Jeenee Jun / Journal of Peace and Unification 10(3) 61-82 61 Journal of Peace and Unification 10(3), pp.61-82 ISSN: 2233-9671 © 2020 by Ewha Institute of Unification Studies doi: https://doi.org/10.31780/jpu.2020.10.3.61 North Korean Heroine Epics of the Early 2000s: A Case Study of the North Korean TV Drama Hannah's Echo1 Jeenee Jun1 1. First Author Assistant Professor, Hankyong National University, Republic of Korea, Email: [email protected] Received on 16 October 2020. Reviewed on 17 October 2020. Accepted on 17 November 2020. Abstract This article analyses the North Korean TV drama Hannah's Echo (Hanna-ui Meari, 2002), which was produced following the signing of the North-South Joint Declaration on June 15, 2000. This series dramatizes the lives of Gang Gyu-chan, chairperson of the Jeju Island branch of the Workers’ Party of South Korea, and his wife Go Jin-hui, director of the women’s division of the party. In the early 1990s, Go Jin-hui’s legacy was revived in North Korean novels and television drama to reinforce North Korea’s ideology of self-reliance and bolster public confidence in achieving autonomous reunification. This paper analyses how Hannah's Echo contributed to the construction of North Korean unification discourse, focusing on the representation of female heroines in North Korean popular media. Keywords : June 15th North-South Joint Declaration, North Korean unification dis- course, North Korean television drama, Jeju Uprising, female heroine 1 * This research has been supported by the AMOREPACIFIC Foundation. ** I presented this research at the 8th Korean Screen Culture Conference and“the Transnational North Korea”Conference in 2019. *** I wish to thank Max J. Balhorn for helping with the translation process. 61 62 North Korean Heroine Epics of the Early 2000s: A Case Study of the North Korean TV Drama Hannah's Echo I. Introduction This article discusses the North Korean television drama Hannah’s Echo (Hanna-ui Meari, 2002), a twelve-episode television series produced in the early 2000s and broadcast on Korean Central Television. The series drama- tizes the events of the Jeju Uprising, an armed rebellion by citizens and anti- imperialist fighters on Jeju Island in 1948 in defiance of the division of the country between North and South and plans to hold a separate general election in South Korea. In the following decades, various literary and filmic adapta- tions of the Jeju Uprising have been produced in both South and North Korea. However, the North Korean TV drama Hannah’s Echo is unique in that it was produced during an atmosphere of peace following the proclamation of the North-South Joint Declaration on June 15, 2000 (hereafter “Joint Declara- tion”)—an event which preceded a historic thawing in the decades-long ide- ological standoff between the North and South. This essay places the text within the context of changing North-South relations in the early 2000s in order to demonstrate how this drama functioned as a propagandistic spectacle that popularized North Korean unification discourse in the early 2000s. In South Korea, a committee tasked with uncovering the truth of the Jeju Uprising defined the incident as follows: “The Jeju Uprising began with pro- tests on March 1, 1948 and culminated in an armed citizen uprising on April 3, 1948. The suppression of the uprising led to the loss of many citizens’ lives” (National Committee for Investigation of the Truth about the Jeju 4.3 Events, 2003). In South Korean literature and popular culture, violence committed by the state against Jeju residents has been dealt with in Hyun Gi-yeong’s novel Suni Samchon (Uncle Suni, 1978), the documentary Binyeom (Jeju Prayer, 2013), and the theatrical film Jiseul (2012). Recently, genre films such as Munyeogul (The Chosen: Forbidden Cave, 2015) and the musical Yeo- myeong-ui Nundongja (Eyes of Dawn, 2019) have further raised the profile of the incident in popular culture. In North Korea, contrastingly, the state de- fines that uprising as “an anti-American struggle to save the nation led by the people of Jeju Island on April 3, 1948, in defiance of the illegitimate election in South Korea concocted by the American invaders” (Encyclopedia of North Korea, 2000). Yang Ui-seon, author of the North Korean novel Hannah’s Echo, described the Jeju Uprising as “the first uprising in the South against the Americans following liberation” (Yang, 2000). Likewise, commentary ac- companying the final episode of the television dram Hannah’s Echo explained Jeenee Jun / Journal of Peace and Unification 10(3) 61-82 63 that the drama was made to reinforce that “our eyes will not sleep and our voices will not be extinguished until unification echoes ceaselessly in the spirit of the North-South Joint Declaration.” As can be seen, the memory of the Jeju Uprising has taken on different ideological meanings in