VS North Korea

December is a busy month. Even when I am not busy, I can't be relaxed very well. One of the reason is that I have to see many people for business. I have to go to my customers and business-partners to give thanks for many things about our business in this year.

I went to a library, to see the library's manager. After talking about our business, we talked about literature. Because, the manager's life work is literature, and he sometimes writes a book about literature criticism.

In this two years, many Korean books, dramas and movies became popular in Japan. The manager thinks it's a good thing for Japanese culture. Because we can understand the emotion and feelings of the people in a different country.
This boom of Korean works is called "Han-ryu" or "Kan-ryu" in Japan.
The manager is, however, not satisfied with this boom. For him, it is not enough at all.
If Japanese is interested in Korean culture, we should be interested in North Korean culture more. This is his opinion.
For most Japanese, North Korea is a bad country, or our enemy. We think that the people in the country is brainwashed, and the media and culture is completely propaganda.
But, the manager doesn't think so. His friend went to North Korea before, and bought a lot of novels there. He translated some books to Japanese. The manager read them. Certainly the novels are influenced by the education and control of North Korean government. But, even so, he can understand the real feeling of North Korean in the books. The novels terat Love, Social jusitice, Life and so on. Such themes are easily shared by us.

He wrote a criticism of the novels in a magazine before.
But, his attempt looked difficult.
For Japanese, North Korea is a just kidnapping country. For facing a big political issue, nobody can have the interest in the culture of the country.
And, he had to think about the North Korean novelists.
The novelists must write about their real feeling under the pressure by the government. So, he worried that it would give a bad influence on them to focus on the good points easily shared by us. Brainwashers might hate such works.

I've never read the books in North Korea. So, I can't judge the quality of them. But, maybe to some extent, we can enjoy what they can enjoy. And, maybe to some extent, they can enjoy what we can enjoy. It seems to be intersting to find out the shareable parts of enjoyment between us.