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Chapter 3

Look to the Party, Young Revolutionary, and Buy

Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by

the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The

masses have to be won by propaganda.

—Hannah Arendt

"He looks like a monkey,” Mr. Kim, a customer, said while giggling during our lunchtime one day, as he watched a Western aid worker at another table. I laughed as I found both the foreigner funny as well as the reactions of the two Koreans.

The foreign aid worker had piercings all over his face, on his eyebrows, nose, lips, and even cheeks. His untidy long hair was patched with dyed colors. He wore a ridiculous-looking cap that was too small and had a zany insignia, and tattered clothes, including the typical torn jeans in vogue for Westerners.

He wasn’t the only unkempt Westerner I knew in the expatriate community, and people like him reinforced the stereotype. They seemed to forget that they were, in fact, guests in a foreign country, and not there to take advantage of some tributary vassal state in the Far East.

Mr. Kim’s superior, Mr. Son, looked at him sternly, disapproving of his remarks. Mr. Son probably thought exactly the same thing. But Mr. Kim was not supposed to express his thoughts about a foreigner in front of another foreigner. Reading between the lines, I understood what both of them were really thinking. What Korean would ever want to become like him?

Meanwhile, patriotic songs were constantly blaring on public loudspeakers, on television, and at military parades. But one piece in particular got stuck in my head, played over and over as the country’s most popular melody. At a gymnastics performance, the tune buzzed on once again, prompting me to turn to a friend for an explanation.

Mr. Pang, a chief beer brewer working at a beer factory, responded that he was shocked that this Swiss expatriate wasn’t familiar with it.

“You don’t know this tune?” he answered with genuine surprise. “It’s called ‘No Motherland without You.’”

“What is it about then?” I inquired.

He went into an impassioned but short speech, showing off his patriotism for the fatherland. “It’s about our General Kim Jong Il. It says without him we cannot exist, as he has extraordinary talents and virtues, and that’s why we Koreans love him. It was him who further developed the Juche idea created by our Great Leader president Kim Il Sung, and it was him who introduced the Songun (military first) politics to protect our motherland and the Korean people.”

Mr. Pang then translated the core sentence that is repeated in the song: “We cannot exist without you, Comrade Kim Jong Il! The motherland cannot exist without you!”

For all his faults, Kim Il Sung did everything in his power to preserve Korean arts and culture. His ideas were even supported by ardent overseas Koreans who opposed the regime.

North Koreans consider themselves to this day as ethnically pure and intrinsically superior, far more than do the people of other nationalistic regimes in Japan and China. They believe that they are the world’s most upright people living in the world’s most exceptional nation.

The mindset is a natural extension of their history. A national experience of foreign dominance by China, Japan, and the U.S. has, in the eyes of the North Koreans, wrecked the purity of their southern neighbors; today, North Koreans have taken sole guardianship of what they see as true “Koreanness.”

The attitude is reflected in North Korean propaganda, and taking a look at the myriad of posters and leaflets reveals much about the mindset. Pyongyang is home to the Korean Workers’ Party’s Propaganda and Agitation Department, which controls far-reaching ideological campaigns. The state sees propaganda as particularly valuable, giving it the needed resources that take up a good chunk of the gross national product—although the precise data haven’t been published.

To be fair, all over the world businesses engage in another form of propaganda: advertising. The only difference is that it advances a cause of consumerism rather than politics. North Korea had banned the unsocialist practice until 2002, when advertisements were allowed. The opening suggests at least a partial embrace of market ideas.

Still, it’s only a little creek compared to the vast sea of state-sponsored information: PyongSu, my pharmaceutical company, launched its first radio commercial for its painkiller PyongSu Spirin in 2005. For a short while in 2009, television stations surprised their viewers by broadcasting commercials for beer, ginseng, hairclips, and a Korean restaurant.

The government has, unfortunately, not resumed TV commercials since then, part of a ploy by the same hard-liners who pushed for a disastrous currency devaluation in 2009. Yet it wasn’t a complete reversal of the new policy: the state didn’t clamp down on printed advertising, allowing PyongSu and other North Korean companies to continue distributing flyers and catalogues and advertising their products and services on the country’s intranet. TV advertising was perhaps perceived as too politically sensitive by the conservative old guard since foreign visitors as well as South Koreans could watch and observe it.

However, propaganda continues to be an everyday message blurted in front of the North Korean people. And it plays a significant role in their lives.

After Kim Jong Il died in December 2011, party mouthpieces shot off a new emergent ode called “Footsteps”—and it wasn’t the jazz standard performed by John Coltrane. The piece was written for Kim Jong Un, and its title signified that he was marching in the heroic footsteps of his deceased father. North Koreans attribute the song with son Kim’s emergent legacy. Of course, pretty much no beautiful melody on TV, radio, or in karaoke rooms is free from ideology and propaganda. Most of them appeal to patriots, the party, and the army. They often wax philosophical on the sufferings under the yoke of the Japanese colonialists or praise the leaders.

