Value changes of North Korean new generation and prospects

책 소개

Values are important not only to individuals but also to societies. Individual values work to a significant degree during the formation of a society, and to no small degree, they eventually affect the development and maintenance of that society. Naturally, as a member of a society, a person’s change of consciousness or changes in the set of values they hold can become the source of societal changes. Therefore, small individual changes are profound and meaningful in the study of the values of an entire population that form the society. The younger generation in North Korea is the center of their society. They show a sensitive reaction to changes in the society to which they belong. They also, like their counterparts from South Korea, have an important role in leading a future reunified Korea. Researching the changes in their set of value is necessary and significantly meaningful, not only for keeping track of the trends or the prospects for change in North Korean society, but also for considering the possibility of the reunification of the Korean peninsula and the two Koreas’ internal unification. The two Koreas’ internal unification is more likely to happen when, in advance, the two societies try to get over their differences and try to find a common identity with the help of this kind of research. According to a source, changes in North Korean values have been evident since the late 1980s and have become wider and deeper through the 1990s due to economic difficulties like food shortages. Changes in individual and societal values have been more distinct and more quickly apparent among this younger generation of North Koreans, and it is this trend that was deeply analyzed in the author’s thesis ‘The Values of the North Korean Younger Generation,’ which was released in December 1995. This research, however, analyzed related material only up to early 1995, when food shortages had just become known to the world. North Korea asked the international community for food aid in the mid-1990s, and it is known that since then, changes in the younger generation’s values have become more widespread and intense. The previous research, therefore, is insufficient to explain the current situation. Analyzing the North Korean younger generation’s values after 1995, when the food shortages became known to the world, and comparing the results of related previous research, this paper looks into the changing aspects and trends of the new values that emerged after the food shortages and explores prospects on the values held by future generations based on the researched factors of change. Questionnaires, in-depth interviews, and/or behavior observation can be used to analyze values, although the questionnaire is the most common method. Doing a questionnaire to analyze the North Korean young people’s values, however, is not appropriate since this method involves direct contact. Only an indirect way, therefore, is feasible for this research. Content analysis is an indirect research method and it is considered a proper method when the researcher’s material is limited to documents or when it’s difficult to obtain materials involved in or connected to the subject experience. This paper researched, using the content analysismethod, North Korean novels released after 1995. In order to prove or supplement the analyzed results, this research made good use of the relevant research previously undertaken, the results of in-depth interviews with North Korean defectors, here called new settlers, and the collection of new settlers’ testimonies and essays.

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