Happy Chuseok (20-22 September). It will be a slow news week from Korea as most everyone is on holiday.
Chuseok, also known as Korean Thanksgiving Day, is one of the most important and festive holidays of the year. This year, Chuseok falls on Tuesday, September 21st, but the holiday period actually lasts for three days in total – including the day before and after Chuseok. Traditionally, Koreans return to their ancestral hometowns to celebrate with their families, causing one of the biggest traffic jams of the year as people often take to the road to reach the provinces outside of Seoul.
I urge everyone to think of the Koreans in the north who cannot celebrate the holiday on a level anywhere near those in the South can.
Quotes of the Day:
“Perception is strong and sight weak. In strategy it is important to see distant things as if they were close and to take a distanced view of close things."
- Miyamoto Musashi
“What we don’t know about North Korea is so vast that it makes the Kremlin of the 1950’s look like an open book. The communist northern tier of the peninsula once known as the Hermit Kingdom has lived up to that name with a vengeance, enveloping its 22 million people in a bell jar of propaganda, thought control and mythology glorifying the Kims, often in public pageants that would dwarf a Cecil B. DeMille production.”
- Arnold Kantor, Former U.S. Undersecretary of State
"The North Korean leadership faces three broad options: it can adopt fundamental economic reforms in an attempt to reverse the economic decline, recognizing that reform may unleash forces that threaten the character of the political regime; it can stand pat and try to ride out the current crisis, risking collapse; or it can muddle through, making ad hoc adjustments as circumstances dictate. In the end, North Korea will most likely follow Romania in a form of apparatchik capitalism in which growth will follow the initial decline in output that results from the relaxation of central control."
- Marcus Noland, Foreign Affairs, July 1997
1. N. Korea discounts S. Korea's new SLBM as 'clumsy product' in 'elementary' development stage
2. S. Korea to deploy homegrown SLBM next year: sources
3. N.K. says U.S-Australia submarine deal 'extremely undesirable,' vows to take counteraction
4. Highways clog with traffic as Chuseok exodus is in full swing
5. Ruling party chief says U.S. policy on N. Korea remains too 'vague'
6. North Korea warns U.S. risks "nuclear arms race" over submarine deal with Australia
7. North Korea's nuclear programme going 'full steam ahead', IAEA chief says
8. The U.S. Just Made Travelling to North Korea Easier—For Some
9. The South Korean Writer Locked Up for Daring to Go North: Hwang Sok-yong’s Memoir The Prisoner
1. N. Korea discounts S. Korea's new SLBM as 'clumsy product' in 'elementary' development stage
I think the regime is jealous because the South Korean capability is superior.
(2nd LD) N. Korea discounts S. Korea's new SLBM as 'clumsy product' in 'elementary' development stage | Yonhap News Agency
(ATTN: UPDATES throughout with KCNA's English dispatch, more background info; ADDS 2nd photo)
By Oh Seok-min
SEOUL, Sept. 20 (Yonhap) -- North Korea on Monday questioned whether South Korea's newly unveiled submarine-launched ballistic missile is a real SLBM, claiming even if it is, the "clumsy product" is just in the elementary development stage and cannot serve as an effective means of attack.
The chief of the North's Academy of National Defense made the claim in an article carried by the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), days after South Korea unveiled its first homegrown SLBM by announcing the successful test-launch from the 3,000-ton-class Dosan Ahn Chang-ho submarine.
"The disclosed pictures show that the weapon has the structure and shape of a typical ground-to-ground tactical ballistic missile. Though the photos could have deliberately been retouched for secrecy, the missile in the picture looked somewhat like a poor weapon without all its shape and far from an underwater weapon," agency chief Jang Chang-ha said. "What was shown in the pictures was clearly not SLBM."
Alleging South Korea seemed to have failed to complete key underwater ejection technologies, Jang called the new asset a "clumsy product" that imitates India's K-15 sea-based missile, and it "cannot be the one which will be an effective military attack means in a war" and "not be regarded as a weapon of strategic and tactical significance."
"If what south Korea opened to public and trumpeted so much is SLBM, it is just in the stage of elementary step," the article read. "We have experienced all these processes."
The North then said it is closely watching South Korea's intention and purpose behind the development, warning that such efforts are "a clear omen for the military tension that will be certainly aggravated on the Korean peninsula and this awakens us once again to what we should do."