A PROPAGANDA STATE?

It is true that Bible-like allegories have a profound impact on how North Koreans see themselves and the world, as told to me by countless locals. Posters are also a potent venue: they are the regime’s most visible form of propaganda, painted with bright colors, meaningful symbols and images, and large fonts. Simple but commanding language is used.

Barbara Demick, the author of the widely acclaimed 2010 book Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, mentioned that in his book 1984, “George Orwell wrote of a world where the only color to be found was in the propaganda posters. Such is the case in North Korea.”¹ But her statement isn’t entirely true. Half a decade before she wrote this, we had already plastered our pharmaceutical factory with a green color, because it was a well-known pharmaceutical symbol in continental Europe.

Around the same time, other buildings were being repainted in Pyongyang in a wider variety of colors. People could be seen over the years with more colorful clothes, not only during holidays, as is tradition. More young students carried colorful Hello Kitty and other fancy school bags.

In her book, Demick also claims that “Gone with the Wind is a dangerous, banned book.”² But I saw people reading the novel at the Grand People’s Study House in Pyongyang and in public libraries in provincial capitals. The gap between Barbara Demick’s Orwellian stereotypes and the reality on the ground is widening a little every year.

Still, the signs are hung up everywhere you go: in school buildings, hospitals, factories, and farms; in magazines, paintings, films, theaters, operas; on TV and radio and on public loudspeakers. It’s difficult to escape the gaze of a nationalistic worker or national leader peering down at you from his poster, urging absolute loyalty to the pure Korean race.

Posters are addressed to different groups of people. For farmers, they offer a resounding call to the fields, to boost food production amid chronic shortages. For industrial laborers, the placards urge no able body to sit idle in the withering factories, but rather encourage them to double their efforts for a strong and prosperous nation. Students are pushed to become skillful scientists who can develop sophisticated technologies and to propel the country into “a brilliant new era,” to quote a common catchphrase on the posters. Nobody is left out: other targets include grandchildren being urged to care for their grandparents and rascals being cautioned against doing something dangerous.

That’s not to say the propaganda is trite and childlike. Sometimes the party is clever in how it plays with imported foreign ideas. In response to George Bush’s declaration of the “axis of evil” in 2002, one North Korean poster launched subtle counterpropaganda: “The world turns with Korea as its axis.” Of course, not all North Koreans believed the world actually revolved around their country.

Even the newspapers play a prominent role in spreading state ideas. In North Korea, state-run publications do not compete to break the fastest and hardest-hitting news. The mass media’s purpose is spelled out in the Constitution: it defines the press as “strengthening the dictatorship of the proletariat, bolstering the political unity and ideological conformity of the people, and rallying them behind the party and the Great Leader in the cause of revolution.” North Korea’s media correspondingly carries strict proofreading procedures. Any journalist committing an ideological “error” is quite certain to be sent to a harsh wasteland to be thoroughly “revolutionized.”

Every administrative district in North Korea is home to a so-called immortality column, a reference to the immortal heroes of the revolution. Statues of Kim Il Sung adorn the special zones, usually found in provincial capitals and places of national significance. All of the effigies display the same tagline: “The Great Leader Comrade Kim Il Sung will be with us forever.”

SOME PROPAGANDA SLOGANS

Instilling a sense of loyalty in the Korean Workers’ Party (created in the 1980s, still fully valid):

“What the party decides, we do.”

Worshipping the best:

“Worship the Great Leader, General Kim Il Sung, like the eternal sun.”

“Let’s thoroughly arm more and more through the revolutionary ideas of the Great Leader Kim Il Sung.”

“The Great Leader Kim Il Sung will be with us forever.”

“Hurray for General Kim Jong Il, the sun of the twenty-first century.”

“Thank you to General Kim Jong Il, our loving father.”

“Let us become human bullets and bombs guarding the Great Leader General Kim Jong Il with our lives!”

“Let us defend the party Central Committee headed by the respected comrade Kim Jong Un, at the cost of our lives.”

“Let us become revolutionary soldiers boundlessly loyal to the party and Great Leader!”

“Let’s accept our party’s Songun (army first) revolution loyally.”

“Our [Leader/ideology/military/system] is the best.”

Calling to uphold Juche and Songun (army first) politics:

“Let’s stick to self-sufficiency and nationalism in revolutions and construction!”

“Our country’s socialism is the best!”

“Ideology, technology, and culture according to the demands of Juche!”

“Spread the ideological, fight, speed, and skill battles. [This is a literal translation from Korean, but it roughly means the battles fought everywhere such as against imperialist enemies and to build up the country.] Let’s use Juche Korea’s wisdom and bravery.”

