Unification became a popular conversation topic among North Koreans leading up to Liberation Day, on Aug. 15, with a definite generational divide on the topic.
A North Korean source told Daily NK recently that more North Koreans had been discussing unification as they prepared to commemorate the 80th anniversary of Korea’s liberation from Japanese colonial rule.
North Korea organized a variety of political and cultural events on Aug. 15 as part of the state’s official narrative presenting Japan’s defeat in World War II and Korea’s subsequent liberation as being the result of North Korean founder Kim Il Sung’s resistance movement.
“As well as being the day when Kim Il Sung liberated Korea, Aug. 15 was always an occasion for reminding us that unification would come someday. The government may have erased the word ‘unification’ (from public discourse), but elderly people were still reminded of it whenever this day rolled around,” the source said.
North Korea has been stepping up efforts to quash discussion of unification ever since supreme leader Kim Jong Un defined inter-Korean relations as “the relations between two states hostile to each other and the relations between two belligerent states, not [. . .] consanguineous or homogeneous ones” during the Ninth Plenary Session of the Eighth Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea in late December 2023.
Older North Koreans were heard to lament that Korea’s unification—something they had assumed would happen in their lifetime—had become impossible. “The country would already have been unified if Kim Il Sung had just lived a little longer,” one said.
These elderly individuals could also be heard quietly humming songs about unification such as “Our Wish Is Unification,” the source related.
Younger generation embraced hostile state narrative
In contrast, younger people’s attitudes toward unification differed substantially from those of the older generation.
“Unification was always an uncertain prospect, so I’m not sure why people are still going on about it. It’s probably for the best that unification isn’t happening,” one young person reportedly said.
“Considering we’re not going to be reunified anyway, it’s not weird to treat a place we can’t even go to as a hostile state,” another said, suggesting that North Korean youth approved of the government’s narrative about “two hostile states.”
The public discussion of unification was rekindled by a map on a North Korean weather report that only showed the northern half of the Korean Peninsula.
Most North Koreans expressed disappointment about the new map on state-run Korean Central Television, which had long displayed the entire Korean Peninsula in its weather reports.
“Older people were told for decades that unification would come someday, and they hadn’t abandoned their belief in unification, no matter how challenging that would be. These people were shocked and saddened to see the southern half of the peninsula omitted from maps on TV reports and in propaganda materials,” the source said.
For many North Koreans, the meteorological map’s exclusion of South Korean territory was dispiriting proof of how unlikely unification had become.
“Banning the word ‘unification’ and cutting the map in half weren’t enough to eliminate ideas of ‘one nation’ and ‘unification’ from people’s hearts. While attitudes toward unification may have varied with the generation, the state wouldn’t find it easy to completely erase thoughts about unification,” the source said.
