Maria Osetrova PhD

The chapter discusses the relations between nationalism, national cuisine, and gender, and the way these relations are manifested in mass media based on an analysis of the Sikkaek series (a graphic novel written by Hur Young Man, its two film adaptations, and a same-titled TV drama). Building on the idea of gastronationalism - which claims that a nation can be understood by its foodways - the chapter demonstrates that the intensification of this type of cultural nationalism in Korea with its peak in the late 2000s led to the revision of the image and gender identity of those representing the national food, with male figures beginning to gain more authority. The chapter argues that though the four Sikkaek versions have different authors, media formats, and production teams, all applied the same dichotomous structure of gender roles to authenticate national foodways: a "strong" figure of a male professional chef as a defender of Korean cuisine and a "weak" figure of a mother as the embodiment of a Korean tragic past. The chapter concludes that such a gendered imagination of the national foodways enhances the gender inequality in the domain of national dietary practicies and does not fully correspond with reality.

Russia Focus (RF) is a Russian periodical that from 2012 to 2017 was publishing the news and other materials about Russia in Korean language for readers in the Republic of Korea. RF was a part of an international multimedia project Russia Beyond the Headlines (RBTH) that belonged to the Russian governmental newspaper “Rossiiskaya gazeta”. RBTH was created in 2007 to internationally promote the Russian official position on the country’s political, economic, society and business issues.
RF main activity was: 1) preparing printed supplements to the Korean newspaper JoongAng Ilbo that were published every two months (the circulation ranged from 1 million 400 thousand to 900 thousand copies); 2) managing a daily updated website. Besides this, the RF editorial team led special projects: for example, in 2013 together with the Korean-Russian Business Council it published a collection of exclusive interviews with influential Russian politicians, economists, representatives of academic and cultural life. Also from 2014 to 2015 RF supervised the business-oriented magazine R Magazine.
The article aims at writing the history of RF, describing its’ successes and difficulties, discussing the reasons of its’ closure and evaluating its’ contribution to the Russian-Korean humanitarian cooperation.
The article shows that RF was a unique project that actively deepened the understanding between Russians and Koreans, induced Korean interest towards Russia. The important feature of the project was the fact that it consolidated all the groups of people who in one way or another were engaged in Russian-Korean interactions at that period but worked separately from each other.
The author argues that the closure of RF in 2017 deprived the Russian side of an important and effective instrument that had the potential to fill and enrich the image of Russia in Korean mass consciousness, make Russia more understandable and attractive for Koreans.

The article analyses the present condition of the connections between Russia and Republic of Korea in the sphere of culture and art since the moment of the establishment of their diplomatic relations in 1990. The author shows the main areas of cultural interest and cooperation, highlights the success stories of the period but at the same time focuses the attention on the problematic points that prevent the bilateral cultural contacts from progressive development. These points are 1) low level of mutual awareness about the cultures of each other, 2) poor quality of the popularization of the countries’ cultures through the official and public channels, lack of systematic efforts from both sides 3) miscommunication and misunderstanding difficulties. After explaining the reasons for these limitations, the author suggests the possible ways to overcome them and points out the areas that have high potential for boosting the cultural connections. The main resources for the analysis are the data that the author received during organizing and conducting Russian-Korean Forum of humanitarian contacts “Most druzhbi” (from 2014 until the present time), as well as public opinion surveys conducted among Russians and Koreans (2013, 2016-2018), reports on the bilateral cultural events and projects from other institutions.

