South Korea is a strange place for women, certainly much freer than any developing country, women command important jobs in South Korean companies and are able to have six figure salaries. Whilst there has not been a sexual revolution, and social mores are still more restrictive in Sexual practices. An illustration of this is one of my best Korean friends is a really normal guy, kind, funny, with a slightly cheeky wit. You would expect him to be a demon with ladies; not a bit of it, he has a very steady girlfriend, and he knows to the day when they got together. What is so wonderful about this couple for me is how normal they are by Western standards; they have similar interests, the same "major" etc. The funny thing is, the boy is better looking. He told me his society is plagued by what is called in Korean "lookism". Yet he is not defined by that, and he does not critically engage with his culture. He doesn't really see how terribly shallow South Korean popular culture is even by the low standards of western popular culture in general. He told me he likes his girlfriend for her heart (in the Korean world view there is no heart/mind distinction). This male friend of mine is irreligious, but he has the sexual ethics of a strict Christian; he says he will not have sex until he gets married. This is an old way and he is not the only man in Korea like this. Its strange sometimes, you meet people who are on the surface very western, they watch western TV, listen to Rap, and yet they aren't.
Another close Korean friend of mine has exactly the same sexual ethics, and he is even more steeped in Americanization, considering the fact he lives in America. It's very weird to hear a liberal, ethnic Korean with an American accent tell me, he has never had sex and doesn't want to think about it until he gets married. Part of me is quite envious, sex is so confusing and complicating. But here is the paradox, my second friend likes women who have been surgically "enhanced". What is meant by this is that the woman is made to look more westernized through surgery.
The most popular surgery in Korea is the splitting of the eyelid. I have feminist Korean friends who have fathers that want them to get surgery in order to increase their confidence with men. Its really unbearably sad for me to think of otherwise descent parents pressuring their children to have their faces (the very representation of their soul, their uniqueness), mutilated, defaced, turned into a lie, in order to please the rabble. This is the paradox of westernization, it liberates women from old pre-modern patriarchal power structures. Specifically women are no longer forced to stay at home, they have economic freedom. Yet in the case of South Korea, the cultural westernization has just created a new, unrealistic perception of beauty. Women are supposed to have bigger noses, straighter cheeks and bigger eyes. I have arguments with people about this, they say it is a choice, and many people do it for themselves and not for men. But this is clearly bullshit, we define ourselves in looks terms by what we desire, and what the desired wants. Its Stockholm syndrome, the prison guards, the dumb rabble who wants vacuous, mutilated, plastic women has won; so many women in South Korea now think of their own interests and that of the object of their desire as one and the same. A whole new internalized patriarchy exists.
Friday, 23 October 2009
Sunday, 4 October 2009
DPRK Travellogue: Day Four
The following day we went to Kumsusan memorial palace; this was the primary residence of the eternal president Kim Il Sung (he had many other secret retreats but this was his official state residence). It is a vast building, of which were only allowed to see small parts, foreigners are apparently not worthy to see his office and bed chambers. It allegedly cost $750 million to convert it from a residence to a pilgrimage site after the death of the great leader in 1994; this was the time of the great famine, when people were starving across the country. The parts of the palace we are allowed to see were the room of lamentation which is the room where every North Korean listens to the MP3 player provided that tells them about the death of the great leader. The other room to see takes the perversion grand prize for the country, Kim Il Sung’s embalmed corpse is on display, and as you pass through you must bow 3 times, at both his sides and at his head.
The final day in the country became the honoured dead grand tour in the morning. The next stop was the revolutionary martyr’s cemetery; this has over 500 grave stones for many obscure guerrilla comrades of Kim Il Sung, as well as the most honoured graves for his first wife (Kim Jong-suk) and favourite fellow fighter (O Chin-u). The cemetery is really just an obligatory ideological stop for all visitors to Pyongyang; it holds no particular interest to most, except to the relations of the dead buried there, and to regime true-believers. I did manage to make it interesting for myself though, by meeting more students from Kim Il Sung University, and talking to them in bad, broken Korean.
Tourism is a foreign currency earner, this is its role for the North Korean government, and they are not subtle in trying to liberate every last penny from your capitalist wallet. We went to 8 gift shops at least in the space of 4 days, perhaps more, I wasn’t really keeping count. The gift shop we went to on our last day was quite interesting however, because it wasn’t just for tourists, it was a functional shop open for domestic consumers. Most gift shops in Pyongyang are only opened when a tourist or visiting delegation is coming; they are left shut the rest of the time as they serve no other purpose. This means that the staff probably only serve customers 2-3 hours a week, 7 months of the year during the tourist season, at a maximum. The exception to the rule would be the shops at the Yanggakdo, which must be open most of daytime, whenever the hotel is open, as the hotel will always have a small number of guests, business or humanitarian as well as the seasonal tourists. But this gift shop was different; the ground floor had imported goods, dresses from China, motorbikes and watches from Japan to name a few. I even saw a copy of Rodong Shinmun (Workers News), the party newspaper, on the counter; the shop attendant wouldn’t let me buy it though. All the prices were in Euros, this is now the standard foreign currency in Pyongyang, and so this shop was clearly for the elite who can afford to spend hard currency on luxury goods. Most people even in Pyongyang who have hard currency, spend the bulk of it on food, to supplement very austere rations that are apportioned them by the state. Outside the capital, North Koreans often do not have access to state rations, or hard currency, so they have to barter or use the local North Korean currency, the Won. The quality of the goods on offer was poor, they did not look new, the watches were fake, the clothes looked akin to Primark knock-offs of named brands, and the motorbikes looked old, early 90s or late 80s in style. But this is to be expected, in a country almost untouched by globalisation and the influx of western goods that third world elites usually have access to as a result.
Mansudae is a very famous sight in the DPRK; if you have ever seen the giant statue of Kim Il Sung, hand outstretched toward the sky then you have seen Mansudae (Mansu Hill). It is another obligatory ideological stop, you are supposed to lay flowers at the feet of the statue, and bow before it to show even more respect to the peerless Patriot Kim Il Sung. It wasn’t worth the trip, the Supreme People’s Assembly the North Korean parliament, was just down the road from there, and it would have been much more interesting to see that. The statue is flanked by two sets of sculptures depicting Korean revolutionaries before and after the war, the constant theme of a united people of Peasants, workers and intellectuals is repeated.
