Today's episode delves into the national anthem of North Korea, known as "Aguka," and explores the complex history surrounding its creation. The host reflects on the intriguing yet uncomfortable experience of appreciating a song from a country often associated with oppression and isolation. As the discussion unfolds, the narrative highlights the surprising origins of North Korea as a communist state and the significant role of Kim Il Sung in shaping its history. The episode also touches on the geographical and cultural aspects of North Korea, contrasting it with South Korea and examining the impacts of historical events on both nations. Through this exploration, listeners gain insight into the anthem's lyrics and the broader significance of national identity in a politically charged context.

Yes, I know I pronounced subsistence every time and I will note in the next episode. Sorry folks.

Here is a piece of good news about the country:

https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/north-and-south-korea-have-begun-clearing-the-mines-in-the-dmz/

Also, EAT KOREAN FOODS:

https://www.tastewiththeeyes.com/2015/05/gochujang-chicken-adobo-chef-hooni-kim/

Sources:

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icY3PS6X-V8 Newscasters are the whitest people in the world, smh.
2. https://www.quora.com/Why-do-communist-countries-have-the-best-national-anthems 
3. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Historical_Dictionary_of_Democratic_Peop/rh5h4bZgkhEC?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=aegukka+pak+se-yong&pg=PA273&printsec=frontcover
4. https://archive.org/details/00book729884
5. Cumings, Bruce (2005). Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
6. Robinson, Michael E (2007). Korea's Twentieth-Century Odyssey. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
7. https://web.archive.org/web/20050318052905/http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Korea/GC16Dg03.html
8. Sohn, Won Tai (2003). Kim Il Sung and Korea's Struggle: An Unconventional Firsthand History
9. Lankov, Andrei (2002). From Stalin to Kim Il Sung: The Formation of North Korea 1945–1960. Rutgers University Press.
10. Robinson, Michael E (2007). Korea's Twentieth-Century Odyssey. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
11. Sang-Hun, Choe; Lafraniere, Sharon (27 August 2010). "Carter Wins Release of American in North Korea". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 30 June 2017.
12. Smith, Lydia (8 July 2014). "Kim Il-sung Death Anniversary: How the North Korea Founder Created a Cult of Personality". International Business Times UK. Archived
13. Lankov, Andrei (2002). From Stalin to Kim Il Sung: The Formation of North Korea 1945–1960. Rutgers University Press.
14. Lone, Stewart; McCormack, Gavan (1993). Korea since 1850. Melbourne: Longman Cheshire.
15. https://providencemag.com/2016/07/jerusalem-east-american-christians-pyongyang/ 
16. Seth, Michael J. (16 October 2010). A History of Korea: From Antiquity to the Present. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers (published 2010).
17. Buzo, Adrian (2002). The Making of Modern Korea. London: Routledge.
18. Blair, Clay, The Forgotten War: America in Korea, Naval Institute Press (2003).
19. "Writer remembered with national anthem". Pyongyang Times. THE PYONGYANG TIMES.
20. "Pak Se-yong". Korean Affairs Report No. 304: North Korea, Biographical Dictionary (Part II) (PDF). Washington, D.C.: Foreign Broadcast Information Service. 1983-08-24.
21. James E. Hoare (13 July 2012). Historical Dictionary of Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Scarecrow Press. 
22. Portal, Jane (15 August 2005). Art Under Control in North Korea. Reaktion Books. pp. 92–93. ISBN 978-1-86189-236-2.
23. 2010 Minerals Yearbook (PDF). United States Geological Survey.

Li, Jie (21 August 2002). "Some Discoveries of Fossils and Relics of Prehistoric Civilizations From Around the World". Pureinsight.

Hello and welcome to the Anthems podcast. Today we are going to a decidedly different place on earth than a tropical archipelago.

If I was at all clear about what was coming next, I'm not sure that people would want to listen or something. Maybe. Regardless, thank you for listening and welcome to today's show. Today's anthem is Aguka, or the patriotic song.

It's brought to you by my existential fear as a consumer of news in the 21st century. Seriously, this is the national anthem of North Korea.

I promise this is not a doom and gloom show and I present no opening for political debate and I'm trying not to present a strong political opinion, but im super afraid of the catastrophe that is probably going to happen someday regarding the peninsula. So the place has been on my mind. Apparently that means we get to learn about the national anthem there. Here we go.

North Korea, or more fully, the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea, is a country that I thought I knew more about than I did before getting into the reading for this. Most Americans that consume the news are familiar with the 38th parallel and maybe the red phone and stuff like that.

Most of us know about South Korea because that's where Samsung is and they're not actively trying to isolate themselves from the rest of the world. But given the nature of the so called Hermit kingdom, we've got some kind of an interesting story here.

First we've got to listen to the roughly two and a half minutes of the anthem. I feel awkward enjoying this song because of the country of origin, and it's almost certainly because of the culture I've grown up in.

