Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (94 page)

Q. What about the question of personal freedom?

A. “What you call ‘freedoms’ in the capitalist countries cannot be found in North Korea, but they do enjoy sovereignty and independence. Just look: There are no foreign troops in North Korea.”

Q. How were living conditions at your uncle’s place?

A. “Pretty bad by Japanese standards, although if you went there from certain Asian countries you would find better conditions than you had left at home.”

Q. If your uncle moved there voluntarily, why was he put in such a remote corner of the country instead of being allowed to live somewhere with some urban comforts?

A. “That kind of economic condition is just the same everywhere in the country.”

Q. What sort of work do your relatives do?

A. “My uncle is a mining engineer. His son drives a truck and his daughter is a clerk. Another of my uncle’s sons graduated from medical school in Pyongyang.”

Q. One recent report by Asia Watch and another human rights group describes a North Korean class system in which people are ranked according to how well they can be trusted to support Kim Il-sung, with those opposed to the regime given the hardest living conditions. Does that jibe with what you saw?

A. “I detected nothing that would suggest the presence of any opposition to the government. Wherever I went I saw no sign of opposition to or disaffection with Kim Il-sung or Kim Jong-il. I did see differences in political treatment. Of course the best treated are Kim Il-sung’s family, then
the anti-Japanese guerrilla fighters in World War II. Then come those who fought against the Americans in the Korean War.”

Q. How were you received at your uncle’s place?

A. “I got the most fervent welcome and warm hospitality—for the reason that I was a pro-Pyongyang Korean businessman who had donated money to the town. I’ve given hundreds of millions of yen to the pro-Pyongyang organization in Japan, mostly for Korean schools here as a sort of repayment of my obligation for what those schools did for me. The North Korean government started sending money to Korean schools in Japan right after the Korean War. I’ve given tens of millions of yen directly to the North Korean government in cash, trucks and heavy equipment. But still my donations are a joke compared “with those some businessmen have made.”

Q. Will your family stay in Japan, or maybe try to go back to South Korea?

A. “If Korea is reunified I’ll go back to South Korea. For the moment it’s politically impossible to go back. I’m telling my children, ‘Never think Japan is the only place where Koreans can live. You may go to Canada or the United States but still remain Korean.’ Japan is racially and politically intolerant. We think Canada or the United States is more tolerant and comfortable for Koreans. People of my parents’ generation are always talking of returning to the homeland. My generation’s main concern is how to live as Koreans wherever we live. Maybe in the fourth generation the attitude may change, I don’t know.”

It was clear that something was going on in the spring of 1992, when North Korea’s Ministry of External Economic Relations sponsored a weeklong tour by more than one hundred business executives, scholars and officials. Most were from Japan and South Korea but small delegations came from China, Russia and the United States. The visitors would travel though remote areas that few Westerners had seen for decades. The unusual arrangements signaled unprecentedly serious efforts to attract foreign investment—and for good reason. Despite Kim Il-sung’s trumpeting of
juche,
national self-reliance, his country for four decades had gotten more than a little help from its socialist friends abroad. Now, the rest of the communist bloc had shrunken to China, Cuba and not much else, and that flow of aid and subsidized trade was squeezed off. A clear sign that Pyongyang’s external partnerships were falling apart had come in the summer of 1990, when South Korean President Roh Tae-woo’s “northern policy” of wooing the Soviet Union and Pyongyang’s other communist allies paid off spectacularly: Roh flew to San Francisco (I was the lone foreign reporter on his plane) for an epochal meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Diplomatic relations followed—and by late 1992, China, the last major communist holdout, would exchange ambassadors with Seoul.

With 21 million people to keep reasonably satisfied, the regime had little alternative but to look to the global free-market economy. Belatedly following China’s example, Pyongyang had decided to set up its first free economic
zones. The North Koreans welcomed the visitors from capitalist countries in the hope they would funnel investment into infrastructure and manufacturing. The goals were simple, explained Kim Song-sik, vice-chairman of the Committee for Promotion of External Economic Relations: “Introduce more modern factories of international standard, and generate more foreign exchange.” (I noticed that Kim Song-sik was wearing proletarian garb: Lenin cap, Mao jacket. But he set those off-with a modern accessory of more or less international standard, for which someone had expended foreign exchange: his belt buckle, which bore a
Playboy
bunny motif.)

Besides the knowledge that they were being blamed for their countrymen’s plight, another factor had been helping to coax Pyongyang officials out of their shell. That was an international scheme for developing manufacturing, trade and shipping among countries facing the Sea of Japan, with help from the United Nations Development Program. Meetings in various cities in the region had explored multinational development of a triangular area of Russia, China and North Korea surrounding the mouth of the Tumen River, which formed the border among the three countries. Pyongyang’s turn to host a conference on the proposal was the occasion for our tour in North Korea.

The tour provided a chance for North Korea to stage what one American called “a rolling party through the countryside” and play up its ambitious plans to expand tourism. Kim Do-jun, director of the Bureau of Tour Promotion, said around 100,000 foreign visitors were arriving annually, bringing in a total of about $100 million. Hong Kong, Thailand and Australia were being considered as the origins of new tourist flights. Pyongyang wanted to increase the visitor total to 500,000 foreigners, in addition to South Koreans and overseas Koreans. And Kim Do-jun spoke of long-range plans for such developments as “a Disney World” in Kangwon province, near the South Korean border in the mountainous eastern region. Clearly, though, there was a long way to go before the infrastructure would be up to handling such an influx. Counting those of us in the press, the delegation’s numbers were so great that hotels outside the capital couldn’t or wouldn’t house the group—so we had to bunk together for nights on end in the sweaty compartments of a slow-moving passenger train.

