Illusive Utopia: Theater, Film, and Everyday Performance in North Korea

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Page xii →A Note on Translation, Transliteration, and the Order of Names All translations not otherwise credited are my own. All Korean terms are transliterated according to the Official Romanization of Korean (also referred to as Revised Romanization of Korean) system released by South Korea’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism in 2000. Exceptions are made for proper names (e.g., Pyongyang, Kim Jong-il, and Yoduk) and surnames (e.g., Kim and Park) well known in the English-speaking world by alternate Romanizations. In the case of these exceptions, the Official Romanization of Korean appears in parentheses after the first occurrence of the term. The order of surnames and given names appear according to the convention of the home country; hence Asian names (e.g., Mao Zedong and Kim Jong-il) appear with the surname listed first. All Chinese terms are transliterated according to the PRC pinyin system, and Russian terms are rendered according to the Library of Congress system. Exceptions occur when quoting others’ work, where the transliteration system originally chosen by the author is respected.

Page 1 →Introduction The central square in Pyongyang (Pyeongyang) buzzes with patriotic commotion as millions of legs are lifted in one unanimous step. The procession of soldiers, workers, farmers, students, and ordinary citizens, all in immaculately organized regiments, turns around the gloomy corners of the gargantuan Stalinist buildings and heads straight toward the sacred center of today’s jubilee. Each regiment moves in unison while exuding unflinching zeal for the regime: young students, future soldiers, flaunt slogans like “Let us meet at the war front” and “We will become bullets ourselves”; farmers march around the gigantic moving platform displaying the models of the bountiful harvest for the year; veterans’ family members demonstrate with slogans professing their profound love for the leader, such as “We cannot live without you” and “We worship the Dear General like the sky.” The marchers look weary and lean, wearing their best clothes, well adorned for the pompous occasion. Their facial expressions are intense, but their hollow gazes directed at the state leaders on a high podium betray the intensity. As the marchers pass by the sacrosanct leader Kim Jong-il (Gim Jeong-il), they wave their arms more frantically and proclaim even louder than before: “LONG LIVE THE DEAR GENERAL! LONG LIVE THE DEAR GENERAL!” Like the voice of a specter, the echo resonates over the gray city long after the marchers disappear from sight.1 It is 2003 and North Korea is commemorating the fifty-fifth anniversary of the foundation of its state. For half a century, the country has gone through vicissitudes from the glorious reconstruction of the war-shattered nation to the recent nuclear and economic crises. As the end of World War Page 2 →II brought thirty-six years (1910–45) of Japanese colonial rule over Korea to an end, Koreans hoped to establish a self-governed and united nation-state. But contrary to the desire of the Korean people, the nation was divided along the thirty-eighth parallel in 1945. Against the overwhelmingly nationalistic sentiment of the Korean people, who longed to resuscitate a lost national identity in a unified postcolonial nation, North and South Korea established their own regimes, which still exist as two separate sovereign states. Figure 1. A parade that took place in Pyongyang in 2003, from The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea 9 (2008), 3. The current North Korean regime was established in 1948 with the Soviet Union’s support of Kim Il-sung (Gim Il-seong) as the head of the state, who was a young guerrilla fighter returning from Manchuria via the Soviet Union. North Korea and the Soviet Union officially established a diplomatic relationship in August 1948, but during the three preceding years, the Soviet Union created a virtual protectorate out of North Korea. As the supporter of Kim Il-sung, the Soviet Union played a crucial role in the formation of the North Korean state in both political and cultural spheres: however, North Korea eventually made attempts to grow out of the shadows of foreign influence by manifesting the ideology of juche (self-reliance), the Page 3 →guiding spirit of North Korea that extols the indigenous Korean ways of life. As North Korea was flaunting an independent spirit that became an essential way of differentiating itself from South Korea, it quickly restored traditional ties with China and played savvy diplomatic games to set off the two big brothers in the socialist bloc. By cleverly maneuvering the SinoSoviet tension, North Korea was able to attract much-needed financial assistance from both superpowers, which enabled the post–Korean War reconstruction of the nation from ground zero. The economic boost that followed came to its demise as the socialist bloc disintegrated with the downfall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the open market policy of China, and the subsequent halt of economic aid from traditional allies of the socialist countries. Added to these factors, North Korea’s unwillingness to adjust to the rapidly changing world order in the 1990s created a disaster that mounted to unprecedented national crisis, yielding countless casualties of political persecution and economic deprivation. Millions of North Koreans endured monumental suffering during the last decade, as millions starved to death, while many others escaped the country in search of food and a better life. Just a year before the parade in the central square in Pyongyang was staged, the North Korean regime was labeled by the U.S. president as a member of “the axis of evil”—a stultifying political branding that would gain much wider recognition than the “hermit kingdom,”

formerly used often in reference to the quixotic nation. North Korea’s elusive negotiating tactics in attempts to resolve the nuclear crisis in the years since have worsened its national image; it is still perceived as one of the most antagonistic nations in the world. Amid a series of intense political/economic crises and international conflicts, North Korea has staged an unflinching display of patriotism, the massive scale of which exhausts even those who merely watch. Why is North Korea so obsessed with theatrical presentation of this idealized self-assessment while its political, economic, and sociocultural reality presents a stark contrast? What is the rationale for an economically troubled nation’s investing so many resources in daylong propaganda exercises? And finally, do the participants staging such a breathtaking synchronicity actually conform to the state-imposed ideals of the unified North Korean nation?

The Confucian-Family State This book emerged from the desire to answer these questions and fill the lacuna in research on North Korean society and culture through the lens of Page 4 →theater, film, and everyday performance—an ideology-shaping matrix that not only entertains but also essentially organizes and mobilizes society. While considerable political, military, and economic attention has been paid to North Korea in recent years, much less effort has been focused on the culture developed since the Cold War era. The socialist culture of North Korea has had a tremendous influence on daily life and produced the nation’s great contradiction: striving to be a part of the global market economy while still claiming socialism as the official state ideology. How are we to understand such dual measures, which allow socialism to linger on, whereas the Soviet Union saw its grand finale more than a decade ago and China is continuing its march toward economic prosperity? In addressing these issues, the dominant Eurocentric analyses of modernity in Korea, which misrepresent the sources and significance of political revolution in East Asia, should be scrutinized. As Martin Lewis and Karen Wigen have argued, “The nation-state idea—i.e., the assumption that cultural identities (nation) coincide with politically sovereign entities (state) to create a series of internally unified and essentially equal unites”2 proves to be a myth in the case of North Korea, since the cultural identity of the nation is deeply rooted in Confucian tradition, which Eurocentric discourse on the establishment of the modern state does not necessarily take into account. Consequently, the significance of the socialist revolution in North Korea should be reassessed with bifocal scrutiny: the Soviet Union’s patronage was an undeniable factor in establishing the modern state and culture,3 yet the long-standing Confucian family traditions of East Asia, which prioritize collectivity over individuality, are another reason the socialist revolution, advocating the communal life rather than modern individuality, succeeded. Confucian ideals value the family as one organic body and the basis of a universal structure; accordingly, Confucianism throughout history postulated an intrinsic relationship between individual and family, and extended that notion to the state and even the universe. As Judith Stacey points out, the family structure provides a frame through which individuals function in society, a view that can be extended to examine the North Korean case. It is impossible to fully separate discussions of social and family structure for two major reasons. First, in profound ways the economic order that supported the Celestial Empire was a family economy. Second, Confucianism, the “state religion”—a set of social structural principles, ethical precepts, and behavioral norms—was at an exceptionally well-articulated Page 5 →ideology both for ruling-class hegemony and for family relationships and organization. Thus, traditional China offers an unusual opportunity to perceive the casual contribution a family system—and the principles of sexual and generational relationships that underlie it—can make to the construction of broader arenas of political and economic order.4 Similar to China, Korean society also organized social relationships in terms of family structure. As Bruce Cumings points out: “Family rearing principles [in Korea] can be extended to politics, to the state, and to the family-state of ancient kings or of Kim Il-sung (at least in the imaginings of his ideologues). The individual is not

an atom, detached from the society, but the building block of the whole, the basis of a society conceived organically.”5 Likewise, Charles Armstrong notes that the metaphors of “community and kin” were central to the North Korean representation of the nation.6 Such an emphasis on the family unit and values typical of traditional Korea survived political upheavals and social changes and continued to serve the new regime of North Korea. Stacey’s argument that “socialist revolution has had the ironic role of strengthening a reformed version of traditional peasant family life” in rural China, which, in turn, “has strengthened peasant support for the revolution,”7 offers a useful analogy for examining the case of North Korea. There, an even more forceful patriarchy than that of the People’s Republic of China was instituted to regulate and monitor every aspect of life, engineering a hereditary socialist state unprecedented in history. Charles Armstrong aptly notes how North Korea articulated its postcolonial nationalism in terms of familiar family kinship: As in all effective nationalisms, North Korea extended outward the concept of agnatic kinship, routinizing family metaphors until they no longer seemed metaphorical and took on a concrete literalness. Over time these symbols would evolve into the “fatherly leader,” the “motherly party,” and the son as the legitimate heir to the Great Leader.8 It would hardly be an exaggeration to state that the backbone of Communist China and of Korea and its social structures is one of the most ancient traditions of prioritizing family kinship over other sets of socialist values. Nevertheless, what seems to be an oxymoronic phenomenon, traditional notions of family structure and hegemony in the North Korean socialist state, at a closer look are actually significant components of modernity9 in East Asia. This book views family rhetoric as the most fundamental, yet little-examined Page 6 →aspect of North Korean sociocultural performances, the study of which will illuminate the reason for the survival of socialism. The notion of family is one of the central concepts used to assess the dynamics of propaganda performances in this book, and will be articulated on multiple levels of Confucian understanding of self, society, nation, and state.10 “Family,” on the one hand, refers to various units of human cohabitation related by blood and marriage, such as extended family or nuclear family, to which I refer as “traditional family.” On the other hand, “family” is used as a synonym for nation and race—a concept often found in a totalitarian regime, such as Nazi Germany or colonial Japan in the first half of the twentieth century.11 In the case of Korea, such a meaning initially emerged as part of the resistance sentiment against the threat posed by foreign powers, and then was consolidated after Japanese colonization in 1910. The rule by Japan from 1910 to 1945 provided the ground for the rise of nationalism as well as artistic imagination, which made use of family rhetoric as one of the most appealing vehicles for enhancing nationalism. After World War II, the nationalistic sentiment of the second interpretation of “family” was used as an ideological weapon to forge a strong sense of statehood. I use the term imagined family to refer to this notion in the book. The North Korean state emerged from the painful experience of Japanese colonialism, when the loss of sovereignty necessitated finding alternative conduits to address national ideals and crises. “The nation fills the void left in the uprooting of communities and kin, and turns that loss into the language of metaphor,”12 remarks Homi Bhabha, whose observation illuminates why the family kinship based on Confucian ideals became the predominant metaphor used in cultural propaganda performances. The state of North Korea, established in 1948, has been adhering to familial expressions in amending the historical rupture during the colonial period and restoring national dignity. Korea failed to establish a unified nation after World War II, leaving South Korea as the other half of two nations. The North Korean state used—and also abused—this notion of family since it was conscious of its division and incompleteness as a political entity. As a partial representative of the nation, North Korea had to cope with the paradox of asserting itself as the only legitimate embodiment of the Korean national essence while South Korea was making an identical point. In order to establish a congenial national kinship among the people and address Korean partition as a temporary passage that would ultimately lead to unification, the North Korean state appropriated more than what Bhabha calls

“linguistic metaphor” and went on to generate powerful visual images and performances, imagining the nation through familiar Confucian family Page 7 →ideals with an authoritative patriarch and his docile wife, sons, and daughters. North Korea attempted to create a new foundation myth about the father of the socialist state, Kim Ilsung (1912–94), in the form of urban folklore and theatrical and cinematic performances, to the point that theater became a ritual for shaping the realities of everyday life. The two levels of family are intrinsically related, since many traditional family units disintegrated when Korea resisted the Japanese occupation. Kim Il-sung led his own resistance armies, consisting of poor peasants who were dislocated from their traditional families because of economic hardship but found a sense of imagined family in military brotherhood. As Bea Lewkowicz points out, the wars transformed the sense of real home, and “the communities became a substitute home, in which relationships between its members were perceived in terms of an extended family framework.”13 However, in the eyes of the socialist revolutionaries and reformers, the oppressive structure of the traditional family was the main culprit in the failure to strengthen Korea in the early twentieth century. Therefore, they made the traditional family one of the central agendas of reform during the struggle against the Japanese and after the establishment of North Korea. In a way, the social movements to free people from a repressive traditional family structure in the first half of the century presaged the effort to establish a classless society in North Korea. For all its fierce rhetoric of eliminating repression, the nation—that is, the imagined family—could literally deconstruct and disperse the traditional family units, as the state pursued land collectivization, aggressive economic reform, and ideological revolution by sending infants to state-run day care centers and mobilizing workers to rural areas.

Whose Nation-State? In the aftermath of two world wars and the birth of numerous nation-states from former colonies, the tendency to view the nation as a construct involving people’s imagination gave rise to its treatment as an “imagined political community,”14 a view articulated in the widely known theories of Benedict Anderson and Ernest Gellner,15 that the nation is a nonessentialist construction. This book takes into account that invention and imagination are the essential forces needed to project the idea of a nation for communities striving to define their unique identity. But whose imagination? Whose invention? Whose perspectives and voices do we take into account in narrating North Korean history and culture? The central nation-constructing matrix may diverge widely depending Page 8 →on the subject who imagines the nation and his or her political interests. Especially in North Korea, where the ability to narrate national history and consolidate community has been monopolized by a singular subject, it becomes even more imperative to ask questions about the considerable absence of historical agency of the people. Researchers need to see through the blunt walls of officially sanctioned narratives and identify the hidden multiple subjects and objects of national imagination. Concurrent with our defining multiple subjects and the objects, we need to give special attention to the specific mode in which the nation is imagined in twentieth-century Korea. The genealogy of this imagination exhibits how people and culture function as variables in the process of constructing the nation, especially in a country where a firmly established traditional system faced an inevitable and unprecedented transformation. The dynamics in the formation of nationalism arose from various sectors of society, and differed depending on class, gender, generation, and geographic locality, so as to construct competing categories. As Prasenjit Duara aptly points out: Nationalism is best seen as a relational identity. The multiplicity of nation-views and the idea that political identity is not fixed but shifts between different loci. . . . Consequently, national self contains smaller “others”—historical others that have affected an often uneasy reconciliation among themselves and political others that are beginning to form their differences. And it is the potential others that are most deserving of our attention because they reveal the principle that creates nations—the willing into existence of a nation which will choose to privilege its difference and obscure all the cultural bonds that had tied it to its sociological kin.16

Duara notes that “smaller others” are easily overshadowed by the metanarrative of nationalism, which, under the guidance of a national patriarch, tends to sacrifice subaltern social sects for the purpose of rescuing the nation. As Edward Said remarked, anticolonialism could often overshadow the subaltern voices or invisible actors of a nation.17 Likewise, Leela Gandhi reiterates Said’s conviction that “the intellectual strings of anti-colonialism can only be properly realized when nationalism becomes more ‘critical of itself’—when it proves itself capable of directing attention ‘to the abused rights of all oppressed classes.’”18 Duara’s comment on the overpowering anticolonial desire to reconstruct the lost nation, which lacked self-criticizing Page 9 →mechanisms and tended to ignore the need to acknowledge “smaller others,” aptly illuminates conventionally overlooked fissures in twentieth-century Korean history. Based on the postcolonial theories articulated in Duara’s, Said’s, and Gandhi’s works, this book identifies “the woman question” to be one of the most important—although persistently ignored—”smaller others” in the formation of a national self in modern Korea.19 The discussions of gender and nationalism will be carried out in tandem, with two concrete goals in mind. First, I employ gender studies to critique what nationalism generally ignored under the grand banner of the nation’s survival and reconstruction. Second, merging gender studies with the studies of postcolonialism and nationalism facilitates exploration of the continual existence of the traditional gender and family ideologies within seemingly revolutionized societies. As Neil Diamant has observed: “Modern state-led social change can actually be facilitated by ‘traditional’ inequality between the sexes, as a fairly rigid division between the sexes can make it easier for women to forge identities and communities based on common experiences and grievances.”20 The second strategy reveals what Diamant perceives as a paradoxical construction of women, which simultaneously signifies modernity and tradition within the Korean socialist state. The discussion of North Korean women as projected in theater, film, visual culture, and everyday performance is predicated on certain feminist theories and methodologies, which acknowledge the perceived gap between “‘women’ as a discursively constructed group and ‘women’ as material subjects of their own history.”21 In my view, it is not only useful but also necessary to differentiate these two categories, since identifying and ultimately mending the elision between them will help explain why there is a conspicuous discrepancy between the image of women as essential members of social production, depicted in theatrical and filmic representations of North Korea, and the traditional Confucian practice that limited women’s social mobility in everyday life. The notion of women as material subjects of history implicates the concrete local experiences of twentieth-century Korean women living at a transitional moment of history, rapidly transforming from colonialism to socialism. This book takes the position that material conditions of women in a given historical moment—including gendered space, economic relationships, and social factors that determine women’s mobility—are illustrative of women’s potential to function as subjects in narrating social change. Thus in studying the family ideology in propaganda performances, this Page 10 →book reaffirms that gender is a useful category for analyzing theater, film, and everyday performance in North Korea. Gender, in this sense, is not limited to sociohistorical analysis of men’s and women’s movements in North Korea (i.e., men and women as material subjects of history); it also functions as a crucial aspect of theatrical and cinematic representation (i.e., men and women as discursively constructed groups). The appearance of women on stage and screen is one of the most striking innovations of North Korean performances as a sociocultural commodity. Compared to the pre-twentieth-century situation of Korean women of decent background, who were strongly discouraged from appearing in any public space, the vision of female characters on stage and screen, performed by actresses, was a revolution in itself from the perspective of gender politics. While investigating concepts of women and femininity in the social sphere and in North Korean performances, this book attempts to avoid an approach exclusively centered on women. In contrast to a surge of academic inquiries on women and femininity, less attention has been paid to the studies of men and masculinity. Casting a sideways view on the Chinese case, Susan Mann points out that the paucity of studies on Chinese men is particularly vexing because “bonds among men were key to success and survival for rich and poor; elite and commoner, in Chinese history.”22 Similarly, Korean men’s social identity was defined by the male network, which reached beyond the boundary of the traditional family. Hence, it is imperative that equal attention should be

given in this book to the construction of male and female, masculinity and femininity as two aspects of one and the same question of imagining the nation.23 In this respect, the ability of performing arts to glorify the state father Kim Il-sung as the founder of new tradition and national culture legitimized the leadership vis-à-vis the woman question. At the same time, ordinary male citizens were theatricalized as secondary males, contrasted with the state fathers, often pushed to the peripheries of visual composition on stage and screen. Such was the distinctive reflection of the ideal Confucian state patriarch that persisted as the backbone of the new socialist culture. North Korean social practices adhere to the long tradition of family values and ideals, often recapitulating the Confucian political catchphrase of addressing the nation as a family unit. Once the various notions of family become the fulcrum of analysis, they are not a radical departure from the past or from the theatrical tradition. These practices of upholding Confucian ideals are the Page 11 →most fundamental traditions of East Asian culture. This ironically leads to the question: how revolutionary was the seemingly radical culture of the socialist states? As Cumings claims, Marxism in North Korea merged with the traditional Confucian idea that “rectification of the mind must precede correct action, even to the point of committing the Marxist heresy that ideas determine human reality.”24 In a similar light, Erik Cornell observes how Marxist doctrines were subsumed by the theoretical guidance of Confucianism in the North Korean context: The official North Korean ideology has had other sources of inspiration besides Marxism-Leninism. It also contains strong elements of the East Asian heritage of ideas and a good dose of nationalism. The dominating impression is that North Korean communism combines theories taken from Confucianism’s hierarchical worldview and Soviet Russian industrialization ideology of Stalinist vintage, blended to form a unity, the specific Korean characteristic of which they are keen to point out.25 Marxism, which was to serve as an explanatory model of how and why the Western capitalist powers would face proletarian revolution, was doubly distorted when it finally reached East Asia.26 Thus, this project provides an opportunity to rethink the prevalent views of European dominance in cultural development and historical social change in North Korea.

Only Propaganda By launching a historical investigation into state-produced propaganda—stage performances, film productions, parades, mass games, and visual arts—as a unique entry point to understanding how otherwise little-known North Korean society and culture function, this book illuminates deep-rooted cultural explanations for the survival of North Korean socialism. At the same time, the project is based on the premise that propaganda is a contested junction where political, social, economic, and cultural trajectories of the North Korean nation collide in an evertransforming manner. On one level, North Korean propaganda performance reflects the state’s wishful desire to cultivate its ideal selfportrait. David Holm, in commenting on the Chinese Communist Party’s appropriation of folk art as propaganda, writes: Page 12 →The general feeling is, of course, that propaganda is lies—in the words of Dr. Goebbels—and that therefore a study of propaganda will yield nothing of value except perhaps a moral lesson on the wickedness of the totalitarian regime. I would suggest that, on the contrary, propaganda is interesting—and revealing—precisely because it is an attempt to manipulate and persuade.27 In accordance with Holm’s observation that propaganda is a transparent showcase of the regime’s intentions, this book looks beyond the political facade and pays close attention to how North Korean propaganda productions manipulate and persuade. Behind the blatantly fictional representation of an ideal self-image lies the modus operandi of the state; therefore, I regard propaganda as one of the available ways of understanding North Korea.

What may come across as one-dimensional campaigns actually have a tremendous impact on society. The inquiry into how and why propaganda works as a tool of manipulation and persuasion is a revelatory process through which the inner workings of North Korean society and culture loom from behind the facade. While I treat propaganda as an effective means to understand the formation of North Korean society and culture, I also acknowledge another view of propaganda as a dynamic dialogic process between creator and receiver. In her study of the erotic fantasies of fascism in modern literature, Laura Frost delineates an alternative function of propaganda—complementing the aforementioned definition proposed by Holm—as “a form of communication that can express its creator’s inadvertent or unconscious investments (and fantasies) and that can also be read many ways and have unintended effects in its reception.”28 North Korean propaganda can be a window into the agenda and inner workings of the state. However, such an instrumental approach is based on the naive belief that the state’s intention to manipulate and persuade symmetrically translates into actualization of the master plan. The actual operation of propaganda, even in a rigidly controlled society like North Korea, is much more discursive; it does not simply conform to the government’s intentions. The foundational aspect of propaganda is arguably the North Korean people’s complicity with the propaganda machinery, without which the system could not have operated to the extent it has for half a century. In order to stage labor-intensive propaganda performances, the North Korean state has used forcible measures to ensure people’s participation.29 In cases where there was a failure to send a required number of participants, the slackers Page 13 →were immediately punished by reduced food rationing and other means of withholding basic necessities. Despite these practices that stripped people of basic human rights and dignity, at the same time, according to the interviews conducted, the North Korean people seem to have enjoyed the collective shaping experience of performance rehearsals. This book explores the multifaceted values and functions propaganda holds in North Korea from a performance scholar’s point of view. In a narrow sense, this means that the primary case study of propaganda will be theater, including revolutionary operas (hyeongmyeong gageuk)30 and film productions31 and their parallel performance genres, such as mass games, demonstrations, and parades. In a broader sense, however, this means that the theatrical nature of North Korean society will be examined simultaneously. As will be illuminated in the subsequent chapters, film has been the preferred genre of the state. However, there is no strict sense of division between theater and film in North Korean performing arts, since most live stage performances are produced with the intention of being filmed for wider circulation among the population.32 In order to guarantee that stage productions are seen throughout the nation, the North Korean propaganda bureau films them whenever possible. The films and filmed stage productions, including five revolutionary operas, have become a dominant cultural form for North Koreans, since every citizen has to watch them as part of their mandatory education in revolutionary ideology and discuss how to emulate ideal stage characters during daily study sessions in schools and at work.33 At the same time, these filmed productions provide materials for staging mass games and parades, which are the culminating annual celebrations of the state leaders’ birthdays and the rituals commemorating the foundation of the state: On the birthdays of Kim Il-sung (born April 15, 1912), the founding father of North Korea, and Kim Jong-il (born February 16, 1942), the current head of the state, numerous mass games, stage performances, and street parades are performed throughout North Korea. Thus, theater and film productions are not confined to stage and screen, but reach out to the daily lives of North Koreans and have become easily recognizable cultural experiences. Other visual media, such as posters34 and fine art, have also participated by endlessly reproducing iconic images from these cultural productions. Thus, feature films, revolutionary operas, and their filmed versions not only produce theatrical/cinematic illusions within theater space but also are at the center of the theatrical nature of everyday life. Page 14 →The intersection between the actual study of theater genres and the theater of everyday life challenges us to construe theatricality as a resilient and encompassing notion in a country like North Korea. A seminal idea with which to tap into the otherwise little-known North Korean society and culture, the term theatricality, as

theater historians Tracy Davis and Thomas Postlewait have noted, “is a concept so widely and loosely used that it is comprehensive of all meanings yet empty of all sense.” However, as Davis and Postlewait argue, the history of how the concept has been used helps theater scholars to identify some of the modes in which theatrical representation and everyday reality define each other: “Just as theatricality has been used to describe the gap between reality and representation—a concept for which there is a perfectly good and very specific term, mimesis—it has also been used to describe the ‘heightened’ states when everyday reality is exceeded by its representation.”35 Both of these functions of theatricality are useful for this study of how represented reality in propaganda, like the aforementioned 2003 parade scene, supersedes everyday life in North Korea. In the concept of mimesis, there is an embedded assumption that reality and representation are fundamentally different, so that representation has to make a conscious effort to imitate reality in an assimilative mode. But when producers of theater and film regard everyday reality as inferior to represented reality, and invent utopian versions of reality and present them for audiences to emulate, theatricality becomes the key notion, the staged version of reality when the representation of everyday life exceeds everyday life itself. This is the reversal of mimesis: that is, everyday reality is in a position to imitate the represented reality. North Korea is a theatrical state par excellence precisely because it forces a utopian illusion to mandate conditions of real life. Perpetually obsessed with appropriating the utopian narrative for staging its ideal self-image and directing its citizens as if they were actors playing stereotypical roles found in revolutionary operas, I claim, with neither hesitation nor exaggeration, that the North Korean state, with its welldeveloped propaganda apparatus, fabricates the foundation of every sociocultural reality.

Ethics of Ethnography North Korea is a case where theatricality is taken to the extreme, to the degree that sacrificing individuals for the sake of producing hyperreal national images becomes acceptable. Just as “torture was not accidental quality of this Page 15 →Third Reich, but its essence,”36 in many cases, forfeiting basic human rights of its own people has been the very premise of the North Korean self-representation in propaganda performances. The state gladly removes undesirable objects for the cultivation of its immaculate national landscape. Therefore, anyone delving into discussions of—or participating in—the theatricality of North Korean society cannot fully dodge ethical responsibility. Moreover, George W. Bush’s infamous “Axis of Evil” speech in 2001 made North Korea an even more contested hotbed of arguments and debates waged by academics and policymakers alike. Many have projected their given agenda on North Korea without taking a very close look at the country, either to uphold the moral lessons of how and why Communism does not work or to critique the appallingly dogmatic attitude of the United States and its wartime allies. As a scholar whose primary goal is to bring new knowledge about North Korea to the world, I find it increasingly difficult to claim intellectual objectivity. Under the current polarized circumstances, I am often pressured by both human rights activists and the academic Left to take a clear political stance. If this book focused primarily on the state-sponsored violence in North Korea, it might win the favor of human rights activists around the world. By the same token, if this book only argued for the legitimacy of the North Korean state, it could easily serve as an instrument for the Marxist Left to talk back to neoconservatives. “Either you’re for us, or you’re against us” has been stated by both Communists who diminished socialist ideals to the worst kind of totalitarian rule and Western crusaders who distorted freedom to persecute the Other. Such an exclusionist attitude not only betrays the core of what scholarship is supposed to achieve but also negates the complexity of human existence. North Korea is a complex and contradictory country, like anywhere else in the world: on the one hand, the government has demonstrated remarkable achievements in modernizing the postcolonial state; on the other hand, it has committed unthinkable atrocities and violence. The purpose of my research is to bring out these complexities so that we become more sophisticated in our approach, moving beyond extreme positions of idolization or accusation, which have so dominated discourse on North Korea. As Max Horkheimer proclaimed, “There should be a study on terror but not to denounce its frightfulness, for that has been done enough with both good and bad conscience. Rather, its usefulness in certain social situations should be explained.”37 The primary objective of this book does not rest on moral accusations of a regime that reduces its people to mere

disposable props for a self-aggrandizing show. However, I have tried my best to be cognizant of the many Page 16 →ways the theatrical displays examined tie into a larger matrix of human rights abuses in North Korea. Even though theoretical explications of how the state uses performing arts and theatricality are the basis of this book, these theoretical issues often belie the atrocious human conditions of that country, which is what really concerns ordinary North Koreans. I regard these two seemingly opposite poles of my research—the objective analysis of how theatricality operates in North Korea and the ethical responsibility of a scholar studying human suffering—to be mutually inclusive problems. Throughout this book, I hope to illuminate that a close reading of how performance functions as formidable means of control will deepen our understanding of the actual conditions of North Korean people’s lives. Very often in North Korea, basic daily activities—such as eating, dressing, and speaking—become the objects of state control, which in turn becomes a legitimate field of inquiry for performance scholars interested in the modes by which the state sets out to regulate how people present themselves. These acts of mundane life are rehearsed on a daily basis to be heightened as revolutionary achievements, through learning from the heroes in theater and film productions, an essential part of education in schools and places of work. Moreover, the everyday ritual that equates rehearsal with the process of becoming an ideal North Korean citizen not only aims at presenting a final performance but also is an end in itself, with instrumental advantages of disciplining people to embody collective life. Richard Schechner has noted the significance of the rehearsal process as an integral part of the culminating performance, in that it plays a key role in shaping the collective. For Schechner, preparation becomes an important part of the ritual, inviting community members to participate as performers.38 However, Schechner’s understanding of community-based ritual is voluntary and therefore volatile at times, whereas community-based ritual in North Korea is situated in a radically different environment in which the formation of community is not fluid and voluntary, but a systematic procedure controlled by the harsh principles of selection and elimination. For North Korean people, transforming daily lives into rehearsals dictates the precise inscription of the correct modes of self-presentation onto their bodies. This is why the process of preparing a performance is functionally much more significant than the result. In this respect, John MacAloon’s idea of “ritual as duty,” as opposed to “spectacle as a choice,”39 is useful for understanding the function of community ritual in North Korea. As a result, Schechner’s conceptualization must be modified: the preparation Page 17 →process becomes the phase that exceeds the culminating performance. Aiming at social control by forcing people to participate in state ritual is North Korea’s most efficient governing strategy. Its implementation requires constant institutional surveillance, which has been achieved by the North Korean regime as far as it procures people’s complicity. However, the modes in which North Koreans participate in state-initiated rehearsals and performances are much more discursive than can be labeled as forced enjoyment, reluctance, fear, or suffering. In interviews I conducted with North Korean defectors, reminiscing about their community rituals at times conjured up fond memories of bonding with classmates or wild expectations of seeing the greatest national heroes, namely Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il, in person in the grandiose capital city of Pyongyang. Therefore, my analysis of North Korean propaganda based on ethnographic research will consider multilayered implications of rehearsal and performance rituals from various perspectives: performance producers, participants, and deserters of the regime. Each chapter is a step-bystep explanation of how such viewpoints interact on various levels of performance medium, space, ideology, and strategy. Chapter 1, “Hybridization of Performance Genres,” focuses on the process of inventing the ideal form of propaganda in North Korea. Kim Jong-il’s cinemania is well known to many people in the outside world, but the impact it has had in organizing and regulating North Korean society has not been fully explored. Thus, this chapter looks at how and why North Korean propaganda prioritized film over other forms of art, most notably theater, in order to investigate the rationale for the government propaganda department’s choice of film as its primary medium, which had a lasting impact on live stage productions. Although the demise of live theater seems to have changed the landscape of performing arts, amateur acting has flourished in everyday life with the political educational program for ordinary citizens, who are supposed to learn from the films and filmed theater

productions shown in schools and workplaces. Chapter 2, “Time and Space in North Korean Performance,” addresses how North Korean propaganda performances create a seamless visual continuum between the physical space of the nation and the illusionary utopian space of stage and screen. The social and artistic significance of the projected theatrical and filmic image of North Korea exceeds that of the actual space, as the utopia created by theater and film techniques has dictated the formation of the actual North Korean landscape. The semiotic dichotomy between urban and rural, as well as between the dark prerevolutionary past Page 18 →and projected utopian future, illustrates the contrapuntal national landscape of the newly established socialist fatherland. Chapter 3, “Revival of the State Patriarchs,” examines the structure and ideology behind patriarchal family life as performed in propaganda. Confucian patriarchal family ideology and structure, well known to every North Korean, are the primary rhetorical figures appropriated by the government for propaganda. By using the familiar traditional form to propagate revolutionary ideology, the North Korean state could easily make its people relate to propaganda performances, which were relatively new cultural commodities. In this process, Kim Il-sung was idolized as the creator of national culture whose legitimacy to rule was rightfully transferred to his biological son Kim Jong-il, a ritual that enacted the prioritization of the imagined family over traditional family. Chapter 4, “Model Citizens of the Family-Nation,” looks at how North Korean propaganda transformed the traditional structure of the patriarchal family, as the ultimate state father relegated the traditional family patriarchs to secondary males by projecting them as his docile children. This necessitated creating a visible boundary between the legitimate members of the imagined family and the enemies of the family-nation, which in turn serves as a useful educational theme in daily performance. Theater and film train North Koreans to identify the enemy as a way of reinforcing a sense of community. The dual identities of citizen and performer merge for North Korean people in the liminal zone where theatrical illusion blends into everyday life. Chapter 5, “Acting Like Women in North Korea,” examines the process in which North Korean women gained prominence and visibility in propaganda performances as righteous agents carrying out revolutionary tasks. The shifting power and gender dynamics and family rhetoric are examined through visual signs manifested by costumes, props, and bodily gestures in performing arts and visual culture vis-à-vis social policy regarding women. These signs expose the discrepancy between the utopian images of liberated and revolutionized women and the North Korean state’s perfunctory promotion of gender equality, which remains rhetorical at best. Chapter 6, “Performing Paradoxes: Staging Utopia, Upstaging Dystopia,” addresses the paradoxical performances that have come out of North Korea since the 1994 death of Kim Il-sung. Because of economic hardship, conflict with major world powers, and its own desire to join the world community, gaps and fissures started to appear in the state’s official self-presentation, originating from—and also leading to—a gradual transformation Page 19 →of North Korean society. Two related, conspicuous forms of national performance in recent years are brought to conversation: the conditions of human rights and tourism, with a special focus on North Korea’s Arirang Festival, a mass gymnastic performance designed to attract foreign tourists. I look at how the global flow of finance and media has reacted to North Korea’s desire, spurred by economic crisis, to stage an ideal national image for tourism and the regime’s brutal, but futile, efforts to hide epidemic hunger by hunting down escapees. The conjunction of tourism and hunger, as oxymoronic as it may sound, reveals the manipulative principles of North Korean propaganda and the state’s desire to display or conceal its people on an international stage over the past fifty years. The book finally examines the 2006 musical Yoduk Story (Yodeok seutori), the only known North Korean dissident performance that addresses North Korea as the antithesis of utopia. By countering the idealized thesis of official North Korean propaganda for the first time, the musical made its mark in performing arts history; however, this counterpropaganda disturbingly replicates the same strategies found in official North Korean propaganda and thereby absurdly underlines the contagious power of the official culture of North Korea. The fundamental paradoxes of the North Korean reality—the Confucian socialist state, women’s nominal liberation, and staging utopia at the expense of creating dystopia—account for the inexplicable traits of North Korean society and culture, which has established the first and the only known hereditary socialist state in history.

Only the future can tell us whether such paradoxes will sustain the nation.

Prologue: Kim Jong-il’s “Guests” and North Korea’s Cultural Crisis On October 19, 1983, in Kim Jong-il’s office at the Central Party Building in Pyongyang, a private conversation took place between Kim and two South Korean filmmakers: director Sin Sang-ok and his actress wife Choe Eunhui, who had spent five years in North Korea after they had been abducted and brought there under Kim Jong-il’s personal direction in 1978.40 That day, Sin and Choe secretly recorded what they describe as “Kim Jong-il’s tirade-like monologue rather than a dialogue between Kim and us,” which lasted for more than two hours.41 According to the transcript of this recording, Kim Jong-il was struggling with the questions of how to elevate North Korean film to an advanced level without jeopardizing the tight control of its people: Page 20 →We send our people to East Germany to study editing, to Czechoslovakia to study camera technology, and to the Soviet Union to learn directing. Other than that, we cannot send our people to go anywhere since they are enemy states. No France, no West Germany, no Great Britain. We especially have to have exchange with Japan, but we cannot even allow [North Korean people] to watch Japanese films. We end up analyzing foreign films to imitate them, but there is limit to what we can do, and our efforts have brought no progress. I have been struggling with this problem for five years [since 1978]. All we ended up doing was to send a couple of people to the Soviet Union after the liberation and to establish a film institute, but they are not that impressive after all. I acknowledge that we lag behind in filmmaking techniques. We have to know that we are lagging behind and make efforts to raise a new generation of filmmakers.42 Although very little is known about North Korean cinema in the outside world, many have heard of the “beloved leader” Kim Jong-il’s intimate relationship with film. As this speech testifies, he played a wide range of roles in North Korean cinema—from producer, editor, and scriptwriter to critic, historian, and visionary. According to the director Sin, Kim Jong-il is not only a dedicated film producer, but he is also a highly talented critic of drama and music, allegedly capable of pinpointing a single out-of-tune instrument from a full orchestra.43 Further accounts by Sin point out that Kim’s boundless knowledge in arts owes to a large amount of materials collected from around the world, materials he has been systematically compiling over a long period of time. Sin had a chance to see Kim Jong-il’s enormous private collection of films, which he thought was possibly the largest of its kind in the world: On March 14, 1983, Eun-hui [Sin’s wife] and I were invited to a tour of the Film Archive. I hurriedly got prepared because this was a place I always wanted to visit. The Film Archive stood on the hills in the middle of Pyongyang. Tightly locked heavy metal doors guarded the archive, and no people were to be seen. This was a controlled access area. . . . We were invited inside for a briefing and were told that 15,000 copies of films were stored here. Nearly 250 employees, including voice actors, translators, subtitle specialists, projectionists, and recording specialists, were working for this facility. The films at the archive came from all around the world—from both Communist and capitalists, developed Page 21 →and underdeveloped countries alike. The size of the three-story building measured up to that of any main school buildings in South Korea. As I was listening to the briefing of an archive employee, I thought that this could possibly be the largest [private] collection in the entire world. After the briefing, the manager took us around for a tour. The width of the building was about 100 meters, and all three stories stretching 100 meters were filled with films. The room with the best equipment was the one holding North Korean films. In that room every single North Korean film ever made was stored in chronological order. The room boasted a perfect temperature and humidity control system.44 Sin goes on to say that after this impressive introduction, he was given permission to visit the Film Archive and watch all kinds of movies as much as he wished. Access to this building was limited to those who were recommended by Kim Jong-il himself, and for this reason there was an archive employee whose only

responsibility was to take care of communications with Kim Jong-il’s office, which testifies to the fact that the archive was indeed a private one. Choe and Sin also noticed that all of Kim Jong-il’s residences across North Korea have projection rooms, where Kim is known to watch films almost every night.45 Kim Jong-il was a highly motivated autodidact of world films, which, according to Sin, made Kim Jong-il’s cinematic knowledge and talent surpass those of other North Korean filmmakers. Most filmmakers were barred from using this library owing to North Korea’s stringent ideological control, and consequently it was difficult for any filmmaker’s understanding of world cinema to measure up to Kim Jong-il’s knowledge. Kim Jong-il’s predilection for film became a well-known story through the accounts of the few people who had a rare chance to work closely with him. Director Sin was one of those inadvertently chosen ones who had a rare glimpse of Kim Jong-il’s involvement in North Korean films while assisting him to realize his grand cinematic vision. In the mainstream media, this bizarre story of the abduction of the South Korean couple has often served as a popular entry point for exploring the psychotic nature of the “Dear Leader.” Nonetheless, the fact that the North Korean leader chose South Korean filmmakers, citizens of the sworn enemy state, to bail the local film industry he had fostered out of the cultural dead end it found itself in provides us with the opportunity to delve deeper into more complex issues surrounding North Korean society and culture, such as the regime’s attempts to strike a balance between outside culture and indigenous culture Page 22 →and the ways in which the North Korean leadership envisioned culture as an effective tool for shaping the minds of its people. Although Sin and Choe’s book offers an in-depth analysis of the films produced by the kidnapped South Korean couple, we will look at the presence of this film couple as a way of exploring a complex matrix into which North Korean society’s contradictions and ironies are woven. The filmmakers’ book provides an opportunity to think about North Korea’s culture as a highly politicized form of power. The kidnapping was a drastic measure that the frustrated visionary came up with after he assumed full power as heir designate. Kim Jong-il’s conversation with Sin and Choe took place in 1983, but Kim had been struggling with the inherent North Korean contradictions since he entered politics in the late 1970s, and he saw the power of film and art in general as the primary source of, or his way to, governance. The film industry is a collaborative field operated by multiple constituencies because it is a medium produced, circulated, and consumed on a massive scale, which makes it impossible to imagine that one person’s initiative and taste can shape the contours of film production for an entire nation. But as the aforementioned episodes illustrate, Kim Jong-il’s opinion has a formative influence on every aspect of cultural production in North Korea, which makes it very difficult to imagine North Korean film production without Kim’s personal intervention.46 What is often overlooked in the world’s fascination about Kim Jong-il’s cinemania, however, is that the function of film as an essentially political tool was already established long before his coming to power, and it is precisely by means of mobilizing film’s political potential that he ascended to become the successor of his father, strengthening his position as he further intensified the importance of film. Beginning at the establishment of North Korea in 1948, Kim Jong-il’s father, Kim Il-sung, openly recognized film’s potential to serve his political direction more effectively than any other means of communication. Although at the time of the founding of North Korea, “Kim Il-sung’s comrades from the anti-Japanese guerrilla struggle in Manchuria was comprised of the least educated of the Communist ‘factions’ and the least involved in cultural affairs,”47 Kim Il-sung nevertheless followed the examples of other socialist states and recognized the edifying potential of film for his newly founded republic. Kim Il-sung learned a valuable lesson from Lenin and Mao, who held in high regard film’s potential to serve as effective propaganda. Lenin himself presaged film’s ability to penetrate the illiterate masses and concluded: “For Page 23 →us the most important of all arts is cinema.”48 For the same reasons, the film industry in China was fully utilized by Nationalists and Communists alike in order to educate and mobilize the masses. Historian Charles Armstrong enumerated the reasons why the Soviet leaders adhered to film as a major tool to serve politics, which functions as a useful reference to examine the North Korean case: The Bolsheviks were attracted to the propaganda potential of film for several reasons. In a vast,

diverse, predominantly agricultural and largely illiterate society such as the Soviet Union, cinema could reach far more people than, for example, literature. Furthermore, the novelty of film and the immediate power of its imagery made film, or so the Soviet leadership believed, particularly effective. Film-viewing itself was a public, collective act and therefore even the mode of viewing could be a means of instilling collective consciousness. Finally, the great expenses of making films allowed the state to control cinematic production more easily than other arts.49

The aforementioned reasons why the Soviets privileged film for propaganda over other media—ease of controlling the filmmaking process, film’s ability to reach out to a wider population, the novelty of the cinematic medium to attract attention from a wide range of population, and film consumption as a collective process furthering a collective consciousness—apply to the North Korean situation well. The film production process requires massive participation and consumption. The collective nature of producing film simulates well the way North Koreans lead their lives in various collective organizations.50 The filmmaking process of shooting, editing, and watching others’ lives mirrors how North Koreans constantly monitor one another in their daily lives. Put otherwise, to watch, to be watched, to make a presentable showcase through editing all represent major principles of the North Korean way of life. This point reinforces I U-yeong’s observation of why “underground literature is difficult to detect, but underground cinema is difficult to make,”51 since the production process is not only collective but also highly controlled to the degree that it does not allow for any improvisations or accidents to take place. From the planning stage to the final cut, filmmakers repeat the production process to achieve the image they desire, which resonates with the way North Koreans filter their language and behavior to abide by the rules. The rehearsal process of these productions could be viewed not only as a means to reach a goal of producing an end product, but as an end in itself. Put otherwise, the didactic nature of the production process becomes one of the most significant purposes of producing films. Page 24 → Figure 2. A mural on the outside wall of a theater in Pyongyang. A filmmaker with a camera is depicted as fully participating in the revolutionary march of the people. On the right side of the image, characters from well-known revolutionary films, such as Kkot-bun in Flower Girl and Mother in Sea of Blood, join the march. (Photo courtesy of an anonymous donor.) On a more empirical level, the reason why film gained a prominent place in North Korea is because it allowed for easy and fast circulation around the country. Theater productions, in contrast, had to send people, props, and costumes to provinces, which could be a costly and slow process, whereas film reels could easily reach far ends of the North Korean territory. For these reasons, the North Korean state makes hundreds of copies of each new North Korean production to be sent nationwide. However, the distribution of film reels reflects the inherent hierarchy of various sectors within the country as the government sends color copies to large cities and black-and-white ones to rural areas. It is not at all surprising to see that films about the leaders are developed in the highest quality, using only U.S. Kodak or Japanese Fuji films and the highest-quality chemicals.52 Page 25 →Although rural areas are given secondary treatment in terms of film distribution, to a rural peasant with no previous exposure to film whatsoever the central government’s efforts to reach out with unfamiliar yet marvelous moving images must have been a welcome event. Thus, no matter how dogmatic or one-dimensional the content of film might have been, the novelty of film as a new medium must have attracted the attention of the vast majority of the North Korean population. In the absence of other competing media, film soon became the newborn state’s most prestigious art form, so as to deserve the highest regard from its leader. In the 1960s Kim Ilsung wrote: Film is the best form of propaganda for the party. It can be shown to multitude of people in multiple places. Film is capable of projecting a long period of history in just a couple of hours. It is a better form than novels or newspapers in educating workers. Film is also superior to theatre in a sense that it is not confined by the boundaries of stage.53

Kim Il-sung’s commitment to film encompassed a broad spectrum of plans to nourish the North Korean film industry in a tangible way. It promised filmmakers training, educational opportunities, and better wages, which, according to Armstrong, was the reason why many artists from South Korea defected to the North in the aftermath of division in 1945.54 The Soviet occupiers of the North provided an ideal atmosphere for filmmaking, but the situation changed soon after. Although Kim Il-sung initially assumed the role of apprentice in relation to the Soviet and the Chinese leaders’ tutelage, under Kim’s encouragement, North Korea began to devise highly nationalistic films distinctively changed from their Soviet or Chinese counterparts. His son Kim Jong-il inherited the state’s vision of film’s irreplaceable importance in grooming a distinctively nationalistic sentiment. The nationalistic tendency and ethnocentric impulse of North Korean film and performance became a highly effective means of delineating the boundary between “us” and “them,” comrades and enemies, and it functioned as a managing principle of the North Korean society. The rise of Kim Jong-il as the producer of numerous productions and arbiter of creative principles merges with a decrease in the coverage of information about world culture and arts within North Korea. Although early North Korean art was in fierce pursuit of dogmatic revolutionary ideology, North Korean publications beginning in the late 1940s covered a fair amount of international arts news and kept up a dynamic flow of information. Page 26 →However, the relatively free flow of information gradually started to diminish with the launch of the personal cult of Kim Il-sung in the 1960s. This tendency continued into the 1970s, when Kim Jong-il gradually rose to become a prominent figure in arts and politics. Sacrificing the relatively free flow of information was a necessary step in solidifying the monolithic leadership of the Kim family. The importance of this rather obvious fact of isolation is contrasted with the fact that the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, never severed himself from the dynamic development of world cinema, although average North Koreans were shown only dogmatic productions, mostly domestic, with only occasional exposure to films from the socialist bloc. When reading arts-related publications coming out of North Korea from the late 1950s to recent times, one is struck by the dwindling of coverage of world culture over time. In the 1950s, North Korean publications covered an impressive array of world theater, dance, and film. The opening issue of Joseon Yesul (North Korean Art), arguably the most important journal covering North Korean arts, was published in September 1956, and it featured columns exclusively dedicated to the coverage of the world stage, from both the Communist and the Western spheres. Among the works introduced were Soviet-American collaborative film projects, the opening of the children’s theater in Beijing, Italian actress Anna Magnani’s 1955 Oscar for best actress, the opening of Nekrasov in London’s Unity Theatre, and the development of Polish film theaters in the 1950s.55 However, in just a year, this colorful array of worldly coverage soon narrowed down to the cultural activities of socialist states, such as the success of the Soviet and the PRC troupes in Indonesia, Egypt, and Iran.56 The March 1957 issue of Joseon Yesul, the seventh volume, was the last one to run a world theater column. Information about the international coverage of films that came from both Communist and capitalist regimes lasted much longer than other cultural topics. In the early 1960s, for example, Ri So-hun wrote an article in Joseon Yeonghwa (North Korean Film) introducing a brief history of Italian films,57 and Kim Jeong-ho wrote a series of articles that provided an overview of the 1920s French avant-garde films and filmmakers, such as Jean Epstein’s The Fall of the House of Usher (1928) and Germaine Dulac’s Arabesque.58 The magazine covered a fairly decent number of international film festivals, such as the Venice International Film Festival, the Asian-African Film Festival,59 and the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.60 By the end of 1966, however, the journal’s rich coverage of world films gradually narrowed down in scope to cover Marxist-Leninist techniques and ideology in filmmaking.61 Page 27 →As if resisting the Soviet Union’s de-Stalinization campaign and the attack on personality cults the campaign represented, the North Korean media started in 1957 to promote Kim Il-sung’s unchallenged position. Beginning in the 1960s, it became obvious that the cult of Kim Il-sung began to intensify in all realms of the arts. The inner covers of the magazine, which used to feature various still shots of films and actors, started to publish

Kim Il-sung’s photos and instructions continuously. The October 1960 issue of Joseon Yeonghwa even published a photo of Kim Il-sung with his retinue on the cover, an image that seemed to have absolutely no relation to the arts world whatsoever . . . or did it? Joseon Yeonghwa featuring the face of the cultural czar symbolically gestures toward the displacement of international art and culture for an indigenous political model, a shift that North Korea would live with for many years to come. The shift in cultural production from international to local, multicultural to dogmatic, was a wellchoreographed move by the North Korean leadership. As obvious as Kim Jong-il’s fascination with film was, it is only fair to state that Kim Jong-il’s open manifestation of cinemania is not only his personal proclivity but also a natural result of searching for the most efficient way to gain political capital within the leadership and manage the North Korean people’s worldview. Figure 3. The cover image of the October 1960 issue of Joseon Yeonghwa, featuring Kim Il-sung. Page 28 →According to director Sin, the reason Kim Jong-il was chosen as heir apparent to his father Kim Il-sung was twofold: having witnessed the de-Stalinization campaign in the Soviet Union and the degradation of Mao Zedong in the PRC, Kim Il-sung was concerned with the possibilities of suffering the same posthumous insult. Taking these factors into account, director Sin argues that Kim Jong-il earned his privilege to be the heir designate by effectively building the cult of his father by means of the performing and visual arts.62 Sin’s view is both persuasive and illuminating for understanding Kim Jong-il’s rise to power as ultimately related to his successful cultural productions glorifying Kim Il-sung. Many scholars assume that Kim Jong-il was officially designated as the heir to Kim Il-sung in the late 1970s, which, indeed, follows Kim Jong-il’s intensive yet highly successful deification of his father as the legitimate ruler of Korea and the canonization of his household through revolutionary operas and films in the early 1970s. Film, in this sense, is not only an object of Kim Jong-il’s personal interest but also a highly effective apparatus to increase incrementally Kim’s political capital. But Kim Jong-il’s cinematic journey does not stop here. He took one additional step in appropriating film as an instrument for domestic politics: he attempted to bring in innovative techniques to the filmmaking industry and made visible efforts to diversify North Korean film. According to Sin, this seemed to have been motivated by Kim Jong-il’s desire to increase the ability of North Korean films to gain visibility and notoriety in the international arena through festivals circuits and even commercial releases. Kim Jong-il set as his ultimate cinematic goal to win the hearts and minds of the international audience. If Kim Il-sung endowed film with a mighty social status as an adequate tool to carry out propaganda, Kim Jong-il strove to achieve higher filmic standards in order to compete with world cinema. Yet Kim Jong-il’s task of enhancing the artistic quality of film while keeping in mind the notion of film as the most effective propaganda tool was paradoxical in nature, as it required him constantly to mediate arts and politics without compromising either one. He had two conflicting realizations about North Korean film: he believed it was the best political instrument Page 29 →he possessed as a ruler, but he also believed that North Korean film could benefit from diversification that would enhance its artistic value. How could he elevate North Korean film to compete with world cinema without opening up the borders of the country? How could he improve actors’ performances and create competition without taking away the central government’s subsidy, which was the only way to finance any film production? These questions bring us back to the private conversation introduced earlier. Kim Jong-il’s struggle to seamlessly mediate propaganda and arts in film is known to us thanks to the risk Sin and Choe took in recording their conversation with him on October 19, 1983, in his office. Kim in this conversation honestly expressed his frustrations over North Korean films as underdeveloped as children in kindergarten, whereas the South Korean film industry was approaching its full maturity like college students.63 Such an acknowledgment creates a stark contrast with his official speeches and writings, in which he extols the virtues of North Korean cinema and socialist cinema as a whole vis-à-vis their corrupt capitalist counterparts.64 Kim was well aware of the inertia of his film staff, which he believed was due to a lack of competition and their excessive reliance on the central government support: “Since the government is taking care of the pay and basic needs of writers, they are not

motivated to produce more scenarios. When requested to do so, they want to be sent to sanatoriums or resorts to work on it.”65 When Sin told Kim Jong-il there was a need to change the typical propaganda style and produce heroic movies in the American Western style in order to make them more interesting and effectively didactic, Kim Jong-il was fully in accord.66 This encounter brought about a dramatic change in North Korean filmmaking in the 1980s, when the element of entertainment together with propagandistic value became one of the fulcrums of what sustains North Korean film. Director Sin’s presence in the North Korean film industry from 1983 to 1986, during which time he directed six feature films in collaboration with his wife and supervised thirteen, helps account for such a turn in North Korean film. But it was Kim Jong-il’s determination that opened the door for the change to take place. Kim openly acknowledged to Sin and Choe during their private conversation: “When director Sin asked me [the other day] why we do not host an international film festival, I was ashamed to admit it then, but I admit it now. We really do not have any films to present. What kind of North Korean film could we show to the entire world? We do not have any films that will make the world laugh and cry.”67 Kim took Star of Joseon (1980–87), the sacrosanct epic film series that deifies his Page 30 →family history traced back to his grandfather’s household, as an example of how propaganda and art have become mutually exclusive in North Korean filmmaking: “Star of Joseon is history. It is suitable for those who have difficult time reading history, but it is not art. It is history.”68 Kim knew that there was a way to advance the film industry by learning from the world’s experience. The painful realization tempted Kim to absorb the advanced technology of Western filmmaking, but this desire presented problems that had to be curbed by North Korea’s political line. The discrepancy that rose from limited political freedom and the desire to catch up with the rest of the world in filmic standards was the dilemma metonymically standing for the entire social problem Kim was facing in the 1980s when North Korea’s neighbor and ally China was living North Korea’s hypothetical situation as reality. In his private conversation with the South Korean film couple, Kim bluntly admitted: When I met with Hu Yaobang of the PRC, he honestly told me that China partially opened up its doors to learn advanced technology, but young people started imitating only Western appearance, growing beards and long hair. It’s the same with us. If we start airing foreign films on TV and everywhere, then only nihilistic thoughts will emerge out of them. Our country is now divided and we must foster national dignity and pride. We cannot simply worship foreign things, so we must raise the level of our technology and then open our country to foreign things, but this is paradoxical in itself. So I want to give [the film industry] partial autonomy within the given limits.69 This primary contradiction Kim faced—to renovate the ailing North Korean film industry without the danger of opening North Korea to the outside world—thus led to a twisted solution in the abduction of a South Korean couple. And just as Kim had hoped, the couple did so well with their string of film productions that they even managed to claim some degree of fame on the international festival circuit, mostly featuring films from the socialist bloc, by winning the special jury prize for directing Special Envoy Who Never Returned (Doraoji anneun milsa) at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in 1984 and the best actress award for Choe’s performance in Salt (Sogeum) at the Moscow International Film Festival in 1985. Sin and Choe’s given task in North Korea was not limited to renovating the North Korean film industry and charting out a place for it on the map of world cinema. The fact that they were the chosen guests of Kim Jong-il Page 31 →surreptitiously pointed to alternate possibilities for understanding North Korean cultural policies: If all Kim Jong-il wanted was to innovate North Korean cinema and achieve international claim, he could have made exceptions by sending a few North Korean directors to the Western world to bring back advanced filmmaking technology or by inviting directors from Japan or other advanced countries to North Korea for a limited time. Instead, Kim Jong-il decided to choose South Koreans for reasons dictated not entirely by the aesthetics of filmmaking but by the ethnicities of the filmmakers. The fact that Sin and Choe were Koreans must have been a determining factor in Kim’s decision precisely for the reason that Kim envisioned the couple functioning as a cultural buffer filtering and bringing in Western cinema through the disguised forms of Korean ethnicity.

Ethnic cohesion—especially because Sin was originally from North Korea—was a sublimated process of bringing in foreign influences under the well-known political banner of uri minjok-kkiri, or “Our people [deal] with each other [without foreign interference].” This sentiment implied Kim’s desire to improve (North) Korean film with the help of (South) Koreans without any foreign cultural intervention; this aptly served the ideological foundation of juche.70 By having South Koreans make North Korean films embodying North Korean ideology, Kim Jong-il hoped to project South Koreans in general as North Korea’s revolutionary project. As the North Korean leadership saw it, South Korean civilians were subjects placed under the wrong leadership and therefore should be liberated from the oppression of corrupt South Korean capitalists and foreign imperialists. In this light, Sin and Choe were officially projected as prodigal children who were temporarily led astray under a wrong set of political and cultural influences, but were finally rescued and brought back to where they originally belonged. They were supposed to showcase the North Korean belief that the only good South Korean was the one liberated by North Koreans. But was this propaganda project really a transparent process where the directions of the Dear Leader were symmetrically transmitted to his guests as hostages? Were there no subversive moments in Sin’s and Choe’s careers in North Korea when they secretively bit the hands that brought them there and provided for them? The irony of their presence is doubled when we consider that the almighty cultural leader had to depend on his prisoners for promoting North Korean cinematic standards, which were to serve as the models for everyday life in North Korea. The inversion of power relations—in which Sin and Choe were the guiding light for Kim, the prisoners Page 32 →providing the jailer with visions of the rescue of North Korea—symptomatically signals the intricate dynamics of what North Korea officially put on display at the expense of suppressing other heretical factors into silence and invisibility. Although covered in the veil of revolutionary ideology, there are fissures and gaps in the movies Sin and Choe produced, which allows for subversive readings challenging conventional ways of understanding their work as faithfully serving Kim’s regime.71 It is undeniable that the changes Sin and Choe brought to the North Korean film industry were often limited, but their story of North Korea opens up the possibilities of discussing most crucial moments in the development of North Korean theater, film, and performance history and offers tales of misplacement in time and space, the place of the state patriarch in North Korean society, gender relations, and the everyday performance they were to display as model citizens of Kim Jong-il.

Page 33 →CHAPTER 1 Hybridization of Performance Genres Institutional Reforms The North Korean leader’s fascination with and special treatment of film raises questions about how the genre evolved from or had a formative influence on its parallel genre—theater. Michelle Mills Smith has shown that there are two ways of looking at the relationship between film and theater: “either as a ‘to the death’ struggle between competing performance genres, or as a sort of ‘parallel universe’ in which the two have little to do with each other.”1 While these two models might prove useful for other case studies, neither provides a self-sufficient method for the analysis of North Korea. There was an open preference for film from the initial stage of the North Korean state, so as to make live theater appear peripheral. North Korea’s own report claims that its film industry began in February 1946, when a small film laboratory was established in Pyongyang. This was just one month after the Propaganda Bureau of the Korean Workers’ Party Central Committee established a film unit.2 Armstrong’s study of early North Korean cinema confirms the story: “The Soviets and the North Koreans had to create a film industry from the bottom up. According to playwright O Yeong-jin, active in the filmmaking circles in Pyongyang at the time, the Red Army signed a film production agreement with the People’s Political Committee of South Pyeongan Province in 1946, and brought in film equipment and trained technicians from the Soviet Union.”3 The following year saw the opening of the Joseon Art Film Studio Page 34 →(Joseon yesul yeonghwa chwalyongso), where feature films were supposed to be made. As the North Korean official claim goes, in February 1947, Kim Il-sung ordered a sock factory formerly owned by the Japanese to be converted into a film studio.4 The North Korean media claim that Kim Il-sung himself was actively involved in guaranteeing that the studio had the necessary infrastructure. Kim directed his staff “to order the import of equipment, the recruitment of filmmakers from all over the country, and provided ample encouragement so that North Korea would have a film studio by no means inferior to those in other nations.”5 However, this cradle of North Korean film production was ruined during the Korean War when heavy bombardment effectively destroyed Pyongyang. A North Korean source claims that a Soviet cameraman with the last name Nevrisky helped plan the reconstruction of the studio.6 The veracity of this report is proven by echoes in the memoirs of eyewitnesses. As Sin and Choe noted late in the 1980s, this North Korean film studio was a smaller replica of Mosfilm Studio in the Soviet Union.7 The Soviet influence on North Korean cinema was formative, but this was openly acknowledged by the North Korean state only in the late 1950s.8 For example, in November 1957, Joseon Yesul featured an article, “The Soviet Influence on Our Cinema” by Jeong Jun-chae, in which the author compared the film industry of 1950s North Korea to that of the 1919 postrevolutionary Soviet Union. This detailed history of the Soviet–North Korean collaboration in film production testified to the immediate presence of Soviet directors and cinematographers on production sites.9 Although the Soviet presence in charting out early North Korean cinematic practice is undeniable, it is difficult to claim that North Korea uncritically absorbed this cultural assistance. The first North Korean feature film, My Hometown (Nae gohyang, 1949), exudes a strong nationalistic ethos, distinctively different from Soviet films of the time such as The Fall of Berlin (Padenie Berlina, 1949), which mostly centered on the idolization of Stalin without paying equal homage to the homeland. Loosely based on Kim Il-sung’s biography, the film features an ordinary family’s vicissitudes against the larger background of national struggle against Japanese colonialists and the landed class. The narrative follows the epic journey of a male protagonist, Gwan-pil, who leaves his family in the devastated countryside to fight for the Japanese colonialists in Manchuria. The film illustrates the unflinching struggle of male peasants entirely dedicated to the reclamation of national dignity. After the heroic victory, Gwanpil returns to his hometown and participates in the liberation of landless peasants from the exploitative Page 35 →landed class, which ultimately brings the peasantry’s long oppression under occupation and exploitation to an end. Bucolic family life is restored, culminating in Gwan-pil’s marriage to a village girl as an allegorical

rehabilitation of national sovereignty, which is predicated on the revival of masculinity. Although the film seems primarily to focus on the revolutionary struggle and the salvation of the nation through the personal views of Gwan-pil, the political theme is richly interwoven with a lyrical portrayal of the Korean countryside, creating an intricate tapestry designed to canonize the simple way of life of peasants, who were projected as the embodiment of the Korean national essence. As Armstrong argues, the national ethos expressed in the movie was so powerful as to eclipse the socialist tenet: “One might expect a film made in North Korea during the Soviet occupation, at a time when Soviet cinema was the object of so much lavish praise, to be a faithful imitation of a Soviet film, focused on class struggle and saturated with fulsome gratitude for the Red Army’s liberation of Korea from Japanese colonial rule. But the USSR is not even mentioned in Nae gohyang, and class struggle is far less important than the national struggle against Japanese oppression. Nae gohyang is a propaganda film, to be sure, but its propaganda message is one of Kim Il-sung leading the Korean nation, not the Soviet Army liberating North Korea.”10 Similar to Armstrong’s analysis of the national superseding the pan-socialist, director Sin, who saw this film in Seoul in 1950 just before the outbreak of the Korean War, acknowledged that he was quite impressed and thought at the time that the Soviets were instrumental in making the film. However, when he came to North Korea later, he was surprised to find out that it was virtually a North Korean production, made with Soviet resources.11 The driving force of this film, the autochthonous sentiment for the homeland based on unfaltering patriarchy, provided the archetype narrative line for future films to come. With the success of its first feature, the North Korean state’s preference for film was consolidated, and it had a foundational influence in remolding the educational curricula in the arts. The way North Korea has reorganized the performing arts institutions over time reflects the leadership’s high expectations for film to carry out revolutionary education of the public. With the lofty aim of producing the first generation of indigenous North Korean artists, the Pyongyang Institute of Music and Dance was established in 1950. In the same year, the Pyongyang Institute of Art was also established. On November 1, 1953, following Kim Il-sung’s instructions “to uphold the artistic principles of the Party and to nurture future generations of revolutionary artists,” the first performing arts school was founded in North Page 36 →Korea. This school was renamed the Pyongyang Institute of Performing Arts. It provided not only technical education but also a professional and well-balanced curriculum in higher education for theater artists. On August 11, 1956, the institute was reformed into the National Theater School, a single college providing an education for future directors, actors, set designers, and lighting designers. However, in September 1959, the National Theater School was dissolved and replaced by the Pyongyang Institute of Theater and Cinema (PITC). This event signaled a turn in performing arts education in North Korea, toward film as the dominant genre for propaganda. In the early 1960s, Kim Jong-il began to make his presence felt in the art world by providing leadership before he made an official debut as the head of the propaganda bureau in the late 1960s. One such effort was to supervise the PITC himself. He pointed out that theater cannot cope with the rapidly changing reality and is trapped in old-fashioned pedagogy; he criticized the PITC for ignoring education in the emerging genre of cinema. In implementing his wishes, the PITC started to pay much more attention to film education by the mid-1960s. A 1965 article, “Hopeful New Generation: The Sixth Graduation Ceremony of the PITC,” introduced the titles of the student films made at the PITC, such as Wife, Landlord, and Servant; Pride; The Departing People; and The Waiting, but not a single theater production was introduced.12 The preference for film over other performing arts genres manifested itself in an extreme form during the following decade. On July 8, 1971, Kim Jong-il abolished the theater department and renamed the school the Pyongyang Institute of Cinema (PIC). It provided a four-year education concentrating only on film. This was the period when the revolutionary operas under the guidance of Kim Jong-il were produced and aggressively promoted. Kim Jong-il’s personal involvement cannot be underestimated, but at the same time, the notion that he was at the heart of the creative process was systematically propagated by the North Korean media. For instance, Laudatory Actor Rim Chun-yeong (just like members of other professions in North Korea, artists and performers are ranked according to a strict social hierarchy, in which a “laudatory actor” is the second highest level), who played the female lead in one of the revolutionary operas, Oh, Tell the Forest, remembers when Kim Jong-il was intensively involved in the making of revolutionary operas: In those days [early 1970s] we had to start rehearsing way after 10:00 p.m. since we used the same

theater space in which Sea of Blood was Page 37 →being performed. It took about three hours for the workers to take down the stage set of Sea of Blood and put up a new set for Oh, Tell the Forest. . . . I played the role of the female protagonist, Bok-sun. When we were rehearsing act 5, scene 2, where my character was supposed to sleep for seventeen minutes, I felt so tired that I really fell asleep. When I woke up and realized my mistake, to my surprise, I saw the smiling face of our Dear Leader in the auditorium. When I saw his caring face, my stiff body relaxed like melting ice under the sunlight, and I promised myself not to make the same mistake again.13

The anecdote about Kim Jong-il’s presence at the rehearsal eludes any reliable proofs. However, what deserves our attention foremost is the fact that the North Korean journals created the image of an artistic director who stood at the heart of the creative process. On a similar note, People’s Actor Choe Hae-ok, who played the leading female role in the revolutionary opera Flower Girl, made an entry in her diary on April 19, 1973, which was published in Joseon Yesul in 1989: “I heard that a week ago, on April 13, our Dear Leader expressed his opinion on the characterization of the leading role in Flower Girl. ‘A female singer in the Sea of Blood Opera Troupe sang very well in the production of Sea of Blood. I think that she can play well Kkot-bun’s role in Flower Girl.’”14 Choe Haeok’s May 8, 1973, diary entry further shows her excitement after the successful premiere of the production: “The Dear Leader showed up at midnight after our performance. I was so worried that I could have disappointed him with my immature acting and singing, so I was simply touching my costumes [in anxiety]. But to my surprise, the Dear Leader once again showed his love and trust: “The actress playing Kkot-bun’s role plays the role quite well in a modest fashion. That role should not be exaggerated and should be played simply and modestly. The actress has quite a good stage presence. She is taller than others, but since she is in harmony with the actress who plays her sister’s role, it does not create any concerns.”15 The detailed coverage by the North Korean media of Kim Jong-il’s involvement in such productions promoted the notion that he was the originator of the revolutionary operas and the idea that thanks to the leadership’s unflinching support, the operas prospered as the brainchild of the Dear Leader and the new model of national theater. However, the revolutionary operas’ prosperity brought about the downfall of pure spoken drama. Not until July 25, 1987, did Kim Jong-il change his mind and restore theater education to the PIC’s curriculum, after Page 38 →watching a revolutionary play, Three Members, One Party, which was an adaptation of a classical Korean play.16 Nonetheless, the more than decade-long hiatus in theater education caused irreversible damage to pure spoken dramas. In 1983, twelve years after official theater education halted and four years before it was officially restored, director Sin had a chance to see two North Korean stage plays: My Hometown, the stage adaptation of the 1949 film; and Mortification at the Hague Peace Conference, a piece allegedly written by Kim Il-sung himself, which centers on the secret emissary of the Joseon dynasty who was dispatched to the 1907 Hague Peace Conference to protest the Japanese ambition to annex Korea. Sin recalls that he was disappointed with both productions, as he believed that both plays significantly lacked dramatic tension. Sin regarded the decline in stage performance as a result of three primary factors: first, only limited topics were allowed on stage, while all translated foreign plays were forbidden; second, Kim Jong-il neglected pure spoken drama and focused on revolutionary operas; and third, talented stage actors retired without raising the next generation of actors, reflecting the discontinuity in theater education.17 Although the realistic acting style of the pure spoken drama was fully absorbed by film, reducing the stage performance and education of spoken drama to the minimum had a detrimental impact on acting as a whole; with fewer venues for actors to explore, they now had limited chances to engage in various genres and less versatility. During what Kim Jong-il thought was a private conversation with Sin and Choe, he openly acknowledged the shortcomings of North Korean actors vis-à-vis their South Korean counterparts: “South Korean actors are versatile, they appear in TV dramas, live stage shows, and in film, and they do it all well. Our screen actors are ridiculous when they are put on stage or on TV. They are so unnatural, to the point that it is much better to listen

to the recorded performance. However, when stage actors are put on screen, they also appear ridiculous. It is all our responsibility; for fifteen years we have been in charge of culture and arts and we have not even resolved that problem yet. Stage actors ought to act equally well in front of the camera. There are only few actors who do both well.”18 In order to foster versatile actors as Kim Jong-il wished to do, it was absolutely necessary to have different venues and formats for acting—live stage, film, and TV. Although North Korea did have all those venues, balanced training for different acting formats was significantly impaired by the one-sided curriculum. To revive actor training for spoken drama was not Page 39 →yet a part of Kim Jong-il’s intention in 1983, when the conversation with Sin and Choe took place, and in the meantime, the North Korean leadership was investing all its energy in film to the degree that no resources were spared to raise its cinematic profile. The culmination of Kim Jong-il’s effort to vitalize North Korean cinema with the help of the South Korean couple came with the opening of Sin Film Studio in Pyongyang in 1983.19 The unprecedented naming of the film studio after an individual other than the Kim leaders and some other prominent revolutionaries manifested Kim Jong-il’s desire to pledge unlimited support for Sin Sang-ok, whom he believed to be capable of creating a place on the map of international cinema. Kim Jong-il added US$2 million annually to Sin’s personal budget, tremendous support for any individual by North Korean standards, to be used for his filmmaking activities.20 Sin and Choe immediately started making films drastically different from previous North Korean films, with a faster tempo, rhythmic editing, and a realistic acting style. The promotion of realism in films directed by Sin reached its zenith with his second film made in North Korea. Based on the 1920 novel by Choe Seo-hae, Runaway (Talchulgi, 1984) features a male protagonist who joins the underground anti-Japanese revolutionary group. The film features a scene where he blows up a train with dynamite. In order to enhance the realistic effect, Sin asked the North Korean authorities for permission to blow up a real functional train, since there were no special effects available. The authorities came back to Sin immediately with a positive answer. As he wrote in his memoir, “Everything was allowed to [him] in the name of filmmaking in North Korea.”21 Sin and Choe’s experimentation with different cinematic styles with the unlimited patronage of the leadership not only brought realism into North Korean films but also expanded the scope of possible cinematic subject matter. In 1985, Sin made a film involving a fantastic creature called Bulgasari, which became the title. Modeled after the Godzilla film series and intended to be an international blockbuster,22 the film centers on a small iron doll figure, which, upon coming in contact with human blood, grows into a gigantic monster that destroys everything. The film is set in an unspecified past when landless peasants suffer from cruel exploitation by the ruling class. The film concludes with Bulgasari eventually joining the peasant side and bringing social justice by punishing the exploitative class. The unusual subject matter makes Bulgasari stand out from the rest of North Korean cinema and even from Sin’s North Korean oeuvre, as there are no other films featuring similar imaginary subject matter. Moreover, the Page 40 →film is unique in its hybridization of different performance genres. Clearly with an eye set on entertainment, it incorporates folk dances and martial arts to advance the dramatic action, which in turn is not-so-subtly framed by revolutionary ideology hailing the collective will of the people. Nevertheless, as obvious as the socialist orientation is, equally conspicuous is the fact that North Korean film from then on became aware of its potential to entertain as much as to educate. Love, Love, My Love (Sarang, sarang, nae sarang, 1984), Sin’s greatest hit among the movies he made in North Korea, is a musical adaptation of a traditional tale well known in both parts of Korea. Set in the Joseon dynasty, the story centers on the female protagonist, Chunhyang, who is born of a courtesan mother and a literati father. She falls in love with the son of a governor, but because of their different status in a strict social caste system, their love meets challenges from all sides. Eventually, Chunhyang’s perseverance and loyalty defeat all odds and the lovers are happily united in marriage. More detailed thematic analysis of Love, Love, My Love will follow in chapter 5. Here I want to emphasize that

Sin turned this classical tale into a cinematic innovation through various experiments, such as mixing the old lyrics with contemporary music to be performed with choreographic gestures demonstrating traces of both old Korean dance patterns and contemporary dance. However, the cinematic experimentation culminates at a moment when the film introduces different spaces of performance showcasing three disparate spatial types, which bring in various genres of film, theater, and two-dimensional visual arts. Sin presents the moment when Chunhyang and her lover, Mongryong, celebrate their union by singing a love duet in a fluid transition. First, the lovers are located in the three-dimensional space of a film studio, with realistic props and furniture unambiguously signaling the interior of Chunhyang’s bedchamber. As the song and dance progresses, Chunhyang and Mongryong move on to the adjoining space, devoid of any realistic props and filled with large and tall panels on which abstract calligraphic patterns are written. The panels are randomly lined up to create the three-dimensionality of space, the theatrical illusion of a live stage. Then finally, the two move on to the two-dimensional space of an ink painting, where the flat surface of a large white paper on which a tree is painted in black functions as the only backdrop. The colorful silk costumes of the two lovers freely roaming around the surface evoke a butterfly chasing a flower. Such a variety of blending of different performance spaces in this scene strikingly resembles the quintessential North Korean way of promoting the Page 41 →hybridity of all forms of art, with film at the helm coordinating diverse performance genres. Whether intentionally or not, the most experimental moment of filmmaking in North Korean cinematic history reverts to the principles of hybridization, ironically echoing the artistic vision of Kim Jong-il, who sought to appropriate various motifs and styles of each performance medium to create a culminating total art in which cinema was the backbone. The theoretical issues of hybridity provided the rationale for North Korean performing arts to develop as they did over the past fifty years, with particular attention paid to the paradoxical proximity of innovation and tradition, amateur and professional principles of performing given roles.

Staged Film, Filmed Stage All things considered, film occupied a preferred position in North Korean performing and visual arts under the exclusive patronage of the leadership. As observed in the previous section, this fact was reflected in institutional structures such as educational curricula and distribution of resources, which established and guaranteed the unchallenged status of cinema. Then, did the theater and live performance lose their relevance under the tangible dominance of film as the prototype genre for the political education of North Koreans? Political education, heavily reliant on visual propaganda, mandated that audiences reenact the cinematic ideals in their daily lives through systematic educational and community activities. As every North Korean was supposed to discuss and embody the heroic virtues of film characters, ordinary viewers were encouraged to perform their roles as model citizens in communal activities such as parades, mass games, and educational sessions at work and school. Consequently, amateur acting flourished. The elements of live performance can be found in the everyday lives of the people, who strove to emulate the characters on screen and thereby practice the state-imposed doctrines. Thus the ubiquitous medium of education and entertainment became a conduit to an appropriate worldview. The mighty status of cinema as a tool for education brought about an intriguing reversal in the roles of spectators and performers: while the usually anonymous spectators watching film (North Korean people) had to become performers of politically correct acts under constant social surveillance, the role of the spectator with all-seeing privileges was reserved only for the leader. However, it would be misleading to claim that the prominence of film eclipsed live theater performance in the performing arts scene. That film Page 42 →received preferential treatment is undeniable, but equally undeniable is the fact that the principles of live stage performance found alternative venues in the hybrid genre of revolutionary opera and the political importance of amateur acting in everyday life. The latter will be explored in the next section together with professional actor training; in this section, I examine North Korea’s essential debates on how theater and film evolved as genres and whether the boundary between the two is as firm as many claim. The positions of theater and film as disparate genres began to change with the advent of revolutionary operas. This was not only because revolutionary operas consciously integrated various art forms such as spoken drama,

Western orchestral music, dancing, and singing, but also because the advent of these operas in the 1970s was at a crossroads in time when spoken dramas were declining and new types of feature films with much more vigorous revolutionary content were on the rise. The introduction of revolutionary operas may appear as the advent of an unprecedented performance format, but a closer look reveals that it was a meticulously planned state effort to reconcile the declining stage tradition with the ever-increasing popularity of film. The revolutionary operas faithfully followed the stage production format in their use of proscenium space, but they were mostly circulated across North Korea not as live productions but through filmed documentation—so much so that revolutionary operas brought about the tradition of filming stage performances, fusing live theater performances with filming techniques. In contrast to frequent statements about separating film and theater, intentionally or not, the North Korean filmmakers ended up integrating the two, and thereby created a stronger medium for propagating ideology. The characteristics reflecting the interference of film in theater and the hybrid medium of filmed theater performances deserve attention in their own right, since the ability to propagate cultural products dramatically changes depending on the choice of genre. The filmic intervention, documenting the live performance, engenders creative rupture and reconfigures the contours of performance as a whole. In other words, the medium of representation (stage or screen) becomes as significant as the object of representation (political agenda). Susan Sontag referred to the use of film as “a medium as well as an art, in a sense that it can encapsulate any of the performing arts and render it in a film transcription.”23 But as Annabel Melzer has contended, Sontag failed to sufficiently address the question of what it means to “document” a performance. By focusing on the act of recording a live performance, Melzer turns our attention to the “intention” of filming: Page 43 →“Can the performed piece withstand the move from medium to medium, without undergoing irreparable damage? The question in itself implies that in the move there is no chance of a ‘pure’ document and that some ‘damage’ is inevitable. Questions and answers are echoed in terms of how many cameras, how much editing.”24 Extending a step further Melzer’s argument that questioning the intention of documentation is a good starting point for tackling the problems posed by a hybrid genre, I approach the “inevitable” damage as creative fissures and gaps consciously appropriated by the filmmakers who documented live performances. Editing a live performance is a drastic type of manipulation, often used to implement a certain ideology. Each technical aspect of filming—lighting, the camera’s point of view, mise-en-scène, position of the camera, editing that reconstructs time and space through montage—is an ideological statement, a “film phrase” reflecting the motivation of the filmmaker.25 Filmed performance provides a glimpse of what could have been lost forever, but at the same time it poses the question of what has been left out in the process of documentation. Live performance could be the prized value of stage productions creating an authentic aura within mechanically reproducible films, but this was less so in the case of North Korea. For propaganda strategists, live stage performances primarily meant logistic challenges caused by disappearing acts impossible to reproduce. To borrow performance scholar Philip Auslander’s argument, the filmization of live performances is “determined by cultural and historical contingencies” rather than stemming from the competitive opposition between live and mediatized performances.26 Auslander’s book Liveness, a study of live performances in the mediatized world, provides a helpful insight into the North Korean practice of filming live performances. As Auslander has argued: “Initially, mediatized events were modeled on live ones. The subsequent cultural dominance of mediatization has had the ironic result that live events now frequently are modeled on the very mediatized representations that once took the self-same live events as their models.”27 Although his primary focus is Western popular music, his research quite aptly explains the North Korean situation. The first part of Auslander’s observation—that the early mediatized events imitated live performances—at first glance may not appear to apply to early North Korean films; on a closer look, it explicates why these early films did not retain many elements of live performance. The primary reason is that while live performance and techniques of mediatization existed coevally in Auslander’s case study so as to mutually shape the modes of production, the first North Korean film was produced as late as 1949, quite Page 44 →some time after the initial stage of mediatization or filmmaking, which is heavily based on theatrical staging principles, as we see in George

Méliès’s Trip to the Moon (1903). By 1949, the world cinema had gone through many cycles of development, with the introduction of color and sound films and the emerging tendency to capture realism on screen. More concretely, the fact that North Korean films, even from the early stage, did not retain many theatrical elements is contingent upon the fact that Soviet cinema—the foundational model for North Korean films in 1949—was rigorously cultivating the new genre of socialist realism.28 Although North Korean cinema persistently dramatized the nationalistic ethos on a thematic level, as in My Hometown, on a technical level it was deeply indebted to Soviet filmmaking traditions. Starting in the 1970s, most North Korean theater productions were filmed primarily for wider circulation, which reinforced a rigorous editing process to achieve desirable images. The manipulation of the camera dictates the direction of the viewer’s gaze at certain aspects of a viewed object. As film critic Andre Bazin has argued, “The screen has certainly modified our feeling about verisimilitude in interpretation”:29 the position of the camera and editing were intended to have a clear ideological orientation. Eric Bentley, a renowned critic and playwright, has introduced a polemical perspective: “Just as the abstract painter argues that photography removed the need for representational painting by doing the job much better, so it is argued that cinematography removes the need for realist theater.”30 Kim Jong-il’s open abandonment of live spoken drama seems to agree that film can depict the revolutionary effort much more realistically than theater, but the hybridization of performance genres that began in the 1970s contradicts such an assumption. North Korean films demonstrating visible theatrical elements and theater performances were mediatized according to filmmaking principles; in other words, staged films and filmed stages reveal that both genres were very much in touch with nonrealistic theater elements, sharing similar themes and acting styles. This creates a perceptible contrast to the earlier films, which self-consciously marked themselves as distinct from all other genres. The theoretical and empirical debate on how screen and stage evolved out of mutual influence was very much at the center of North Korean producers’ attention. The February 1959 issue of Joseon Yesul contained an article regarding the difference between theater and film by accentuating the advanced nature of the latter.31 Using snowflakes as an example, the author states that in cinema one can shoot a scene under real snow, whereas it is Page 45 →impossible to scatter real snowflakes on stage, where no spectator expects to see them. The use of props on stage is based on the assumption that they are seen by the audiences as conventional lies intended to represent something real; props in cinema are real in themselves and therefore more credible. Using the montage effect as an example, the anonymous author continues to enumerate the differences between genres, and states that cinema was devised to convey a controlled vision proposed by the creators, whereas theater is left to the audience’s voluntary viewing process: “Montage in theater is accomplished by individual spectators, whereas montage in film is planned by the director before reaching spectators.”32 One of the first meticulous articulations of the difference between theater and film in North Korea, the article elaborates by discussing their genealogy: “Silent films often mixed stage techniques with film techniques and in that respect were a transitional step in the move toward full-blown cinema”;33 “dialogues in film are brief because film naturally can rely on rich visual imagery.”34 This author evaluates theater as a preliminary passage that leads to the mature genre of cinema, thus justifying the artistic privilege the latter enjoys. The argument that film is in a superior position continues to appear throughout North Korean criticism, echoing the leadership’s vision. In 1960, film critic Han Hyeong-won, in an article titled “Special Features of Film Scenario and Questions for Discussion,” quite persuasively demonstrated the superiority of film to other genres: “Film is the most important art of all. It is the mission of our party to arm the people with communist ideology through cinema.”35 Han proves his point by elaborating on such advantages as editing, easy manipulation of time and space, and inherent cinematic rhythm that is distinguished from other genres. Han points out that “editing is a series of words, cuts, colors, and collision of mise-en-scène, which allow for effective artistic expressions,”36 and thereby indicates that the film scenario, unlike the drama script, does not bind writers with many restrictions. Han further notes that assisting this editorial advantage in film is a free-flowing time and space structure. This not only enables the scenario writer to switch time and space at will “but also enables the writer to choose the most

essential part of events, and hence, to understand editing techniques translates to opening up infinite possibilities of changing the flow of events.”37 Accordingly, the manipulation of time and space can force viewers to focus on certain aspects of the viewed object: “The specific nature of film editing is based on the subtraction of the elements of visual presentation. Page 46 →Editing techniques may force viewers to look at one specific object, whereas spectators of theater production may choose to stop looking at an object that might not grab their attention.”38 Han’s argument that film as a genre could be more dictatorial than stage presentation emerges from the distinctive nature of the medium itself. The author seems to believe that “although distance in spatial settings could be an indication of time passing in both theater and film, film as a genre seems to capture more appropriately the passage of time than stage productions.”39 Such a view is questionable in nature, showing the author’s inherent bias toward theater as a genre of limitation. Nonetheless, views like these were taken seriously by the filmmakers and the political authority to account for the North Korean propaganda bureau’s preference for film. Another important remark concerns language in film. Han quotes Konstantin Stanislavsky’s assertion that “not everything has to be said in order to be expressed”40 in emphasizing the need for films to use laconic language, since wordiness can take away the persuasive nature of film: “[Verbosity in film] emerges from the lack of understanding the specific nature of filmic language. An effective balance between silence and words could increase the dramatic nature of the presentation.”41 This point resonates with that of Han Seol-ya, the leading literary figure in the early years of the North Korean state. Han asserted that the verbosity of stage productions reflects the undesirable legacies of the byeonsa, the narrator who provided a narration accompanying the silent film, which polluted the beauty of the Korean language: “Dialect, when used to simply invite laughter from the audience members, becomes a cheap device. Many actors indeed imitate the exaggerated tone of a narrator from the silent film era.”42 In Han’s view, the residue of silent film that crept into spoken drama was unambiguously a detrimental factor for contemporary filmmaking. However, Han Seol-ya’s point presents a set of problems, since it implies that speech is the only component in stage production through which plot unfolds itself. He argues that characters on stage express their thoughts and emotions mainly through speech, but film scriptwriters are not so bound by this limitation in expressing characters’ thoughts.43 Both authors agree that stage production generally is much more dependent on verbal means of communication than film, whereas cinematic representation tends to manipulate image-based silence much more effectively than theater. Based on such conclusions, Han Hyeong-won asserts that films have inherently different visual and sound rhythms differentiated from all other genres.44 Page 47 →Counter to the idea that theater needs to unlearn realism on stage, Bentley has suggested that if the screen is able to be more realistic than the stage, it is also able to be more fantastic.45 Although the aforementioned opinions of filmmakers and critics agree that film has many aspects that differentiate it from theater, a thorough investigation of theatrical and cinematic practice points to the affinities between North Korean film and theater, at least since the 1970s, when the revolutionary operas started to emerge: early North Korean films may not come across as theatrical, but since the filming of live stage productions began, there have been many instances in which North Korean theater has freely borrowed film techniques, such as erratic changes of time and space achieved through editing, thus resulting in the visible affinities between the two genres. Even though Auslander’s observation that live events rendered mediatized events a performance format does not apply to early North Korean films, his later conclusion that with time, live events were modeled increasingly after mediatized performances has held true in the North Korean case. The comparison between the stage version of Flower Girl and its filmic counterpart illustrates this point well. The stage production quite frequently uses blackout in order to quickly change the time and space setting of the action, which creates various effects akin to film editing. It also uses film projected on a blank backdrop to create realistic scenes of a house set on fire or roaring waves of the sea. But most significantly, the camera movement, using close-ups and rapid zoom-out sequences, allows for the scene to change without the viewers’ knowledge. When the female protagonist, Kkot-bun, travels to visit the prison where her brother is held, the guards refuse to let her in to meet him. Devastated, Kkot-bun clings to the iron gates while the camera zooms in to show her tormented

face. When the camera zooms out after a few minutes, the prison is nowhere to be found and instead, there is a film projection depicting roaring waves, which signals elapsing of time and space—a sequence only film editing can achieve. In addition to the filmization of stage productions, theater and film were tied by another level of acting, grounded on a heightened melodramatic style. Furthermore, both genres fully shared the legacies of socialist realism,46 which promoted the teleological vision of the future. As delineated in the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, socialist realism promised to depict reality in progress. As literary scholar Katerina Clark eloquently points out, the mythological structure of socialist realism fortified the vision that the present leads to the utopian future, which was distanced from Page 48 →historical reality.47 Although the North Korean producers wanted to create works in line with the realist tradition, their films nevertheless faithfully reflected the illusionist spirit of socialist realism. In its relentless promotion of illusion as reality, North Korea’s openly political manifesto aiming to embody revolutionary reality is interrupted by not-so-subtle utopian visions propelled in form and content by socialist realism. As one North Korean documentary filmmaker frankly admitted in 1965, shooting reality as it existed without visible dramatic intervention is not the best way to render revolutionary spirit: “I have had the experience of making the historical documentary Glorious Anti-Japanese Armed Resistance. I have learned some things I can apply to my next film: although the film deals with historical events, researching archives and collecting materials is not enough. Filmmakers should reflect his [the Leader’s] lofty mind and the passion of the time period they are capturing on screen.”48 Kim Jong-il expressed the same sentiment in his book The Character and the Actor: “The real objective of cinematic art is not to make people merely aware of the world, but to develop them as communist revolutionaries and accelerate the revolution and socialist construction.”49 Distanced from the goal of verisimilitude, North Korean performance has allowed pretentious ideals to occupy the creative center in both theater and film throughout the history of their development. Such a vision of utopian reality paradoxically brought about the embrace of an acting style that came from a melodramatic tradition under Japanese colonial rule. With the benefit of hindsight, the irony becomes clear: North Korea opposed everything Japanese according to its loudly proclaimed ideology, but at the same time, it seems that North Korean performers inherited the acting style of Japanese shimpa, a transitional genre that evolved in the early half of the twentieth century as a bridge between traditional Kabuki and modern shingeki, a spoken drama influenced by Western-style spoken drama. According to Ayako Kano, shimpa “translated as ‘new school drama,’ and the standard encyclopedia definition explains that it was a kind of hybrid genre, a step between kabuki and truly modern theater.”50 Early twentieth-century Korean theater absorbed the elements of this genre, which had a formative influence on the overall development of modern Korean theater. The official North Korean theater detested everything Japanese on a thematic level, but ironically, so far as acting style was concerned, it retained some quintessential iconographies of shimpa as it extolled the histrionic passions expressed in immediately recognizable tableau gestures of stage characters. Only through exaggerated passions could North Page 49 →Korean films clearly project the utopian visions of the future as the blueprint of how the nation was destined to evolve. This exaggerated acting style has been criticized by both North and South Koreans who detested North Korean theater’s superficial appropriation of foreign genres. Han Seol-ya, in an article titled “Proud Current State and the Future of Mass Art,” criticized some plays featured during the National Arts Festival in 1958.51 He noted that “sinpa [shimpa] style acting and staging were undesirable,”52 and that “the appropriation of various foreign genres, such as operetta, musical sketch, variety, and ballads without exploring the thematic depth of performance should be avoided.”53 The half-baked appropriation of various foreign genres was not the only symptom of ailing theater productions. South Korean dissident writer Hwang Seok-yeong, who is known for his pro–North Korean political stance, noticed a similar trend in much later films of the 1970s and 1980s: “North Korean films, dance, and opera . . . all carry a fatal flaw, which originates from 1900. The intellectuals of the feudal agricultural society, most of whom were educated in Tokyo, blindly absorbed and introduced Western civilization and culture. These intellectuals

brought to Korea a Japanized version of Western culture.”54 This flaw ironically tied the disparaged genre of theater much closer to film. The melodramatic acting style of the film Flower Girl is hardly distinguishable from that in a theater version, although the former takes much more liberal leap of faith in the camera’s ability to capture life more realistically than live performance. Bentley makes the point that the screen is equally realistic and fantastic, like its predecessor: “The camera can show us all sorts of things—from close-ups of insects to panoramas of prairies—which the stage cannot even suggest, and it can move from one to another with much more dexterity than any conceivable stage. The stage, on the other hand, can be revealed in the unsurpassable beauty of three-dimensional shapes, and the stage actor establishes between himself and his audience a contact real as electricity.”55 What Bentley suggests as the strong point of film—its ability to involve rapid camera movement—became instrumental in the way stage productions were filmed. At the same time, the three-dimensionality of stage characters might have motivated the staging of films as communal rituals in which live bodies of spectators formed a congenial notion of community. Although the living actors’ bodies were transposed onto a two-dimensional screen, spectators emerged as living heroes of the filmed theaters, expected to live out the ideal collective drama.

