All Monsters Must Die

by Magnus Bärtås

  That same year, there were new reports of the sea monster in Heaven Lake. A functionary on the Chinese side, who measured the water temperature and took gas samples with a colleague, spied a creature in the water. He took a number of blurry photographs that were supposed to show a deer-like head jutting through the water’s surface.

  AT THE START of 2014, the icy relations between North and South Korea began to thaw. On February 12, representatives from both governments met in the demilitarized zone. During the meeting, imminent reunification of a number of families that had been separated since the Korean War was discussed. At the same time, the United Nations published a new report about conditions in North Korea. The 372-page document was seen as the most exhaustive and reliable account of the violence that had been carried out during the Kim clan’s rule. It is merciless in its descriptions of human rights violations in the country: a total lack of freedom of speech, slavery, execution because of “disloyalty to the State,” concentration camps where torture, rape, and forced abortions are carried out. The report also condemns North Korea’s most unique contribution to the dark list of crimes against humanity: the systematic kidnapping of carefully selected foreign nationals.

  NOTE ON SOURCES AND THANKS

  Korean names have been written according to Korean convention with the surname first. Japanese names have been written in Western fashion with the given name followed by the surname.

  CERTAIN SOURCES HAVE been especially important for our work on All Monsters Must Die.

  Bradley K. Martin’s Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty, Bertil Lintner’s Great Leader, Dear Leader: Demystifying North Korea under the Kim Clan, and Selig S. Harrison’s Korean Endgame: A Strategy for Reunification and U.S. Disengagement were our main sources on North Korean history, as well as facts and theories about the ruling clan.

  Through his studies of internal communication in North Korea (literature, propaganda, communiques, news media, and documents), B. R. Myers has formulated a series of original theories about the North Korean self-perception in The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters. His book has helped us understand what lies behind the country’s isolation policy, nationalism, and extreme racial ideology. Some of Myers’s ideas about the formation of the image of Kim Il-sung as a ruling figure touch on anthropologist Roy Richard Grinker’s thoughts in Korea and Its Futures: Unification and the Unfinished War.

  Regarding information about North Korea’s economic situation, the country’s media landscape, and developments after the catastrophic famine, we are deeply indebted to Ralph Hassig and Oh Kongdan’s The Hidden People of North Korea: Everyday Life in the Hermit Kingdom. The book is based on 200 interviews they conducted with North Korean defectors at the end of the 1990s. It should be said that the authors cite lower numbers (between 600,000 and 1 million) in their estimation of the number of people who died during the famine than what is normally cited (around 2 million). The authors harbour strong hope for the relaxation of economic systems of control, cross-border trade with China, and concessions in the planned economy for future democratic changes in the country — phenomena that Myers brushes off as naive hopes.

  Our experience of North Korea as a nation where performances, films, and choreography permeate society often coincides with Professor Kim Suk-young’s ideas around performance studies. Her lectures and essays have been collected in Illusive Utopia: Theater, Film, and Everyday Performance in North Korea — possibly the only thorough study of the North Korean social system from a culture-theory perspective.

  When it comes to interludes on Japanese monster movies, David Kalat’s A Critical History and Filmography of Toho’s Godzilla Series and William Tsutsui’s Godzilla on My Mind have been invaluable. Both books are innovative in their theories about Godzilla as a cultural metaphor and stem from a true kaiju-fan’s body of knowledge. For the technical aspects behind Japanese monster movies and the historical context, August Ragone’s book about special effects artist Eiji Tsuburaya is an indispensable reference — Eiji Tsuburaya: Master of Monsters explores all the films that Tsuburaya worked on, how he developed his techniques, and his importance in Japanese cinema as a whole.

  For the parts of the book that address cuteness (kawaii) and its place in Japanese contemporary culture, the essays of Carl Cassegård and Sianne Ngai have been sources of inspiration, especially their political reading of “cute” in Japanese culture (Cassegård) and as an aesthetic category in general (Ngai).

  The main source for Choi Eun-hee and Shin Sang-ok’s story is our own five-hour-long conversation with Madame Choi in Seoul on July 18, 2007. We’ve taken some details from her autobiography Gobaek, but also from Michael Breen’s book Kim Jong-Il: North Korea’s Dear Leader. We want to extend a large thanks to Choi Eun-hee for so generously sharing her life story. A special thanks to Kwak Hyun-jin for the translation of Choi Eun-hee’s autobiography, for help with Korean terminology, and for the insight into Korean culture.

  Sten Bergman’s travel stories of occupied Korea are deeply coloured by the colonial power relationships at that time. The Japanese ruling perspective is even more dominant in the English translation (In Korean Wilds and Villages): all the Korean names are written in Japanese, and the Koreans in general are presented as relatively primitive and helpless — in need of a protective power.

  For knowledge about the Swedish North and South Korea debate and reflections on Korean events in Sweden, the Sigtuna Foundation Library’s archive of press cuttings has been a gold mine.

  An equally important archive has been the Korean Film Archive in Seoul, where we had the opportunity to view many of Choi Eun-hee and Shin Sang-ok’s productions. For the archival work in Seoul, the knowledge and translations of the artist Jo Ha-young and the theatre researcher Kim Tae-hyung have been essential.

  We also want to thank Choi Sun-kyoung, Huh Sook-young, Mårten Frankby, Will Oldham, Svante Weyler, Dilsa Demirbag-Sten, Kim Sunjung/SAMUSO, Seoul (Platform -09), RAS-1, the Headlands Center for the Arts in San Francisco, and the Arts Initiative Tokyo, as well as our fellow travellers in North Korea.

  Our research trips have been made possible by means from the Swedish Authors’ Fund, the Längmanska Cultural Foundation, Helge Ax:son Johnson Foundation, and Konst­fack, as well as the Harald and Louise Ekman Research Foundation. Parts of our research overlap with You Told Me: Work Stories and Video Essays — a dissertation in artistic research by Magnus Bärtås at the Valand Academy/University of Gothenburg.

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  ESSAYS, ARTICLES, ONLINE PUBLICATIONS, WEBSITES, AND DOCUMENTARIES

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