Using Moon Jae-in and Kim Jong-un’s ascent of Mount Paektu as a point of departure, this essay interprets the essence of Juche as wishful thinking and political fantasy.
It warns Japanese readers by tracing the structure of Korean Peninsula politics, the push for premature reunification, the possible withdrawal of U.S. forces from South Korea, and the resulting implications for the Japan-U.S. security framework.

2019-04-14
At the inter-Korean summit in September, he climbed the sacred Mount Paektu with President Moon Jae-in, a Juche-sympathizing leader from the South, and the two of them fully indulged in the feeling that they were the “masters of a unified Korea.”
Because it was a fantasy, both of them were in ecstasy.

This is a chapter I published on November 6, 2018, under the title:
The Juche-sympathizing regime in the South is strengthening its domestic authoritarianism in order to bring forward reunification.
Japanese people should be on guard.
The chapter I published on April 11, 2019, under the title Liberalist Political Science Will Turn into Fantasy ranked 57th in the official hashtag rankings in Mongolia.
What follows is a continuation of the previous chapter.

“Juche ideology” is nothing more than a wish.

This is what North Korea’s “Juche ideology” is.
In South and North Korea alike, people commonly say “manly” (namjatapge) and “womanly” (yojatapge), using the same suffix tapge, and they also say “like the master of the nation” (narae chuin tapge).
The reason is that it is a wish, because they cannot easily become masters of their own nation.
Korea allowed itself to be split and manipulated along the 39th parallel, asked the Ming, “May we attack them?” regarding the Manchus who abducted its people into slavery, despised those Manchus as barbarians, then submitted to them once they became the rulers of China as the Qing, and when the national treasury ran dry, it threw the burden of governing onto Japan.
After being liberated by the Soviet army, it became a puppet state, but after purging the pro-China and pro-Soviet factions, Kim Il-sung loudly sang out, “Man is the master of his own destiny,” and that was what came to be called “Juche ideology.”
At last, they had become masters of their nation.
That is why translating this word “master” as “protagonist” is a mistranslation.
It is fantasy because the very man who sang this fled as far as Tonghua in Manchuria during the Korean War.
That was an abandonment of the responsibility of a master.
Incidentally, Korea’s kings all fled from foreign invaders.
That is because, given the terrain of a “dead-end corridor,” it could never be defended.
As for King Injo of the Yi dynasty, records say that when Ganghwa Island, where there was a royal palace prepared for escape, was surrounded by Manchu forces, he froze “like a clay doll.”
Juche ideology is still fantasy even now.
Chairman Kim Jong-un has been immobilized by President Trump’s twin pistols of an end-of-war agreement and nuclear abandonment, together with the glare of Chinese President Xi Jinping, and he still cannot become the “master of the nation.”
At the inter-Korean summit in September, he climbed the sacred Mount Paektu with President Moon Jae-in, a Juche-sympathizing leader from the South, and the two of them fully indulged in the feeling that they were the “masters of a unified Korea.”
Because it was a fantasy, both of them were in ecstasy.

The empty political science of liberalists.

At such times, the “causal story” adopted by the Korean people is a delaying tactic.
They prolong a solution endlessly until the other side gives up, or until circumstances change.
The Juche-sympathizing regime in the South is strengthening its domestic authoritarianism in order to bring forward reunification.
Japanese people should be on guard.
If they prevail, a peace agreement will be signed while the North remains nuclear-armed, and since North and South will no longer be enemies, U.S. forces in South Korea will leave.
If that happens, the Japan-U.S. security line will retreat southward as far as Tsushima.
What a splendid discipline social science is.
It can reveal even such things.
And the results always come to reflect a stark and ruthless reality.
Not only scholars, but also journalists, bureaucrats, and politicians who have mastered the methods of social science are now active all over the world.
Their achievements are incorporated into their peoples as “causal stories,” and those peoples progress and become ever more clever.
Conversely, the humanities, which seek what is noble and solemn, will probably wither because they cost too much money.
No noble or solemn things will any longer be born upon this earth.
No one will continue to believe that there is any pre-established harmony or predetermined equilibrium point in world politics, and reality itself will become that way.
Liberalist political science will turn into fantasy.
(Furuta Hiroshi)