The Invitation-Only Zone

by Robert S. Boynton

  In 1948, Kotondo Hasebe, head of the Anthropology Department at Tokyo University and soon to be the president of the Anthropological Society of Nippon, published a paper on a human pelvic bone that had been discovered near the city of Akashi.25 In “On the Primitive Nature of the Human Pelvis (Plaster Model) Discovered in the Old Pleistocene Stratum of Nishi-yagi, Near the City of Akashi,” Hasebe classified what he called Akashi Man, along with other early examples of Homo erectus, such as Java and Peking Man.26 For Hasebe, Akashi Man was evidence of the Japanese archipelago’s uninterrupted line of inhabitants, from the Paleolithic period to the present. The discovery of Akashi Man was the first step that Japan’s postwar social scientists took to replace the bankrupt narrative of the militaristic, multinational empire. Hasebe expanded his thesis in his 1949 book, The Formation of the Japanese People, which was part of a series, The New History of Japan.

  The image of Japan as a tranquil, homogeneous nation was attractive to a people who had tired of war and empire, and it quickly became the dominant paradigm, inspiring a popular intellectual genre (Nihonjinron) in which philosophers, historians, and psychologists parsed the causes of Japan’s unique cultural identity. The default assumption was that Japan was a nation of peace-loving farmers and fishermen on an isolated island lacking any significant exposure to alien peoples. Those who, following Torii, had championed the mixed-race, common origins theories that dominated pre-1945 Japan were shunted aside and given teaching positions at minor universities.27

  In postwar Korea, the notion that the peninsula had been continuously inhabited by a pure Korean race may have been the only thing the North and South agreed upon. The rhetoric of racial purity thrived in part because it fed the nationalist politics that each Korea used against the other as they competed over which better embodied pure “Koreanness,” the common goal being to distance themselves from Japan’s assimilationist policies.28

  The quest to root out the traces of Japanese influence that pollute Korean purity continues to this day. South Korea banned the import of Japanese CDs and DVDs until 2004, and in 2005, it established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, part of whose charge was to create the definitive list of Koreans who had collaborated with the Japanese almost a century before. As the scholar B. R. Myers argues, “Having been ushered by the Japanese into the world’s purest race, the Koreans in 1945 simply kicked the Japanese out of it.”29

  * * *

  In December 2001 the Japanese emperor Akihito used part of his annual message to the nation to acknowledge his Korean ancestors. “I, on my part, feel a certain kinship with Korea, given the fact that it is recorded in the Chronicles of Japan that the mother of Emperor Kammu was of the line of King Muryong of Paekche,” he said. Confucian and Buddhist philosophy, court music, and much else in Japanese culture had arrived via the peninsula, he explained, adding, “I believe it was fortunate to see such culture and skills transmitted from Korea to Japan.” The emperor ranged widely over the state of Japan at the press conference, whose contents the reporters present duly summarized. His comments about the royal family’s Korean roots, however, did not appear in any of the accounts, other than a brief mention in the Asahi. The common origins theory was so tied up with imperial Japan’s erstwhile ambitions, that neither the political left nor the political right wanted to think about it. The emperor’s attempt to make common cause with Korea, and foster a better relationship with Japan’s neighbor, was ignored.

  5

  ADAPTING TO NORTH KOREA

  When he was first abducted, Kaoru Hasuike realized that if he was to survive, he had to learn Korean. He had always been a good student and now threw himself into his studies, memorizing the Hangul alphabet, in which the Korean language is written. It was a solitary task, without language labs, conversation partners, or other pedagogical aids. One of his minders doubled as a language tutor, but Kaoru was generally left to fend for himself, using textbooks designed for the few foreign exchange students from Russia and Eastern Bloc or socialist countries at Kim Il-sung University. Study took his mind off his plight, and he was surprised to discover the structural and linguistic similarities between Japanese and Korean. Within nine months, he could read the official newspaper, Rodong Sinmun, with the aid of a dictionary. The articles were unlike anything he’d ever encountered in newspapers back home, with pages of praise for Kim Il-sung interspersed with denunciations of South Korea, Japan, and the United States. With the exception of the positive light shone on the heads of Communist countries who offered a steady stream of compliments, the world outside North Korea was portrayed as hostile and dangerous, obsessed with bringing the good, pure people of the nation to their knees through embargoes and military threats.1

