Tourism as political theatre in North Korea - ScienceDirect
Tourism as political theatre in North Korea
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https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2018.11.003Get rights and content
Highlights
• All tourism is performed within the Korean theatre-state.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2018.11.003Get rights and content
Highlights
• All tourism is performed within the Korean theatre-state.
• Itineraries constitute repeated ritual geopolitical performances.
• Tourist rationales primarily constitute an apolitical moral tourism.
• Performance and direction confound the ability of tourists to discover the ‘everyday’ and see behind the theatre-state.
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1. Introduction
The Democratic People's Republic of North Korea (DPRK) is one of the least known, even supposedly inaccessible, tourist destinations, hence the question often posed to past and potential tourists: ‘can you actually go there?’ However, since the mid-2000s, North Korea has slowly opened up to tourism, both geographically and politically. Although initially centred mainly on Pyongyang and the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) with South Korea, northern areas of the country have become accessible since 2013. Only South Koreans (and, since mid-2017, United States citizens) are barred. In this already unusual context, a familiar political economy of tourism is embedded and performed within the ideology and practices of a theatre-state. This paper documents the contours of tourism in North Korea to examine how this unusual geopolitics functions.
The paper develops a critical geopolitics of tourism (Mostafanezhad & Norum, 2016; Rowen, 2016), engaging with conceptual insights on performativity and the theatre-state drawn from diverse fields, including geography, anthropology, politics and theatre studies. Beyond the axiomatic concerns of tourism studies with motivations and perceptions, tourism encounters are performed in relational manner (Gibson, 2010), and mediated by intersecting geopolitical discourses that circulate in popular culture, social media, and tourism marketing (Dittmer, 2010, 2014). Places and tourist imaginaries are constantly constructed, and continually enacted, through encounters in the concrete spaces of travel (Edensor, 1998, 2001). Bodies, materials, landscapes and discourses are co-constituted through their relationships in tourist space (Duffy, Waitt, Gorman-Murray, & Gibson, 2011). However, as the case of North Korea attests, the presentation for tourist consumption of concrete urban and rural spaces and people serves another end: the construction, perseverance and performance of the theatre-state. Tourism is inseparable from, and part of, the country's wider functioning as a theatre-state, where status, power and governance are elaborated in mass performances and spectacles, public art and film, museums and monuments, with public culture an instrument of propaganda and political indoctrination, and an ordering force of display and repetition. While the North Korean case may seem melodramatic, it brings into sharper relief tourism's geopolitical functions.
North Korea, the seemingly reclusive ‘hermit kingdom’, is often described as the last communist country on earth, yet ‘communism’ is an intense ethnic Korean nationalism, blended into ancestor worship, order and culture, in a Confucian family state. For over sixty years a leadership dynasty and personality cult has passed from Kim Il Sung, through Kim Jong Il to Kim Jong Un, within a centralised, military-first state. The DPRK has a nuclear capacity of international concern, a repressive human rights record, and plays little part in regional and international organisations. Media coverage of North Korea has an intense and relentless negativity (e.g. Dalton, Jung, Willis, & Bell, 2016; Shim, 2014), but little is conveyed about everyday life. Typically the ABC (2017) introduced a news item:
Conjure up a picture of North Korea and it would probably be a mass military parade - tanks, ballistic missiles and thousands of faces and feet marching in perfect unison. It may invoke images of poverty, human rights abuse and a repressive regime teetering on the brink of war
Since journalists are discouraged from visiting, and routinely denied visas, their insights are limited and constrained by restrictions on access and mobility.
In such a heightened geopolitical context, tourism represents a distinctive and unusual form of political tourism (Clarke, 2000; Isaac, 2010), where tourists seek to develop a moral perspective on a place that has hitherto eluded their (and others') vision and understanding. Political tourism, and geopolitical discourses, have emerged in conflict and post-conflict situations, such as Palestine (Belhassen, Uriely, & Assor, 2014), Israel (Barnard, 2017; Brin, 2006) and Northern Ireland (e.g. Dowler, 2013; Murphy, 2010; Skinner, 2016). Sites, sights and perspectives are usually designed to assert the restoration of peace, and a degree of everyday normality, but alongside the merit of particular causes, hence such tourism may also be partisan (Barnard, 2017; Gelbman, 2016; Skinner, 2016). By contrast it is argued here that tourists in North Korea are oriented to an apolitical converse of this, attempting to see beyond and between both the pervasive negativity of external media coverage and antithetical local positive depictions of progress and morality, and so avoid a partisan ideological position (Connell, 2017; Wang, van Broeck, & Vanneste, 2017). The purpose is not to see the ‘indictments’ of human failure’ that are the core of dark tourism (Willis, 2014, p. 16; Kim, 2010) but their converse, the everyday yet different ‘normality’, that is assumed to exist but is invisible.
It is thus argued that tourism to North Korea is neither dark tourism, the search for a dark past of problematic sites (battlefields, walls, jails, slavery or holocaust sites, and related museums and memorials), associated with violence, death, disaster and suffering (Bowman and Pezzullo 2009; Johnston, 2015; Lennon & Foley, 2000; Light, 2017), nor war-zone or danger tourism. Dark tourism sites are characterised by diversity, but also by temporality. Dark tourism motivations centre on relationships between duty, respect for heritage, reflection and particular forms of nostalgia, marking the ideological influence of tourism in the ‘brokerage of memory’ (Naef & Ploner, 2016; Stone & Sharpley, 2008). In such contexts, as at battle sites such as Gettysburg and Pearl Harbor, slave departure points in Ghana, Ground Zero and Vietnam's Cu Chi tunnels and War Remnants Museum (Chronis, 2012; Gillen, 2014; Willis, 2014), past events and histories are presented in particular, sometimes partisan, ways, requiring distinctive site management, interpretation and performance (see Buda & Shim, 2015, 2017; Connell, 2017; Gillen, 2018; Miller & Del Casino, 2018; Wang et al., 2017). Danger tourism, by contrast, involves sites of ongoing violence, crime and conflict (Adams, 2001; Mahrouse, 2016), shaped by socio-political activities and divisions (including politics, ethnicity and religion) that are also diverse and transitory, including places of war, hence its initial designation as war tourism (Adams, 2001), terrorism, nuclear contamination (such as Fukushima and Chernobyl), or even volcanic activity (Skinner, 2018). It is usually discouraged, and avoided (e.g. Lanouar & Goaied, 2019), but occasionally sought out (Adams, 2001) or the risks downplayed by tourists (Fuchs, Uriely, Reichel, & Maoz, 2012) and in tourist promotions, where danger may also be downplayed, or said to be localised or exceptional (Tarplee, 2008, Buda, 2016). Danger is ephemeral and fluctuating (Causey, 2007; Lisle, 2000) hence, as in Bali and Northern Ireland, sites of warfare (and war tourism) and terrorism may become places of dark tourism. Many destinations can become dangerous, or at least punitive, for individuals who disregard norms, advice and warnings, engage in ‘deviant behaviour’ (Buda & McIntosh, 2013) or are simply unlucky, or exercise poor judgement, in places that are not otherwise dangerous or dark.
Distinctions between dark and danger tourism are imprecise, with sites sharing common elements of past or present danger and violence. What may be a dangerous site to some, is a dark site to others; ongoing danger, from volcanic activity to terrorism, may occur at sites of memorialisation. Moreover, just as dark and dangerous places are diverse, and fluctuate, tourists vary in gender, age, knowledge, nationality and familiarity with sites and contexts, resulting in variable assumptions and responses, much influenced by affect and emotion (Martini & Buda, 2018). Warfare, emotion and tourism are not apart, but shaped by complex and uneven relationships, practices and performances (Coward et al., 2018; Gillen, 2018; Lisle, 2000, 2016; Miller & Del Casino, 2018). It is therefore argued here that North Korea is neither the locus of dark tourism, since few have knowledge of the events and locations that might make it such, nor is it dangerous, but it nonetheless emphasises how travel is intricately linked to geopolitics, and in turn to performance, theatre and affect.
All tourism in North Korea constitutes theatre. The theatre-state, as described by Geertz in Bali, represents a political state directed to the performance of drama and ritual, rather than the provision of welfare and services, employing symbols, myths and rites both oriented to political ends but primarily being ‘what the state was for’ (1980: 13). Ritual, stylised repetition and re-enactment of symbolic statements about the social order reinforce social cohesion, and underpin and sustain personal, civic and national identity (Butler, 1988; Cartledge, 1997; Goffman, 1959; Turner, 1987; Werry, 2011). Tourism is replete with guided tours. It is not unusual for tourist workers, guides and performers, to stage their identities and culture in specific, scripted ways for the benefit of tourists, especially in cross-cultural contexts, with directed audience participation (Edensor, 1998; Mordue, 2005). In North Korea, however, staging, performance and participation are pervasive and comprehensive; only guided tours exist, while guides are both observers and protagonists. Political practice (and its outcome as social practice) is turned into a tourism product with tourism a wholly scripted and performed performance, in which tourists are expected to play a part. There is nothing outside the performance and nothing beyond the guided tour, but everything is not the tour.
In what follows, I elaborate on this argument, partly through a semi-autoethnographic ‘travelogue’, ‘following’ two tour groups, one in the north (of which the author was part), and a more ‘typical’ tour of Pyongyang and the south. Immersed in the co-constitution of North Korean tourism as political theatre, it considers the motivations and perceptions of tourists; beyond mere representations and discourse, it also countenances the staging of a distinctive tourism, to provide critical engagement with representation, performance and geopolitics. It thus responds to calls on political geographers to explore the performative dimensions of geopolitics (Bialasiewicz et al., 2007; McConnell, 2016) and the growing interest within tourism studies of moral encounters (Gibson, 2010; Mostafanezhad and Hamman 2014) that engage with performativity and social construction to trace relationships between discourses, performativity and lived experience.
2. Tourism and the theatre-state
The idea of the theatre-state has been linked to large cultural events, including nuclear tests, both directed to the national population (Cho, 2017; Kwon & Chung, 2012; Merkel, 2013) and, partly in response to negative external perceptions, directed outwards to attract global attention (Hughes, 2007). Versions and virtues of the nation are especially evident in monuments and museums, and vividly depicted in mass games, parades and demonstrations, often a centrepiece of tourism to Pyongyang. The state is not therefore a fixed and stable entity, but is an evolving process of repeated actions, behaviour and practices that collectively create the image of national identity(McConnell, 2016). It is argued here that this perspective can be extended, at a different scale, to all tourism sites and performances – and certain aspects of everyday life – that connect tourism to political goals and highlight its potential role in imagining, shaping and narrating the national past, present and future, as a highly visual part of soft power and public diplomacy.
The most spectacular cultural event in North Korea has long been the massive annual Arirang Festival, designed to foster a national discourse through staging the structure of the nation, its recent history and its charismatic leadership. Arirang, the most famous Korean folk song, tells the story of people, perhaps lovers, divided by a mountain pass, a useful metaphor for a divided Korea. Military parades, repeated rehearsals and mass gymnastics involve tens of thousands of choreographed citizens, linking the stage with recreation, everyday life and ‘military-first’ policy, through a patriotic nation-branding within an invented tradition of filial piety translated into a radical and revolutionary political principle (Burnett, 2013; Kwon & Chung, 2012). The festival thus sought to create ‘an illustration of the power of grandeur to organise the world’ (Geertz, 1980, p. 102). Power becomes real through symbols and performances; the people create the spectacle and the spectacle recreates and reinforces society in a microcosm of ‘the material embodiment of political order’ (Geertz, 1980, p. 13; Cho, 2017) and the ‘routinisation of politics’ (Choi, 2013). Ritual and spectacle are combined in the pursuit of continued power, both nation and unification, and celebrate and emphasise dynastic continuity and pan-Korean identity, with politics and performance more ritualised and symbolic over time from the Korean War and from the death of the nation's founding father, Kim Il Sung.
The Arirang Festival is one dramatic part of collective cultural narratives in North Korean popular music, ‘socialist realist’ art, theatre, literature and film (Dukalskis & Hooker, 2011; Kim, 2010; Lim, 2017) that source problems in Japanese colonialism and American aggression and legitimate the revolutionary survival of North Korea. Comprehensive forms of nation-branding, with ritual and culture underpinning politics, constitute ‘the architecture and cosmological order of political organisation’ (Cho, 2017, pp. 14–15) and national self-reliance, imbued in ‘a politics of sacrifice in everyday life’ (Dukalskis & Hooker, 2011, p. 60), underpinned through performance. Political power becomes the display and repetition of power: the state as affect (Cartledge, 1997; Geertz, 1980; MacRae, 2005; Thrift, 2009) with North Korea a ‘perpetual ritual state’ (Ryang, 2012, p. 21). Rehearsal is both directed to performance but is an end in itself ‘disciplining people to embody collective life’ (Kim, 2010, p. 16). As one tourist surmised, the purpose of Arirang is ‘to teach the North Korean people the power of the collective to demonstrate how the discipline and surrender to the collective … can produce extraordinary results’ (Podell, 2016, p. 245). This paper argues that politics, history, place and society are constantly performed and staged, at different scales, for both domestic and tourist consumption (Edensor, 2001; MacCannell, 1976), and tourists are firmly directed to multiple stages, effectively to the exclusion of all else. Tourism is effectively a smaller-scale version of Arirang, the theatre state writ small, emerging from recent interest in projecting a national identity outwards.
