Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader

by Martin, Bradley K.

Actually, Mrs. Chung said, there were few behavior problems. The pupils hardly ever fought among themselves, even outside class, because “we are educating them in communist morality.” She was proud of the discipline of her students. Sitting up straight in class was required for health reasons, she said. Outside class the pupils were free to slouch if they liked—“but as we teach them the healthful way they always follow that way” Even as she spoke, I heard from the playground the unmistakable sound of schoolchildren at recess, whooping and running around. Relieved by this return to recognizable reality, I stepped to the window to photograph the scene. Mrs. Chung, however, quickly spoke to my interpreter—-who strode over and grasped my arm before I could click the shutter. Those two explained, patiently and in excruciatingly friendly fashion, that such a photograph of unorganized activity might make a bad impression abroad.

  Quite the contrary, I replied. Americans and many other Westerners would be favorably impressed by such evidence that at least a little freedom survived in such a rigidly controlled society.

  My interpreter, though, would not buy the argument. North Koreans valued unity, he explained earnestly. As for the schoolchildren, “we are educating them in a unitary idea—thinking in the same way and acting in the same way” The playground picture, unfortunately, would not illustrate that.22

  Even at the time of my first visit, such thinking—no matter how passionately taught by earnest ideologues—-was in decline in many other communist countries. Kim Il-sung himself had warned North Korean teachers to guard against the trend in some socialist countries for the young to seek “a fast and indolent life.” Such a development in North Korea could result in slowed economic growth, he had warned. The children must be educated to “love labor.” They must be “working-classized,” and taught to “have faith in communism before anything else.” Later, in his memoirs, he blamed the Khrushchev brand of communists for problems with the younger generation: Such people, “who are addicted to extreme egoism and hedonism, are not taking care of the younger generation; they are disarming them spiritually and exposing them to all sorts of social evils.”23

  In North Korea’s case, it was very difficult for a foreigner to judge how well the regime had succeeded in achieving its goal of casting all the young in the same mold. My interpreter, Han Yong, seemed, a fairly typical representative of the earnest and zealous Kimilsungists of his generation, a star product of the educational system that he was showing me. He was a twenty-nine-year-old senior at the Foreign Languages University, majoring in English. He and his entire class had been mobilized to interpret for tournament visitors. Han hoped to become an engineer, he said, and studied English because it would help him “look at what others have done and apply the best to Korea.” For his engineering training, he planned to take a correspondence course. Han said he wanted to marry, and had a bride picked out, but thought it “better to wait, since I returned to school at an old age.” (He didn’t say so, but presumably he had served in the military before college, as was typical.) Han said his proudest moment had been joining the Korean Workers’ Party in 1973.

  Otherwise, I could see three- and four-year-olds in the accordion band24 at the September Fifteenth Nursery in Pyongyang who had obeyed the Great Leader’s dictum that every child should learn to play a musical instrument. The youngsters employed precisely the same technique as all of the uncounted other youthful accordionists in the country—smiling, cocking their heads, keeping eye contact with the audience—as they pumped out a passable melody. Then there were the groups of red-kerchiefed children’s corps members marching to and from school in formation, saluting passengers in passing cars, halting to perform community cleanup projects.

  A boy assembling a miniature electric motor in a class at the Pyongyang Children’s Palace might say during an interview, as twelve-year-old Jong-hyun did, “When I grow up I want to become an electrician because electricity is very important in building our country into an independent and powerful country, according to the teachings of the Great Leader.” Still, I could not go out freely and talk at random with young adults who had spent most of their lives being indoctrinated, to see how much of it had taken.

  Instead, I had to settle for contacts with the North Koreans whom the authorities had placed in my path—Lee Yong-ho, for example, who identified himself as a twenty-six-year-old doctoral candidate in molecular biology at Kim Il-sung University, one of the one million intellectuals the regime claimed to have produced in its push to develop the country.

  Finding Lee on a weekday afternoon was unavoidable. For days I had been asking my handlers to let me meet some university students, and on this afternoon they finally told me it was time to visit the university. When we arrived, however, the campus was deserted. I asked them where all the students had gone. In a seminar, was the reply. “Twelve thousand students in a seminar,” I marveled. “Amazing!” I contemplated the possibility that the authorities had gone to the trouble of emptying out a campus just to make sure I would not have any unscheduled conversations with the wrong people. Anyhow, when my handlers ushered me across campus and up several flights of stairs to a particular laboratory, Lee just happened to be sitting there—in a business suit, with a miniature, gold-framed, enameled portrait of President Kim pinned to his left lapel—peering intently at a textbook.

  A bull-necked boxer, soccer player and veteran of army service, Lee in response to my questions professed a complete lack of interest in the two prime interests of 1970s students in the West: protest and sex. As for sex, he said that he had neither girlfriend nor wife, and never thought of such things even though the university was coeducational. “I am a student, so I am studying now, concentrating all my efforts on my subject,” he said. Student dissent, Mr. Lee said, would be unthinkable at Kim Il-sung University. There were not even any campus issues, much less national issues, to arouse rebellious feelings. “Among our students you can’t find a single one who believes there is some element to be criticized,” he said.