Page 50 →Actor Training and Everyday Performance The process of blurring the boundary between performed illusion and social reality by transforming spectators into performers was carried out on two fronts. While professional performers on stage and screen were perpetually striving to learn the virtues of real revolutionary citizens in real life, ordinary viewers were aiming to become like the film characters who were presented as models to emulate. These simultaneous processes were taking place in accordance with the vision of the leaders, especially Kim Jong-il. Kim’s ideas on performance were crystallized in numerous publications, one of which was a 1987 book, The Character and the Actor: “In order to have a broad and deep understanding of a character, the actor should first study the script and, in accordance with it, experience life on which he is to base his portrayal. The actor should get to know the character while studying the script, and on that basis, delve into his life.”56 In order to achieve the union of himself and the character, the actor should deeply explore the character’s world and correctly analyze his personality, and on that basis, gain invaluable experience of his life.”57 Kim’s rather naive insistence that the actors master the lives of the characters they play, in principle, was based on the Stanislavskian method of acting inherited from the Soviet Union. However, more important in the process of becoming a character was a total political conversion. Before imagining the lives of characters, actors were expected to be politically correct model citizens themselves. North Korean society openly prized actors’ political correctness more than their performing talents, which reveals a significant aspect of performative practices’ glossing over what seem to be the two disparate realms of illusion and reality—the character’s identity should spill over into the actors’ daily lives so they would be perceived solely by the roles played on stage and screen. Kim’s direction that “actors mediate screen and spectators by functioning as conduits attracting spectators into the world of cinema”58 requires the actors to establish a correct ideological entry point for viewers. Actors are political teachers who perform ideology, whose social significance is located in the liminal realm of performed illusion and political utopia. This is precisely why achievements in acting are presented as a collective pride of the North Korean state rather than as individual talents. In fact, any mention of individual talent is extremely difficult to find in North Korean society, and in rare cases when specific performers are praised, the state leaders are behind the endorsement. The flip side of this practice is Page 51 →that a performer’s individual identity in real life is a continuation of a film character’s identity, which is made evident in the film itself and therefore not to be elaborated outside it. When Sin Sang-ok directed his first feature film, Secret Envoy Who Never Returned, in North Korea in 1983, he credited all performers and staff members at the end of the film, which was unprecedented in North Korean film history. All the movies that came before contained no acknowledgments because North Korean actors were not supposed to gain individual fame. Even leading stars such as Hong Yeong-hui were known by their character’s name (Kkot-bun in the film Flower Girl).59 In fact, Hong Yeonghui’s role as Kkot-bun was so popular that it even appeared on a frequently used North Korean banknote, perpetuating the identity of a fictional screen character in

real life. Although the individual identities of famous performers are not made public, as they are in many other places around the world, a handful of successful North Korean stars enjoy social and economic prestige. Those who have successfully played major characters to become social icons are given high honors in North Korean society. To be awarded the title people’s actor (inmin baeu) is the most honorable rank a performer can achieve, equivalent to a government minister. The next rank, laudatory actor (gonghun baeu), is equal to a vice minister. In principle, actors are perceived and treated as pliable workers, like peasants and farmers, who contribute their labor to the construction of the socialist state. Stalin’s dictum that “writers are the engineers of the soul” is revised and expanded in North Korea so as to create a new equation: “performers are the trainers of political correctness.” Ron Gluckman, an American reporter based in Hong Kong, had a chance to visit Joseon Film Studio in Pyongyang. During the tour he received a booklet titled “Guide to the Korean Film Studio,” which indicated that “film stars go into real life and help farmers in their work at the rice-transplanting season.”60 True to the account in this guidebook, performing for stage and screen is interwoven with efforts to learn from real-life experience. North Korean media transmit many stories where actors are identified with ordinary viewers. Laudatory Actor Rim Chun-yeong, for instance, published a memoir in 1988 reminiscing about when she acted in revolutionary opera productions: “In 1963, upon graduating from Pyongyang High School of Transportation, I was working as an inspection worker at the Pyongyang Railroad Department. Thanks to our Dear Leader Kim Jong-il’s loving care and his high regard for my political solidarity, I realized my dream of becoming an Page 52 →artist and ended up participating in the productions of Oh, Tell the Forest and Song of Geumgang Mountain.”61 Rim’s narrative unfolds two ways of becoming an actor in North Korea: not only professionally trained actors but also real workers were recruited for productions. But a more telling aspect of her story is that her correct political stance was the main reason for her selection as a performer, reiterating the notion that a successful actor and an ideal political citizen are inseparable identities in North Korea. People’s Actor Choe Hae-ok tells a similar story in an article titled “Memories of Faith and Love,” which is an excerpt from her diary entry on April 19, 1973: Today I was chosen to play the leading role of Kkot-bun in the revolutionary opera Flower Girl. I have only spent a few months on an opera stage, and to be selected as the heroine of this masterpiece is simply unbelievable. . . . The more I think about it, the more it feels like a dream. I was only a high school student in the far northern province of our homeland, lucky and blessed to be chosen to study at the Pyongyang Institute of Music and Dance. How can I ever express my gratitude for getting a chance to play this important role! . . . Without the Dear Leader’s faith and love, I, the poor farmer’s daughter, would never have had a chance to play the leading role in this masterpiece.62 Her story resonating with Rim’s account in the previous quotation, Choe emphasizes that the Dear Leader’s clemency, as well as her correct political background as a poor farmer’s daughter, opened chances for her to play the heroic roles. In some cases, the actor’s political involvement has gone beyond embodying revolutionary heroes on stage and screen. Without exception, all decorated actors have to have politically correct backgrounds; in rare cases, some have joined the Korean Workers’ Party, the highest political honor bestowed on any North Korean citizen. According to People’s Actor Choe Hae-ok, her entry into the Korean Workers’ Party was a monumental event of her life, as she recalls in her diary published later in Joseon Yesul: “Today, thanks to the Dear Leader’s magnificent political trust, I became a member of our honorable party, the Korean Workers’ Party. Member of the Korean Workers’ Party! A noble title that I longed to embrace with my heart. . . . In front of me is the party membership card that the Dear Leader kindly issued and presented to me. As I keep touching and looking at the membership card, I can hear his kind voice giving various instructions.”63 North Page 53 →Korean actors are highly political in a sense that they perform the models for ordinary people to emulate, but becoming an actual politician is rare and comes with clear limitations. Although some decorated actors have joined the Communist

Party, there is no evidence that they have participated in political affairs in any leadership capacity so as to assert their view in politics. Historically, actors’ political participation has been a fact in various societies. For instance, Paul Friedland summarizes such dynamics well in Political Actors, which investigates the symbiotic fusion of theater and politics during the 1789 French Revolution: “Actors storming the political stage, politicians in the National Assembly behaving like actors, and both of them suddenly discovering the profound importance of political theater—all of these phenomena testify to the convergence of politics and theater in revolutionary France. Within a remarkably short span of time, France had been transformed from a nation in which actors were virtually ostracized from every aspect of social and civic life into a nation in which actors and politicians—and theater and politics in general—mixed so familiarly that they had become virtually indistinguishable.”64 Not too different from the situation in revolutionary France, in North Korea the elevation of actors’ social status to that of political leadership took place in a remarkably short time. However, the change remained a figurative one rather than an actual one. Unlike the French actor Jean-Marie Collot d’Herbois, who became “one of the most important political figures in all of France,”65 North Korean actors never ventured into real politics but remained within the liminal zone between illusion and reality, serving through their acting skills alone. Although there was an aggressive mutual influence of theatrical and cinematic images and political life, the actors themselves only rendered the images of immaculate revolutionary heroes and toured the country to interact with and educate ordinary citizens. Actors inspired audiences to become like them by simulating the political heroes, yet they themselves were placed at a distance, in the spectators’ position, to simply observe politics but not to take part in it. The creative team’s efforts to bring themselves closer to the daily reality of workers and peasants included other participants in the performative process, such as directors and writers. For instance, writers needed to find the roots of their creative subjectivity in everyday life: “In writing short one-act plays, it is important to find positive facts in our lives and aggressively make an archetypical model out of them . . . we should find the hero of our times and the red fighters of our party. In order to achieve this goal, we Page 54 →should not only work on already well-known heroes but also look into the ones who have not been discovered yet, and forge archetypes out of them.”66 By the same token, writers who did not situate their subject matter in reality were criticized for neglecting their role as vanguards of revolutionary struggle, as demonstrated in the theater critics Park Hye-ok and Kim Gwang-hyeon’s assessment of the 1962 drama festival: “The playwrights have not totally mastered the reality of revolutionary struggle. They should make more efforts to go among the people and experience real life.”67 These assertions arguing for the total conflation of illusion and reality appeared not only on journal pages but also in other venues, such as communal activities, whereby the performers on screen and viewers in real life were brought together. “Once a month, or twice a month if there are holidays, we show documentary films we made to the people of the countryside in assisting them with organizing and improving their cultural activities,”68 wrote one documentary filmmaker in 1966. A 1967 article exemplifies another instance where the actors and spectators created an occasion to encounter each other face to face: “Recently, the production team of Choe Hak-sin Family visited Kim Il-sung University and played the film for the students, faculty, and staff. The attendees enthusiastically applauded the achievements of the production team, which artistically captured the lofty revolutionary ideals. . . . The participants in the discussion pointed out that this film attained a high level of artistic and ideological achievement by disclosing the American imperialists’ aggression, barbarity, and cunning.”69 These types of discussions were intended to prevent the film production teams’ potential detachment from immediate audience responses. For filmmakers to stay in close touch with the audience was a way to transcend film’s defect of being an infinitely reproducible medium for the consumption of numerous anonymous viewers with whom the filmmakers rarely interacted—a genre that inherently is distanced from the audience. Films of Hollywood musicals share a similar fate in that they originated in live stage productions and have been transcribed into another format. Film scholar Jane Feuer points out the efforts to create the illusive presence of community within the musical itself in order to veil the alienation between the professional performers and the

anonymous spectators of the film: “The Hollywood musical as a genre perceives the gap between producer and consumer, the breakdown of community designated by the very distinction between performer and the audience, as a form of cinematic original sin. The musical seeks to bridge the gap by putting up ‘community’ as an ideal concept.”70 Page 55 →North Korean communal activities aimed at tying film production and consumption into one circular event are too numerous to list in their entirety. The following letter, from farmers urging filmmakers to visit their collective farm and make movies based on their lives in the socialist countryside, is just one example. It was written in 1965 by Ri Sin-ja, then the director of the Pyongyang Seungho District Riheon Collective Farm: “Members of our collective farm are encouraging ourselves to uphold the spirit of our Great Leader’s ‘Thesis on the Problems of Our Socialist Countryside’ and doing our best to repay the Party’s endless grace bestowed upon us. . . . Come to our village where people struggle to realize our Great Leader’s ideals and energetically advance our nation’s living standards. Please visit us and make more movies about the socialist countryside. We believe that comrades who made admirable films such as Red Agitator and The Son of Earth will produce more outstanding movies depicting the socialist countryside in the new year.”71 A farmworker’s plebeian opinion, such as this one, was treated as equal in importance to a professional critic’s review, since film was supposed to be the document of reality, about which real workers and farmers were the utmost authority. For the same reason, a member of the Ryangtan Cooperative Farm in Yeongheung-gun criticized the depiction of a farmworker for lacking any realistic aspects: “Whether the farmworkers are progressive or reactionary, they should be depicted in a way that one can smell soil from them. Just because actors wear peasants’ clothes, grow beards, and use local dialects does not mean that they have embodied a character possessing features typical of farmworkers’ character.”72 Through these various venues where conversation between professional actors and ordinary citizens was encouraged, viewers learned to discipline themselves according to visual performances. In turn, the consumers of these performances set out to internalize the bodily behaviors demonstrated by actors. According to a retired soldier’s letter sent to the editor of Joseon Yesul, “Retired veteran soldiers who work in our factory watched the play Our New Generation. It was so touching that we kept watching it again and again. The new generation of veteran soldiers who grew up in the loving care of our Mother Party swore to lead heroic lives like those of stage characters. Please write more plays like this one.”73 The nonprofessional film and theater viewers’ assimilation to heroic characters on stage and screen was facilitated by organizational support at a grassroots level. From the very early stages of North Korean history, local organizations were created to support political education through the arts. Collecting viewers’ feedback for future productions was one way to implement Page 56 →this policy. Park Tae-yeong, the head of the Writers’ Union of Dramatists in 1957, claimed that it was necessary “to establish a system that could listen to the viewers’ opinion; to discover and cast talented new actors and directors instead of rotating roles according to rigid work schedules; to have the leadership demonstrate moral virtues themselves; to depict everyday life in a much more artistic, delicate, and calm way.”74 Likewise, the Art Circle of the Pyongyang Cooperative Factory producing miscellaneous household items published a statement that its members should “uphold the teachings of the Great Leader and strive to depict the mechanization of the production line in various performance forms such as comic sketches and variety shows, which are the ways to bring those performances closer to real life and enliven everyday experience.”75 Such views were echoed by professional writers as well. The leading writer of the time, Han Seol-ya, commented: “We need to systematically coordinate the organizational structures of artistic activities of small circles and the circle for the masses. Each organization at a provincial level should encourage small-circle activities and make them interact with other circles in order to find and develop national treasures. . . . Small circles should not insist on staging large-scale productions but develop small-scale pieces in order to function as the vanguard of agitprop among the people.”76 These “circles,” or small-scale local organizations, were to be places where nonprofessional viewers could learn from the characters in film and theater. The lesson was learned well; these small organizations also became essential social structures to foster collective ways of life through various collaborative performance projects, such as group discussions and creating performances.77

Similar to this story from the PRC, director Sin tells a story involving a campaign officially titled “Struggle to Implement and Realize Ideals in Films” (yeonghwa silhyo tujaeng), through which the North Korean state involves every social unit, from schools to workplaces, in organizing study groups to carry out their duty of learning from films: The study group members organize discussions by comparing their lives to the lives of heroes in the film and make resolutions to emulate the heroic virtues at work and home. Moreover, the Party publishes exemplary lines and theme songs in a small notebook to be distributed free to every North Korean. Each workplace and school will organize acting or singing contests and reward individual or group winners in order to encourage competition among them. Once when I was detained in the Page 57 →Social Security Police Station [for attempting to escape North Korea], I was not aware of such struggle sessions, so when one guard, all by himself, started to rehearse lines from a movie in a stultifying melodramatic tone, I thought he was mad.78 By systematically organizing audience participation in and reenactment of performance, what may seem onedimensional propaganda theater productions and films become live events; the major lessons promoted by the repetition are inscribed onto the bodies of North Koreans and serve as the ideological foundation of their worldview. The small-scale performances that people practice on a daily basis often culminate in street parades and mass games, a large-scale performance involving thousands of participants. Emulating the actors on proscenium stage and film screen, the citizens of North Korea perform collective ideals of revolutionized nationhood in unison. Since this kind of mobilization requires a long preparation period, the events are staged on the streets and squares for special occasions, such as the annual celebration of the leaders’ birthdays, the People’s Liberation Army, the Korean Workers’ Party, or the founding of North Korea. Or according to one defector who lived in a small town near the North Korean–Chinese border, on these national holidays, sports competitions were held instead of street parades in celebration.79 Although this kind of small-scale sporting event does not measure up to the massive parades in urban areas, it nonetheless upholds the same state ideals of physical strength and coordination of participants. Figure 4. A panoramic view of parade rehearsal scene, from the Grand People’s Study Hall overlooking Kim Ilsung Square. Mid 2000s. (Photo courtesy of an anonymous donor.) Page 58 →Storming the squares and streets has been an enduring tradition of socialist states and had a formative influence on the early stages of North Korean collective performance. The earliest North Korean state documents, captured by the U.S. Army during the Korean War, showcase film documentations of Soviet mass gymnastics, testifying to the early influences North Korea received from the Soviet Union. According to these Soviet materials, thousands of schoolchildren, teenagers, and adults staged physical exercises choreographed to demonstrate the unity of all participants, exercises that their North Korean counterparts remarkably resemble. Although I have not yet encountered a direct source confirming the immediate Soviet connection in building the prototype of the North Korean mass performances, the fact that the North Korean government possessed these extensive documentaries sheds light on the substantial influence from the Soviet Union. Mass performances—mass gymnastics, street parades, group dance, and demonstrations—embody the collective ways of North Korean life in a literal sense, bringing the members of the family-nation into a physical space and thereby visually ascertaining the corporeal unity of the collective. Furthermore, the bodies on display showcase national strength, with a particular emphasis on the youth and health of the burgeoning nation, which were expressed by the youthful physicality of participants. As Charles Armstrong comments, “Immediately following the creation of North Korea, there was a considerable emphasis on hygiene, sports, and physical purity. The individual had a duty to perfect his physical condition in order to strengthen the society and better serve the state . . . the well-trained body was a synecdoche of, and a prerequisite for, a well-functioning body politic.”80 From the very early days of North Korea, its citizens were made to participate as performers staging a national body as a wholesome and congenial entity. This practice forecasts the ensuing state policy, which placed so much emphasis on training, regulating, and demonstrating the healthy bodies of the state’s subjects as a metonymy of a strong

nation. Figure 5. A poster of a physical training campaign, 1980. The caption on the top reads: “September and October are People’s Physical Strength Examination Months.” The caption at the bottom reads: “Let Us All Pass!” (Photo courtesy of an anonymous donor.) Page 59 →The proliferation of images of parades testifies to the North Korean state’s investment in communal rituals meant to discipline citizens into patriotic actors. Chris Springer, who traveled to North Korea, effectively describes the breathtaking scale of these parades on the central square of Pyongyang: “North Korea excels at putting on a show—and this [Kim Il-sung Square] is its center stage. On national holidays this square witnesses awe-inspiring displays of power. Thousands of soldiers goose-step in dress parades, backed by an array of fearsome weaponry. Flamboyant floats tout the regime’s successes. Civilians bring up the rear, carrying placards, chanting slogans, and waving to the leader on the tribune. Through such political theater, the regime creates its own reality.”81 The military as the spearhead of the parade, followed by the civilians, seems to be the sequence of all North Korean parades I have researched. Kim Jong-il was mindful of the effects of such a sequence, as he noted the necessity to showcase the military’s strength on a regular basis so that the people will have faith in the military’s ability to protect them in times of war.82 To have its bracing effect, military power must be displayed properly, and yet the display of power is not effective until its appreciators—not only Kim Jong-il, but more significantly, North Korean civilians—become complicit actors in the display process. This is why the civilians always follow the military in North Korean parades: these civilian actors moving in unison were performing the same ideals they saw in films, filmed stage productions, and some live stage productions, all engineered to create a simulacrum of a utopian family-nation where illusion and reality coexisted in hyperreal performances. Although the suppression of live theater performances seems to have assured the dominance of film as a genre, film in a way simply became a means for amateur everyday life performance to flourish in order to reinforce the solidarity of the nation in everyday life.

Page 60 →CHAPTER 2 Time and Space in North Korean Performance Without Pyongyang, Korea would not exist, and without Korea there would be no earth. —NORTH KOREAN PROPAGANDA SLOGAN

Inventing the Sacred Landscape of the Mythic Past In the 1993 feature film The Story of On-dal, set in the ancient kingdom of Goguryeo, a lachrymose song accompanies the reluctant steps of young men who embark on a heartbreaking exile: “Who wants to leave their dear homeland behind? Only firm resolution can sustain us in this hardship. Who wants to experience the tragedy of not having a country? No one wants to be subjugated under the yoke of foreign power. Never will I spare my life for defending my country.” These young men are lowly outcasts driven from their homeland by unbearable discrimination inherent within the feudal caste system of Korea. Although the fate of the nation is precarious and the ruin of their hometown obvious in the face of an impeding foreign invasion, they have been deprived of any chances to defend their country, ironically by native Koreans of higher caste. Having no other option, they are forced to set out for a secret training ground to become warriors, hoping that the future will bring them a chance to avenge the common people against both the foreign invaders who compromise their dignity and other oppressive wrongdoers. This lament from The Tale of On-dal is but one segment in a series of performative attempts to reflect on the “feudal past”1 that began long before Page 61 →the socialist revolution. North Korean films and stage plays dramatizing the feudal past are full of frustrated characters similar to these young men. The cinematic and theatrical representation of the past hinges on the official historiography of North Korea, which views the prerevolutionary era as marked by failure. Invoked as the dark age associated with either chaotic statelessness or oppression Koreans had to suffer, the “feudal past” figures the time when Kim Il-sung had not yet made a destined entrance into national history as the savior of the Korean people. Clearly stated in this historical perspective is the notion that legitimate Korean history began only with Kim Il-sung’s arrival to lead the socialist revolution and liberate the subjugated Korean people from servitude. The past has been reconfigured to merge the origins of the North Korean state with the personal history of Kim Il-sung; his birth year of 1912 became the North Korean anno domini marking the official beginning of the state. Cast in this light, the past that precedes Kim Il-sung’s rule is configured as a meaningless time when feudal rulers suppressed the working class, who longed for equality and liberation. Consequently, North Korean theater productions and films show no special efforts to glorify the past, nor any nostalgic longing for it. Instead, there is a persistent need to expose and exhibit systemic social flaws and correct them in every performance that dramatizes the pre–Kim Il-sung era. Perhaps because of the insignificance imposed on the feudal past, only a handful of performances are set during that time, such as Story of On-dal, Hong Gildong (1986), Rim Kkeok-jeong (1993), and Story of Chun-hyang (1980), together with the last’s musical adaptation, Love, Love, My Love (1984). Still fewer stage productions are set in the feudal past, and those rare instances were written and produced prior to the rise of Kim Jong-il’s revolutionary operas in the 1970s, with examples such as Princess Seon-hwa (Seon-hwa gongju), the musical in five acts scripted by Jo Ryeong-chul in 1956.2 North Korean society projects its historiography along the patriarchal succession stemming from a highly gender-discriminative stance. Performances that center on female protagonists of the feudal past, such as Princess Seon-hwa, Story of Chunhyang, and Love, Love, My Love will be discussed in chapter 4, which focuses on women’s issues. Three films that are set in the feudal past—Hong Gil-dong, Rim Kkeokjeong, and The Story of On-dal—feature striking commonalities despite the enormous gaps among them in the configuration of time and space. With their almost identical character types and similar plot lines culminating in the ultimate triumph of the low and humiliated, these films form a trilogy with a common thread running their structural and ideological matrix. The

Page 62 →heroes of the past may be courageous, but they carry fatal flaws of not being able to subvert and revolutionize their given society, and in this sense, they remain as the failed understudies of the only successful heroes in Korean history—Kim Il-sung and his family members. What this intentional creation of failed heroes of the past brings to our attention, more than anything else, is the presence of the triumphant leader of the present. It was a way to vicariously glorify the present by sketching out the darkness of the past, thus creating a vivid chiaroscuro of North Korean history that culminates with the advent of the savior. Hong Gil-dong, the first of the three films to be released, in 1986, enjoyed enormous success in North Korea and abroad in the eastern bloc, most notably in Bulgaria.3 The film is based on a popular novel by a Joseon dynasty literati scholar and official Heo Gyun (1569–1618), which captures the life of a legendary folk hero, Gil-dong, who steals from the rich to serve the poor. His background—born out of wedlock to an aristocratic father and his lowly concubine4—was a fatal flaw for a hero of this period, when illegitimate children were openly discriminated against as the lowest members of the rigid caste system. Thus, throughout the film the protagonist carries this stigma, which eventually becomes the natural justification for resisting corrupt feudal establishments. Figure 6. A poster of the film Hong Gil-dong on display outside a theater in Pyongyang. (Photo courtesy of an anonymous donor.) Page 63 →The film opens with scenes featuring the harsh discrimination and injustice little Gil-dong has to suffer in his father’s household. Known for his intelligence and a sense of justice, he becomes a favorite child of his father, a status that invites the jealousy of Gil-dong’s stepmother, the legitimate wife and the birth mother of Gildong’s kind half brother. Threatened by Gil-dong’s growing presence in the household, the stepmother conspires to eliminate the boy and his mother, forcing them to leave home. Gil-dong enters a mountainous region to receive martial arts training from an old master who previously saved his life from the stepmother’s deadly plot. He trains diligently to become a martial arts master, and when he comes of age, he falls in love with an aristocratic lady named Yeon-hwa, whom he frees from the thieves who have captured her. Unknown to the young lovers, however, is the fact that Yeon-hwa is the daughter of Lord Rim, who is a long-standing enemy of Gil-dong’s father, Lord Hong. Consequently, the lovers’ desire to be united meets challenges from both families, especially from Yeon-hwa’s parents, who are opposed to admitting an illegitimate son of their rival family into their own family. Not able to cope with this injustice and social discrimination, Gil-dong forsakes society and becomes a thief, punishing corrupt officials and distributing their wealth to the suffering people. Gil-dong becomes a national hero when he triumphs over Japanese pirates. When he returns to the capital, the king summons him to the court to grant him any wishes he names: KING: You’ve saved our country. What can I do to reward you? Tell me what you want, title, wealth, you name it. GIL-DONG: I’m humbled, Your Majesty. But I couldn’t have saved the country without the people’s help and sacrifice. My only wish is to see social order restored so that the people can focus on their livelihood. KING: (Smiling to Gil-dong.) You have a kind heart. (Turning to Lord Rim.) But what does this mean? You kept telling me that people live peacefully, but this is not what I hear from Gil-dong. LORD RIM: Forgive me, Your Majesty. Page 64 →BROTHER [Gil-dong’s half brother]: Your Majesty, allow me to ask a favor on my brother’s behalf. KING: Please proceed. BROTHER: My brother and Lord Rim’s daughter are in love. We seek your approval of their union. KING: (Gladly.) Is that true? Lord Rim, isn’t this a great way to make peace between the two

families? LORD RIM: Not at all, Your Majesty! Gil-dong is an illegitimate child, born out of wedlock, of Lord Hong and his lowly concubine. If you grant this marriage, it will create social disorder. And the strict caste system will collapse. I implore you not to approve of this union. KING: Is that true? BROTHER: But Your Majesty! You’ve promised to grant any wish! KING: But this is a request that is impossible to fulfill. After this final act of betrayal by the king, Gil-dong realizes that the only way to cope with the corrupt system is to step outside of it instead of vainly fighting from within. This dialogue sequence is shot in a confined theatrical space of the court with patterns of shot / reverse shot to capture the faces of the speakers. The extreme close-up of Gil-dong’s disappointed face creates a contrast to the medium shot of the king with the camera frame capturing the grandeur of his court attendants. Of particular interest in this contrasting sequence of shots is that it creates a palpable sense of disjuncture between the social system as a whole and Gil-dong as an individual. The courtiers’ ranks are marked by a strict hierarchy of lineups and sumptuous costumes, all designed to uphold the king as the central focus of the gaze; in this forest of pretentious courtiers, even a legendary hero like Gil-dong is a diminished component of mise-en-scène. The camera angle explicitly suggests this idea as the spectators look down on Gil-dong from the pedestal where the king is located. In a similar fashion, the dialogue in the scene replicates the visual hierarchy. The conversation involving the king, Gil-dong, Lord Rim, and Gil-dong’s brother is not dialogic in nature, but rather like a series of authoritarian dictates by the king perfunctorily involving various partners, thus reinforcing the contrast of one versus many. Only in this case, the contrast lies between the mighty king and the multitude of subjects who are rendered mute. In the historical archives as well as in the novel, Hong Gil-dong leaves his homeland in search of a utopian country and establishes his own kingdom, Page 65 →in what scholars believe is now Okinawa. However, the North Korean film creates a much more open ending, with Gil-dong and his suite, including his mother and Yeonhwa, embarking on an uncertain journey to the unknown land. In the closing scene, Gil-dong does not leave his homeland as a vindicated hero, but rather as a hermit resigned from worldly affairs. He exits the screen with a sense of defeat, as he cannot change reality no matter how much he resists. This modification of the original ending in real history and Heo Gyun’s novel seems to serve two purposes: Gil-dong, the hero of the oppressed people, could not have been presented as the settler of what is now Japan, the openly sworn enemy of the North Korean state. In addition, there must have been a need to tone down Gil-dong’s heroism to accentuate the real mighty hero for the nation—the founding father, Kim Il-sung. Gil-dong’s exile is attributed to the systematic failure of the feudal society, which does not present the possibility of revolutionary redemption, thus paving the way for the long-awaited arrival of the real savior. A similar sense of failure can be found in the film Rim Kkeokjeong, based on the epic novel by Hong Myeong-hui, who was a leading literary talent under Japanese colonial rule. Hong went to North Korea after the Korean partition in 1945 and became a prominent political figure there. Written over a decade to be published in installments in a major newspaper, Joseon Ilbo, from 1928 to 1939, Hong Myeong-hui’s epic novel vividly captures the rise and fall of the sixteenth-century bandit figure whose pillaging under the reign of King Myeongjong made an entry into history.5 The North Korean film version resembles the original’s epic scale, with the production of the first eighty-minute installment commenced in 1986 and the fifth installment—the last in the series—completed in 1993.6 This film continues to observe a folk hero’s vicissitudes in a feudal society—a tradition established by Hong Gil-dong— as it centers on yet another version of the Korean Robin Hood who lived in the sixteenth century.

According to the North Korean film version, Rim Kkeok-jeong was a butcher in the village of Yangju well known for his superhuman strength. The narrator’s grave voice catalogs the hardship people had to endure in 1550—the film’s temporal background: “During this time, all over the country people suffered from exploitation. The thirteenth king of the Joseon dynasty, Myeongjong, ascended to the throne as a child, and the real power has fallen to the child king’s uncle, who abused his position to indulge his greed. He increasingly demanded tribute from the people, and consequently the list of mandatory tribute grew exponentially each year. To make things even worse, drought decreased the harvest, and the entire Page 66 →country plunged into terrible disaster.” The chronicle-like nature of this opening narration adds a sense of historical veracity to the events that are about to evolve. The film proceeds to show Kkeok-jeong’s victorious return to his hometown after having repelled the Japanese invaders from the southern shores of Korea. Nonetheless, just like Gil-dong, Kkeok-jeong and his family are doomed to suffer insurmountable discrimination because of his profession, which classifies him as the lowest in the social caste system. The worst discrimination of all is that he cannot cultivate land for a living because of a national law that prohibits butchers from participating in agriculture. However, in reward for Kkeok-jeong’s exceptional valor during the battle against foreign invaders, he is granted the right to cultivate land. In the scene where Kkeok-jeong goes to the governor’s court to ask permission for this exclusive right, the fallacious inner workings of the feudal society become fully exposed: GOVERNOR: The national law prohibits butchers like you from cultivating the land. However, such a law means little in the face of your heroic deeds to save our country. You may go ahead and start irrigating the land, but just be sure not make a huge display out of it. KKEOK-JEONG: Thank you, thank you, sir. I will not forget your benevolence. (Kkeok-jeong leaves the court.) ATTENDANT: (Looking up at the governor worriedly.) Sir, what if someone finds out about the breach of law? GOVERNOR: (With a sly smile.) What kind of idiot would follow the national law at a time like this? We are better off to tame a popular guy like Kkeok-jeong and use him later. Given an exceptional permission to have an agricultural livelihood, grateful Kkeok-jeong works hard all summer, only to be deceived by treacherous officials who wait until the harvest to confiscate the butcher’s crops. The governor’s betrayal of unsuspecting Kkeok-jeong resembles the king’s false promise to Gil-dong; both authoritative figures reveal the inherent flaw of the feudal system by which they govern and exploit ordinary folks. When protest does not yield any changes, just like Gil-dong, Kkeok-jeong and his family are forced to the hideout in the mountains—a breeding ground for social outcasts. There he becomes the leader of the brotherhood of bandits who punish the greedy and help the needy. Page 67 →Although Kkeok-jeong in the original novel by Hong Myeong-hui is caught by the authorities and executed, just as with the historical figure, the North Korean film version does not bring defeat to end Kkeokjeong’s life. Much as Gil-dong’s search for utopia is modified as an open ending, Kkeok-jeong’s execution is replaced by a succession of modest conquests, forming another open ending that makes him neither the sacrificial victim of the feudal past nor the revolutionary hero of the present. The time and space in which Kkeok-jeong and his fellow bandits exist are dramatically differentiated from those of the revolutionary age, primarily in that the hero, although he occupies the very margin of society, does not intend to subvert the oppressive social class structure. Instead Kkeok-jeong merely resists it in a sporadic manner. Nevertheless, the underground hideout for the thieves appears as an allegoric transposition of Manchuria, where Kim Il-sung based himself during his antiJapanese resistance movement. Last to enter the triumvirate of folk heroes is On-dal, a man of the Goguryeo dynasty (37 BCE–668 CE) who supposedly died in battle against the Chinese invasion in 590, as chronicled in The History of Three Kingdoms. However, the reconstruction of this historical figure in the North Korean film version is largely legendary. Just

like The Story of Rim Kkeok-jeong, the film opens with a narration that provides the audience with the historical background and establishes the aura of an authentic chronicle. Yet when compared to Hong Gil-dong and The Story of Rim Kkeok-jeong, the narrator’s tone in this movie gains a folktale-like quality: “On-dal lived during the reign of King Pyeongwon of the Goguryeo dynasty. On-dal’s father died when he was only an infant, and his blind mother raised him single-handedly amid poverty and hardship. When On-dal was little, he sometimes had to beg in order to support his mother. He grew up to be a kind and hardworking man, but since he was a man of few words, people often called him On-dal the fool.” As the narration progresses, the impression of historical accuracy created by setting the Goguryeo dynasty as the historical background gradually glides into the realm of folktale. The folkloric narrative strategy becomes even more conspicuous with the introduction of a head-strong princess, Pyeong-gang, who insists on marrying On-dal, which gives the impression that the film is anything but a historical documentary. Princess Pyeong-gang’s rather stultifying obsession with the fool stems from an incident that took place during her childhood. The princess was a crybaby, and her father the king urged her to stop weeping; otherwise, he would have to marry her off to On-dal the fool. Princess Pyeong-gang takes what was meant to be a joke so seriously that when she reaches marriageable Page 68 →age, she insists on marrying On-dal the fool. Infuriated at Pyeonggang’s ignominious intentions, the king plans to marry her off to the womanizing son of a corrupt official. What seems to be a cheery episode regarding the childlike insistence of the princess on fulfilling her father’s childhood joke figures another meaning in this film. The king’s threat to marry her serves as a vehicle through which the king’s moral depravity becomes apparent: if he is not able to gain the trust of his own daughter, how can he gain the trust of the nation? Although set in a fairytale land, this movie, like the other two, shows an untrustworthy ruler whose authority is gravely compromised. Resisting the false patriarch’s tyranny and his threat to disown her if she does not accept his order, Pyeong-gang runs away from the palace in search of her destined husband. On-dal initially does not believe that Pyeong-gang is a human being and condemns her as the fox spirit trying to entice him, but at the end they become happily united as a couple. She teaches him how to read, while he teaches her how to do physical work: “Oh, how fun! How clever it is for people to have invented such a device!” the Princess cries in joy when On-dal teaches her how to mill. The princess’s running away from the sheltered life in the palace to a life of hard labor is not projected as condescending but as the righteous path of self-awakening. The virtue of physical labor is extolled in the movie just as it is in contemporary North Korea, an unmistakable parallel between the past and the present. However, this connection is not made to draw a similarity between prerevolutionary times and the present, but to lay claim to the past by making it familiar through the values of revolutionary society. What starts like a folkloric tale turns into a heroic saga when Pyeong-gang discovers a dagger in On-dal’s mother’s closet that belonged to On-dal’s father, who died a hero’s death defending the country against Japanese invasion.7 On-dal discovers a cause greater than his personal life in his father’s death, which compels him to depart for the secret training ground. Disheartened by the prospect of separation, Pyeong-gang sees her husband off while her mother-in-law consoles her with unflinching heroic words: “Women of Goguryeo must be as strong as men in order to groom their sons and husbands to become warriors.” Eventually, On-dal transforms into a valorous warrior who triumphs over the foreign invaders and is rewarded by the king, who finally accepts him as his legitimate son-in-law. While The Story of On-dal observes almost identical patterns of a hero’s journey from the humiliating abyss to the glorious zenith, this particular production approaches the realm of fairy tale more closely than the others. Page 69 →In addition, unlike the two previous productions, this film sheds a relatively positive light on the king. Can we see this shift in how North Korea viewed its past as related to changing sociopolitical circumstances of Kim Ilsung’s personality cult? Coincidently or not, in 1993, when The Story of On-dal was released, North Korea celebrated the grand reopening of King Dongmyeong’s tomb. The tomb and the adjacent Jeongneung Temple went through a rapid restoration after Kim Il-sung visited the site in 1989 and instructed that it be renovated.8 This event was a part of a larger historical project that provided the regime with a ground to argue that the northern part of the Korean peninsula

was the originating site of Korean history and civilization: in addition to the reopening of King Dongmyeong’s tomb after intensive restoration, Kim Il-sung in January 1993 ordered the excavation of a tomb in the Gangdong district of Pyongyang. As a result of this effort, North Korean archaeologists declared that the tomb belonged to Dangun, the mythical figure who founded Gojoseon, the first Korean kingdom. Although foreign archaeologists have not verified that the tomb actually belongs to Dan-gun,9 the North Korean historical project transformed Dangun from a mythical hero into a historical figure. In light of the same history-making endeavor, the North Korean state sanctified the monument of King Dongmyeong as a testimony to the historical legitimacy of the North Korean state as the successor of the glorious Korean past. King Dongmyeong was the founding father of the ancient kingdom of Goguryeo, where the action of the film The Story of On-dal takes place. Kim Il-sung himself took part in the reopening of the king’s tomb, out of which the media made a ceremonious public display: “On May 16, the Great Leader Kim toured the renovated tomb of Dongmyeong, the founding king of Goguryeo. The Party’s policy to preserve national legacy and treasure resulted in an admirable renovation of King Dongmyeong’s tomb, which demonstrates thousand years of illustrious history of Goguryeo.10 The Great Leader Kim Il-sung said that the new generation growing up should be proud of our wise and talented ancestors and that preserving artifacts from the past will foster a deep sense of national pride and patriotism in future generations.”11 The event carried nationwide significance, so much so that Kim himself celebrated the occasion by adorning the tombstone with his own writing: “Commemorative monument for reopening of King Dongmyeong’s tomb” (Dongmyeong wangneung gaegeon ginyeombi).12 The buzz regarding the reopening of the renovated tomb was well deserved, Page 70 →if we look at the elaborate architectural details and lavish mural paintings in the adjoining pavilions. Freshly painted for the reopening ceremony, these murals depict the glorious founders of the Goguryeo dynasty as well as its worship of physical culture: they illustrate muscular bodies engaged in martial arts and wresting.13 The various scenes of bodily discipline illustrated in the mural paintings at the alleged tomb site of the founding king of Goguryeo show the martial spirit of the dynasty, which prized corporeal strength as an essential national asset. These images of Goguryeo’s physical culture are strikingly similar to the scenes in The Story of On-dal where the hero goes to the secret training ground to become a warrior. The temporal proximity of the two visual texts—the murals and the film—in terms of their historical setting and the timing of their release in 1993 to the public makes clear that the North Korean leadership wanted to promote the state ideals of the Goguryeo dynasty, centering on physical and martial strength, as positive models for the entire nation to emulate. The proximity between the contemporary North Korea and the Goguryeo dynasty is articulated in Kim Il-sung’s own words: People of Goguryeo were not only wise and brave, but also considered it their prime honor to pledge their loyalty to defending their nation. For this reason, men considered it their duty to master martial arts, archery, horseback riding, and swordsmanship, and folk entertainment and sporting events were all primarily based on the basics of martial arts techniques. The Story of On-dal tell us a saga of a hero who rose from obscurity to fame by exhibiting superb skills in hunting, and then went on to serve the country on a battlefield; this tells us that in Goguryeo, martial arts skills as well as wisdom and bravery were important standards by which to judge an individual.14 What, then, made Goguryeo a unique time-and-space so distinctively different from the Joseon dynasty, which served as the background for Hong Gil-dong and The Story of Rim Kkeok-jeong? For one thing, the ancient kingdom of Goguryeo was in a past distant enough from the present—separated by more than a millennium from contemporary life in North Korea—that it presented itself as malleable via reimagination and reappropriation to reinforce the political agenda of the present as a positive model. In contrast, the Joseon dynasty, which came to an end in 1910, was not only of the immediate past but also regarded as a culprit in Japanese colonialism, for its rulers failed to provide effective leadership.15 But more significantly, Page 71 →Goguryeo was physically based in the northern part of the Korean peninsula, with Pyongyang as its southern capital. Attempting to position North Koreans as the successors of the valorous northerners, the North Korea government invented an ideal space out of Goguryeo in comparison to other past dynasties located in the south. Particularly in the 1990s, when North Korea was becoming increasingly isolated from the rest of the world, it felt more need to

legitimize its own existence by way of illustrating its past legacy. The contemporary political divide between north and south was transposed in imagining the past in North Korean cinema, as can be witnessed in the contrasting semiotics of space in the three aforementioned films. Although Goguryeo was situated in the distant past on the site of contemporary North Korea, there must have been a risk in valorizing the kingdom: that it might obscure Kim Il-sung’s glorious founding of the current state. The folktale-like events in the film The Story of On-dal may be explicable in that the narrative devices involving fox spirits or the world of children’s imagination are meant to transform the narrative into a fairy tale featuring improbable yet entertaining elements; as a result, the film is deprived of any realistic implications. This way, a safe yet distant parallel is drawn between the past and the present, opening the possibility of looking at North Korea as the contemporary reincarnation of this ideal ancient kingdom with a legendary aura. On a related note, a sense of inevitable destiny begins to surface when we look at the two visual texts of 1993 with the benefit of historical hindsight. Kim Il-sung’s much-publicized visit to King Dongmyeong’s renovated tomb was like a rehearsal of his nationally mourned funeral, which took place only a year later. Kim Il-sung’s stressing the importance of guarding the national treasure in his aforementioned 1993 speech seems to have emphasized to the whole nation the importance of guarding his personal legacy in the posthumous era. Interlacing the historical gravity with his personal destiny endowed the cult of Kim Il-sung with a sense of legitimate divinity, and without question, Kim Il-sung’s mausoleum far outweighs King Dongmyeong’s tomb in its significance as a site where mythopoetic past, glorious present, and utopian future of Korea are synchronized into a fluid continuum. The past is only useful as a historical framework with which the present and the future come to fully illuminate the national destiny toward socialist revolution. The stature of Kim Il-sung in North Korea is unparalleled, and in this sense, the kings of the feudal past only serve as inferior references to this Page 72 →ideal leader of revolutionized Korea. The relationship between Kim Ilsung and King Dongmyeong, no matter how ideally presented the latter may have been, can best be described in terms of distinction rather than equation. King Dongmyeong as the founding father of the dynasty may have provided an inspiration for the founding father of North Korea, but nevertheless he was of the distant feudal past and could not provide much-needed revolutionary enlightenment.16 Other feudal kings in Hong Gil-dong and The Story of On-dal equally fail in this respect. This is the main reason the folk heroes of the lowly social caste in these films have to provide the revolutionary vision. These folk heroes share many traits, one of which is their ability to invoke a question: What was the hero in feudal times in relation to the authentic national hero Kim Il-sung? The three eponymous protagonists in the trilogy would qualify as contemporary revolutionaries in many regards. They all come from the lowliest class background and endure harsh discrimination, and yet they remain faithful to the people. This quality endows them with a certain legitimacy to carry out revolt, as analogues to an authentic hero, Kim Il-sung, who carries out revolution. However, these heroes also experience failure as they all try to conform to the society ruled by deceptive authorities, only to be betrayed in the end. They can resist the social establishment as folk heroes, but they cannot be kings themselves, unlike Kim Il-sung, whose biography is reconstructed to show the transformation from one to the other. Thus, exile becomes an inevitable course of action for all three heroes, as On-dal and Kkeok-jeong go underground to realize their dreams and Gil-dong departs on a journey abroad in search of the uncertain future. Hong Gil-dong captures this fugitive moment in the image of a vessel floating on the sunset ocean, as the narrator deplores the drifting fate of the hero: He tried resisting the corrupt aristocrats. He also saved his country from grave dangers. But he was only treated to ridicule and discrimination. This is why people have forsaken their homeland and embarked on an uncertain journey.

They set out to search for a country free of discrimination, hunger, and fear. But does such a utopia lie beyond the horizon? Of particular significance in this passage is that the hero’s exile simulates and invokes Kim Il-sung’s exile to Manchuria during Japanese colonial rule. Page 73 →However, the uncertainty embedded in the final departure scene becomes the hallmark that distinguishes the heroes of the feudal past from Kim Il-sung, who went into exile and came back to his homeland to successfully subvert the system from within. The feudal rule that Gil-dong, Kkeok-jeong, and On-dal resist is corrupt to the core under the tyranny of depraved feudal kings. Nevertheless, these male heroes cannot replace the king, nor can they thoroughly revolutionize their homeland. Occupying the lower steps of the evolutionary chart that maps out the genealogy of national heroes, they were created to serve as the underdeveloped prototypes for Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. For a future hero to embark on a life-determining journey and encounter his true identity is a common mythological structure, as James Frazer and Joseph Campbell have elucidated in The Golden Bough and Hero with a Thousand Faces, respectively. Kim Il-sung is no exception, which is evidenced by a wide variety of literary and visual examples illustrating his heroic journey from colonial Korea to Manchuria. This typical exile situates Kim Il-sung in the familiar terrain of traditional heroes, but in order to distinguish him, there had to be a radical intervention to rescue Kim from any potential failure. This necessitated corollary steps to reinvent Manchuria as a place where Kim Il-sung planned his famous antirevolutionary resistance movement, faithfully providing a ground for future revolution. Removed from the corrupting power of Japanese colonial rule, Manchuria, with its harsh winter storms and precipitous mountains as the embodiment of unflinching national spirit, was invented to provide a sacred haven where the hero’s tragic statelessness could be rectified. Korea as the physical territory under colonialism is replaced by the imagined nation, temporarily displaced to foreign Manchurian soil. Such a geographic design of the nation under colonialism was meant to achieve two objectives simultaneously in North Korean propaganda: on one hand, by deterritorializing the locus of the nation, Kim could disassociate himself from the national humiliation under colonial rule and place himself in diametrical opposition to the collaborators with the Japanese. But more significantly, it reinforced the notion that nation is an invented concept rather than an essentialist entity grounded in a physical space, which was a crucial tool for North Korean propaganda in laying claim on and reinventing the past. Establishing the mandate for the North Korean ruler as detached from the Korean soil involved stories of his early childhood, which portrayed young Kim Il-sung on a sacred journey to achieve the nation’s independence. This movement to go away from the humiliated homeland generated numerous visual texts, which could effectively embody the topography of a nation in exile. A twelve-year-old Kim is featured on Baekdu Mountain, at the border marking North Korea and Manchuria, where he would later find a revolutionary ground for his anti-Japanese resistance movement. Page 74 → Figure 7. A mosaic mural of child Kim Il-sung on his journey to attain learning. The mural is located in Mangyeongdae, birthplace of Kim Il-sung. (Photo courtesy of an anonymous donor.) The painting Comrade Kim Il-sung Departs for the Wilderness in Order to Establish an Underground Revolutionary Organization, published in Joseon Yesul in 1970 (see fig. 8), continues the reconstruction of Kim’s biography as he moves even further away from the Japanese yoke. The painting reconstructs the watershed moment when the future liberator of the nation takes his first step on the long journey that eventually takes him to the revolutionary training ground. The painting is accompanied by commentary: “In the early days of the revolution, the great leader Kim Il-sung stated, ‘Revolutionaries should not be afraid of death. They should resist no matter how harsh the challenge might be. Faithful revolutionaries who welcome the future should embark on a road untaken at the dawn of revolution.’ This painting makes us think about the glorious revolutionary traits of

Kim Il-sung, who embarked on a journey to realize the grand plan of Korean socialist revolution.”17 The North Korean aptitude for transforming the Page 75 →“imagined” into the “actual” conspicuously manifests itself in this painting. By projecting Kim in his formative years embarking on a resolute journey to save the country, the painting claims to recover faithfully the undocumented part of his actual life. As it was necessary to justify the legitimacy of the North Korean state, theater and film productions invested much effort in establishing the mythic past of Kim Il-sung’s anti-Japanese guerrilla movement and revolutionary activities. Although little is known about Kim’s military victories against the Japanese in Manchuria,18 the invented mythic past was situated as the immediate past along chronological lines, clearly distinguished from the feudal past in which legendary folk heroes only partly succeeded. To locate the origins of the North Korean state outside of Korea was necessary as well, far away from the Japanese colonial rule viewed by North Korean historiography as a destructive force compromising the integrity of Korean identity. By interlacing the pure spatial images of rough mountains and snowy fields with the personal cult of the founding father of North Korea, the Kim leadership could establish the untainted origins and the mythic past of their state. The underverified history of Kim’s resistance movement in Manchuria was compensated for and reinforced through reproduced images, such as the painting Arduous March (Gonan-ui haenggun) depicting Kim Il-sung’s military advance in the Manchurian mountains (see fig. 9). In this painting illustrating the events in 1938 when Kim led his comrades through the harsh landscape under the Communist red flag, he assumes a vertically higher position as the unchallenged leader of the brotherhood, just like folkloric heroes in their community of supporters. The realistic style of painting, however, betrays the fictional subject matter. The timeand-space configuration of Kim’s emergence as liberator of the Korean nation is in the liminal zone between myth and history, feudal past and present, and illusion and reality. Figure 8. A painting depicting young Kim Il-sung embarking on his revolutionary mission, printed in Joseon Yesul 4 (1970): 7. Page 76 → Figure 9. A painting entitled Arduous March (Gonan-ui haenggun), printed in Joseon Yesul 1 (1970): 7. Manchuria as the sacred cradle of revolutionary movements, however, was meant to be a temporary haven at best. Designated as a hiding ground for revolutionaries in exile, it had to be a transitional space leading to the glorious return of the revolutionary heroes at the dawn of the birth of the new nation. As Carol Medlicott notes: “Any state’s exercise of authority is deeply bound up in a range of symbolic practices. Although states appear to be materially real—after all, their territory is mapped and their institutions are housed in physical structures that exist on the landscape—states’ sovereignty and their coercive power only become real and meaningful through symbol and performance.”19 Page 77 →The invention of sacred sites was crucial in realizing the new North Korean state’s sovereignty and power through ritualized performance. Physical sites, such as Baekdu Mountain and Samji Lake, assumed canonized status as spatialized metaphors of the birth of the nation, so it was natural that this patriotic space was repetitively captured through visual texts. Judging from the monumental significance Baekdu Mountain occupies in the founding myth of the nation, it seems that propaganda intended to mark the hero’s transition in spatial terms as the fluid continuum between Manchuria as the site of revolutionaries and Korea proper. Baekdu Mountain, which is located along the border between North Korea and China, was chosen to mark the triumphant return to the fatherland. That continuum, from exile in Manchuria to homeland as essentially unified national experience, was literally transposed onto the family history of Kim Il-sung’s household, which, in turn, served as the metonymy of the entire nation as an extended family. Essentially related to this sacred site is the companionship between Kim Il-sung and Kim Jeong-suk, Kim Jong-il’s mother (see fig. 10): “Female revolutionary fighter Kim Jeong-suk raised her beloved son on Baekdu Mountain. She had one sincere wish—that her son would inherit the revolutionary legacies of his father cultivated in the mountains and become the future of North Korea, and the guiding star of the people.”20 The transition from foreign soil to the native land is essentially tied to the female figure, the wife and the mother of two national leaders. It is no coincidence that the birth of the new nation is predicated on the female life-giving force, which is symbolized by the sacred water. Figure 10. A painting of Kim Jong-il with his parents in Baekdusan. (Photo courtesy of an anonymous donor.)

Page 78 →For example, Samji Lake at the top of Baekdu Mountain is a locale symbolizing Kim Jeong-suk’s boundless loyalty to Kim Il-sung. A sculpture titled Water of Homeland stands at this site, which performs “the moment when Kim Il-sung entered the homeland in 1939. He was so moved that he stood there speechless when, with great reverence, Comrade Kim Jeong-suk presented to Kim Il-sung a bowl of water.”21 The symbol of water plays out in multiple registers in the narratives and visual images regarding Samji Lake. Perpetually narrated as the site of epiphany of the new nation, the lake on a microscopic level symbolizes the relationship between Kim Il-sung and Kim Jeong-suk as partners in revolution, which logically yields the fact that Baekdu Mountain came to be tied to the birth of their son Kim Jong-il, through whom the patriarchal succession of the nation is fulfilled. Visually encapsulating the idea (see fig. 11), Kim overlooks his nation from the lofty summit of the mountain, with Samji Lake in the background. In the scene, the lake is not merely an animated part of nature foregrounding the revolutionary history but an animating force, entering the national history as its founding spirit. The juxtaposed images of life-giving father and water symbolize the site where the national essence originates. As the integrity and continuity of the North Korean nation were fully marked by the transition of power from father to son, Baekdu Mountain as the birthplace of the future leader gained prominence in North Korean topography. His actual birthplace is generally known to have been the Soviet Union, but this association between the heir designate and foreign soil was erased from the official history. Instead, Baekdu Mountain, through numerous visual images and narratives, was mythologized into the sacred site where Kim was born. Numerous songs and epic poems written by both North Koreans and foreign admirers22 capture such an apotheosis, the work of an Indian poet, Lanta Gupta, titled “Baekdu Mountain” (“Baekdusan”) and published in 1992 being just one example. Figure 11. A painting of Kim Il-sung overlooking Samji Lake, from Joseon Yesul 9 (1975): 9. Page 79 →The mountain of Joseon Baekdu Mountain stands high Among the endless forests of Clouds and fogs You stand firmly On your strong roots The holy mountain of revolution Baekdu Mountain On your peak The sky is blue And the sunset flames When Comrade Kim Jong-il was born He saw this limitless sky Spreading like the roof of Joseon The everlasting water of the lake on the peak Was the pure well of his dear home

Grass that survived amid snow Its fragrance widespread He set out his first step On this vast land As if it were the fields of Joseon Oh, tell me Baekdu Mountain, You roared with the gunshots of the anti-Japanese fighters! Where the sky meets the lofty peaks Lies the hometown of he Who is revered by the entire world Oh, Baekdu Mountain You retain General Kim Il-sung’s Twenty-year anti-Japanese revolutionary history Page 80 →You are the cradle of revolution that greeted The birth of the star leading the way home Oh, the cradle of revolution Baekdu Mountain You, Together with Mangyeongdae Where the Great Leader was born, Are the site of glory You are the birthplace of the Eternal sun of mankind You will shine forever.23 The rhetoric associating Baekdu Mountain with national origin and prosperity via Kim Il-sung and his son, such as “cradle of revolution” or the “site of glory,” recurs in other poems as well. Peruvian poet Mario Luna’s work titled “Baekdu Mountain and Jong-il Peak” (“Baekdusan-gwa Jong-il-bong”), for example, relies on similar panegyrics, such as “the first cradle of the Dear Leader comrade Kim Jong-il” or “the spirit of the Korean people and the Korean revolution,”24 whereas the Russian poet Aleksandr Brezhnev’s “Jong-il Peak” (“Jong-ilbong”) refers to the site as “the root of the juche ideology.”25 Yet another example, the song “Kim Jong-il Is Our Fate” (“Kim Jong-il-eun uri-ui unmyeong”) reiterates Baekdu Mountain as the cradle of Kim Jong-il’s revolutionary efforts.

He left his marks on the lofty peaks of Baekdu Mountain And came to us with rays of spring sunlight He became the sunshine of our heart And unfolds a bright future for us We grew up in his bosom and Will defend him with our lives General Kim Jong-il, you are our fate.26 Jong-il Peak as the sacred birth site of the founding father’s heir is visually reinforced not only through painted images but also by means of inventing the actual physical space. A photo titled “Morning at Jong-il Peak” (see fig. 12) appeared on the cover of Joseon Yesul 2 (1996), featuring a hut cocooned on snowy Baekdu Mountain, where Kim Jong-il was allegedly born. In the upper left corner of the photo is Jong-il Peak, an actual summit on Baekdu Mountain, which was consecrated to commemorate the birth of the future national leader. The physicality of this invention is astounding not only because of the effort to impose illusion on historical reality but also because the actual site creates cultural and educational practices that mobilize North Koreans through pilgrimages and excursions. Being a physical space, it also serves as the archetype for numerous replications in the form of paintings and photographs, as can be seen in the painting Great General Comrade Kim Jong-il (Widaehan janggun Kim Jong-il dongji), which features the same Jong-il Peak in the upper right corner, presented with photographic accuracy (see fig. 13). Page 81 → Figure 12. A photo entitled Morning at Jong-il Peak, depicting the alleged birthplace of Kim Jong-il, from the cover of Joseon Yesul 2 (1996). In these instances of visual reinforcement, Kim Jong-il is established not only as a child born from the bosom of the national spirit but also as its master who is in full command of the unruly natural environment. The painting illustrates Kim mounted on a horse looking down on the native land, paralleling the image of his father looking down upon the nation, with Samji Lake in the background. Presented as the heir born on national soil, he becomes the personification of the nation, just as his father was presented as the natural leader guiding the soldiers on the snowy field of Manchuria in figure 9. Kim Jong-il also occupies an elevated level measuring up to the highest peak on the entire mountain range; thus he is positioned as the master of nature and the national spirit it embodies. Page 82 → Figure 13. Great General Comrade Kim Jong-il, from Joseon Yesul 4 (1997): 4. Such physical sites commemorating the allegedly realistic revolution have become the source of inspiration for many artists in a very literal sense. In 1960 drama critic Sin Go-seong wrote: “Many dramatists have visited the sites of the heroic antirevolutionary struggle not only to get artistic inspiration but also to conduct meticulous research for writing. As a result, the dramatists have produced numerous works that will go into the treasury of national literature.”27 Intensive research on the revolutionary sites was meant to reinforce the notion of the imagined past as an unchallengeable fact regarding the origins of the North Korean people’s sacrosanct leaders, quite unlike the heavenly mandate of the Confucian rulers. A similar process took place in film as well, with much effort invested in cultivating the veracity of the reconstructed history that allegedly took place in Page 83 →Manchuria. For example, film critic Chu Min wrote: “In the 1930s, the anti-Japanese resistance movement in Manchuria led personally by the Great Leader Kim Il-sung was a shift in history marking a transition from passive resistance to aggressive resistance, which incited a nationwide uprising of the working proletariat and peasants. This historical shift gave enormous hope for future victory and had a formative influence on the development of film, as the history of resistance stimulated progressive leftist writers to materialize their artistic vision in spite of the fascist persecution by the Japanese.”28 Indeed, the theatrical and cinematic efforts to reinscribe the national history in the collective cultural memory

resulted in many productions throughout North Korean history. The North Korean government claims that My Hometown, the first North Korean feature film, discussed in the previous chapter, is based on Kim Il-sung’s story.29 What deserved particular attention regarding time and space is that the film appropriates the visual image of Kim Il-sung’s founding mythology, as seen in the geocultural symbolism of Baekdu Mountain, as a sacred entrance that marks the hero’s homecoming: “It opens with a panoramic model of Baekdu Mountain on the SinoKorean border and moves on to shots of pristine forests, spring fields, running streams, and finally, to the streets and houses of a village in south Hamgyeong Province, the ‘hometown’ of the title.”30 The film’s plot evolves around the male hero’s return to his homeland, which functions as deus ex machina restoring the social order, family life, and national dignity. As Armstrong argues: “Above all, My Hometown is the perfect embodiment of the foundational myth of the DPRK: the creation of an independent Socialist state with little or no outside assistance, Kim Il-sung as the agent and embodiment of Korean liberation, and Manchuria as the space of revolutionary genesis.”31 The founding mythology of the state continues to dominate the North Korean filmmaking, often creating an interdisciplinary dialogue between various media where the verbal meets the visual, or where the individual creation of a poet meets the collective efforts of filmmaking. A feature film released in two parts in 1980, Baekdu Mountain (Baekdusan) was based on Jo Gi-cheon’s epic poem with the same title. There is almost a verbatim transposition of linguistic images onto the screen; the verbal and the visual collaborate equally in creating quintessential images of the Korean struggle for independence, liberation, return to homeland, and the founding of a socialist state. In the most exalted moment in the poem, the narrator gasps for breath to convey the excitement of crossing the Amnok River, the borderline between the strange land and the long-forsaken homeland. Page 84 →Partisans have crossed the Amnok River This homeland subjugated by the Japanese Has no place for us to live, nor to die We have lost it all. . . . Oh, Amnok River! Amnok River! But you will roar tonight You will raise waves Splash! Splash! Roar up to shake the mountains and rivers Partisans have crossed you to spread the flames of liberation We burn our patriotic hearts to illuminate our path We raise high our rifles polished with our willpower The patriotic fighters have crossed into the homeland. Amnok River! Amnok River!32 Exalted passages like this enter the filmic text in their original form, often functioning as bridging shots punctuating the rhythm of the storytelling. As one article aptly points out, “The film uses the epic poem as an editing principle, which brings disparate scenes into one unity.”33 The idea that Kim Il-sung’s return to the homeland initiated a new chapter in national history, captured in various media, was not meant to be presented passively to spectators. Rather, these media invited active participation from audiences, who were to perform the story repetitively through various social practices in North Korea. Just as Mao

Zedong’s Long March became the monumental journey to be reenacted by later generations of Chinese youth, Kim Il-sung’s journey in his youth was ritualized as a sacred past to be reenacted by students. According to one North Korean defector: Every child in North Korea has to participate in a pilgrimage commemorating the footsteps of our Great Leader Kim Il-sung. We were told that when the Great Leader reached 12 years old, he crossed Amnok River and walked 1,000 ri34 to attain learning. When he reached 14 years old, he again walked 1,000 ri from Mangyeongdae to Samji Lake in order to unify his homeland. The teachers would tell us that these were remarkable achievements for a boy of his age, but our Great Leader showed unusual determination and perseverance even from the early stages in his life, which we all must emulate. In tracing the footsteps of our Great Leader, we participated in a walking pilgrimage every year—the same distance our leader had covered at our age. We would not only walk, but also post revolutionary maxims of the Great Leader on the knapsack of the student walking in front, so that we could walk and learn Page 85 →at the same time. Not all children in the rural areas could participate. They had to be selected and endorsed by their school to participate in a march to Pyongyang. It was a great festival for all even though by the end of the march, our feet were stripped of skin and there were bruises on our toenails. But if our Great Father had done it, so must we, so must all of us if we were to carry out his great legacy and fulfill his desire to unify Korea.35 As this testimony shows, the reenactment of Kim Il-sung’s journey, which delineates the fluid connection between Pyongyang and the rural areas, would reinforce the unique revolutionary topography, with Pyongyang embodying the superior space of the future and rural areas being the holy center of the past but subordinate to Pyongyang. The unique place Pyongyang occupies in North Korean geocultural imagination, however, can only be understood when its founder Kim Il-sung’s revolutionary activities elsewhere are fully taken into account. This allows us to discern the diverging implications of the past and present, foreign and native, sacred and marginal.

Spectacular Pyongyang: City on Stage and Screen, City as Stage and Screen One foreign eyewitness described his impression of the histrionic North Korean capital in the following terms: “Pyongyang is like a huge stage set. It is the closest thing to Germania, Hitler’s grandiose and happily unrealized vision of the future Berlin.”36 True to the statement, the pompous yet controlling cityscape of Pyongyang gives outsiders an impression that it is the ultimate dream-come-true for tyrants, from the Roman emperor Nero to the founder of North Korea, Kim Il-sung, who saw their cities as arenas for self-glorification rather than functional places serving the needs of their inhabitants.37 In this light, dwellers in the city become anonymous supporting actors whose roles are reduced to silent mise-en-scène, accentuating the ebullient presence of their rulers.38 The North Korean stage and screen present Pyongyang as a metonymy of socialist paradise, while the city itself becomes a stage for a narcissistic self-portrait of the North Korean state and its leader. Put more succinctly as the dynamics between Pyongyang on stage and Pyongyang as stage, the dialogic tension emerges from the simultaneous processes of theater productions staging the city and the cityscape embracing theater productions as a part of its landscape. The focal point that seamlessly links theater to the city is the physical and spiritual presence of Kim Il-sung, who is constantly hailed as the sire of the city and theater and film productions. Kim’s image throughout the city in artifacts such as badges,39 portraits, and statues creates an impression of him as the constructor of the capital and a choreographer of the fatherland landscape. Kim was also hailed as the sire of the national capital in productions that created a visual “continuum” between theater/film and city. In effect, Kim Il-sung’s presence throughout North Korea was so pervasive that the continuum between performance and everyday life became functional “homogeneity” tightly interwoven by immediately recognizable renderings of Kim’s images. Like mirrors reflecting one and the same object, Pyongyang and theater/film productions about Pyongyang become each other’s twin image conjoined at birth by their professed love for their creator. Page 86 → Figure 14. Statue of Kim Il-sung at Mansudae, Pyongyang. Compare its overwhelming size to the people standing in front. (Photo courtesy of an anonymous donor.) Figure 15. A panoramic view of Pyongyang. The pyramid-shaped building on the left is Ryukyeong Hotel. The construction of this gigantic hotel had been

ordered by Kim Jong-il with the intention of opening in 1989 to accommodate visitors for the World Festival of Youth and Students. Structural problems and lack of funding left only the exterior of the building finished. Construction resumed in May 2008, after two decades of hiatus. (Photo courtesy of an anonymous donor.) Page 87 →Nevertheless, Kim Il-sung is never reduced to a mere object of visual spectacle, but becomes an allseeing subject himself, constantly monitoring patriotic performances of the North Korean people in his city. His portraits are omnipresent throughout North Korea, from gigantic ones hanging in the public squares to smaller ones in private households, providing an omniscient gaze that constantly polices the activities of city inhabitants.40 In this respect, Kim Il-sung becomes both the object of dramatization and the privileged spectator of the performances about the city on stage and as stage. The city of Pyongyang and performances centering on the city inevitably lead a symbiotic life so as to become self-portraits and autobiography of each other in glorifying their creator. There are countless theater and film productions about Pyongyang varying in medium and genre, which have been produced from the 1950s to the present day. Despite the extensive list of productions on the city, they all capture the same ethos of Pyongyang as the rising capital of the socialist paradise, as evidenced by the title of documentaries such as Pyongyang under Reconstruction (Bokgudoeneun Pyongyang-si, 1954)41 or Pyongyang Rises (Pyongyang-eun ireoseonda, 1957).42 Similarly, a drama script published in 1963, My Pyongyang (Na-ui Pyongyang), also deals with the constructivist idea of rebuilding the city in the aftermath of the Korean War.43 Of numerous productions, I particularly focus on two revolutionary operas entitled True Daughter of the Party and Song of Geumgang Mountain,44 which stage a utopian vision of the capital city. The production images of the former, in particular, have been displayed on the streets of Pyongyang during patriotic mass games and parades. Exploring these examples provide an occasion to analyze the semiotic transformation of theater space when the performance about the city crosses the physical boundary of theater building to enter the cityscape, thus selfreflexively returning to the locus of its inception. Page 88 →Perhaps the symbiotic relationship between the city of Pyongyang and these productions about the city could be summed up most effectively through Henri Lefèbvre’s words: “Space is at once result and cause, product and producer; it is also a stake, the locus of projects and actions deployed as part of specific strategies. . . . Activity in space is restricted by that space; space ‘decides’ what activity may occur, but even this ‘decision’ has limits placed upon it. Space lays down the law because it implies a certain order—and hence a certain disorder.”45 Lefèbvre’s observation on the bifurcating nature of space becomes much more complex when the particular space in discussion is theater. As Marvin Carlson lucidly demonstrated in The Haunted Stage, theater is a kind of space constantly invaded by the past memories; if theater is an empty space where visual illusions can fluidly be staged and erased, leaving possibilities for other productions to create alternative temporal spaces on stage, then theater productions staging a certain cityscape may take spontaneous forms of parody or satire, creating various versions of one and the same city each time a new show is produced. While this may be true elsewhere, in North Korea, a politically correct vision channels the process of staging Pyongyang in theater and film productions to guarantee that no free imagination distorts the profile of the city as the spiritual and physical center of the nation. Needless to say, the controlling mechanism involved in staging Pyongyang gives birth to an end product that is isomorphic to the actual city. However, the city does not regard theatrical and cinematic presentation of Pyongyang as a mere epiphenomenal reflection of itself. While it is true that Pyongyang as an actual city is the source of Pyongyang as theatrical and cinematic illusion, the real city becomes reshaped by the twin image it created on stage and screen, since the represented city functions as the blueprint of how the real city should be. In this respect, the North Korean production is faithful to the accurate depiction of Pyongyang, but at the same time, is still preoccupied with presenting the utopian version of the North Korean capital while not entirely risking the photographic depiction of the city. The overriding mission of every North Korean stage production is to simulate this ideal world as if it were already a part of reality, a phenomenon epitomized most conspicuously in revolutionary operas. However, the North Korean life the operas staged was filtered through a utopian imagination and presented to

people as undoubted reality while it was really the blueprint of an ideal world. Thus, revolutionary operas existed in an ambivalent dimension created by the dual axes of the fictional Page 89 →utopian world of theater and the real world that was supposed to look like the ideal world theater fabricated. The revolutionary operas were both the product of utopian imagination and the producers of the real city. Given the role revolutionary operas played in shaping cityscape, one can imagine what happens when they embrace Pyongyang as one of the most glorified themes on their stage. When the operas eulogize Pyongyang to the degree that the city transforms itself from a mere spatial background into a protagonist with a full-blown personality, the operas’ impact is not limited to theater space alone, but permeates the realm of everyday North Korean life. As can be seen in the title of an article in Rodong Sinmun (Korean Workers Daily), “Be a Human Fortress to Defend Pyongyang,”46 the North Korean state constantly endeavored to establish the sacrosanct status of its capital so as to treat city dwellers as functional instruments protecting their city. A Korean junior high literature textbook also cites Kim Il-sung’s instructions to regard Pyongyang as the central pulse of the North Korean people’s livelihood: “Pyongyang is the heart of the North Korean people, the capital of the socialist motherland, and the site where revolution originated.”47 The sprit of upholding the city as the sacred center of motherland, as captured by these slogans, is reiterated in Magnificent Heart,48 a 2002 feature film that portrays the capital city as the legitimate site for constructing the Korean nation in the postcolonial era. The film centers on the crucial moments in Korean history, such as Korea’s partition in 194549 and the two Koreas’ declaration of respective governments in 1948. The film follows the political journey of Kim Gu, the leader of the Korean provisionary government in exile in China during the Japanese colonial rule, and his visit to North Korea at Kim Il-sung’s invitation in an effort to resolve the political division between the two Koreas. Kim Il-sung appears in this film in the usual heroic persona—a leader who urges different Korean sectors to work together in order to prevent the partition and to create a unified government. Although the film is filled with historical inaccuracies,50 it nevertheless provides viewers with North Korea’s unique apparatus of canonizing Pyongyang; the film shows long sequences capturing Kim Gu’s amazement when he sees Pyongyang’s factory chimneys constantly pumping out smoke—a progressive sign that the North Korean capital is the hub of industrial power, while the South Korean factories became “dusty, all covered with spider webs,” according to Kim Gu. Moreover, the city becomes a place where Kim Gu is reunited with his old comrades: he encounters the old mother of his comrade from the days of Korea’s independence movement. Kim Gu also meets his former assistant Page 90 →who left searcing for a socialist utopia and found one in Pyongyang. Finally Kim Gu is reunited with his fallen comrade’s young son, who used to beg for food in China; but in Pyongyang, the boy now attends a military school established by Kim Il-sung himself. Kim Gu is moved to tears when he sees the young boy’s transformation from a beggar into a dashing military cadre: a bright future bestowed upon Pyongyang residents by the magnificent leader Kim Il-sung. The auspicious nature of the city, with its capacity to bring separated family members and friends together, is entirely attributed to the benevolent leadership of Kim Il-sung. Family members separated by war being reunited in Pyongyang is one of the quintessential events in North Korean performances on stage and screen. In one of the revolutionary operas, Song of Geumgang Mountain, a long-separated father and daughter identify and finally embrace each other in Pyongyang. In this opera, the male and female chorus in unison exudes the joy of the family reunion: “For twenty years they have been separated, but finally they are reunited in the bosom of the Supreme Leader. No mountain could be loftier than his benevolence. No sea could be deeper than his affection.”51 The lyrics proclaim, without any ambiguity, that the presence of the Supreme Leader is what endows the city of Pyongyang with its miraculous potency, which is reiterated in another lavish ode to the city in the same production. The ode stipulates not only the unchallenged dominance of the capital in the spatial hierarchy of North Korea, but takes one step further to pronounce the significance of the city as the fountain of a life-giving force. Ah, our Pyongyang How beautiful our red socialist capital is!

Capital of revolution where our Supreme Leader resides. We fully experience happiness in the city. The entire world sings about the Sun of juche ideology. Here we see how its brightness shines through. Ah, our Pyongyang, prosper forever, our red socialist capital!52 Once again, the profile of this glorious city is determined by Kim Il-sung, whose presence is manifested through solar imagery. As the ultimate source of energy presiding over the course of nature, Kim illuminates the glorious city and empowers it to be the “red socialist capital.” Pyongyang draws its authority as the dominant space precisely from the fact that it is the city erected and inhabited by the Supreme Leader himself, whose presence is compared to the ultimate life-giving force. The filmed production faithfully Page 91 →reflects such a notion of the vital city by building a visual composition around a rising sun illuminating the efflorescent city. Equally significantly, the city of Pyongyang in revolutionary operas becomes a sanctuary bearing the image of the Supreme Leader. True Daughter of the Party is a unique production among revolutionary operas in that it stages the future image of Pyongyang as its dramatic climax. The main characters of this opera—a military nurse and foot soldiers—are fighting the American and South Korean enemies in a small South Korean village during the Korean War. The opera is set in a time when Pyongyang in its contemporary shape is yet to be built. While the soldiers are asleep on the battlefield at night, the nurse has a proleptic vision of a future Pyongyang. As the nurse immerses herself in reverie, the battlefield gradually fades out from the screen, and soon the camera introduces a close-up shot of Kim Il-sung’s statue, which is painted as a backdrop; then the camera slowly zooms out to capture the entire panorama of Pyongyang, also painted as a backdrop, at the center of which stands the sacred statue of the national father. This scenographic rendering of Pyongyang is a near photographic depiction of the real city’s skyline; the female protagonist envisioned Pyongyang many long years before it was built. Arguably, this improbable accuracy—resulting from the verisimilitude between the theater character’s utopian vision of the city during the Korean War and reconstructed Pyongyang in the postwar era—stems from meticulous calculation (rather than anachronistic elision of time), attempting to show that Pyongyang as we know it today was destined to develop as such. The teleological determinism embedded in this scene of future Pyongyang gains persuasive power when Kim Ilsung’s image is projected as the mediator between the dark present of the Korean War and the utopian version of North Korea. Kim’s statue, which marks the center of the city, is not a monument erected to the glories of the past, but a point of reference in the future. In this light, theater productions staging Pyongyang served as an ideal ground for inventing rather than memorializing the tradition. In the filmed version,53 this sequence directs viewers to capture the statue of Kim Il-sung as the entry point to the city, thus establishing him as a sacred center of the city. As the camera manipulates the viewer’s gaze, Kim’s domineering statue becomes the point of origin from which centrifugal force diffuses to the entire city. It also becomes a centripetal destination to which the energy of the city converges. This visual presentation of Kim’s statue, framed by a circle that gradually enlarges as the camera zooms out from Kim’s image, unmistakably resembles the shape of the sun and its spreading rays. When the camera zooms out to capture the entire city of Pyongyang, Page 92 →dancing girls stage the image of blossoming flowers under the merciful sunray. Life effloresces under Kim’s presence, and Pyongyang claims the advent of spring when the red sun illuminates the entire world, the ethos of which resonates with the text of the ode already quoted. Just like the promised land of Canaan where milk and honey flow, Pyongyang beckons the exhausted North Korean soldiers fighting in enemy territory. Significantly, because of the accurate architectural references on stage, this paradise-like staged city is not merely a mirage, but a real city in which the audience members are situated at the time of the opera’s performance. Such a proleptic vision of future Pyongyang at the time of its complete destruction can be found in numerous

other examples. For instance, the 1963 film script My Pyongyang depicts the city at its infancy under the postwar reconstruction efforts, but it features visions of the rising city under reconstruction.54 Significantly, the scenario begins not with a bird’s-eye view of the urban utopia of the future, but from the retrospective vision that links Pyongyang to the ancient past. Looking from far away in the sky, Pyongyang in the month of May seems to be immersed in silence. Pyongyang is an ancient city with 1,530 years of history, but still in the twentieth century it tells us a dreamy tale. Silvery streams of the Daedong and Botong Rivers moisten curvy hills and valleys of the mountains, while high-rise buildings sprawling over well-constructed large roads shine brilliantly under the rays of summer. If we descend from the sky and get closer and closer to the city, we can see the bustling lives of young people charged with passion and energy. We will also be able to listen to the songs of inhabitants, old and young. Their songs are rhythmic and elegant, and yet are surging with joy, gradually reaching out to the infinite blue sky.55 The description of the cityscape does not present an entirely modern space made triumphant by modern technology and adorned with high-rises and spacious roads. Rather, it retains the ideals of mythic space, just like Baekdu Mountain as signifying the sacred origins of the North Korean state. Pyongyang’s cityscape in My Pyongyang is presented as a source of creative energy retaining rich symbols of life, such as rivers, rays of sun, and forests whereby it invents itself as the natural successor of the mythic Baekdu Mountain. Just as the mountain was the holy ground marking Kim Il-sung’s return to homeland, Pyongyang as the basin of sacred leaders punctuates the beginning of the new socialist era in national history. Page 93 →The script of My Pyongyang is written to reveal the presence of a narrator who features a particular point of view in capturing the city. The narrator clearly positions herself or himself as someone looking at the devastating postwar destruction from a perspective of prosperous future: “Here and there vendors were spreading out their goods on the side streets of Pyongyang, which had yet to emerge as a modern city. Trolley buses traveled along the rails on narrow streets, which were then regarded large. But the future roads were already under construction.”56 The editing directions present an overlap of the current city in destruction with the future glories the city was bound to achieve. The script features a messenger who brings a telegram from the war headquarters to one of the protagonists at the war front while the cannon shots are still prohibiting the protagonists from dreaming of future utopia. “Commander, soon the reconstruction of Pyongyang will begin.” Chisam’s hands holding the telegram were trembling. Despite his middle age, his face turned ruddy with excitement. The commander suppressed his heaving excitement and turned his gaze to the telegram. On the image of the telegram appear overlapping images of dear Pyongyang where streams of cars exude brilliant headlights. The images of urban life appear and disappear.57 Such a juxtaposition of wartime efforts with the mirage of the utopian future in the scenario strikes a similar chord in the aforementioned reverie of the nurse in True Daughter of the Party. Like chiaroscuro painting, the dark destruction of the wartime Pyongyang only illuminates the brilliant potential of the future city. The writers’ vision for the city is effectively built on contrasts, which take the form of montage sequences: scenes of devastating wartime destruction are frequently invaded by the scenes of future construction. However, what makes the future bright and hopeful is the dark wartime devastation that Pyongyang suffered. The passage in the scenario captures the destruction city had to suffer: Gun shot! Gun shot! Gun shot! A flock of birds, with their wings spread wide, fly mellifluously in the clear blue sky.

Page 94 →Byeong-su is walking along the destroyed streets of his hometown. He is wearing a discharged soldier’s uniform and is carrying a large combat backpack. The familiar streets that used to bustle with ebullient life have disappeared and instead, there are only few chimneys sticking out from the rubbles. All the familiar roads and bridges have been severed. Heavy iron gates of former schools and hospitals lie in the middle of tall weeds sprawling out of destruction, and bullet-ridden signs of state-run stores and private shops lie by the riverbanks. Byeong-su’s heart beat faster. His steps became quicker. The next minute he was running. He ran by the broken electric pole, through the blackened Botong Gate, and ran to climb onto the old walls of the city to look for his home. “Home! Where is home? Where did I live before in this city?” Nothing was on the site where his home used to stand but a huge, dark scar left by the bomb. Rooms, kitchen, side doors that were filled with laughter and merriment were now all gone. A half burned tree was the only thing that remained at its place to greet Byeong-su. Byeong-su caressed the tree. The remaining branches with lush leaves rustled and told him many tragic stories they witnessed. A bird nest on top of the tree also were destroyed. There was only a mother bird sitting on a broken branch.58 However, the elaborate description of the city’s destruction and the inhabitants’ devastation do not turn into a prolonged lament. Instead, they only serve as the prelude to the heroic reconstruction efforts that follow. Soon Byeong-su gives up the idea of going back to college and persuades the construction committee to let him join the project. He is so engrossed in the idea of building a massive amount of housing that he passionately argues with the housing construction committee members to choose manufactured homes over brick houses. Byeong-su gives a heated speech. “The heroic Pyongyang is the heart of our people. The city marks the origin of the revolution. Now it’s being reborn like a phoenix by the hands of our party members and people. We will go with the manufactured housing!” He lifts up a brick and smashes the podium with it. A shot of surprised and frightened crowd. A shot of broken brick falling onto the floor. Page 95 →Once again, an energetic marching music starts to play. A huge lifting machine elevates construction materials. The main strip in Pyongyang brilliantly unfolds. Tall trees on sideways spread out their lush branches and flowers blossom in the gardens. Reflecting the shadows of trees and flowers, the river flows as if it dances. Birds sing and the mandolin music resounds. At the every corner of the democratic capital of Pyongyang there are simple, modern, yet elegant high-rises.59 Although brick houses may satisfy the aesthetics of the city more than manufactured housings, the passage here shows a strong concern for rapid reconstruction of the city in the aftermath of war: practicality wins over aesthetic concerns, and speedy reconstruction over careful urban planning.