National food traditions play an important role in national identity, and therefore constitute an effective instrument in a state’s cultural politics and the construction of its global image. Since the division of the Korean Peninsula into two independent states in 1948, Korean cuisine has developed in two separate directions. Today, two variations of Korean cuisine not only differ in their official names (hansik in the South, chosŏn ryori in the North) but also transmit different cultural and ideological messages both within and beyond the two Korean states.
    This chapter examines the construction of the national food narrative in the DPRK and its relationship to North Korean ideology. It shows that the state’s ideological apparatus often mobilizes food topics to address its immediate problems. To do that, it may invent food traditions by connecting new food practices with the country’s leader (his words, images, writings or biography), and thus legitimizing and institutionalizing these new practices into North Korean social reality. At first glance, the main reason for such inventions might appear to be the DPRK’s notorious food shortages, especially in the 1990s. However, a close study of the North Korean national food narrative reveals that there are more diverse reasons. By stressing the idea of improving people’s nutrition and the key role the state leader plays in this process, North Korean national food discourse reinforces the connection between the people and power. The state leader in this respect not only takes on the role of “the father feeding his children” but is also promoted as the (re)creator of national food history and traditions. To prove this argument and to show the actual mechanics of the invention process, various examples of invented food traditions are presented including the one that the author defines as guerrilla cuisine – the contemporary North Korean eating practices which propaganda relates to the time of Kim Il Sung’s anti-Japanese guerrilla struggle.
    In this way, the invention of new food traditions can be interpreted as an instrument for unifying the North Korean people. These new elements in North Korean food culture and imagery help the regime to construct a new, chuch’e-styled worldview and life patterns that will contribute to the formation of the accepted national identity on a very basic level – that of dietary culture.

В последние годы в крупных городах России – в первую очередь в Москве – растёт интерес к корейской кулинарии. Ещё в начале 2016 года эту тенденцию остроумно подметил известный досуговый журнала TimeOut, написав, что «за последние два года корейская кухня из личного дела диаспоры превратилась в модное московское явление. Кимчи, конечно, вряд ли когда-нибудь займёт место суши, но время научиться отличать панчан от пибимпапа определённо пришло». Действительно, если ещё в 2000х гг., да и раньше, корейские рестораны можно было пересчитать по пальцам и ходили туда в основном корейские экспаты и их знакомые, то сегодня блюда корейской кухни можно увидеть в меню популярных сетевых кафе и ресторанов, рассчитанных на самый широкий круг горожан. Как это произошло и что может помочь корейской кухне стать ещё более узнаваемой среди русских любителей азиатской еды?

The paper attempts to find out whether the so-called invented traditions exist in the DPRK, what their specifics are, why and how they got formed. First, the paper overviews the general evolution of the official discourse on national culture and traditions in the DPRK and traces the most noticeable changes and trends. As an example of the invented tradition the paper discusses the hypothesis suggesting that the Korean dish Pyeongyang-raengmyeon since the 1980s was being transformed into a symbolic dish of the North Korean culinary tradition and the main gastronomic brand of the contemporary DPRK.

North Korean restaurants operating outside the DPRK is an interesting example to explore the meaning of national cuisine as an instrument of the state official politics of national cultural identification. While the DPRK is still quite closed in its contacts with the outside world such restaurants become practically the only place where the country can demonstrate on the regular base its culture, traditions and way of life to the broad international audience and thus transmit certain cultural and ideological messages using the language of national foodways. Under such conditions we can regard these restaurants not just the places to taste Korean food but in a sense an instrument of public diplomacy of the DPRK.
The paper presents the results of the field research conducted by the author in two North Korean restaurants (Koryo and Reungrado) operating in Moscow at present time. The main purpose of the field research was to investigate how these restaurants present Korean cuisine for foreign clientele, what extra-culinary meanings they transmit and in this regard, if it is possible to see their activity as an instrument of public diplomacy of the DPRK.             
The author argues that the sphere of national food culture is a terrain where we can trace the actual evidences of indirect (latent) inter-Korean cultural interaction in spite of the fact that on the surface both states declare the independence and authenticity of their vision of national culinary tradition. The author also asserts that in contrast to the previous decades, nowadays the DPRK has started to reconsider its attitude toward the cultural resource of the national foodways in order to use it more actively as an element of the official politics of national identification.