South Korean TV Show Invents Friendly Rivalry With North

South Korean TV Show Invents Friendly Rivalry With North
By Gordon Fairclough
The Wall Street Journal
May 2, 2005
SEOUL, South Korea -- The hottest Saturday-night TV program in South Korea this season has featured a quiz pitting elementary-school students from North Korea against kids from the South.

The North Korean contestants -- models of socialist propriety, with identical white shirts and red kerchiefs knotted around their necks -- regularly beat their more-fashionable rivals from the capitalist South.

The North's kids are good at math, nature and history. They know Korea's first capital was Pyongyang, not Seoul. They also can tell you that a cut-up sea slug will regenerate if thrown back in the ocean. The South Korean kids are stronger in astronomy, and did better naming famous inventors, explorers and musicians.

The show, called "Exclamation Point," looks like a milestone in North-South cooperation, but it actually is a triumph of skillful editing. It melds footage from a quiz show aired last year in North Korea with scenes shot in a studio in Seoul, to produce what looks, at first glance, like a head-to-head competition.

"Exclamation Point" is the latest in a string of South Korean TV shows and movies to portray Northerners as friendly, if a bit eccentric, while at times -- critics say -- glossing over unpleasant truths about the repressive Pyongyang regime.

Kim Jin Kuk, the highest-scoring North Korean contestant on the quiz show 'Exclamation Point'

A recent hit film, for example, follows the comic adventures of two North Korean marines accidentally blown ashore in South Korea. As the pair desperately try to get home, they befriend a girl in trouble and rescue her by outfighting South Korean hoodlums.

That's a drastic departure from the propagandistic depictions of North Koreans as blood-thirsty automatons poised to invade the South that dominated the South Korean media during decades of Cold War hostility and anticommunist military governments in Seoul.

This pop-culture U-turn, along with warming relations between the Koreas, is softening South Koreans' attitude toward their erstwhile enemy. It is also widening a perception gap with the U.S. about the threat posed by North Korea, even as tensions mount over the North's nuclear-weapons programs.

In a February Gallup poll, Americans identified North Korea, along with Iraq, as their country's biggest enemies. Polls of South Koreans, by contrast, find that fewer and fewer believe the North poses an immediate threat.

During a visit to Pyongyang in 2003, Kim Young Hee, the creator of "Exclamation Point," saw a North Korean quiz-show series and was determined to bring it to the South. "In the South there is still an unnecessarily negative view of the North," says Mr. Kim. "I wanted to change that."

The South Korean producers took footage from episodes that aired in North Korea last year and edited in new scenes shot in Seoul, on a set that is a replica of the North Korean stage. The producers have redubbed parts of the Northern emcee's dialogue to make it appear as if she is bantering with the South Korean host. Casual viewers often think the quiz is a direct competition, despite disclaimers to the contrary.

Lee Jae Kyoung, a communications professor at Ewha Women's University in Seoul, says South Korea's media outlets have fallen in behind the government policy of reconciliation and cooperation with North Korea. He says he fears shows such as "Exclamation Point" will lead to a false "romanticization of the North."

Mr. Kim, the show's producer-director, says he believes it "reflects the reality of North Korea." And he dismisses critics as "those who think of North Korea as competition, or even as the enemy."

The show has many supporters, but also detractors. "If we don't see things like this, how can we change our views of North Korea?" asks Chae Yong Suk, a 31-year-old trading-company executive and fan of the show. "I think it will help shrink the culture gap between North and South."

Other viewers, however, complain that the quiz show is unfair, because the quiz questions, which are drawn from the original, North Korean version of the show, favor the North and make the South Korean kids look bad. "Only a few Southerners, who have strange beliefs, think that we must learn about the North," says Lee Eui Kyum, in a posting on the program's Web site.

The show reveals plenty of differences between the two Koreas. The dialects spoken on either side of the demilitarized zone have diverged. South Koreans have adopted many English words. North Koreans haven't. Sometimes, the show resorts to subtitles to explain what the Northerners are saying.

The North Korean children seldom smile, and they often use military language. Answering a vocabulary question, kids from the North rattled off the words "arsenal," "military supplies," "platoon leader," "battalion commander," and "detached force." The South Korean children, dressed in colorful, brand-name clothing, laugh and joke with the moderator.

In February, the show went on the road to film a series of special episodes at Mount Kumgang, a tourist area in the North that allows Southerners a drive-through safari view of life across the border. From the windows of their bus, the South Korean contestants caught glimpses of villages with thatched-roof houses and ox carts in the fields and armed soldiers posted along the roads.

Ten-year-old Choi Joon Hyun says he was impressed by what he saw. "The people work together. They walk around together. They always seem to be together. I like that." He also observed: "On the South side, people waste a lot of energy. We go by car even short distances. Here, they save energy and go by bicycle everywhere."

Another boy, Han Su Kyo, says, "I thought the people from the North would be very different." Now, he says, "I can see that we're similar. I feel like we are one people."

That message is clearly a focus of the questions for the special episodes, which point out that North Korea, like the South, has a lottery and celebrities. Kids there also watch "Tom & Jerry."

But while South Korea tries to embrace the North, educate its people about life there and expand contacts between the two Koreas, the Pyongyang government fights to insulate its people from Southern influence. Outside the hotel where the South Korean contestants stayed in the North, a sign carried an exhortation to North Korean workers in big, red letters: "Let's Keep Living Our Way!"

--Lina Yoon contributed to this article.