North Korea Journal

by Michael Palin

  Bursting out! Bursting out!

  My faux pas of the day is to take a photo of the Leader from behind. I want to get an all-round view of the impressive monument, sixty feet high and skilfully sculpted. But I’m sharply instructed to put my camera away and reminded, as I was in Pyongyang, that any image of the Leaders, apart from full-length, front-on, is considered deeply disrespectful.

  Next on the Great Leader trail is the cabin in the woods where Kim Il Sung hid out whilst leading, Che Guevara-like, the resistance to the Japanese occupiers in the 1930s. A neatly paved path leads up to a log cabin with a red flag flying above it. It’s a replica of the original humble dwelling where, so legend has it, Kim Jong Il was born in 1941, to the revolutionary leader Kim Il Sung and his formidable wife Kim Jong Suk, also a resistance worker, who was serving as a member of the Sewing Unit at the time.

  A female guide in army uniform delivers the tourist spiel, pointing out Kim Il Sung’s hat on a peg, a 1930s map of the world, the chopsticks he ate with, the blanket made for their baby. It’s all fairly standard stuff until she comes to the birth of their son, the future Great Leader. Here her delivery goes up a note. Settling her gaze somewhere in the middle distance, she describes the circumstances of his birth in the same manner and with the same intense, almost trance-like quaver as the schoolgirl reciting her Mount Paektu poem. How the weather changed on the morning he was born, and a star and a double rainbow appeared in the sky, and ‘all the soldiers believed a child had been born who would lead his people out of captivity!’ The equivalent, almost word for word, of what you’d find in a banned Bible.

  At various points throughout the forest there are shrines to the Great Leaders, massive marble emplacements bearing poems they’ve written, a mosaic tableau depicting a youthful Kim Il Sung standing with his wife and child amongst snow-laden pine trees, and there is even a Kim Jong Il Peak, with his name marked out on the sheer rock face, each character inscribed on stone blocks weighing fifty tons each.

  The association of the Great Leaders with Mount Paektu is challenged by some historians. Official records show that Kim Il Sung did indeed become a brave and able leader of resistance to the Japanese, but from a base in Siberia, where the Russians trained and taught him, and that he remained in Russia from 1935 until the defeat of the Japanese in 1945.

  If that’s true, and like so many of the Kim stories it’s often impossible to distinguish fact from fiction, then it means that all this relentless identification of the Leaders with Mount Paektu is a fantasy, a deliberately contrived cornerstone of the cult of the Kims, who describe themselves as the ‘Mount Paektu bloodline’. This, of course, is not open to doubt in North Korea. For the official account of their origins to work then everyone has to believe that it is the reality. To ask questions, to debate the facts, to suggest things might have happened otherwise, is disloyal and dangerous. It gives succour to the enemy. And the DPRK’s existence, and its undoubted achievements, are all based on the existence of enemies. The Japanese, the Americans, the traitorous capitalists to the south.

  Hence the relentless reminders of the presence of the Great Leaders in this remote and inhospitable corner of the country. Do as you’re told and above all accept what you’re told as the truth.

  And don’t photograph them from behind.

  The fact that we can’t make the trek up the mountain gives us little reason to hang around in this inhospitably cold corner of the country, especially as none of the minders have coats, and later in the afternoon we return to the airstrip at Samjiyon. There’s a long security hold up, as we have to pass everything through a metal detector. It’s only after a while that I notice it’s not plugged in. Eventually we’re cleared to board our Antonov and head back to Pyongyang. Nearly two hours later, as we descend towards the capital, back amongst low green hills and sunlit valleys, there is a whirring and a rumbling just opposite my window, and I look out to see the comforting sight of the undercarriage creaking down in preparation for landing. Not two minutes later, I look out again to see the undercarriage disappearing back under the wing. I study the faces of my fellow passengers. No one seems to have noticed. Nick, I think, might have seen it too, but like me didn’t want to worry anyone by screaming. Instead, he diverts our attention by pointing out Kim Jong Un’s all-white private jet on the ground below. It’s a rare sight, according to Nick, and must mean that he has just arrived from somewhere, hence the last-minute postponement of our landing in Pyongyang.