The Pyongyang subway was opened in 1973, I have heard many journalists and commentators compare it to the Moscow metro. I have never been to Moscow so I cannot comment as to the veracity of these claims, but trusted sources tell me it was built with Russian expertise, architectural and engineering. It is the deepest subway system in the world and doubles as an air raid shelter, as you would imagine in the most militarised society on the planet. The platforms have luxuriant murals to the revolutionary exploits of Kim Il Sung, and the chandeliers befits a socialist paradise. The subway trains themselves are old East German (Correction: The Current rolling stock are West Berliner vintage from the 1980s) former communist rolling stock from the 1950s-80s. The doors don’t open automatically; you have to pull them with a handle! Inside the train there are very old fashioned hard, faux-leather seats and pictures of Kim father and son stare down from above the door to the next carriage. The Pyongyang subway is the showcase that isn’t, when compared to the Seoul subway. The Seoul subway is one the largest and most impressive subways in the world, ultra-modern and fully functional. Whilst the Pyongyang subway would have been impressive in the 1930s or 1940s, it looks extremely dated and quaint now.
When we exited the subway our driver was waiting to take us to the stamp shop, I managed to nab some shots of the Koryo Hotel before we got on the coach. I persuaded my guide to let me take my friend to the Koryo Hotel rather than go to the stamp shop directly (another gift shop to hoover up our hard currency). The Koryo Hotel was complete in 1985. It isn’t the first Koryo Hotel in Pyongyang, there was a Koryo Hotel in Pyongyang in 1945, this is where the old Nationalist leader in Pyongyang, Cho Man-sik (the so-called Korean Gandhi) was imprisoned after he disagreed with the Soviet Union over their plans for Korea (when they occupied the country in 1945). The new Koryo Hotel is the most luxurious hotel in Pyongyang; it has a vast, cavernous lobby, flanked by a tea house on one side and a bar on the other. The hotel is a favoured haunt of the North Korean Nomenklatura; I read a rumour in Bradley Martin’s book that Kim Jong-nam (first son of the dear leader) went on a shooting rampage there in the late 1990s and I really wanted see the place for myself. I didn’t see any bullet holes or signs of a massacre; I asked one frequent traveller to the DPRK and he dismissed the rumour as idle gossip. I played the piano at the hotel and had a very overpriced cup of coffee for €3; but this was the best cup of coffee in the country, it came from a machine that had real coffee beans in it. You could tell this was an elite hang out by all the creepy bureaucrats in Mao suits and sunglasses sitting at tables. This seems to be the style of the Nomenklatura in Pyongyang, the baggy summer Mao suit that looks like pyjamas (see Kim Jong Il in one here: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/5e/Kim_Jong_il_2009_2.jpg), and the tinted sunglasses. They look like a cabal of gangsters as a result.
The Tower of the Juche Idea was built in 1982 to replace the industrial achievements exhibit on the same sight. This was to celebrate the 60th Birthday of the Great Leader Kim Il Sung. Juche as already mentioned is the ideology of North Korea; like many words in Korean it has more than one meaning, but in this context it is often translated as Self-reliance. What it means in practice is that the DPRK has attempted (disastrously) to achieve self-suffiency in agriculture, and to rely less on foreign technology in manufacturing. North Korea was always reliant on Soviet preferential prices for oil and other vital raw materials which amounted to Aid. The tower itself is like a bigger version of the Washington Monument with a giant red light bulb in the shape of a flame at its peak. They charge you €5 to ride the elevator to the top; it’s worth the money because you get a panoramic view of Pyongyang (except when it’s covered in Mist, like the day we were there). I met an American academic at the top who specialises in Chinese 20th Century History; he said that the place had a feeling similar to Beijing after the death of Mao. He elaborated, it felt like it was in a transition period, the prevalence of foreign currency and the existence of state sanctioned markets seemed to him like the green shoots of a Korean style “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics”. I disagreed with him; I see the reform process in North Korea as being dead locked in an institutional cul-de-sac. The military and the party hierarchy have much to gain by small reforms that can bring in foreign currency, like joint ventures with foreign companies (like the Kaesong industrial project). But they have everything to lose by embracing Chinese style reform; these reforms would necessarily lead to an influx of information about the outside world and would destroy the regime’s credibility. As so often noted by specialists in this field, Vietnam and China could risk capitalism because they did not have a large ethnically identical capitalist rival that would discredit the regime (Taiwan is far too small to discredit Beijing). The other major road block to reform is the continued profitability of the status quo, the Nomenklatura is Pyongyang have control over all the profitable industries that the state still runs; this means that they can still enjoy a comparatively comfortable standard of living. When East Europe liberalised in 1980s and 1990s, most of the Nomenklatura lost these kinds of privileges; even in China, former Nomenklatura status is no guarantee of a decent standard of living.
The second to last stop on the trip was the 50th Anniversary Monument to the Foundation of the Worker’s Party of Korea. It was completed in 1995; this isn’t actually the 50th Anniversary the WKP was founded in 1949, when the Southern and Northern parties were merged into one party. The 1945 date is the founding date of the Korean Communist Party, which was a fundamentally different organisation. Anyway, the monument is quite an iconic image for Pyongyang. It is a large stone building with a stone paint brush (symbolic of the intellectual), a stone sickle (the peasant), and a stone hammer (the worker). It is another example of terrible waste, completed at the start of the great famine.
My last evening in Pyongyang was very interesting; I went the far side of the island on which the Yanggakdo resides. There was an outdoor bar staffed by 20 year old bar staff, their English was about as basic as my Korean, but they were very interested to hear about South Korea. I did an impression of my South Korean friends talking on their mobiles in Korean which they found uproariously funny. One of the staff was a girl my age who was very cute for a North Korean, and she seemed very interested in me, so I bought her a drink and tried to talk to her in Korean and English. It was very difficult, but she wanted me to come back to Pyongyang to see her again; she was reading a Korean folk love story, and I wish I had met her sooner, then I could have taken her on more dates. I went back the following morning to tell her that I was leaving, and told her I would be coming back to Pyongyang to take her out on another date. She was about as forward as any girl in Pyongyang can be considering how conservative North Korea is, but I hope to continue my North Korean love life when I go back.
I owe a debt of thanks to the following scholars who have been so influential on my thoughts on North Korea: Andrei Lankov, Dae-sook Suh, Brian Reynolds Myers, Robert Scalapino, Chong-sik Lee, David Hawk, Charles Armstrong, Adrian Buzo, Erik Cornell, Ralph C. Hassig, Kongdan Oh, Bradley K. Martin, Bruce Cumings, Helen Louise Hunter, Marcus Noland, Stephen Haggard, Balazs Szalontai, and Hy-sang Lee.
The final day in the country became the honoured dead grand tour in the morning. The next stop was the revolutionary martyr’s cemetery; this has over 500 grave stones for many obscure guerrilla comrades of Kim Il Sung, as well as the most honoured graves for his first wife (Kim Jong-suk) and favourite fellow fighter (O Chin-u). The cemetery is really just an obligatory ideological stop for all visitors to Pyongyang; it holds no particular interest to most, except to the relations of the dead buried there, and to regime true-believers. I did manage to make it interesting for myself though, by meeting more students from Kim Il Sung University, and talking to them in bad, broken Korean.
