The Hidden People of North Korea: Everyday Life in the Hermit Kingdom

by Ralph Hassig

  First-Person Accounts of Kim Jong-il

  Kim Jong-il is hidden person number one in North Korea. He has shrouded his life in secrecy as a first line of defense against domestic and foreign threats to his regime, and it would seem that secrecy is also an important characteristic of his lifestyle and mode of governance. He has said, “We must envelope our environment in a dense fog to prevent our enemies from learning anything about us.”17 Kim’s penchant for secrecy makes it difficult to get behind the persona of the “respected and beloved general” and his international reputation as a crazy playboy. In reality he is not crazy, and although he likes to think of himself as a bold leader, his most important decisions are made with calculation and, more often than not, with caution.

  Kim’s international debut could be said to have occurred when he welcomed South Korean president Kim Dae-jung to Pyongyang for a summit meeting in June 2000. The meeting went well, and some Korea observers expected that Kim’s public success would prompt him to adopt a more open leadership style. As it turned out, Kim was not about to become a public figure or international globe-trotter, and he never got around to making a promised reciprocal visit to Seoul. The leaders of China, Russia, Japan, and South Korea have come to Pyongyang, as has an American secretary of state, but Kim has continued to lead a secluded life and stayed close to home. Except for making a few trips to China and Russia, where he can feel at home among fellow autocrats, he has avoided going out into the world.

  Clues about his personality, leadership style, and personal goals can be gleaned from the testimony of the relatively small number of North Korean defectors and foreigners who have come into contact with him. They describe him (to use what psychologists call the “big five” personality traits) as publicly retiring, impulsive, open to experience, alternately good-natured and irritable, and tense and insecure.

  Kim Loses His Ideological Theorist

  To date, the highest-level North Korean official publicly known to have defected is Hwang Jang-yop. When he defected in February 1997 while on an official visit to China, the seventy-three-year-old Hwang was chairman of the foreign policy committee of the Supreme People’s Assembly and had previously been president of Kim Il-sung University and secretary of the KWP’s international department. Hwang’s interests lie mainly in the realm of ideology.18 He appears to be a strong believer in socialism and a severe critic of Kim Jong-il, whom he accuses of betraying socialism and misguiding Kim Il-sung. Hwang claims that the senior Kim was “a perfect leader” until Kim Jong-il began to exert his influence around 1974, adding, “Kim Il-sung committed errors because of Kim Jong-il.”19 By the time he defected, Hwang was no longer in close touch with Kim, but he still knew much about the upper echelon of North Korean officialdom. When he defected, accompanied by his associate Kim Tuk-hong, Hwang left behind a wife believed to have committed suicide, one daughter who may also have committed suicide, another daughter, a son, and granddaughters, all presumably sent to prison camps. Hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of his friends and associates were fired from their jobs, imprisoned, or banished to the countryside. The thoroughness of this purge reveals the anger that Kim Jong-il can show when betrayed.

  Hwang’s greatest contribution to the body of knowledge about Kim Jongil is his description of how the younger Kim ingratiated himself with his father and maneuvered to gain the succession. Hwang says the young Kim would stand beside his father and help him put on his shoes, even when his father was fully capable of taking care of himself. Kim Jong-il was an artist and manager, not a military man like his father, but his staging of patriotic films such as Sea of Blood and Flower Girl apparently impressed the old soldier. The young Kim successfully sidelined Kim Il-sung’s younger brother, Kim Yong-ju, and wooed the politicians and military generals of his father’s first generation of revolutionaries. In public at least, Kim showed respect to these older men, although once he had grasped power, he made it clear to them that he was the boss.

  Hwang doesn’t want to say much about Kim Jong-il’s personality, but he does say that Kim is a suspicious person and very emotional in showing his likes and dislikes. Kim’s moods and opinions change quickly, and he wants things done immediately. When making decisions, he does not consult advisors as readily as his father did. He likes to appear knowledgeable on a wide variety of subjects and presents himself (and probably thinks of himself) as a modern, liberal individual, more sophisticated than the officials who surround him. He is a micromanager, going so far as to choose apartments and cars for his top officials.