Consequently, since tourists anticipate some elements of a theatre-state – if nothing more than ‘socialist propaganda’ - all performances are scrutinised on the assumption that the stage is obvious, the performance lacks authenticity, in truth, accuracy and ‘everyday reality’, and there is an alternative perception. This paper therefore attempts to examine how tourists seek to consider and challenge how the nation state is performatively constituted, where the performance of political theatre is paramount, in a quest for an ‘everyday authenticity’ absent from standard media depictions of the country. Here more than elsewhere tourists are a ‘a kind of contemporary pilgrim, seeking authenticity in other “times” and other “places” … the “real” lives’ of others' (Urry 1990: 8), envisaging productive encounters and interactions (Gibson, 2010; Tsing, 2005; Wilson, 2017) and anxious to distinguish ‘reality’ from staged authenticity (MacCannell, 1992) and from the domineering nationalism of monuments and parades. Tourism is not primarily centred on pleasurable recreational experiences, or experiencing the natural landscape, but is underpinned by a moral purpose (cf. Gibson, 2010), that represents a rejection of hegemonic, but divergent, conflicting and contrasting, political narratives emanating from outside and inside the country. Rather than being interested in darkness, touring embodies a commitment and opportunity to shed light on a poorly known and maligned country. Tourists however wish to go beyond geo-imaginaries, whether external media perceptions or locally staged and contrived depictions of North Korean life, in search of a banal everyday national and human identity: a country and people apart from political rhetoric, in a ‘back stage’ daily life that is presumed to exist (Goffman, 1959). Tourists seek out the ‘normal’, alongside the unusual, in their attempts to find order and structure, distinct from political rhetoric, but also distinct from tourism elsewhere. As I explore below, ironically, this is largely thwarted by the confines of political theatre itself, and a rigid regulatory structure and itinerary that prevent such goals from being achieved.
3. Tourism in North Korea
Despite the prominence of North Korea in international geopolitical debates and media discourse, tourism has eluded sustained attention. Previous studies include overviews of an earlier era (Hall, 1990), accounts of a temporary phase of South Korean tourism to Mt Keumgang (Kim, 2010; Shin, 2004), a study of domestic tourism based on the accounts of North Korean defectors in South Korea (Kim, Timothy, & Han, 2007), and two on contemporary Chinese tourism (Li, Wen, & Ying, 2018; Li & Ryan, 2015). Two recent studies have offered perspectives on small groups of mainly western tourists (Wang et al., 2017; Wassler & Schuckert, 2017). This paper seeks to extend such work, by focusing on situating tours, and tourist experience, within conceptual understandings of political theatre.
No reliable data exist on tourist numbers and texts on the DPRK economy make no mention of tourism (e.g. Eberstadt, 2007, 2011; Smith, 2015). However, Kim Jong Un has sought renewed tourism, directing the state tourist agency in 2013 to increase the number of tourists fivefold in three years (Lankov, 2015). Tourism provides a legitimate though trivial source of foreign exchange, valuable in the face of sanctions, and constitutes a limited exercise in soft power, as the DPRK seeks some degree of recognition and respect from others, symbolised by one tourist guide stating that North Koreans are ‘not crazy, not dangerous, just different’ (quoted in Wall, 2014). Presentation of the nation competes with and challenges external images, offering positive political values centred on a version of self-reliance (juche), in the face of external oppression, directed towards international recognition of a self-determined identity.
Guidebooks and websites are limited in terms of background information on what might be expected in North Korea, but, over time, greater congruence exists between what they describe and market and what tourists see and do. The largest agency, Koryo Tours, established in Beijing in 1993, begins its online brochure with ‘the last frontier’ and ‘Your journey to the world's most mysterious country begins here’, emphasises cultural exchange and argues that ‘we thrive on exchanging ideas to give the North Korean people the opportunities that interaction brings’ (http://www.koryogroup.com). Young Pioneer Tours states ‘We are an adventure tour operator that provides “budget tours to destinations your mother would rather you stayed away from”’ (http://www.youngpioneertours.com). Other smaller agencies develop similar themes, emphasising the unusual nature of North Korea and the distinctiveness of the experience. Travelmasters claim that ‘Tourists are drawn to this country out of pure curiosity. It is predictably austere. But simply put, North Korea's sometimes dubious charms are absolutely fascinating’ (http://travelmasters.com.au/north-korea/). Peregrine claim: ‘Our adventure in the north offers a real insight into the strangest country on earth. With barely 1500 visitors a year, ‘off the beaten tourist path’ doesn't quite explain things here … The delights of North Korea aren't for everyone. But if you are to come with us, prepare to be amazed!’ (http://www.peregrineadventures.com/central-asia/north-korea). The ‘true’ and the ‘real’ are pervasive themes. Only Young Pioneers even hint at risk or excitement. All the agencies also mention attractive landscapes, including mountains and beaches, food, and opportunities to meet local people: loosely, other than nightlife, the normative themes of tourism.
Unlike most guidebooks, those covering the DPRK issue as many warnings as invocations to travel. Lonely Planet writes: ‘Most people don't even know that it’s possible to travel here, and indeed the compromises required to do so are significant. You'll be accompanied by two government minders at all times and only hear a one-sided account of history. Those who can't accept this might be better off staying away’ (Richmond, Hornyak, & Low, 2013, p. 302). The Rough Guide points out that: ‘the country's inaccessibility brings an epic quality to its few officially sanctioned sights … North Korea's dubious charms make it the Holy Grail for hard-bitten travellers' (Paxton, 2011, pp. 14, 335). Only rarely do politically unaware ‘standard’ tourists blunder in, unprepared for its ‘dubious charms’. Most have been tutored by the texts, and media silences, to be curious and sceptical.
All tourism in North Korea, while organised through overseas travel agencies, is accompanied by local tour guides, who provide contexts, structure itineraries, control photography and ensure that groups stick together. In the 1990s, a very limited tourism, centred on museums, Kim Il Sung's mausoleum and ritual presentations of flowers at statues, constituted politicised ‘friendship visits’ that ‘were highly stilted, choreographed affairs’ enabling North Korea to ‘derive symbolic sovereignty through the enactment of these ritualised visits’ in national media depictions (Medlicott, 2005, p. 73). Tourists have always had to travel as a ‘permanent, coherent group’ consequently being physically conspicuous, so aiding tourist ‘policing’ (Hall, 1990, p. 45). Tour guides have been described as ‘government minders’ (Richmond et al., 2013, p. 302) or ‘guard-guides’ (Florian, 2014). Despite the geographical spread of tourism, at every scale it remains extremely carefully controlled, in terms of itineraries, sights, sites and stopping points. Travel agencies and guidebooks thus accord with the aspirations of tourists to visit a distinctive, politically isolated, country, to see its ‘known’ features, such as monuments, massed parades and performances, and to penetrate beyond the political façade and gain some experience of everyday lives. Being a tourist in North Korea is a complex political, moral and ethical act.
4. In search of North Korea: towards a distinctive rationale
This paper concentrates entirely on what are loosely characterised as ‘western’ tourists, of whom there are about 3000 a year, including visitors from such Asian countries as Japan and Singapore. The paper is based on discussions with all the members of two tour groups; the first constituted eight people (including the author) visiting the north of North Korea in mid-2014 and the second a group of eleven, all from Australia, on a more ‘standard’ tour of Pyongyang and the south in 2016. The two groups included individuals from the United Kingdom, Australia, Bulgaria, Russia, Japan, Germany and the United States. Most tourists to North Korea have been from northern Europe (especially UK), North America or Australia. Tours typically last about a week as did these two1.
The methodology was centred on qualitative research including interviews and participant observation, involving reflexive ethnographyand elements of auto-ethnography (Butz & Besio, 2009), alongside casual non-directed conversations as the first tour unfolded. The objective was to approach tourism through the concept of an ongoing theatrical performance, following the series of actual events, to assess the experiences and emotions, beyond the motivations and expectations, of the tourists. The experience of the northern tour was also linked into and compared with a detailed blog recounting the previous northern tour (Florian, 2014). Members of the second tour group were interviewed before and after their tour. In both cases perceptions were sharpened by regular evening discussions in the absence of entertainment options. All quotations in the paper are from members of the groups, unless otherwise stated.
According to the main travel agencies, most tourists (over 65%) to North Korea are male, and a significant proportion (about 50%) are repeat visitors. All the northern tourist group were male, university graduates, aged from the late twenties to the sixties, fluent English speakers and seasoned travellers. Four of the eight were return visitors. With just one exception, eleven out of twelve of the previous northern tour group were also repeat visitors (Florian, 2014). Three spoke some Korean; some spoke Chinese, useful in this border region, enabling more contact with people and guides than usually possible. The southern tour group were evenly divided by gender, almost all graduates, and professionals or retired. All were on their first visit. None spoke Asian languages.
Collectively the tourists were experienced travellers with a high educational status. The previous northern group were likewise ‘well-travelled and highly educated’ (Florian, 2014). The widespread uncertainty about visiting North Korea, and the absence of information on the country from standard tourism sources, such as travel agents, suggests this is generally so (Wheeler, 2007). None had expected resorts and recreation; while it was a holiday, there was a serious undertone, with participants inquisitive and open-minded. One of the group had been to Transnistria, Eritrea, Somaliland and Afghanistan in recent years and was fascinated by unusual and distinctive political regimes. The southern group included three who had been to more than 130 countries; only two had been to fewer than 20. None had any concern over security; the concerns of others – ‘are you crazy’, ‘is it safe’ and, more generally, the frequent ‘can you actually go there’ – had long been overcome, although others have expressed concerns (Wassler & Schuckert, 2017). Despite many western countries issuing travel advisories discouraging visits to the DPRK, personal safety is maintained by the permanent presence of the guides, and distance from the broader population.
Both groups had done ‘homework’ beforehand. Almost all had read books and/or watched documentaries, and were well-informed. Underpinning the rationale for visiting North Korea, and especially its north, was ‘to learn more about the only different place in the world’ while ‘we only read and hear negative stuff in the media; we wanted to see if there was another side’, ‘to see if there was a normality about North Korea: I couldn't believe it can be like in the newspapers'. The southern group had much the same basic objectives: ‘to see how a reclusive society such as this operates’, ‘I have never just accepted media accounts and news about DPRK. The little we get is negative. I wanted to experience and see as much as I could myself’ and I was ‘curious to see a communist regime’. A constant refrain was that ‘I wanted to see the country for myself’ simply ‘because it's different’, while, almost as frequently, in the words of one of the southern group: ‘I was eager to get past the charade’. Several had contemplated this for some time: ‘I had always wanted to see this place’. Such rationales parallel those briefly reported by Wang et al. (2017). Other tourists had similar goals: ‘We hear so many things about North Korea in the media, but most of it is designed to either make fun of the country or to frighten us. I felt that it couldn't be that black and white so I decided to travel there myself to form my own opinion’ (Hjelle, 2017).
While none expected a ‘workers’ paradise’, as is reportedly true of some tourists, there was an inchoate feeling that limited insights into an alternative North Korea would be possible, and a was a general sentiment (a ‘Cuban syndrome’) that it should be seen now ‘before it changes’. One travel agency has advertised ‘See it while it lasts’ (Demick, 2010, p. 284). Thus ‘Now is probably the last chance to get a glimpse at the old regime, the strict, stiff dictatorial North Korea’ (Florian, 2014). A central objective was to discover a distinctive place that seemed to exist outside of history, allied to the fascination that socialism holds for residents of capitalist (and post-socialist) regimes (in some cases, but not in these groups, imbued with nostalgia), to know more of the ‘unknowable’ and dissect the ‘external vision’ of North Korea as a persistently negative hegemonic discourse (Shim, 2014, p. 43). That was particularly evident for return visitors, for whom the intention was to see somewhat further ‘beyond the carefully controlled experience’ and ‘to penetrate further into the enigma … it was so bizarre that I wanted to know more’. One claimed that on a previous visit a drunken guide had told him that the ‘truth about Kim Il Sung’ had yet to be revealed, and he was interested to know if such dissidentperspectives might be more common. Another thought ‘it might be a little more open now’. A third returned out of some degree of empathywith the local people: ‘it was all so hard to work out I wanted to have another try’. Other visitors had similar perspectives: ‘My goal was to capture the glimmers of authenticity that would inevitably peek through’ (Stewart, 2017). Florian too ‘wanted to see more. I wanted to see a different side. I wanted a rougher version, to see myself whether Pyongyang was just a sample of an aspiring country struggling for success or if it was the exception, a Potemkin village to fool visitors’ (2014; see Demick, 2010, p. 288). Tourists making repeat visits felt that their knowledge ‘might allay all the worries our constant companions [the ‘guard-guides’] might have had, to get a little bit more freedom and insight than previous visitors' (Florian, 2014). The search for insights, for one tourist, became a search for a Korean ‘Winston Smith’ (the hero of Orwell's 1984) and for a ‘more genuine’ North Korea beneath the widely perceived ideological facade.
All the tourists sought to escape as much as possible from the choreographed and controlled tourist ‘bubble’ and guided tour in search of relativity and shades of grey. Defectors have indicated that, in effect, deliberate preparation of tourist bubbles occurs, at least in Pyongyang: ‘Whenever [tourists] came [the regime] gave us electricity, made us paint our apartments, clean everything and wear nice clothes. They made anyone who was handicapped or in a wheelchair get off the streets. Tourists aren't seeing the real North Korea, they are seeing a farce’ (quoted in Thompson, 2014). Return tourists suspected such choreographed farce, and were anxious to circumvent it.
Sooner or later, as journalist Christopher Hitchens (2001) pondered: ‘all talk among foreigners in Pyongyang turns to one imponderable subject. Do the locals really believe what they are told, and do they truly revere [the dynastic leaders] … I often wondered how my guides kept straight faces’. Barbara Demick similarly wondered of her guides ‘if they believed what they said. What were they really thinking? Did they love their leader as much as they claimed?’ (2010: 7–8). Orville Schell recorded how ‘most of us left with a sensation of having been somehow cheated – a place that was so managed that its true reality remained almost completely unrevealed’ (2003: 29). Even the author of the only exclusive guidebook on North Korea questioned: ‘was I being brilliantly hoodwinked? I realised I didn't really know anything at all worth knowing’ (Willoughby, 2014: ix). Wendy Simmons (2015), observing that the ‘fundamental conundrum’ was that ‘it's equally likely that it’s true or not true’, took to listing ‘shit it might be real’ moments. As the Lonely Planet guide observes: ‘the fascination of travelling in North Korea is trying to divine the real from the fake and attempting to see past the ideology’ (Richmond et al., 2013, p. 310). Almost every visitor to North Korea has contemplated similar conundrums.
