A very North Korean way to die
The Kim personality cult has penetrated the most intimate aspects of North Korean life, even the mourning of the dead
Markus Bell September 7, 2021
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Image: NK News | A North Korean tour guide at the Fatherland Liberation War Martyrs' Cemetery, north of Pyongyang, on July 25, 2018
Contrary to what we often read, North Koreans are not that different from us. They have hopes and dreams. They date and fall in love. They celebrate marriages, births and graduations.
They also mourn the loss of their loved ones. But until recently, how people do this in North Korea has largely been a mystery.
Now, interviews with those who have left the DPRK make clear that some 70 years of Kim family rule and a devastating famine have altered North Koreans’ relationship with loved ones who have passed away.
From life to death, and into the spiritual realm, the ruling Kim family has become inseparable from traditional practice in North Korea.
North Koreans visit the Revolutionary Martyrs’ Cemetery outside Pyongyang on Sept. 9, 2015 | Image: NK News (file photo)DEATH AND MODERNITY
Until recently, death in both Koreas clearly reflected a Confucian structuring of family relationships. The eldest son in a family reported a death to the local government, paid for and led funerals and greeted the ancestors each year thereafter. Women prepared the deceased’s body for burial and readied food and drink for ancestor worship ceremonies.
These practices differed from region to region, but someone from say, a southern province of South Korea, would have been familiar with a death ritual in northern North Korea.
But from about the 1980s onward, the North and South Korean states compelled families to adopt modern methods of mourning their dead. Highly urbanized South Korea was running out of space. With more Koreans moving into apartment blocks and the legalization of cremation at hospital mortuaries, burials quickly became far more infrequent.
In North Korea, the nationwide famine in the 1990s impacted both how people died and what happened to them afterward. Throughout the country during this time, too many people were dying with not enough places to put them. Hillsides surrounding towns and villages became congested with grave mounds. During heavy rains, according to interviewees, partially decomposed corpses washed into the valleys below.
In response, interviewees said that Pyongyang banned burials, instructing citizens to instead cremate their dead. Authorities stored ashes in government-administered columbaria and permitted families to visit on request.
But away from urban centers of political power, in rural areas and difficult to access mountainous communities, people continued to bury their dead whenever possible.
In both Koreas, some families cremated their dead, and others interred in hillsides. And what materialized was a division between rural and urban communities in how they imagined their relationships with the deceased.
Former North Korean leader Kim Jong Il’s body on display in 2011 | Image: KCNAKIM WORSHIP MEETS CONFUCIANISM
In North Korea, a mixed economy of death emerged, with traditional Confucian rituals merging with reverence for the ruling Kim family. The 1994 death of Kim Il Sung exemplifies these hybrid practices. After he passed, there was a three-year period where his son, Kim Jong Il, publicly mourned his father. In this case, an ostensibly atheistic state drew on Confucian ideology to legitimize the dynastic succession from father to son.
In research interviews with North Koreans, they describe experiences where modern practices overlapped with tradition. Following the sudden death of her father, one interviewee explained that she laid out her father’s body in the traditional fashion, cleaned it and dressed it in new clothes. She filled his nostrils with cotton wool and placed him behind a decorative folding screen for three days of mourning, during which time, visitors would arrive to eat, drink and pay their respects. With the help of family friends, she then interred her father in a nearby grave mound.
Once the corpse is interred, families try to visit on death anniversaries and other auspicious occasions. In some cases, this might mean traveling several hours. Once at the burial site, the head of the family — usually the eldest male — pours soju on the grave and offers rice to the spirit of the dead.
They also place items of value to the deceased next to the tomb. If, for example, the deceased was a member of the Workers’ Party of Korea or the military, visiting family might put pictures of them in official regalia on the grave, along with medals and other symbols of their status.
Graveside performances are likely couched in praise for the Kims, while stories of personal success are framed as successes of the DPRK state. Visiting family may take a moment to tell the deceased what’s been happening in the family since their death. Marriages, births and graduations are each worthy of sharing. While the dead consume their meal, living family members may sing songs.
These rituals are remarkable examples of how Confucian practices have merged with North Korea’s cult of personality.
The Revolutionary Martyrs’ Cemetery in May 2010 | Image: Eric LafforgueDEATH AND EXILE
North Koreans are still attached to these obligations after defecting. Interviewees described ancestor worship ceremonies performed in their Seoul apartments. For families without photographs of their deceased, they make do with a portrait of the dead or a wooden board with the deceased’s name carved in traditional Chinese characters.
One North Korean defector interviewed in Seoul described her struggles with the ghost of a brother who died in North Korea. Desperate to placate his restless spirit, she burns effigies of items she feels might help him in the afterlife — books, cash, a bike and so forth.
It’s common knowledge that the state looms ever-present in the lives of ordinary North Koreans from Pyongyang to Hamhung. But less well known is the extent — and the depth — that the Kim cult of personality has penetrated the most intimate of spaces for denizens of one of the world’s few remaining experiments with communism.
This article is drawn from a research piece published by the University of Hawai’i Press, Korean Studies journal.
Edited by Arius Derr
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