North and South Korea. In South Korea, the memory of the Jeju Uprising has centered on the mourning of victims. In North Korea, references to the uprising stress the anti-imperial consciousness of the Jeju people. However, in both countries, the legacy of his tragic event serves as a reminder that despite the peninsula having been liberated from Japanese co- lonial rule in 1945, the legacy of imperialism continues to weigh heavily on the peninsula. II. Hannah’s Echo and the Geopolitics of the North-South Joint Declaration The drama Hannah’s Echo is based on a novel of the same title written by North Korean author Yang Ui-seon (Yang, 2000). The novel and its television adaptation were produced amidst an atmosphere of peace following the Joint Declaration and sought to glorify the achievements of Kim Jong-il. Indeed, both texts reflect Kim Jong-il’s stance on unification discourse during the early 2000s. Kim Jong-il stated that literature must “take up the important task of revolution in South Korea and the unification of the fatherland.” It is in this context that writer Yang Ui-seon published Hannah’s Echo. Yang (2000) said that his motivation for writing the novel was “a desire for unification above all else”. Two years after the novel’s publication, the drama Hannah’s Echo premi- ered on Korean Central Television in North Korea and was adapted into twelve episodes. The television series was written by Lee Anhui, directed by state merited artist Sin Jeong-nam, and produced by the Korean Central Broadcasting Committee. State merited North Korean actor Oh Gyeong-il was cast in a leading role, and it features state merited singers, including Seok Ran-hui. This drama was introduced to South Korean audiences in the mid- 2000s. As tensions between the North and South eased, South Korean state broadcaster KBS created the Unification Broadcasting Research Center for the purpose of providing information on North Korea and introducing the public to North Korean television dramas. The drama Hannah's Echo was introduced to South Korean audiences as part of this effort (Lee, 2006). 63 64 North Korean Heroine Epics of the Early 2000s: A Case Study of the North Korean TV Drama Hannah's Echo The narrative centers on historical figures Gang Gyu-chan, chairperson of the Jeju Island branch of the Workers’ Party of South Korea, and his wife Go Jin- hui, director of the women’s division of the party. After defecting to North Korea, the two Jeju Island natives become delegates at the first North Korea National People's Congress. During the Korean War, they return to the South to fight as partisans, where it is believed they died. After their deaths, they were each honored as “Heroes of the Republic” and were buried in the Patri- otic Martyrs’ Cemetery. Although Gang Gyu-chan received considerable at- tention in the press after the couple’s defection to the North, Go Jin-hui’s memory as a war heroine was not popularized until the early 1990s. In South Korea, discussions of Yang Ui-seon’s Hannah’s Echo have oc- curred within the larger frame of what can be called the genre of “Jeju Upris- ing literature.” This framing has served to polarize South and North Korean literary works on the Jeju Uprising, and has generally neglected to place these works within context of the North-South politics of the early 2000s and the objectification of South Korea. Moreover, scholars are yet to incorporate tel- evision dramas into this discussion. South Korean scholar Kim Dong-yun classifies the characters of the novel into three types: armed rebels, minjung (the people), and American military personnel. According to Kim, the novel demonstrates that North Korea’s framing of the Jeju Uprising is heavily in- formed by North Korea’s “Democratic Base Theory,” which promises to “lib- erate” the Korean continent (Kim, 2003). Scholar Go Myeong-cheol com- pares Hannah’s Echo to three South Korean novels from the 2000s that deal with the Jeju Uprising, noting that the North Korean novel places particular emphasis on internal disagreements between armed rebels as well as “Amer- ica’s strategy for Asia”—aspects which are absent from the South Korea nov- els (Go, 2008). Amidst heightened expectations for unification in the early 2000s, North Korean media devoted considerable effort to relaying the significance of the North-South Joint Declaration to its citizens (Rodong Shinmun, 2000). In North Korea, the Joint Declaration was perceived as having transformed an atmosphere of distrust and confrontation between the two nations into one of reconciliation and cooperation, and the declaration was interpreted as “a shared symbol for the people” that guaranteed autonomy and independence from foreign powers during the process of achieving reunification (Rodong Jeenee Jun / Journal of Peace and Unification 10(3) 61-82 65 Shinmun, 2000; Rodong Shinmun, 2001).