Tourists consequently sought to go beyond official touristic experiences and critically engage with the local context. Incomprehension and a search for credibility were unusual and distinctive motivations, oriented to the search for lies and indiscreet phrases, suggesting alternative perspectives and ideologies, and anomalies and discrepancies within the landscape. Unanticipated circumstances, such as roadworks resulting in a detour, created near panic for guides (Florian, 2014) and further implied a hidden world: part of a choreography of both ‘showing and hiding’ (Kim, 2010, p. 263). Tourists anticipated some ability to discover the typical and ordinary, yet hidden, with travel accompanied by constant questioning, self-questioning and discussion. A highly structured tour implied a common-sense perspective that something was hidden, hence there was an insistence, especially amongst repeat tourists, that there was a ‘backstage’, and alternative discourses and meanings. Status, justification and vindication might be acquired by being able to see that backstage.
Returnees particularly felt that the ‘real North Korea’ was geographically more likely to be distant from Pyongyang, where ‘authenticity’ woud be rural and remote. That accorded with guidebook accounts. Lonely Planet suggests that ‘the opportunity to visit truly remote and little visited cities such as Nampo, Wonsan or Hamhung [all in the centre of the country] [offers] a great chance to see real life in North Korea’ (Richmond et al., 2013, p. 303) while ‘Jump at the chance to visit Chongjin (tours rarely go there) ... a great way to see how North Koreans really live …. most locals have never even seen foreigners and this is about as “real” an experience of the country as you'll ever get’ (op cit: 321). Some found variants of authenticity: ‘Away from the Disneyland-like machine that is the capital, things get a little messier – the petulant schoolchildren and tired farmers and shy, reclusive locals’ (Stewart, 2017). One journalist characterised Chongjin as ‘being on the outer limits of “civilisation”’ (Sweeney, 2013, p. 46). Indeed, ‘The further one goes from the capital, the less there is that one's allowed to see’ (Willoughby, 2014: ix), suggested the presence of ‘reality’. Underlying almost every context, account and aspiration was the notion of seeking the ‘reality’ of a very different state and some possibility of finding it.
5. Focusing the gaze
This and the following section primarily elaborate on the structure and form of the northern tour, as indicative of the choreography and control of tourism, since that involved the author, was relatively new, included ‘returnees’ and (literally and eerily) covered the same ground as Florian's tour a year earlier. There was however no obvious difference in format, procedures and strictures on the southern tour. The northern tour went from the border town of Namyang to Hoeryong, only once visited by tourists previously, and south to Chongjin and Mount Chilbo, before turning northwards to Rason and the Chinese border (Fig. 1). Hoeryong was previously the site of a notorious political prison; its closure in 2012 was a factor in opening the region for tourism. North Hamgyong is the main source region of defectors.
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Fig. 1
5.1. Figure one. North Korea
In its final pre-departure document, the travel agency advised that, because tourism in the north is rare, ‘as a result photography is extremely limited … They are very nervous of photographs being taken of anything other than tourist sites so please do respect this and don't push the boundaries'. ‘Tourist sites’ centred on monuments, the symbols of a frozen political culture. Photographs were encouraged there as long as they were not cropped, leaving out parts of the leaders, or blocking out parts by standing in front. At such sites we were requested to be properly dressed, deferential and reverential. Photographs that included anything that suggested poverty, such as village housing, local people and handcarts, shops (which had a limited range of goods), trains and unfinished building projects, were not permissible. Photographing through the bus window was particularly discouraged. We were regularly reminded: ‘no photo’, and reprimanded when we ‘forgot’ or ‘thought this one was OK’. Citizens occasionally intervened to discourage us.
Guides were quick to deter any efforts, intended or unintended, to photograph ‘inappropriate’ subjects, emphasising that local people were shy and guarded their privacy. At different times we were reminded literally ‘when in Rome do as the Romans’ and ‘you are guests of our country; you must follow the rules’. Restrictions were further established by ‘psychological controls’ that indicated ‘that one might be offending the very gracious, polite, sensitive, and helpful hosts, or that one would be bringing opprobrium on the rest of the group and thereby perhaps be curtailing group activities – which usually impose the greatest constraints (through self-censorship) on individual yearnings for the freedom to explore’ (Hall, 1990, p. 46).
Beyond our photographs were repeated glimpses of peasant livelihoods. Bicycles, handcarts and bullock carts dominated wheeled transport. Walking was a significant means of transport, evidently over considerable distances. Rare trucks and buses passed on dusty unsealed roads. Steam–powered trucks were ‘belching smoke … as if they had been retrofitted to burn wood and corncobs instead of gasoline’ (Demick, 2010, p. 290). Ancient electric trains were frequently immobile. People worked by hand in the fields. A few antiquated tractors existed. Spades and buckets were basic tools of road repair. Stone houses with tiled roofs were surrounded by intensely cultivated home gardens of corn, beans and cabbages. Goats were the main livestock. Clothes were washed in rivers, even in Chongjin suburbs. Hotels often had no running water or hot water. There was therefore a ‘real’ and relatively poor world, not to be captured by camera but easily observed: a partial objective achieved.
Former clichés of communism were apparent: songs booming out from factories, revolutionary posters, a large proportion of the population in uniform, workers jogging and working in unison, and collectively stopping to sing or perform callisthenics, drab identical blocks of apartment buildings. Factory workers broke off at appropriate moments to study the works of Kim Il Sung, or have collective exercise breaks. Each town was dominated by a vast square with statues or murals of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. Dustpans and brushes were used to sweep streets. Roads were literally being made by hand, working well into the evening, symbolised in the hundreds of people working at key sites where monuments were being established (Fig. 2). Regimentation was evident in group work and recreation, with work accompanied by parades and musical performances.
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Fig. 2
5.2. Figure Two. Monument Site Preparation, Rajin
On the tour bus we were taught to sing the national song, Arirang, and requested to sing our national anthems, while the guides performed karaoke, offering a distraction from scenery that reflected rural poverty. For those who had previously been to the south of the DPRK, the relative poverty was evident but there were indications of change. Chongjin had an unexpected, briefly glimpsed market. Market hours are deliberately restricted and, with one exception, tourist access to markets was prohibited (Dunlop, 2017; Willoughby, 2014). Rason, the exception, had a dynamic and crowded market, a highlight for most of the northern group, where we curiously arrived just before closing time. Considerable quantities of fish, meat, fruit, cigarettes, clothes and electrical appliances could be bought: a nascent capitalism and entrepreneurialism. Photographs were forbidden. A handful of counterfeit Puma and Adidas shirts hinted at other worlds: ‘one guy was wearing an Adidas polo shirt’. Despite the control of vision, site and itinerary, that followed exactly the same route and chronology as the year before, it was possible to observe beyond the guides, and beyond the front stage, but impossible to record key facets of the landscape.
6. Empty meeting grounds?
Both tours visited carefully chosen sites, many substantial monuments to Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, revolutionary sites (usually where Kim Il Sung directed guerrilla operations against the Japanese) and museums, schools (including English language courses and musical performances), factories, mountains and a lone beach, seal colony and spa. It was a journey through a version of everyday life, yet always simultaneously tangential to it. Meals were in hotel rooms or restaurants, invariably empty of other patrons, such that Simmons (2015) designated them as ‘fakarants’. One night was spent in what was designated a village homestay but the village and individual houses were almost entirely empty of people (and much larger than those elsewhere). Lack of contact was palpable.
Other than the natural landscape nothing pre-dated the founding of the DPRK whose heritage was anchored in stylised monuments, exuding sentiments of nationalism, progress, and nostalgia to portray a specific militarised image of national identity. Numerous revolutionary museums and monuments mark sites of violence, in the north especially associated with the Korean War and the subsequent liberation from Japanese occupation, an era poorly known by most tourists, being rarely discussed in their home countries. History was teleological, recent, nationalistic and focused on the efforts of great men. Just as was true a quarter of a century earlier: ‘historic sites and museums are often visited when they appear to be otherwise closed or poorly used by the local population’ (Hall, 1990, p. 45). Revolutionary museums were always empty, with local people kept carefully away, often directed to the other side of the road when we visited sites, even as we paid homage, as directed, to the Great Leader Kim-Il-Sung. We needed to bow respectfully in unison, present bouquets of flowers if we wished and exhorted, for example, ‘to follow the wisdom of the anti-Japanese heroine Kim Jong Suk’ (the wife of Kim Il Sung). Revolutionary politics was part of contemporary history. As the pre-departure tour notes stated, in themselves a measure of discipline, distinctiveness and control, with particular reference to bowing: ‘If you are not willing to behave as expected by the local customs then we recommend that you do not visit the DPRK’. Ritual and acquiescence were imposed on us as we became part of the performance.
Not only were the monuments huge, but their dimensions were recited at each site by a local tour guide, always a woman in hanbok national dress. Thus the monument to Kim Il Sung at Wangjaesan, celebrating his actions in fighting back the Japanese occupiers in the 1950s, the ritual accounting of which routinely required an apologetic nod to the lone Japanese tourist, was 66 m high, and could supposedly be seen across the Chinese border, some 25 km away. Routine stone revolutionary slogans on hillsides were 11 m high and weighed 1000 kg each. Kim Jong Suk's statue weighed 250 tonnes. Quantification rarely extended beyond monuments.
At each site tourists receive an account of its historical significance, usually involving its role in warfare against Japan and the United States, or its significance for one or more of the dynastic leaders, directed to attitudes and moral judgements that reinforce national history, culture and progress, establishing a consistent discourse further reinforced, at intervals, by the tour guides. No tourist site was without some relationship to Kim Il Sung, whether because he had visited, lived or inspired devotion there, or, with a few hortatory words, had redirected the course of industrial, tourist or rural development. Typically ‘the nearby ski run was entirely due to the wisdom of Comrade Kim Il Sung’ and ‘this was where Comrade Kim Il Sung set up the first cooperative fishing company’. Such ‘on-the-spot-guidance’ (OTSG) events are widely represented in photographs and paintings of leaders surrounded by numerous senior acolytes with notebooks. The leaders' primacy was ubiquitous. A school classroom was entirely filled with a model of the village where Kim Il Sung grew up. One guide recalled that he had achieved membership of the Workers Party after passing a burning house and being able to rush in and save the pictures of the two leaders (standard décor in houses and apartments), a teacher revealed that her favourite hobby was ‘reading revolutionary stories’, and a school boy stated that his dream in life was to travel to Pyongyang and meet Marshal Kim Jong Un. We were carefully instructed never to fold any newspaper across a picture of a leader or, worse still, throw such a newspaper away. Such hagiography, comforting legends, pious verities and obsequiousness proved challenging.
The DPRK thus chooses and controls what aspects of culture, history and geography to portray to tourists, far beyond museums and galleries, and in what form. In doing so it defines, curates and strengthens national identity. Monuments staged cultural performances of sanctioned history, in which we were participants, and local people performers. Tourists routinely took photographs of participants in the performance, as encouraged, to the extent that it appeared duty, so completing a ‘circle of representation’ (Jenkins, 2003), reproducing the expected images that represented the nation, replicating the imaginative geography portrayed in brochures and national propaganda. Korean guides and tourists thus became typecast, occupying specified roles and enacting prescribed movements in defined spaces (Chronis, 2012; Edensor, 1998, 2001), collaborating in the representation, production, performance and validation of recent events, simultaneously resulting in a paralysis of history without change or spontaneity.
The single TV channel emphasised revolutionary themes; ‘highlights’ of the Korean War were broadcast nightly, sixty years later, usually followed by films and soap operas centred on the same era. The backdrops for karaoke songs (a reminder, alongside kitsch sculptures and landscape paintings, that the DPRK was very much Korean and Asian) interspersed bucolic scenes and attractive women with monuments, artillery barrages and tank movements. The present was inseparable from the past, another performative paralysis of history. Just as Pyongyang was ‘a living museum of the Cold War era’ (Wall, 2014) so museums suggested that little had happened since the revolutionary birth of the DPRK. So ‘I got tired of the emphasis on the war that ended in 1953; it is as if they haven't moved on since then’. Indeed ‘The worst thing was the constant repetition of North Korea's claims to be victims or victors, contrary to our received history’ while ‘the war atrocities exhibits were too graphic and confronting’. Ironically these constitute the predominant images within dark tourism.
School corridors were festooned with revolutionary posters and playground toys decorated with rockets, tanks and other military paraphernalia. English textbooks included such sentences as ‘Our enemies are the American bastards’ and ‘We are going to kill the Japanese soldiers’. The Korean War lived on. Children performed with smiles rigidly in place and were fearful after and outside the performances, uncertain how to respond to the thanks of rare foreigners. Stepping outside the fixed performance was difficult. Language students had rehearsed lines and questions but were uncertain of responses to our unrehearsed questions. Despite the extreme rarity of western tourists, we were otherwise effectively ‘unseen’ and unacknowledged; there were no waves from pedestrians. At Hoeryong we were such a rarity that wary local people could not resist a glance, but eye contact was otherwise assiduously absent. They could not be part of the performance. Unrehearsed lives were inaccessible. Since even English language teachers had hesitant English, meaningful contact and casual spontaneous interactions were largely impossible. Occasionally we glimpsed groups of local tourists, waiting for us to leave, as they too engaged in obligatory pilgrimagesand ‘ideological tourism’ (Lankov, 2014). A brief encounter at a beach, where two of our group spoke to local tourists and were offered food, was quickly terminated on the grounds that time was pressing. Otherwise potential meeting grounds were almost literally empty: ‘The main thing that was different to what I expected was the amount of surveillance to the point of paranoia’.