Seriously, communist countries have excellent national anthems. I thought about it and did some googling, and I found a Quora answer that I agree with, and it makes sense.

Essentially, what the post says is that the best people at music want to continue to work with the best people in music, and in order to do that, one was forced to capitulate to the state in the form of patriotic pageantry when you are confined in an actual communist dictatorship. His potential insight leads me to my first surprise. I did not know that North Korea started off as a communist government.

My american ignorance about a situation it turns out that my country was directly involved in is a heavy feature of this episode, and something that we're almost certainly going to see again and again as I learn doing this show. Another surprise, or maybe just weird feature of this episode, is that it's going to have a sister one down the road.

When I cover South Korea, essentially the same set of events, or rather, a different part of the same set of events, will be viewed from a different but related perspective. It won't be right away, because, again, that won't have suspense if I told you what I was going to do.

Plus, it's going to be a tricky needle for me to thread. Maybe first let's figure out where in the world we are, and then I'll get into the timeline that I have figured out.

The 38th parallel is the most easily associated landmark in my mind that will help us locate North Korea. The most prominent thing I can think of for the average American along that line is roughly the Golden Gate Bridge. That's 37.8 on the longitude.

Start there and go west or left across the Pacific in a straight line.

As far as I can tell, there's nothing between there and Japan that has any people on it, at least unless someone has a secret pirate base or a clandestine government research lab or.

Or an uncharted and tiny Pacific island with indigenous people that are fortunate enough not to have learned about podcasting and all that other modern world stuff we're going through so much trouble for. Go left, get to Japan. Then the peninsula jutting off the top end of China is the korean peninsula.

The north and south are split kind of roughly along the 38th parallel. If you're not an american, laugh at me and just point at it on a map, because we're terrible at geography. At least I am.

When you get there, you will find a mountainous country bordered to the north by China and to the south by South Korea. The Yellow Sea and the Bay of Korea are on the west, and the Sea of Japan and Japan itself are to the east.

The country is roughly the size of England, slightly smaller, and shaped a bit differently. Obviously, most of the 26 million people live along the coastal plains.

The mountains of North Korea are grand, and they fill some sacred and significant places in old korean lore as well in the current dictatorial story, interestingly, the country is 70% forested and is 28th in forest integrity out of 192 countries surveyed. The climate is temperate, with summers as warm as 85 and winters as cold as nine in fahrenheit negative 13 and 29, respectively.

For folk that can think in metric two, the climate is mostly the consequence of the mountains and, you know, having seas on both sides. We're going to do some time jumping in a moment or two, but first we get to talk about etymology.

It's a subject I have no training in, but one that I find intensely interesting to hear and read knowledgeable people talk about. Aguka is a highly romanticized translation of the patriotic song.

You're going to need to look this up because there is simply no way for me to show you a korean character for this. But I can tell you that the north's version of the Alphabet is called Shozan gul and the souths is called Hang gul.

The anthem is also known by its insipid or its first few words. It's a new term for me, musically speaking. In the case of this anthem, the insipid is Ashiman Pinara. That's p I n n a r r a if you know Korean.

Or let the morning shine. One source defines ago as basically any song that is passionately patriotic about its country of origin.

So I guess all, or at least most of national anthems are in this category. At least ostensibly anyway.

And that leaves room for a bunch of other stuff as well, such as the stars and stripes forever, or whatever a non us version of that song would be. Please let me know what some very patriotic non anthem songs are in your country.

I was thinking, and since I've got to draw the line somewhere on the north and south narrative, and that the communist narrative, at least in the sense of North Korea, is really part of the post world War two narrative, I'm presented with a natural dividing line in a few ways.

But more importantly, I can keep most of the pre demilitarized situation as a discussion for the south korean narrative to come and consider most of of the post World War two korean story here.

So the story of this anthem is essentially the story about the rise of the guy that had it written.

So it's mostly the story of how the USSR set up the country because they put him in power and we're stopping well short of the state that the place is in today.

So that leaves us in place for the first time jump in the story of any real significance because at least some of the pre split north needs to be talked about.

Part of that was keeping the population engaged in substance farming when they weren't being forced to be miners. If you don't know what subsidence farming is, in most cases it is not very fun.

It's the kind of farming where small communities, groups, or even individual families do all of their own agricultural stuff and have no opportunity to participate in pretty much anything but that because it is tons of work and they make just enough to live. Besides, the agricultural situation, insular really was the operative term here.

They didn't have pretty much anything to do with western culture, with a gigantic exception that I thought actually would have been a bigger deal, but really kind of turned out not to be.

They were super christian, at least during the japanese occupation, it was very, very christian once it became what the western media knows as North Korea. There is a hostility in general to religion, and that almost always happens with the adoption of dictatorial communism.

