Brian Myers

I really like reading Brian Myers, who I consider to be the world's foremost expert on North Korean culture (and perhaps thereby North Korea in general). He teaches at Dongseo University, speaks Korean fluently...well, I'll let you read his Wikipedia page. He's legit, and I highly recommend his A Reader's Manifesto -- An attack on the growing pretentiousness of American literary prose, which was originally printed in The Atlantic.

He's got a new book coming out, which means he's in the public eye a little these days. There's an article in today's Voice of America that's worth a read, since it does a nice job of summing up a lot of his ideas in a succinct way.

In his new book, Myers describes North Korea's core race beliefs as a legacy of Japanese colonial rule in the early 20th century.

"After an initial period in which they brutally tried to stamp out all Korean feelings of pride in their nation, the Japanese decided to co-opt it. They did this by saying 'you Koreans, and we Japanese, we are all part of a uniquely pure race, a uniquely ancient race, that goes back thousands and thousands of years, to the same divine progenitor," he explained.

The Japanese left when Tokyo was defeated in World War II, says Myers, but North Korea kept key pillars of their ideology.

"The Korean people, because they are so racially pure, because they are so homogeneous, are morally superior to all other peoples, not tainted by outside influences which, according to the North Korean world view, are inherently evil," he said.

This is the main reason I'm not really looking forward to a unified Korea. There's plenty of Korean pride and wacky ideas about homogeneity to go around in the South as it is. A post-North Korea Korean peninsula would be worse up in Seoul, and especially in Jeolla, where I'm assuming a lot of North Koreans would end up if they chose to move south, but I'm sure there would be a few in this part of the country as well.