For returnees, there was a feeling that they had learned rather more, partly because their gaze was better focused the second time around, and they had found some cracks. Could I take a photograph through the bus window? The guide carefully examines the landscape, and permission is granted, but what might have been there that required caution? Such were fragmentary breaches in the bubble. Getting to a possible backstage was difficult, but glimpses offered encouragement: ‘It was really interesting to see the rural areas where people seemed much poorer’, ‘It was so interesting to see Rason market’. Such banal observations represented achievements. As an earlier tourist had observed: ‘I was struck by the sense of having stumbled upon that fabled thing which seems so hopelessly impossible to find: the real North Korea’ (http://www.thebohemianblog.com/2012/09/dark-tourism-pyongyang-north-korea.html). For Florian too ‘this trip was a lot more real – a much better look at the current state of the DPRK, yet still just a scratch on the surface’, yet he concluded ‘The more you know about North Korea, the less it makes sense’ (2014). There was always a backstage, another inscrutable layer. But guides are human: ‘They made mistakes. Said things they shouldn't have said. Let me see things they probably shouldn't have. Contradicted themselves' (Simmons, 2015, p. 300). The challenge and possibility of discovering glitches and breaching infallibility was the core of tourism that combined recreation, politics and history, where museums and monuments evoked revolutionary recent history and factories and schools emphasised the construction of modernity on a revolutionary edifice. We encountered stage sets rather than people.
7. Extinguishing the gaze?
Cameras were carefully inspected on departure to ensure that no illicit photographs had been taken. Inspection was more rigorously enforced during the brief periods when South Korean tourists were allowed to visit the Mt Keumgang area; only digital cameras were allowed, politically incorrect photographs, such as the military or ox-carts on citystreets, were deleted and culprits fined (Cadwalladr, 2010, p. 8; Lankov, 2015). Elsewhere tourists have been asked to erase pictures of poverty, distress and military contexts (Shim, 2014; Stewart, 2017). Some of our pictures from the northern tour were similarly lost and erased as what suggested poverty and peasantry were partly eliminated. One of the group could restore the ‘lost’ pictures revealing that what had been deleted were photographs and short films taken from the bus window of fairly routine rural and urban scenes, showing some ‘poor’ people, unfinished road work, an informal market and photographs of people carrying goods or engaged in collective work. Figure Two, with its collective hand labour, was such a deleted photograph: part of a structured politicisation, erasure, cleansing and control of the visual.
A tentatively glimpsed DPRK beyond the preferred representation could thus abruptly disappear at the border, leaving a clichéd nation of monuments, scenery and selected local people: preferred national representations. In practice border officials were too busy and harassed to make detailed examinations (and were often more interested in photographs from elsewhere) hence many ‘doubtful’ photographs slipped through. There was an assumption that since we had been guided at all times, and guides too would have erased photographs, detailed inspection was less necessary. Nowhere else is the tourist gaze (Urry, 1990) more carefully constructed, demarcated, organised, truncated and value-laden.
8. Closing the curtains on the theatre-state
At an inter-personal scale theatrical performance invents and maintains a clearly defined national historiography, constructed and preserved without contamination, grandiosely displayed at the Arirang Festival, but just as evident in the diurnal progress and rituals of small-scale tourism. Ritual delivers key messages, a powerful political rhetoric with clear enemies (Japan and the US) not abstract political philosophies(Cho, 2017). Ideology weaves together political, cultural and moral authority. Tourism plays a small part in contributing to and upholding a dynastic political system, as political messages and histories are ritually and repeatedly recounted, even as tourists seek to challenge the veracity of ‘the suffocating narrative of North Korean state propaganda’ (Dunlop, 2017). Consequently ‘the ordering force of display’ (Geertz, 1980, pp. 111–112) was ultimately not enough to satisfy inquiring tourists. Most tourists, albeit two small samples and sporadic bloggers, while not rejecting the probability of North Korea being imbued with negative characteristics, sought a ‘normality’ absent from western and Korean media depictions, that might challenge the distinctive, received political discourses, initially of the ‘west’ and subsequently of North Korea. Tourists recognised that discourses were imbued with propaganda, hence their efforts to go beyond the performance and subvert both dominant discourses, seeking insights of their own rather than, as in versions of political tourism, adhering to a particular perspective (e.g. Belhassen et al., 2014). Ideology was frustratingly unassailable, even incomprehensible, and shielded from ambiguity. Guides sometimes went blank or changed the subject. On one occasion I enquired as to a distant seemingly fortified building: I was directed to an array of fields on the other side of the bus. As Simmons put it:
Everything you do is staged and managed. Everyone with whom you are allowed to speak knows what he or she can and cannot say. When there are real people doing ordinary things, you're not allowed to engage. When there are sights deemed too unsightly, the guides pretend they aren't there. When questions are asked they don't want to answer, or criticism levied they don't want to hear, they are masterful at staying on point and controlling the message … There's no sharing, empathizing, or finding common ground: there's only the propaganda tour (2015: 253–4)
Central to that were choreographies – a staged mobility - ‘characterised by purposive directed moments, which follow a limited number of strongly demarcated paths’ (Edensor, 1998, p. 50), oriented to the engineering of affect (Thrift, 2009). Performances maintained received stereotypes, and evasiveness guaranteed both the search for alternatives and doubt over the revolutionary story: a direct challenge to the theatre-state. It was difficult to discern what was beyond the performance, yet glimpses of other ‘realities’ reduced the ability of tourism to be a strategic tool of soft power and cultural diplomacy.
Only during incidental glitches, and gaps in the ordered agenda, particularly in unscripted travel between sights, could tourists encounter a ‘real’ North Korea. Such cracks became the objective of tourism, as tourists became detectives, rather than the grand monuments, choreographed mass spectacles and ideologies that were offered, in order to challenge the organised construction and fabrication of politicised ‘place-myths’ (Lash & Urry, 1994), whether international or national. That offered a Gramscian optimism of the will focused on ‘the possibility that tiny cracks might yet break open the dam’ (Tsing, 2005, p. 267), or that there would necessarily be holes in the ‘fabric of space in which new forms of expression can come into being’ (Thrift, 2003, p. 2022). However seemingly ‘everyday encounters’ while not necessarily ‘consciously planned deceptions’ (cf. Goffman, 1959), proved elusive or illusory. What was previously known of North Korea was usually quite limited, and related to monuments and displays, but not to houses, markets, fields, schools, hospitals and people, the basic and banal components of a national landscape. Such prosaic and mundane things were more important to tourists than the formal objects and scenes they were expected to consume. Empathy grew from the incidental depiction of a ‘normal’ country rather than the deliberate depiction of grandeur through displays and monuments or the legitimisation of nationhood and polity in museums. ‘I regularly caught glimpses of what appeared to be mundane life and everyday happiness: uniformed military couples holding hands, bored parents waiting at benches in the shade … In a country often portrayed as incomprehensibly foreign the familiar seemed bizarre’ (Wall, 2014). Trivial yet normal details became fascinating.
Emotional and critical perspectives involved simultaneous empathy with and detachment from ‘ordinary’ Koreans, despite a sense of difference, emphasised socially and physically by the ‘empty’ meeting grounds of staged and controlled performances. For many, the experiences were a revelation, even surreal, in moving between different places and different ontological experiences, where interactions could be unsettling and unexpected. As one blogger recorded
I'd find myself in these perplexing situations trying to figure out if a lie-spouting North Korean was in on it or not. Was she thinking, “I know this is false, you know this is false, but I live here so I gotta play the game”? Or was she fully brainwashed and thought she was telling me the truth? It was impossible to tell. During interactions, I'd find myself thinking, “Are you an actor in The Truman Show and you think I'm Truman? Or are you Truman and I'm one of the actors?” Are those kids on the street just pretending to be playing for my benefit? Is any of this real?
Put otherwise: ‘All the world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn't are not easy to specify’ (Goffman, 1959, p. 72). About half the tourists vowed to return, some to see the north or when national circumstances changed, but all for ‘another go’ at detective work. Pleasure was gained from achievements outside the theatre. Occasional fortuitous glimpses revealed a more complex, and more ‘normal’, nation. Rare glimpses, as of unexpected market activity, offered moments of triumph and brief escapes from tightly structured, staged experiences and directed gazes. They hinted at alternative ‘realities’ and discourses beyond rigid state control, performance and ‘guide-guard’ direction, subordinate to a particular geopolitics of memory and economy. Where tourists are firmly controlled and dissuaded from individual exploration, independent observations and discoveries proved unusually valuable. Tourism revealed much about North Korea, but what might be hidden and what that meant was always unknowable.
9. Conclusion
A tightly controlled tourist perspective on North Korea has become more accessible. Yet, after three decades, it remains true that ‘tourist groups are virtually compulsorily taken, totally segregated from the host population, to see and hear declarations of ideological infallibility articulated through “touristic” objects and sites’ (Hall, 1990, p. 48). Perhaps the first guidebook to include North Korea observed that ‘visits are primarily designed as didactic excursions’ (Far Eastern Economic Review, 1976, p. 349). Little has changed. Despite expanding spatial and social boundaries and increased numbers, tourism is thoroughly planned and never spontaneous, being confined to circumscribed and framed enclaves, where conformity to rules and adherence to centralised regulation hold sway (Edensor, 1998). Beyond a superficial and incidental geography, opening up remains fictitious.
At every scale and in every place constraints on what tourists see and hear in North Korea confused and clouded observations and emphasised geopolitics. But, as tourists observed, it had been a ‘chance to see the history of the twentieth century’, where ‘we could still see the stars at night’ and where people ‘went about their lives much like us’. Despite rare glimpses of change however, through the pervasive politics and controlled performance, the metaphors that emerged were of Alice in Wonderland, George Orwell's 1984, the Truman Show and Donald Rumsfeld's ‘unknown unknowns’ (cf. Shim, 2014; Simmons, 2015). Guidebook authors, and journalists, were as curious, yet confused and uncertain, as tourists. Beyond the symbolism of parallel worlds, the conundrum of what and where constituted ‘truth’ and ‘shit it might be real’ moments, was necessarily unsolvable. For Simmons ‘seeing is not believing’ (2015: 299). Uncertainty reigned. Perhaps nowhere else is the touristic challenge so great: an ultimately frustrated search for an authentic everyday life – a back stage apparently deliberately hidden, invisible amidst the touristic landscapes and histories that were not ‘real’ manifestations of history and geography, but reflected the dissonance between tourist expectations of a ‘real slice of history’ and the cleansing of a troubled history (Kim, 2014, p. 166). While performance offers a field of enquiry that draws attention to subjectivity, agency and the creative production of space and place (Reid, 2005; Rogers, 2015), apart from Arirang itself, performance is more subtle, more pervasive and designed to obfuscate as much as enlighten: a thoroughly disciplined and regulated social space, where ‘everyday reality is exceeded by its representation’ in a heightened form of theatricality (Davis & Postlewait, 2003, p. 11). The durability of charismatic dynastic and ideological politics in North Korea performs and defines its distinctive place in modern history.
The idea of a theatre state, developed primarily through analysis of Balinese political systems, can be usefully – if partially - transferred to a better understanding of a modern, secular, revolutionary state. Indeed North Korea offers the converse of Geertz’ interpretation of the theatre state where power is not subordinated to culture (cf. MacRae, 2005), but constantly constructs variants of it. As in theatrical performancesthe theatre-state has a static and repetitive order, an absence of improvisation, with formalised performances crystallised in time. Although visits to museums and monuments are central to tours, the transformation of history into monuments, programmatic, formulaic recitations of victories, and OTSG sites, played out in schools, museums and factories, the basic components and stages of the theatre-state, were of little interest to most tourists. They were perceived much less favourably than encounters with local people, however transient, that enabled seeing around and beyond the supremacy of symbols. The more that the gaze was controlled and directed, repetitious and sterile, as in enclosed museums and grandiose monuments, the less interesting and more frustrating it proved. Repeated performance, at the intersection of tourist choreographies and political discourse, rather than opening up new political possibilities, effectively extinguished them. By contrast, the ability to see something beyond the performance, ordinary people engaged in ordinary lives, stimulated empathy and opened up potential discursive spaces.
Direct experience, without a politics of engagement, provided both insights and frustrations, but enabled some making of meaning through interaction and reflection, effectively experiential learning, though at best a fractured process of comparing notes, observations and thoughts to re-examine assumptions and dissect and challenge constructed representations. That reflexivity contributed further to rejecting dichotomies and embracing ambivalence and complexity, with analogies in the performance of ‘slum tourism’ (Mkono, 2016). Fixed itineraries, staged events and encounters, ensured that the forlorn search for authenticity could never be realised, but that the entirety of the culture and economy that was viewed could not be artificial, enabling a partial escape from themed places, and something of everyday life. Not everything could be contrived, constructed and incorporated into the performance. Both observations and encounters transgressed constructed political boundaries.
That different perceptions of ideology underpin travel suggests that much tourism in North Korea represents a ‘dutiful tourism’ related to a loose and rather abstract ‘moral imperative’ (Graburn, 2017; Hughes, 2008; Mkono, 2016) to learn more about a censured, denigrated state and its moral order, aimed at (re-)imagining and shaping a largely unknown nation. Yet, much like tourists to the Tuol Sleng Museum in Cambodia, visitors generally left in a ‘state of confusion’ rather than with ‘a better understanding’ (Hughes, 2008, p. 325). More than in most tourist destinations, tourists sought to ‘make sense of themselves and the world in which they live’ (Edensor, 1998, p. 70) through a moral apolitical tourism that might escape and evade ideology and demonstrate that, even in a theatre-state, power and meaning cannot be enforced. Likewise Chinese and South Korean tourists also visited North Korea for similar reasons: they were curious about North Korea and specifically wanted to know more about the ‘real situation’ of North Korea. Nostalgia, relaxation, proximity, value for money and an unspoilt natural environment played lesser parts (Li et al., 2018; Li & Ryan, 2015; Mun, Lee, & Jeong, 2018). Both there, and in the present study, tourists are politically aware and rationales are similar, circumstances supported by blog and website data. However sample sizes are tiny, tourists exhibit degrees of intensity and diversity (in prior knowledge, intent and expectation), all tours are limited in time and place, and further studies are needed. A better understanding of North Korea would be invaluable for peace and security, yet North Korea remains elusive: moral apolitical tourism has geopolitical limitations in a theatre-state.
Notes
1.
For reasons of confidentiality it is not possible to identify the particular travel agencies which organised these tours, and thus the source of some data. Nor is it possible to provide more details on the tour participants.
Conflicts of interest
No conflict of interest is involved.
Acknowledgment
I am grateful to Stephen Codrington, Paul Dwyer, Brad Garrett, Chris Gibson, Jamie Gillen, Rachel Hughes and Marilu Melo for their insights and enthusiasm, and, above all, to the tour participants.
