Do You Still Love the Great Leader?: Autoethnographic Fragments of an Anthropologist

What happens when an anthropologist’s autobiography becomes inseparable from her ethnography? This is the question Sonia Ryang confronts in Do You Still Love the Great Leader? upon her return to the community she first examined in North Koreans in Japan (1997). Conceived nearly three decades after her original fieldwork, Do You Still Love the Great Leader? is the product of the author’s sustained engagement with Koreans in Japan who, in the past, identified themselves as North Korea’s overseas nationals—among whom she herself once stood.

A polyvocal and reflexive text, the book tells a story of a community of Koreans in Japan who once regarded North Korea as their genuine homeland, despite the fact that a predominant majority of first-generation Koreans in Japan originated from the southern regions of Korea under Japanese colonial rule. Today, that community has largely dissipated: many have acquired South Korean nationality, and Chongryun—once a powerful pro–North Korean organization—now persists only as a vestige of its former institutional and political presence. At the same time, Ryang’s own life has undergone a profound transformation, from a Zainichi Korean graduate student in Britain to an established academic in the United States. The book traces these parallel trajectories, weaving together personal memory and renewed fieldwork to produce a deeply layered account of time, history, and belonging.

Moving between intimacy and analysis, it unsettles conventional boundaries between autobiography and ethnography, revealing how each is inevitably shaped by—and entangled with—the other. In doing so, the book offers a compelling account of intertwined collective and personal histories lived through a transformative period connecting North Korea and Japan.

• Sonia Ryang, Author

  Sonia Ryang is T. T. and W. F. Chao Professor of Asian Studies at Rice University.

• Sonia Ryang wrote an essential book about North Koreans in Japan and she has returned triumphantly to update her classic work. In so doing, this engrossing volume is replete with brilliant aperçus and poignant reflections not only about them but also about the nature of anthropological knowledge and of the human condition. A coup de foudre.
  —John Lie, Distinguished Professor of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley
• Combining autobiographical narrative with historical and ethnographic analysis, this book offers a compelling and accessible account of the Chongryun-affiliated Korean community in Japan. Drawing on decades of research and personal experience, Sonia Ryang provides unique insights into the troubled history of Chongryun, its changing relationship with Zainichi Koreans, and the complex connections among Japan, North Korea, and South Korea. At once a powerful personal history and a theoretically sophisticated ethnography, the book illuminates the diversity of experiences within a widely misunderstood community while demonstrating the possibilities of autoethnography as a mode of scholarship.
  —Tessa Morris-Suzuki, professor emerita of history, The Australian National University