DPRK Travellogue: Day One

The tour company I went with was Koryo Tours, which is run by a group of British expatriates in Beijing, they have been taking tourists to the DPRK since the late 1980s, and have also been involved in making very interesting documentaries about the country. The staff advised us before we went on several things; we should be polite to our guides, not dogmatic, don’t ask to go to places not on the itinerary, and also never insult the dear/great leaders. Easy enough guidelines to follow, or so I thought at the time.

Air Koryo is the state carrier of the DPRK, and so far as I am aware there are no other civilian airlines in the DPRK; it is run by the military and has a rather interesting, somewhat dated fleet of Russian aircraft. The aircraft we took I think was an Ilyushin Il-62, a late 1960s passenger jet that could carry over 150 passengers. I remember at check-in being stared at by the North Korean passengers who were wearing blue jackets and shirts, and had their Kim Il Sung badge pinned to their lapel. It was a rather daunting sight, I wondered what the country would be like if these were my native co-passengers. On the flight stewardesses said nothing to any of the non-Korean passengers and this added to the feeling of apprehension I had.

We landed at Sunan airport, customs was exactly the same as anywhere else in the world, a health check, and passport control took a scan of my passport, they do have computers in the North. I talked to a random Korean People’s Army (KPA) major whilst waiting for my bag; he giggled when he heard me try to speak in very broken South Korean style Korean. He was rather intimidating before I opened my mouth, but surprisingly friendly. We were met at the airport by our North Korean guides; the main one was an exceptionally beautiful girl aged 27 was called Ung-nim. She started every new paragraph with a very cute and laboured “soooooo” and I was entranced by her the moment I met her. She had the most readable changes in attitude; when she was being official and parroting what she was supposed to she would say “yes, umhum” with a serious almost robotic voice. When she was talking with about her own life she did so with warmth and affection; she was so perfect I could see why she was picked as a guide. She had a way of talking that reminds me of one of my most beautiful Korean friends. Like I said to one of my friends on the tour, I was in love with our guide at first meeting.

One of the first things our guide told us was that Korea had 4 distinct seasons, and then told us what we should expect from each season in Korea (it sounded just like England). I was overwhelmed by the views from the windows as she was talking, to see the murals and the villages, the rice paddy fields and the people on bicycles. There is a monument in every village, town and city in the DPRK that says that “the great leader Kim Il Sung will always be with us”. Seeing them for the first time as we passed many villages on our way to the capital it made me feel like ill.
The first revolutionary sight we saw in Pyongyang was the Arch of Triumph built in 1982 for the occasion of the Great Leader’s 70th birthday. It’s very similar to the one in Paris except its bigger, and it commemorates the liberation of Korea by Kim Il Sung’s guerrilla forces the Korean People’s Revolutionary Army (KPRA). This is actually a propaganda fiction; when this organisation was allegedly liberating Korea with Soviet assistance, Kim Il Sung was actually living in Soviet Army barracks in the Russian far-east. It’s part of the contemporary North Korean Juche propaganda narrative that emerged in the 1960s. Juche is the state ideology of the DPRK (sometimes called Kimilsungism); it translates roughly as self-reliance. What it meant for the history of the DPRK was to lionise the Kim Il Sung faction of the Korean Worker’s Party (KWP) and marginalise all other communists as factionalists. It also meant that the role of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was that of supporting Kim in liberation and in the Korean War. They were no longer recognised as the great powers that created and sustained the DPRK in the 1940s and 1950s. The KPRA is a convenient creation to play into the self-reliance narrative, but there is no documentary evidence of its existence except for the assertion of North Korean propaganda.