“Let us complete the Juche revolutionary cause under the leadership of the respected comrade Kim Jung Un!”

“Living methods, fighting spirit, new ideas, all according to the needs of Songun.”

“Songun politics. The DPR Korea moves the world.”

Promoting Korean culture devoid of any impure foreign content:

“Let’s make the beautiful Korean clothes a way of life.”

“Let’s establish a social spirit for enjoying our people’s clothes.”

“Let’s actively promote our people’s traditional folk games.”

Parents and teachers being asked to make Korean children more intelligent and able than they already are:

“Let’s actively develop children’s intelligence.”

“Let’s learn how to swim starting young.”

“Let’s all become expert swimmers.”

This quote adorns every book shop and library.

A propaganda poster at the school of the Chongsanri farm, a model farm shown to foreign tourists, praising a North Korean kids’ game:

“It is exciting to play soldiers beating and seizing the Americans!”

Messages directed at farmers: the first one, issued years ago, expressing a wish that has yet to be fulfilled:

“Let’s send more tractors, cars, and modern farming machines to the farm villages for the working class.”

“Let’s raise a great number of goats in every family.”

“Let’s raise a lot of livestock through multiple methods.”

“Let’s expand goat rearing and create more grassland in accordance with the party.”

“Let us turn grass into meat!”

“Let’s grow more sunflowers.”

“Prevention and more prevention. Let’s fully establish a veterinary system for the prevention of epidemics!”

Messages on posters, in newspapers, and on loudspeakers urging voters to take part in elections held every five years. Elections are mostly a formality, though: citizens elect the candidate for their district chosen by the Democratic Front for the Reunification of the Fatherland, which is dominated by the Korean Workers’ Party.

“July 24 is day of elections for deputies to provincial (municipal), city (district), and county people’s assemblies.”

“Let’s demonstrate the power of single-hearted unity.”

“Let’s all vote yes.”

The first message below urged people to work at the speed of the mythical Korean Pegasus, a campaign to make Pyongyang look modern by 2012 (when the hundredth birthday of founder president Kim Il Sung was celebrated):

“Let’s develop Pyongyang, the capital city of the revolution, into a world-class city.”

“Electric power, coal, the metal industry, and the railroad are important to the revitalization of the people’s economy.”

“Let’s construct small and medium power plants everywhere in our country and get energy everywhere.”

“Work and live with the mind and spirit of Pegasus!”

“The twenty-first century is the age of information (communications) industry.”

“Radical turn in people’s livelihood improvement!” (The slogan, several years old and regularly repeated, will hopefully be realized someday in the not too distant future.)

Calling upon families to avoid wasting resources:

“In your family, let’s conserve every drop of water.” (The poster shows a mother closing a dripping water tap.)

These messages should make clear that North Korea is invincible thanks to its military might:

“Just as it began, the revolution advances and is victorious, through the barrel of a gun.”

“The reunified fatherland is at the tip of our bayonets.”

“Nobody in the world can defeat us.”

“Let’s be invincible in every fight.”

“Let’s achieve even more supremacy.”

“Our missile program is a guarantee for world peace and security.”

Calling for reunification of North and South:

“Kimjongilia, the flower of reunification.” (The poster depicts united Korea in the shape of a sea of Kimjongilia flowers.)

“Let’s quickly end the agony of division.” (The poster shows a grandmother still waiting for reunification.)

“Between our people, let’s rush towards a majestic and prosperous strong unified country.”

Messages to keep people alert about the threats posed by the DPRK’s worst enemies from day one of its existence:

“When provoking a war of aggression, we will hit back, beginning with the U.S.”

“Let’s take revenge a thousand times on the U.S. imperialist wolves.”

“If the American imperialists attack us, let us wipe them off the map forever!”

“Death to U.S. imperialists, our sworn enemy!”

“Let’s prepare thoroughly in order to defeat the invaders. The Japanese invaders slaughtered innocent, law-abiding citizens. 1,000,000 slaughtered; 6,000,000 forced arrests; 2,000,000 sex slaves.”

LIFE IN COLOR

Seeing propaganda spread across every nook and cranny of North Korean society, it’s easy to pass off North Koreans as mindless drones. But would such logic make sense if it were reversed? Do Americans get brainwashed by cravings for McDonald’s and Starbucks, seeing their logos smothered all over the country? Do they salute every American flag?

Actually, North Koreans simply walk by propaganda posters—including new ones—without so much as a glance. Like their American counterparts who constantly drive by advertising billboards and are inundated with flashy Internet marketing, North Koreans are accustomed to the messages at political training courses, mass rallies, and in the mass media and blurted out on loudspeakers. The propaganda is reiterated—again and again—until the slogans are known by heart (just like how most young Americans bandy about the old McDonald’s tagline, “I’m lovin’ it”).