Appendix A. Supplementary data
The following is the supplementary data to this article:
Research data for this article
Data not available / The data that has been used is confidentialAbout research data
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1. Introduction
The Democratic People's Republic of North Korea (DPRK) is one of the least known, even supposedly inaccessible, tourist destinations, hence the question often posed to past and potential tourists: ‘can you actually go there?’ However, since the mid-2000s, North Korea has slowly opened up to tourism, both geographically and politically. Although initially centred mainly on Pyongyang and the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) with South Korea, northern areas of the country have become accessible since 2013. Only South Koreans (and, since mid-2017, United States citizens) are barred. In this already unusual context, a familiar political economy of tourism is embedded and performed within the ideology and practices of a theatre-state. This paper documents the contours of tourism in North Korea to examine how this unusual geopolitics functions.
The paper develops a critical geopolitics of tourism (Mostafanezhad & Norum, 2016; Rowen, 2016), engaging with conceptual insights on performativity and the theatre-state drawn from diverse fields, including geography, anthropology, politics and theatre studies. Beyond the axiomatic concerns of tourism studies with motivations and perceptions, tourism encounters are performed in relational manner (Gibson, 2010), and mediated by intersecting geopolitical discourses that circulate in popular culture, social media, and tourism marketing (Dittmer, 2010, 2014). Places and tourist imaginaries are constantly constructed, and continually enacted, through encounters in the concrete spaces of travel (Edensor, 1998, 2001). Bodies, materials, landscapes and discourses are co-constituted through their relationships in tourist space (Duffy, Waitt, Gorman-Murray, & Gibson, 2011). However, as the case of North Korea attests, the presentation for tourist consumption of concrete urban and rural spaces and people serves another end: the construction, perseverance and performance of the theatre-state. Tourism is inseparable from, and part of, the country's wider functioning as a theatre-state, where status, power and governance are elaborated in mass performances and spectacles, public art and film, museums and monuments, with public culture an instrument of propaganda and political indoctrination, and an ordering force of display and repetition. While the North Korean case may seem melodramatic, it brings into sharper relief tourism's geopolitical functions.
North Korea, the seemingly reclusive ‘hermit kingdom’, is often described as the last communist country on earth, yet ‘communism’ is an intense ethnic Korean nationalism, blended into ancestor worship, order and culture, in a Confucian family state. For over sixty years a leadership dynasty and personality cult has passed from Kim Il Sung, through Kim Jong Il to Kim Jong Un, within a centralised, military-first state. The DPRK has a nuclear capacity of international concern, a repressive human rights record, and plays little part in regional and international organisations. Media coverage of North Korea has an intense and relentless negativity (e.g. Dalton, Jung, Willis, & Bell, 2016; Shim, 2014), but little is conveyed about everyday life. Typically the ABC (2017) introduced a news item:
Conjure up a picture of North Korea and it would probably be a mass military parade - tanks, ballistic missiles and thousands of faces and feet marching in perfect unison. It may invoke images of poverty, human rights abuse and a repressive regime teetering on the brink of war
Since journalists are discouraged from visiting, and routinely denied visas, their insights are limited and constrained by restrictions on access and mobility.
In such a heightened geopolitical context, tourism represents a distinctive and unusual form of political tourism (Clarke, 2000; Isaac, 2010), where tourists seek to develop a moral perspective on a place that has hitherto eluded their (and others') vision and understanding. Political tourism, and geopolitical discourses, have emerged in conflict and post-conflict situations, such as Palestine (Belhassen, Uriely, & Assor, 2014), Israel (Barnard, 2017; Brin, 2006) and Northern Ireland (e.g. Dowler, 2013; Murphy, 2010; Skinner, 2016). Sites, sights and perspectives are usually designed to assert the restoration of peace, and a degree of everyday normality, but alongside the merit of particular causes, hence such tourism may also be partisan (Barnard, 2017; Gelbman, 2016; Skinner, 2016). By contrast it is argued here that tourists in North Korea are oriented to an apolitical converse of this, attempting to see beyond and between both the pervasive negativity of external media coverage and antithetical local positive depictions of progress and morality, and so avoid a partisan ideological position (Connell, 2017; Wang, van Broeck, & Vanneste, 2017). The purpose is not to see the ‘indictments’ of human failure’ that are the core of dark tourism (Willis, 2014, p. 16; Kim, 2010) but their converse, the everyday yet different ‘normality’, that is assumed to exist but is invisible.
It is thus argued that tourism to North Korea is neither dark tourism, the search for a dark past of problematic sites (battlefields, walls, jails, slavery or holocaust sites, and related museums and memorials), associated with violence, death, disaster and suffering (Bowman and Pezzullo 2009; Johnston, 2015; Lennon & Foley, 2000; Light, 2017), nor war-zone or danger tourism. Dark tourism sites are characterised by diversity, but also by temporality. Dark tourism motivations centre on relationships between duty, respect for heritage, reflection and particular forms of nostalgia, marking the ideological influence of tourism in the ‘brokerage of memory’ (Naef & Ploner, 2016; Stone & Sharpley, 2008). In such contexts, as at battle sites such as Gettysburg and Pearl Harbor, slave departure points in Ghana, Ground Zero and Vietnam's Cu Chi tunnels and War Remnants Museum (Chronis, 2012; Gillen, 2014; Willis, 2014), past events and histories are presented in particular, sometimes partisan, ways, requiring distinctive site management, interpretation and performance (see Buda & Shim, 2015, 2017; Connell, 2017; Gillen, 2018; Miller & Del Casino, 2018; Wang et al., 2017). Danger tourism, by contrast, involves sites of ongoing violence, crime and conflict (Adams, 2001; Mahrouse, 2016), shaped by socio-political activities and divisions (including politics, ethnicity and religion) that are also diverse and transitory, including places of war, hence its initial designation as war tourism (Adams, 2001), terrorism, nuclear contamination (such as Fukushima and Chernobyl), or even volcanic activity (Skinner, 2018). It is usually discouraged, and avoided (e.g. Lanouar & Goaied, 2019), but occasionally sought out (Adams, 2001) or the risks downplayed by tourists (Fuchs, Uriely, Reichel, & Maoz, 2012) and in tourist promotions, where danger may also be downplayed, or said to be localised or exceptional (Tarplee, 2008, Buda, 2016). Danger is ephemeral and fluctuating (Causey, 2007; Lisle, 2000) hence, as in Bali and Northern Ireland, sites of warfare (and war tourism) and terrorism may become places of dark tourism. Many destinations can become dangerous, or at least punitive, for individuals who disregard norms, advice and warnings, engage in ‘deviant behaviour’ (Buda & McIntosh, 2013) or are simply unlucky, or exercise poor judgement, in places that are not otherwise dangerous or dark.
Distinctions between dark and danger tourism are imprecise, with sites sharing common elements of past or present danger and violence. What may be a dangerous site to some, is a dark site to others; ongoing danger, from volcanic activity to terrorism, may occur at sites of memorialisation. Moreover, just as dark and dangerous places are diverse, and fluctuate, tourists vary in gender, age, knowledge, nationality and familiarity with sites and contexts, resulting in variable assumptions and responses, much influenced by affect and emotion (Martini & Buda, 2018). Warfare, emotion and tourism are not apart, but shaped by complex and uneven relationships, practices and performances (Coward et al., 2018; Gillen, 2018; Lisle, 2000, 2016; Miller & Del Casino, 2018). It is therefore argued here that North Korea is neither the locus of dark tourism, since few have knowledge of the events and locations that might make it such, nor is it dangerous, but it nonetheless emphasises how travel is intricately linked to geopolitics, and in turn to performance, theatre and affect.
All tourism in North Korea constitutes theatre. The theatre-state, as described by Geertz in Bali, represents a political state directed to the performance of drama and ritual, rather than the provision of welfare and services, employing symbols, myths and rites both oriented to political ends but primarily being ‘what the state was for’ (1980: 13). Ritual, stylised repetition and re-enactment of symbolic statements about the social order reinforce social cohesion, and underpin and sustain personal, civic and national identity (Butler, 1988; Cartledge, 1997; Goffman, 1959; Turner, 1987; Werry, 2011). Tourism is replete with guided tours. It is not unusual for tourist workers, guides and performers, to stage their identities and culture in specific, scripted ways for the benefit of tourists, especially in cross-cultural contexts, with directed audience participation (Edensor, 1998; Mordue, 2005). In North Korea, however, staging, performance and participation are pervasive and comprehensive; only guided tours exist, while guides are both observers and protagonists. Political practice (and its outcome as social practice) is turned into a tourism product with tourism a wholly scripted and performed performance, in which tourists are expected to play a part. There is nothing outside the performance and nothing beyond the guided tour, but everything is not the tour.
In what follows, I elaborate on this argument, partly through a semi-autoethnographic ‘travelogue’, ‘following’ two tour groups, one in the north (of which the author was part), and a more ‘typical’ tour of Pyongyang and the south. Immersed in the co-constitution of North Korean tourism as political theatre, it considers the motivations and perceptions of tourists; beyond mere representations and discourse, it also countenances the staging of a distinctive tourism, to provide critical engagement with representation, performance and geopolitics. It thus responds to calls on political geographers to explore the performative dimensions of geopolitics (Bialasiewicz et al., 2007; McConnell, 2016) and the growing interest within tourism studies of moral encounters (Gibson, 2010; Mostafanezhad and Hamman 2014) that engage with performativity and social construction to trace relationships between discourses, performativity and lived experience.
2. Tourism and the theatre-state
The idea of the theatre-state has been linked to large cultural events, including nuclear tests, both directed to the national population (Cho, 2017; Kwon & Chung, 2012; Merkel, 2013) and, partly in response to negative external perceptions, directed outwards to attract global attention (Hughes, 2007). Versions and virtues of the nation are especially evident in monuments and museums, and vividly depicted in mass games, parades and demonstrations, often a centrepiece of tourism to Pyongyang. The state is not therefore a fixed and stable entity, but is an evolving process of repeated actions, behaviour and practices that collectively create the image of national identity(McConnell, 2016). It is argued here that this perspective can be extended, at a different scale, to all tourism sites and performances – and certain aspects of everyday life – that connect tourism to political goals and highlight its potential role in imagining, shaping and narrating the national past, present and future, as a highly visual part of soft power and public diplomacy.
The most spectacular cultural event in North Korea has long been the massive annual Arirang Festival, designed to foster a national discourse through staging the structure of the nation, its recent history and its charismatic leadership. Arirang, the most famous Korean folk song, tells the story of people, perhaps lovers, divided by a mountain pass, a useful metaphor for a divided Korea. Military parades, repeated rehearsals and mass gymnastics involve tens of thousands of choreographed citizens, linking the stage with recreation, everyday life and ‘military-first’ policy, through a patriotic nation-branding within an invented tradition of filial piety translated into a radical and revolutionary political principle (Burnett, 2013; Kwon & Chung, 2012). The festival thus sought to create ‘an illustration of the power of grandeur to organise the world’ (Geertz, 1980, p. 102). Power becomes real through symbols and performances; the people create the spectacle and the spectacle recreates and reinforces society in a microcosm of ‘the material embodiment of political order’ (Geertz, 1980, p. 13; Cho, 2017) and the ‘routinisation of politics’ (Choi, 2013). Ritual and spectacle are combined in the pursuit of continued power, both nation and unification, and celebrate and emphasise dynastic continuity and pan-Korean identity, with politics and performance more ritualised and symbolic over time from the Korean War and from the death of the nation's founding father, Kim Il Sung.
The Arirang Festival is one dramatic part of collective cultural narratives in North Korean popular music, ‘socialist realist’ art, theatre, literature and film (Dukalskis & Hooker, 2011; Kim, 2010; Lim, 2017) that source problems in Japanese colonialism and American aggression and legitimate the revolutionary survival of North Korea. Comprehensive forms of nation-branding, with ritual and culture underpinning politics, constitute ‘the architecture and cosmological order of political organisation’ (Cho, 2017, pp. 14–15) and national self-reliance, imbued in ‘a politics of sacrifice in everyday life’ (Dukalskis & Hooker, 2011, p. 60), underpinned through performance. Political power becomes the display and repetition of power: the state as affect (Cartledge, 1997; Geertz, 1980; MacRae, 2005; Thrift, 2009) with North Korea a ‘perpetual ritual state’ (Ryang, 2012, p. 21). Rehearsal is both directed to performance but is an end in itself ‘disciplining people to embody collective life’ (Kim, 2010, p. 16). As one tourist surmised, the purpose of Arirang is ‘to teach the North Korean people the power of the collective to demonstrate how the discipline and surrender to the collective … can produce extraordinary results’ (Podell, 2016, p. 245). This paper argues that politics, history, place and society are constantly performed and staged, at different scales, for both domestic and tourist consumption (Edensor, 2001; MacCannell, 1976), and tourists are firmly directed to multiple stages, effectively to the exclusion of all else. Tourism is effectively a smaller-scale version of Arirang, the theatre state writ small, emerging from recent interest in projecting a national identity outwards.
Consequently, since tourists anticipate some elements of a theatre-state – if nothing more than ‘socialist propaganda’ - all performances are scrutinised on the assumption that the stage is obvious, the performance lacks authenticity, in truth, accuracy and ‘everyday reality’, and there is an alternative perception. This paper therefore attempts to examine how tourists seek to consider and challenge how the nation state is performatively constituted, where the performance of political theatre is paramount, in a quest for an ‘everyday authenticity’ absent from standard media depictions of the country. Here more than elsewhere tourists are a ‘a kind of contemporary pilgrim, seeking authenticity in other “times” and other “places” … the “real” lives’ of others' (Urry 1990: 8), envisaging productive encounters and interactions (Gibson, 2010; Tsing, 2005; Wilson, 2017) and anxious to distinguish ‘reality’ from staged authenticity (MacCannell, 1992) and from the domineering nationalism of monuments and parades. Tourism is not primarily centred on pleasurable recreational experiences, or experiencing the natural landscape, but is underpinned by a moral purpose (cf. Gibson, 2010), that represents a rejection of hegemonic, but divergent, conflicting and contrasting, political narratives emanating from outside and inside the country. Rather than being interested in darkness, touring embodies a commitment and opportunity to shed light on a poorly known and maligned country. Tourists however wish to go beyond geo-imaginaries, whether external media perceptions or locally staged and contrived depictions of North Korean life, in search of a banal everyday national and human identity: a country and people apart from political rhetoric, in a ‘back stage’ daily life that is presumed to exist (Goffman, 1959). Tourists seek out the ‘normal’, alongside the unusual, in their attempts to find order and structure, distinct from political rhetoric, but also distinct from tourism elsewhere. As I explore below, ironically, this is largely thwarted by the confines of political theatre itself, and a rigid regulatory structure and itinerary that prevent such goals from being achieved.
