P'yongan Society Journal

North Korean Society & Culture

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The Korea Society hosted former UK Ambassador to North Korea, John Everard, to discuss his time in Pyongyang and the release of his book “Only Beautiful, Please”.  Ambassador John Everard lived in the capital city from 2006 to 2008, and outside of his official duty, spent his time interacting with North Koreans.  His book takes a different approach in depicting North Korea, by showing the human dimension of ordinary citizens living in Pyongyang.  Granted, this dimension only showcases the lives of roughly 3 million, out of the 23 million people who live in North Korea.  Foreigners are allowed within a 35km radius of Pyongyang, and Everard took every opportunity to visit and document within this area.

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KEI’s Chad O’Carroll recently interviewed Dr. Andrei Lankov of Kookmin University on the prospects for economic reform in North Korea and reunification. Dr. Lankov is scholar of Asia and a specialist in North Korea. Part 1 of the interview focuses on the likelihood that the new regime in Pyongyang will undertake economic reforms. Part 2, to be published next week, focuses on the prospects for reunification.

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SHANGHAI - Officially billed as the first China-North Korea co-produced film during more than 60 years of the neighboring countries’ diplomatic relations, dance drama Meet in Pyongyang made its mark at the Shanghai International Film Festival by offering a glimpse of life in present-day North Korea, and attracted the interests from buyers in South Korea, Japan, and Europe.

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A video of I am a Flower Bud (see previous post). 

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Visit Original Link

나는야 꽃봉오리, or I am a Flower Bud, is a North Korean children’s song. In the DPRK, children are often referred to as ‘flower buds’ and the word finds its way into many children’s books and songs.[1]

     I am a flower bud, a flower bud

     Shall I bloom for the spring winds?

     Shall I bloom for the honey bees?

     Oh no, no. I bloom for the love of the leader.

     I am a flower bud of Korea.[2]

See here for a video performance of this song.

Flower Bud is also the name of a bimonthly children’s educational newspaper.[3]

 -P'yongan Society Journal, June 15th 2012

[1] Information Center on North Korea: http://library.unikorea.go.kr

[2] For the full Korean lyrics, see: http://blogs.yahoo.co.jp/kimno_souko/10950439.html

[3] Korea Publications: http://www.korea-publ.com/

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Bakeries in North Korea?  Love North Korean Children has set up bread factories in Rajin, Sangbon and Pyongyang to help feed North Koreans in a direct and practical way. Two more factories are due to open in 2012.  The group’s overall objective is to open 26 bread factories: 1 in each major district of North Korea.  NK News recently caught up with founder George Rhee to learn more about the interesting project. (NK News)

Please also see the website of Love North Korean Children. 

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The Korea Society hosted a gallery opening for its newest installment entitled “Feast or Famine: DPRK Agrarian Posters from the Zellweger Collection”. The collection consists of 23 North Korean propaganda posters gathered by Katharina Zellweger during her 5 year stay in Pyongyang. While there, she worked as director of the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation and spent her weekends purchasing over 100 posters, etchings, and wood blocks depicting the DPRK’s desired state of reality. (NK News)

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Another excellent article by James Pearson

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NK News interviews Roger Barrett from Korea Business Consultants. Another excellent article worth reading. 

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An excellent article from Gabriel Mizrahi at the Huffington Post on comedy and humor in North Korea. His description of North Korea humor as "Self-conscious and a bit immature, perhaps, but funny and endearing -- a celebration of the mundane and those human universals, including marriage, love, and the corresponding anatomy" is spot on, as is the assertion that "Dick jokes, it turns out, are huge in the DPRK". I've heard more than a few of these from North Koreans. I wonder if Lonely Island's Dick in a Box has made it to the DPRK yet? 

The best part of Mizrahi's article has to be the following: 

I asked another of my guides, a porcelain face in her 20s, to tell me her favorite joke.

"OK," she said, giggling. "There is a boy, and all day he is saying that he has to pee, so his mother tells him, 'It is rude to say you have to pee. If you have to pee, just say you have to whistle.'