"South Korea must have wanted to relieve the increasing security uneasiness in the face of the continued news about missile development by the DPRK," Jang said. DPRK is the acronym of the North's official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
Sources in Seoul said several more rounds of tests will be conducted to ensure the reliability of the new asset. It will then be mass produced for operational deployment in around 2022.
The South Korean military seeks to deploy a total of 78 units to nine mid-class submarines, including the Dosan Ahn Chang-ho, in phases in accordance with the country's procurement plan, they added.
The SLBM, believed to be a variant of the country's Hyunmoo-2B ballistic missile, has a maximum flight range of 800 kilometers. During the underwater test last week, the missile reportedly flew around 400 kilometers before striking a target.
The Seoul government said that the underwater ejection test made the country the world's seventh nation to develop an SLBM after the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France and India.
North Korea has also been developing SLBMs, and it said in 2016 that it test-fired one in waters off its east coast. But it is unclear if the missile was fired from an actual submarine, according to the Seoul officials.
graceoh@yna.co.kr
(END)
2. S. Korea to deploy homegrown SLBM next year: sources
And it seems the South can produce an SLBM capability faster than the north.
S. Korea to deploy homegrown SLBM next year: sources | Yonhap News Agency
By Oh Seok-min
SEOUL, Sept. 20 (Yonhap) -- South Korea plans to put into operations a newly unveiled homegrown submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) at sea around the second half of next year, sources said Monday.
Last week, the country unveiled its first homegrown SLBM by announcing the successful test-launch from the 3,000-ton-class Dosan Ahn Chang-ho submarine. South Korea became the world's seventh nation to have proven field operation capabilities of the system.
"Several more rounds of tests will be conducted to ensure its reliability. After wrapping up development by early next year, we will begin mass production in the first half of 2022. The missiles will likely then be deployed for actual operations starting in the second half," a government source said.
As the country's first 3,000-ton-class submarine, the Dosan Ahn Chang-ho is equipped with six vertical launch tubes. The Navy received the mid-class submarine last month.
Another government source said the military is working to deploy a total of 78 units to nine mid-class submarines, including the Dosan Ahn Chang-ho, in phases in accordance with the country's procurement plan.
South Korea is working on a project to build two more 3,000-ton-class submarines by 2023 and is planning to secure six additional units of a larger class that have up to 10 launch tubes, each, according to officials. Last year, the defense ministry unveiled a plan to develop a 4,000-ton next-generation submarine to boost its underwater capabilities.
The SLBM, believed to be a variant of the country's Hyunmoo-2B ballistic missile, has a maximum flight range of 800 kilometers. During the underwater test last week, the missile reportedly flew around 400 kilometers before striking a target.
It will be equipped with conventional warheads, as South Korea is barred from going nuclear, according to officials. All the six nations that have the SLBM system -- the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France and India -- are all nuclear powers.
graceoh@yna.co.kr
(END)
3. N.K. says U.S-Australia submarine deal 'extremely undesirable,' vows to take counteraction
Sometimes north Korea seems like the child standing knee-high next to the bully shouting insults and making threats he cannot achieve because he feels confident he will be protected.
N.K. says U.S-Australia submarine deal 'extremely undesirable,' vows to take counteraction | Yonhap News Agency
By Yi Wonju
SEOUL, Sept. 20 (Yonhap) -- North Korea on Monday denounced a United States decision to help build nuclear-powered submarines for Australia as an "extremely undesirable and dangerous" move that can trigger off a nuclear arms race.
The North will also take "corresponding counteraction in case it has even a little adverse impact on the security" of the country, the foreign news section chief of the North's foreign ministry told the official Korean Central News Agency.
The United States on Wednesday announced the launch of a new trilateral security partnership with Australia and Britain, and said the countries will also work to equip Australia with "conventionally armed" nuclear submarines.
"These are extremely undesirable and dangerous acts which will upset the strategic balance in the Asia-Pacific region and trigger off a chain of nuclear arms race," he was quoted as saying in the KCNA.
He added that Pyongyang is "closely looking into the background" of the U.S. decision.
The official also took aim at the Joe Biden administration, saying that "the U.S. double-dealing attitude ... erodes the universally accepted international norm and order and seriously threatens the world peace and stability."
He then supported China and other neighboring countries' criticism that the deal destroys the regional stability and the "international nuclear non-proliferation system."
"The prevailing situation shows once again that bolstering the capabilities for national defence from a long-term perspective should not be slackened even a bit in order to cope with the ever-changing international security environment," he added.
