DPRK Travellogue: Day Two

The first full day in the DPRK began early; if you ever plan to go on tour in the DPRK be prepared to be chronically sleep deprived. The beer in Pyongyang costs €0.60 a bottle and the bottles are 640ml so it’s very cheap to get drunk. The beer is also exceptionally good, they imported a brewery from England in 2001 and it shows. If I could get Taedonggang beer I would buy it in England. The upshot of all this is that I got very little sleep in the DPRK because I was too busy drinking and trying to flirt with the North Korean waitresses with lyrics from South Korean songs and it didn’t go to badly, except when the bar maid asked me about my Sowŏn and I thought she said Sŏwŏn. Sŏwŏn is a Confucian academy from the Chosŏn period, but Sowŏn is the Korean word for wish. I kept asking her why I would go to a Confucian University if I were British; the barman thought this was rather hilarious and I did too once I understood what she was trying to say.

We went to Panmunjŏm (the village where soldiers from both sides stare at each other); one of the first things you will notice when you come to the DPRK is that it has very few cars. The country has a number of very impressive motorways and yet there is no traffic to fill them. Personally I can see the advantage of having the motorways, I do not think they are merely more folly on the part of the regime. They make a great deal of strategic sense for military transportation and logistics, being a country technically still at war it makes moving tanks and troop transports around very easy. And you can see the level of militarisation in the DPRK when you travel between two cities, there are multiple roadblocks between Pyongyang and Panmunjŏm, all staffed by very young looking KPA conscripts. This also goes back to an earlier point I made about re-Stalinisation, you can see it when you’re on the roads, its’ that the state is reasserting itself by curbing freedom of movement. At least that was my impression. This was my first real chance to talk to my guides about the DPRK and I think I started by humming my favourite Korean tunes from the North. This was rather shocking for my guides, I am pretty sure they have never encountered such an enthusiast as me when it comes to DPRK music and propaganda (and I did ask them if they have ever had a tourist who knew the music).

On our way to Panmunjŏm we stopped at a ‘coffee’ house, one of many occasions where the Korean International Tourist Company (KITC) attempted to liberate foreign exchange from our imperialist wallets to use the phrase of my friend Ed from the tour. The coffee house was an ugly building that overhung the expressway in the middle of nowhere but was well staffed for some reason known only to the North Korean state. I went up and struck up a thoroughly broken conversation with one of the waitresses asking her if she had a Hanbok (Korean traditional female clothing). She looked at me blankly, I asked several times thinking my pronunciation was wrong and then I remembered. The use of the word “han” in Hanbok is derived from the name of South Korea in Korean “Hanguk”; in the North as the waitress told me when I asked her, the outfit is known as the Chosŏn-ut. The division of Korea can be very confusing for Korean language novices like me.

The drive to Panmunjom was quite interesting for what we could see from the car; the motorway that we were supposed to drive up was undergoing repairs so we had to turn off onto a dirt track for a substantial portion of the journey. We saw columns of soldiers several times; something you will notice if you ever visit the DPRK is that there are soldiers everywhere. They are usually very young looking; most of them look like they have not long left school. Before I blow this out of proportion I should add that both Koreas have conscription, so there are plenty of young men who are in the military straight after school in both Koreas. The difference in proportions can be seen North of the border; I met plenty of guys older than me who had been in the military, but the only time I ever saw a South Korean soldier was when I was in Panmunjom from the Northern side. The south maintains an army just over half a million strong, drawn from a total population of 44 million. The north on the other hand, maintains an army of over one million from a population of 22 million. This means that the north is four times more militarised than the south. If this worries you then I should just add that the south spends more than double what the north does on defence; they counter the raw numbers of the north with far more advanced firepower.

One other thing worthy of mention from the trip to Panmunjom was that I saw Sariwŏn. Sariwŏn is the capital of North Hwanghae province; this isn’t particularly interesting in itself, but I know someone who is from there. My pre-modern Korean history teacher at summer school in the south was originally from very near Sariwŏn; his family fled south during the Korean War, and he is sad to never be able to see where he is from. We sped past it, and I am sure that he would not recognise it; the skyline was composed purely of brutalist tower blocks, it was a very ugly city. If Korea is ever reunified, southerners will be very disappointed to see what their northern brothers have done to their beautiful country. While I was in the south I went up the Seoul tower on the South Mountain, Seoul is a beautiful and dynamic city at night. Pyongyang is relatively well lit at night compared to the videos I have seen from the 1990s; tower blocks are now lit, in the 1990s they would be dark at night. North Korea seems to have much more power than it did during the arduous march of the 1990s. But it’s a very ugly view; it looks like a skyline from George Orwell; the triumph of mechanistic rationality, no character, no randomness, just perfectly planned, cheap and ugly tower blocks. At least capitalism has some flair to it; Pyongyang is the triumph of socialist planning.

