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Project Competition

First Prize
HIROSHI WATANABE, West Hollywood, CA

Idealogy in Paradise
What I heard about North Korea were all terrible stories—stories of people starving and dying on the streets, stories of people being abused and brutalized by the police, and stories of the ignorance of the North Korean people resulting from strict government media control and no access to outside information or education. The concept of North Korea was one that did not suggest anything positive about the people or culture of this “closed society.”

The Japanese media especially focused much on North Korea because of North Korea’s kidnapping of Japanese citizens. In the 1970s, North Korea began kidnapping Japanese citizens as part of their program of spying on South Korea. North Korean spies entered Japan’s remote beaches by boat and
kidnapped young Japanese, bringing them back to North Korea. The kidnapped were then forced to teach North Korean spies the Japanese language, customs, and behavior. Once trained, these spies traveled to Japan, assumed identities of Japanese citizens, and eventually obtained Japanese passports. With Japanese passports, the spies then traveled as “businessmen” or “tourists” to South Korea, where they were able to engage in espionage with greater freedom. After years of investigation and negotiations with the Japanese government, some kidnapped Japanese citizens
were finally returned to Japan, where their stories confirmed the account.

Eventually, Japanese media outlets began to show photographs of the returned Japanese citizens that
were taken during their captivity. One snapshot stood out in my mind; it was a family photograph of one of the kidnapped Japanese named Kaoru Hasuike at the beach. This one was shown on Japanese TV as a proof of another kidnapped Japanese named Megumi Yokota who are believed to still be
hidden by the North Korean government. She was abducted in 1977, and later married to a kidnapped South Korean named Kim Chon Jun. They said the couple is in the far background of the Hasuike family’s photo. The purpose of the showing of the photo was to prove that Miss Yokota was
indeed there and married to Mr. Kim.

But I was actually struck by the picture itself and its normalcy. The photograph certainly did not match the image of living in the forced captivity. It looked just like any other picture of a summer beach outing anywhere in the world and it told a very different story of suffering, malnutrition, and
ignorance I was hearing about North Korea all this time. In this picture, their facial expressions, behavior, and landscape all looked very normal. After looking at these photographs, I thought that these images and stories do not match altogether and I felt uncomfortable and unsettled about our
views and perceptions of North Korea. I was puzzled and intrigued, and I wanted to take a personal journey and see the country and the lives of the North Korean people with my own eyes.

All images are 20x20," Archival Pigment Prints

All images © Hiroshi Watanabe

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