Performing Death and Memory: Ancestral Rites of North Koreans in Exile
Markus Bell
While there is an increasing interest in the economic and political relationships of North Koreans in exile to the homeland, little has been said on the significance of North Koreans’ everyday cultural practices in the places they resettle. Based on a year of interviews and participant observation, this article examines an oftenoverlooked aspect of North Korean spiritual life: the performance of Confucian commemorative practices in North Korea and in the homes of North Koreans now living in South Korea and in Japan. Specifically, this article asks what North Koreans’ commemorative practices tell us about the seismic economic, political, and social changes that have occurred in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) since the collapse of the bi-polar cold war world order. How has the political economy of the DPRK, established with the Kim family at its heart, shaped the relationship of the living to the dead? And how do individuals who survived traumatic experiences, such as the North Korean famine, draw on ritual practices to make sense of the experience of living in exile? I suggest that acts of remembrance help divided families negotiate feelings of guilt and sorrow and enable members of the growing North Korean diaspora to foster a collective sense of self and reconnect to the country they were forced to leave.
Keywords: migration, diaspora, North Korea, ancestor worship, kinship, memory
Korean Studies, Volume 45. © 2021 by University of Hawai‘i Press. All rights reserved.
Introduction
In North Korea, my sons performed the ancestor worship after my husband died. Then they also died. Now, since my daughter and two grandchildren have arrived in Japan, I do it with them in my house. When I do ancestor worship I feel very lonely. We can tell the spirits what we’ve been doing and apologize for not looking after them properly, but we still miss them.—Yamamoto Hiroko (2014)
In the mid-1990s, out migration from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (hereafter DPRK/North Korea) increased dramatically, provoked largely by a famine that is estimated to have caused the death of some 600,000 to one million people by starvation and malnutrition related diseases (Haggard and Noland, 2007:11). Citizens of the country who left during the famine years usually headed north, crossing into China in search of food and economic support. A small number continued their journey to the Republic of Korea (hereafter South Korea/ROK), and in some cases Japan. As the North Korean diaspora has grown in number, it has also reached beyond East Asia. Escapees from the DPRK now live in countries such as the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States, Australia, and Germany, to name a few (Song and Bell, 2018).
When people migrate they do not cut themselves off from friends and family, nor do they abandon cultural practices peculiar to their homeland. On the contrary, through transnational practices, specifically, “the fluidity with which ideas, objects, capital, and people now move across borders and boundaries” (Basch et al., 2000:27), migrants build multistranded social relationships that have both instrumental and emotional purposes: transferring capital, goods and ideas, while maintaining familial and organizational relationships and shaping new identities and understandings of belonging on the other (Skrbiš, 2008; Bell, 2013, 2018:6–7). Subsequently, in the age of globalization, highly mobile people are facilitating the cross-fertilization or “creolization” of diasporic identities and cultural practices on an unprecedented scale (Hannerz, 1987; Cohen, 2007).
For some 32,000 North Koreans in South Korea (Ministry of Unification) and an estimated 300 returnees from North Korea now in Japan,1 transnational connections to North Korea have not been limited to globally connected political activists (cf. Yeo and Chubb, 2018), nor to underground networks moving economic remittances, information, and goods that are destined for North Korean black markets (Baek, 2016).2 While there is an increasing interest in the long-distance economic and political relationships within the North Korean diaspora to the homeland, little has been said on the significance of North Koreans’ everyday cultural practices in the places they resettle and how, through these practices, ordinary people attempt to resist and avoid the state and its mechanisms of surveillance (Choi, 2013:657). Cultural practices here refer to such activities as the preparation and consumption of North Korean food (Bell, 2013), the performance of North Korean song and dance (Koo, 2016; Sands, 2018), the participation of North Koreans in religious and secular civic institutions (Han, 2013; Jung, 2015; Bell, 2016), and otherwise overlooked interactions that take place in daily lives and living spaces (Choi, 2013). Based on a year of interviews and participant observation, this article examines an often-overlooked aspect of North Koreans’ spiritual life: the performance of commemorative practices in North Korea and in the homes of North Koreans now living in South Korea and in Japan.
Religious practices occupy a central role in the life of a community. Emile Durkheim (1964), in his study of Australian Aboriginal totemism, described religious life as a system of ideas for individuals to represent themselves and their intimate social relations. Religious rites in particular, according to Durkheim’s (1964:219–227) functionalist perspective, offer a time when communal life attains its greatest intensity, and the bonds within a clan are strengthened. Durkheim called the energy of communal rituals a “collective effervescence” that subsumes the individual into the group, thereby promoting social cohesion. Paul Connerton (1989:50) extended Durkheim’s symbolic interpretation, suggesting that rituals be understood as representing “particular concepts of what a society is and of how it functions” in contexts in which power is distributed unequally. In other words, the power dynamics, rules, and taboos that structure rituals are contingent on broader societal changes. The shifts in communal rituals that occur over time are best read as a symbolic text through which a group embodies and performs communally identifiable narratives. Such group narratives contribute to fostering a “collective self-definition” (Hall, 1992:292) among participants, and reinforce a connection with the past that shapes group memory in the present.