On Wednesday, Biden stressed that that the submarines will only be nuclear-powered, not nuclear-armed, and said the countries will consult on Australia's acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines over the next 18 months.
julesyi@yna.co.kr
(END)
4. Highways clog with traffic as Chuseok exodus is in full swing
Best time to remain at home in Korea!
On a semi-serious note. When we think about NEO in Korea we should compare the transportation challenges to Chuseok and New Years.
Highways clog with traffic as Chuseok exodus is in full swing | Yonhap News Agency
SEOUL, Sept. 20 (Yonhap) -- Traffic surged on South Korea's expressways nationwide Monday as a huge number of people head to their hometowns for family reunions and for travel during the extended Chuseok holiday, the traffic agency said.
More than 4 million vehicles are expected to hit the road across the country in the day, with 390,000 leaving Seoul and the surrounding metropolitan regions for other parts of the country, according to the Korea Expressway Corps.
As of 9 a.m., the drive to the southeastern city of Busan from Seoul took five 1/2 hours, at least one hour longer than usual, the agency said, adding the traffic volume is expected to reach the maximum at around noon before easing at around 7 p.m.
This year's Chuseok, the Korean equivalent of Thanksgiving, falls on Tuesday, and the holiday runs through Wednesday. Koreans usually visit their hometowns to get together with family members and visit their ancestors' graves.
Around 32.26 million people are expected to travel during the Chuseok holiday, and the average daily traffic is estimated at 5.38 million, up 3.5 percent from a year earlier, according to the Korea Transport Institute. But this year's figure marked a 16.4 percent fall compared to 2019, a pre-pandemic year.
graceoh@yna.co.kr
(END)
5. Ruling party chief says U.S. policy on N. Korea remains too 'vague'
I guess he needs another briefing or he has not been paying attention.
Ruling party chief says U.S. policy on N. Korea remains too 'vague' | Yonhap News Agency
WASHINGTON, Sept. 19 (Yonhap) -- The United States must not return to the so-called strategic patience when dealing with North Korea, the head of South Korea's ruling Democratic Party said Sunday, also arguing the Joe Biden administration's policy on the North may be too "vague."
Rep. Song Young-gil insisted the North Korean nuclear issue may be one of the areas where the Biden administration can make actual progress before the mid-term elections next year.
"It just remains too vague without any progress. In other words, I think it is moving toward neither the (Barack) Obama administration's strategic patience nor the (Donald) Trump administration's top-down (summit diplomacy) and just remains uncertain," Song told reporters after arriving in Washington.
Trump held two historic summit meetings with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, held in Singapore in June 2018 and in Hanoi in February 2019.
The Biden administration has repeatedly offered to meet with North Korea "anytime, anywhere without preconditions," but its dialogue with the North remains naught as Pyongyang continues to ignore U.S. overtures.
North Korea has stayed away from dialogue with the U.S. since the second Trump-Kim summit in Hanoi ended without a deal.
"I believe resolving the North Korean nuclear issue is something Biden can show to the American people before the mid-term elections in November (2022) and that the North Korean nuclear issue is something where (he) can make actual progress through bipartisan efforts by building on Trump's legacy," Song said.
He also argued the North may still be willing to come to the dialogue table, claiming the North has left some "room" for future dialogue in its recent messages aimed at denouncing Seoul and Washington.
He said he will discuss ways to bring North Korea back to the dialogue table when he meets U.S. officials here this week that his party earlier said will include National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and Kurt Campbell, White House policy coordinator for the Indo-Pacific.
Song is set to head back home on Thursday.
bdk@yna.co.kr
(END)
Related Articles
6. North Korea warns U.S. risks "nuclear arms race" over submarine deal with Australia
and north Kore would not be the cause of an arms race?
North Korea warns U.S. risks "nuclear arms race" over submarine deal with Australia
Axios · by Rebecca Falconer
North Korea warned of possible "counteraction" if it finds the new U.S. deal to provide nuclear-powered submarines to Australia is a threat to its security, per a statement published by the state-run KCNA news agency Monday.
Details: The North Korean Foreign Ministry statement said both the U.S. security partnership with the U.K. and Australia, known as AUKUS, and the submarine deal were "extremely undesirable and dangerous acts which will upset the strategic balance in the Asia-Pacific region and trigger off a chain of nuclear arms race."