"That night the boy wakes up because he has to pee. So he wakes up his father and he tells him, 'Father, Father, I have to whistle.'

"And the father says, 'OK, but do it quietly in my ear.'"

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Visit Original Link

흘라리 (Heulrari) is a folk song from Hamgyŏng province.[1] According to the Daily NK citing an article on Uriminzokkiri, a North Korean website based in Japan, ‘Heulrari’ originated in the Moraedok area of the Pukch'ŏng region in what is today Southern Hamgyŏng. The song is said to be named after the nickname of a man who lived in the vicinity of a local spring and played the flute and bugle especially well.[2]

Traditionally on the 3rd day of the 3rd lunar month (samjitnal) the people of the Pukch'ŏng region had a custom of doing a round dance to the song while striking upturned calabashes (gourds) inside water basins to keep rhythm.[3] On these occasions, the so-called ‘Heulrari’ would often perform and so his name eventually became associated with the song and make up both the song’s title and lyrics.

The lyrics were later expanded to include lines related to dancing.

Let’s all hold hands and go out and dance…

Gentle maidens don’t be shy…

Hard-working men don’t decline out of courtesy…

Let’s match our hearts and hands and dance! [4]

I suspect these lyrics date from post-1945 given the North Korean fondness for mass dances and the reference to workingmen. In addition, the modern lyrics also include the verb ending “-자요” (let’s -), an expression typical of P'yŏngan province where P'yŏngyang is located and not Hamgyŏng where the song originates.

-P'yongan Society Journal, May 1st 2012

[1] “Heulrali” at North Korean Human Geography (in Korean):

http://www.cybernk.net/infoText/InfoHumanCultureDetail.aspx?mc=CC0402&sc=C868380&tid=CC030600006361&direct=1

[2] “An Introduction to the Northern Traditional Dance Song ‘Heulrali’” from the Daily NK (in Korean): http://www.dailynk.com/korean/read.php?cataId=nk09000&num=13142

[3] An example of this can be seen in the ‘Dondolrari’ dance, which shares a common origin with Heurali: http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMTUxMTAyOTMy.html

[4] This is the basic gist of the song. The full Korean lyrics can be viewed here: http://www.big.or.jp/~jrldr/w/mi22.html

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Transition’s Follies: China’s Mausoleum and North Korea’s Rocket

In the days directly preceding and following North Korea’s unsuccessful rocket launch, a number of people asked me what I made of the whole situation. Namely, why might the North Koreans risk (and ultimately end up scuttling) the March 29th food-aid agreement[1] with the United States on a rocket?

While I can only speculate, I read something that reminded me of a story from China that can perhaps shed some light on the situation and how an idea can take on a life of its own in a place like North Korea. Dr. Jeffery Lewis at Arms Control Wonk wrote the following in his interesting piece entitled “Hostile Intent” after a meeting with North Korean officials at a Track 2 event in London:

I came away with the impression that Kim Jong Il himself made the decision to launch the satellite to commemorate Kim Il Sung’s birthday.  North Korea may be between a rocket and hard place — there is no way to countermand the order of the late Dear Leader himself…Perhaps whoever makes decisions has enough authority to engage the United States but not enough to countermand the Dear Leader’s launch plans.[2]

Lewis’ comments made me recall a story someone once told me in Beijing about the building of Mao’s Mausoleum, which now stands in Tiananmen Square and holds Mao’s embalmed body.

Most likely apocryphal, the story claims even high officials were originally opposed to the idea of laying the Mao to rest in Tiananmen Square following his death in 1976 for the structure would violate centuries of tradition, or what should have been to any good communist- ‘superstition’.

For those unfamiliar with Chinese culture, Tiananmen Square lies directly to the south of the Forbidden City, the imperial palace of the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1912) Dynasties. According to traditional beliefs, both the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square are oriented on a roughly north-south meridian, or the “Axis of Heaven”, that led to the throne of the emperor, who himself faced south. From this auspicious position, the so-called “Son of Heaven” was believed to govern the realm backed by “the Mandate of Heaven”.