  (Hwang Jang-yop, a former president of the university, confirmed following his 1997 defection to the South that “student demonstrations calling for freedom on campus are unthinkable.” But he contradicted student Lee on another point. “In Kim Il-sung University, the students start harboring suspicions about the Great Leader’s personality cult by the time they are in their second year, but none of them dare to voice their suspicions out loud.”)25

  It dawned on me during that 1979 visit that, in its zeal to create a new man, the regime had swept away most traces of the cultural achievements of Korea’s past. I was astonished to learn that even the Korean classics were taught only at universities—not at either primary or secondary level in schools. Instead, an official explained, students studied the modern Korean classics of Kim Il-sung and his juche philosophy. The music I heard, from the choral numbers in Song of Paradise right down to the oom-pah-pah marches and ditties that the kindergartners pumped out on their accordions, sounded basically Western as interpreted through a Japanese filter. The architecture of the boxy buildings like-wise was largely Western in style—Stalinist, I would say—as were the ubiquitous oil paintings of Kim.

  I arranged an interview with Lee Sang-tae, a member of the Central Committee of the General League of Writers and Artists, and asked him what had become of the old works. After all, as Lee himself told me, Korea claims thousands of years of history and “the literature and art in our country bloomed in the tenth century”—by which time Korean pottery art and architecture were being exported across the Korea Strait to become a formative element in what is now Japanese culture. Ironically as Lee noted, it was the Japanese who, in the colonial period, tried to “stamp out our national literature and language.”

  After liberation Kim Il-sung, like the Japanese colonialists before him, sought to root out old “ways of thinking—in this case “feudalistic and Confucian”—and enforce new, communist norms.26 “While other people were traveling the world by warship and by train, our country’s feudal ru
lers rode on donkeys and wore horse-hair hats, singing of scenic beauties,” Kim later wrote in a contemptuous assessment of traditional culture.27 “Revolution is to overthrow the old system and establish a new system,” he explained in a speech. “Cultural revolution is also devoted to eradicating the old and bringing the new into being.”28

  The country’s 1972 constitution called for just such a cultural revolution. Unlike the Japanese, Kim with his nationalist background knew that trying to extirpate Korean tradition completely would only alienate the people. He compromised based on Stalin’s “Socialism in one country” formula, which had revised the original utopian notion of communist internationalism so as to allow for the reality of national differences. This cultural policy Kim eventually bundled into his overall juche philosophy of national self-reliance.29

  Culture in North Korea would be “socialist in content, national in form.30 In other words, old novels, plays, songs and poems unsuitable for the indoctrination of the masses might be consigned to libraries and filing cabinets accessible only to a handful of specialists—but the regime would recycle elements of the old Korean forms to support the new, approved content. In my talk with Lee Sang-tae, I observed that this content seemed limited—mainly praising socialism and Kim Il-sung. Lee did not disagree, but explained, “We think that the main function and purpose of literature and art is, firstly, describing and also depicting the sentimental, general life of the people. Secondly, they should also be means of educating the people. We educate them to love the fatherland and their socialist system and to revere the Leader and to have sound morality and sound life and to have a noble human feeling and civilized feeling and life.”

  Lee’s organization was in charge of making sure writers and artists did their duty, assigning and enforcing production quotas on behalf of the Culture and Arts Division of the Workers’ Party31 Having been tamed by purges of creative people in 1952, 1956, 1961, 1963 and 1964 (plus others, following Kim Jong-il’s takeover of culture, as we shall see in chapter 13), those remaining in the field presumably had a proper respect for authority and were ready to comply.

  And what were the results? In many cases, Lee told me, the regime had produced new versions of folk songs whose original versions were no longer sung. The traditional elements provided “interest and flavor.” He hummed a few bars of one such recent product, a song called “Moranbong.” Sure enough, it did come through with the nasal sound and the catch in the voice that I associated with East Asian folk music. Lee said the old folk melody might be used as the basis for a more “modern” sound—an example, in Song of Paradise, being the dance and grand ensemble “Let Us Boast of Our Bumper Harvest to the Whole World,” which sounded to my ear somewhere between Indian raga and American bluegrass.32

  Still, I said to Lee, most of Song of Paradise seemed Western in feeling. Did the use of the gigantic choirs possibly trace back to the church music brought in by Western missionaries from the late nineteenth century? Absolutely not, Lee replied. “We have had no such influence from the missionaries. We developed our songs based on our traditional heritage. Before liberation we had religions—Buddhism, Christianity—but after liberation the influence of those disappeared.”

  I saw or heard little in the way of overtly foreign cultural offerings, but Lee assured me the works of the likes of Beethoven and Tchaikovsky were studied and performed by “specialists.” He added that there had been two series of translations of foreign literary classics, one in 1955 and a second in 1977. Shakespeare, Balzac, Jack London, Mark Twain, Homer, Goethe, Byron, Gorky and Tolstoy were names he mentioned of authors he said were generally available to North Korean readers. As for movies, such relatively tame offerings as Cleopatra and Spartacus had been imported for general distribution—but the regime drew the line at the more recent, sexier offerings of Hollywood. Nudity and sexual permissiveness, Lee said, were alien to the “traditional way of life of our people.”