A recent U.S. government-funded study titled A Quiet Opening: North Koreans in a Changing Media Environment reads: “While it remains the most closed media environment in the world, North Korea has, to a significant extent, opened unofficially since the late 1990s. North Koreans today have significantly greater access to outside information than they did 20 years ago.” Young North Koreans in particular are better informed overall and take official propaganda with a grain of salt. They’re less respectful of the state and less fearful of repression.

North Korea historian Andrei Lankov even argues that state subjugation overall has significantly diminished over the last two decades and that propaganda has lost some of its power of persuasion. He also stressed that “contrary to media portrayals in recent years, North Korea has actually become a less repressive place to live.”³ Keep in mind, though, that North Koreans rarely gossip about politics and that the country is still a very authoritarian state despite the loosening.

Propaganda posters twenty or thirty years earlier portrayed North Korea as an industrial powerhouse, with steel mills and factories running at full capacity. South Korea was depicted as a poor agrarian country with grim and oppressive American soldiers. Taking account of the latest developments on the Korean Peninsula that are largely known to North Koreans, newer propaganda posters are portraying the South in a reverse mode as a place where people are being suffocated by air, poisoned by its numerous factories and vehicles, and deafened by infernal noise. North Korea, meanwhile, is shown as a pristine, quiet natural paradise.

Compare the everyday experiences and struggles of North Koreans with the stereotypes coming out of the West. In 2012, Stanford professor and Pulitzer Prize-winner Adam Johnson wrote a novel set in North Korea, but included just about every negative generalization he could find on the country. He and his publishers promoted the book as “insight” into North Korea.

So much for insight: he claimed that in North Korea “no one has read a book that’s not propaganda for 60 years,” a patronizing falsehood. My staff, along with all sorts of other North Koreans I’ve met, have read foreign books such as Alexandre Dumas’s thriller The Count of Monte Cristo and Ernest Hemingway’s short stories Men without Women, and some of them could even recite lengthy passages. At home and sometimes at their universities, they watched foreign movies like Gone with the Wind and Titanic.

Over the years, more kids carried around backpacks and bags adorned with Mickey and Minnie Mouse and Daisy Duck. Nobody complained that the harmless characters were miguk nom, the Korean phrase used in official propaganda that means “American bastards.” The kids also enjoyed watching Jungle Book, The Lion King, and Spiderman. I have listened to North Korean orchestras play all sorts of Western classics; the most memorable for me was “Gwine to Run All Night,” more widely known as “Camptown Races.” It was not composed by some communist sympathizer, but by Stephen Collins Foster, the most famous songwriter of the United States in the nineteenth century, often called the “father of American music.”

A former U.S. State Department official summed up the situation: “We know less about North Korea than they know about us.”

Journalist Melanie Kirkpatrick, a longtime member of the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal, published another North Korea book in September 2012. She portrayed North Korea as a “hellhole” that was “rife with suffering and starvation.” The country, she added, “keeps its citizens in the dark ages.” “Foreigners and foreign goods are kept out” is another tall claim of hers. Had that been true, I would, of course, not have been able to sell foreign goods in North Korea.

Yet looking more carefully under the veil, it becomes clear that these stories represent a single slice of North Korean society. A professor from the Australian Defence Force Academy who spent six months from 2010 to 2012 teaching English to North Korea’s future leaders opposes Johnson’s and Kirkpatrick’s views. In North Korea from inside the Classroom, Professor Stewart Lone, wrote: “Having spent a good deal of time in the company of more than 400 North Korean teenagers, I dismiss the idea that everyone lives in fear and privation.” He later told news.com.au: “I saw young people who were secure, contented, and proud of their society.” “The stereotype of North Korea … is the contemporary version of ‘the yellow peril’ and follows many of its key features (irrationality, brutality, docility),” he added in his book, referring to the hysteria in Western countries over the rise of Japan in the early twentieth century.

Another American literature professor who teaches in South Korea, Bryan R. Myers, summarized North Korean propaganda in a more thoughtful—even if flawed—way in his 2010 book, The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters. His problem was that he took the propaganda more seriously than North Koreans do themselves. His claims were shaky: he argued that the basis of North Korean ideology is race, not the more commonly cited mix of socialism, Juche, and Songun. He even called Juche “window-dressing” for foreigners, a rather absurd claim given the reality that the state carried out huge efforts to teach Juche to its people.

During exhibitions students from different universities approached me at my exhibition booth to practice English. I often asked them what trade they wanted to take up when they finished university, and why. The answer was often quite patriotic: “I want to be an electrical engineer to help electrify my country to stand on its own feet in accordance with the Juche idea.” Another said, “I want to be a medical doctor to help my countrymen to be healthier. I agree with our Juche idea, which aims at strengthening our health system and at making it independent from foreign countries.” These were their actual beliefs, and didn’t fit into any narrative of “window-dressing.”

