North Korea Authoritarianism

North Korea in Japanese is written as “朝鮮民主主義人民共和国”. Japanese people generally use this name when they refer to North Korea, but this name is really controversial because of the meaning of the Chinese characteristics “民主主義 (min-shu-shu-gi)”. “民主主義” means democracy in Japanese. To begin with, what principle does North Korea try to achieve? Generally, people seem to have one conventional wisdom that North Korea has only authoritarianism, which means favoring complete obedience or subjection to authority. The effects by the media can make this conventional wisdom. For example, the news about broadcasting the death of the North Korean leader Kim Jong Il must be memorable for those who watched the news. It would be phenomenal for most of them to
Everyday Life in The North Korean Revolution, 1945-1950 by Suzy Kim, North Korea Markets and Military Rule by Hazel Smith, and other articles can demonstrate that it is not true that North Korea is affected by only authoritarianism. By looking at politics, society, economic, and education in North Korea though these resources, it becomes clear that North Korea consists of not only authoritarianism, but also socialism and capitalism.
First, the idea of authoritarianism is included in education in North Korea. The book, North Koreans in Japan by Sonia Ryang can be used to support this idea. Generally, there are two ways of explaining the author’s arguments, including qualitative approaches and quantitative approaches. Qualitative methods usually have numerical consequences to prove the author’s argument. On the other hand, qualitative methods don’t rely on the numbers and they utilize the materials which includes non-numerical resources such as interviews, diary, autobiographies. In her book, Ryang discovers the relationships between North Korea and South Korea by writing about North Korean people who live in Japan by using the resources she got from interviews with them. The information in her book is retrieved
Suzy Kim mentions society in North Korea through her book. Her book is not quantitative, but qualitative because she gives us a new way of seeing North Korea, which describes each person in North Korea rather than a whole state of North Korea by referring not numerical resources such as autobiographies that North Korean citizens actually wrote. For example, she quoted the North Korean women’s autobiography which complains the women’s situation in order to show women in North Korea suffered from the lives in North Korea. To be specific, in the autobiography, the women complained people had stereotypes toward women because they were supposed to do housework even though she was seeking to study instead of doing house work (Kim, 2013, p231). As a result, Kim’s book is qualitative. Kim focuses on writing about women in North Korea in several chapters and explains how their roles in the society or their families have been changed. For example, women couldn’t be involved in the social activities and one of the reasons of it was that approximately 90 percent of women were not literate in 1945, when North Korea has been liberated from Japan (Kim, 2013, p100). Then, women were given chances to go to school. It was possible for women who lived far from school because they could take education by an instructor who came to their house. Their