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Understanding North Korea: Rimjin-gang Citizen Journalists out to cure the “Sick Man of Asia”?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 May 2025

Suzy Kim
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Back in 2008, a small but significant piece of news circulated in South Korea about a magazine “secretly published by North Korean journalists” as one headline read. This was hardly covered in the Western media, but it seems the news has finally reached across the Pacific with the publication of the magazine's first English edition in October 2010. On the evening of October 18, 2010 Ishimaru Jiro – editor and publisher of Rimjin-gang magazine – was invited to speak at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at NYU in “a discussion about journalism in and about North Korea” (according to the event flyer). The Nation published an article on November 15, 2010, seductively titled “North Korea's Citizen Journalism” featuring the publication.

Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 8 , Issue 49 , December 2010 , e3
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2010

References

Notes

1 Rimjin-gang: News From Inside North Korea (Osaka: Asiapress Publishing, 2010) All subsequent page references from the magazine are given in the body of the text in parentheses.

2 After the fourth issue of Rimjin-gang, North Korean defectors in South Korea involved in the magazine launched their own magazine with funding from the US National Endowment for Democracy. This publication titled, Imjingang, is thus more openly identified with defector sources. According to Ishimaru, Rimjin-gang declined NED funding in order to maintain journalistic integrity. The first English edition is a translation of selections from the first four issues published in Japanese.

3 When asked about such overlap, Ishimaru relayed anecdotes of the kind of jokes North Koreans tell him. He reports to have heard North Koreans say, “Oh, if only colonial rule had never ended” or “If only North Korea could become part of China's Yanbian Prefecture.” It is difficult to know what to make of these “jokes” without fully knowing the circumstances under which they were told, but the anecdotes reveal more about the kind of people Ishimaru is working with than North Koreans as a whole.