The wishful visions of the city in many scripts and productions were grounded on concrete facts: the city of Pyongyang was completely cleared by the insurmountable destruction it suffered. The eradication of Pyongyang’s concrete historical sites during the Korean War created a positive ground for Pyongyang to worship the founder of the new city almost in a biblical sense. How, then, did the city on stage serve as the blueprint for the construction of the real city? How did theater productions about the city transform the vision of real city? A city whose history dates back to the first millennium BC, Pyongyang was once a capital of the ancient Korean kingdom Goguryeo in the seventh century.60 The city was chosen as the North Korean government’s capital in 1948 to function as the political, economic, and cultural center of the northern part of the Korean peninsula. But during the Korean War, the capital suffered a devastating bomb attack that left a once-bustling city with nothing but debris. The destruction Pyongyang suffered during the war has been documented by scholars and journalists. Peter Atkins notes: “During the Korean War, about three million Koreans died, mainly in the North. Pyongyang was effectively obliterated by blanket bombing by the UN force. The DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) claims that 400,000 bombs were dropped, destroying all public buildings and 65,000 houses and shops.”61 Similarly, Bruce Cumings, in North Korea: Another Country, quotes a Hungarian correspondent who was present in Pyongyang during the war to show the devastating destructiveness brought to the city: “We traveled in moonlight, so my impression was that I am traveling on the moon, because there was only devastation . . . every city was a collection of Page 96 →chimneys. I don’t know why houses collapsed and chimneys did not, but I went through a city of 200,000 inhabitants and I saw thousands of chimneys and that—that was all.”62 The destruction of the city necessitated excruciating reconstruction efforts, but at the same time, the evacuation of the previous city opened all kinds of possibilities for the new one to rise from scratch. When most of the traditional architectural monuments disappeared almost without a trace,63 Pyongyang was left like an empty stage where any kind of space could be created at will. As Atkins aptly remarks: “The elimination of all historic structure and function in Pyongyang created a timeless space onto which could be projected an ideological simulation of the authorities’ choosing,”64 just as the film script reflects. The city was like a blank canvas where anything could have been drawn without making efforts to coordinate and harmonize new artifacts with already existing ones.65 In this respect, Pyongyang was not genuinely a “haunted stage” in Marvin Carlson’s mnemonic sense. Carlson argues that “the empty spaces that have been utilized for centuries for theatrical events are particularly susceptible to semi-otization, since they are almost invariably public, social spaces already layered with associations before they are used for theatrical performances.”66 Pyongyang after the Korean War was left as an empty space, but instead of being haunted by the ghosts of the past, it emerged as a place where visions of the future loomed large. Although the destruction of Pyongyang cost North Koreans tremendous manpower and resources in rebuilding the city, it provided an opportunity for Kim Il-sung to put what he regarded as one of the Communist duties, “to master and remake nature,” into practice.67 A brainchild of the Great Leader, Pyongyang was invented to be the showcase of socialist paradise and the new face of the Korean nation. The new landscape of Pyongyang gladly inscribed new sets of signification onto itself as the spatial center of hierarchal power structure that organized and operated North Korea. James Duncan’s observation is particularly conversant with what took place in Pyongyang during the reconstruction efforts: “The issue of the rhetoric of landscape is interesting because it raises questions about the processes whereby the landscape as a text is read and thus acts as a communicative device reproducing the social order.”68 The invented landscape in Pyongyang made blunt statements about new order, an example of which appeared in Kim Il-sung’s article titled “Pyongyang City must be an Example for the Whole Country in All Spheres of Politics, the Economy, and Culture.”69 Page 97 →Thus, was it more than a coincidence that the modern city of Pyongyang became a simulacrum of theater as plans for rebuilding the city emerged in a theater building? On July 27, 1953, on the day an armistice was signed between North and South Korea, Pyongyang Review wrote: While streets were in flames, an exhibition showing the general plan of restoration of Pyongyang was held at the Moranbong Underground Theater, the air raid shelter of the government under Moran hill. On the way of Victory . . . fireworks that streamed high into the night sky of the capital in a gun salute briefly illuminated the construction plan of the city that would rise soon with a new look.70

Pyongyang in its current form rose from the rubble through the sacrificial labor of its inhabitants, as is evidenced by the 1958 song promoting the reconstruction of the city, “For the Workers Constructing Pyongyang.” Dawn in the morning blazes in the sky Colorful flags flap on the streets over Daedong River Young workers line up in a row Construction sites calls you forth, forward! Beloved Capital, Streets of Heroes!71 But the North Korean state gave all the credit to Kim Il-sung by propagating his image as the constructor of the city. Figure 16 shows the painting titled Reconstruction of Pyongyang, in which Kim Il-sung is depicted as directing the rebuilding efforts. This painting testifies that Kim was represented as the sire of the city not only on stage, but also in other forms of visual culture reaching far beyond the physical boundaries of theater space. A strikingly similar visual composition of this painting is replicated in a 1960 photo that centers on Kim Il-sung directing the construction of the Pyongyang Grand Theater (see fig. 17). Here, the national father is portrayed as the one who gave birth to the physical venue where theater performances would serve the people of his city. Not by coincidence, Kim Jong-il, twenty-six years later, continued to carry out the constructive spirit of his father and order more theaters to be built in the city of Pyongyang: “We need to build more contemporary theaters in Pyongyang. In the eastern part of the city we should build a theater for youth and another large-scale theater. Since we have many celebrated gyoye (circus) artists, we should build an arena where artists could stage ice shows or water shows. We should also construct an international movie theater where we can show movies and stage music concerts.”72 The son’s statement reaffirms the leadership’s vision of the North Korean city not only as the cultural capital of the nation, but also a place that functions like a theater itself. Page 98 → Figure 16. A painting titled Reconstruction of Pyongyang capturing Kim Il-sung as the visionary constructor of the city appeared in Joseon Yesul 7 (1968): 6. Figure 17. “The Supreme Leader Kim Il-sung directed the construction project of Pyongyang Grand Theater on May 30.” Joseon Sibo (North Korea Times) 31 (1960). Page 99 →As intensively as North Korean propaganda wanted to create a continuum between theater stage and the city through forms of visual culture, so the iconic scenes from the revolutionary operas became intermediaries to achieve homogeneity between stage and city. For example, images of immediately recognizable stage and film characters from propaganda performances saturated the city, becoming an integral part of the cityscape. Through this process, Pyongyang was established as a fluid location functioning both as a theatrical stage and the space of everyday life mediated by the opera characters whose omnipresence blurred the boundaries between the idealized world on stage and the everyday. The images of the fictional characters from the revolutionary operas were painted and displayed outside of public buildings in Pyongyang, such as Pyongyang Grand Theater. The theater displays the history of how the North Korean people heroically achieved their socialist revolution. In the mural outside of the building two celebrated female characters from the revolutionary opera productions can be found. The image of a girl with a bunch of flowers (see fig. 18) represents Kkot-bun, the leading character in Flower Girl (1972). The image of an elderly woman (see fig. 19) represents Mother, the leading figure in Sea of Blood (1971). These are famous tableaux from stage productions and film adaptations of revolutionary operas, and were immediately recognized figures throughout North Korean society, the evidence of which is their appearance on the covers of widely read magazines (see figs. 20 and 21). Apart from proving the popularity of these stage personas, the images on murals and the scenes from theater and film productions on the magazine covers demonstrate a photographic accuracy in transposing fictional characters onto the city’s public space. In my view, this invasion of stage characters into everyday life eradicates the

boundary between the stage and the city. Moreover, it creates a seamless continuum between the illusory world of theater and the real world of everyday life, especially in the way in which these fictional characters are presented as exemplary models of “nonfictional” North Korean revolutionary history. Whereas paintings and murals are a static genre that does not necessarily involve the bodily discipline of the masses in its production and consumption, the production of parades, by contrast, necessitates collective efforts based on physical training. Moreover, they are performances that primarily define the city as a theater space staging thousands of people demonstrating synchronized movements.73 Not surprisingly, the main square of Pyongyang was named after Kim Il-sung as the main stage to bear glorious icons of the Great Leader and his achievements. Just as medieval European cities, according to Marvin Carlson, would gradually shift the central focus of their procession from “the city’s wealth, power, and prosperity” to “monuments and allegorical paintings and tableaux reflecting his [the visitor’s] own significance,”74 the glories of Pyongyang were ultimately subsumed by the magnificent presence of Kim Il-sung.75 Page 100 → Figure 18. Mural depicting Kkot-bun in Flower Girl on the outside wall of the Pyongyang Grand Theater. (Photo courtesy of an anonymous donor.) Page 101 → Figure 19. Mural depicting Mother in Sea of Blood on the outside wall of the Pyongyang Grand Theater. Iconographic figures like these have become recognizable heroes of the revolution in North Korea. (Photo courtesy of an anonymous donor.) Page 102 → Figure 20. The cover of J oseon Yesul 8–9 (1972) features a photo of actress Hong Yeong-hui, who played the lead role of Kkotbun in the film version of Flower Girl. This image of Kkot-bun corresponds to the image in the mural in figure 18. Figure 21. A scene from the North Korean revolutionary opera Sea of Blood, as it appeared on the cover of Joseon Yesul 7 (1979). The image of the Mother in this scene is replicated in the mural painting in figure 19. Page 103 →The North Korean state has invested a great deal of energy in staging parades as reality-producing machinery.76 Their scale became aggrandized with time.77 In 2003 a mass parade staged in Pyongyang celebrating the fifty-fifth anniversary of the foundation of North Korea demonstrated a scene from the aforementioned production True Daughter of the Party in an attempt to bring the stage production to the city itself. The gigantic platform on wheels moving past the “Dear Leader” Kim Jong-il staged a painted backdrop of the characters from the production. Most notably among them, the image of the female protagonist from the opera is an immediately recognizable icon of a model revolutionary figure for North Koreans. She is depicted as calling out for the “Dear General,” one of the sacrosanct appellations reserved for Kim Il-sung. The painted slogan in the background, “Where are you, Dear General?” is a well-known line from the opera production, intended to remind citizens of the harsh days of the Korean War. At the same time the enormous scale of the parade creates an effect of contrast: the distance between the stories of the war and the frenzied celebration at the moment of parade is intended to remind North Koreans of the enormous progress the present state has made with the city. However, the ritual is not limited to commemorating the glories of the state and the city. It also displays the invigorated livelihood of the North Koreans to the outside world. Street parades and mass games mask the daunting economic crisis the state endured at the cost of its own people’s lives. At the time of the aforementioned 2003 parade, the state was suffering from a decade-long food crisis. The crisis in North Korea began to surface in the mid-1990s when the centralized rationing system collapsed and people were left on their own to make ends meet.78 As the crisis dragged on into the late 1990s, gruesome reports came out of North Korea via escapees about how people coped with hunger: their testimonials covered a wide spectrum of horrifying stories, ranging from robbery to cannibalism.79 Page 104 →Thus, when considering the scale of human suffering that swept through North Korea in the past decade, the extravagance of mass parades reaches the point of absurdity. Pyongyang was made to confront the prevalent image the outside world had of North Korea as a starving, yet threatening, nation. Such a ceremonious parade transforms squares and streets of Pyongyang into a space intended to show others that the North Korean people enjoy full-fledged daily lives in a bustling city. But in fact the state is more interested in staging a show than in caring for people’s well-being, which

conspicuously brings to attention the unfortunate historical parallel between North Korea and the Stalinist Soviet Union: the North Korean state’s concern for showcasing its people’s livelihood mirrors the Stalinist regime’s disconcertment over how the gulags might look to the West.80 Likewise, the North Korean state is uninterested in the actual people’s livelihood, in the same manner that the Stalinist regime neglected the atrocities of the gulags. To these regimes, show designed for spectators located outside of their community is what truly matters; the ethos of this spectacle endows their cities with peculiarly theatrical qualities.81 The comment by Kongdan Oh and Ralph Hassig testifies to the North Korean state’s obsession with displaying a certain image of itself: “When an important group of dignitaries hits town, a Potemkin ‘street show’ is staged for their benefit. A former North Korean official recounts how almost the entire staff of his ministry—as many as a thousand people—would be mobilized to play the role of shoppers, drivers, and pedestrians to parade around the city. The only people who looked forward to these performances were the military personnel, who enjoyed the opportunity to wear civilian clothes.”82 A story similar to this one was told by a U.S. State Department official, who recounted his visit to Pyongyang. From his hotel room he observed people walking in and out of the subway and realized that it was always the same people, and that they appeared to be going over to a hidden alcove where there was a stash of coats, umbrellas, tote bags, and so on. These civilian actors would switch coats and accessories and then make another trip in and out of the subway.83 This extreme stage management designed to satisfy outsiders’ gazes made some South Korean scholars justifiably claim that “Pyongyang as a showcase of North Korean prosperity hid more than it showed.”84 When faced with such channeled images of citizens of Pyongyang in these aggrandized state rituals, I cannot help but wonder how the North Korean people really feel about being a part of these performances. To what degree are North Koreans complicit with the regime in making Pyongyang Page 105 →a showcase? Given the current historical situation, it is impossible to conduct comprehensive fieldwork in North Korea, and such a question will remain in the realm of speculation for the time being. Under such circumstances, the testimonies of North Korean defectors are not the ideal resource, but they are the best available counterdiscourse to the official narratives produced by the North Korean state. What could people in Pyongyang really think when they not only have to watch these operas endlessly, but also have to be actors themselves, not by choice, but as mandatory ritual? During interviews with North Korean defectors who prefer to remain anonymous, it was possible to gain a glimpse of how the North Korean state drafts participants for these rituals. A former army officer in his fifties explained that local party officials are in charge of managing the system of recruitment; the smallest North Korean social units are the inminban (people’s unit), which consist of twenty-three households. Local party officials make sure that the inminban under their supervision supply enough participants for staged displays, the number required depending on the scale of each occasion.85 Another interviewee, a former North Korean propaganda squad member and musician in her twenties, confirmed that participating in state-organized parades is not left to choice. However, it is not an activity mandated by law either. Missing too many duties is an occasion for self-criticism in weekly communal meetings, but not for severe punishment.86 Kang Cheol-hwan (Gang Cheol-hwan), a North Korean defector who spent ten years in a prison camp, tells a more severe version of the story: “To miss an official march was good enough a reason to be sent to a labor camp.”87 Rebelling against the North Korean practice of disregarding the spectator’s preferences or desires, Kang found that “the propaganda [was] so grotesque, the teaching method so crude, we were bound to reject it.”88 Willingness to participate and the severity of punishment put aside, the bodily practices Pyongyanites needed to be the city’s mise-en-scène glorifying the Great Leader, taught through propaganda performances on stage and in the city, were lessons learned well. The North Korean state repeatedly fed its population the ideal models of thoughts and behaviors in relation to the orders in Pyongyang, which were fundamentally based on the cult of the leader in theatrical illusion. In this respect, the institutions of theater and identity-making state ritual merge in these performances, and the process and intention of staging these operas become quite similar to what Victor Turner calls “making, not faking.”89

Given the fact that these mass parades are annual events systematically Page 106 →and routinely mobilizing thousands of people, the rehearsal process of these performances can be viewed not only as a means to reach a goal of producing an end product, but an end in itself. Put differently, the didactic nature of production process becomes one of the most significant purposes of producing these performances. The state rituals, in a short time period, discipline people in how to embody the collective life—or to be more realistic, teach them how to create an image of ideal collective life in their utopian capital city. In analyzing the case of disappearance and torture in Argentina’s Dirty War (1976–83), Steven Gregory and Daniel Timerman make luminary observations that are pertinent to understanding the significance of repeated state rituals in North Korea: “Such state rituals may very well be a central plank of the regime, but they still depend less for their effectiveness on their satisfaction as ritual than on the depth and comprehensiveness of the surveillance systems that monitor participation. These rituals do not resolve the fundamental contradictions posed by the existence of the individual as a discrete, and hence, identifiable member of the society.”90 The North Korean state rituals lack what Gregory and Timerman call “the resolution that primitive rituals achieve through reincorporation,” and therefore require “an endless repetition in order to achieve their vicarious effect.”91 The coercive way in which the North Korean state turns the members of its society into mandatory participants in identity-making state ritual indicates that, from the participant’s point of view, the reversal of what Victor Turner called “making, not faking” may be taking place. If, against one’s desire, one is brought in to be a part of massive rituals, one might have to “fake it until one makes it.” In this respect, the North Korean propaganda performance becomes a process in which the stage and everyday life become two pillars sustaining Pyongyang as Kim Ilsung’s theatrical sanctuary. Many former Communist states desecrated gigantic statues of their past leaders in their central streets and squares. In the early 1990s, the removal of artifacts reminiscent of the bygone Communist era was a spectacle in itself, occupying the center stage in many former Communist countries. The German film Goodbye Lenin (2003) memorably restages such a moment, when the mountainous statue of Lenin is removed and carried away by a helicopter, an allusion to a flying statue of Jesus in Federico Fellini’s apocalyptic La Dolce Vita. If North Koreans ever get to see this scene, they may see it as prescient. Will the monuments dedicated to the Supreme Leader suffer the same fate in Pyongyang? Will the statues survive longer than the regime and end up Page 107 →as reminders of the past in a place like Szoborpark in Budapest where the torn-down statues of Lenin are on display?92 To borrow David Harvey’s expression, “The public may take collective action to ‘speak back’ to the state and redefine a nation’s history and identity by honoring, profaning, and occasionally destroying these monuments.”93 Will the people of North Korea speak back some day? Even though only time can answer these questions, one thing is evident at the present moment: Pyongyang, as the city of Kim Il-sung, has created a wide range of self-reflexive images on stage, squares, and streets that make it one of the most theatrical places in the world.

Revolution in the Countryside: Romance, Sex, and Agricultural Production The countryside in North Korea is a dichotomized space in the realms of both political economy and cultural imagination. Constantly marked as an ongoing project of modernization and reform, it also appears as a sacred shrine of moral purity retaining untainted national spirit, often romanticized by urbanites who lack experience of harsh rural life. At the same time, for rural dwellers who lack mobility to move to urban areas in search of better life, it is a space of trial that provides constant challenges of agricultural production, and yet the countryside is presented to them in official propaganda as a euphemized locale called hometown—something they should love and protect. Retaining these dualistic qualities, the countryside has shaped by a multifaceted imagination in North Korean culture: on the one hand, it is feudal, backward, and therefore should be elevated to the level of urban areas, especially Pyongyang; on the other hand, it embodies the virtuous Korean tradition that was fueled by a strong nationalistic propensity behind which stood a concrete economic rationale to boost agricultural productions to guarantee the national food supply. Although the countryside often appears in various performances as an ideal ground for socialist economic production to prosper, it is peculiar to observe the recurrent mapping of the rural

area as being subservient to the urban area, especially Pyongyang, in the strict hierarchal construction of the North Korean socialist utopia. This spatial hierarchy and disparity between the urban and the rural was not at all disguised but openly found its way into performative texts; most characters on stage and screen publicly admit that they could live more comfortable lives in the city, but because of their duty to the betterment of the national collective, they choose to remain in, or go to, the countryside. Page 108 →The urban-rural divide takes various formations over the course of performance history in North Korea, which is inherently tied to the transforming economic realities of the countryside. From burgeoning utopian ideals of constructing a new socialist paradise in the 1950s to the declining nationwide economic conditions in the 1990s, the contours of the popular imagination about the North Korean countryside were defined vis-à-vis its relationship with the city. There appears a stark contrast between the amateur productions written by farmworkers on collectives and the urban professional writers in their approach to the rural. In this section, I tease out the different ways of inscribing rural life by various writing agents: While the farmworkers who were also amateur writers showed a discursive and often decentralized approach to the countryside not only as the source of food production, but also as procreative mother nature providing the ultimate source of life, urban writers projected the rural as the subdivision of the central space of national life in a much more cohesive fashion. Having been significantly influenced by the early Soviet cultural policy in the early days, the North Korean state and urban intellectuals seemed to have retained the prevailing Soviet view of rural regions as a project of modernization. Katerina Clark has noted on the Soviet rural projects that “the Bolshevik experiment . . . on the whole stood for what might be called the ‘urbanist’ side of the various dichotomies—after all, theirs was to be a ‘proletarian’ revolution. The ‘vanguard’ of the proletariat was to overthrow the stagnant, bourgeois order and institute a new age of efficiency, increased industrialization and technology, universal education, and so on. This was to be effected in a country that was overwhelmingly peasant, but the blueprint for the village was largely a subfurcation of the urban model.”94 The Soviet vision of projecting the rural as the subsidiary space to emulate the urban remained highly relevant to the North Korean policy toward rural areas. Likewise, Charles Armstrong has argued that the North Korean leadership was keen on “educating” the rural area, which marked the difference from that of the PRC leadership. Kim [Il-sung] did not quite have Mao Zedong’s faith in the peasant masses as the source of political change and creativity. While cadres would learn from the masses, they must first of all lead them; thus Mao’s dictum was “from the masses, to the masses, from the masses,” Kim left off the first part, believing political change must be responsive to society but must be initiated from the top. There was a high degree of centralization and top-down direction in the party from as early as December Page 109 →1945, but there was also the forerunners of “on-the-spot guidance” that Kim was to practice frequently as leader of the DPRK, with Kim and other leaders going directly to the countryside and to factories, meeting local people and investigating local circumstances.95 The central government’s top-down approach to the rural enlightenment project was most vividly manifested in North Korea’s economic plan, which promoted the importance of cultural productions that took questions of the countryside as a main subject matter. In December 1956, the state launched the first five-year economic plan, thorough which economic production was to achieve unprecedented growth. Known as the cheollima96 movement, the central-government-initiated plan had a formative influence in the countryside both politically and culturally. The cheollima movement was imbued with unrealistic plans to boost economic production, often resulting in great sacrifice,97 bearing a clear resemblance to the Chinese Great Leap Forward.98 However, this economic movement brought about social changes in North Korean society as a whole. In speaking of the transformation of the English countryside during the Industrial Revolution, Raymond Williams has noted that “the Industrial Revolution not only transformed both city and country; it was based on a highly developed agrarian capitalism, with a very early disappearance of the traditional peasantry.”99 Something akin to this happened in North Korea, transforming the traditional peasantry into the body of legitimate citizenship in the new socialist republic. In the process, traditionally unmarked demographics, most notably women, emerged as visible social groups. As early as the late 1940s and early 1950s, the North Korean government seemed to have occupied

itself with transforming the traditional female peasant into a constructive socialist subject. A poster likely produced between the late 1940s and the early 1950s by the North Korean Culture and Propaganda Bureau captures the visual essence of such reform. At the foreground is a healthy female farmer harvesting crops with the caption: “Let Us Now Start Saving Fertilizer for Next Year! Households with High Piles of Fertilizers Will Harvest More Surplus Rice!” This working body of a robust peasant woman is situated in the vital pulse of the national economy, projected as a farmworker contributing to agricultural production. The visual propaganda promoting female peasants was actually implemented by economic policy in real life. Balázs Szalontai points out that “local industries employed many housewives and young people without aggravating the serious shortage of adult male workers.”100 Foremost, the cheollima movement brought about the empowerment of women and the younger generation as new sources of labor on the rural front, which was reflected in, and forged by, cultural representations of these demographic groups. In the plays, films, and paintings centering on rural life, we see the overwhelming presence of females and youth as the guiding lights of the rural economy. Provided that these demographic groups were also likely to have a strong desire to leave provincial areas and join the modern life that urban areas had to offer, it was even more necessary to project them as the backbone of the national rural economy and production. Casting a sidelong glance at the Soviet Union, Victoria E. Bonnell illustrates a similar point in the case of female farmers in Soviet posters who are happily engaged in agricultural productions: “The smiling woman tractor driver appeared in posters not as an accomplished fact but as an indication of what should be, as an incentive to make it happen.”101 Likewise, North Korean propaganda features not the reality of rural life, but a wishful version of what it should be. Page 110 → Figure 22. A poster with the caption “Let Us Now Start Saving Fertilizer for Next Year! Households with High Piles of Fertilizer Will Harvest More Surplus Rice!” (Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration.) Page 111 →The disparity between urban and rural standards of living was a direct result of imbalance in distribution of resources in these two areas.102 Local productivity was increasingly important in the 1950s to run a highly centralized government in North Korea, and in order to boost the morale of farmers, factory workers, and soldiers serving the rural area, the state not only produced performances that extolled the diligence and innovative production methods demonstrated by rural workers as the highest socialist virtues, but also allowed local farmworkers to express their fulfilling lives on the socialist farmland through amateur plays, some of which appeared in amateur journals, such as Sseokeulwon. The centrifugal urge to export Pyongyang-based policies to rural areas left visible marks in the terrains of performance, but something of the reverse also materialized in the realm of the cultural imagination. While external living standards and the degree of modernization left rural areas as the backwater of urban space, in terms of moral impulse, the rural life was privileged as the stronghold of Korean essence, which was predicated on highly nationalistic sentiment. Overall, the success of spartan economic plans mostly relied on the perseverance of the North Korean people, but on the other hand, it intensified the visceral ethnocentric sentiment in those involved.103 Consequently, the countryside became increasingly associated with the tradition embedded in nationalism, which groomed distinctively Korean performances. Ethnomusicologist Keith Howard argues that the cheollima movement was meant to “firmly establish artistic independence from Chinese and Soviet models. Certainly, it side-stepped what had happened in both states, following the death of Stalin and a loosening of central control over art begun in China in 1956.”104 However, the nationalistic sentiment and perspective that sustained the cheollima movement geminated even before its official launch; already in the first North Korean feature film, My Hometown, in 1949, there is an abundant attempt to recover the national dignity that had been forfeited under Japanese colonial rule. Armstrong argues that the socialist element of class struggle is not as prevalent in this film as is upholding the idyllic purity of the rural life: “Its message of revolutionary transformation is less impressive than its emotional evocation of the Korean landscape, village life, and the Page 112 →pure, uncorrupted spirit of the peasants, especially women. Nae gohyang [My Hometown] expresses a sentimental attachment to the innocence and simplicity (sobakham) of

the Korean peasantry, a kind of Socialist pastoralism, alongside the Socialist realism adopted form the USSR.”105 North Korean culture in the 1950s and 1960s provided abundant examples of such work, and the tendency is revived ever more aggressively in the 1990s when deadly famine impaired the rural economy and claimed a devastating toll of human lives.106 The grotesque juxtaposition of utopian ideals of rural life and the dystopian reality of its dismal condition captures the tension in North Korean rural life as it oscillates between two extreme poles. The dual aspects—as a stagnant as well as moral ground—represented by the countryside are even more complicated when the following factor is taken into consideration: Given that the nation’s founding myth was predicated on the cultural landscape of a mythological time and space of exile, and on the capital city of Pyongyang as the glorious site embodying the grand plans of the national father, was the countryside less likely to be burdened by the duty to mythologize national past and its leaders? Theater and film productions set in the countryside provide more room for artistic flexibility to explore humor, failure, and even sexuality—a longstanding taboo subject in North Korean public discourse. This may be why we find more experimental and ambiguous characters than in productions set elsewhere featuring the strict dichotomy between immaculate heroes and obvious villains. Subversive moments of exploring failure, although extremely rare, make incursions into rigid narratives for the official propaganda feeding clear-cut revolutionary ideology to its spectators. Among the most intriguing aspects associated with the countryside as an alternative to other types of time and space is found in amateur dramas of the 1950s and 1960s. This is especially true for works written and published in a journal entitled Sseokeulwon,107 or “members of the circle,” specifically targeting the workers belonging to “circles”—small grassroots organizations at each workplace functioning for workers’ political education and socialization. In this body of works, which started to appear in the late 1950s, there is virtually no shortage of those exploring the liminal realms of political correctness and surreptitious moments of human sexuality. These dramas explore heterosexual relationships with graphic images of the body as a site where carnal pleasure and desire are nurtured. So how do the socialist way of collective life and the individual’s open expressions of sexual desire go hand in hand? This question may sound oxymoronic if we consider how North Korea’s official culture was shaped by the stringent suppression of Page 113 →sexual desires in the public sphere. However, a careful scrutiny of dramas set in the countryside, written by workers on collective farms and published in amateur literary journals of the 1950s and 1960s, must confront the conventional wisdom projecting North Korean culture as driven to construct collective citizenry devoid of sexual fantasies of individuals. Often transposed onto images of nature and farmland labor, the sexual desires of the main protagonists, who are usually heterosexual couples of marriageable age, charge their relationship with erotic tension, defying our conventional wisdom about socialist subjects whose intention should be to “produce,” but not so much to “procreate.” What is at stake in this rare moment in North Korean cultural history is whether the fissures within the hegemonic governing ideology of North Korea open up the possibility for individual desire to manifest itself surreptitiously. Romance in the countryside becomes a predominant element in plot development, transforming rural villages into a space replete with procreative activities, a stark contrast to the works set in Pyongyang, Manchuria, or Baekdu Mountain. Jang Se-geon’s one-act play entitled The Water of Life Flows (Saengmyeongsu-neun heureunda),108 for example, is set in a small farm village struggling to solve the problems of irrigation in the springtime. From the very beginning of the play, romance surfaces as the main propeller of plot development. Twenty-three-year-old Hye-seon has set her eyes on her twenty-five-year-old neighbor Dong-hyeok, who is blind toward her affection because he is completely focused on the construction of a water pipeline. Dong-hyeok is more in love with the project than with his admirer—this seemingly odd choice being justified because a successful harvest depends on the outcome of the construction. Heartbroken, Hyeseon relieves her pain by trying to look beyond the personal emotion and focus on her given work task. In the end, when the construction brings plenty of water to the agricultural fields, Dong-hyeok proposes to Hyeseon, thereby elevating water from the material prerequisite for agricultural production to the symbolic signification of life-generating source. If we allow a psychoanalytic imagination to decipher the image of strong gushing water along the pipeline pouring out on the rich soil, on the background of which joyfully stands the enamored young couple, then water as the life-generating source gains a concrete corporeal dimension of human sexuality.

Likewise, U Rim-ho’s one-act play written in 1959, The Day the Milk Cow Gave Birth (Jeotso-ga saekki nanneun nal), illustrates the countryside as a place of burgeoning romance. The play centers on family life in a mountain village as farmers experiment with artificial fertilization of cows to produce Page 114 →more milk and beef. Just like the male protagonist in The Water of Life Flows, the family in The Day the Milk Cow Gave Birth senses a communal duty to succeed in order to increase the food supply for the entire village. Man-bok, the head of the household, emphasizes everyone’s need to serve the state well as he praises the new political regime for making it possible for his son to attend university and his wife to wear silk clothing. The play ends triumphantly with the divine intervention of natural force when the cow gives birth to a healthy calf—the first one to have been artificially inseminated on the collective farm. The imagery of reproduction and regeneration, however, does not unfold on any abstract level, but is concretely predicated on the tangible language of physical labor, the birth of the calf being directly associated with the provider of farm labor, and with a concrete source of food. The daily language of labor and production, however, remains relevant not only on a material level, but also on a subconscious level in other plays dramatizing rural life on the collective farm. Playing on a subject similar to that found in the The Water of Life Flows, the play News from Ongnyu Riverside (Ongnyu gangbyeon-eseo on sosik), written by the Literary Circle Members of the Naeok Village Collective Farm in northern Pyeongan Province, takes bold steps to appropriate the language of labor as an unexpected instrument of flirtation between male and female protagonists. News from Ongnyu Riverside continues the genealogy of countryside drama by centering on the life on a collective ranch. However, various events on this farm are not beautified by the purely poetic expressions of bucolic paradise, but remain on the level of daily activities of agricultural production and breeding animals. In News from Ongnyu Riverside, two pairs of young male and female workers constantly milk cows, which is presented in the play as a series of flirtation sessions between two pairs of lovers rather than the sanguine time of socialist labor. Although the two couples use the language of farm labor in expressing their romantic feelings, soon it is subverted into blunt expressions of their sexual desire. Against the backdrop of the milk cow’s full breasts, the young female worker Geum-sun confesses to Chang-ho, her male coworker, how happy she feels: “Comrade Chang-ho! I feel like my breast is going to swell whenever I sing.”109 In Korean, the word gaseum, which I translate as “breast,” can be read in two ways—with its primary referent being chest or breast, the body part, and its secondary meaning being heart. Thus, Geum-sun’s line can also be read as “my heart is going to swell.” However, for an appropriate translation of ga-seum, Page 115 →“breast” gains currency over “heart” especially when the scene features an imagery of cows being milked. Concrete descriptions of their breasts follow the aforementioned line when workers discuss problems of how to increase milk production. In the same fashion, another pair, Ok-hui and Cheol-ju, discusses how important it is to increase milk production for the health of the nation. CHEOL-JU: Comrade Ok-hui . . . as the chair of the Party’s Central Committee recommended, we should keep experimenting. Before milking cows, let’s bathe them and let them rest for an hour and feed them. Then for twenty minutes we can caress their backs and breasts. OK-HUI: Yes! How wonderful it would be to succeed in this experimentation and have milk flowing like tap water . . . CHEOL-JU: Then how happy all the kindergarten children would be. OK-HUI: Why suddenly mention kindergarten children? . . . CHEOL-JU: Because they are the flowers of the future . . . and . . . our . . . OK-HUI: What? . . . CHEOL-JU: Comrade Ok-hui! OK-HUI: . . . (Enamored, glances at Cheol-ju.)110

The dialogue between young male and female workers progresses from the ordinary language of labor and production to that of romance and procreation. The reference to children is by no means subtle, nor is the carnal desire exchanged between the male and the female workers. The concrete bodily image of the cow and her swelled breasts transposes itself onto the body of the female conversationalist, which opens up the possibility of mating between the two workers. The images of female body and copulation are almost always mediated by images of food and its production. This is not surprising given the fact that all those activities fall under the same purpose of creating, maintaining, and propagating life, establishing the foundational importance of the countryside, where basic necessities of life in its most primitive sense are satisfied. While the countryside might lack the lofty mythological ideals of Baekdu Mountain, where Kim Il-sung dreamed of liberating Korea from the Japanese colonial yoke, or the glories of Pyongyang as the holy founding city of the national leader, it nevertheless becomes the source of North Korean life. These amateur plays from the 1950s, when set against the later plays of the 1960s and 1970s, are striking in their openness to the romantic feelings of protagonists. Likewise, the vivid corporeal images associated Page 116 →with women’s procreative body eventually became substituted by the productive bodies imbued with ideological correctness as the state’s control and censorship tightened in the 1960s.111 As the female in the countryside in post-1960s North Korean drama approached the stereotype of positive heroes defined in the tradition of socialist realism, she nevertheless appeared as a pale caricature, devoid of flesh and blood, when compared to the previous generation of women with their wondrous combination of carnal desire and communal, if not entirely communist, spirit. In the early 1970s, with the advent of revolutionary operas, Kim Jong-il’s ambitious projects implemented by highly trained urban theater and film professionals, pure spoken dramas declined in the performing arts scene. It is interesting to note that parallel to this transformation, the revolutionary operas do not feature productive rural life imbued with laughter and procreative energy, unlike spoken dramas written in the 1950s and 1960s. Two out of the five revolutionary operas—Sea of Blood and Flower Girl—are mostly set in rural villages in the North;112 their time is the Japanese colonial era, disclosing atrocious conditions Korean peasants suffered. Revolutionary operas produced by Kim Jong-il were preoccupied with glorifying Kim Il-sung’s achievements, and therefore the time-and-space coordination of these operas focused on the holy mountainous areas and the glorious city of Pyongyang. As a result, happy pastoral life on the socialist farm lost its chance to be represented in the prestigious revolutionary operas. No matter how marginalized the problems of constructive rural life might have been in the overall scheme of the production, there were still numerous spoken drama scripts being published throughout the 1970s. Evergreen Pine Tree (Pureun sonamu, 1970)113 and Red Agitator (Bulgeun seondongja, 1970) are two examples, both tackling the question of how to revolutionize peasants who retain feudal traits of the past.114 Both written by anonymous workers on collectives, the plays improvise on the aforementioned amateur plays in the sense that instead of focusing on healthy farmworkers, they represent peasants as a challenging enlightenment project and the fulcrum of the dramatic tension. The second production, in particular, features characters who are head-strong and resistant to any changes, sabotaging the Party-led reform efforts to bring a new work ethic to the countryside. In this sense, the play becomes the experimental ground on which the most difficult cases of converting traditional peasants are boldly put on display. As one anonymous North Korean critic noted, “The portrayal of the extremely negative peasants in this play contributed to the veracity of the events, in which these negative Page 117 →characters eventually become the members of working class, quite logically and persuasively.”115 The countryside as significant time-and-space model for theater and film make a visible comeback in the 1980s with renovated patterns of plots and conflicts among characters. One of the noticeable features of theater and film productions set in rural areas in the 1980s is an open acknowledgment of the backwardness of the countryside and country people’s need to emulate the models of the city. This is not coincidental when we take into consideration that predominantly professional urban writers worked on these scripts from a central government’s perspective with an eye on invigorating rural agricultural production in order to overcome the crisis of national economy.

While young characters in the 1950s and 1960s were seen to lead joyful, self-fulfilling lives in the countryside, their counterparts from the 1980s onward seem to share a common understanding that life in the countryside is a work in progress. Emulating urban standards of living is presented as one way of catching up to national standards rather than succumbing to a country youth’s vain thoughts. The young characters, especially women, have to cope with the temptation to forsake their home village and leave for the city. But without exception, they all realize that their true mission to uphold socialism lies within the rural community. Such a tendency seems to reflect the crisis of young people and women as the two pillars of the rural economy in this time period, the idea of which has been established in the early dramas centering on rural life. Considering that hunger has taken a devastating toll on human lives in the North Korean countryside starting in the 1980s, the rural drama’s task was to make the rural residents realize that their duty is to guard the backwater of the national economy. Consequently, a strong sense of self-sacrifice replaces the sexual bodily imagery of the characters of the 1950s and 1960s. Jeon Pyeong-chang’s 1986 play Cuckoo Bird Sings (Ppeokkuksae-ga unda) exemplifies the shift the rural plays brought about in the 1980s, in that self-sacrifice of young rural women becomes the fulcrum of the moral lesson. The dramatic conflict arises from other characters’ misconception of a girl’s desire to modernize and urbanize her rural hometown. Ok-sil, a young girl of a small village, is planning to improve the living standards of villagers by building high-rise apartments, theaters, and paved streets, but villagers think that she is madly in love with the city and wants to escape by marrying a young man from the city. In reality, Ok-sil is in love with a boy from her village, Hyeon-cheol, but everyone, especially the elder generation, thinks that she has fallen for the city boy Yeong-ho. Page 118 →The villagers’ misunderstanding of the protagonist is predicated on the comic play of mistaken identity. The village elderly Man-ho is afraid that a model worker like Ok-sil might leave the village, so he spies on her to find out what her true intentions are. One day, while secretly pursuing Ok-sil, Man-ho notices a notebook she has dropped, but instead of returning it to her, he scrutinizes it with a hope that he will find out about her plans. As he reads through, he notices scornfully what he thought was Ok-sil’s plans to escape to the city: “Huh? . . . ‘my future apartment, theaters, and paved sidewalks?’ Ha, she acts as if she has already become a city girl. (He has a bitter expression on his face).”116 Man-ho’s anxiety of losing the model worker is compounded by the incident, and he goes so far as to hide behind a tree to spy on what Ok-sil and Hyeon-cheol’s father Kim are talking about, but soon Man-ho is mistaken for someone else and is dragged from behind the tree by villagers, humiliated by public laughter. The final comic touch comes when Man-ho urges Ok-sil’s mother to hold back her daughter from leaving. Ok-sil’s mother, whose dream is to attend the land they have been irrigating for a lifetime, becomes angry at the news of her daughter’s potential departure. However, the mother, just like the klutzy Man-ho, inadvertently ends up staging a comic show at the cost of her own ridiculousness: she comes out to scold her daughter wearing the daughter’s flowery parasol and high heels, only to be laughed at by villagers for trying to look like a young marriageable girl. The generational divide in this play between hardworking, faithful young people and the misguided, clumsy elderly gets resolved in a clear vindication of the young generation, which is well captured in the chorus song. CHORUS: A girl and a boy run together to bring blossoms to the farmland But the head of the work unit misunderstands the girl’s intention and wreaks havoc by accusing her of planning to run away to the city. Look at the ridiculous way he runs! Oh, the belated cuckoos sing their song. They procrastinate, and then sing “Coo-coo.”117 In the end, villagers overcome the generational divide and everyone rejoices at Ok-sil’s plan to transform her beloved village into a modernized town. MAN-HO: Only now I came to realize the truth. If I stop trusting myself and others, then I will lag

behind and become the laughingstock of modern times . . . Page 119 →HYEON-CHEOL AND OK-SIL: Comrade Head of the Work Division! MAN-HO: (Trying to calm his excitement.) I hear the engines! That sound urges me to move forward. That sound for me is the heartbeat of our time. MRS. RI: So let us seniors march together with the younger ones. MAN-HO: Yes, let us be united and make our village a cultured socialist farmland, a civilized place where nobody is envious of city life. Along the mountain hills, contemporary buildings in two or three stories are lined up neatly. Brand new parks and pavements accentuate the beauty of the scenery. In the center of town stands a cultural center with dashing roofs as if they were wings ready to be spread out over the sky. HYEON-CHEOL: (Pointing at the backdrop.) This is a future plan of our village. EVERYONE: It is as good as a city. (Everyone looks at the backdrop in wild rapture. Chorus sings.) Cuckoo birds sing their songs In my lovely hometown. Labor opens the path of happiness Labor brings flowers Oh, always a happy place Oh, my hometown—mother’s bosom.118 The play ends in an outlandish celebration of Ok-sil’s wisdom and leadership, which will bring a brighter future to the village. Upholding the young generation in this play becomes coterminous with ridiculing the older generation, particularly men. The reversal of the traditional gender and age hierarchy is significant in light of the long-standing Confucian tradition of upholding male elders as village heads. The reversal of the conventional order becomes possible only because of the rural area’s special place in the spatial hierarchy within North Korea. Distanced from the physical and symbolic center of the nation, Pyongyang, where the sacrosanct patriarchy is very well guarded, the countryside can reverse the norm, with folkloric laughter dismantling the conventional authority of the patriarchal village head Man-ho in a Bakhtinian moment of carnivalesque decrowning of the king figure. At the same time, the last line of the chorus song, “Oh, my hometown—mother’s bosom,” resonates as a reminder of the traditional vision that Page 120 →equates home and the earth with the mother figure. The comparison clearly establishes the bridge between the rural area and the female life-giving source, and therefore ironically reaffirms the old village head’s anxiety that the village will lose young women of procreative age. As stultifying as the village head may be, his worries proved to be realistic. Losing women is not only about losing a workforce, but entails much grimmer consequences; it equals losing the ability to produce future generations, ultimately dismantling family life in the countryside. The village head talks to himself: “In case Ok-sil marries a city boy and leaves this town, all other girls will dream of leaving as well. Then what do we do . . . ? (He ponders.) Aha! I will make him wait for Ok-sil in vain so that he gives up at some point.”119 The village head’s reasoning is echoed by another male villager, a local engineer, Yong-ho: “At one point we country young men had difficult time finding girls since all the country girls were attracted to city boys.”120

While the urbanization of rural life brought by the younger generation and female workers is taken as a sign of progress, the play does not fail to remind its readers of the most traditional task rural women face—procreation of future generations. Or more precisely, the future labor force in the countryside is a significant part of women’s duty. While preserving the pastoral status quo is not part of the utopian formula, inscribing urban markers onto rural life should not result in the evacuation of a valued labor force. While Cuckoo Bird Sings extolled the virtues of country women who steadfastly held onto improving rural life, subsequent films and plays that came out of North Korea took one step further to introduce female protagonists who voluntarily give up the comforts of urban life in order to dedicate their lives to the betterment of the countryside. The 1989 film Traces of Life (Saeng-ui heunjeok) tells the story of a widow whose husband dies in a suicide mission to blow up a South Korean ship. The widow protagonist suffers from guilt over having argued with her husband on the night he left to sacrifice himself for the nation. In order to redeem herself, the wife embarks on a self-imposed exile to the countryside, where she becomes a farmer and eventually raises rice production to unprecedented levels. She thus transforms her mourning and loss into love and rebirth in the countryside. At the end of the film, when Kim Il-sung himself comes to the farm and praises its success, her sacrifice reaps its reward. The film projects the female protagonist’s journey to the countryside as a self-imposed exile, and thereby accentuates the inherent logic of North Korean society, by which the urban and the rural divide exists only on the vertical hierarchy. It is only Page 121 →with the epiphany of the national leader in the countryside that the latter becomes a glorious space essentially tied to revolutionary struggle at large. Ra Seong-deok’s 1990 stage play New Generation (Sinsaedae) continues the motif of the urban girl choosing hard life in the countryside, but unlike Traces of Life it put a comical spin on the subject. The play mediates various levels of interest between male and female, urban and rural, and military and civilian. The central conflict of the play emerges from the misunderstanding between a female railroad ticket controller Jeong-ok, a young and inexperienced Pyongyangite, and a discharged male army officer Yun-cheol. Yun-cheol served in the DMZ area and lost his vision while defending the border in a military conflict with South Korea, after which he was honorably discharged from the army. The play begins with the conversation between Yun-cheol and his subordinate Gil-nam at a train station as they are on their way to return to Yun-cheol’s home in the countryside. However, the blind man has misplaced the ticket, which causes a heated bantering between the soldiers and the ticket controller Jeong-ok. Not having recognized that Yun-cheol is blind, Jeong-ok refuses to admit them on the train when they fail to present their tickets. The soldiers miss their train, but before leaving the station to find a place to stay in Pyongyang for the night to catch the next day’s train, disgruntled Gil-nam, unbeknownst to Yuncheol, tells Jeong-ok that Yun-cheol must have lost his ticket because of his blindness. Jeong-ok realizes that Yuncheol is the blind hero whose story she recently read about in the newspaper.121 Embarrassed by her own rudeness, bewildered Jeong-ok wants to make up for her mistake by inviting the soldiers to her parents’ home and save them the trouble of finding a night’s stay in Pyongyang. When they arrive in Jeong-ok’s place, Gil-nam and Jeong-ok pretend to Yun-cheol that they are in a hotel. However, when Yun-cheol discovers that they are at the home of the railroad ticket controller, he refuses to burden Jeong-ok’s family and insists on leaving. Jeong-ok’s parents urge Yun-cheol to stay, but his upright nature and thoughts of his old mother waiting for him make him insistent on his departure. Unable to persuade Yuncheol, Jeong-ok’s father tells him: “I want to keep you here in this efflorescent paradise and let you enjoy all the happiness of this capital city.”122 Resembling the propagandistic epitaph reserved for North Korean capital city, Jeong-ok’s father’s comment on Pyongyang is a blunt reminder that the divide between the urban and the rural is an unchallenged fact for North Koreans. Nevertheless, the blind military hero’s lofty heart and nature moves the young city girl, and toward morning, Page 122 →Jeong-ok persuades her mother Yeon-hwa to let her follow Yuncheol to the countryside as his lifetime companion. YEON-HWA: If you marry him, you will have to work in the field, and you simply have no idea what it’s like! JEONG-OK: If I have to work in the field, then I will do it! YEON-HWA: What nonsense. When you returned from a couple of days of volunteer labor on a

farm, you said that you cannot imagine a life outside of Pyongyang.123

Here, Yeon-hwa is certainly concerned about her immature daughter’s rash decision to follow a virtual stranger. However, an even more grave concern is that the daughter is about to follow him to the countryside, and the urbanites’ blunt prejudice about rural life emerges without much critical filtering. For Jeong-ok’s mother, a harsh life marked by backbreaking labor is all that exists in the countryside—a generally true reflection of the North Korean view. Jeong-ok’s decision to leave Pyongyang reflects the opposite mind-set of the conventional desire of other young North Korean women. Not only do the young women of Pyongyang want to remain in the city, but the women from rural areas want to move there by finding Pyongyangite husbands. Such widespread sentiment is reflected in popular culture. One defector vividly recalled a comic sketch aired on Pyongyang Central TV Network in the 1980s: “A midget hunchback husband, a native of Pyongyang, found a beautiful bride from the countryside. One day, when they went to a bathhouse together, a man in the ticket office by the entrance told the husband: ‘Children are not allowed to enter.’ The husband asked the bride to lift him up to the ticket counter and told the man: ‘Hey, comrade, don’t you see that I am the husband of this woman?’”124 Through the device of laughter, the comic sketch implies that the mismatch between a midget hunchback husband and a beautiful bride is justified by the bride’s obtaining the right to reside in Pyongyang. The physical deformity of the husband can be neglected if she gains the privilege of spending her life in the capital city. In New Generation, the disability of the husband is actually presented as a valorized marker of patriotism, a kind of physical euphemism, so as to lure a girl to give up her privileged urban residency. Although in the end Jeong-ok manages to persuade her parents and departs with Yun-cheol to become his lifetime companion, New Generation ends “with the brilliant neon light of the capital city,”125 which projects Page 123 →Pyongyang as the glamorized utopian space, an image that fuels everyone’s desire to live there. Even though the play shows the female protagonist’s voluntary decision to move from an urban to a rural area, it nevertheless reaffirms the binary opposition Pyongyang-versus-rural by asserting that lives in those two spaces are fundamentally different in their material and cultural circumstances. Jeong-ok’s decision to follow Yun-cheol to his hometown in the countryside is presented as the young Pyongyangite’s self-sacrifice, thus affirming the idea that life in the capital is far more desirable for her: throughout the play, Pyongyang is defined as a comfortable space with concrete material qualities—comfortable, well-furnished rooms, broad streets, high-rises, beautiful parks—and leisurely activities constantly alluring the viewers. In the stage plays that center on Pyongyang, including New Generation, urban pleasures are state-sanctioned, far from the decadent pleasures associated with consumerist culture. However, as is explored in Cuckoo Bird Sings, sustaining rural life is coterminous with retaining young women in the countryside as guarantors of the future labor force, and in this respect New Generation, together with Traces of Life, pushes the notion to a higher register by making urban women go to the countryside. This theme reaches its zenith with the 1993 film Urban Girls Come to Get Married (Dosi cheonyeo sijibwayo). Its title presupposes a spatial divide between urban areas and the countryside. The dichotomy is accentuated by the visual juxtaposition of two disparate spaces, which are later used to valorize urban girls’ decision to settle in the countryside. The film centers on Ri-hyang, a young fashion designer in Pyongyang, who eventually gives up the coveted urban lifestyle to marry Seong-sik, a model farmworker whose lifetime dream is to increase the national food supply by producing a better breed of ducks. The unlikely coupling of Ri-hyang and Seong-sik begins with their accidental encounter in Pyongyang when Seong-sik comes to town to discuss his breeding methods. He enters the city as a country bumpkin with ducks waddling around him, one of which inadvertently steps on Rihyang’s fashion illustration. When Ri-hyang reprimands Seong-sik for behaving senselessly, as if he were on a country farm, Seong-sik bashfully replies: “So, comrade, you only think of clothing, but don’t you also consume food?” The film sets up Seong-sik’s question as an entry to illustrate the point that the spatial divide between the urban and the rural is transposed onto the divide in the production of clothing and food, with which Ri-hyang and Seong-sik are respectively associated. Seong-sik implies that life would be impossible with only one product or the other, that Page 124 →a person must have both clothing and food in order to live. Likewise, a nation could not exist if there were only urban or rural, and there must be both in order for it to sustain itself.

The initial petulance of Ri-hyang toward Seong-sik eventually turns into a feeling of admiration when she and her coworkers at the garment factory volunteer to help do farmwork that the movie calls “battle for rice planting” (monaegi jeontu). Ri-hyang gradually learns about Seong-sik’s unconditional dedication to his calling, and their relationship develops into romantic courtship. Ri-hyang’s supervisor, Gwang-ho, encourages the young couple’s courtship, as he has a plot in his mind to lure a model worker like Seong-sik to his factory in case the couple gets married. Ri-hyang also hopes for Seong-sik to follow her to the city, but his dedication to farmwork is unflinching. He tells her why he sees his work as a national mission: “Our Father, Comrade Great Leader [Kim Ilsung], has visited our farm three times. He instructed young people not to leave their hometowns and to build ideal Communist land here.” Hearing the instructions of the Great Leader, Ri-hyang seems to understand the unflinching will of her potential suitor and stops urging him to leave his hometown. The couple is separated when Ri-hyang and her comrades return to Pyongyang after completing the volunteer work, a separation that drives both to sentimental depression. Having noticed that his plan to bring Seong-sik to the city has been thwarted, frustrated Gwang-ho urges Ri-hyang to convince Seong-sik to join her in the city. She replies: “I miss him, but I do not miss him as an individual. I miss the spirit of our young workers whose minds stream toward the construction of a socialist countryside.” Ri-hyang finally gives her job in the city and goes to live with Seong-sik. Thus, the film issues a definitive verdict through Ri-hyang’s speech—that there is a national mission which transcends that of individuals. Moreover, the film ascertains that the coupling of the young lovers should ideally take place in the countryside rather than in the city. Only then will the personal and the collective mission be in harmony. The same year that saw the release of Urban Girls Come to Get Married, a play by Ri Jeong-u entitled Girl from Pyongyang was published, which features an almost identical plot line. The play is set in contemporary rural farm that is struggling to come up with better rice production plan. A native of the village, Chang-seop, attends an agricultural institute in Pyongyang with a hope that he will be able to aid his hometown farmers to improve their plan to increase production. But while studying in the capital city, he falls in love with Hui-gyeong, a native of Pyongyang. When Huigyeong’s Page 125 →parents find out about their romance, they secretively meet with Chang-seop and pressure him to find a job in Pyongyang so that they can remain close to their only child. In the meantime, Chang-seop’s younger sister Ok-ryeon, who drives village tractors filled with fertilizer derived from animal droppings, joyfully greets her soon-to-be sister-in-law Hui-gyeong, who plans to come live with the family in the countryside. Ignorant of Hui-gyeong’s intentions, Ok-ryeon bitterly complains when she discovers her brother’s plan to escape the harsh rural life and settle in the city for the sake of his fiancée: OK-RYEON: Who doesn’t want to live in Pyongyang? Who wants to run around with a sunburned face in remote farmland like this? Do you think I wouldn’t enjoy wearing high heels and carrying a flower-patterned parasol? Do you think that’s why I, the unmarried girl, run all around the village carrying animal dung? It’s because rice is precious, it’s because I treasure rice . . . Do you think people can fall in love without eating?126 Ok-ryeon’s vitriolic speech about the hardship of country life focuses concretely on the insulted feminine pride that she gives up to provide labor. High heels and flowered parasols in Cuckoo Bird Sings figure as the symbol of urban femininity, or the objects of desire for rural women. Just as in Urban Girls and Traces of Life, it is the female sacrifice that serves as the moral fulcrum of the play. A girl deciding to give up life in the city is the most important element and saves the play or film from a conflict without end. In response to Ok-ryeon’s speech, Huigyeong says: We cannot forsake the calling of our time and deceive your family for the sake of love. Dear Leader Comrade Kim Jong-il said that the countryside is the utmost front of guarding socialism. Only if we have rice can we protect socialism. How could we run away from such a mission? Isn’t it possible to love only under socialism?! Rice must be our love and fate!127 Such a pitch-perfect demonstration of Communist slogans is not farfetched given the realities of the hungerstricken rural North Korea in the 1990s. The play promotes the logic of such sacrifice, as difficult as it is. The play acknowledges the rarity of Hui-gyeong’s choice to abandon her comfortable life in Pyongyang, as a journalist visits her to introduce this urban Page 126 →girl’s story in a newspaper article.128 Hui-gyeong’s speech, more

than anything else, reflects the dismal food crisis that created the national anxiety to rescue the countryside from hunger. It seems that the jolly mood of procreation and regeneration of rural life as presented in performance texts in the 1950s and 1960s degenerated into a desperate cry in the 1990s, as captured in Hui-gyeong’s speech. The urgent call to boost the production of rice weaves the plot of the play, in the form of the villagers’ obsession with cultivating a special kind of rice, a grain of which “measures up to a chestnut, or even a peach.”129 A plot like this where romance ultimately comes to literal fruition finds numerous variations in North Korea. Han Yeong-sun’s 2004 poem, “Girl from Pyongyang and a Veteran Soldier Groom,” is titled almost identically to Ri Jeong-u’s play and features the same coupling of the Pyongyang girl and the country boy: Everyone praises the hardworking maiden, Whose face is as pleasing as her potato seed planting skills. A veteran soldier just discharged from the service Carefully approached the girl and asked: Comrade, where is your hometown? With bright smile on a sweaty face The girl gently replied to the soldier: The hometown that I can never forget Is the capital city of our prosperous country Pyongyang where the General [Kim Jong-il] resides. Touched by the maiden’s heart, which upheld The instructions of the General and chose to come to the countryside, The soldier proposed to her they work hard together And present the General great pleasure by yielding plenty of potatos. They promised each other, the promise of love.130 This imagery of abundant potato crops in the poem and the super-rice blown up in gargantuan portions in Girl from Pyongyang ultimately became the grotesque poster image of the rural utopia of the 1990s and the new century, when in fact millions of people were staving to death in an apocalyptic famine. In 2003, the aggrandized symbols of livelihood and the glories of country life literally entered the cityscape of Pyongyang as if to demonstrate the Page 127 →robust support that the rural economy had shown for the center of the nation. In the film documentation of the aforementioned 2003 parade, a moment is devoted to a moving platform featuring North Korea’s agricultural achievements; a gigantic platform passes through the squares and streets of Pyongyang, on top of which are painted slogans: “Arirang of National Strength and Prosperity,” “Cultivate the Land and Yield Crops Twice a Year!” and “Socialism Is Ours.” The front side of the moving platform features a cornucopia of crops, while the rear was piled with cartons of milk and cans of food, in all different sorts and sizes. The moving platform is surrounded by dancing male and female bodies; women are wearing traditional Korean dresses and punctuating their movement by beating drums, while men are dancing and beating small gongs. The folk music produced by the harmony between drums and gongs alludes to nong-ak, or Korean farmers’ music and

dance, thus tying agricultural production to the notion of tradition. This appears to be the reason why the most visible slogan on the moving platform is “Arirang of National Strength and Prosperity,” since arirang, as the bestknown Korean folk song arguably captures the quintessential spirit of Korean tradition. In contrast to the previous platform, which extolls the technological advancement of the twenty-first century, its futuristic aspect accentuated by scientists wearing white lab gowns, this agricultural platform is to be associated with the Korea of the past, holding itself as the guardian of tradition. Among the performing bodies of musicians and dancers wearing traditional costumes, a small group of performers wear exaggerated masks in the shape of eggs and farm animals. The liveliness of these puppetlike participants is enhanced as the multitude waves artificial red flowers when they pass by the tribune where Kim Jong-il and other leaders stand. North Korea by 2003 had suffered tremendous loss of human lives to starvation, and it is quite significant that the platform parade emphasized the tangible imagery of crops and factory-produced food products, gleefully supported by the dancing people of the countryside. This scenery—desperately attempting to create the illusion of vigorous livelihood—appears grotesque vis-à-vis the hidden tragedies of the food crisis. What is not shown in this ecstatic moment is the apocalyptic dimensions of human tragedy, and in this aspect, the hunger crisis accentuates a noticeable vacuum in the state pageantry, including a variety of theater and film productions pompously demonstrating state power. This significant absence, for the sake of projecting an agricultural and gastronomic utopia while turning a blind eye to human lives, had to be masked by traditional Page 128 →performances of farmers’ dance and music, turning the viewer’s gaze toward the distant countryside. This is why arirang accompanies the march of animals and food from the countryside as the procession enters the stage called Pyongyang, creating the only passable image of the North Korean countryside as an affluent and dutiful supplier of food for urban and national consumption.

Page 129 →CHAPTER 3 Revival of the State Patriarchs Kim Il-sung as the Founder of National Essence Can there be eternal and unconditional love between the citizen and the state? Can a citizen’s love survive the passing of its object into oblivion and continue to worship only one person forever? Kim Il-sung passed away in 1994, but the majority of North Koreans still pledge unflinching love and loyalty for the deceased leader with an intensity that is often incomprehensible to outsiders. In every major publication and at every landmark in North Korea, the slogan “Our Great Leader Comrade Kim Il-sung Is Forever with Us!” is written in large flaming red letters. Figure 23. A mural painting titled Kim Il-sung Is Immortal in Pyongyang. (Photo courtesy of an anonymous donor.) Page 130 →The memory of the dead leader is so fiercely guarded that he is still the nominal president of the country, making North Korea a nation governed by a dead man, whose right to rule was inherited by his surviving heir, Kim Jong-il. Kim Jong-il has the official title “Chairman of the National Commission of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea”—a modest step down from the title of “President.” The intense admiration for Kim Il-sung is a striking element that often surfaces in conversations with North Korean defectors. The testimony of a defector who participated in the construction of Kim Il-sung’s Presidential Palace in the early 1970s offers a glimpse of the boundless love North Korean citizens feel for their leader: Incredible human effort had been poured into it [the construction of the Presidential Palace], and no expense was spared. Silk blankets wrapped pipelines that were supposed to go underneath Kim Ilsung’s living quarters. All kinds of expensive trees, Chinese junipers, laurels, and many others, came from different provinces to be used as construction materials and garden decorations. White cement, ground marble, and limestone were mixed to create the best kind of wall finish for the exterior of the building. Thousands and thousands of workers dangling on ropes tied to the rooftop hammered the exterior walls of the Presidential Palace as they descended to the ground. It was a remarkable sight; they looked like zillions of ants against the blinding white wall finish. As the hammering went on incessantly, the ground marble became exposed and shone in dazzling sunlight. Soldiers worked with neither sleep nor breaks for meals, as if they were on a battlefield. Once concrete was mixed, everyone dismissed the thought of taking a break and went on working until the concrete ran out. The soldiers’ loyalty to the Great Leader Kim Il-sung was such that everyone voluntarily worked around the clock. The belief that the collective purpose was higher and greater than individual well-being was strong enough to eclipse any other thoughts. . . . Nobody could stop us, and the Presidential Palace came out so solid that even a nuclear bomb would have had difficulty damaging it. The building stood there, a bright shimmering white, as a testimony to the remarkable love all the construction workers had for the Great Leader. When the heroic construction efforts ended, I was awarded the rank of a second lieutenant.1 The voluntary love of these soldiers, without which the massive scale of construction would have been impossible, produced the edifice in a remarkably short period of time. Embodying the power of the collective love and loyalty for the national leader, the Presidential Palace stands today as the eternal sanctuary where his embalmed body reigns as the honorary president. Page 131 → Figure 24. A female cadet looking at Kim Il-sung’s photo outside the Geumsusan memorial palace where his body is enshrined. (Photo courtesy of an anonymous donor.) North Korean people’s love for their state father is expressed in ways too numerous to count, with a typical example sounding like the interview I conducted with a former high-ranking official in the foreign trade

department who defected to South Korea immediately after Kim’s death: “I did not have any problem in North Korea. In fact, I lived a very comfortable life in the north as the general manager of the foreign trade department in charge of supplying all the foreign-made consumer goods to hotels in Pyongyang. Given the nature of my job, I had numerous chances to travel abroad, which was very exciting for me. But when our Dear General died in 1994, I lost all hope. I felt like there was no reason for me to remain in North Korea. Our Dear General was the only reason for me to love my country, so when he passed away, I decided to defect.”2 Considering that these are the statements of defectors who have forsaken their homeland in search of a better life, it is simply astonishing to observe Page 132 →their continuing commitment to and love for the deceased leader of the country they have deserted. Journalist Bradley Martin highlights the same point and admits how effective the propaganda is in upholding Kim Il-sung as all-loving and all-giving: “People were constantly telling me stories about Kim Il-sung’s benevolence. For example, he supposedly sent a team of doctors with medicine ‘worth the cost of a small factory’ aboard his personal airplane when he heard that a resident of the mountains was criticallyill. Even writing off 99 percent to propaganda, it was clear that Kim possessed considerable political genius. In his ability to make North Koreans feel close to him and personally indebted to him, Kim operated much like a successful old-time American big-city boss. Whatever anybody got in the way of goodies came in Kim’s name, as a ‘gift.’”3 Perhaps of all expressions of North Korean’s patriotism, one of the most distinctive rhetorical devices is to identify the country with a single leader. The notion that the state and its leader are completely fused culminated in the state’s ritualistic commemoration of the founding father. How did this collective love for the father-nation come about? What are the historical-cultural circumstances that created a belief in patriarchy as fierce as religious passion? The twentieth century began with a crisis for Korea. The traditional Confucian system led to bankruptcy through humiliating incidents resulting from the pressure of the outside world. While Japan was eagerly modernizing after the Meiji Restoration, Korea held onto its insulated mode of existence, resisting the inevitable process of opening up to the outside world. Koreans were faced with a crisis involving national essence (guksu) far more concrete than any intellectual debate in China. The annexation of Korea by Japan in 1910 and the consequent harsh period of colonial rule deprived Koreans of time and resources to develop their thoughts about the nation itself.4 With the unprecedented oppression of free speech, Korean nationalists, despite threat and danger, strove to define the Korean national essence through language and culture, but their activities generated only an escalated level of oppression.5 According to historian Andre Schmid, as Japanese colonial rule prohibited free speech in Korea, there was a move away from statecentered definitions of the nation, which offered an alternative strategy of resistance: “Now that the state and territory had been taken over, national survival could be redefined through more spiritual concepts, less as an effort to civilize and progress until the criteria for sovereignty were achieved and more as a collective effort to sustain a sense of self by nurturing those facets of the nation such as history, language, and religion—areas that were less accessible to the soldiers and Page 133 →bureaucrats of the colonial state.”6 As a result, the center of debate on national liberation had to move away from the colonized territories to diaspora communities, such as in northern Manchuria, Hawaii, and the Russian Far East, where Koreans could operate in a relatively free environment and reassemble resources for further activities to liberate Korea.7 The sense of lost nationhood had emerged from the lack of a strong national leader in Korea, which had a long history of upholding the Confucian tradition of identifying the nation with the patriarchal leader, who conventionally passed down his status to the designated male heir. As Korea lost its head of state in the early twentieth century, the lineage of the Korean royal family came to an end when the last king of the Joseon dynasty, Sunjong, married a Japanese princess to symbolize the annexation of Korea to Japan. More crucially, the last ruler of the Korean dynasty did not give the people a sense of strong leadership when the nation was in unprecedented crisis. The impotence of the rulers reminded Koreans of why they had been subjugated to foreign powers and harsh colonial rule. Consequentially, the people of Korea desired a charismatic figure, both as a practical commander-in-chief in military affairs and as the symbolic embodiment of national sovereignty, to lead them through crisis. Upon his

return to Korea after the liberation from Japanese colonial rule, Kim Il-sung made an attempt to present himself as the provider for the Korean people with a promise of reviving a strong, independent nation. Moreover, the army unit he led, consisting mostly of poor peasants who had lost their family, became an ideal surrogate family, which offered a vision of a radically different future where the traditional familial authority would not exist. The effect of Kim’s anti-Japanese resistance activities in Manchuria is obscure.8 Historical accounts testify to the fact that “the major organized efforts to resist the Japanese in Manchuria during the life of the Japanese puppet regime, Manchuguo, from 1933 to 1945, were carried out by the Chinese Communists and not Koreans . . . there was no separate organized efforts by the Korean Communists,”9 according to political scientist Suh Dae-Sook’s [Seo Dae-suk] biography of Kim. And the largest number of partisans Kim led was some two hundred. Despite, or because of, his lack of credentials as a leader, there was an urgent need for Kim to fabricate military legends for himself, including escaping death in an attack by the Japanese police, endowing himself with the status of an underground hero.10 As a result, “Kim’s participation in the anti-Japanese guerrilla activities in Manchuria won him the first recognition, and toward the latter part of his campaign he was important enough Page 134 →for the Japanese to post a reward for information leading to his arrest.”11 Furthermore, North Korean historians unanimously assert that Korean partisan groups were formed in southern and eastern Manchuria about 1934 and list members and localities involved. These historians further claim that Kim organized these and other Korean partisan groups to form what he called a Korean People’s Revolutionary Army in the spring of 1934. But the later version of Kim’s biography has changed the date to February 1936. The veracity of numerous contradicting claims about Kim’s activities is not as crucial as North Korea’s assertion that such an army existed in the colonial era. As Suh argues: “More important than the juggling of dates is the formation of the army itself. There is, of course, no record of such an army. It is a name that has been invented to designate a Korean group that operated under a Chinese guerrilla army.”12 The fabricated version of the national past may not be a reliable source of historical facts, but it is an entry point to understanding the origins of unconditional love and obedience cultivated through manipulation and persuasion. The importance of Kim’s resistance activities prior to the foundation of North Korea lies in the significance attributed to them by revolutionary operas and other films of later generations, which identified this resistance period as their major source of inspiration for myths about the newly founded Communist nation-state. This period of the resistance movement also constituted the teleological historiography of North Korea, in the sense that it designated the anti-Japanese struggles as an inevitable historical step toward the state leaders’ coming to power and the subsequent realization of the Communist utopia. The foundation of North Korea in 1948 opened an unprecedented era in which the traditional East Asian values of Confucianism and the social system of Communism, which originated in the political economy of the West, merged into a new hybrid. Eric Cornell in North Korea under Communism points out that a fundamental influence of the Confucian structure on the new regime was “the principles for relations between people—between ruler and subject, between father and son, man and wife, older and younger brother, and between friends. With the possible exception of the last one, they are all clearly hierarchical and connected with authority.”13 Paradoxical as it may sound, the Korean Communists’ claim to have eradicated the feudal culture of the past never restrained their relentless effort to establish the patriarchal figure of the nation as one of their leaders. The Confucian tradition of identifying the father with the nation itself was Page 135 →manifested in every aspect of social life. Armstrong has noted that “the Kim cult would go well beyond Stalinism and Maoism in its pervasiveness, longevity, and extension beyond the individual to the family of the Great Leader himself [. . .] Kim’s immediate family became a kind of substitute and symbol for the family of the Korean nation. In the use of family metaphors and symbols, North Korean nationalism has been typical of postcolonial nations, if more literal than most.”14 However, even if there are similarities among postcolonial nations, and we have in mind the personal idolization of Mao in China, Kim Il-sung took a different path because of the different roles the two leaders played in the

formation of the new socialist regimes. Mao’s position as a recognized leader of the Communist Party was undoubted when he declared the foundation of the PRC. Quite the contrary, Kim Il-sung, whose main guerrilla activities took place outside of Korea, was almost unknown to native Koreans when he returned from the Soviet Union in 1945. Unlike Mao, who was the undisputed central figure in the Communist struggle to grasp hegemony, and who gained victory over the Guomindang at the end of the civil war (1945–49), Kim Il-sung played virtually no role in national liberation. When he returned to Korea, he was aligned with one of the five factions of power competing for leadership of the newly founded North Korea.15 Thus, unlike Mao, Kim had many internal enemies to fight in order to establish himself as the legitimate leader. It was only in the late 1950s that Kim successfully eliminated the other fractions and established himself as the uncontested head of the country.16 This difference in the positions of Mao and Kim led to a gap between the rhetoric of family in the two countries: while both regimes were obsessed with legitimizing their leaders by investing them with the patriarchal authority of a traditional family, Kim promoted himself as the only father figure much more intensely than Mao ever did. If Mao’s personality cult mostly concerned elevating and empowering him as an individual state leader, Kim’s personality cult had much deeper, statewide repercussions, since it was fundamentally conflated with the North Korean state itself. Kim’s process was based on the logic that the empowerment of the family patriarch would result in the empowerment of the family-nation, which blurred the boundary between an individual leader and the state organization. This partly explains why North Korea consolidated the hereditary socialist state, whereas Mao’s biological sons were not regarded as his natural heirs. Kim Il-sung’s insecurity as leader, even after the complete purge of his political competitors, emerged from the fact that he, unlike Mao, could Page 136 →not demonstrate evidence of past partisan activities that had a decisive impact on the foundation of North Korea. Such insecurity stemming from the lack of an actual power base, with the symbolic system created to represent the leader’s legitimacy, engendered a stronger personality cult in North Korea. Kim Il-sung took measures to ensure his fragile position not only by aggrandizing his achievements, most of which were histrionically captured in paintings, illustrations, and episodes in the performing arts, but also by transforming his entire household into a pantheon of revolutionary heroes. Numerous visual presentations depict Kim and his family members—his parents, wife, uncle, and son—as Communist heroes. Part of such efforts were persistent claims that cultural productions based on Kim Il-sung’s anti-Japanese revolutionary saga were grounded on historical facts. Numerous articles reinforce the notion that literature, theater, and film productions of the 1950s faithfully reconstructed events as they had happened. In an article on how Kim inspired writers with his revolutionary activities, the anonymous author recalls how he was moved by the presence of the leader and uses direct quotations in order to deliver Kim Il-sung’s words as they were spoken by the leader himself. Yes, this is the General Kim Il-sung. Yes, this is the very magnificent general who brought iron fist on the heads of the Japanese invaders and subdued them everywhere! And we were having a meal with him now. What an honor. I badly wanted to hear about his revolutionary days, and that moment, one writer asked: “General! We writers want to hear from you about your anti-Japanese revolutionary activities in your own words. This is the biggest wish we all have.” Having heard this, he looked around in the audience. . . . “We all had to arm ourselves by taking back the enemies’ arms and weapons. This was a lifethreatening matter, and this is why on every weapon we have nowadays, there are bloodstains of our fallen comrades.”17 The anonymous writer concludes that listening to Kim Il-sung’s experiences in what turned out to be an all-night conversation was like receiving a university-level education on Marxism and Leninism. And thanks to that unforgettable conversation, the writers in attendance were able to create masterpieces such as My Hometown,

Baekdu Mountain, and Thunderstorm. Visual arts supply abundant comparable examples to accompany the verbal narratives. Paintings and photos reproduced in this chapter are just a few of the many that enjoyed a wide circulation. The idolization of Kim, as these images suggest, created a biography of a revolutionary household embracing three generations. Page 137 → Figure 25. A painting illustrates child Kim Il-sung visiting his father, imprisoned for his antiJapanese revolutionary activities. The caption provided in the text indicates that Kim was inspired by his father to become a revolutionary at an early age. Joseon Yesul 6 (1968): 7. In these paintings, Kim Il-sung’s childhood is reinvented as a germinating period when his revolutionary father and mother not only awaken his consciousness but also live the lives of revolutionaries themselves. Kim’s father is shown imprisoned, a martyr who sacrifices himself for the cause of regaining national independence (see fig. 25). The disconnect between father and son—prison bars in this case—calls forth an emotional response from the viewers, who cannot help noticing how frail the boy is. Nevertheless, he appears resolute, seemingly focused on his own determination to carry out plans to rescue the nation from turmoil, while his father’s gaze is focused on him. Instead of focusing on the personal (the father), the boy looks beyond the confines of his traditional family and looks into the national future. In North Korean revolutionary legend, the boy promises to Page 138 →carry out retribution in the name of the family and fight against the Japanese enemies. The painting is accompanied by numerous tales, creating a realistic impression through countless repetitions: “At the age of seven he and his mother visited his imprisoned father, whose countenance had ‘sadly changed from the torture endured.’ After the visit his mother told him that he would never see his father again. ‘I want you to grow up fast and avenge your father!’ she cried, whereupon Kim, hearing these words, ‘swore before his mother that he would avenge his father without fail.’”18 The Confucian tradition of upholding family elders’ honor plays a major part in justifying the revenge plot. Sheila Miyoshi Jager has pointed out the deeply rooted Confucian vision that fertilizes the nation’s first step toward revolution: “Past meets present in the future avenging of the father by the son. The narrative behind Kim’s narrative is thus one of a fantasy of self-regenerating fatherhood and patriarchal power. But it also offers a redemptive vision of history in which the failures of the father are redeemed by the successes of the son.”19 The father-son relationship creates a timeless continuum with duplicated images of another father-son link, this time between Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il as his heir. This guarantees not only a lineage of a few individuals but also a connection between the leadership and the people, who see a metonymical presence of the entire nation embodied in these individuals. These paintings and photo extend the story of a revolutionary household far beyond one individual to that of a traditional family. North Korea’s idolization of the state father passed down to the next generation, as it did not in the PRC, and Kim Il-sung’s heir also displayed the traditional Confucian virtue of a pious son. Kim Jong-il built a museum and erected a statue of his mother, Kim Jeong-suk, in her hometown after he became prominent in North Korea in the late 1970s. The display of filial piety was intended to strike the chord of traditional Confucian values in the minds of the Korean people. This helped Kim Il-sung and his son establish a virtuous image. Cornell points out that this effort resonated with the absolute power of the ruler of the traditional society: “Against a background of the ‘mandate of heaven,’ the cult of personality—if not all its trappings—was natural. . . . Further, the presentation of Kim Il-sung’s son as successor was logical. At the same time, it is tempting to see both a national and a hierarchical element in the way in which all of Kim Il-sung’s ancestors were made out to be eminent revolutionaries. What was this, other than an insistence upon aristocratic breeding of a suitable sort?”20 Cornell’s observation is grounded on Page 139 →the fact that Kim’s personal idolization resonated with an old aristocratic practice of upholding the prestige of the entire household. But I contend that a closer look at these illustrations reveals that Kim’s personal idolization was also an attempt to present the leader as an approachable, ordinary member of the family: as a child of caring parents, a father of a son, relationships in which many Korean people would find themselves.

The efforts to establish Kim as the founding father of the state influenced all aspects of social and cultural life in North Korea. The notion that he also fathered national art and culture legitimized his advent as a ruler and established the family’s position as the foundation of national essence. One of the ways to project the state father as the provenance of revolutionary spirit and culture was to attribute to him specific linguistic expressions, such as “origin,” “seed,” and “source,” the frequent use of which created an impression that Kim “fathered” the revolutionary productions and thereby opened an era of new national culture for revolutionized Korea. By attributing to the state father the creative principles of national art, North Korea could create and consolidate the images of their leaders as the progenitors of national essence. Kim Il-sung, who could show no concrete evidence of his artistic expertise or creative activities, was hailed as the author or inspirer of numerous revolutionary plays after coming to power. As one example, a literary historian, Ri Sang-tae, noted in 1960 that Kim organized a dramatic circle to propagate revolutionary ideology in the 1920s, from which later emerged a revolutionary dramatic tradition of North Korea.21 It was imperative to invent Kim Il-sung as the authentic creator of revolutionary art, since this not only compensated for his lack of an artistic career but also created a sense of tradition for North Korean culture dating back to the preliberation period of the 1930s. Kim’s and his clan members’ lives were designated as the legitimate source for inventing tradition, which further endowed the leader and his nation with authority. In an effort to conceal the breach between historical fact and fabricated versions of history, North Korea produced and circulated vast amounts of immediately recognizable visual propaganda depicting Kim Il-sung as the founder of Korean socialist art. These images were carefully choreographed to show that his career was persistently invested in developing and supporting socialist arts even before the foundation of North Korea. A painting that appeared in Joseon Yesul (1982) shows young Kim leading a group of entertainers to villagers, which resonates with the socialist ethos of making art serve the people. But it is Kim’s youth that deserves the most Page 140 →attention. The depiction of him as dedicated to the people’s art from such an early age legitimizes his status as the founder of Korean socialist art. Another painting that also appeared in Joseon Yesul (1969) was also part of efforts to fabricate the image of Kim as the person who shaped people’s entertainment and art: in figure 26, Kim is giving instructions to performers on their acting, thus resiliently reinventing himself as not only a valorous military leader, but also an artistic visionary participating directly in the creative process. If this painting captured Kim’s creative endeavor in the making of drama off stage, figure 27 shows him at center stage among performers congratulating him and giving him flowers.22 This narcissistic illustration of Kim shows the reversal of the conventional relationship between the performers and the spectator. The performers are depicted as worshiping the spectator of their show, who occupies the center of their gaze. As a result, Kim Il-sung comes to occupy the place conventionally identified with the main performer, indulging himself in his usual roles, that is, as creator, critic, and patron of North Korea’s national art. By setting the emergence of the revolutionary cultural tradition as simultaneous with Kim’s anti-Japanese guerrilla movement in the 1930s and 1940s, prior to the establishment of North Korea, North Koreans could transform Kim, the guerrilla leader in Manchuria, into a proverbial creator of revolutionary art and argue for the traditional authority of the North Korean culture, which actually was an invented tradition formed over a short period of time under the strong influence of the cultures of the Soviet Union and the PRC. For these reasons, North Korea’s literary history attributes the authorship of revolutionary operas and plays to Kim Il-sung: according to the official explanation, Kim either wrote the production scripts himself or provided his anti-Japanese resistance experiences as vibrant sources of plots for revolutionary operas and plays.23 Figure 26. Kim Il-sung is seen as giving instructions on acting. Joseon Yesul 8–9 (1971): 7. Page 141 → Figure 27. Kim Il-sung is seen among entertainers on stage. Joseon Yesul 11(1973): 5. It must be emphasized that the process of creating the revolutionary operas is invested in the father-son relationship of the Kim clan. This marks a radical departure from the PRC example, which lacks the patrilineal emphasis based on blood ties.24 According to North Korea’s official explanation, Kim Il-sung provided the experience and original script, while Kim Jong-il fleshed out his father’s master plan into a full production.

Allegorically speaking, Kim Il-sung disseminated the seed of the revolutionary operas, while his son cultivated and harvested the productions. The hereditary project of creating national culture, which was passed down from father to Page 142 →biological son, had a theoretical basis systematically crafted to uphold Kim Il-sung’s personal cult. The practice of positioning Kim Il-sung as the disseminator of national culture was consolidated into “seed theory” by the North Korean cultural bureau. “Seed theory” appeared in 1972 in North Korea’s Dictionary of Literature and Art, which correlated the seed with Kim Il-sung’s personal ideology: In the process of materializing Comrade Kim Il-sung’s juche ideology concerning literature and art, seed theory was born as the result of independent research by the party. Simply put, the seed constitutes the core of art and determines its essential value. Only when the creator of an artwork properly determines the core is he or she able to convey appropriately the ideological and aesthetic intentions and secure the philosophical ground of the work. . . . Seed theory is not merely limited to some aspects of creation, such as theme, ideology, or material. It determines the entire process of creation, beginning from the selection of material to the structure of the artwork, character development, and the fundamental value of the work. . . . The most important criterion in selecting the right seed is to examine how truthfully it pertains to the ideas of Kim Il-sung’s instructions and the party’s political measures, which are the realization of Kim’s ideas.25 Despite the close resemblance between the formulaic description of seed theory and the literary theory of socialist realism devised in the Soviet Union, seed theory reflects unique practices to which there is no parallel outside the cultural boundaries of North Korea. Elsewhere, the personal instruction of the political leader was never regarded as the entirety of the artistic principle, but in North Korea, the personal teaching of Kim Il-sung and the party policy were understood to be identical, and also seen as the determinative core of art. Kim Il-sung’s ideology is determined as the seed, and the seed theory is determined as the aesthetic contrivance to carry out his ideological teachings. By attributing to the state fathers the ability to create and disseminate revolutionary art, the theoretical establishment could properly consolidate the patrilineal heritage of the revolutionary operas. In creating the impression that the state leader and his people are united in the socialist family network embodied in propaganda productions, they could distinguish enemies from the rest of the family-nation. This was another crucial reason the Page 143 →patriarchal rhetoric was appropriated in establishing the origins of the socialist theater: theater was not merely an epiphenomenal product of social life but an effective social institution for crafting and propagating the state ideology. It could draw a line between “us” and the “enemy” by resorting to the familiar family structure of establishing kinship among its members.

From Traditional Patriarchs to State Patriarchs When Kim Il-sung’s status as the patriarch of the family-nation was consolidated, what happened to the fathers in traditional family units? If the state patriarchs are supposed to be the source of the socialist theater tradition, then what roles do the patriarchs of the traditional family units play in propaganda performances? The coexistence of two sets of fathers—one of the nation-state, the other of traditional family units—raises the question of how Kim designated propaganda productions as an instrument to establish the necessary hierarchy between himself and the traditional patriarchs. The plot conventions of North Korean propaganda performances demonstrate that the presence of the state patriarchs deprives the traditional patriarchs of their masculinity and transforms them into secondary males. In this process, the state patriarchs must dominate the traditional ones in one way or another. The transition from traditional to state patriarchs was a literal one. In North Korea, orphans from the Korean War have been told that their real and only father is Kim Il-sung, whose benevolence rescued them from destitution and nurtured them into functional members of the new socialist utopia. Kim Yong, a North Korean defector who

grew up in the Pyongyang orphanage in the 1950s, still remembers the lyrics of the first song he learned to sing: The sky is blue and I feel happy Play the accordion out loud, I love my homeland, everyone lives happily Our father, the Great Leader Kim Il-sung The warm embrace of our party!26 Not only the orphans, but also the children with parents learned to revere the state father Kim far more religiously than their biological parents. So much so that according to an anonymous defector who lived in the rural area and witnessed many deaths by starvation in the mid-1990s in his village, Page 144 →he heard no villagers blaming the national leader for their misery despite the horrific events everyone went through.27 What could possibly explicate such an uncanny mind-set of which there seem to be so many instances? Obviously, not only children, but also adults have to unlearn their position within the traditional family and accommodate the fact that they are the eternal children of the father Kim Il-sung within the imagined family of the nation-state. “Simulation of eternal childhood,” as I describe this epistemological process, is fleshed out by many hypnotic performance activities. Like the song taught at the orphanage, North Korea’s numerous visual illustrations aggressively instill the image in people’s minds, substituting the state father Kim Il-sung for the traditional father. Joseon Yesul in April, 1970, featured a painting with a caption “The Party Relies on Veterans’ Families Like Yours.” It shows Kim Il-sung at the center of the viewer’s gaze. At the very far right corner is an old patriarch of the house who occupies less than a marginal position in the visual composition. The gaze of the viewers is directed toward the interaction between Kim, the state patriarch, and the widow of the household, which closely resembles the normative interaction between a married couple or that of parents surrounded by their children. The illustration shows that the void created by a dead traditional patriarch can easily be filled by a state patriarch. Figure 28. Kim Il-sung visits a soldier’s family. Joseon Yesul 4 (1970): 11. Page 145 →Another painting titled “Kim Il-sung visits a soldier’s family” (see fig. 28) shows Kim Il-sung reading a letter sent from a war front by the father of the family. Again, he is seen as occupying the usual space of the traditional patriarch, who is absent rather than dead. A wife stands by Kim Il-sung obediently as if awaiting his orders, while children cling to the arms of the state father in search of fatherly love. The little girl, in particular, is positioning herself intimately with the state father not only by clinging to his arms, but also by marginalizing her biological father, whose little photo she holds onto. However, she is completely oblivious to this photographic presence of her biological father: she is consumed by her intense gaze at Kim as if gladly substituting him with her own father. The space Kim occupies is none other than the fatherly fulcrum of the family. Even when the traditional patriarch is present in a visual composition, he is marginalized by the presence of the state father. A painting that appeared in Joseon Yesul in January, 1969, features a conventional motif: an illustration of Kim surrounded by enraptured members of a traditional family. In the far right corner is a young male who presumably is the father of two children. However, he is situated in the same place as his children in relation to the state father. The state patriarch not only takes the authority of the traditional patriarch but also reduces the latter’s stature to that of his docile children, emerging as the seductive new father of the family. One of the common features of all these images is Kim Il-sung’s physical proximity to the children of the household. The intimate physical interaction between Kim and children reassures the viewer of the patriarchal authority of the state father, which overshadows the authority of the traditional parents, especially the father figure. In order to consolidate the statewide authority of the newborn patriarch of North Korea, it was necessary to

restrain, if not entirely eliminate, the masculine authority of the traditional patriarchs. For this reason, unlike the state fathers, who are now cultivated and worshiped as the life-giving source of the nation, traditional fathers are presented in propaganda performances as individuals deprived of masculinity and vigor. The most prevalent plot structure of the propaganda performance has traditional patriarchs absent from the family unit. At the beginning of the revolutionary opera Flower Girl, Cheol-yong, the son of a poor servant family, laments that he has had to serve the exploitative landlord for many years, as he glances at the room where “his father passed away while serving Page 146 →the same landlord.”28 Reflecting the persistent marginalization of domestic male figures, throughout the filmed stage performance Cheol-yong is given only a peripheral space on stage and screen, while his sister, Kkot-bun—the central figure propelling the dramatic narrative—is presented through multiple close-ups and spotlights. Cheol-yong, the only male in a traditional family unit, is treated as if invisible by means of the camera’s persistent focus primarily on the female protagonist. In this respect, he becomes absent just like the dead father, and is overshadowed by the omnipresent benevolence of Kim Il-sung. In the case of Sea of Blood, the father of the protagonists dies early in the play while resisting the Japanese invaders. The same production features a group of widows whose husbands were killed while working at the Japanese-owned mine. One widow laments that life without her husband, the traditional provider for the family, marked her downfall: “Since I’ve lost my husband to the wretched world, I barely survive taking care of my child. When tears blur my eyes and hardship blocks my path, I think of dying more than ten times a day.”29 Through the filmic technique involved in documenting the performance, the chorus of these widows lamenting their loss resonates as a powerful resurgence of life despite the absence of their male partners in a traditional family unit: the vibrant sound effects capture high-pitched monologues one after another and then bring them together in a vibrant cacophony. This makes the women’s complaints resemble both lament and exhilarating chanting and thereby transforms the widows into the embodiment of the resilient continuation of life in which the absence of men does not weigh too much. In contrast, when the traditional patriarchs are present in the family unit, they are mostly projected as emasculated characters who do not function as traditional providers for the family. Oh, Tell the Forest stands out for its relatively equivocal narrative structure interlaced with the conflicting presence of the two patriarchs, family and state. The production showcases the temporary dissonance between them. The story takes place in colonial Korea under Japanese occupation and revolves around the dual identity of Byeong-hun, who is a secret agent working for Kim’s anti-Japanese resistance movement. He disguises his true identity and plays the role of a servile lackey working for Japanese administrators in order to obtain necessary information for the resistance movement. His daughter, Bok-sun, is engaged to a boy from the village where Byeong-hun and his daughter live. The boy’s father adamantly refuses to become an in-law of the lackey and opposes the engagement. Byeong-hun has to Page 147 →endure the villagers’ hatred toward him for betraying his fellow Koreans, and act servile toward the Japanese so that he can accomplish his secret mission. To the same degree that Byeong-hun’s identity is dichotomized, so is Bok-sun’s role as a daughter. The conflict lies in her having to choose between the two patriarchs. Thus the play imposes a pivotal choice upon children: What should they choose between blood ties and revolutionary ideology? The production centers around this paradox as viewers are forced to face this dilemma for themselves. Bok-sun must operate within two contrasting sets of moral codes. On the one hand, she must function as a good daughter raised in a Confucian society, so she must obey her father regardless of his despicable reputation within the village. On the other hand, she must act loyal to Kim Il-sung, the true embodiment of the Korean national essence. She laments that there cannot be any reconciliation between her biological father and the state father: “Ah, my beloved father, I never imagined that you could serve the Japanese. After we lost our country and mother to the Japanese, how can you serve them?”30 In the meantime, Byeong-hun tantalizes the audience by exposing his moral dilemma: BYOENG-HUN: Should I only tell my daughter the secret story I kept deep in my mind? CHORUS: No way to break the firm oath pronounced in the face of revolution.