Why it matters: The comments come days after Chinese government officials responded to the deal by warning of an "arms race," and at a time when North Korea appears to be stepping up its missiles program.
Of note: The North Korean statement added: "Even a U.S. ally called the U.S. move a 'brutal, unilateral and unpredictable decision' and 'a stab in the back." — an apparent reference t0 comments by French government officials, angry that their $90 billion submarine deal with Australia was scrapped following the pact.
For the record: The Biden administration has stressed that Australia isn't seeking nuclear weapons and that all three AUKUS countries are committed to non-proliferation.
-
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said Sunday that French officials knew his government had "deep and grave concerns" about the original submarines plan.
Go deeper:
Axios · by Rebecca Falconer
7. North Korea's nuclear programme going 'full steam ahead', IAEA chief says
North Korea's nuclear programme going 'full steam ahead', IAEA chief says
Reuters · by Reuters Staff · September 20, 2021
By Reuters Staff
1 Min Read
VIENNA, Sept 20 (Reuters) - North Korea’s nuclear programme is going “full steam ahead”, U.N. atomic watchdog chief Rafael Grossi said in a speech to an annual meeting of his agency’s member states on Monday.
“In the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, (the) nuclear programme goes full steam ahead with work on plutonium separation, uranium enrichment and other activities,” said Grossi, who issued a report last month saying Pyongyang appeared to have restarted a nuclear reactor that is widely believed to have produced plutonium for nuclear weapons. (Reporting by Francois Murphy; Editing by Alex Richardson)
Reuters · by Reuters Staff · September 20, 2021
8. The U.S. Just Made Travelling to North Korea Easier—For Some
Excerpts:
Among those eligible for such validations are journalists, humanitarian workers, one who is a “representative of the International Committee of the Red Cross or the American Red Cross traveling on an officially-sponsored Red Cross mission to the DPRK,” or otherwise representing the national interest.
Traveling to North Korea without the validation could lead to the revocation of a person’s passport, the State Department warned. Those applying must also make clear that this is the type of validation they are seeking.
Daniel Jasper, American Friends Service Committee’s (AFSC) public education and advocacy coordinator for Asia, told NK News that the changes, while welcome, did not go far enough.
“It is something that we’ve been asking for if they’re not going to rescind the travel restrictions altogether,” Jasper said. “So, a multiple-entry passport is a positive step … [and] might be helpful in the future, but right now, it doesn’t really help us get over that initial hurdle of getting back into the country when the borders are reopened.”
The U.S. Just Made Travelling to North Korea Easier—For Some
The State Department just changed the travel restrictions on North Korea, but going there comes with a severe warning.
The State Department has issued a small rule change that will affect aid workers who go to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK).
According to NK News, the State Department will now “allow humanitarian workers to visit North Korea multiple times on a single authorization, rather than just once.”
Under normal circumstances, holders of American passports are not allowed to travel to North Korea, unless they receive a “special validation” passport. The new rule went into effect September 3 and will remain so for four years, continuing through September 30.
“The U.S. Department of State may grant an exception to qualified applicants by issuing a passport with a special validation. Most special validations will permit the bearer to make one round-trip to the DPRK,” the Department’s website says. “In certain qualifying cases subject to additional requirements, the Department of State may approve applicants for a multi-entry special validation, permitting the bearer to make multiple trips to the DPRK during the special validation passport's period of validity of no more than one year. Special validations will only be issued on an extremely limited basis.”
Among those eligible for such validations are journalists, humanitarian workers, one who is a “representative of the International Committee of the Red Cross or the American Red Cross traveling on an officially-sponsored Red Cross mission to the DPRK,” or otherwise representing the national interest.
Traveling to North Korea without the validation could lead to the revocation of a person’s passport, the State Department warned. Those applying must also make clear that this is the type of validation they are seeking.
Daniel Jasper, American Friends Service Committee’s (AFSC) public education and advocacy coordinator for Asia, told NK News that the changes, while welcome, did not go far enough.
“It is something that we’ve been asking for if they’re not going to rescind the travel restrictions altogether,” Jasper said. “So, a multiple-entry passport is a positive step … [and] might be helpful in the future, but right now, it doesn’t really help us get over that initial hurdle of getting back into the country when the borders are reopened.”
In addition to the State Department restrictions, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has also been clear about not wanting Americans to travel to North Korea, despite the regime’s repeated claims to have zero cases of the virus.