3. Tourism in North Korea
Despite the prominence of North Korea in international geopolitical debates and media discourse, tourism has eluded sustained attention. Previous studies include overviews of an earlier era (Hall, 1990), accounts of a temporary phase of South Korean tourism to Mt Keumgang (Kim, 2010; Shin, 2004), a study of domestic tourism based on the accounts of North Korean defectors in South Korea (Kim, Timothy, & Han, 2007), and two on contemporary Chinese tourism (Li, Wen, & Ying, 2018; Li & Ryan, 2015). Two recent studies have offered perspectives on small groups of mainly western tourists (Wang et al., 2017; Wassler & Schuckert, 2017). This paper seeks to extend such work, by focusing on situating tours, and tourist experience, within conceptual understandings of political theatre.
No reliable data exist on tourist numbers and texts on the DPRK economy make no mention of tourism (e.g. Eberstadt, 2007, 2011; Smith, 2015). However, Kim Jong Un has sought renewed tourism, directing the state tourist agency in 2013 to increase the number of tourists fivefold in three years (Lankov, 2015). Tourism provides a legitimate though trivial source of foreign exchange, valuable in the face of sanctions, and constitutes a limited exercise in soft power, as the DPRK seeks some degree of recognition and respect from others, symbolised by one tourist guide stating that North Koreans are ‘not crazy, not dangerous, just different’ (quoted in Wall, 2014). Presentation of the nation competes with and challenges external images, offering positive political values centred on a version of self-reliance (juche), in the face of external oppression, directed towards international recognition of a self-determined identity.
Guidebooks and websites are limited in terms of background information on what might be expected in North Korea, but, over time, greater congruence exists between what they describe and market and what tourists see and do. The largest agency, Koryo Tours, established in Beijing in 1993, begins its online brochure with ‘the last frontier’ and ‘Your journey to the world's most mysterious country begins here’, emphasises cultural exchange and argues that ‘we thrive on exchanging ideas to give the North Korean people the opportunities that interaction brings’ (http://www.koryogroup.com). Young Pioneer Tours states ‘We are an adventure tour operator that provides “budget tours to destinations your mother would rather you stayed away from”’ (http://www.youngpioneertours.com). Other smaller agencies develop similar themes, emphasising the unusual nature of North Korea and the distinctiveness of the experience. Travelmasters claim that ‘Tourists are drawn to this country out of pure curiosity. It is predictably austere. But simply put, North Korea's sometimes dubious charms are absolutely fascinating’ (http://travelmasters.com.au/north-korea/). Peregrine claim: ‘Our adventure in the north offers a real insight into the strangest country on earth. With barely 1500 visitors a year, ‘off the beaten tourist path’ doesn't quite explain things here … The delights of North Korea aren't for everyone. But if you are to come with us, prepare to be amazed!’ (http://www.peregrineadventures.com/central-asia/north-korea). The ‘true’ and the ‘real’ are pervasive themes. Only Young Pioneers even hint at risk or excitement. All the agencies also mention attractive landscapes, including mountains and beaches, food, and opportunities to meet local people: loosely, other than nightlife, the normative themes of tourism.
Unlike most guidebooks, those covering the DPRK issue as many warnings as invocations to travel. Lonely Planet writes: ‘Most people don't even know that it’s possible to travel here, and indeed the compromises required to do so are significant. You'll be accompanied by two government minders at all times and only hear a one-sided account of history. Those who can't accept this might be better off staying away’ (Richmond, Hornyak, & Low, 2013, p. 302). The Rough Guide points out that: ‘the country's inaccessibility brings an epic quality to its few officially sanctioned sights … North Korea's dubious charms make it the Holy Grail for hard-bitten travellers' (Paxton, 2011, pp. 14, 335). Only rarely do politically unaware ‘standard’ tourists blunder in, unprepared for its ‘dubious charms’. Most have been tutored by the texts, and media silences, to be curious and sceptical.
All tourism in North Korea, while organised through overseas travel agencies, is accompanied by local tour guides, who provide contexts, structure itineraries, control photography and ensure that groups stick together. In the 1990s, a very limited tourism, centred on museums, Kim Il Sung's mausoleum and ritual presentations of flowers at statues, constituted politicised ‘friendship visits’ that ‘were highly stilted, choreographed affairs’ enabling North Korea to ‘derive symbolic sovereignty through the enactment of these ritualised visits’ in national media depictions (Medlicott, 2005, p. 73). Tourists have always had to travel as a ‘permanent, coherent group’ consequently being physically conspicuous, so aiding tourist ‘policing’ (Hall, 1990, p. 45). Tour guides have been described as ‘government minders’ (Richmond et al., 2013, p. 302) or ‘guard-guides’ (Florian, 2014). Despite the geographical spread of tourism, at every scale it remains extremely carefully controlled, in terms of itineraries, sights, sites and stopping points. Travel agencies and guidebooks thus accord with the aspirations of tourists to visit a distinctive, politically isolated, country, to see its ‘known’ features, such as monuments, massed parades and performances, and to penetrate beyond the political façade and gain some experience of everyday lives. Being a tourist in North Korea is a complex political, moral and ethical act.
4. In search of North Korea: towards a distinctive rationale
This paper concentrates entirely on what are loosely characterised as ‘western’ tourists, of whom there are about 3000 a year, including visitors from such Asian countries as Japan and Singapore. The paper is based on discussions with all the members of two tour groups; the first constituted eight people (including the author) visiting the north of North Korea in mid-2014 and the second a group of eleven, all from Australia, on a more ‘standard’ tour of Pyongyang and the south in 2016. The two groups included individuals from the United Kingdom, Australia, Bulgaria, Russia, Japan, Germany and the United States. Most tourists to North Korea have been from northern Europe (especially UK), North America or Australia. Tours typically last about a week as did these two1.
The methodology was centred on qualitative research including interviews and participant observation, involving reflexive ethnographyand elements of auto-ethnography (Butz & Besio, 2009), alongside casual non-directed conversations as the first tour unfolded. The objective was to approach tourism through the concept of an ongoing theatrical performance, following the series of actual events, to assess the experiences and emotions, beyond the motivations and expectations, of the tourists. The experience of the northern tour was also linked into and compared with a detailed blog recounting the previous northern tour (Florian, 2014). Members of the second tour group were interviewed before and after their tour. In both cases perceptions were sharpened by regular evening discussions in the absence of entertainment options. All quotations in the paper are from members of the groups, unless otherwise stated.
According to the main travel agencies, most tourists (over 65%) to North Korea are male, and a significant proportion (about 50%) are repeat visitors. All the northern tourist group were male, university graduates, aged from the late twenties to the sixties, fluent English speakers and seasoned travellers. Four of the eight were return visitors. With just one exception, eleven out of twelve of the previous northern tour group were also repeat visitors (Florian, 2014). Three spoke some Korean; some spoke Chinese, useful in this border region, enabling more contact with people and guides than usually possible. The southern tour group were evenly divided by gender, almost all graduates, and professionals or retired. All were on their first visit. None spoke Asian languages.
Collectively the tourists were experienced travellers with a high educational status. The previous northern group were likewise ‘well-travelled and highly educated’ (Florian, 2014). The widespread uncertainty about visiting North Korea, and the absence of information on the country from standard tourism sources, such as travel agents, suggests this is generally so (Wheeler, 2007). None had expected resorts and recreation; while it was a holiday, there was a serious undertone, with participants inquisitive and open-minded. One of the group had been to Transnistria, Eritrea, Somaliland and Afghanistan in recent years and was fascinated by unusual and distinctive political regimes. The southern group included three who had been to more than 130 countries; only two had been to fewer than 20. None had any concern over security; the concerns of others – ‘are you crazy’, ‘is it safe’ and, more generally, the frequent ‘can you actually go there’ – had long been overcome, although others have expressed concerns (Wassler & Schuckert, 2017). Despite many western countries issuing travel advisories discouraging visits to the DPRK, personal safety is maintained by the permanent presence of the guides, and distance from the broader population.
Both groups had done ‘homework’ beforehand. Almost all had read books and/or watched documentaries, and were well-informed. Underpinning the rationale for visiting North Korea, and especially its north, was ‘to learn more about the only different place in the world’ while ‘we only read and hear negative stuff in the media; we wanted to see if there was another side’, ‘to see if there was a normality about North Korea: I couldn't believe it can be like in the newspapers'. The southern group had much the same basic objectives: ‘to see how a reclusive society such as this operates’, ‘I have never just accepted media accounts and news about DPRK. The little we get is negative. I wanted to experience and see as much as I could myself’ and I was ‘curious to see a communist regime’. A constant refrain was that ‘I wanted to see the country for myself’ simply ‘because it's different’, while, almost as frequently, in the words of one of the southern group: ‘I was eager to get past the charade’. Several had contemplated this for some time: ‘I had always wanted to see this place’. Such rationales parallel those briefly reported by Wang et al. (2017). Other tourists had similar goals: ‘We hear so many things about North Korea in the media, but most of it is designed to either make fun of the country or to frighten us. I felt that it couldn't be that black and white so I decided to travel there myself to form my own opinion’ (Hjelle, 2017).
While none expected a ‘workers’ paradise’, as is reportedly true of some tourists, there was an inchoate feeling that limited insights into an alternative North Korea would be possible, and a was a general sentiment (a ‘Cuban syndrome’) that it should be seen now ‘before it changes’. One travel agency has advertised ‘See it while it lasts’ (Demick, 2010, p. 284). Thus ‘Now is probably the last chance to get a glimpse at the old regime, the strict, stiff dictatorial North Korea’ (Florian, 2014). A central objective was to discover a distinctive place that seemed to exist outside of history, allied to the fascination that socialism holds for residents of capitalist (and post-socialist) regimes (in some cases, but not in these groups, imbued with nostalgia), to know more of the ‘unknowable’ and dissect the ‘external vision’ of North Korea as a persistently negative hegemonic discourse (Shim, 2014, p. 43). That was particularly evident for return visitors, for whom the intention was to see somewhat further ‘beyond the carefully controlled experience’ and ‘to penetrate further into the enigma … it was so bizarre that I wanted to know more’. One claimed that on a previous visit a drunken guide had told him that the ‘truth about Kim Il Sung’ had yet to be revealed, and he was interested to know if such dissidentperspectives might be more common. Another thought ‘it might be a little more open now’. A third returned out of some degree of empathywith the local people: ‘it was all so hard to work out I wanted to have another try’. Other visitors had similar perspectives: ‘My goal was to capture the glimmers of authenticity that would inevitably peek through’ (Stewart, 2017). Florian too ‘wanted to see more. I wanted to see a different side. I wanted a rougher version, to see myself whether Pyongyang was just a sample of an aspiring country struggling for success or if it was the exception, a Potemkin village to fool visitors’ (2014; see Demick, 2010, p. 288). Tourists making repeat visits felt that their knowledge ‘might allay all the worries our constant companions [the ‘guard-guides’] might have had, to get a little bit more freedom and insight than previous visitors' (Florian, 2014). The search for insights, for one tourist, became a search for a Korean ‘Winston Smith’ (the hero of Orwell's 1984) and for a ‘more genuine’ North Korea beneath the widely perceived ideological facade.
All the tourists sought to escape as much as possible from the choreographed and controlled tourist ‘bubble’ and guided tour in search of relativity and shades of grey. Defectors have indicated that, in effect, deliberate preparation of tourist bubbles occurs, at least in Pyongyang: ‘Whenever [tourists] came [the regime] gave us electricity, made us paint our apartments, clean everything and wear nice clothes. They made anyone who was handicapped or in a wheelchair get off the streets. Tourists aren't seeing the real North Korea, they are seeing a farce’ (quoted in Thompson, 2014). Return tourists suspected such choreographed farce, and were anxious to circumvent it.
Sooner or later, as journalist Christopher Hitchens (2001) pondered: ‘all talk among foreigners in Pyongyang turns to one imponderable subject. Do the locals really believe what they are told, and do they truly revere [the dynastic leaders] … I often wondered how my guides kept straight faces’. Barbara Demick similarly wondered of her guides ‘if they believed what they said. What were they really thinking? Did they love their leader as much as they claimed?’ (2010: 7–8). Orville Schell recorded how ‘most of us left with a sensation of having been somehow cheated – a place that was so managed that its true reality remained almost completely unrevealed’ (2003: 29). Even the author of the only exclusive guidebook on North Korea questioned: ‘was I being brilliantly hoodwinked? I realised I didn't really know anything at all worth knowing’ (Willoughby, 2014: ix). Wendy Simmons (2015), observing that the ‘fundamental conundrum’ was that ‘it's equally likely that it’s true or not true’, took to listing ‘shit it might be real’ moments. As the Lonely Planet guide observes: ‘the fascination of travelling in North Korea is trying to divine the real from the fake and attempting to see past the ideology’ (Richmond et al., 2013, p. 310). Almost every visitor to North Korea has contemplated similar conundrums.