  Later – quite a while later – the wheels come down again and this time they stay down. The Paektu adventure is over. Pyongyang, which seemed such a strange place two weeks ago, now feels like home, and I find myself oddly stirred as we drive in from the airport past the magnificent Arch of Triumph, like the one in Paris, but thirty feet taller.

  Like the Juche Tower, the Arch of Triumph is a tribute, in masonry, to the founding father of the DPRK. It was completed on Kim Il Sung’s seventieth birthday and comprises 25,500 blocks of white granite, each one representing a day of his life. It is him.

  A BRIGHT DAWN. THE WEATHER LOOKS SET FAIR FOR OUR last full day in the DPRK. The phone rings as I’m dressing. It’s So Hyang. For a moment I think she might be calling to say that the time difference has been restored again, but her message this time is rather more mysterious. The hotel lobby will be out of bounds for arriving or departing guests for the next half-hour. No reason given. I slip down to breakfast. Nothing seems to be happening and I return to my room thirty minutes later to get myself ready for our last day’s filming.

  When I emerge from the lift this time I find myself in the midst of a crowd of people, some of them Koreans, but the rest an altogether taller, bulkier race, with American accents and Bluetooth earphones. A blonde woman looks around with a tight, impatient impression and a dark-haired man beside her clutches a thick sheaf of notes. In the middle of the throng is a burly, heavy-framed man who I later learn is Mike Pompeo, the American Secretary of State. He and his team are here to finalise the repatriation of a number of Americans imprisoned by the regime for so-called ‘hostile acts’, which had previously included distributing Bibles and spreading Christianity.

  Pompeo’s arrival in North Korea, which would have been totally unthinkable four months ago, shows just how fast Kim Jong Un’s charm offensive is moving. Far from being one of the world’s diplomatic backwaters, the DPRK has been the epicentre of international affairs for these past two weeks. And this is another extraordinary chapter. It’s not every day you see an American Secretary of State in your hotel lobby. Especially a lobby in the axis of evil.

  Our last day is a bit of a whirlwind. At a big, well-equipped sports centre I watch a display of taekwondo, the Korean martial art which is practised here with quite stunning strength, agility and concentrated intensity.

  Using a combination of high kicks, twists, and hard, harsh shouts, they demonstrate how to disarm any attacker, after which they take it out on bricks and blocks of wood on which a skilful martial artist can administer a force of 200 kilograms. A slim, young, softly spoken girl, who spends sixteen hours a week training, teaches me the basics. Like standing up straight.

  As with the table-tennis players I saw at the school, there is in all things they do a fierce determination to be the best. Faces are tense and tight-lipped. They are doing it for the Kims, who look down on them from the wall.

  We take a mid-morning break at somewhere I wish we’d found earlier. Coffee shops are practically non-existent in the North Korean capital, certainly ones smelling of freshly ground beans. Hence our great delight at finding a café, set up by an Austrian coffee roaster, Helmut Sacher, in partnership with Austrian entrepreneur, Helmut Brannen, who specialises in bringing the finest coffee to the least likely places. They have a branch in Ulan Bator.

  The atmosphere is Viennese, low-lit, lampshaded and intimate, with real coffee, whipped cream and cake. It’s a small, private space that feels like a welc
ome contrast to the prevailing gigantism of the city’s public spaces. But by coincidence, the two are side by side, because the café is on the corner of perhaps the most well-known of Pyongyang’s arenas, the colossal Kim Il Sung Square. This is probably the only corner of North Korea that international audiences might be able to identify, for this is where the parades and marches and displays of military might take place, though most of the time it’s used for cultural activities, sports demonstrations and the expertly choreographed mass dances for which the North Koreans are renowned.