  Kaoru’s minder instructed him to keep a journal, which the minder would read and correct. It quickly became apparent that the goal of the exercise was less to improve Kaoru’s language skills than to give the minder access to his thoughts. The minder encouraged him to write “freely” about any subject he liked. Kaoru winced at the word. Indeed, in North Korea the word freedom usually carried negative connotations, as did phrases like liberal democracy and democratic values, which were used as euphemisms for the hostile ideology behind U.S. militarism. Under constant surveillance, Kaoru valued what little freedom he retained, such as the freedom to think, and vowed never to give his captors access to his innermost feelings. He was careful not to write about his family or his longing to return home to Japan. He found that the only way to keep from lapsing into depression was to push his desire to see his family as far down as possible. “I made sure that there was no way that my words could be misconstrued,” he says. As a result, his journal entries read like the work of a bored elementary school student (“I woke up at six to exercise, ate breakfast, and studied from nine until…”).2

  “Isn’t there anything else you would like to write about?” his minder inquired. “But every day here is the same,” Kaoru responded, mustering as much good-tempered provocation as he dared. Surprised by his charge’s honesty, the minder nodded in agreement, a small, conciliatory gesture that revealed a trace of compassion. Afterward, Kaoru wrote more politically correct entries, praising public works projects (“The new dam was very impressive…”) and other developments he knew North Koreans were proud of. Reviewing these pages, the minder nodded with relief, as he now could present them to his superiors as evidence of Kaoru’s successful reeducation. Kaoru realized that the minder was only a cog in a larger machine, and feared the consequences of failing as much as anyone else in North Korea did. While Kaoru at first assumed all the officials he met were villains, he gradually learned to distinguish those with genuine humanity from the petty tyrants who took revenge on him for the pain inflicted on Korea by Kaoru’s forebears.

  His original minder had learned Japanese during the colonial era and lived abroad afterward, so was familiar with the world beyond North Korea. He went to some lengths to understand who Kaoru actually was, drawing on his knowledge of the culture that had produced him. His replacement, however, was much younger and had clearly never left North Korea. He seemed to have been raised on a strict diet of Communist dogma, and spoke exclusively in the clotted language of theory and principles. “Being abducted is a very embarrassing thing, you know. You must not speak one word of it to anyone,” he lectured Kaoru at their first meeting.3 Kaoru was so enraged that it was all he could do to resist hitting the man. “If being kidnapped is something I should be embarrassed about, then what about the people who kidnapped me?” he thought to himself. But he held his tongue. As months passed and his political education continued, it struck Kaoru that his new minder was not just ignorant but also mean-spirited and arrogant. “I will clean and wash away your old thoughts and remake you into a juche revolutionary,” the minder promised.

  Kaoru grew inured to such ideological blather, but he couldn’t contain himself when things turned personal. “Tell me, how many times did you steal when you lived in Japan?” the minder asked him on
e day.

  “How dare you! I’ve never robbed anyone,” Kaoru replied.

  “Is that so? I understood that everyone commits robbery in capitalist societies,” the minder responded. His cartoonish image of the world outside North Korea was most likely derived from the propaganda-infused textbooks he’d read in school.

  “So there isn’t a single robber in all of North Korea?” Kaoru retorted sarcastically.

  “Of course not,” his minder replied primly.

  Kaoru was enraged, but his weak Korean made it impossible to express his thoughts effectively. However, he had one weapon. The next day, he described the encounter at length in his journal, noting that working with such a biased instructor was making it difficult for him to like or respect North Korea. Kaoru watched his minder’s face turn white with fear as he read the entry. He begged Kaoru to delete the section, which he did. After that, the minder never uttered another disparaging comment about Kaoru or the Japanese people.

