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INSIDE
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Mark Edward Harris
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5 Foreword by Bruce Cumings 5
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
This book would not have been possible without the assistance of
Michelle Kim, Minsuh Son, and Kim Yong-kyu, and the editing skills
of Steve Mockus. I am indebted to them and to the Korean people
I had the good fortune to meet on both sides of the 38th parallel.
Copyright © 2007 by Mark Edward Harris. Foreword copyright
Foreword
© 2007 by Bruce Cumings. All rights reserved. No part of this
book may be reproduced in any form without written permission
by Bruce Cumings
from the publisher. 6
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available. Introduction
eISBN: 978-1-4521-1363-0 10
Chronicle Books LLC
680 Second Street
San Francisco, California 94107
www.chroniclebooks.com
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CONTENTS
INSIDE THE THE GREAT
HERMIT KINGDOM DIVIDE
Pyongyang Panmunjeom
14 142
Arirang Mass Games Taesongdong
44
and Kichongdong
158
Mangyongdae
Schoolchildren’s Palace Life Along the DMZ
54 170
Korea Feature Film Studio
64
USS Pueblo
70
Kaesong
76
Geumgangsan
86
Sinuiju and the Amnok River
104
Paektusan
116
The Northeast Border
and the Tumen River
124
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FOREWORD
by Bruce Cumings
Of all the slogans the traveler sees in North (Geumgangsan), with scenery as compelling as
Korea, maybe the most poignant is the one Yosemite, until a South Korean firm got permis-
that hangs above the main square (and can be sion to bring thousands of tourists to see these
seen in many other places): “We have nothing mountains (and hardly anything else, of course).
to envy in the world.” It simultaneously fits Then we see a different kind of monument:
the regime’s propaganda about its “paradise” a subway station with shiny walls, spic-and-span
and leads us to ask, how would any North floors, and extravagant chandeliers. I once
Korean citizen know if there might be some- toured the subway with an eerie feeling that
thing to envy in the rest of the world? They I was in a cathedral. Each station-sanctuary
can’t even travel from the countryside to played out a theme, in lavish marble and pains-
Pyongyang without a permit, and only the takingly done inlaid tile: the “harvest” station,
most reliable can travel abroad. for example, shows Kim Il Sung standing amid
Mark Edward Harris’s wonderful collection an abundant corn harvest. The shimmering
of photographs illustrates that North Korea porcelain was lit by chandeliers made of glass
does have some enviable features. When we goblets done in lime green, hot pink, and
view the awe-inspiring crater lake on White bright orange, meant to represent bunches of
Head Mountain (Paektusan), revered as the fruit. Then I looked at the faces of the people
mythical fount of the Korean people, we come on the subway, some of them friendly, some
to understand that one of the world’s most of them unmistakably scornful, most of them
beautiful panoramas—comparable to Mt. Fuji careworn and blank. We see some of them in
or Mt. Rainier, near Seattle—has been off-limits Harris’s book: nothing to envy in the world?
to Western tourists since 1945 because of Everywhere there are the ubiquitous Great
the persistent division of this peninsula. The Leader and his successor son, called the Dear
same was true of the Diamond Mountains Leader, and a huge flock that projects an
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astonishing uniformity in the mass pageants the Harris shows us the largest Kim monument,
regime loves to put on, or the stadium card a sixty-foot statue towering over the entry plaza
displays it choreographs with unparalleled skill; of the Museum of the Korean Revolution. I
as Harris shows, these have now become a witnessed kindergarteners assembling before it
tourist attraction. and bowing while chanting in unison, “Thank
Everywhere, the two Kims greet you from you, Father.” Inside the museum, the alpha and
large murals outside government buildings and omega of the revolution is Kim’s life, which
schools; each room has a plaque over the door modern Korean history merely adumbrates.
showing the dates of their visits. I visited the film He is shown in the vanguard of a mass uprising
studio Harris depicts, and above each door were against Japanese colonizers in 1919, when he
the dates of visits by father and son. Quotations was exactly seven years old. If it is not Kim
are everywhere, ranging from rip-offs of Marxist- on display, it is his son, mother, father, grand-
Leninist slogans to quaint homilies reminiscent of parents, or first wife (mother of Kim Jong Il).
Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. In the finely arranged Even his great-grandfather gets into the act,
Folk History Museum, next to a display of food, helping torch the unfortunate USS General
one can read this from Kim Il Sung: “Koreans can Sherman, which ran aground just short of
hardly be Korean if they don’t eat toenjang” Pyongyang while trying to open trade with
(a fermented bean paste, the most characteristic Korea in 1866. This is a communist state, but
of Korean foods). In one photograph we see also a strange kind of communism-in-one-family.
a diligent young girl playing piano. I visited a Family bedrooms have portraits of father
similar scene myself, with a young woman playing and son on the wall, usually with an impassive
Korean classical music on a Japanese piano. Over or pensive look, sometimes with a smile. Yet
her head was another slogan from Kim Il Sung: Kim Jong Il often has a dyspeptic, vaguely
“It is important to play the piano well.” jaded look on his face. His father, always stolid
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or smiling, would never stand for that. One the men hurrying home and the working
story has it that a foreign cameraman, unhappy women doing double duty—carrying some
with his Polaroid take of the Great Leader, fresh vegetables or fish for dinner, or grasping
ripped it up and started to snap another. He the hand of a child brought home from day
was set upon by a phalanx of retainers: “You care. This could be Seoul, or Tokyo, or any
never destroy a picture of the Leader.” The other city where “modern” means being a cog
Great Leader’s photos are everywhere, and in some bureaucratic wheel.
yet none can be ripped up; it is an extreme of The Leader, the Son, and the people are
Pierre Bourdieu’s view that nothing is “more ever heroic, says the daily paper, effortlessly
regulated and conventional than photographic accomplishing the next stage of the revolution.
practice . . . stilted, posed, rigid, contrived,” Meanwhile, as Harris’s photos sometimes show,
and that every photograph connotes class a catastrophe overtook the country during
ethos*—or, in this case, the maximum represen- the past fifteen years, leaving it somewhere
tative of a class state. between a failed mendicant state and a very
Yet Harris’s photos enable us to move poor but still well-armed nation with a bunker
beyond the posed and the formal, to see real mentality born of a thousand threats to its
people living in a country that has its own daily existence, internal and external. Across from
routines—different from ours, but routines the Pyongyang Hotel is a traditional monumen-
nonetheless. Between the leader and the tal building, not unpleasing to the eye; on its
seemingly uniform mass is a more recognizable side is an inlaid-tile mural, larger than life,
and very numerous salariate, whose members of an attractive Korean woman wearing a
depart unheroically at the crack of dawn from radiant orange traditional dress and seeming
three-room apartments in high-rises, flooding to leap forward. In her right hand is a pistol.
onto buses and subway trains. They put in their For decades this same woman was featured on
day at the office and return in the early evening, the nation’s currency, right in the middle of the
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one-won note. American bombers if they come again. (The
North Korea was supposed to have gone U.S. Air Force demolished the country in the
the way of the eastern European satellite 1950s.) I don’t know what the future holds for
regimes when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, North Korea, but I doubt it is a future that Kim
especially since it is widely thought to be Jong Il or his father would want. Theirs is a
among the worst of such totalitarian regimes, a politics of the 1930s, formed amid colonialism,
wretched excess of communism. Yet today it the worldwide Great Depression, and the onset
perseveres with the same socialist slogans, of World War II. North Korea’s fate now is to
flapping red flags, and ideological formalism as be surrounded by former friends and relentless
if nothing had happened: Here are “the last enemies that have prospered mightily in the
communists,” overcoming the feudal past in the commercial boom now transforming East Asia.
socialist present, building toward the commu- It is anybody’s guess whether the regime will
nist future. disappear tomorrow or finally begin a serious
But the woman with the pistol probably reform program such as China’s and stay afloat,
gives us a better idea of this regime’s staying but Mark Edward Harris’s photographic album
power. Its original leadership came to power will remain an indelible tribute to this odd,
after a terrible and thankless struggle against exasperating, anachronistic, dangerous, and
Japanese imperialism in Manchuria in the faintly poignant nation.
1930s, then it fought against the United States
for three years in one of the truly catastrophic * Pierre Bourdieu and associates, Photography:
wars of the 20th century. The result was a A Middle-Brow Art, trans. by Shaun Whiteside
garrison state with more than a million men and (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1990), pp.
women under arms at any given time, and 7–8.
enormous underground structures (more than
15,000 in all) that it hopes are impervious to
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