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Security, Nationalism and Popular Culture: Screening South Korea’s Uneasy Identity in the Early 2000s

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Abstract

By examining the cultural representations of the South Korean notion of the Self/Other in relation to its major traditional enemy — North Korea — this article aims to capture a picture of South Korea’s discursive economy of the North, and to problematise the South Korean identities implicated in that economy in the early 2000s. To achieve these aims, this article focuses on representations of a successful popular South Korean film which was released in 2000, just a few months after the first inter-Korean summit: Joint Security Area JSA. By analytically reading JSA, it is revealed that, in South Korea, the traditional discursive practices based on the Cold War thinking have been eroded. For the South, the North is part of the Self (Korean-ness; love for the North as the same nation) and, at the same time, is an Other (South Korean-ness; contempt for the North as an inferior state). Related to this, South Korea appears to be the uneasy Self without a firm Other in between Korean-ness and South Korean-ness.

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Notes

  1. Here, the discursive economy means the conventional matrix of interpretations in which South Koreans talk about North Korea(ns) and themselves in relation to the North. It is thus related closely to the formation of existing, dominant discourses on North Korea(ns) in South Korean society.

  2. JSA (2000) is financed by Myung Films which is a well-known, independent, and commercial film company in South Korea. The director of JSA is Mr. Park, Chan-Wook who is internationally famous for what has become known as The Vengeance Trilogy which is composed of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002), Oldboy (2003), and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (2005). Oldboy won the Grand Prix at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival. Although JSA was produced before The Vengeance Trilogy, JSA commercially had great success and has widely been praised by film critics and audiences, internationally and domestically. JSA won the Lotus Award for Best Film at the 2001 Deauville Asian Film Festival in France, New Director‘s Showcase Special Jury Prize at the 2001 Seattle International Film Festival in the U.S., and Blue Ribbon Award for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2002 Blue Ribbon Awards in Japan. JSA has also been translated in English, Chinese, Japanese, and so on. A remake of JSA is in pre-production in Hollywood, called Joint Security America and directed by David Franzoni.

  3. Local Movies Thrive on Nationalism, Korea Times, 20 July 2006.

  4. Since the Korean War (1950–3), there have been two antagonistic Koreas in Northeast Asia, displaying a mutual distrust towards each other and even engaging occasionally with military skirmishes. The Korean Peninsula is still technically at war, and the common border between South and North is the most heavily armed area in the world. To know more about the contemporary history of Korea, see Oberdorfer [18].

  5. Freedom of Expression Threatened: Film Sector: Critics Fear for Future of Korean Arts as Movies, Dramas Attacked for Altering Facts, Korea Herald, 12 October 2000.

  6. From its inception in taking office in 1998, unlike its predecessors, the Kim Dae Jung administration in South Korea initiated a proactive engagement policy towards North Korea, widely known as the Sunshine Policy. The policy was named after one of Aesop’s fables, according to which, sunshine is more effective than strong wind in persuading a passerby to take off his coat. The analogy is that, to induce positive shifts in North Korea’s bellicose behaviour, proactive engagement will more effective than containment or punitive-centred policy. According to President Kim Dae Jung (quoted in [16]: 37), the Sunshine Policy ‘seeks to lead North Korea down a path towards peace, reform and openness through reconciliation, interaction and cooperation with the South’.

  7. See ‘Note on Park Chan-wook’s Joint Security Area, by Christopher Bourne, available at <http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/cteq/05/35/joint_security_area.html> (accessed 20/November/2006).

  8. JSA Gets the Themes but not Story, Korea Herald, 8 September 2000.

  9. JSA Highlights Insecurity of National Security, Korean Times, 27 August 2000.

  10. See <http://www.subwaycinema.com/frames/archives/kfest2001/jsa.htm> (accessed 5/December/2006).

  11. Here, this is not to say that ethnic nationalism and Cold War nationalism exhaust all modalities of making sense of North Korea(ns) in South Korea. Rather, it seems evident that the two nationalisms were dominant in South Korea in the early 2000s.

  12. As each nationalism uses different histories as their reference points, it can be said that the clash of nationalisms is, ipso facto, the clash of histories in South Korea.

  13. One of the best ways to see the differences between both Koreas is to see North Korean defectors’ living in South Korea. For example, one defector (quoted in [2]: 36) says that ‘I am living in a country [South Korea] where the people look like me and speak the same language, but their lifestyle and mentality are so vastly different that I feel like an alien’. Another defector says that ‘Only after 10 years did I understand how the South Korean society works. ... In North Korea, if you were loyal to the system, you were provided a job and housing, and your needs were met. ... But here in South Korea, individuals have to take responsibility and create their own system’ (North Korean Defectors Take a Crash Course in Coping, New York Times, 25 June 2006); also see Life in South Hard for North Koreans, New York Times, 24 December 2000; Korean Defectors Learn Basics, BBC available at <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/2006411.stm> (accessed 13/December/2006); How Defectors Cope in South Korea: The Sense of Loss Remains, and While Life May Be More Free, the Transition Isn’t Easy, San Francisco Chronicle, 20 December 2006; Lankov ([13]: 120–125).

  14. For instance, some North Korean defectors in South Korea ‘complain of bias and discrimination — feeling that many South Koreans regard them as second class citizens’ (Korean Defectors Learn Basics, BBC available at <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/2006411.stm>, accessed 13 December 2006); also see North Korea Defectors Take a Crash Course, New York Times, 25 June 2006; Lankov [13].

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Acknowledgements

I am BK21 Post-doctoral Fellow in the Department of Political Science & International Studies at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea. This article is a substantially revised and edited version of a paper presented at the Joint Conference of Early Career Researchers Conference on East Asian Studies and the 4th Korean Studies Graduate Students Convention in Europe, Edinburgh, U.K., 24–6 October 2007. I am very grateful to William A. Callahan and Roland Bleiker for their critical, helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.

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  1. Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea

    Young Chul Cho

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Cho, Y.C. Security, Nationalism and Popular Culture: Screening South Korea’s Uneasy Identity in the Early 2000s. East Asia 26, 227–246 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12140-009-9086-z

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