The North Korean capital, Pyongyang, held its largest military parade on October 10, 2025, to mark the 80th anniversary of the founding of the ruling Workers’ Party. Its most powerful missile to date, the Hwasong-20 intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), was unveiled during the event, offering clues to the sophistication of the regime’s military technology. The previous evening, ceremonies featuring Respected Comrade Kim Jong-un’s speech and a series of performances filled Rungrado 1st of May Stadium. The usual display of fireworks, dances, songs, and slogans expressing the people’s eternal gratitude to the Respected Comrade lit up the night sky. The effect was dramatic, sending a strong signal that North Korea presents itself as a strong, independent nation—one willing to wield its military power to remain so. Yet the question remains: is North Korea moving toward recognition as a legitimate state with formidable military capabilities, or is this another elaborate display of propaganda concealing, as one Western leader put it, the reality of a “rogue nation”?
Those who lean toward the latter view—that the grand performances staged for occasions such as the anniversary of the founding of the Workers’ Party are merely façades concealing the cruel reality of a socialist dictatorship—often base their perspective on the fact that North Korea is an undemocratic state ruled by a hereditary leader descending from Kim Il-sung, the partisan anti-imperialist fighter. They also argue that the legendary stories of Kim’s battles against the Japanese colonial army were fabricated. After all, who could accept the veracity of tales claiming that Kim Il-sung, during his independence-fighting days in Manchuria, turned a pine cone into a bomb, grains of sand into rice, or crossed a river on a single leaf?
Yet North Korea has successfully built its legitimacy as a nation, in large part, upon these almost mythic stories of Kim Il-sung as a fearless leader who repelled Japanese imperialists and later protected the people from American aggression. To some, such narratives are sheer nonsense; to others, they represent a historical legacy to be revered—a guidebook for survival even in the present day.
The Times for the Believers
The 1980s in South Korea witnessed a fervent student movement that drew ideological inspiration from Juche thought and the broader currents of socialist nationalism circulating across the divided peninsula. While the movement was outwardly directed toward democratization—culminating in the mass uprisings of 1987—its intellectual foundation was shaped by a complex mixture of anti-imperialist sentiment, Marxist critique, and the appeal of North Korea’s self-reliant ideology. Juche, which emphasized autonomy and national dignity, resonated deeply among young South Koreans disillusioned by authoritarian rule and U.S. influence. For many activists, Kim Il-sung’s portrayal as a steadfast anti-colonial fighter was not merely propaganda but a symbolic counterpoint to the compromised political reality of the South. Within university circles, North Korean materials circulated clandestinely, and the idea of an independent, unified Korea under socialist principles carried both utopian hope and practical urgency.
This ideological momentum reached a symbolic climax in 1989 during the 13th World Festival of Youth and Students in Pyongyang, when a South Korean student, Im Su-kyong, crossed the heavily militarized border to attend. Her participation caused a nationwide sensation. To some, she represented the embodiment of national reconciliation and youthful courage; to others, she was a traitor seduced by Northern propaganda. The controversy revealed the depth of division not only between North and South but also within the South’s own imagination of nationhood. What is striking in retrospect is that during those years, the stories of Kim Il-sung—his guerrilla exploits in Manchuria, his supposed transformation of pine cones into grenades—were, for many, accepted as part of a living revolutionary mythology. They were not assessed by empirical accuracy but by their resonance within a social context hungry for authenticity and autonomy.
In this sense, the era illuminates how “historical truth” can function less as an objective account of past events and more as a socially situated belief—something regarded as true because it sustains collective meaning. The students’ engagement with Juche was not a naïve misreading of propaganda but an act of historical imagination through which they sought to reclaim the agency denied under dictatorship. Their faith in those narratives reflected, above all, the desire for a Korea that could stand on its own terms.
By the early 1990s, however, that belief began to erode. The collapse of the socialist bloc and the flow of new information across borders destabilized the symbolic authority of Juche. Reports of famine, political purges, and defections slowly replaced the myth of a self-reliant nation with a more sobering reality.
Cultural expressions—from journalism to film—registered this disillusionment, shifting from admiration to estrangement. What had once been imagined as a mirror of Korean purity now appeared as a tragic remnant of history, frozen in an earlier ideological time. The public consciousness adjusted accordingly, moving from solidarity to critical distance. The 1990s thus marked not only a geopolitical shift but an epistemic one: the moment when belief gave way to recognition, and the North ceased to function as utopia, becoming instead an object of pity, critique, and uneasy kinship.