Tourism is a foreign currency earner, this is its role for the North Korean government, and they are not subtle in trying to liberate every last penny from your capitalist wallet. We went to 8 gift shops at least in the space of 4 days, perhaps more, I wasn’t really keeping count. The gift shop we went to on our last day was quite interesting however, because it wasn’t just for tourists, it was a functional shop open for domestic consumers. Most gift shops in Pyongyang are only opened when a tourist or visiting delegation is coming; they are left shut the rest of the time as they serve no other purpose. This means that the staff probably only serve customers 2-3 hours a week, 7 months of the year during the tourist season, at a maximum. The exception to the rule would be the shops at the Yanggakdo, which must be open most of daytime, whenever the hotel is open, as the hotel will always have a small number of guests, business or humanitarian as well as the seasonal tourists. But this gift shop was different; the ground floor had imported goods, dresses from China, motorbikes and watches from Japan to name a few. I even saw a copy of Rodong Shinmun (Workers News), the party newspaper, on the counter; the shop attendant wouldn’t let me buy it though. All the prices were in Euros, this is now the standard foreign currency in Pyongyang, and so this shop was clearly for the elite who can afford to spend hard currency on luxury goods. Most people even in Pyongyang who have hard currency, spend the bulk of it on food, to supplement very austere rations that are apportioned them by the state. Outside the capital, North Koreans often do not have access to state rations, or hard currency, so they have to barter or use the local North Korean currency, the Won. The quality of the goods on offer was poor, they did not look new, the watches were fake, the clothes looked akin to Primark knock-offs of named brands, and the motorbikes looked old, early 90s or late 80s in style. But this is to be expected, in a country almost untouched by globalisation and the influx of western goods that third world elites usually have access to as a result.
Mansudae is a very famous sight in the DPRK; if you have ever seen the giant statue of Kim Il Sung, hand outstretched toward the sky then you have seen Mansudae (Mansu Hill). It is another obligatory ideological stop, you are supposed to lay flowers at the feet of the statue, and bow before it to show even more respect to the peerless Patriot Kim Il Sung. It wasn’t worth the trip, the Supreme People’s Assembly the North Korean parliament, was just down the road from there, and it would have been much more interesting to see that. The statue is flanked by two sets of sculptures depicting Korean revolutionaries before and after the war, the constant theme of a united people of Peasants, workers and intellectuals is repeated.
The Pyongyang subway was opened in 1973, I have heard many journalists and commentators compare it to the Moscow metro. I have never been to Moscow so I cannot comment as to the veracity of these claims, but trusted sources tell me it was built with Russian expertise, architectural and engineering. It is the deepest subway system in the world and doubles as an air raid shelter, as you would imagine in the most militarised society on the planet. The platforms have luxuriant murals to the revolutionary exploits of Kim Il Sung, and the chandeliers befits a socialist paradise. The subway trains themselves are old East German (Correction: The Current rolling stock are West Berliner vintage from the 1980s) former communist rolling stock from the 1950s-80s. The doors don’t open automatically; you have to pull them with a handle! Inside the train there are very old fashioned hard, faux-leather seats and pictures of Kim father and son stare down from above the door to the next carriage. The Pyongyang subway is the showcase that isn’t, when compared to the Seoul subway. The Seoul subway is one the largest and most impressive subways in the world, ultra-modern and fully functional. Whilst the Pyongyang subway would have been impressive in the 1930s or 1940s, it looks extremely dated and quaint now.
When we exited the subway our driver was waiting to take us to the stamp shop, I managed to nab some shots of the Koryo Hotel before we got on the coach. I persuaded my guide to let me take my friend to the Koryo Hotel rather than go to the stamp shop directly (another gift shop to hoover up our hard currency). The Koryo Hotel was complete in 1985. It isn’t the first Koryo Hotel in Pyongyang, there was a Koryo Hotel in Pyongyang in 1945, this is where the old Nationalist leader in Pyongyang, Cho Man-sik (the so-called Korean Gandhi) was imprisoned after he disagreed with the Soviet Union over their plans for Korea (when they occupied the country in 1945). The new Koryo Hotel is the most luxurious hotel in Pyongyang; it has a vast, cavernous lobby, flanked by a tea house on one side and a bar on the other. The hotel is a favoured haunt of the North Korean Nomenklatura; I read a rumour in Bradley Martin’s book that Kim Jong-nam (first son of the dear leader) went on a shooting rampage there in the late 1990s and I really wanted see the place for myself. I didn’t see any bullet holes or signs of a massacre; I asked one frequent traveller to the DPRK and he dismissed the rumour as idle gossip. I played the piano at the hotel and had a very overpriced cup of coffee for €3; but this was the best cup of coffee in the country, it came from a machine that had real coffee beans in it. You could tell this was an elite hang out by all the creepy bureaucrats in Mao suits and sunglasses sitting at tables. This seems to be the style of the Nomenklatura in Pyongyang, the baggy summer Mao suit that looks like pyjamas (see Kim Jong Il in one here: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/5e/Kim_Jong_il_2009_2.jpg), and the tinted sunglasses. They look like a cabal of gangsters as a result.
The Tower of the Juche Idea was built in 1982 to replace the industrial achievements exhibit on the same sight. This was to celebrate the 60th Birthday of the Great Leader Kim Il Sung. Juche as already mentioned is the ideology of North Korea; like many words in Korean it has more than one meaning, but in this context it is often translated as Self-reliance. What it means in practice is that the DPRK has attempted (disastrously) to achieve self-suffiency in agriculture, and to rely less on foreign technology in manufacturing. North Korea was always reliant on Soviet preferential prices for oil and other vital raw materials which amounted to Aid. The tower itself is like a bigger version of the Washington Monument with a giant red light bulb in the shape of a flame at its peak. They charge you €5 to ride the elevator to the top; it’s worth the money because you get a panoramic view of Pyongyang (except when it’s covered in Mist, like the day we were there). I met an American academic at the top who specialises in Chinese 20th Century History; he said that the place had a feeling similar to Beijing after the death of Mao. He elaborated, it felt like it was in a transition period, the prevalence of foreign currency and the existence of state sanctioned markets seemed to him like the green shoots of a Korean style “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics”. I disagreed with him; I see the reform process in North Korea as being dead locked in an institutional cul-de-sac. The military and the party hierarchy have much to gain by small reforms that can bring in foreign currency, like joint ventures with foreign companies (like the Kaesong industrial project). But they have everything to lose by embracing Chinese style reform; these reforms would necessarily lead to an influx of information about the outside world and would destroy the regime’s credibility. As so often noted by specialists in this field, Vietnam and China could risk capitalism because they did not have a large ethnically identical capitalist rival that would discredit the regime (Taiwan is far too small to discredit Beijing). The other major road block to reform is the continued profitability of the status quo, the Nomenklatura is Pyongyang have control over all the profitable industries that the state still runs; this means that they can still enjoy a comparatively comfortable standard of living. When East Europe liberalised in 1980s and 1990s, most of the Nomenklatura lost these kinds of privileges; even in China, former Nomenklatura status is no guarantee of a decent standard of living.
