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One of the most revealing barometers of South Korean national identity is not found in official policy documents but in popular culture, particularly in the way North Korea has been imagined, feared, mocked, and increasingly humanized on screen. Over the past six decades, South Korean film and television have moved from portraying North Koreans as one-dimensional, demonic spies to portraying them as complex, even romantic, figures capable of drawing sympathy from audiences at home and abroad. This essay examines that transformation as an issue in its own right: what does the changing pop-cultural image of North Korea reveal about how South Korea negotiates its own national identity, its anxieties about reunification, and its growing role as a global cultural exporter? The issue matters because popular culture does not merely reflect political change passively; it actively shapes public imagination about who belongs to the nation and who remains a permanent “Other,” with direct implications for how ordinary South Koreans understand defectors, coexistence, and the prospect of eventual unification.
Historically, South Korean media constructed North Korea in starkly binary terms. Prior to 1998, films and even children’s rhymes depicted northern spies as “evil incarnate,” consistent with an anti-communist state ideology that left little room for nuance (Epstein, 2009). This began to shift dramatically with the Sunshine Policy of the early 2000s, when inter-Korean summitry, cross-border tourism, and a rising wave of North Korean defectors (talbukja) coincided with blockbuster films such as Shiri, Joint Security Area, and Welcome to Dongmakgol, which portrayed northern characters with far greater emotional complexity (Epstein, 2009). Reality-variety programs such as Now on My Way to Meet You further complicated the picture: female defectors were showcased in a talk-show format that oscillated uneasily between light entertainment and harrowing testimony of escape and loss, a tension that Epstein and Green (2013) describe as reflecting South Korea’s simultaneous desire for ethnic homogeneity (dongjilseong) and its practice of othering (tajahwa) newcomers from the North.
This trajectory can be productively analyzed through the constructivist concept of Self and Other in identity formation, most closely associated with Alexander Wendt’s (1999) argument that state identities, and by extension national identities, are constituted relationally rather than given by nature. During the Cold War period, North Korea functioned as South Korea’s constitutive Other: an existential threat against which South Korean identity as a free, capitalist, anti-communist nation could be defined. The gradual humanization of North Korean characters in the 2010s spy-thriller cycle, such as Secret Reunion and Secretly, Greatly, in which attractive northern agents are ultimately shown to value family over ideology, indicates a partial de-securitization of the North Korean image, even as the state itself remains framed as menacing (Epstein & Green, 2019). In securitization theory terms, this represents a curious split-screen effect: individual North Koreans are increasingly folded into an acceptable, even desirable, version of Korean identity, while the North Korean state apparatus continues to be securitized as a threat. South Korea’s popular imagination, in other words, has learned to separate the northern person from the northern regime.
The most striking recent development is the internationalization of this narrative through streaming platforms. Crash Landing on You, a 2019–2020 romantic drama broadcast domestically and distributed globally via Netflix, extended the trope of the appealing North Korean man to a worldwide audience, generating significant attention from global media outlets and fan communities as far afield as the Philippines and the United States (Epstein & Green, 2020). This global reach exemplifies Joseph Nye’s (2004) concept of soft power: South Korea’s cultural industries do not merely entertain domestic audiences but actively export a particular vision of inter-Korean relations, one that is simultaneously nostalgic, romanticized, and commercially profitable. Hyejung Ju’s observation, cited in discussions of this trend, notes that transnational streaming audiences approach such content not only as fans of a national industry but as viewers simply seeking fresh material, meaning that South Korea’s own contested narratives about the North circulate internationally almost as a byproduct of entertainment consumption rather than as deliberate diplomacy (as cited in Epstein & Green, 2020).
In my assessment, this cultural evolution should be read with cautious optimism rather than as straightforward progress toward reconciliation. On one hand, the humanization of North Korean characters, and the increasingly visible and complex roles played by defector characters in globally popular shows such as Squid Game, suggests an expanding capacity within South Korean society to imagine North Koreans as individuals rather than as an undifferentiated threat, which is a necessary precondition for any future project of social integration. On the other hand, commentators such as Euny Hong have wryly noted that stereotypes have often simply been repackaged rather than eliminated, shifting from depicting the North as pure menace to depicting it as an object of curiosity, romantic fascination, or entertainment spectacle. This raises an important caution: representation is not the same as recognition, and a media landscape that finds North Korean characters marketable is not necessarily the same as a society that has resolved its underlying anxieties about unification, security, or the integration of actual defectors into everyday life.
In conclusion, the shifting depiction of North Korea in South Korean popular culture offers a valuable case study in how national identity is continuously renegotiated through cultural production rather than fixed once and for all. Using the constructivist lens of Self and Other alongside the concept of soft power, this essay has shown that South Korea’s entertainment industry has moved from rigid securitization toward a more ambivalent, globally marketable humanization of the North. Whether this cultural shift will translate into a genuine political and social capacity to accommodate North Koreans, both as characters on screen and as fellow citizens, remains an open and consequential question for the future of the Korean peninsula.
Writer: Cut Faiza Dzikrillah – 202410360110128
References
Epstein, S. (2009). The axis of vaudeville: Images of North Korea in South Korean pop culture. The Asia-Pacific Journal, 7(2).
Epstein, S., & Green, C. (2013). Now on my way to meet who? South Korean television, North Korean refugees, and the dilemmas of representation. The Asia-Pacific Journal, 11(41).
Epstein, S., & Green, C. (2019). Revealing voices? North Korean males and the South Korean mediascape. In Y. Kim (Ed.), Routledge handbook of Korean culture and society (pp. 176–188). Routledge.
Epstein, S., & Green, C. (2020). Crash landing on you and North Korea: Representation and reception in the age of K-drama. The Asia-Pacific Journal, 18(12).
Nye, J. S. (2004). Soft power: The means to success in world politics. PublicAffairs.
Wendt, A. (1999). Social theory of international politics. Cambridge University Press.
