The Invitation-Only Zone

by Robert S. Boynton

  Shin continued to make films for the next three years, directing seven and producing eleven more. As Kim grew to trust the couple, they were allowed to travel more, first in the Eastern Bloc and eventually beyond, although always accompanied by minders. On March 13, 1986, they escaped during a film festival in Vienna, evading their minders’ car and asking for asylum at the U.S. embassy.

  On hearing about their escape, Kim Jong-il assumed they had been kidnapped by the United States. The possibility that artists with whom he had been so generous would abandon him was too much for Kim to imagine. He sent a message offering to help them return to Pyongyang. They never replied.

  Kenji Fujimoto (Associated Press)

  Oddly, Kim Jong-il’s most famous Japanese employee was hired, not abducted.

  In 1982, Kenji Fujimoto8 answered a classified ad for a job as a sushi chef. The name and location of the restaurant weren’t listed, but the salary was twice what he was making as a freelance chef in Tokyo. Fujimoto didn’t know much about North Korea, so he wasn’t deterred when he learned that the job was at a new Pyongyang restaurant that wanted a Japanese chef both to prepare sushi and to train a corps of North Korean chefs.

  Fujimoto had received his training through the rigorous and lengthy system that dominates Japan’s sushi industry even today. It typically takes ten years to go from being an apprentice, who cleans the restaurant and accompanies the chef to the fish market, to an assistant (a wakiita, Japanese for “near the cutting board”), who makes rice and prepares ingredients. The highest position is the chef (itamae). Fujimoto began at a restaurant in the exclusive Ginza area of Tokyo, where the smallest piece of sushi cost $30 (as opposed to $1.50 at most restaurants), and rose to chef in five years. “Starting at one of the best restaurants in Tokyo helped me rise quickly because the fundamentals I learned were also of the highest quality,” he tells me.9

  Fujimoto encountered Kim Jong-il a year after he arrived in Pyongyang. One evening, Kim and his entourage took over the whole restaurant, consuming a staggering amount of sushi and sake. With such important guests, Fujimoto pushed himself and his staff so that everything would be perfect. When it came time to pay the bill, Kim pulled out a white envelope bursting with money and tossed it casually at the chef’s feet. Fujimoto just stared at the envelope. “I thought to myself, ‘Here I just finished doing a good job for you. So why aren’t you man enough to thank me and pay for it politely?’” Kim’s entourage watched in horror, fearing, no doubt, the effect that Fujimoto’s insolence might have on the unpredictable leader. Kim’s interpreter picked up the envelope and handed it to Fujimoto, who accepted it with a bow but no smile.

  Fujimoto was surprised when Kim returned to the restaurant the next week. “Fujimoto,” Kim said, “I apologize for my conduct last week. Please forgive me.” Fujimoto says, “Here is the second in command of the whole country, and I’ve made him feel he has to apologize to me!” Fujimoto felt ashamed. He also felt affection for Kim. “That was the day I fell in love with him,” he says.

  They became friends, shooting, horseback riding, and water skiing together. Kim gave him two Mercedes-Benzes. Fujimoto was permitted to marry a North Korean woman (a dancer), and became something of an “uncle” to Kim Jong-un, the country’s current leader. But like so many love affairs, theirs ended badly. Fujimoto served as Kim’s chef until 2001, when he was placed under house arrest for a perceived infraction against the regime. (While on a shopping trip in Japan, the chef was detained by Japanese immigration authorities, to whom he spoke a bit too freely about his employer.) Although eventually reinstated, he was shaken, and soon fled to Japan, where he went into hiding. He has since published four books about Kim—I Was Kim Jong Il’s Chef, the first, was a bestseller—and supports himself by appearing as a North Korea “expert” on Japanese television. His emotional reunion with Kim Jong-un in 2012 was front-page news all across Asia.

  When I meet Fujimoto at a smoky Tokyo café, I can see why he appealed to Kim. His strong hands are adorned with a diamond pinky ring and a gold Rolex. He favors jeans and skintight black T-shirts that show off his stocky, muscular physique. A black bandana is wrapped around his forehead, atop a pair of oversize mirrored sunglasses. A square gray goatee clings to his chin. He grooms himself in a manner designed to display as much as it hides, as if to say, “Look at me! I’m in disguise!” Fujimoto cultivates the appearance of a thug, though one who knows how to select the best wine at a fine restaurant.