It shall not be broken by tender feelings or by tears.31 The chorus here accentuates the rules of the revolutionary task Byeong-hun is likely to forget. In this process of mirroring each other, the chorus comments on the development of the plot, but more importantly, it becomes an alter ego of Byeong-hun and complements what he has not explicitly said in his speech. Thus, the chorus and Byeong-hun explore the psychological dimensions of the protagonist, which is uncommon for didactic propaganda performances. The chorus once again comments on the inner state of the protagonist by presenting his dilemma: CHORUS: The man is suffering deeply from the heart. The excruciating tragedy of not having a homeland. BYEONG-HUN: I can endure insults aimed at me personally. But I cannot ignore the sufferings of the people in our village. Page 148 →When will the national liberation come? I long for the day when the General will embrace me.32 The chorus and Byeong-hun mirror and complement each other’s part. The protagonist gains psychological dimension, which, in turn, discloses the male hierarchy as Byeong-hun openly reveals his dependence on the more powerful male figure. While Byeong-hun’s status as a father of the traditional family unit is deeply threatened, he identifies himself as a child figure who will be embraced by the benevolent state father. This scene allegorically illustrates how the traditional patriarch is subsumed by the patronizing state patriarch. The crisis in this production is resolved when Byeong-hun’s status as a father is restored by virtue of General Kim Il-sung. Just before leaving for a dangerous mission that may jeopardize his life, Byeong-hun shows his daughter a watch presented to him by Kim as a way of proving that he has been working as a secret agent for the General. BYEONG-HUN: (Taking out the watch from his bosom and showing it.) Bok-sun, this watch is a present from the General himself. (Bok-sun receives the watch and sheds emotional tears.) BOK-SUN: Dear General! BYEONG-HUN: You should keep it for many generations to come. (Sings.) To restore our lost nation, we shall march together along the holy path to the revolution. We will be loyal, generation after generation, and fight as our General’s warriors. CHORUS: On the path to the revolution, both life and death are glory. No revolution is achieved easily. Both father and daughter set out for their journey.33 The temporary conflict created between the traditional patriarch and the state patriarch is a device to accentuate the hierarchy among various kinds of fathers in the propaganda productions. The authority of the traditional patriarch stems from nothing but his ability to align himself with the state patriarch. The Song of Geumgang Mountain is another revolutionary opera that reiterates this hierarchy. However, unlike Oh, Tell the Forest, this production Page 149 →precludes any conflict between the traditional and state patriarchs. Quite the contrary, it confirms the hierarchy between the two through seamless harmony. The story is based on how family members, separated during Japanese colonial rule, reunite in utopian Korea. The production attributes the happy occasion of the family reunion to the benevolent leadership of Kim. When the

family members identify and finally embrace one another, the male and female chorus in unison express the joy of the reunion: “For twenty years they have been separated, but finally are reunited in the bosom of the supreme leader. No mountain would be loftier than his benevolence. No sea would be deeper than his affection.”34 The chorus stipulates that the traditional patriarch is rediscovered and his family reassembled only when they are put under the benevolent care of the state patriarch. This transfer of power in propaganda performances presents an inevitable move toward restructuring the traditional family unit within North Korea under the new socialist regime. The state required unconditional subordination and unity from the people in order to consolidate its precarious control. The representation of traditional patriarchs as absent or emasculated figures—or at best, as loyal Kim leaders—in the propaganda performances is a common denominator in both North Korean and PRC propaganda. The social narrative about the individual patriarchs of the traditional family unit during the Cultural Revolution was virtually nonexistent, creating space for the state patriarchs to assert their masculine presence and national unity. The absence of traditional patriarchs and the subsequent rise of the state patriarch to fill the void had to be fleshed out by concrete literary and theatrical devices in the propaganda productions. The state patriarch was projected as the theoretical founder of socialist theater, which was commensurate with the concrete expression in the texts of revolutionary operas. These literary devices include the recurring symbolism of nature representing the state patriarch and the cycle of nature representing the progression of his revolutionary activities. The most prevalent nature imagery used in presenting Kim in the play texts is solar.35 Much as other absolute rulers have been deified through solar imagery—such as Louis XIV and the Japanese emperor Hirohito—Kim Ilsung is routinely referred to as “our Sun, the supreme leader, Kim Il-sung,” not only in theater productions but also in everyday life. The annual celebration of his birthday on April 15, during which a nationwide celebration Page 150 →takes place in the form of arts and sports performances, is named the Sun Festival. The mass media have also highlighted Kim’s stature as the solar hero of the people worshiped not just by North Koreans but by people around the world. The April 1968 issue of Joseon Yesul published eulogies sent by Communist dignitaries, which were studded with phrases such as “Kim eternally shines over the revolutionary people of the world” or “Kim’s name will be embroidered by golden thread in history.” The revolutionary operas carried out such propaganda to establish Kim Il-sung as the ultimate life-giving force. In The Song of Geumgang Mountain, for example, Seok-min composes music to bolster his loyalty for the great leader by comparing Kim to the sun: The sun of our people saved our nation from the blizzard, from the flame. If it were not for the ebullient sun of ours how could Geumgang Mountain stand so beautiful today? The great sun created paradise on earth— our people’s Geumgang Mountain, in the land of heroes. Joy exudes under the sunbeams of our supreme leader. The waves in the East Sea also dance with glee.36 The symbol of the sun as the source of life is accompanied by other supporting images of natural forces, such as blizzards, flames, mountains, and seas. Just as there is a hierarchy in representing levels of patriarchs, so is there a sense of hierarchal structure in the realm of nature, as expressed in model theater works and revolutionary operas. In a similar example:

CHORUS: Ah, the great sun of ours Kim Il-sung, the leader whose name shines For the liberation of this beautiful country He fought amid snowstorm Lofty peaks and crystal-clear water All hymn the boon of Kim Il-sung, the leader.37 The sun as the supreme symbol governs and regulates other symbols of nature. There are multiple examples to illustrate how the sun and other symbols of nature harmonize the conflict between traditional and state patriarch and express the life-giving power of the latter. In Sea of Blood, Mother is tortured Page 151 →and jailed in the Japanese police headquarters for aiding resistance activists. In a hallucinatory state, she envisions the lost Korean nation being restored, which is illustrated in terms of the revival of nature: “Flowers shuffle, the red sun rises.”38 Similarly, in The Song of Geumgang Mountain, there is a moment when Seok-min composes a song about the magnolia, which is the most beloved flower of the supreme leader, Kim Il-sung. Magnolia has bloomed everywhere Under the sunbeams of the supreme leader Embodying the endless feeling of gratitude. They bloomed on every summit of Geumgang Mountain. Ah—magnolia, the flower of Joseon, Bloom forever in the land of socialism.39 Some other symbols of nature include the forest, as in the production Oh, Tell the Forest. Here it becomes so fully animated that it functions to represent the male protagonist Byeong-hun’s inner voice. Such a resonance of voices between the forest and the protagonist becomes especially evident when Byeong-hun, Kim Il-sung’s spy pretending to be a lackey for the Japanese police, finally reveals his true identity after he has led the Japanese troops into the deep forest so that the resistance guerrillas can attack them. BYEONG-HUN: Over there, over there lies Baekdu Mountain. (Having heard Byeong-hun singing “Arirang,” the signal that the Japanese soldiers have arrived at the designated place, the resistance guerrilla blows the trumpet signaling the attack. The Japanese soldiers are in disarray.) JAPANESE LEADER: Who are you, really? BYEONG-HUN: I am the revolutionary warrior of the General Kim Il-sung. (Byeong-hun shoots at the Japanese leader, and in turn, is shot himself. He collapses. The Japanese soldiers are in a chaotic state. The guerrilla attack on the Japanese troops begins. A bunch of Japanese soldiers collapse. Byeong-hun barely gets up.) CHORUS: Ah, the forest begins to shuffle. It shuffles at the loyalty of the revolutionary warrior. Warrior who fell down in the forest, We hear the sounds of victorious trumpets. Page 152 →The forest also shuffles and waves At the loyalty of the revolutionary warrior. (The forest dances. The trees turn.)40

The mere invocation of the General’s name is enough to fully animate the forest. In a fully personified form, it becomes the voice for the male protagonist, whose verbal expression thus far has been limited by the spy role he played. In True Daughter of the Party, Yeon-ok, the self-sacrificing military nurse at the front during the Korean War, enters a South Korean village “liberated” by North Korean troops.41 There, the village girls joyfully sing a song around the village spring, which manifests life-giving force: Is it [spring] so clear because of the brilliant, brilliant sunlight? Is it like a crystal ball, a crystal ball, because of our care? Only tears used to come out of the spring, But today, crystal-clear water joyfully comes out of the spring. The people’s army sent by the General Brought happiness to every single family. The sunbeams of the benevolent General shine and shine. Everyone sings of happiness and joy. There is new life blooming in our southern land, which used to be immersed in darkness. The People’s Army sent by the General Brought happiness to every single family.42 The folk song-like repetition and reiteration of certain stanzas adds a hypnotizing quality to the music. Here again, the General and his army are clearly stated as the source of life. In the same production, when Yeon-ok embarks on a mission to gather food for the army unit she is serving, she encounters an elderly man who attributes the successful harvest to the General. ELDERLY: This rice is the first harvest from the soil liberated by the General. (He sings.) If you encounter the generous General Please express the gratitude of our southern people. Page 153 →Please tell our father General to live a long, long life. CHORUS: Please tell our father General to live a long, long life.43 What deserves a special attention in this quotation is that Kim Il-sung represents the foundation of life in two ways: he is seen as a grain-giver as well as the father of the village dwellers. In a similar vein, The Song of Geumgang Mountain also juxtaposes the General with a bountiful harvest, and thereby accentuates his ability to inspire nature. The grand chorus sings the ode to the supreme leader and blissful nature: Rejoice, rejoice, bountiful harvest everywhere, On the mountains and fields

all kinds of grains and fruits overflow. The Supreme Leader enlightened us with the socialist method of farming, and everywhere you look, there is a bountiful harvest.44 Kim Il-sung’s association with the life-giving and food-producing power is echoed not only in revolutionary operas but also in other fields of art. In the painting published in Joseon Yesul in 1969, Kim is surrounded by farmers threshing grain. Kim himself is holding a thresher, which presents him not as an observer of the harvest but as working with the people in the field. Stars, just like forests, mountains, and flowers, symbolize the state father’s life-giving force in revolutionary operas. In Oh, Tell the Forest, the chorus projects the General as a star: “The star rises, the star of the General rises. High over Baekdu Mountain, the star of the General rises. When you look at the glowing light of the star, joy swells in your heart, joy swells in your heart.”45 Similarly, in the example from True Daughter of the Party, the parallelism between the star and the General becomes apparent: “The Big Dipper is shining bright. Where could our father General be? Brightly lit windows of the high command, where could our General be?”46 By consistently using nature images, the revolutionary operas invented the tradition of projecting Kim Il-sung as a force transcending human affairs. This almighty power, in turn, implies that Kim is in a position to intervene in the human world and resolve its conflicts. At the end of Oh, Tell the Forest, the chorus reiterates its boundless praise of the supreme leader, which obliterates all the boundaries that separate human beings from one another. Page 154 →Ah, our benevolent supreme leader, We people are happy in your bosom. Our Geumgang Mountain has a worldwide reputation. It will be even greater when reunification takes place When brothers of North and South embrace each other. Geumgang Mountain will become a paradise for all. Ah, our sun, the supreme leader Kim Il-sung, We all wish you everlasting life. We all wish our supreme leader everlasting life.47 What demands special attention in the preceding lines is that the reunification between North and South Korea is metonymically presented through the reunion of the traditional family relations. While “brothers of North and South” establishes the horizontal relationship, “we people are happy in your bosom” clearly indicates the vertical parent-children relationship between the supreme leader and the people of Korea. Thus, by employing nature imagery to illustrate Kim Il-sung’s divine quality, the operas establish Kim as the only legitimate unifier of the Korean nation. These literary devices of projecting the state patriarch as a life-giving force,48 together with the argument that Kim was the creator of these productions, give value to national unity under his leadership. The propaganda makes the state father not only the metaphoric source of life or the foundation of theater productions but also the cornerstone of the nation itself. Yet the state father was not alone in being worshiped as a life-giving force; he was accompanied by a familial relationship, which was predicated on the larger body of national politics. The

propaganda performances continue to build the state patriarch’s authority by creating a familial unity between the state leader as father, the Communist Party as mother, and the people of North Korea as their children. The virtue of the people as children is measured by their filial piety. Therefore, one of the conventions that North Korean revolutionary works developed was to make the righteous protagonists recite various maxims of the state fathers to justify their actions. These sayings are employed in the text as an index defining the political correctness of the North Korean people, which constitutes moral notions of good and evil. Kim became the rule-setter and organizing principle for the protagonists in the propaganda performances, which served the same purpose for people living their everyday lives. While the sacrosanct state fathers do not appear in the propaganda productions themselves, their voices reverberate through numerous characters Page 155 →who recite the teachings of their greatest leaders. As Don Oberdorfer has noted, the state leader’s opinion was seen as the only legitimate organizing principle of people’s daily lives: “In an explicit analogy to the human body, in juche the Great Leader is the brain that makes decisions and commands action, the Worker’s Party is the nerve system that mediates and maintains equilibrium between the brain and the body, and the people are the bone and muscle that implement the decisions and channel feedback to the Leader. However bizarre this belief system seems to outsiders, North Koreans are systematically instructed in it and walled off from contrary views.”49 Despite the seeming interconnectedness by which each body part—in Oberdorfer’s metaphorical expression of the way North Korea’s society functions—relates to all the others, it is evident that the brain is the fulcrum of this organism, to which the other body parts are subservient. However, the revolutionary operas attempt to create an impression of a seamless connection between Kim Il-sung, the Party, and the people by using the structure of the traditional family with a father, mother, and children. The familial relationship becomes a powerful way of securing such a connection. For example, in the text of the revolutionary opera True Daughter of the Party, the Korean Workers’ Party is compared to a mother figure, which complements as well as accentuates Kim Il-sung’s paternal image. As the chorus sings, “The female warrior is deeply moved by the mother, the Party.”50 The unity between father and mother illustrating the symbiotic relationship between Kim Il-sung and the Korean Workers’ Party persistently appears in the social realm. For example, Rodong Sinmun on February 4, 1981, noted: “The blood ties between our Party and the people [mean that] . . . the Party and the people always breathe one breath and act as one. . . . The creed of the people [is] that they cannot live or enjoy happiness apart from the Party . . . today our Party and people have become integrated in ideology and purpose, which no force can break. The Korean Workers’ Party . . . is the Mother Party bringing boundless honor and happiness to the people.” The family rhetoric not only helps to create an intimate connection between the state father, the mother party, and the children people but also helps to establish a familiar hierarchal relationship between Kim and the Party: they are necessary to each other, yet the patriarch occupies a much more authoritative position within the power dynamics between the two. People, in this scheme, become their children, as is seen in the self-explanatory title True Daughter of the Party. North Korean people, in turn, Page 156 →pledge their alliance with the father. This circular love, exchanged between the father and his children, remains a political mechanism fostering—metaphorically speaking—collective incest,51 and reinforces the purity of political bloodline and loyalty gene pool. One of the ways in which this incestuous relationship is performed is through children’s speeches voluminously quoting Kim Il-sung’s instructions. The ability to quote Kim is presented as carrying tremendous prestige, which becomes a distinctive political marker used to distinguish right from wrong. As a way of drawing the boundary between inside and outside of that collective purity, only politically correct and sanguine characters quote the leader and thereby establish the moral basis of their action. To put it differently, quoting Kim becomes the marker distinguishing heroes from villains, revolutionaries from counterrevolutionaries. For example, in The Song of Geumgang Mountain, the conductor lectures on correct artistic inspiration, which stems from Kim Il-sung’s teaching: CONDUCTOR: Comrade Seok-min, Our General instructed us: If you are going to write a poem, Write for the revolution.

If you are going to compose a song, Compose for the people.52

In the same production, Myeong-hui, the wife of Seok-min, instructs her daughter Sun-hui by resorting to the authority of Kim Il-sung: MYEONG-HUI: Sun-hui, you grew up happy Thanks to the beneficial love of the father [Kim Il-sung] Never forget the supreme leader’s love Wherever you go, you must reciprocate his love with loyalty. MYEONG-HUI AND SUN-HUI: Centuries and millennia would not change our love We will not forget his love even though the land and the sky change.53 By repeating the quotation from Kim, the characters accomplish dual goals: to proclaim both their political correctness and their pure heritage, diversifying the ways the authority of the state father is construed. The latter goal, in conjunction with the nature imagery and the theoretical Page 157 →work of projecting Kim as the source of the national culture, ultimately creates the impression that the state fathers are deities who descended from the supernatural world to resolve dramatic tension in the human world. This illuminates why one of the quintessential features of revolutionary operas is captured in the ending, when the patriarchal figure appears as deus ex machina. Literally meaning “god from the machine,” this is a highly appropriate term to describe the conclusions of these propaganda performances, since the male figure who appears at the climactic end is a savior who is envisioned as a deity. The famous epithet “the Sun of our nation,” given to Kim Il-sung, always decorates the grand finale of revolutionary operas. The ending of The Song of Geumgang Mountain illustrates this most vividly when the family members, separated under the Japanese yoke, finally reunite under the new regime of North Korea. Twenty years we’ve been separated And as in a dream, are finally reunited in the bosom of the supreme leader. No mountain peak is higher than his benevolence. No sea is deeper than his love.54 In this production, the tension between the female protagonist’s desire to find her biological father and her muchneeded willpower to carry out a demanding revolutionary task is presented as having been resolved by the merciful love of Kim Il-sung. Seok-min, the father, and Sun-hui, the daughter, eventually encounter each other when they work to compose the festival music, mainly dedicated to praising Kim and his achievements in creating a socialist paradise. The patriarch, in this respect, operates within two distinctive realms of existence. He appears as the legitimate substitute for the traditional patriarchs, and thereby establishes an intimate relationship to the members of the state in familial terms. The state patriarch also transcends the human realm by appearing as the source of nature and life, which can resolve conflicts in the human world. The propaganda performances postulate the transcendent level on which Kim exists, and thereby create unlimited authority, comparable to the mandate of heaven.55 Therefore, not surprisingly, when this godly figure passed away at the age of eighty-two in 1994, North Koreans felt that they had lost not only their father but also their life-giving source and the laws of nature and the universe.

Page 158 →From Kim Il-sung to Kim Jong-il: Toward a Hereditary Socialist State

July 1994. Pyongyang, North Korea. The entire country is drowned in vociferous mourning. Tears stream down the faces of North Koreans who stretch their arms toward the passing funeral procession led by the gigantic portrait of the deceased Great Leader, Kim Ilsung. As the procession passes through major avenues of Pyongyang, their arms flutter in the air as if to reach out for the departing leader. When the procession disappears from sight, the citizens of Pyongyang vainly beat their chests and lament the death of their beloved father—a loss that took the immortal divine figure away from his people. Stately generals in uniforms paved with patriotic medals and marines with robust shoulders wallow in grief like leaves helplessly trembling in a deadly storm that has rooted out the tree of life. Kim Il-sung’s funeral procession hardly escapes the impression of mass hysteria, (even though Korean funerals are typically as flamboyant as opera performances: ritualistic wailing and chest beating are regarded as proper ways for mourning the dead). On this national day of mourning, in which the descendants bids farewell to their patriarch, one man with teary eyes stands resolute amid the crowd. It seems difficult for him to grasp the magnitude of this loss, but he stands there as the pale reflection of the fallen giant whose legacy he must carry into the unknown future. The official state documentary film Great Leader Comrade Kim Il-sung Is Immortal (Widaehan suryeong Kim Il-sung dongjineun yeongsaeng bulmyeolhal geosida, 1994) captures the magnitude of Kim’s death. This four-hour epic documentary, which chronicles the three-day mourning period all over North Korea and abroad, blurts out a stream of aphoristic condolences narrated by a lachrymose female voice: With grave sorrow, the Dear Leader Kim Jong-il paid tribute to the Great Leader Kim Il-sung. Together with the party, the military, and the state officials the Dear Leader Kim Jong-il took a final look at the Great Leader. Our Great Leader struggled amid hardship and left behind an immortal legacy to his country and people. Our century was filled with his shining achievements. If only our Great Leader had had one day of peaceful rest in his lifetime our hearts wouldn’t be grieving in such pain. The hero of the anti-Japanese resistance, the invincible general Page 159 →Our Great Leader, our Supreme Leader Kim Il-sung The People’s Army sheds tears sending him off. The revolutionary legacy that started on Baekdu Mountain victoriously continues today. But how could our leader leave us behind? His soldiers lament with sorrow. Why do you leave us behind, Supreme Leader? Do not leave us behind, Supreme Leader! Accompanying the words of the narrator is the image of Kim Jong-il, who stands by the coffin that is buried in sea

of flowers and exposes half of Kim Il-sung’s embalmed body—joining the precedents of Lenin, Mao, and Ho Chimin. The pattern of this narration, which first introduces Kim Jong-il as the subject (in the first four lines) and moves on to general statements (beginning with the fifth line), heralds a new world order: from this moment, the world will be seen through the eyes of Kim Jong-il and him alone. As Kim Jong-il mournfully glances at Kim Ilsung, the spectators are positioned to look at the dead president from his heir’s perspective. Kim Jong-il in this scene is more of a viewing subject than a viewed object, becoming the provider of the North Korean people’s perspective as the new leader of the nation. Passing the right to rule from Kim Il-sung to Kim Jong-il was a sensitive matter given North Korea’s investment in sociocultural campaigns that attempted to demolish the ties between biological father and son in the traditional family setting; in place of the traditional patrilineal and patriarchal bond, the state attempted to strengthen the relationship between Kim Il-sung and the rest of the national subjects as his children. For this reason, to promote a biological son to succeed a father was a controversial idea that contradicted the foundational concepts of dismantling the traditional family. According to Oh and Hassig, North Korea planned Kim Jong-il’s eventual succession at the Korean Workers’ Party’s Sixth Plenum of the Fifth Congress in December 1972, but the process of reaching this decision may have been a tumultuous one: The dubious question of whether a socialist state should condone hereditary succession was being addressed in official literature. The Academy of Social Science 1970 edition of the Dictionary of Political Terminologies denounced hereditary succession, calling it “a reactionary custom of exploitative societies” and “originally a product of slave societies . . . later Page 160 →adopted by feudal lords as a means to perpetuate dictatorial rule.” This statement was deleted from the dictionary’s 1972 edition.56 No matter what the initial reaction to the idea of installing Kim Jong-il as his father’s successor might have been, and no matter how controversial the decision to pursue an unprecedented hereditary socialist state, once the decision had been made, it was pursued with unrelenting determination. But one thing was made clear in the process: that Kim Jong-il would not surpass the divine stature of his father in respects, most notably not assuming the title of Supreme Leader; that appellation would be reserved for the first and the only founding father. What superstitious fervor would it take to have the country run by the deceased leader and the entire nation turned into a shrine of ancestor worship? The patrilineal succession in North Korea followed the old Confucian tradition of male heirs drawing their authority from the endorsement of the patriarch of the older generation. Much of Kim Jong-il’s qualification to rule, as projected in North Korean media, stems not from the fact that he was the biological son of Kim Il-sung but from Kim Il-sung’s own choice to make him the rightful successor. In other words, the traditional family ties that made the hereditary succession possible had to be rhetorically rephrased through the language of the imagined family; it was not that the father chose his biological sun to rule, but that the Great Leader Kim Il-sung designated Kim Jong-il to succeed based on the latter’s peerless qualification. This idea of the Supreme Leader’s voluntary choice was endlessly repeated immediately following Kim Il-sung’s death, starting with the documentary on Kim Il-sung’s funeral. Although there have been countless efforts to glorify Kim Jong-il’s undisputed position as successor prior to 1994, the film documenting Kim Il-sung’s funeral was the first piece of art to display how his son was actually installed as the sole ruler in the aftermath of the Great Leader’s death. At the commemoration ceremony that took place during the funeral on Kim Il-sung Square in central Pyongyang, where thousands of leaders from all sectors gathered to mourn the deceased, one clear message was sent out to everyone. The chairman of the North Korean People’s Supreme Council, Kim Yeong-nam, who was chosen to read the commemoration speech, assured the attendees that one of the most shining revolutionary achievements of the Great Leader Kim Il-sung was to clearly designate his successor in his lifetime. The documentary Great Leader Comrade Kim Il-sung Is Immortal featured Kim Yeong-nam’s speech confirming the point:

Page 161 →The great successor of the juche revolutionary project, The guidance of the party and the people, The supreme commander of the armed forces, The Dear Leader Kim Jong-il personally demonstrated Peerless loyalty to the Great Leader at the highest level and made it his lifetime aspiration to finish the revolutionary project that was commenced by the Great Leader. He possesses unmatchable talent in both knowledge and strength And inherited lofty ideology and virtue directly from his father, Which makes him another Great Leader. He has been wisely commanding the entire party and the army And opened the new prosperous era of revolution and construction. So long as we have the Dear Leader by our side We will neither be confused, nor be afraid of formidable enemies. We will always vindicate without faltering. While what began as a mournful commemoration speech gradually shifted toward an unreserved eulogy for the new leader, the camera alternated shots between the solemn face of Kim Jong-il, the speaker Kim Yeong-nam, the crowd of thousands on the square, and the gray buildings upon which hung a gargantuan red banner with the slogan: “Let us loyally uphold the ideas and leadership of the Dear Leader Kim Jong-il!” This panegyric moment provides witness to the opening of the new era not only in North Korean history but in world history at large. As the deceased Kim Il-sung still remains the only (honorary) president of North Korea, his son, Kim Jong-il, continues to serve the ideals and revolutionary tasks set out by the founding father of the nation. The documentary Great Leader Comrade Kim Il-sung Is Immortal is about the birth of the new leader as much as it is about the death of the old leader. This point resurfaced in a 2002 documentary that commemorated the ninetieth birthday President Kim Il-sung. The Ninetieth Anniversary of the Birthday of President Kim Il-sung (Widaehan suryeong Kim Il-sung dongji tanseang 90 dol, 2002) features an orgiastic display of North Korea’s love and dedication for the immortal leader Kim Il-sung through art exhibitions, book exhibitions, flower exhibitions, film series, sports and performance festivals, mass rallies, mass games featuring 100,000 participants, and an evening ball for Pyongyang citizens, all of which had been typical activities featured for Kim Il-sung’s birthday, officially called the Sun Festival. The title of the documentary may be misleading Page 162 →in that it does not indicate that Kim is no longer of this world and thereby creates an impression that the living Supreme Leader celebrated his ninetieth birthday in 2002, making one wonder whether the mass hysteria staged at Kim Il-sung’s funeral eight years before was simply an illusion. Just like the aforementioned documentary, Ninetieth Anniversary is a eulogy to Kim Jong-il’s successful rule as much as it is a commemoration of the dead father. The documentary places the Dear Leader amid much adulation from both domestic and foreign audiences. A major portion is dedicated to embellishing North Korea’s solid position in international society. The film brings viewers to the International Friendship Exhibition Hall in Pyongyang, where a variegated collection of gifts sent by world leaders to Kim Il-sung is on display. Numerous photos of Kim Il-sung with other leaders, including Fidel Castro, are intended to impress the spectators with their charismatic aura and colossal size. The narrator of the documentary explains how these items evidence North Korea’s shining place in the international revolutionary project and significantly remarks that “the General [Kim Jong-il] said the Great Leader Kim Il-sung will be with us eternally!” This statement, with a shot of the shrine guarding the memories of Kim Il-sung’s stature in the world, invents Kim Jong-il as the keeper of his father’s memory, or a priest who can intervene and mediate between the divine Kim Il-sung and his merely mortal worshipers. The documentary makes a clear statement that although Kim Jong-il may not be the god himself, he is the closest thing to the divine. If Ninetieth Anniversary sees the museum as the stationary artifact that monumentalizes the world’s respect for the Great Leader and the unchallenged stature of his son, at the same time the film captures foreign delegations visiting North Korea to participate in political rallies and sports festivals, including a marathon, and most importantly, to pay homage to the Kim rulers as dynamic testimonial to the friendship between North Korea and

the international community. The documentary features dance troupes from the PRC and Russia to an extensive degree. The performances by the Chinese and the Russians were presented at different times but were structured identically, at least according to the documentary, in order to create the impression that the events were symmetrically choreographed ceremonies dictated by the hosting North Korea and imposed upon these visiting troupes. The dance and song performances begin with Kim Jong-il making an entrance into the theater amid thundering applause. Then two members of the troupe—in the Chinese case, two female soldiers in military Page 163 →uniform, and in the Russian case, a male and a female dancer in traditional peasant costumes—dedicate wreathes to the Dear Leader. The flower dedication is followed by impassioned folk dance performances, but each event ends with the dancers singing the “Song of Kim Il-sung” in Korean. The act of dubbing the song of the father onto the action of the son creates the impression that father and son exist as one entity in synchronized time and space, defying the death that separates them. The foreign dance troupes’ performance of “Song of Kim Ilsung” reasserts the symbiotic relationship between the dead honorary president and his son, and thereby makes a claim that neither can exist without the other. The performance ends with Kim Jong-il posing for a commemorative photo with the troupe members and then leaving the performing arts hall, again amid thundering applause, which replicates his father’s reception of foreign troupes and shows the son in his father’s previous position. Considering the fact that 2002 was a particularly sensitive year for North Korea to confront the world with its open nuclear ambitions, in hindsight the documentation of North Korean friendship with two of its strongest allies, China and Russia, seems a particularly perspicacious gesture. The arts performances are sublimated exhibitions of friendship rather than straightforward political statements, and in this respect, the documentary presents the foreign artists’ performance of the Kim Il-sung song not as an extraneous frill to the Sun Festival, but as a consummation of support from the Chinese and Russian powers, displaying their endorsement of indigenous ideas North Korea has been pursuing for half a century. Under Kim Jong-il’s rule, more elaborate documentaries were produced to chronicle his leadership and alliance with foreign countries, to counter the widespread notion that he is a reclusive isolationist leader of an enigmatic country. Kim Jong-il’s consecutive visits to Russia in 2001 and 2002, for example, were documented with pomp and grandeur under the title The Great Leader Kim Jong-il Pays an Official Visit to the Russian Federation, August 4–5, 2001 (Widaehan ryeongdoja Kim Jong-il dongji-kkeseo juche 90 (2001) 8.4–5 Rossiya ryeonbang-eul gongsik bangmun). Note that the title “the Great Leader” (widaehan ryeongdoja) is used for Kim Jong-il, who used to be addressed as “the Dear Leader” (chinaehaneun jidoja) before the death of his father. The dignified elevation of the title nonetheless differentiates the new national leader Kim Jong-il from the eternal father Kim Ilsung. Whereas Kim Il-sung has always been referred to as “the Supreme Leader” (suryeong), Kim Jong-il never claimed the same title. Nevertheless, “the Great Leader” (widaehan ryeongdoja) places Kim Jong-il at the same level as Page 164 →the leader of a major world power, the Russian president Vladimir Putin. The international spirit of this visit was also coded into selected language: instead of narrating the events in Korean according to the conventions of other documentaries capturing the activities of North Korean leaders, this one features English as the chosen code of communication. What was intended in this choice was rather obvious: North Korea wanted to project its state head as an excellent leader in the international political arena. The documentary opens with a trans-Siberian train crossing the vast Eurasian continent with alacrity. On board is the Great Leader Kim Jong-il, who is on an official state visit to the Kremlin at the Russian president’s invitation. The documentary opens with an image of the vast continent, accompanied by a leonine male chorus setting the mood for the laudable visit of the Great Leader. The next scene features Kim Jong-il in the Kremlin, conducting conversations with President Putin in the latter’s office as the English narration dubs the action as the two leaders discussing friendship, cooperation, and international questions of mutual interest, and states that this visit is “an important event in furthering peace and security in the Asia-Pacific region.” The image of Kim Jong-il as a peacemaker in this documentary creates a stark contrast to the belligerent conception that the Western media created for what they saw as a dangerous, quixotic leader, or to borrow Ronald Reagan’s expression, “nuts with nukes.” Quite the contrary, Kim Jong-il goes around the city of Moscow to further the notion that he is a leader enjoying people’s respect, plebeian support, perseverance, and culture. After

the meeting with Putin, the film features Kim Jong-il in Red Square to dedicate a wreathe to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and pay silent tribute, after which he stages the same ritual for Lenin.57 Kim’s tour of Lenin’s mausoleum on Red Square appears significant in the twenty-first century for a variety of reasons. Although the inside of Lenin’s mausoleum is not featured, this moment draws a conspicuous parallel with the scene in Kim Ilsung’s funeral documentary where Kim Jong-il pays tribute to the embalmed body of his father. As the narrator in the funeral documentary emphasizes the righteousness of Kim Jong-il’s inheritance of his father’s rule, the scene featuring Lenin’s mausoleum clearly states the revolutionary pedigree that connects Kim Jong-il to the grandfather of socialist revolution—Vladimir Lenin—via Kim Il-sung, who also paid tribute to Lenin during his visit to the Soviet Union in 1986.58 Especially at the dawn of the century, when North Korea’s strongest allies have traded the socialist economy for a market economy, Kim Jong-il’s tribute to Lenin may seen to ring Page 165 →an anachronistic chord. However, the documentary makes a statement that his staging of the socialist lineage invents Kim Jong-il as the unflinching carrier of the revolutionary legacy that originated in Russia. However, by paying tribute to the unnamed soldiers first and then to Lenin, Kim Jong-il makes a statement to the viewers that his rule is upheld by grassroots support, and that it values the collective more than any individual leaders or heroes. The ritual staged on Red Square might seem a pale ghosting of the conventional Soviet rituals in which all visiting dignitaries pay tribute to the Unknown Soldier. But more profoundly, it affirms Kim Jong-il’s ambidextrous qualification as a leader who is in touch with the people as well as with the highest leader in the pantheon of the Soviet empire. Emerging out of the shadow of his father, Kim Jong-il in the North Korean documentaries appears not only as the successor of the founding father of North Korea but also with the founding leader of the world’s first Communist state. No matter what the rest of the world may think about such gestures, the North Korean documentaries keep portraying their new leader as always in touch with the people of his own country as well as those around the world. Kim Jong-il’s visit to the Far East region of the Russian Federation in 2002 and the PRC’s central and southern regions in 2006 were all documented to illustrate the idea that Kim Jong-il is a highly respected and adored leader of the twenty-first century. This, however, was to have a flip side: the story was to project the same ideals from a different perspective, that of the people, who were supposed to play the role of happy citizens adoring their national leader. That story naturally involved the history of the nation, which was essentially projected as a history of a tightly knit family. As is the father, so is the son.

Page 166 →CHAPTER 4 Model Citizens of the Family-Nation Bertolt Brecht once observed that a country which needs heroes is an unfortunate one. But even more unfortunate is the country that needs heroes and has none. —EVGENY EVTUSHENKO, “INTRODUCTION,” ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF IVAN DENISOVICH

The Brotherhood of the Family-Nation The foundation of North Korea in 1948 signaled the birth of a nation operating on the system of a socialist political economy, unprecedented in Korean history. Equally significant was the new nation’s invention of its citizens, which was an idealistic projection rather than a realistic reflection. The molding of North Korea’s model citizens reflected the state’s effort to establish what Fredric Jameson describes as a “fabled national image,” shaped according to the state’s desire to reconfigure its demographic profile. It was inevitable that a gap was created between people as material subjects and people as part of the social imaginary. This chapter addresses the way the North Korean performing and visual arts addressed that gap in an attempt to create an illusion of seamless fluidity between the real and the imagined. I particularly focus on the formation of male citizenship as a metonymy of the entire family-nation, since North Korean society as a whole prefers to imagine itself as masculine or male-centered rather than feminine or female-centered. The North Korean leadership had prescribed notions about the ideal profile of its citizens, which did not necessarily reflect the occupational and Page 167 →ideological diversity of the people at the time of the state’s founding. Constructing demographic categories reflecting the “ideal” rather than “reality” was part of North Korea’s effort to mark the commencement of a new regime radically differentiated from previous ones. Instead of exploring the needs of every discursive occupational, economic, and social stratum, the North Korean state attempted to fabricate through propaganda the ideal image of its citizens as traditionally underprivileged laborers, exploited by the landed class in feudal Korea. If one considers the fact that Korea has maintained an agrarian economy for millennia based on the cheap labor of landless peasants, it is logical to suppose that landless peasants would be the fulcrum of the project constructing the new people of North Korea. Even though poor peasants existed throughout the history of Korea as the backbone of the national economy, the North Korean state put them under scrutiny to be given artistic treatment and be reborn as a highly politicized class. Projecting peasants as an enlightenment project of socialist revolution in North Korea was most likely influenced by the late-nineteenth-century Russian revolutionary project, the vnarod (to the people) movement, which influenced the East Asian colonial and semicolonial nation-states, including China, in the first half of the twentieth century. As China scholar Suzanne Pepper points out, constructing poor peasants as one of the major categories of the population in the Chinese revolution “apparently had its origins in the Russian countryside.”1 Such popular movements had an impact on Korean situation as well; as Armstrong points out, “Even the category of poor peasants (pinnong), as a group with specific collective interests, was a new concept that seems partly influenced by Russian and Chinese revolutionary experiences.”2 Statistically, peasants were the majority of the population in North Korea at the time of its foundation in 1948.3 Although North Korea inherited a much better developed industrial basis from the Japanese colonial period than did South Korea,4 workers (including white-collar workers) made up approximately 25 percent of the population between 1946 and 1950.5 The exact number of peasants in North Korea in 1948 is unknown, but given the low percentage of other workers, we can assume that peasants comprised the majority of the population. But more important, the North Korean leadership imagined soldiers and workers to be crucial members of the new familynation, thereby remapping the demographic distribution of the state in a way different from reality. By emphasizing these occupations, the North Korean state made a statement about its preference for male physical strength, which shaped the gendered perspective of the ideal citizenry.

Page 168 →Casting a sideway glance, a similar project was under way in Communist China. In order to invent the ideal body of citizens, the PRC created a sort of holy trinity, or gongnongbing, referring to workers, peasants, and soldiers. As Dong Jian aptly puts it regarding the PRC: “Gongnongbing (workers, farmers, and soldiers), which served as the new national image, was not at all a reality but a symbol of the common nature of the nation, a superempirical and romanticized image of China. Obviously, the gongnongbing heroes, the so-called ‘Number One’ model characters, assumed the task of symbolizing the “common nature” of the nation, which required them to possess the features of “superhumanness and perfection.”6 The PRC dramatic arts were a primary site for crafting the ideal image of the people in the new political era, at the heart of which stood heroes who were workers, farmers, and peasants. Accordingly, a term referring to this theatrical genre of play (gongnongbing xiju) was coined. Much as the PRC’s notion of gongnongbing registered the symbolic invention or wishful embodiment of the socialist nationhood rather than reality, the North Korean state’s formation of its citizenry was a collective idea referring to workers, peasants, and soldiers in the holy trinity of the new citizens.7 A steady number of plays were produced after the foundation of the North Korean state, but especially during the late 1950s, when circumstances matured as North Korea led an active cultural exchange with the socialist bloc,8 there was a surge of productions dramatizing the lives of workers, peasants, and soldiers. Quite similar to the case of the PRC, soldiers occupied the focal point. Numerous plays on the heroic sacrifice of soldiers and partisans fighting Japanese, Americans, and South Koreans appeared even before the emergence of revolutionary operas in the early 1970s. The late 1950s—a time when the traumatic memories of the Korean War were still very vivid—saw many plays of this kind, such as Han Seol-ya’s Snow Peak Mountain (Seolbongsan)9 and Sin Go-song’s Ten Years (10 nyeon),10 which dramatized soldierly self-sacrifice and became the prototypes of productions in the 1960s and 1970s. There were also numerous peasant and worker plays produced during this period meant to draw attention to the significance of the working class, which was sorely needed in the postwar reconstruction. For example, A Family Story dramatized how the labor struggle restructured the hierarchical relationship in a traditional family of laborers into a more equal one. From My Hometown intended to demonstrate how peasants were transformed into modern farmers leading a utopian life on a collective farm. While the general ethos of idolizing workers, peasants, and soldiers in these plays continued Page 169 →throughout revolutionary operas in the 1970s, the earlier worker-farmer-soldier plays of the 1950s were not nearly as rigid as the operas in their portrayal of ideal protagonists. For example, From My Hometown displayed a wide range of peasants on a collective farm—from the ones still possessing a feudal mentality to the ones with a thoroughly revolutionized mindset—and created multiple shades of human personalities that did not exist in later revolutionary operas. The North Korean version of the worker-peasant-soldier trinity, however, varied in one aspect from that in the PRC. In the PRC, even prior to the Cultural Revolution, stripping intellectuals of preferential treatment was a prevalent practice with very few exceptions, such as the state’s unflinching efforts to protect, from raging Red Guards, scientists working on nuclear weapons. However, in North Korea, the regime embraced intellectuals and professional workers as an essential part of its legitimate citizenry. This pro-intellectual and pro-professional sentiment was reflected in the insignia of North Korea’s only political party. The Soviet emphasis on physical labor was represented by the scythe and a hammer as the symbol of socialism; North Korea replicated the two images of masculine strength and labor but added a pen between the two tools to embody the marriage between physical labor and intellectual activities. Figure 29 shows a poster of the Korean Workers’ Party flag, with the symbols of physical labor and literacy held by three hands, one of which is evidently that of a professional worker. The hand on the left side belongs to someone wearing a suit—a whitecollar professional worker. In another poster that appeared in Joseon Yesul in 1982, a white-collar professional appears side by side with a worker, a farmer, and a solder. It captures the equal status of the intellectual worker and the physical laborers, which is not an ethos found in the PRC’s citizenry politics. The intelligentsia and the militant revolutionary movement in North Korea were connected for several historical reasons. Most importantly, North Korea after the division of 1945 did not wish to lose its educated population to South Korea, and therefore treated them with due respect. Another practical reason was that North Korea had to retain skilled intellectuals to restore and rebuild the industrial bases that had been created during Japanese colonial

rule and were destroyed during the Korean War. Because of its geographical proximity to Manchuguo, Japan’s puppet state from which Japan launched attacks on mainland China, the northern part of Korea under Japanese colonial rule was rapidly industrialized to serve as a base supplying military products for Japan’s war efforts. As Jang Se-hun points out, in the aftermath of liberation from Japanese colonial rule, “North Korean industry could not operate properly; thus the North Korea government regarded it an urgent task to restore its operation.”11 Page 170 → Figure 29. A poster showing the Korean Workers’ Party flag, which incorporates the intelligentsia in the representation of the ideal people. The caption reads “The Party’s instructions are our lives!” Back cover of Joseon Yesul 1 (1996). In addition, according to Armstrong, Korea—even more than other countries with Confucian cultural traditions, such as China and Vietnam—had for centuries been a society in which formal education and the leading role of intellectuals had been paramount virtues. However, education in North Korea was supposed to erase the boundaries between intellectuals and the working masses through the political conversion of the former and the intellectual uplifting of the latter. As a result, intellectuals in the North Korean context included people with little more than an elementary education and people with practical skills. North Korean propaganda would later express this idea in an awkward but ubiquitous slogan, “Intellectualize the working classes and working class-ize the intellectuals.”12 This policy was faithfully reflected in revolutionary operas, in which the uneducated strove to become literate, while professionals and intellectuals attempted to assimilate to peasants and laborers without destroying or demonizing the intelligentsia itself. Thus, the wholehearted inclusion of the educated class in the ideal citizenry was what distinguished North Korea’s imagination of its people from Page 171 →that of the PRC. This was faithfully reflected in the portrayal of intellectuals as one of the core constituencies in revolutionary operas and films, which was not the case in the PRC’s model theater works. Otherwise, both regimes embraced workers, peasants, and soldiers as the core members of their people. Then how did workers and soldiers come to be ranked with peasants, who constituted the majority of the Korean population at the time of the establishment of North Korea? As noted previously, workers were a rather insignificant percentage of population in North Korea. However, they came to join the peasant majority in representing the people. This process should be examined with a bifocal scrutiny. On the one hand, the phenomenon reflects the irony of Marxist theory, which predicted the socialist revolution would occur in advanced industrial countries. In Marx’s estimation, Korea and China were not obvious locales for revolution. This was true for the Soviet Union as well, which was by and large an agrarian state in comparison to the western European industrial powers. Nevertheless, the Soviet Union encouraged the growth of its industrial sector with the New Economic Policy in the 1920s; this effort later encouraged the PRC and North Korea, at least until the beginning of the Sino-Soviet rift in 1957. Under Soviet tutelage, the PRC and North Korea launched new economic plans, which made workers the central plank of the new socialist economy. In this climate, workers had to become the focal point in the postwar nation-building project. On the other hand, industrialization was a way for the North Korean state to recover from the failure to advance in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This perspective reflects a stronger nationalistic sentiment of the Korean people. As a result of its failure to transform into a modern nation-state, Korea degenerated into the proletariat of the advanced imperial powers. Such a way of envisioning the international relationship, in terms of Marxist class struggle, in the case of China has already been pointed out by Duara, who notes that class and nation present themselves as competing identities in modern Chinese history. Duara predicates his case on the cofounder of the Chinese Communist Party, Li Dazhao (1888–1927), who raised the question of the Chinese nation in terms of a class: according to Li, the Chinese people were a national proletariat (within an international proletariat) oppressed by Western capitalists.13 In my view, projecting Korea as the exploited proletariat of the industrially advanced nations creates a useful perspective for examining the family politics of the model citizens in North Korea. The legitimacy of the new

Page 172 →people of North Korea was expressed in their propaganda using the language of class struggle: who exploits whom and how the exploited rises up against the exploiter became the central narrative of these propaganda performances. By showing the sufferings of the Korean people, whose patriotism was represented in terms of children’s filial piety toward their parents, propaganda art could remind the people of their national unity as one family and incite them to avenge the exploitative enemies who caused national suffering.14 Becoming industrial workers was one way to accomplish such a goal, and there appeared numerous visual representations bolstering this sentiment. For example, a painting of Kim Il-sung praising the mechanization of the construction industry appeared in Joseon Yesul in 1979; in it, being an industrial worker was presented with a sense of pride, endorsed by the state father. As for the peasant majority of the population, North Korea saw them as objects of reform; the underprivileged and illiterate peasants were not seen as a virtuous class in itself, but as a shameful legacy of the feudal past. The state took measures to embrace peasants as valid members of the new family-nation, but this required an intensive process of transforming ignorant peasants into useful members of the new society. This process was coterminous with land reforms in the PRC and North Korea, as was the case in the Soviet Union. Partha Chatterjee notes that the fierce debate between populists and Marxists over the peasantry’s role in revolutionary Russia was settled by the elimination of the peasantry under the collectivization program of the 1930s.15 Likewise, Chinese and Korean peasants who used to cultivate the properties of landed gentry were now subsumed by huge state farm organizations, which attempted to provide them with a sense of national belonging and achievement. This was especially true in the case of North Korea. As Cumings notes: “When the North knocked the slates out from under the landed class in 1946, through a relatively bloodless reform, it was a millennial change for the vast majority of the population (about 75 percent peasants at the time). They received titles to the land and the homes sitting on them; they were heritable within the family, but not alienable on a real estate market.”16 Although the land reform did not reshape the foundational social relations among class divisions, as North Korean society itself was strictly stratified according to class background, it nevertheless brought about the tropes of reform and modernization. The North Korean propaganda bureau accordingly produced images of peasants who were eager to learn and embrace the latest technology in agricultural activities, which promised to Page 173 →alleviate their backbreaking labor and thus speed up the production process. Numerous images, such as the ones published in Joseon Yesul in 1971 and 1973, for example, captured peasants welcoming the advent of machines in the fields, indicating the reshaping of the premodern peasantry into ideal citizens of the new socialist regime. However, as mentioned previously, it is rather peculiar that peasants, who were the majority of the population, did not appear as central characters in propaganda performances. A contributing factor was that soldiers appeared in revolutionary operas instead. On a practical level, military support was the ultimate source of Kim Il-sung’s power. Kim prioritized his military experience as the most important resource for imagining the new citizenry. Notwithstanding the differences in location, scale, and scope of the armed operations, the military activities of Kim became the virtuous prototypes for model citizens to reenact, the core of the dramatic action in propaganda performances. Some crucial legacies presented in later performances include the contribution of male peasants turned soldiers, whose resistance activities were the backbone of the new socialist regime, since they proved to be the most important human resource in anticolonial efforts. Therefore, embracing the peasantry as members of the family-nation was grounded on the historical fact that peasants served Kim’s military units before the establishment of North Korea. Without their support, his efforts would not have succeeded. The guerrilla unit led by Kim Il-sung in Manchuria was composed of poor peasants who regarded themselves as a brotherhood that resembled a traditional family unit, quite similar to the situation in Mao’s Red Army.17 Kay Ann Johnson points out that the ethos of the social bandit brotherhood of popular culture was self-consciously male centered and misogynous: “Traditionally the ranks of such bandit gangs, like the Red Army, were filled with desperate, disenfranchised male peasants pushed from the land and deprived of the ability to live by traditional family ideals. They looked to the brotherhood not only as a means of survival, but also as a means to assert their manhood and find a salve of masculine self-respect when the inability to pay a bride price and produce male progeny for their male ancestors made them less than whole men.”18

Johnson’s observation that the military units gave men a chance to bolster their lost masculinity resonates with Ralph Taxton’s assertion that “communist legitimacy among these peasants may be understood largely in terms of a return to traditional morality, to the customary principles and practices of subsistence and security among the rural poor.”19 Thus, the poor male peasantry’s desire to reclaim masculine authority matched up Page 174 →ideally with Kim’s intention to obtain support for the military efforts leading to the foundation of the socialist regime. With this historical background, the military was the most important social unit for the governance of North Korea; consequently, all other social units and professions were militarized. This practice reaffirms the state’s conviction that the ideal body of citizens, that is, workers, farmers, soldiers, and intellectuals, should be reformed as a military unit supporting and obeying the leadership of their state father. Revolutionary operas and films were also shaped by the need to promote military spirit; at the same time, they attempted to construct reality out of the ideal new society Kim envisioned, in which the military was dominant. Thus, the propaganda performances were situated in the ambivalent zone of being both the product and the instrument of political maneuvering, achieving dual goals of reflecting and regulating social changes. The intention to locate a direct precursor of revolutionary operas in the military activities of the anti-Japanese resistance movement illuminates why soldiers appear as the most essential type of citizens in propaganda performances. The military, more than any other social group, clearly determines the boundary between its members and nonmembers. An extremely hierarchical structure operated by unconditional subordination to the commanders, the military was not only a forceful way of regulating society but also a way to reinvent the variegated citizenry as a unified masculine entity of revolutionary fighters. As the military has been elevated to stand as a metonymy of the entire North Korean nation, regimented ways of determining and training its members have been applied to defining citizenship in North Korea. For instance, in the revolutionary opera True Daughter of the Party, the female protagonist Yeon-ok raises a question: “Who can become a member of the Party?” This seemingly simple question tackles a rather significant issue that recurs in propaganda performances: what does it take to join the family-nation as a legitimate member? Revolutionary operas were obsessed with defining the identity of the nation, to create a sense of unity. Chen Xiaomei aptly remarks about the PRC’s model theater works, a genre that bears visible resemblances to the Korean revolutionary operas, “As powerful cultural memory, model theatre reveals much about the way people and a nation envisioned the self, imagined the other, and, in turn, as a result of coming to an understanding of the other, reconstructed the self.”20 Chen’s comment could well be applied to North Korea’s propaganda performances, as they became the major ground upon which the self was constructed Page 175 →in the form of an ideal citizenry clearly distinguished from the other. The urge to identify the boundary between the self and the other stemmed in part from the fact that North Korea failed to achieve unity with South Korea. Divided from the south almost immediately following the expulsion of the Japanese colonial power from Korea in 1945, the new regime in the north had to endow the nation with a legitimate collective identity vis-à-vis South Korea, which also claimed to be the rightful bearer of the Korean national essence. Consequently, propaganda performances constantly raised questions, as in True Daughter of the Party, about the boundary that defines members of the nation embodying the true national essence. Soviet scholar Yuri Lotman, in his study on the semiotics of culture, delineates every culture’s urge to create a clear sense of boundary: “The boundary can be defined as the outer limit of a first-person form. This space is ‘ours,’ ‘my own,’ it is ‘cultured,’ ‘safe,’ ‘harmoniously organized,’ and so on. By contrast ‘their space’ is ‘other,’ ‘hostile,’ ‘dangerous,’ ‘chaotic.’ Every culture begins by dividing the world into ‘its own’ internal space and ‘their’ external space.”21 The contrast between the first-person and the third-person forms is relevant to the notion of a boundary that divides legitimate citizens of North Korea from their enemies, as expressed in propaganda performances. The first-person form of address, especially in the plural we as opposed to they, enhanced the degree of unity and intimacy among the people of North Korea. Although Lotman’s remark tells us that distinctive differentiation between self and other is not specific to North Korea, but a universal urge in all societies and

cultures, the collective ethos reminiscent of the Soviet slogan “Either you are with us, or with the enemy”22 found another level of operation in North Korea. The tightly organized structure of the traditional family was appropriated in establishing the notion of the ideal citizenry, and the rhetoric of fraternal equality became the predominant mode of regulating relationships among people of various backgrounds, although only on a surface level. Dongji, or “comrade” in Korean, was used as a familiar term to address members of the society, which, at least nominally, supposed the fraternal principles of equality. However, beneath the surface of fraternal equality upheld by Communism, there existed a strong sense of unequal class structure reminiscent of the traditional caste system. As Prasenjit Duara points out, “The rhetoric of fraternity and comradeship was not incompatible with an extremely strict hierarchy of ranks, authoritarianism, and the exclusion of certain unclean Page 176 →groups from regular membership.”23 In this respect, Communism shared common traits with Confucianism. As examined in the previous chapter on state fathers, the authority and power Kim enjoyed were unfathomable, and could only be sustained by hierarchical control of the society. The brotherhood of Kim Il-sung’s guerrilla unit in Manchuria, which was identified as the ideal prototype of North Korea, also resembled hierarchical traditional family life.24 But the cultural expressions of these communities in later propaganda performances were stripped of any hierarchical relationship among their members. How and why did this transition take place? It was inevitable that the traditional family unit had to be disintegrated in order to structure the new life of a brotherhood consisting of dispersed individuals. At the same time, this new fraternal community as a revolutionized society had to be distinct from feudal family life. As a result, the North Korean propaganda performances emphasize the disintegration of traditional family units—an ironic move because the relationship among the members of the newly formed imagined family was, in practice, based on a hierarchical and therefore unequal relationship. As Armstrong remarks, “The result of the North Korean revolution—and this became clear after the Korean War—was not the elimination of social hierarchy as such, but a radical change in the content of hierarchy.”25 In effect, the conspicuous stratification of the traditional family was destroyed only superficially; the structure remained intact and was applied to every aspect of the new social practices. In order to mask the hierarchy that paradoxically functioned as the governing principle of the newly formed imagined family-nation, revolutionary operas, in particular, emphasized the destruction of the traditional family. Numerous scenes were fabricated in order to justify the disintegration of the traditional family unit, which initiates the destruction of hierarchical relationships within the family so that the members, discharged from the old relationship, can enter a new hierarchy headed by the state fathers. Oh, Tell the Forest features a scene in which the daughter leaves the family as she embarks on a revolutionary mission. The disintegration of family members, however, is immediately justified in this farewell scene, as the traditional familial relationship is reinterpreted as that of revolutionary comrades: BOK-SUN: How could I part from my dear father As soon as he embraces me in his heart? When will I see him again if I part from him tonight? Let this moment be prolonged forever. . . . Page 177 →BYEONG-HUN: Let us set out for a holy path to the revolution In order to reinstate our lost nation. TOGETHER: From generation to generation, with one mind, We will fight as the General [Kim Ilsung]’s warriors. CHORUS: On the path of revolution, Both life and death are glorious. One cannot easily pursue revolution at home. Both father and daughter leave home.26

The last two lines by the chorus evidently state that the traditional home, with its embedded hierarchical relationship, is not the central locus for carrying out revolution, even if it functions as a starting point for the protagonists to nurture their plans and ambition to join the revolutionary movement. The nucleus of action moves beyond the traditional domestic confines as the new family is born. The imagined family consisting of revolutionary comrades, however, resembles the traditional family. Although not tied by blood, the newly constructed imagined family mandates a hierarchical relationship among its members, who are regarded as warriors of Kim Il-sung’s military unit. Oh, Tell the Forest proclaims the strong traditional bond of the imagined family in much more explicit terms. CHORUS: The comrades of the revolution encounter Each other more warmly than do the family members of the same bloodline. When they encounter each other on the road of revolution One cannot possibly imagine greater joy.27 Here the chorus bluntly reiterates the hierarchy between the two families: the imagined family takes priority over the traditional family because of its political purposefulness, which is often absent in the latter. In propaganda performances, the traditional family life becomes meaningful only when it is framed by the political orientation of the imagined family. Likewise, the bonding among biological family members is legitimized only when they are united by the same revolutionary dedication, which ultimately transforms the members of the traditional family into revolutionary comrades. The fraternity among the members of the imagined family was not confined to a single national boundary. The Soviet Union as the mentor of the new regime of North Korea fostered familial ties not only in the political Page 178 →and military domains but also in the realm of cultural imagination. Although North Korean culture has maintained a strong degree of nationalistic orientation, the presence of Soviet culture was vividly felt in all spheres, especially in the early days of the state when the Soviet Union was deeply involved in the reconstruction of North Korea. The following pro-Soviet song, published in 1959 in a worker’s magazine, Sseokeulwon, is only one example illustrating the point: Imperial dogs flock together to prepare World War II / As a last shriek of crumbling capitalism, they prepare war against the Soviet Union / Peaceful policies of the Soviet Union protested against the war of imperial dogs / And saw the victory of the five-year plan and the construction of the socialist state / Glorious victory of the socialist industrialization—electric furnaces everywhere in the large Soviet Union, and everything produced in the factories is for the working class / Everywhere tractors plow the land and airplanes disseminate seeds on collective farms / This is to improve the farmers’ life, it is the collectivization of the socialist state / Everywhere there are schools for laborers, every child and youth is entitled to free education / Everywhere there are libraries, it is the cultural revolution of the socialist state / All the oppressed people of the world, arm yourself and join the revolutionary front / Down with the capitalist system and let’s protect the great Soviet Union with our lives.28 In line with the pro-Soviet ethos and the ties between North Korea and the Soviet Union presented in this song, Joseon Yesul published an illustration (see fig. 30) of a Soviet soldier sitting on the front porch of a North Korean family’s house. Peculiarly, the familiar expressions of the Soviet soldier and North Korean mother and daughter create an impression of a nuclear family, in which the North Korean father is substituted by a Soviet soldier. Quite similar to the dynamics between Kim Il-sung and the children whose father was absent, as depicted in figure 28, we can see the progression of how the North Korean posters imagined ideal families as centering around the male figure. By comparing figures 28 and 30, we can see the genealogy of this visual composition: in place of the missing Korean father of the traditional family, a Soviet soldier is in place, who is later replaced by the state father who ultimately completes the imagined family. In figure 30, which can certainly be seen as the understudy of figure 28, the physical proximity between the child and the soldier creates an impression of intimacy between father and daughter, which in turn supports the solidarity between the two states united in a family structure. Page 179 → Figure 30. Joseon Yesul 8 (1957), inside of the back cover. Oil painting by Song Yeong-nam entitled I Forgot about the Uncle from the Soviet Army captures a Soviet soldier and North Korean mother and daughter.

During the Korean War, the PRC and North Korea also established an unbreakable coalition predicated on the expressions of fraternity and family ties.29 The massive intervention of Chinese “People’s Volunteers” in the Korean War sealed the future relationship between the two states. As the October 25, 1953, editorial of the Renmin ribao (People’s Daily) expressed just a few months after the war came to a halt, the two countries built up “an unbreakable, militant friendship” that was “cemented by blood.”30 North Korean visual propaganda was primary in elaborating the intimate Page 180 →ties between the PRC and North Korea. For example, in 1958, Min Byeong-seon published a short essay titled “Wang Pyeong and Mother (Wang Pyeong-iwa eomeoni),”31 which introduced a supposedly real story about the friendship between a North Korean family and Chinese soldiers fighting for North Korea. The story introduces Wang Pyeong, a member of the people’s voluntary corps, who calls an elderly North Korean woman “Mother” and tells the local Koreans that their town is his genuine home-town. It is noteworthy that the ties between a Korean elderly woman and a young Chinese soldier are narrated through a familial relationship of mother and son, just like the 1957 painting that portrays the Soviet soldier as a member of the Korean family. Moreover, to accentuate the intimacy between the two, who are different in nationality, gender, and age, the story was accompanied by an illustration creating a simulacrum of an imagined family united in the name of Communist brotherhood. As the illustration (see fig. 31) captured, an elderly North Korean woman bid farewell to a young Chinese soldier, Wang Pyeong. In this moment of emotional rapport, the two become fused through the familial affection, which effectively creates the natural bond between the two nation-states. Figure 31. Illustration of Min Byeong-seon’s story, “Wang Pyeong and Mother” (“Wang Pyeong-iwa eomeoni”), Sseokeulwon 11 (1958): 43. An elderly North Korean woman is seeing off a Chinese solder after the end of the Korean War. Page 181 → Figure 32. Xinmin wanbao, October 25, 1965. The PRC reciprocated the friendship through numerous visual illustrations to create brotherhood between itself and North Korea. In 1965, more than ten years after the end of the Korean War, the Shanghai newspaper Xinmin wanbao published a chart (see fig. 32) on the accomplishments of the PRC and North Korea joint military action during the war. It showed two soldiers, one Chinese and the other North Korean, next to their national flags, as equal comrades. This illustration captured the fraternal ethos that the PRC wanted to evoke in presenting the relationship between itself and North Korea. However, the seemingly unbreakable fraternity between the two countries manifested during the war and in the 1960s found altered expressions in the 1970s in revolutionary operas. The portrayal of the “brother” country in North Korea took varying forms, which reflected the way North Korea wanted to project the boundary of its family-nation. In spite of the Page 182 →PRC’s open expressions of friendship with North Korea in various performances,32 it is difficult to find counterparts in North Korea’s repertoire of propaganda performances. Even though there were multiple novels33 and newspaper and journal articles about the PRC’s generous assistance during the war and the postwar reconstruction effort, no theater productions spoke of North Korea’s undoubted friendship with the PRC. Likewise, in other realms of visual culture in North Korea, the Chinese contribution to the Korean War was by and large ignored. As Suh points out: “It was the Chinese volunteers who took over the war and brought a ceasefire, but there is not a single picture in honor of the Chinese contribution to the Korean War in the great hall of the revolutionary museum in Pyongyang today.”34 This is also true for the Soviet Union, whose political and cultural presence had a formative influence in shaping the foundation of the early North Korean state. This phenomenon primarily stems from North Korea’s increasing emphasis on juche ideology, but the visible lack of any cultural expressions of the friendship between North Korea and the PRC or the Soviet Union in the 1970s demands a discursive treatment. Why was there a change in the North Korean imagination about the international family-nation? Why did North Koreans refrain from making any open comments about the PRC or the Soviet Union in their most representative form of culture? In my estimation, the absence of any allusion to ties between the countries is the result of a twofold phenomenon: on the one hand, any expressions of such fraternity in theater productions would have

complicated North Korea’s effort to balance the influence from the PRC and the Soviet Union. Since the two main Communist powers did not envision themselves as nations united by the same ideological line after the 1957 SinoSoviet rift, North Korea could not afford to alienate either of them. Thus, if the propaganda performances were supposed to stage the brotherly love between the PRC and North Korea, then they also had to present the same relationship between North Korea and the Soviet Union. On the other hand, the dramatization of the fraternal unity between North Korea and either of the two brothers would have exposed this dilemma. North Korea’s desire to envision itself not only as an independent state but also as the leader of the small and independent-minded nation-states of the Third World did not fit well with North Korea’s obvious position as a beneficiary of various kinds of assistance from the Soviet Union and the PRC. Therefore, it must have been easier for North Korea to exclude any expressions of transnational brotherhood in its national culture during the dogmatic pursuit of juche ideology and instead focus on the internal Page 183 →cohesion of the family-nation. The unified degree to which North Korean propaganda performances imagine themselves is the result of such complex dynamics embedded in North Korea’s international politics. The presence of comrades as traditional family members in North Korean performances is based upon the premise that a certain potential familial relationship is absent—most notably, that between North Korea and its two big neighbors: the PRC and the Soviet Union.

Learning from the Communist Saints: Model Brothers in the Fabled National Image On the gentle hills of Daeseong Mountain just six miles northeast of central Pyongyang lie the remains of those who have sacrificed themselves for their country under the Japanese colonial rule. In solemn commemoration, a bronze bust has been erected to each and every martyr enshrined in this Revolutionary Martyrs Cemetery (hyeongmyeong yeolsareung), as it is referred to in North Korea (see fig. 33). Rows of bronze busts capture different facial features as they shine under the bright sun. Supporting the busts are white pedestals onto which a brief biographic description about each martyr is inscribed. This is a sacred ground for North Koreans, who come in large groups to dedicate flowers and pay tribute to those who became the foundation upon which the present could be built. The deceased martyrs, now revived in the orderly arrangement of their bronze incarnations, look down on central Pyongyang like the guardian angels of the living for whom they have given their lives (see fig. 34). But who are these heroes really and how could the builders of the cemetery remember all the intricate facial details of all these martyrs, many of whom perished on the battleground during the anti-Japanese resistance movement? According to Chris Springer, “Those guerrillas who gave their lives in battle have been relegated to less prominent graves in lower rows,”35 while the prominent figures, such as Kim Jong-il’s mother Kim Jeong-suk and Vice-Premier Kim Chaek, who did not die on the battlefield, occupy the top rows. Those who fell in Manchuria and whose bodies were never recovered sometimes did not even leave photos behind: hence, “to fashion their busts, sculptors supposedly relied on Kim’s descriptions of their faces.”36 This episode of how Kim Il-sung personally shaped the face of martyrs figures metonymically to illuminate a larger practice of making history in North Korea. The details of a public ground commemorating historical events and characters generated from an individual’s memory is a sign of creative process, sharing significant similarities with the process of creating propaganda. This particular site of Revolutionary Martyrs Cemetery figures prominently in the overall propaganda theater and film production of North Korea also in a sense that the personal lives of those buried in the cemetery provided abundant resources for the major narrative structure of propaganda performances. Page 184 → Figure 33. Revolutionary Martyrs Cemetery in Pyongyang. (Photo courtesy of an anonymous donor.) Figure 34. The Revolutionary Martyrs Cemetery is designed to look down on Pyongyang so that its spirit can guard the capital city. (Photo courtesy of an anonymous donor.) Page 185 →Revolutionary theater and film attempted to provide an ideal image of the nation and its people, and thereby serve as a blueprint for everyday life. However, in order for theater and film to succeed as public

education, the ideal images these media created had to be credible sources from reality rather than entirely separate from everyday life. In other words, if the North Korean propaganda productions were supposed to be isomorphic to everyday life, then they had to craft and present believable characters, not absolutely perfect ones who were devoid of realistic traits. If characters in revolutionary productions were too idealized, then they risked losing credibility as models for the general public. Nevertheless, as observed in the previous chapter, the propaganda performances of North Korea created all-tooideal images of the people and their national patriarch. The revolutionary operas allowed very little ambiguity in the characterization of heroes, as the only life goal of the immaculate protagonists in propaganda was to provide their service to the Party and the state fathers. This invites a question of how the revolutionary operas bridge the gap between the ideal world depicted on stage and screen and the reality of everyday life. How was the contrast between theatrical idealism and daily reality addressed?37 In my view, there were several strategies used to achieve this goal, all of them designed to resolve the perceived differences between performed illusion and everyday life. The most conspicuous strategy was to bring the idealized theater characters out of the physical confines of the theater building and place them in the most visible spaces, such as squares, streets, and public memorials such as Revolutionary Martyrs Cemetery, where people could encounter them even without entering traditionally defined performance venues. In this light, theatrical and filmic characters as paragons of revolutionary virtues, such as Yeon-ok from True Daughter of the Party, became an integral part of the mass parades commemorating the most important national holidays. As observed in chapter 2, on the founding day of North Korea, the image of the female protagonist from the opera True Daughter of the Party was painted on a large board, along with her Page 186 →famous lines, and placed on a large platform on wheels to be displayed throughout the major streets of Pyongyang and on Kim Il-sung Square, the center of the city.38 Such presentations of fictional theater characters as the focal point of national celebrations in sacred public spaces were part of North Korea’s effort to invent the tradition of revolutionary heroism and martyrdom. The fact that these characters were treated as real heroes raises a question: How could perfect characters in model theater works and revolutionary operas reach out to mundane people and convince them to emulate their virtue? In the effort to make this connection, another strategy was to create intermediary agents who were positioned between the fictional world of idealized theater characters and the nonfictional world of real people. These intermediary agents operated in the liminal zone between everyday life and theatrical illusion; they had concrete biographical data, just like the martyrs in cemetery, but there are no other reliable sources to make researchers believe that their biographies were not fabrications based on the formula of a Communist hagiography. Real facts concerning the lives of these intermediary agents were hardly known, since the only available information came from media representations of North Korea. The mass media and school education contributed significantly to the introduction of these model citizens, entirely dedicated to serving their state fathers, the Communist Party, and the nation. Some, such as An Geon-ho of North Korea, were widely promoted as selfsacrificing heroes in their societies.39 An Geon-ho was a secret police operative who was posthumously given the title “hero of North Korea” in the 1970s. An is said to have worked under cover on a construction site, and in a fatal incident that cost him his life, he covered with his own body the sacred letters of Kim Il-sung’s name from being destroyed by falling construction materials.40 Similar stories documenting inconceivable self-sacrifice are too numerous to catalog in their entirety; the following account from a North Korean defector illustrates only one facet of the unconditional loyalty to the leaders of North Korea: My future wife had an appropriate class background, was a Party member, and had unflinching loyalty to the Great Leader Kim Il-sung. She worked as a political advisor for the Korean Workers’ Party, a leadership position. She was so devoted to the teachings of Kim Il-sung that she sacrificed herself to uphold the Great Leader’s ideals. She suffered chronic back pain after she single-handedly attempted to save a large Page 187 →board where Kim Il-sung’s instruction was inscribed. “Let us defend Kim Il-sung’s great ideals with our own lives” was a phrase she held onto when a gust of wind was knocking it over. She threw herself toward the falling board but was caught underneath it, the

heavy board falling on her back. She was literally ready to defend the Great Leader’s ideals with her own life. . . . She and I got married in 1978, but it took us some years to bring our first child into this world. Our first baby was lost on the altar of Kim Il-sung. In every household as in every public space, there is a portrait of Kim hanging high on the wall. Underneath it is a box called a “casket of devotion” where the cleaning supplies—clean cloths and feather duster—are stored. My wife would religiously clean the portrait every morning. That was the first thing she did when she woke up. Even late into pregnancy when she was very close to the delivery date, she kept cleaning, until one day she fell off the chair while dusting the portrait. The shock took our first baby away. After this incident, she kept having miscarriages until we were blessed to see the birth of our first son in 1987.41

These kinds of stories were widely propagated through newspaper articles and school textbooks in North Korea. It is beyond my capability to prove their veracity; however, no matter how fictional the narratives about these Communist saints might have been, the crucial point is that these people were not introduced as fictional characters in theater and film productions but as people living real lives, making it credible that ordinary people could become model citizens just like the ones in theater productions. No matter how selflessly these heroes acted, it should be noted that their loftiest accomplishments were not superhuman deeds but unconditional self-sacrifice, which, in principle, was an achievable goal for everyone. As observed in the previous chapter, descriptions of divine qualities and deeds were exclusively reserved for creating gods out of state fathers. I contend that the reason propaganda presented sacrifice as the prime virtue of these intermediary agents stems from the leadership’s vision that self-sacrifice was possible and necessary for ordinary people. In addition to this rationale, the intermediary agents were presented as nonfictional people like everyone else, even though they demonstrated unbelievable loyalty to the party, which hardly distinguished them from the fictional characters in propaganda. Just as propaganda productions invented biographical pasts of the state fathers, they invented the narratives or developed the mechanisms for telling the real-life stories of saintly Communists to effectively convince Page 188 →ordinary people that they, too, could aspire to become real-life Communist saints. Another commonality among these Communist saints was that these heroes belonged to the ambiguous time zone created by the overlapping categories of past and present. They were introduced as contemporaries to the public, so that they could serve as palpable and credible models for the ordinary citizens to emulate. But more precisely speaking, these “real” heroes belonged to the immediate past, since many of their lives and deaths were canonized posthumously and presented to their contemporaries as a finalized hagiography. As Paul Cohen argues, “Any aspect of the past has the potential to live on as myth in the present, certain events and persons, because they resonate with themes of broader historical scope and importance.”42 An Geon-ho was canonized partly because his life belonged to the past, which made his story appropriate material for tradition and created a mythical aura stemming from the authority of the past. Inventing these heroes was a process parallel to inventing a national tradition, which was to inspire the public with its authority derived from continuity with the past. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger’s description of “invented tradition” is an adequate explanatory framework for pointing out how tradition is invented in order to serve as a bridge between the past and the present. They define the concept as “a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past. . . . Inventing traditions, it is assumed here, is essentially a process of formalization and ritualization, characterized by reference to the past, if only by imposing repetition.”43 Hobsbawm and Ranger’s notion helps us to formulate the process of North Korea’s invention of Communist saints as part of the revolutionary tradition: the producers of propaganda performances could use ordinary citizens as efficient intermediary agents between various sets of competing categories—past and present, ideal and real, theater and everyday life—by mythologizing their lives through numerous repetitions. By making audiences familiar with the nonfictional model citizens in real life through numerous campaigns and

educational sessions, the audience gradually came to accept the ideal characters of theater productions as part of reality. Moreover, learning from nonfictional Communist heroes served as an efficient introduction to theatrical characters, bridging the gap between reality and illusion. The formulaic narrative of a self-sacrificing hero in real life added new dimensions in theater productions, such as the Page 189 →hero’s superb military skills and strategic wisdom. But just like An, the most powerful virtue the stage and screen personas possessed was their determination to die willingly for the Party and their leaders. And if a glorious place like Revolutionary Martyrs Cemetery was what waited them, then it must be worthwhile to die willingly for the Party and the leaders. In this light, the cemetery’s true objective is to discipline the living as much as it is to honor the dead. In True Daughter of the Party, Yoen-ok, a military nurse, sacrifices her own life when she tries to save one of her patients from American bombing. The zealous effort to portray her as an immaculate saint goes so far as to push the boundaries of scientific knowledge; in one scene, she extracts her own blood and injects it into a dying patient. The production makes no reference to the nurse checking whether the blood types match at all. The filmed version captures Yeon-ok’s sacrificial movements at the center of the screen, even though she is located at the far left corner of downstage. As she freely moves around the stage from the center to the margins, from left to right, and back and forth, the camera persistently follows her movements in order to make the viewers’ gaze focus on Yeonok while ignoring the movements of other marginal characters. Despite the overzealous presentation of a selfsacrificial act that ignores scientific common sense, Yeon-ok’s stature as the ultimate paragon of virtue is not compromised thanks to the visual composition on screen, which constantly centers on her movements. She is presented as an immaculate model of self-sacrifice who is willing to realize the state father’s teaching even at the cost of her own life. North Korea often cites the slogan “Let’s follow the path of Gang Yeon-ok,” which parallels the PRC’s counterpart, “Let’s learn from comrade Lei Feng.”44 Joseon Yesul frequently publicized the fact that this revolutionary opera was based on the true story of a nurse who sacrificed her life during the Korean War. The portrait and life story of the nurse are exhibited at war memorials throughout North Korea, which are intended to demonstrate the veracity of theatrical illusion and thereby bring life and theater closer. The rationale for inventing the intermediary figures between theater and everyday life becomes even clearer when we consider that these figures, in conjunction with the characters in theater productions, were used to fortify the authority of the state fathers. The virtuous model citizens were ultimately sacrificing their lives for the principles of their state leader. In pledging loyalty to the state father and vowing to become a model citizen, one had to learn new sets of skills, virtues created to serve the revolutionized family-nation. North Korean propaganda performances promoted Page 190 →sets of virtues and vices for each group of allies and enemies, so as to present a recurring theme defining which deeds are virtuous and which are not. This dichotomy was part of the clear boundary being established between “us” and “them.” At the same time, since the propaganda performances were designed to be the model for everyday life, they served a practical purpose of teaching the people what to emulate and what to eradicate. At first glance, nothing exceeds loyalty to the Communist Party and to leaders as the primary virtue of the revolutionary heroes in propaganda performances. However, the nature of Communist virtue is often articulated in a more specific way. Acquiring literacy and mastering military tactics are presented as crucial aspects of the passage to enlightenment that aspiring Communists must undergo in order to join the community of revolutionaries. This priority reflects North Korea’s preference for military experience over other kinds of virtue, expressed in the prioritization of soldiers over workers and peasants as well as the desire to reform the people into useful members of the new society. Numerous articles and visual images about the importance of learning have saturated North Korea since the infancy of the state. For instance, the 1950 propaganda documentary film From North Korea bolstered the achievements of North Koreans in public education by showing children learning how to read and write. In accordance with the social propaganda promoting literacy, numerous revolutionary opera productions addressed the significance of education for future Communists, resonating with the state’s ideal to foster and embrace “intellectuals” as part of the model citizenry.

The revolutionary opera Sea of Blood illustrates such popular presentations of literacy as a new Communist virtue. The message that one needs to become literate in order to properly carry out revolutionary tasks is reiterated by Mother, the main character. When she is given a secret mission to transport explosive materials to an antiJapanese resistance group, the treacherous pro-Japanese village head issues her a false travel permit, in which he indicates that she needs to be scrutinized since she may be aiding the resistance. The illiterate Mother cannot comprehend its content and believes that she has a valid permit to travel through dangerous areas heavily guarded by the Japanese. Luckily, she shows the permit to Dong-chun, a member of an underground anti-Japanese guerrilla unit, before embarking upon her mission. DONG-CHUN: (Reading the permit.) “She behaves suspiciously, and needs to be watched carefully.” Page 191 →MOTHER: What?! . . . DONG-CHUN: (Giving back the permit to Mother.) Why would the wretched village head issue you the permit? Mother, if you want to help us revolutionaries, you must learn how to read. MOTHER: How can I learn at my advanced age? . . . DONG-CHUN: A literate person can pursue revolution more effectively.45 As Dong-chun categorically states, the desire to become a revolutionary is not sufficient and must be accompanied by diligent efforts to become a useful member of the family. Upholding the notion that true revolutionaries should be literate in propaganda performances was part of North Korea’s promotion of literacy. The propaganda conveyed clearly that being literate was no longer seen as a personal choice, but as a mandatory condition to be met. In this respect, the promotion of learning, even of highly politicized subject matter, became concrete evidence for the North Korean state to argue that Communists were systematically building an unprecedented paradise in which everyone was entitled to education. The point is reemphasized in the production True Daughter of the Party when a little boy, Bong-cheol, brags about his chances of receiving education: BONG-CHEOL: Sister, I am starting my schooling today. BONG-CHEOL’S MOTHER: The General [Kim Il-sung] granted us people’s rights and we obtained land and happiness. BONG-CHEOL’S GRANDMA: Our family members have been lackeys for generations. But today my grandson is going to school. ALL: Ah, the General made our lifetime wishes come true. BONG-CHEOL: Sister, I will always be singing the General’s songs you taught me on my way to school. YEON-OK: There is no greater happiness in the world than to revere the General as our father.46 Even though these lines are typical propagandistic expressions to promote Kim Il-sung’s benevolence and his fatherly love for the people, they resonate with North Korea’s determination to transform education from an exclusively elite into a public privilege. Armstong argues that, in North Korea, “workers and peasants would not only be allowed an education, but were given preferential access to education. As never before in the past, education was a means for social advancement available to the lower strata of Page 192 →Korean society, many of whose members could even enter that most honored of professions: becoming a teacher.”47 In fact, there is a full convergence between the theater stage and daily experience concerning education. North Korea’s commitment to make knowledge accessible to the people, however, did not involve dismantling the traditional intelligentsia and persecuting intellectuals, as was the case in the PRC, especially during the Cultural

Revolution (1966–76).48 North Korea took more protective measures toward its intellectuals, as reflected in and promoted by the propaganda performances. In True Daughter of the Party, Seong-rim, a bespectacled professor turned soldier, brings the symbolic props of glasses and guns together in his bodily presentation as a union of literacy and military skills. A fellow soldier asks why an intellectual like Seong-rim joined the army, in order to address the seemingly incongruent signs of militarism and learnedness. GI-CHANG: I heard you were a university professor, but why do you wear a sergeant’s badge? SEONG-RIM: Ha, ha, ha . . . maybe in the area of botany I may pass for a company or regiment commander, but on the battlefield, my place is that of a sergeant.49 Seong-rim’s answer highlights the fact that military skills, together with literacy, which promoted revolutionary ideology and activities, were the primary virtues of the members of the family-nation. However, upon a closer reading, Seong-rim’s seemingly lighthearted answer organizes the field of academic knowledge (“botany”) according to military terms (“company or regiment commander”), thus projecting the intellectual field through the military hierarchy. The prioritizing of soldiers and military culture as the fulcrum of the ideal citizenry is manifested in the linguistic practice of propaganda performances. The Communist virtues of literacy and military skills become more distinctive when juxtaposed with contrasting attributes assigned to enemies. One of the consistently recurring vices in the propaganda productions is superstitious belief. Flower Girl features a caricature of a character, the landlord’s wife, who is deeply invested in superstition. After inflicting much harm upon Kkot-bun’s family—enslaving her mother and brother, blinding her sister, and making Kkot-bun herself a fugitive—the landlord’s wife is haunted by a ghostly hallucination in which she sees her own image as a persecutor of the poor and the oppressed. For this reason, in act 6, a shaman Page 193 →is brought into the household to perform an exorcism. The landlord pours out money on piles of silk as his payment for the shaman’s healing performance. Sarcastically, the landlord says to his wife: “So, you’re telling me that Jesus-believers can also see ghosts?”50 By indicating that the landlord’s wife is a Christian, the production categorically dismisses Christianity, which became a powerful social force in South Korean society after the Korean War. In the official North Korean view, neither shamanism, which had been officially suppressed as irrational elements of the feudal past, nor Christianity from the West is the solution to the social evils of feudal society. Quite unambiguously, both are presented as superstitious vices that must be eradicated. North Korean propaganda suggests that the Communist army is the only corrective to the vices that corrupt people’s minds. The entrance of Kim’s army marks the commencement of the citizens’ true enlightenment. In Flower Girl, Kkot-bun’s brother returns home as a soldier in Kim Il-sung’s guerrilla army to put an end to the vicious cycles of the old society—a prototype utopian ending that had been formulated already in the 1949 film My Hometown. Since in North Korea’s propaganda, building the nation was viewed as a continuation of the enlightenment movement initiated in early-twentieth-century Korea, the same efforts and motivations were required of the people: acquiring literacy and learning military tactics, in addition to unconditional self-sacrifice, in order to cultivate the virtues of the imagined family. At the same time, these virtues functioned as markers of a distinctive identity, distinguishing the legitimate members of the family-nation from outsiders, who were straightforwardly identified as its enemies. The state’s imagination of the ideal citizenship was inherently inseparable from its projection of its enemies, and thus drew a clear boundary around the family-nation.

Enemies of the Family-Nation: Japanese, Americans, and Their Lackeys A Communist regime could be successfully established in Korea partly because it was able to restore a sense of a nation through the figurative construction of brotherhood using the traditional Confucian family rhetoric familiar to Koreans. By using the rhetoric of family kinship in addressing the novel socialist notion of class structure, North Korea could easily propose a new social order evolving around the structure of the family-nation. By the Page 194 →same token, defining exclusion from the family-nation became an easy way to define inclusion. It was

crucial that the newly established regime designated and differentiated the enemies of the nation from the model citizens. For these reasons, in his nation-building project Kim was quick to draw a clear boundary between those who were part of the family and those who were not. He noted in numerous speeches that there was no ambiguous zone in between: “We should let the rising generation know clearly how harshly the imperialists, landlords, and capitalists oppressed and exploited their parents, educate them thoroughly to hold a hatred for the exploiting classes and oppose the old social system. Along with this, we should arm our children and youth with socialist patriotism to make them ardently love their fatherland.”51 For North Korea, the Japanese, together with the Americans, were perhas the most ignoble enemy. Kim was quick to historicize the importance of his resistance movement against the Japanese invaders by invoking a strong nationalistic sentiment based on hatred of the enemy.52 Kim Il-sung’s vision of the Japanese as the arch-enemy of the Korean nation had a lasting impact on the formation of revolutionary propaganda. Adrian Buzo notes that Kim Il-sung’s resistance movement and other ramifications of nationalist movements shared one single-minded goal, which was to defy Japanese colonial rule: “The characteristic of the nationalist movement as a whole also applied to the prewar Korean Communist movement. The strong sense of cultural identity and the task of reclaiming the homeland from the Japanese meant that Korean communists operated in an environment charged with nationalist sentiment. In practice, therefore, there was little distinction between communists and nationalists, as nationalists became communists, communists became nationalists with all manner of shadings in between.”53 True to Buzo’s statement, having a tangible enemy energized a nationalistic discourse on reinstating the nationhood that had been lost before the foundation of North Korea, which obscured the boundaries between Communists and others. But even after the withdrawal of the enemy from Korean territories after World War II, the hostile discourse about the enemy was omnipresent in North Korea because it reinforced the unity of the family-nation. The propaganda performances of the 1960s and 1970s fostered a sense of community by focusing on the process akin to what Vamik Volkan terms “psychologizing” the enemy. In The Need to Have Enemies and Allies, Volkan notes: Page 195 →The more chronic that involvement with conflict with one or more opposing group is, the greater the tendency to “psychologize” it. Concealed or apparent emotional issues and attempts to regressively solve them dominate, modifying real world aspects of the conflict. Whatever the contributing historical, military, economic, or social factors may be, the resultant chronic conflict becomes increasingly difficult to resolve; it becomes embedded in the identity of a group or nation. The enemy is insinuated into the self-image of the group or nation, becoming “the other,” a collection of traits that the group itself does not wish to have, the embodiment of taboos vigorously repudiated by the group ethos.54 Psychologizing and dramatizing the Japanese as the enemy in propaganda performances in the 1960s and 1970s was not entirely a fictionalizing process, since the memories of recent Japanese colonialism and war were still vivid in the minds of Koreans. For North Korea, such memories became their nation’s collective humiliating experience. The process of psychologizing the enemy was devoid of any moral ambiguity: audiences were not supposed to see the Japanese from their discursive individual perspectives, but from the specific perspective of the anti-Japanese resistance group, which the propaganda performances provided constantly. There were numerous anti-Japanese plays very early in performance history, all of which were based on the time and space of Manchuria in the 1930s, including Hwang Jeok-mo’s Victory Achievers (Seungnijadeul),55 Kim Hyeong-chuk’s They Fought and Achieved Victory (Geudeul-eun ssawo seungnihaetda),56 and the Mangyeong Graduate School Circle Members’ The Son Also Set Out for Revolutionary Struggle (Adeul-do tujaeng-ui gil-e naseotda),57 all published in 1959. One of the most notable features of presenting the enemy consisted of envisioning Japanese as the racial other. Just like Americans, Japanese are presented as the white race in relation to Koreans. Ironically, this nonessentialist

view on racial distinction is a deviant recycling of Japan’s own racial politics during the imperial expansion. Although the depiction of Japanese was always vile in North Korean propaganda performances, Japan’s role in the modernization of Korea was ambivalent. Japan’s imperialistic expansionism no doubt delayed the modernization of Korea. Simultaneously, Japan functioned as the surrogate West (in a political and cultural sense) for the colonized country, having reinvented itself through the Meiji Restoration in the 1860s, as Japan embarked on a crash course on military skills and Page 196 →Western civilization. Its reform made Japan, traditionally seen by Koreans as an inferior nation, the most Westernized East Asian nation in terms of its resemblance to the dominant state powers of the West. As Kam Louie notes: “Very quickly, the Japanese modernized and left their Asian neighbors far behind technologically and militarily. By the first half of the twentieth century, they distinguished themselves from other ‘Asians,’ and became an imperialist power with their own colonies.”58 The assimilation of Japan to the West led to a distinctively racial differentiation between themselves and other Asians. The Japanese employed the racial rhetoric of whiteness—marked by both lighter skin color and cultural dominance—to distance themselves from the East (in both geographical and cultural senses) with which they had been associated.59 According to Morris Low, in the 1870s and 1880s imperial visits were a way of making visible the connections between the new centralized government and the emperor and the nationwide embracing of Western masculinities, through a form of theatrical display. In massive photographs and lithographs of the emperor in Western military uniform, “Notions of God-given whiteness and brightness linked the body of the Emperor to the lives and bodies of Japanese soldiers. This served to distance the Japanese from their Asian neighbors, showed European nations that Japan was a world power worthy of respect.”60 The Japanese leadership endorsed the hierarchal power divide between East and West and associated itself with the West as the possessor of political hegemony. Nonetheless, Japan’s efforts to reinvent itself as a Western imperial power by associating its people with the biological traits of the white race had its limitations. Leo Ching argues that the biological and sociohistorical assimilation with the white race had to be accompanied by an equally rigorous process of disassociation from other Asian people: “Japan’s identification with the “white” race is far from being a “natural” one. Visible morphological characteristics such as skin, bone, and hair that enabled the categorical division of people into broad racial groupings such as “white,” “black,” and “yellow” cannot simply be altered or transformed through representation. What imperial Japan needed in justifying its new-found status was not only a rhetoric of identification with the West, but also a systemic differentiation and dissociation—on biological and sociohistorical grounds—from its Asian neighbors.”61 The repetitive self-representation as a white race undermined Japan’s traditional connection with the rest of East Asia. And it is precisely this segregationist racial politics that serves as a basis for vilifying Japanese in North Korean propaganda performances. Page 197 →The Japanese people’s facial color in the propaganda performances is conspicuously lighter than that of the working people of Korea. For example, the 1972 filmed theater production Flower Girl features a vicious Japanese woman whose face is distinctively marked by a tone whiter than the Korean characters’. The Japanese woman’s snow-white face contrasts with the darker face of the Korean protagonist, representing the former as the exploiter and the latter as a positive working character. The Japanese woman marked by means of racial difference is an obvious outsider to “our” community. However, in most cases, the internal enemies—that is, Korean people who are not part of Kim’s revolutionary camps—are seen as aligned with the external Japanese enemies. The contrast between Japanese as the racial other and the superior Chinese soldiers as “our” people finds its parallel in North Korea’s revolutionary operas, in which Americans join the ranks of the racial other with Japanese. In True Daughter of the Party, which supposes Americans as the arch-enemies, the heroic main characters sing a duet in defiance of American imperialism: Let’s not forget our friendship Which was forged in the battle fire. Let’s dedicate our youth to the homeland, my friend

To the battleground where American imperialists are destroyed. Oh, my friend, let’s dedicate our youth to the homeland.62 This production presents Americans as “ruthless killers,” the same way other productions present Japanese.63 A little boy, Bong-cheol, who is overjoyed to be attending school under the merciful guidance of General Kim Ilsung, is burned to death by the American soldiers.64 Furthermore, Americans, together with their South Korean lackeys, are described as bombing and burning the fugitives. In the following scene where American soldiers are dragging innocent Korean villagers out of their homes, a South Korean soldier appears in the role of an American soldier’s servant: AMERICAN: (To a South Korean soldier.) Pull out all the family members of the red Communist! SOUTH KOREAN: I-e-ss [the English word yes pronounced in the Korean fashion] (The enemies are dragging out the people.) Page 198 →CHORUS: How can we yield to the enemy? Let us defend our firm promise to carry out the revolution. Ah, even if we have to give up our lives, Let us fight and pursue the General’s sunbeams. AMERICAN: Shoot them all. (A little girl is dragged out. The atrocious American enemies are beating the resisting people. Sound of gunfire. Enemies drag an old man, beat him, and go away.)65 This white American soldier, although he is played by a Korean actor, is characterized by his whitened face and tall stature, conspicuously distinguished from other Korean characters as the racial other.66 North Korea’s anti-American sentiment as expressed in revolutionary operas is deeply rooted in the circumstances surrounding the division of the two Koreas in 1945. However, the bitter resentment toward the United States exploded during the Korean War. Although the actual military engagement with the United States ceased with the armistice in 1953, North Korea’s psychological war escalated in the post–Korean War era through various antiAmerican campaigns. Propaganda plays portraying Americans as monstrous beasts prevailed upon the popular imagination. For instance, one elderly woman during a discussion at work said that “Americans are worse than wolves” after seeing the play Wolves (Seungnyang-i).67 In addition to stage and screen performances, visual culture in everyday life practice also called for rabid antiAmericanism. The most conspicuous example is the display of the USS Pueblo on the Daedong River in Pyongyang. The Pueblo was an American spy ship captured by the North Korean navy on January 23, 1968. At the time, the crew members surrendered to the North Korean navy with one casualty. Although the American crew members were released back to the United States, the ship was docked in the port of Wonsan until 1999 and then moved to Pyongyang for public display as a symbol of North Korea’s victory over the American imperialists. The ship is still on display on the river. Another prominent spatial artifact bringing the ideology of hatred to tangible form is the American Imperial Massacre Remembrance Museum located in the North Korean city of Sincheon. The following story by one North Korean defector tells how these physical artifacts were used for the anti-American education of younger generations in North Korea:

Page 199 →The American Imperial Massacre Remembrance Museum was a site where American soldiers killed some 900 villagers, 300 of whom were women and children. The American troops led the unarmed civilians into an air raid shelter, kept them there in fear for three days, and set the building on fire and burned everyone to death on the third day. The museum was a place where we learned how much we should hate America. We were told that the American soldiers separated children from mothers and burned them separately in ammunition storage facilities up the mountain. We were brought into a mausoleum and shown the walls where the victims’ nails were stuck as they desperately gasped their last breath and wrote on the wall: “Avenge our death,” and “Americans are our arch-enemies.” The excursion guide also pointed out that the white layer on the wall was grease produced from incinerated human bodies.68 The graphic violence used to narrate the atrocities supposedly committed by the American army gains veracity when the tangible space of a museum is assigned to commemorate the events associated with the narrative, which, in itself, cannot be verified as historically accurate. The coupling of the physical and the verbal reinforces the magnitude of the hatred embedded in the minds of the North Korean people and presents a clear boundary between them and the enemy. In addition to such artifacts, which occupy a part of an essential national space, other numerous, infinitely reproducible images joined the anti-American rally. As the poster in figure 35 poignantly displays, the official sentiment of North Korea toward Americans can be best expressed as the desire for retribution. The dominating North Korean soldier standing over the body of an American soldier and the American flag expresses North Korea’s unfulfilled desire to defeat the South Korean–American alliance that germinated during the Korean War. However, to inspire the same anger and hatred in the younger generation of North Koreans who did not experience the war, it was necessary to have ongoing psychological propaganda, at the heart of which lay revolutionary operas. South Koreans joined the ranks of the enemy in propaganda performances. In the previous scene from True Daughter of the Party, the South Korean soldier is the betrayer of Korean essence, which is linguistically marked in the scene. His usage of an English word, “yes,” pronounced in a Korean way of distinguishing syllables, “i-e-ss, ” discloses North Korea’s disparaging attitude toward South Korea as the servant of the American imperialists.69 Page 200 → Figure 35. A North Korean poster with a caption: “If the American empire provokes another war, death will be their only reward.” Joseon Yesul 7 (1969), back cover. Page 201 →Such a condescending perspective on South Koreans as an extension of the enemy was found in North Korea’s visual culture even before the outbreak of the Korean War. On the cover of the January 1950 issue of The Arrow (Hwalsal) (sic) magazine, the South Korean leader I Seung-man is depicted leading the Japanese enemies back to Korea. The caption in the illustration reads, “I Seung-man inviting back the enemy whom we have dispelled.” The South Korean leader is wearing a Western-style coat and a pouch with a dollar sign, marking him as an ally of the Americans. The Japanese who follows Rhee wears a cap with a dollar sign on his head, placing himself in the same category as the South Korean leader. North Korea equated South Korean leaders and Japanese by presenting them both as the racial “other”: the South Korean leader’s white complexion, together with his Western suit, represents him as the betrayer of true Koreanness. Nevertheless, the portrayal of ordinary South Koreans in the North Korean popular imagination diverges from the rigid formula of projecting them as bitter enemies. North Korean productions centering on South Koreans seem to distinguish between people from the regime and the common people; often, the portrayal of South Korean civilians (nongovernment, nonmilitary personnel) takes a sympathetic turn, as in True Daughter of the Party: for North Koreans, South Korean civilians are brothers and sisters who have been forcefully separated from them by greedy imperialists who forsake the Korean national interest for the sole purpose of realizing their ambitions. North Korean propaganda dictated that South Koreans were ignorant of the existence of socialist life in North Korea; therefore, it was North Koreans’ national mission to liberate the devastated South Koreans and accomplish the long-awaited national unification.

