“President Park Rode in a Jeep”: The National Imaginary of Automobility in South Korea, 1961–79

This paper aims to document the Park Chung-Hee government’s role in promoting automobility in the early stage of the South Korean auto industry, focusing on its engagement with media and popular culture. In the 1960s and 1970s, the foreign prototype of automobilized living was exhibited, desired, and yet barely accessible to the general public in South Korea. The administration of Park Chung-Hee, who came to power through a military coup in 1961 and held the dictatorial  presidency until he was assassinated in 1979, exploited cultural representations of auto traffic and private car ownership in order to mobilize public support for the government and legitimize its dictatorship.

The paper consists of three parts. First, I will discuss how Park’s military junta presented an image of promoting domestic auto industries. This part deals with a controversy over the junta’s special treatment of Saenara Motors, a licensed manufacturer of Nissan’s Bluebird, and the 1963 film, Tosuni: The Birth of Happiness, which suggested that owning a private car named “Saenara” [New Country] was a way to happiness. Second, I will examine the discursive structure in the news media that related Park’s preference for automobiles and his experience of the German Autobahn to the objective of independent modernization. Finally, I will analyze the 1972 film, Let’s Drive Our Own Car to Visit Mama, which was one of the government propaganda films that were mandatorily shown with commercial motion pictures, to show how private car ownership was advertised as a future fruit of the authoritarian reform.

By examining this early transnational stage of an industry on the cusp of ascending to a source of great pride for the nation, I argue that the automobile came to be regarded as a future ideal for the middle-class lifestyle that was propagandized to be given in return for autocracy.