“Avoid travel to North Korea. If you must travel to North Korea, make sure you are fully vaccinated before travel,” the CDC’s current advisory says. In addition to COVID-19 vaccinations, travelers to North Korea are advised to be inoculated against Hepatitis A and B, Japanese Encephalitis, malaria, and rabies, in addition to “routine vaccines” to chickenpox, polio, shingles, Diphtheria-Tetanus-Pertussis and Measles-Mumps-Rubella (MMR).
Stephen Silver, a technology writer for The National Interest, is a journalist, essayist, and film critic, who is also a contributor to The Philadelphia Inquirer, Philly Voice, Philadelphia Weekly, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Living Life Fearless, Backstage magazine, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenSilver.
Image: Reuters
9. The South Korean Writer Locked Up for Daring to Go North: Hwang Sok-yong’s Memoir The Prisoner
Excerpts:
It bears repeating that this is a memoir not of captivity in North Korea, a genre in which the US publishing industry has shown an insatiable interest, but of captivity in the South. Nevertheless, it is also in part a travelogue of North Korea, Hwang’s trip to which brought down his prison sentence in the first place. He took it in 1989, the year international travel opened up to ordinary South Koreans, though by that time he already possessed the rare distinction of experience abroad. The then-West Germany had invited him in 1985, and his time there plunged him into uncertainty about his very identity. “Who was I? I was forty-two. I had written four novellas and a volume of plays and had just published the tenth volume of my popular novel Jang Gil-san, which I had serialized since 1974. My work, however, did not exist outside of Korea.”
...
Despite South Korea’s simultaneous entry into the United Nations with the North in 1991, among other implicit acknowledgments of nationhood, the National Security Act “was never struck down and remains the law of the land to this day. Even the most vaguely positive-sounding mention of the North Korean regime can be construed as a crime of ‘praising’ terrorists.” Giving a talk in Japan, Hwang deals with an audience member whose hostile questions spur him to contemplate more brazen action: “Was it enough, to avoid ‘praising’ the North Korean regime, to say that communism was evil and that we had to destroy the communists if we wanted reunification? I thought of the people who had died in both North and South during the Korean War, the people who had broken the taboo of this border and were imprisoned or executed, and all the people in Gwangju who died while demanding democracy.”
The South Korean Writer Locked Up for Daring to Go North: Hwang Sok-yong’s Memoir The Prisoner
09/19/2021
The reunification of Germany has long been a topic of interest among South Koreans invested in relations with the North. When the Berlin Wall fell, Hwang Sok-yong was one of the few such South Koreans actually there to witness it. Though known primarily as a novelist, Hwang split his energies between writing and political agitation in the early decades of his now more than half-century-long literary career. He often failed to strike an ideal balance between the two, as he admits in his memoir The Prisoner (수인), recently published by Verso in Anton Hur and Sora Kim-Russell’s English translation. This German sojourn comes early in the book, whose 624 pages (condensed from the two-volume original) ultimately constitute a full autobiography, albeit a chronologically shuffled one. Through these episodes of his life he interweaves the titular narrative, that of his half-decade’s political imprisonment by the South Korean government.
It bears repeating that this is a memoir not of captivity in North Korea, a genre in which the US publishing industry has shown an insatiable interest, but of captivity in the South. Nevertheless, it is also in part a travelogue of North Korea, Hwang’s trip to which brought down his prison sentence in the first place. He took it in 1989, the year international travel opened up to ordinary South Koreans, though by that time he already possessed the rare distinction of experience abroad. The then-West Germany had invited him in 1985, and his time there plunged him into uncertainty about his very identity. “Who was I? I was forty-two. I had written four novellas and a volume of plays and had just published the tenth volume of my popular novel Jang Gil-san, which I had serialized since 1974. My work, however, did not exist outside of Korea.”
“A country bumpkin on his first overseas trip,” Hwang decided that in Germany he “wouldn’t even bother mentioning literature: I would only talk to as many people as possible about the plight of the citizens of Gwangju and our democracy movement.” The nine-day long violent conflict between protestors and the military in that South Korean city — now called the Gwangju Uprising, or by some the Gwangju Massacre — had occurred just five years earlier. That Hwang had been living there at the time would align with his uncanny knack for finding himself in the way of historic events, but other organizing commitments called him up to Seoul before the fighting broke out. “It always weighed on me that I was not there to stand with the people of Gwangju in their hour of need,” he writes, a guilt he first sought to alleviate through writing.