The ambiguity of South Koreans presented a unique challenge for propaganda producers, who had to navigate between the “negative” and the “salvageable” without obscuring the transparent ideology of propaganda. Such limits in representation are fully explored in the 1969 film The Choe Hak-sin Family, which centers on the vicissitudes of one family whose members take different political sides during the Korean War. The patriarch, Christian minister Choe Hak-sin, is a revered local community leader in Pyongyang. He blindly believes that Americans will save Korea and let Christianity prosper. His youngest daughter, Seong-mi, joins the underground Communist resistance movement under the American occupation of the city. Choe’s only son, Seong-geun, fights for the South Korean army under the American leadership and returns to his hometown with the occupying forces. Only when his elder sister Seong-ok is abducted, sexually Page 202 →harassed, and killed by an American soldier do the father and the son realize the fallacies of American promises and wake up to see the Communist Korea as the only viable future of their nation. The film elaborates on the process by which Choe Hak-sin and his son reach their ultimate conversion. By the director’s own admission, Choe Hak-sin, who embodies the ideological journey from Christianity to Communism, is a complex character: He blindly worships Americans, but also claims that he does not support everything America presents. He claims not to follow the path of Communists, but openly declares that not all Communist politics are bad either. The challenge I faced as a director was to reconcile these various traits into one personality. . . . Did this mean that I was supposed to create a neutral character? That was impossible. That would have meant paralyzing the hatred for the enemy and dissipating the passion for the things we should uphold. That is why we have to criticize harshly the pro-Americanism of Choe Hak-sin and to embrace him wholeheartedly when he comes back to the side of the people. Dividing the lines between these two tenets was crucial in the portrayal of Choe Hak-sin.70 The director further points out that the stage version of the story produced in 1955 did not express the ambiguity of the character. Instead, it made the mistake of denigrating Choe as a follower of everything American from the beginning, thus losing the opportunity to create the dramatic reversal at the end. The pivotal aspect of Choe, as the film director saw it, was the persuasive political conversion that came after a long process of deliberation, but the story’s ultimate aim was not the construction of a multifaceted character with complex psychological dimensions but the dramatic ending reaffirming that Communism is the only viable path for both Koreas. What seems to be ambiguity in portraying civilians without clear political orientation ultimately reinforces typical North Korean propaganda in other productions. A 1974 film entitled Fate of Geum-hui and Eun-hui (Geum-huiwa Eun-hui-ui unmyeong) centers on the diverging fates of twin sisters who were separated during the Korean War and consequently led contrasting lives in the two Koreas. While the elder sister, Geum-hui, grows up to become an artist under the auspicious guidance of Kim’s leadership in North Korea, the younger, Eun-hui, ends up a prostitute exploited by heinous capitalists in South Korea. By having the same actress play both roles and using the identical camera Page 203 →angle to capture the same gaze onto the divided lives of the twin sisters, the film effectively demonstrates the schizophrenic existence of Koreans, whose lives could differ dramatically depending on which Korea they belonged to. Just like The Choe Hak-sin Family, this film uses the traditional family structure to speak of the tragic division, expressed as the separation of the inseparable. The forces that disperse members of the family-nation are highlighted, which ultimately amplifies the culpability of these enemies. Not Even an Iron Chain Can Stop Us (Cheolsoe-ro uri-reul makji mothanda, VHS release by Mongnan Video in 2002) is based on fictional events involving long-term North Korean prisoners in South Korea. These prisoners were captured during the Korean War by the South Korean army and became among the longest-held political prisoners in the world by refusing to denounce their Communist convictions. The film shows graphic scenes of torture in a South Korean prison as well as the South Korean authorities’ psychological coercion, trying to convert them by using the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dismantling of the Eastern bloc and by giving false information about their fellow prisoners’ betrayal.

Although the South Korean authorities are presented as the most atrocious enemies of the North Korean state, the film also presents ambiguous pictures of South Korean civilians, who are under the wrong regime and therefore should be shown a clear political vision. For instance, one of the long-term prisoners, Choe Nam, has a grandson in South Korea who is used as bait to convert his stubborn grandfather. The film at times approaches Choe Nam’s life from the grandson’s point of view, and thereby presents the unflinching ideological struggle from a naive outsider’s perspective. The film viewer’s defamiliarized perspective temporarily merges with that of the South Korean grandson, thereby creating a rapport between the two. In the end, the grandson comes to realize that his grandfather died for the greater cause of the nation, which makes him a true believer in his grandfather’s political vision. The North Korean government also suspects that there are “internal enemies” within the national boundaries of North Korea who appear neither as racial nor as political others. However, unlike Americans, Japanese, or South Korean leaders, who conspicuously embody the traits of the racial other, these internal enemies require careful scrutiny by the legitimate members of the family-nation. If the purpose of defining an enemy is to establish the boundary between “us” and “the other,” then discerning the enemy within is a demanding but necessary step in order to learn oneself more clearly. The most intricate play treating the boundary between an internal enemy Page 204 →and an ally is Oh, Tell the Forest, introduced in the previous chapter. The male protagonist, Byeong-hun, serves as a lackey of the Japanese police with the purpose of getting much-needed information and reporting it to Kim Il-sung’s anti-Japanese guerrilla camp. Because Korean villagers living under the Japanese colonizers are not aware of Byeong-hun’s true identity, he is despised by the entire village, including his own family. Out of despair and shame about her father’s ignominious job, his daughter attempts suicide, which serves as an occasion to reveal the inner conflict of Byeong-hun, who has to play the role of an enemy to his own people. This moment in the play reveals the reverse process of justifying the existence of the imposter-enemy. By revealing the emotional conflict of the undercover hero, the production calls attention to the boundary between “us” and the enemies. What does such a boundary ultimately divide? Although the boundary may not be crossed randomly, according to individual determination and decision, it illustrates the potential transformation of allies into enemies and vice versa through each character’s willingness to perform a role of a certain kind. In a similar example from Sea of Blood, Yong-pal, a villager who is sympathetic toward the secret anti-Japanese resistance movement, pretends to be constantly drunk and flatters the pro-Japanese village head in order not to invite any suspicion. By playing two sets of roles—the real revolutionary, which he conceals, and the fake Japanese ally, which he embodies—Yongpal is able to unveil what it means to act as a truly dedicated model citizen in North Korea. By crossing the boundary between enemy and ally, these protagonists show that revolutionary heroes are able to tame the enemy by shrewdly embodying them. “Enemy,” in this sense, becomes a temporary and unstable identity for heroes, who sagaciously master how to play the role. Doing so opens the possibility of destabilizing the identity of the other by allowing the self to fake it until the acting process is complete, and thereby asserts that the seemingly stable position of the enemy is nonexistent. Hero’s staging the other is condoned only because it is an illusive performance, its justification lying in the ephemeral nature of playing the wrong role just for the time being.

Page 205 →CHAPTER 5 Acting Like Women in North Korea Between Tradition and Revolution The rapid political shift from colonialism to socialism in the northern part of the Korean peninsula in the middle of the twentieth century inevitably brought about transformations in the social and cultural sectors that were manifested in everyday life. This political shift was more palpable in women’s lives, since women were by and large not an integral part of public discourse prior to the twentieth century. This chapter addresses how women as a political trope entered the public discourse of nation-building with the establishment of the new socialist state and the ways performing and visual arts shaped as well as reflected the everyday life of North Korean women. One foundational aspect of North Korean women’s lives, regardless of political regime or social circumstances, is that women’s identity is seen through the prism of familial relationship. In a Confucian notion of the traditional family, women are defined in relation to male family members as mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters. However, as the notion of family was brought out of the traditional domestic realm and expanded to the level of the state, so were the notions of mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters considered on a larger national plane. Women in representative propaganda productions, such as Sea of Blood and Flower Girl, became not only the focal point of visual composition within the traditional family structure but also the agents of ideological awakening for the newly founded socialist state. Revolutionary operas and numerous other productions depicted as well as Page 206 →forged the new gender order within the structure of the “imagined” family, which gained supremacy over blood ties. The imagined family was defined by the degree of commitment to ideological and political struggle, which separated “us” from the “enemy.” The process of imagining a family thus intended to liberate women from the domestic realm and encourage them to be a part of societal currents. Women’s role in traditional family life had been a social topic of debate since the early twentieth century, when Korea was under increasing pressure to open up to the outside world. The humiliating colonial experience under occupation by the Japanese, traditionally despised as “barbarians,” propelled Koreans to evaluate their weakness vis-à-vis the concrete threat to their national sovereignty. Women’s backwardness was regarded as directly related to a national problem, and many Korean intellectuals explored the question of how to modernize Korean women, whose traditional ways of life were seen as an urgent enlightenment project. In the age of social Darwinism, when international politics was viewed through the concept of the survival of the fittest and the strongest, female weakness was immediately perceived as one of the primary reasons for a nation’s backwardness. In light of their nation’s fragile future, Koreans with modern education saw traditional family life, one of the most ancient institutions in Korean society, as the main culprit holding back the progress of women as well as the nation’s modernization. Proportionate to the increasing criticism of the oppression of traditional family life, the traditional mind-set of denying women’s visibility in the public sphere came under scrutiny. Females seen in public prior to the twentieth century were mostly despised professionals, such as shamans, gisaeng (courtesans), and medical experts. Although these women were of disparate class backgrounds, all of them were often viewed as notorious compromisers of men’s morals and, in the case of shamans and gisaeng in particular, corrupters of public decency. The custom of either confining women within the nonvisible domestic sphere or acknowledging their significance when they played a man’s role in the public sphere started to change in the early twentieth century, when women’s questions became social issues for the public in their own right. Propelled by the liberal atmosphere created by modern education and urban life, women had a self-generated awakening that expanded their realm of activity beyond strict domestic confines. Social icons groomed to represent ideal women, however, were closely linked to a strong patriotic sentiment that saw women as instruments in the national project to restore a lost sovereignty. Ryu Gwan-sun, for instance, was one of the key figures who Page 207 →marched in peace to protest the harsh Japanese colonial rule on March 1, 1919. After Liu was arrested for her participation in the march and died in prison, she became an icon of selfless political resistance, providing inspiration for generations to come.

Popular theater and film productions played a crucial role in forging the new type of women in the social life of early-twentieth-century Korea.1 The earliest example was Shriek (Gyuhan), written and published in 1917 by I Gwang-su, a writer who persistently addressed issues of public education, equal rights for men and women, and the oppressive nature of traditional customs. I’s drama centers on the devastating situation of the lonely wives of overseas students. Even though the female protagonist in this drama lacks the strong will of Ibsen’s Nora and is a victim who becomes insane after her husband’s betrayal, the drama poignantly captures the irrational custom of arranged marriages, which, most of the time, were imposed on young people against their will. Likewise, Kim U-jin, an English major at Waseda University, in 1925 wrote I Yeong-nyeo, which realistically portrays how an underprivileged young woman struggles to survive as a mother and wife within a traditional family but is doomed to fail because of the systemic failure of the society without an exit from poverty and discrimination. In 1936, Ryu Chi-jin, the most prolific Korean dramatist of the first half of the twentieth century, wrote Sisters, in which he ambitiously addressed multiple aspects of modern women’s lives, such as their pursuit of education, career, marriage, love, social status, and a role in the rapidly transforming society. But when Ibsen’s A Doll’s House was staged in Korea in 1934, three years prior to the Chinese adaptation of the play, it did not stir up a significant debate over the issue of women’s emancipation, as it did in China.2 North Korean theater historian Choe Chang-ho comments that the social mood for such a debate had not developed yet, and the play was by and large received as a typical melodramatic story of a fallen woman,3 by which he implies that the revolutionary consciousness could not have germinated fully under colonial rule. In Choe’s view, which represents official North Korean historiography, true revolutionary ideology involving gender could only blossom under Kim Il-sung’s revolutionary resistance activities in Manchurian exile. However, in reality, Kim Il-sung’s resistance effort was only one of the many factions within the socialist revolutionary movement, which consisted of many other top-to-bottom movements seeking to reform gender relations. Mostly initiated by the intelligentsia during the Japanese colonial rule, these movements aimed at restructuring the repressive nature of the Page 208 →traditional family, and were predicated on emancipating women. Socialists were one of the most active groups, with a specific aim of transforming both men and women into a labor force usable for the impending Communist revolution. This process was interlaced with the deployment of highly effective anti-Japanese sentiment to coat the emancipation of women with a feeling distinctively nationalistic rather than socialist. The North Korean Law of Gender Equality (Bukjoseon namnyeopyeongdeunggwon-e daehan beomnyeong), promulgated on July 30, 1946, stipulated the historical urgency to liberate women as stemming from the necessity to restore national dignity more than instituting women’s rights: For thirty-six years [under Japanese colonial rule], women of Joseon had to endure endless humiliation and cruel exploitation. They had neither political nor economic rights, and never had a chance to participate in cultural, social, and political life. Feudal family relations from the Middle Ages bound women politically and economically. Humiliation, ignorance, and spite became the fate of the women of Joseon. However, the status of women changed when the Red Army liberated North Korea from Japanese colonial rule. The democratic reforms being carried out on a domestic front created conditions for women to be liberated from their unequal positions in political, economic, and family life.4 Although the law was modeled after the parallel cases from the Soviet Union, which presided over the northern part of Korea at the time the law was promulgated, the North Korean version was clearly grounded on antiJapanese sentiment, which was sure to provoke nationalistic response. Underneath the conventional rhetoric of women’s emancipation and gender equality, there lay the urgency for the North Korea’s leaders to build its identity as the liberator of the North Korean people who have been oppressed and humiliated by the Japanese. The subtext of the preface to the law reads as a promise to guard the dignity of North Korean women from humiliating violation, including sexual violation by foreign forces. At the same time, it was also the state’s claim to exercise the rights to use female labor forces for national reconstruction in return for this protection. Women had joined the labor front upon the outbreak of the Korean War. As manpower was concentrated on

warfare, industry and agriculture were left to women’s care. But even after the war, the North Korean leadership urged women to continue participating actively in the reconstruction of society. According to the 1958 report “Plans to Hire More Female Page 209 →Laborers in Various Economic Sectors,” North Korea was planning to (1) increase the percentage of female workers in education and health care to 60 percent by 1961; (2) hire women instead of men for jobs women could handle; (3) open more daycare centers to accommodate working mothers’ needs; (4) increase the ratio of female students in higher education.5 However, even though women’s enrollment in higher education actually increased, we should not read this plan as an achievement of gender equality in the workplace, for “there are disproportionately fewer women in other fields, such as government, business management, engineering, or trade and finance.”6 The state’s true motivation in encouraging women to join the collective labor force was to fill the empty places that men had left when they joined the army. For North Korean men, it was “mandatory to serve the army for approximately ten years,” which created “more demand for a female workforce.”7 As marriageable men were serving the state long term, women’s marriage and pregnancy years were retarded accordingly. Thus, instead of having families of their own, women were driven out of the domestic sphere and into the public sphere, in such a radical manner as to make Helen Hunter note that “it is doubtful that any society has accomplished a more basic change in so short a time.”8 Because of the practical social demand for a female labor force, women’s emancipation from the domestic sphere was legitimized under the pretext of “achieving gender equality.”9 As Hunter points out: “In 1947, only 5 percent of industrial workers were women; by 1949, the number had jumped to 15 percent. By 1967, women accounted for almost half of the total workforce.”10 The official claim that full equality exists between the sexes was “promulgated as law in the Law of Equality, enacted in July 1946 and later incorporated into the Constitution of 1948. Under the law, North Korean women are guaranteed full equality ‘in every phase of life, including political, economic, and cultural life.’”11 Even though the government promised the same work privileges, wages, social security, and education as men, in practice, women are not paid comparable wages for essentially comparable work, and they are not promoted comparably.12 The actual gender discrimination in society notwithstanding, the image of working women in the public sphere was endorsed by the leadership for practical reasons of supplementing the labor force and paved the legitimate way for representing ideal women in revolutionary operas. Alongside the highly codified projection of a new male citizenry consisting of soldiers, peasants, workers, and intellectuals examined in the previous chapter, there Page 210 →emerged a systematic depiction of working women as empowered national subjects in the revolutionary operas and other performance genres, yet they managed to retain visible markers of traditional femininity in all aspects of their bodily performances involving gestures, costumes, and action. The creation of ambidextrous women—working subjects as well as docile females—is one of the most conspicuous innovations in North Korean arts.13 However, this process had its own set of dilemmas. The endorsement of women in the public sphere, as depicted in revolutionary operas, primarily aimed at utilizing women’s labor as a social resource. Emancipating women from the domestic sphere actually doubled their duties in the domestic and social spheres while keeping their rights status quo. The dilemma raised by the Marxist women question—that women’s rights could not become a societal issue so long as women did not contribute to social production—had no solution in North Korea. Promoting a strong image of women whose existence extended beyond the domestic realm was part of the attempt to mobilize women as a labor force by creating an illusion of women’s liberation without addressing gender equality in the social and domestic areas. North Korea produced many statues and posters of armed women in the public sphere and replicated the images of female revolutionaries on stage and screen. Theater and film, together with other visual art forms, perpetuated the impression of women’s liberation through countless repetition of images of the emancipated woman to the point that they became the real foundation of everyday life rather than a mere reflection of it. The conflicted gender politics in North Korea, as expressed in revolutionary performances, is manifested on various planes, such as body politics, experimentation with sexuality, gaze, and fashion, which comprise iterative questions about female protagonists’ making the physical move from the domestic to the public space.

Every major female character in North Korean propaganda performances bids farewell to the traditional family life bound in the domestic sphere. Crossing the boundary of that traditional life becomes a crucial step for character development, or more precisely, an inevitable rite of passage for female characters who become genuine protagonists. Stepping out of the inner domestic world for these women is a risky and occasionally deadly event. Nevertheless, it is a crucial moment that transforms these women into heroes, and one without which the task of revolution cannot be carried out. This is exemplified by the female heroes Kkot-bun in Flower Girl, Mother in Sea of Blood, and Yeon-ok in True Daughter of the Party. In fact, crossing the boundary between the domestic and the public not Page 211 →only became the signature action of revolutionary heroines but also retroactively reshaped the female protagonists living in feudal times, before the twentieth-century revolutionary struggle. The North Korean perspective actively cast the well-known folk heroines in a revisionist light, reinventing them as belonging to the immediately recognizable paradigm of revolutionary heroes. Theater pieces and films set in feudal times galvanized the heroism of women—the upper class as well as the lowest caste—to step out of the oppressive patriarchal household in search of social equality and justice. While their crossing the boundary between domestic and public was evocative of their male counterparts who left traditional fathers for state fathers, it also paved the way for inventing traditions of revolutionary women in prerevolutionary times. Historical accuracy was never really a concern for the producers of these performances, which allowed for anachronistic liberated working women in feudal times. At the same time, such creative moves allowed North Korean producers to claim the world of fantasy as a political terrain and to reinvent the world of legends, folktales, and the imagination in general according to immediately recognizable socialist ideals. Inventing the past in North Korean propaganda performances was inherently an ideological maneuvering. Princess Seon-hwa,14 published in 1956, is one of the earliest known North Korean plays to feature an audacious female protagonist who is driven equally by a sense of social justice and individual passion. This five-act play is based on the folk legend of the beautiful princess Seon-hwa, who was the third daughter of King Jinpyeong (?–632) of the Silla dynasty (BCE 57–935 CE). The legend that serves as the raw material for the play has little historical veracity, but reinvented by North Korea’s dramaturgical imagination, it centers on the princess’s daring acts of speaking against her father king—transgressing the absolute authority of her biological father, who is also the ruler of the feudal kingdom. The dramatic tension erupts when a song spreads through the kingdom spreading rumors about the illicit nocturnal encounters between the princess and her secret admirer Seo-dong, who is a commoner from the neighboring kingdom of Baekje. Seo-dong claims to have met the princess and immediately fallen in love on a spring day when she came out to the field to watch blossoming flowers. Shortly after, a raunchy folk song about their love affair spreads rapidly: “Princess Seon-hwa secretly fell in love with Seo-dong / She takes him into her quarters stealthily in the middle of the night.”15 The king becomes infuriated with his beloved daughter for having defamed the royal household, and issues an order to arrest and execute Page 212 →Seo-dong. Seon-hwa feels sympathy for the wrongly accused admirer and pleads for justice, only to be dismissed by the king. That night, she secretly helps Seo-dong escape and becomes enamored of the brave commoner, turning groundless rumor into reality. For this act of betrayal, the princess is exiled deep into the mountains and is finally sentenced to death, but just before she swallows poison sent to her by her father, Seo-dong appears to rescue her and both live happily ever after as commoners. Princess Seon-hwa appears as one who dares to speak the truth and challenge the wrong assumptions of the ruler who wields boundless power. When the king orders the execution of Seo-dong, whose only crime consists of unbridled passion for the woman he cannot dream of having, Seonhwa kneels before the king and pleads: Father, Your Majesty, I have one wish to ask: I deserve to be punished a hundred times and more If I have ever defamed the lofty court and its people.

But if you execute innocent people Under the pretext of carrying out law and justice And let the innocent Seo-dong die because of me He will become a ghost to haunt you. I implore you to value the lives of your people.16 The princess’s daring speech, which challenges the strict hierarchical power of the male ruler, is quite akin to what Foucault terms parrhesia, or “a kind of verbal activity where the speaker has a specific relation to truth through frankness.”17 The fearless speech involves the speaker’s courage and risk, since it is a daring act by a person of lower status frankly speaking about a person of higher status. It challenges the authority and power of one whose supremacy is undoubtedly predetermined by social agreement. In Foucault’s own words: “The orator who speaks the truth to those who cannot accept his truth, for instance, and who may be exiled, or punished in some way, is free to keep silent. No one forces him to speak, but he feels that it is his duty to do so.”18 In the North Korean propaganda tradition, one of the major risks the revolutionary heroes endure is the threat of punishment for speaking the truth about social injustice and inequality despite the grave danger frank speech imposes on them. Likewise, the princess’ parrhesic speech reserves her a place in the lineage of revolutionaries in North Korean tradition. The female protagonist’s willingness to speak against the Page 213 →ruler became a recurring motif in the plays and films of later years, amplified with explicit reference to socialist revolutionary themes. Princess Seon-hwa appears to promote antifeudalism in the guise of a romantic legend from the past, but at the same time, the play also predicates the question of women’s emancipation on their crossing the boundary between the domestic and the public. When Seon-hwa is found challenging the absolute order of her father, she is expelled from the household and goes into exile in the mountains. Only there, away from the repressive court life, does Seon-hwa succeed in transgressing her father’s order by refusing to swallow the poison. Instead, she starts a new life as a commoner, one of the people whose lives she holds dear in her heart. This event also indicates that she is now a working woman who has to participate in daily labor and provide for herself and the household—a point that is not literally stated but clearly implied in the text. Although the exile is not initiated by Seon-hwa herself, it nevertheless authenticates the play as populist, if not socialist, by upholding a theme of oppressed women embarking on self-emancipating journeys by leaving home and adopting the commoner’s life—a recurring theme in the years to come. However, this play occupies a unique position in the North Korean dramatic repertoire by centering on a positive ruling-class protagonist. In the North Korean imagination, feudal kings were unreliable agents of social progress, which was the ground for justifying the advent of socialist state patriarchs. It is Seon-hwa’s gender that makes the process possible, since as a female, she is assigned a marginal place within feudal society, which allows for the subversion of the hierarchical order. This rather understated subversion serves as a rehearsal for future revolutionary acts carried out by female protagonists, showing the genealogy of the revolutionary heroines in North Korean performance traditions. As opposed to Princess Seon-hwa, which centers on a ruling-class woman, Ryu Jong-dae’s musical Gye Wolhyang (1957)19 evolves around the tale of Wol-hyang, a female courtesan who lived in the Joseon dynasty. Giseang, or courtesans, were the lowest of all women in the strict caste system of the Joseon dynasty and feudal Korea in general, since their profession directly violated the Confucian female virtue of serving only one man throughout their lifetime. In addition, gisaeng were located outside of the traditional family structure, the appropriate place for women of decency; hence the society’s contempt for this particular group of women. Nevertheless, it should be emphasized that giseang was one of few professions Page 214 →available to women in premodern Korea, and so allowed for the potential association with the socialist notion of the working class. Combined with their despised status in feudal society, gisaeng in a way constituted the working-classization of women upheld by the North Korean state. However, gisaeng as a profession that capitalizes on female sexuality

had to be addressed and cleansed under the socialist imaginary, which nominally suppressed all forms of sexuality. Set during the Japanese invasion of Korea known as the Imjin War (1592–93), the musical centers on a Pyongyang courtesan, Wol-hyang, who voluntarily offers herself to the Japanese general with the intention of helping to assassinate him, in a plot masterminded by a patriotic Korean general. However, the local Koreans—not being aware of her plan—excommunicate this already marginalized woman from society for serving the enemy who invaded their homeland. Only when she carries out her plan do these local folks come to project her as a national martyr. When she is arrested after the assassination, she is tortured and sent to the execution ground. On the way to death, she recites the following farewell poem: My homeland, where flowers bloom and grasses are green under the sun’s rays! Prosper forever. I bid farewell to the people For whom I sacrifice my humble life. No regrets can taint my departure. I’ve expelled the enemy. Bright sun shines on our homeland. All sorts of birds sing and thousands of flowers bloom. When people’s laughter resounds in this land I will smile brightly even in my tomb. Dear General, please take care of yourself and drag all our enemies into the deep blue seas of our southern shore so that this girl’s death will be avenged.20 The dying woman’s song exudes a sense of righteousness, which helps to canonize the lowly gisaeng as a sacrificial martyr. What brings this gisaeng of the Joseon dynasty closer to people living in contemporary North Korea who read the libretto or watch the musical performance21 are the specific allusions in the song to Kim Ilsung, such as “bright sun shines on our homeland” Page 215 →or “Dear General.” As mentioned in chapter 3, Kim Il-sung was the only person to whom the sun as image referred, an unmistakable solar symbolism of which the most explicit example is the Sun Festival, the official title of Kim Il-sung’s birthday celebration. Likewise, although “Dear General” here primarily refers to the character who carries out the assassination of the Japanese enemy, it is the unmistakable appellation reserved in modern times for the state leader. By sharing immediately decipherable phrases with general propaganda practices, the musical bridges the time gap between the past and the present as well as laying claim on the past, which is now turned into a familiar terrain of socialist revolution. Regarding gender relations, what deserves our particular attention is that it is the Korean general, not Wol-hyang, who ultimately assassinates the Japanese enemy. This general, whose image overlaps with that of Kim Il-sung, escapes after the assassination so that he can continue fighting the enemies. This act is predicated on the voluntary self-sacrifice of Wol-hyang, who is left behind to face the deadly consequences. Women’s suffering here not only is justified but also becomes a prerequisite for supporting the state leader’s public activities. Sexuality can be used as the means, so long as the ends signify the patriotic cause. While the only positive placement of women outside the traditional family is related to the process of social awakening, the only allowed type of female sexuality is the one instrumentalized to expunge enemies from the fatherland. The lineage of revolutionary females leaving the domestic realm for the public reached full divergence from tradition in the 1970s, when revolutionary operas were produced to capture the essence of socialist struggle. This emphasis on grooming nationalistic socialism as being predicated on gender revolution also marked a shift from dramatizing the distant feudal past to galvanizing the immediate past—the Japanese colonial period, the time of

Kim’s guerrilla resistance struggle—to motivate patriotism in the present. Accordingly, ideal female heroes in revolutionary operas were imagined as a ghastly exploited class, which set up a natural genealogical arc away from heroines of previous generations, such as Seon-hwa and Wol-hyang. One common feature of female protagonists in revolutionary operas of the 1970s, such as Mother in Sea of Blood and Kkot-bun in Flower Girl, is that their domestic life within the traditional family is complicated by poverty and physical labor. In order to be righteous agents to carry out revolutionary tasks, these women have to come from the exploited and under-privileged class, so the condition of their domestic life is presented as divorced from material comfort. Nevertheless, they do not desire to leave the Page 216 →household voluntarily; most of them desperately cling to the traditional family, which is doomed to disintegrate. When these women finally step out of their traditional life, they nostalgically look back on it as a lost utopia that the male members of their family failed to protect. The life from which these females step out is depicted as an inevitable failure, but it is a necessary step since the family’s downfall propels the further development of the female characters. The next step for these “homeless” female protagonists is to join the collective lives of the revolutionaries. Mother in Sea of Blood becomes a member of the secret resistance movement. She works in league with other women who also carry out risky tasks and contribute to the collective cause of revolution. In Flower Girl, when Kkotbun’s brother is arrested by the Japanese police, she also steps out of the traditional household and travels to the jail where he is confined. In the process, she encounters numerous compatriots who have lost family members to the Japanese colonial yoke. When they make a futile attempt to see their imprisoned relatives by putting in a request to the prison guards, these suffering people establish a sense of community by sharing painful feelings of loss as well as hatred toward the Japanese. Likewise, Yeon-ok in True Daughter of the Party lives among her comrades, whom she projects as her family sharing life and death on a battlefield. This type of collective organization for women who have left their household makes their presence, and even their labor, socially visible. Transforming invisible labor into visible labor demonstrates that channeling individual labor into a social commodity to be used for the revolutionary cause was an important agenda for the North Korean government. Women are reborn as a professional workforce when they leave the domestic realm and join the collective. What really matters is their ultimately joining the collective workforce so as to provide the society with more trained and professional skills. Nevertheless, these women retain an auxiliary role as laborers, secondary to men. Women’s work in the public sphere is similar to their work in the domestic sphere: supplementary service to assist the more crucial missions carried out by men. And yet revolutionary operas project women’s leaving the traditional domestic role as a critical moment of political awakening. As observed in the previous chapter about model citizens, the labor of all society’s members coalesces in the ultimate aim of glorifying the Party and its leader. The individual state leader is viewed through an extended perspective of the nation-state, so the distinction between male and female, the Page 217 →inside and outside of traditional family life, the individual and the collective, private and public blurs in the overarching effort of glorifying the state and its leader. Thus, combined with other factors such as body politics and filmic manipulation of the gaze, women in revolutionary operas are made to represent the collective entity, indistinguishable from the male workforce but subordinate to the state patriarch and his party. Chen Xiaomei’s comment on the PRC’s issues of gendered labor resonates with the North Korean case as well: “Once accounted a new life as a woman warrior, however, she is further distanced from womanhood by the fantasy that a new woman like herself can break away from the family structure that restricts women to their men and hence impairs women’s capacity to act together with other women. Although the existence of such women led the official press to assert that it was a historical fact that the revolutionary army was drawn from the people and was thus of the people and for the people, this political history concealed the discursive practice that ruthlessly erased gender differences to sacrifice female subjects to the agenda of the nation/state.”22 As in the PRC, stepping out of the domestic realm and joining the collective does not, for the most part, improve the quality of women’s lives in North Korea, even if their labor becomes part of the visible collective resources.

However, the propaganda performances, through countless repetitions, created an impression that there is a continuum between life inside and outside the traditional family structure, a continuous realm of existence in which the private family life is negative and doomed to fail. By separating the inner and outer spaces, these performances could deceptively portray the public space as the only legitimate place to invest collective energy in reconstructing the society and the nation. Caught between tradition and revolution, North Korean women in the end had to maintain the same Confucian virtues despite conspicuous political changes and social reforms.

Between Erotic and Heroic Gazes: Female Sexuality as State Property Every film made by Sin Sang-ok has modified the way North Koreans think about film, but no work has revised the expressions of sexuality in cinema more than his 1984 film Love, Love, My Love. The film was Sin’s second cinematic attempt on the well-known tale of Chun-hyang—a heroine from the Joseon dynasty period famous for her beauty as well as unflinching loyalty to her husband. Twenty-three years earlier, in 1961 in Seoul, Sin Sang-ok and Choe Eun-hui collaborated on Seong Chun-hyang with Choe playing Page 218 →the chaste namesake heroine. However, unlike this first production, which captured the pure virtues of Chun-hyang, the 1984 version bared the erotic male gaze, which has been rarely staged or screened in the history of North Korean performing arts. GOVERNOR: Don’t be too polite and come here, closer. (Inspects Chunhyang.) Oh, just as your reputation goes! You are neither too flamboyant nor too coquettish. I like your shy manners. I’ve seen many beauties throughout the country, and as they say, even the perfect-looking jade ball has hidden defects. Some beauties had noses that were too sharp, others had eyes that were too slanted. Everyone is bound to have some kind of defect, but no matter from which angle I look at you, you are just perfect. . . . CHUN-HYANG: I am guarding my chastity while waiting for my husband. It is inappropriate for a married woman to entertain anyone else. GOVERNOR: (Laughs and sings merrily.) Your face, your words, they are so lovely. You are beautiful both inside and outside. But youth is like an ephemeral flower. When you wither, no butterfly will visit you. So adorn yourself and serve my needs. A corrupt governor’s tempting Chun-hyang to entertain him during her husband’s absence is a rare moment in North Korean performance history for its open expressions of male sexual desire and the objectification of female sexuality. This scene featuring the conversation between Chun-hyang and the governor has traditionally been regarded as an emblem of Chunhyang’s heroism and spirit of chastity, as was the case in The Story of Chunhyang (Chun-hyangjeon, 1980), an orthodox North Korean film production of the same tale. While The Story of Chun-hyang emphasizes the defiance of the female protagonist in guarding her loyalty and chastity and therefore introduces the encounter through her perspective, Sin’s film Love, Love, My Love achieves quite the opposite effect by accentuating the governor’s perspective, the prurient gaze of the powerful male who scrutinizes the helpless Chun-hyang, the daughter of a lowly courtesan who belongs to a significantly lower caste than he. The bold expression of sexual desire embedded in the governor’s adulation of the heroine, using concrete physical imagery, was a striking subject for the screen in North Korea, where open statements of erotic desire were never a part of public discourse. Although the governor’s projection of Chun-hyang as a sexual commodity was supposed Page 219 →to invite critical responses from audiences reviling him as the embodiment of corrupt feudal power, to what degree does this ideological safety belt hold back the viewers from identifying with the governor’s perspective? How do the audience members check and balance their gazes to accord with Chunhyang’s perspective, not with that of the governor? Do they always take the politically correct path and identify with the heroes? Or is there any possibility the spectators will identify with alternative, not officially prescribed gazes? The problem of the gaze is important in accessing theater and film, because the relationship between the subject

and the object is a hierarchical one that operates in a semiotic network of power. The problem of seeing involves the way actors relate to spectators, both within and outside of film, affecting characters’ relationships to one another and actors’ relationships to audiences of the film. Laura Mulvey’s seminal essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” directly touches upon the power of spectators’ gaze within the visual network in film, which can be applied to both channels of visual communication previously outlined: “As an advanced representation system, the cinema poses questions of the ways the unconscious (formed by the dominant order) structures ways of seeing and pleasure in looking.”23 Mulvey renders Freud’s concept of scopophilia in explaining one of the possible pleasures cinema can offer, as associated with “taking other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze.”24 The well-known maxim “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” can be translated into a slightly modified version: “Power is in the eye of the beholder.” On the opposite side of this power, there remains a question of whether the object of the gaze has any influence over its viewing subjects. This concerns whether the act of seeing is a reciprocal performance between the subject and the object of the gaze, or put more concretely, whether the positions of “the one who sees” and “the one who is seen” are equivocal binary opposites that even allow exchange between them, ultimately implicating their inseparable roles in making the performance. To what degree do the actors and actions on stage/screen invite spectators to identify with them—or alienate them? For further analysis of performances related to the hierarchical nature of gazes, dance historian Susan Manning’s case study on the dancer-spectator relationship of the early modern dance is useful. Having contemplated the critiques of both Ann Daly and Jane Desmond, who see kinesthesia and the projection of generalized ethnic racial types, respectively, as the quintessential aspects of modern dance,25 Susan Manning derives her characterization Page 220 →of early modern dance as a kinesthetic dismantling of the voyeuristic gaze and the projection of an essentialized notion of identity.26 Such a bifurcating perspective on early modern dance, in my view, is helpful in illuminating the complex dynamics of gaze involved in North Korean propaganda performances. Manning notes that “unlike the spectators of the nineteenth-century ballet, whether male or female, who rarely had direct experience of the movement techniques presented on stage, many female spectators of early modern dance did have such direct experience, which surely intensified their kinesthetic response to the performers they witnessed.”27 The spectators’ kinesthetic response allowed them to empathically experience and identify with the dancer’s body on stage, or “to identify the dancer’s flow of bodily motion as reflective of their own.”28 Applying the idea of kinesthetic power that brings performers and spectators closer to each other facilitates an understanding of the identification between the spectators and the performers involved in North Korean performances. Although these spectators were strongly encouraged to identify with the revolutionary heroes on stage and screen by emulating their political ideology, this does not mean that North Korean spectators had personally experienced dancing or singing techniques needed to experience kinesthesia in the sense described by Manning. But some limited, yet conspicuous, measures were taken to bring such performing skills closer to the audience. The first example concerns dance. In order to increase the kinesthetic response from the audience, traditional dance, especially the court dance movements, were drastically simplified and altered. According to dance scholar Judy Van Zile, Korean court dances involve “moving elegantly through circle, square, and line formations . . . [W]ith arms frequently extended sideward, the dancers walk, almost as if floating, while gently bending and extending their knees. They punctuate their movements with flicks of the wrist that gently propel their sleeves upward and outward.”29 These disciplined movements meant to perform elegance and beauty were modified in order to achieve simplicity and broad participation by the untrained mass. From the early days of North Korean performing arts, there were multiple publications pertaining to the popularization of dance, the process of which was coterminous with expelling foreign elements and nationalizing dance forms while making this art accessible to nonspecialists. For instance, Kim Je-heung in 1957 wrote: “Traditional dance in the past was a cultural commodity exclusively patronized by the upper class. Under the auspicious protection of the party nowadays, it became the treasure of Page 221 →the people.”30 He further goes on to mention that “hyangbalmu used to be a type of elegant dance performed usually by eight dancers, widely enjoyed by the royal court. Nowadays there can be more people participating in this performance.”31 Many traditional dance forms were made accessible to

ordinary people, accompanied by music typified into evocations of nationalistic themes, composed to ring familiar chords in the minds of the listeners.32 Thus, the viewers of dance productions were practicing some essential movements in everyday life on numerous occasions, including mass parades and evening balls for citizens during the Sun Festival, so the kinesthetic response would have been unavoidable. A second example is the revolutionary songs found in theater and film productions, widely circulated via various publications for educational purposes, which were often sung during marches and parades, thus creating a strong connection between the spectators and the performers who demonstrated those songs in performances. In this area, it would be far-fetched to symmetrically apply Mulvey’s view on the one-sided flow of influence—from spectators to desired object of the gaze. Another paradigm is needed to explain the flow in the opposite direction—from performing subjects to spectators—as well. Ostensibly, the gaze of the spectators cast onto performing subjects was not supposed to be based on erotic pleasure, but rather on mutual understanding of the same choreographic, musical, and ideological templates. Generated from the common movements familiar to both parties, these templates were designed to consolidate as tangible reality the projected image of the utopian nation. The mutual flow of influences between the viewing subject and the viewed object based on both the principles of voyeuristic gaze and kinesthesia was designed to emerge from—and contribute to—a larger manipulative scheme of creating essential ideals of national identity, which was nonexistent in reality. In revolutionary operas, there are frequent moments when the screen montage demonstrates a visual hierarchy, with the patriotic figure almost always occupying the center and the villains pushed to the periphery. In popular productions, the central heroic figures are often women, as in Sea of Blood and Flower Girl. What is noticeable is the dramatic transformation of the female characters during the play. In the beginning, these women appear as powerless victims of historical turmoil and social injustice, especially as potential candidates for sexual exploitation by the landed class. In the film version of Flower Girl, Kkot-bun has to endure the possibility of being sold as a concubine to the landlord if her family does not manage to pay their debt. In True Daughter of the Party, Yeon-ok may have to endure Page 222 →sexual harassment and degradation if she is captured by the enemy during the war. However, they overcome the challenges imposed on them and join the imagined family unit, often composed of newfound friends, such as Communist Party comrades and members of the anti-Japanese guerrilla movement. In the process of transforming from hapless victims of predatory males, the female characters turn from passive objects of the erotic gaze to active holders of the heroic gaze, exerting influence on their onlookers as models to be emulated. But what about the erotic gaze of the governor that scrutinizes Chunhyang in Love, Love, My Love? No matter how discouraged the spectators may be from identifying with the villainous character, does he not provide a chance for them to have a stealthy glance at the lost world of open sexual expression, to sneak a rare moment of erotic pleasure? How did the North Korean producers try to prevent this from happening? Artistic expression to exclude any kind of eroticism from heroism in North Korean performances mandated that the female characters call forth a feeling of heroism in the viewers via kinesthetic responses. To ensure that female characters and performers do not incite erotic pleasures, almost all the female protagonists in orthodox propaganda performances are projected in familial relationships, as mothers, sisters, and daughters of other heroic characters, and since spectators were supposed to identify with heroes, as family members of spectators as well. To feel sexual desire for kin would open up the forbidden path of incestuous attraction, and this familial setup became the ultimate device to discourage any erotic gazes from falling on female characters. Many revolutionary heroines are introduced in films or filmed theater productions via close-ups at the moment of their political awakening, which glorify equally their physical power and ideological achievement. These film phrases are by no means associated with an eroticizing gaze; rather, the semantic dominance is put on women’s physical strength and heroic gestures. As part of an effort to effectively convey the idea of heroic women, the producers of revolutionary operas and

performances endowed elderly women with crucial roles. Elderly women often occupy roles as central as their younger counterparts in establishing heroic images of women, such as the mother in Sea of Blood. In contrast to the younger women whose physical qualities involuntarily open up possibilities of attracting the spectators’ attention, these elderly women have the double merit of being asexual and female. Thus, much as the younger women of the revolutionary class became Page 223 →visible to the public eye, elderly women became a pervasive social icon to be viewed by the entire nation. The venerable construction of these women’s image induces what Manning calls kinesthetic response from the audience, inspiring heroic deeds in the spectators, who were supposed to identify themselves with the female protagonists on stage and screen. For instance, the plot of Sea of Blood centers on Mother’s transformation from an ordinary housewife to a revolutionary hero. Her political awakening is the dramatic climax of the production, the only revolutionary opera in which the mother figure becomes the only and true protagonist. The production is a strong reminder of the Soviet film Mother (1926), based on Maksim Gorkii’s novel (1907) and directed by Vsevolod Pudovkin, which was later adapted by Bertolt Brecht into a stage play Die Mutter (1932).33 The Soviet film was translated into Korean and introduced to North Korea in 1955.34 The two films show striking parallel images of Mother firmly standing up against oppression, in which the position of the camera is significantly lower than her eye level. In addition, Mother in both films glances to the far distance with an expression of purposefulness, showing her heroic determination to lead the people on the revolutionary path. As a result of this camera arrangement, the spectators are forced to adopt a worshiper’s point of view, looking at an object that inspires awe and veneration. This is a prevalent point of view that pedestrians were made to adopt when strolling on the streets of the Soviet Union, prior to its downfall, or in the present PRC and North Korea, where gigantic statues of revolutionary leaders, peasants, and soldiers on high pedestals subdue spectators and force them to look up to their majestic presence. The mother’s glance in Sea of Blood dictates that spectators follow her lead, and thereby establishes a strong bond between performer and viewer, which diametrically opposes the class enemy’s eroticizing gaze. As observed, both young and elderly women work in tandem to establish the heroic female image in the eyes of spectators. By posing as the object of the social gaze, women, young or old, establish for themselves the notion that they are merely tools for accomplishing the objective of the revolution, and in more concrete terms, as Chen notes, they consolidate the unchallengeable authority of Kim Il-sung. However, to end my analysis at this level would explain only half the story regarding the dynamics involved in gazes. What about the villains’ lurid gazes cast upon female protagonists in various performances? Although sexually charged gazes are exclusively assigned to villains, do they ever become an alternative to the politically correct gaze for spectators Page 224 →looking at stage and screen heroes in propaganda performances? In exploring this question, Mulvey’s idea of predominantly male-oriented spectators’ gaze has to be scrutinized once again: is there any possibility the spectators, both male and female, view these vulnerable females with the same eroticizing gaze as some malevolent male characters do within the film? Can young female protagonists, who are supposed to incite heroism among viewers, accidentally provoke sexual desire instead? The ambiguous representation and reception of some female protagonists, such as Chun-hyang, whose performance could be construed as both sexual and heroic, is a complex question in North Korea, which officially dismisses eroticism as an expressive vehicle for revolutionary struggle. In principle, the state-sponsored art practice, which is arguably the only art practice in North Korea, attempted to cleanse itself of any sexualizing expressions. But as ironic as it may sound, art endorsed and sponsored by the state is the only sphere where members of the society can explore the clandestine visual pleasure of the sexualized gaze, since any form of art expressing individual erotic desires does not openly exist for public consumption.35 Even though state-sponsored art is not in the least intended to evoke sexual desire in the spectators, there may be gaps and fissures through which certain aspects of tantalizing engagement with sexual allusion are manifested in revolutionary operas and other propaganda films.36 These clandestine gazes are fundamentally differentiated from the 1950s amateur dramas romanticizing the

countryside in that the countryside dramas openly used sexual tropes to address augmenting agricultural productivity. The stealthy sexual gazes currently under discussion are also distinguished from the conspicuously sexualizing gazes: while the conspicuously sexualizing gaze of the governor in Love, Love, My Love does not allow any disconnection between his intent to seduce Chun-hyang (signified by the gaze) and his action, there may be a discrepancy between the intent of the propaganda producers to invoke heroism by creating a exchange of heroic gazes between the heroes and viewers and the sexual effect these scenes inadvertently have on the audience. Chen has noted a case study on the PRC’s yangbanxi (model theater works)37 quite similar to that of North Korea: “Model theater contributed one of the most ingenious examples of the patriarchal appropriation of women’s bodies to serve as the beautiful object of the gaze. The sexualizing elements of women’s bodies—their hair, poses, and wounds—were cleverly employed to popularize the glorified power of the great man. Women’s bodies became a social, institutionalized language and an open space for cultural signification.”38 Page 225 →The subtly sexualized expressions of the female body situated as the beautiful object of the gaze may also describe what the viewers see in Chun-hyang. Her vulnerability, accentuated by the sexualizing gaze of the governor, ultimately glorifies the power of the male leader, that is, her husband, who is absent while his helpless wife is threatened, tortured, and condemned to death for refusing to comply with the governor’s request. But he nevertheless comes back just before Chun-hyang’s execution to flaunt his masculinity. The weakened, abused, and emaciated body of Chun-hyang is presented to the husband as a trophy dedicated to the shrine of his ebullient ego, decorated with his wife’s chastity and self-sacrifice. The appropriation of Chun-hyang’s tortured body, beaten up and disarranged to expose her very human nature (she has a superhuman will to resist fear and temptation, but her body bleeds like the rest of us), quite possibly invites sadistic imagination from onlookers. Intentionally or not, the gaze of the governor may open the opportunity for male spectators to indulge in the stealthy pleasure of projecting themselves as full-fledged males in a society where their masculinity is compromised by their demotion to the status of children of the state fathers. It is undeniable that Chun-hyang incites heroism in viewers by creating a strong ideological rapport concerning loyalty and resistance, but this type of politically sanguine gaze is not the only gaze involved in viewing the film. Just as women’s transition from tradition to revolution has been framed by their enduring role in the Confucian patriarchy, so women’s sexuality on stage and screen is trapped in the vague and largely unexplored zone created by the overlap between heroism and eroticism, with the only clear element in this diagram being that women’s sexuality, no matter from which angle it is regarded, belongs to the state as its rightful property. Women’s sexuality as state property, malleable to instrumentalization and transformation, succumbs to the hierarchy of the North Korean state, which prioritizes public over private, collective over individual. In The Story of Chun-hyang (1980), which is much more astringently regulated in terms of sexual expressions than Shin’s Love, Love, My Love, the issue of the ownership of female sexuality is brought to the forefront in the dialogue between Chun-hyang and the governor. When Chun-hyang keeps insisting on guarding her chastity, the governor finally loses his patience and shouts: GOVERNOR: Nonsense! Although the moon went hiding behind the clouds, it still is the moon. You pretend you are a woman guarding her chastity, but you are still who you are. Stop teasing me and hurry up to move in and serve me. Page 226 →CHUN-HYANG: I implore you to stop saying those meaningless things and instead pay attention to people’s livelihood. GOVERNOR: (Laughs.) Pay attention to people’s livelihood? ATTENDANT: It’s none of your business to worry about, and the governor will take good care of people. You just listen to what he tells you. If you refuse his invitation too many times, it will not be good for you. You’d better attend to his needs while he is charmed. CHUN-HYANG: I am not a courtesan but a chaste wife who is waiting for her husband to return.

GOVERNOR: (Enraged.) What nonsense! ATTENDANT: You are only the daughter of a lowly courtesan! And to say that you are guarding your chastity is too absurd! CHUN-HYANG: What law mandates that all daughters of courtesans should be courtesans, and what law mandates that women of lowly classes are not entitled to guard their chastity? I’ve never heard that only high-class women should guard their chastity. GOVERNOR: What? CHUN-HYANG: You are a governor who should look after the people. Why is it that you want to ignore common ethical understanding and violate a married woman? This lengthy conversation between the lowly daughter of a courtesan and the highest official in town is more politically charged than a parallel scene in Sin’s Love, Love, My Love. The orthodox North Korean version features a carnivalesque inversion on various levels: the conventional division between man and woman as respectively being in charge of the public and the private domain seems to have been shattered. Although Chunhyang’s grave concern as a married woman is to keep her chastity, at the same time, she keeps reminding the governor of the Confucian virtues he should abide by as an official, such as wise governance of the people and protection of the common ethics. By doing so, she emerges as the guardian of these values of public service. On the contrary, the governor, a public servant, is motivated by his personal desire in pressing Chun-hyang, thus prioritizing private matters over public and betraying his duties as a male ruler. Added to this inversion of conventional gender roles is the conflation of the frivolous with the serious. Chun-hyang as the daughter of a courtesan inadvertently inherits the duty to entertain and thus induce smiles in her patrons. However, it is the governor who instead fulfills the role of jester. When Chun-hyang speaks, the camera Page 227 →provides a close-up to capture the seriousness of her expression—a typical film phrase reserved for revolutionary heroes in the North Korean tradition—whereas the governor’s speech is always captured in medium shots that feature not only the governor but also the clownlike attendant who mimics what the governor says. The persistent juxtaposition of serious and intense close-ups and clumsy medium shots makes viewers identify with Chun-hyang, who emerges as the true heroine at the end of this sequence. As the verbal duel continues, unrelenting Chun-hyang even more daringly corrects the governor’s stance by pointing out his confusion over ethical principles and his compromise of ethics for personal gain. CHUN-HYANG: (Cuts him short.) Of low caste I may be, but I am not a prostitute. GOVERNOR: How dare you speak! CHUN-HYANG: There is neither loftiness nor lowness in women’s chastity, just as there is not in men’s loyalty. When our country is subjected to great misfortune by the invasion of horrific thieves, would you serve the thieves just because you are afraid of them? Would you serve two lords? Chun-hyang defies the governor by preaching that her chastity is rather a matter of public morality than an object of an individual’s fantasy, while the governor relies on the implied logic of viewing his sexual desire as the will of a public servant, which should take precedence over this individual’s desire to guard her chastity. Although their points of view diverge, one perspective that both Chun-hyang and the governor share is the notion of female chastity as belonging to a discourse involving the state: for Chun-hyang, wives’ loyalty to men is a clear allegory of men’s loyalty for the state; for the governor, women’s sexuality should be in service of the state and its officials. Thus, two diametrically opposed characters—a villain and a heroine—surprisingly arrive at the same conclusion regarding the place of women’s chastity and sexuality at large. Both Chun-hyang and the governor regard female

sexuality as a matter in which the state should be involved. Such a perspective surely embodied the prevailing ideas and practices of the state, which carefully engineered women’s sexuality for its own benefit. The erotic and heroic gazes that defined the reception of performances featuring female sexuality, or lack of sexuality, entered a realm of public discourse through fashion as well, shaping the normative as well as clandestine Page 228 →desires for ideal female bodies, a fashioning that will be explored in the next section.

Fashioning the Socialist Utopia North Korea is a fashion-conscious39 nation where political leaders strive to dress its people through rigid regulations, imposing uniforms on various social sectors and systematically recommending certain designs to civilians.40 North Korean leaders have issued numerous statements with an intention of promoting fashion as a national project meant to groom ideal corporeality and build national strength through centrally monitored practices. Both Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il have predicated their ideas about national strength and bodily wellbeing on sartorial projects.41 In this process, visual arts, including theater, film, and posters played a seminal role in constructing and propagating the ideal bodily image of women through fashion codes. Anyone investigating North Korean women’s fashion is bound to make a discovery about the bifurcation of femininity. While some other socialist and authoritarian states glorified masculine clothing as a preferred means to represent revolutionized women,42 North Korean fashion has continuously explored and expressed degrees of femininity, seemingly contradicting the astringent revolutionary spirit often identified with masculinity. The varying visual representations of traditional femininity and state-organized socialist ideals predicated on masculinity collide in North Korea, marking a unique sense of fashion for women clearly distinguished from its closest neighbors—the PRC, the former Soviet Union,43 and South Korea. Still retaining the traditional Confucian ideals of a male-centered society, the North Korean leadership perceived women as a national project distinguished from men, which meant forging different corporeal practices for two genders. The PRC presents an interesting comparison. Chinese historian Tina Mai Chen has pointed out that “since the early twentieth century, liberated body parts represented new sociopolitical and gendered visions of China, but these visions tended to be imagined on the bodies of women by male intellectuals or masculinized political parties.”44 As with the PRC’s conception, in North Korea the notion that femininity is a gift bestowed on national subjects by the state, or more specifically, by male state leaders, provided the ground for forging and regulating gendered bodily practices within national subjects. However, North Korean female fashion Page 229 →constituted distinctive practices, quite unlike practices during the height of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, where genderless body expression made it difficult to delineate differences between male and female fashions.45 There is no shortage of representations of the ideal body in a North Korean visual media, including stage productions, films, magazine illustrations, paintings, and posters. My aim is to present a critical overview of North Korea’s body politics by exploring how the new idealized vision of women was produced and consumed from the 1950s to the present. Fashion in visual media manifests the central ideological issues that the state wanted to present as tangible models of disciplining its people. Jane Gaines’s observation that costumes in films “primarily work to reinforce narrative ideas”46 is pertinent to understanding the North Korean case, as dress codes became an entry point to materializing the ideology involved in bodily practices. But more significantly, like fashion, visual media in North Korea are not merely objects of consumption, but by far the most important form of communication. Their functions are wide in scope—they educate, entertain, and mobilize people. In a society where ideals shape reality itself, the way in which visual images are coordinated and circulated is far from being spontaneous. It would not be an exaggeration to claim that visual media in North Korea set the parameters of available fashion choices. In North Korea, images of women on stage and screen, in photos and posters function not only as the objects of visual consumption, but also as concrete models to emulate, thus imposing on viewers the desire to produce ideal bodily presentations. Examining the dress codes of female protagonists on stage and screen illuminates how the state set out to craft ideal female bodies as constantly navigating between revolutionary masculinity and traditional femininity.47 Taking into consideration that daily practices in civilian sectors are by no means

formulated accidentally, it would not be farfetched to claim that such practice would have been impossible without a state endorsement of women’s fashion that the leadership saw as beneficial to managing the state. Although North Korea is a tightly controlled nation across its political structures and cultures, its women’s fashion is as diverse as anywhere else in the world. At a first glance, there is nothing conspicuously socialist about North Korean women’s fashion. Most North Korean women wear their hair in elegant perms at shoulder length, while younger schoolgirls wear girlish braids, creating a stark contrast to the genderless hairdo and clothing of the PRC during the Cultural Revolution. The ubiquitous femininity Page 230 →in hairstyles is paralleled by clothing; most women wear skirts instead of trousers, and even in military uniforms, feminine traits are distinctively marked by the preference for skirts. Such distinctively feminine manifestations in women’s fashion come about as a result of a code shift from colonial modernity to nationalistic joseonot and then military uniform to a more eclectic mixture of styles. Each fashion paradigm reflected different stages of state-led reforms and social agendas as the North Korean policy toward women changed over time. However, these fashion codes nowadays do not exist as separate signifiers of consecutive time periods, but rather as synchronous manifestations of eclectic styles expressing various degrees of ideal femininity accumulated over time. I trace back three stages of fashion development that yielded foundations for contemporary North Korean women’s fashion codes: joseonot of the 1960s, promotion of military uniforms in the 1970s, and the mix of fashion codes that has risen since the 1980s.

Away with Colonial Legacies: Joseonot as a New Socialist Fashion Code With the success of post–Korean War reconstruction efforts, beginning from the 1960s, the North Korean leadership had a chance to view the importance of fashion as a marker of a new socialist state.48 Fashion became an instrument to mark historical periods that separated past and present; the way people dressed under the oppressive feudal culture of the past and the liberating socialist culture of the present featured irreconcilable differences in the North Korean imagination. On November 16, 1961, only two months after the Fourth Party Convention, during which Kim Il-sung emerged as an unchallenged leader of North Korea, Kim gave a speech at the National Meeting of Mothers in which he criticized a few women in the past “who went about dressed to kill and wearing fancy hats” and stated that “these women have been removed from their posts and the ranks of the Women’s Union.”49 Kim uses fashion codes to sort out the corrupting element within North Korea as remnants of the pre–North Korean colonial stage. The increasing stability North Korea achieved in the 1960s created an occasion to look at its internal dissent and gage the standards of bodily correctness predicated on fashion. In the same speech Kim inscribed correct ways of life that were emblemized in fashion codes: “How can Women’s Union work be conducted by the so-called enlightened women if they are ignorant of the factory and rural life and only know how to apply Page 231 →make-up and hair curlers? To tell the truth, it is not so essential to have curly hair and wear pretty dresses, and neither are these things difficult to learn. Even rural women can learn these things easily once they are taught.”50 What deserves particular attention here is the historical development of women’s clothing in Korea that led to this moment in 1961, when certain fashion codes were marked as a bad example to be openly derided in public. Kim Il-sung’s disparaging remarks about certain fashion types counteract the distinctively marked working bodies of laborers and farmers—the ideal citizenry of the newly established North Korea. Concretely described as “make-up,” “hair curlers,” “pretty dresses,” and “fancy hats,” these paraphernalia would surely interfere with backbreaking work on collective farms and in factories. Retaining distinctively Western features, this negative fashion type, in addition to countering proletarian working bodies, defies the ethnocentric look of Korean women’s traditional dress. Western fashion codes such as these were introduced preceding, but mostly during, the Japanese colonial period and were regarded by many as compromising national purity. As Susie Kim has illustrated, Western sartorial norms, which encroached upon a segment of the Korean population at the turn of the nineteenth century, were filtered through ambiguous encounters between Korea and Western culture, often framed through the Japanese sensibility of the West. Kim points out that women’s fashion reform was carried out particularly by female students who had an exposure to the new ideas of womanhood through education abroad and at newly established modern schools in Korea where they could vicariously experience the ideals of the West.

The movement during the colonial era to reform traditional dress into a more functional dress code was not only motivated by a practical sense that Western-style dress would permit better mobility, but more significantly, by a symbolic order that promulgated the idea that Western clothing was a gesture toward civilization in the globalizing economy and in cultural trends. Western-influenced fashion codes filtered by colonial modernity were in most cases accepted by educated upper-class women, whom the state labeled as oppressive bourgeoisie: “Socalled sinyeoseong (New Women) could partake in this new material culture insofar as their social standing and economic means, often through their wealthy families, would permit it.”51 These fashion codes had to be eradicated from women’s wardrobe as remnants of the colonial past and the cultural traits of the enemy class, the bourgeoisie. The spirit that guided this process was akin to that during the Page 232 →Chinese Republican era, when clothing reform was viewed “as a rite of ethnic rehabilitation that would expunge . . . ignominy and reinvigorate the nation to redress its recent humiliation.”52 Out of erasure of sartorial markers for colonial modernity rose new clothing norms for socialism, which suggested an alternative to Western garments that came to Korea through the corrupt Japanese filtering of culture. As the nascent North Korean leadership envisioned it, the new socialist era’s departure from the past would not necessarily mean devising a brand-new dress code, but restoring the clothing details found in the sacred memories of the leader’s household during the anti-Japanese struggle in 1930s Manchuria. The official North Korean historiography, assisted by visual media such as paintings and photos, persistently cultivated the idea that Kim Ilsung’s family embodied the epitome of national purity by resisting the Japanese aggressors. Although many historians have argued that Kim Il-sung’s father attended a Christian school and was an obscure figure in the Korean independence movement, North Korean history tells a different version of his life as sacrificed in prison for the cause of rebelling against the Japanese colonizers. Oxymoronic as it may sound, North Korea’s brand of socialist modernity and progress found its prerogative in traditional dress codes rather than the preceding colonial period, when modernity for women meant more westernized garments—a marker standing for non-working bodies. An alternative to the corrupting feminine bodily practice of the past was designed in an old-fashioned mold: the traditional Korean dress joseonot became the new signature code for women under the socialist state. Since a large number of women were still wearing this traditional dress, having failed to accept Western clothing during the colonial period, no thorough dress reform was required to promote this dress type. A poster (see fig. 36) from the National Archives and Records Administration, dating between the late 1940s and early 1950, features a motherly figure who is immersed in amending clothing. The caption at the bottom (“Let Us Be Well Prepared for Winter!”) urges viewers to prepare for the upcoming cold. The frugal nature of this slogan is mirrored by her modest traditional dress, which marks her body as enduring hardship akin to that experienced by Kim Il-sung’s mother. Like Gang Ban-seok, the woman in this poster wearing joseonot embodies working-class ethics through the ethnically prescribed dress code, and thereby becomes a state-endorsed antidote to the corrupting markers of the colonial past. As the state perceived it in the early 1960s, the ideal North Korean women’s bodily presentation attired in traditional form was the corrective to the immediate past of Japanese colonial rule, which had disgraced national dignity. The state’s promotion of modified joseonot was predicated on a nationalistic dress code borrowed from traditional sartorial motifs that emphasized modest feminine beauty and virtue. In the following description of joseonot published in 1960, the author attributes distinctive nationalistic qualities to joseonot as essentially different from styles of other nationalities: “People say the Korean women’s dresses with the pleated chima (skirt) and short jeogori (jacket) are simple, but they have a charm of elegance and harmony. The jeogori has a white dongjeong (neckpiece), and the beoseon (footwear) is also white. Korean women usually wear white shoes. The beauty of their dress is in their graceful lines, not in flashy colors. As a matter of fact, Korean women prefer delicate or pastel shades for their dresses, as if to symbolize the virtue that they have preserved throughout the long history of Korea.”53 The essentialist quality emphasized in the dress code recurs throughout the decade, as seen in the anonymous article titled “Characteristics of Korean Women’s Clothing” (“Joseon nyeoseong uisang-ui teukseong”), where the specificities of Korean women’s fashion are grafted onto ethnically marked body types. Page 233 → Figure 36. A poster produced between the late 1940s and the early 1950s by the North Korean Culture and Propaganda Bureau urging North Koreans to be well prepared for winter. (Courtesy of the National

Archives and Records Administration.) Page 234 →Korean women’s clothing is designed to suit the special physiological needs of our Korean women. Short jackets and long skirts—this is the basic style that embellishes feminine beauty. Skirts that start above the waistline ending at a length covering the knees make one slim so as to enhance the elegant personality of the wearer. Short jackets that barely cover the armpit make one’s face look simple and dapper while revealing the chaste nature of the wearer. A tightly designed jacket and wide skirt, when worn together, complement each other to create harmony. . . . Korean women’s clothing is as practical as it is beautiful, for it reflects the frugal spirit of the Korean people. The end of sleeves and neck area of the jacket are always prone to wear and tear, and by using different cloth and color for these areas, one does not have to throw away the whole jacket because it is possible to retain the decent part of the jacket while replacing the old part with new fabric.54 The explanation first takes the corporeal distinction of Korean women as a primary factor for shaping joseonot into certain design patterns, which in turn reflect the frugal nature of their wearer. The clothing here transcends the material level so as to mark distinctive national traits and become a conduit that connects the ethnically distinctive body types with essentialist national characteristics of Korean women. The modest beauty of joseonot, which was repeatedly emphasized in the quotations previously reviewed, was supposed to bear subtle color schemes well harmonized with the environment. To North Koreans in the 1970s, the color scheme of joseonot should present the idea of female modesty and chastity, and in this sense, visual media were particularly concerned with how the costumes were chromatically coordinated within themselves as well as with the surrounding environment. The color coordination was not merely an aesthetic concern, but ultimately touched upon the realm of ideology. A 1963 article by theater critic Hwang Guang-hyeon exemplifies this Page 235 →point. Hwang touched upon color and clothing in tandem in his review of the children’s musical film Our Flower Garden: “Color on screen plays an important role in enriching ideological themes. Colors affect both the visual and psychological realms and produce various effects in the viewer’s mind. Therefore the various identities of the viewers—race, age, knowledge, sex, and health—bring in various emotional responses to different colors.”55 Far from being a peripheral element, color, according to this passage, is an essential collaborator in determining the emotional responses of certain demographics. Hwang consequently insists that “colors should be organically coordinated with each other, and also with other elements of film, such as music and dance.”56 He goes on to lament that Our Flower Garden used too many colors without appropriate coordination, especially in a scene (see fig. 37) that featured “a motley of flowers, grass, trees, butterflies, which clashed with the colors of the protagonists’ clothing. Inappropriate color coordination distracted viewers from the jolly mood created by the dance and music and instead distracted the viewer’s attention.”57 What is not clearly stated in this quotation, but certainly implicated in the criticism, is that the protagonist in question was wearing joseonot, which should reflect the subtle and elegant beauty of the Korean people. In this respect, Hwang’s criticism not only targets the misuse of color, but also the disruption it creates in establishing joseonot’s mission of expressing a modest and subtle nationalistic ethos. Figure 37. A scene from children’s musical film Our Flower Garden. Cover page of Joseon Yeonghwa 6 (1963). (Photo by Park Gyeong-un.) Page 236 →Another example from a revolutionary opera illustrates the need to coordinate joseonot with the surrounding environment. The Song of Geumgang Mountain shows chorus girls in dresses rehearsing their song and dance for the performance competition. The girls’ bodies in joseonot in this scene create a seamless harmony with the idealistic national landscape. Geumgang Mountain for North Koreans is tourist space boasting scenic beauty and idyllic recreation. However, the representation of traditional joseonot in this production did not preclude a socialist ethos and visions of modernity in a revolutionized North Korea. Quite the contrary, the female bodies displaying joseonot become active interlocutors with the dress code of the new socialist state. Tradition, in this particular situation, is not regarded as remnants of the feudal past, but a rich reservoir where nationalism could be reinstated in the service of the new socialist state. In The Song of Geumgang Mountain, the girls wearing joseonot appear as necessary

mediators of tradition and revolution, past and future. The female protagonist travels back and forth between the countryside and Pyongyang, mediating disparate national spaces. In the end, she is reunited with her father, who was separated from the family during the Japanese colonial period. Her traditional dress in this production symbolizes restoration of the family, which can be seen as the restoration of a nation at large. Joseonot acquires a timeless quality embodying essential Korean values as it mediates disparate times and places. In light of joseonot’s ability to articulate different values and sectors of national life, Joseon Nyeoseong (North Korean Women) in 1960 featured a collage of photos of smiling North Korean women in joseonot. In the background are factory chimneys and a tractor on a farm (see fig. 38). This traditional women’s look, which is usually identified with domestic space, was brought to the front line of industrial and agricultural production—the very heart of socialist reconstruction. The juxtaposition of what seem to be incongruous elements of tradition and modernity marks joseonot as the dress of North Korean women under the new nation. Nevertheless, these wellgroomed women in joseonot are placed as pleasant embellishments of the social reconstruction rather than the main force of production, a beautiful garnish to the rising economy, just like the flowers they hold in their hands. Page 237 → Figure 38. Cover of the August 1960 issue of the magazine Joseon Nyeoseong (North Korean Women). Why, then, is there such ambiguity in women’s bodily performances? Why are women depicted as mediators between past and present, tradition and revolution? For one thing, North Korean men do not wear traditional Korean clothing, and are not encouraged to master feminine virtues—neither in theatrical representations nor in everyday life. It is only women who must confront this double standard, mastering the performance of both gender roles. Two major reasons account for such a practice: The obvious reason can be found in North Korea’s pursuit of juche ideology, which is generally Page 238 →translated as “self-reliance” or “independence.” This ideology, known to be Kim Il-sung’s theoretical work, was adopted in international politics for advocating the ideological independence of Third World nations. But as Park Han notes: “Juche views Korea as a chosen land, as people are told consistently that world civilization originated from the Korean Peninsula.”58 As a way of practicing this extreme ethnocentric viewpoint, North Korean women did not completely substitute their traditional Korean dress for Western-style dress. While this line of explanation points to why traditional dresses were widely encouraged, it does not explain why only women had to demonstrate “Koreaness” through their bodily expression, thus requiring another explanation. Throughout most of Korean history, social roles that integrated women into state politics were largely absent, especially during the Joseon dynasty. Yun Mi-ryang notes that from the early days of the North Korean state leading up to the consolidation of Kim Il-sung’s leadership in the early 1960s, there were systematic attempts to promote women as aggressive revolutionary fighters, but such policies eventually gave way to more traditional approaches that emphasized the domestic virtues of women, who were now seen as mothers and wives—docile subjects of state discipline.59 Thus, for women suddenly to become revolutionary warriors under the North Korean state meant that they had to master new roles with which they were entirely unfamiliar. If women were to master military roles, they would have to abandon their familiar persona as domestic housewives and attempt to personify something they were not. No matter how intensively visual media created simulacra of female warriors, this impersonation would have presented a tough challenge for North Korean women, since the gap between them and the theatricalized characters was so wide. If everyday life is so distanced from represented reality, then visual media’s ability to present a credible model of everyday life becomes diminished. The North Korean state intended ordinary women’s experience of watching revolutionary women in media productions to involve a strong degree of empathy and identification. For this reason, the North Korean state needed to create an intermediary procedure that would enable everyday women to identify with women on the stage. By creating an ideal woman in real life, the North Korean

propaganda productions could convince ordinary viewers that ideal women exist not only on stage, but also in everyday life. The lives of these historical characters were forged into narratives in the liminal zone between reality and illusion. The state promoted the ideal North Korean woman’s identity Page 239 →through its fashion code, carefully inventing paragons of virtue through numerous legendary tales concerning members of the leaders’ family. Kim Il-sung’s mother Gang Ban-seok was the iconic vanguard of this effort.60 In the 1960s, her story became the textbook example women set out to emulate. One telling example comes in the form of her biography, entitled The Mother of Korea. It is written in the style of Communist hagiography, presenting Gang’s lifelong dedication to supporting her husband and raising the revolutionary hero Kim Il-sung. The narrative unambiguously promotes her as the model mother for all North Koreans to emulate.61 Gang appears as a dexterous and hardworking girl from a poor household. According to the story, she displayed a precocious gift for weaving and spinning—not unlike Arachne in Greek mythology—creating a superhuman aura about her sartorial talent: “In the evening she used to spin together with her mother. She had learnt to spin when she was a child, and now she could also weave. She did not just imitate others—watching them working she tried to work even better. Far from being satisfied with her results of today, she strove to achieve perfection tomorrow. She worked with such dexterity and skillfulness that all her movements seemed easy and graceful. Everything she made was extremely durable. She weaved so skillfully that the neighbors used to say, ‘Her linen is as soft as silk, and as beautiful as brocade.’”62 Of particular interest in the passage is that even as a young girl, Gang is portrayed as a producer of dress materials rather than a consumer.63 Although she appears as a provider of domestic labor rather than a revolutionary heroine on a battlefield, her ability to produce endowed her with heroic qualities; she grows up to be the mother of the national savior who liberates Korea from the Japanese colonial yoke and moves on to establish a new socialist paradise. In Mangyeongdae, which is supposedly Kim Il-sung’s birthplace, there are clusters of photos featuring Kim Il-sung’s immediate parents inside the house where he grew up. One of the photos feature an elderly woman—supposedly Gang Ban-seok—sewing clothing (see fig. 39). The narrative that sealed her as the maker of clothing is sustained into the later stages of her life through photographic evidence. The virtue of labor and production as a Marxist hallmark legitimizes Gang as a mother of a national hero. Coalescing ideal motherhood with the ability to produce was an enduring view of the North Korean leadership through the 1960s and 1970s. Numerous statements made by Kim Il-sung testify to the fact that domestic skills of nurturing and providing for the family were projected as social virtues positioning women as useful members of society. This assertion was tied to the rhetoric of fashion indicating women’s stance within the society. The sartorial discourses often merged with the state’s official stance of glorifying production rather than consumption, although that production was confined to the domestic sphere. The North Korean leadership seemed to have perceived the notion that women’s domestic labor was a foundational aspect of the national economy, but nevertheless subservient to male labor; this idea was reiterated in the public sphere, most prominently in the speeches by Kim Il-sung: “Women play a very important part in their homes, and their mentality as housewives greatly affects their families. At home even men are influenced by their wives in no small measure, to say nothing of the fact that children are influenced by their mothers. If women with obsolete ideas grumble over food and dress at home, asking their husbands to buy them this or that, even men are obliged to be distracted by these things and gradually become greedy.”64 In a similar vein, women were also seen as mothers who carry out their duty to groom their children tidily, which, again, is predicated on the question of clothing and bodily representation: “If women would be just a little bit concerned about a neat and orderly life, then everything would be settled. But some mothers do not do what they could well do within their possibilities, nor do they consider anything wrong with that. In some homes they even allow children to go about with their hair uncombed, and they do not feel the need to provide them with caps and school knapsacks. . . . Only when children are reared to be tidy at home will they keep everything spick-and-span at school and grow up into men of a new type who will live in a cultured way in the future.”65 Page 240 → Figure 39. Photos of Kim Il-sung’s ancestors in Mangyeongdae. The upper right image features Gang Ban-seok, who is sewing clothing. (Photo courtesy of an anonymous donor.) Page 241 →The national project to foster women as reliable housekeepers, evidenced in this speech by Kim Il-

sung, foremost concerned the domestic discipline that involved the bodies of family members, but it also had real repercussions in life, in that there was a concrete need to produce efficient clothing for women for domestic work. Vis-à-vis joseonot (see fig. 40), simple and modern clothing was promoted to meet the needs of women’s labor at home (see fig. 41). Nevertheless, these new clothes for domestic labor retained distinctively feminine traits marked by the preference for skirts instead of genderless garments. The overriding preference for skirts, not trousers, and the way women were groomed for elegance in both joseonot and modern clothing accentuate similarities rather than differences between the two sets. Both paradigms of clothing stamp women’s bodies as being firmly situated within the domestic realm, devoid of any hint that these delicately adorned bodies have any direct participation in national construction and advancement, although in reality women by this time were almost half the workforce in North Korea.66

Military Uniforms: A New Code of Revolutionary Virtue However, the national project to embrace women as useful members of society did not confine the ideal dress code for women within the domestic sphere. Paralleling this notion of women as domestic workers was that they should participate in industrial and military efforts to resist colonial powers and defend the liberated motherland through hard labor and military tactics. Although the idea had existed since the beginning of the North Korean state, starting from the mid-1970s there was a tendency to actively promote women in both the domestic and public realms. In 1974, at the Fourth Congress of the Democratic Women’s Union of Korea, Kim Il-sung gave a speech titled “On the Revolutionization and Working-Classization of Women,” which emphasized the importance of women’s labor: “The revolutionization and working-classization of women is of great significance not only in revolutionizing and working-classizing half the population, but also in revolutionizing their homes.”67 Kim’s speech coincides with the time when women were actually consolidating their position as part of the indispensable workforce within North Korea. As was pointed out by Hunter, by the mid-1970s, women already made up half of the workforce. To extol the values of a female workforce, visual media promoted the image of working women in all spheres, but most notably, military women were the crux of glorifying female labor force in North Korea. Page 242 → Figure 40. “Elegant style” clothing. Joseon Nyeoseong 4 (1966). Figure 41. “Home style” clothing. Joseon Nyeoseong 4 (1966). Page 243 →In addition to these social factors, there seems to be an obvious correspondence between promotion of the military uniform and Kim Jong-il’s rise to power: Kim Jong-il as the head of the propaganda bureau produced and promoted revolutionary operas and their filmed versions from 1971 to 1974. Partly in response to model theater works created in China during the Cultural Revolution that promoted a thorough militarization of women, placing them on a par with their male counterparts, the revolutionary operas wanted to place female citizens within a new dual role that straddled the domestic-public continuum. Women in revolutionary operas were stable guardians of family life, yet, when necessary, they were at the forefront of military battle and revolutionary struggle. On stage and screen, women’s ambidexterity was marked by constant alternation of joseonot and military outfit. Unlike the PRC’s yangbanxi where women’s domestic activities were presented predominantly as feudal practices of the bygone era, in North Korean revolutionary operas women were able to gain access to both realms as mediators. Nevertheless, their military outfits retained the quintessential feminine marker of the skirt, which distinguished them from their male comrades—quite unlike the case of the PRC of the same time, where female soldiers wore a genderless military uniform just like their male counterparts. Juxtaposing dual values of feminine joseonot and masculine military uniforms positioned at the opposite ends of sartorial spectra, feminized military uniforms were devised in order to mark fluid identity of the North Korean women of the 1970s. Military uniforms mark women’s entry into social and economic structures, but at the same time, their feminine shapes were constant reminders of different positions between men and women in the public sphere; military skirts were adopted to mark women’s auxiliary positions in relation to their male comrades with a

purpose of confining the parameters of women’s role (see fig. 42). Women in uniform can be seen frequently on the streets of North Korea as well as on stage. A scene from the True Daughter of the Party shows a military nurse who is graciously receiving a new uniform from the Korean Workers’ Party as a reward for her excellent service at the war front (see fig. 43). Her feminine gesture in holding the treasured military uniform marks the endearing relationship between the female body and the military uniform. On a surface level, military uniforms on women may create a sense of gender equality or a mark of privilege, but more importantly, they mark a woman’s body as state property and an essential part of social routine, both in everyday life and on stage. Uniforms become a visual claim on the body’s political affiliation and determination to go through the discipline that the state imposes. The fashion code of the North Korean military uniform, therefore, signifies less empowerment than regulation by discipline. Page 244 → Figure 42. A traffic policewoman in Pyongyang wearing a modified military uniform. In the background stands a billboard painting that features a peasant woman in joseonot. (Photo courtesy of an anonymous donor.) Kim Jeong-suk—Kim Il-sung’s first wife and Kim Jong-il’s birth mother—appears in the visual media as the quintessential figure marking the transition from joseonot to military uniform. Through various sketches from biographical episodes, her corporeal presentation gradually marks the transition from joseonot of the domestic realm to the military uniform of revolutionary space. This shifting dress code seems to reflect how North Korean society cast her in dual roles of traditional homemaker and revolutionary fighter: “As soon as she became familiar with revolutionary ideology, she never left Kim Il-sung’s side and assisted him in various capacities, such as seamstress, cook, nurse, and shooter in his anti-Japanese revolutionary struggle.”68 Page 245 →If Gang Ban-seok was the Korean mother who epitomized Korean women’s virtue within the domestic realm, Kim Jeong-suk became the archetypical model of the 1970s who mixed domestic activities with the public activities that included military struggle. Such a transition is visibly marked by the sartorial transformation from traditional joseonot to modern uniform. In 1981, an anonymous article was published in a women’s magazine that emphasized women’s need to fulfill binary duties both domestic and public: “Just because our country has issued the Laws of Gender Equality, we cannot forget to think and behave like virtuous women. We should be as resolute as possible when it comes to revolutionary business, but in ordinary life, women should be feminine and use feminine speech.”69 This article is not an isolated instance of extolling essentialist feminine virtues, but is merely one of the countless similar examples, most of which centered around the legendary figure of Kim Jeong-suk. Figure 43. Scene from the revolutionary opera True Daughter of the Party. Joseon Yesul 2 (1978), cover page. Page 246 →Kim Jong-il was at the center of systematically promoting his mother’s virtues in revolutionary artworks, visually capturing the fluid juxtaposition of joseonot and military uniforms adorning the body of the model woman of the new era, as seen in figures 44 and 45. Figure 44 is a painting published in 1976 under the title Unflinching Fighter of Revolution, Comrade Kim Jeong-suk Studies Juche and Revolutionary Ideologies of Our Great Leader, Comrade Kim Il-sung. Here Kim Jeong-suk is presented as a girl who manages to find time to read the revolutionary writings of Kim Il-sung, her future husband, after putting her brothers to bed; her chaste, modest, and diligent nature is expressed through black-and-white dress code of joseonot. Figure 45, however, marks her as an adult in military uniform, as a companion of the revolutionary hero Kim Il-sung. The March 1975 issue of Joseon Yesul published the painting titled Comrade Kim Jeong-suk Protects Comrade Kim Il-sung, the Great Leader of the Revolution, with Her Life. In this painting, the hagio-graphic companionship of the couple in a revolutionary setting legitimizes Kim Jong-il’s rise to power in the 1970s. Just as Kim Il-sung’s mother was projected as the producer of dress materials—thus configuring her as the righteous bearer of the future national father of North Korea—Kim Jeong-suk was positioned as the revolutionary fighter whose son would naturally assume the position of the heir. In the same manner that Gang Ban-seok’s sartorial dexterity was emphasized, legends about Kim Jeong-suk

accentuated her sewing skills, which produced much needed revolutionary fighters’ uniforms. A short story titled “She Produced Military Uniforms during the March” (“Haenggungil-eseo jieusin gunbok”) captures an event that allegedly took place in one bitter winter when Kim Il-sung had to retreat from the Japanese: “As the fighters marched through high piles of snow for many days, their uniforms were torn into pieces. So Kim Il-sung acquired cloth materials to make military trousers, but the soldiers had no time to sew them. So Kim Jeong-suk wanted to make new trousers for the soldiers, but not wishing to burden her with such a task, the soldiers did not hand over the cloth. However, the unflinching revolutionary fighter comrade Kim Jeong-suk read the soldiers’ kind hearts and told them that assembling clothes is naturally a woman’s job and took the cloth from them and made uniforms.”70 Just like Gang Ban-seok, Kim Jeong-suk appears as a maker of clothes, but unlike her traditional mother-in-law, she does so on the battlefield. By doing so, Kim Jeong-suk expands the realm of women’s domestic labor to what is traditionally defined as masculine space, but at the same time, she keeps her militant identity from completely taking over women’s bodily representations by performing feminine activity even on the battlefield (see fig. 46). Page 247 → Figure 44. An oil painting illustrates young Kim Jeong-suk wearing joseonot. Joseon Yesul 9 (1976):11. Figure 45. Kim Jeong-suk in this oil painting is wearing a feminized military uniform that is distinguished from those of her male comrades. Joseon Yesul 3 (1975): 11. Page 248 → Figure 46. Kim Jeongsuk is sewing milirary trousers for soldiers on the battlefield in this oil painting published in Joseon Yesul 9 (1970): 11. From shooting to sewing, Kim Jeong-suk is cast as traveling through the two worlds of feminine domesticity and masculine publicity through a wide range of bodily gestures oscillating between tradition and revolution. As expressed in the above paintings, she marks the transition from the ideal woman of Gang Ban-seok’s generation to that of the newer generation in the 1970s.71 The two realms of traditional femininity and military masculinity do not form a mutually exclusive relationship, but coexist harmoniously so as to form a notion of feminine virtue much more complicated than that of the previous generation. The gradual transition from joseonot to military uniform, or better put, the seamless coexistence between the two dress codes, did not contradict women’s undertaking within North Korean society. There existed a dual mission for women, to nurture and build family life as well as to fight and construct at the workplace. Performing arts and their visual documentation were at the forefront of congealing such ideas into daily practices. In figure 47, which captures a dance drama entitled Snow Is Falling, the duality of North Korean women’s fashion codes as related to bodily practices is represented in a hierarchy, emblematically capturing various layers of femininity. Page 249 → Figure 47. An illustration of a scene from dance performance Snow Is Falling (Nun-i naerinda), published in Joseon Yesul 2 (1981): 28, symptomatically captures different degrees of femininity in North Korean imagination. Page 250 →In the illustration from the dance sequence, a group of dancers in white joseonot embody snowflakes, forming the foreground to sustain a glorified female soldier in a military outfit. The female soldier, in turn, upholds the red flag as the unambiguous escutcheon of revolution. This vertical composition symptomatically captures the hierarchy of North Korean femininity: at the summit shines the red embodiment of revolutionary ideology; beneath it is a female soldier, whose body is marked as distinctively feminine with her slim waist, kneelength skirt, and exposed calves; she, in turn, is supported by numerous women wearing white joseonot—the dress code capturing the ideals of the traditional past. This trilevel structure might signify different levels of femininity, but at a closer look, they illustrate a visual-ideological continuum rather than a rupture. Accompanying the choreographic plans for the performance are the two illustrations of costumes for a female soldier and dancers performing snowflakes (see figs. 48 and 49). At a first glance, the two figures reveal differences, such as military uniform versus traditional joseonot, short versus long hair and skirts, easily differentiated waistlines and different forms of headgear. However, at a closer look, their bodies are united by significant similarities that expunge diverging points: both dancers feature similar docile bodily gestures, while their gazes are focused on some distant point as if anticipating the advent of an ideal world. Topped by the red

flag—the ultimate sign of the socialist revolution—both figures implicate the coming of a socialist utopia. Although different in color and shape, their costumes feature the same fluid silhouette that accentuate their feminine beauty, resonating with the fluid identity Kim Jeong-suk embodied through a wide variety of dress codes and bodily gestures. Such resilient negotiations between the traditional joseonot and military uniforms are too numerous to catalog, since similar images were infinitely replicated and circulated through media from the 1970s on. In one example, this ubiquitous visual structure was put into a full-fledged spatial environment. In True Daughter of the Party, the same visual composition manifests itself through a dance sequence where a female solder wearing a military uniform is supported by a group of dancers in traditional white joseonot (see fig. 50). The two images from Snow Is Falling and True Daughter of the Party are identical in their visual composition and verisimilitude. Once again, a female soldier is carrying a red revolutionary flag. This production seemed to have taken the previously discussed dance production one step further in that the advent of the utopian future is not only implicated through the gazes of female performers, but is visually manifested through a realistic rendering of Pyongyang’s cityscape and architectural details, including Daedong River and People’s Grand Study Hall (see fig. 51). The production makes a statement that Pyongyang is the socialist utopia of the revolutionized future. What is even more telling in this pictorial illustration is that the trilevel hierarchy is extended by another significant element of a red sun, which, without exception, signals the presence of the Great Leader Kim Il-sung. Ultimately, regardless of women’s progression marked by various dress codes, they are situated under the benevolent guidance and radiance of the national father, destined to perform docile gestures of beauty and obedience. Page 251 → Figure 48. Costume design for the dance performance Snow Is Falling. Joseon Yesul 10 (1970): 113. Figure 49. Costume design for the dance performance Snow Is Falling. Joseon Yesul 10 (1970): 113.

Page 252 →Shift in Fashion in the 1980s If the sartorial discourse of the 1970s was predicated on the fluid continuum between military uniform and joseonot, the 1980s saw a much more discursive sartorial landscape created by factors including the diversification of the textile industry, transforming cultural influences from neighboring regions, and most importantly, the leadership’s changing visions of women’s fashion. When Kim Il-sung declared in 1982 during the Supreme People’s Assembly that “sleeveless shirts with low necklines do not contradict the socialist way of life,”72 was he fully aware of the fact that exposure of the body, especially the female body, can be taken as an open expression of sexuality, a counterintuitive gesture for socialism? Or when his son Kim Jong-il, in 1984, noted that “we must pursue revolution in the textile industry and produce smart clothing that is up to the latest fashion,”73 was he implying that the source of the “latest fashion” lies outside of Korea, or even outside of the socialist bloc, thus contradicting the ideological backbone of North Korean self-reliance? Just as the former East Germany and the countries of the Soviet bloc sent their officials to capitalist fashion centers “to attend haute couture shows and industrial exhibitions,”74 North Korean officials seemed to be setting their eyes on Western standards to catch up with the latest fashion modes, which would diversify the binary dress codes based on traditional female garments including joseonot and other clothing for domestic labor and military outfits. Once again, visual media were at the forefront of promoting fashion diversity in the 1980s. Numerous illustrations attempted to diversify the production of dress materials in ways that did not belong to the traditional binary division. In 1981, Joseon Yesul published a painting titled Fatherly Love Is Felt in Silk Fabric (Bidanpil-e gitdeun eobeoi sarang) where Kim Il-sung is standing in the middle of textile factory (see fig. 52). He is holding colorful fabric surrounded by female workers who look up to Kim as the true object of adoration. Because of the idolizing gazes of the female factory workers, he assumes the focal point of this visual composition as if he were the real producer of the fabric. Not inadvertently at all, Kim in this painting resembles his mother, Gang Ban-seok, who was portrayed as the producer of dress materials in biographical sketches. The adoring gazes of the female factory workers fixed on Kim Il-sung accentuate his masculinity as the revered and even desired provider of goods necessary for women’s livelihood. Page 253 → Figure 50. Joseon Yesul 2 (1975), cover page. Stage curtain design for the Grand Pyongyang Theater depicting a scene from the True Daughter of the Party. Figure 51. A panoramic view of Pyongyang. (Photo courtesy of an anonymous donor.)

Page 254 →Why then, was there such a need to situate the most sacrosanct political figure at the heart of textile production? Was there a practical need for the leader to intrude on what is conventionally regarded a female domain? To a certain extent, Kim’s centrality to the visual composition marginalizes the potential subject material—the silk fabric—as a perfunctory medium through which the male state leader and the female national subjects are brought together. The flowery pattern of the fabric is obviously marked as intended for female consumption, and in that sense, Kim Il-sung’s endorsement of the material situates him as the arbiter of feminine beauty. As a metonymic object standing for North Korean women’s materiality and sexuality, silk fabric in this painting reinforces the link between the national father and female consumer materials. As the title of the painting denotes, the product of women’s labor plays an important role in lifting female workers to an ecstatic realm where they experience an emotional rapport between themselves and the national father. In the process, female labor, which brings the workers closer to the national leader, becomes an aesthetically valued object; in the upper right corner of the painting, a slogan in red letters reads, “Textile Is Art.” The slogan succinctly articulates the intimation between labor and art. At the same time, it teaches the viewers that the right form of beauty is an efficient way of measuring political correctness. All in all, the juxtaposition of the national father and fashion was created with a dual intention: it was a political project endorsing female labor by endowing Kim Il-sung with the power to establish standards of how women should produce rather than consume, yielding the fashion products that would ultimately regulate their patterns of consumption and bodily expressions. In case of North Korea, it is not only visual arts that enforced the idea of Page 255 →the paternal authority over female production and consumption of fashion. There are many other examples that indicate Kim Il-sung actually used coercive measures to reform North Koreans’ fashion practices to make them look more diverse. Sin Sang-ok and Choe Eun-hui, the South Korean director and actress who were kidnapped by Kim Jong-il in 1978 and stayed in North Korea until 1986, recounted several examples they experienced in the 1980s in North Korea. In her memoir, Choe notes that the Korean Workers’ Party instructed people to wear hats: “The instructions from the Party were religiously followed, so everyone started putting something on their head. Some women wore western style hats with a large shade and other women wore hats with ear covers resembling children’s hats, all while wearing modified joseonot.”75 A similar case illustrates a top-down approach to fashion: in 1984 Kim Il-sung returned from Eastern Europe and suddenly instructed people to wear ties: “The next day, everyone was wearing a tie regardless of whether it matched their other clothes or not. People who did not have a dress shirt still wore a tie on top of collarless shirts. From then on, party members and office workers put aside their Mao suits and started to wear ties at work. But Kim Jong-il still insists on wearing a Mao suit.”76 Kim Il-sung’s and Kim Jong-il’s preferred fashion codes diverged conspicuously, as the father preferred Westernstyle suits often tailored out of white fabric, while the son preferred Mao jackets as a marker of his status as a military commander.77 The difference in fashion codes notwithstanding, they shared an interest in reforming people’s fashion. The leadership’s pervasive fashion measures often resulted in stultifying practices, but on the other hand, they also evidence the leadership’s strong desire to present North Koreans as fashionable. Choe, as the abducted guest of Kim Jong-il, provides a unique insider’s view on how Kim personally thought of North Korean women’s fashions: “I put on Korean traditional dress made of flamboyant fuschia cloth Kim Jong-il had sent me as a present. When Kim Jong-il entered the reception room, he closely scrutinized me, looked at my dress up and down, and finally murmured to himself. ‘Why is it that our comrades do not make Korean dresses like that?’ He must have been impressed by the fancy color of joseonot.”78 Kim Jong-il’s desire to fast-forward North Korean women’s fashion certainly implies his acknowledgment that fashion elsewhere was far more advanced. Choe recounts that a couple of weeks after her abduction in 1978, Kim Jong-il sent her forty to fifty boxes of cloth of all sorts for all seasons, starting from cashmere for coats, silk for Korean dress, thin veils, and velvet Page 256 →for evening dresses. One time he even sent her three mink coats, two of which she returned to him. Everyday he would send all kinds of boots, hats, gloves, “all made in Japan.”79 If Choe’s accounts are true, Japan as the pronounced enemy was ironically providing North Korea with high fashion standards, which could have disturbed Kim Jong-il deeply. But could this have been a sufficient reason for Kim to issue instructions that abrasively affected the daily fashion practices of North Koreans?

