*.*Cover Photo: Art by Aspen Pflughoeft
"I'm going to be studying in Seoul, Korea next semester."
"Wait, North Korea? Please tell me you're not moving to North Korea!"
"No, no, Seoul is in South Korea."
"Oh good, for a second I thought you were moving to North Korea!"
In the months before my move abroad, I had multiple versions of this conversation with an array of people. If this had happened once or twice, I wouldn't have thought about it much. Maybe some people just aren’t aware of current geopolitical conflicts.
But I had this conversation routinely for months. Again and again, people expressed relief that I was moving to South Korea, not North Korea. I began to wonder, are people just uninformed about Korea? Why do so few people know what’s happening in Korea?
Conversations displaying the ignorance around Korea, and immediate concerns of North Korea, seem indicative of a deeper problem than simple lack of awareness of current geography. They demonstrate an oversimplified and immediately disapproving view of Korea so many in the U.S. share.
These conversations reveal a "North Korean Stereotype” — a widespread misperception of North Korea that reduces the country to only the politics of nuclear warheads and dictators while ignoring the culture, daily life, and humanity of over 25 million North Koreans.
Let’s unpack this stereotype.
In the U.S., "Korea" seems to have gained popularity with the Hallyu wave of K-dramas and K-pop. These components, however, are only pop-culture exports of South Korea. These depictions of “Korea” do not adequately represent North Korea — regardless, is familiarity with such components even adequate to understanding South Korean culture?
Even with the Hallyu flood of South Korean culture into the Western world, many people's ideas of South Korea remain static, incomplete, and unrepresentative. So, how unrepresentative would perceptions be about a country which aggressively restricts all cultural exports and information exchange? A country most people do not actively seek to understand (except maybe from a mixture of fear and fascination)? A country like, say, North Korea?
Understanding culture is a complex, nuanced, and elaborate process. It involves keeping up with popular topics, following relevant politics, making efforts to understand the language, researching ancient and modern history, learning about social customs, tasting normal life for different demographics — the list goes on.
While perfect knowledge of any culture is not possible, we can always develop a more accurate, robust, and comprehensive understanding. Doing so benefits us as individuals and our collective societies because expanding knowledge better informs opinion, action, and empathy.
As passive mass-media consumers, we naturally cultivate an unrepresentative idea of North Korea due to the incomplete media narratives surrounding the country.
U.S. media reports on North Korea have a strong history of sensationalism. Analysts from the Guardian, the Huffington Post, and The Washington Post (to name a few) have all commented on this widespread trend. The narrative of North Korea in popular media has two components: nuclear weapons and dictatorship. There is nothing about the people, culture, or daily life in North Korea.