Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (144 page)

36.
Kim,
With the Century,
vol. 1, p. 31.

37.
Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 80–85.

38.
Scalapino and Lee,
Communism in Korea,
pt. I, p. 205.

39.
Kim,
With the Century,
vol. 3, p. 44
.

40.
Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 92–93.

41.
Ibid., vol. 1, p. 89.

42.
Ibid., vol. 1, p. 86.

43.
Ibid., vol. 1, p. 94.

44.
Ibid., vol. 1, p. 95.

45.
Ibid., vol. 1, p. 148.

46.
Ibid., vol. 1, p. 143.

47.
Ibid., vol. 1, p. 163.

48.
Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 156–157.

49.
Ibid., vol. 1, p. 159.

50.
Ibid., vol. 1, p. 158.

51.
Ibid., vol. 1, p. 159.

52.
Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 174–178.

53.
Ibid., vol. 1, p. 211.

54.
Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 207–208.

55.
Ibid., vol. 1, p. 248.

56.
See Suh,
The Korean Communist Movement 1918-1948
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 263. Kim in his memoirs seems to suggest that his Chinese-language abilities contributed to his career in the anti-Japanese movement in .Manchuria. That does indeed seem to have been the case, as we shall see in the next chapter.

57.
Kim,
With the Century,
vol. 1, pp. 208–210.

58.
Letter from Dr. Won Tai Sohn comprising written answers to the author’s questions, January 1995. Kim himself in
With the Century
wrote simply that he lived with friends in Jilin, not mentioning the .Methodist dormitory.

59.
Kim,
With the Century,
vol. 1, pp. 213–226. Previous North Korean biographical works claimed Kim read
Das Kapital
in 1927. Outside biographers, however, had noted that this was highly unlikely, since neither the Korean nor the Chinese translation was published until after World War II. See Lim Un,
The Founding of a Dynasty in North Korea
—
An Authentic Biography of Kim Il-song
(Tokyo: Jiyu-sha, 1982). Like many points in Kim’s memoirs (and whether true or not), the explanation that a friend read Marx’s magnum opus in Japanese and told him about it seems to be an adjustment that responds directly to the outside biographers’ challenge.

60.
Kim,
With the Century,
vol. 1, pp. 240–245.

61.
Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 227–239. “Literary works play a great role in the formation of the world view of people, so every time I meet writers, I tell them to produce many revolutionary stories and novels,” Kim wrote (vol. 1, p. 215).

62.
Mark O’Neill, “N. Korea’s Dead Dictator Remembered as Star Pupil According to Chinese Teacher’s Daughter” (Reuters dispatch from Beijing),
Korea Times,
September 10, 1994.

63.
Kim,
With the Century,
vol. 1, p. 236.

64.
Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 222–224.

65.
See Scalapino and Lee,
Communism in Korea,
pt. I, p. 19.

66.
Kim,
With the Century,
vol. 2, p. 12.

67.
Ibid., vol. 1, p. 267.

68.
Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 281–292.

69.
Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 293–306. Dr. Won Tai Sohn told me in a letter (January 1995) that he had been present, seated in the front row, at An Chang-ho’s lecture. He vouched for Kim’s account: “Still vivid in my memory is the scene of Kim Song-ju [Kim Il-sung’s name at the time] asking the speaker questions as well as the scene of Ri Kwan-Rin, a heroine of the Independence Army, rushing toward the policemen on the stage to stop them when they were arresting An Chang-Ho,” Sohn told me. “Actually I was arrested too because I was trying to climb on the stage to release An Chang-ho.”

70.
Kim,
With the Century,
vol. 1, pp. 309–315.

71.
Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 315–317.

72.
Letter to the author from Dr. Won Tai Sohn, January 1995. Also see Kim,
With the Century,
vol. 1, p. 21.

73.
Kim,
With the Century,
vol. 2, p. 8.

74.
Letter to the author from Dr. Won Tai Sohn, January 1995. Also see Geraldine Brooks, “Two Old Friends: One Became A Doctor, the Other a Dictator,”
Asian Wall Street Journal,
September 19, 1994.