The fallout from Hwang’s work on a clandestinely published narrative of the troubles in Gwangju, assembled according to the testimony of surviving protestors and their supporters, motivated his first visit to Germany. Interrogated after a week in jail, he was informed that he could avoid charges of “rumormongering” if he left Korea for a while. When he did so, he met with reunification-minded groups in not just Europe but Japan and the United States as well, which got him arrested and questioned again upon his return to his homeland. The authorities’ concern seems to have been potential violation of the National Security Act. “Unilaterally legislated by the ruling party after the formation of separate North and South governments in 1948,” that law was “built on the premise that North Korea is not a sovereign nation but an ‘anti-governmental’ or terrorist organization” — one whose sympathizers should be dealt with accordingly.
Despite South Korea’s simultaneous entry into the United Nations with the North in 1991, among other implicit acknowledgments of nationhood, the National Security Act “was never struck down and remains the law of the land to this day. Even the most vaguely positive-sounding mention of the North Korean regime can be construed as a crime of ‘praising’ terrorists.” Giving a talk in Japan, Hwang deals with an audience member whose hostile questions spur him to contemplate more brazen action: “Was it enough, to avoid ‘praising’ the North Korean regime, to say that communism was evil and that we had to destroy the communists if we wanted reunification? I thought of the people who had died in both North and South during the Korean War, the people who had broken the taboo of this border and were imprisoned or executed, and all the people in Gwangju who died while demanding democracy.”
“If I did not try to cross this border myself,” Hwang describes himself as concluding, “then I was not a writer. I wasn’t anything.” In fact he’d already crossed the 38th parallel once, in childhood, during his family’s harrowing escape south with national division underway. Insofar as that family was from the half of the peninsula now called North Korea, Hwang is North Korean himself, though he was actually born in Manchuria, which like Korea was still a Japanese colony in the early 1940s. They returned to Korea after the end of World War II, and history would keep him on the move throughout his formative years. The Korean War displaced him more than once — he retains vivid memories of playing with neighborhood friends amid the smoldering ruins of Seoul — eventually forcing his family to resettle for a time in the southern city of Daegu.
This sets the precedent for a certain peripateticism in Hwang’s life, both within Korea and without. His autodidactic tendencies encouraged by his mother, the young Hwang displays little patience with educational institutions, at one point running away to spend his days reading books in a cave, and at another going so far as to become an apprentice Buddhist monk. After a few months his mother turns up to extract him from the monastic life; years later, when he’s been sent to fight in the Vietnam War, she arranges his transfer out of what turns out to have been immediate danger. By then he’s already had nearer-death experiences than that in Vietnam, and indeed in Korea; on the whole, the number of close scrapes he recalls would approach implausibility in a work of fiction, as would his number of direct encounters with people, places, and events important in modern Korean history.
Throughout The Prisoner Hwang draws connections to his own stories and novels, never hesitating to name his real-life sources of inspiration. While reading it, the work of fiction came to my mind wasn’t one of Hwang’s, but rather Yoon Je-kyoon’s 2014 film Ode to My Father (국제시장). A Forrest Gump-style historical blockbuster that tells the story of South Korea through the life of one man of Hwang’s generation, it, too, depicts wartime chaos, struggles in a poverty economy, and marches through the booby trap-laden Vietnamese jungle. But while Ode to My Father might be called a lighthearted tearjerker (surely a Korean speciality genre) and has been criticized as a conservative romanticization of a more authoritarian time, The Prisoner takes the opposite tack, avoiding opportunities for sentimentality and seizing opportunities to criticize the Republic of Korea, especially as it was at its height of developmentalism.
That developmentalism was personified by Park Chung-hee, who took power in a 1961 military coup and ruled as president until his assassination in 1979. During Park’s reign Hwang lived in Haenam, a rural hamlet already losing its traditions “due to the destructive effects of the Saemaul ‘New Village’ Movement that was sweeping the country. Far from being revived, villages were emptying out.” While “today some regard the Saemaul Movement as Park Chung-hee’s jewel in the crown” for its modernization of the countryside, the result Hwang sees is that “the poorer farmers became the urban poor, clinging to the outskirts of towns, or low-income, unskilled laborers.” As for Vietnam, he writes that “to this day, I still cannot freely talk about everything that I witnessed” — which is saying something, given the vividness with which he relates his memories of destroyed villages and other sites of wanton killing.