The relationship of religious practices to transnational mobility is by no means a new or under-researched phenomenon. As with other forms of exchange, the global transference, diffusion, and emergent cultural heterogeneity of religious ideas have accelerated with the intensification of modern forms of travel and communication (cf. Csordas, 2009; Vertovec, 2009:145). In the era of globalization, the relationship between mobility and religion in Asia has been made salient by ethnographic research into people displaced by both an expanding market economy and regional political turmoil (cf. Cao and Lau, 2013; Tapp, 2013). Religious practices have been framed as a means by which diasporic communities imagine a collective identity through transtemporal and translocative symbols connecting them to the homeland (Tweed, 1997:10). Such practices contribute to the resettlement and stability of people displaced across multiple locations. The experiences of Karen refugees displaced in the border regions of Thailand and Myanmar, for example, underline how religion can be mobilized in the context of displacement, as people “[d]raw upon familiar cultural schema to create a sense of place, security, and belonging in a new home” (Rangkla, 2013:10).
In this article, I do not claim that North Korean defectors’ longdistance commemorations are entirely unique from, for example, those of South Korean labor migrants in Japan. Nor do I suggest that their commemorative rituals are only controlled and mediated within North Korea—Judy Han has successfully shown that some North Koreans who escape their country are subsequently controlled and shaped by the custody of faith-based missions in China (Han, 2013). Rather, this article highlights the creative and often overlooked means that migrant families from the DPRK reconnect to ancestors and ancestral lands by imagining the joining of intimate spaces in the host society to emotionally charged sites in the homeland.
In this article, I understand religious rituals as a means for individuals to foster a sense of communal belonging and strengthen kinship ties that have been fragmented by forced migration. I theorize that the performance of ancestor worship supports the belief that the spirit makes the journey from North Korea to kin now in places like Seoul or Osaka. Participants’ belief that they are meeting with the spirits of deceased family subsequently helps them to negotiate feelings of guilt and regret associated with being unable to tend to ancestors buried in the hillsides of villages and towns they left behind. The findings of this article highlight that the transnational connections of diasporic communities, in this case North Koreans in exile, are manifest in ways beyond the material and the political. I suggest that the imagined reunions taking place between ancestors from North Korea and their living kin in South Korea and Japan suggests that the spiritual realm is just as important as earthly forms of exchange between displaced, divided families.
Performing rituals are a particularly significant way to reaffirm membership to a kin lineage and provide a sense of order to the dislocating experience of migration and resettlement. But to what kind of historic past do such traditions reconnect? Specifically, what do North Koreans’ commemorative practices tell us about the seismic economic, political, and social changes that have occurred in the DPRK since the collapse of the bipolar cold war world order? And how has the political economy of the DPRK shaped the relationship of the living to the dead? Finally, how do individuals who survived traumatic experiences, such as the North Korean famine or state persecution, draw on ritual practices to make sense of the experience of living in exile?
Commemorative practices reveal much about social structure and cosmology both within the sovereign borders of the DPRK and the emergent North Korean diaspora. Yamamoto Hiroko, whose quote opened this article, returned to Japan in 2001 after living in Ryanggang province, North Korea, for forty years. Ethnically Japanese, Hiroko had emigrated to North Korea with her Korean husband and his family in 1961 as part of a mass repatriation organized by the Japanese and North Korean governments between 1959 and 1984 (cf. Morris-Suzuki, 2007; Bell, 2018). Displayed on a shelf in the living room of Hiroko’s Osaka apartment sit five wooden boards, no more than a foot long and a few inches in width. Each of these boards, known as shinwi in Korean, is engraved with the name of a deceased family member in Chinese characters. Hiroko explained to me that the wooden boards are placed on the ritual table at the beginning of a commemoration ceremony:
We lay out everything on the table, the pictures of my husband and children, and the food and alcohol that we get from the local supermarket. Each wooden tablet has the names and death day of a family member written on it. We burn incense and greet our ancestors, telling them about our lives in Japan. We apologize for not looking after them properly and let them know how much we miss them.
(2014)
Similar to interlocutors I spoke with in Seoul and Tokyo, Hiroko has modified traditional Korean ancestor worship rites, known as chesa in Korean, to maintain emotional connections to deceased family members interred in mountains near her former home in North Korea. These rituals are a time when her daughters and grandchildren who also escaped North Korea for Japan meet in Hiroko’s apartment to share food and memories with what they imagine as the visiting spirits of their family. Commensality— meeting and sharing food with others—is a way in which members of the NorthKoreandiasporiccommunitycreatespacesforfamilyunificationsthat are not otherwise possible.