  The banquets Fujimoto prepared for Kim were elaborate, even orgiastic affairs. Kim insisted the sashimi be so fresh that the mouth of the fish was still moving. When drunk, he would command his guests to strip and dance nude. Kim thought nothing of spending fifty thousand dollars for ordinary occasions. And when there was something to celebrate, the parties cost several times that. U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright’s 2000 visit was one such occasion. “He was absolutely thrilled to meet her because it meant that Clinton was reaching out to him. He was drinking a lot and was at the top of his game. He laid out between one hundred and two hundred thousand per party, and they went on for three days. He gave everyone presents and served the finest cognac. It was really something,” Fujimoto recalls.

  But the parties also served a serious political purpose. “By inviting his trusted subordinates to a party, he can observe their personalities at close range,” reported Kim’s erstwhile adviser Hwang Jang-yop, who defected to the South in 1997.10 Members of the North Korean elite lucky enough to be invited became “vassals” to the king. Kim regularly dispatched Fujimoto on shopping trips to scour the globe for delicacies. Other than trips to Russia and China, usually in his private, bulletproof train, Kim never traveled abroad. Still, he knew where to find the best of everything. He sent Fujimoto to Denmark for pork, Iran for caviar, France for wine, Czechoslovakia for beer, and Japan for seafood and appliances. “However, Kim insisted his refrigerators must come from the U.S., since they made the best ones. He gave me one as a present. It was enormous, created ice quickly, and held tons of food at all different temperatures,” Fujimoto says.

  He acknowledges that Kim valued him not only as a friend but also as a status symbol—proof that despite living in an isolated, impoverished country, Kim was a citizen of the world. “I think it was important to him that the chef who fed him Japanese food was himself Japanese,” he says. “He is a man who values the best of everything, and that includes me.” Kim would often pull Fujimoto aside and boast to his guests, “Isn’t Fujimoto splendid? I hired him. He’s in my club, and I get to keep him!”

  7

  FROM EMPEROR HIROHITO TO KIM IL-SUNG

  While North Korea remained mysterious to most post–Second World War Japanese, some viewed the young Communist nation as an antidote both to the emperor system that had driven Japan to war and to the Cold War capitalism that America had imposed on Japan after it. For members of the fast-growing Japanese Communist Party, the success of North Korea and, later, the Chinese Revolution were evidence that communism was the new modernism. When the dark side of North Korean communism revealed itself in the 1960s and ’70s, some of its most fervent admirers became the most severe critics.

  * * *

  On a brilliant May morning in 1946, the freighter Liberty edged down the California coast, toward San Francisco. The ship reduced speed at the mouth of San Francisco Bay and veered toward the harbor. Katsumi Sato gasped at the enormous rust-red suspension bridge that loomed before him. Behind it was the most beautiful city he had ever seen. As the Liberty eased beneath the Golden Gate Bridge, he gazed up at the bright pink houses atop Russian Hill and the phalanx of office buildings peeking out from behind them. Compared to the devastated Japanese cities he had left behind, San Francisco was radiant, a magical city on a hill.

  “What were we thinking?” The question played through Sato’s mind as if on a tape loop. “There was no way we could win against a nation that can build bridges and cities like this! Japan is a country of peasants who live in buildi
ngs made of wood. We never had a chance. The emperor and the generals must have been out of their minds!”1 Thinking back to all the times he’d nearly died during the war, Sato felt sick to his stomach. It was as if he were awaking from a dream, or, more accurately, a nightmare. Still recovering from the loss—of the war, of his friends—he hadn’t until this moment fully understood the war’s futility.

  It was a miracle Sato had made it this far. Most of the other young men he’d served with were dead. Like many other Japanese boys in the final days of the war, Sato had dropped out of high school at age sixteen and enlisted in the military. Every man was needed, and some of his fellow volunteers were even younger. They were driven by a combination of patriotism and anxiety: What would happen if Japan won the war—and everyone was certain of a Japanese victory—before they’d had a chance to test themselves in combat? What if they missed their generation’s defining experience?

