북한의 백두산 인식 변화와 함의

Abstract

In the 1960s, North Korea faced internal and external crises such as the Sino-Soviet dispute and the implementation of a parallel economic and defense policy. These internal and external crises made the North Korean leadership reflect on the difficult times when they led the anti-Japanese guerrilla army at the end of Japanese colonial rule. North Korea mythologized Kim Il-sung’s anti-Japanese armed struggle, promoted it as a war criminal to emulate the guerrilla-style life, and demanded that the people learn and live by its style. In the process, Baekdu Mountain began to be symbolized as a sacred place of anti-Japanese revolutionary tradition. Baekdu Mountain is a place that reminds us of the revolutionary tradition of the anti-Japanese armed struggle, and is depicted as a symbol of the so-called ‘Baekdu bloodline’ and a medium to justify hereditary succession. For this reason, the majority of research on Mt. Baekdu has tended to interpret it in relation to the process of establishing North Korea’s revolutionary tradition or its idolization. However, Baekdu Mountain was not portrayed as the site of Kim Il-sung’s anti-Japanese armed struggle or stereotyped as a symbol for the idolization of Kim Il-sung’s family immediately after liberation. Even in the early 1950s, Baekdu Mountain was depicted as an object to be developed and the territorial belonging of it was confirmed, and in the process of building a ‘guerrilla state’, it was also a stage that had to be occupied first in the competition between Kim Il-sung and the Gapsan faction. In addition, after the dissolution of the Cold War, it became a symbol of the unification ofNorth and South Korea as well as a medium to unite the people in the midst of a systemic crisis