In the sections that follow, I discuss the relationship between the broader changes in Korean ancestral rites and modernity and social change in East Asia. I subsequently turn my focus to commemorative rituals in North Korea, historically positioning these practices within the political economy of the DPRK and the famine of the 1990s. I show that the realm of the dead in North Korea has been subsumed into a political economy characterized by veneration of the DPRK leadership. As a result, the famine that was so devastating to ordinary North Koreans also affected the world of the dead, a space I refer to as a “spiritscape.” In the concluding sections, I use ethnographic evidence to illustrate the significance of religious practices for North Koreans outside of the DPRK. I argue that the individuals with whom I shared conversations and commemorations in South Korea and in Japan use commemorative practices as a means to conceive of what Benedict Anderson referred to as an “imagined community” (2006:6) with the people and places they left behind, and to mitigate the corrosive effects of communally experienced trauma, exile, and division on the kinship group.
Methodology
The research for this article was carried out using qualitative, ethnographic methods, including participant observation, some 30 semi-structured interviews and two focus groups, to understand the experiences of North Koreans migrating from the DPRK. Interviews took place in Seoul, Osaka, and Tokyo and lasted from one to two hours and were conducted in Korean, though several of my interlocutors mixed Korean, English, and Japanese. The two focus groups were organized through North Korean friends and held in Seoul in 2012. Participants were not financially compensated for their contributions.
The data for this article comes from separate research projects in South Korea (2011–2012, 2013) and in Japan (2014–2015) that were part of ethnographic studies into the experiences of North Koreans resettling outside of the DPRK. As such, the main focus of my interviews was not specifically commemorative rituals in North Korea. Rather, my interest in these cultural practices grew out of attending a commemoration in the home of a North Korea in Seoul in 2011. From that point on, I included questions on death and commemoration in my interviews as a point of personal interest.3
Ideally, I would have been able to visit burial sites in person, but due to the restrictions on carrying out ethnographic work in North Korea, I had to rely on interviews and informal conversations with interlocutors, as well as my own experiences participating in commemorative ceremonies in Seoul, Kobe, Osaka, and Tokyo, to build a picture of how commemorative rituals are performed for people who cannot return to the grave mounds of their departed. Satellite analysis of grave mound distribution in North Korea complemented my participant observation and interviews.
Commemorative Practices in the Post-Cold War Period
Religious practices have long been a subject of interest for social scientists. Ancestor worship, in particular, has provided an entry point for indigenous and foreign researchers to unpack the complexities of the East Asian family and kin-group organization. A large body of scholarship has explained the function of ancestral rites within the Confucian cosmology, explicating both the ideals and everyday practices associated with death and death rituals in Taiwan, Korea, and Japan (cf. Wolf, 1976; Kendall, 1977; Janelli and Janelli, 1982; Lee, 1984; Deuchler, 1992; Danely, 2015). Korean ancestor worship organizes the agnatic kin group by delineating who belongs and who does not. Specifically, the kin group is defined by who participates in the ancestral rituals, while hierarchical status within the group is symbolized by the role a participant plays during a ceremony.
Filial piety (hyo, in Korean) allocates each person a specific place in the political sphere of the community (Deuchler, 1992:129), and the death of an elder does not sever a person’s relationship to the deceased. Janelli and Janelli (1982:58) explain, “In the Korean ancestor cult, deceased parents retain their dependency on offspring; filial obligations are perpetuated through ritual services.” Indeed, even after death, a family member is imagined to influence the lives of the living, bringing either fortune or affliction, depending on the person’s life experiences and the nature of their death.
While filial piety is still widely regarded as central to contemporary Korean identity (Park and Müller, 2014:1), practitioners in both Koreas modify ancestor worship rituals to suit their changing circumstances. Modifications are influenced by the state and by the economic, cultural, and social capital of a family. For example, as the Pak Chŏnghui government mechanized farming practices in the 1960s–1970s, rural Koreans’ reliance on family labor lessened, subsequently pushing young people to migrate to urban areas in greater numbers. Divided between urban and rural settings, many families were compelled to adapt their filial practices accordingly (Sorensen and Kim, 2004:159–160). Around the same time, the South Korean state also introduced austerity measures designed to curb lavish expenditure on practices that the Park government branded as backward and wasteful, such as ancestor worship, weddings, and funerals (Moon, 1974:72). More recently, cremation has replaced burial in South Korea as the common mode of managing the deceased. Park Chang-Won
(2010:93–112) suggests that the shift in funerary practices reflects the disappearance of areas used for outdoor celebrations (madang in Korean), as South Koreans adopted apartment living and the government legalized funerals at hospital mortuaries.