The leadership’s interest in elevating the standards of fashion, especially women’s fashion, manifests itself well in a photo of the father and the son during the 1988 fashion exhibition in Pyongyang. While attending the exhibition, Kim Jong-il noted: “If there is a gathering of ten thousand people, they should all be dressed diversely according to their own taste.”80 Kim Jong-il also echoed his father’s statement: “We must increase the production of clothing. We should efficiently manage clothing factories so that they produce various sorts of clothing catering to the taste of our people. We must open many tailor shops and train more tailors and seamstresses so that people can obtain appropriate suits according to seasonal change.”81 Paralleling the ideas expressed in these statements is a photo published in Joseon Nyeoseong in 1988. The two leaders of North Korea are inspecting women’s red high-heel shoes on exhibit with other sorts of shoes. Produced in domestic factories, these flamboyant shoes embody the livelihood of the North Korean people, but at the same time, they also become conduits through which the national leaders endorse certain types of femininity. Just like the painting (see fig. 52) in which Kim Il-sung endorsed colorful fabric and thereby established himself as the arbiter of female beauty and regulator of their bodily practices, both Kims in the photo establish their stature as endorsers of the production and consumption of female fashion goods. Kim Jong-il’s interest shown in the photo is paralleled by numerous writings throughout 1990s. For instance, in a 1990 speech entitled “On the Revolution of Light Industry,” Kim Jong-il claimed: “Shoes are absolutely necessary consumerist items for people’s daily lives. As people’s living standards keep rising, there is a growing demand for shoes. We must improve the quantity and quality of shoes production so that we can produce massive amount according to gender, age, season, and profession. We must concentrate on the production of a large quantity of leather shoes and winter shoes, especially women’s long neck boots, high heels, sandals, and guarantee that there are enough workers’ shoes. We must produce at least 120 million pairs of shoes every year.”82 The diverse kinds of shoes cataloged in this speech showcase the fact that Kim Jong-il was concerned with the beauty as well as the utility of these items. Fashion, in this sense, is not simply placed in the conventional domain of female consumption, but rather belongs to the fluid production-consumption continuum that seamlessly links labor with art. Page 257 → Figure 52. A painting featuring Kim Il-sung as surrounded by female textile workers. Joseon Yesul 9 (1981): 17. The 1993 film Urban Girls Come to Get Married reinforces the aforementioned ideals of the state leaders equating fashion with people’s livelihood. The film is about a young fashion designer in Pyongyang who gives up her coveted urban lifestyle to marry a model farmworker in the countryside. In the end, when she finally settles down in the countryside, she opens a tailor shop to bring in higher standards in the urban mode to the village.83 Page 258 →The influence of urban fashion, often associated with consumption, however, is projected as a site of production in this film, where designing clothes and driving tractors form parallel activities through a montage sequence. The union of the urban girl and the country boy in the movie becomes the industrial coupling between fashion and agriculture. The sequence sets up a seamless account in which consumption and production are just two dots on the same orbit of any North Korean industry: farmers and workers flock to the newly opened dress shop to revamp their style, but in the immediately following sequence we see them laboring in the rice field. Every consumer produces something for the community in turn, and this is the only way consumption becomes justified as an extension of production. Just as in figure 38 in which beautifully adorned women in joseonot rejoice at the socialist construction symbolically captured by tractors and factory chimneys, fashion that is often regarded as the site of fickle feminine consumption fully meshes with the masculinized site of production. What, then, is achieved by the urbanization of rural women’s fashion? In the broad scheme of things, it reinforces the obvious urban-rural divide that privileges the former as a model to emulate. Likewise, the bodily presentation embodied in the newly arrived urban girl imposes superior body politics on rural women, who should be enlightened and cultivated by urban standards. Not by chance, this is the space associated with the sacrosanct national leaders. In this light, the urban girl becomes the fashion evangelist spreading the nationally recommended fashion standards and behavioral norms that accompany this new code of fashion. Fashion is just but one way for the North Korean leaders to configure, discipline, and circulate the politically correct ideas about female bodies, which prove to be so central to the postcolonial nation-building process. This process proved to be more nationalistic than socialist in North Korea, as the conceptualization of postcolonial

modernity foremost hinged upon ethnocentric ideals. While the new socialist republic promised to bid farewell to the feudal legacies of the past, the most painful of which remained the immediate memories of the Japanese colonial rule, the promises remained rhetorical at best when it came to the regime’s idea about what constituted womanhood. As late as 1988, Kim Il-sung proclaimed his essentialist view on women and how they should always remain within the parameters of the feminine: “Of course women should be encouraged to struggle to achieve liberation and rights. This is one of the reasons why we still struggle. However, women should not solely focus on their liberation, rights, and equality and forget about the traditional feminine beauty and Page 259 →virtue that typically defined the Korean women . . . women should be feminine after all.”84 Upholding the sacred opinion of the leader, North Korean women’s fashion as expressed in the media was mindful of potentially dangerous cross-pollination of genders: to be sure of this, women’s military uniforms were feminized with the introduction of a pleated skirt and slim waistline. At the same time, feminine traditional dresses were modified to achieve mobility, which would allow women to participate in domestic and social labor alongside their male counterparts. Underneath this convenient marriage between the instrumental pursuit of women’s labor and control over gender hierarchy, there lies a much more resilient interchangeability and fluidity between the masculine and the feminine, as well as the traditional and the revolutionary. The matrix of women’s fashion in North Korea is woven through these complexities, for fashion is a site of production as well as consumption. As seen through the examples of iconic national heroines, such as Gang Ban-seok and Kim Joeng-suk, who were both masterful makers and bearers of women’s clothing, the North Korean brand of women’s fashion created an equation in which production and consumption are mutually exchangeable. Even with the advent of more diverse styles in the 1980s and thereafter, this thesis remains truthful, resonating with the founding principles and practices of women’s fashion. However, the final question remains: “Are there any possibilities of reading subversive moments of fashion practices, in which women can randomly rebel against the state politics of gender? How shall we decode the transparent top-down approach to women’s fashion in North Korea? A comprehensive study of how fashion practices work from the bottom up in North Korea is impossible to conduct at this stage in history, as free access to North Korean people and the ethnographic research are not guaranteed. While those curious can vicariously answer these questions by interviewing North Korean defectors or foreigners who frequent North Korea, one thing remains certain about women’s fashion and the bodily practices aligned with it: it gains its distinctive texture by weaving together labor and art, production and consumption, and the postcolonial desire to restore the national essence by reinforcing ideals of untainted femininity.

Page 260 →CHAPTER 6 Performing Paradoxes: Staging Utopia, Upstaging Dystopia Tourism and Human Rights in North Korea Since the North Korea opened Geumgang Mountain to outside tourists in 1998, more than 860,000 South Koreans and other foreign nationals have visited the famous scenic site.1 Even though there were occasional obstacles that brought the tourist operation to a halt, both Koreas hailed the tourist project as a successful effort to increase mutual understanding via human exchange.2 However, while South Korean visitors have already begun setting their feet back onto what was once forbidden territory, North Korea’s human rights violations are still a long way from center stage in official inter-Korean political dialogues. Despite grassroots protests against North Korea’s prison camps and persecution of political dissidents, South Korea has not confronted the North Korean leadership about these politically volatile issues, preferring to maintain a smooth inter-Korean relationship.3 North Korea, on the other hand, made it its mission to improve its belligerent national image by presenting itself as a respectable nation to the outside world. This meant that North Korea carefully developed criteria for selecting presentable images to be shown to outside spectators and had its people rehearse according to those criteria. For North Korea, fabricating a desirable national image is a process contingent on Foucauldian bodily discipline requiring a “meticulous control of the operations of the body, which assured the constant subjection of its forces.”4 Truthful to Foucault’s Page 261 →statement that “the body was in the grip of very strict powers, which imposed on it constraints, prohibitions or obligations,” the North Korean state deemed the bodies of its people to be ancillary props to ideal self-presentation, while it systematically eliminated unnecessary bodies from its territory.5 At the same time, the state also ensured that foreigners—tourists, journalists, and aid workers—did not interfere with its plans to stage a highly choreographed self-idolization by prohibiting outsiders from accessing unrehearsed daily lives of the North Korean people. This process of staging an ideal national image according to strict state control necessitated a high degree of regulation intended to differentiate what should be visible from what should be invisible. North Korea’s systematic process of disciplining certain bodies to be invisible while promoting others as the self-reflexive representation of an ideal nationhood is supported by state-sponsored violence, which forcefully determines the mobility of both domestic and foreign bodies within North Korea. For a country that chronically suffers from famine, the state-controlled distribution of necessary resources for survival, most notably food, became a tangible form of state violence to reinforce and perpetuate its power and discipline its subjects. Disciplining North Korean people and keeping outsiders at bay are mutually dependent processes, but no matter how rigorous the state control may be, the carefully planned tourism at times resulted in unexpected interactions between North Koreans and foreigners. Despite the state’s efforts to reduce chances of accidental encounters between its people and outsiders, at times, the two engaged in spontaneous interactions that the North Korean state could not control. In the master plan of the North Korean tourist industry, its natural and cultural landscape becomes a stage on which the state directs the movement of its people and foreign tourists. In this totalizing scheme, tourists are intended to be silent and compliant spectators. The state perceives foreign aid workers and tourism service staff, operating on the boundary between tightly controlled North Korea and the world beyond, to be undesired but necessary intermediaries. From the state’s point of view, foreign aid workers are undesired parties because they insist on stepping out of the roles of controllable spectators, but they are granted some degree of autonomy so they can distribute much-needed resources. North Korean employees providing services to foreign tourists are also in a peculiar situation. They are constantly exposed to visitors, and thereby become unwanted but necessary agents who must mediate between North Korea and the outside world. But how does North Korea handle the significant contradictions of having Page 262 →a permeable boundary,

which allows only a selected few to enter its territory? And how should we understand the various modes through which North Korea regulates foreign tourists, aid workers, service providers and escapees? I attempt to answer these questions by exploring specific strategies that demonstrate the state’s desire and motivation to show and hide certain elements of its national landscape. The two issues—tourism and the human rights question—may at first appear to be diametrically opposed realms of North Korean performance, since they explicitly disclose the contrapuntal principles of staging and hiding. At first glance, euphoric tourist sites and the brutal hunting of escapees may appear to be unrelated. But once the performance mechanism of producing what is visible and invisible becomes the focal point of analysis, tourism and human rights issues form a coherent dialogue about North Korean propaganda as a process of making a national performance. Performance, as I see it in this case, derives its energy from the paradoxical stance of the state that intends to render visibility only to limited areas while making the rest of the nation invisible to the outside world. However, to accept the dichotomized production of visible and invisible as the strategy of the state alone is to reduce the complex nature of the two aforementioned performances and to overlook other agencies involved in the matters of tourism and human rights. North Korean escapees, foreign tourists, aid workers, and human rights activists all bring in competing ideas in an effort to create their version of the “real” representation of North Korea. In exploring how visibility shapes the notion of the real, it is useful to consider Peggy Phelan’s methodological stance centering on “the way in which the visible itself is woven into each of these discourses as an unmarked conspirator in the maintenance of each discursive real.”6 Phelan’s ideas are particularly pertinent to the analysis of the North Korean national performance in that she points to the notion of “visible” as the misleading indicator of empowerment: While acknowledging how visibility exerts power over our perception of the real, Phelan points out that “the binary between the power of visibility and the impotency of invisibility is falsifying.”7 Invisibility is not the usual marker of disempowerment if we take the following fact into account: Human rights activists often have to become invisible in the eyes of the North Korean state in order to gain access to the realities of human rights abuses. But once they complete their mission to document the abuses, they will turn the documentation into a cantankerous anti–North Korean performance to the international audience. Human rights violations, for the North Korean state, are not a legitimate undertaking Page 263 →in its canon of national performance, but for activists, who temporarily assume the role of invisible actors in accessing the hidden realities of North Korea, invisibility becomes an empowering performance strategy. If visibility summons up the state’s surveillance, invisibility provides ways to subvert it. In this sense, invisibility is just as powerful a performance mode as visibility in regards to documenting human rights violations. On the other hand, state-sponsored tourism exhibits North Korea’s wishful self-portrait; it visualizes everything the North Korean state deems as its ideal self-image. Like Dean MacCannell’s notion of tourist attractions as “analogous to the religious symbolism of primitive people,” tourist attractions designated by the North Korean state are unmistakable signs of the ideological hierarchy of that society.8 This chapter neither investigates the entire modus operandi of the North Korean tourist industry, nor appropriates an activist stance, accusing North Korea of violating human rights. Rather, I attempt to determine the overlapping fields of two evidently disjunctive realms of performance—tourism and human rights issues—by looking at North Korea’s highly choreographed principles of showing and hiding. Moreover, the contrasting intentionality of showing and hiding, as an image-producing process, becomes more important than what actually happens to the actors involved in the process. Despite the impression North Korea may produce to outsiders as a solipsistic nation, the state in fact works faithfully to prioritize the production of an idealized self-image over the actual experience of the people beyond that theatrical facade. This chapter attempts to fill that precise void stemming from the absence of the voices of the social actors—South Korean tourists, foreign aid workers, human rights activists, and North Korean escapees—involved in various capacities in creating a national performance out of tourism and human rights issues. In order to meet that objective, I interviewed North Korean escapees, former trainers and managers of service workers, and foreign aid workers, and finally participated in a tour of the Geumgang Mountain resort.

Inventing Silent Tourists After the death of Kim Il-sung in 1994, North Korea underwent a severe economic crisis, which necessitated that the state compromise by partially joining the world market economy.9 Consequently, fissures began to appear in the tightly controlled state, leading to a gradual transformation of North Korean society. While hunger was sweeping the country, it opened up limited Page 264 →special tourist zones to visitors. The emergence of a free market economy has changed the way North Korea approaches its resources for tourism. The nation used to take great pride in assigning mythological significance to scenic sights as inspiring, and inspired by, the national leaders’ revolutionary deeds.10 This practice is still alive at the present moment, but with the loss of the luxury to prioritizing ideological purity over economic needs, North Korea opened up part of its territory to foreign visitors in order to bring new financial resources into its cash-trapped economy. Many advertisements evidence the fact that North Korea has been making consistent efforts to attract tourists from various parts of the globe: the North Korean National Tourism Administration in 2003 invited the Bangkok-based Pacific Asia Travel Association (PATA) to send a task force to advise on tourism development, which resulted in a PATA report; in April 2004, after two years of planning, a German travel agency started to sell a tourist package for railway travel in North Korea; beginning in July 2004, North Korean travel agencies started advertising on the Internet; at the same time package tours to North Korea via South Korea became available in Canada for the first time.11 However, putting economic motivations aside, North Korea seems to have another compelling motivation to encourage tourism: that of constructing a radically different notion of North Korea for foreign spectators. By partially opening up what it regards as the most desirable locations in the county, North Korea is able to reinvent its national image, so often associated with military threats and destitution of apocalyptic proportions. The lure of attracting a global flow of finance, together with positive media coverage, certainly propels the clandestine country’s desire to stage Potemkin-village-like images for tourists. In analyzing the motivations for fabricating tourist cities, Dennis Judd and Susan Fainstein write: “The designers of tourist space understandably avoid the troubling aspects of life . . . the main spatial effect of urban tourism is to produce spaces that are prettified, that do not feature people involved in manual labor, that exclude visible evidence of poverty, and that give people opportunities for entertainment and officially sanctioned fun.”12 Even though North Korean tourist zones seem to reflect the spirit of fun and entertainment, visitors to North Korea search for a different paradigm of what Judd and Fainstein describe as an attractive tourist space for entertainment and fun. To many potential visitors, the selling points of this clandestine country are not the conventional commodities of relaxation and sightseeing that many world-famous tourist resorts offer, but rather the Page 265 →pleasure of satisfying their curiosity about a forbidden territory. To some tourists, the attraction of visiting North Korea is to have an experience of glancing at times gone by. “The Stalinist theme park”—as a BBC reporter aptly referred to Pyongyang—offers a unique experience of traveling backward in time, especially for those who have lived under socialism elsewhere in the world.13 Thus, visitors expect to find relics of time, the frozen historical memory ubiquitously present on the city’s streets, such as the gargantuan monuments of the North Korean rulers. However, this experience has been shared only by a limited number of South Korean tourists, who still have few opportunities to visit urban areas.14 Most South Korean tourists who visit North Korea are limited to seeing rural areas far away from the center of daily activities and real life, which raises the question of how nature is consumed by South Korean visitors. For example, hiking trail maps prepared by the Hyundai-Asan Cooperation, the South Korean business investor in the Geumgang Mountain resort, show a colorful illustration of the area—an aestheticized version of already innocuous nature—as if to minimize South Korean tourists’ perception of North Korea as enemy territory. The urban landscape, with political slogans hanging practically on every building, may provoke negative feelings in South Korean visitors, whereas nature provides them with the harmless pleasure of being in a quixotic land without being exposed to blunt political propaganda. However, such an account immediately encounters challenges once nature stops being natural and becomes political. Tourism is an ideological reconfiguration of nature; thus there is hardly any room for natural elements to

be left innocent in the ideological remapping of tourist space. The emergence of nature as a political agency invites sets of related questions: what is the framework that is being used to politicize nature? How does the political framing of nature affect the performances of various participants such as tour guides, tourists, and North Korean inhabitants? I point out two related modes in which the North Korean state frames tourist space, that is, to provoke nostalgic feelings in tourists while suppressing multidirectional discussions on political issues in that space. Both are concerned with disciplining South Korean tourists’ bodies so that they become tame participants in a project the state can easily control. An attempt to find a happy balance between ideological purity and capitalist gain seems to have led the North Korea state to deploy two plans—making a commodity out of nature and provoking nostalgic feelings for the lost motherland. Significantly, neither item invites bitter political contention Page 266 →between two Koreas. Nostalgia in particular has an intuitive appeal for South Koreans whose families originally come from North Korea. The South Korean tourist agency selling tour packages to visit Pyongyang identified nostalgia as the central selling point for potential tourists; posters clearly state that the Pyongyang tour was “a rare chance to realize the wishes of separated family members.” In fact, nostalgia is not only the sentimental mode in which to conduct tourist business, but is also a best-selling product in itself for South Korean and Russian tourists. Russian tourists in particular find it amusing to encounter the old tone of the Soviet Union in contemporary North Korea.15 Leonid Petrov, a Russian tourist writing to his compatriots in an online travelogue, described his visit to Pyongyang as a nostalgia-evoking experience (“on a train with Kim’s portraits you may find yourself like an extra in Stalinist film”), even though nostalgic feelings are often accompanied by ironic relief that the good old Soviet days are part of the past. Many South Koreans who go on the Geumgang Mountain tour are senior citizens whose families are originally from North Korea.16 At one of the summits of Geumgang Mountain from which one can get a good glimpse of nearby towns on a clear day, I overheard conversations among tourists: “Somewhere there should be our ancestral burial ground.” Other elderly tourists told me: “We are originally from this township; you can see the edge of our neighborhood from here.” Catering to the nostalgic sentiment, a speaker incessantly blasts music with lyrics such as “Welcome brothers,” or “We will meet again” when tourists arrive at the checkpoint to enter or depart from North Korea. The lachrymose songs invent and groom forced intimacy for those, like myself, who have no family relationship to North Korea. Likewise, the South Korean tour guides, who are employed by Hyundai-Asan Corporation and assigned to a group of twenty to twenty-five tourists and accompany them throughout the tour, constantly emphasize the connection between North and South Korea. As the bus I was on entered North Korea, they urged tourists not to look for differences, but to find similarities between North and South. As the tourist bus passed by dilapidated farmhouses along the unpaved roads, the tour guide urged curious spectators not to point fingers at the scenery and people outside: “Do not look for how backward North Korea is, but just think about how life was thirty years ago in the South and you will find unmistakable links between the south and the north.” While these guides were making good efforts to eliminate prejudices against North Korea, it was not the condescending attitude toward economically backward North Korea that marked Page 267 →the South Korean tour guides’ direction. Quite the opposite, their direction reflected the North Korean state’s desire to regulate the way South Koreans view their country. As directors and dramaturges often do to actors, the guides urged tourists to process visual images in a prescribed way and thereby made the viewing experience a directed one. This process of editing tourists’ vision is coterminous with making docile accomplices out of them; both discipline South Korean visitors to be exposed to sets of limited activities sanctioned by the North Korean state. As Foucault noted, “Discipline increases the forces of the body (in economic terms of utility) and diminishes these same forces (in political terms of obedience).”17 The North Korean state sees the economic utility of South Korean tourists primarily in their power to consume while disciplining them to become politically obedient. Such a dual stance can be best seen in the shops catering to tourist shoppers. The only souvenir shop in the tour zone is a replica of what could be any typical shopping center in any urban area around the world: bright lighting fixtures, impeccably made-up clerks, pleasant music to stimulate consumerist desire, and a conveniently located foreign currency exchange booth.

Moving through this seductive space almost erases the ideological boundary South Koreans have been made aware of for the past fifty years. The consumerist desires provoked by the shopping center in Geumgang Mountain create a sense of misplacement for tourists because the firm boundary between North and South Korea becomes malleable and penetrable—to the degree that two Koreas are more divided by the “relic” boundary than by a functional boundary.18 Tourists become the liveliest actors in this situation as they are encouraged to ask about products, compare prices, and even document their activities by taking photos—an activity that is forbidden in other spaces in the tour zone. This formation of theatrical space, based on the acculturation of the consumer-driven economy intended by the North Korean state, leaves little room for ideological contention between North Korean employees and South Korean tourists; the only books on display are photo collections of scenic sites, cookbooks, and collections of children’s fairy tales. No ideologically charged products are on display for consumption. In the same spirit, none of the North Korean guides spoke of the benevolent leaders Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-Il, in an obvious attempt not to incite the anti–North Korean sentiment that is so deeply ingrained in many South Koreans. The tour guides also spoke only of fairy tales and legends related to each site. South Korean tourists are greeted by North Korean tour Page 268 →guides’ eloquent storytelling when they reach a summit named Cheonseondae (the “altar of the heavenly fairies” in Korean). The love story between a human being and a fairy is a familiar tale for all Koreans, providing common ground for understanding between otherwise culturally alienated people. The coordinators of the Geumgang Mountain tour—Hyundai-Asan Corporation, South Korean tour guides, North Korean clerks—make it clear that the conventional verbal propaganda exchanged between South and North, in which each accuses the other, which has been the dominant mode of communication between these countries since the end of the Korean War, is nonexistent in this pleasant fairyland. In lieu of a verbal medium, visual images speak flamboyantly, sometimes louder than words, the most evident example of this being Kim Il-sung’s and Kim Jong-il’s instructions engraved on monumental rocks (see fig. 53). The sight of nature deployed as unnatural political propaganda generates a question: what happens when natural scenery speaks for the North Korean leaders in bloody red letters, silently, but loudly? The engraved red letters on the mountain cliffs and stone monuments are ideological scars of the Cold War era that immediately catch the attention of tourists who are not accustomed to seeing Communist propaganda. South Koreans have been continuously educated to identify such visual images as alien objects, while North Koreans have been systematically trained to see these monuments from a very early age as sacrosanct objects. For South Koreans, these silent yet politicized monuments evoke strange feelings and memories of war and confrontation, but the tour guides advise them not to make any politically sensitive comments on these monuments displaying the holy scriptures of the Kim rulers. For South Korean tourists, such advice carries firm authority because of an unhappy precedent involving a politically careless comment. In June 1999, a South Korean housewife told a North Korean tour guide that North Korean defectors live a good life in South Korea, for which she was detained for a week in North Korea before being released back to the South. After this incident, no South Korean tourist has ventured the inconvenience of being detained for exercising freedom of speech. Thus, silence becomes the best prescription for tourists visiting North Korea. Despite its tranquil surface, silence, when coupled with invisibility, can be the most abrasive mode of directing human bodies. While the North Korean state makes seamless efforts to display content but silence tourists in limited tourist zones, it also makes brutal but futile efforts to hide epidemic hunger by hunting down economic migrants, political escapees, and regulating the mobility of foreign aid workers. Silence is the link that brings together two seemingly opposite types of social actors—tourists and tourist guides, foreign aid workers and escapees—in making North Korean national performance. While tourists are treated with a hospitality that forces them to be silent and compliant spectators, escapees are treated with a hostility that literally mutilates their bodies to make them immobile. Page 269 → Figure 53. Inscription of Kim Jong-il’s words reads: “Geumgang Mountain is truly the spiritual essence of North Korea. Kim Jong-il.” (Photo by Kim Suk-Young.)

In coordinating hospitality toward tourists and hostility toward its own people, violence becomes the state’s major mode of directing bodies of the various parties involved. As the North Korean state silently eliminates undesired bodies when coping with food crises, it simultaneously spins the Page 270 →wheel of lucrative tourism while it forces silence upon tourists, an invisible way of exercising a minor degree of violence.

Erasure of Undesired Bodies: Escapees and Foreign Aid Workers The North Korean state and visitors to North Korea have very different expectations regarding what they want to show and see, which certainly creates conflicts of interest. In order to resolve such conflicts, the state uses its unlimited power to erase undesirable elements from its national landscape, the process of which constantly requires the violation of the North Korean people’s human rights. The degree of erasure varies tremendously, ranging from preventing foreign visitors from taking snapshots of unrehearsed local scenes to expelling disfigured people from the capital city, Pyongyang. The former was the experience of Jill Dougherty, the former managing editor of CNN International Asia Pacific, when she visited Pyongyang in August 2005. One morning, as we were driven out of Pyongyang to a mountain resort ensuring we would be kept far from any interaction with ordinary people, we asked our guides to let us stop by the road and shoot some pictures of the countryside. Grudgingly, they agreed. Suddenly, the young one, 29-year-old Mr. Jang, sporting a sleek black pompadour and a smirk, told us to stop. “There is an old woman down there,” he explained. Presumably, her bent back was not what he wanted on tape.19 Although the Western world’s prevalent notion of North Korea as an isolationist country might have contributed to Dougherty’s impression, defectors I interviewed indeed confirmed more drastic measures by the state to expel invalid people from Pyongyang. Two former residents of the capital city—one a former military officer and the other a high-ranking official at the foreign trade bureau—told me that the central Party systematically transferred invalid people to other job sites outside of Pyongyang.20 While the North Korean state makes relentless efforts to veil undesired bodies to make them invisible to outsiders, many impoverished people voluntarily choose to escape from North Korea before the state takes any measures toward them. Economic hardship, combined with political oppression, triggered a massive exodus of North Koreans in the 1990s. As soon as North Koreans, formerly invisible to outside visitors, reach neighboring countries, they become visible objects of the international media and foreign Page 271 →aid workers, creating bad publicity for North Korea. This is why the state mercilessly hunts down the escapees and severely punishes them once they are brought back to North Korea. The food crisis in North Korea began to surface in the mid-1990s when the centralized food-rationing system came to a halt and people were left on their own to make ends meet.21 Up until this point, the North Korean people relied on the state rationing system as their sole guaranteed source of food. But the lack of consumable food made the state prioritize military over commoners in its food distribution, leaving many people with no recourse but to face certain starvation. As the crisis was prolonged into the late 1990s, gruesome reports came out of North Korea via escapees about how people coped with hunger: their testimonies covered a wide spectrum of horrifying stories, ranging from robbery to cannibalism.22 Children and elderly people died first; then young people disappeared. Some managed to escape the country to search for food, while others perished on the way. The North Korean state only recently resumed its food-rationing system, and the impact of the food crisis during the nine to ten years when the system was halted is hardly fathomable.23 There has been speculation about exactly how many North Koreans disappeared during the 1990s famine. As the human rights activist Norbert Vollertsen put it, this was not a natural disaster but a man-made one that could be referred to as “genocide.”24 It was literally a form of state-engineered violence against its own people, the majority of whom depended on the government’s food supply to survive. Instead of openly seeking the international community’s help, the North Korean state handled the disaster by keeping the situation under cover and making it invisible to the outside world. On the other hand, foreign aid workers wanted to claim some degree of control in aiding the troubled country,25 only to face an impenetrable barrier shunting them off from the actual lives of the people.26 For the most part, foreign aid workers

were immediately deprived of their mobility when they brought humanitarian aid to the country,27 and when the North Korean state took control of the distribution process, they did so in a way that only escalated the crisis.28 As the North Korean economy has made improvements, the state has reclaimed full control over the food distribution system.29 The state’s first step was to refuse foreign donations and expel aid workers. Radio Free Asia reported on September 25, 2005: Officials working for non-governmental organizations (NGOs) operating in North Korea are bewildered by the nation’s official request for Page 272 →them to leave by the end of this year. Senior officials at NGOs, such as Ireland’s Concern, France’s Triangle Generation and Germany’s German Agro Action, are frustrated over North Korea’s decision to end their on-going aid activities. Ann Omahony, head of Concern’s Asian affairs, said North Korean authorities have asked the NGO to hand over its work to them or to leave the country by December 31. But it is impossible to do so because it defeats the purpose of NGOs’ existence, the station quoted her as saying. North Korea’s strategy of keeping NGOs at bay seems to have triggered the intended result. In line with North Korea’s request, the United Nation’s World Food Program reported that it would halt its decade-old emergency food shipment program by January 2006. Likewise, on October 2, 2005, the Guardian reported that North Korea has begun to reverse market reforms by kicking out international relief workers and choking off supplies of food and medical aid in a crackdown that puts millions of the country’s children and elderly at risk. In what one resident described as the biggest change in the humanitarian situation in 10 years, the government in Pyongyang is attempting to regain control over the distribution of essential supplies that have increasingly been provided by the market and outside donors. As of yesterday, stall-holders have been ordered to stop trading in cereals, including rice. From now on they can only be sold at controlled prices through the state’s public distribution system.30 As the report predicted, North Korea resumed the centralized rationing system soon after. While the North Korean state intends to retain power over its people by monopolizing food distribution, many foreign aid workers also see their project as a chance to disseminate positive images of the outside world to North Koreans and bring small, gradual changes in the country. Though the North Korean state and foreign aid workers have divergent intentions, they share the common desire to use food to mobilize people and train them to act in certain ways. For the most part, the North Korean people have no choice but to become compliant actors, displaying their bodies as silent props on the stage of a tranquil national landscape. For example, when foreign NGOs arrive in rural areas to distribute food, local Party representatives require people to wear their best clothes to create presentable images.31 As seen in the previous chapter, clothing choice for North Koreans is Page 273 →not left to individuals’ discretion, but rather to the decisions of the state, just as stage actors have to wear costumes specifically tailored for the show. The staged nature of the North Korean people’s act, nonetheless, is unstable: ironically the visible actors in a carefully planned performance often accentuate what is invisible, that is, the noncompliant bodies who resist institutionalized power—be it the North Korean state or the foreign aid workers. As a result, they make what is visible highly susceptible. Some North Koreans assume partial agency by rejecting passive roles, and functioning as independent actors when they refuse to comply with directorships from the state or from foreign aid workers. Some Christian NGOs saw missionary work as their primary objective in rescuing North Korean refugees in China. Even though many escapees gladly accepted help from them, most refugees were not exposed to religion in North Korea and found it difficult to accept a new religion. As a result, many resist conversion—a resistance to foreign aid workers’ desire to direct them.32 North Korean people fluctuated between the foreign aid workers and their state in a variety of roles—as compliant actors propelled by the fear of fatal punishment, as economic immigrants in search of chances

for survival, and finally, as rebellious escapees motivated by the freedom to denounce the state and express their violated rights. Despite the state’s severe strategies to display and conceal its national subjects, its failure to provide its people with the minimum calories to survive created a massive exodus of starving North Koreans. These economic migrants often bore the second identity of political dissidents as they searched for food as well as political freedom. Some of them expressed their defiance as they secretly returned to North Korea with hidden cameras to provide the outside world with rare footage of what the official media will never show. These returnees became the chroniclers/documenters of the gruesome realities of the food crisis and of the violations of human rights that the state desperately wants to hide. Being able to play various roles for some North Koreans—from a docile actor to director/producer of a piece with a controversial point of view—is one of the fatal accidents in the North Korean state’s master plan of directing people. These escapees create a subversive performance out of human rights violations by transforming invisible (starved and persecuted bodies) into visible (the main focus of their documentary). The danger these stealthy documenters voluntarily impose on themselves is also grave, since being discovered while reporting the “unpresentable” will only result in torture and capital punishment. These homecoming escapees are uninvited guests to the ritual that is both public (for North Koreans) and private (for outside world). Page 274 →The documentary film Seoul Train (2004) features the first known attempt to show, close-up, the reality of a provincial North Korean market place. It features shocking images of starved children begging for food and emaciated adults with bare feet scraping for any food residue. The footage used in the film was taken by a North Korean defector who smuggled small cameras into North Korea. As noted by Jim Butterworth, the producer of this film, “The actual footage . . . inside North Korea came from a defector that risked his life and went back in, and if he had been caught he would have undoubtedly been summarily executed. The underground railroad was mostly shot by the activists.”33 Similarly, the public execution scene, which took place in the Sino-Korean border town of Hoeryeong in March 2005, was taped secretively by an escapee who went back to North Korea with a small portable camera hidden in his pocket.34 This image was posted on the Web for worldwide circulation, providing an undeniable piece of evidence testifying to the North Korean state’s public display of capital punishment. The footage captures a blindfolded man with his mouth fully stuffed with what appear to be pebbles in order to prevent him from pronouncing any criticism, which would work against the executioners’ planned scenario. In these public executions, only carefully chosen local North Koreans are witnesses. In this respect, public executions are communal rituals in which inhabitants are forcefully drafted to be spectators as well as ritual participants. Once the executioners carry out the capital punishment, spectators are forced to act out certain gestures denouncing the executed, such as finger-pointing at the corpse or throwing rocks as they condemn the dead verbally. Capital punishment becomes an invitation-based performance in which forced subscribers are also requested to participate in making the ritual complete. As Dwight Conquergood noted: “Executions are awesome rituals of human sacrifice though which the state dramatizes its absolute power and monopoly on violence.”35 It is true that the public executions in North Korea are rigidly controlled state rituals that are visible only to insiders. But the fact that dissidents turn these invisible rituals into an international spectacle to be posted on various Internet sites, including CNN, signals a fissure in the coherency of the North Korean state’s ability to control its national image. Dissident performance captures and brings back the executed bodies, which are about to vanish into oblivion, to the world’s attention—an accident completely unintended by the state. These stealthy documenters, however, have to become invisible during the process of creating a documentary in North Korea in order to gain access Page 275 →to the otherwise unapproachable materials. Even though these documenters assume temporary invisibility and thereby may appear to be abiding by the rules of the state, their invisibility is empowering precisely because of its subversive potential to culminate in dissident performance. Dissident performance is made possible by temporarily complying with the rules the documenters intend to resist—a paradox that shatters the notion that the visible is powerful.

Moreover, public executions illustrate the fact that there is hardly any distinction between concentration camps and the rest of North Korea. According to testimonies by refugees who survived the camps, public executions are an integral part of taming the prisoners. In numerous Korean gwalliso (political penal-labor colonies) and gyohwaso (prison-labor camps),36 public executions occur as a part of routine edification of inmates who are expected to show their defiance and integrity at the moment of execution as a marker of their loyalty to the state that imprisoned them. When compared to the haunting images of public executions of captured escapees who ran to China in search of food, the aforementioned choreographed images of well-dressed food recipients create a grotesque protrusion into the coherent landscape of official North Korean propaganda. The gap between authentic and fabricated images primarily accentuates the state’s strategy of visualizing only limited objects. But more evidently, it points to the state’s persistent investment and belief in staging an ideal self-image even in the most extreme of situations, such as massive death of its people by starvation. What makes the food crisis a dialogic event directly related to tourism is that some activists see tourism as an easily available opportunity to enter North Korea in order to raise human rights issues, adding yet another paradigm to an already multifaceted relationship between the two performances. Just as some North Korean escapees with hidden cameras are silent actors turned noisy producers, some foreign aid workers subvert the state’s intention to use tourism as an ideal showcase. By posing as tourists to gain access to the sites of human rights violations, these foreign workers eventually disclose the North Korean state’s atrocious treatment of its people. For instance, the producers of the documentary film Seoul Train, Jim Butterworth and Lisa Sleeth, posed as tourists in the Sino-Korean border region in order to interview and shoot footage of North Korean escapees on the run. By actively seeking the images of what the North Korean state wants to veil, these fake tourists step out of the passive roles of spectators who are constantly relegated to viewing choreographed images of North Page 276 →Koreans. Thus they blur the boundary between actors, spectators, and directors, challenging the state’s exhaustive efforts to monopolize directorial intentions. As a more recent example, Norbert Vollertsen has attempted to enter North Korea as a tourist with an aim of staging an anti–North Korean protest.37 Even though the attempt was bound to be aborted because of his cantankerous revelation of the plan in advance, the provocative idea and the frenzied response from the media created enough performative effect. The South Korean government declared that it would prohibit Vollertsen from reentering South Korea if he adhered to his sensational strategy to incite the South Korean public. Vollertsen’s strategies are based on agitation more than anything else, making a spectacle of resisting silence and invisibility: “Try to get the attention of the world—nobody knows—so nobody can care. When there is no normal way to get this attention try the unusual: hunger sit-in in front of the Chinese Embassy (Olympics!); set up refugee camps at the Chinese–North Korean border; take provocative acts at the border, jump over the fence, get arrested.”38 Vollertsen’s blunt agitation makes one wonder: Does inviting attention have a value of its own, or does it merely demonstrate an empty propaganda strategy with no tangible reference to the actual issue? Human rights activists and theater scholars will have different answers. From a performance studies point of view, such an action of creating the extreme version of what a conscious person should do, as demonstrated by Vollertsen, creates a simulacrum of angry tourists who have the freedom to resist the silent roles they are assigned to play within North Korea. However, this is impossible in reality, because staging an actual demonstration in North Korea would certainly result in the a tourist’s detention, or in lucky cases, in expulsion. Thus, Vollertsen is virtually rehearsing a show meant to culminate in actual protest. However, in this case, the rehearsal process is much more significant than the actual, though paradoxically nonexistent, performance within North Korea. Such a predominance of rehearsal over culminating performance strikingly parallels the North Korean state’s emphasis on creating theatrical performances rather than actual outcomes. In the coordinated and disciplined rehearsals for mass games and parades, North Koreans learn to subordinate their individual voices to the commands of leadership. Thus, rehearsals are not mere preparations for culminating performances, but rather are crucial educational processes defining the fulcrum of North Korean society’s seeming absence of individual opinions.

In North Korea, the concern for appearance always stands as an issue Page 277 →superior to people’s well-being. Related to this consistent hierarchy of values is the notion of theatricality—the excess of illusion so as to eclipse reality—which looms large in disguising the socialist dystopia. According to Anne Applebaum, in 1929 when Stalin’s Politburo first began to discuss the expansion of the concentration camp system that eventually became known as the gulag, there were almost no objections. In the end, only one problem was taken seriously: that the system might look bad abroad.39 The unfortunate historical parallels are presented by the North Korean state’s obsession with outside spectators: even though outsiders were not an integral part of either society, they shaped the presentation of the society. This discussion has selected two kinds of performances concerning North Korea, namely tourism and human rights issues, in an attempt to illustrate how various parties involved in both performances create a complex matrix of illusion and reality, visible and invisible, discipline and rebellion.

Nation on Stage: Mass Performance and the Arirang Festival On April 26, 2002, the North Korean government launched the Arirang Festival, an unprecedented large-scale presentation described as “mass gymnastics and artistic performance.” Blessed by the Dear Leader Kim Jong-il as a “great success of juche culture and art, a world classic, and a national treasure to be passed down to future generations,”40 the festival staged a breathtaking history of North Korea, from its prenatal struggle for independence to its utopian future. An amalgamation of performance forms such as acrobatics, martial arts, circus acts, singing, dancing, and a laser light show, the spectacle was given the name Arirang, borrowed from the title of a Korean folk song: a metaphor for a quintessential “Koreanness” that transcends the ideological divide between North and South Korea. Although these types of mass games have been staged on a regular basis since the foundation of North Korea, the Arirang Festival surpassed all previous efforts by its ambitious intention and gargantuan scale. Nearly a hundred thousand performers gathered in a Pyongyang’s May Day Stadium to stage the event, a sheer scale that has made this festival a tradition attracting foreign tourists and journalists who were not only curious about the performance but also eager to use it as a rare chance to tour Pyongyang. The highly publicized 2005 performance inherited the grandeur of the 2002 festival and displayed the usual pomposity of state jubilee in North Korea. It was even larger than before, to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of liberation from Japanese colonial rule in 1945. As if restoring Page 278 →the glories of the past, when Kim Ilsung presented himself as the leader rallying to protect the national dignity and sovereignty of the Third World countries, North Korea took the Arirang Festival as a chance to parade as a nation enjoying international attention. Naturally, the staging of the event was paralleled by great publicity within North Korea. Both the 2002 and 2005 Arirang Festivals were produced amid heated contention surrounding North Korea’s nuclear capability,41 when the Western media displayed biased condemnation of North Korea without considering the origins of the conflict, which surprisingly and ironically resembled the propagandistic practices of the North Korean Central State News Agency. This deprived world citizens of a fair chance to access balanced information about North Korea, which only increased the prevailing prejudice that the country cannot be anything but an international thug.42 Both times, the Arirang Festival was meant to serve as an antidote to such vitriolic accusations, with its orgiastic display of festivity as the quintessential image of the North Korean nation. As if countering its extremely negative image, the country staged its solid membership in the international community, admitting a limited number of tourists of diverse nationalities to the event while the North Korean media eagerly captured and publicized the visitors’ wonderment. With these objectives in mind, the festival organizers lauded the event through the eyes of the spectators, as if to cover up the strange fact that there were not enough spectators to accompany an event of this magnitude. The most publicized spectator of the festival was Kim Jong-il, who had attended the event twice in 2002, demonstrating his unchallenged position as the nation’s leader. Joseon Yesul published a series of articles highlighting his visits to the festival: “On April 26, the Great Leader of our people, the General Secretary of the Korean Workers’ Party, the Chair of the DPRK National Defense Committee, and the Highest Commander of the Korean People’s Military Kim Jong-il went to the May Day Stadium to watch the collective gymnastics and art performance

Arirang.”43 The elaborate and prolonged titles that decorated Kim Jong-il’s name were magnified in the media to shift the focal point of the reportage from the festival coverage to the glorification of the leader. The awe-inspiring scale of the Arirang performance was outshone by his illustrious titles, and augmented the North Korean leader’s visibility vis-à-vis the outside world. With Kim Jong-il’s attendance widely publicized, the Arirang Festival became a venue to flaunt the fact that solidarity between his country and other socialist states was still strong. In an article titled “Dear Leader Kim Jong-il Attended Collective Gymnastics and Art Performance Arirang,” the point was made clear: “On Page 279 →July 28 the Great Leader of our people, the General Secretary of the Korean Workers’ Party, the Chair of the DPRK National Defense Committee, and the Highest Commander of the Korean People’s Military went to the May Day Stadium to watch the collective gymnastics and art performance Arirang. Accompanying dignitaries were the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Igor Sergeyevich Ivanov and his retinue.”44 The presence of the Russian minister of foreign affairs sent the message to the North Korean people that the United States’ efforts to isolate North Korea from the world were simply a failure. Although the Arirang Festival was deployed as a lavish ode to the supremacy of the North Korean leader, there had to be a body of spectators to witness and testify to the glorious display of state power. Consequently, publicity for the festival accentuated the presence of awe-inspired spectators, many of whom were identified as foreigners. There is no shortage of histrionic testimonies from foreign visitors who univocally marveled at the unbelievable scale and artistic excellence of the performance. In August 2005, Joseon Yesul published an article titled “Guest Who Resembled Hitching Post,” which featured a Chinese audience member who earned the nickname of “hitching post” from the people sitting next to him because he kept standing up as the festival introduced more and more spectacular shows.45 Another Chinese tourist named Jin Chingsong returned in less than a week to see the once-in-a-lifetime spectacle.46 Moreover, according to North Korea’s claim, tourists came not only from the socialist states but also from the traditional enemy states such as Japan and the United States to be completely mesmerized by the grand scale of the festival. According to the journal, Japanese tourist Sakamoto Takashi kept taking tranquilizers as his heart beat faster while watching the breathtaking festival. When the tour guide asked him whether he needed a doctor, he replied: “My heart is not that weak. But even my healthy heart cannot handle the excitement of the Arirang performance.”47 Similarly, in the September 2005 issue of the same journal, Canadian tourist John Isaac confessed that he did not believe 100,000 people could really participate in the show. But when he saw the unbelievable scale of the performance, he had to take a deep breath. He regretted that he could not take this performance to his home country.48 The list of foreign spectators in awe of the Arirang Festival goes on further. A German tourist, Rudolf Hagen Juhler, sighed as the show ended, because he did not take a single photo, as he was completely captivated by the magnificent spectacle.49 The exultant rhetoric with which the stories of these eyewitnesses are Page 280 →told may as well indicate the frightening absence of freedom of speech in the official North Korean media. These statements reveal North Korea’s directorial intention of staging not only an amazing spectacle but also uniformly positive responses from the international audiences whom the state imagined as essentially compliant, or even reverent of its regime. Nonetheless, the dynamic tensions of the large-scale mass gymnastics and artistic performances, for its politically subversive potential, cannot be reduced to merely evidence of the totalitarian nature of the North Korean society. As observed, the intricacy of the show stems from circumstances surrounding the unusual dynamics between the performers and the spectators: while in most contemporary performances, audience members far outnumber onstage performers, this large-scale performance with over a hundred thousand participants necessitates a new paradigm of articulating the conventional spectator-performer relationship and the implications entailed by the inversion of that relationship. What is inherently at stake here is the creation of ways to stage the ideal political order of the state: when a hundred thousand performers present a show for a few thousand spectators, what kind of corporeal discipline is at work to achieve the overall cohesion of the performers? To probe the dynamics of performer and spectator, producer and consumer of performance, is to illuminate not only the draconian discipline of the citizenry’s collective bodies but also the profound theatrical self-reflexivity of North Korean society that lies beneath the

conspicuous display of state power. To a certain degree, the gargantuan scale of the Arirang Festival becomes quite fascinating for the lack of enough spectators to enjoy the event. All the commotion about the international attention paid to the event is so shrilling that it rather sounds like a thin foil to disguise the missing audience. One is easily tempted to devaluate the media hype this way, but more revealingly, could the mass hysteria be not so much about the outsiders, but rather for the domestic audience who should metaphorically recognize itself in the performing multitude? Upon a closer look, the Arirang Festival strikes an observer as North Korea’s self-training process rather than as a party for the international community. The film documentation opens with an aerial view of the brightly lit May Day Stadium, which has been transformed into a gigantic stage.50 The camera casts its focus down onto the stadium, showcasing the celebratory fireworks in the night sky. This is followed by a scene inside the stadium from the perspective of a spectator as the camera focuses on numerous decorative water fountains by the stage, and female dancers in colorful joseonot Page 281 →dance to the rhythm of the Arirang Festival theme song. The female dancers’ beautiful hand gestures lure spectators’ gaze, cheerfully signaling the beginning of the celebration. Soon the scene changes to a bird’s-eye point of view documenting the excitement of the opening moment in its panoramic entirety. This alternation between panoramic view and closeups creates the impression that the perspective of the camera merges with that of an all-seeing subject. Given the fact that the premier Arirang Festival on April 15, 2002, was meant to celebrate the ninetieth birthday of the deceased Great Leader Kim Il-sung, could we suppose the possibility that the camera movement simulates the gaze of the omniscient and omnipresent father of the nation looking down upon his descendants’ ritualistic offering of their filial piety? Although the Arirang Festival is set in a sports stadium to accommodate a large number of performers, there is a clear sense of spatial separation between performers and spectators, with the entire stadium divided into three spaces: a proscenium-like stage marked by the grass field; a backdrop that features various slogans and background images created by sections of the audience holding up cards; and a seating area for spectators who do not participate in the performance. The second and the third are located in a circular seating area surrounding a grass field, which is divided into two—one side for the stage and the other for the auditorium—with multiple columns of empty seats separating them. The large grass field in between is used as a live stage for dancers, acrobats, martial artists, soldiers, and marching bands, while the stadium seats behind the grass area are used as a backdrop for what is performed on the field, often providing slogans and images through amazingly synchronized card sections. Only one side of the stadium reserved for spectators is hidden from the camera. While the viewers of the film witness a seamless harmony between the card section part and the performance on the field, they are uninformed about the spectators attending the live show, left to imagine and reconstruct the nature of live spectators. Strangely enough there is not a single moment throughout the entire four acts of performance when the camera reflects on the audience’s response, quite a curious decision made by the documentary filmmakers that creates a stark contrast to the impassioned praises of foreign viewers printed in journals. Can the viewers of the documentary be allowed to see the exhilarated spectators so well described in various publications? There is no way the two kinds of spectators—those present at the live performance and those watching the film version—can create virtual rapport because of the Page 282 →complete absence of the former in the filmed documentation of the event. The principles of showing and hiding, as observed in the previous section on tourism and human rights, persist in the documentation of the Arirang Festival as well, which raises questions about the staging principles of film documentation. Spectators of film, be they foreign, South Korean, or North Korean, see the totalizing presentation of a hundred thousand performers moving in unison from a bird’s-eye perspective, thus enjoying the privilege of seeing what the audiences of the live show cannot see. Given the fact that the official North Korean historiography assumes that the birth and growth of the nation was single-handedly led by Kim Il-sung, it would be not far-fetched to assume that the auspicious nature of the camera’s gaze capturing the nation’s epic history implies the presence of the Great Leader, or at least denotes his perspective. In this respect, the spectators of the film are elevated to the level of the almighty leader, so viewing

the documentary is intended to be a sacred transcendence whereby a union between the Great Leader and ordinary citizens is established. Ultimately, the multiple layers of spectatorship—of the live performance and of the filmed documentation—become coordinated in the presence of the Great Leader. Kim Il-sung is invisible, but his clairvoyant vision is present in the camera movement, creating a notion that Kim Il-sung is the only all-seeing subject who can rise above chronological time by bridging the gap between the moment of the live performance and the moment of viewing the filmed documentation. The performance of Arirang features a chronological national history, beginning with the dark past of Korean history and the lives of disenfranchised Korean people under the Japanese colonial yoke—a period that awaits the advent of the national savior. The typical cultural trope of separated families is captured by the camera’s close-up movement, which melodramatically presents the expulsion of family members to dangerous exile in a foreign land. Instead of relying on verbal media, the actors playing these personas resort to melodramatic acting styles, appropriating exaggerated bodily gestures and musical tones. A narrator in a lachrymose voice describes the motions of the disarrayed and disenfranchised colonized subjects without sovereign nation-states to look after them. The muteness of their actions, however, finds compensation in the camera movements that amplify their facial expressions of suffering and sorrow. However, these stateless subjects cannot narrate their stories, since for them, the nation does not exist. The intrinsic relationship between nation and narration,51 as Homi Bhabha observed, is no longer a figurative one but Page 283 →a visually staged event in the Arirang performance. These actors’ inability to narrate the national history, on the one hand, faithfully reflects the historical truth of the Korean people living under the Japanese colonial oppression. But on the other hand, this mute scene ironically foreshadows the future reality for North Koreans, as the performers in the later part of the Arirang Festival embodying the happy subjects in a utopian socialist republic are also rendered silent. This muteness of the multitude stands in stark contrast to the presence of the single leader Kim Il-sung. This binary between an all-seeing leader and a mute multitude, however, is not a clear-cut one, since the performing mute bodies on the field are North Korean citizens who will see themselves later in the film version documented through the perspective of the Great Leader. Given the North Korean system of recruiting participants from all sectors of society for these mass games, we can understand that most North Korean spectators of the filmed documentation have participated in similar collective rituals to connect them to the anonymous performers in the festival. This way, North Korean performers go through a transition from being a part of the mute collective in a live performance to being the privileged all-seeing subject of the film, which is yet another way of formulating self-reflexivity—North Korea’s long-standing obsession with constantly projecting itself from the perspective of the supreme leader that time and again becomes sanctified through the Arirang mass ritual as the official history-producing vision. The next section, subtitled “Star of Joseon”—the appellation solely reserved for Kim Il-sung—subscribes to upbeat emotional cues of revolutionary valor and progress, which are seen from the leader’s perspective. This section features the rise of revolutionary heroes during the colonial period, namely Kim Il-sung, his family members, and his comrades from the days of anticolonial resistance. Undoubtedly, the main focus of the show is the founding father of the nation, whose shining guidance, visually expressed as a soaring star, literally lights up a torch installed on the roof of the stadium. The sobbing family members of the previous chapter are nowhere to be seen in this glorified moment; instead, there is a well-coordinated group of young boys who march out to the stadium field with blazing torches in both hands. Their youthful energy is coupled with the synchronized movements of well-trained students in the following scene, demonstrating consummate gymnastic skills to exponentially increase the dynamism of the performance. However, instead of being given a voice to express their own mission, these silent performers are given a vicarious voice: a synchronized card section in the background that displays party slogans, such as “Comradeship is Page 284 →the foundation of our party.” Providing subtitles for the action unfolding on the field, the members of the card section makes the viewer ponder the inherent notion of “act” embedded in the word action. Is there anything active about the card section performers’ display? Not to mention the draconian discipline needed to

produce their level of mechanical synchronicity, there is a sense of forced simulation of political ideals in their performance. By displaying the slogans that are ubiquitous in North Korean life, the card section performers reflect the political ideals of their nation. The self-reflexivity, performed for the eyes of the supreme leader and the spectators who aspire to experience rapport with the implied divine spectator, becomes an end in itself, which simultaneously marks the corporeal and ideological fulcra of discipline itself. North Korea’s obsession with itself inherently hinges on a certain internal gender order in order to create as compelling a self-image as possible. In the next section, titled “My Country,” female soldiers gush out into the stadium in order to stage happy life in the new socialist republic. Although these are soldiers, their movements are extremely feminized as they perform patriotic gestures, wearing skirts and holding azaleas. When the card section presents the gigantic portrait of the smiling Kim Il-sung (see fig. 54), these soldiers gracefully lower their gazes, expressing boundless gratitude to the national father. It is a striking moment for those who used to be the passive card section performers, who now become an empowered medium to incarnate the sacred image of the Great Leader. The multitude of card section performers captured by the camera now self-reflexively returns the gaze to the camera. Female soldiers on the field, in the meantime, are located between the camera, which assumes the perspective of the dead leader, depicting the grinning face of Kim Il-sung, functioning as docile intermediaries bridging the two, and in turn, creating the circular unity, all mediated by the ideals of commemorating the national father. Figure 54. Card section in Arirang performance. (Photo courtesy of an anonymous donor.) Page 285 →The gender dynamics setting a clear boundary between distinctive femaleness and maleness in the service of glorifying the father continue to shape the ensuing act 2, part 6. A horde of male soldiers appear on the field to flaunt their physical strength through martial arts. Then a group of parachuters land on the field and immediately engage in fighting by demonstrating unflinching military spirit manifest through superb physical skills—a metonymic demonstration of the national strength of North Korea. The strong impression of masculinity created by these soldiers’ performance featured in this scene is in stark contrast to the femininity of the aforementioned female dancers. This reinforces North Korean gender politics, by which national subjects are distinguished and polarized by a heteronormative gender binary. The ensuing acts strengthen the impression further, as the costume for female performers is predominantly the traditional joseonot, whereas for male performers, it is unfailingly a military uniform. The alternation of masculine and feminine, as opposed to a fluid and synchronous encounter on the same stadium field, is one of the organizing principles of the Arirang Festival. Male and female performers do not enter the stadium together unless they are put in an obviously asexual context. The few occasions featuring an interaction between the sexes involve family members and children.52 For example, in act 2, part 2, children of both sexes perform highly trained gymnastic drills together, including physical contact with each other.53 Otherwise, in most cases, female performers dominate the field as dance becomes the main vehicle of expression. This opens up a possible critical analysis, since in North Korean performing tradition, dance employs female bodies more than male. But on the other hand, martial arts or acrobatics are genres that conventionally employ male performers more than females. The use of a clear gendered binary is inevitably related to the narrative structure of this epic performance, which covers the development of colonial subjects into the sanguine citizenry of the new socialist republic. As in many other North Korean stage and film productions, women are projected as the legitimate bearers of past tradition. Naturally, the collective sorrow of subjugated people can be best expressed by female dancers’ Page 286 →benign choreography. But what deserves more attention is that even the exultant moment of unification and the utopian vision of the future are consistently expressed by female bodies. The highest state ideals, which focus on the leaders rather than the collective citizenry, allow for only limited empowerment of male citizens, who surpass female performers in physical strength through demonstrations of martial arts and military drills, whereas the traditional ethos staged by the female dancers serves as a perfect background to highlight the revolutionary virtues of the male state leaders.

It is in this context that an explicit reference to the male leader appears against the backdrop of a multitude of female performers. In act 2, part 4, adolescent girls appear on the stadium field to extol rapid progress in modernizing agricultural industry. Accompanying the action on the field, a card section in the background depicts a slogan, “How delighted the Supreme Leader would have been!” which transforms the implied perspective of Kim Il-sung into the visualized voice. Conquering nature for the sake of the national prosperity is often understood through women’s ability to procreate and nurture; this is why girls, not boys, are deployed to perform the transformation of natural space into industrialized agricultural sites—another example of the essentialist view on gender the North Korean state upholds. Act 1, part 4 takes this gender binary one step further when the sexuality of female performers serving the single male leader takes on an even more explicit contrast. In this segment, the card section depicts the Supreme Leader Kim Il-sung’s smiling face while the stadium is filled with female soldiers in miniskirts flaunting their beautiful leg lines. This conspicuous employment of the gender binary and the ensuing contrast of sexualities—one or two male state leaders versus many sexualized female dancers—recurs once again, becoming an obvious theatrical device in act 4, entitled “Arirang of Unification.” This part directly addresses partition as an essentially tragic event, but stages it through spectacular choreography on a large scale. This five-minute presentation begins with a satellite view of the Korean peninsula, establishing the factual and visual presentation of Korea as one nation. Then the screen proceeds with the portrayal of division by staging a tragic image of separated family members, in this case, mother and son. At the lower right corner of the screen appears a male narrator, who exultantly deplores the tragic realities of divided Korea. The narrator’s voice dubs—or more accurately, dictates—the action of female dancers: Page 287 →The only partitioned country in the world The land of tragedy where a white-haired mother cannot recognize her son where the son cannot recognize his mother. For centuries Koreans have lived in peace But overnight we are suddenly divided in half and turned into strangers. Foreign imperial power is to be blamed for the tragedy How long do Arirang people have to live in separation? The film projection then moves onto the image of the demarcation line when the stadium is covered with female dancers wearing joseonot, in white, the color typically used to represent the Korean people. The clear geometric lines formed by the two groups of dancers mark division. The counterintuitive nature of separation is accentuated by a female singer’s lachrymose performance of the Arirang folk song dubbed over the dancers’ contained movements. The female dancers are divided into two groups and approach one another from far ends of the stadium in highly controlled steps, as if they can barely contain their desire to embrace. The ensuing choreography intends to debunk the forces that separate two groups of identical people, marked by the same color, as two sides merge to form a Korean peninsula in a fluid and yet orderly fashion. The joy of merging is documented through the close-ups of facial expressions of individual dancers, but the camera soon pans away to capture the image of the peninsula from a bird’s-eye point of view. Viewers are now invited to see the card section in the stadium featuring a boy and a girl facing each other. In between, the word one appears. An amazingly synchronized card section features phrases such as: “Unification—The Great Leader’s Will”; “Let the Korean people open the doors of unification with our own hands”; “One, One Land, One Blood, One [Set of] Customs,” “June 15, the Age of Unification,” referring to the 2000 summit meeting between the two Koreas, “with our own hands [we deal with Korean matters]”; “2005 agreements for the national unification”; “SinuijuBusan train,” referring to the imagined railroad system that would connect the northernmost reaches of the country to its southern border—a moving metaphor of unification. In these sequences, the North Korean view of partition and unification univocally approaches a hopeful ending, allowing the Korean people to make a destined transition from separation to unification. Coupled with these positive narratives is the magnitude of performance, so breathtaking in Page 288 →scale and perfectly synchronized that it gains authority to authenticate the merely performed events to historical truth. However, amid

these sweeping moments of epic proportion, there are details that demand close scrutiny. The presence of a male narrator captured in the lower right corner as a screen within the screen is more than a necessary device to dictate the movements of dancers. The silent film era narrator, or byeonsa in Korean, is a tradition established during the colonial period, when a male narrator gave a dramatic description of actions projected onscreen. In a live performance setting, it is logical to have a byeonsa-like male narrator because his performance complements the events portrayed with liveliness and also allows the dancers time to enter the stadium and form geometrical lines. But in the filmed documentation, the choice was made to turn this narrator into more than a voice by making him visible as well as audible. How, then, does his visual presence onscreen figure in the overall performance? There are various levels of contrast in terms of number, gender, and mode of performance. The position of one male narrator with a forceful voice against the backdrop of a visual epic performing partition and reunification confirms the ultimate lesson of this festival—that he is the authority to tell the national history. The established authority of this narrator carries over to the dance sequence when thousands of female bodies, with a precise coordination producing almost computer graphic-like effects, demonstrate a movement reenacting the story presented by the voice. Although the camera constantly moves back and forth to capture close-up scenes of individual human bodies and the overall coordination of collective movements from above, because of the scale of the production, spectators of the live performance can only get the overarching vision of what the performance wants to accomplish when they see it from a bird’s-eye view. This distanced perspective is located not among the multitude of audience members who are performing in card sections, but in the privileged place assigned to only a few viewers in the entire stadium. As if reflecting the imagined viewer in a privileged position, the male narrator sees and foresees the sequence of Korean historiography as the tragic division of the past unfolds into the current struggle to unify Korea. The culminating moment of the narrator’s vision rests on the revelation of a utopian future in which divided subjects will reclaim one Korea. The male voice opens up the venue for the performance to reach emotional confluence when two separated groups embrace to symbolize the unified nation. By setting up a viable connection between the voice and the invisible spectator, the boundary between the performer and the spectator becomes Page 289 →blurred in the climactic moment of reunion. This self-reflexive moment, projecting the nation as both the subject and the object of narration, unfolds through the typically North Korean view of history as a teleological development. What, then, do the silent collective bodies signify through traditional dance? The massive scale of the dance production suggests that they perform a gesture of anonymous and unanimous support of the totalitarian vision, but can they inscribe their full presence as independent agents in the moment of performing the nation? Profound theatricality emerges out of the sequence when we consider how the collective bodies of dancers and card holders figure in the overall North Korean vision of the unique genre they term “mass gymnastics and artistic performance.” As one North Korean critic has proclaimed: Never has the world seen the combination of mass gymnastics with artistic performance! Collective gymnastics repeatedly demonstrate relatively simple and mechanical movements, whereas artistic performance, with the help of music and stage design, illuminates the overall theme of the performance and presents enormous artistic satisfaction to the audience members. Collective gymnastics and artistic performance have their own idiosyncratic features, but at the same time, they also share a common denominator that can be organically shared by both genres. First, both are based on bodily movements trained in order to express ideological purposes.54 As this critic openly claims, the hybrid genre of mass gymnastic and artistic performance is designed to discipline participants, the former by instilling synchronized physical drills and the latter by means of coordinating emotional and ideological rapport among all participants. Combined with the card sections is the dance performance on stage, which, in North Korean tradition, is a performance genre well recognized to present a strong nationalistic sentiment. As the North Korean critic Park Seol-hwa claimed, dance is “an art form shaped through creative labor in everyday life most efficiently and effusively demonstrating national characteristics, history, customs, and sentiment. Therefore, capturing national characters is an important issue for dance

performance.”55 According to these official views, Arirang aims to train its subjects to perform the nationalistic ideology for the all-seeing eye of the spectator, whose presence is visualized by the male narrator who initially frames the story of unification. Page 290 →In contrast to the singularity and omniscience of the male narrator/spectator, the multitude of female dancers calls into question how they figure collectively in the dance sequence. Coupled with the North Korean notion of dance as a performative outlet to express nationalism, the gender of these dancers signifies the nation embedded in the pristine and premodern state before the division took place. Just like joseonot, the drum dancers explicitly mark the quintessential past of Korea in which the female becomes the logical carrier of the traditional national essence, silently implementing the vision and voice provided by the male subject. However, the duty to serve as a background to the single male subject is assigned not only to female dancers but also to both male and female participants performing in card sections, who alternately, but not simultaneously, occupy the field to perform their support for the leader via highly polarized forms of masculinity and femininity. As mentioned previously, the presence of this male gazer is conspicuously marked when the card section depicts Kim Il-sung’s portrait as a visual manifestation of the all-seeing father who is now presented by the multitude. This moment captures the doubling of Kim Il-sung’s gaze: as the honorary president of North Korea, he is still the Supreme Leader, symbolically present at the stadium seats from which he can have a bird’s-eye view of the spectacle. At the same time, his image projected by the card section at the opposite side of the stadium looks back at the place where the Supreme Leader is supposed to be present. In this circular return of gaze to the place of its origin, the festival finds its ultimate statement on national history marked by tragic partition and hoped-for unification. The performers of the card section now become the mirror image of the divine spectator and thereby embody the idea of “one in many,” which ultimately forges the ideology of “many in one”—many in harmony, and many in unification. But could this be the definitive reading of North Korea’s perception of itself in Arirang performance? Does that perception fall into the fixed binaries of male and female, single and multitude in which the latter always figures as the silent subaltern? In my view, if we were to uncritically accept this reading, it would lead to an impasse where the implicit dynamics of the live performance and its film documentation would be reduced to the minimum. The performative strategy based on various levels of binaries, such as masculine and feminine, a single leader and the multitude, at first may appear to be the limits of representation. However, the viewers’ expectations based on binaries are dismantled when invitations to corporeal fantasies are made within the larger matrix of state discipline. Not even surreptitiously, Page 291 →the camera movement in the Arirang documentary goes back and forth between the bird’s-eye point of view and individual bodies and faces of female dancers, proudly flaunting their beauty to the viewers and inviting their stealthy glances. The documentary performance allows the viewers to see what is invisible to the spectators of the live performance. Intentionally or not, the close-up scenes, when merged into the standard propaganda practices, dismantle the singular authority of the all-seeing onlooker. The filming and editing process contributes to this effect, as the viewers of the film see much more than that onlooker does through the filtered gaze of the camera. Viewers of the filmed performance are allowed to capture individual faces of otherwise anonymous dancers and witness fragments of the totalizing live performance. This way visual authority becomes fractured into decentralized discursive forces, which now lie both inside and outside of the singular male narrative subject. As the film version opens a new privileged perspective, it invites the problem of embedded perspective, in addition to the perspectives of the commemorated supreme leader Kim Il-sung and the North Korean citizens who will be repetitively watching the performance. Primarily, it was meant to make the festival more visible to world spectators who could not attend live performances. Prior to the 2005 Arirang Festival, South Korean civilians had not had a chance to set foot in the North Korean capital since the division in 1945, although access to limited tourist areas, such as Geumgang Mountain and the city of Gaeseong, was granted. The price for a round trip from Seoul to Pyongyang and a night’s stay there after attending the Arirang Festival was excessively high for the short distance and duration of travel. However, there were more tourists than the allocated package could handle, and North Korea capitalized on foreign visitors who eagerly paid handsome amounts to be in Pyongyang.56 In order to meet the demand by tourists who could not attend the event, the Arirang Festival was taped by Mongnan Video

Production with the dual intention of reaching a wider audience and generating extra revenue from the video sales. The South Korean tourists who attended the Pyongyang presentation tried to bring these tapes back to South Korea, but they were stopped at the border when the South Korean authorities confiscated these items as contraband. The two Koreas displayed diametrically opposed intentions regarding the Arirang Festival: whereas North Korea tried to use multiple media formats to make the festival as widely visible as possible, South Korea allowed its people only limited access to the event by barring the circulation of the filmed documentation. The Arirang Festival showcases North Korea’s contradictory Page 292 →will to render visibility and invisibility to its contrasting national performances of tourism and human rights issues; the contradiction is paralleled by the South Korean government’s upholding a pro–North Korean policy while simultaneously enforcing the National Security Law that prevents free flow of information between the two Koreas. Although many South Korean tourists have attended the live performance, including President No Mu-hyeon during his state visit to North Korea in October 2007, South Korea became a self-negating spectator of the filmed version of the Arirang Festival. Just as the North Korean state wanted to render invisible the escapees who become vocal opponents of its regime, the South Korean state did not wish for its tourists to propagate the North Korean event once they returned home. This unlikely parallel rests on the two states’ anxieties about their national subjects who find themselves beyond the border. The impossibility of managing the consequences of people’s mobility increases when those bodies return home unregulated and uncensored, carrying undocumented items that threaten the ideological orientation of each state. In South Korean tourists’ case, those whose Arirang films have not been discovered by customs become propagators of images from the festival to other South Koreans, thus making North Korea’s ideal selfrepresentation widely available. This may result in more benign violation of the state surveillance on the South Korean side, compared to North Korean returnees who secretively document public executions eventually to show them worldwide. Nevertheless, the state apparatus of controlling visible and invisible spheres in both Koreas takes similar approaches of surveillance and truncation of undesired images. The variation lies only in degree. In addition, the documenting act itself creates differences between performing and viewing times, which is fundamentally related to the two Koreas’ respective regulatory systems for consuming the documented Arirang Festival. In North Korea, the filmed festival is constantly shown on the state television channel. When the performers of the card section come to watch themselves on television after the live performance is completed, the film connects the performers of the live event to spectators of the film. This identification of the performers and the spectators—filtered through Kim Il-sung’s gaze—creates the notion of imagined community under the auspicious blessing of the immortal Kim. Thus, the intention of film documentation is to impose on North Korean civilians the national leader’s perspective, rather than to give them privilege to assume an all-seeing perspective. The spectators of the filmed version of the Arirang Festival do not view Page 293 →it from an impersonal perspective, but concretely recognize their presence among the 100,000 performers, or can identify with the performers through the experience of participating in street parades, card sections, and mass games, which require numerous hours of rehearsals. In the Arirang Festival, community is not an illusive ideal fabricated on a thematic level, but a very concrete performance mechanism imposed on the collective bodies of the performer/spectator continuum. Large-scale performance, in this sense, is not only a device to accommodate the large number of participants but also an organizing principle that connects the multitude to the single perspective through which the collective recognizes itself as a coherent nation.

Musical from the Gulag: Yoduk Story and the Price of Counterperformance Can torture sing? Can trauma dance? Can Jesus save North Korea? Can Les Misérables become the guiding light for North Korean refugees? As if affirming the uncannily resilient nature of human tragedy, the musical Yoduk Story yields positive answers to these oxymoronic questions. Having premiered in Seoul in March 2006, Yoduk Story toured to the United States in October 2006. It was the first performance made by North Koreans themselves to openly stage events in the infamous North Korean gulag camps.

The musical, which attempts to disclose North Korea’s most atrocious human rights violations—including rape, mutilation, and execution—drew much attention in Korea and abroad for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was the timing of the musical’s U.S. opening, which coincided with a critical juncture in the potential North Korean–U.S. military standoff: In July 2006, North Korea carried out two rounds of missiles test; in October of the same year, only five days after the U.S. premiere of Yoduk Story, it set off an underground nuclear weapons test. Moreover, both the play’s writer-director, Jeong Seong-san, and one of the two choreographers, Kim Yeongseon,57 were once political prisoners in North Korea. Both Jeong and Kim openly claimed that the musical was a documentation of their own suffering in North Korea, which endowed the musical with the authority of an authentic confessional, inviting curious audience members to witness the little-known life in the gulags.58 During an interview, sixty-five-year-old choreographer Kim calmly narrated her life story over the phone from her new home in exile in South Korea: “I was a very successful dancer working for the army propaganda unit in Pyongyang before I was suddenly arrested Page 294 →and sent to Yoduk prison camp. No explanations were given upon my arrest, so I do not know to this day the official reason for my imprisonment. I can only suspect that I perhaps knew too much about the private lives of the high-ranking North Korean leaders. All of my immediate family members were also arrested at the same time. In the camp I lost my husband and my brother. My son went mad before drowning himself. My experience at the camp is exactly what you see in Yoduk Story.” Indeed, the musical reflects similar, if not exact, experiences. The central character is a popular North Korean actress, Gang Ryeon-hwa, who is imprisoned in a penal labor camp when her father is deemed a spy. On her first day in the prison camp, she is raped by the captain of the prison, Ri Myeong-su, and becomes pregnant. In a dramatic twist, Gang’s terrorizer, Ri, repositions himself as her attempted savior when he himself becomes a prisoner and tries to help the actress escape. In the end they both lose their lives, but their surviving child sends a Christian message of love and forgiveness to the audience. The musical not only reflects the visceral trauma of its choreographer, but also relays what happened to Jeong Seong-san. While serving in the army, Jeong was imprisoned for having listened to South Korean radio. He escaped while being transported to another prison and eventually came to South Korea, but he paid a grave price for this act. In a 2006 interview with the Washington Post, he noted: “I wrote this play after I received word that my father had been publicly executed in North Korea because I was at the forefront of exposing Kim Jong-il’s private life in South Korea.”59 Although Yoduk Story did not directly refer to Kim Jong-il’s private life, the director was so eager to dramatize subhuman life in the North Korean gulags through the musical that he offered one of his kidneys as collateral to borrow money to stage the show.60 As the first known performance staged by North Korean dissidents, the musical invited sensational responses in South Korea, instigating heated debates about South Korea’s position regarding North Korea’s human rights violations.61 The controversy surrounding Yoduk Story found its way into the musical itself, and the production challenged and bewildered audience members with its eclectic performing styles.62 The U.S. production was replete with irruptions of unpredictable moments, which created a unique set of performative and ideological dynamics.63 The imprisonment, torture, rape, mutilation, and death of a model North Korean family in the Yoduk political prison camp, and the Christian love that forgave it all, were staged in a cacophony of performing styles that eclectically alluded to Broadway musicals, Page 295 →European melodrama, Japanese shimpa, and even the Communist performing arts traditions, such as the PRC’s model theater works, and most paradoxically, revolutionary operas, 64 the representative propaganda performance of North Korea whose utopian construction of North Korean life Yoduk Story attempted to subvert. The overwhelming variety of performance forms raises questions regarding and offers the opportunity to examine each form’s capacity for speaking of unspeakable trauma. How successful is each genre? Does stylistic appropriation as a strategy allow the creators of the musical to speak effectively of their trauma to audiences who have never experienced it? Or does it inadvertently obfuscate or even subvert the creators’ intended narrative strategy for denouncing everything North Korean, especially the country’s dogmatic ideology? Certainly the production’s voracious appropriation of various performance styles delineates the limits of countering trauma rather than providing the audience with recourse to empathy. Moreover, despite the producers’ tenacious attempts to indict North Korea as the culprit in human rights violations, a process that involved Christian lessons of

sacrifice and redemption as well as the complete conflation of reality with dramatized reality, the musical actually does little to promote an anti–North Korean political campaign. On the contrary, what the performance revealed was Yoduk Story’s own overall ideological tenuity. It is this perceivable dissonance between the variety of performance styles and the singularity of ideological dogmatism of Yoduk Story that leaves the production floundering, turning what started out as an anti–North Korean dissident performance into propaganda of its own. Yoduk Story’s borrowing of Western popular entertainments, most notably from Broadway, elicited critiques from Western reviewers. According to John Feffer, one of the journalists who reviewed the U.S. premiere, the musical “is high melodrama, as if Andrew Lloyd Weber decided to put an Amnesty International report to music.”65 I consider the obvious allusion to Broadway and the use of diverse modes of entertainment an attempt to counteract any impression of totalizing ideological indoctrination. As a prelude to the entire show, before the curtain goes up, two North Korean soldiers, in measured steps, emerge from behind the curtains to downstage center. They are wearing stylized North Korean uniforms—a strange hybrid of authentic North Korean army uniform and hotel bell-boy attire, with golden trim on their sleeves and caps, and gold fringe on their shoulders. But before the audience has had time to register the unconventional dress code, one soldier starts to perform a tap dance routine while Page 296 →striking up a conversation with the other soldier in a distinctive North Korean accent: “Comrade, how should this musical be performed to amuse the audience?” The countenance of the North Korean soldiers adorned in bizarre sartorial details visually implies that this strange conversation is quite unlikely to take place in North Korea. The audience, expecting to see ghastly aspects of North Korean life in the gulags, is thwarted by the soldiers’ concern for their ability to “amuse” the audience. This metatheatrical moment could be read as a variation on Springtime for Hitler in Germany, the fictional musical in Mel Brooks’ 1968 film The Producers, which glorifies the rise of the Nazi Party and Hitler’s leadership in a burlesque chorus song-and-dance sequence featuring lavishly adorned soldiers of the totalitarian regime. This musical within the film is created by con artists to bring financial benefit to themselves as producers when the film fails—which is what they intend it to do. Both Springtime for Hitler and the prelude to Yoduk Story function as a tongue-in-cheek framing device, commenting on their own suspicious nature vis-à-vis the productions of which they are a part. Both moments find their commonality in reflexive questions about the appropriateness of their genre; using musical theater to address the horror of Nazi Germany and the gulags of North Korea is counterintuitive. In The Producers, Springtime for Hitler was meant to be a total failure but ends up being unexpectedly successful, a wild comedy despite its awful subject; Yoduk Story begins with the tap dance sequence, perhaps the most stereotypically frivolous dance genre and normally a cute entry point to a performance, but which here ends up accentuating the horrific nature of Yoduk Story by contrast. At first glance, the tap routine seems to undercut the audience’s expectation of seeing a realistic portrayal of North Korean propaganda performances, but all too soon, the upbeat dance number yields to the unspeakable brutality of North Korean life, ultimately a grotesque opening number to the nightmarish musical. Promptly after the short conversation in the prelude, the stage curtain opens to reveal, upstage center, a tall golden statue of Kim Jong-il illuminated by a dazzling spotlight. The entire stage gradually is immersed in red light when North Korean soldiers march out onto the stage, carrying red flags of the North Korean Workers’ Party. Military tunes, reminiscent of numerous North Korean patriotic songs composed in the style of the Communist anthem “The Internationale,” play in sync with the synchronized movements of the marchers. This opening scene attempts to simulate the familiar, stereotypical image of North Korean soldiers marching mechanically through public squares. Nevertheless, although the performers supposedly Page 297 →reenact soldiers offering their loftiest encomium to the statue of their leader Kim Jong-il, the South Korean actors’ bodily gestures betray their lack of training in authentic North Korean revolutionary operas in their simulation of classic Broadway-style choreography: a chorus of male dancers surrounding a single female performer. Although the initial marching scene shows anonymous soldiers paying homage to the imposing statue of Kim Jong-il, it quickly morphs into a typical Broadway “big number,” culminating in numerous male soldiers lifting the female protagonist, in this case the popular actress Gang Ryeon-hwa. The viewer’s gaze is directed away from the “Dear Leader” to the star of the show.66