A few other claims are questionable. Myers claims that the North Korean personality cult is an idea imposed by Japanese colonialists. I think the concept arose out of Stalin’s personality cult, or even more from a historical undercurrent stretching back to thousands of years of Chinese overlord emperors. Myers doesn’t fully address how three decades of a Japanese administration could upend these more entrenched forces at work.

Myers further claims that the party, in its propaganda, portrays North Korea’s leadership as motherly figures, not fathers. But he doesn’t explain, then, why the Korean War is called the “Fatherland Liberation War” instead of the “Motherland Liberation War.” The North Koreans who talked to me about the “father of the nation” or the “father of all Koreans,” referring to their leader, never mentioned any mothers of the nation.

My company’s staff members reminded me that company bosses in North Korea were expected to behave like good “fathers” with the staff. I used to reply half-jokingly that I, as their father, would expect the respect and obedience from my large family—as is typical in a traditional Confucian Korean family. Had my staff called me “mother,” Myers would have been believable. The expression “father” was used not only for the English translation but also in Korean.

Other North Korea experts such as Professor Leonid Petrov and Professor Victor Cha have continued to ponder the country’s isolation, especially whether collapse would come about from information entering the country.⁴ It completely escaped their attention that years before, in the mid-2000s, a quiet but radical “information revolution” had already taken place in North Korea. Memory sticks and USBs became popular when they were more affordable. Foreign music, movies, and even e-books were stored or exchanged on these easily concealed sticks. More people started talking about famous movies; I was surprised that they knew films like Kill Bill and The Pianist.

At the beginning of my stay in North Korea, I offered nice gifts to prospective partners, such as a pair of fine leather shoes, a bottle of Scotch whisky, or a large box of Dunhill cigarette packs for the men. For the ladies, I handed over a beautiful silk scarf, a brand-name perfume, or a piece of jewelry. But when people became so keen on getting a USB to watch foreign movies, I stopped offering expensive presents and gave them those tiny electronics. One male recipient laughingly told me that USBs had become so popular that women would carry them under the bra to have them well-cushioned. He didn’t tell the full truth. They were being kept away from preying authorities who would have loved to know what was stored on these accessories.

A MONOLITHIC COUNTRY?

When I first arrived, I had a singular, bland image of North Korea, envisioning it as a place where everyday life is choreographed and controlled. I had learned from media and book authors that North Korea is a country where everybody marches single-mindedly to the tune of the leadership, physically as much as mentally in goose step. It was a country, I assumed, where orders would come from the top and everybody would mindlessly execute them or else risk being thrown into a gulag.

That was hardly the truth. I was in Pyongyang when there was a soccer game in 2005 between the allied countries Iran and DPRK. To my total surprise, a full stadium of North Korean fans got so excited that they started shouting abuse and throwing objects against the Iranians, a absolutely politically incorrect and outrageous act by their standards. The security forces struggled to maintain order. The Iranians even complained that they feared for their lives, a worry that they did not overstate. The world soccer governing body FIFA soon punished North Korea for crowd unrest. I knew North Koreans who were at the game and behaved like hooligans. But they did not disappear, thrown in a prison camp for potentially damaging the nation’s relationship with Iran, as the Western media would have you believe.

I have also seen drivers getting out of their cars, shouting and yelling at the traffic police for perceived missives, men defiantly smoking under the watchful eye of guards of public buildings or the Pyongyang Metro in nonsmoking areas, and farmers pushing their carts in the prohibited opposite directions of a one-way street despite the presence of police. I also knew people who traveled across the countryside even though they did not have the permits that the government still requires for moving around in the country. Some workers did not attend the compulsory weekly ideological training sessions, playing hooky so they could set up their own little capitalist businesses. In what was once the world’s most radically demonetized country, American dollars, euros, and Chinese yuan were used regularly to bend laws, overcome old habits, and grease the emergence of small businesses.

So, not everyone ends up in a gulag for infractions of socialist laws. I have been told the opposite by people who believe they know North Korea better than me, and who criticize me for not sharply condemning human rights abuses in this country. While I clearly disavow any human rights abuse in North Korea and anywhere else in the world, I’m a businessman who has never visited any gulag or prison. I am not a human rights expert.

Human rights activists claim that 150,000 to 200,000 people are inmates of such camps, while the United Nations estimated in February 2014 that the number now stands at 80,000 to 120,000 prisoners. That is certainly bad, but it represents less than 1 percent of the total population. While a significant portion of the 99 percent of the population still live a life in hardship, many of them live normal lives and don’t end up in horrible places.

