Reply #42: As a graduate student in Japanese

[Lydia Leftcoast]

I was interested in all of East Asia, so I've been following NK for a long time.

The library got government PR magazines from all the East Asian governments. All of them portrayed their countries as reasonable, progressive societies that were going to be even better in the future.

Not the North Korean magazines. They just raved. Even the Chinese during the Cultural Revolution had some clue about what would look good to outsiders. The North Koreans were so into their cult of Kim Il-sung that they didn't care that they were ridiculous to anyone who didn't "share the fantasy."

Since then, I've lived in Japan and visited many times, as well as following events in East Asia pretty closely. It should tell you something that China (China!) has a North Korean refugee problem. They swim across the Yalu River and try to blend into the population of ethnic Koreans in that region.

I've also seen coverage of the family reunification visits. The South Koreans complain that their trips into North Korea don't allow enough time to visit their relatives, because they have to participate in all these offical events glorifying Kim Jong-Il. When the North Koreans come South, their relatives complain that their handlers won't leave them alone and that they parrot the sayings of the Kims like brainwashed zombies.

Did you see the Wide Angle program on North Korea? British filmmakers were allowed free access to two selected families. While the families seemed to have enough food and live in tidy little apartments, they talked like fundamentalists, only everything was "thanks to Kim Jong-Il" instead of "praise the Lord." The political indoctrination that children received from the pre-school level would make a fundamentalist envious.

One of the families went to the countryside to their ancestral village for a festival, and the filmmakers mentioned that they had to get a permit to do so. The infrastructure is so bad that the 30-mile trip took half a day by bus.

I've never been to South Korea, but I was in Japan just before the last World Cup, which was co-hosted by Japan and SK, and there was a lot of TV coverage of South Korea. The scenes shown indicated a country with a living standard nearly as high as Japan's.

As far as literacy is concerned, Korea traditionally used Chinese characters supplemented with their own indigenous phonetic alphabet. The North Korean government abolished the use of Chinese characters back in the 1950s. so it's a simple matter to achieve basic literacy. From what I hear of South Korea, they have gradually phased out Chinese characters, and most publications nowadays use only the phonetic alphabet.

Even a friend of mine who lived in SK in the 1960s said that all material that was directed at a mass audience was written in the hangul alphabet.

South Korea is a very Confucian society, and it would be surprising if there were any families that didn't send their children to elementary and high school. (BTW, SK offers free elementary and high school, too.)