Thus, any structure that disrupted heaven’s mandate was believed to be incredibly inauspicious in what was already proving to be a very inauspicious year. Nineteen seventy-six had already seen the death of Premier Zhou Enlai in January and the deadly Tangshan Earthquake in July that killed upwards of 240,000 people prior to Mao’s death in September.[3] Throughout Chinese history, both governments and the common people had considered natural disasters to be a sign that heaven’s will had turned against the rulers.

Very worrisome, indeed, in a country of 800 million impoverished people which in 1976 had spent the last decade “bombarding the headquarters”.[4]

The story continues, again probably apocryphal, that no one officially proposed the building of Mao’s Mausoleum. The idea just appeared, perhaps put forward by an over zealous Maoist, or perhaps just mentioned in passing by a man on the street.

Mao himself probably wished to be cremated,[5] however, once the idea was out in the open no one in his or her right mind dared to oppose it. The cat was out of the bag, so to speak, and the lack of free expression characteristic of authoritarian states compounded by the uncertainty (and risk) of political transition[6] ensured there was no turning back.

Mao’s Mausoleum was completed less than one year later in May of 1977.

Whether the story is true or not, the story’s very existence is proof the uncertainty associated with times of transition and change. Fear, paranoia, and the desire to protect oneself and one’s loved ones can provide a distorted context in which rational actors choose to make irrational decisions even when they may have unpopular and/or horrid consequences. 

In this way, North Korea today is not so different from China in 1976. Granted North Korea's folly may result in much more than an eye-sore, but the forces at work are the same. For this reason, we should keep in mind that even if we cannot clearly quantify or qualify what is going on in the minds of the leaders and strategists in Pyongyang, the decisions being made are ultimately based on the actions of individuals living in uncertain times. While this does not condone their actions, it does begin to explain why they may have done what they did.  

-P’yongan Society Journal, May 1st 2012

[1] For details of the so-called “Leap Day” agreement, see “North Koreans Agree to Freeze Nuclear Efforts” from The New York Times: 

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/01/world/asia/us-says-north-korea-agrees-to-curb-nuclear-work.html?pagewanted=all.

[2] The full article from March 29th is worth a read for a well-rounded and thoughtful analysis:

http://lewis.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/5106/hostile-intent.

As is Lewis’ follow up article from April 10th entitled “North Korea’s Upcoming Launch”: 

http://lewis.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/5140/north-koreas-upcoming-launch.

Arms Control Wonk is Dr. Lewis’ personal blog and deals with issues of arms control, disarmament, and non-proliferation.

[3] Official sources record 242, 769 deaths, however, other estimates are as high as 655,000. The earthquake measured a magnitude of 7.5 on the Richter scale. For more information and photos, see: 

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/world/events/1976_07_27.php.

[4] Mao’s Bombard the Headquarters- My Big-Character Poster is associated with giving his full-support for to the Red Guard movement in the early stages of the Cultural Revolution.

[5] According to Wikipedia, citing an October 6th 1976 New York Times article entitled “China After Mao’s Death: Nation of Rumor and Uncertainty”,in 1956 Mao Zedong signed the “Proposal that all Central Leaders be Cremated after Death”. Kathlyn Gay in Mao Zedong’s China (2007) cites Mao as saying (writing?), “Burn the bodies. I’ll take the lead. We should all be cremated when we die. Be turned into ashes and used to fertilize the fields” (112).

[6] The years following Mao’s death saw a series of power struggles between various factions inside the Communist Party that saw the downfall of the “Gang of Four” and eventual rise of Deng Xiaoping, whose economic reforms set China on the course of unprecedented economic growth. 

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A very good piece by Tad Farrell at NK News about that touches on the need for better journalistic standards for North Korea coverage and sorting out the wheat from the chaff of what constitutes a good story. 

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A Country of People

“What is your dream?”[i] Spend enough time around North Koreans and it is a question you should come to expect. The first time a friend of mine asked me this question I was caught completely off guard. Perhaps because I myself had no clear answer, perhaps because I associated North Korea with anything but a land where dreams can exist, thrive, and perhaps come true.