During South Korea’s democratic transition, ancestral rites also played a role in healing the wounds of ideological conflict. On Cheju Island, for example, commemorations of the violent 1948 Uprising have been represented in the Islanders’ relationship to the dead. Seong Nae Kim (1989) argues that the relationship between the dead and their descendants and the performance of this relationship through shamanistic ritual was a way of converting a history of violence into social healing. Heonik Kwon (2013) builds on Kim’s study to show how Cheju Islanders created spaces for reconciliation by reshaping commemorative rituals into an inclusive form that united previously fragmented communities. In other words, participants forged new forms of ancestral rituals as a means of healing fractured interpersonal relations on the island.
Bureaucratic Ghosts: Ancestral Rites in the DPRK
Pyongyang (P’yŏngyang), North Korea’s capital, was once known as the center of Protestant Christianity in Korea. Although there are now both Christian and Buddhist places of worship, these institutions are stateoperated and do not allow for citizens to worship freely (Jang, 2014:185). Instead, North Koreans are taught to revere the Kim family, with former leader Kim Il sung (Kim Ilsŏng) and his son, Kim Jong Il (Kim Chŏngil), regarded as demi-gods, and Kim Il sung’s revolutionary thought codified and transmitted as ideological principles structuring everyday life (Jeon, 2000; Richardson, 2017).
The reality is that even the everyday is politicized in the DPRK and state socialist ideology overlaps with and informs commemorative practices. The death of Kim Il sung in July 1994, for example, was followed by a traditional three-year mourning period, during which time his son, Kim Jong Il, publicly demonstrated his filial piety to his father. The younger Kim’s public observance of traditional Korean mourning practices stressed his dynastic relationship to the founder of the DPRK and legitimized his imminent succession to the leadership role (Jeon, 2000:127–128). Kwon and Chung argue that such theatrical and public displays have been key for facilitating the transferal of charismatic power through three generations of Kims (Kwon and Chung, 2012).
Commemorative rites also reflect the economic and social realities of everyday North Korean life. Interlocutors told me that when a person dies in North Korea, the chief mourner, who is usually the first son of the deceased’s family, is required to inform the deceased’s work unit of the death. The head of the work unit then notifies the local People’s Committee, which in turn notifies the neighbors of the deceased. The name of the deceased is subsequently added to government records and the local hospital then issues a death certificate. Arrangements are subsequently made, through official channels, for family to relocate the deceased to a final resting place. Once the death certificate is issued, the local government office provides money to pay for the funeral costs, as well as food and alcohol for the ceremony. My interviewees explained that these practices vary according to the political standing of the individual and the wealth of the family. Generally, the local government office issues one tenth of the deceased’s monthly salary, approximately 18 kilos of rice and 5 to 6 bottles of rice wine. One interviewee I spoke with in Osaka, recalled the morning she found her father unconscious:
I ran to the hospital and told one of my father’s colleagues [her father was a doctor]. He grabbed his bag and immediately raced to our home. By the time I arrived home the doctor had given my father mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but it was too late. The doctor returned to the hospital and reported the death. There was no funeral parlor near our home [on the outskirts of Sinuiju, close to the border with China], so we laid out father’s body in the main room of our apartment. We then cleaned the body and dressed him in new clothes. We filled his nose and mouth with cotton wool and pulled a folding screen across where father was laid. In front of the screen we put a small table, on top of which we placed a photo of father, incense, alcohol and drinking glasses. We then started to prepare food for the mourners who would visit for three days following. (2015)
In North Korea, death is as much of a bureaucratic exercise as it is in other countries, with forms needed completed and decisions made on how to manage the remains of the deceased. In the above case, the state was involved in the process in terms of registering the death and issuing necessities for the wake, but the manner in which the corpse was cleaned, dressed, and then displayed for mourners to pay their final respects is similar to how a passing is traditionally managed in South Korea.
On both sides of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), ancestor worship is performed in a multitude of different ways, with regional variations and personal preferences influencing when and how the rites occur. My interviews with North Koreans and images I sourced from Google Maps (see Figs. 1 and 2) highlight similarities in burial practices between the DPRK and those in South Korea.4 Figure 1 shows two burial sites located between Sangunhung-ni and Unhung-ni, villages in Hamju-gun, Hamgyong-namdo, approximately 35 kilometers from the city of Hamhung. “Site 1” is composed of about 30 eroded burial mounds. These mounds are within walking distance of the village and have a view into the valley. “Site 2” is closer to the village of Undong-ni, above the village in an area that looks to have been cleared for this purpose.
