When actor Larry Hagman said of his 1980s soap-opera megahit Dallas that it brought about the 1989 toppling of the Ceausescu regime in Romania, few quarreled with the claim. How could they? To recall,

Or, in the words of Hagman himself, “Romania put on Dallas to try and show how corrupt the American system was and it ended up with them lining up Ceausescu, who was the dictator, and shooting him 500 times … He let that show in to show how decadent we were and they said, ‘Yeah, we want some of it.’”Footnote ²

Something like this has been going on in North Korea for the past two decades, say the editor of and contributors to South Korean Popular Culture and North Korea. However, in that notoriously Orwellian as well as “professedly” Korean place,Footnote ³ the corrupting infiltrator has not been an ethnically foreign pop-culture entity but, instead, the whole viral spray of its southern sibling state's pop-culture offerings. Called “Hallyu” (한류) or “the Korean Wave,”Footnote ⁴ this effusion of musical acts, movies, television dramas, and even fashion products has also circulated in the DPRK, albeit illegally, and there day by day it has de-stabilized the North Korean populace's understanding of self, state, and world.

The all-star list of contributors to this volume is headed by Joseph Nye, the Harvard political scientist who in the late 1980s coined the seminal term that is the collection's guiding rubric—soft power.Footnote ⁵ Here Nye first reviews that concept's meaning: a state's ability to “co-opt rather than coerce” a desired response from another state and also its “ability to entice and attract,” as well as take it down in an argument plain and simple (p. 41). And here his co-author, Youna Kim, recommends South Korea's measured and thoughtful employment of its considerable genius in this regard. For, yes, an overplayed soft power hand can prove counterproductive. Witness, Kim warns, the anti-Korean Wave that currently prevails in Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines (pp. 49–50).

Other recognizable names on the contributors’ list are those of Sandra Fahy, Ahlam Lee, and Elaine Kim—all authors of well-received books of DPRK analysis. Fahy and Lee draw on their backgrounds in 1990s North Korean famine research to make the point that it was in the breakdown of societal order that occurred during the famine, and, in particular, in the development of North Korea's black market (jangmadang) culture, that Hallyu got its start in the DPRK. Smuggled into the country on USB flash drives by traders and by border security, and played in secret on down-market, Chinese-made portable media players called Notetels, Hallyu products were soon everywhere in North Korea, exercising an influence that has proved to be a societal game-changer. Says Fahy: “Hallyu … is essentially about freedom, and it is the stuff of revolution” (p. 117). Lee's analysis, derived from published interviews of the 36,000 North Korean refugees who have arrived in South Korea since 1998,Footnote ⁶ is similar. The defectors’ stories of their first encounters with Hallyu, she says, are stories of desire being born. In no small measure, the spike in North Korean defections that occurred between 2005 and 2012 might be attributed to Hallyu, says Lee.

Another trio of this collection's contributors explore the Hallyu echo chamber in the South. First, Elaine Kim and her co-author, novelist Hannah Michell, look at those Hallyu cinema offerings that feature North Korean characters and find in them a richer, more nuanced portrait of the North Korean than the stereotypical rendering of Western filmmakers. New Zealand and Dutch co-authors Stephen J. Epstein and Christopher K. Green explore the now decade-long vogue in the South for television shows that feature North Korean refugees. And Cornell doctoral student Jahyon Park focuses on the more recent South Korean vogue in webtoons that feature North Koreans. These are revealing essays; however, they are all disappointing in their failure to at least mention South Koreans’ increased skepticism about North Korean refugees’ media-driven representations of themselves in the wake of discoveries of exaggerations in several defectors’ printed memoirs.Footnote ⁷

Instructive, too, are those essays in the collection that see the Hallyu phenomenon in North Korea through the prism of historical precedents: in Nikolay Anguelov's piece, his pre-1989 boyhood in Bulgaria, when American-made VCR tapes were as common in his hometown as was yogurt, and in co-authors Weiqi Zhang's and Micky Lee's study of China's 1970s–1980s era of rampant media piracy.

However, in the submission offered by defector Thae Yong-Ho, the collection delivers most concretely what North Korea observers instinctively look for: a firm forecast of the Kim regime's impending collapse. North Korea's former deputy ambassador to the UK and one of the highest-ranking officials ever to defect from the country, Thae delivers this prediction on the basis, yes, of Hallyu’s influence in the North, but also on the basis of Kim Jong-Un's irregular, family-based ascent to power. The violation of the Confucian norm constituted by this third-son's elevation to power is the source of Kim's transparent paranoia, says Thae, and for those North Koreans who know about it, it is the irremediable fact that portends his regime's demise.

With Thae, we look forward to that longed-for day when, without tongue in cheek, some South Korean K-pop celebrity—perhaps PSY, or BLACKPINK's Rose, or actress Song Hye-Kyo—can look back with satisfaction on his or her contribution to an accomplished North Korean regime change.