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Staff reporter
More and more North Koreans can access the latest soap operas that were aired in South Korea just a couple of days earlier, according to North Korean defectors.
Some North Korea watchers claimed approximately 80 percent of North Koreans are being informed on what's going on outside the hermetic kingdom through radio or contraband CDs.
Prof. Park Jung-sook of Kyung Hee University in Seoul commented that the growing awareness of North Korean residents of the cultural codes and popular trends of their southern neighbor will help a unified Korea spend less time and money bridging the two very distant cultures.
In an interview with The Korea Times last Friday, she elaborated on how the Korean wave in the North will work in cutting so-called unification costs if the two Koreas become unified in the future.
``Regardless of how unification happens politically, a widespread sense of cultural sameness will cushion the inevitable shock and displacement and expedite the adjustment process,'' she said.
The Korean wave expert presented her insight on the role of Korean dramas and movies in narrowing what she called fault-line conflicts between the two nations at the Korea Vision Forum held at a hotel in Seoul last week.
It is illegal in the North to listen to anything other than state-run radio.
But North Korean defectors here testified that residents there are able to secretly tune in late at night.
They said that South Korean dramas, movies and actors have filtered through all strata of society.
Once Korean dramas first air in the South, they are copied on to CDs in China and then these CDs are sold to distributors who deal with North Koreans near the border between China and the North, according to them.
``I understand that hallyu or the Korean wave is not just a flash in the pan but a lasting society-wide phenomenon, despite the authorities there trying to ban their availability as well as top their circulation,'' Park said.
She used the term ``organic power'' to describe the bottom-up process of intensifying cultural interactions and its effect on a possible unified Korea in the future.
``Hallyu's popularity is a bottom-up process of individual choices that occur without specific and prior political intent,'' she said.
``Therefore its popularity in the North represents an organic consumer-driven process in which the main forces driving the process are individuals.''
It is not planned or directed anyway from the top-down, she added.
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