The second to last stop on the trip was the 50th Anniversary Monument to the Foundation of the Worker’s Party of Korea. It was completed in 1995; this isn’t actually the 50th Anniversary the WKP was founded in 1949, when the Southern and Northern parties were merged into one party. The 1945 date is the founding date of the Korean Communist Party, which was a fundamentally different organisation. Anyway, the monument is quite an iconic image for Pyongyang. It is a large stone building with a stone paint brush (symbolic of the intellectual), a stone sickle (the peasant), and a stone hammer (the worker). It is another example of terrible waste, completed at the start of the great famine.
My last evening in Pyongyang was very interesting; I went the far side of the island on which the Yanggakdo resides. There was an outdoor bar staffed by 20 year old bar staff, their English was about as basic as my Korean, but they were very interested to hear about South Korea. I did an impression of my South Korean friends talking on their mobiles in Korean which they found uproariously funny. One of the staff was a girl my age who was very cute for a North Korean, and she seemed very interested in me, so I bought her a drink and tried to talk to her in Korean and English. It was very difficult, but she wanted me to come back to Pyongyang to see her again; she was reading a Korean folk love story, and I wish I had met her sooner, then I could have taken her on more dates. I went back the following morning to tell her that I was leaving, and told her I would be coming back to Pyongyang to take her out on another date. She was about as forward as any girl in Pyongyang can be considering how conservative North Korea is, but I hope to continue my North Korean love life when I go back.
I owe a debt of thanks to the following scholars who have been so influential on my thoughts on North Korea: Andrei Lankov, Dae-sook Suh, Brian Reynolds Myers, Robert Scalapino, Chong-sik Lee, David Hawk, Charles Armstrong, Adrian Buzo, Erik Cornell, Ralph C. Hassig, Kongdan Oh, Bradley K. Martin, Bruce Cumings, Helen Louise Hunter, Marcus Noland, Stephen Haggard, Balazs Szalontai, and Hy-sang Lee.
DPRK Travellogue: Day Three
The hangover from the Taedŏnggang Beer was rather slight; we stopped at the coffee place of the previous day on our route back to Pyongyang. I had a rather interesting conversation with my male guide about the South, when I asked him about Sŏngbun (the North Korean hereditary class system) he told me that it was the name for a worker, expertly dodging what would have been an impossibly politically dangerous question. I also asked him what he thought of the South, and he told me that he had no problem with the people, whilst making vague references to the horrors of the Korean War. He was very interested in Seoul and the way South Koreans talk; I found it rather interesting discussing the levels of formality. North Koreans talk to each other as if they were addressing their very senior elders, whilst in the South people seem most of the time to be far more familiar with each other. He told me that the way he talks to his wife is equivalent to the way a southerner would address the President.
The other interesting thing about this conversation is that my guide did know that No Mu-hyŏn had died, whilst my female guide did not know. Neither of them knew that at that time Kim Dae-Jung was at death’s door. He was also very interested in the list of all the world leaders who have been embalmed, Lenin, Stalin, Ho Chi Minh, Mao Zedong, and Kim Il Sung. He also knew that Stalin’s body had been buried on Khrushchev’s orders. My male guide seemed always to have a look of pained discomfort on his face long before I started asking what I subsequently realised were awkward questions. When he talked about the division it looked like he held the grief and pain of the Korean nation in his heart; when he talked about daily life in Pyongyang he didn’t look happy. Part of me suspects that he is very sad about what has happened to his country since the death of Kim Il Sung; without access to outside information he would probably not blame his own government. But it would be very naive to assume that he was a true believer; I felt that he accepted his system as a fact of life, almost second nature, but did not actively approve or disapprove of it. Maybe the way I think about human biological realities is comparable to this feeling; I accept the inevitability of aging and death, but I do not like or approve of it in the abstract, but it would be folly to actively disapprove of it.
A monument that you will see a lot of if you ever leave Pyongyang to go southward in the DPRK is the Arch of Reunification (Choguk Tongil is National reunification in Korean, and that it is worth memorising). It’s a rather large arch that overhangs the road that leads out of Pyongyang to the south. It’s rather bizarre that they would build an arch composed of two women in a neoclassical style in a country where even the nicer apartment blocks in the showcase capital look like they were last repaired in the 1970s. No matter, this is Pyongyang to a tee. We stopped there and I fraternised with our very sociable driver who looked like the Korean Scarface; when he drove he wore white gloves and shades. He drove like a maniac as fast as the coach would move, and honked his horn at anything that got in the way. The one time he gave way it was to an expensive car in Kaesŏng that was honking its horn; I got the impression that the driver’s were high Nomenklatura of the military variety. But Driver Lee as he was known was damn cool, I had running jokes with him where I would mime myself being killed in ever more intricate ways which he found hysterically funny. He told me through my female guide that he didn’t know who Scarface was (no surprise given the absence of American culture of any kind in the DPRK). He thought I was referring to Chinese martial arts films, and he condemned them for their gratuitous violence. I thought this was rather funny considering his sense of style and his driving abilities.
The Korean War Museum was the next port of call for our on-the-rails tour of the DPRK. If you don’t the back story I will give you a brief overview; the real story so far as the world is concerned (including the Russian archives) is that on June 25th 1950 Kim Il Sung launched an invasion of South Korea. The North have a rather funny story about the Americans invading the North first on the aforementioned date; the reason why this is so comical is that there weren’t any American troops in South Korea when they were supposed to be invading the North. Anyway, the Museum’s rather funny propaganda film makes the same point. On a serious note, the DPRK was bombed into rubble and Napalm was used first in Korea. Wada Haruki called the DPRK a “garrison state”, this means the place is filled with underground facilities from homes to arms production; this originates from the Korean war time, and is as a result of the war crimes perpetrated by the USA in their aerial bombardment of the DPRK. It’s not difficult to explain why anti-Americanism in the DPRK is still official state ideology and why it was so easy to drill into the national consciousness, the Americans did the job for the leadership. The museum was horrifying in its cataloguing of US atrocities (and no mention of the KPA atrocities), but I was quite bored by the whole experience.
