The following interview of Byung-ho Chung Professor at Hanyang University and President of the Korean Society for Cultural Anthropology, was conducted by American Association of Anthropology Executive Director Ed Liebow prior to the DPRK-US summit. It is revised and updated here with an epilogue reflecting on the summit.

For many people outside the South Korean popular music (K-pop) world, the December 2017 death of pop star Kim Jonghyun was a sad, but abstract event. Jonghyun, and dozens more like him, is a type of Korean celebrity known as an “idol.” In addition to being popular within Korea, idols are the public face of K-pop, which has become a worldwide phenomenon. This has made idols into incarnations of Korea and Korean culture, and brought the public's powerful disciplining gaze to bear on these young performers. In this paper, we explore how characteristics of life in contemporary Korea—including a high suicide rate, and intense pressures in education and employment—compound with idols' years of intense training in singing and dancing without adequate attention to physical, much less mental, health. Although this is the first incident of an A-list K-pop idol committing suicide, we propose that the nature of contemporary Korean celebrity, together with specific factors defining the lives of Korean youth, create an environment where suicide may become even more prevalent, escalating Korea's suicide rate, which is already among the world's highest. Finally, we discuss the potential impact of Jonghyun's suicide on K-pop fans.

This story is the product of a two-year collaboration between U.S. news website The Intercept and the Japanese broadcaster NHK. The project began in mid-2016, and was initially focused on investigating three U.S. military bases in Misawa, Okinawa, and Yokota. In April 2017, we revealed that the bases were an integral part of the global surveillance network controlled by the U.S. National Security Agency. With the help of a batch of leaked U.S. documents, we showed that the Japanese government had spent more than half a billion dollars to fund the facilities, and received in return powerful surveillance equipment for its own spies to use to eavesdrop on emails and phone calls.

After we published that information, sources in Japan came forward and provided us with new details about the inner workings of Japan's little-known spy agencies. That was an extraordinary development for us, because prying classified information out of the Japanese government is not an easy thing to do. I have reported on the activities of spies in countries across the world, and never before have I encountered a group that is more institutionally secretive than the Japanese. For decades, basic details about the structure, size, operations, and funding of Japan's intelligence community have been withheld from the public. Even within the Japanese government, only a select few officials at the highest echelons of power are provided with any information about the shadowy people in control of the country's surveillance systems.

In 2012, the Central Intelligence Agency's Open Source Center published a manual for U.S. officials advising them on how to shape Okinawan public opinion about the large U.S. military presence on their island. Categorized For Official Use Only, the 60-page CIA report is titled A Master Narratives Approach to Understanding Base Politics in Okinawa. It was released under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act and the full text is now available here.