  According to Hwang, Kim has an “animal’s instinct for judging one’s loyalty.” He likes to get people drunk, the better to study them when they are off their guard, and the customary entrance fee for attending Kim’s parties is to gulp down a glass of cognac. He does not trust nondrinkers, or at least he does not share his thoughts with them. He speaks boldly, always talking about war, but, according to Hwang, Kim takes care not to overplay his hand because he has no desire actually to fight a war and has never engaged in combat himself, although he is an excellent marksman with a pistol. He fancies himself a great general, but like certain other dictators—Hitler and Stalin come to mind—he thinks he knows more about military affairs than he actually does. Hwang says Kim does not read books but does review the hundreds of reports that reach his desk every week.

  Hwang believes that Kim Jong-il has a clear view of his political interests. Unlike Kim Il-sung, who appeared to care for his people, the younger Kim seems not to be shocked by the hardship they face. Both Hwang and the abducted movie director Shin Sang-ok quote Kim as saying that having too many people in North Korea makes ruling difficult; Hwang even believes that Kim considered the famine of the mid-1990s a good way to weed out the untrustworthy people, who were the first to have their rations stopped.

  Kim Abducts a South Korean Film Director and His

  Actress Wife

  The South Korean film director Shin Sang-ok and his actress wife, Choe Unhui, had the unwelcome opportunity to get to know Kim during their forced stay in North Korea. Choe was kidnapped from Hong Kong in January 1978 and brought to North Korea. According to her testimony, when she disembarked from the boat, she was met by Kim Jong-il himself, who said, “You have gone through a lot of trouble to come here. Honorable Miss Choe, I am Kim Jong-il.” Choe was then taken in Kim’s car to a Pyongyang guesthouse, which was to become her prison for a time.20

  Six months later Choe’s husband, director Shin, was also kidnapped from Hong Kong where he had gone when his films came under attack from the authoritarian government in South Korea. As Kim Jong-il later explained to the couple, who on several occasions secretly recorded their conversations with him in order to secure evidence that they had been abducted and had not willfully traveled to the North, he was aware that Shin was unhappy in South Korea and “wanted to show that South Koreans, people from the southern half, do come to us, to the bosom of the Republic, and make genuine movies while enjoying true freedom, not worrying about anything.” Another time, he said, “It would be natural for you to say you came here to exercise your rights of creative freedom, instead of saying you were forced to come here.”

  When he arrived, Shin had no idea that his wife was in North Korea. He was confined to a guesthouse, but after an escape attempt in his first year of captivity, he was put in prison for several months. After trying to escape a second time the following year, he was imprisoned for four years, and he did not meet his wife or Kim Jong-il until 1983. Shin and Choe gradually gained Kim’s trust and made ten films for him in North Korea. Kim wanted to make North Korean films known worldwide—“Make sure that the bastards envy us,” he said—so he encouraged Shin and Choe to travel abroad, although they were always accompanied by a security detail. On a trip to Vienna in 1986, the two eluded their minders and asked for political asylum in the United States, where they lived for several years. Shin returned to South Korea in 1994 and died in 2006. Choe Un-hui reportedly divides her time between the United
States and South Korea.

  Most remarkable about Kim’s comments as recorded by Shin and Choe is how realistically he describes conditions in North Korea. “As you may have seen, comrades, or rather Mr. Shin and Mrs. Choe, in short, we are people who only see things within the perimeters of our own fence, and believe we are the best (all three laugh).” After criticizing the “backwardness” of his film industry, Kim says, “If other people were to say this, these people would be criticized for not being satisfied with what they have (he laughs). That is, they would be branded flunkeyists [that is, subservient to capitalist enemies of North Korea].” Kim did not need to add that such critics would be sent straightaway to a prison camp.

