The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves-and Why It Matters

The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves-and Why It Matters B.R. Myers, Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2010. 200 pp. ISBN: 978-1-933633-91-6.

B.R. Myers's The Cleanest Race is an unreliable work. Beginning with the preface, one finds misrepresentation. Singling out North Korean Review, Myers makes the incredible claim that those associated with the journal "do not understand Korean well enough to read [North Korean] official texts" (12). What is the basis of this allegation when the NKR founder is originally from South Korea and a significant number of the journal editors and those who have published in it are native speakers of Korean? Reading requires discernment, but Myers makes rather odd translation choices, for example, "Homeland Liberation War" for choguk haebang chonjaeng and "jackals" for sungnyangi (39, 40). Choguk literally means "ancestor country," which has a male bias. North Korean texts use "fatherland." Moguk or omoni choguk is motherland. As for sungyangi, it is a dhole, a species of wild dog found in Korea, unlike the jackal, chaek'ol or chyak'al in Korean. North Korean sources render sungnyangi in English as "wolf."

The real problem, however, is Myers's alleged discovery that North Korean ideology is rooted in Japanese fascism. Replacing the official Juche ideology with his own idea of "paranoid, race-based nationalism," he says, "[North Korea has] an implacably xenophobic, racebased worldview derived largely from fascist Japanese myth," and, "They [the Hirohito cult and Kim Il Sung cult] are fundamentally alike, because they derive from a fundamentally similar view of the world" (109; emphasis in original). One does not have to...