  Two sides of the square are flanked by grand Stalinist facades but at one end rise the pitched and tiled roofs of an impressive Korean-style building, dating from the 1980s, from whose long balconies salutes are taken in military parades. The building itself has no military purpose. It is in fact the national library, known as the Grand People’s Study House.

  I look up at the Study House from the vastness of Kim Il Sung Square, feeling tiny in a space that can easily accommodate over 100,000 participants at a time. On the ground are lines of discreet white dots to show exactly where each member of the display stands, and how much room they’ve got on either side. It’s tight.

  Our last lunch is at a hugely popular restaurant serving the national dish, naengmyeon. Tables are at a premium, for it seems that the people of Pyongyang cannot get enough of buckwheat noodles in an iced broth with half a boiled egg perched on top.

  Once you’ve got used to the fact that they’re cold, the noodles are tasty. They’re served in great heavy bunches which are not easy to eat politely. My chopsticks have difficulty heaving them off the plate, let alone into my mouth. Consumption is a messy, but ultimately rewarding, process.

  It is in this fabled restaurant that our minders ask us for the first time to erase footage that we’ve shot. And it isn’t over any big issue, simply that diners on one table object to being filmed. The rest of the time, although there have been robust arguments about how material might be edited, nothing has met with blanket disapproval. Which is not what any of us had expected.

  In the afternoon we film along the extraordinary phenomenon that is Mirae Street, or Future Scientists Street, an avenue of intriguingly designed forty-storey towers that were completed in less than a year. Much of the work was done by soldier-builders, members of North Korea’s vast army, working day and night. They describe such swift construction as building at ‘Chollima speed’, Chollima being a mythical winged horse, co-opted by the regime as a symbol of the speed with which the economy needed to be rebuilt after the war.

  The Western view I’ve often heard expressed is that these tower blocks are merely a grand gesture, a visual shell, empty and unfinished inside. I can refute this suspicion and confirm that at least one family has moved in. On the tenth of forty-four floors I’m invited into a spacious apartment, home to a husband and wife, two children and two grandparents. The grandparents are expected to look after preschool children so both parents can go out to work.

  I meet the wife, who happens to be at home today and is happy to show me around. She’s in her thirties, I’d imagine, dark hair neatly styled, and considering she can’t have had that many Western film crews in her kitchen, remarkably relaxed. There are a lot of artificial flowers and stuffed toys around and an air-conditioning unit called ‘Enjoy Wind’.

  This apartment is in a street for the elite, a concentration of top scientists and university professors, reaping the reward no doubt for creating the nuclear weapons that allow this small country to punch so far above its weight.

  It’s early evening as we leave the towers of Mirae Street. At ground level there is a busy public space with a volleyball game in progress and a TV soap playing on an outdoor screen. It’s a drama of everyday life, I’m told. A North Korean EastEnders.

  Midnight in Pyongyang, and I’m back in my room on the twenty-fifth floor after a celebratory meal with all our guides and minders. Glasses were raised and toasts drunk in beer and whisky and soju. That Neil was so genuinely cordial in his thanks said everything about the strength of the relationship that has grown up between us all. My feelings were guarded to start with. I equated the unfamiliar with the threatening.

  As the days went by, I realised my preconceptions were distorted. The North Koreans I have encountered are not malevolent automatons. They are locked in a system which demands unbending loyalty, but which in return offers security, and within narrow confines the chance for some to enjoy life and to excel. Those we have met, and those we saw going about their daily lives, were not broken and bowed, but proud of their country and pleased that we were so interested in how they lived.

  For our part, we worked very hard every day, grasping every opportunity a rare trip like this offered. I think our hosts appreciated that, hard work being very much a Korean trait, north and south of the border.

  Friendships grew, as did their curiosity about how we lived. By the end Mrs Kim, Tall Li, Yung Un, all so formidably stern to start with, relaxed and joked and enjoyed being with us, rather than just watching us. I’d shown So Hyang photos of my family in London and she had talked about herself and her parents quite openly. This morning as I was about to be filmed, I’d asked her to look after my panama hat. I told her that the best way of looking after it was to wear it. Shyly at first she tried it on. After that, she was clearly reluctant to take it off. Out of the corner of my eye I caught her striking a pose, testing the new look in her reflection in the window of the minibus. That was when I knew at least something of me was destined to stay in North Korea.