Panmunjŏm is the place where all the tourists get their kicks; to see the frontline of the frozen war that is still theoretically going on. Personally I found it quite dull; seeing soldiers stare at each other with rather forced and practiced contempt. But our guide did impart something quite interesting; there was a rather horrible incident known as the Axe Murder incident that occurred near Panmunjom in 1976. So far as the west is concerned the story is this: a poplar tree was obscuring the view from a lookout point in the southern part of the DMZ, so a group of UN soldiers went to trim it. Some KPA soldiers accosted them and demanded they stop, the UN soldiers told them they were within their rights to trim the tree, so the KPA soldiers attacked them. My North Korean guide told a different story; that the KPA were attacked by UN soldiers. There was a convincing justification to this, why would the USA need to trim this tree? They have the most sophisticated observing equipment in the world and would be able to see perfectly well without the need to trim the tree. To me the incident doesn’t make much sense, the US would obviously not want a war straight after Vietnam, the north could not win a war, and the south did not want a war in the middle of industrialisation. But I suppose it could play into the imperialist propaganda narrative of the north in the same way as other bizarre incidents did in the 1970s.

One other thing I noticed in Panmunjŏm which I found very amusing was the Samsung air conditioning unit installed on the North Korean side. I asked my guide if she had ever heard of the company and she looked at me blankly. In the South Korean language the big companies like Samsung, Hyundai et al are known as chaebŏls, this is the Korean pronunciation of the Japanese word for company. My North Korean guide had never heard the word before which I found surprising. And she didn’t find it funny that the air conditioning was made by South Koreans, in fact I don’t think she would have realised if I hadn’t pointed it out.

After Panmunjŏm we went to Kaesŏng which I found much more interesting. Kaesŏng was the capital of Korea until 1392 under what is known as the Koryŏ dynasty; actually the English name for Korea is a bad Romanisation of the word Koryŏ. Kaesŏng still has a little of its pre-modern charm, but more about that later. The first thing I noticed about Kaesŏng is how much poorer it was than Pyongyang, when you enter the city there are no cars; Pyongyang has some cars, not many, it’s not like any other capital, there is no traffic. But Kaesong has no cars on entry, just people on bicycles and walking by the side of the road. The other indication of poverty is roughness of the roads, they are filled with potholes and cracks; the Pyongyang roads are not, and they are much more used than the Kaesŏng roads, which leads me to suspect that the roads in Kaesŏng are badly maintained. This is the second city of North Korea in terms of size and in terms of resources allotted; most foreigners who visit Pyongyang will also be taken to Kaesong. The decaying state of its infrastructure and the poverty of its people show just how bankrupt the North Korean state is.

For lunch in Kaesong we went to a ‘local restaurant’, a euphemism our guide used for what was clearly a showcase. There is no way the people walking/riding past me on the street could have afforded the lunch we were given. The presence of a gift shop selling only in Euros to liberate more foreign exchange from my purse was further proof of this. Whilst the elite in North Korea obviously have access to foreign exchange, the common people surely would not have the money to afford a meal at the ‘restaurant’. The food was very good; an assortment of cold, traditional Korean side dishes, and the Soju (the Korean equivalent of Vodka) was very good too. Having called it a showcase, I should add a proviso; I saw some side rooms there, so I think it might have been an elite luncheon hangout as well as being for tourists.

When the meal was over I went outside; I had already seen quite a bit of revolutionary paraphernalia in Pyongyang. Currently there is a 150 day work campaign instituted by the party to speed up production. This is the standard growth strategy adopted by communist countries; make up for a lack of capital investment by trying to make your workers work harder. This is known as Stakhanovism after Alexey Stakhanov, the famous Russian miner who over fulfilled his coal quota by 10 times. The 150 day work campaign offers the ideological incentive of medals and flags to those who work the hardest; the problem with this kind of economic model is that of diminishing returns. Labour can only give so much, machinery and infrastructure is just as important; this is why the DPRK is mired in persistent underdevelopment with a moribund and stagnant economy. It does not have the money or the inclination to modernise its industrial base. So instead it pursues pointless and for its people, exhausting campaigns to increase production and try to push the economy out of its quagmire.

What I noticed on the streets of Pyongyang and on the streets of Kaesŏng is how obvious the gap is between rich and poor. Near the Arch of Triumph in Pyongyang the day before, I saw two very beautiful high school students; if it weren’t for their modest, long skirts, they could have been Japanese and in Kaesong I saw girls just like them. Whilst I was trying to read aloud one of the revolutionary posters a man from Kaesŏng came alongside me and helped me read it. He was missing teeth, and was wearing ragged clothes, an oversized Mao suit jacket which was unbuttoned, with a vest underneath, and baggy trousers that were above the waistline with a belt. He looked very haggard; I can imagine that he struggled for food in the 1990s. It is a blatantly class society, the gap between the connected and the unconnected is yawning; it is especially disturbing considering the state socialist roots of the DPRK.

