On my first visit to Pyongyang in 1979, handlers and interviewees repeatedly spoke of the North Koreans’ constant need to be on guard against “impure elements.” The unfamiliar term, puzzling at first, turned out to mean the country's enemies. The implication was that the North Koreans themselves were pure. Indeed, as B.R. Myers argues in his provocative and important new book, a childish fantasy of purity is at the core of the ideology that the North Korean regime has used so effectively to control its people. It is a doctrine that, according to Myers, owes relatively little to Marxism-Leninism, or to Confucianism. It is, rather, “an implacably xenophobic, race-based worldview derived largely from fascist Japanese myth.”

Like Japan’s Hirohito, the late North Korean President Kim Il Sung was popularly portrayed as the parent of an unsophisticated “child race whose virtues he embodied.” Each of the two rulers “was associated with white clothing, white horses, the snow-capped peak of the race’s sacred mountain, and other symbols of racial purity.” Each was “joined with his subjects as one entity, ‘one mind united from top to bottom.’ ” Each was “the Sun of the Nation,…the Great Marshal…whom citizens must ‘venerate’…and be ready to die for.”

Coming from a base in Japan for that first Pyongyang visit in 1979, I likewise found this comparison inescapable. In Kim's parading subjects' shouts of "Mansei"—the Korean equivalent of the Japanese "Banzai!", wishing long life for the ruler—one could discern evidence that colonial rule had provided a powerful model for the cult of Kim's personality. So Myers’s point is well taken—even if, in making that point more thoroughly and convincingly than anyone has previously done, he risks excessively downplaying the Stalinist, Maoist, and traditional East Asian contributions to the North Korean ideological fever.

The analogy to Imperial Japan is not merely academic. It has crucial implications for our ongoing debate about whether to engage or contain North Korea—and for the perennial question of war and peace, which is once again salient thanks to a recent series of threats by North Korea to “mercilessly destroy” its foes, perhaps with nuclear weapons. All bluff? Maybe. But recall that the pure childlike Japanese, when they felt themselves cornered, threw rationality to the winds and attacked the far mightier Americans at Pearl Harbor.

Japan’s rule over Korea from 1910 to 1945 was the Koreans’ first experience with modern governance. And the Japanese imperial worldview managed to attract the allegiance of many members of the Korean educated class. Myers says that by the 1930s nearly all of them bought into the system—to the extent that many spoke Japanese, even at home when the authorities were not listening, and cheered in movie houses when newsreels showed Japanese military victories.