The question itself captures something fairly obvious- that North Koreans, like any other people anywhere in the world, have their own hopes, goals, and ambitions.

Yet due to the apparent inaccessibility of North Korea to the outside world, this can be easy to forget. What may seem obvious in the abstract does not always translate to the concrete understanding that most people in North Korea spend much of their time go about their own daily lives. Without the context of personal experience, we have a tendency to see the country solely amongst the backdrop of larger issues such as nuclear weapons, human rights, rockets, and chronic food shortages.  

We believe that these issues, although timely and pressing, cannot be understood outside of a human context. They are important precisely because they impact people’s lives, but at the same time, they we must remember are also products of human behaviors, habits, and opinions.[ii]

Authors such as Andrei Lankov in North of the DMZ and Barbara Demick in Nothing to Envy have done tremendous work in bringing everyday life and society in North Korea to outside readers.[iii] However, much work remains to describe a country of 24 million people with its own unique society, politics, and economy not to mention in-country regional differences in culture, history, and language.[iv]

This journal seeks to continue such work based on the experiences of those who have spent time in North Korea and around North Koreans. We hope to explore North Korean culture and society, while at the same time placing these experiences in a broader context and speculate what they might mean for the present and future. Our goal is not so much to draw conclusions, but to expand the general scope of understanding of and dialogue on what is certainly a complex country.

In doing so, we make two major, if not obvious, assumptions about North Korea: 

First, we assume that North Korea society has its own cultural, artistic and intellectual developments worthy of note and investigation and the exploration of these has inherent value.

Second, we assume that North Korean society is not monolithic. Diversity of thought, opinion and ambition do exist. These influence the present, even if they do not or cannot find expression, and will without a doubt influence the future.

What evidence do we have that the above is true? Aside from the personal experiences that follow, anthropological works from the former eastern bloc and China have shown that daily life certainly existed under “high-socialism”.[v]

But perhaps most importantly we know that North Korea, just like any country in the world, is a country of people.

-P’yongan Society Journal, April 17th 2012

[i] <<네 소원이 무엇인가?>>

[ii] A large body of literature exists describing the ability and role of common people, including the severely marginalized, to shape (albeit at time indirectly) society, politics and economy. A representative work is James C. Scott’s Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, which describes how activities such as foot-dragging, sabotage, and gossip can aid the weak, in this case farmers, influence local and even national policy and events.

Scott, James C. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. Yale University Press, 1987.

See also:

Creed, Gerald W. Domesticating Revolution: From Socialist Reform to Ambivalent Transition in a Bulgarian village. The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998

Oi, Jean Chun. State and Peasant in Contemporary China: The Political Economy of Village Government. University of California Press, 1991.

Scott, James C. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. Yale University Press, 1992.

Thaxton Jr., Ralph A. Catastrophe and Contention in Rural China: Mao’s Great Leap Forward Famine and the Origins of Righteous Resistance in Da Fo Village. Cambridge, 2008.

[iii] Another excellent work in Korean is Joo Sung-Ha’s book Pyongyang Stories Written from Seoul (서울에서 쓰는 평양이야기) and blog with of the same name, http://blog.donga.com/nambukstory/category/n-story.

Demick, Barbara. Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea. Spiegel & Grau, 2010.

Lankov, Andrei. North of the DMZ: Essays on Daily Life in North Korea. McFarland & Company, 2002.

[iv] A small, but growing, number of scholars have recently published studies in English on regional identity, culture, and history in pre-division northern Korea (P’yongan, Hamgyong, Hwanghae provinces, and Korean-Manchuria). Examples of such, include:

Hwang, Kyung Moon. “From Dirt to Heaven: Northern Koreans in the Choson and Early Modern Eras.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 62, no. 1 (June 2002): 135-78.

Kim, Sun Joo. Marginality and Subversion in Korea: The Hong Kyongnae Rebellion of 1812. University of Washington Press, 2007.