To talk about North Korea being a single concentration camp, like Auschwitz, with a systematic extermination program through gas chambers is demagogic and is not a fair characterization of the system. I personally knew a government minister and a mechanical engineer who committed what the state called “serious crimes.” They were sentenced to time in labor camps, but were released after a few years and then fully reintegrated into society. They would hardly have survived a “crime” of that nature in Stalin’s Soviet Union or in Hitler’s Germany.

It seems that when it comes to human rights issues in the DPRK, stories are highly dramatized for political reasons. What about all the poor souls rotting in post-genocide Rwandan prisons or Equatorial Guinea? And how about the U.S., which is home to the highest documented percentage of prison inmates in the world?

GLORY OF THE NATION

The Arirang Mass Games, as the popular event is called, takes place in the May Day stadium in Pyongyang, which is spacious enough for an audience of 150,000 people. Every year more than 100,000 participants attend—double the number of spectators. The Guinness Book of World Records ranked the spectacle in 2007 as the world’s largest performance.

Thousands of gymnasts perform acrobatics, synchronizing their maneuvers to create wonderful kaleidoscopes on the field. Students form giant changing mosaics by turning the 150 pages of large books in their hands, to name another example. For Koreans, such glamour brings razzle-dazzle to an otherwise colorless life; the games also give tasks to the unemployed or underemployed, of whom North Korea harbors a great number. People around me seemed happier around the time of Arirang each year.

According to Rodong Sinmun, the party mouthpiece, millions of North Koreans and foreigners have witnessed the games, although the numbers don’t quite add up and are probably part of a propaganda push. Still, it’s safe to say that hundreds of thousands of people, if not more, have performed and watched the games. I visited for the first time in 2002, when the tradition started, and a few more times in the years after that.

The exhibition was bedazzling and probably quite effective propaganda that raised the profile of the DPRK. More importantly, though, it presented one interpretation of Korean history as seen by the party and its leaders; the games reflected on how they felt their nation should be regarded by the masses: the dancing and gymnastics, all in unison, gave off an image that North Korea was a happy, socialist country and a paradise. The appearance of solidarity further reflects on a notion that North Korea could mercilessly crush and destroy any foreign invader, with the entire nation standing behind a single cause.

During my first visit, I was still unfamiliar with North Korea and didn’t fully understand what was going on. There were so many symbols displayed and as a foreigner I couldn’t quite follow them. As time went by, I learned to better understand the Korean symbolism that played an important role in these mass games but also in many other circumstances. The sea of red flowers, for example, represents the working class, and the purple color stands for Kim Il Sung, as a purple orchid had been named after him as Kimilsungia. And the rising sun is a symbol for Kim Il Sung, venerated as the sun of humanity.

I paid around 150 euros for the second-best possible ticket, one step below the best seating. Twice I was driving my car with staff to the stadium when I was stopped every thirty meters or so by officials asking for ID. Before walking into the stadium, they ordered me to leave my mobile phone, camera, wallet, and keys in the car; it was obvious that Arirang had attracted a high-ranking guest. Indeed, I was sitting about twenty rows behind the Dear Leader himself, Kim Jong Il. He was sitting in the front row with a foreign guest and a lineup of Korean dignitaries, surrounded by plain-clothed secret service officers.

THE FLOWERS OF PYONGYANG

Flower exhibitions, sometimes consisting of thousands of blossoms, carried heavy symbolism during the two most revered public holidays: the birthday of Kim Jong Il on February 16 and the birthday of Kim Il Sung on April 15. Government agencies, organizations, and individuals exhibited flowers outside their buildings.

Two species of flower were exhibited in the Kimilsungia-Kimjongilia Exhibition Hall, a building made of bricks and mortar but that had some characteristics of a greenhouse. The center was appropriately named after the Kimilsungia and the Kimjongilia species. Kimilsungia was bred by an Indonesian botanist in 1965 and Kimjongilia by a Japanese one in 1985, and both offered them as gifts to North Korea.

I observed a flower exhibition of Kim Il Sung’s birthday on April 15, 2008. In addition to the two dynastic flowers, the government put on display 7,000 various trees, plants, and flowers representing several hundred species. Everywhere the eye could see, ministry buildings, hospitals, and People’s Army offices showed off their flowers on two floors of exhibition space. The booths also carried national symbols such as country and party flags, and reproduction models of important national monuments. In the center of the exhibition a plaque read: “The great leader Comrade Kim Il Sung will always be with us,” “Juche,” and Kim Il Sung’s quote “The people are my God.”

I understood how pivotal this day was to the North Korean people, so I decided to chip in on behalf of PyongSu. At the two main exhibitions every year, I brought along flowerpots of the best quality and presented them with a placard displaying my name and the PyongSu logo. The Ministry of Public Health placed my donation at its booth, and the flowerpots became famous around the country because they were the only ones offered by a foreign boss of a domestic enterprise. When journalists interviewed me, I offered praise for the showcase and added my own advertising angle: that our quality-and service-minded pharmaceutical company could never be absent from such a prestigious exhibition.