  Kim expressed awareness of socialism’s shortcomings: “Socialism is fine, but there are many internal problems that need to be solved.” Speaking of his screenwriters, he said, “The state gives one living expenses, even when one does not write. Therefore, one has no motivation.” Twenty years later, in 2003, Kim voiced the same complaints about socialism, this time to the visiting chairman of South Korea’s Hyundai conglomerate: “The evil of socialism is that there are too many people who want a free ride.”21 According to Kim, the solution to this problem of poor motivation and lack of responsibility is to change people, not the system: “The spirit of the socialist life of labor should be established so that people leading a dissolute life or getting a free ride do not exist.”

  In his talks with Shin and Choe, Kim even showed he was aware that the adulation he received from the people was not always genuine. According to Shin, one day when band members were cheering him, Kim said, “Mr. Shin, that is all fake. They are not cheering from the bottom of their hearts.”22

  Kim seemed to understand the bind he was in as the dictatorial ruler of a poor country. On the subject of permitting North Koreans to learn about the outside world, he admitted, “Say we constantly broadcast foreign films on television; then, the people will feel a sense of futility. Under the situation in which the country is divided, how can I let the people worship foreign things at a time when we need to arouse national pride, patriotic struggle, and other things? We have to develop our technology before opening up to foreign countries, but again, this is self contradictory.”23 This was still Kim’s dilemma twenty-five years later: how to introduce foreign technology and attract foreign investment without exposing his people to foreign ideas that would weaken their loyalty to the regime or kindle thoughts about alternative forms of government.

  Kim Adopts a Daughter

  A fascinating close-up of Kim in the 1980s is provided by his “adopted daughter” Yi (Lee) Nam-ok, who was actually his niece. In the late 1960s Kim had taken as a mistress Song Hye-rim, a beautiful and popular actress who was already married. They began living together around 1969 and had a son, Kim Jong-nam, born in 1971. Song had a widowed sister, Song Hye-rang, who had a daughter named Yi Nam-ok and a son named Yi Han-yong. Because the illegitimate Kim-Song household had to be kept secret, not just from Kim Il-sung but from all of North Korean society, little Kim Jong-nam was not permitted to associate with children outside the family.

  To keep him company, Song Hye-rang was brought to the house in 1979 so that her little daughter, Nam-ok, then age thirteen and five years older than Jong-nam, could become his live-in playmate. Nam-ok came to think of Kim Jong-il as her father, although there was always some distance between Kim and his family. Song Hye-rang defected with her sister in 1996 (her sister subsequently returned to Moscow) and published her memoirs in Korean (the English title is Wisteria House).24 So far as we know, she lives in Europe. Her daughter, Nam-ok, defected to France in 1992; since then, she has lived a secretive life as a French citizen.25 With a French writer she wrote a manuscript titled The Golden Cage but later thought better of it and blocked its publication.

  According to Nam-ok’s testimony, Kim Jong-il was absent from home much of the time; he was, after all, running the country and had a wife and various other extramarital affairs to attend to. When he was home, his changeable moods put everyone on edge. Nevertheless, Nam-ok’s impression of Kim was favorable—at least according to what she has said. The “golden cage” in which the family lived was distinctly Western, complete with imported furnishings. Nam-ok recalled many examples of Kim’s interest in the latest foreign products. For example, he was always sending away for Japanese electronics (his favorite brand was Sony), he drove Western cars (Mercedes), and his son’s playroom was filled with more toys than a toy store.

  Nam-ok says Kim doted on Jong-nam, who physically resembled his father, and Jong-nam in turn was devoted to his father and bitterly missed him when he was later sent to school in Switzerland with Nam-ok. According to Nam-ok, Kim Jong-il hated protocol and flattery and had no interest in attending public gatherings. He always seemed to know what people were thinking and doing: “If a bud of a [political] ‘faction’ sprouted, he would not leave it to grow bigger.”26 He loved to laugh and have a good time, but she never saw him drunk and never saw him physically mistreat anyone, including family members, although he yelled and frightened them.