Tourists consequently sought to go beyond official touristic experiences and critically engage with the local context. Incomprehension and a search for credibility were unusual and distinctive motivations, oriented to the search for lies and indiscreet phrases, suggesting alternative perspectives and ideologies, and anomalies and discrepancies within the landscape. Unanticipated circumstances, such as roadworks resulting in a detour, created near panic for guides (Florian, 2014) and further implied a hidden world: part of a choreography of both ‘showing and hiding’ (Kim, 2010, p. 263). Tourists anticipated some ability to discover the typical and ordinary, yet hidden, with travel accompanied by constant questioning, self-questioning and discussion. A highly structured tour implied a common-sense perspective that something was hidden, hence there was an insistence, especially amongst repeat tourists, that there was a ‘backstage’, and alternative discourses and meanings. Status, justification and vindication might be acquired by being able to see that backstage.
Returnees particularly felt that the ‘real North Korea’ was geographically more likely to be distant from Pyongyang, where ‘authenticity’ woud be rural and remote. That accorded with guidebook accounts. Lonely Planet suggests that ‘the opportunity to visit truly remote and little visited cities such as Nampo, Wonsan or Hamhung [all in the centre of the country] [offers] a great chance to see real life in North Korea’ (Richmond et al., 2013, p. 303) while ‘Jump at the chance to visit Chongjin (tours rarely go there) ... a great way to see how North Koreans really live …. most locals have never even seen foreigners and this is about as “real” an experience of the country as you'll ever get’ (op cit: 321). Some found variants of authenticity: ‘Away from the Disneyland-like machine that is the capital, things get a little messier – the petulant schoolchildren and tired farmers and shy, reclusive locals’ (Stewart, 2017). One journalist characterised Chongjin as ‘being on the outer limits of “civilisation”’ (Sweeney, 2013, p. 46). Indeed, ‘The further one goes from the capital, the less there is that one's allowed to see’ (Willoughby, 2014: ix), suggested the presence of ‘reality’. Underlying almost every context, account and aspiration was the notion of seeking the ‘reality’ of a very different state and some possibility of finding it.
5. Focusing the gaze
This and the following section primarily elaborate on the structure and form of the northern tour, as indicative of the choreography and control of tourism, since that involved the author, was relatively new, included ‘returnees’ and (literally and eerily) covered the same ground as Florian's tour a year earlier. There was however no obvious difference in format, procedures and strictures on the southern tour. The northern tour went from the border town of Namyang to Hoeryong, only once visited by tourists previously, and south to Chongjin and Mount Chilbo, before turning northwards to Rason and the Chinese border (Fig. 1). Hoeryong was previously the site of a notorious political prison; its closure in 2012 was a factor in opening the region for tourism. North Hamgyong is the main source region of defectors.
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Fig. 1
5.1. Figure one. North Korea
In its final pre-departure document, the travel agency advised that, because tourism in the north is rare, ‘as a result photography is extremely limited … They are very nervous of photographs being taken of anything other than tourist sites so please do respect this and don't push the boundaries'. ‘Tourist sites’ centred on monuments, the symbols of a frozen political culture. Photographs were encouraged there as long as they were not cropped, leaving out parts of the leaders, or blocking out parts by standing in front. At such sites we were requested to be properly dressed, deferential and reverential. Photographs that included anything that suggested poverty, such as village housing, local people and handcarts, shops (which had a limited range of goods), trains and unfinished building projects, were not permissible. Photographing through the bus window was particularly discouraged. We were regularly reminded: ‘no photo’, and reprimanded when we ‘forgot’ or ‘thought this one was OK’. Citizens occasionally intervened to discourage us.
Guides were quick to deter any efforts, intended or unintended, to photograph ‘inappropriate’ subjects, emphasising that local people were shy and guarded their privacy. At different times we were reminded literally ‘when in Rome do as the Romans’ and ‘you are guests of our country; you must follow the rules’. Restrictions were further established by ‘psychological controls’ that indicated ‘that one might be offending the very gracious, polite, sensitive, and helpful hosts, or that one would be bringing opprobrium on the rest of the group and thereby perhaps be curtailing group activities – which usually impose the greatest constraints (through self-censorship) on individual yearnings for the freedom to explore’ (Hall, 1990, p. 46).
Beyond our photographs were repeated glimpses of peasant livelihoods. Bicycles, handcarts and bullock carts dominated wheeled transport. Walking was a significant means of transport, evidently over considerable distances. Rare trucks and buses passed on dusty unsealed roads. Steam–powered trucks were ‘belching smoke … as if they had been retrofitted to burn wood and corncobs instead of gasoline’ (Demick, 2010, p. 290). Ancient electric trains were frequently immobile. People worked by hand in the fields. A few antiquated tractors existed. Spades and buckets were basic tools of road repair. Stone houses with tiled roofs were surrounded by intensely cultivated home gardens of corn, beans and cabbages. Goats were the main livestock. Clothes were washed in rivers, even in Chongjin suburbs. Hotels often had no running water or hot water. There was therefore a ‘real’ and relatively poor world, not to be captured by camera but easily observed: a partial objective achieved.
Former clichés of communism were apparent: songs booming out from factories, revolutionary posters, a large proportion of the population in uniform, workers jogging and working in unison, and collectively stopping to sing or perform callisthenics, drab identical blocks of apartment buildings. Factory workers broke off at appropriate moments to study the works of Kim Il Sung, or have collective exercise breaks. Each town was dominated by a vast square with statues or murals of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. Dustpans and brushes were used to sweep streets. Roads were literally being made by hand, working well into the evening, symbolised in the hundreds of people working at key sites where monuments were being established (Fig. 2). Regimentation was evident in group work and recreation, with work accompanied by parades and musical performances.
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Fig. 2
5.2. Figure Two. Monument Site Preparation, Rajin
On the tour bus we were taught to sing the national song, Arirang, and requested to sing our national anthems, while the guides performed karaoke, offering a distraction from scenery that reflected rural poverty. For those who had previously been to the south of the DPRK, the relative poverty was evident but there were indications of change. Chongjin had an unexpected, briefly glimpsed market. Market hours are deliberately restricted and, with one exception, tourist access to markets was prohibited (Dunlop, 2017; Willoughby, 2014). Rason, the exception, had a dynamic and crowded market, a highlight for most of the northern group, where we curiously arrived just before closing time. Considerable quantities of fish, meat, fruit, cigarettes, clothes and electrical appliances could be bought: a nascent capitalism and entrepreneurialism. Photographs were forbidden. A handful of counterfeit Puma and Adidas shirts hinted at other worlds: ‘one guy was wearing an Adidas polo shirt’. Despite the control of vision, site and itinerary, that followed exactly the same route and chronology as the year before, it was possible to observe beyond the guides, and beyond the front stage, but impossible to record key facets of the landscape.
6. Empty meeting grounds?
Both tours visited carefully chosen sites, many substantial monuments to Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, revolutionary sites (usually where Kim Il Sung directed guerrilla operations against the Japanese) and museums, schools (including English language courses and musical performances), factories, mountains and a lone beach, seal colony and spa. It was a journey through a version of everyday life, yet always simultaneously tangential to it. Meals were in hotel rooms or restaurants, invariably empty of other patrons, such that Simmons (2015) designated them as ‘fakarants’. One night was spent in what was designated a village homestay but the village and individual houses were almost entirely empty of people (and much larger than those elsewhere). Lack of contact was palpable.
Other than the natural landscape nothing pre-dated the founding of the DPRK whose heritage was anchored in stylised monuments, exuding sentiments of nationalism, progress, and nostalgia to portray a specific militarised image of national identity. Numerous revolutionary museums and monuments mark sites of violence, in the north especially associated with the Korean War and the subsequent liberation from Japanese occupation, an era poorly known by most tourists, being rarely discussed in their home countries. History was teleological, recent, nationalistic and focused on the efforts of great men. Just as was true a quarter of a century earlier: ‘historic sites and museums are often visited when they appear to be otherwise closed or poorly used by the local population’ (Hall, 1990, p. 45). Revolutionary museums were always empty, with local people kept carefully away, often directed to the other side of the road when we visited sites, even as we paid homage, as directed, to the Great Leader Kim-Il-Sung. We needed to bow respectfully in unison, present bouquets of flowers if we wished and exhorted, for example, ‘to follow the wisdom of the anti-Japanese heroine Kim Jong Suk’ (the wife of Kim Il Sung). Revolutionary politics was part of contemporary history. As the pre-departure tour notes stated, in themselves a measure of discipline, distinctiveness and control, with particular reference to bowing: ‘If you are not willing to behave as expected by the local customs then we recommend that you do not visit the DPRK’. Ritual and acquiescence were imposed on us as we became part of the performance.
Not only were the monuments huge, but their dimensions were recited at each site by a local tour guide, always a woman in hanbok national dress. Thus the monument to Kim Il Sung at Wangjaesan, celebrating his actions in fighting back the Japanese occupiers in the 1950s, the ritual accounting of which routinely required an apologetic nod to the lone Japanese tourist, was 66 m high, and could supposedly be seen across the Chinese border, some 25 km away. Routine stone revolutionary slogans on hillsides were 11 m high and weighed 1000 kg each. Kim Jong Suk's statue weighed 250 tonnes. Quantification rarely extended beyond monuments.
At each site tourists receive an account of its historical significance, usually involving its role in warfare against Japan and the United States, or its significance for one or more of the dynastic leaders, directed to attitudes and moral judgements that reinforce national history, culture and progress, establishing a consistent discourse further reinforced, at intervals, by the tour guides. No tourist site was without some relationship to Kim Il Sung, whether because he had visited, lived or inspired devotion there, or, with a few hortatory words, had redirected the course of industrial, tourist or rural development. Typically ‘the nearby ski run was entirely due to the wisdom of Comrade Kim Il Sung’ and ‘this was where Comrade Kim Il Sung set up the first cooperative fishing company’. Such ‘on-the-spot-guidance’ (OTSG) events are widely represented in photographs and paintings of leaders surrounded by numerous senior acolytes with notebooks. The leaders' primacy was ubiquitous. A school classroom was entirely filled with a model of the village where Kim Il Sung grew up. One guide recalled that he had achieved membership of the Workers Party after passing a burning house and being able to rush in and save the pictures of the two leaders (standard décor in houses and apartments), a teacher revealed that her favourite hobby was ‘reading revolutionary stories’, and a school boy stated that his dream in life was to travel to Pyongyang and meet Marshal Kim Jong Un. We were carefully instructed never to fold any newspaper across a picture of a leader or, worse still, throw such a newspaper away. Such hagiography, comforting legends, pious verities and obsequiousness proved challenging.
The DPRK thus chooses and controls what aspects of culture, history and geography to portray to tourists, far beyond museums and galleries, and in what form. In doing so it defines, curates and strengthens national identity. Monuments staged cultural performances of sanctioned history, in which we were participants, and local people performers. Tourists routinely took photographs of participants in the performance, as encouraged, to the extent that it appeared duty, so completing a ‘circle of representation’ (Jenkins, 2003), reproducing the expected images that represented the nation, replicating the imaginative geography portrayed in brochures and national propaganda. Korean guides and tourists thus became typecast, occupying specified roles and enacting prescribed movements in defined spaces (Chronis, 2012; Edensor, 1998, 2001), collaborating in the representation, production, performance and validation of recent events, simultaneously resulting in a paralysis of history without change or spontaneity.
The single TV channel emphasised revolutionary themes; ‘highlights’ of the Korean War were broadcast nightly, sixty years later, usually followed by films and soap operas centred on the same era. The backdrops for karaoke songs (a reminder, alongside kitsch sculptures and landscape paintings, that the DPRK was very much Korean and Asian) interspersed bucolic scenes and attractive women with monuments, artillery barrages and tank movements. The present was inseparable from the past, another performative paralysis of history. Just as Pyongyang was ‘a living museum of the Cold War era’ (Wall, 2014) so museums suggested that little had happened since the revolutionary birth of the DPRK. So ‘I got tired of the emphasis on the war that ended in 1953; it is as if they haven't moved on since then’. Indeed ‘The worst thing was the constant repetition of North Korea's claims to be victims or victors, contrary to our received history’ while ‘the war atrocities exhibits were too graphic and confronting’. Ironically these constitute the predominant images within dark tourism.
School corridors were festooned with revolutionary posters and playground toys decorated with rockets, tanks and other military paraphernalia. English textbooks included such sentences as ‘Our enemies are the American bastards’ and ‘We are going to kill the Japanese soldiers’. The Korean War lived on. Children performed with smiles rigidly in place and were fearful after and outside the performances, uncertain how to respond to the thanks of rare foreigners. Stepping outside the fixed performance was difficult. Language students had rehearsed lines and questions but were uncertain of responses to our unrehearsed questions. Despite the extreme rarity of western tourists, we were otherwise effectively ‘unseen’ and unacknowledged; there were no waves from pedestrians. At Hoeryong we were such a rarity that wary local people could not resist a glance, but eye contact was otherwise assiduously absent. They could not be part of the performance. Unrehearsed lives were inaccessible. Since even English language teachers had hesitant English, meaningful contact and casual spontaneous interactions were largely impossible. Occasionally we glimpsed groups of local tourists, waiting for us to leave, as they too engaged in obligatory pilgrimagesand ‘ideological tourism’ (Lankov, 2014). A brief encounter at a beach, where two of our group spoke to local tourists and were offered food, was quickly terminated on the grounds that time was pressing. Otherwise potential meeting grounds were almost literally empty: ‘The main thing that was different to what I expected was the amount of surveillance to the point of paranoia’.
For returnees, there was a feeling that they had learned rather more, partly because their gaze was better focused the second time around, and they had found some cracks. Could I take a photograph through the bus window? The guide carefully examines the landscape, and permission is granted, but what might have been there that required caution? Such were fragmentary breaches in the bubble. Getting to a possible backstage was difficult, but glimpses offered encouragement: ‘It was really interesting to see the rural areas where people seemed much poorer’, ‘It was so interesting to see Rason market’. Such banal observations represented achievements. As an earlier tourist had observed: ‘I was struck by the sense of having stumbled upon that fabled thing which seems so hopelessly impossible to find: the real North Korea’ (http://www.thebohemianblog.com/2012/09/dark-tourism-pyongyang-north-korea.html). For Florian too ‘this trip was a lot more real – a much better look at the current state of the DPRK, yet still just a scratch on the surface’, yet he concluded ‘The more you know about North Korea, the less it makes sense’ (2014). There was always a backstage, another inscrutable layer. But guides are human: ‘They made mistakes. Said things they shouldn't have said. Let me see things they probably shouldn't have. Contradicted themselves' (Simmons, 2015, p. 300). The challenge and possibility of discovering glitches and breaching infallibility was the core of tourism that combined recreation, politics and history, where museums and monuments evoked revolutionary recent history and factories and schools emphasised the construction of modernity on a revolutionary edifice. We encountered stage sets rather than people.
