The group of young North Korean women in white cheer-leading uniforms scrambled from their buses and climbed a pole to pull down a welcome banner during an international athletic competition in South Korea in 2003.
The sign, put up by local residents, showed a photo of then North Korean leader Kim Jong-il shaking hands with former South Korean President Kim Dae Jung. The women, dubbed a “legion of beauties” by the South’s media, told reporters they were angry that an image of their “Dear General” may be soaked by rain.
The scene underscores the conflicting symbolism of North Korea’s decision after a nine-year hiatus to send a cheerleader squad to the South for the Asian Games this year. While many South Koreans associate them with a period of detente that also included the development of a joint industrial park and a cross- border tourism program, the women serve as a propaganda tool for a regime trying to divert global attention from human rights abuses and nuclear weapons.
“The dispatch of young, playful and gorgeous cheerleaders is intended to help enhance the North’s dark, poverty-stricken and totalitarian image abroad,” Kim Jung Bong, a political science teacher at Hanzhong University in the South, said by phone today.
“The North thinks that if the cheerleaders succeed in changing that perception among South Koreans toward the North positively, that will pressure President Park Geun Hye to engage the North more actively through concessions.”
FUTURE FIRST LADY
South Korea said yesterday it would accept the cheerleaders along with a team of North Korean athletes that had already been scheduled to participate in the games in Incheon this September. At the same time, South Korean Unification Ministry spokesman Kim Eui-do criticized what he called the North’s irrational claim that its nuclear weapons development can safeguard the people of both Koreas.
The 2003 cheering squad was the second of three groups to appear in the South at sporting events, with members handpicked from the children of ruling party and military officials. In 2005, they included Ri Sol-ju, then a teenager and now the country’s first lady. Ri was unveiled in 2012 as the wife of current leader Kim Jong-un, who took over the country upon the death of his father Kim Jong-il in late 2011.
While the South’s media covered the squads favorably, the 2003 incident with the banner was a reminder of the deep psychological and emotional divide the two nations would face in the event of unification, with two starkly different systems in place since the 1950-53 Korean War ended in a truce
NUCLEAR MISSILES
The period of improving relations between the two Koreas hit turbulence in 2006 after the North conducted the first of its three nuclear tests and began touting atomic development as a deterrent against what it calls US hostility.
Following its latest underground detonation in February last year, the North threatened to strike the US and South Korea with nuclear missiles, claiming it had succeeded in making its warheads smaller and lighter.
The sinking of a South Korean warship and the North’s bombardment of a South Korean island in 2010 has also damaged ties. The North denies a role in the sinking while saying it was provoked into firing artillery at Yeonpyeong Island.
North Korea said in its statement yesterday on the plan to send cheerleaders that hostility on the peninsula has “reached the extremes,” calling for “reconciliation and unity.”
NEGOTIATION TACTIC
“I think this is one of North Korea’s negotiation tactics,” said Hideshi Takesada, a professor at the Institute of World Studies of Takushoku University in Tokyo. The North is aware South Korea wants to improve relations because ties between Kim’s regime and Japan have improved, he said.
Japan decided July 3 to ease sanctions on North Korea after the North said it would begin a new probe into abductees and other Japanese in the country.
South Korea says the North must end its pursuit of nuclear arms, acknowledge its attack on the South’s Cheonan warship and apologize officially for the 2008 death of a tourist at Mt. Geumgang, among other concessions, before it can resume economic assistance last seen during the detente.
North Korea’s gesture comes days after Park hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at a summit in Seoul, where both made clear their opposition to the development of nuclear arms on the Korean peninsula. China is the North’s biggest political ally and economic benefactor and has sought to revive international aid-for-disarmament talks it chairs.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
A fossil jawbone found by a British girl and her father on a beach in Somerset, England belongs to a gigantic marine reptile dating to 202 million years ago that appears to have been among the largest animals ever on Earth. Researchers said on Wednesday the bone, called a surangular, was from a type of ocean-going reptile called an ichthyosaur. Based on its dimensions compared to the same bone in closely related ichthyosaurs, the researchers estimated that the Triassic Period creature, which they named Ichthyotitan severnensis, was between 22-26 meters long. That would make it perhaps the largest-known marine reptile and would