This was already on Ask a Korean!, where I found it, and the giant Gizmodo, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t post photos of the North Korean Arcade. As AaK! says, ignoring how run down and 1982 this joint looks, it’s interesting that such places exist at all. I wonder how many varieties of rock they sell at the concession counter.

From here let me crudely maneuver you toward the latest piece by B.R. Myers, who writes about North Korea with greater insight than anyone out there.  ”After Kim Jong Il” is a popular topic these days, but as usual Myers cuts through the crap and again provides us with what should be the starting point for any diplomatic efforts from here on.

Plenty of misperceptions are bouncing around America’s newsrooms and think-tanks: that North Korea is a hard-line communist state, a Confucian patriarchy, a “rational actor” frightened by a bullying America, a theocracy devoted to a weird cult of self-reliance, and so on. While each of these fallacies contradicts the rest, all of them keep us from grasping the implacability of North Korea’s hostility to the outside world. In fact, the country’s true ideology is a race-based, paranoid nationalism. To put its myths in a nutshell: The Korean people are too pure-blooded, and therefore too virtuous, to survive in this evil world without a parental leader. Note that oddly androgynous word “parental.” Because the Korean race is born good, it has no need for an educating father figure like Stalin or Mao; instead, Kim Jong Il appears in the personality cult as more of a maternal figure. The function of this “great mother,” as the official news agency acclaimed him in 2003, is not to teach, but simply to nurture and protect. The so-called Mother Party sees its own function in much the same terms.

I was a little disappointed that my usual trusty Economist didn’t offer any of Myers’s perspectives in its recent Special Report on the Koreas, entitled The Odd Couple. Don’t get me wrong, the series is still worth reading, but it meanders in a few obvious topics — Lee Myung-bak was neutered by the beef protests, South Korea is an export economy, and the lamely titled Reformed Characters, which is supposed to illustrate how South Korea’s chaebol are on the road to, well, reformation. Wishful thinking, as the story itself points out toward the end when it runs down the recent presidential pardons for evildoers from SK and Hanwha.

I did, however, find the shorter piece Contested Grounds, very interesting. Apparently China is laying claim to Mount Paektu, a volcano that straddles the boarder of North Korea and China. Just to give you an idea of what Paektu means to Korea history/mythology:

This was the area of one of Korea’s three founding kingdoms, Koguryo, which flourished between 37BC and 668AD. Koreans have an unshakable belief in their bloodlines, and most insist that holy Mount Paektu is the fount of their culture and myth. Tangun, Korea’s mythical founder, was born on its slopes, and Kim Jong Il, in his official biography, made sure he followed suit.

Well, China wants to hold the 2018 winter Olympic there. Huh? Seems like a bit of a bigger deal that Dokdo, which the article also mentions.

Emotions ran high this summer over the rocks, known as Dokdo in South Korea and Takeshima in Japan, when the Japanese education ministry reminded textbook writers that they were formally incorporated into Japan in 1905, when Korea was forced to cede the conduct of its foreign policy to Japan. Outraged Koreans claim historical rights to the islets going back more than a millennium.

Actually the tone in the audio version on that last line is a little derisive.

Note: The Gizmodo post also links to a Soviet arcade that makes the North Korean one look downright futuristic.