[Vision2020] Re: Well, It ain't plumbing

[Debbie Gray]

Speaking of personal appearance constraints... here's another one for 
your eye rolling pleasure. (Especially if you've seen 'Team America: 
World Police w/Kim Jong-Il singing 'I'm so Ronery')

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4157121.stm
N Korea wages war on long hair
North Korean Television campaign on hair
Men's hairstyles reflect their 'ideological spirit'

North Korea has launched an intensive media assault on its latest 
arch enemy - the wrong haircut.

A campaign exhorting men to get a proper short-back-and-sides has 
been aired by state-run Pyongyang television.

The series is entitled Let us trim our hair in accordance with 
Socialist lifestyle.

While the campaign has been carried out primarily on television, 
reports have appeared in North Korean press and radio, urging tidy 
hairstyles and proper attire.

It is the strongest media campaign against men's sloppy appearances 
mounted in the reclusive and impoverished Communist state in recent 
years.

The propaganda drive on grooming standards has gone a stage further 
than previous attempts. This time television identifies specific 
individuals deemed too shoddy.

Crew cut

Pyongyang television started the campaign last autumn with a five-
part series in its regular TV Common Sense programme.
	
How the propaganda campaign looks on Pyongyang television

In pictures

Stressing hygiene and health, it showed various state-approved short 
hairstyles including the "flat-top crew cut," "middle hairstyle," 
"low hairstyle," and "high hairstyle" - variations from one to five 
centimetres in length.

The programme allowed men aged over 50 seven centimetres of upper 
hair to cover balding.

It stressed the "negative effects" of long hair on "human 
intelligence development", noting that long hair "consumes a great 
deal of nutrition" and could thus rob the brain of energy.

Men should get a haircut every 15 days, it recommended.

Named and shamed

A second, and unprecedented, TV series this winter showed hidden-
camera style video of "long-haired" men in various locations 
throughout Pyongyang.
	
Hair is a very important issue that shows the people's cultural 
standards and mental and moral state
Minju Choson newspaper

In a break with North Korean TV's usual approach, the programme gave 
their names and addresses, and challenged the fashion victims 
directly over their appearance.

The North Korean media normally reserves the reporting of names of 
its citizens to exemplary individuals who show high communist 
virtues.

The series was shot at various public locations - on the street, at a 
sports stadium, a barbershop, a bus stop, a restaurant, a department 
store.

Some unruly-haired pedestrians or customers captured on camera 
"meanly ran away", the programme said, while others made excuses 
about being too busy to get a trim.

Television newsreels such as "Employees of Pyongyang Textile Plant 
keep their hairstyle and dressing neat and tidy" and "Hairdressers at 
Ch'anggwangwo'n manage men's hair according to the demands of the 
military-first era" have also aired.

What not to wear

State radio programmes such as "Dressing in accordance with our 
people's emotion and taste" link clothes and appearance with the 
wearer's "ideological and mental state".
	
People who wear other's style of dress and live in other's style will 
become fools and that nation will come to ruin
Nodong Sinmun newspaper

Tidy attire "is important in repelling the enemies' manoeuvres to 
infiltrate corrupt capitalist ideas and lifestyle and establishing 
the socialist lifestyle of the military-first era," the radio says.

Newspapers too highlight the civic advantages of short hair and smart 
shoes.

Hair is a "very important issue that shows the people's cultural 
standards and mental and moral state", argues Minju Choson, a 
government daily.

"No matter how good the clothes, if one does not wear tidy shoes, 
one's personality will be downgraded."

For party papers such as Nodong Sinmun, the struggle against foreign 
and anti-communist influence is being fought out in the arena of 
personal appearance.

"People who wear other's style of dress and live in other's style 
will become fools and that nation will come to ruin," it says.

BBC Monitoring, based in Caversham in southern England, selects and 
translates information from radio, television, press, news agencies 
and the Internet from 150 countries in more than 70 languages.



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Debbie Gray		dgray at uidaho.edu
Research Analyst	          208-885-4017
University of Idaho 	208-885-5759 (fax)
Dept of Ag Econ and Rural Sociology
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