shows Japan (r) and its colony as schoolboy partners, running a three-legged race over the globe.

Nationalist intellectuals attempted to counter this propaganda by reviving interest in the legend of Tan’gun. Set down in an anthology of folk-tales in 1284, then largely ignored for centuries, it told how this half-divine figure had inaugurated the first Korean kingdom with his seed in 2333 BC. As the nationalists saw it, the tale gave the Koreans their own pure bloodline, a civilization grounded in a unique culture, and over four millennia of history to their colonizers’ three. One writer even tried to establish Mount Paektu, a volcanic mountain on the border with China, as Tan’gun’s birthplace and a counterpart to Japan’s sacred Mount Fuji.
⁵
The South Korean historian Yi Yǒng-hun puts it best: “The myths and symbols needed to form a nation were coined new in the awareness of Japan’s myths and symbols—in opposition to and in emulation of them.”
⁶
The public proved indifferent to this derivative mythmaking, however, and by the end of the 1930s most prominent nationalists had themselves become enthusiastic advocates of the new order.

Korea’s left-wing writers executed a similar
volte face
. Rounded up and imprisoned in the early 1930s, then released
after promising to behave themselves, they soon began lending their voices to the great militarist chorus. As the Korean-language
Maeil sinbo
newspaper remarked with satisfaction in 1944, writers of all ideological stripes—communist, nationalist, libertarian—had united in support for the system.
⁷

But even while these writers glorified the emperor, they urged their countrymen to cherish their Koreanness.
⁸
In romance novels frail Japanese women fell in love with strong Korean men, much as they still do in South Korean films and dramas.
⁹
Illustrations in newspapers and magazines showed girls in traditional
hanbok
costume waving the Japanese flag, and Confucian gentlemen in horsehair hats standing proudly by their newly recruited sons.
¹⁰
The regime stimulated pride in “peninsular” history for imperial ends, encouraging Koreans to reclaim their ancient territory by settling in Manchuria.
¹¹
One writer invoked the elite
hwarang
soldiers of the Silla dynasty to whip up fighting spirit.
¹²
Another called on young men to “demonstrate the loyalty of a Japanese citizen and the spirit of a son of Korea” by volunteering to fight in the “holy war” against the Yankees.
¹³
As the historian Cho Kwan-ja has remarked, these collaborators regarded themselves as “pro-Japanese [Korean] nationalists.”
¹⁴

Little of this propaganda reached the illiterate majority of the population, who often had to be brutally coerced into complying with Japanese demands for soldiers, laborers and prostitutes.
¹⁵
The educated classes, however, being more highly propagandized (as the educated always are), and enjoying the benefits of the new order, generally behaved as the authorities wanted them to. Granted, a repressive system was in place.
¹⁶
But one must either assume that the average educated Korean harbored a fierce opposition to the
status quo
, and
collaborated in painful awareness of his fear and hypocrisy, or that he chose to believe he was serving his people as part of a winning racial team. No one familiar with human nature can doubt that the latter assumption is more likely to be true.
¹⁷
It is borne out by evidence of widespread over-compliance with the
naisen ittai
campaign. By the end of the 1920s the upper and middle classes in Seoul were speaking Japanese in their own homes.
¹⁸
Marriages between Koreans and their colonizers were, as a famous short story later put it, “thought quite natural by many, perhaps even a mark of distinction.”
¹⁹
(In South Korea, marriage with Japanese citizens remains the form of international marriage with the least social stigma attached.) Newsreels of the imperial army’s victories in the Pacific War elicited vigorous applause from moviegoers.
²⁰