Altered states

The divertissement du jour among Westerners who follow the news is their fascination with the public grief demonstrated by the North Koreans on the news of the death of Kim II.

There are several reasons for their interest, and perhaps the most immediate is the surprise at suffering people shedding tears for the monster responsible for their suffering.

Another is that most Westerners are unaware the Koreans tend to be more demonstrative in certain situations than other people. For example, here are some excerpts from a scholarly paper on the Korean concept of han. The first is a quote from another work translated by the author of that work into English, so make some allowances:

The Koreans are a people strong emotional side. They are especially apt in expressing the emotion of sadness. Koreans cry not only when they are sad, but when they are ill or shocked by something impossible to put down in words.

The author continues:

Koreans interpret frequent crying as a positive sign of being ‘compassionate’. Many people are seen wailing in funerals and even birthdays and weddings, where professional wailing-woman or a female shaman is called to cry during the ceremony.

Also:

The social taboo on crying is less emphasized in Korea than is in other cultures. Despite being a nation strongly affected by Confucian beliefs, which emphasizes that a man should not cry, Korea does not regard men crying itself as a shameful activity. Rather, it emphasizes that men should only cry for sacred subjects such as their elders or their motherland, and that in such cases, the crying is an act of honour and fidelity, not an act of weakness. Putting restrictions on the emotional expression of males has in turn affected that of females in Korean culture. Being an emotive, tearful nation and putting limits on men crying at the same time has made the act of women crying a mandatory procedure in certain situations (20). Ethnological analysis has shown that during funerals and annual sacrificial rites (a Korean tradition that honours the dead of the family), the cries of the men are short and formal, while the women wail louder, longer and without any reservations. Males have to shed reserved tears, especially when they are not closely related or unrelated to the deceased. However, women are not bound by such limits and can cry openly for distant relatives or even strangers. Such acts are even appreciated by the families of the deceased, who believe that having women cry with them assists the funeral procedure. (21)

In folk culture and traditions of shamanism, the role of wailing women are crucial in many rites and ceremonies. The wailing ritual, called goot in Korean, is a performance consisting of crying and wailing that serves diverse purposes from driving away evil spirits, honouring the dead, and providing entertainment to the public…The main characteristic of goot has been its portrayal of the emotion of Han artistically. It holds significance in that in a goot, the act of crying transcends that of a personal feeling of grief but a publicly shared emotion initiated by the wailing women. The act of crying and the essence of Han has thus become a cultural symbol as well as holding individual significance.

Finally, taking all the responses as a whole, there is the unmistakable whiff of an attitude of cultural superiority as they watch others make a spectacle out of themselves. Civilized people are more seemly in their grief. There’s quite a lot of that sort of thing on the Web these days, by the way — couched in intellectualism and scientific detachment, of course.

Some are even debating the sincerity of the tears. Based on his experience and knowledge of China, John Derbyshire asserts:

More often than not, those North Korean tears are real.

Other people aren’t so sure. We’ve already seen that Joshua Stanton at One Free Korea thinks Kim was generally despised by his people. Another doubter is Oshima Shinzo, the editor of the monthly Seiron magazine. Here’s a post from his blog on Tuesday.

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The strongest impression I get from the news reports of Kim Jong-il’s sudden death on television and the newspapers is the unexpected calmness of the North Korean public.

When I opened the morning papers, I saw the headlines in the Asahi (“The Citizens Weep”), and the Nikkei (“Sobbing on the News of the Death”). The Sankei captioned a photo taken in Pyeongyang, “Citizens Break Down in Tears”.

But, for example, only a few people were weeping in the Reuters photograph the Asahi ran of workers in the Pyeongyang electric wire factory — even though the caption said they were all crying at the news.

On television, I saw the camera pursue people who were crying as they walked. One could almost feel a sense of something like desperation on the part of the cameraman, due to the scarcity of the scenes he was looking for.

None of the media conveyed the coldness of the North Korean people’s emotions, however. The media person will make the stereotypical assumption that the northerners would weep and sob at a time such as this.

Kim Il-sung died suddenly at 2:00 a.m. on 8 July 1994. When his death was announced at noon on the ninth, the entire country was engulfed by true weeping and sobbing. Of course a few were faking it, but for most of them, those were real tears.

Lee Dong-il, the editor/translator of North Korean History Textbooks, wrote: “When we come in contact with news so sad it is as if heaven will collapse, we shed tears of blood, weep and wail in a loud voice, and thrash about.” Even if the part about tears of blood is an exaggeration, scenes very similar to this were in fact seen throughout the country (at the elder Kim’s death).

I’m sure many people still remember the reports from print and broadcast media throughout the world of the scenes of people crying and shouting at the bronze statue of Kim Il-sung on Mansudae in the center of Pyeongyang.

Perhaps the North Korean media will make a point of showing scenes of weeping and sobbing people now, but I suspect they will be dramatizations.

We should recognize that the feelings of the North Korean people toward Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il are as different as heaven and earth.

(End translation)

Afterwords:

* Another matter of interest is that some of the same people who are sharp to spot the mass media’s tendency to wildly exaggerate the size, extent, and enthusiasm of certain events, such as demonstrations (particularly the broadcast media), are so accepting and unsuspicious at other times.

* From the paper on han:

Even today, crying at funerals is a taboo for the Japanese. (16)

There’s been crying at every one of the several Japanese funerals I’ve attended. It was subdued for the most part, but quite intense at one or two of them.

Just because it’s footnoted in an academic paper doesn’t make it a fact.

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From one altered state to another

The Pyeongyang Amen Corner should be able to get off on Prince Jazzbo’s first line:

“It shall be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, and who do have no teeth the gums will feel it.”