As a writer and editor of the Kyiv Post, I sometimes suffer from “imposter syndrome” when asked to cover topics I know little or nothing about. emerging recently north korea in the media environment due to its increasing participation Russia’s warIt made me realize the gap in my knowledge about Korea; both north and south.

As I normally do when asked to write about topics on which my knowledge is sketchy, I turned to my good friend George Oogle to fill in the gaps. Unfortunately, most of the available information is pro-Western and focuses heavily on the country’s politics and the evil influence of the ruling Kim dynasty. I did my best to weed out the weeds – some of what I learned was mind-blowing – so I decided to share some of it with you.

Where?

Korea is a 1,200-kilometer (750-mile) long peninsula located in the easternmost part of the Asian continent, divided into two: South and North Korea. North Korea borders China to the north and Russia to the 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 a 250-kilometer (155-mile) long, 4-kilometer (2.5-mile) wide strip of land known as the Demilitarized Zone (or DMZ), located at the 39th parallel north latitude circle.

The choice of the point for dividing the two nations was arbitrarily negotiated by Russia and the United States at the end of the Korean War, which lasted from June 25, 1950 to July 27, 1953. A probably apocryphal story is that the DMZ was being negotiated. It is based on a map of the 39th parallel published by National Geographic magazine, which included a line at the 38th parallel as a concession to Stalin.

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Korean Names

Korean names generally consist of three parts: a family or surname that comes first, and a name identifying the generation that comes second or third, with a personal name given in each generation.

A survey conducted in 2010 (in South Korea) found that there were only 280 different family names; the most common: Kim, Park, Lee, Choi and Oh, shared by more than half of the population.

Korean women retain their original surnames after marriage, but children normally take their father’s surname unless it is agreed upon at the time of marriage that they take their mother’s name. Despite the similarity in family names, each individual knows their origins, including which “Kims” clan they traditionally belong to and the village they come from.

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

Korean language – Kugo

Kugo is the Korean of Korean! More than 80 million people speak this language in Asia: 25 million in North Korea, 42 million in the south, about 2 million in the Chinese border regions, half a million in the USA, Japan and Russia; others are smaller. Communities in Singapore, Thailand, Guam and Paraguay.

The origin of Korean/Kugo is unclear and is classified as an “isolated language”, meaning a language that has no demonstrable genetic (or memetic) relationship to any other language. Some linguists say that the language emerged from the “Altaic languages” of Central Asia, which included the Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungus dialects of Siberia. Others say there are similarities with the “Uralic languages” of Hungarian, Finnish, and Japanese, and overlap with the “Dravidian languages” of southern India and Chinese due to modern contact with these countries.

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

Of course, as in every country, there are regional dialects that roughly correspond to provincial borders. North Korean regional dialects are Hamkyong, Pyongan, Hwanghae; These are dialects that people from other states cannot easily understand.

Written Korean has been heavily influenced by Chinese since the first century, when it used the Chinese translation of Korean words known as Hanja. This was largely unimportant since most Koreans were illiterate. In the 16th century, Korea adopted its own alphabet, Hangul, which was considered better than Chinese, which was seen as a poorly structured phonetic derivation for depicting the language. 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 resisting external influences for more than 80 years, North Korea is one of the few countries in the world whose population consists almost entirely of a single undiluted ethnic group – 99.8 percent of the population is Korean.

Approximately 70 percent of the country’s people live in urban areas; Of the 25 million population, approximately three million live in the capital Pyongyang, the country’s largest city, and approximately one million live in Hamhung, the country’s second largest city. The country’s most populous rural areas are the eastern and western coastal plains and river valley plains.

North Korean culture has been shaped by many religious traditions over the centuries. Historically, the teachings of the Chinese teacher and philosopher Confucius were at the forefront, although there were strong influences from Buddhism, Shamanism and Christianity. However, in the current regime, practicing religion is prohibited and people caught or suspected of having religious beliefs face heavy penalties.

As in the USSR, the North Korean government makes a concerted effort to preserve and promote art as an expression of nationalism that shows that Korean culture is better than others, while also celebrating the ruling family (statues of Kim Il-sung and public art). There are people commemorating the revolution everywhere.

Since Kim Il-sung is still the Eternal President of the country despite his death in 1994, it is natural that there are so many statues of him. His son Kim Jong-il took over as the country’s Supreme Leader, but did not become President, a position he held until his death in 2011 when he (his father) was elevated and anointed as the Eternal General Secretary of the Workers’ Party. The current Supreme Leader of the “hermit kingdom”, Kim Jong-un, was also officially surpassed by his grandfather, the Eternal President, thirty years after his death.

North Korean society is mostly closed to the outside world, and the government has great influence over people’s behavior. Writers and artists should be affiliated with government institutions and their works should be based on communist ideology, promote class consciousness, and spread the superiority and independence of Korean culture.

The government controls what people can see on television, read in newspapers, and watch on the internet (in the few examples that exist). It even controls how people look: its citizens are required to have only government-approved haircuts.

But thanks to the Jangmadang phenomenon, things are slowly changing.

jangmadang

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

In the past, every North Korean was assigned to a forced labor unit where they received supplies from the government, but many turned their backs on these government labor units and began growing, foraging, and trading through new illegal markets. It is 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 mentality.

New technology and smuggled foreign goods found today in Jangmadang have given North Koreans greater, albeit officially limited, access to the outside world. Some believe that illegal access to foreign media will eventually lead to weakening loyalty to the regime.

Currently this is largely limited to the “harmless” entertainments of binge-watching South Korea and Hollywood movies, but it has the potential for “revolution”. Many people think that the impetus for the fall of the Berlin Wall was a result of the emergence of the “window to the west” that satellite television provided to East Germany in the late 1980s.

The NGO “Freedom in North Korea” says that three-quarters of North Koreans receive or use income from Jangmadang:

What will be the future of North Korea?

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