  Inhabitants of the Invitation-Only Zone maintained their ideological health through weekly “lifestyle reviews,” during which each member of the community reflected publicly on his shortcomings. The ability to articulate one’s weaknesses is perceived as a virtue in North Korea, and each session would start with a confession, followed by critical responses from the group. As with his journal, Kaoru had trouble finding suitable subjects to discuss, but he learned to rotate through a few topics—camaraderie, study, work—appending minor criticisms about each. But the dynamic of the public lifestyle review was different from the semiprivate journal, and after months of superficial self-criticism, people often felt the urge to speak more honestly, in the hope that their candor would be recognized and perhaps rewarded. Kaoru, too, yearned for something authentic in his bizarre life, in addition to his love for his wife. If he couldn’t have it in Japan, then perhaps it was possible in North Korea? By carefully removing almost everything he held dear, the regime was trying to draw Kaoru to its way of thinking. “All they had to do was create a vacuum in my heart,” he says. He began bringing up slightly more personal failings, until one day he was approached by one of the more humane minders. “Only bring up mundane issues and nothing that the Party might object to. There is no use wringing your own neck,” the minder advised him.

  Kaoru had arrived in North Korea without a strong political perspective. In Japan, the study of law is a largely technocratic pursuit, so when his captors engaged him in ideological or philosophical discussions, he wasn’t prepared to martial strong counterarguments. Kaoru was intelligent but not particularly contemplative, so he didn’t really understand what philosophy was. “They told me that a philosophy was something you needed in order to observe the world, and that made sense to me. I came to understand that it was useful to have a philosophy. I was a student, so I was curious about North Korea’s philosophy of juche. Besides, it wasn’t as if they were offering anything else,” he says.4

  Commonly translated as “self-reliance,” juche is a protean group of ideas whose meaning has changed throughout North Korean history depending on the ideological needs of the regime. The word first appeared as shutai in the late nineteenth century as a Sino-Japanese compound meaning “subject.” It grew popular in the first decades of the twentieth century when Korean nationalists employed it in their quest for self-rule and independence from Japan. Kim had studied the Western notion of self-determination in Chinese translation. Kim Il-sung didn’t use the term juche until his 1955 speech “On Eliminating Dogmatism and Formalism and Establishing Juche in Ideological Work.” In it he described juche as a creative application of Stalin’s ideas, which offered the most up-to-date version of Marxism. “What we are doing now is not a revolution in some foreign country but our Korean revolution,” he said. In the early seventies, North Korean children competed for medals and prizes by memorizing Kim Il-sung’s writing on juche.5 In 1972 the North Korean constitution was expunged of all references to other systems, and juche was enshrined as the state’s official “guiding ideology.” It wasn’t long before juche became so closely identified with Kim Il-sung that his son, Kim Jong-il, described it in On the Juche Idea (1982) as “the previous fruit of the leader’s profound, widespread ideological and theoretical activities. Its creation is the most brilliant of his revolutionary achievements.”

  * * *

  Having grown up in the peaceful Japan of the 1970s, Kaoru was shocked by how common talk of war was in North Korea. War had always been an abstraction to him. As a young boy, he’d watched televised coverage of the Vietnam War and feared the fighting might spread to Japan. While his parents had experienced war, and the students in the sixties protested against it, Kaoru’s generation shunned the topic altogether. Largely apolitical and apathetic, they adhered to what was known as the “Three Nos” (san mu shugi): no vigor, no interest, no responsibility. Passivity and pacifism dominated the day. “Our lives were growing wealthier day by day, and I became a person who took an interest only in things like music and fashion,” he says.6