Such glorification of an individual other than the North Korean leader certainly is not part of the performative routine in North Korean revolutionary opera, but it is typical of a Broadway show. Even the title—Yoduk Story—refers to a Broadway production, and not merely as a maneuverable subtext but as a domineering archetype for it to emulate: named to refer to one of Broadway’s classics, West Side Story,67Yoduk Story is not the English translation of the original Korean title, but the only title given to the performance. It was the ambition of Jeong that his creation speak to an audience familiar with the Broadway musical tradition: in the director’s own words, “Yoduk Story will become the Korean version of Les Misérables,” a statement that appears in the U.S. performance program and became the show’s slogan. A rehearsal photo of the production printed in the Los Angeles Times shows the slogan on a sign that hangs on the studio wall: “We will become the Korean Les Misérables.”68 Indeed, Yoduk Story expounds the dismal conditions of the subjugated prison inmates in a realistic style similar to its inspirational Broadway production, featuring songs with related lyrics; Les Misérables’ “Look down, look down / Don’t look ‘em in the eye / Look down, look down, you’re here until you die,”69 sung by the prisoners in the beginning of the show, was revived as, “Careful, be careful,” and “don’t even dare to dream” in Yoduk Story. Likewise, the former’s “Can Jesus hear my prayer?” was rephrased as “Is there someone to hear this scream?” in the latter. However, the most visible parallel between the two is found in the reference to Christian parables of love and forgiveness, which is a significant choice the creators of Yoduk Story have made in addressing the issues of trauma. The Christian reference brings to mind another archetypical Broadway musical, Jesus Christ Superstar,70 particularly through the character Ri Tae-sik, who incarnates the all-forgiving Christ. The musical clearly states the age of this half-crazed, half-saintly man as thirty-three, the same Page 298 →age as Jesus when he was crucified. Ri is presented as a man who fled North Korea for South Korea, where he was introduced to Christianity. He then voluntarily returned to North Korea to spread Christian teachings about love and forgiveness. When he narrates his conversion to Christianity in story and song, Ri plays wild rock music on an electric guitar in a style reminiscent of the rock music performed in Jesus Christ Superstar. Nevertheless, unlike the Broadway version of Jesus, who all too humanly suffers physical and spiritual torments, Ri Tae-sik plays a sanitized version of the Christ, so holy as to occlude any human doubts about his potential for failure, making him pale as a character when compared to the Jesus on Broadway. If Yoduk Story conspicuously gleaned from Broadway productions as its theatrical archetype, then its reference to a wide variety of theatrical forms from East Asia, such as Japanese shimpa, North Korean revolutionary operas, and model theater works of the PRC, seems to be inadvertent. Even if the connection between the musical and East Asian performances is unintentional, which can only be discovered through a close investigation of the performance genealogy in East Asia, it nevertheless expands the range of performing styles of the production while adhering tightly to the monolithic anti–North Korean ideological stance. The stylistic affinities between Japanese shimpa and Yoduk Story are apparent in their exaggerated expressions based on typified musical motifs and gestures, which are akin to the signature traits of European melodrama and Japanese Kabuki. The connection is not unfounded when we consider the dual heritage of shimpa “as the offspring of traditional kabuki”71 and also as a genre that “emerged out of agitprop political drama in the late nineteenth century.”72Shimpa, as a hybrid genre fusing new political themes with old melodramatic treatments, produced effects that Thomas Rimer labeled as “cloying sentimentality.”73 Early twentieth-century Korean theater ended up absorbing the melodramatic tendencies of Japanese shimpa, which had a formative influence on the overall development of modern Korean theater.74 Ironically, although official North Korean theater productions openly express disdain for everything Japanese on a thematic level,75 shimpa’s melodramatic acting style and its agitprop conventions surreptitiously made inroads on the performance styles of North Korean revolutionary operas, which retain elements of the histrionic acting style centering on some of its stage characters’ immediately recognizable tableau gestures.76 At the same time, early works of shimpa by the genre’s pioneer, Kawakami Otojiro (1864–1911),77 chose patriotic themes glorifying the nation, which is a defining element in practically every theater work in North Korea. In Page 299 →addition, the reservoir of stock characters crudely divided into good and evil is also found in practically every North Korean theater production. Japanese shimpa and North Korean revolutionary operas as interlocutors on a stylistic level in turn illuminate the

performative subtext of Yoduk Story. Even as Yoduk Story intends to subvert everything that the North Korean state represents, it borrows heavily from conventional North Korean propaganda styles and thereby also vicariously from shimpa. Most obviously, Yoduk Story taps into shimpa’s reservoir of immediately recognizable stock characters, such as innocent virgins and lascivious villains. The ominous, melodramatic song titled “Hellish Prison Yoduk” relays the moment when the character Gang Ryeon-hwa is violated by the guard Ri Myeong-sik, conjuring the image of the stock melodramatic tableau: the villain’s sexual conquest over the pure virgin. The song transplants the quintessential melodramatic shimpa scene to the North Korean context. Although the sexual violation of Kang is not enacted on stage, the song, its musical tone signaling the downfall of the heroine, establishes an identification between the violated Yoduk character and other ruined virgins in melodramatic shimpa. Intended or not, the musical’s obvious foray into North Korean propaganda tropes demonstrates a troubling kinship between the center and the periphery, official and dissident cultural expressions coming out of North Korea. For instance, Flower Girl, arguably the best-known revolutionary opera in North Korea and abroad, features a female protagonist, Kkot-bun, whose name unambiguously signifies a paragon of revolutionary virtue for North Koreans. In Yoduk Story, however, this name is given to a little girl who is a prisoner in the labor camp because of her counterrevolutionary parents. The hero of the North Korean official performance is reinvented as the antihero of the North Korean state. However, they both transform themselves from victims to rebels when they stand up against their oppressors: the Japanese and the North Korean regime, respectively. Such a transformation in their character is accompanied by agile bodily transfigurations: both characters emerge from their silent and subdued gestures and become resolute fighters who stand up against their victimizers by performing the ferocious gesture of resistance. The Yoduk Kkot-bun rebels against the prison guards with empty hands until her frail body is shot; the Flower Girl Kkot-bun throws a brazier at the landlords who blinded her little sister until her act brings justice upon the offenders. Yoduk Story shares another feature with revolutionary operas, namely the tragic iconography of a dispersed family centered on the heartbreaking image of a mother suffering through separation from her children. Sea of Page 300 →Blood, another popular revolutionary opera, features a mother whose revolutionary son is taken away from her by the Japanese police. The recurring close-ups of her suffering face (in the filmed version of the play) are intended to invite compassion from the viewers, just like the scene in Yoduk Story where Gang Ryeon-hwa has just given birth to the “forbidden” child conceived during her rape by the prison guard. She struggles to resist separation from the baby, just like the mother in Sea of Blood. In both productions, the mothers heroically suffer the loss of their children at the hands of the despot, another example of the dissident using the propaganda techniques of the oppressor. As Allen Feldman points out: “Visual appropriation, because it is always pregnant with the potential for violence, has become a metonym for dominance over others: power lies in the totalizing engorged gaze over the politically prone body, and subjugation is encoded as exposure to this penetration.”78 Feldman’s view on the violent potential of visual appropriation aptly speaks to the aforementioned examples: the visual texts are a powerful means of manipulation, inviting from viewers a kinesthetic reaction that borders on the realm of the prelingual. As the extremely painful trauma is often inexpressible in language, that unspeakable place which holds the painful memory can only be addressed by means of visual representation. Both Sea of Blood and Yoduk Story utilize the image of the suffering mother as a vehicle for spectators to vicariously experience visceral pain, meant to invite resistance against each performance’s supposed perpetrators. In these examples, the genealogy of the eruptive melodramatic passion and the visual arrangement of suffering that we witness in Yoduk Story can be traced back to North Korean revolutionary operas, which, in turn, retain acting styles of Japanese shimpa. In this respect, the musical does not truly subvert the revolutionary operas, as it voraciously takes advantage of their available acting styles and visual tropes and displaces them within its own performative matrix. As a result, the only difference between the musical and revolutionary operas lies in ideological orientation. For instance, Japanese nationals have always entered North Korean revolutionary operas as villains, as

exemplified in Flower Girl or in another North Korean revolutionary opera, Oh, Tell the Forest.79 Performing Japanese in revolutionary operas involved distinctive dress codes, such as kimonos and military uniforms, which mark the wearers’ bodies as hostile agents clearly distinct from native Koreans. Yoduk Story, on the other hand, features a Japanese inmate, Matsuko, who was abducted by the North Korean state for a reason never identified in the production.80 She is simply Page 301 →presented as one of the helpless victims of the North Korean regime, with her body marked the same way as those of other Korean inmates: beaten, undernourished, and covered with a tattered prisoner’s uniform. Still, as conspicuous as is the reversal between what Japanese signify in revolutionary operas and in the musical Yoduk Story, so is there a perceivable continuity between the two regarding the clearly moralizing view of trauma, which manifests itself only through the dichotomizing scheme of the victimizer and the victimized. The traditional role of a persecuted Korean working-class citizen in revolutionary operas may now be played by a Japanese abductee in Yoduk Story, but the structure of dichotomy remains essentially the same. The inversion of perpetrator and victim roles becomes as much an issue as the similarity between the official propaganda and the dissident performance trying to become counterpropaganda: both genres are explicitly accusative of the obvious culprits without delineating the nuanced experience of trauma, thereby failing to transcend the binary. Just as Yoduk Story unconsciously replicates North Korean revolutionary operas, it sometimes uses strategies similar to those found in Red Detachment of Women81—one of the PRC’s eight model theater works. Early in that production, the female protagonist Qionghua wears a traditional red tunic to symbolize her feminized feudal body, which needs to be liberated and revolutionized. When Qionghua runs away from her feudal household and joins the revolutionary training ground, she appears on stage in a gray military uniform, which signals that she has embodied the masculine strength of the revolution. In Yoduk Story, Ryeon-hwa makes her first appearance in her red Korean dress as an honorable actress gloriously serving the North Korean state before her family is sent to Yoduk prison camp. Ryeon-hwa’s feminine body, dressed in beautiful traditional dress, is degraded by the tattered gray prisoner’s clothes, which at a first glance seem to mock Qionghua’s liberation and the ideals of socialist utopia. While such a reading surely can be defended as valid, a closer examination allows an alternative interpretation that points to the similarity between the two female protagonists. In both cases, traditional women’s bodies marked by the red dresses are subsumed by a new form of masculinity—the amorphous gray uniform—which is layered on to women’s bodies. Although Qionghua’s new life as a military trainee is evidently better than Ryeon-hwa’s miserable existence in the prison camp, these women, both in new stages of their lives, are governed by the absolute rules of the state father—Qionghua by the rules of Mao, who liberated her, and Ryeon-hwa by Kim Jong-il’s regime, which imprisoned her. Page 302 →From Broadway musicals to Communist propaganda performances of North Korea and the PRC, the producers of Yoduk Story resiliently inscribe onto the production various performative techniques—both intentional and unintentional—carrying out a dialogue with intercultural performance forms. However, flaunting such diverse forms does not translate into a dialogical ideology. In contrast to the unsettling fluidity of performance genres, the musical is astringently invested in projecting one consistent message: North Korea as the worst hell on earth—which ironically resembles the monolithic and dogmatic stance of official North Korean theater productions. The ideological orientation of Yoduk Story gravitates toward the faithful representation of Christian authority as the spiritual backbone of the production. How does Christianity, among other religions, serve as an effective ideological ground for the musical to speak of trauma? How does it subsume various performing styles under its banner? Michel Foucault has noted: “Christianity is a confession. This means that Christianity belongs to a very special type of religion—those that impose obligations of truth on those who practice them.”82 Reflecting the confessional nature of Christianity referred to by Foucault, the producers of Yoduk Story insisted that the musical was a way for them to truthfully speak of atrocities in North Korea. The quest for truth embedded in Christianity is the narrative model used to “confess” their traumatic experience and find redemption for their suffering and relief from their haunting memories. The introduction to the Yoduk prison camp presents a visual simulation of the biblical Golgotha where Christ was

crucified. The very first scene staging the prison features a huge cross onto which a severely wounded prisoner is tied. The viewers are invited to take the familiar Christian liturgical gaze as they witness the suffering of a Christian martyr. The notion that the stage serves as the site of Christian suffering and salvation is sustained throughout the musical, as Ri Tae-sik, a prisoner who incarnates an all-forgiving and loving Jesus, is executed tied to a cross for the sins of others, faithfully replicating the Christian iconography of the Crucifixion. Moreover, throughout the musical, Ri Tae-sik is accompanied by a character named Crazy Woman—disheveled, barely clothed, and always singing forbidden Spanish love songs. By staging the physical contact between Crazy Woman and the guards, the production makes clear that she provides sexual service to the guards as well as emotional consolation to the inmates. This “fallen” woman is a not-so-subtle stand-in for Mary Magdalene. Her insanity and sexuality are objects of official condemnation according to Page 303 →official North Korean standards, but ironically, it is in her madness and sexual capability where everyone finds comfort. The conflation of female sexuality with madness has been an enduring tradition in various cultures. Yannick Ripa, for instance, documents the nineteenth-century French medical practice in asylums, where “hysterical women, nymphomaniacs, and erotomatiacs were not distinguished from masturbators” and medical practice projected all these behaviors as sexual deviations and as pathological phenomena.83 Likewise, Rachel Fensham has noted that “the emotional susceptibility of women to insanity was based on the evidence of the body—the peculiarly female needs of her anatomy—and the visibility of emotional expressions.”84 In the case of North Korea, any sexuality, especially corporeal expressions of female desire, has been disallowed in official public discourse, and such standards apply to camp inmates even more strictly. While the Crazy Women’s obvious expressions of sexuality—exposed shoulders and legs in addition to clearly indicated sexual contact with camp guards—become markers of her insanity, they nevertheless become simultaneous signifiers of Christian love and salvation, thus replicating the story of Mary Magdalene. Just like this Crazy Woman, Ri Tae-sik prays for the salvation of suffering souls. In act 2 he implores God for mercy: “Father, do not only go to South Korea, come to this land, help us.” He incessantly offers the prison camp inmates unconditional love and compassion. This savior figure, in a predictable ending, sacrifices himself in order to save the life of the guard, Ri Myeong-su, who impregnated the actress. Ri Myeong-su’s subordinate tries to get rid of his superior by reporting him as the rapist; as the incarnation of Christian love, Ri voluntarily tells the authorities that he was the one who fathered Gang Ryeon-hwa’s child. As Lee is taken to the execution grounds, he makes it known that he wishes the couple to stay together and escape to the south with their child. Inspired by Ri Tae-sik’s unconditional love, the violated actress forgives and even begins to love the contrite guard. After the execution of Ri Tae-sik, the couple sings a love duet entitled “We Can Forgive It All,” proclaiming their conversion to all-embracing Christian love. At the very end of the performance, Ri Yo-duk, the surviving child of this couple, named after the camp site, makes an appearance on stage to remember his parents who perished during their escape: “I do not resent the ones who killed my parents.” In contrast to the previous acts, where the atrocious conditions of the prison camp are cast in gloomy lighting, in this final scene the overwhelming brilliance of white spotlights, so dazzling and Page 304 →pure as to blind the audience, signal the eidetic advent of the baby Jesus Christ. As the innocent child’s message of forgiveness and love reverberates with the preachings of Ri Taesik, this final scene is presented as the salvation of mankind. In this moment of redemption, arguably the most atrocious crime against humanity—namely brutality against children—is recalled and forgiven. Earlier in the musical, starving children from Yoduk prison steal potatoes in violation of the camp rules. When the furious guards cannot find the culprit, they randomly choose a boy and threaten to cut off his hands if no one confesses. When no one comes forward, the guards chop off the boy’s right hand. This unbridled cruelty is performed realistically as a sharp butcher blade, gleaming in the ominous theatrical lighting, descends on the boy’s arms. By staging the Christ child figure in the final scene, Yoduk Story conjures up the earlier staged crime against children—not in order to put the perpetrators on trial, but to forgive them. How is anyone to account for such unspeakable atrocity, which comprises only one episode in the endless catalog of cruelty so bluntly exhibited in the musical? Does the staging of atrocity have to represent the same degree of pain and trauma caused by the original event? Or as literary scholar Wendy S. Hesford asks, “In order to revisit

violence must we give it violent expression?”85 After all, how does trauma figure ultimately in a musical that strives to be an evangelical form of entertainment based on the marriage between Christianity and various forms of performance style? Despite all the claims concerning Yoduk Story as an exposé of the North Korean gulag, it is common for the survivors of trauma to remain silent since they find it difficult to revisit their painful memory with documentary precision. To borrow performance scholar Diana Taylor’s expression, this “anti-archival nature of trauma”86 has to do with the challenges for trauma survivors to find appropriate voices to express themselves. This painful process of finding channels of expression is complicated by the fact that their credibility may be damaged by the refractive nature of memory. As anthropologist Roberta Culbertson has stated: “Yet despite this [a trauma victim’s] silence, the momentous nature of threats and harm to the body dictates that violence and trauma nevertheless leave the survivor preoccupied with the memory of it, which itself seems both absent and entirely too present. Most disturbingly, bits of memory, flashing like clipped pieces of film held to the light, appear unbidden and in surprising ways, as if possessed of a life independent of will or consciousness.”87 Although the creators of Yoduk Story are quite vocal about their experience, Page 305 →like most other trauma survivors, they nevertheless struggle to cope with trauma by finding the appropriate voice to narrate it. For these particular survivors, Christianity became the chosen ideology and narrative strategy for dealing with their tragedies. In addition to providing the production with a confessional mode and a clear model of salvation, the Christian narrative provides a safe cultural haven and an emotional distance, from which the authors of Yoduk Story can revisit their own traumas. Reliving trauma through a literal re-presentation of the events is too painful; therefore, there is a need to create a narrational distance between the storyteller and the trauma, the process that Hesford has called rendering “bodily pain and trauma tellable.”88 Christianity is nonexistent in North Korea and thus creates a certain comforting buffer for the North Korean expatriates between their current lives and their memories of the prison camp. As a newly adopted belief system taken up after their escape from North Korea—and therefore having no association with their North Korean experience—Christianity provides an adequate shield protecting them from what took place in North Korea. As Hesford points out, “Fantasy figures trauma’s unscriptability, that is, its resistance to, yet reliance upon, cultural scripting, and thereby illustrates how trauma is imbricated with the imaginary and symbolic.”89 Christianity figures as the imaginary and symbolic cocoon for Yoduk Story’s producers and becomes the play’s central performative ideology. On the other hand, gaining safe psychological distance from the original trauma is not the only reason why the musical appropriated the New Testament narrative. More significantly, the focus on Christianity reflects director Jeong’s long years of training under North Korea’s socialist culture. For an artist who had spent his formative years in North Korea, where all art has as its supreme mission to pay homage to Kim Il-sung and then his son, Kim Jong-il, what happens if that sacrosanct center disappears? How does the artist cope with the lack of absolute divinity that he has been trained to glorify? In the case of Yoduk Story, the void of the divine center—the Kim leadership—is filled by Jesus Christ. The cult of personality enshrined in North Korea has a hold on Jeong, and he finds an analogous voice in Christianity’s moral authority, Jesus Christ. Yoduk Story counters the official North Korean performance, replacing it with a Christian narrative. Instead of glorifying the political figures of North Korea, it worships a new, Christian savior. However, using the Jesus story does not translate into the erasure of official North Korean propaganda. Quite the contrary, the empowerment of Christianity, more than Page 306 →anything else, establishes and performs a striking parallel between the political state the musical strives to subvert and the religious belief it attempts to uphold. This is not to say that Christianity becomes the surrogate of North Korean politics, but that, ironically, both religion and politics form the basis for Yoduk Story. Even as Yoduk Story produces a religious performance countering official North Korean political theater, it fails to transcend the official North Korean propaganda performance it tries to oppose. Perhaps inadvertently, the musical extends its reproduction of the dogmatic ideology of the North Korean propaganda machine by further tapping into one of the foundational propaganda strategies of North Korea: the

obvious conflation of theatrical illusion with political reality.90 On the opening night of the U.S. premiere, the director proclaimed on stage: “Today’s show is not a show. It is reality in North Korea.” The choreographer also appeared and told the audience: “I lost my mother, husband, and children in [the] gulag. This is truth. Save North Korea.” The program notes include satellite pictures of North Korea showing the gulags scattered around country, as well as short testimonials from camp survivors that parallel the synopsis of the musical. For the U.S. tour, former prisoners of the Yoduk camp Gang Cheol-hwan, An Hyeok, and Kim Yeong-seon accompanied the troupe, testifying to the veracity of the performance for which they served as consultants. The director, Jeong Seong-san, himself asserted that exposing the practices in the North Korean gulag was the primary task in making the musical: “The important thing is that I can reveal the reality of North Korea and its prison camp in the form of art. Kim Jong-il knows how powerful art is. If we continue to disclose the reality of human rights in the North by means of art, winning human rights in North Korea will be a reality sooner/ . . . I am going to fight against Kim Jong-il by means of art. I will reveal the seriousness of North Korean human rights infringement to the world. You just watch and see.”91 Jeong’s challenge targeting Kim Jong-il claims that his work is going to start “dismantling prison camps.”92 The director’s strategies paradoxically closely resemble official North Korean propaganda in that both obliterate the boundary between the represented reality of the performance and the unadorned facts of the human rights violations in the gulags, which the North Korean state hides from the world and the Yoduk producers interpret through Christianity. In recounting the strategies of narrating traumatic experience, Hesford warns against looking at “survivor’s representations as mirrors of historical or psychic realities”; instead we should “consider how Page 307 →realist strategies authenticate survivor’s representations.”93 The perplexing assurance that the imaginary presented in Yoduk Story is a documentary reenactment of the real is troubling precisely because it distorts every bit as much as the propaganda machine it so vehemently denounces. I faced a very similar moment when choreographer Kim Yeong-seon answered a question about the boundary between reality and illusion: “Musicals are so much better than giving hours of political lectures about the North Korean gulag.” When she staged her real experience as part of Yoduk Story, she inevitably reorganized the structure of the real in order to increase the musical’s persuasive effects. Promoting performance—an interpreted version of reality—to make people accept a particular reality is precisely what official North Korean propaganda does. In fact, there is an affinity between propaganda and counterpropaganda. Is counterperformance inadvertently paying homage to the creative principles of its oppressor? The interview with the musical’s choreographer opened an unexpected possibility: Was the musical a manifestation of the Stockholm syndrome? The dissident performance, by recounting trauma, unconsciously acknowledges the success of the oppressor’s techniques if not entirely empowering the aggressor. But the most challenging question regarding staging trauma arises out of the comic elements employed in the musical. The audience laughs at various moments in the production in response to the slapstick physical comedy of inmates as well as the aforementioned tap dance sequence of the two North Korean soldiers, reminiscent of Springtime for Hitler. Erratic comic moments like these confound the overall purportedly tragic message of the performance. How can laughter serve adequately as a tool for exposing North Korea’s state-sponsored atrocities? To revisit the questions posed in the beginning: Can torture sing? Can trauma dance? What happens when the presentations of traumatic events are interlaced with comic moments while claiming to be the truthful and actual reflection of traumatic experiences? Traumatic neurosis, as literary scholar Cathy Caruth explains it, is not just a reaction to the initial event, but also “the peculiar and perplexing experience of survival.”94 The survival of the event itself and the difficulty comprehending and assimilating it are themselves unbearable for the trauma victim: “The survival of trauma is not the fortunate passage beyond a violent event, a passage that is accidentally interrupted by reminders of it, but rather the endless inherent necessity of repetition, which ultimately may lead to destruction.”95 In an obsessive reenactment of trauma, laugher may at first appear as an accidental by-product of the overwhelming tragedy. But Page 308 →it springs out of a recuperative gesture allowing both producers and spectators to have a glimpse of what lies beyond the morbid violence. In a way, comic moments, in the same way as the incorporation of

Christianity, provide a safe zone where the producers can disengage from the original violence—the raw material of their storytelling, which has yet to be fully processed. Laughter marks that inconclusive fluidity between reality and illusion, but rather than successfully masking trauma, laughter reveals it and demonstrates the painful passage to survival. Yoduk Story, then, becomes a performance repetitively addressing and readdressing the messy encounter between the real and the invented, fear and laughter, death and survival by eclectically clashing most unlikely cultural texts. By choosing to simulate trauma on stage, Yoduk Story not only consumes the available narratives about trauma, but also adds a new entry to the archives of trauma. Diana Taylor writes: “Performance . . . works in the transmission of traumatic memory, drawing from and transforming a shared archive and repertoire of cultural images. These performance protests function as a “symptom of history” (i.e., acting out), part and parcel of trauma. They also assert a critical distance to make a claim, affirming ties and connections while denouncing attacks on social contracts.”96 Taylor’s statement scrupulously reminds us of the very basic yet powerful function of performance as a transmitter of traumatic memory, which, in my view, is essentially tied to expanding the parameters of historical memory. Yoduk Story achieves this goal by constantly shifting the boundaries between politics and arts, propaganda and counterpropaganda, religion and human rights, which serves as both creative and destructive force: creative in the sense that it becomes a polyglot performance experimenting with a variety of styles to address an overwhelmingly tragic issue; destructive in the sense that it offers the same kind of monolithic, totalitarian vision it tries to oppose. The many contradictions it embodies extend an invitation to future debates on the theatrical nature of staging trauma. Although the regurgitation of official North Korean performance structures and the ideological dogmatization of trauma impede the original commitment to subverting the oppressive order, Yoduk Story nonetheless marks its place in theater history as the first performance to catalog and perform this unclaimed experience. The official historiography of North Korea will never render this experience visible, and this is why torture sings and trauma dances in Yoduk Story: to resist the tyrannical impulse to erase traumatic memory from history.

Page 309 →Conclusion: Looking Back, Moving Forward If we were to look back from a distant future, North Korea in the early twenty-first century will most likely be remembered as having traversed a crossroads where dark nightmares of the past intersected with cautious dreams for the future. Although no stranger to hardship, the North Korean people at the turn of the millennium went through suffering of such magnitude that it can only be fathomed through fragmented stories told by defectors and travelers. Even the overwhelmingly optimistic North Korean propaganda machinery, in a rarely honest moment of self-reflection, dubbed the harsh times as the “arduous march”1—an expression previously reserved for the time when Kim Il-sung had to march through a Manchurian blizzard in defiance of the Japanese imperial army. As the world is becoming a closely-knit community with exponentially increasing mobility and communication, North Korea attempts to engage the outside world through limited yet intriguing channels, such as the Pyongyang International Film Festival (hereafter PIFF) and tourism projects open to westerners. The PIFF, in particular, is an intriguing venue for Pyongyangites who want to have a glimpse at the world beyond national boundaries. A biennial festival that began in 1987 and was reinvented in 1990, it has been introducing North Koreans to a wide variety of films from around the world—from Egyptian action films to the British comedy Mr. Bean. By all indications, the film festival has been consistently successful, with one participant recalling that 12,000 tickets were sold for the 2008 festival alone.2 According to German journalist Malte Herwig, who traveled to attend the 2008 PIFF, there were even some spontaneous and uncontrolled moments on site, such as an incident involving a minor failure of the projectionist to exercise instantaneous censorship in the projection room. Page 310 → Figure 55. Pyongyang International Cinema House during the Pyongyang International Film Festival. Mid 2000s. (Photo courtesy of an anonymous donor.) Figure 56. Audiences for the 2008 Pyongyang International Film Festival. (Copyright Malte Herwig, 2008.) Page 311 →In most other countries movies like Marcus H. Rosenmüller’s “Heavyweights,” a lighthearted comedy about a group of Bavarian villagers contending in the 1952 Winter Olympics, would be harmless fun. But not in North Korea, and to prove it there was a man with a piece of cardboard sitting in the projection room to cover the lens in case anything deemed unseemly to Korean eyes was shown. That day, mercifully, the cardboard-wielding censor wasn’t particularly good at his job. His hapless attempts to maintain officially sanctioned decency only added to the amusement of the 2,000 moviegoers in the gigantic Pyongyang International Cinema House, who responded energetically to the sight of a half-dozen outsize German bobsledders baring their bottoms and stuffing themselves with food and beer to gain weight for a competition.3 This amusing detail is primarily an exposé of how censorship works as an improvisational performance by a projectionist, and at the same time, it is an amazing testament to the powerful status of cinema as a social practice in North Korea that has so centrally occupied this book. After all, Kim Il-sung’s and Kim Jong-il’s ideas on film as a primary tool to mold nationalistic pride were well founded, as the PIFF brought not only foreign films to curious North Koreans, but also curious foreign journalists and tourists to North Korea, putting it on the map of the global cultural economy and in the art sections of major newspapers such as the New York Times and Los Angeles Times. 4 What is at stake here for the North Korean authorities is film’s ability to bridge the cultural differences so fluidly and effortlessly: as much as the North Korean domestic front has been unified by propaganda films for the past sixty years, so too audience members attending the PIFF were able to build a true rapport between themselves and the outside world through laughter—a prime transnational means to communicate with the unknown “other.” If the humor in Heavyweights could so easily attract North Korean viewers who perhaps saw Bavarians for the first time, then just imagine: what else could other films, more seductive in technology and narrative structure, potentially achieve? Could, films from the West, especially from Hollywood—where commercial propaganda has reached its pinnacle—subsume homegrown political propaganda in the future? Given the social Page 312 →significance of film in North Korea and the pervasive infiltration of commercially driven Western media

products into the world market, this is the most likely vision of North Korea’s filmic future that we will one day look back on. Whether it was meant to be an act of subversion or not, spontaneous moments like the aforementioned cardboard box incident provides us with an opportunity to ponder whether we could take this as an indication that North Korea is willing to be more flexible about its cultural boundaries, if not daring to change its political orientation. Another notable episode from the 2008 PIFF includes the screening of a film that featured a depiction of Adolf Hitler hiding in a bunker during the final days of World War II.5 What did the North Korean audience think when they saw the defeated image of the notorious Nazi dictator who is so often compared to their own Great Leader outside their country? As celluloid images of the Führer appears on screen for North Korean viewers, just how many make the same frightening analogy so many westerners have drawn, even if only secretly in their own minds? Although culture and politics are two faces of the same coin in North Korea, the cultural front appears to be much more susceptible to change than the strictly controlled political front, as we witnessed during the historic New York Philharmonic visit to Pyongyang in February 2008.6 It is my personal hope that more and more cultural engagement with the outside world, limited though it may be in temporal and spatial settings, like the PIFF, will gradually erode the political front in North Korea. Nonetheless, these surprising moments are exceptional and rare, and North Korea by and large still remains a mystery to most of us. Foremost, it remains the only hereditary socialist state on earth, with a realistic possibility of Kim Jong-il’s third son, Kim Jeong-un [Gim Jeong-un], succeeding the father as a third-generation ruler.7 Growing more anachronistic with every day’s passing as the visions of this hereditary socialist kingdom loom large, North Korea is still invested in guarding its principles of ethnic purity and the supremacy of Kim Jong-il’s leadership. Maintaining such a purist notion of power comes in the form of draconian surveillance, often costing people their lives, including those of non–North Korean civilians. The year 2008 saw a continuous deterioration in the inter-Korean relationship, which became quite pronounced after I Myeong-bak assumed the presidency in South Korea during February of that year. Openly adhering to hawkish policies toward North Korea, the South Korean president attempted to distinguish his approach from the so-called “sunshine policy”8 of his two predecessors, Kim Dae-jung (1998–2003) and No Mu-hyeon Page 313 →(2003–8), by reverting to a hard-line approach that characterized much of George W. Bush’s North Korean policies. I’s policies caused antagonistic responses from the North, ranging from shutting down the tourist operation in Geumgang Mountain and the city of Gaeseong to ceasing operation of the inter-Korean railroad, which had begun just a year before.9 In the middle of 2008, the inter-Korean relationship finally imploded. On July 11, 2008, a South Korean civilian was shot to death by a North Korean soldier near Geumgang Mountain, which appeared to be a benign tourist park featuring pristine nature when I had visited only three years prior to this incident. According to North Korea’s claim, a South Korean tourist, Park Wang-ja, a housewife in her fifties, stepped out of the designated tourist zone, and when she failed to respond to the North Korean soldier’s warning to stop, she was promptly shot. The South Korean investigation team claimed otherwise, insisting that she was not given a chance to explain herself, which North Korea immediately denied. The Geumgang Mountain tourist project, once seen as a symbolic harbinger of Korean reunification, was preparing to celebrate the tenth anniversary of operations with much fanfare on November 18. Instead, the shooting incident led to the immediate shutdown of the tourist operation, leaving its future uncertain. The Gaeseong tourism project, which introduced a less filtered urban experience to civilian tourists than did Geumgang Mountain, also came to an indefinite halt on November 28, 2008, the same date inter-Korean train operations, which ignited hopes of reunification just a year earlier, also came to a screeching halt. Gaeseong Industrial Park, where South Koreans set up numerous factories employing North Korean workers, also faced difficulties with the North Korean government, which has ordered a reduction in the number of South Korean workers permanently stationed in the Industrial Park area.

The decline in the inter-Korean relationship most symbolically manifested itself during the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games, where the two Koreas broke the tradition of marching into the stadium as one nation, which had started in 2000 during the Sydney Olympic Games. Invoking the memories of confrontation and standoff during the Cold War era, recents events have dissipated much goodwill, as if the relationship between the two Koreas had reverted to where it all started, in partition in 1945. In the eyes of concerned observers, every crisis involving North Korea seems to present itself as a penultimate step leading to the ultimate apocalyptic confrontation, the inevitable clash between North and South, or even the downfall of the North Korean regime. To fuel concern, Kim Jong-il staged a disappearing act from the media as Page 314 →these crises were playing out. Speculation that the Great Leader was ailing came to a head in October 2008. Nonetheless, Kim Jong-il once again proved himself to be the consummate master of self-staging in the eyes of the public. Soon after rumors about his health surfaced, the state news agency released photos capturing Kim watching soccer matches and carrying out military examinations.10Rodong Sinmun, on October 11, 2008, published a photo of Kim standing in the front row with soldiers. Three more rows of soldiers in uniform were behind him under the banner “We Serve the Military for the Dear Supreme Leader, Comrade Kim Jong-il” (see fig. 57). The need to stage the authoritative image of the commander-in-chief reconfirms the fact that this sixty-year state practice still wields power over political maneuvering. Put on trial vis-à-vis doubting viewers, the images of Kim Jong-il nevertheless carry out their mission to persuade and manipulate just as they have throughout the history of North Korea. These photos are visual revelations testifying to how a national father, seemingly absent in the thick of domestic and international crises, transformed into a leader who was not only present, but very much in charge. Such disappearing and reemerging acts staged by the father seem to have gained a significant place in the cultural imagination in North Korea. Having cultivated the practice of believing religiously in the visual image as a realityshaping vision, iconic images of Kim Jong-il become the primary means for North Koreans to believe in their leader as well as themselves. Figure 57. A photo of Kim Jong-il as if in response to those who speculated he was gravely ill when he disappeared from the media for a while. Rodong Sinmunm October 11, 2008. Page 315 →In the longer history of North Korea’s alienation from the world, these events belong to the recent past. Yet their significance haunts the present day, guarding the gates of the new era. Looking back in history, it is remarkable that not much has changed in North Korea over the past sixty years in the realm of propaganda. While foreign journalists and tourists are visiting Pyongyang in increasing numbers, North Koreans still see the same portraits of their leaders and sing the same songs of praise of the Korean Workers’ Party every day. While the world’s political and cultural geography has been remapped, with old walls being demolished and new borders being drawn, North Korea has remained consistently faithful to its founding father and his ideology. This extreme form of theocracy found the most suitable site of worship in a family structure, both in a traditional biological unit and in an extended family unit called nation. After all, who can really exist outside of the family if fate is sealed by the birth origins and future legacies already prescribed by the mythic saga of the Kim clan? It still remains a question whether the day will come when we can write anything about North Korea in the pluperfect tense. The tautological cycle of history brings us once again to the North Korean screen—a refractive site where vision looms larger than reality. Only this time, it is Mickey Mouse and a little schoolgirl who steal our attention. The recent North Korean box office hit film The School Girl’s Diary sheds new light on the way in which the presence of foreign media surreptitiously influences official media practices. It opened in North Korea in 2006 and was allegedly shown to eight million North Koreans, which is roughly one-third of the entire population. The film was so successful that in May 2007 it was featured in the Cannes Film Festival, and distribution rights to French-language markets were sold there. In December 2007, the film saw commercial release in France: three screens in Paris, a screen in Rile, and another in Nante, where The School Girl’s Diary played to near-empty theaters and commercial failure. The film’s notoriety emerges from many directions. The timing of the release in North Korea came at a highly

contentious moment, just two months prior to the first underground nuclear test, which shocked the world. What equally drew our attention was the fact that open claims about Kim Jong-il’s involvement in the filmmaking were made in the North Korean media. Joseon Yesul ran an extensive special section featuring testimonials Page 316 →by luminaries from the North Korean film industry, all of them providing a unanimous panegyric to Kim Jongil’s contribution to this film. The screenwriter An Jun-bo recalled that the “Dear General” gave him the idea of using the housing issue to sketch out the conflict between the self-sacrificing father and the immature daughter, while the celebrated actor Choe Chang-su, who played the namesake hero in Rim Kkeok-jeong, proclaimed that the cast members were directly instructed by the General for half a year. Likewise, Malte Herwig speaks of his interview with the film’s director Jang In-hak, whom he met during his travels to the 2008 PIFF: “Over many cups of coffee, the director kept emphasizing how Kim Jong-il’s involvement in making this film was crucial.”11 The School Girl’s Diary opens with a close-up capturing a little girl’s backpack with the unmistakable figure of a large Mickey Mouse patch sewn on the back. How did this quintessential Walt Disney character make it into a North Korean film, the production of which was allegedly monitored by Kim Jong-il himself? Were North Korean viewers or filmmakers aware that Mickey Mouse is one of the most recognized symbols of American pop culture and a chief purveyor of the romanticized commercial fairy tales of the West? Whether it be due to a simple lack of knowledge about the cultural origins of this prop, or to the deliberate and even subversive misplacement of an American cultural icon in a North Korean context, the availability of Mickey Mouse’s image to North Korean viewers is intriguing, as the film was the biggest box office hit in 2006. The pervasive power of film in North Korea certainly makes this movie the most desirable venue for Mickey to surreptitiously emerge from his mouse hole and sneak into the North Korean cultural playground. The real surprise of this hit movie, however, emerges not from the presence of a Walt Disney character, but from the unique position of its protagonist. The film is narrated through the perspective of a teenage girl, Suryeon, who resents her father for prioritizing his work over family life. Her father is a scientist, constantly working in the factories and labs, trying to crack mysterious computer codes. The exact nature of her father’s work is never clearly stated in the film, but because of his complete dedication to work, he is hardly at home, leaving Su-ryeon and her sister Su-ok under the care of their mother and grandmother in a dilapidated house. Su-reyon is constantly envious of her peers who enjoy the presence of their father in everyday life. To make things even worse, Su-ryeon painfully remembers how his father missed his chance to move his family to a contemporary Page 317 →highrise, giving priority to his coworker. Just like any teenage schoolgirl, Su-ryeon grumbles and complains about the unfairness of her reality. But because such discontent is expressed through the eyes of a teenage girl who naturally craves the attention of her father, the viewers are inclined to sympathize with her rather than criticize her as a selfish character. Given the conventional filmic practice in North Korea of dividing characters into either heroes or villains, from the first North Korean film, My Hometown (1949), to the quintessential classic Sea of Blood (1971) and Flower Girl (1972), Su-ryeon emerges as a new kind of protagonist who defies this dichotomy. She is neither a hero nor an antihero, but simply remains an immature schoolgirl. Would it be an overstatement to claim that the emergence of this complex character with a full psychological gamut signals a departure from typical propagandistic filmmaking? The character of Suryeon demonstrates a visible affinity to fully developed characters in foreign films and TV dramas. The fact that her emotional range demonstrates more than the well-defined contrast between socialist virtue (self-sacrifice) and vice (selfishness) makes us speculate whether the character has been inspired by ambiguous but complex characters in foreign films, TV dramas, and media products that may have made their way into North Korea.12 It will take some time to observe whether the themes established in The School Girl’s Diary will continue on as a new trend in North Korean cinema, but one thing seems to be clear; that the rhetorical significance about the father weighs heavily in this seemingly innovative production. Su-ryeon’s father is openly blamed for his perennial absence from the family, which leads to endless speculations about what he is really up to and why he has to be so absent, much akin to the fascination with Kim Jong-il’s prolonged absence from the media in 2008. How could a father, the provider for the family become invisible? Could something be not quite right with him, or could it even be the case that he is not quite perfect?

More than a decade has passed since Kim Il-sung’s death, but his presence is constantly reinforced by the ubiquity of political slogans, portraits, and commemorative rituals, inundating daily lives of North Korean people with the vindictive nature of human mortality. Though he might be absent, he is with the people, overseeing them with their daily needs and spiritually guiding them through hard times. His son, though he might not be as holy as his father, now leads the nation through a new “arduous march” against the economic sanctions and international isolation imposed by the United States. He is always at work, devoted to improving the livelihood of the Page 318 →people. So much so that he sometimes disappears from the sight. He is not almighty, which explains why the nation is going through such monumental hardships, but he is the first one to brace suffering to put the nation back on its feet. On the proud day Su-ryeon enters college to become a scientist like her father, the man who inspired her to take this path cannot even attend the convocation ceremony to witness his legacy continued on through his daughter. Needless to say, he is at work, as he always has been. The film, in a quite moving way, indicates that his absence is not a meaningless one. The absent father’s voice resounds significantly in the mind of the protagonist, who is now a college student: “Su-ryeon, as you know, our Dear General also is a human being with a family of his own. But he is on the road away from his family all year round. I would have absolutely no regrets if my path could reach his, which leads to a life dedicated to the people and the nation.” At this emotional climax, the image of Su-ryeon’s father overlaps with that of Kim Jong-il. The viewers are invited to extend their imagination to see, through Kim Jong-il, the “real” father of the nation, the founding father, Kim Il-sung. The patrilineal legacy passed down from Kim Il-sung to Kim Jong-il finds a cinematic extension in the portrayal of Su-ryeon’s imperfect father who nonetheless is loveable for his human flaws. This recognition of the father’s failure is a déjà vu moment in North Korean film history, as was shown in the film Hong Gil-dong. Gil-dong’s absent biological father, and even the national father, the king, cannot rescue our hero from the stigma of being the outsider of the feudal society. Instead of reconciling with these fathers, Gil-dong sets out in search of his own utopia, whereas Su-ryeon finds solace in reconciling with imperfect fathers—her biological father and the national father, Kim Jong-il. Despite the differences in time and space that separate the two protagonists, they are bound by an identical allegory of an imagined family that lives within the concrete body of a biological and traditional family. All the more, the father’s vision may become the children’s reality, but when that vision is no more than illusion, what comes of the children’s destiny but a utopian delusion? As the final moment of Hong Gil-dong asks us, “Does such a utopia lie behind the horizon?”

Page 319 →Appendix: Notes on Sources Archival Resources During my research process, many people have raised questions about how I obtained my research materials on North Korean visual culture, performance, and media. Part of the reason I faced such inquiries is related to an assumption prevalent both in academia and among the public that, since North Korea is a secretive nation-state, any valuable information must be hidden somewhere in the stacks of a classified, high-security archive. Quite the contrary, a surprising number of archives are wide open to those who are interested in conducting research on North Korea. The National Archives in College Park, Maryland, stores millions of pages of early North Korean documents and publications (dating from 1945 to 1950); the size of this archive alone is already too vast for any single individual scholar to process critically in a lifetime. The Library of Congress holds an impressive collection of North Korean feature films, documentaries, filmed live performances, and books, as well as a near-complete collection of North Korean newspapers, magazines, and journals dating from the late 1950s to the present. The real challenge in researching North Korea emerges not from the dearth of available materials, but from the overabundance of primary sources begging for researchers’ attention. Some readers might wonder whether the aforementioned archives in the United States are arranged according to the ideological principles of the Cold War era, which projects the world through the U.S.-centered perspective. While it is true that the information-gathering activities of the Page 320 →U.S. government regarding its “enemy states” during the Cold War resulted in the richness of the North Korean materials at the National Archives and the Library of Congress, the materials gathered there present a unique perspective on North Korea. As Armstrong has noted: “The United States is probably unique both for its systematic collection of documents from enemy countries and its willingness to open these documents to researchers; the captured Korean document collection may be the most important source of materials for DPRK history outside of North Korea itself and is currently the most accessible.”1Illusive Utopia is one of the few projects that actively use these archives. By drawing upon a rich array of available visual and textual materials from the aforementioned archives, this book not only illuminates the cultural history of North Korea, but also shatters the myth according to which it is impossible to obtain valid materials for North Korean research. Naturally, the media and print publications at the Library of Congress are entirely materials endorsed by the North Korean government, since underground media, if they ever exist, do not see the light of publication in North Korea. Hence, it is difficult to see that these official North Korean materials in any way represent a U.S.-centered worldview. These primary sources, abundant and wide open for public access, are subject to interpretive possibilities. I believe that future researchers will be able to explore deeper and better these valuable resources and correct many inadvertent mistakes I might have made in this book. The following is a list of archives visited: Beijing Guojia tushuguan (Beijing National Library), Beijing Shanghai tushuguan (Shanghai Municipal Library), Shanghai Bukhan jaryo center (North Korean Information Center), Seoul Tongil yeonguwon (Korean Institute for National Unification), Seoul The National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD The Library of Congress, Washington, DC Korean Collection, Harvard Yenching Library, Cambridge, MA

Interviews

I tried my best to interview as many North Korean defectors as possible in an effort to present a wide spectrum of cultural experience in North Korea. Although their availability and willingness to speak about sometimes painful memories posed challenges to my project, I poured in my best efforts Page 321 →to gather information from my interviews sufficient to supplement my archival research. I have conducted sixteen interviews with North Korean defectors of diverse backgrounds, hailing from a wide spectrum of different regions in North Korea and representing different genders, ages, classes, educational backgrounds, and professional training. During my research phase, I also conducted ten interviews with a variety of NGO employees working with North Korean refugees, a former U.S. intelligence officer, and foreign tourists who visited North Korea. I respected the interview subjects’ wish to maintain anonymity, and revealed their identity only if they wished to have me do so. Finally, in order to enhance my understanding of theatricality in the North Korean tourism industry, I traveled to North Korea as a tourist in August 2005. As scholars are not permitted to conduct research freely in North Korea, I had to settle for a short-term tour, which is the only way I could enter that country as a South Korean citizen. Given that North Korean tourism is one of my research interests, even state-sanctioned group tours such as the one I participated in proved to provide a wealth of insight and primary materials for this project. The result of this ethnographic work is best represented in chapter 6, on North Korean tourism and human rights.

Page 322 →Page 323 →Notes INTRODUCTION 1. This parade was recorded by Pyongyang Mongnan Video Productions and was released in 2004. 2. Martin Lewis and Karen Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Meta-geography (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 8. 3. On a more philosophical level, Russia’s ambivalent cultural identity stretched out between East and West clearly affected the formation of modernity in Korea, as was the case in China. First, for Korea, imperial Russia signified the model of a strong empire, which was best epitomized by the leadership of Peter the Great. Second, the Soviet Union provided North Korea with Marxism and Leninism as the founding ideology of the state. The Soviet Union itself became a model of a successful socialist state for North Korea, which served as an attractive alternative to the Western European model of colonizing empires. 4. Judith Stacey, Patriarchy and Socialist Revolution in China (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983), 16. 5. Bruce Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 13. 6. Charles Armstrong, The North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 225. 7. Stacey, Patriarchy and Socialist Revolution, 5. 8. Armstrong, North Korean Revolution, 222. 9. The term modernity in this book is defined as a relational concept. I use it as a notion that represents the opposite of the feudal political and economic system under which Korea lived prior to the twentieth century. Koreans under Japanese colonial rule struggled to liberate the subjugated nation, in the process of which socialism was introduced as one of the ways to arrive at a modernized nation. In this respect, the establishment of the socialist regime was a crucial step in realizing Korea as a modern nation. For North Korea, the term modernity represents the utopian Page 324 →state that is diametrically opposed to Japanese colonialism, since North Korea’s understanding of the colonial period is entirely negative, with no redeeming features. 10. I use the terms nation and state differently depending on their context and function. The term state is used whenever the country’s legislative, administrative, and political functions as an institution are emphasized; the term nation is used whenever a country is establishing or addressing its cultural identities, whether ethnic, racial, linguistic, or historical. In reality, it is difficult to establish a conjunctive notion of a “nation-state” out of distinct notions of nation and state. Even though one can argue that PRC and North Korea were established as modern nation-states, I take the position that these states do not constitute a complete nation, since each can be seen as one nation divided into two states, the Republic of China (Taiwan) and the PRC in the case of the Chinese nation, and the Republic of Korea (South Korea) and North Korea in the case of the Korean nation. 11. For example, the radical-nationalist and revolutionary Kita Ikki (1884–1937) called the Japanese nation “an organic and indivisible great family.” Quoted in Masao Maruyama, Thought and Behaviour in Modern Japanese Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 36. 12. Homi Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990), 293. 13. Bea Lewkowicz, “After the War We Were All Together,” in After the War Was Over, ed. Mark Mazower (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 23. 14. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1991), 6. 15. Ernest Gellner notes that “nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist.” Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 169. 16. Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 15. 17. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto and Windus, 1993), 264. 18. Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 82. 19. Duara notes that “the representation of the women—in body and spirit—[is] a very significant site upon which regimes and elites in China responsible for charting the destiny of the nation have sought to locate the

unchanging essence and moral purity of the nation” (Rescuing History, 368). In understanding Duara’s point, I take into account that women as a privileged site were mostly manipulated by androcentric discourse indicating that women could serve the nation and sacrifice themselves for the nation. Chapter 4 shows that acknowledging the woman question per se was seldom encouraged by the social elite, which speaks for the instrumental nature of the woman question used as a tool to construct the nation. 20. Neil Diamant, Revolutionizing the Family: Politics, Love, and Divorce in Urban and Rural China, 1949–1968 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), 314. 21. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” in Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, ed. Chandra Mohanty (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 56. 22. Susan Mann, “The Male Bond in Chinese History and Culture,” American Historical Review 105 (2000), 601. Page 325 →23. On this issue, Judith Butler notes that “feminism ought to be careful not to idealize certain expressions of gender that, in turn, produce new forms of hierarchy and exclusion.” Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999), viii. 24. Cumings, Korea’s Place, 79. 25. Erik Cornell, North Korea under Communism (New York: Routledge, 2002), 119. 26. First, Marxism became the founding ideology of the Soviet Union, which was far from the developed capitalist state Marx had in mind. Second, when the ideology reached East Asia via the Soviet Union, it was subsumed by a Confucian ideology very different from the original Marxist principles. In this respect, the Soviet Union functioned as a buffer zone in which Western ideology and culture were filtered on their way to East Asia. 27. David Holm, “Folk Art as Propaganda,” in Popular Chinese Literature and Performing Arts in the People’s Republic of China 1949–1979, ed. Bonnie McDougall (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 5. 28. Laura Frost, Sex Drives: Fantasies of Fascism in Literary Modernism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 12. 29. The regime ensures people’s participation by applying a quota system to draft from each inminban (the minimal social unit in North Korea) a certain number of people required for the given performance. 30. Revolutionary operas were produced by the Korean state propaganda bureau from 1971 to 1973 under the guidance of Kim Jong-il. This theatrical genre consists of speech, Western orchestral music, solo and choral singing, dancing, acting, and spectacular set designs. The genre borrows abundantly from the Western opera tradition, simultaneously imbricating these elements with traditional Korean musical motifs and dance sequences. Even though there were other revolutionary plays based on the format of spoken drama, the revolutionary operas became the leading national performance genre sanctioned by the state as accurately depicting the revolutionary struggle and the achievements of North Korea. Revolutionary operas enjoyed great prestige as the vehicle for dramatizing the valor of North Korea’s sacrosanct leaders. The five revolutionary operas include Sea of Blood (Pibada, premiered in 1971), True Daughter of the Party (Dangui chamdoen ttal, premiered in 1971), Flower Girl (Kkotpaneun cheonyeo, premiered in 1972), Oh, Tell the Forest (Milima iyagihara, premiered in 1972), and Song of Geumgang Mountain (Geumgangsanui norae, premiered in 1973). 31. Current circumstances do not allow me to travel freely to North Korean archives; thus selection of theater and film productions dealt with in this book had to be determined by availability. I visited all the archives that had open access where there were substantial collections of North Korean films and filmed stage productions, such as the North Korean Information Center in Seoul, the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, and the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. Please see the appendix, “Notes on Sources.” 32. Thus all of the stage performances were filmed by Pyongyang Mongnan Video Productions. The North Korean Information Center and the Korean Institute for National Unification are two archives where researchers are able to screen revolutionary operas. Unfortunately, I did not have a chance to attend any live performances Page 326 →of these operas. Thus the discussions in this book are based on dramatic texts and the filmed version of stage performances. 33. For example, North Korean textbooks of various levels publish the scripts of revolutionary operas such

as Sea of Blood and True Daughter of the Party and list discussion questions about the true meanings of revolutionary deeds and the sacrifice of dramatic characters. See the junior high school textbook, level 6, Korean Literature (Joseon Munhak) (Pyongyang: Pedagogical Publishing House, 1989), 32–40, and junior high school textbook, level 3, Korean Literature (Joseon Munhak) (Pyongyang: Pedagogical Publishing House, 1990), 23. 34. According to Susan Sontag, “Posters are aggressive because they appear in the context of other posters. The public notice is a free-standing statement, but the form of the poster depends on the fact that many posters exist—competing with (and sometimes reinforcing) each other. Thus posters also presuppose the modern concept of public space—as a theater of persuasion. . . . The poster, as distinct from the public space, implies the creation of urban, public space as an arena of signs: the image- and word-choked facades and surfaces of the great modern cities. The main technical and aesthetic qualities of the poster all follow from these modern redefinitions of the citizen and of public space.” “Posters: Advertisement, Art, Political Artifact, Commodity,” in The Art of Revolution: Castro’s Cuba, 1959–1970, comp. Dugald Stermer (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970), vii. 35. Tracy Davis and Thomas Postlewait, eds., Theatricality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 11. 36. Noted by Jean Améry, who was interrogated by the Nazis for distributing anti-Nazi propaganda. Frost, Sex Drives, 97. 37. Max Horkheimer, Dawn & Decline (New York: Seabury Press, 1978), 209. 38. Richard Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 20–21. 39. John J. MacAloon, Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle: Rehearsals toward a Theory of Cultural Performance (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1984), 243. 40. To this day, some argue that Sin Sang-ok and Choe Eun-hui defected to North Korea voluntarily instead of being abducted. Such belief partly emerges from the fact that Sin Sang-ok’s film career suffered in the 1970s in South Korea after he was blacklisted by President Park Jeong-hui for challenging Park’s policy. Sin’s films were banned and his film studio closed, and this forced him look elsewhere to continue his film career. Although speculation that Sin and Choe defected cannot be proven, it testifies to the contested nature of their residency in North Korea. For more detailed information on their involvement with the North Korean film industry, see Steven Chung, “Sin Sang-ok and Postwar Korean Mass Culture,” Ph.D. diss., University of California at Irvine, 2008, 147–203. 41. Choe hid a small recorder in her handbag and taped the conversation she and her husband had with Kim. Choe wrote in her memoir that she took the risk of tape recording the conversation because she wanted to prove that Kim Jong-il had kidnapped her and her husband and that they had been detained in North Korea against their will. An excerpted transcript of this recording is published in Sin Sang-ok and Choe Eun-hui, Our Escape Has Not Yet Ended (Uri-ui Talchul-eun Kkeunnaji Anatda), part 1 (Seoul: Wolgan Joseonsa, 2001). (In cases such as this, in which a Page 327 →translation is given of a title originally in Korean, subsequent citations are of a shortened title in English.) 42. Ibid., 249. 43. Ibid., 288. 44. Ibid., 274–75. 45. Ibid., 289. 46. It is no wonder that the world media has consistently satirized the Dear Leader’s penchant for film and art, most notably via a mainstream Hollywood movie directed by Trey Parker, Team America (Los Angeles: Paramount Pictures, 2004) and the MADtv (on Fox) Kim Jong-il series. 47. Armstrong, North Korean Revolution, 171. 48. Peter Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 27. 49. Charles Armstrong, “The Origins of North Korean Cinema: Art and Propaganda in the Democratic People’s Republic,” Acta Koreana 5.1 (2002): 2. 50. The clearest example would be inminban, the smallest social unit in North Korea, which consists of five households. Each inminban shares the duty of monitoring its members and providing the necessary labor force for communal projects, such as recruiting participants for street parades during state celebrations. 51. I U-yeong, “Reading North Korean Cinema while Considering its Social Stature,” in Five Things You

Want to Know about North Korean Cinema (Bukhan yeonghwa-e daehae algosipen daseotgaji), ed. Jaehyeong Jeong (Seoul: Jimmundang, 2004), 42. 52. Sin and Choe, Our Escape, 279. 53. Kim Il-sung, Selected Writings of Kim Il-sung (Kim Il-sung seonjip, Pyongyang: JoseonRodongdang chulpansa, 1981), 129. 54. Armstrong, “The Origins,” 13–14. 55. Anonymous, “International Arts News” (“Gukje yesul dansin”), Joseon Yesul, no. 9 (1956): 106–7. 56. Anonymous, “International Arts News,” Joseon Yesul 3 (1957): 128. 57. Ri So-hun, “Italian Film: Past and Present” (“Itaeri yeonghwagye-ui eoje-wa oneul”), Joseon Yeonghwa (North Korean Film) 12 (1964): 46–67. 58. Kim Jong-ho, “Capitalist Filmmaking Trends in the 1920s” (“1920nyeondae jabonjuui yeonghwa joryu”), Joseon Yeonghwa 4 (1966): 43–44. 59. Anonymous, “International Film Festival,” Joseon Yeonghwa 6 (1966): 40. 60. Ibid., 24. 61. For example, see Gang Seok-man, “Marxist-Leninist Theory on National Characteristics in Art,” Joseon Yesul 1 (1967): 34–37. 62. Sin and Choe, Our Escape, 289. 63. Ibid., 254. 64. For instance, in comparing the roles of film directors in opposing ideological systems, Kim Jong-il (The Cinema and Directing [Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1987], 2–3) wrote: “In capitalist society the director is shackled by the reactionary governmental policy of commercializing the cinema and by the capitalists’ money, so that he is a mere worker who obeys the will of the filmmaking industrialists whether he likes it or not. On the other hand, in socialist society the director is an independent and creative artist who is responsible to the Party Page 328 →and the people for the cinema. Therefore, in the socialist system of filmmaking the director is not a mere worker who makes films but the commander, the chief who assumes full responsibility for everything ranging from the film itself to the political and ideological life of those who take part in filmmaking.” 65. Sin and Choe, Our Escape, 261. 66. Ibid., 233. 67. Ibid., 251–52. 68. Ibid., 255. 69. Ibid., 256–57. 70. The term juche is generally translated as “self-reliance” or “independence.” This ideology, known to be Kim Il-sung’s theoretical work, made its first appearance in the 1955 report to the Korean Workers’ Party Central Committee plenum and was adopted in international politics for advocating the ideological independence of Third World nations. On a practical level, the ideology was abused in setting the Soviet Union and the PRC against each other. North Korea used the term in the broadest sense in order to indicate everything genuinely Korean. For more detailed meanings and usages of the term, see Cumings, Korea’s Place, 403–5. Chin O. Chung argues that the major factors that enabled North Korean Communists to increasingly emphasize juche in formulating domestic and foreign politics were (1) the bitter memories of the Korean War; (2) postwar political consolidation; (3) economic progress; (4) the possibility that Soviet and Chinese influence on North Korean decisions had reached a state of equilibrium; and (5) the growing conflict within the international Communist camp. Chung notes that the North Korean regime, however, could not afford to alienate either of its two neighbors by excessive advocacy of juche. Chin O. Chung, Pyongyang between Peking and Moscow (Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1978), 23–24. 71. For instance, in 1984, Sin directed a film entitled Runaway featuring his wife, Choe. Based on the 1920 leftist novel by Choe Seo-hae, the film centers on a male protagonist who joins an underground antiJapanese revolutionary group. The film features a scene in which he blows up a train with dynamite. To enhance a realistic effect, Sin asked the North Korean authorities to give permission to blow up a real functional train because there was no technology to create appropriate special effects to assist the scene. The authorities came back to Sin immediately with a positive answer. As Sin recalled, everything was allowed to him in the name of filmmaking in North Korea, and this was possibly the most cathartic moment in his filmmaking career (Sin and Choe, Our Escape, 339–40). Sin’s comment implies the possibility of reading

subversive pleasure in a South Korean captive director who damages North Korean state property under the disguise of making revolutionary films. This film also introduces graphic allusions to sexual intercourse, which the official North Korean view labeled as a theme essentially tied to the corrupt culture of capitalism. CHAPTER 1 1. Michelle Mills Smith, book review of Theatre and Film: A Comparative Anthology, Theatre Journal 58 (2006): 709. 2. Hwang Jae-gon, “Short History of the National Film Studio” (“Gungnip yeonghwa chwaryeongso-ga georeo-on gil”), Joseon Yesul 9 (1956): 76. Page 329 →3. Armstrong “The Origins,” 13. 4. See Cha Hyeong-sik, “The First Feature Film My Hometown and a Tree” (“Cheot yesuryeonghwa Nae gohyang-gwa hangeuru-ui namu”), Joseon Yesul 8 (1970): 40. 5. Ibid. 6. Hwang, “National Film Studio,” 76. 7. Sin and Choe also pointed out the dysfunctional inertia of both institutions: “Mosfilm with its 3,000 staff members was producing only twenty feature films and thirty TV dramas,” whereas “the North Korean Film Studio, with its 1,800 staff members, produced only ten films per year.” See Sin and Choe, Our Escape, 323 and 285 respectively. 8. The relationship between North Korea and the Soviet Union started to deteriorate with Khrushchev’s deStalinization in 1957, which threatened the idolization of Kim Il-sung, who modeled his personality cult on that of Stalin. 9. For example, the author noted that the first documentary to be produced in North Korea was titled North Joseon (Buk joseon), for which a Soviet director, Nevrisky, was invited to monitor the production. In 1949, another director, Setkina, and a cinematographer, Beliakov, visited North Korea to assist in the production of a documentary film that commemorated the fifth anniversary of the Korean liberation from Japan. Jeong Jun-chae, “The Soviet Influence on Our Cinema,” Joseon Yesul 11 (1957): 7–9. 10. Armstrong, “The Origins,” 16. 11. Sin and Choe, Our Escape, 290. 12. Anonymous, “Hopeful New Generation: The Sixth Graduation Ceremony of the PITC,” Joseon Yesul 8 (1965): 10. 13. Rim Chun-yeong, “Reminiscence of the Days of Creating Revolutionary Operas,”Joseon Yesul 9 (1988): 62. 14. Choe Hae-ok, “Memories of Faith and Love,” Joseon Yesul 11 (1989): 41. 15. Ibid. 16. Park Min-jeong, “From Agitation and Propaganda to Realism” (“Seonjeon, seondong-eseo realismeuro”), in Jeong, Five Things, 236–37. 17. Sin and Choe, Our Escape, 287. 18. Ibid., 258. 19. Sin Film Studio joined the existing two film studios, which were in charge of producing all North Korean films up to that point; Joseon Art Film Studio was in charge of producing all feature films, whereas 2.28 Film Studio specialized in military movies. 20. Sin and Choe, Our Escape, 267–68. 21. Ibid., 339–40. 22. The film had a theatrical release in Japan but was not a commercial success. 23. Susan Sontag, “Theater and Film,” Tulane Drama Review 11.1 (1966): 25. 24. Annabelle Melzer, “Best Betrayal: The Documentation of Performance on Video and Film, Part One,” NTQ 42 (1995): 156. 25. Russian formalist Boris Ejxenbaum’s [Eikhenbaum] term film phrase indicates a basic unit in the linkage of shots, but it speaks to the problem of style and motivation. For example, “a close-up functions as a stylistic accent, a medium shot as an adverb of time and space, and phrases altering medium close-ups and close-ups produce laconic expressions” (Ejxenbaum, “Problems of Cinema Stylistics,” in Russian Page 330

→Formalist Film Theory, ed. Herbert Eagle (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981), 72. 26. Philip Auslander, Liveness (London: Routeledge, 1999), 11. 27. Ibid., 10–11. 28. For more details on the development of Soviet films in the 1940s, see Peter Kenez’s chapter on World War II films (Cinema and Soviet Society, 186–206), which were used to appeal to the patriotic sentiments of the Soviet people. 29. Andre Bazin, “Theater and Cinema,” in Theater and Film: A Comparative Anthology, ed. Robert Knopf (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 130. 30. Eric Bentley, “Realism and the Cinema,” in Knopf, Theater and Film, 103. 31. This article deserves our attention in that it focuses on the technical aspects of both genres rather than emphasizing the ideological dimensions, which has been a prevalent argument since the mid-1960s in the North Korean film world. This reflects how the North Korean art world devolved from more rigorous open debate about theoretical issues to the monolithic practice of building the personal cult of Kim Il-sung in the mid-1960s. Anonymous, “Film (Scenario) and Theater (Dramatic Art),” Joseon Yesul 2 (1959): 45–52. 32. Ibid., 50. 33. Ibid., 47. 34. Ibid., 49. 35. Han Hyeong-won, “Special Features of Film Scenario and Questions for Discussion,” Geungmunhak 1 (1960): 142. 36. Ibid., 134. 37. Ibid., 135. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid., 136. 40. Ibid., 141. 41. Ibid., 136. 42. Han Seol-ya, “Proud Current State and the Future of Mass Art,” Sseokeurwon 1 (1958), 10. 43. Han, “Special Features,” 139. 44. If images of similar colors are arranged together it will make the transition between disparate images easier, and “sound should not be a perfunctory accompaniment to the images and should be organically blended to the totality of cinematic art.” Ibid., 142. 45. Bentley, “Realism and the Cinema,” 107. 46. According to Keith Howard, the reason socialist realism gained currency in North Korea is related to the fact that socialist realism “echoed the Confucian view that the arts, in particular music, embody the ethical code of a society,” that politics, ethics, and morality share the same objective and function. “Juche and Culture: What’s New?” in North Korea in the New World Order, ed. Hazel Smith, Chris Rhodes, and Diana Pritchard (London: Macmillan, 1996), 172. 47. Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). 48. Kim Ha-yeon, “Let Us Become Fighters First” (“Meonjeo tusa-ga doeja”), Joseon Yeongwha 1(1965), 7. 49. Kim Jong-il, The Character and the Actor (Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1987), 3. Page 331 →50. Ayako Kano, Acting Like a Woman in Modern Japan (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 57. 51. Commemorating the tenth anniversary of the founding of the North Korean state, the National Arts Festival was large in scale, featuring 248 plays by 1,491 participants. 52. Han, “Proud Current State,” 8–9. 53. Ibid. 54. Hwang Seok-yeong, “Post-resistance Literature,” Changjak-gua Bipyeong, Winter 1988, quoted in I Hyoin, Pride and Reverie of Our Cinema (Uri yeonghwa-ui oman-gwa mongsang) (Seoul: Mingeul, 1994), 290. 55. Bentley, “Realism and the Cinema,” 108. 56. Ibid., 5. 57. Ibid., 15. 58. Kim Jong-il, On Art of Cinema (Pyongyang: Munhwa yesul jonghap chulpansa, 1973), 273.

59. Sin and Choe, Our Escape, 332. 60. http://www.gluckman.com/NKfilm.html. 61. Rim, “Reminiscence of the Days,” 62. 62. Choe, “Memories of Faith and Love,” 41. 63. Ibid., 42. 64. Paul Friedland’s Political Actors: Representing Bodies and Theatricality in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 196. 65. Ibid., 167. 66. Choe Mansun, “Let Us Produce More One Act Plays Centering on the Realistic Themes of Socialist Patriotism” (“Sahoejuuijeok aegukjuui hyeonsiljuje-ui danmakgeuk-eul deo mani changjohaja”), Joseon Yesul 6 (1970): 45. 67. Park Hye-ok and Kim Gwang-hyeon, “Lofty Images through Deep Contemplation!” Geungmunhak 7 (1963): 126–30. 68. Anonymous, “Filmmakers Helping the Countryside: From the Documentary Film Studio” (“Nongchoneul domneun yeonghwaindeul”), Joseon Yeonghwa 2 (1966): 9. 69. Han Sang-su, “Arena for Accusing American Imperialism: Filmmakers Visit Kim Il-sung University,” Joseon Yesul 4 (1967): 21. 70. Jane Feuer, The Hollywood Musical (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 3. 71. Ri Sinja, “We Wish You Creative Success in the New Year: A Letter Sent to the Dear Comrades of the Art Film Studio” (“Aeha-eui changjak seonggwa-reul chugwonhamnida: chinaehaneun yesulyeonghwa chwaryeongso dongjideurege”), Joseon Yeongwha 1 (1965): 9. 72. Bae Geung-jae, “It Is Necessary to Have Farmworkers’ Dignity” (“Nongminjeok pumgyeok-i yogudoenda”), Joseon Yeonghwa 11(1960): 16. 73. Jeong Seung-won, “I Will Live Like a Hero on Stage,” Joseon Yesul 6 (1990):43. 74. Park Tae-yeong, “Audience Opinions on Films and Stage Art,” Joseon Yesul 5 (1957): 131. 75.Sseokeurwon 9 (1959): 72. 76. Han, “Proud Current State,” 16–17. 77. Casting a sideways glance, I note that there was a parallel process in the Page 332 →PRC under Maoist rule. According to testimonies by some actors: “Watching movies was part of the teaching curriculum. All of the students lined up and went together to the theater. After each movie our teacher would lead a class discussion, and then we were required to write an essay about what we had learned from the movie. Heroes and heroines in the pictures were our role models, and revolutionary movies were a guide to a revolutionary life.” Xueping Zhong, Wang Zheng, and Bai Di, eds., Some of Us: Chinese Women Growing Up in the Mao Era (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 33. 78. Sin and Choe, Our Escape, 295. 79. A phone interview with an anonymous North Koran defector, a male in his fifties who lived in a small North Korea–China border town for over forty years, took place on November 14, 2008. 80. Armstrong, North Korean Revolution, 213. 81. Chris Springer, Pyongyang: The Hidden History of the North Korean Capital (Budapest: Entente Bt., 2003), 37. 82. Kim Jong-il noted so in a private conversation with Konstantin Pulikovsky, a special envoy sent by the former Russian president Vladimir Putin in order to host the North Korean leader, who traveled to Russia on the trans-Siberian railroad from July 26 through August 18, 2001. Konstantin B. Pulikovsky, Oriental Express (Dongbang teukgeup yeolcha), trans. Seong Jonghwan (Seoul: Jungsim, 2003), 30. CHAPTER 2 Rodong Shinmun, January 29, 1999), 1. 1. The term feudal past is used in order to distinguish it from the immediate past when, according to the official North Korean historiography, Kim Il-sung began his revolutionary activities with self-imposed exile.

2. The script of this musical was published in Joseon Yesul 9 (1956): 76–90. 3. Martin Dimitrov, a Dartmouth political science professor who grew up in Bulgaria in the 1980s, recalls that Hong Gil-dong was one of the most popular films for his generation. 4. Hong Gil-dong has been known as a fictional invention of the writer Heo Gyun, but recently, scholars from both South Korea and Japan, including Seol Seolgyeong and Gadena Shodoku, who conducted extensive research at the Japanese Yaeyama Archive in Okinawa, have concluded that Gil-dong was an actual historical figure. 5. The chronicle records that Rim Kkeok-jeong was captured and executed in 1562. 6. This five-installment series was restructured into ten installments when the South Korean TV station, the Korea Broadcasting System, aired the film in 1998. 7. As in Hong Gil-dong and The Story of Rim Kkeok-jeong, the Japanese occupy a perennial position as invaders in this film, whereas the real On-dal died fighting the Chinese on the northern front. 8. I Gi-dong, “The Development of North Korean Historiography” (“Bukhan yeoksahak-ui jeongae gwajeong”), in Civic Lectures on Korean History (Han-guksa simingangjwa), ed. I Gi-baek, vol. 21 (Seoul: Iljogak, 1997), 39. Page 333 →9. In fact, the majority of South Korean historians believe that the North Korean discovery of Dangun’s tomb cannot be proven authentic. Do Myeon-hoe et al., North Korea’s History Making (Bukhanui yeoksa mandeulgi) (Seoul: Pureun Yeoksa, 2003), 95–96. 10. “Great Leader Comrade Kim Il-sung Inspected the Newly Renovated King Dongmyeong’s Tomb” (“Widaehan suryeong Kim Il-sung dongji-kkeseo saero gaegeondoen Dongmyeong wangneung-eul bosiyeotda”), Joseon Yesul 7 (1993): 4. 11. Ibid., 5. 12. Do et al., North Korea’s History Making, 105. 13. Details from the mural paintings at King Dongmyeong’s tomb are featured in Joseon Yesul 9 (1993): 89. 14. Kim Jin-guk, “The Story of On-dal, a Novel from an Early Medieval Period of Our Nation” (“Urinara jungse chogi soseol On-daljeon”), Cheongnyeon munhak (Youth Literature) 2 (2005): 58. 15. The failure of the Joseon dynasty rulers is well imagined in the 1984 film Special Envoy Who Never Returned. The first film to be directed by Sin Sang-ok in North Korea, the story centers on I Jun, who was dispatched as a special envoy by the Joseon king Gojong to the Hague in 1907 in order to protest Japanese imperial ambitions in Korea. 16. Although a historical figure, King Dongmyeong is also introduced as a semilegendary leader born of a celestial king and an ordinary woman, thus positioned in the liminal zone between reality and imagination. The other kings in all three films are similarly situated, but what distinguishes them from a mythic king is that they lack the prescient vision of the people’s suffering. 17.Joseon Yesul 4 (1970): 7. 18. This aspect will be dealt with in detail in chapter 2. 19. Carol Medlicott, “Symbol and Sovereignty in North Korea,” SAIS Review 25.2 (2005): 71. 20. Anonymous, “Deeply Instilling the Revolutionary Spirit of Bakedu Mountain” (“Baekdu-ui hyeongmyeong jeongsin gipi simeojusiyeo”), Joseon Nyeoseong (North Korean Women) 1 (1983): 29. 21. Yun Mi-ryang, North Korea’s Policy toward Women (Bukhan-ui yeoseong jeongchaek) (Seoul: Hanul, 1991), 149. 22. The fact that North Korean media keep introducing eulogies of its leaders written by foreigners, no matter how obscure they may be, indicates that North Korea is invested in promoting an international profile of its leaders and creating an impression among its people that the deification of the Kim leaders was convincing to the entire world. 23. Lanta Gupta, “Baekdu Mountain” (“Baekdusan”), Joseon Yesul 8 (1992): 12. The journal introduces the poet as a Ph.D. from Delhi University, India. 24. Mario Luna, “Baekdu Mountain and Jong-il Peak” (“Baekdusan-gwa Jongilbong”), Joseon Yesul 6 (1993): 6. 25. Aleksandr Brezhnev, “Jong-il Peak” (“Jongilbong”), Cheongnyeon Munhak 2 (2006): 25. 26. Lyrics by Sin Eun-ho and music by Eom Hajin, “Kim Jong-il Is Our Fate” (“Kim Jong-il-eun uri-ui unmyeong”), Joseon Yesul 9 (1993), inside of the front cover. Page 334 →27. Sin Go-seong, “For the Progress of Dramatic Art,” Geungmunhak 3 (1960): 150.

28. Chu Min, “Revolutionary Tradition in North Korean Art Films” (“Joseon yeonghwayesul-ui hyeongmyeongjeok jeontong”), Joseon Yesul 9 (1956): 46. 29. See Cha, “The First Feature,” 41. 30. Armstrong, “The Origins,” 17. 31. Ibid., 19. 32. Central Committee of the Joseon Filmmakers’ Alliance, “How an Epic Poem Transformed into Film: On the Art Film Baekdu Mountain” (“Seolhwasirosseo saeroeun yeonghwa hyeongsik-eul gaecheokhan bonbogi—Joseon jangpyeonyeonghwa Baekdusan jeon, hupyeon-e daehayeo”), Joseon Yesul 11 (1980): 40. 33. Ibid., 41. 34. Approximately 240 miles. 35. Kim Yong with Kim Suk-Young, Long Road Home: Testimony of a North Korean Camp Survivor (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 33. 36. Ian Buruma, “Following the Great Leader,” New Yorker, September 19, 1994, 68. In fact, it is not only Buruma who noticed the theatrical nature of the city: According to Korean film expert Johannes Schonherr, even the capital Pyongyang has been developed with films in mind. “It looks like a movie set,” Mr Schonherr said. “It’s not a capital built for living, it’s a capital which is built to show off—something that you can film and transmit to the rest of the country via movies and television.” “North Korean Movies’ Propaganda Role,” BBC News, August 18, 2003. 37. Peter Atkins eloquently puts it this way: “The consumers of the North Korean landscape are obedient and willing participants, yet they live in a ‘framed’ space in which everyone is an outsider.” “A Seance with the Living: The Intelligibility of the North Korean Landscape,” in Smith, Rhodes, and Pritchard, New World Order, 205. 38. In Atkins’s view, “Gigantic and oppressive monumentality is hardly new in the socialist world but it has been refined and personalized to an extraordinary extent in the DPRK” (ibid., 203). 39. According to Jan Wong, a Chinese-Canadian who spent years in China during the Cultural Revolution, “The Chinese had mostly stopped wearing Mao badges by 1972.” Red China Blues (New York: Doubleday, 1996), 67. In contrast, the North Koreans still wear a discreet Kim badge just above their hearts. 40. These portraits are treated as sacrosanct objects of worship, and a minor insult inflicted on them would be sufficient grounds for imprisonment. For example, the testimonial of a North Korean defector, An Hyeok, who was arrested and imprisoned in a North Korean labor camp for having crossed the border between North Korea and China out of curiosity, confirms this practice. While An was at a detention center, there were “prisoners detained for spilling ink on or failing to adequately dust photographs of Kim Il-sung, charges even the prison guards regarded as lacking seriousness.” David Hawk, The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea’s Prison Camps (Washington, DC: US Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, 2003), 31. 41. An anonymous article gives the following information on the film’s credits: scenario by O Jun-seo, direction by Cheon Sang-wol, camera by Ri Myeong-je. Page 335 →“List of Major North Korean Documentary Films” (“Joseon girok yeonghwa juyo mongnok”), Joseon Yeonghwa 7 (1966): 43. 42. Ibid. 43. Kim Ju-myeong and Seo In-gi, “My Pyongyang” (“Na-ui Pyongyang”), Geungmunhak 9 (March 1963): 36–87. 44. There are two productions —True Daughter of the Party and Song of Mountain Geumgang—among the five revolutionary operas produced from 1971 to 1973 that stage Pyongyang and theater as mirror images of each other, reflecting the sacrosanct iconography of Kim Il-sung. 45. Henri Lefèbvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 142–43. 46. Rodong Sinmun, January 29, 1999, 1. 47. Pedagogical Committee, Korean Literature: Junior High School Level 3 (Gugeo godeung junghakgyo 3) (Pyongyang: Gyoyukdoseo chulpansa, 1995), 55. 48. Mongnan Video (Pyongyang, 2002). 49. In the aftermath of World War II, Korea was partitioned along the Thirty-eighth parallel. The division actually occurred “on the evening of August 10, 1945, when an all-night meeting was convened in the Executive Office Building next to the White House [which was] to decide what to do about accepting the

impending Japanese surrender in Korea and elsewhere in Asia. Around midnight two young officers were sent into an adjoining room to carve out a U.S. occupation zone in Korea. Working in haste and under great pressure, and using a National Geographic map for reference, they proposed that U.S. troops occupy the area south of the thirty-eighth parallel, which was approximately halfway up the peninsula and north of the capital city of Seoul, and that Soviet troops occupy the area north of the parallel.” Don Oberdorfer, The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (New York: Perseus Books, 1997), 6. 50. In reality, Kim Gu was the one leader who attempted to transcend the ideological divide between North and South Korea, each represented by the Communist and capitalist occupying forces, and create a unified government. This is the primary reason why Kim Gu decided to visit North Korea in the first place, in order to persuade Kim Il-sung to realize the importance of establishing a unified government. However, Kim Gu returned to South Korea having failed to persuade Kim Il-sung, who persistently argued for only one version of unified Korea as a socialist state. The North Korean documentary captures Kim Gu’s visit to North Korea. NARA Record Group 242. 51. Gang Yeong-hui, ed., Twentieth-Century Revolutionary Operas (20 segi hyeongmyeong gageuk) (Pyongyang: Pedagogical Press, 1975), 180. 52. Ibid., 177. 53. I did not have a chance to see the live stage version of this production, which did not tour abroad. Therefore I cannot comment on how the live theater version stages this reverie sequence without involving the camera movement directing the viewer’s gaze. 54. The scenario of this film appeared in Kim and Seo, “My Pyongyang,” but it is not clear whether it has been made into a film. 55. Kim and Seo, “My Pyongyang,” 36. Page 336 →56. Ibid., 44. 57. Ibid., 50. 58. Ibid., 53. 59. Ibid., 57. 60. A. Schinz, and E. Dege, “Pyongyang—Ancient and Modern—the Capital of North Korea,” GeoJournal 22.1 (1990): 21. 61. Atkins, “Seance with the Living,” 198. 62. Bruce Cumings, North Korea: Another Country (New York: New Press, 2004), 30. 63. There are only a handful of traditional architectural sites remaining in Pyongyang as a result of heavy bombing of the city during the Korean War. Among the remaining historical sites are Botong Gate, Eulmil Pavilion, Yeongwang Pavilion, and Chilseong Gate. For a brief background history of these sites, see Springer, Pyongyang. 64. Atkins, “Seance with the Living,” 198. 65. According to Kongdan Oh and Ralph Hassig, the leaders of North Korea personally supervised the building of Pyongyang: “The city’s reconstruction was supervised by the two Kims, with the younger Kim taking a particular interest in city planning and architecture. The Kims put into the city what they wanted and kept out what they did not want. It is said that Kim Jong-Il would look out over the city and order that some building be put up at a certain location because the view was incomplete.” Kongdan Oh and Ralph C. Hassig, North Korea through the Looking Glass (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2002), 128. 66. Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 133. 67. Han O-ryeol, “Along the West Coastline,” Korea Today, July 1981, 43. 68. James Duncan, The City as Text: The Politics of Landscape Interpretation in the Kandyan Kingdom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 19. 69. Kim Il-sung, Works, vol. 29 (Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1987), 172. 70. Schinz and Dege, “Pyongyang—Ancient and Modern,” 26. 71. Choe Won-geun, lyrics, and Kim Jun-do, composition, “For the Workers Constructing Pyongyang” (“Pyongyang geonseoljadeul apeuro”), Sseokeulwon 9 (1958): 47. 72. Kim Jong-il, “Questions on Restructuring Pyongyang into a Contemporary Cultural City” (March 30, 1986), in Selected Writings of Kim Jong-il, vol. 8 (Pyongyang: Joseon Rodongdang chulpansa, 1998), 358. 73. Recently, European filmmakers have produced several documentaries about the North Korean mass

games and parades. Peter Tetteroo’s Welcome to North Korea (produced for KRO television, 2001) shows clips of North Korean children mobilized under the rain to practice for mass parades. This clip was surreptitiously captured by the filmmaker without the North Korean guides’ knowledge, whereas most of other scenes in the documentary are carefully scripted and supervised by the North Korean hosts. Daniel Gordon’s documentary The Game of Their Lives (VeryMuchSo Productions, 2003) shows a short clip of the intensive mobilization of manpower that is needed to stage a single mass game. A more recent documentary by Gordon, The State of Mind (VeryMuchSo Productions, 2004), focuses exclusively on Page 337 →two teenage North Korean girls who undergo demanding daily training sessions to get prepared for a single day’s mass game. 74. See Marvin Carlson, Places of Performance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 20. 75. Pyongyang’s status as a place for pageantry not only in contemporary times, but also in ancient times, has been testified to by numerous sources: “During the Goguryeo dynasty around the 380s, dance music also flourished in Pyongyang. We can witness numerous types of dance and musical instruments in Goguryeo mural paintings. Judging from the pose assumed by human bodies, we can assume that they express certain types of movement as in a theatrical dance sequence. There were also all sorts of musical instruments . . . when the orchestra procession marched on the streets of Pyongyang, the entire world roared according to its tunes.” Anonymous, “Pyongyang Celebrating Its 1530th Anniversary,” Joseon Yesul 9 (1957): 117. 76. In Record Group 242 at the National Archives Record Administration in College Park, Maryland, there are photos of parades in the early stages of the North Korea government, evidencing the regime’s investment and endorsement of that performance form. A couple of examples of early North Korean parade photos appear in Armstrong, North Korean Revolution, 212. 77. In 1971, the government established a special committee on developing mass games and parades. Ever since then, the committee has been developing two large-scale performances annually, staged for occasions of national celebration, such as the birthdays of the state leaders and the national holiday commemorating the foundation of North Korea. 78. According to Andrei Lankov, the North Korean food distribution system came to a halt in 1994–95 in the countryside and in 1996 in urban areas. “North Korea Hungry for Control,” Asia Times, September 10, 2005. 79. For detailed testimonials on cannibalism in the late 1990s in North Korea, see Joeun Beotdeul, ed., We Wish to Live like Human Beings (Saramdapge salgosipso) (Seoul: Jeongto, 1999), 65–67. 80. For further comment on the Stalinist regime’s concern about the way gulags may appear to the outside world, see Applebaum, preface to The Hidden Gulag, 8–9. 81. I use the term theatrical in the sense of one of the meanings of “theatricality” pointed out by Tracy Davis and Thomas Postlewait. They write: “Just as theatricality has been used to describe the gap between reality and its representation—a concept for which there is a perfectly good and very specific term, mimesis—it has also been used to describe the ‘heightened’ states when everyday reality is exceeded by its representation” (Theatricality, 6). 82. Oh and Hassig, North Korea through the Looking Glass, 128. 83. This is based on a conversation with Carol Medlicott, a former FBI research analyst and a specialist in North Korean geography. 84. Jang Se-hun, “The Process of Urbanization of Provincial Cities through the Study of the Transformation of Spatial Structure,” in Formation and Development of North Korean Cities: Cheongjin, Sinuiju, and Haesan, ed. Choe Wan-gyu (Seoul: Hanul Academy, 2004), 23. 85. The interview with this anonymous former North Korean army officer was conducted on August 9, 2005, in Seoul. Page 338 →86. The interview with this anonymous former North Korean musician and propaganda squad member was conducted on August 30, 2005, in Seoul. 87. Kang Cheol-hwan and Pierre Rigoulot, The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 52. 88. Ibid., 134. 89. Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theater: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982), 93.

90. Steven Gregory and Daniel Timerman, “Rituals of the Modern State: The Case of Torture in Argentina,” Dialectical Anthropology 2.1 (1986): 69. 91. Ibid. 92. For more information on this park, see http://www.szoborpark.hu/en/en_museum_faq.php. 93. Quoted in Bejamin Forest and Juliet Johnson, “Unraveling the Threads of History: Soviet-Era Monuments and Post-Soviet National Identity in Moscow,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 92 (2002): 526. 94. Katerina Clark, “The City versus the Countryside in Soviet Peasant Literature,” in Bolshevik Culture, ed. Abbott Gleason, Peter Kenez, and Richard Stites (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 176. 95. Armstrong, North Korean Revolution, 64–65. 96. The world cheollima literally means “a horse that can travel thousands of miles,” and is based on the legend of the flying horse traveling at the speed of light. The word thus symbolically stands for the lightning speed at which North Korean production should grow. 97. According to Balázs Szalontai, “The agricultural cooperative of Gongcheong Village went so far as to ‘pledge’ to produce 41 metric tons of rice and 10.8 metric tons of corn in 1959. Given that the village had harvested 4.5 metric tons of rice and 2.3 metric tones of corn per hectare in 1957, one wonders how the coop leaders intended to keep this promise.” Kim Il Sung in the Khrushchev Era: Soviet-DPRK Relations and the Roots of North Korean Despotism, 1953–1964 (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 122. 98. Ibid. 99. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford :Oxford University Press, 1973), 2. 100. Szalontai, 123. 101. Victoria E. Bonnell, “The Peasant Woman in Stalinist Political Art of the 1930s,” American Historical Review 98 (1993): 67. 102. As Szalontai pointed out: “Local productions of consumer goods enabled the government to increase investments in centrally managed heavy industry. . . . The provinces shouldered the burden of local industrialization. Instead of supporting them Pyongyang skimmed off their revenues” (Kim Il Sung, 123). 103. As Szalontai argues, “North Korean nationalism indeed became more intense than ever during the cheollima movement” (ibid., 131). 104. Howard, “Juche and Culture,” 175. 105. Armstrong, “The Origins,” 17. 106. The failure of the state-engineered food distribution system, coupled with natural disasters in 1994–95, devastated the countryside more than the urban areas. Page 339 →Stephen Haggard and Marcus Noland’s study tells us that this apocalyptic event, claiming up to one million lives, “ranks as one of the most destructive of the twentieth century.” Famine in North Korea: Markets, Aid, and Reform (New York: Columbia University. Press, 2007), 209. Famine as North Korea’s social crisis will be dealt at length in chapter 6. 107. It is not entirely clear when this journal was first published or stopped publishing. The Library of Congress has issues from 1956 to 1961. 108. Jang Se-geon, The Water of Life Flows (Saengmyeongsu-neun heureunda), Sseokeulwon 12 (1958): 8–21. 109. Literary Circle Members of the Naeok Village Collective Farm, Northern Pyeongan Province, News from Ongnyu Riverside (Ongnyu gangbyeon-eseo on sosik), Sseokeulwon 8 (1959): 19. 110. Ibid., 23. 111. This process is similar to what happened in Soviet propaganda of the 1930s. Unlike the voluptuous female figures that often became associated with peasant women in the 1920s, Bonnell argues, the ideal female type changed in the following decade: “Collectivization posters of the early 1930s seldom accentuate the fecundity of peasant women (signified by large bosoms and corpulence) or portrayed female peasants with their children. Most of the imagery depicted peasant women engaged in agricultural labor. The attributes of youth, agility and fitness were directly linked to the labor function. . . . The image of the peasant woman focused on production, not reproduction.” (“Peasant Woman,” 63). 112.True Daughter of the Party also features village life in its production, but the setting is distinctively marked as a South Korean village during the Korean War that should be liberated from the American

imperialists and their South Korean collaborators. 113. Anonymous Collective Works, Evergreen Pine Tree (Pureun sonamu), Joseon Yesul 7 (1970): 16–43. 114. This play is known to have been written in reflection of Kim Il-sung’s instruction in November 1968 to make arts and literature serve the party line, as is mentioned in Jang Yeong-gu, “The Description of Revolutionary Process in the Play Red Agitator” (“Yeongeuk bulgeun seondongja-eseoui nongmindeul-ui hyeongmyeong gwajeong myosa”), Joseon Yesul 3 (1970): 85. 115. Ibid., 89. 116. Jeon Pyeong-chang, Cuckoo Bird Sings (Ppeokkuksae-ga unda), Joseon Yesul 1 (1986): 69. 117. Ibid., 73. 118. Ibid., 75. 119. Ibid., 69. 120. Ibid. 121. According to Sin, such a pairing of a blind socialist hero and a beautiful girl actually took place as a result of glorifying invalid soldiers. He recalls that in 1983, a twenty-one-year-old female worker of the East Pyongyang Textile Factory, Ri Hye-ryeon, was inspired by the heroine of the film Wolmido who gladly sacrifices her life for the homeland. Wishing to emulate the selfless act of the film character, she volunteered to marry a blind man who lost his vision in an army accident. When the blind man thoughtfully refused to “make a young woman unhappy,” she brought the Page 340 →matter to a party committee and upon everyone’s blessing, they happily married in front of a gigantic statue of Kim Il-sung (Sin and Choe, Our Escape, 295). 122.Joseon Yesul 6 (1990): 20. 123. Ibid., 23. 124. Interview with Kim Yong, September 14, 2005, Santa Barbara, CA. 125. Ra, 49. 126. Ri Jeong-u, Girl from Pyongyang (Pyeongyang-eseo on cheonyeo), Joseon Yesul 11 (1993): 48. 127. Ibid., 49. 128. Ibid. 129. Ibid., 48. 130. Han Yeong-sun, “Girl From Pyongyang and a Veteran Soldier Bachaelor” (“Pyongyang cheonyeo-wa jedaegunin chonggak”), Cheongnyeon Munhak (Youth Literature) 5 (2004): 9. CHAPTER 3 1. Interview with Kim Yong, September 14, 2005, Santa Barbara, CA. 2. Interview with Kim Dong-hun, August 20, 2005, Seongnam, South Korea. 3. Bradley Martin, Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (New York: St. Martin Press, 2004), 5. 4. One of the most conspicuous measures taken by the Japanese colonial rulers, intended to eradicate Koreanness, occurred in 1938, enforcing the conversion of Korean family names into Japanese versions and prohibiting the use of Korean in school education. 5. In 1941, the Society for the Study of Korean, an organization that for more than twenty years had guided research on the language and promoted its standardization, was suddenly judged in violation of the Peace Preservation Laws of the Japanese colonial government in Korea. Its leading members were arrested and remained in prison until Japan’s defeat. Andre Schmid, Korea between Empires, 1895–1919 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 257–58. 6. Ibid., 142. 7. For a detailed account of Korean diaspora communities during Japanese colonialism, see ibid., 224–52. 8. For Kim Il-sung’s activities in Manchuria under the Japanese colonial rule, see Hyun Ok Park, Two Dreams in One Bed: Empire, Social Life, and the Origins of the North Korean Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 229. 9. Dae-Sook Suh, Kim Il Sung: The North Korean Leader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 12.

10. Even though the majority of the myth concerning Kim was fabricated by later propagandists, some of his anti-Japanese resistance activities may be seen through the lenses of unimpeachable documentation. One of the rare studies by two Japanese Kwangtung Army colonels in 1951, men who tracked Kim in Manchuria, depicted Kim Il-sung as “the most famous” resister of the Korean War: “Kim Il Sung was particularly popular among the Koreans in Manchuria. It is said that there were many Koreans who praised him as a Korean hero and gave him, secretly, both spiritual and material support” (Cumings, Korea’s Place, 161). Page 341 →11. Suh, Kim Il Sung, 11. 12. Ibid., 13. 13. Cornell, North Korea under Communism, 120. 14. Armstrong, North Korean Revolution, 225. 15. According to Chung, the five factions are “the indigenous nationalists (non-communists); the domestic communists; the Yan’an group from China; the returnees from the USSR; Kim Il-sung’s personal followers” (Pyongyang, 5). 16. Suh notes the indication of Kim Il-sung’s consolidation of individual power: “On February 8, 1958, in commemoration of the tenth anniversary of the founding of the Korean People’s Army, Kim said for the first time that the People’s Army was the successor of the tradition of anti-Japanese armed struggle of his partisans in Manchuria. He noted that all Korean Nationalist and Communist armed struggle had failed except that of his partisans” (Kim Il Sung, 154). 17. Anonymous, “The Story That He Told Us All Night Long” (“Bam-eul balkyeo deullyeojusin iyagi”), Joseon Yesul 9 (1970): 36–40. 18. Quoted in Sheila Miyoshi Jager, “Students and the Redemption of History,” in Narratives of Nation Building in Korea: A Genealogy of Patriotism (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2003), 115. 19. Ibid. 20. Cornell, North Korea under Communism, 123–24. 21. Quoted in Sin and Choe, Our Escape, 55. 22. One noticeable feature of this painting is the overwhelming number of female worshipers, which accentuates Kim Il-sung’s masculinity. Visually positioning Kim as the central male figure endows him with the state fatherhood, which will be discussed later in this chapter. 23. Seo Yeon-ho and I Gang-ryeol, Performing Art of North Korea (Bukhan-ui Yesul) (Seoul: Goryeowon, 1989), 41. 24. In the PRC, the head of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), Lin Biao, was promoted as Mao’s successor until he was purged by Mao in 1973. Even though Lin and Mao appeared in public as a ruler and his successor, as on the front page of Renmin ribao on October 1, 1966, their relationship lacked the paternal-filial bonding that held between Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. 25. Korean Association of Literary Criticism (KALC), Forty Years of North Korean Opera and Theatre (Seoul: Sinwon, 1990), 20–22. 26. Kim, Long Road Home, 20. 27. A phone interview with an anonymous defector (male, midfifties), November 14, 2008. 28. Gang, Twentieth-Century Revolutionary Operas, 5. 29. Ibid., 65. 30. Ibid., 86. 31. Ibid., 97. 32. Ibid., 101. 33. Ibid., 111. 34. Ibid., 180. 35. The appropriation of solar symbolism to establish a powerful image of leadership is not endemic to the leadership of the PRC and North Korea. The sun and its light as symbols of political power present striking similarities across times and Page 342 →places. For example, Nazi Germany appropriated the swastika, which is one of the variants of the solar symbol. The Japanese empire was the most aggressive in fabricating a connection between itself and the rising sun, as can be seen in the Japanese national flag. For a more detailed account of how human history adapted solar symbolism, see James Frazer, The Golden Bough (New York: Collier Books, 1963), 106.

