Getting to Grips with All Things Korean as Pyongyang Enters Ukraine’s War

As a writer and editor for the Kyiv Post I sometimes suffer from “imposter syndrome” when being asked to deal with subjects I know little or nothing about. The recent appearance of North Korea on the media landscape, because of its growing participation in Russia’s war, made me aware of the gap in my knowledge of Korea; both north and south.

As I normally do when I am asked to write on subjects where my knowledge is sketchy, I consulted my good friend George Oogle to fill in the gaps. Sadly, most available information is Western biased and heavily focused on the politics of the country and the malign influence of the ruling Kim dynasty. I have done my best to sort through the weeds – some of what I found out was mind blowing – so, I’ve decided to share some of it with you.

Where is it?

Korea is a 1,200-kilometer (750-mile) long peninsula on the easternmost part of the Asian continent which is divided in two: South and North Korea. North Korea borders China to the north and Russia in the extreme northeast. To the east of the peninsula is the Sea of Japan and to the west is the Yellow Sea.

The countries are separated by the 250-kilometer (155-mile) long, 4-kilometer (2.5-mile) wide strip of land known as the Demilitarized Zone (or the DMZ) located on the 39th parallel north circle of latitude.

The selection of the point for the division of the two nations was arbitrarily negotiated by Russia and the US at the end of the Korean War which ran from June 25, 1950 – July 27, 1953. A possibly apocryphal story is that the DMZ was negotiated for the 39th parallel based on a map, published by the National Geographic magazine, which had a line on the 38th parallel as a concession to Stalin.

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Korean Names

Korean names usually have three parts: the family or surname placed first, and a name identifying the generation, alternating each generation to second or third place with the given personal name.

A 2010 survey (in South Korea) found there was only 280 different family names – the most common being: Kim, Park, Lee, Choi and Oh which are shared with more than half of the population.

Korean women keep their original surnames after marriage, but children will normally receive their father's surname, unless it is agreed at the time of marriage for them to adopt their mother’s name. Despite the similarity in family names each individual traditionally knows their origins including which clan of “Kims” they belong to and the village from where it originated.

Koreans rarely address each other directly by their name and normally use a person’s. title, position, trade, profession, scholastic rank or some honorific form such as “professor or teacher.” This is particularly the case when dealing with adults or one’s elders. Among younger generations it is increasingly becoming acceptable to call someone by their given name if they are the same age as the speaker.

The Korean language – Kugo

Kugo is Korean for Korean! More than 80 million people in Asia speak the language: 25 million in North Korea, 42 million in the south, along with around 2 million in the Chinese border regions, half a million each speakers in the US, Japan and Russia, with other smaller communities in Singapore, Thailand, Guam, and Paraguay.

The origin of Korean / Kugo is unclear and it is classified as “a language isolate,” meaning a language that has no demonstrable genetic (or memetic) relationship with any other language. Some linguists say it grew out of the “Altaic languages” of central Asia, that includes Turkish, Mongolian, and the Tungusic dialects of Siberia. Others say there are similarities with the “Uralic languages” of Hungarian, Finnish and Japanese with an overlay of the “Dravidian languages” of southern India and Chinese because of modern contact with those countries.

Officially, there are two standard varieties of Korean: the Seoul dialect of South Korea and the Pyongyang dialect in North Korea, which are both regulated by two separate national language policies.

Of course, as in every country, there are regional dialects that roughly correspond to provincial boundaries. The North Korean regional dialects are Hamkyong, Pyongan, Hwanghae – dialects that are not easily intelligible to those from other provinces.

Written Korean was heavily influenced by Chinese, from as far back as the first century using the Chinese rendering of Korean words known as Hanja. It was largely immaterial as most Koreans were illiterate. In the 16th century Korea adopted its own alphabet Hangul, which was considered better to portray the language than Chinese, which was seen as a poorly constructed phonetic derivation. Hangul remains the basis of Korean writing today.

People and Culture

Since the end of World War II, very few foreigners have been allowed to settle in (or even enter) the northern country. As a result of over 80 years of resisting outside influences, North Korea is one of the few countries in the world whose population is almost entirely made up of one undiluted ethnic group – 99.8 percent of the population is Korean.

Nearly 70 percent of the country’s people live in urban areas with almost three million of the 25 million population residing in its largest city, the capital Pyongyang and around one million in the country’s second-largest city, Hamhung. The country’s most-populated rural areas are the eastern and western coastal lowlands and river valley plains.

North Korean culture has been shaped by several religious traditions over the centuries. Historically, the teachings of Confucius, a Chinese teacher and philosopher were to the forefront although there were strong influences from Buddhism, Shamanism, and Christianity. However, under the current regime it is forbidden to practice religion and anyone caught or suspected of holding religious belief face harsh punishment.

As in the USSR, the government of North Korea makes strenuous efforts to maintain and advance art as an expression of nationalism that shows how Korean culture is better than others, as well as celebrating the ruling family – statues of Kim Il-sung and public art commemorating the revolution are everywhere.

It is only natural there are so many statues of Kim Il-sung since he is still the nation’s Eternal President despite his death in 1994. His son, Kim Jong-il took over the country as its Supreme Leader, but not President (his father kept that job), until his death in 2011 when he was elevated and beatified to be the Eternal General Secretary of the Workers’ Party. The current Supreme Leader of the “hermit kingdom,” Kim Jong-un, is also officially outranked by his Eternal President grandfather, thirty years after his death.

North Korean society is mostly closed to the outside world, and the government has a huge influence on how people behave. Writers and artists must be affiliated with government institutions and their work must be based on communist ideology and should enhance class consciousness and propagate the superiority and independence of Korean culture.

The government controls what people can see on TV, read in newspapers, and view on the internet (in the few instances it is available). It even controls how people look: its citizens must only have government-approved haircuts.

However, some things are slowly changing thanks to the phenomenon of Jangmadang.

Jangmadang

In the 1990s, North Korea’s socialist economy all but collapsed, resulting in a famine that killed almost a million. The regime could no longer provide enough food and other everyday products, so millions of ordinary North Koreans were left to fend for themselves, so they took the economy into their own hands.

In the past, every North Korean was assigned to a mandatory work unit through which they received rations from the government, but many turned their backs on these state work units, and began to grow and forage for food, and began trading through new illegal markets called “Jangmadang.” These quickly became the main source of food for ordinary North Koreans and gradually grew to include more goods and services and with them a new capitalism-lite mindset.

Today new technology and smuggled foreign goods available in the Jangmadang gave North Koreans greater, if still officially limited access to the outside world. Some believe that access to illegal foreign media will eventually lead to the undermining of loyalty to the regime.

Currently this is largely limited to the “harmless” pastimes of binge-watching South Korean and Hollywood films but the potential for “revolution” is there. Many feel that the momentum for the fall of the Berlin Wall was a result of the appearance of the “window on the west’ that satellite television gave to the GDR in the late 1980s.

The NGO “Liberty in North Korea” says as many as three quarters of North Koreans use or derive their income from Jangmadang:

What of the future for North Korea?

Your guess is as good as mine but there is an interesting, thought-provoking article written by the Institute for the Analysis of International Relations (IARI) in September this year which you can read here, if you’ve a mind to.