  At its peak, the Japanese Empire spanned three million square miles, including Korea, Burma, Singapore, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, and parts of China. The logistical challenge of dismembering the empire nearly eclipsed the war effort in its complexity. Millions of Japanese colonists and soldiers returned to Japan, and two million of the colonial subjects who had aided Japan returned to their homes. Forty billion dollars of military and industrial equipment was confiscated, dismantled, and shipped to Japan’s former territories.

  With 80 percent of Japan’s merchant fleet destroyed, the Japanese had borrowed ships such as the Liberty from the Americans. Sato had spent the year after the war ended ferrying people back and forth among Japan, Manchuria, and Taiwan. The work was dull, but it gave him time to contemplate both his wartime experience and his uncertain future. The third of nine children, Katsumi Sato was born in 1929 in the mountains just north of Niigata. He came from a long line of rice farmers who had lived in the same spot since the seventeenth century. His father was a tenant who leased the land, giving the landlord 60 percent of his rice crop as rent. Sato had an active, curious mind, and the one thing he knew for certain was that he wanted no part of a farmer’s life. When a recruiter visited Sato’s high school class, every child, no matter his age, health, or size, volunteered. An older boy whom Sato admired served in the navy, so he decided to go to sea as well. He transferred to the naval academy in Kobe, but the need for sailors was so dire that his training lasted barely six months. It was useless anyway, “brainwashing, basically,” he says. The instructors assured the recruits that the war was going well—no matter that a shortage of guns reduced them to drilling with bamboo spears.

  In December 1943, Sato was assigned to a six-thousand-ton freighter delivering provisions and ammunition to troops fighting in Southeast Asia. One night the ship, fully loaded with ammunition, was attacked by American bombers while docked in Manila Harbor. The explosions shattered windows all across the city. Most of the crew was on port leave at the time of the attack and therefore survived. A few days later, Sato joined another ship en route to pick up supplies in Taiwan. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt had implemented a policy of unrestricted warfare, and the waters around the Philippines were crawling with American submarines. Sato was standing on deck when he spotted a ripple of bubbles rushing through the water, directly at him. He recognized the telltale sign of an incoming torpedo and tried to run, only to find that he was paralyzed with fear. Fortunately, having unloaded its cargo in Manila, the ship was sitting high in the water and the torpedo slid beneath it. The next two torpedoes, however, hit the ship, sinking it. Sato and three others were left floating in the water.

  The final four months of the war inflicted terrible hardship on the Japanese people. Cities burned to the ground, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians. Those who survived were starving. American B-52s were dropping floating mines to disrupt the shipping routes. In May 1945, Sato’s ship, carrying much-needed rice from Thailand to Tokyo, hit one, exploded, and sank. By August 15, 1945, the day Japan surrendered, only one-quarter of the four hundred men Sato had enlisted with were alive.

  * * *

  The main goal of the Allied occupation of Japan (1945–52) was to transform it into a Western-style democracy. All legislation passed by the Japanese legislature was subject to approval by General MacArthur, the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers. Japan’s prewar government had been hijacked by politicians and generals, with virtually no input by its people. Therefore, the thinking went, the Americans would write a new constitution to foster the kinds of democratic institutions through which the Japanese could take control of their nation. The new constitution demoted the emperor to a figurehead and forbade Japan from waging war again.

  Japan circa 1945 was in many respects a feudal state. While farmers such as Sato’s father comprised half the labor force, two-thirds of the land they tilled was owned by landlords, who took the bulk of the profits. Little more than indentured servants, the farmers passed debts from generation to generation. Under MacArthur’s land-reform program, the government purchased 40 percent of Japan’s cultivated land from the landlords and resold it at a discount to the farmers who worked it. The idea was that, as landowners, farm families would become economically independent participants in Japan’s new democratic institutions. MacArthur also supported labor unions in the hope that they would provide democratic opposition to the old imperial system. The number of union members grew from five thousand in 1945 to over five million in 1947.2

  On October 4, 1945, Order No. 93 directed the release of all persons imprisoned on other than criminal charges. Entitled “Removal of Restrictions on Political, Civil and Religious Liberties” directive, it guaranteed civil rights, such as the right to organize and strike, and released labor leaders and Communists who had spent decades in jail.3 Illegal since 1925, the Japanese Communist Party was one of the few organizations that had opposed the emperor’s militarism on pacifist grounds. The relationship between MacArthur and the Japanese left seemed promising. The Communists welcomed the Americans as liberators, thanking them, in the first postwar issue of the newspaper, Akahata, for initiating Japan’s “democratic revolution.” Membership grew quickly, and in 1949 the Communists won 10 percent of the popular vote, sending thirty-five members to the legislature.