  Kim Relaxes with His Japanese Chef

  A treasure trove of information about Kim Jong-il’s luxurious lifestyle and impetuous personality, some of it perhaps exaggerated, has come from the testimony of a Japanese chef, “Kenji Fujimoto” (a pseudonym he later adopted to protect himself), who was recruited in 1981 by a Japanese trading firm with connections in North Korea and ended up spending thirteen years working for Kim.27 For Fujimoto, life in North Korea was one long adventure, although he had to endure constant surveillance and was always at the beck and call of his unpredictable boss.

  Much of Fujimoto’s testimony is about Kim Jong-il’s food, parties, and hobbies. He speculates that Kim liked him as a companion because Fujimoto was a playful soul ready for almost anything. Fujimoto’s first encounter with Kim, before he even knew who Kim was, reveals how the “Kim court” works. At the time, he was working as a sushi chef at a North Korean hotel, and one night the hotel manager told him to prepare sushi materials for twenty to thirty people. Three Mercedes picked Fujimoto and his assistants up and drove them two and a half hours to a villa at Wonsan beach. The kitchen crew finished preparing the sushi, and at 2 a.m. they were called into the banquet hall to serve Kim Jong-il and his guests.

  After preparing sushi for Kim two or three times a month for several years, Fujimoto was invited to join in card games and other entertainments, and eventually he became a member of Kim’s personal secretariat, traveling around the country with him and taking on added responsibilities such as house-sitting with Kim’s children.

  After Fujimoto became estranged from his wife and family back in Japan, Kim Jong-il observed that his chef was attracted to one of the young entertainment women attending Kim’s parties and arranged a marriage. Fujimoto and his bride were married in a ceremony attended by Kim—but not by the girl’s parents, who were not permitted to associate with the Kim court. The couple was given an eight-room apartment, complete with imported furniture and appliances. The girl’s family, who lived in a one-room apartment (later upgraded to two rooms), was eventually permitted to make a visit to the Fujimoto household, where they were amazed to discover that running water was available twenty-four hours a day, not just for a couple of hours in the morning and evening as is the case in most Pyongyang apartments.

  Fujimoto had a particular interest in Kim’s cuisine and kept records of some of the dinners. Here, for example, is a menu for a family dinner: chilled flowering fern, radish dressed with vinegar, quail egg jelly, grilled pheasant, sautéed rice noodles, sautéed mushrooms, fried octopus with ginkgo nut, Chinese cabbage stew, and dog meat soup, not to mention the usual selection of side dishes that accompany every Korean meal.28 According to Fuji-moto, Kim’s tastes in food are eclectic, but he particularly appreciates the delicate flavor of Japanese food, including sushi, noodles, and shark fin soup. Kim also likes Western food and even hired two Italian chefs to come to Pyongyang
and teach his staff how to make pizza.29

  The domestic ingredients for Kim’s meals come from special farms. For example, Kim’s beef comes from a cattle ranch staffed by former bodyguards who enjoy a princely standard of living but are prevented from leaving the ranch to mix with ordinary people.30 A defector who had a relative working on one of Kim’s farms told how the organic apples were cultivated by adding sugar to the soil (sugar is very hard to come by in North Korea) and severely pruning each tree to produce just a few sweet apples.31 Foreign ingredients for Kim’s table are procured by North Korean officials stationed in embassies around the world.

  Of course, the North Korean media give an entirely different description of Kim’s diet: “We all know what simple meals the great general takes on the road when giving on-the-spot guidance. Rice balls, some roasted potatoes, a bowl of porridge and kimchi. What hot tears all the people of this country shed every time that the anecdotes about his simple meals were reported in the newspapers!”32 Or consider this “apology” to the dear leader (published in the party newspaper, Nodong Sinmun) by a writer who describes the pain Kim is said to have felt when he realized how hungry his people were: “It was heart-breaking to see the general in such agony. We were ashamed of ourselves for having brought anxiety to the general through our poor performance. At that moment, I came to see more clearly why the general was always on the move from front to front, having short and uncomfortable sleep in the car, instead of staying home and getting a comfortable sleep in his own bed, and why he ate rice balls and scorched rice gathered from the bottom of the pot on the road instead of eating proper meals prepared by the people.”33