Why pop culture looks to North with warmth despite nuclear fears
By Evan Ramstad And Gordon Fairclough
SEOUL -- In a recent TV commercial that aired here for Samsung cellphones, a famous South Korean singer meets a North Korean dancer on a concert stage. The two women join hands and begin singing together. As the music swells, a banner showing a united Korean peninsula unfurls behind them.
It is a theme that is becoming more common in South Korean culture. In movies and television shows, people from North and South come together to overcome their common foes or work for the greater good.
That might seem odd, given that North Korea still has hundreds of missiles aimed at the 12 million residents of Seoul that could destroy the South Korean capital in minutes. North Korea’s detonation of a nuclear device only about 300 kilometers northeast of Seoul earlier this month would seem to give South Koreans plenty of reason to panic, too.
Yet reactions to the Oct. 9 nuclear test in South Korea have been blase, bordering on the bizarre. Earlier this month, the chairman of the South’s ruling political party visited a factory complex just across the border and toasted to solidarity with North Korea’s workers. He ironed clothes at a garment factory and danced with the local waitresses. The politician, Kim Geun Tae, later apologized -- but only for the dancing, which he called “inappropriate and careless.” Only a day earlier, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had visited and urged South Korean leaders to get tough with Pyongyang.
For eight years, South Korea’s government has preached conciliation with the North, stressing the common ties and interests that unite fellow Koreans on both sides of the demilitarized zone separating two countries that technically remain at war.
But underlying that policy is fear that sanctions and threats will lead to an outbreak of hostilities -- or, almost as worrying to many Southerners, an economic collapse in the North that will leave South Korea with the main burden, and cost, of rebuilding its neighbor.
South Korea has a Ministry of Unification that encourages unification -- but not too much. One office in the ministry aims to foster a sense of connection with the North among children by providing lessons about North Korea to elementary schools. Another stops churches and human-rights groups from sending propaganda via balloons that might antagonize the North. Unification Minister Lee Jong Seok resigned last week, saying President Roh Moo Hyun needed a fresh slate to handle interKorean relations after the North’s nuclear test.
Candid discussions about unification are rare in the government and media, says Kim Moon Soo, the governor of Gyeonggi province, which borders the North. Discussions about the North’s humanrights atrocities are squelched by some for fear of upsetting the regime of dictator Kim Jong Il?something the governor objects to. “North Korean human rights must be addressed if we want to achieve unification based on democracy and freedom,” he says.
The South started a policy of engagement in 1998 under then president Kim Dae Jung, hoping to guide the North toward economic overhaul and narrow the large gap between the two. Soon after, the unity theme began seeping through into South Korea’s pop culture.
Movies about North and South Korean soldiers working together are a common trope. In 2000, the movie “Joint Security Area” shocked audiences by depicting a soldier from the North and one from the South who become friends in the demilitarized zone. “Welcome to Dong Mak Gol,” one of South Korea’s biggest grossers last year, portrayed soldiers from the two sides during the Korean War who destroy a village during their skirmishes -- and then come together to rebuild it.
Another hit from last year, “Heaven’s Soldiers,” shows the North and South jointly developing a nuclear weapon. Soldiers from both sides are then accidentally sent back in time with a bomb (conventional, not nuclear), and end up protecting Korea against invaders from Manchuria and Japan.
The feel-good unity message shows up in marketing, too. A commercial broadcast in June by KT Corp., the country’s largest telecommunications company, depicted a North Korean family cheering for South Korea’s World Cup team. To make sure the family didn’t look too South Korean, the ad was made with Chinese actors.
Last year, Samsung Electronics Co. decided to pair South Korean pop star Lee Hyo Lee, its main spokeswoman in Korea, with Cho Myong Ae, a member of a North Korean traditional music and dance troupe who wowed the South on a goodwill tour several years ago. The women “met” in the first ads through editing tricks. But the campaign climaxed with ads that showed them actually meeting and performing together -- in China, since Ms. Cho wasn’t allowed to visit the South.
At the time, the company’s ad agency said the campaign “overcomes differences in ideology and broadens the horizons of advertising standards.” Executives for Samsung and the ad agency declined to comment for this story.
“I see these ads and movies, but they show reunification in a superficial way,” says Yun Nam Hui, an unemployed 27-year-old resident of Seoul. Mr. Yun, who says he understood how difficult and costly real unification would be after doing military service, isn’t eager for it to happen anytime soon. “We want unification because we’re one people, but the differences of regimes and the economic pressures make it very difficult.”
Not all portrayals of North Koreans in the South are favorable. And idealized portrayals of a unified Korea haven’t changed the perception that the actual process of reunification would be difficult. Newspapers and TV stations often report on the challenges that North Korean defectors face when they try to adjust to life in the South. Even the common language is a hurdle because many words now used in the South come from English.
Jang Sung Hyuk, a 36-year-old manager at a software company, grew up reading comic books that portrayed North Koreans as wolves and then-dictator Kim Il Sung as a pig. His perceptions changed as he grew up and the South overcame the North economically.
“Unification is something we of course want,” Mr. Jang says. But it would be “very costly and very hard,” he adds. He says it could be brought about in phases over a long period.
“Perhaps 50, or 100 years more,” he suggests.