I spent most of the time talking to the very attractive guide for the other tour group; she had a kind of beautiful but deadly sex appeal about her, indomitable, an ideal partner for a rather overbearing person like me. She had heard from her colleagues about my knowledge of Korean history, and my impossible number of questions. She said that she was interested in history; this is something I have noticed about East Asia in general, it’s not a taboo for people to be interested in intelligent things, and I find that it so often is in the west. The other point is that there are very few women as beautiful as this guide in the west who could have a serious and stimulating chat with me about North Korean history. Anyway she asked how obscure my knowledge could get, so I recited Kim Jong-il’s family tree, which she was extremely impressed by. I saw on Wikipedia when I got back that I had forgotten Kim’s first wife, but the guide didn’t correct me. Wikipedia also told me why she wouldn’t have been able to correct me, because she wouldn’t have known Kim Jong-il’s family history, because it is state secret. I didn’t know that when I was parroting the names, but in retrospect I should be more careful! I mentioned Hwang Jang-yop, the most senior defector from the DPRK (and Kim Jong-il’s tutor, as well as the architect of the Juche idea). This was a very interesting avenue of conversation, she wanted to know what the man had to say about the country, and I duly told her some of it in very polite and apologetic language. She wrote him off as being greedy, which I suppose is fair enough considering her very limited access to fair and impartial information.
Lunch was a very interesting experience; the usual fusion of bizarre pseudo-western foods like Corn based faux-sausage. There is also a great deal of fried and grilled meat with every meal in the DPRK; they seem to be most enthusiastic about showing the carnivorous triumph of Juche socialism. But this was my only opportunity to have North Korean raengmyŏn. Raengmyŏn is a Korean summer delicacy; it is a specific kind of thin noodles served ice cold. I caused quite a funny situation when I asked for my noodles to be cut with scissors; this is a common practice in the south. My waitress was very confused and didn’t understand, so the waiter/manager type male came over, it took a minute for him to understand. When he did he erupted into laughter, North Koreans never cut their raengmyŏn with scissors, how bizarre. The other point worth noting is that North Korea has never been rice-self-sufficient. As a result, even before the collapse of production in the 1990s many North Koreans had to eat a mixture of Rice and Corn as their staple food, this is of course not ideal for a people who use the same word for rice as they do for meal (Pap). You notice the lack of food in the country in very subtle ways when eating in the DPRK; you are given a lot of food, but 85% is not Korean in style, and clearly comes from China along with the small bottles of shampoo in your en suite bath room. The rice however does come from the north, and is of a much lower quality than what you would get in the South even in the cheapest restraints. This is some of the best food there is in the country, a show case, and it is bad quality, to the point where 5% of your rice is not ripe and therefore very crunchy.
The afternoon started with the USS Pueblo, the US ‘spy’ ship that was captured by the North Koreans in 1968. This is quite an interesting story; my friends told me that it certainly had too much genuine US equipment on it not to be a spy ship, so I will take their word for it. But it is almost certain that the DPRK was not within its rights to seize the ship; Charles Jenkins the US defector to the DPRK wrote in his book that the first English draft of a pamphlet the North was going to publish on the incident makes reference the ship being captured on the “high seas”. It was captured to the East of Wŏnsan, and the crew were held in custody by the DPRK for 11 months, apparently in rather appalling conditions. It is now docked in Pyongyang in almost the same place where the General Sherman was destroyed in 1866. The General Sherman incident was the first incursion of the ‘US imperialist aggression forces’ on Korean territory, when an American trading vessel tried to force its way up the Taedong River, and fired on hostile Koreans. The ship ran aground and was burnt by a crowd that according to North Korean historiography contained the Great-grandfather of Kim Il Sung, Kim Ung-u. There is no evidence beyond what North Korean historians assert, but it adds to the compelling narrative of US imperialist aggression toward Korea, and to the revolutionary lineage of the Kim family.
The USS Pueblo itself is alright, to be frank I would have preferred to have gone to the Korean history museum to see the differing interpretations of Korean history. Or to the ‘restored tomb’ of the legendary founder of Korea, Tan’gun. Nonetheless, the Pueblo was rather amusing, the North Koreans had put all the magazines the crew had in a display cabinet, such choice articles as Reader’s Digest 1967 vintage; the country is so isolated they can’t seem to tell the difference between complete mundanity and outright mendacity.
Man’gyŏngdae was the next stop on a rather stilted day. This is the sight of Kim Il Sung’s early life; actually he was born Kim Sŏng-ju, Il Sung was his nom de gurre. Man’gyŏngdae is a rather nice traditional Korean cottage with a well nearby, that will give you explosive diarrhoea (that wasn’t a nice experience). It is a sacred revolutionary site as you would expect, and not in the least bit interesting; except for the crowds of ‘young-pioneer-esque’ children that come on school trips to the site, and the rather standoffish cadres on their day trip.
What came next was a long walk up the park that surrounds Man’gyŏngdae, the walk was interesting for two reasons. North Korean ice cream is not nice and is ridiculously overpriced at €1.50 for a shitty little cone; it tastes like frozen and partially curdled milk, I thought it was what gave me my upset stomach until two of my friends told me they had upset stomachs as well and that they hadn’t had the ice cream, but had Kim’s water from the well. The other curiosity which was much more interesting was a small cart that I saw on a side path as we were descending down the hill. It was being moved by a woman who was selling dried-out sea food, cidar and beer; she was clearly not a state employee given the set up of the stall and how almost illicit it felt to see her; she didn’t know any English whilst most of the state employees know enough to get by. My guide didn’t try to keep me away from her, in fact when she saw me approach she had a world-weary look of resignation on her face. Even the show case capital cannot maintain the façade of socialism for its tourists. I bought nothing from the vendor, and in hindsight I feel a bit guilty for not giving her some money that she probably needed a lot more than me.
The next stop was the best part of the whole trip, a trip to Moran Hill (Moranbong) park; this is where the young people like to be, so my guides said any way. It’s quite a pretty place; there was street entertainment which was rather silly, one American tourist resorted to self-humiliation, I hate street entertainment, but the North Koreans thought Americans being silly rather than bastard-like was good fun. I found some students who were talking, singing and laughing; they were all very welcoming, they insisted I have as much Beer and Kimpap (Korean equivalent of Sushi) as I could eat. North Korean Kimpap is lacking in meat which is to be expected, but the rice is greased with egg as it should be. The beer as already mentioned is the best you can have in Asia, and vastly superior to South Korean stuff. The students sung me a folk song that I had never hear before, they demanded a song in return, and the only song I can ever remember the words to is ‘Tainted Love’ by Soft Sell, so I sung that. I doubt they have ever heard it before, or are familiar English synthpop (I just looked the term up on Wikipedia).