Dr. Sohn, who knew Kim in his middle-school days in the Chinese city of Jilin, told me, “Had I written about my days in Jilin, I would have written just the same as he did.” But Dr. Sohn also told me he had not replied to my letter of inquiry immediately but first had taken it along on a trip to Pyongyang. Although I do not doubt his basic story, I can’t help wondering whether he perhaps received help in the preparation of his literary-sounding accounts from some of the people involved with researching, ghostwriting or polishing Kim’s memoirs. The physician eventually published a book of his own. It is glowing, indeed almost worshipful, in its account of Kim, as the University of Pennsylvania’s G. Cameron Hurst III and Bradley University’s In Kwan Hwang noted in forewords they contributed. See Won Tai Sohn,
Kim Il Sung and Korea’s Struggle: An Unconventional Firsthand History
(Jefferson, N.C: McFarland & Company, 2003).

75.
Kim,
With the Century,
vol. 2, p. 8.

76.
Letter from Dr. Sohn to author, January 1995.

Kim also played the guitar, according to a reference in his memoirs: “Once I went to Ryang Song Ryang’s house and played the guitar there. I did not do it because I was merry or free from anxiety. Frankly speaking, I felt gloomy at that time”
(With the Century,
vol. 3, p. 314).

77.
Kim,
With the Century,
vol. 2, p. 10.

78.
Letter to the author, January 1995.

79.
Kim,
With the Century,
vol. 1, pp. 245–246.

80.
Ibid., vol. 2, p. 11.

81.
Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 254–257. Kim gave the founding date as August 28, 1927. In a typical boast, he wrote that this organization “played the vanguard role in the Korean revolution.”

82.
Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 354–357.

83.
Letter to the author from Dr. Won Tai Sohn, January 1995; Geraldine Brooks,
Asian Wall Street Journal,
September 19, 1994. Kim,
With the Century,
vol. 1, pp. 359–367; vol. 2, pp. 4–8.

3. On Long Marches Through Blizzards.

1.
“Some time near the beginning of the century there seems to have existed in Korea a legendary patriotic national hero named Kim Il-song who fought courageously against the Japanese and so won the admiration and respect of the Korean people. The true identity of this
legendary
Kim Il-song is not known. … [T]he lack of uniformity in the tales of the legendary Kim suggests strongly that this Kim
is
only a legend. These tales, without concrete evidence, have led some to discredit the legend as a fiction designed to belittle the North Korean premier. The
legend,
however, does exist, and while the originator of the legend cannot be identified, there are many Korean revolutionaries, Nationalist and Communist, who, by deliberate adoption of the name, contributed to the legend” (Suh,
Korean Communist Movement
[see chap. 2, n. 56], pp. 256–257).

Note that in scholarly literature the last syllable of Kim’s name is often transcribed as “song,” with a diacritical mark over the vowel, in accordance with the
McCune-Reischauer system of Romanization. In the Seoul dialect, at least, to my ear the syllable as pronounced by native Koreans does sound more like the English “song” than “sung.” Confusing Westerners further, in a transcription system recently adopted by South Korea the syllable would be spelled “seong.” Fortunately for people who can read Korean, the marvelously rational and compact
hangul
writing system gives a phonetically precise rendering of any syllable at a single glance.

2.
Kim,
With the Century
(see chap. 2, n. 2), vol. 2, pp. 23–24.

3.
Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 136–137. In his memoirs he overcomes his earlier reluctance to reveal any affinity for things foreign when he acknowledges that learning Chinese stood him in good stead in later life. “If my father had not made me learn Chinese at an early age I might have had to face a great language barrier at every step of my life for the quarter of a century I spent in China,” he writes. Because he was able to dress in Chinese clothing and speak fluent Chinese, “the Japanese detectives, who were said to have a hound’s sense of smelling, and the Manchukuo police did not suspect me to be a Korean when I was walking in the street” (vol. 1, pp. 63–64).