Fig. 1. The hills surrounding Sangunhung-ni and Unhung-ni are marked by burial mounds (“1” and “2”).5
Fig. 2. Using Google Maps it is possible to make out clusters of burial mounds dotting the hillsides of the DPRK.6
Figure 2 shows two more burial sites, again between Sangunhung-ni and Unhung-ni villages. As is common in both South and North Korea, the burial sites are located on hillsides, away from agricultural areas, but within walking distance of residential sites. I spoke with Kim Sangun, who arrived in South Korea from the DPRK in 2008. As Sangun explained,
There is no god in North Korea. But people still do ancestor worship. To do it they go to the countryside, to the tombs of their deceased. In North Korea, people don’t do cremation; they still make burial mounds. My friend used to go with his father. It’s the father, as the head of the family, who always leads the ceremony. The ceremony is done on the birthday and death day of the deceased, on Liberation Day [15th August], and to celebrate the end of the harvest period (ch’usŏk). When the family arrives at the tomb, they clean the gravesite. They then begin the ceremony, setting out ritual food and incense and greeting the ancestors. (2013)
Throughout South and North Korea, death and the related commemorative practices are usually a patriarchal affair, with men taking the lead in tending to the ancestors on auspicious days. In both Koreas, once participants arrange food and incense at the foot of the grave mound, the dead consume their meal while their living entertain them with family news. Once the meal concludes, the living perform a sending off of what they imagine as now satiated spirits, symbolized by the act of extinguishing the burning incense. The family then begins their own meal.
The North Korean famine (early to mid-1990s) presented an opportunity for the state to modernize death practices in the DPRK. There were too many dead and not enough space for traditional burials. Consequently, the state encouraged people to cease traditional practices and instead cremate the remains of loved ones. In other words, the famine years provided a window of time during which there was an overlap between the state (socialist) modernizing project and the needs of citizens to manage the increasing mortality rate. Discussions with interlocutors confirmed that during the 1990s, in the urban areas of the country in particular, cremation became more common as a way to tackle the sudden rise in mortality and accompanying issues of space for traditional burials. Interestingly, Kim notes that it was also around the 1990s that cremation became socially acceptable in South Korea, losing its association with Japanese imperialist practices (2005:56). North Korean families who choose to see off their dead at a crematorium likely store the deceased’s ashes in a columbarium, also administered by the state. From that point on, visitations to the remains of their loved ones required an application to the state facility.
The state made progress in changing the funerary practices of citizens during the famine years, but it seems that some North Koreans continued to inter their dead in hillsides where, from such modest heights, those freed from the mortal coil might be afforded a favorable view of their village. Interviewees told me that they met with their ancestors several times a year. Once they reached the grave mound of the dead, they placed state awards on the stone alter, alongside food, drink, and other items. If the person was a member of the Korean Workers’ Party, participants would likely position awards from the state in front of a portrait of the deceased. For ordinary citizens, however, a less grandiose ritual is likely. One respondent described his friend’s father’s rituals as follows:
He was an alcoholic and drank himself to death. So every time they held ancestral rites my friend would take a box of soju to the mountain. Once at the graveside, he would pour all the bottles onto the mound, soaking it entirely. “Drink a lot, father,” he would say. He was certain this made his father’s spirit very happy. (2015)
Yang Yŏng-hui’s (2009) documentary, Sona, the Other Myself, presents her own family’s experiences of how these rituals are conducted in North Korea. Some 20 minutes into the film, Yang’s family arrives at a clearing on a hillside overlooking Pyongyang. The relatives gather around as Sona, Yang’s niece, crouches beside her mother’s grave mound. She places flowers on the stone alter and bows to the mound, which looms over her small frame. On the alter is a bottle of alcohol, a carved watermelon, a bowl of fruit, and a color picture of Sona’s mother, Jŏng Jŏngsun. “Mother, auntie is here, too,” Sona calls to her mother, emptying the contents of a large bottle of beer over the grassy mound.
Wearing a summery white dress, Sona’s family encourages her to “sing a song loudly so your mother can hear.” With her arms flat at her side and her body at attention, she sings,
The stream turns left and right, where is it going?
It is going to the wide bosom of the ocean.
My heart’s flying, where is it going?
It’s going over the clouds, to the star of my beloved Great Leader.
The performance is received with admiring coos from her family and Sona, suddenly overcome with shyness, retreats to her father’s side. Elements of the political bleed into the spiritual when songs for the ancestors are couched in praise of the Kim family, and stories of success are embedded within the supposed achievements of the state. In Yang’s documentary, Sona’s recital to her mother is also a song of reverence to North Korea’s former leader, Kim Il sung.
Commemorative practices in the DPRK have been further reshaped by the hardships of the living. Yi Sujin, who migrated to South Korea from North Korea in 2009, recalled:
In North Korea, when things were really hard during the famine, people who didn’t have any food used paper with images of food drawn on. The people were starving and so were the ancestors. But it was still important to carry out the rituals, so instead of real food, people performed the ceremony using images of the food you were supposed to use. (2013)
In times of adversity in North Korea, the dead have been united with the living in their suffering. During a famine that afflicted much of the country, many families had to survive on whatever they could forage from the surrounding countryside. Subsequently, where once they might have enjoyed steamed rice, meat, and vegetables, the dead had to make do with images of food hand drawn on paper.