We stayed at the Yanggakdo hotel in the evening, a rather large hotel with 1000 rooms, and about 75 occupants at most. Typical of the gargantuan folly that is North Korean prestige projects. There are at least 4 hotels in Pyongyang, and I think there might be as many as 8, yet the place has nowhere near enough tourists to justify the expense. The Ryugyong hotel is a prime example of this folly; it is now being completed by an Egyptian company hopefully to at least look presentable by 2012, in time for the 100 anniversary of the Great leader’s birth. It is over 100 stories tall and could house over 1000 rooms, and what is the point? Apparently the Yanggakdo was built by a French company in some crocked scheme between President Mitterrand and Kim Il Sung.

The first night in the DPRK was a rather shocking if pleasant experience; to actually arrive in the country I have been obsessing over for three years was quite a head-(expletive deleted). The bowling alley at the Yanggakdo was rather difficult for someone of my very limited sporting talents but it was very interesting to talk to the staff in broken Korean. I couldn’t ask them any particularly interesting questions, but even with my rather rudimentary understanding of Korean language I could hear the highly formalised nature of Chosŏnmal (the name of Korean in North Korea). They use the most formal verb and adjective endings, but they still speak too quickly for me to understand.

I went to the small bookshop in the Yanggakdo after supper in the evening of the first night. In fact I went several times, I wish they had North Korean bookshops in London; I would spend hundreds of pounds on DVDs, CDs and posters. I sang “No motherland without you” to the rather pretty older woman who staffed the shop on the first night, and she found me the version by the Pochonbo electrical ensemble, check it out here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9b85_KlIBU . I wish I had asked her for some more music, I have so many North Korean songs I really like, and want on CD for my MP3 player. What is interesting was that she looked quite young for a woman in her late 30s; she clearly had access to good food and took good care of herself possibly at the gym or through a strict dietary regime. Her clothes were western, clearly quite expensive and well fitted; I think she might have bought them from one of the department stores in Pyongyang. She wore an expensive watch, a Seiko and she had styled hair. The point is she had an income comparable to an upper middle-class westerner. But on the streets of Pyongyang, the show case capital of the DPRK, she would be extremely wealthy; many of the people on the streets wear quite loose fitting clothes of Soviet style, they often do not look well fed, nor do they have watches. The older they are the more coarse they look, very few look as soft and young as she did; this is just my view from the coach as we sped through Pyongyang every day, when I did got out and walked around I had these impressions confirmed. It’s funny how few pretty girls there were in Pyongyang; my guide and the guide for the other group were both pretty, but most female cadets and general bystanders were not in any way eye-catching.

The bookshop was interesting for another reason, I met the guide for the other group staying at the hotel; I couldn’t resist asking him his opinions of all the key figures in the North Korean leadership who I know the name of from the last 50 years. I can’t remember all the names I asked him about, but I do remember what he said about some contemporary figures in the leadership. He knew who Chang Sung-taek was, the fact that he knew the name made no sense considering how he described Chang. He said that he was a mere high level functionary. Now how would my North Korean guide have heard of Chang if he honestly thought the man was a mere Samuwon (functionary in Korean). For reference Chang Sung-taek is the alleged regent in charge of the day-to-day running of the North Korean state because of the illness of Kim Jong-il.

I asked him about Kim Jong-un, the third son of Kim Jong-il; he told me that they call him the Young General, the rumour in the western press is that he is being groomed as the successor to Kim Jong-il. This sounds like part of an emerging personality cult, but who knows, there have been such things in the past for the other sons that came to nothing. Kim Jong-il’s family history is quite interesting; Kim Jong-nam the first son has fallen out of favour because he was caught trying to enter Japan on a forged Dominican Republic passport with some of his wives (yes the plural is correct) and children in 2001. He now lives in Macao and gambles away the excess family savings; he was recently on Japanese TV and didn’t know what was going on in his own country which I found rather amusing. The second son, Kim Jong-chŏl is allegedly gay and rather feminine which apparently father Kim thinks is a disqualification for succession. My guide was rummaging through my flash cards and found the South Korean word for gay (I thought it would be funny to memorise). He told me that they had a different word for gay, in the south its “homo”, so I asked if there were any gay people in the north, and he said with an uncomfortable smile “no”.