News from the North
I haven’t updated in a while because, quite honestly, nothing too exciting has been going on. After over a month of constantly being out of town my friends and I have been sticking around Daegu a lot lately and have fallen into a routine of work, board games, and complaining about the cold.
However, as anyone with internet access or a basic awareness of the outside world must know, there has been big news coming out of North Korea. I thought THIS of all things might be something blog-inspiring; surely my day to day life will be given a little jolt by this news! But… no, not really.
The news of Kim Jong-Il’s death is definitely big news and around the world people are speculating what this will mean for the leadership of North Korea and its regime, but contrary to what I would have expected my expereince following this news as a resident of South Korea has probably been less intriguing than the discussion happening elsewhere. I immediately thought this would be a frequest topic of discussion and was interested to find out what South Koreans felt about the news. The story broke right before lunch here and I learned about it from a student who was waiting outside my classroom to be the first to tell the foreign teacher about KJI’s death.
Really, it’s my students who have been most excited about this story. They are all strangely militant about North Korea and vocal about their hate for KJI. Same goes for their prejudice agaisnt Japan and their obsession with Korea’s claim to Dokdo Island (another post somtime, maybe?). My fellow teachers, on the other hand, met me for lunch with a “Did you hear about KJI?” and that was pretty much it… lunch time discussion transitioned pretty quickly to a female teacher’s upcoming wedding plans. So for anyone who had been reading CNN or BBC articles claiming that the south is nervous about the aftermath of Kim’s death… from what I can see nobody is really that nervous.
I have a few thoughts on this. My main coteachers told me about an anxiety test she had to take in university. Students were tested for their levels of anxiety over different subjects (money, work, etc.), including war. The Koreas have technically been at war since the 1950s conflict and that sense of unresolved tension is something the public has lived with ever since. The impact of this event seems invisible to me because it is. As an outsider I might expect this event to insight some new consiousness about this neighboring threat, but that consciousness is everpresent. It is in the back if people’s minds, it is a part of the collective South Korean identity.
As an foreginer, North Korea has not always been something I have been consistently aware of. When news emerges we suddenly remember the gravity of the situation across the Korean border. We suddenly re-educate ourselves on the basic info and talk about how crazy and bizarre things are up there. However, for those in South Korea this is obviously something much “closer to home”. This is the second time South Korea has witnessed a deified North Korean leader pass and the expectation here is that nothing is going to change. This conflict has been present in its current state for this long and there doesn’t seem to be any reason to expect anything different.
Despite all of that I am deeply interested in what is going to happen next in the north. Living in South Korea or not, this is the kind of thing that brings out the poli sci student in me and as someone who focused both on development and small state politics I will definitely be watching.
Just to make note, this post is based on my observations and is not meant to be a definitive explanation of the attitudes of South Koreans.