The south I'm not sure about yet. We'll learn about that if it comes up.

If you take Kim Il Sung's biarwit face value as dictated by the north, we are currently discussing the most exceptional example of a human being that has ever walked.

Of course, that is silliness and nonsense that must exist for things to seem to function when one person is ostensibly in charge of an entire country.

With the advent of information technology and the Internet in general, the extremely not stupid people of the DPRK have been out in a cadre trying to edit Internet information. That said, most of their historical retcon is easily dismissed as such, but with anything historical, there are some fuzzy edges. That's fine.

We are getting to an explanation for the national anthem, so we don't have to deal with almost all of that if it isn't entertaining or germane to the narrative at hand. But I'm going to highlight a few things that are credible and make the rest of the story more sense.

And I'm going to talk about some stuff that is definitely made up. Just want to point that out and note Kim's parents were presbyterian ministers and they were heavily involved in the religious community.

Religion was in fact so entrenched that for a time Pyongyang was referred to as the Jerusalem of the east.

His father was an elder in the ministry, according to a few sources, and they were also, at least according to the official narrative, heavily involved in the anti japanese movement and were forced to flee Manchuria to avoid prosecution or persecution.

This actually is not all that implausible a thing for them to have to do, because a lot of people were fleeing the japanese imperial application to Manchuria and hiding there because Japan was being pretty terrible.

So we have another story that is at least somewhat wrapped up in the resistance because it does read that Kim's parents were legitimately involved in the anti japanese sentiment that had guerrilla movements growing throughout the region. It's not entirely clear what the nature of their involvement was, though this leads me to hazard the guess that it was something, but not thrilling.

So, like, just some boring stuff. Otherwise, it seems that the north would have tried to lie more clearly about it and get put out a message that I would have found when I looked.

And that was definitely where Kim decided to reject feudal korean ideas that his parents grew up with and embraced communism. This got him arrested and done with school and fully engaged in political activism. At 17 years old.

Of course, it was with the Chinese Communist Party, because in, I guess, a scarily accurate foreshadowing of events to come, the Korean Communist Party was kicked out of the comintern because they were too nationalistic. Regardless of the nation that he ended up in the communist party for, it seems that Kim had frowned his calling.

Now, I've waded through a great deal of straight up sanctioned lying about this guy, and that's been used to prop up the north korean narrative, but he was a legitimately notorious problem for the Japanese and a non trivial figure in the Chinese Communist Party. He did end up being installed as one of the USSR's puppet government leaders, even though he totally jumped ship on communism later.

The sources are unclear about what that actually means, so who knows?

The point is that Kim made a name for himself, so much of a name, in fact, that he was yanked out of Manchuria by the USSR and dumped into a small fishing village where the comm intern was training korean refugees for what they assumed was the coming communist revolution that was going to sweep the world.

This immediately freaked out the Americans, because my country was already, well, terrified of the communist threat. And the famed 38th parallel was proposed as the dividing line between the respective occupations.

The USSR immediately agreed to the dividing line, and then they did the same thing the USSR did at the time. They just moved right in and began an immediate attempt at spreading the revolution there.

They did it with the ostensibly grassroots people committees that popped up all over North Korea spontaneously just after the occupation began. This is another one of the moments in the show where the historical narrative, like, immediately and super quickly becomes wildly complicated.

To go from hanging out in a fishing village in the USSR, waiting for the Japanese to surrender, to figuring out who is going to write your new country's song, Lightspeed.

As per usual, I'm forced to thumbnail some large parts of history and ignore others because time is finite, and I am a long winded enough guy to start. What Russia was doing, and still does in a bunch of places, was complicating the stated United nations goal of a democratic government.

In this case, the democratic government they wanted was a reunited Korea.

They brought Kim and dozens of other korean nationals back to the country, and they introduced them as guerrilla war heroes that had kept the fight alive with nothing but their countrymen and patriotism in mind. Oh, and they all also happened to be well regarded officers in the Red army, and the resistance had actually a lot of help from the Red army.

The aforementioned spontaneous communist groups were consolidated, and there was the usual farce of democracy when a government like this is installed. To be clear, I am not trashing specifically communism here. That's just the thing I'm talking about right now. This is. That's more.

I have more of a general criticism of authoritarian systems, just to be clear.

They already had somebody installed as the head of the government. But that also means that we are almost done with Kim. What he did was very quickly build a military alliance, red dependence on the Soviet Union.

I'm not sure if we are gonna run into Kim Il sung again after the couple of other mentions he gets here, but I'm surprised every time I read for this. So who knows? We've got the anthem. I will go back and we'll talk a little bit about the guys that wrote it.

Like I said before, musically speaking, this is an anthem that I'm a fan of. I enjoy it. Honestly, as far as a patriotic north korean song goes.

