October 6, 2025
SEOUL – Lee Kang-hyuk, a 24-year-old North Korean defector who uses a pseudonym, remembers trekking to familial burial grounds in North Korea’s Ryanggang Province every Chuseok, Korea’s traditional autumn harvest festival, before escaping to the South in 2018.
“During Chuseok, families who have been apart get together, prepare food, carry it up the mountain, and perform ancestral rites,” Lee told The Korea Herald. “I loved the holiday as a child. Our house would be bustling from early morning.”
Lee fled alone at 17. His mother had defected nine years earlier, while his father remains in the North. For him, Chuseok meant not only honoring ancestors but also reconnecting with kin. “It’s a very big holiday in North Korea. They attach great importance to seasonal celebrations,” he said.
Six uncles and their families would crowd into the house nearest to the cemetery, sharing drinks, playing cards, and watching ssireum, Korean traditional wrestling, on television. While households in the South typically prepare songpyeon, or half-moon rice cakes, Lee’s hometown favored jeolpyeon, patterned flat rice cakes. In Pyongyang, nochi (a chewy rice cake made from malt), bamdanji (sweet chestnuts) and dumplings were staples of the holiday table.
After North Korea endured a severe famine in the 1990s, rice cakes were increasingly replaced with cheaper corn and potato cakes.
Lee would spend the rest of his day with other children in his town, chasing grasshoppers in the mountains, sharing treats and bragging about what their family ate.
“(North Koreans) begin preparing money and food for Chuseok’s ancestral rites a month or even several months in advance,” said Kim Sang-bum, professor of unification education at Seoul National University. “The streets are thronged with people walking to the cemetery.”
However, unlike in the South, where millions travel across the country to reunite with family, such large-scale movement is absent in the North. “Because there is no freedom of movement in North Korea, you don’t see the kind of mass migrations that occur in South Korea,” Kim added.
Chuseok under control
Experts note that Lee’s fond recollections contrast with Chuseok’s complicated place in North Korea’s history.
Chuseok is one of the only days in North Korea, a society where religion is heavily regulated, where citizens are allowed to visit familial burial grounds and pay respects to their ancestors.
“The Chuseok holiday is only one day long, and its sole purpose is for visiting cemeteries and performing ancestral rites,” said Kim.
But, until the late 1980s, even this was not guaranteed. Unlike South Korea, which celebrates Chuseok and Seollal (Lunar New Year) as national holidays, the North initially downgraded Chuseok to a “folk holiday.” In 1967, it was banned outright as a “remnant of feudalism.”
“When the North Korean government was founded in 1948, they started regulating folk religion, including Chuseok, under the assertion that they go against the socialist lifestyle,” said Bae Young-ae, unification expert and adjunct professor at Seoul National University’s Department of Ethics Education. “Chuseok was reinstated only in 1988, as socialism declined and the regime began emphasizing nationalism.”
According to professor Kim, the revival was politically calculated. “As the economy faltered in the late 1980s, authorities needed to stabilize public sentiment and accommodate demand for traditional culture,” he said. “With the Seoul Olympics drawing global attention to the peninsula, Pyongyang also sought to present itself as a system that ‘respects national traditions.’”
By the late 1990s and early 2000s, the regime went further, encouraging elaborate celebrations and framing them as “the Party’s grace,” according to Professor Kim.
Even today, Chuseok is tightly bound to state ideology.
Authorities promote it not only as a time to honor ancestors, but also as an occasion to commemorate late leaders Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il, revolutionary elders, and fallen comrades, according to Bae.
On Chuseok morning, people are expected to bow before the leaders’ portraits displayed in every home, or visit statues and state cemeteries such as the Taesongsan Revolutionary Martyrs’ Cemetery and the Fatherland Liberation War Martyrs’ Cemetery. Bowing to one’s ancestors, however, remains prohibited.
Holiday of contrasts
Lee recalls that beneath the ancestral rites, Chuseok laid bare North Korea’s stark inequalities. “At cemeteries, you could see what food others had prepared,” he said. “Bringing more food would make your family look more prosperous and harmonious.”
A single banana, rare in the North, carried special prestige if laid on the ancestral table. Holiday demand also pushed market prices upward, further straining poorer households.
Nonetheless, for defectors like Lee, Chuseok today is bittersweet. “I miss them a lot — the Chuseok scenes of playing with my friends and sharing food,” he said quietly. “But I don’t have anywhere to go anymore. All my ancestors are in North Korea.”