Diasporic Ancestor Worship
How does the nature of a person’s death affect our relationship to the deceased? In contemporary Vietnam, there are two sides of memory, identified as “house” and “street,” or inside and outside (Kwon, 2006:6). “Death in the street” is understood as a violent, untimely death, often alone, and away from the ancestral home. A traumatic passing has a ripple effect that threatens to fragment the family line and leaves the deceased as an accursed figure (Kwon, 2006:15). By contrast, “Death in the house” is a safe death, a timely death, and a passing considered part of the natural order of things. A safe death allows for kin to take their rightful places in the continuum of descent that extends vertically from the dead to the living and on to descendants yet to be given life (Avieli, 2007:125).
The binary of good death/bad death presents itself in the Korean cosmological system in a manner similar to that of post-war Vietnam. For Koreans on both sides of the DMZ, the difference between death at home, surrounded by family and following a full life, and death outside the home, usually untimely and by violent means, can mean the difference between an ancestor at peace and a restless ghost that wanders in search of resolution.
Many of my North Korean interlocutors had left villages and towns crowded with friends, family, tastes, and smells that contributed to shaping their memories. They had also left behind the burial mounds of family members, some of whom had died under traumatic circumstances. In defaulting on their kinship obligations they carried an emotional burden with them to their new homes, a weight that some of my interlocutors sought to relieve themselves of. Yi Sujin, for example, explained how family deaths affected her:
My father died in a labor camp in North Korea. Neither my mother nor I know my father’s death day, so we do ancestor worship on his birthday and at the harvest festival (ch’usŏk). My brother also died a difficult death when he was a boy. Later, he came to me in a dream and asked for money. So the next day I went to the place where he used to play [while in North Korea] and burned 100 won for him. I thought he would be able to use it wherever he is. From that time on, whenever my brother asks for anything, I always do the same thing. I don’t know if he can use the money, but I know that doing it has made me feel happier. (2013)
Sujin’s father and brother both died untimely deaths and she has relied on commemorative rituals as a means of managing her feelings of loss. In her father’s case, he was a direct victim of state violence. Further, as a result of his arrest and internment in one of North Korea’s political labor camps, Sujin’s entire family was branded as traitors and subsequently forbidden from joining the Korean Workers’ Party, limited in marriage and employment prospects, and exiled to the country’s northern provinces. From that time on, they were under constant surveillance by the state apparatus. This was a major contributing factor in Sujin’s decision to escape North Korea.
Although Sujin does not expect to return to North Korea, she believes that she is not free from the obligation to tend to the spirits of her departed kin. Sujin’s brother regularly appears in her dreams and asks for items that might help him. When she feels it necessary, she burns effigies of items her brother requests, placating his restless spirit. In the living room of her small apartment on the outskirts of Seoul, Sujin believes that she communicates with the spirits of her father and brother through commemorative rituals that she carries out several times each year. Through such intimate practices, Sujin reconnects with her family, living and dead. For Sujin, maintaining a relationship with the spirits of her father and brother is both a cathartic process and a necessary act of filial piety.
A communally experienced tragic death has left an imprint on the memories of many North Koreans. For my interlocutors in South Korea and in Japan, a belief in the ability to relate to the spirits is one wrought with emotional and ritual challenges. Along with Sujin’s father and brother, there are many restless spirits in North Korea, the result of people who suffered death by disease, by starvation, by public execution, and other unnatural means. While the physical remains of the dead lie untended in North Korean soil, their spirits cannot be at peace. The mass death of North Korean citizens has created a nation of restless spirits, unable to seek recourse for the harm inflicted on them while they were alive. The spirits of the dead now express their pain by appearing in the dreams of their living kin and at the commemorative rituals of exiled family.
Feasting with the Dead
Commemorative rituals are a costly business. In North Korea, if the dead are to eat well, participants have to borrow money to provide the required offerings. In contrast, for North Koreans living outside of the DPRK, the table is piled high with expensive alcohol and unusual foods like cake and noodles. My interviewees in South Korea served Korean food and drink to the spirits. In contrast, my interlocutors living in Japan seemed more flexible in the food they served. The rationale was that because their deceased family members were either born in Japan and subsequently emigrated to North Korea, or lived in North Korea and enjoyed Japanese foods when packages arrived from family in Japan, they must have a taste for both Korean and Japanese foods. My interlocutors explained that they believed the spirits enjoy the variety of tastes on offer. Reflecting on this, I imagine that the dead, whose last living memories of sharing food with their kin might have been characterized by a dearth of ingredients, must be impressed at the feasts on offer.
