‘북한 방랑기’를 통해 본 지역적 냉전의 시차(視差/時差)

Abstract

Kim Satgat’s North Korean Wandering was popular for a long time as a leading KBS radio drama, but this paper concerns a forgotten North Korean Wandering discovered in the Hoover Institution Archives, for which this paper provides an introduction and an overview. This older North Korean Wandering is based on a popular children’s character in the 1946 film The Adventures of Ttolttori (똘똘이), released just after liberation, following the colonial period of Japanese occupation. During the Korean War, the first subsequent large-scale conflict, both sides engaged in a fierce psychological war. As part of this contest, the news leaflet Free World Weekly Digest was issued, with Korean and Chinese versions published simultaneously. One version targeted the Chinese Army, and was known as Amyeong Wandering (阿明流浪記), and the other was called Ttolttoli’s North Korean Wandering. Thus emerged a regional Cold Warnarrative which combined the ideas of adventure and wandering with an anti-communist narrative. This paper also discusses Teacher Kim, which aired on the ‘Voice of the United Nations Command’, one of the pillars of the Cold War, before Kim Satgat’s North Korean Wandering. It was a radio show of about 15 minutes in length which exposed and ridiculed the hypocrisy and contradictions of North Korea. Kim Satgat’s North Korean Wandering, which first aired in 1964, owed a heavy debt to the earlier “North Korean Wandering” of psychological warfare leaflets and radio programs. Given this prior history, it is not surprising that Kim Satgat’s North Korean Wandering never quite managed to break free from the magnetic attraction of psychological warfare. The people who defected to South Korea just before the Korean War disseminated a repertoire of similar stories about their experiences, which were transformed into a public consciousness of “North Korean Wandering”, and ultimately manifest as psychological warfare in Kim Satgat’s North Korean Wandering. This paper critically explores the Cold War which remains within us, originating as psychological warfare during the Korean War, but persisting into peacetime and everyday life, as a specific understanding and ideology of “North Korean wandering.”