A new book offers what many readers will find surprising insights into the circulation of texts in the Cold War among three neighbouring countries at odds with one another: North Korea, South Korea, and Japan.
The victorious Allied Powers at the conclusion of the Second World War severed from the Japanese Empire its key imperial territory, Korea, and divided the Korean Peninsula between them, with Washington occupying the south and Moscow the north. As relations between the United States and the Soviet Union grew hostile, the two zones turned in 1948 into separate nations, each regarding the other as illegitimate and each laying claiming over the entire peninsula: the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) in the north, with its capital in Pyongyang, and the Republic of Korea (ROK) in the south, with its capital in Seoul. Following the peninsula’s postwar division came the Korean War, when the North invaded the South in a failed attempt to reunify the nation.
After the fighting had ceased in 1953, without a peace treaty, an authoritarian ROK faced a dictatorial DPRK in the years of the Cold War across a sealed border bristling with arms. Japan, which had dragged Korea into its empire in 1910 after decades spent bringing the peninsula under its control, was viewed with hostility by both regimes.
One could imagine that the two successor states to Korea—itself famous in history as “the hermit kingdom”— and Japan spent the Cold War in total isolation from one another. Indeed, Pyongyang and Seoul to this day do not recognize one another, and the DPRK and Japan remain without diplomatic relations. Only in 1965 did Seoul and Tokyo normalize relations after years of difficult negotiations and sustained pressure from Washington.
Perhaps the most surprising angle in this triangular flow of texts is North Korea’s repeated references in official media to literature from South Korea.
I Jonathan Kief challenges challenges the assumption of three hostile nations isolated from one another in the Cold War by showing how various literary and social science texts flowed among them during this period. The texts crossed borders and, in some cases, evaded the censors by appearing as references, reworkings of banned items, and republishings.
The Korean community in Japan was a key to this surprising circulation of literary works and publications in the social sciences among countries with sharply different political regimes. Many Koreans who had gone, willingly or as conscripted labor, to the Japanese metropole in the imperial years remained in Japan with their families after the Second World War, while new waves of Koreans seeking to escape the waves of violence and repression that wracked the US zone of occupation flowed into Japan in the early postwar years.
Kief writes of how Koreans organized under the pro-Pyongyang General Association of Korean Residents in Japan (established in 1955, is also known in Japanese as Chosen Soren and in Korean and Chongryon) founded their own schools, with Korea University in Tokyo at the apex, and established their own publishing houses. Resident Koreans traveled both to the DPRK and the ROK, imported books from the socialist “Fatherland”, translated Korean works into Japanese, and otherwise served as a “crucial hinge of regional interactions”.
Perhaps the most surprising angle in this triangular flow of texts is North Korea’s repeated references in official media to literature from South Korea. DPRK media in the 1950s and 1960s not only denounced by name various works of ROK literature but also singled out some southern authors for praise. Kief includes a table of southern publications referenced in the DPRK party organ Rodong Sinmun in the 1950s and a table of southern literature republished in the north from the middle of the 1950s to the mid-1960s. Kief suggests that Pyongyang published a great many southern works in those years because the DPRK was then the stronger economy and military power.
The southern archaeologist Kim Won-yong a northern colleague, that he had read in Japanese translation his book on ancient Korean murals.
Readers are also likely to find of interest the surprising flows into the ROK around the time of the Korean War of Japanese publications, including Japanese translations of Marxist literature and the works of Japanese authors on Marxist and socialist topics. Surprising, too, is the revelation that Korean archaeologists and historians from the north and south, working together in Japan in the 1970s at an archaeological site, learned that each side was familiar with works of the other. The southern archaeologist Kim Won-yong, for example, told Chu Yong Hon, a northern colleague, that he had read in Japanese translation his book on ancient Korean murals.
The author ends by recounting in his book’s epilogue his encounter in 2022 with continued restrictions in the ROK on the access and handling of “special materials”, that is, DPRK publications. The Korean Peninsula remains separated into two hostile regimes. Neither in Pyongyang nor in Seoul are publications from the other side freely available to the public, although restricted access is available on both sides.
Kief, assistant professor of Korean studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, has produced for the Anglosphere an interesting book that shows intellectual currents that flowed among Japan and the Koreas in the Cold War. His book is also of interest for its extensive reference to Korean sources from all three countries. Previous works in English in this area, the author notes, have tended to rely on Japanese sources.