“Fieldwork” North Korea: Observations of daily life on the ground inside the country

[unhappycamper]

http://japanfocus.org/-Emma-Campbell/4196

“Fieldwork” North Korea: Observations of daily life on the ground inside the country 北朝鮮での「フィールドワーク」 現場で観察する日常生活
The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 12, Issue 40, No. 2, October 6, 2014.
Emma Campbell

Introduction

Looking out from my guesthouse window in Ch’ilbosan, the beautiful mountain region in the Northeast of North Korea1, I watch a mother and father walk down a country road, each holding a hand of their small son and listening intently to his excited conversation. The tight grip with which the parents hold onto the little boy’s hands reminds me that in a few years’ time he will be leaving his family for mandatory national service of up to eight years in North Korea’s army2. The family’s tanned skin, small frames and simple clothes betray their tough rural life in North Korea. The boy looks around ten or eleven, but North Korean children often appear much younger than their actual age, their physical development held back by chronic malnutrition and poor sanitation.

This family scene, witnessed during a recent visit to North Korea reminds us of the daily life that carries on inside a country better known for its bizarre leadership and nuclear programme. It also gives rise to a puzzling question: When researching the lives of the people of North Korea, such as this family, can anything really be learned by travelling to the country? This paper describes observations of everyday life collected “on-the-ground” inside North Korea that help provide an answer to that question. It argues that everyday life matters when researching North Korea and that one method of carrying out such research, although not perfect, is to travel there as a tourist. This paper also shows how knowledge of the North Korean system and language can help to minimise or even neutralise the effect of state attempts to provide a particular image of the country and its people. Within that context, making on-the-ground observation is a useful methodological tool for the collection of data about this relatively closed nation.

I observed this family in 2013 when I travelled as part of a group to North Korea with the “Pyongyang Project”, an NGO that promotes exchange with the country and funds scholarships for North Korean students to study in Chinese universities. The 6-day “Program on Economic Development and Cross Border Interaction3” involved visits through cities and towns in the Northeast of the country including Rajin-Sŏnbong, T'umŏn, Kyŏngsŏng and Ch’ŏngjin. The itinerary took the group to a few more factories than normal, but it otherwise resembled two previous trips that I had made to North Korea as a tourist in 1997 and 2010 (on those occasions to P’yŏngyang and Kaesŏng). This time, however, I felt more prepared – my Korean was more fluent, I had additional years of Korea-focused research during a PhD and postdoctoral fellowship, and I had spent a year as a field worker in Africa with the charity Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) where I had honed the skill of “reading between the lines”.

Aside from these visits to North Korea, I have lived for a number of years in China and Korea and spent time on the China-North Korean border in both Dandong and Yanji. Using Korean and Chinese, I have been able to meet and interact with a variety of North Koreans, South Koreans, Chinese and Chinese-Koreans living in China, North Korea and South Korea. In these interactions it is the details of daily lives that have proved the most informative and insightful for me in my research and analysis and in critiquing the existing literature that informs current academic and policy discussion on North Korea. Furthermore, everyday life is too often neglected in discussion of North Korea, for example in the human rights literature or in the formulation of international policy toward the country, where the wellbeing of the general population should be of critical concern but is frequently overlooked. One of the aims of this article, therefore, is to contribute to the small and often ignored body of literature that tries to approach broader discussions of policy toward North Korea from the perspective of its people and their lives, rather than from the often abstract and high-handed position of international politics and a small and non-representative elite4. Developing a better understanding of everyday life in North Korea is necessary to ensure that policy making toward the country is appropriate and effective and does not overly disadvantage the general population in efforts to curtail the activities of the elite.