Some families in Osaka, Seoul, and Tokyo go to great lengths to follow practices established while they were in North Korea. For example, Cho Misŏn, who was in her early twenties when she left North Korea in the mid-2000s, explained that her family in Osaka only uses new bags of rice and boiled pork as they did in North Korea. She told me that they place dried corvine fish alongside cooked herbs and pressed rice on the ceremonial table, and she partially peals the top of stacked apples and pears so the visiting spirits can enjoy them more easily (Fig. 3).
In my family we do simple ancestral rites because we don’t have a lot of money. We have odd numbers of everything and we place my father’s picture at the top of the table. We don’t wear makeup, nor do we wear red or white clothes. Our fingernails have to be clean, and any woman who is menstruating is not allowed to take part. (2015)
The layout of the table might also be dependent on the individual needs of the spirit coming to dinner. “When my father was alive he was lefthanded,” Misŏn told me. “So, the rice is placed on the left side and the seaweed soup on the right side. Everything is laid out facing father, taking into account that he was left-handed.” Misŏn and her family set out two bottles of white liquor, along with a packet of cigarettes; these items offer familiar tastes for her father’s spirit.
Fig. 3. Food and ceremonial items used during the ancestor worship of a Zainichi returnee family now living in Osaka, Japan. The food items are a mixture of Japanese and Korean. To the bottom right of the table is a packet of the deceased’s favorite cigarettes. At the head of the table is a picture of the deceased (obscured for privacy).
During the ritual, once the food is arranged on the ceremonial table, each person takes a turn to greet the dead by bowing two and a half times before pouring a cup of alcohol for their ancestors to sip. Once the spirit is welcomed into the room it takes up a position behind the table laden with food. Two chopsticks are set upright in a bowl of steamed rice, indicating that the dead are feasting. The living sit back from the table and wait for the dead to finish. Misŏn explained how her family concludes the meal:
Our father used to love smoking so, after he’s finished eating, my younger brother lights a cigarette and places it on the edge of an ashtray to encourage father to smoke it. When father’s finished smoking, we bow to him one last time and turn our bodies to face the door, allowing him to leave. We tell him that it’s time to go back. We sort of shoo him away before we begin eating. (2015)
After the spirits are said to have filled their bellies, it is time for the living toeat.AsPakHyangjin,whosefamilyemigratedtoNorthKoreafromTokyo in the early 1960s, only to return in 2007, explained, “When they have eaten, we talk to the ancestors and tell them what we have been doing. We thank them and let them know we are sorry we cannot be with them in person.”
Inquiries as to the well being of the spirits are accompanied by apologies for not taking better care of them and updates on the successes of children and grandchildren. “While he’s eating, we talk to father, telling him things he might like to hear, letting him know about the events of the year. Even though he’s returned to the ‘sky country’ (hanul nara) we ask him to watch over us,” Misŏn told me. The language spoken during these exchanges, a mixture of Korean and Japanese, is less important than the content of the conversation. After all, as Yi Minji, now running a restaurant in Asakusa, Tokyo, explained, “I’m more comfortable in Japanese language now, so I talk to the dead using Japanese. But that’s no problem because my family spoke both Japanese and Korean” (2015). Bi-lingual exchanges with the spirits of the dead, many of whom while alive would have been unable to communicate in Japanese, is a further indicator of Koreans doing what practitioners of traditional commemorative rituals have done for generations before them: putting practical concerns ahead of dogmatic adherence to the rules. Kim Hyŏnjae, now working in Osaka, offered a pragmatic explanation. “My ancestors—my grandparents—are [buried] in North Korea and of course we can’t go there. So, we have to do ancestral rites a different way” (2015). Despite the departures from tradition, continuing to arrange and perform ancestor worship facilitates the act of coming together in the physical world and of renewing ties to what are imagined to be restless spirits in the DPRK. Instrumentally speaking, these rituals also serve as an emotional valve, enabling participants to relieve themselves of the guilt of having left the lands where their family is buried.
Commensality with the dead, sharing food, and offering stories of a new life in a new home, contributes to a group narrative of migration and separation, loss, and recovery. Central to the transnational relationship of the deadinNorthKoreatotheirdiasporicdescendantsisacompactbetweentwo parties that transcends nation state boundaries. This compact, rooted in the obligationsoffilialpiety,reaffirmsenduringbondsofkinship,keepstheheart in North Korea, even if the body is in Japan or South Korea, and offers hope for the resolution of anxieties about family abandonment.
Conclusion
This article has examined North Koreans’ relationship to death with a focus on the significance of memory practices for people who have endured traumatic loss and family separation. Religious practices are a means for people to reflect back to themselves the intimate relations binding them together. Such rituals allow a person to be submerged within the group, ensuring the community endures, even beyond the life of each of its members. I have suggested that performing commemorative rituals are a way for families divided by geo-political strategies to make sense of the experience of being cut off from familiar locations, friends, and family.
