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By Root 723 0

work bore the influence of the ideology they had spent much of their lives disseminating. Having been ushered by the Japanese into the world’s purest race, the Koreans in 1945 simply kicked the Japanese out of it. The legend of the ancient racial progenitor Tan’gun, which Korean nationalists had failed to popularize during the 1920s, came almost overnight to be regarded as historical truth. Japanese symbols were transposed into Korean ones. Mount Paektu, hitherto known only as the peninsula’s highest peak, suddenly attained a Fuji-like, sacral status as the presumed place of Tan’gun’s birth.17 Much of the Japanese version of Korean history—from its blanket condemnation of Chinese influence to its canards about murderous Yankee missionaries—was carried over whole. This is not to say that North Korean ideology simply codified what everyone already believed. The average illiterate citizen was likely no more nationalist in 1945 than he had been in 1910. It was the Japanese-schooled minority which now put a radio in every village, taught the peasants to read, sent children to school—and convinced the race that it was the purest in the world.

Gone, however, was the confident tone of imperial propaganda. Where the colonial power had touted Japanese virtue as a protective talisman, the Koreans now believed that their virtue had made them as vulnerable as children to an evil world. What by international standards had been an enviably placid history was now remembered as a long litany of suffering and humiliation at foreign hands. In depictions of the colonial era, novelists and painters focused on the forced labor of little girls and boys, thus reinforcing the impression of a child race abused by an adult one.18 Because Koreans truly were as the perfidious Japanese had only claimed to be, i.e. inherently virtuous, never evil by nature, all atrocities they had committed during the Pacific War were ascribed to duress and quickly erased from the collective memory.19 Koreans had done nothing under the Japanese but suffer.†

The new racial self-image manifested itself clearly in stories of Soviet-Korean friendship written and published in the late 1940s.20 Writers depicted ailing men and women being carried to hospitals on the backs of Russian nurses and female doctors. Lest anyone miss the symbolism, the heroines were explicitly compared to mothers, the locals to children.21

Even in the hardest times Wǒnju had only to look into Dr. Kriblyak’s eyes to know that he would not die. His heart was always in her embrace, as if he were being held at his mother’s bosom.22

The genre was evidently meant to flatter the Soviets with the implication of filial subservience, and at the same time to plead for motherly protection of a race too pure to survive on its own. These tales should not, however, be misread as asserting the moral equality (let alone superiority) of the Russian people. Just as foreigners can be evil, while Koreans can only do it, so it is that only the child race is inherently virtuous; foreigners can at best do the occasional good deed.

The North Koreans were by no means alone in reinventing their past, nor were they the only nationalists in the new East Bloc. The historian Tony Judt has written that myths of a “France of resisters or a Poland of victims” played an important role in helping Europe set aside its past and move on.23 But there is an enormous difference between nationalism and a race-based view of the world. The North Koreans’ image of themselves as inherently pure and vulnerable would prove particularly problematic, encouraging as it did both a dislike of their allies and a chronic dependence on them.

Kim Jong Il as a spartan, Juche-minded 18 year old, one of many images designed to counter the assumption that he had a carefree or privileged upbringing.

This worldview also posed problems for iconographers of the new personality cult, for Kim Il Sung had to be presented on the one hand as the embodiment of Korean naivety and on the other as a brilliant revolutionary warrior. The logical solution would