And because that in my search history now there are patriotic north korean songs, this is essentially the single example that I can find and have heard. That doesn't just kind of tell you how wonderful the people in charge are in a poetic and astonishingly sad way.

It's not terribly shocking that he fled over the 38th to the ostensibly socialist north after the north south split. According to what I can find, it was solely because of his patriotism, because only socialism could truly unite and make the peninsula free.

Somewhere in between there, he got into politics and wrote a very patriotic set of lyrics that Kim Il sung approved of as the national anthem for his brand new country. The guy that wrote the music for iguca gets the nod for having a more interesting story, at least in my opinion. Our composer is Kim Wong Gyeong.

For clarity, I'm gonna use their entire name because two Kim's in the story confuses me. Thankfully, it's only two. It is a very common name in Korea.

Of course, the leader absolutely loved the thing, and he asked for a national anthem as a follow up, even sending the at that point, completely self taught Kim Won jung into Russia to be formally trained as a musician, and proceeded to move on to musical prominence in the DPRK.

It's not clear if he was composing the anthem and studying music at the same time, but I guess that's not all that important, because with that, we have gotten the national anthem for the Democratic Republic of North Korea, the patriotic song, and we manage to do it without getting entirely swept into the wild complication that is World War Two. I consider that a win, and hopefully the clarity that I feel comes through. Now I get to talk about the song itself for a bit.

I learned two new and related terms in my reading about the music for a gucka. The first half is played loudly and the second half is played softly on the sheet music. This is indicated by a little italic, MF and MP.

That means mezzo forte and mezzo piano, meaning somewhat loud and somewhat soft respectively. A guga is just one of those pieces of music that I really dig.

It's kind of a shame that it really only gets played in international settings where the north is represented and at the beginning of the broadcast day on their state tv.

It doesn't rise to the highly polished level of ridiculous propaganda that got the composer's first song literally carved into stone steps up a mountain leading to a monument. I think that's part of what makes this song so good lyrically. I'll read through the whole thing before I talk about them anymore.

As always, I will be doing this in English because Korea is another on the list of all the languages but English that I don't speak. But do note that the lyrics are written and performed in the native tongue. Fun fact, lady Raidicorn on the cartoon adventure time is speaking Korean.

Anyway, from an amount of words standpoint, we are again greeted with something fairly short.

And in the spirit of Mount Pak two, with the love of toil that shall never die, with a will of iron fostered by the truth will lead the whole world. By and by we have the might to foil the angry seas, our land more prosperous still shall be.

And as by the people's will we strive, Korea shall forever thrive. The sentiment is clear through the entire song. This is the best country and you wish you lived here.

The first verse speaks of a fair and pretty nation. I've looked it up and the northern part of Korea was not an ugly place before the split. And it retains some seriously cool natural beauty.

I have no idea what they're referring to here, other than assuming the obvious implication that they're the largest Korea, I haven't looked up how big the south is yet. So yeah, I came into this one aware that there is a rich and long cultural history in Korea, so that line makes sense.

But skepticism abounds when dealing with the hermit kingdom. So, gold and silver? Yes, actually, there are lots of.

Lots of mines with rich mineral deposits and precious metal deposits in the northeast, but they're hard to get to, and it's difficult for a heavily sanctioned nation to actually sell things efficiently. Apparently, otherwise they would probably have more money. Moving on, we again meet the deep cultural heritage.

The verse again refers to the continued existence of a people with a culture that goes back more than 30 times as far as mine. That's the US one. It's like nothing compared to something like Korea.

It's another place that I've discovered reading for this show that is a kind of stunning thing in the world. About a thousand years ago, the whole top of the mountain blew off and it left a massive caldera lake that feeds three rivers.

It is a cultural and spiritually significant mountain for Manchuria and Korea, and the people of the peninsula consider it their ancestral homeland.

The rest of the song is classic communist bravado, written eloquently in the original language. They were very, very good at doing that.

For me to try and pick the whole thing apart more thoroughly than that would be, I think, to belabor the point, and it's a point that I am pretty sure is well made and that the story is at least told here, maybe not well told. Hopefully you have also learned stuff, because I learned a lot in this one, and hopefully we don't hear something bad about North Korea in the news.

Anyway, the writing, recording and production for the show are done by me and I also wrote played the intro and outro music. The music was used with my permission unless otherwise noted. The anthems I play are public domain stuff.

My sources, other tasty bits I found and stuff are in the show notes. The most direct way to get to those notes is@anthemspodcast.com you can find me on Facebook and WhatsApp as the Anthemspodcast.

I'm not doing the rest of the social medias because I don't have time yet. Maybe ever.

You can email me corrections, comments, suggestions, ideas instructions concerns tell me how to do cool stuff, ask me questions, send me recipes from the countries that I have done for better or for worse. Oh, I'm sorry I didn't give you my email. It is anthemspodmail.com. for better or for worse.