Earlier this afternoon, this video titled "How North Korea got so crazy" resurfaced on Vox's Facebook page. Relatively short and vague, the clip states quite matter-of-factly that North Korea is "the last holdover of Japanese fascism" and not a state clinging to "Soviet-style communism." The video makes no effort to expand on this, so I did some digging and discovered that their reference was this book. From the description:
Examining North Korean books, news broadcasts, and films, Myers finds that the country's supremacist propaganda can be traced to imperial Japan, which sought to convince Koreans that they were part of the "world's purest race." Myers acidly discredits Western interpretations of North Korea as "hard-line communist" or "Confucian," noting the prevalence of maternal rather than paternal imagery and the societal scorn for the former Soviet bloc. Esoteric cultural markers-e.g., the heavy use of flashbacks in film and literature-are mined for compelling clues to the North Korean sensibility.
This is the first time that I've heard someone argue (in popular discourse or otherwise) that North Korean ideology had anything other than Stalinist/Maoist influences. After some cursory searches, I haven't found anything scholarly that strongly agrees with this analysis yet.
Did Imperial Japanese propaganda really have any significant influence over the development of North Korea's ideological path?
I read that book. what the author was basically saying about this issue is that imperialist, fascist Japan had been ruling Korea for decades when Kim Il-Sung took power. They had therefore had decades of indoctrination--almost 2 generations--into imperialist Japanese dogma about the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, with its emphasis on an all-powerful leader who ruled with religious mandate. And that there was a hierarchy of peoples across Asia with Japan's mandate to rule them and, importantly, to free them from Western imperialism. Everyone was educated in school about this dogma so it would have been pervasive.
I don't think Myers is saying there's no communist, Stalinist influence. I think the point he's making is a novel one--emphasizing fascist Japan's role in teaching North Koreans a particular way of thinking that greatly influenced how they looked at the role of leader, and how they submitted to ongoing totalitarianism, which made Kim Il-Sung's oppressions seem less of a difference from their lives before Kim Il-Sung. But it sounds like some interpret that as meaning that he discounts communist or Stalinist influence. I don't think he's discounting their influence, it's more like he's discounting them as the sole explanation for North Korean government and culture. It's been well-established that North Korea is communist and Stalinist, but he wants to show that there is this other key influence that has not received due attention.
It's important also to state clearly that North Koreans don't in any way, explicitly or implicitly, believe in the teachings of Japanese fascism. North Koreans are extremely hostile to Japan. It's just that, once taught that there was this all powerful leader (the Japanese Emperor), it was easier to convince them to transfer those thoughts to a new leader, Kim Jong-Il.
In making his assertions, it's important to see the context in which he is saying them. There are certain concepts that people frequently use to interpret and describe East Asian cultures. These tropes have been used extensively in discussing North Korea, which otherwise has a paucity of data to base things on due to difficulty in getting access to people there. Myers is bringing up a point that in hindsight is obvious but that was not being widely used as a lens through which to interpret some of the realities of life in North Korea.
For example, all kinds of mystical stories have been brought out to describe the abilities of the Kim family, like it is said of Kim Jong-Il that he was born on the slopes of sacred Mt. Paektu, where a bird spoke with a human voice to celebrate his birth, and a double rainbow appeared. A new star appeared in the night sky, and winter turned to spring immediately. This kind of mystical nature isn't the sort of thing that people talked about regarding Stalin, it's more a thing that people would say about the Japanese imperial family.