The only delegates from the United States who had been invited for the 1992 affair were a pair of researchers at the East-West Center in Honolulu. I happened to be working at the center as journalist in residence (starting on a project that eventually turned into this book) and I applied to make the tour with them. I hoped that in the years since 1989 the Pyongyang authorities somehow would have removed my name from their list of unwelcome scribes—or, otherwise, that I would manage to go unrecognized as a blacklisted reporter thanks to my new scholarly affiliation. Perhaps,
I hoped, there were separate bureacracies involved in screening scholars and journalists. After all, commentators on the top-down North Korean political system had noted that there was remarkably little in the way of lateral communication among parallel governmental units—apparently they needed to save their breath and paperwork for dealing vertically with their bosses and subordinates.

Whatever the cause for my good fortune, I not only was accepted for the trip but received VI.P. treatment including a first class seat on the Air Koryo plane that took our delegation and others from Beijing to Pyongyang. When we arrived at the airport it turned out that a pair of young foreign affairs officials, assigned as handlers of the foreign reporters who were expected, did know who I was. “Have you really left
Newsweek,
Mr. Martin?” one of them asked. “Oh, yes,” I replied, truthfully. (I was happy that they did not ask whether I had left journalism. Would they have branded me an imposter and put me on the next plane back to Beijing if I had revealed, there at the airport, that I would return to full-time journalism after my fellowships ran out—and that I planned to pay for that trip by writing an article for a magazine?
¹
)

In the past, normally, it had been North Korean officials who restricted foreigners, while the foreigners demanded more freedom of movement—but early in this visit the tables were turned somewhat. Our
Japanese
tour organizers insisted that the accompanying foreign newsmen stay in the hall to cover the two-day Tumen conference. Then the two North Korean press handlers, officials in their twenties who were both named Kim, struck an unaccustomed blow for a free press. They heatedly argued the journalists’ case for skipping conference sessions to leave time for seeing more of Pyongyang. By that time the press corps had developed considerable affection for the two, to the point of giving them nicknames. A relatively tall and handsome Kim worked for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He was dubbed Slick Kim because he always wore a well-tailored pinstriped suit. (It was the same suit day after day, I noticed eventually; probably he couldn’t afford a spare.) His shorter, slightly chubby colleague—-who resembled Kim Jong-il and other ruling-family Kims—-was called Fat Kim. Fat Kim, who worked for the Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, told us that Slick Kim was on the fast track to eventual cabinet position.

Successful as it had proven up to that point, my Clark Kent–style change of identity had begun to threaten my mission. When we arrived at the conference hall where the official delegates were to convene I found that the scholar Martin had been classified as an official delegate. Not only that, I had been assigned a front-row seat facing the dais, my name in very large letters affixed to a placard on the table in front of me. I couldn’t bug out without being noticed. Fearing that I would end up wasting precious days vegetating in that conference room, I approached Fat Kim and Slick Kim
and won their kind permission to give up my VI.P. status and join the rest of the crew of foreign reporters to look around in Pyongyang and environs.

With the notable exception of Kim Jong-su, whom I did not meet on this visit, North Korean officials had been notorious for bland, filibustering, prevaricating replies to interviewers; they would talk for hours but give little useful information. Speaking with the foreign reporters who were covering this tour, however, our chief host, Deputy Prime Minister Kim Dal-hyon, was a refreshing departure from the rule. Kim Dal-hyon frankly acknowledged that the collapse of Soviet and East European communism had hit his country hard. “Because of the rapid destruction of the world socialist market,” he lamented, “we can’t export our goods to socialist countries and import oil in exchange.”

In particular, longtime barter partner Moscow had begun demanding payment in hard currency, which was in very short supply in North Korea. Trade with the former Soviet republics had accounted for 38 percent of Pyongyang’s global trade in 1990, but dropped to less than 14 percent in 1991, according to South Korean figures.
²
Not only was North Korea importing less from its old ally; its exports were down even more, since its products generally were not competitive with rival free-market products. Analysts were saying the North’s economy actually had shrunken each year since 1990 (including, by one estimate, a sickening drop of as much as 30 percent in 1992 alone).
³
China reportedly had joined Russia in demanding hard-currency settlement, further fueling the alarming trend. Not surprisingly, Pyongyang appeared determined to squeeze every possible dollar or yen out of foreign visitors: A European businessman living in Pyongyang’s thirty-five-story Koryo Hotel said his daily room rate had doubled to $200 not long before our arrival.

Nickel-and-diming, however, would not solve the problem. Evidence of poverty and economic stagnation was too abundant for the authorities to hide as we rode by train and bus from Pyongyang across the central mountains to the east coast and north-ward to the Russian and Chinese borders. In previous years I had seen progress in farm mechanization in other parts of the country, but it seemed not to have occurred in this area—or, if it had occurred, to have been reversed, perhaps because of the oil shortage. Farmers plowed far less often with tractors than with oxen, which were among the few farm animals visible. Beanpoles lining the dooryard of almost every house along the route were the only visible source of protein—helping to explain a propaganda campaign that recently had pushed the slogan: “Let’s eat two meals a day instead of three.
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