4.
Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 159–160.

5.
Suh reports in
The Korean Communist Movement
(see chap. 2, n. 56), p. 259, that
Chokki
(Red Flag), organ of a communist group in .Manchuria, carried an article in its .March 1930 issue mourning the death of a Kim Il-sung.

6.
Kim,
With the Century,
vol. 2, pp. 107–108.

7.
The Kim Il-sung who became North Korea’s leader “undoubtedly received or inherited some of the credit due to other revolutionaries, but the rumors around his name are the consequence of his own success. Prior to his accession and consolidation of power in the North, Kim Il-song, with his own record, was well known to the Koreans as well as to the Chinese and, of course, was well known to the Japanese police. … He is certainly not a nonentity who inherited everything from the legendary patriot or from the revolutionaries named Kim Il-song” (Suh,
Korean Communist Movement,
pp. 260–261).

8.
As recently as January 2000, the South s Unification Ministry aroused controversy in Seoul by describing Kim as an “independence fighter.” Some critics questioned this “policy change” (Kim Ji-ho, “New Unification Ministry Publication Calls Kim Il-sung Independence Fighter,”
Korea Herald,
January 13, 2000). In fact, however, South Korea’s government-funded Naewoe Press, affiliated with the organization then known as the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, had published an essentially accurate account of Kim’s life as early as 1978, including the information that he “became a leading member of the [Chinese Communist] Party’s anti-Japanese guerrilla forces in the latter part of the 1930s.” See “Kim Il-sung,”
Vantage Point
(May 1978): p. 19. It might surprise some foreigners interested in Korea to realize that such accurate information had issued from the KCIA, whose reputation was so universally sinister that the government thought it wise to change its name (to Agency for National Security Planning, or NSP) after the 1987 revival of democratic elections. The reputation of the KCIA’s professional analysts of North Korean affairs was tarnished by association with the organization’s dominant group, secret police who carried out internal political repression of dissidents on behalf of South Korea’s military-backed rulers. The analysts’ reputations also were not helped by the work of government propagandists who were less than eager to let the facts get in the
way of anti–North Korea broadsides. Further, the South Korean military rulers from time to time concocted imminent threats of Northern invasion, claiming to base their warnings on “intelligence reports.” The situation in some
’ways
parallels that of the American CIA, whose conscientious professional analysts also suffered in reputation during much of the same period due to the unlawful exploits of some of the true “spooks” in their agency.

The author has reviewed much of the output of Naewoe Press’s monthly
Vantage Point
from its first volume in 1978. I find much of the information presented even decades ago to be consistent with the best information available today. True, some contributors reveal very strong unscholarly biases against the North, strong enough to affect the credibility of their conclusions and in some cases their information. But more often than not the South Korean and Korean-American contributors to
Vantage Point
appear to have struggled against great difficulties to get the basic information right. This stands to reason. For South Korea, after all, accurate information about the North was a matter of life or death.

Nonetheless, despite such long-ago efforts by South Korean government-affiliated professional analysts to set the record straight, the scenario that casts Kim Il-sung as an impostor still has credibility among some anti-communist zealots and just plain sloppy researchers, not only in South Korea but abroad. Thus it was considered news in 1994 when Naewoe Press published
A Bird’s Eye View of North Korea,
which implicitly repudiated the theory. See “NK’s Kim Acknowledged as Independence Fighter,”
Korea Times,
May 1, 1994.

9.
Scalapino and Lee (see chap. 2, n. 28), pt. 1, pp. 66–136.

10.
For a provocative analysis of this political culture focusing on South Korea, see Gregory Henderson’s classic
Korea: The Politics of the Vortex
(Cambridge, .Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968).

11.
See Scalapino and Lee (see chap. 2, n. 28), pt. I, p. 190.