North Koreans will mark Chuseok on the 25th, as a four-day holiday period begins in South Korea. Grave visits and songpyeon rice cakes look much as they do in the South, but Chuseok in the North was once branded a "feudal remnant" and disappeared for more than two decades before being restored.
Chuseok in North Korea falls on the 15th day of the eighth lunar month and is treated as a folk holiday, according to Ministry of Unification materials and North Korean media on the 24th. This year the South has four days off, from the 24th, the eve of Chuseok, through Sunday the 27th, while the North typically takes only the day itself.
Holiday customs in the North closely resemble those in the South. Families visit ancestral graves on the day, prepare dishes made from the year's new grain and share them with relatives. Songpyeon and bamdanja, a chestnut confection, are among the signature foods. Folk games such as ssireum wrestling, swinging and tug-of-war are played, and the custom of gazing at the full moon in the evening has also continued.
Chuseok was not always honored as a holiday in the North. After the regime was founded, it rejected traditional folk holidays as "feudal remnants" incompatible with a socialist way of life. Folk holidays including Chuseok and the Lunar New Year officially vanished for a time after President Kim Il Sung ordered the "eradication of feudal remnants" in 1967.
Chuseok began to reappear in the 1970s. North Korea partially revived traditional customs, allowing grave visits for Chuseok in 1972. It then permitted Chuseok as a holiday again in 1988 and designated it a day of rest. The Lunar New Year, Hansik (Cold Food Day) and other folk holidays were restored in the following year.
Chuseok has since become established as part of the traditional culture presented by North Korean media. The Rodong Sinmun ran a piece titled "Our People's Distinctive Chuseok Holiday Customs" on Oct. 5 last year, describing the holiday's origins along with grave rites, foods and folk games in detail.
"The first rite of the Chuseok holiday was to visit the graves of ancestors," the Rodong Sinmun said, describing the custom of preparing food from the new grain, visiting ancestral graves and holding memorial rites. It named songpyeon and bamdanja as the foods that represent Chuseok, and introduced nochi, a Pyongyang regional specialty made by frying a dough of glutinous rice flour and malt powder in oil. It also presented ssireum, tug-of-war and swinging as Chuseok customs.
The traditional holiday has also acquired the North's own ideological framing. While defining Chuseok as "one of the traditional folk holidays," the Rodong Sinmun stressed that it is an occasion to remember "revolutionary forerunners and comrades who went before us on the path of upholding the party and the leader."
Chuseok does not carry the status of the nation's biggest holiday in the North as it does in the South. The country has given greater weight to political anniversaries such as the birthdays of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il and the founding of the Workers' Party. Last year the Rodong Sinmun devoted far more coverage to events surrounding the approaching 80th anniversary of the party's founding than to Chuseok.