  Its influence growing, the Communist Party soon dominated the labor unions, which took a more militant pose. In January 1947 the National Congress of Industrial Unions, Japan’s largest labor federation, announced its plans for a nationwide general strike. The honeymoon between the United States and the Communists was over. This was more democracy than MacArthur had anticipated, and he reversed course, banning the strike the day before it was to begin. Whereas the Communists had once been wooed, they were now lumped in with the militarists and fascists as opponents of Japan’s new democracy. In 1950, MacArthur accused the party of having “cast off the mantle of pretended legitimacy and assumed instead the role of an avowed satellite of an international predatory force.” Twenty thousand Communists were fired from their jobs, and by 1952 the party had lost all thirty-five of its seats in the legislature.

  After Sato delivered his ship to San Francisco, he returned to Niigata to work for Kawasaki Kisen, one of Japan’s largest shipping companies. He had become active in the union movement and was stunned by the Americans’ about-face. “Why did MacArthur stop us from striking? We thought it was the highest expression of our faith in democracy,” he says. Sato, too, was fired, which shattered any belief he had in America’s democratic ideals. MacArthur, he concluded, was no more trustworthy than the emperor.

  The day he learned he’d been let go, Sato had just checked in to the Uchino hospital, a facility for tuberculosis patients. Diseases that had been widespread during the war had reached epidemic proportions in the postwar chaos and poverty. With food and water in short supply, tens of thousands of cases of cholera, dysentery, smallpox, and polio broke out across Japan. In 1946 there were 20,000 reported cases of typhus. In 1947 more than 146,000 died from tuberc
ulosis alone, with another million infected. The Red Cross found that 70 percent of Japanese under age thirty tested positive for the disease. Sato’s case appeared mild, so he was treated and released within three months. With no job, he resolved to complete his education and enrolled at a high school with students nearly a decade younger than he was. Despite the revolution the nation had undergone, he was struck by how little had changed. The teachers who years before had taught him to “hail the emperor” now displayed the same uncritical devotion to an abstraction called “democracy,” and Sato was disgusted by the ease with which they had traded one set of beliefs for another. “This wasn’t thinking for yourself,” he says. “These people were simply obeying the ruling system, whatever it was. If the emperor had been reinstated the next week, they’d have followed him again.”4

  Tuberculosis is a devious disease whose symptoms wax and wane without warning. The month before Sato was to receive his high school diploma, his breathing problems returned. The bacillus had in fact never left his body and was now stronger and more resilient. Streptomycin, the first antibiotic capable of curing tuberculosis, was isolated in 1943 at Rutgers University but wasn’t widely available in Japan until the early 1950s. Sato spent a good portion of the next five years in the hospital, getting discharged when his doctors thought they had rid his body of tuberculosis and then being readmitted when it returned.

  Despite his condition, he continued to agitate, this time on behalf of his fellow patients. With the postwar economy in shambles, the hospital had furloughed a portion of the nursing staff, and Sato was outraged. “These men and women had sacrificed their health for the sake of their country, and now Japan was turning its back on them,” he says. He formed a patients’ association and went from ward to ward lecturing. He discovered he had a talent for public speaking, holding forth on subjects large and small without losing the audience’s interest. His performances made an impression on a particularly beautiful girl named Tamiko Sakamoto, a doctor’s daughter whose illness had confined her to the hospital for two years. While Sato wasn’t as handsome as the boys who usually pursued her, he spoke with a passion she had never before heard. Tamiko’s case was less severe than Sato’s, so she was released after a small part of one of her lungs was removed. Sato got to know her by sight—how could he not?—but was too shy to introduce himself. And anyway, what kind of suitor could he be stuck in the hospital?5