We climbed the Moran hill which is rather pretty and we saw many different gatherings of very friendly North Koreans. When we got to the top we descended to the monument commemorating the liberation of the north by the USSR. Around there was a group of North Korean students from Kim Il Sung University, who were very friendly; among their number was the most beautiful girl I saw in all of the North, and maybe even the south, she was truly perfect. I think she must have been around my age, I asked her for a photo which she refused me; but I did manage to get a photo for posterity, of the whole group of Kim Il Sung undergraduates, which she was in. Like all Kim Il Sung university undergrads she must have been from an elite family, she had the look of someone who eats a very good diet and the face she pulled on the photo made her look like a Japanese anime character smiling, eyes closing. Looking back, out of all my 2 months on the Korean peninsula, this was the time that I most wanted to speak Korean. To be able to socialise with people my age who have a very similar standard of living to me and live in the most interesting country in the world. They were very friendly and did their best to understand my very broken Korean, but it just was so frustrating; if I had known the language I could have conversed with the future cadres, these upper stratum elite children will be the ones who perpetuate, reform or collapse North Korea. What do they want, what do they know about the South and China and the wider world. What do they think of their country, its history, and culture; have they met Kim Jong-il? I had so many questions, and no way to ask them. My guess would be that these students would know a lot more than we would expect; considering their upper elite status, they probably have VCRs, and videos of at least Chinese TV, and possibly South Korean soap operas. They must know something of the wealth of South Korea considering they have South Korean Samsung Cameras. If asked directly they probably wouldn’t have anything bad to say about South Korea, just like my guide, they would probably not just parrot state policy. I get the feeling from watching documentaries on the DPRK, that there is one line for journalists, heavily scripted by party guides and officials who echo a 1970s style anti-imperialist line. Then there is the contemporary tourist line, which seems resigned to the decline of the DPRK economically, and treats the Kim cult as a fact of life not as something to enthuse over, just something that has to necessarily be acknowledged, but an uncomfortable subject.
The next stop was the second traditional restaurant of the trip; the food was excellent if a bit on the sparing side. We had grilled meat, and I don’t think it was Bulgogi but maybe it was, the quality wasn’t bad, but in South Korea I could eat about three times as much at a buffet near Korea University for £3.50. The best part of the restaurant was introducing my guides to So-maek, a South Korean drink that their Northern brethren had never heard of. So-maek is a neologism, Soju is a rice based clear alcohol of 20% and Maekju is the Korean name for Beer. So when you mix them you get So-maek, a punchy light brown drink which tastes better in the North because the beer is so much better. My Korean guides seemed to appreciate it to the extent that they downed it; it’s really bizarre to think that I know more about South Korean popular culture than North Koreans.
The supposed highlight of the entire trip so far as most tourists was next on our itinerary, the Arirang Mass games. Our guide did the best she could to give us a synopsis of the event, but it goes on for a while and has a series of interconnected images which often make no sense unless you have an intimate understanding of the motifs of North Korean propaganda and an advanced ability in the Korean language (for a somewhat comprehensive breakdown see: http://1stopkorea.com/index.htm?nk-trip5.htm~mainframe). This is not the half of it however; it is never noted in the western press or in other travelogues of the DPRK that I have read, or for that matter in any publication on the DPRK that I have read, Arirang is a violation of U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child. This isn’t my idea, I read it here: http://www.dailynk.com/english/read.php?cataId=nk00300&num=3578, and I think it is a compelling case. It is in some ways the greatest show on earth, when the boys and girls holding the cards that make up the flashcard picture in front of you let out their first screams at the start, you feel a burst of excitement. There are many beautiful images, and the old Korean folk song is so ubiquitous throughout the performance (check it out here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FlXH9CGnvw ) it sounds more beautiful when it’s sung by a girl you love, but it is still beautiful. The symbolism is apt; the song is about a woman left by her lover, singing for him to come back and for them to be reunited (read: reunified). This is a theme of the display; as we queued up to enter the stadium we saw young men dressed from head to foot in white carrying very large light blue flags. The colours white and light blue are part of the symbolism of the reunification in both North and South Koreas.
There is a very simple reason why it is called a “display”, the performance is jaw dropping in its size and coordination, but it has no soul. There are no protagonists except for the collective, the Korean people. The aim of the display is to interweave the revolutionary exploits of the two leaders into the fabric of modern Korean History, within the art form of gymnastics. If you can read the Korean alphabet, even with minimal vocabulary, it works. I picked out the names and titles of the two Kim’s hundreds of times over the course of two hours. The revolutionary mythology of the regime is ubiquitous in all North Korean art and culture. I don’t have much else to say about Arirang, it is worth seeing, but personally I preferred other events on the tour, like actually meeting North Korean elite children. One funny thing I noted was how bored the tour guides were, they had seen it so many times before. I sat with my tour guide alone, because everyone else bought more expensive tickets, my poor guide was constantly pestered by questions about the revolutionary slogans that were appearing on the mosaic opposite us.
The other interesting thing about this conversation is that my guide did know that No Mu-hyŏn had died, whilst my female guide did not know. Neither of them knew that at that time Kim Dae-Jung was at death’s door. He was also very interested in the list of all the world leaders who have been embalmed, Lenin, Stalin, Ho Chi Minh, Mao Zedong, and Kim Il Sung. He also knew that Stalin’s body had been buried on Khrushchev’s orders. My male guide seemed always to have a look of pained discomfort on his face long before I started asking what I subsequently realised were awkward questions. When he talked about the division it looked like he held the grief and pain of the Korean nation in his heart; when he talked about daily life in Pyongyang he didn’t look happy. Part of me suspects that he is very sad about what has happened to his country since the death of Kim Il Sung; without access to outside information he would probably not blame his own government. But it would be very naive to assume that he was a true believer; I felt that he accepted his system as a fact of life, almost second nature, but did not actively approve or disapprove of it. Maybe the way I think about human biological realities is comparable to this feeling; I accept the inevitability of aging and death, but I do not like or approve of it in the abstract, but it would be folly to actively disapprove of it.