North Koreans’ commemorative practices provide insight into particular political, social, and economic changes that have occurred in East Asia. Ancestor worship as currently practiced in North Korea indicates that, in the DPRK and beyond, the reach of the state is not limited to shaping the worlds of the living. The rules and regulations directing the manner in which the deceased is managed—burial or cremation, for example—and the pervasiveness of state symbols in the form of songs and paraphernalia associated with commemorative rites indicate that the hegemony of the state reaches deep into the spirit world. In this sense, a commemoration of the ancestors could also be construed as a veneration of the DPRK leadership.
The overlap that emerged as the state pulled together the lifeworlds of ordinary North Koreans and the world of the dead meant that events that affected North Korean citizens also affected their ancestors. The collapse of the cold war world order and the gross mismanagement of the DPRK economy were key factors in the nationwide famine of the 1990s. As North Korean citizens starved, so did their ancestors. The impact of the famine on the spiritscape was evident in the physical world, seen in the corpses that reportedly littered some North Korean urban areas, in the foliage that grew up around abandoned grave mounds, and in the efforts of some families to placate their ancestors with sketches of offerings instead of the real thing.
The communal suffering of the North Korean people reached into a spiritscape now overpopulated with troubled spirits and continues to resonate in the domestic commemorative performances of diasporic North Koreans. In Seoul, Osaka, Tokyo, and beyond, families separated by a lasting ideological standoff communicate with restless spirits through long-distance commemorative rituals that emphasize enduring bonds of kinship for people who have lived and died according to the extremes of ideology and state imperative.
For many individuals who emigrate from their homeland, ties to family are created and maintained through the exchange of letters and parcels, the sending of remittances, and when possible, family visits. Yamamoto Hiroko and others who lost loved ones in North Korea are not limited to material exchanges as a means of communing with the dead. For people denied travel to visit their family, communion with the dead takes place in dreams and during the ancestral rites practiced in homes across East Asia. Each time the spirits are imagined as joining their living family in South Korea or Japan, they transcend the confines of the body and the political borders of the nation state designed to prevent such movement.
For some North Koreans outside the DPRK, commemorative practices will however never be enough to make sense of the experience of family separation, not when the physical remains of their kin lie north of the DMZ. “If reunification occurs,” Mrs. Kim confided in me one rainy afternoon in Tokyo, “I’d visit the graves of my father and grandparents [in North Korea].” Pausing before taking a sip of her herbal tea, she added, “I’d collect the bones of my relatives and bring them back to Japan. I want to keep them here” (2015). In the places they resettle, ancestor worship practices are a connection to a past marked with both joy and hardship. In their new homes, North Korean exiles engender spaces for new forms of emotionally and politically charged remembering. The newly emergent diasporic ancestor worship allows families who have endured great suffering to manage the ghosts of the past and provides stability during the challenging process of making home away from home.
Notes
1. This figure is difficult to confirm, as the Japanese government does not release information on returnees from North Korea. As such, the figure of 300 returnees from North Korea is based on many conversations I had with various civic group leaders working with returnees in Osaka and Tokyo.
2. I refer to a South Korean national as “South Korean”; a person born and raised in North Korea as “North Korean”; Koreans who migrated to Japan during the colonial period (1910–1945) and did not return after liberation as “Zainichi Korean”; a person who moved to North Korea during the repatriation project (1959–1984) and has now returned to Japan as a “returnee” and a North Korean living in South Korea after escaping from the DPRK as a “North Korean defector” or “North Korean exile.” I am aware that these are all slippery and somewhat problematic terms.
3. While the conversations and more formal discussions I had with North Koreans on the topic of death and ritual each contributed in their own way to shaping my thoughts on long-distance commemoration, the voices of only nine individuals are directly drawn on in this article. As I interviewed such a small number of individuals, the findings are not supposed to be representative of broader trends, either within the DPRK or within the North Korean diaspora.
4. It appears that at these sites the burial areas have been respected when new construction or development has been undertaken. While we should take care when interpreting satellite data, for future research it would be interesting to look into the relationship between state-sponsored construction and local burial practices.
5. Google Earth: 39°53048.7600 N, 127°25038.9700 E. 6. Google Earth: 39°54002.7600 N, 127°25036.0900 E.
Acknowledgments
I would like to sincerely acknowledge the time and effort of my interlocutors from North Korea; without their help, this research would not have been possible. I also wish to acknowledge the support and contribution of Kyungmook Kim, Ishimaru Jiro, Kato Hiroshi, Deokhyo Choi, Sarah Son, and Sandra Fahy. A special thanks to Joseph S. Bermudez Jr., Benjamin Silberstein, and Max Ernst for their insights on reading satellite data. Finally, I would like to sincerely thank the anonymous reviewers and editors of this special edition for their helpful suggestions.
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A 12-year-old girl in the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq.Credit...Mauricio Lima for The New York Times