  I’M LOOKING OUT FOR THE LAST TIME AT THE GREY, unpainted tower blocks across the road. The same blank exteriors that had spooked me out on that first morning. Beyond them I can see the river, and the Juche monument with its flaming crest standing very tall on the far bank. The strains of ‘Where Are You, Dear General?’ resonate from their hidden speakers, once so disturbing, now irritatingly familiar.

  I’ve been quite comfortable here. I’ve appreciated the neatness, tidiness and politeness of those we’ve met. I’ve relished the lack of pollution and not for one moment missed the internet, the smartphone or the jarring, screeching, continuously in-your-face advertising of the West.

  So why should I feel something’s missing? I think it’s because I sense that, for all the access we’ve had here, for all the increasingly warm relations between us and our minders, they’ve been playing a game with us. We have been indulged, but never fully informed. We have been allowed more sustained access to this cagey country than most broadcasters, but I still feel that we have been subtly manipulated for some greater end. Was the permission we were given to film just another strand in the policy of detente? The inscrutable nature of power in this country makes it impossible to know what they really want from us. It’s obvious that the regime needs to make friends, if only to save their tottering economy. The conundrum for the leaders is how to welcome foreigners economically whilst slamming the door politically. We take freedom of expression to be one of our most basic democratic rights. Here in the Democratic People’s Republic it is one of their greatest fears.

  The regime doesn’t want its people to be spoilt for choice. They want them to be carrying one thought, in unison, at all times. Love of the Leaders. Total obedience. This is the certainty that has sustained the DPRK since its inception.

  But even in the short time we’ve been here quite big things have changed. At breakfast we hear two contrasting news headlines. Mike Pompeo and his team, who were in this same hotel only yesterday, are flying back home today, taking their freed hostages with them. A glimmer of peace, a hint of conciliation to be followed by an unprecedented summit between American and North Korean leaders. We also learnt this morning that the American President has repudiated the Iran nuclear deal. Trump, it seems, is much more comfortable dealing with a hereditary dictatorship in Korea than with a theocracy in the Middle East. Only months after calling him a mentally deranged dotard, Kim
Jong Un has responded with enthusiasm to the American President’s approaches. This is breathtakingly spontaneous diplomacy and who knows where it will lead? Kim sees valuable opportunities for wider international recognition. He must also calculate carefully where this might lead his country. With recognition will come thoughts and ideas that could undermine the very existence of his regime.

  Into our minibus for the last time and out to the airport. One final image to take home with me: a chorus line of military mothers waving flags, beating drums and line dancing as the rush-hour crowds come and go in the metro station behind them.

  And as we settle into our seats in a sparkling clean and modern Air Koryo Tupolev jet, the screens above our heads flash on, filled with all-singing, all-dancing, if rather younger, ladies. They seem to have no trouble expressing emotion. It pours out of them. The sheer joy of being born a part of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

  We roll down the runway, lift into the skies and soon Pyongyang is disappearing below us. Whatever qualifications we might have, the trip has been an eye-opener, a chance to look behind the headlines and see this secretive country as few other Westerners ever will. As Pyongyang recedes into the distance, we turn and exchange smiles. Of relief, but also of regret. One thing we all agreed on at our farewell meal last night is that none of us would mind coming back.

  MANY FILMING TRIPS ARE PRECEDED BY WHAT IS generally known as ‘the recce’, when the director visits the locations and meets many of the people they hope to film. Because North Korea is effectively cut off from the outside world, my recce in March 2018 was the first and only time anyone from the ITN production team would have direct contact with the North Koreans before the start of the shoot in late April. I know travelogues can look as though they are really easy programmes to make but most are planned with military-like precision, so this ten-day trip was, to say the least, essential.