Of course, the press spun my commentary into an entertaining propaganda twist, but I didn’t mind. Later on television, a euphoric reporter described me planting and growing the flowers myself—and, to add, with the loving care that is usual for patriotic Kimilsungia and Kimjongilia flower growers. I did not mind the propaganda. On the contrary, it helped boost our sales more than any advertising campaign could ever have achieved.

Western journalists have continued to write to this day that there are no advertisements to be seen in North Korea. The exceptions, they often write, are displayed on billboards promoting domestically assembled cars and the Koryo Link, a mobile phone telecom joint venture between the North Korean telecom and the Egyptian Orascom company.

Kimjongilia flowers donated by this tributary foreigner. The relatively small gesture was paid back multiple times.

In 2006, the government-run Korea Central News Agency (KCNA) published a fascinating news item about the newly founded Korea Advertising Company. The group reported that the company, “which is doing commodity and trade advertising activities in a uniform way, makes and sets up advertising mediums of various forms and contents in streets, stadiums, and international exhibitions and extensively advertising them through newspapers, TV, and Internet at the request of local and foreign industrial establishments and companies.”

Today, the advertising firm belongs to the Foreign Trade Ministry and is run by a former student of my project, the Pyongyang Business School. No matter how harsh the socialist regime, those journalists should remember that where there are markets, there are advertisements. And by looking at opportunities in the advertising industry, North Korea made quite a leap that signifies deeper market changes.

SUBVERSION AND PROPAGANDA?

Whenever I ordered foreign literature, consisting mostly of commercial and technical books, my staff had to submit them to the authorities for a review. The censors made sure my potentially dangerous material contained no hostile propaganda.

ABB, which had a strong presence in South Korea, made a faux pas when they began sending us their Korean-language literature from Seoul. They thought it would make more sense, since those books were written in Korean and were cheaper to send. But the authorities found glamorous photographs of their southern neighbor, which looked like counterrevolutionary propaganda—the high standard of living down there, they thought, was too good to be true. To get by them, we had to remove ABB’s South Korean address and replace it with ABB’s Pyongyang address using stickers. The authorities noticed the tactic but didn’t seem to care.

We had other awkward encounters with the ideology police, of course. I sometimes bumped into inspectors who arrived at our office after 7:30 P.M., when I was not expected to be there. They weren’t naïve, but understood I was expecting them in the one-party state. Nevertheless, they came off as embarrassed and said that they preferred to review all of the foreign material in my absence. I let my Korean staff handle the matter with them behind closed doors in the meeting room. The inspectors were always upright with us, not veering zealously from their set procedure. I respected them: they had a tough and rather invasive job and just wanted to do it right.

On the other hand, DHL Pyongyang always handed me private courier deliveries on the same day they arrived. In Vietnam, however, when I received a book, like one on wildlife in East Africa sent by my mother for my birthday, DHL called me the day of the arrival and informed me that delivery would take another five days. The reason was that customs and “cultural control” procedures needed to be implemented. It’s one of the many examples in which the North Korean authorities surprised me with their much less bureaucratic and more pragmatic approach.

Outside the DPRK, the government is embarking on thrusts of propaganda directed at overseas Koreans. Uriminzokkiri, which roughly means “on our own as a nation,” is the official website of the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea in Pyongyang. It spreads the message that the North Korean leadership is, according to its website, “guardian of the homeland and creator of happiness” for all Koreans. But under South Korea’s National Security Law, Uriminzokkiri was banned in an attempt to block communications in support of the North.

Another party-sponsored overseas group is the Committee for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, which is charged with disseminating North Korea’s views around the globe. Unlike Uriminzokkiri, it’s aimed at non-Koreans. Through its Korea Friendship Association (KFA)—a body designed to give the committee’s views to foreigners—it is trying to foster constituencies abroad that are sympathetic to the plight of North Korea. The group does some business operations: it’s involved in attracting funding and foreign investment for North Korea, running a body in Pyongyang called the IKBC (International Korean Business Centre). KFA’s website calls itself “the Official Website of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” which a senior cadre from a competing state organization told me is “somewhat pretentious.”

A video by another organization featuring Pak Jin Jun, a beautiful student at Pyongyang Teacher’s University, went viral on the Internet. Her message was clear: whereas poverty and chaos reign in the capitalist West, where people even kill themselves and die of hunger, the Korean socialist system guaranteed a life of happiness and serenity. The video showed her family, cheerfully clapping their hands and happily singing together at home. It is a masterpiece of North Korean propaganda worth watching.