Mỹ Lai, as Hwang sees it, “was just one of the many acts of cruelty on a mass scale that were perpetrated during the Vietnam War,” including, as one occasionally hears referenced in stories a long way indeed from the pratfalls of Ode to My Father, by Korean troops. “I believe it was the internalized violence from the Korean War and onward, exacerbated by the Vietnam conflict, that enabled the slaughter of civilians in broad daylight several years later during the pro-democracy protests in Gwangju. Korea’s lack of reflection on our role in the Vietnam War is especially shameful in the light of our eagerness to point out Japan’s atrocities.” 21st-century South Korea, in his view, retains something of the hypocrisy of the Park dictatorship, “wearing the fashionable clothes of democracy over one half of a body that remains divided by a militarized border.”
If Hwang’s contrarian streak made him a sufficiently outspoken anti-authoritarian for the South Korean government to peg him as a troublemaker early on, it has also kept him from permanently abandoning his homeland. He could have stayed in Germany, his next stop after his fateful visit to North Korea; he could have stayed in the United States, where he moved his family and which actually granted him residency after strings were pulled at the Department of Defense. He could even have stayed in the DPRK, having received a personal appeal to do in the embrace of Kim Il-sung himself. But he writes of having understood that he was “a product of South Korean history and therefore would never be anything more than a houseguest in North Korea” — and what’s worse, a houseguest whose presence would inevitably be milked by both sides for all the propaganda value it was worth.
Several years in Japan, Europe, and America followed Hwang’s visit to North Korea, but the whole time, he insists, he intended to return to South Korea and accept the punishment awaiting him there. When a German novelist suggests he apply for asylum, Hwang declares that “I have to go back to where they speak my mother tongue” — which is also where his case would become a high-profile illustration of what he saw as the absurdity of the National Security Act. Arrested right off the plane in April 1993, he within months inspired an “international movement led by PEN chapters around the world to free me from jail” (not including PEN Korea, whose tone-deaf intransigence becomes a minor theme). These and other efforts bore no fruit: Hwang received a seven-year sentence, five of which he ultimately served before being pardoned by democratic activist-turned-president Kim Dae Jung.
In North Korea Hwang had been introduced to well-known writers who shared his love of the Korean language. But “the country would fall into real peril a few years later, and from prison I would watch on TV what later became known as the Arduous March,” the famine of the 1990s that killed hundreds of thousands (and potentially millions) of North Koreans, including two of Hwang’s cousins. Not that Hwang himself was fed particularly well during his imprisonment, especially given the nineteen separate hunger strikes he undertook to demand improvements in conditions. Sometimes he did so for better food, and other times, less successfully, for the mere ability to write: “It was true that I’d been more of an activist than a writer during my four years of exile after visiting North Korea, but they understood very well that preventing a writer from writing was a punishment in itself.”
Despite having had not so much as a pen to keep a diary, Hwang recalls the techniques he employed and adaptations he made to endure these psychological privations and physical discomforts in a remarkably high degree of detail. None of this is without interest, though the same could be said of the other chapters of Hwang’s storied life — mostly retained in equal clarity, which accounts in part for The Prisoner‘s length — some of which must have made prison feel like less of an ordeal by comparison. Enthusiasts of Korean literature and politics will recognize many in the parade of scantily introduced names throughout the book, from novelist Kim Hoon‘s appearance as a “newbie reporter” the late Seoul mayor Park Won-soon’s as a lawyer doing pro bono work on Hwang’s case. The foreign notables are fewer, but include the likes of Ōe Kenzaburō and then-PEN America present Susan Sontag.
“Sontag let out a playful yelp at the sight of the writhing tentacles, her face full of curiosity and amusement, but couldn’t bring herself to take a bite,” Hwang writes of one dining experience during her visit to Korea. Whether or not she had another chance to taste sannakji, she might never have had one to read Hwang’s writing. Almost all English translations of his novels and stories have been published in the 21st century, mostly work he wrote after his release from prison. (Familiar Things and Priness Bari, both translated by Sora Kim-Russell, were reviewed in the LARB.) Still unavailable to English-language readers is Jang Gil-san, the saga of a seventeenth-century bandit with which he made his name — and managed covertly to criticize South Korean politics and society. Nowadays he does it overtly, of course, but also well understands that some ideas are still best conveyed in fiction.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall hosts the Korean-language podcast 콜린의 한국 (Colin’s Korea) and is at work on a book called The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. You can follow him at his web site, on Twitter @colinmarshall, or on Facebook.
V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