A monument that you will see a lot of if you ever leave Pyongyang to go southward in the DPRK is the Arch of Reunification (Choguk Tongil is National reunification in Korean, and that it is worth memorising). It’s a rather large arch that overhangs the road that leads out of Pyongyang to the south. It’s rather bizarre that they would build an arch composed of two women in a neoclassical style in a country where even the nicer apartment blocks in the showcase capital look like they were last repaired in the 1970s. No matter, this is Pyongyang to a tee. We stopped there and I fraternised with our very sociable driver who looked like the Korean Scarface; when he drove he wore white gloves and shades. He drove like a maniac as fast as the coach would move, and honked his horn at anything that got in the way. The one time he gave way it was to an expensive car in Kaesŏng that was honking its horn; I got the impression that the driver’s were high Nomenklatura of the military variety. But Driver Lee as he was known was damn cool, I had running jokes with him where I would mime myself being killed in ever more intricate ways which he found hysterically funny. He told me through my female guide that he didn’t know who Scarface was (no surprise given the absence of American culture of any kind in the DPRK). He thought I was referring to Chinese martial arts films, and he condemned them for their gratuitous violence. I thought this was rather funny considering his sense of style and his driving abilities.
The Korean War Museum was the next port of call for our on-the-rails tour of the DPRK. If you don’t the back story I will give you a brief overview; the real story so far as the world is concerned (including the Russian archives) is that on June 25th 1950 Kim Il Sung launched an invasion of South Korea. The North have a rather funny story about the Americans invading the North first on the aforementioned date; the reason why this is so comical is that there weren’t any American troops in South Korea when they were supposed to be invading the North. Anyway, the Museum’s rather funny propaganda film makes the same point. On a serious note, the DPRK was bombed into rubble and Napalm was used first in Korea. Wada Haruki called the DPRK a “garrison state”, this means the place is filled with underground facilities from homes to arms production; this originates from the Korean war time, and is as a result of the war crimes perpetrated by the USA in their aerial bombardment of the DPRK. It’s not difficult to explain why anti-Americanism in the DPRK is still official state ideology and why it was so easy to drill into the national consciousness, the Americans did the job for the leadership. The museum was horrifying in its cataloguing of US atrocities (and no mention of the KPA atrocities), but I was quite bored by the whole experience.
I spent most of the time talking to the very attractive guide for the other tour group; she had a kind of beautiful but deadly sex appeal about her, indomitable, an ideal partner for a rather overbearing person like me. She had heard from her colleagues about my knowledge of Korean history, and my impossible number of questions. She said that she was interested in history; this is something I have noticed about East Asia in general, it’s not a taboo for people to be interested in intelligent things, and I find that it so often is in the west. The other point is that there are very few women as beautiful as this guide in the west who could have a serious and stimulating chat with me about North Korean history. Anyway she asked how obscure my knowledge could get, so I recited Kim Jong-il’s family tree, which she was extremely impressed by. I saw on Wikipedia when I got back that I had forgotten Kim’s first wife, but the guide didn’t correct me. Wikipedia also told me why she wouldn’t have been able to correct me, because she wouldn’t have known Kim Jong-il’s family history, because it is state secret. I didn’t know that when I was parroting the names, but in retrospect I should be more careful! I mentioned Hwang Jang-yop, the most senior defector from the DPRK (and Kim Jong-il’s tutor, as well as the architect of the Juche idea). This was a very interesting avenue of conversation, she wanted to know what the man had to say about the country, and I duly told her some of it in very polite and apologetic language. She wrote him off as being greedy, which I suppose is fair enough considering her very limited access to fair and impartial information.
Lunch was a very interesting experience; the usual fusion of bizarre pseudo-western foods like Corn based faux-sausage. There is also a great deal of fried and grilled meat with every meal in the DPRK; they seem to be most enthusiastic about showing the carnivorous triumph of Juche socialism. But this was my only opportunity to have North Korean raengmyŏn. Raengmyŏn is a Korean summer delicacy; it is a specific kind of thin noodles served ice cold. I caused quite a funny situation when I asked for my noodles to be cut with scissors; this is a common practice in the south. My waitress was very confused and didn’t understand, so the waiter/manager type male came over, it took a minute for him to understand. When he did he erupted into laughter, North Koreans never cut their raengmyŏn with scissors, how bizarre. The other point worth noting is that North Korea has never been rice-self-sufficient. As a result, even before the collapse of production in the 1990s many North Koreans had to eat a mixture of Rice and Corn as their staple food, this is of course not ideal for a people who use the same word for rice as they do for meal (Pap). You notice the lack of food in the country in very subtle ways when eating in the DPRK; you are given a lot of food, but 85% is not Korean in style, and clearly comes from China along with the small bottles of shampoo in your en suite bath room. The rice however does come from the north, and is of a much lower quality than what you would get in the South even in the cheapest restraints. This is some of the best food there is in the country, a show case, and it is bad quality, to the point where 5% of your rice is not ripe and therefore very crunchy.
The afternoon started with the USS Pueblo, the US ‘spy’ ship that was captured by the North Koreans in 1968. This is quite an interesting story; my friends told me that it certainly had too much genuine US equipment on it not to be a spy ship, so I will take their word for it. But it is almost certain that the DPRK was not within its rights to seize the ship; Charles Jenkins the US defector to the DPRK wrote in his book that the first English draft of a pamphlet the North was going to publish on the incident makes reference the ship being captured on the “high seas”. It was captured to the East of Wŏnsan, and the crew were held in custody by the DPRK for 11 months, apparently in rather appalling conditions. It is now docked in Pyongyang in almost the same place where the General Sherman was destroyed in 1866. The General Sherman incident was the first incursion of the ‘US imperialist aggression forces’ on Korean territory, when an American trading vessel tried to force its way up the Taedong River, and fired on hostile Koreans. The ship ran aground and was burnt by a crowd that according to North Korean historiography contained the Great-grandfather of Kim Il Sung, Kim Ung-u. There is no evidence beyond what North Korean historians assert, but it adds to the compelling narrative of US imperialist aggression toward Korea, and to the revolutionary lineage of the Kim family.
The USS Pueblo itself is alright, to be frank I would have preferred to have gone to the Korean history museum to see the differing interpretations of Korean history. Or to the ‘restored tomb’ of the legendary founder of Korea, Tan’gun. Nonetheless, the Pueblo was rather amusing, the North Koreans had put all the magazines the crew had in a display cabinet, such choice articles as Reader’s Digest 1967 vintage; the country is so isolated they can’t seem to tell the difference between complete mundanity and outright mendacity.
Man’gyŏngdae was the next stop on a rather stilted day. This is the sight of Kim Il Sung’s early life; actually he was born Kim Sŏng-ju, Il Sung was his nom de gurre. Man’gyŏngdae is a rather nice traditional Korean cottage with a well nearby, that will give you explosive diarrhoea (that wasn’t a nice experience). It is a sacred revolutionary site as you would expect, and not in the least bit interesting; except for the crowds of ‘young-pioneer-esque’ children that come on school trips to the site, and the rather standoffish cadres on their day trip.