36. Gang, Twentieth-Century Revolutionary Operas, 168. 37. KALC, Forty Years, 163. 38. Gang, Twentieth-Century Revolutionary Operas, 75. The worship of the Great Leader Kim Il-sung as the solar hero of the nation was not limited to Kim alone, but expanded to his biological family members. According to Erik Cornell’s account on North Korea’s propaganda films, Kim’s mother, Gang Ban-seok, was also portrayed as the solar heroine: “I particularly remember a magnificent scene: as the music of the heavens gradually grew to a crescendo, a figure could be seen coming out of the forest, lit up from behind by the rays of the sun which finally formed a halo around the person’s head. When we could eventually discern that it was the Leader’s mother, all the Koreans present stood up and joined together in a chorus of cheers, while jumping up and down in from of their seats and clapping their hand with their arms stretched up over their heads.” Cornell, North Korea under Communism, 29. 39. KALC, Forty Years, 166. 40. Gang, Twentieth-Century Revolutionary Operas, 114–15. 41. Ibid., 124. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid., 138. 44. Ibid., 156. 45. Ibid., 103. 46. KALC, Forty Years, 119. 47. Gang, Twentieth-Century Revolutionary Operas, 182. 48. Stefan R. Landsberger, who has studied Chinese poster art produced during the Cultural Revolution, notes that “the daily demonstrations of faith in and obeisance to Mao echoed many aspects of the various cults for the many protective and auspicious deities that were traditionally revered by the household. In this way, Mao became the God of Wealth; the God of Longevity; the Well God; the God of the Granary, etc., and combined their various powers. As the ultimate Guardian, he was expected to render the same protection and blessings formerly associated with these deities.” “The Deification of Mao: Religious Imagery and Practices during the Cultural Revolution and Beyond,” in China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution: Master Narratives and Post-Mao Counternarratives, ed. Woei Lien Chong (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 156. 49. Oberdorfer, Two Koreas, 20. 50. Gang, Twentieth-Century Revolutionary Operas, 128. 51. I credit Patrice Pavis for alerting me to this metaphor. 52. Gang, Twentieth-Century Revolutionary Operas, 174. 53. KALC, Forty Years, 164–65. 54. Ibid., 174. 55. I find a conspicuous parallel between the nationalistic Korean historiography during Japanese colonialism, which envisioned the Korean nation as originating from the mythological figure Dangun, and North Korea’s postulating Kim Il-sung Page 343 →as the father of the nation. Both views establish the authority of the nation by associating it with supernatural figures in an attempt to compensate for the lack of historiography that narrates its origin. For a more detailed account of nationalistic Korean historiography during Japanese colonialism, see Schmid, Korea between Empires, 192–98. 56. Oh and Hassig, Looking Glass, 87. 57. In the real sequence of Kim Jong-il’s visit, these two events took place in reverse order. See Pulikovsky, Oriental Express, 49–50. 58. Ibid., 50. CHAPTER 4 Signet Classic, 1998. 1. Quoted in Armstrong, North Korean Revolution, 72. 2. Ibid. 3. In the case of the neighboring PRC, figures in 1949 show a population 10.6 percent urban, 89.4 rural. Colin Mackerras and Amanda Yorke, The Cambridge Handbook of Contemporary China (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1991), 171. The statistical data for the PRC in 1952 indicate that only 19.5 percent of the national income came from industry and 57.7 percent from agriculture (Mackerras and Yorke, 159). 4. Japan developed the northern part of the Korean peninsula as an industrial base to supply military equipment to Manchuria and mainland China during its imperial expansion in the first part of the twentieth century. See Armstrong, North Korean Revolution, chap. 1. 5. The population of North Korea was estimated to be 16 million in the late 1950s, and Armstrong notes that in 1946, the number of workers in North Korea was 430,000 (ibid., 88). 6. Dong Jian, “Model Dramas and Cultural Contexts” (“Yangbanxi yu ershi shiji zhongguo wenhua yujing”), Ph.D. diss., Nanjing University 1996, 5. 7. It should be noted that the term was not coined by the new regimes of the PRC and North Korea, but was already in use as early as 1928. According to Roger Howard: “In 1928 workers’, peasants’ and soldiers’ dramatic troupes were formed in Jiangxi Province, as the Fourth Red Army of Mao Zedong and General Zhu De began revolutionary land reforms there.” Contemporary Chinese Theatre (London: Heinemann, 1978), 7. Thus, one can make a reasonable assumption that the PRC inherited the term from the previous revolutionary tradition, while North Korea might have easily adopted the widely used Chinese term in presenting its new citizens. 8. North Korea’s theater world in the late 1950s, when compared to the late 1940s, was already leading active dialogues not only with the Soviet Union and the PRC but also with various Eastern European and other African countries. Joseon Yesul frequently published news of touring foreign troupes in North Korea as well as North Korean troupes performing abroad in the late 1950s. As a result, the North Korean theater world functioned as only a marginal recipient of cultural influence, and primarily as part of the cultural bloc that offered unique contributions to cultural exchange within the socialist world. The most representative case can be seen Page 344 →in the sensation North Korea’s celebrated dancer Choe Seung-hui and her troupe created in her extended tour of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries from September 1956 to February 1957. 9. Joseon Yesul 10 (1958): 41–77. 10. Joseon Yesul 9 (1958): 24–57. 11. Jang, “The Process of Urbanization,” 29. 12. In the case of North Korea, tremendous resources were put into education, propaganda, and culture upon the foundation of the government. Twenty percent of the first People’s Committee budget was devoted to education, for example (Armstrong, North Korean Revolution, 166–67). 13. Duara, Rescuing History, 12. 14. Such an ethos is well captured in Mao’s comment: “We the communist soldiers and people should unite and struggle . . . so as to defeat Japanese imperialism, to build a nation in which liberty and equality will prevail, and to participate in international cooperation and [China’s] reconstruction as a new country.” Quoted in Ip Hung-yok, “Cosmopolitanism and the Ideal Image of Nation in Communist Revolutionary Culture,” Constructing Nationhood in Modern East Asia, ed. Kai-wing Chow, Kevin M. Doak, and Poshek Fu (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 226. 15. Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 158. 16. Cumings, North Korea, 130. 17. Women were scarce in Kim’s guerrilla operation in Manchuria. Chi Sun-ok (Ji Sun-ok), the spy sent by the Japanese police to monitor Kim’s activities, said that after four days of interrogation by Kim Il-sung himself, she was allowed to join a women’s detachment consisting of thirty-two women. According to her account, they were basically in charge of traditional domestic labor, such as cooking and sewing clothing (Suh, Kim Il Sung, 42). 18. Kay Ann Johnson, Women, the Family, and Peasant Revolution in China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 32. 19. Ralph Thaxton, “Tenants in Revolution: The Tenacity of Traditional Morality,” Modern China 1 (1975): 348–49. 20. Chen Xiaomei, Acting the Right Part (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002), 74. 21. Yuri M. Lotman, Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture, trans. Ann Shukman

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 131. 22. Similar to the Soviet slogan, Mao noted: “If you are not with Yan’an, you are for Xi’an.” Quoted in Yarong Jiang and David Ashley, Mao’s Children in the New China (London: Routledge, 2000), 64. Yan’an, a village in Shanxi Province, was the capital of the CCP Soviet base in the 1930s and 1940s, whereas Xi’an was the capital of Shanxi held by the Guomindang (GMD). Mao’s maxim denoted that there was no middle ground between the Communists and the GMD. 23. Duara, Rescuing History, 117. 24. According to Suh Dae-sook, Kim Il-sung often used coercion to recruit and train guerrilla members (Kim Il Sung, 38–39). 25. Armstrong, North Korean Revolution, 72–73. 26. Gang, Twentieth-Century Revolutionary Operas, 111. Page 345 →27. Ibid., 102. 28.Sseokeulwon 8 (1959): 64. 29. Both the Soviet Union and the PRC regarded the Korean War as the first military challenge posed by Americans and Western Europeans in the Cold War. In the face of unprecedented contestation, the Soviet Union and the PRC provided North Korea with necessary military support. However, the types and the intensity of support varied. The Soviets did not prove as helpful as the Chinese: they gave advice, fighter pilots, weapons, and other military supplies and relief goods, but did not actively participate in the war. 30. Chung, 17. 31. Min Byeong-seon, “Wang Pyeong and Mother” (“Wang Pyeong-iwa eomeoni”), Sseokeulwon 11 (1958): 31–43. 32. Most notably, one of the PRC’s model theater works, Sweeping the White Tiger Regiment (Qixi Baihu Tuan), captures the Sino-Korean friendship most explicitly. The dramatic action takes place in the summer of 1953, toward the end of the Korean War. Allies of the enemy, the United Nations led by the Americans and the South Korean government led by I Seung-man, deceptively negotiate with the PRC–North Korea alliance in an attempt to prepare for a fatal attack. Their main force, the White Tiger Regiment, is at the center of this prospective attack. Presaging the enemy’s hidden plans, Yan Weicai, a heroic platoon leader from a unit of volunteers, commands a dagger squad in order to shatter the enemy’s attack before it can begin. With the help of the North Korean Army and the Korean people, Yan’s soldiers disguise themselves as the enemy and break through their defenses suddenly, completely destroying the headquarters of the White Tiger Regiment. Their heroism is rewarded with the overall victory of the PRC troops. 33. Immediately following the end of the Korean War, numerous novels and collection of poems about the Sino-Korean alliance were published. Most notable among them was a collection of poems, Song of a Comrade, published in 1953. 34. Suh, Kim Il Sung, 138. 35. Springer, Pyongyang, 138. 36. Ibid. 37. As early as 1956, North Korea struggled to resolve this issue of creating believable characters on theatrical and cinematic illusion. In Joseon Yesul 9 (1956), Kim Won-bong wrote: “Protagonists in film should not be entirely idolized, but they should be portrayed as multifaceted characters to sustain their credibility.” 38. Such a practice of bringing revolutionary heroes in propaganda performances to the streets was prevalent in other Communist countries. During the PRC’s National Day celebration on October 1, 1970, a ballerina dressed as Xi’er in White Haired Girl displayed her mastery by posing in attitude (standing on one leg while the other leg is raised behind) on a tank that paraded through the streets of Beijing to Tiananmen Square. 39. The PRC had a parallel practice of learning from model citizens. The most prominent examples are the campaigns involving Lei Feng. Lei Feng, a young PLA soldier, was introduced to the Chinese people during the Cultural Revolution as having given his life for the country. In 1963, Lin Biao intensified the degree of indoctrination in the army by starting a mass campaign within the PLA to emphasize the basic values of service to the party. The center of this campaign was the life of Page 346 →Lei Feng. Jonathan Spence writes that the posthumously discovered Diary of Lei Feng heavily emphasizes the soldier’s undying love for the revolution, for his country, and for his comrades, as well as his unswerving devotion to Chairman

Mao: “Lei Feng’s life allowed no ambiguities. He was pledged to service and obedience. His life was presented as honest and sincere, but without great drama except for his own family’s suffering at the hands of Japanese invaders, GMD rightists, and rapacious landlords. Lei Feng himself drove an army truck, and he died, selflessly but un-heroically, when a truck backed over him as he was trying to help a comrade in trouble. The study of Lei Feng’s diary was introduced to China’s regular school system, and Mao consolidated its impact when, in late 1963, he graced the diary’s title page with his own calligraphy.” The Search for Modern China (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), 597–98. Regardless of the credibility of the diary and the circumstances of Lei Feng’s death, the massive propaganda, which was endorsed by Mao himself, transformed Lei Feng into an iconic figure of the PRC’s model citizenry and the epitome of the ideal comrade during the Cultural Revolution. As Spencer remarks, the circumstances of his death were rather unheroic, which gave him an ordinary, human dimension and allowed the common people to relate to him. 40. Kim Jeong-yeon, North Korean Women (Pyongyang yeoja), vol. 2 (Seoul: Goryeo seojeok, 1995), 49–50. 41. Interview with Kim Yong, September 14, 2005, Santa Barbara, CA. 42. Paul Cohen, “The Contested Past: The Boxers of History and Myth,” Journal of Asian Studies 51.1 (1992): 82. 43. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Traditions (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 1, 4. 44. KALC, Forty Years, 139. 45. Gang, Twentieth-Century Revolutionary Operas, 60. 46. Ibid., 125. 47. Armstrong, North Korean Revolution, 169. 48. For more detailed accounts of the way intellectuals were treated during the Cultural Revolution, see Spence, Search for Modern China, 613–14. 49. Gang, Twentieth-Century Revolutionary Operas, 139. 50. Ibid., 32. 51. Kim Il-sung, “On Some Tasks Confronting the Women’s Union Organizations,” in On the Work of the Women’s Union (Pyongyang: Foreign Language Publishing House, 1971), 40. 52. Similarly, well before the foundation of the PRC, Mao categorically characterized the Japanese imperialists as enemies and established how art should capture the difference between the enemy and “our” people. During his speech in 1942 at the Yan’an Forum, he noted: “With regards to our enemies—that is, the Japanese imperialists and all other enemies of the people—the task of revolutionary artists and writers is to expose their cruelty and treachery, point out the inevitability of their defeat, and encourage the antiJapanese army and people to fight them with one heart and one mind and to depose them resolutely.” Mao Tse-tung, An Anthology of His Writing (New York: New American Library, 1962), 130. 53. Adrian Buzo, The Guerilla Dynasty: Politics and Leadership in North Korea (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999), 5. Page 347 →54. Vamik Volkan, The Need to Have Enemies and Allies (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1994), 5–6. 55. Hwang Jeok-mo, Victory Achievers (Seungnijadeul), Sseokeulwon 3 (1959): 5–14. 56. Kim Hyeong-chuk, They Fought and Achieved Victory (Geudeul-eun ssawo seungnihaetda), Sseokeulwon 5 (1959): 10–19. 57. Mangyeong Graduate School Circle Members, The Son Also Set Out for Revolutionary Struggle (Adeuldo tujaeng-ui gil-e naseotda), Sseokeulwon 4 (1959): 13–25. 58. Kam Louie, “Chinese, Japanese and Global Masculine Identities,” in Asian Masculinities, ed. Kam Louie and Morris Low (London: Routledge, 2003), 9. 59. Meiji intellectuals, such as Taguchi Ukichi articulated the racial difference between Japanese and other Asians by using simple syllogism, which is eloquently summarized by Leo Ching: “First of all he (Taguchi) begins with the dominant racial supposition that whiteness is not yellowness (whiteness . . . yellowness). Secondly, he follows with the identification of the yellow race with the Chinese race (and Chinese = yellowness). Thirdly, Taguchi asserts that absolute difference between the Chinese and the Japanese races (since Japanese Chinese). And finally through logical deduction, Taguchi concludes with the similarity

between the Japanese and whiteness (therefore, Japanese = whiteness).” “Yellow Skin, White Masks: Race, Class, and Identification in Japanese Colonial Discourse,” in Trajectories: Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, ed. Kuan-hsing Chen (London: Routledge, 1998), 75. 60. Morris Low, “The Emperor’s Sons Go to War: Competing Masculinities in Modern Japan” in Louie and Low, Asian Masculinities, 82. 61. Ching, “Yellow Skin, White Masks,” 72. 62. KALC, Forty Years, 136. 63. Ibid., 121. 64. Gang, Twentieth-Century Revolutionary Operas, 133. 65. Ibid., 137. 66. The anger of the North Korean people toward Americans is not entirely a result of the propagandistic instigation that revolutionary operas created, but has its historical grounds. As Cumings explains, the atrocities committed by both South Korean troops and Americans against the North Korean civilians during the Korean War is still an understudied topic, systematically silenced by both governments of the United States and South Korea. Cumings, North Korea, 31–42. 67.Joseon Yesul 9 (1956): 79. 68. Interview with Kim Yong, September 14, 2005, Santa Barbara, CA. 69. This point of illustrating South Koreans as the servants of Americans in terms of linguistic practice becomes clear when North Korea’s linguistic policy is taken into consideration. In the north after liberation from Japanese colonial rule in 1945, Chinese characters were strongly discouraged. According to Schmid, “In 1949, as a part of a broader attempt to purify the language, a policy of writing exclusively in Korean script was adopted. Chinese characters were abolished outright, a policy that has continued to this day” (Korea between Empires, 258). 70. O Byeong-jo, “From the Creative Notes of the Choe Hak-sin Family,” Joseon Yesul 3 (1967): 12. Page 348 →CHAPTER 5 In writing this chapter, I have benefited from many authors whose work centers on the relationship between gender, nation, and performance. Ayako Kano’s Acting Like a Woman in Modern Japan, in particular, served as an inspirational source, and therefore I name this chapter in a conscious emulation of Kano’s book. 1. The strict censorship imposed by the Japanese colonial government after the annexation of Korea prohibited radical theater from gaining ground. After Japan was severely criticized by the international community for its harsh suppression of the March 1st Movement in 1919, the Japanese colonial government in the same year changed its approach to Korea from the harsh “military policy” (budan seiji) to a “cultural policy” (bunka seiji). Even though cultural policy inaugurated a period of more relaxed measures, it did not mean that Koreans were allowed freedom of expression in media, literature, and performing arts. Most of the Western dramas performed in Korea under colonial rule were apolitical; the majority was either melodramas or comedies of manners. Therefore, it is difficult to trace a sustained social debate on the role of women and the fate of the traditional family in a rapidly changing world. 2. The 1937 Chinese stage production of the original play was simply named Nora after the title character, who was played by Lan Ping (the stage name of the later Jiang Qing, Mao’s third wife and one of the architects of the Cultural Revolution). The play stirred up so much debate on women’s role in the disintegrating traditional family life that the year it was performed was remembered by Chinese intellectuals as “the year of Nora.” The popularity of Ibsen’s drama, which came via Japan, testifies to its appeal for the new generation of Chinese who were eager to exit from the traditional past. 3. Choe Chang-ho, Korean Dramas during the Time of National Struggle (Minjok sunangi-ui yeongeuk) (Pyongyang: Pyongyang Publishing House, 2002), 360. 4. North Korean Law of Gender Equality (Bukjoseon namnyeo pyeongdeunggwon-e daehan beomnyeong), in North Korea in the Original Documents (Wonjaryeo-ro bon bukhan), ed. Sindonga (Seoul: Dongailbosa, 1989), 42. 5. Jang Pil-wha, “Gendered Labor in North Korean Society,” in Unification and Women: North Korean

Women’s Lives (Seoul: Ewha Womans University, 2001), 81–82. 6. Helen Hunter, Kim Il-song’s North Korea (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999), 96. 7. Jang, “Gendered Labor,” 80. 8. Hunter, Kim Il-song’s North Korea, 95. 9. Kim Gui-ok, Kim Seon-im, I Gyeong-ha, and Hwang Eun-ju, How Do North Korean Women Live? (Bukhan yeoseongdeul-eun eotteoke salgo isseulka) (Seoul: Dangdae, 2000), 36. 10. Ibid. 11. Hunter, Kim Il-song’s North Korea, 96. 12. Ibid. 13. Nevertheless, there is a conspicuous difference in the ways Chinese model theater works and North Korean revolutionary operas depict their women. Whereas the majority of Chinese women are consistently portrayed as masculinized Page 349 →agents of revolution, Korean women’s role and image in revolutionary operas fluctuates evenly between masculine and feminine. 14. The script does not list the performance history; however, the playwright’s name is specifically indicated as Jo Ryeong-cheol, Princess Seon-hwa (Seon-hwa gongju), Joseon Yesul 9 (1956): 76–90. 15. Ibid., 77. 16. Ibid., 84. 17. Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech, ed. Joseph Pearson (Los Angeles: Semiotexte, 2001), 19. 18. Ibid. 19. Ryu Jong-dae, Gye Wol-hyang, Joseon Yesul 12 (1957): 50–66. 20. Ibid., 66. 21. It is not clear whether the libretto has ever been performed. 22. Chen, Acting the Right Part, 110. 23. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Film Theory and Criticism, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 834. 24. Ibid., 835. 25. Taking the kinesthetic quality of Isadora Duncan’s dancing as a focal point to dispel the abiding power of the sexualizing gaze, as argued by Janet Wolff and Elizabeth Dempster, Ann Daly notes that “dance was not about the spectator, but it was about the self’s inner impulses made manifest through the rhythmic, dynamic expressions of the whole body.” Quoted in Susan Manning, “The Female Dancer and the Male Gaze,” in Meaning in Motion, ed. Jane Desmond (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 159. On the other hand, Manning believes that Jane Desmond’s harsh critique of Ruth St. Denis’s performances of the Oriental Other in Radha lacked consideration for the kinesthetic aspect of the dance (162). 26. Manning, “Female Dancer,” 154. 27. Ibid., 162. 28. Ibid., 163. 29. Judy Van Zile, Perspective on Korean Dance (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), 7. 30. Kim Je-heung, “Hyangbalmu,” Sseokeulwon 8 (1957): 70. 31. Ibid. 32. Han Seol-ya condemns some circles for “not trying hard to incorporate traditional music themes into dance, or some musicians who have not mastered how to incorporate unique ways to play traditional instruments and play them as if Korean instruments are foreign instruments” (“Proud Current State,” 13). 33. Brecht’s stage play Die Mutter was, in turn, adapted into a film in 1958, which was directed by Harry Bremer and Manfred Weckwerth. 34. Jeong Jun-chae, “The Soviet Influence on Our Cinema,” Joseon Yesul 11 (1957): 7. 35. For a detailed account of the parallel case of the PRC during the Cultural Revolution, which also attempted to oppress any expressions of sexuality, see Anchee Min, Red Azalea (New York: Berkley Books, 1994). 36. In tacking this question, Chen Xiaomei presents an interesting view on how Page 350 →the producers of the PRC’s model theater works could unwillingly invite a sexual gaze from the audience. Chen notes that in Azalea Mountain, “to emphasize her [Ke Xiang’s] sacrifice to Mao, constant references are made to her scars, wounds, openings, ruptures, and the captivity of her body—all symbols of enslavement that, when eroticized through objectification and ennoblement, could arouse desire for possession of that body” (Acting

the Right Part, 116). Chen’s notion of a sexual element involved in spectatorship may be seen as bordering a broader sense of sadistic pleasure. In depicting the martyrdom of revolutionary heroes, each production of model theater works and revolutionary operas depicts a moment of the protagonists’ physical struggle with the enemy, in which they are bound, tortured, and put on display. However, what is intriguing is that women protagonists, especially younger women, are put on such display more often than other types of heroes. 37. The term yangbanxi refers to the hybrid genre of spoken drama, ballet, symphony music, and jingju (Beijing opera) produced during the Chinese Cultural Revolution for political propaganda. Eight model operas were produced during the Cultural Revolution. For the etymology of yangbanxi, see Hua-yuan Li Mowry, Yang-pan hsi—New Theatre in China (Berkeley: Center for Chinese Studies, University of California, 1973), 10–24. The so-called eight model theater works (geming yangbanxi) were officially created during the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966–76), but more than eight plays were staged as model theater works during that time. In addition to Red Detachment of Women (Hongse Niangzi Jun); White Haired Girl (Baimaonu, Beijing opera stage version, 1945, in Yan’an; feature film, 1951; film of ballet production, 1972); Red Lantern (Hongdengji; film of Beijing opera production, 1970); Shajia Bang (modern Beijing Opera, 1974); Sweeping the White Tiger Regiment (Qixi Baihu Tuan, date unknown); Capturing Tiger Mountain by Strategy (Zhi Qu Wei Hu Shan, Beijing opera and later film, date unknown); The Harbor (Haikou, date unknown), Azalea Mountain (Dujuan Shan, Beijing opera, 1973; film, date unknown), Hymn of Dragon River, Battle on the Plain, and Pan Shi Wan (dates unknown). There is no consensus on which of the plays were selected to be listed among the eight. For example, Chen Xiaomei claims that the first seven and the symphony version of Sha Jia Bang comprise eight works (Acting the Right Part, 75–76). 38. Chen, Acting the Right Part, 116. 39. I use the term fashion, as opposed to neutral clothing and state costume, in order to refer to the socially engineered visions that condition how members of society ought to dress and exhibit politically determined relationships between the production and consumption of clothing. 40. On November 16, 1961, Kim Il-sung noted to a group of mothers, “Our ideal is to build a society where everyone is well fed, well clothed, and lives a long life.” Kim Il-sung, “The Duty of Mothers in the Education of Children: Speech at the National Meeting of Mothers, November 16, 1961,” in On the Work of the Women’s Union, 4. His son inherited the same vision and stated that improving livelihood is directly related to matters of clothing: “Clothing is of equal significance to people as food. Without the discussion of clothing, we cannot talk about happy livelihood of the people.” “On Improving the Livelihood of the People: Speech given to the Managerial Workers of the Central Committee of the Korea Worker’s Party on Februray 16th, 1984” (“Inmin saenghwal-eul deouk nopilde daehayeo: Page 351 →Joseon Rodongdang Jungang Wiwonhoe Chaegimilkkun hyeobuihoe-eseo han yeonseol. 1984. 2.16”), in Selected Works of Kim Jong-il (Kim Jong-il Seonjip), vol. 8 (Pyongyang: Joseon Rodongdang chulpansa, 1998), 13. 41. According to Li Go-song, the) North Korean state did not make visible attempts to restore its light industry, including textile industry, which was completely destroyed during the Korean War. Instead, it focused on rebuilding heavy industry centering on military industry, but starting from the 1980s, North Korea paid particular attention to grooming light industry, at the center of which stood the textile industry: (1) textiles were an easy way to attract foreign investment; (2) the state wanted to earn foreign currency by exporting textiles; (3) the state wanted to vitalize domestic consumption of clothing. 42. The PRC during the Cultural Revolution promoted androgynous military uniforms, in stark contrast to feminized fashion codes in North Korea at the same time. According to Klaus Mehnert, who frequented Chinese theaters in the early 1970s, “Here [the foyer of the theater], too, men and women were scarcely distinguishable; the girls showed not the slightest attempt at elegance and, of course, not a trace of makeup.” China Returns (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1972), 137. Eric Cornell, who served as a chargé d’affaires at the Swedish Embassy in North Korea from 1975 to 1977, traveled to the PRC frequently during his service, and was in a position to compare the state of affairs in the two states. He observes, “Whereas Chinese women . . . wore unisex clothes, Korean women put their hair up and wore skirts. The impressions of the differences were strengthened after each visit, and it felt more and more as though they were deeply ingrained” (North Korea under Communism, 125). 43. According to John Bowlt, in the early days of the Soviet Union, a principal task is undertaken by experimental artists such as Aleksandra Exeter, Nadezda Lamanova, Kazimir Malevich, Aleksandr

Rodchencko, Vladimir Tatlin, and especially Liubov’ Popova and Varvarar Stepanova, which was “to create just such a new look, a revolutionary dress that was to be simple, cheap, hygienic, easy to wear, and ‘industrial,’” but by the 1920s, the Soviet design had “lost its clarity of purpose and, as in all aspects of design, the result was a curious eclecticism of styles.” See “Constructivism and Early Soviet Fashion Design,” in Gleason, Kenez, and Stites, Bolshevik Culture, 203 and 218. The systematic promotion of Soviet fashion by these designers resembled the North Korean state-led efforts to cultivate nationalistic fashion. However, the North Korean national fashion, unlike the Soviet style, did not drastically differ from the previous era. 44. Tina Mai Chen, “Dressing for the Party: Clothing, Citizenship, Gender-Formation in Mao’s China,” Fashion Theory 5 (2003): 367. 45. The gendered distinction in constructing fashion separately for male and female seems to be ubiquitous phenomenon, pertaining not only to North Korea but to quite different cultures as well. Jane Gaines argues that in Hollywood musicals, “a woman’s dress is a demeanor, much more than a man’s, indexes psychology; of costume represents interiority, it is she who is turned inside out on screen.” “Costume and Narrative: How Dress Tells the Woman’s Story,” in Fabrications: Costume and the Female Body, ed. Jane Gaines and Charlotte Herzog (London: Routledge, 1990), 181. 46. Ibid. Page 352 →47. In illuminating the bipolar bodily representation of women, I share the views of fashion historian Tina Mai Chen, who notes that “examining the bodily performance in conjunction with costumes highlights the way body and clothing accrue meaning to each other within intertwined sociopolitical and aesthetic framework” (“Dressing for the Party,” 363). 48. The 1960s became a turning point, according to Yun Mi-ryang, because Kim Il-sung by then had managed to subdue political dissent and had emerged as unchallenged leader during the Fourth Party Convention in September 1961. Policy toward North Korean Women (Bukhan-ui yeoseong jeongchaek (Seoul: Hanul, 1991), 135. 49. Kim, “Duty of Mothers,” 25. 50. Ibid., 28. 51. Susie Jie Yong Kim, “What (Not) to Wear: Refashioning Print Civilization in Print Media in Turn-ofthe-Century Korea,” positions 15 (2007): 621. 52. Peter Carroll, “Refashioning Suzhou: Dress, Commodification, and Modernity,” positions 11 (2003): 446. 53. Ri Jeong-suk, The Life of Korean Women (Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1960), 5. 54. Anonymous, “Characteristics of Korean Women’s Clothing” (“Joseon nyeoseong uisang-ui teukseong”), Joseon Yeonghwa 11 (1966): 19. 55. Hwang Gwang-hyeon, “Color as a Creative Element: The Case of Children’s Masks and the Musical Film Our Flower Garden (“Changjakjeok yoso-roui saek: donghwa gamyeon gamugeuk yeonghwa uri kkotdongsan-eul jungsim-euro”), Joseon Yesul 8 (1963): 46. 56. Ibid., 48. 57. Ibid. 58. Quoted in Oberdorfer, Two Koreas, 19. 59. See Yun, Policy toward Women, 131–55. 60. Gang Ban-seok’s Koreanness, expressed through her affilation with joseonot, is emphasized vis-à-vis Lady Francesca, the Austrian wife of the first South Korean president. The film Magnificent Heart illustrates Francesca as a complete foreigner who aligns herself with greedy Americans who want to partition Korea for their own gain. 61. For a more detailed description of ideological orientation of this book, see Yun, Policy toward Women, 142–47. 62. Anonymous, The Mother of Korea (Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1978), 36. 63. In the 1980 film Story of Chu-hyang, the female protagonist Chun-hyang, the quintessential paragon of female virtue and beauty, is depicted as weaving and embroidering clothing material in the same manner as Gang Ban-seok. Such a parallel creates a mythical dimension for Gang Ban-seok, who is now equated with the heroine of the folk novel, Chun-hyang, in her weaving skills. 64. Kim, Il-sung, On the Revolutionization and Working-Classization of Women: Speech at the Fourth

Congress of the Democratic Women’s Union of Korea (Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Press, 1974), 4. 65. Kim, “Duty of Mothers,” 25. 66. According to the 1958 report “Plans to Hire More Female Laborers in Page 353 →Various Economic Sectors,” North Korea was planning to (1) increase the percentage of female workers in education and health care to 60 percent by 1961; (2) hire women instead of men for jobs women could handle; (3) open more daycare centers to accommodate working mothers’ needs; (4) increase the ratio of female students in higher education (Jang, “Gendered Labor,” 81–82). However, even though women’s enrollment in higher education increased, reading this information as North Korea’s achievement of gender equality in workplaces will be misleading. The regime’s true motivation in encouraging women to join the collective labor force was to fill in the empty places that men had left when they joined the army. For North Korean men, “It is mandatory to serve [in] the army for approximately ten years, which accordingly creates more demand for [a] female work-force” (Ibid., 80). Because marriageable men were serving the state long term, women’s marriage and pregnancy dates were retarded. Thus, instead of having families of their own, North Korean women were driven out of the domestic sphere to the public, in such a radical manner that Hunter ironically remarks, “It is doubtful that any society has accomplished a more basic change in too short a time” (Kim Il-song’s North Korea, 95). 67. Kim Il-sung, On the Revolutionization and Working-Classization of Women: Speech at the Fourth Congress of the Democratic Women’s Union of Korea (Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Press, 1974), 3. 68. Yun, Policy toward Women, 151. 69. Quoted in “Valuable Instructions,” Joseon Nyeoseong 7 (1982): 15. 70. “She Produced Military Uniforms during the March” (“Haenggungil-eseo jieusin gunbok”), Joseon Nyeoseong 2 (1986): 22–23. 71. Yun argues that “if Gang Ban-seok was presented as the model women of the 1960s and 70s, then Kim Jeong-suk played the role in the 1980s” (Policy toward Women, 147). However, at least in visual culture, Kim Jeong-suk made an appearance as the paragon of female virtue by the mid-1970s. 72. Kim et al., How Do North Korean Women Live? 152. 73. Ibid. 74. Judd Stitziel, Fashioning Socialism: Clothing, Politics, and Consumer Culture in East Germany (New York: Berg, 2005), 64. 75. Sin Sang-ok and Choe Eun-hui, Far Away from the Skies of Home (Joguk-eun jeohaneul jeomeoli), part 2 (Pacific Palisides, CA: Pacific Artists Corporation, 1988),85. 76. Ibid., 84. 77. Kim Jong-il never had a military career, yet he currently assumes the position of commander in chief of the military. His lack of military background may contribute to his persistent choice of the disciplinary fashion code that he sees in the Mao jacket. 78. Sin and Choe, Our Escape, 115. 79. Ibid., 46–48. 80. Kim et al., How Do North Korean Women Live? 152. 81. Kim Jong-il, “On the Fierce Execution of the Light Industry Revolution: A Letter Sent to the Participants in the National Light Industry Exhibition, June 2, 1990” (“Gyeonggong-eop hyeongmyeong-eul cheoljeohi suhaenghalde daehayeo: Jeon-guk gyeonggong-eopdaehoe chamgajadeul-ege bonaen seohan 1990. 6.20”), Page 354 →in Selected Works of Kim Jong-il (Kim Jong-il Seonjip), vol. 10 (Pyongyang: Joseon Rodongdang chulpansa, 1997), 116–60. 82. Ibid. 83. I thank John Feffer for bringing this detail to my attention. 84. Kim Il-sung, “Women Should Be Feminine,” Joseon Nyeoseong 5 (1989): 5. CHAPTER 6 1. Ministry of Unification, Republic of Korea, White Paper on Korean Unification (Seoul: Ministry of Unification, 2005) 109. 2. North Korea’s bureaucratic measures often interfere with tourism. For example, in the summer of 2005,

the North Korean state abruptly postponed sales of the much-awaited Gaeseong tourist package for reasons related to the resignation of personnel from Hyundai-Asan Corporation, the South Korean investor and partner in the Geumgang Mountain project. Even though North Korean officials to a degree abide by the rules of the market economy, some of the fundamental decisions they make seem to be driven by ideological motivations, which constantly interfere with conducting business in a competitive way. 3. The most controversial move the South Korean state has made regarding North Korean human rights violations was to abstain from voting for the United Nations resolution to condemn North Korea’s violation of human rights in 2005. 4. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1991), 137. 5. Ibid., 136. 6. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1996), 3. 7. Ibid., 6. 8. Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Schocken, 1976), 2. 9. Even though economic hardships in the 1990s forced North Korea to seek to cooperate with the outside world, the country’s efforts to join the world market economy predate the 1990s. Dallen Timothy gives a comprehensive account North Korea’s invitations to potential foreign partners, which were attempts to revitalize its domestic economy. See Tourism and Political Boundaries (London: Routledge, 2001), 122. 10. There are far too many examples of revolutionary scenery to describe, and it is not an exaggeration to say that revolutionary landscaping has created and determined the spatial hierarchy in North Korea. The holiest site of all is Mansudae, the mausoleum of Kim Il-sung, where tourists visiting the capital city are required to pay their homage to the deceased founding father of North Korea. 11. Report by Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency (KOTRA), Stockholm branch. 12. Dennis Judd and Susan Fainstein, “City as Places to Play,” in The Tourist City, ed. Judd and Fainstein (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 269. 13. Kate McGeown, “On Holiday in North Korea,” http://www.news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific (accessed September 17, 2003). 14. The tourist spaces that North Korea opens up for South Koreans are different from those operated for others, in terms of location and rationale. Tourists Page 355 →who visit the Geumgang Mountain area are mostly South Koreans, because they are not granted access to urban tourist destinations such as Pyongyang or Baekdu Mountain, located at the far northern side of the Sino-Korean border. Thus, for South Koreans, North Korean urban space is a desired destination because of its inaccessibility. Thus, when it was announced that the city of Gaeseong would be opened to South Korean tourists, the phone lines at the Hyundai-Asan office were besieged with phone calls from South Koreans inquiring about the package. Similarly, the pilot tour package to Pyongyang, which was specially designed to enable South Koreans to attend the North Korean Arirang mass games, the quintessential North Korean performance with a hundred thousand performers coordinating their actions to stage synchronized card sections or seminal events in North Korean history, also attracted more applicants than the tour package could accommodate. The pilot tour of Pyongyang admitted ten delegations, each consisting of 150 tourists who stayed in a four-star hotel in Pyongyang for one night between October 4 and 15, 2005. Tourists of other nationalities, however, are granted a limited access to Pyongyang and other tourist destinations. Their travelogues are valuable accounts for learning about conditions in North Korean cities, even though these travelers are constantly under surveillance. 15. The Vladivostok branch of the KOTRA (September 21, 2004) report cites some Russian tourists from Khavarovsk who did not necessarily want to visit the late Kim Il-sung’s mausoleum to pay homage. 16. South Korean students who tour North Korea on field trips organized and sponsored by their schools are exceptions to this trend. These students do not have much choice in selecting the destination of their trip, and thus are distinguished in their motivation from senior citizens who visit North Korea voluntarily. 17. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 138. 18. According to Dallen Timothy, “relic boundaries” are those that no longer function as borders but are still visible in the cultural landscape (e.g., parts of the Berlin Wall and the Great Wall of China). Dallen Timothy, Tourism and Political Boundaries (London: Routledge, 2001), 5. 19. Jill Dougherty, “North Korea: A Prism to Soviet Era,” CNN.com, September 14, 2005, http://www.cnn

/com/1005/world/asiapc (accessed June 22, 2007). 20. I conducted interviews with them in August and September 2005 in Seoul and Los Angeles, respectively. 21. Lankov, “North Korea Hungry.” 22. For detailed testimonials on cannibalism in the late 1990s, see Joeun Beotdeul, We Wish to Live, 65–67. 23. According to the Associated Press (October 2, 2005), North Korea announced its plans to resume fullscale food rationing across the country after ending grain sales. On October 1, 2005, the World Food Program reported that their cereal sales in the markets would cease and that public distribution centers would take over countrywide distribution. 24. Norbert Vollertsen is a German doctor who spent time in North Korea providing medical service from July 1999 to December 2000. He was expelled from North Korea for expressing his opinion on the state’s violation of human rights. He currently works as a human rights activist and is widely known for his provocative strategies for demonstrating against the North Korean state. 25. For example, Tim Peters, the director of Helping Hands Korea, a Seoulbased Page 356 →NGO, operates a bread factory in the Sino-Korean border region to alleviate the food crisis in North Korea. He uses a cellular phone to call his North Korean contacts to ensure that the bread is appropriately distributed among starving people. Tim Peters, personal interview, August 20, 2005, Seoul. 26. The World Food Program, which has fed an average of 6.5 million North Koreans in recent years, withdrew its emergency aid from North Korea at the end of 2005, causing concern that monitoring access would be lost. Hanguk Ilbo, October 9, 2005. 27. Norbert Vollertsen, in an interview with Joseonjournal.com (June 30, 2001), declared that when he joined the NGO Cap Anamur–German Emergency Doctors, he “was not allowed to see behind the curtain of silence in this country. Like all the other foreigners, we were never allowed to look into any prison camp or the like. We were fooled like idiots in regards to the cruel reality of this place. . . . Before Cap Anamur came to North Korea, other agencies such as Oxfam and CARE pulled out because they weren’t allowed to distribute aid directly to the people. They had to turn it over to the authorities, who took complete charge of distribution. Monitoring is impossible. Nobody really knows where the aid is going, except that it is not going to the starving citizens.” 28. A North Korean defector, Kim Yong, in an interview told me that he had a friend who worked as a warehouse manager in the city of Hoeryong. The warehouse managed by his friend, which he visited, had piles of aid materials from foreign donors—medical kits, food, clothing—not for distribution to the people who needed them, but mostly for army provision. Interview with Yong Kim, Santa Barbara, CA, September 13, 2005. As another example, a retired official in Pyongyang heard of a donation from the South Korean state including 50,000 pairs of shoes and 5,000 items of clothing, but he has never seen them distributed (Beotdeul, We Wish to Live, 121). 29. Andrei Lankov states that the North Korean state over the years has made efforts to achieve domestic economic stability by relying on free foreign donations: “The aid-maximizing strategy allowed them [North Koreans] to extract some resources from outside donors through diplomatic efforts. Such aid made possible the survival of an economic structure that otherwise would be unviable. For a long time, the role of the overseas donor belonged to the USSR and China, then it was China and South Korea (and some foreign aid agencies), and nowadays it seems that this role has been enthusiastically assumed by Seoul. The overseas aid is probably not sufficient to kick-start economic development, but it is sufficient to keep the economy afloat, prevent a major famine and also allow for a reasonably luxurious life for the country’s few elite—the few dozen families around Kim Jong-il.” Lankov, “North Korea Hungry.” 30. Jonathan Watts, “North Korea Turns Away Western Aid,” The Guardian, October 2, 2005, http://www.observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story (accessed June 8, 2007). 31. Kim Yong, interview with the author, September 13, 2005, Santa Barbara. 32. Kim Yong in his interview (September 13, 2005) recollected that soon after he crossed the Sino-Korean border, he met South Korean missionaries who helped him escape to South Korea. But soon after his rescue, the missionaries brought him the Bible and other reading materials on Christianity, which he initially resisted. 33. Jim Butterworth, interview by the UCLA Asia Institute, January 15, 2005. http://www.asiaarts.ucla.edu /article.asp?parentid=19778

34. Page 357 →For a detailed background of how the footage became public, see http://www.atimes.com /atimes/Korea/GD13Dg01.html (accessed March 30, 2006), and http://www.northkoreanrefugees.com/dvd /statement.htm (accessed March 30, 2006). 35. Dwight Conquergood, “Lethal Theatre: Performance, Punishment and the Death Penalty,” Theatre Journal 54 (2002): 342. 36. I follow David Hawk’s description of these detention facilities (The Hidden Gulag, 56). 37. For a more detailed account of Dr. Norbert Vollertsen’s stance on the North Korean human rights issue, see James Brook, interview with Vollertsen, “One German and His North Korean Conscience,” New York Times, March 19, 2002, A4; Hong Seok-jun, “NK Human Rights Like Nazi Germany,” Joseon Ilbo, May 8, 2001, http://www.chosenjournal.com/pierrerigolout (accessed June 8, 2007); Vollertson “A Prison Country, ” Wall Street Journal Opinion, April 17, 2001, http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra (accessed June 8, 2007); Donald Macintyre, “Diary of a Mad Place,” Time, January 22, 2001, http://www.time.com/time/asia /magazine/2001 (accessed June 8, 2007). 38. Norbert Vollertsen, interview, Joseonjournal.com. 39. Anne Applebaum, preface to Hawk, The Hidden Gulag, 8. 40. Joseon Yesul 5 (2003): 6. 41. The Western media’s biased portrayal of North Korea during the 2002 nuclear crisis strikingly resembles North Korean propaganda. For the complicated origins and discursive debates concerning the crisis, see Victor Cha and David Kang, Nuclear North Korea: A Debate on Engagement Strategies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). 42. The unfair nature of the Western media’s coverage of the North Korean nuclear crises was most explicit when most reports failed to mention the first such crisis in the mid-1990s. For a more detailed account of it and President Jimmy Carter’s intervention, see Marion Creekmore, A Moment of Crisis: Jimmy Carter, the Power of a Peacemaker, and North Korea’s Nuclear Ambitions (New York: Public Affairs, 2006). 43. Joseon Yesul 6 (2002). 44. Joseon Yesul 9 (2002): 4. 45.Joseon Yesul 8 (2005): 32. 46.Joseon Yesul 9 (2005): 51. 47.Joseon Yesul 8 (2005): 32. 48.Joseon Yesul 9 (2005): 51. 49. Quoted in Joseon Yesul 8 (2005): 32. In a similarly grandiose fashion, an American tourist, William Moore, said that never in his life had he seen such a fantastic scene, and he wished that he had more than two eyes in order to capture the entirety of the show. His compatriot George Robert Auburn had completely lost track of where he was by the time he finished watching chapter 2, part 1 of the performance, which staged sea waves so realistically. When the performance was over, he asked: “Hello, where am I? Am I not by the seaside?” Joseon Yesul 9 (2005): 51. 50. The performance analysis will be based on Arirang Mass Gymnastics and Artistic Performance (Daejipdan chejo-wa yesulgong-yeon arirang) (Pyongyang: Mongnan Video, 2005). Page 358 →51. See Bhabha, Nation and Narration. 52. There are only few instances where male and female performers act together. The first is family members under the colonial yoke as staged in act 1, and the other is circus performers in act 3. 53. I thank Shigemi Inaga for pointing out a comparable scene from the 1988 Seoul Olympics opening ceremony in which a boy appeared on the stadium field alone, rolling a large ring. The singleness of this boy, in opposition to the multitude of children in the North Korean Arirang Festival, created a focused visual point for spectators to concentrate on, whereas the North Korean festival allowed for a panoramic view of the entire stadium field as thousands of children were performing gymnastics drills at the same time. 54. Choe Myeong-jin, “New Art Form Combining Gymnastic Movements with Dance,” Joseon Yesul 8 (2004): 19. 55. Park Seol-hwa, “Importance of Rhythm in Dance,”Joseon Yesul 8 (2004): 67. 56. The Arirang tour generated over $3.5 million, but still more could have been made had there been more opportunity for attendance. 57. The musical’s choreography was a collaborative effort between Kim Yeongseon and the South Korean

choreographer O Jae-ik. 58. Before the staging of Yoduk Story in the United States, there were only a few books available in English that disclosed the conditions of the North Korean prison camp system, including Gang and Rigoulot’s The Aquariums of Pyongyang and Hawk’s The Hidden Gulag. 59. Added to the musical’s aura of martyrdom is the fact that director Jeong was pestered by the South Korean secret service, which kept asking questions about the musical’s politics. Jeong noted in an interview: “At first Korean officials tried to block this project because of Seoul’s ‘sunshine policy’ of engagement with Pyongyang.” Nora Boustany, “Prison to Playhouse: Director Hopes to Bring N. Korean Expose to US,” Washington Post, July 19, 2006, A 12. According to this policy, initiated by the former South Korean president Kim Dae-jung, South Korea would actively engage North Korea in dialogue in peaceful coexistence and mutual prosperity instead of continuing the tension and conflict between the two states. 60. In an interview, the director noted: “I wanted to expose the North Korea regime’s violation of human rights in the heart of America. I felt it my mission to tell the entire world that in Korea there still exists death camp such as Auschwitz. . . . This is a message sent to the North Korean government telling them not to kill any more families and friends.” Interview with Segye Ilbo, September 21, 2006. 61. The former South Korean government under President No Mu-hyeon did not address North Korea’s human rights violations in order to avoid damaging the inter-Korean relationship. However, during No’s presidency, the opposition party, Hannaradang (Grand National Party), sought to actively address North Korea’s violations in inter-Korean talks. For this reason, when Yoduk Story was premiered in South Korea, most members of Hannaradang in leadership positions attended the performance and referred to the show when addressing North Korea’s human rights violations. 62. The audience for the U.S. tour largely comprised Korean American Christians who were outspoken in their opposition to North Korea. The support of the Korean American Christian community in the Washington, DC, area was crucial for Page 359 →the U.S. premiere. Local Korean American Christians hosted forty members of the cast and staff, nearly half the number of the entire visiting troupe. The hosts of the tour were mostly Washington–based NGOs concerned about North Korean human rights abuses. The program for the U.S. tour credits the following NGOs as supporters: Defense Forum Foundation, the Freedom House, US Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, National Endowment for Democracy, Korean-American Church Coalition, Liberty in North Korea, Freedom North Korea Broadcast, Democracy Network Against the North Korean Gulag, Exile Committee for North Korean Democracy, Bradley Foundation, and North Korean Freedom Coalition. These organizations capitalized on their political connections to attract influential policymakers to opening night. In the crowd were high-ranking government officials such as Jay Lewkowicz, a special envoy for North Korean human rights, Alexander Vershbow, U.S. ambassador to South Korea, and Victor Cha, the director of the East Asian Affairs Directorate of the National Security Council. These high-profile politicians attracted a great deal of attention at the premiere; before and after the show, journalists in the lobby attempted to interview them. Most of the journalistic coverage focused on the production’s anti–North Korea stance. See Boustany, “Prison to Playhouse”; Paul Eckert, “N. Korea Gulag Play Draws Standing Ovation,” Washingtonpost.com, October 5, 2006, http://www.nkfreedomhouse.org/wpcontent/uploads/2006/11/Yodeok-story.pdf (accessed October 22, 2006); Jay Solomon, “New Script on North Korea? Groups Hope Stark Prison Play Spurs Pressure on Pyongyang Regime,” Wall Street Journal, September 30, 2006, A5. 63. The analysis of Yoduk Story in this chapter is based on the U.S. premiere, which took place at the Music Center at Strathmore in Maryland on October 4, 2006. This premiere was originally scheduled for Washington’s National Theatre in September 2006, but budget constraints prevented the producers from renting the venue, and the opening had to be moved. 64. Both Chinese model theater works and North Korea’s revolutionary operas are similar to U.S. musicals in that they employ multiple means of representation, such as dancing, singing, and speaking. However, unlike their U.S. counterparts, the model theater works and revolutionary operas center on the rigid promotion of revolutionary ideology, as opposed to the lighter fair of most of the more traditional musicals produced in the West. 65. John Feffer, “Anti-Socialist Realism,” www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/3721 (accessed June 13, 2007). 66. John Feffer has noted the affinities between the musical and revolutionary operas manifest in this

opening scene: “Although meant to serve as a contrast to all that follows, the accurate parody of the saccharine nationalism and aggressive simplemindedness of North Korea’s official culture in this opening sequence unintentionally echoes throughout the play” (ibid.). 67. The similarity between West Side Story and Yoduk Story does not go much beyond the title. Although both musicals address seemingly similar issues—such as rejected social groups and forbidden love between the rivals—the ghastly nature and the scope of the human tragedy in Yoduk Story makes it very different from West Side Story. 68. Jinna Park, “Revisiting the Past,” LA Times.com, http://www.latimes.com/search/la-musical_iur5uvnc, 0,5451090.photo (accessed October 30, 2006). Page 360 →69. Alain Boublil and Claud-Michel Schönberg, Les Misérables (London: Cameron Mackintosh, 1995). 70. Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, Jesus Christ Superstar (Los Angeles: Universal Studios, 2001). 71. M. Cody Poulton, “The Rhetoric of Real,” in Modern Japanese Theatre and Performance, ed. David Jortner, Keiko McDonald, and Kevin J. Wetmore Jr. (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006), 27. 72. David Jortner, “Introduction: Modern Japanese Theatre (Revisited),” in Jortner, McDonald, and Wetmore, Modern Japanese Theatre and Performance, xii. 73. Thomas Rimer, Toward a Modern Japanese Theatre: Kishida Kunio (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), 15. 74. Sun Ju Kim (Gim Seon-ju) has commented that the proliferation of Kabuki in Korea in the early twentieth century gave rise to the growing popularity of shimpa in modern Korean theater. “Commercial Theatres Opened in Korea: The Introduction of Entertainment Space and Changing Theatrical Practices, 1900–1910s,” paper presented to the Association for Asian Studies, March 22, 2007, Boston. 75. Anti-Japanese resistance has been a continuing theme throughout North Korean state theater productions. To mention just a few examples, Hwang Jeokmo’s Victory Achievers (Seungnijadeul), published in 1959, documents the glorious self-sacrifice of a male protagonist fighting the Japanese colonialists in the 1930s. Similar plots are found in Mangyeong Graduate School Circle Members’ The Son Also Set Out for Revolutionary Struggle and Kim Hyeong-chuk’s They Fought and Achieved Victory. 76. There is one known instance where a renowned North Korean literary figure criticized North Korea’s tendency to replicate the Japanese acting style. Han Seol-ya was highly critical of some plays featured during the National Arts Festival in 1958 for their staging of Japanese shimpa acting styles (“Proud Current State,” 8–9). 77. For a brief description of Kawakami’s theatrical career, see Rimer, Toward a Modern Japanese Theatre, 14–15. 78. Allen Feldman, “Violence and Vision: The Prosthetics and Aesthetics of Terror,” in States of Violence, ed. Fernando Coronil and Julie Skurski (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 428. 79. The events of Oh, Tell the Forest, which premiered onstage in 1972, take place in a small village under Japanese colonial rule. Byeong-hun works as an informant for Kim Il-sung’s resistance movement, but as a cover, he pretends to be a lackey of the Japanese policemen who persecute his fellow villagers. Byeong-hun has no choice but to endure the villagers’ hatred so he can continue to carry out his secret mission. Bok-sun, his daughter, is planning to marry a neighbor, but cannot get approval from her future groom’s parents because of her father’s bad reputation. Finally the day comes when Byeong-hun intentionally misleads Japanese soldiers into the forest to be ambushed by the Korean guerrilla group, which restores Byeonghun’s reputation. The play ends happily with Bok-sun’s wedding. See chapter 3 for a fuller discussion. 80. Although the production does not explain why this Japanese woman was abducted to North Korea, such stories were familiar to most South Koreans and Japanese by the time the production went onstage. Various investigations launched by Page 361 →the Japanese government disclosed the fact that the North Korean state abducted Japanese citizens to train their spies how to look and behave like authentic Japanese. For more details, see the recent documentary film by Chris Sheridan and Patty Kim, Abduction: The Megumi Yokoda Story (Washington, DC: Safari Media, 2006), which centers on the story of one of the Japanese abductees. 81.Red Detachment of Women was produced as a feature film in 1960; the ballet production premiered in 1969; the film documentation of the ballet took place between 1969 and 1972. 82. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Herley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978),

182. 83. Yannick Ripa, Women and Madness: The Incarceration of Women in Nineteenth-Century France, trans. Catherine du Peloux Menagé (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 32. 84. Rachel Fensham, “On Not Performing Madness,” Theatre Topics 8.2 (1998): 151. 85. Wendy S. Hesford, “Staging Terror,” TDR 50.3 (2006): 34. 86. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 193. 87. Roberta Culbertson, “Embodied Memory, Transcendence, and Telling: Recounting Trauma, Reestablishing the Self,” New Literary History 26 (1995): 169. 88. Hesford, “Reading Rape,”194. 89. Ibid., 195. 90. For a detailed account on how theatrical performance is used for instilling political reality, see Kim SukYoung, “Springtime for Kim Il-sung in Pyongyang: City on Stage, City as Stage,” TDR 51.2 (2007): 24–40. 91. Kim Yeong-hun, “Pro-North Left Wingers Are the Real Adherents to Old Times: Interview with Jeong Seong San, a Movie Director in Making a Musical Titled Yoduk Story,” DailyNK.com, http://www.dailynk.com/korean/read.php?cataId=nk06100&num=14315 (accessed November 9, 2005). 92. Solomon, “New Script,” A5. 93. Hesford, “Reading Rape,” 196–97. 94. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Balti-more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 60. 95. Ibid., 62–63. 96. Diana Taylor, The Archive, 187–88. CONCLUSION 1. There are alternative translations to this, such as “March of Ordeal,” or “March of Struggle.” 2. Interview with an anonymous traveler to North Korea, November 11, 2008, Santa Barbara, CA. 3. Malte Herwig, “North Korea’s Very Cautious Cinematic Thaw,” New York Times, November, 23, 2008, 16. 4. Barbara Demick, “North Korea Film Festival: Hollywood Need Not Apply,” Los Angeles Times, October 11, 2008, A6. 5. Interview with an anonymous traveler to North Korea, November 11, 2008, Page 362 →Santa Barbara. This interviewee could not remember the title of the film, in which Hitler was featured. 6. Although the aforementioned events seem to evidence North Korea’s increasing media collaboration with foreign counterparts, upon a closer look, they also confirm the conventional belief that these events are still very tightly regulated by the state. In the case of the New York Philharmonic, the program committee ensured that the cultural influence traveled both ways. The New York Philharmonic started the evening by playing the North Korean anthem and ended the program with the North Korean symphonic version of Arirang. 7. Kim Jong-il has three officially known sons: the eldest son, Jeong-nam, was born in 1971 to an actress, Seong Hye-rim (1937–2002?), out of acknowledged wedlock. His two other sons, Jeong-cheol and Jeongun, were born to his third wife, a former dancer, Go Yeong-hui (1953–2004), in 1981 and 1983 respectively. In the summer of 2009, South Korean and foreign media started to announce that Kim Jong-il named his youngest son, Kim Jeong-un, as his successor. See Justin Mc-Curry, “Kim Jong-il ‘names youngest son’ as North Korea’s next leader,” http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jun/02/north-korea-kim-jong-il/ (accessed June 3, 2009). 8. Kim Dae-jung had been an ardent advocate of the sunshine policy before he assumed the presidency in 1998. He credited the nonhostile approach of the Clinton administration toward North Korea in resolving the 1993 nuclear crisis by inviting North Korea to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty in Geneva in 1994. During his presidency, Kim Dae-jung consistently committed himself to a nonhostile approach to the Korean conflict, in the process of which he went so far as to send secret funds to Kim Jong-il. The monetary aid presumably facilitated the summit meeting between the leaders in June 2000, but the secrete delivery of

the funds to North Korea only became known to the South Korean public when Kim’s tenure ended and a scandal erupted, marring the significant steps taken forward in improving the relationship between two Koreas. The scandal also tarnished Kim Daejung’s receipt of the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize, which was awarded for his contribution to bringing peace to the Korean peninsula. Nevertheless, the succeeding president, No Mu-hyeon, supported the sunshine policy; ten years of implementing the policy brought significant changes to South Korea. 9. With the advent of Obama administration, which has promised a policy different from the Bush administration’s and to engage North Korea without preconditions, the North Korean leadership sees the opportunity to strengthen its relationship with the United States, and therefore may feel that it can afford to alienate South Korea. This perhaps is one of the reasons it takes a hostile approach toward South Korea while warming up to the United States. 10. Even so, as if proving that the strongest denial of bad news could mean confirmation that the reports were true, some commentators regarded these photos as evidence of Kim’s unstable condition. The gesture of assurance invited doubts about the authenticity of the photos, rather than convincing the viewers that Kim Jong-il was indeed in charge. See Richard Lloyd Parry, “Kim Jong Il: Digital Trick-ery or an Amazing Recovery from a Stroke?” November 7, 2008, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia /article5101905.ece (accessed June 24, 2009), and Choe Sang-hun, “More Kim Jong-Il Photos Are Released,” Page 363 →http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/03/world/asia/03korea.html, November 2, 2008 (accessed June 24, 2009). 11. Phone interview with the author, November 7, 2008. 12. No matter how draconian the state-imposed regulations on the influx of foreign media might be, the reality is that there have always been ways to smuggle banned media products into North Korea, seemingly on two fronts. On the one hand, North Koreans who have the privilege to travel abroad and trade with foreigners have been bringing in foreign films, most of which were Japanese adult movies, as early as 1970s. Another known source of unsanctioned items is peddlers—both Chinese and North Korean—who bring in all types of foreign media materials, including South Korean TV dramas widely available in China. Although these foreign media materials do not get absorbed into official North Korean media, they certainly complicate the overall media practice in unexpected ways. APPENDIX 1. Armstrong, North Korean Revolution, 247.

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Page 377 →Index Note: Page numbers are given in roman type, illustration numbers in italic type.

American Imperial Massacre Remembrance Museum, 198–99 Amnok, River, 83–84 An, Geon-ho, 186, 188 An, Jun-bo, 316 Anderson, Benedict, 7 Applebaum, Anne, 277 Arabesque (1929), 26 arduous march, 309, 317 Arduous March (Gonan-ui haenggun) (painting), 76 Arirang (folk song), 127–28, 151, 277, 287 Arirang Festival (Arirang performance), 19, 277–85, 289–93, 355n14, 357n50, 358n53 Armstrong, Charles, 5, 23, 25, 33, 35, 58, 83, 108, 111, 135, 167, 170, 176, 320, 343n5 Arrow, The (Hwalsal, sic), 201 Art Circle of the Pyongyang Cooperative Factory, 56 Atkins, Peter, 95–96, 334nn37–38 Auslander, Philip, 43, 47

Baekdu, Mountain, 74, 77–80, 83, 92, 113, 115, 151, 153, 159, 354n14 Baekdu Mountain (Baekdusan, 1980) (film), 83, 136 “Baekdu Mountain” (Baekdusan, 1992) (poem), 79–80 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 119 Bazin, Andre, 44 Bentley, Eric, 44, 47, 49 Berlin Wall, 3 Bhabha, Homi, 6, 282 Bolshevik, 23, 108

Bonnell, Victoria E., 110, 339n111 Brecht, Bertolt, 166, 223, 349n33 Brezhnev, Aleksandr, 80 Brooks, Mel, 296 Bulgasari (1985), 39 Bush, George W., 15, 313, 362n9 Butterworth, Jim, 274–75 Buzo, Adrian, 194 byeonsa, 46, 288

Campbell, Joseph, 73 Carlson, Marvin, 88, 96, 103 Page 378 →Caruth, Cathy, 307 Castro, Fidel, 162 Chatterjee, Partha, 172 Chen, Tina Mai, 228, 352n47 Chen, Xiaomei, 174, 217, 350n37 cheollima movement, 109–11, 338n96 China, 3–5, 23, 30, 77, 89–90, 111, 132, 135, 163, 167–71, 207, 228, 243, 273, 275, 323n3, 324n10, 324n19, 332n79, 334nn39–40, 341n15, 343n4, 344n14, 345n39, 355n18, 356n29, 363n12. See also PRC Chinese Communist Party, 11, 171 Ching, Leo, 196, 347n59 Choe, Chang-ho, 207 Choe, Eun-hui, 19–22, 29–32, 34, 38–39, 217, 255–56 Choe, Hae-ok, 37, 52 Choe Hak-sin Family, The (1969), 54, 201–3 Christianity, 193, 201–2, 298, 302, 304–6, 308, 356n32 Chu, Min, 83 Clark, Katerina, 47, 108 class: intellectuals, 49, 108, 169–71, 174, 190, 192, 209; peasants(farmers), 1, 7, 34–35, 39, 51, 53, 55, 83, 109,

111–12, 116, 133, 153, 167–74, 190–91, 209, 223, 231, 258, 343n7; soldiers, 1, 59, 91–92, 111, 130, 132, 167–69, 171, 173–74, 190, 192, 209, 223, 246, 281, 296–97, 314, 343n7; workers, 1, 7, 25, 51–53, 55, 110–12, 116, 120, 130, 167–69, 171–72, 174, 190–91, 209, 254, 258, 343n5, 343n7 Cohen, Paul, 188 Cold War, 4, 268, 313, 319–20, 345n29 colonialism, 9, 73, 195, 205; anti, 8; colonialist, 34, 360n75; Japanese, 6, 70, 323n9, 340n7, 342n55; post, 9 Communism, Communist, 15, 20, 22–23, 26, 45, 48, 53, 116, 124, 150, 173, 182, 187, 202; army, 193; anthem, 296; brotherhood, 180; Chinese, 5, 11, 133, 135, 168, 171, 344n14, 344n22; Confucianism and, 175–76; duties, 96; education and, 190–91; hagiography, 186, 239; hero, 136, 188; in film, 197, 201–3; Korean, 133–34, 193–94, 335n50; nation-state, 106, 134, 165, 345n38; North Korean, 11, 328n70, 341n16; Party, 11, 53, 135, 154, 171, 186, 190, 222; performing art traditions, 295; propaganda, 268, 302; red flag, 76; revolution, 208; saints, 187–88; slogans, 125; social system of, 134; utopia, 134; virtue, 190, 192 Confucianism, 4, 11, 134, 176, 325n26; family, 4, 6, 18, 193, 205; female virtue, 213; ideals, 4, 6, 10, 228; patriarchy, 10, 225; practice, 9; ruler, 82; socialist state, 19; society, 10; system, 132, 134, 147; tradition, 4, 119, 133–34, 138, 160, 170; virtue, 138, 217, 226; vision, 138, 330n46 Conquergood, Dwight, 274 Cornell, Erik, 11, 134, 138, 342n38, 351n42 Cuckoo Bird Sings (Ppeokkuksae-ga unda, 1986), 117, 120, 123, 125 Culbertson, Roberta, 304 Cumings, Bruce, 5, 11, 95, 172, 347n66

Daedong, River, 92, 97, 198, 252 Daly, Ann, 219, 349n25 Davis, Tracy, 14, 337n81 Day the Milk Cow Gave Birth, The (Jeotso-ga saekki nanneunnal, 1959), 113–14 Desmond, Jane, 219, 349n25 Diamant, Neil, 9 Doll’s House, A (Ibsen), 207 Dongmyeong, King, 69, 71–72, 333n13, 333n16 Dougherty, Jill, 270 DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea), 83, 95, 109, 130, 278–79, 320, 334n38, 338n97. See also North Korea Duara, Prasenjit, 8–9, 171, 175, 324n19

Dulac, Germaine, 26 Page 379 →Duncan, Isadora, 349n25 Duncan, James, 96

Evergreen Pine Tree (Pureun sonamu, 1970), 116

Fainstein, Susan, 264 Fall of Berlin, The (Padenie Berlina, 1949), 34 Fall of the House of Usher, The (1928), 26 family, 30, 34–35, 83, 90, 113–14, 120, 133, 135, 139, 143, 145, 149, 155, 157, 165, 176–77, 179–80, 191, 194, 201, 205, 216–17, 222, 236, 266, 282, 285–86, 294, 299, 315–18; biological, 177, 315; Confucian, 4–6, 10, 18, 138, 193, 205; feudal, 176, 208; ideologies, 9; imagined, 6–7, 18, 144, 160, 176–78, 193, 206, 222, 318; in nationalistic sentiment, 6; Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il’s, 26, 62, 77, 133, 135–36, 232, 239, 283, 342n38; nation, 5, 18, 58–59, 135, 142–43, 166–67, 172–74, 176, 181–83, 189, 192–94, 203, 315; nuclear, 178; patriarch, 18, 135, 145; politics, 171; socialist, 142; traditional, 5, 7, 10, 18, 135, 137–38, 143–46, 148–49, 154–55, 159–60, 168, 173, 175–78, 183, 203, 205–8, 210, 213, 215–17, 315, 318, 348nn1–2; women in, 239, 241, 243, 248, 348n2 Family Story, A, 168 fashion, 210, 228–30, 350n39, 351n45; code, 230–31, 239, 244, 250, 255, 258, 351n42; North Korean leadership’s interest in, 255–58, 353n77; North Korean women’s, 228–31, 234, 250, 252, 255–59; of Soviet Union, 351n43; production and consumption of, 254–57; visual media and, 229, 252, 259 Fate of Geum-hui and Eun-hui (Geumhui-wa Eun-hui-ui unmyeong, 1974), 202 Feffer, John, 295, 359n66 Feldman, Allen, 300 Fellini, Federico, 106 Fensham, Rachel, 303 Feuer, Jane, 54 Flower Girl (Kkotpaneun cheonyeo, premiered in 1972), 24, 37, 47, 49, 51–52, 99–100, 102, 116, 145, 192–93, 197, 205, 210, 215–16, 221, 299–300, 317, 325n30 Foucault, Michel, 212, 260, 267, 302 France, 20, 53, 272, 315; actor, 53; film, 26; language, 315; medical practice, 303; French Revolution, 53 Frazer, James, 73 Friedland, Paul, 53 From My Hometown, 168–69

From North Korea (1950), 190 Frost, Laura, 12

Gaeseong, 291, 313, 354n2, 355n14; Industrial Park, 313 Gaines, Jane, 229, 351n45 Gandhi, Leela, 8–9 Gang, Ban-seok, 232, 239–40, 245–46, 248, 254, 259, 342n38, 352n60, 352n63, 353n71 Gang, Ryeon-hwa, 294, 297, 299–301, 303 Gellner, Ernest, 7, 324n15 gender, 8–10, 180, 213, 215, 237, 256, 259, 285, 288, 290, 321; equality, 18, 208–10, 244–45; genderless, 229, 241, 243; hierarchy, 259; in North Korea, 32, 61, 136, 210, 228, 284–86; labor and, 217; preference for male, 167; revolution, 215; revolutionary ideology and, 207; traditional, 119, 226; within family, 206 Girl from Pyongyang (Pyeongyang-eseo on cheonyeo), 124, 126 “Girl from Pyongyang and a Veteran Soldier Groom” (“Pyongyang cheonyeo-wa jedaegunin chonggak”), 126 gisaeng (courtesan), 206, 213–14 Gluckman, Ron, 51 Goguryeo, 60, 67–71, 95, 337n75 Goodbye Lenin (2003), 106 Page 380 →Gorkii, Maksim, 223 Great Leader Comrade Kim Il-sung Is Immortal (Widaehan suryeong Kim Il-sung dongji-neun yeongsaeng bulmyeolhal geosida, 1994), 158, 160–61 Gregory, Steven, 106 Guardian, The, 272 Guomindang, 135, 344n22 Gupta, Lanta, 79 gwalliso (political penal-labor colonies), 275 Gwan-pil (in My Hometown), 34–35 Gye Wol-hyang (1957), 213 gyohwaso (prison-labor camps), 275 gyoye (circus), 97

Han, Hyeong-won, 45–46 Han, Seol-ya, 46, 49, 56, 168, 349n32, 360n76 Han, Yeong-sun, 126 Harvey, David, 107 Hassig, Ralph C., 104, 159, 336n65 Heo, Gyun, 62, 65, 332n4 heroism, 65, 186, 211, 218, 222, 224–25, 345n32 History of Three Kingdoms, The, 67 Hobsbawm, Eric, 188 Hollywood, 54, 311, 327, 351n45 Holm, David, 11–12 Hong, Myeong-hui, 65, 67 Hong, Yeong-hui, 51, 102 Hong Gil-dong (1986), 61–62, 65, 67, 70, 72, 318, 332n3, 332n7 Horkheimer, Max, 15 Howard, Keith, 111, 330n46 Howard, Roger, 343n7 human rights, 13, 15, 19, 262–63, 275, 277, 282, 292, 306, 308, 321, 357n37; abuses, 16, 262; activists, 15, 262–63, 271, 276, 355n24; violations, 260, 262–63, 270, 273, 275, 293–95, 306, 354n3, 355n24, 358–59nn60–62 Hunter, Helen, 209, 241, 352n66 Hwang, Guang-hyeon, 234–36 Hwang, Jeok-mo, 195 Hwang, Seok-yeong, 49 hyeongmyeong gageuk. See revolutionary opera Hyundai-Asan Cooperation, 265–66, 268, 354n2, 354n14

I, Gwang-su, 207 I, Myeong-bak, 312 I, Seung-man, 201, 345n32

I, U-yeong, 23 Ibsen, Henrik, 207, 348n2 inminban (people’s unit), 105, 325n29, 327n50

Jager, Sheila Miyoshi, 138 Jameson, Fredric, 166 Jang, Se-geon, 113 Jang, Se-hun, 169 Japan, 20, 38, 49, 63, 65, 84, 146–47, 151, 157, 168, 193–97, 201, 203, 232, 246, 256, 279; anti-Japanese activities, 22, 39, 67–68, 74–75, 83, 133–34, 136–38, 140–41, 146, 158, 174, 183, 190, 195, 204, 208, 222, 244; colonial rule, 2, 6, 34–35, 48, 65–66, 70, 72–73, 75, 89, 111, 115–16, 132–33, 149, 169–70, 175, 183, 194–95, 207–8, 233, 258, 277; films, 20, 24, 31; modernization of, 132, 195–96; occupation of Korea, 7, 146, 167, 206, 231, 236, 239, 282–83; police, 204, 216 Jeon, Pyeong-chang, 117 Jeong, Jun-chae, 34 Jeong, Seong-san, 293–94, 305–6 Jesus Christ Superstar (musical), 297–98 Jo, Gi-cheon, 83 Johnson, Kay Ann, 173 Jong-il Peak (Jong-ilbong), 80–81 Joseon Art Film Studio, 33, 329n19 Joseon dynasty, 38, 40, 62, 65, 70, 133, 213–14, 217, 238, 333n15 Joseon Film Studio, 51 Joseon Ilbo, 65 Joseon Nyeoseong (North Korean Women), 236, 237, 242, 256 joseonot, 230, 232–34, 236–37, 241, Page 381 →243–44, 246–48, 250, 252, 287, 290, 352n60; as dress code, 230, 232, 246; color of, 234, 255, 280; description of, 233; modified, 233, 255; traditional, 236, 245, 250, 252, 285; women in, 236–37, 244, 258 Joseon Yeonghwa (North Korean Film), 26–27, 235 Joseon Yesul (North Korean Art), 26, 34, 37, 44, 52, 55, 74, 76, 78, 80–82, 98, 102, 137, 139–41, 144–45, 150, 153, 169–70, 172–73, 178–79, 189, 200, 245, 246–49, 251, 253–54, 257, 278–79, 315 juche (self-reliance), 328n70; as revolutionary project, 161; in culture and art, 277; ideological foundation of, 31, 80; ideology of, 2, 182, 237–38; Kim Il-sung and, 90, 142, 155, 246

Judd, Dennis, 264

Kabuki, 48, 298, 360n74 Kano, Ayako, 48, 348 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, 26, 30 Kawakami, Otojiro, 298, 360n77 Kim, Chaek, 183 Kim, Dae-jung, 312, 358n59, 362n8 Kim, Gu, 89–90, 335n50 Kim, Gwang-hyeon, 54 Kim, Hyeong-chuk, 195 Kim, Il-sung, 5, 7, 10, 18, 27, 35, 61, 65, 69, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 78, 84–85, 86, 89–90, 92, 96, 98, 103, 115–16, 124, 129, 130, 131, 132–33, 135–36, 137, 140, 141, 142–44, 144, 158, 161–62, 173, 183, 186–87, 194, 197, 214, 230, 238, 252, 267–68, 278, 335n50, 341n22, 352n48; and his family, 62, 77–78, 138, 145, 147, 232, 239, 240, 244, 246, 342n38; birthdays of, 13, 161, 215; childhood, 74, 137; cult of, 26–27, 69, 71, 142, 330n31, 342n38; death of, 18, 129, 160, 263, 317; funeral of, 160, 162; heroic act during Japanese colonial rule, 7, 22, 72–73, 75–76, 83, 135–36, 173, 176, 204, 207, 309, 340n8, 340n10, 341n16, 344n24; ideas on family, 239–41; ideas on fashion, 231–32, 244, 246, 254–56; ideas on film, 22, 25, 28; ideology of, 142, 238, 328n70; images in visual artifacts, 87, 91, 97, 139, 144–45, 158, 161–62, 172, 178, 254, 290, 334n40, 339n121; in films, plays or musicals, 83, 89, 120, 146–49, 158–60, 223, 305, 339n114, 360n79; influence from Lenin, Stalin and Mao, 22, 25, 28, 135, 164, 329n8; in poems, 79–80, 143; in the Arirang Performance/Festival, 281–86, 291–92; in slogans, 129; involvement in film, 34; journey in his youth, 75, 84–85; Kim Jong-il and, 28, 73, 77, 138, 159–60, 163, 228, 318, 341n24; kings of the feudal past and, 69–72, 332n1, 342n55; Mortification at the Hague Peace Conference, 38; Presidential Palace, 130; Pyongyang and, 98, 106–7, 354n10; revolutionary operas and plays, 139, 141, 150–51, 153–57, 177, 191, 204, 335n44; Song of, 163; Soviet Union’s support of, 2; Square, 57, 59, 103, 160, 186; University, 54; view on women, 258, 344n17, 350n40 Kim, Je-heung, 220 Kim, Jeong-suk, 77–78, 138, 183, 245–48, 250, 353n71 Kim, Jong-il, 1, 13, 17–19, 22, 51, 77, 77, 183, 228, 252, 255, 267, 277, 306, 312, 332n82, 362n8, 362n10; Arirang Festival, 278; artistic vision, 41, 44, 306; as national hero, 73, 81–82, 82; birth of, 78–81; cinemania, 17, 19–22, 25–26, 28; diplomacy, 341n24; documentary film, 163–65; family, 362n7; fashion codes, 243–44, 246, 255–56, 353n77; heir to Kim Il-sung, 28, 130, 138, 160, 162–63; ideas on film, 311, 327n64; in play or film, 125–26, 158–59, 161, 294, 296–97, 301, 305, 316–18; instruction Page 382 →engraved on rocks, 268, 269; involvement in cultural production, 22, 25, 28, 36–38, 138; involvement in filmmaking, 315–16; Jong-il Peak, 80, 81; on media, 313–14, 314, 315; parade, 59, 103, 127; private life, 294; promotion of film, 28–32, 36, 39; reconstruction of Pyongyang, 336n65; residences, 21; revolutionary opera, 61, 116, 141, 243, 325n30; statue of, 296–97; Sin Sang-ok and Choe Eun-hui, 39, 326n41; theater construction, 97; The Character and the Actor, 48, 50 Kim, Susie, 231

Kim, U-jin, 207 Kim, Yeong-nam, 160–61 Kim, Yeongseon, 293, 358n57 Kim, Yong, 143, 356n28 Kkot-bun (in Flower Girl), 24, 37, 47, 51–52, 99, 100, 102, 146, 192–93, 210, 215–16, 221, 299 Korean War, 34–35, 91, 103, 152, 169, 176, 179, 189, 198, 201–2, 208, 268, 328n70, 336n63, 339n112, 345nn29–33, 347n66, 351n41; armistice, 97, 198; eradication of Pyongyang, 95–96; in True Daughter of the Party, 152; Kim Il-sung, 340n10; orphans, 143; post war situation, 3, 180, 181, 198, 230; PRC, 179–82; prisoner, 203; reconstruction after, 3, 87, 230; South Korea, 193; South Korean-American alliance, 199; traumatic memories, 168; United States, 58, 198–99 Korean Workers Daily. See Rodong Sinmun Korean Workers’ Party, 33, 52, 57, 155, 159, 169–70, 186, 243, 255, 278–79, 296, 315, 328n70

laudatory actor (gonghun baeu), 36, 51 Lefèbvre, Henri, 88 Lewkowicz, Bea, 7 Lenin, Vladimir, 22, 106–7, 159, 164–65; Leninism, 11, 136, 323n3; techniques and ideology in filmmaking, 26 Lewis, Martin, 4 Li, Dazhao, 171 Lotman, Yuri, 175 Louie, Kam, 196 Love, Love, My Love (Sarang, sarang, nae sarang, 1984), 40, 61, 217–18, 222, 224–26 Low, Morris, 196

MacAloon, John J., 16 MacCannell, Dean, 263 Magnificent Heart (2002), 89, 352n60 Manchuguo, 133, 169 Manchuria, 2, 22, 34, 67, 72–77, 82–83, 113, 133–34, 141, 173, 176, 183, 195, 207, 232, 309, 340n8, 340n10, 341n16, 343n4, 344n17 Mangyeongdae, 74, 80, 84, 239–40 Mann, Susan, 10

Manning, Susan, 219–20, 223, 349n25 Mao, Zedong, 22, 28, 84, 108, 135, 159, 173, 255, 301, 331n77, 334n39, 341n24, 342n48, 343n7, 344n14, 344n22, 345n39, 346n52, 348n2, 349n36, 353n77, Martin, Bradley, 132 Marxism, Marxist, 11, 15, 171, 323n3; class struggle, 171; education on, 136; gender issue, 210; in North Korea, 11; in Russia, 172, 325n26; Kim Il-sung and, 239; techniques and ideology in filmmaking, 26 May Day Stadium (Pyongyang), 277–80 Medlicott, Carol, 76, 337n83 Meiji Restoration, 132, 195 Méliès, George, 44 Melzer, Annabel, 42–43 Min, Byeong-seon, 180 mise-en-scène, 43, 45, 64, 85, 105 Misérables, Les, 293, 297 model theater works. See yangbanxi Moscow International Film Festival, 30 Mother (1926), 223 Page 383 →Mother of Korea, The, 239 Mulvey, Laura, 219, 221, 224 Mutter, Die (1932), 223, 349n33 My Hometown (Nae gohyang), 34–35, 38, 44, 83, 111–12, 136, 193, 317 My Pyongyang (Na-ui Pyongyang), 87, 92–93, 335n54

Nae gohyang. See My Hometown National Defense Committee (DPRK), 278–79 nationalism, 5–6, 8–9, 11, 111, 236, 290, 324n15; of North Korea, 135, 290, 338n103, 359n66; postcolonial, 5 National Theater School (Pyongyang), 36 nation-state, 2, 7, 143–44, 180, 282; colonial and semicolonial, 167; Communist, 134; idea of, 4, 216, 324n10; modern, 171, 324n10; North Korea, 319 Nazi, 6, 296, 312, 326n36, 341n35 New Generation (Sinsaedae, 1990), 121–23

News from Ongnyu Riverside (Ongnyu gangbyeon-eseo on sosik), 114 No Mu-hyeon, 292, 312, 358n61, 362n8 nong-ak (Korean farmers’ music and dance), 127 North Korea, actors status in, 51–53; capital of, see Pyongyang; Confucian tradition of, 4, 6, 10–11, 138, 160, see also Confucianism; conditions of women in, 9–10, 206, 208–11, 238, see also gender; economic policy, 109–11; educational institutions of arts, 35–38; film production, 20–25, 28–34, 39–41, 60–62, 83; leaders of, see Kim Ilsung, Kim Jong-il; mythification of the state, 83; nuclear crisis, 1, 3, 163, 278, 357n41; patriarch of, 145–46, 149, 154, 157; propaganda exercises in, 3, 12, 17, 73, 170, 172, see also propaganda; publications on arts, 25–26; regime establishment, 2, 6–7, 22, 134; relationship with China, 135, 141, 163, 168–71, 179–83, 228–29, 276; relationship with United States, 3, 15, 198–99, 279, 293, 362n9; relationship with Soviet Union, 2, 4, 27, 34–35, 58, 104, 108, 141–42, 163–65, 167, 172, 177–78, 182–83, 208; rural culture, 107–8, 110–13, 116–17; state rituals of, 16–17, 106; tourist industry, see tourism; women’s fashion, see fashion North Korean Art. See Joseon Yesul North Korean Film. See Joseon Yeonghwa North Korean National Tourism Administration, 264 North Korean Women. See Joseon Nyeoseong Not Even an Iron Chain Can Stop Us (Cheolsoe-ro uri-reul makji mothanda, 2002), 203

O, Yeong-jin, 33 Oh, Kongdan, 104, 159, 336n65 Oh, Tell the Forest (Milima iyagihara, premiered in 1972), 36–37, 52, 146, 151, 153, 176–77, 204, 300, 325n30, 360n79 Our Flower Garden (Uri kkotdongsan), 235 Our New Generation, 55

Pacific Asia Travel Association (PATA), 264 Park, Hye-ok, 54 Park, Jeong-hui, 326n40 Park, Seol-hwa, 289 Park, Tae-yeong, 56 people’s actor (inmin baeu), 37, 51–52 People’s Liberation Army (PLA), 57, 341n24, 345n39 PRC (People’s Republic of China), 28, 30, 56, 138–39, 141, 162, 165, 168–69, 171–72; arts, 168; Cultural Revolution, 192; cultures of, 141, 162, 228–29, 302; foundation of, 135; gender issue, 217–18; land reforms, Page

384 →172; leadership of, 108; model theater works, 171, 174, 224, 243, 295, 298, 301; politics of, 169; propaganda, 149; friendship with North Korea, 179–83; troupes, 26; worker-peasant-soldier trinity in, 168–69 Pepper, Suzanne, 167 Petrov, Leonid, 266 Phelan, Peggy, 262 Postlewait, Thomas, 14, 337n81 Princess Seon-hwa (Seon-hwa gongju), 61, 211–13 Producers, The (1968), 296 propaganda, 3, 11–12, 14, 18, 22–23, 25, 28–29, 31, 41, 77, 105, 107, 132, 150, 154, 167, 185, 187, 194, 198, 215, 265, 276, 291, 293, 308, 311, 315; art, 11, 172; bureau, 46, 109, 172, 233, 243; communist, 268; counter, 19, 301, 307–8; film, 29–30, 35–36, 57, 185, 190, 224, 311; machine/machinery, 307, 309; North Korean, 12–13, 17–19, 73, 99, 105–6, 111, 170, 172, 193, 201–2, 212, 262, 275, 299; official, 112, 301, 305–7; performances, 6, 9, 11, 12, 15, 18, 99, 105–6, 143, 145, 147, 149, 154, 157, 172–77, 182–83, 185, 188–92, 194–97, 199, 210–11, 217, 220, 222, 224, 302, 306; productions, 142–43, 148–49, 154, 185, 187, 192, 205, 224 (producers), 238, 295–96; psychological, 199; slogan, 60; strategy/strategists, 43, 306; techniques, 300; verbal, 260; visual, 109, 139, 179 Propaganda Bureau of the Korean Workers’ Party Central Committee, 33 Pudovkin, Vsevolod, 223 Putin, Vladimir, 164, 332n82 Pyongyang, 17, 24, 60, 62, 71, 85, 87, 88–90, 94–95, 97, 99, 104, 113, 119, 131, 143, 158, 182–83, 201, 244, 265, 272, 293; as a showcase, 104–5; as the socialist utopia, 87, 90, 96, 252; canonizing, 89; capital of Goguryeo, 95; central square in, 1, 3, 59, 103; citizens, 158, 161, 309; cityscape of, 126–27, 186, 252; countryside and, 236; courtesan, 214; documentaries about, 87; during the Korean War, 34, 91, 93, 95–96; fashion exhibition in, 256; Film Archive in, 20; film industry in, 33, 51, 87; film laboratory in, 33; film making circles in, 33; Gangdong district of, 69; in Girl from Pyongyang, 124–26; in New Generation, 121–23; in revolutionary operas, 89, 91; in stage and screen, 85, 257; in Urban Girls Come to Get Married, 123–24; Joseon Film Studio in, 51; Kim Il-sung and, 103, 106–7, 115–16, 160, 162; Kim Jong-il’s office in, 19; Mansudae, 86; May Day Stadium in, 277; mural in, 24, 129; New York Philharmonic in, 312; parades in, 2, 104; reconstruction of, 96–97; Revolutionary Martyrs Cemetery in, 184; scenographic rendering of, 91; Sin Film Studio in, 39; Seungho District Riheon Collective Farm, 55; theater and film production about, 87–88, 91–92; tourism, 266, 270, 277, 291, 315; urban, 107, 111; USS Pueblo, 198; view of, 86, 253 Pyongyang Central TV Network, 122 Pyongyang Grand Theater, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 253 Pyongyang High School of Transportation, 51 Pyongyang Institute of Art, 35 Pyongyang Institute of Cinema (PIC), 36–37 Pyongyang Institute of Music and Dance, 35, 52 Pyongyang Institute of Performing Arts, 36 Pyongyang Institute of Theater and Cinema (PITC), 36

Pyongyang International Cinema House, 311 Page 385 →Pyongyang International Film Festival (PIFF), 309, 310 Pyongyang Railroad Department, 51 Pyongyang Rises (Pyongyang-eun ireoseonda), 87 Pyongyang under Reconstruction (Bokgudoeneun Pyongyang-si), 87

Ra, Seong-deok, 121 Ranger, Terence, 188 Reconstruction of Pyongyang (painting), 97, 98 Red Agitator (Bulgeun seondongja, 1970), 55, 116 Red Army, 33, 35, 173, 208, 343n7 Red Detachment of Women (Hongse Niangzi Jun), 301, 350n37, 361n81 Renmin ribao (People’s Daily), 179, 341n24 Revolutionary Martyrs Cemetry (hyeongmyeong yeolsareung), 183, 184, 185, 189 revolutionary opera (hyeongmyeong gageuk), 13–14, 28, 36–38, 42, 47, 51–52, 61, 87–91, 99, 102, 116, 134, 141–42, 145, 148–50, 153, 155, 157, 168–71, 173–74, 176, 181, 185–86, 189–90, 197–99, 205, 209–10, 215–17, 221–24, 236, 243, 245, 295, 297–301 Ri, Jeong-u, 124, 126 Ri, Sang-tae, 139 Ri, Sin-ja, 55 Rim, Chun-yeong (actor), 36, 51–52 Rim Kkeok-jeong (1993), 61, 67, 70, 316, 332n7 Rodong Sinmun (Korean Workers Daily), 89, 155, 314 Runaway (Talchulgi) (film), 39, 328n71 Russia, Russian, 11, 80, 133, 162–5, 167, 172, 266, 279, 323n3, 329n25, 332n82, 335n15 Ryu, Chi-jin, 207 Ryu, Gwan-sun, 206 Ryu, Jong-dae, 213

Said, Edward, 8–9

Salt (Sogeum), 30 Samji, Lake, 77–78, 82, 84 Schechner, Richard, 16 Schmid, Andre, 132, 347n69 School Girl’s Diary, The, 315–17 Sea of Blood (Pibada, premiered in 1971), 24, 36–37, 99, 101–2, 116, 146, 150, 190, 204–5, 210, 215–16, 221–23, 300, 317, 325n30, 326n33 Secret Envoy Who Never Returned (1983), 51 Seong Chun-hyang (1961), 217 Seoul, 35, 217, 291, 320, 325n31, 335n49, 355n20, 355n25, 356n29, 358n59; Olympics, 358n53; premier of Yoduk Story in, 293 Seoul Train (2004), 274–75 shimpa, 48–49, 295, 298–300, 360n74, 360n76 shingeki, 48 Sin, Go-seong, 82 Sin, Sang-ok, 19–22, 28–32, 34–35, 38–40, 51, 56, 217–18, 226, 255 sinyeoseong (New Women), 231 Sleeth, Lisa, 275 Smith, Michelle Mills, 33 Snow Is Falling (Nun-i naerinda), 249, 250, 251 Snow Peak Mountain (Seolbongsan), 168 socialism, socialists, 4, 6, 9, 117, 169, 205, 208, 252, 265; clothing norms for, 232; in slogans, 127; in the play or film, 125, 151; modernization through, 323n9; nationalistic, 215; of North Korea, 4, 6, 11 Son Also Set Out for Revolutionary Struggle, The (Adeul-do tujaeng-ui gil-e naseotda, 1959), 195, 360n75 Song of Geumgang Mountain, The (Geumgangsanui norae, premiered in 1973), 52, 87, 90, 148, 150–51, 153, 156–57, 236, 325n30 Son of Earth, The, 55 Sontag, Susan, 42, 326n34 South Korea, 2, 3, 6, 21, 25, 97, 121, 131, 154, 167, 169, 175, 199, 202–3, 228, 260, 264, 266–68, 276–77, 291–94, 298, 303, 312, 324n10, Page 386 →326n40, 335n50, 356n29, 356n32, 358n59, 358–59nn61–62, 362nn8–9; government, 276, 292, 345n32, 347n66 South Korean film industry, 29

Soviet Union, 2–4, 20, 23, 50, 78, 110, 171, 178, 223, 228, 266; relationships with China, 3; collapse of, 3–4, 203; de-Stalinization campaign in, 27–28; film, 33–34; Kim Il-sung and, 2, 135, 164; influences on North Korea, 2, 4, 58, 141–42, 172, 177–78, 182–83, 208; Stalinist regime, 11, 104 Special Envoy Who Never Returned (Doraoji anneun milsa, 1984), 30, 333n15 Springer, Chris, 59, 183 Springtime for Hitler, 296, 307 Sseokeulwon, 111–12, 178, 180 Stacey, Judith, 4–5 Stalin, Joseph: death of, 111; de-Stalinization, 27–28, 329n8; dictum, 51; idolization of, 34, 329n8; Politburo, 277; Stalinism, 135; Stalinist building, 1; Stalinist film, 266; Stalinist political art, 338n101; Stalinist Soviet Union, 104, 337n80; Stalinist theme park, 265; Stalinist vintage, 11 Stanislavsky, Konstantin, 46 Star of Joseon (1980–87), 29–30 Stockholm syndrome, 307 Story of Chun-hyang, The (Chun-hyangjeon, 1980), 61, 218, 225 Story of On-dal, The (1993), 60–61, 68–72 Suh, Dae-Sook, 133–34, 182, 341n16, 344n24 Sun Festival, The, 150, 161, 163, 215, 221 Szalontai, Balázs, 109, 338n97, 338nn102–3

Taxton, Ralph, 173 Taylor, Diana, 304, 308 Ten Years (10 nyeon), 168 theatricality, 14, 16, 277, 337n81; in North Korea, 14–16, 289, 321 They Fought and Achieved Victory (Geudeul-eun ssawo seungnihaetda, 1959), 195, 360n75 Three Members, One Party (revolutionary play), 38 Timerman, Daniel, 106 tourism, 19, 261–65, 270, 275, 277, 282, 292, 321, 354n2; industry, 321; project, 309, 313; state-sponsored, 263; urban, 264 Traces of Life (1989), 120–21, 123, 125 Trip to the Moon (1903), 44 True Daughter of the Party (Dang-ui chamdoen ttal, premiered in 1971), 87, 91, 93, 103, 152–53, 155, 174–75,

185, 189, 191–92, 197, 199, 201, 210, 216, 221, 243, 245, 250, 253, 325n30, 326n33, 335n44, 339n112 Turner, Victor, 105–6

U, Rim-ho, 113 United Nations (UN), 95, 345n32, 354n3 Urban Girls Come to Get Married (Dosi cheonyeo sijibwayo, 1993), 123–24, 257 U.S. (United States), 15, 24, 198, 293–94, 297, 317, 319–21, 335n49; army, 58; government, 104, 320; Korean War, 198, 347n66; musicals, 359n64; premier and tour of Yoduk Story in, 293–95, 297, 306, 358n58, 358–59nn62–63; relationship with North Korea, 3, 279, 293, 362n9 USSR, 35, 112, 341n15, 356n29. See also Soviet Union utopia/utopian, 67, 72, 89, 149, 168, 193, 216, 295; agricultural and gastronomic, 127; antithesis of, 19; communist, 134; formula, 120; future/vision, 18, 47–49, 71, 87, 91, 93, 277, 286, 288; ideals, 108, 112; illusion, 14; image, 18; imagination, 88–89; in stage and screen, 14, 17, 19, 260; nation, 221, 323n9; political, 50; rural, 126; socialist, 90, 107, 143, Page 387 →228, 250, 252, 283, 301; society, 59, 64; urban, 92, 106, 123; version of, 14, 88, 91

Van Zile, Judy, 220 Victory Achievers (Seungnijadeul), 195, 360n75 vnarod movement, 167 Volkan, Vamik, 194 Vollertsen, Norbert, 271, 276, 355n24, 356n27, 357n37

Walt Disney, 316 “Wang Pyeong and Mother” (“Wang Pyeong-iwa eomeoni”), 180 Water of Life Flows, The (Saengmyeongsuneun heureunda, 1958), 113–14 Weber, Andrew Lloyd, 295 West Side Story, 297, 359n67 Wigen, Karen, 4 Williams, Raymond, 109 Wolves (Seungnyang-i), 198 World War II, 1–2, 6–7, 178, 194, 312, 330n28, 335n49

Xinmin wanbao, 181

yangbanxi (model theater works), 224, 243, 350n37 Yeon-ok (in True Daughter of the Party), 152, 174, 185, 189, 191, 210, 216, 221 Yoduk Story (Yodeok seutori), 19, 293–302, 304–8, 358n58, 358n61, 359n63, 359n67 Yun, Mi-ryang, 238, 352n48

Van Zile, Judy, 220