THE FACE OF JUCHE

Over seven years I hosted all sorts of visitors who were hoping for insight into the so-called hermit state. The Juche Tower was almost always on their wish list. After all, it was the world’s second-tallest monumental column behind the San Jacinto Monument, built in memory of the decisive battle of another revolution in the Western Hemisphere, namely the Texas Revolution in 1836. Its towering height is, of course, symbolic of its influence over the lives of North Koreans.

Over the years, I’ve always been impressed by the wit and fluency of the English-speaking tour guides at the tower. One pretty and affable young guide struck my attention: she graduated first at the Foreign Studies University, where she learned perfect English and sophisticated etiquette for dealing with foreigners. She must have been talented, or else she would not have received this job, which is respected in North Korea.

I met her for the first time at the Juche Tower when she was a twenty-something university graduate. During another visit a few years later, she told me that she had happily been married. A couple of years later I visited yet again, and she was gleeful that she recently gave birth to her first child. She was very effective at her work, communicating the ideas of Juche; never overzealous, she maintained a relaxed demeanor and was fully convinced of what she was representing. Her self-confidence gave her an authoritative aura on all things Juche. Tourists asked her plenty of silly, embarrassing, and sometimes even provocative questions, but nobody could ever disturb her; she had the situation under control.

This woman and her colleagues taught me the remarkable history of the monument: The 555 foot (170-meter)-high tower, designed by Kim Jong Il himself, was built in 1982 on the occasion of the seventieth birthday of his father, Kim Il Sung, the founder of the Juche idea. The government erected it on the eastern riverbank of the Taedong River, opposite the Kim Il Sung Square in central Pyongyang. The structure contains a stunning 25,550 blocks, each representing a day of Kim Il Sung’s life. The slabs are dressed in white stone with 70 dividers, or lines, on all four sides of the tower. The entire edifice is capped off with a 20-meter-high, 45-ton torch that shines every night.

Visitors take an elevator to the top, where a balcony offers a 360-degree view of Pyongyang. It’s one of few places where they’re allowed to film and take pictures. North Koreans brag that the entire structure was erected at “Chollima speed” in only thirty-five days, and that it was dressed up in seventy-six days. In front of the tower sits more propaganda: a single, 100 foot (30-meter)-high statue comprising three figures. One man grasps a hammer, another holds a sickle, and the final one carries a writing brush. They represent the classes of workers, peasants, and intellectuals.

The word Juche or Chuch’e literally means “main subject.” It often has been translated and interpreted as “independent stand” or “spirit of self-reliance” or “always putting Korean things first.” To my mind, the last one is the most accurate one. Kim Il Sung explained that the Juche idea is based on the belief that, in his words, “man is the master of everything and decides everything.” And of course, in Korea, man should always be Korean and never a foreigner.

At the Juche Tower, a stone was left on behalf of my predecessor, resident ABB country director André Reussner, who passed away in 2002 in a Bangkok hospital. The North Koreans removed the plaque when the ABB group downgraded its engagement with North Korea, a sort of pragmatic move for them.

In a nutshell, Juche is, according to Kim Il Sung, the “independence in politics, self-reliance in the economy, self-defense in the military.” Although Juche is the national ideology of North Korea, Kim Il Sung also recommended it as a solution to developing countries. North Korea has been organizing international seminars on Juche since 1977.

After the death of Kim Jong Il in December 2011, the North Korean media swiftly heralded Kim Jong Un as the “great successor,” according to several news reports. Most importantly, the propaganda apparatus stated, the young Kim would uphold the Juche philosophy and the army first policies, creating an uninterrupted line from his father’s rule.

The press went along with the story that like both his grandfather and father, Jong Un descended indirectly from Paekdu Mountain because his father was supposedly born there. That made him “the spiritual pillar and the lighthouse of hope” for all Koreans, according to all the state newspapers. The personality cult, it seemed, did not end with single personalities, but stretched across family lines.

A few days after the news broke, the managing director of a North Korean company operating in a Southeast Asian country sent me a letter that affirmed what I suspected. “I am now in great sadness to hear that our Great Leader has passed away,” he wrote, “but we will push ahead our work to build up a great powerful nation by upholding the wise leadership of our new Leader General Kim Jong Un according to the lofty will of our Great Leader General Kim Jong Il.”

The letter made it clear that he, like all North Koreans, understood that Kim Jong Un would be the undisputed successor. The fervor hasn’t wavered.

NOTES

1. Barbara Demick. North Korea: secrets and lies. The Telegraph. February 16, 2010. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/north-korea/7249849/North-Korea-secrets-and-lies.html.

2. Barbara Demick. Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea. London: Granta Books, 2010.

3. Luc Forsyth. Understanding North Korea—part 2. Luc Forsyth, Photo-journalist. May 16, 2012. http://lucforsyth.com/tag/policy/.

4. Victor Cha. The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future. New York: Ecco, 2012.