  I asked whether rock-’n’-roll music would be an acceptable import. That stopped my otherwise very competent interpreter.

  “What is rock-and-roll music?” he asked me. “Do you mean jazz?”

  I explained, and he passed along my explanation to Lee, but Lee replied that he like-wise had never heard of rock-and-roll music.

  In addition to music, Lee said, “we develop modern fine arts based on [traditional] Korean paintings.” Those tended toward group efforts, however, as individualism was one of the bad old traits the regime was trying to root out. Pictures embroidered in silk, for example, were produced by teams. Different teams had responsibility for design and the actual embroidery, as I found on a visit to Pyongyang’s Embroidery Research Institute.

  I was curious about one of the finest of traditional Korean arts, pottery making. Sadly for connoisseurs of celadon and other famous varieties of Korean pottery ceramics as an art had become truly a thing of the past. “To meet the needs of the people we produce by industrial means, not by handicraft,” Lee told me, although he assured me that “artistic features are used in the pottery and some hand touches remain, such as hand-drawn pictures on the pottery.”

  The health-care system offered a case study in the ways North Korea combined various threads of the country’s ideology—socialism, modernization and crash development, nationalism and national self-sufficiency the Kim Il-sung personality cult.

  The official literature around the time of my 1979 visit held up healthcare workers and especially physicians as examples of what the regime asked of its subjects. The doctors were expected literally to cut themselves to pieces for their patients. There was the story, told in the newspaper Nodong Shinmun, of a surgeon in a small hospital in a place called Ryongsong who felt sorry for a youthful polio victim. To correct a bad limp, the child needed a bone graft. The doctor cut out a chunk of his own bone and implanted it in the child’s leg.

  Similar stories of doctors giving their own blood and flesh to their patients had flowed regularly from the North Korean propaganda machine since the start of the Chollima movement in the late 1950s. They included cases of physicians donating skin to burn victims, and even one case of an eye surgeon who was preparing to transplant his own corneal tissue to a patient until the doctor’s wife and daughter agreed to be the donors. In the latter case, when the bandages were removed and the surgery proved successful, the transplant recipient was reported to have shed tears “for the happy socialist system and the good care of the Great Leader.” Whether true or not, those stories were one of the means the regime used in seeking to obliterate the last traces of pre-revolutionary thinking and acting in order to create a new type of man—unselfish, nationalistic and dedicated to the achievement of a socialist paradise on earth. Such people were “new communist human beings safely reared under the ’warm care of Comrade Kim Il-sung.”33

  The stories illustrated the conflict between old and new ways. Although no places of religious worship remained—officials claimed that U.S. bombs had destroyed every single Christian church during the Korean War—still old customs based on both Eastern and Western religious beliefs persisted. One of those customs was that the dead were to be dressed in new clothing, placed in coffins and buried. Removing tissue or complete organs from a cadaver was taboo. The repeated tales of doctors literally giving of themselves to their patients confronted the old religious taboo indirectly even as officials pleaded with selected bereaved families to confront it directly by permitting organ donations. This may explain why the officially spread stories were vague on the question of-why the surgeons did not use whalebone or pigskin, for example.

  The doctors’ self-sacrifice stories came out of a propaganda campaign directed at health workers themselves, seeking to teach them by example to be more aware of their responsibility for “the welfare of the people” and to inspire them to practice “high ideology and morality in treatment.”34

  In case they might be inclined to forget their identity with the masses, doctors’ salaries were kept low. The maximum, for a physicia
n with twenty years’ experience, was 180 won a month—$105 at the official exchange rate and only double the average pay for North Korean wage earners in general. Then there was professional review, which appeared to consist at least in part of the “criticism sessions” typical in communist countries. While interviewing Dr. Han Ung-se, the Public Health Ministry’s director of treatment and preventive health care, I mentioned that workers in the tractor plant I had visited lacked safety goggles, helmets, hard-toed boots and guard plates for their metal-cutting machines. Han replied, a trifle ominously, that the doctor in charge of the plant’s health and safety “will be criticized.”

  Saying that they-were following Kim Il-sung’s idea that “man is the most precious,” officials took great pride in having established a system of constitutionally guaranteed, free, cradle-to-grave health care. The U.S. Navy crewmen of the Pueblo had reported considerable experience with North Korean medical services, and their views were far from positive.35 But having no real opportunity to verify the state of North Korean public opinion on the quality of health care, I could not rule out the possibility that there was more than a little truth in the official assertions that the country’s people were pleased with the system as it existed in 1979. The official comparison was always with what had passed for health care before establishment of the communist state— a comparison that permitted boasting of how much better a nationalistic, self-reliant, socialist system served the people. In the period preceding 1945, Dr. Han of the Public Health Ministry told me, the medical system reflected the Japanese view of Koreans as expendable cogs in the colonial economy. Consequently, there were no public hospital beds and fewer than three hundred private beds. Medical doctors (presumably excluding traditional practitioners) numbered fewer than thirty, with some records giving the figure as nine, Han said.