by B. R. Myers
B.R. Myers, Busan, South Korea, October 2009
PART I
A History of North Korea’s Official Culture
CHAPTER ONE
THE COLONIAL ERA, 1910-1945
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
They had less to clap about as the war progressed. By early 1945 propaganda had taken on a note of desperation. “If our destiny is thwarted in this war … it would be a tragedy for all mankind,” the Korean-language daily warned in March. “We must win.”21 But on August 6 the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, emboldening the USSR to enter the war with Japan. The Red Army was advancing swiftly down the Korean peninsula on August 15 when Hirohito read out his famous surrender notice. By that time the US and the Soviet Union had already decided, without consulting the Koreans themselves, to share the administration of the former Japanese colony for an indefinite period. The Red Army occupied the north, setting up headquarters for a so-called Soviet Civil Administration in the ancient city of Pyongyang. American soldiers arrived in September to take over Seoul and the rest of the southern half of the peninsula.22
THE SOVIET OCCUPATION, 1945-1948
Though most Koreans in 1945 had no memory of life before Japanese rule, neither the Soviets nor the Americans saw a need to de-colonize hearts and minds. That the Koreans now hated Japan was taken as proof that they had always done so. Nor did either power punish former propagandists. In Seoul, the cultural scene’s spontaneous efforts to come to terms with its past were soon undermined by the settling of personal scores and a general refusal to acknowledge a collective guilt.1 Obs
cure ex-collaborators condemned the famous ones, those who had propagandized in Korean asserted moral superiority over those who had done so in Japanese, and erstwhile “proletarians” acted as if their brief prison stays in the 1930s made up for everything they had written afterward.
Meanwhile, to the north, the Soviet authorities set about orchestrating a “people’s revolution” of the kind already underway in much of Eastern Europe. The first stage was to be a coalition between communists and other forces, followed by a pseudo-coalition in which the communists called the shots, and finally a monolithic regime.2 This plan was complicated by the lack of left-wingers in the north of the country, which had hitherto been a bastion of conservatives and Christians. The occupying power had to build up a local party from scratch while courting right-wing partners for a coalition.3 For all their feigned impartiality, the Soviets lost no time transferring ownership of printing presses, publishing houses and radio stations to the fledgling Workers’ Party. The first issue of the party daily (known today as the Rodong sinmun) appeared in September 1945.4 The radio network began operations on October 14, 1945 by broadcasting a mass rally in Pyongyang to honor the Soviet liberators.5
Among the Koreans who took the podium that day was Kim Il Sung, a Pyongyang-born thirty-three-year-old who had attained the rank of captain in the Red Army. Although Kim had sat out the Pacific War in the USSR, he had earlier fought against the Japanese as a commander in Mao Zedong’s army, acquiring brief renown in 1937 for an attack on an imperial outpost just south of the Yalu River.6 For better or worse Kim was the closest thing to a resistance fighter the Koreans had. He is said to have wanted a military career, but the Soviets, finding no more appropriate person to work with, persuaded him to assume leadership of the new state. Yet Kim was by far the least educated of all the leaders in the socialist world. His spotty schooling had ended at seventeen, and although he had spent a year at an infantry officer school in the USSR, it is unlikely that he understood enough Russian to grasp anything theoretical. None of his writings evinces an understanding of Marx.† Equally ignorant of communist ideology were the guerilla comrades who comprised the core of Kim’s power base. Andrei Lankov, a prominent Korea researcher, has written that “with the exception of the Soviet Koreans, no top cadres had undergone training in … Marxism-Leninism.”7 It is no wonder that instead of guiding the cultural scene in ideological matters the party allowed itself to be guided by it.
Kim Il Sung
Contrary to South Korean left-wing myth, which the American historian Bruce Cumings has done much to nurture, almost all intellectuals who moved to Pyongyang after liberation had collaborated with the Japanese to some degree. Several who had done so with special enthusiasm, like the novelist Kim Sa-ryang, had been virtually run out of Seoul. The North was more and not less hospitable to such collaborators. As a history book published in the DPRK in 1981 puts it, “the Great Leader Kim Il Sung refuted the mistaken tendency to doubt or ostracize people just because they … had worked for Japanese institutions in the past.”8 Kim’s own brother, it is worth remembering, had interpreted for Japanese troops in China.9
From one Great Marshal on a white horse to another; Hirohito (above) and Kim Il Sung (below) atop their respective purity symbols. Kim Jong Il, here on his father’s arm, has been filmed and photographed on white horses of his own.
But retaining the emperor’s administrators and technocrats was one thing, and retaining his propagandists another—or so one would have thought. According to Marxism-Leninism, a communist party’s main task lies in infusing the masses with revolutionary consciousness.10 It is remarkable, therefore, that when the North Korean Federation of Literature and Art was established in March 1946, most of the top posts went to well-known veterans of the wartime cultural apparatus, like the playwright Song Yǒng and the choreographer Ch’oi Sǔng-hǔi.11 No writer was excluded from the party or its cultural organizations due to pro-Japanese activities, let alone imprisoned for them (as Yi Kwang-su and Ch’oi Nam-sǒn were in Seoul).