7. Extinguishing the gaze?
Cameras were carefully inspected on departure to ensure that no illicit photographs had been taken. Inspection was more rigorously enforced during the brief periods when South Korean tourists were allowed to visit the Mt Keumgang area; only digital cameras were allowed, politically incorrect photographs, such as the military or ox-carts on citystreets, were deleted and culprits fined (Cadwalladr, 2010, p. 8; Lankov, 2015). Elsewhere tourists have been asked to erase pictures of poverty, distress and military contexts (Shim, 2014; Stewart, 2017). Some of our pictures from the northern tour were similarly lost and erased as what suggested poverty and peasantry were partly eliminated. One of the group could restore the ‘lost’ pictures revealing that what had been deleted were photographs and short films taken from the bus window of fairly routine rural and urban scenes, showing some ‘poor’ people, unfinished road work, an informal market and photographs of people carrying goods or engaged in collective work. Figure Two, with its collective hand labour, was such a deleted photograph: part of a structured politicisation, erasure, cleansing and control of the visual.
A tentatively glimpsed DPRK beyond the preferred representation could thus abruptly disappear at the border, leaving a clichéd nation of monuments, scenery and selected local people: preferred national representations. In practice border officials were too busy and harassed to make detailed examinations (and were often more interested in photographs from elsewhere) hence many ‘doubtful’ photographs slipped through. There was an assumption that since we had been guided at all times, and guides too would have erased photographs, detailed inspection was less necessary. Nowhere else is the tourist gaze (Urry, 1990) more carefully constructed, demarcated, organised, truncated and value-laden.
8. Closing the curtains on the theatre-state
At an inter-personal scale theatrical performance invents and maintains a clearly defined national historiography, constructed and preserved without contamination, grandiosely displayed at the Arirang Festival, but just as evident in the diurnal progress and rituals of small-scale tourism. Ritual delivers key messages, a powerful political rhetoric with clear enemies (Japan and the US) not abstract political philosophies(Cho, 2017). Ideology weaves together political, cultural and moral authority. Tourism plays a small part in contributing to and upholding a dynastic political system, as political messages and histories are ritually and repeatedly recounted, even as tourists seek to challenge the veracity of ‘the suffocating narrative of North Korean state propaganda’ (Dunlop, 2017). Consequently ‘the ordering force of display’ (Geertz, 1980, pp. 111–112) was ultimately not enough to satisfy inquiring tourists. Most tourists, albeit two small samples and sporadic bloggers, while not rejecting the probability of North Korea being imbued with negative characteristics, sought a ‘normality’ absent from western and Korean media depictions, that might challenge the distinctive, received political discourses, initially of the ‘west’ and subsequently of North Korea. Tourists recognised that discourses were imbued with propaganda, hence their efforts to go beyond the performance and subvert both dominant discourses, seeking insights of their own rather than, as in versions of political tourism, adhering to a particular perspective (e.g. Belhassen et al., 2014). Ideology was frustratingly unassailable, even incomprehensible, and shielded from ambiguity. Guides sometimes went blank or changed the subject. On one occasion I enquired as to a distant seemingly fortified building: I was directed to an array of fields on the other side of the bus. As Simmons put it:
Everything you do is staged and managed. Everyone with whom you are allowed to speak knows what he or she can and cannot say. When there are real people doing ordinary things, you're not allowed to engage. When there are sights deemed too unsightly, the guides pretend they aren't there. When questions are asked they don't want to answer, or criticism levied they don't want to hear, they are masterful at staying on point and controlling the message … There's no sharing, empathizing, or finding common ground: there's only the propaganda tour (2015: 253–4)
Central to that were choreographies – a staged mobility - ‘characterised by purposive directed moments, which follow a limited number of strongly demarcated paths’ (Edensor, 1998, p. 50), oriented to the engineering of affect (Thrift, 2009). Performances maintained received stereotypes, and evasiveness guaranteed both the search for alternatives and doubt over the revolutionary story: a direct challenge to the theatre-state. It was difficult to discern what was beyond the performance, yet glimpses of other ‘realities’ reduced the ability of tourism to be a strategic tool of soft power and cultural diplomacy.
Only during incidental glitches, and gaps in the ordered agenda, particularly in unscripted travel between sights, could tourists encounter a ‘real’ North Korea. Such cracks became the objective of tourism, as tourists became detectives, rather than the grand monuments, choreographed mass spectacles and ideologies that were offered, in order to challenge the organised construction and fabrication of politicised ‘place-myths’ (Lash & Urry, 1994), whether international or national. That offered a Gramscian optimism of the will focused on ‘the possibility that tiny cracks might yet break open the dam’ (Tsing, 2005, p. 267), or that there would necessarily be holes in the ‘fabric of space in which new forms of expression can come into being’ (Thrift, 2003, p. 2022). However seemingly ‘everyday encounters’ while not necessarily ‘consciously planned deceptions’ (cf. Goffman, 1959), proved elusive or illusory. What was previously known of North Korea was usually quite limited, and related to monuments and displays, but not to houses, markets, fields, schools, hospitals and people, the basic and banal components of a national landscape. Such prosaic and mundane things were more important to tourists than the formal objects and scenes they were expected to consume. Empathy grew from the incidental depiction of a ‘normal’ country rather than the deliberate depiction of grandeur through displays and monuments or the legitimisation of nationhood and polity in museums. ‘I regularly caught glimpses of what appeared to be mundane life and everyday happiness: uniformed military couples holding hands, bored parents waiting at benches in the shade … In a country often portrayed as incomprehensibly foreign the familiar seemed bizarre’ (Wall, 2014). Trivial yet normal details became fascinating.
Emotional and critical perspectives involved simultaneous empathy with and detachment from ‘ordinary’ Koreans, despite a sense of difference, emphasised socially and physically by the ‘empty’ meeting grounds of staged and controlled performances. For many, the experiences were a revelation, even surreal, in moving between different places and different ontological experiences, where interactions could be unsettling and unexpected. As one blogger recorded
I'd find myself in these perplexing situations trying to figure out if a lie-spouting North Korean was in on it or not. Was she thinking, “I know this is false, you know this is false, but I live here so I gotta play the game”? Or was she fully brainwashed and thought she was telling me the truth? It was impossible to tell. During interactions, I'd find myself thinking, “Are you an actor in The Truman Show and you think I'm Truman? Or are you Truman and I'm one of the actors?” Are those kids on the street just pretending to be playing for my benefit? Is any of this real?
Put otherwise: ‘All the world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn't are not easy to specify’ (Goffman, 1959, p. 72). About half the tourists vowed to return, some to see the north or when national circumstances changed, but all for ‘another go’ at detective work. Pleasure was gained from achievements outside the theatre. Occasional fortuitous glimpses revealed a more complex, and more ‘normal’, nation. Rare glimpses, as of unexpected market activity, offered moments of triumph and brief escapes from tightly structured, staged experiences and directed gazes. They hinted at alternative ‘realities’ and discourses beyond rigid state control, performance and ‘guide-guard’ direction, subordinate to a particular geopolitics of memory and economy. Where tourists are firmly controlled and dissuaded from individual exploration, independent observations and discoveries proved unusually valuable. Tourism revealed much about North Korea, but what might be hidden and what that meant was always unknowable.
9. Conclusion
A tightly controlled tourist perspective on North Korea has become more accessible. Yet, after three decades, it remains true that ‘tourist groups are virtually compulsorily taken, totally segregated from the host population, to see and hear declarations of ideological infallibility articulated through “touristic” objects and sites’ (Hall, 1990, p. 48). Perhaps the first guidebook to include North Korea observed that ‘visits are primarily designed as didactic excursions’ (Far Eastern Economic Review, 1976, p. 349). Little has changed. Despite expanding spatial and social boundaries and increased numbers, tourism is thoroughly planned and never spontaneous, being confined to circumscribed and framed enclaves, where conformity to rules and adherence to centralised regulation hold sway (Edensor, 1998). Beyond a superficial and incidental geography, opening up remains fictitious.
At every scale and in every place constraints on what tourists see and hear in North Korea confused and clouded observations and emphasised geopolitics. But, as tourists observed, it had been a ‘chance to see the history of the twentieth century’, where ‘we could still see the stars at night’ and where people ‘went about their lives much like us’. Despite rare glimpses of change however, through the pervasive politics and controlled performance, the metaphors that emerged were of Alice in Wonderland, George Orwell's 1984, the Truman Show and Donald Rumsfeld's ‘unknown unknowns’ (cf. Shim, 2014; Simmons, 2015). Guidebook authors, and journalists, were as curious, yet confused and uncertain, as tourists. Beyond the symbolism of parallel worlds, the conundrum of what and where constituted ‘truth’ and ‘shit it might be real’ moments, was necessarily unsolvable. For Simmons ‘seeing is not believing’ (2015: 299). Uncertainty reigned. Perhaps nowhere else is the touristic challenge so great: an ultimately frustrated search for an authentic everyday life – a back stage apparently deliberately hidden, invisible amidst the touristic landscapes and histories that were not ‘real’ manifestations of history and geography, but reflected the dissonance between tourist expectations of a ‘real slice of history’ and the cleansing of a troubled history (Kim, 2014, p. 166). While performance offers a field of enquiry that draws attention to subjectivity, agency and the creative production of space and place (Reid, 2005; Rogers, 2015), apart from Arirang itself, performance is more subtle, more pervasive and designed to obfuscate as much as enlighten: a thoroughly disciplined and regulated social space, where ‘everyday reality is exceeded by its representation’ in a heightened form of theatricality (Davis & Postlewait, 2003, p. 11). The durability of charismatic dynastic and ideological politics in North Korea performs and defines its distinctive place in modern history.
The idea of a theatre state, developed primarily through analysis of Balinese political systems, can be usefully – if partially - transferred to a better understanding of a modern, secular, revolutionary state. Indeed North Korea offers the converse of Geertz’ interpretation of the theatre state where power is not subordinated to culture (cf. MacRae, 2005), but constantly constructs variants of it. As in theatrical performancesthe theatre-state has a static and repetitive order, an absence of improvisation, with formalised performances crystallised in time. Although visits to museums and monuments are central to tours, the transformation of history into monuments, programmatic, formulaic recitations of victories, and OTSG sites, played out in schools, museums and factories, the basic components and stages of the theatre-state, were of little interest to most tourists. They were perceived much less favourably than encounters with local people, however transient, that enabled seeing around and beyond the supremacy of symbols. The more that the gaze was controlled and directed, repetitious and sterile, as in enclosed museums and grandiose monuments, the less interesting and more frustrating it proved. Repeated performance, at the intersection of tourist choreographies and political discourse, rather than opening up new political possibilities, effectively extinguished them. By contrast, the ability to see something beyond the performance, ordinary people engaged in ordinary lives, stimulated empathy and opened up potential discursive spaces.
Direct experience, without a politics of engagement, provided both insights and frustrations, but enabled some making of meaning through interaction and reflection, effectively experiential learning, though at best a fractured process of comparing notes, observations and thoughts to re-examine assumptions and dissect and challenge constructed representations. That reflexivity contributed further to rejecting dichotomies and embracing ambivalence and complexity, with analogies in the performance of ‘slum tourism’ (Mkono, 2016). Fixed itineraries, staged events and encounters, ensured that the forlorn search for authenticity could never be realised, but that the entirety of the culture and economy that was viewed could not be artificial, enabling a partial escape from themed places, and something of everyday life. Not everything could be contrived, constructed and incorporated into the performance. Both observations and encounters transgressed constructed political boundaries.
That different perceptions of ideology underpin travel suggests that much tourism in North Korea represents a ‘dutiful tourism’ related to a loose and rather abstract ‘moral imperative’ (Graburn, 2017; Hughes, 2008; Mkono, 2016) to learn more about a censured, denigrated state and its moral order, aimed at (re-)imagining and shaping a largely unknown nation. Yet, much like tourists to the Tuol Sleng Museum in Cambodia, visitors generally left in a ‘state of confusion’ rather than with ‘a better understanding’ (Hughes, 2008, p. 325). More than in most tourist destinations, tourists sought to ‘make sense of themselves and the world in which they live’ (Edensor, 1998, p. 70) through a moral apolitical tourism that might escape and evade ideology and demonstrate that, even in a theatre-state, power and meaning cannot be enforced. Likewise Chinese and South Korean tourists also visited North Korea for similar reasons: they were curious about North Korea and specifically wanted to know more about the ‘real situation’ of North Korea. Nostalgia, relaxation, proximity, value for money and an unspoilt natural environment played lesser parts (Li et al., 2018; Li & Ryan, 2015; Mun, Lee, & Jeong, 2018). Both there, and in the present study, tourists are politically aware and rationales are similar, circumstances supported by blog and website data. However sample sizes are tiny, tourists exhibit degrees of intensity and diversity (in prior knowledge, intent and expectation), all tours are limited in time and place, and further studies are needed. A better understanding of North Korea would be invaluable for peace and security, yet North Korea remains elusive: moral apolitical tourism has geopolitical limitations in a theatre-state.
Notes
1.
For reasons of confidentiality it is not possible to identify the particular travel agencies which organised these tours, and thus the source of some data. Nor is it possible to provide more details on the tour participants.
Conflicts of interest
No conflict of interest is involved.
Acknowledgment
I am grateful to Stephen Codrington, Paul Dwyer, Brad Garrett, Chris Gibson, Jamie Gillen, Rachel Hughes and Marilu Melo for their insights and enthusiasm, and, above all, to the tour participants.
Appendix A. Supplementary data
The following is the supplementary data to this article:
Research data for this article
Data not available / The data that has been used is confidentialAbout research data
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