Representing religion in North and South Korea: seventy-five years of the semiotics of stamp design

As government documents, postage stamps are a rich source of information about a government’s policies on a wide range of subjects. In this article, a comparative semiotic analysis of the first seventy-five years of North and South Korean stamps is used to illustrate the similarities and differences in their attitudes towards ‘religion’ and religious practice. A corpus of stamps on a ‘religious’ theme was created for stamps issued by both governments from which a series of themes and motifs was noted. The semiotic analysis of the themes and motifs showed that while on South Korean stamps Buddhist motifs constituted the majority of stamps commemorating cultural history, there were few references to the commemoration of Buddhism itself. The reverse was found to be true for Christianity. Although Christianity was not shown to be a major expression of Korean culture, Christianity itself was commemorated extensively. On North Korean stamps, folklore and Christian motifs predominated as projections of cultural history, but the Christian motifs referred only to foreign cultures, not Korean culture. Motifs relating to the foundation myth of Tan’gun were common to both North and South Korea. However, in the South, motifs from the myth referred to the nation, while in the North they referred to the ruling family.