What came next was a long walk up the park that surrounds Man’gyŏngdae, the walk was interesting for two reasons. North Korean ice cream is not nice and is ridiculously overpriced at €1.50 for a shitty little cone; it tastes like frozen and partially curdled milk, I thought it was what gave me my upset stomach until two of my friends told me they had upset stomachs as well and that they hadn’t had the ice cream, but had Kim’s water from the well. The other curiosity which was much more interesting was a small cart that I saw on a side path as we were descending down the hill. It was being moved by a woman who was selling dried-out sea food, cidar and beer; she was clearly not a state employee given the set up of the stall and how almost illicit it felt to see her; she didn’t know any English whilst most of the state employees know enough to get by. My guide didn’t try to keep me away from her, in fact when she saw me approach she had a world-weary look of resignation on her face. Even the show case capital cannot maintain the façade of socialism for its tourists. I bought nothing from the vendor, and in hindsight I feel a bit guilty for not giving her some money that she probably needed a lot more than me.
The next stop was the best part of the whole trip, a trip to Moran Hill (Moranbong) park; this is where the young people like to be, so my guides said any way. It’s quite a pretty place; there was street entertainment which was rather silly, one American tourist resorted to self-humiliation, I hate street entertainment, but the North Koreans thought Americans being silly rather than bastard-like was good fun. I found some students who were talking, singing and laughing; they were all very welcoming, they insisted I have as much Beer and Kimpap (Korean equivalent of Sushi) as I could eat. North Korean Kimpap is lacking in meat which is to be expected, but the rice is greased with egg as it should be. The beer as already mentioned is the best you can have in Asia, and vastly superior to South Korean stuff. The students sung me a folk song that I had never hear before, they demanded a song in return, and the only song I can ever remember the words to is ‘Tainted Love’ by Soft Sell, so I sung that. I doubt they have ever heard it before, or are familiar English synthpop (I just looked the term up on Wikipedia).
We climbed the Moran hill which is rather pretty and we saw many different gatherings of very friendly North Koreans. When we got to the top we descended to the monument commemorating the liberation of the north by the USSR. Around there was a group of North Korean students from Kim Il Sung University, who were very friendly; among their number was the most beautiful girl I saw in all of the North, and maybe even the south, she was truly perfect. I think she must have been around my age, I asked her for a photo which she refused me; but I did manage to get a photo for posterity, of the whole group of Kim Il Sung undergraduates, which she was in. Like all Kim Il Sung university undergrads she must have been from an elite family, she had the look of someone who eats a very good diet and the face she pulled on the photo made her look like a Japanese anime character smiling, eyes closing. Looking back, out of all my 2 months on the Korean peninsula, this was the time that I most wanted to speak Korean. To be able to socialise with people my age who have a very similar standard of living to me and live in the most interesting country in the world. They were very friendly and did their best to understand my very broken Korean, but it just was so frustrating; if I had known the language I could have conversed with the future cadres, these upper stratum elite children will be the ones who perpetuate, reform or collapse North Korea. What do they want, what do they know about the South and China and the wider world. What do they think of their country, its history, and culture; have they met Kim Jong-il? I had so many questions, and no way to ask them. My guess would be that these students would know a lot more than we would expect; considering their upper elite status, they probably have VCRs, and videos of at least Chinese TV, and possibly South Korean soap operas. They must know something of the wealth of South Korea considering they have South Korean Samsung Cameras. If asked directly they probably wouldn’t have anything bad to say about South Korea, just like my guide, they would probably not just parrot state policy. I get the feeling from watching documentaries on the DPRK, that there is one line for journalists, heavily scripted by party guides and officials who echo a 1970s style anti-imperialist line. Then there is the contemporary tourist line, which seems resigned to the decline of the DPRK economically, and treats the Kim cult as a fact of life not as something to enthuse over, just something that has to necessarily be acknowledged, but an uncomfortable subject.
The next stop was the second traditional restaurant of the trip; the food was excellent if a bit on the sparing side. We had grilled meat, and I don’t think it was Bulgogi but maybe it was, the quality wasn’t bad, but in South Korea I could eat about three times as much at a buffet near Korea University for £3.50. The best part of the restaurant was introducing my guides to So-maek, a South Korean drink that their Northern brethren had never heard of. So-maek is a neologism, Soju is a rice based clear alcohol of 20% and Maekju is the Korean name for Beer. So when you mix them you get So-maek, a punchy light brown drink which tastes better in the North because the beer is so much better. My Korean guides seemed to appreciate it to the extent that they downed it; it’s really bizarre to think that I know more about South Korean popular culture than North Koreans.
The supposed highlight of the entire trip so far as most tourists was next on our itinerary, the Arirang Mass games. Our guide did the best she could to give us a synopsis of the event, but it goes on for a while and has a series of interconnected images which often make no sense unless you have an intimate understanding of the motifs of North Korean propaganda and an advanced ability in the Korean language (for a somewhat comprehensive breakdown see: http://1stopkorea.com/index.htm?nk-trip5.htm~mainframe). This is not the half of it however; it is never noted in the western press or in other travelogues of the DPRK that I have read, or for that matter in any publication on the DPRK that I have read, Arirang is a violation of U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child. This isn’t my idea, I read it here: http://www.dailynk.com/english/read.php?cataId=nk00300&num=3578, and I think it is a compelling case. It is in some ways the greatest show on earth, when the boys and girls holding the cards that make up the flashcard picture in front of you let out their first screams at the start, you feel a burst of excitement. There are many beautiful images, and the old Korean folk song is so ubiquitous throughout the performance (check it out here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FlXH9CGnvw ) it sounds more beautiful when it’s sung by a girl you love, but it is still beautiful. The symbolism is apt; the song is about a woman left by her lover, singing for him to come back and for them to be reunited (read: reunified). This is a theme of the display; as we queued up to enter the stadium we saw young men dressed from head to foot in white carrying very large light blue flags. The colours white and light blue are part of the symbolism of the reunification in both North and South Koreas.
There is a very simple reason why it is called a “display”, the performance is jaw dropping in its size and coordination, but it has no soul. There are no protagonists except for the collective, the Korean people. The aim of the display is to interweave the revolutionary exploits of the two leaders into the fabric of modern Korean History, within the art form of gymnastics. If you can read the Korean alphabet, even with minimal vocabulary, it works. I picked out the names and titles of the two Kim’s hundreds of times over the course of two hours. The revolutionary mythology of the regime is ubiquitous in all North Korean art and culture. I don’t have much else to say about Arirang, it is worth seeing, but personally I preferred other events on the tour, like actually meeting North Korean elite children. One funny thing I noted was how bored the tour guides were, they had seen it so many times before. I sat with my tour guide alone, because everyone else bought more expensive tickets, my poor guide was constantly pestered by questions about the revolutionary slogans that were appearing on the mosaic opposite us.
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.
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.
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”.
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”.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