Old Habits Die Hard
A long detour for the film in discussion, Dear Pyongyang (2005). Created by Yang Yong-hi, a second-generation Korean in Japan, this documentary brilliantly captures the fact that perceptions of North Korea never pass neatly from one phase to another. They are continually reinterpreted, historically constructed, and politically manipulated. In her film, the Kim Il-sung myth still operates powerfully in the background, even as Yang’s perspective carries a subtle yet acerbic critique of the North Korean regime. This doubleness reflects not only her personal circumstances but also the broader political terrain in Korea—one still shaped by the tension between politicians rooted in the 1980s student movement and those aligned with pro-development and pro-American security policies on the peninsula.
Most recently, Kim Jong-un declared that South and North Korea exist as two separate states in conflict. In apparent response, South Korea’s Minister of Unification publicly endorsed the “two-state” principle—an assertion widely seen as influenced by a strand of self-determination thought that originated in the early 1980s movement. For those who still believe that South Korea, as the legitimate holder of Korean identity, must pursue reunification, such a statement is nothing short of outrageous. The ideological tension between these competing visions of Korea continues to define the present.
Yang belongs to the generation of Zainichi, the Korean diaspora in Japan. During the Japanese annexation of Korea, her father crossed the sea from Jeju Island to Japan as a young man in search of better opportunities. By 1940, the number of Koreans living in Japan—whether by choice or as forced laborers—had reached about 1.2 million. When Korea was liberated from colonial rule in 1945, approximately six hundred thousand returned home, while the remaining half formed what would become the Zainichi community.
Beyond the suffering inflicted by Japan’s exclusionary policies—denying them access to welfare, education, and stable employment—these Koreans faced dire choices. They could naturalize as Japanese citizens and become part of the ex-colonizer’s rigid systems of class, race, and ethnicity; they could take South Korean citizenship, tied to a poverty-stricken nation under military dictatorship through the early 1970s; or they could align with North Korea, which at the time appeared politically legitimate, emphasizing socialist equality and fairness, and economically viable. Some refused all of these options, remaining registered as “Joseon,” a nationality of a Korea that no longer existed.
Yang’s father, despite being from Jeju Island—geographically part of South Korea—chose to identify with North Korea. A fervent believer in socialist ideals, he sent his three sons there in search of a life free from discrimination in Japan. They were fourteen, sixteen, and eighteen when they arrived in North Korea, fulfilling their father’s dream of raising proud North Koreans, yet they were never able to leave. Yang and her parents visited them occasionally, bridging a family divided by ideology and geography. Dear Pyongyang is, at its core, a record of this complex history, unfolding between Osaka, Japan, and Pyongyang, North Korea.
It may not be fair to say that Dear Pyongyang simply rests on two contrasting views of North Korea, poised on a precarious balance of emotional wounds and ideological conflict. Rather, the film exposes how these two strands—emotional longing and political conviction—are deeply entangled in the symbolic framework that North Korea itself has long cultivated. On one hand, the state projects the image of a unified family, suggesting that the wholeness of Korea has already been restored through its leadership. This rhetoric must have resonated strongly among displaced Koreans, particularly the Zainichi, who lived with the trauma of exclusion and separation. On the other hand, this same rhetoric was firmly embedded in the Cold War machinery of ideological warfare, revealing its propagandistic core. If one side speaks for emotional truth, the other speaks for political truth.
Yang’s documentary transforms this ideological tension into cinematic language, where gestures, silences, and the careful framing of family interactions embody the unresolved contradictions between belief and disillusionment. In one scene, the father visits his eldest son in Pyongyang. They walk together, yet he never explains why he sent his sons to a country they could never leave, and the sons never express anger or frustration. In the background, state messages howl indistinguishably. North Korea emerges as a fatherland where the trauma of division and separation is continually passed down. Even if it is not exactly a portrayal of a happy family, it still reflects the image of a nation modeled on familial ideals, even as it remains one of the most closed and state-centered countries. The documentary conveys the complex dynamics of belief and disillusionment through the relationships of family. Brilliant!