  In North Korea, however, the assumption was that war was inevitable. Every spring, during the United States and South Korea’s joint military drills, a sense of crisis descended over the country, with nightly blackouts and daily evacuation drills. Kaoru could have handled these periods if they’d been isolated, but they merely accentuated the everyday military culture that permeated the North. Even today war metaphors are everywhere: in factories, workers “battle” to meet production goals; students solve math problems framed in military terms (“If the brave uncles of Korean People’s Army killed 265 American Imperial bastards in the first battle…”); the famine that killed more than a million people in the 1990s is referred to as the Arduous March.7 War dominates North Korean popular culture, too, in popular movies such as Sea of Blood, Flames Spreading over the Land, and Righteous War. Every evening, the state-run television screens movies about the Korean War and Kim Il-sung’s anti-Japanese campaigns. Those with family ties to the Korean War, no matter how tenuous, held an elevated social rank. All North Korean men served up to a decade in the military, so Kaoru was surrounded by people eager to hold forth on the topic. A Korean War veteran described his friend’s internal organs splattered into a tree by an exploding shell. Another told him of a U.S. pilot who parachuted to safety when his plane was shot down. Although prisoners of war were supposed to be taken into custody, the North Korean soldiers executed him on the spot. The sounds of military drills, planes, tanks, and gunshots became familiar to Kaoru. It was a question not of whether war would come, but when. “We will definitely have to fight the U.S. one more time,” a female guide at the Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum told Kaoru. “Let’s get ready for that day!”

  The story of North Korea is, essentially, a military story—the story of a never-ending battle waged by General Kim Il-sung, its founder, protector, and “eternal president.” It has deep roots. According to the state’s hagiography, in 1866 Kim’s great-grandfather helped burn the General Sherman, the armed side-wheeled steamer that attempted to open Korea to trade; and Kim’s father and grandfather are reputed to have been brave anti-Japanese fighters. Born southwest of Pyongyang on April 15, 1912, Kim Il-sung was the eldest of three sons in a tight-knit Christian family. Pyongyang was known as the Jerusalem of the East for its concentration of churches, and its Christian community fought the Japanese colonizers fiercely, their resistance fueled by faith. Kim’s uncle, a preacher, was arrested for anti-Japanese activities and died in prison. In 1919, when Kim was seven, the family immigrated to Manchuria, where he spent most of the next twenty-one years. In 1929, Kim, then seventeen, was arrested for taking part in a Communist youth protest and expelled from school, serving a short prison sentence. In 1935, he joined the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army, a partisan group under the auspices of the Communist Party of China, fighting the Japanese in their puppet state Manchuria. Having lived much of his life there, Kim’s Chinese fluency accelerated his rise. He is said to have fought with dist
inction, and was eventually given command over a unit of three hundred Korean soldiers.

  Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-suk, 1935 (Associated Press)

  Bound together by their love of Korea and hatred of the Japanese, the guerrillas became Kim’s new family, a cadre of insiders who later helped him consolidate, and maintain, power in North Korea. Their small numbers made direct engagement with the larger and better-equipped Japanese military suicidal, so Kim’s group ran hit-and-run operations, “liberating” money and supplies from villages, and forcing young men to join its ranks. Kim would regale new recruits with stories about the grandeur of communism, and he vowed one day to liberate all of Korea.8 The Japanese used a two-pronged strategy against the insurgents, hunting down the leaders with single-minded intensity, while giving amnesty to soldiers in exchange for intelligence. The resulting paranoia and suspicion nearly tore the guerrillas apart, and Kim became known for his ruthlessness with alleged collaborators.9

  The group’s most famous exploit was the June 4, 1937, attack on a Japanese police station in the Korean town of Pochonbo, which killed seven officers, including the chief, and left the station in flames. Kim had become enough of a nuisance that the Japanese put a ten-thousand-yen bounty on his head, and in August 1940 he and his compatriots fled to the Soviet Union, where he married Kim Jong-suk, a cook in the guerrilla force, who gave birth to Kim Jong-il in 1941. Kim Il-sung received his first formal military training while serving as an officer of the Red Army. He also used the time to study Stalin’s leadership methods: purging enemies, developing a cult of personality, and building a modern industrial nation. North Korean children are taught that Kim’s Korean guerrillas single-handedly defeated the Japanese—neither Hiroshima nor Nagasaki is mentioned. In reality, Kim arrived in Pyongyang, resplendent in a Soviet officer’s uniform, on September 19, 1945, a month after the Japanese surrendered to the United States. Stalin appointed Kim, then thirty-three, the country’s “supreme leader,” a position he held for fifty years. The cult of personality began immediately, with the Pyongyang Times describing Kim as “the incomparable patriot, national hero, the ever victorious, brilliant field commander with a will of iron … the greatest leader that our people have known for the last several thousand years.”10