Ryu, Kyunga (Postdoctoral Researcher, Yonsei Institute for North Korean Studies, KOREA)
1. Daily Life in Hiroshima: Generation Over Nation
Knowing Hiroshima only for its tragic atomic history, I turned to the HPP fellowship to explore contemporary Japan and the essence of peace. I applied to expand my academic perspective and connect these insights to the peace process in Northeast Asia.
My HPP fellowship at the Hiroshima Peace Institute was cut short from the planned three months to just forty days, and began without any Japanese language preparation. Yet sharing a dormitory with undergraduate students proved an unexpected window into Japan, a neighbor at once close and distant. The language barrier was considerable, but thanks to students who reached out first, I found my footing in this unfamiliar routine sooner than I had anticipated.
What struck me most in daily life was the pervasiveness of Korean popular culture. During my stay, a general election for the House of Representatives took place, and a campaign poster featuring Fujiki Naohito (藤木直人)—the lead from a drama I once loved, Hotaru no Hikari—caught my eye. To my surprise, the dormitory students didn't recognize him at all; the actor and the drama meant nothing to their generation. Yet, these same students spoke enthusiastically about Korean idols, while bookstores were filled with Japanese magazines featuring Korean stars. In contrast, when I met a professor from Fukuyama University of my own age, we connected instantly, sharing a mutual recognition rooted in the same cultural era.
This contrast suggests that in a globalized world, generational belonging can be a more decisive axis of affinity than national origin. When borders are blurred by simultaneous media consumption, when one came of age may shape mutual intelligibility more powerfully than where one was raised. While I did observe social differences between Japan and Korea, the generational variable proved far more defining in personal encounters.
This realization inevitably turned my attention back to Korea. In a society of intensifying intergenerational tension, perhaps the conflict stems not from one side being wrong, but from the fact that each generation constructed its worldview under fundamentally different conditions. True understanding must begin with acknowledging this structural gap.
As a new semester begins, I will carry these reflections from Hiroshima into my classroom. But the deeper challenge remains: bridging the generational distance with my students — and learning to connect with them.
2. Researching North Korea: Insights Gained in Hiroshima
For a researcher of North Korea, Hiroshima is a peculiar place to find oneself. Since declaring the completion of its nuclear forces, North Korea has made nuclear weapons the hegemonic discourse underpinning its entire system — most recently illustrated by Kim Jong-un's reference to "nuclear" over fifty times in his work report at the Ninth Party Congress of the Korean Workers' Party in February 2026. North Korea argues that nuclear capability is the only means of deterring war and guaranteeing the security of its regime. To me, as someone who studies North Korea, Hiroshima seemed at first to stand on the opposite side of that argument.
While making my way through the exhibits at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, I stopped in front of materials I had not expected to find. Among the victims of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were Koreans who had been brought to Japan as forced laborers and conscripted soldiers under Japanese imperial rule. As I continued my research, I also discovered that North Korea had established the Korean A-bomb Sufferers Association for Anti-Nuclear Peace, and that in the mid-1980s it had hosted the Pyongyang International Conference for a Nuclear-Free, Peaceful World. Hiroshima and North Korea were connected far more closely than I had imagined.
I had initially approached Hiroshima's peace and anti-nuclear discourse as something fixed and settled. But as I read through academic papers and walked through the exhibitions, that assumption quickly changed. Hiroshima's nuclear discourse has in fact been continuously reconstructed — shaped dynamically by the activism of atomic bomb survivors and anti-nuclear civil society, the structural constraints of the U.S.-Japan alliance, and Japan's national development strategies.
At this point, I found myself stepping back from a simple framing of Hiroshima versus North Korea as "anti-nuclear versus pro-nuclear." Looking more closely at the roots of both discourses, there is a surprisingly similar underlying logic. Hiroshima says: "Because we are victims of nuclear weapons, we speak against them for the sake of survival." North Korea says: "We must possess nuclear weapons in order to survive." The directions are diametrically opposed, yet both discourses share the same starting point — the anxiety of survival and the fear of insecurity.
Where, then, do they diverge? Hiroshima's discourse expanded the experience of victimhood into a universal language, reaching outward and toward international anti-nuclear solidarity. North Korea's discourse, by contrast, turned the same logic of survival inward, hardening into a tool for regime legitimation. The question I found myself newly focused on in Hiroshima is precisely this process of divergence — why, how, and in what context did North Korea's nuclear discourse come to take the hegemonic form it holds today?
I have conducted my research by viewing North Korea’s nuclear discourse as a dynamic process rather than a fixed outcome. Moving forward, I hope that the insights gained from the Hiroshima experience will expand the horizons of my work and contribute, however modestly, to the process of fostering lasting peace in Northeast Asia beyond the Korean Peninsula.