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same token, de‹ning exclusion from the family-nation became an easy way to de‹ne inclusion. It was crucial that the newly established regime designated and differentiated the enemies of the nation from the model citizens. For these reasons, in his nation-building project Kim was quick to draw a clear boundary between those who were part of the family and those who were not. He noted in numerous speeches that there was no ambiguous zone in between: “We should let the rising generation know clearly how harshly the imperialists, landlords, and capitalists oppressed and exploited their parents, educate them thoroughly to hold a hatred for the exploiting classes and oppose the old social system. Along with this, we should arm our children and youth with socialist patriotism to make them ardently love their fatherland.”51 For North Korea, the Japanese, together with the Americans, were perhas the most ignoble enemy. Kim was quick to historicize the importance of his resistance movement against the Japanese invaders by invoking a strong nationalistic sentiment based on hatred of the enemy.52 Kim Il-sung’s vision of the Japanese as the arch-enemy of the Korean nation had a lasting impact on the formation of revolutionary propaganda. Adrian Buzo notes that Kim Il-sung’s resistance movement and other rami‹cations of nationalist movements shared one single-minded goal, which was to defy Japanese colonial rule: “The characteristic of the nationalist movement as a whole also applied to the prewar Korean Communist movement. The strong sense of cultural identity and the task of reclaiming the homeland from the Japanese meant that Korean communists operated in an environment charged with nationalist sentiment. In practice, therefore , there was little distinction between communists and nationalists, as nationalists became communists, communists became nationalists with all manner of shadings in between.”53 True to Buzo’s statement, having a tangible enemy energized a nationalistic discourse on reinstating the nationhood that had been lost before the foundation of North Korea, which obscured the boundaries between Communists and others. But even after the withdrawal of the enemy from Korean territories after World War II, the hostile discourse about the enemy was omnipresent in North Korea because it reinforced the unity of the family-nation. The propaganda performances of the 1960s and 1970s fostered a sense of community by focusing on the process akin to what Vamik Volkan terms “psychologizing” the enemy. In The Need to Have Enemies and Allies, Volkan notes: 194 • ILLUSIVE UTOPIA The more chronic that involvement with con›ict with one or more opposing group is, the greater the tendency to “psychologize” it. Concealed or apparent emotional issues and attempts to regressively solve them dominate, modifying real world aspects of the con›ict. Whatever the contributing historical, military, economic, or social factors may be, the resultant chronic con›ict becomes increasingly dif‹cult to resolve; it becomes embedded in the identity of a group or nation. The enemy is insinuated into the self-image of the group or nation, becoming “the other,” a collection of traits that the group itself does not wish to have, the embodiment of taboos vigorously repudiated by the group ethos.54 Psychologizing and dramatizing the Japanese as the enemy in propaganda performances in the 1960s and 1970s was not entirely a ‹ctionalizing process, since the memories of recent Japanese colonialism and war were still vivid in the minds of Koreans. For North Korea, such memories became their nation’s collective humiliating experience. The process of psychologizing the enemy was devoid of any moral ambiguity : audiences were not supposed to see the Japanese from their discursive individual perspectives, but from the speci‹c perspective of the antiJapanese resistance group, which the propaganda performances provided constantly. There were numerous anti-Japanese plays very early in performance history, all of which were based on the time and space of Manchuria in the 1930s, including Hwang Jeok-mo’s Victory Achievers (Seungnijadeul),55 Kim Hyeong-chuk’s They Fought and Achieved Victory (Geudeul-eun ssawo seungnihaetda ),56 and the Mangyeong Graduate School Circle Members’ The Son Also Set Out for Revolutionary Struggle (Adeul-do tujaeng-ui gil-e naseotda),57 all published in 1959. One of the most notable features of presenting the enemy consisted of envisioning Japanese as the racial other. Just like Americans, Japanese are presented as the white race in relation to Koreans. Ironically, this nonessentialist view on racial distinction is a deviant recycling of Japan’s own racial politics during...

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