South Korean Popular Culture and North Korea

Download or read book South Korean Popular Culture and North Korea written by Youna Kim and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-01-17 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over recent decades South Korea’s vibrant and distinctive populist culture has spread extensively throughout the world. This book explores how this "Korean wave" has also made an impact in North Korea. The book reveals that although South Korean media have to be consumed underground and unofficially in North Korea, they are widely watched and listened to. The book examines the ways in which this is leading to popular yearning in North Korea for migration, defecting to the South or for people to just become more like South Koreans. Overall, the book demonstrates that the soft power of the Korean wave is having an undermining impact on the hard, constraining cultural climate of North Korea.