The Workers’ Party had to wait until 1948 to receive its own crash course in Marxism-Leninism and was therefore unable to provide much guidance to writers and artists.12 Reading out a speech crudely plagiarized from Mao, Kim Il Sung told them to study Marxism and “communicate with the masses in words they understand.”13 A Soviet-Korean poet took it upon himself to regale admiring fellow writers with a list of socialist realist classics not yet translated into Korean.14 Other than that, the party simply doled out themes, starting in early 1946 with that of land reform. None of the literati wanted to make the first move. “How was one to write a novel or poem on land reform? … All put their heads to one side, finally concluding it was an impossible task.”15 Only when the party responded angrily to an anthology of love poems in January 1947 did North Korean writers begin propagandizing in earnest.16
Not surprisingly, their work bore the influence of the ideology they had spent much of their lives disseminating. Having been ushered by the Japanese into the world’s purest race, the Koreans in 1945 simply kicked the Japanese out of it. The legend of the ancient racial progenitor Tan’gun, which Korean nationalists had failed to popularize during the 1920s, came almost overnight to be regarded as historical truth. Japanese symbols were transposed into Korean ones. Mount Paektu, hitherto known only as the peninsula’s highest peak, suddenly attained a Fuji-like, sacral status as the presumed place of Tan’gun’s birth.17 Much of the Japanese version of Korean history—from its blanket condemnation of Chinese influence to its canards about murderous Yankee missionaries—was carried over whole. This is not to say that North Korean ideology simply codified what everyone already believed. The average illiterate citizen was likely no more nationalist in 1945 than he had been in 1910. It was the Japanese-schooled minority which now put a radio in every village, taught the peasants to read, sent children to school—and convinced the race that it was the purest in the world.
Gone, however, was the confident tone of imperial propaganda. Where the colonial power had touted Japanese virtue as a protective talisman, the Koreans now believed that their virtue had made them as vulnerable as children to an evil world. What by international standards had been an enviably placid history was now remembered as a long litany of suffering and humiliation at foreign hands. In depictions of the colonial era, novelists and painters focused on the forced labor of little girls and boys, thus reinforcing the impression of a child race abused by an adult one.18 Because Koreans truly were as the perfidious Japanese had only claimed to be, i.e. inherently virtuous, never evil by nature, all atrocities they had committed during the Pacific War were ascribed to duress and quickly erased from the collective memory.19 Koreans had done nothing under the Japanese but suffer.†
The new racial self-image manifested itself clearly in stories of Soviet-Korean friendship written and published in the late 1940s.20 Writers depicted ailing men and women being carried to hospitals on the backs of Russian nurses and female doctors. Lest anyone miss the symbolism, the heroines were explicitly compared to mothers, the locals to children.21
Even in the hardest times Wǒnju had only to look into Dr. Kriblyak’s eyes to know that he would not die. His heart was always in her embrace, as if he were being held at his mother’s bosom.22
The genre was evidently meant to flatter the Soviets with the implication of filial subservience, and at the same time to plead for motherly protection of a race too pure to survive on its own. These tales should not, however, be misread as asserting the moral equality (let alone superiority) of the Russian people. Just as foreigners can be evil, while Koreans can only do it, so it is that only the child race is inherently virtuous; foreigners can at best do the occasional good deed.
The North Koreans were by no means alone in reinventing their past, nor were they the only nationalists in the new East Bloc. The historian Tony Judt has written that myths of a “France of resisters or a Poland of victims” played an important role in helping Europe set aside its past and mo
ve on.23 But there is an enormous difference between nationalism and a race-based view of the world. The North Koreans’ image of themselves as inherently pure and vulnerable would prove particularly problematic, encouraging as it did both a dislike of their allies and a chronic dependence on them.
Kim Jong Il as a spartan, Juche-minded 18 year old, one of many images designed to counter the assumption that he had a carefree or privileged upbringing.
This worldview also posed problems for iconographers of the new personality cult, for Kim Il Sung had to be presented on the one hand as the embodiment of Korean naivety and on the other as a brilliant revolutionary warrior. The logical solution would have been for the regime to re-conceive ethnic virtues so as to include the qualities of strength, discipline and wisdom. Attempting to do just that, the Soviet-Korean poet Cho Ki-ch’ˇon—one of the few intellectuals in Pyongyang who had not received a Japanese schooling—depicted Kim as a brilliant strategist who read Soviet history between battles.24 Han Sǒr-ya and other homegrown writers and artists, however, acclaimed a nurturing, maternal leader, one whose success derived more from his naivety and innocence than anything else. He had mastered Marxism-Leninism with his heart, not his brain, and his best ideas came to him in his sleep.25 It was this latter image that took hold, though the Soviet-Koreans are said to have found it as bizarre and comical as we in the West do today.26
Needless to say, no mention was made of the fact that “the General” had spent the Pacific War years in a rural Soviet town. Instead he and his guerillas were said to have fought the occupying power from a secret base on Mount Paektu. This clever lie put the heroic troops just inside the homeland during the national ordeal while offering a plausible explanation as to why no one could remember seeing them. No less importantly, it linked Kim to Tan’gun’s alleged birthplace.27