March 29, 2007

The food shortages that wracked North Korea through the 1990s constituted one of the worst famines in human history—and even a decade later, the crisis hasn’t fully abated. Despite this, and the unprecedented involvement of world-class NGOs in the situation, remarkably little is actually known about the famine or its consequences for North Korean society. Speaking at an event co-presented with The Asia Society, economist Marcus Noland, co-author (with Steven Haggard) of the new book Famine in North Korea: Markets, Aid and Reform, said both the famine and the secrecy can be laid at the feet of North Korea’s political system.

Noland laid out his explanation of the famine’s origins. When the country’s communist leadership first acknowledged the famine, and requested international help, in 1995, they attributed it to that year’s massive floods. The real origins were more systemic, according to Noland. Owing to its inhospitable environment, Noland said, North Korea’s agricultural system was heavily reliant on electric irrigation and chemical fertilizers. When electricity and petrochemical production contracted after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the shortages dragged the agricultural economy down with them.

Noland and Haggard estimate the resulting food shortages, exacerbated by the inefficiencies of the North’s monopolistic public distribution system, led to between 600,000 and 1,000,000 North Korean deaths (between 3% and 5% of the population). Starvation wasn’t the primary cause of death. Instead, an undernourished and weakened population succumbed easily to diseases like tuberculosis. The old and young suffered most. Cohorts of 7 year-olds that survived were the shortest and lightest of any in recorded Korean history. Ten years later, 30% to 50% of the population is still undernourished.

The famine was unnecessarily extended, Noland continued, by the way the North responded to aid flows. When donated food began arriving in the country, the North’s government reduced its food imports by a corresponding amount to improve the country’s balance-of-payments. Thus, in the aggregate, food levels remained static.

To maintain the country’s authoritarian isolation, the North has greatly restricted donor monitoring activities. However, the frequently-made claim that in the absence of monitoring the government is diverting the aid to loyal party cadres and army officers isn’t as much as of an issue as is usually thought. More likely than a centralized conspiracy to divert aid, Noland said, was that local officials who processed the aid pilfered a great deal of it, and instead of distributing it to the population, sold it for profit.

Though an ugly practice, this channel does ultimately deliver food to those who need it, and the process aids the development of free markets. If the North’s government can buck its instincts for total control and accept, institutionalize and eventually encourage this fledgling free market in foodstuffs, it may have taken a substantial step towards lasting food security.

March 21, 2007

Caught between the demands of a globalizing economy and the reality of a steadily falling birthrate, Japan—long famous for its ethnic homogeneity—is admitting a new wave of foreign workers. Integrating them into mainstream Japanese society will be an almost unprecedented challenge. This is illustrated by the zainichi—longtime Korean residents of Japan that make up the country's largest ethnic minority—and their ongoing struggle for equality and integration.

So Im Lee, a professor of business administration at Ryukoku University and co-editor of the recently published Japan's Diversity Dilemmas: Ethnicity, Citizenship and Education, spoke to an audience at The Korea Society about the zainichi experience. That experience began shortly after Japan's annexation of Korea. Japanese authorities drew laborers from the Korean Peninsula to fill empty jobs. As labor shortages grew more acute during WWII, the Japanese deceived and coerced Koreans into emigrating. Most Koreans in Japan returned home following the war, but 650,000 remained permanently.

Settled in a country where ethnicity and citizenship were nearly synonymous, long-term Korean residents of Japan were treated as a social and legal class apart. Zainichi were not allowed to hold government jobs or participate in Japanese politics. They were required to carry special identification cards at all times and, until 1992, all zainichi had to be fingerprinted by the police.

Beginning in the 1960s, Lee continued, zainichi activists began demanding that discriminatory laws be repealed and social institutions opened. They also demanded that ethnic Korean students receive equal access to Japan's educational system. This proved to be a pivotal move. Once Koreans were integrated into the educational establishment, it became more difficult for authorities to find grounds on which to exclude them from other arenas of public life. Today, though activists still continue to press for greater recognition, many zainichi speak only Japanese and marry into Japanese families.

March 13, 2007

In 1952 Joe Savitzky was a U.S. Army engineer deployed to Seoul. His mission, as the Korean War was winding down, was to begin rebuilding South Korea. For two years he built schools, government facilities and railroad lines, in his spare time taking snapshots of the Korean landscape and people. At an evening program at The Korea Society, Savitzky shared his pictures of a bygone moment in Korean history.

“At that point, the situation was quite static,” Savitzky recalled of the conflict’s stalemate phase in 1953, “There weren’t great movements of armies up and down the Peninsula. Even in Seoul. Things were quiet.” Indeed, for such a generally devastating period, Savitzky’s photographs convey as sense of bewildered peacefulness.

Shots taken in the countryside outside Seoul suggest a timeless, unchanging scene: wooden Buddhist temples, farmers bringing in the rice harvest and placid rivers. Shots taken in Seoul communicate a more dynamic mood. They show high school students protesting the division of the Peninsula and bustling cattle markets. As Savitzky cycled through his slides, reflecting on Seoul’s limited indoor plumbing and musing on the origins of various landmarks, audience members actively joined in the process of remembering. Fellow veterans and others who had been to Korea struggled to recall the exact locations of pictured buildings and shared their own recollections of the city.

Scenes of devastation and desperation were included. But Savitzky’s collection, like his subject, did not dwell on them. Some of his most careful compositions are of traditional Korean architecture and old Seoul neighborhoods that, in the decades to come, would be cleared to make way for new high rises.

The last photo in Savitzky’s collection could serve as a prescient visual metaphor of Korea at the end of the war. In it, a young Korean laborer is carrying what appears to be an improbably large bale of hay. He bears the load with patient confidence that he will soon reach his destination.