From the ‘local restaurant’ we went to the Concrete wall, this is the Korean version of the Berlin wall. The DPRK alleges that the South Koreans built a concrete wall along the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) in the late 1970s. The South contends that it is merely a tank barrier and does not take up the entire DMZ; the fact is I don’t know who to believe. The North has carefully built a lookout post in one area where the wall/barrier is visible through a telescope, so either side could be telling the truth. I know if the south had built such a wall they probably wouldn’t make it public, and there isn’t any way for the media to double check the truth of northern claims because freedom of movement is heavily restricted in the DMZ.

The route to the concrete wall was far more interesting than the lookout point itself. North Hwanghae province is one of the wealthiest provinces in the North, it has a productive agricultural base and being near Pyongyang it is treated quite well in allocation of state resources. Being near the border with the south also means that it would be treated better, in order to showcase the triumph of the Juche idea. I think it’s important to note this before I describe what I saw; leaving Kaesong there were many people on bicycles on both sides of the road. But as we progressed beyond the city limits we saw few people; there were soldiers, young conscripts yet again. But there were also children, dressed in old and oversized clothes walking or sitting by the side of the road. I saw one of them doing their washing in the stream, a clear sign of the third world. The one happy sight was a river filled with children and adults enjoying the warm day and swimming; one of the guides told me later the reason why they were swimming. He said that the waters are suspected to have medicinal qualities at this time of year; I think it may have something to do with Shamanism but he didn’t mention it. I don’t think there is a prohibition against the recognition of native Korean superstitions; my beautiful North Korean guide did not know much about Chŏndogyo, but the North Korean state continues to recognise the religion (as a political force, Chŏndogyo Young Friends Party), which is a home grown mix of shamanism, Catholicism and Buddhism.

The concrete wall itself was a rather bland exhibit; the curator was a KPA major who was rather too friendly to be real. They subjected us to a nice bit of badly translated and crass propaganda film about the US imperialists and their flunkey’s in the south. The major was very enthusiastic about us having pictures with him and he said that he wanted us to come back to the country again. I asked him if he had ever met Kim Jong-il and I could tell that my guide called Kim Jong-il “the general” (Chang-gun) in Korean. He said he had his photo taken with him. This is a bizarre thing about the DPRK, propaganda exhibits that obviously cost time and money to construct and are staffed by permanent guides exist right next to the most grinding poverty. This kind of noxious misallocation of resources toward prestige projects over the basic needs of the people is ubiquitous in the north. You see it when you drive past villages, each having its own obelisk at its centre that says “the great leader Kim Il Sung will always be with us”. I also saw it at the book shop at the Yanggakdo, one of the books I bought was called ‘Let’s Learn Korean’, was published at the start of the famine in 1995. The Yanggakdo was completed in 1995; the North Korean state seems to genuinely not care about much of its people, seeing its prestige projects as more important.

After the concrete wall we went to the Koryŏ museum; it was a jarring contrast between the decrepit tower blocks in Kaesŏng and the immaculately maintained Koryŏ museum that was completely empty except for the specialist guide who took us around it. There were quotations and pictures of the Kim’s on the walls, yet they were completely ignored; the same was the case at Panmunjŏm, the guides made no effort to tell us about the Kims. I don’t think my female guide was a true believer; it felt like talking to a South Korean about their politics; the references to the great and dear leaders seemed perfunctory, when the cult could be ignored it was.

The next sight after that was the Tomb of King Kongmin, the flawed genius during the final decline of the Koryo dynasty. The tomb was robbed by those Waenŏm (Cunning bastards, the colloquial Korean for Japanese) in 1905. It was completely unideological which was slightly surprising; the reason why King Kongmin is famous in Korea is because of his attempts at land reform, he wasn’t as radical as Kim Il Sung but he did seek to break the power of the nobility and empower the common people. He also disempowered the pro-Mongol elite within Koryŏ; as I have already mentioned the whole point of the Juche idea is national independence. King Kongmin would fit perfectly into the North Korean historical narrative, yet my guides said nothing about the historical parallels. Maybe it was because Kongmin was assassinated and failed in his efforts at reform.

We did not go back to the Yanggakdo in the evening; rather we stayed at the Kaesŏng Folk Hotel. Folk hotel means that you sleep on the floor, the doors are made of paper and the food is western/Korean fusion as usual. It was a reasonably pleasant experience, but I managed to drink too much and tell my guides rather too much about their country that they didn’t know and I don’t think in retrospect they would have wanted to know.