Kim, et. al. The Northern Region of Korea: History, Identity, Culture. Kim, Sun Joo, ed. University of Washington Press, 2010.

Park, Hyun Ok. Two Dreams in One Bed: Empire, Social Life, and the Origins of the North Korean Revolution in Manchuria. Duke University Press, 2005.

[v] There is considerable debate about the exact nature of the North Korean state. Scholars have described the North Korean state as “Neo-Confucian” (Cummings, 2003), “a combination of a Confucian and twentieth century totalitarian state” [i.e. Stalinist] (Hassig & Oh, 2000) and “race-based nationalism with roots in Japanese fascism” (Myers, 2010).

Cumming, Bruce. North Korea: Another Country. The New Press, 2003.

Hassig, Ralph., Oh, Kong Dan. North Korea Through the Looking Glass. Brookings Institutions Press, 2000.

Myers, B.R.. The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why it Matters. Melville House Publishing, 2010.

However, I would argue that this does not preclude comparisons to other states with similar Marxist-Leninist origins, especially the periods of “high socialism” in the USSR, China, and the former socialist sates in Eastern Europe.  In all cases, the state penetrated daily life to an unprecedented degree and in all cases significant regional differences existed between all socialist states, former and present, both geographically and temporally.  For example, compare the USSR of the 1920’s, 1930’s and 1960’s with itself, or any of these era’s with Mao’s China, Ceausescu’s Romania and/or Hoxha’s Albania. Many of these states incorporated a high-degree of ethnic nationalism based on local idiosyncrasies grounded in that particular country’s own history and/or culture into the basic Marxist-Leninist and/or Stalinist or Maoist framework mixed with . In the same way, North Korea is not unique in its uniqueness.

For studies of life in Stalin’s USSR, see:

Fitzpatrick, Shelia. Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village After Collectivization. Oxford University Press, 1991

Fitzpatrick, Shelia. Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930’s. Oxford University Press, 2000

Kotkin, Stephan. Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as Civilization. University of California Press, 1992

Scott, John. Behind the Urals: An American in Russia’s City of Steel. Indian University Press, 1989

For China, see:

Hinton, William. Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village. Monthly Review Press, 2008.

Yun, Yunxiang. Private Lives under Socialism: Love, Intimacy, and Family in a Chinese Village, 1949-1999. Stanford University Press, 2003

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About the P'yongan Society Journal

A North Korean friend once told me, “In North Korea everyone is concerned about the future. Everyone has his or her own ideas about the direction of the country. It is all they talk about with those they trust. Of course, they don’t say it in open, but everyone has their own opinion.” 

This purpose of this journal is to begin to capture some of this plurality based on actual conversations and interactions with North Koreans by people familiar with the country and at the same time to provide relevant background and perspective to outside readers. 

Our work is based on the simple assumption that a diversity of thought does exist in North Korea today. In addition, we believe many aspects of North Korean society and culture have their own inherent value and are therefore worth exploration. 

For better or for worse, the North Korea of today will serve as a foundation for the future. Whatever that may be only time will tell.

Ignoring, belittling, or poking fun at North Korean culture today not only provides an inaccurate and unrealistic depiction of an entire society with its own unique history, cultural achievements and flaws, but also denies the people of that society any chance at achieving a normal existence in their own time and place. 

We hope to shed more light on how different people in North Korea live, what they think about, and what they value. In doing so, we hope to not so much draw conclusions, but expand the discourse of understanding, thought and debate related to North Korea. 

Our journal takes after The Economist in that all authorship remains anonymous. Moreover, entries are purposely lacking and vague in regards to personal details, such as name, location, occupation and gender, out of respect for the privacy of all parties involved. 

The conversations and personal experiences, however, are genuine. It is our opinion that the broad ideas expressed within are more valuable than any factual information that could be gleaned from providing more exact details.

Lastly, as a caveat this journal by no means claims to represent the whole of North Korean society, but merely parts of it. In the end, we should assume that in reality North Korean society is much more diverse and complex.  

-P’yongan Society Journal, April 15th 2012