The Great Successor

by Fifield, Anna;

  Kim Jong Il embarked on a three-year mourning period, not because he was especially grief stricken but because he had been bequeathed a catastrophe and was anxious to avoid the blame for it.

  A devastating famine had just begun to ravage the country, the result of decades of mismanagement by the Kim regime. During the Cold War, there hadn’t been much incentive to encourage food production in the country’s inhospitable soil because the Soviet Union and China had been sending in food supplies. When those shipments stopped, North Korea had to fend for itself. But it didn’t have enough arable land, and it didn’t have enough energy to produce the chemical fertilizer needed to boost crops.

  This political catastrophe coincided with a series of natural disasters: floods and droughts in the mid-1990s that wiped out what little food North Korea could produce. No one knows exactly how many people died during those years. Some experts say it was half a million; others say it could have been as high as two million.

  There was an explosion in the number of street urchins whose parents had died or abandoned them during this period. They were rather whimsically called “flower swallows,” as if they flitted about looking for nectar. Instead, they were fending for themselves by stealing everything from manhole covers to scraps of wire during these years.

  Many of those who survived were skeletons who’d picked single kernels of corn from cow pats and eaten rats to survive. Some did unconscionable things, including resorting to cannibalism, to make it through a period known euphemistically in North Korea as “the arduous march.” This was the name that had been given to Kim Il Sung’s struggle in Manchuria, and it was resurrected during the famine to create a sense that this was another epic battle for the nation.

  The famine loosened the regime’s grip on the populace in a way no other event had before. Food rations stopped being distributed; people had to rely only on themselves. Citizens of a Communist state became quasi-capitalists out of necessity—and the authorities had to tolerate it because they knew the state had nothing to give.

  Pak Hyon Yong, who was a young man living in Hamhung, north of Wonsan, at the time of the famine, watched his younger brother starve to death. Then his older sister’s children. Then his sister too. Realizing he would be next, Pak started making noodles from “corn rice,” North Korea’s measly substitute staple involving grains of “rice” made out of dried corn kernels. He would eat a little but sell the rest, using the pitiful profits to buy more corn rice for the next day’s batch.

  “The police would come by and try to persuade me not to sell the noodles, saying that I should not succumb to capitalism and that the Dear Leader would resolve our food shortages,” Pak told me in the northern Chinese city of Yanji, where he was living in hiding after he’d escaped from North Korea.24 But the Dear Leader did no such thing.

  The famine in North Korea coincided almost exactly with Kim Jong Il’s ascent to power, forever associating him with a time of extreme hardship. Even today, people who have escaped from North Korea tend to remember Kim Il Sung fondly and recall a time when North Korea was strong and prosperous in reality and not just in the state media’s version of events.

  There was no such love for Kim Jong Il. North Koreans wondered, If he cares for us so much, why are we starving?

  After the famine passed and North Korea returned to a state of mere gnawing hunger and malnutrition, Kim Jong Il began pouring his energies into the military. He had promoted a “military first” policy and elevated the military to pole position within the regime’s hierarchy. The Workers’ Party of Korea, the political arm of the regime, adopted the slogan “The Military Is the Party, the People and the Nation.”25 For a cash-strapped regime intent on strengthening its army, no weapon offers more bang for the buck than a nuclear bomb. The regime had been pouring all its energy and resources into a covert nuclear program over the years. Then Kim Jong Il blew the lid off it when his regime conducted its first nuclear test in 2006.

  By then, the leader, who was sixty-four, had started to look noticeably unwell. Once plump, his frame was gaunt, and his skin was pallid. In the middle of August 2008, he suffered a stroke.

  He recovered, but when he finally appeared in public again, he seemed diminished. He looked smaller and thinner and appeared to have some paralysis on his left side that affected his leg and the use of his left arm.

  Speculation mounted about who would succeed the Dear Leader.

  According to the rules of traditional Korean hierarchy, it should have been the oldest son, Kim Jong Nam.

  Over the years, many people have contended that the First Son lost the crown because of an embarrassing incident that happened in 2001.

  That year, Kim Jong Nam was caught sneaking into Japan with a fake Dominican Republic passport bearing the name Pang Xiong—“Fat Bear” in Chinese. Kim Jong Nam, who was with his wife and young son, told Japanese authorities he was just trying to take his family to Tokyo Disney. After that, he went into exile in Macau, a Chinese territory near Hong Kong, and remained based there for the rest of his life. It was never clear if the exile was forced or voluntary.

  In fact, he had fallen out of favor many years before.

  The succession question had much more to do with the ambitions of the mothers than the suitability of the sons.

  Kim Jong Nam’s mother had been living in Moscow more or less continuously since 1974, when Kim Jong Il had taken up with his next “wife.” When she did return to Pyongyang, she was often temperamental, suffering from migraines or volatile episodes that cast a black mood over the entire house. Plus, she had been raised to have ambitions and a career rather than become a traditional homemaker. Subservient, dutiful wife was a part the actress never reconciled herself with playing.

  Kim Jong Un’s mother, on the other hand, became a consistent presence in Kim Jong Il’s life. As his favored consort, she planted the seeds of change from behind the scenes. Her influence came to be seen everywhere, such as in the way Donald Duck and Tom and Jerry cartoons suddenly appeared on television, dubbed into Korean, right around the time her children would have been watching them.26

  Around the same time, Kim Jong Il had flown into a rage when he discovered that Kim Jong Nam, who was then about twenty, had been going out and drinking in Pyongyang. For disobeying his orders, Kim Jong Il put Kim Jong Nam’s household under house arrest for a month, cutting off their food supplies and making them clean up after themselves. He even threatened to send them to work in the mines in the labor camps where political prisoners were held.

  Plus, Kim Jong Nam has been judged illegitimate because his mother had been married before and she had had at least one child by that man.

  Kim Jong Nam’s cousin, who lived with him, saw the “other woman’s” fingerprints all over this. She imagined Kim Jong Un’s mother setting up the situation, encouraging Kim Jong Il to allow his oldest son more freedom—then ratting on the young man when he enjoyed that freedom.27

  There was also speculation in Seoul, a capital perpetually abuzz with theories about North Korea, that Kim Jong Un’s ambitious and calculating mother had deliberately leaked Kim Jong Nam’s travel schedule to the Japanese authorities so he would be caught and discredited.28

  That would put her children next in line as long as some inconvenient facts were overlooked: she hadn’t legally married Kim Jong Il either, technically making their sons illegitimate too; she had been born in Japan, the country of “imperialist aggressors”; and her sister had defected.

  Their oldest son, Kim Jong Chol, was quiet and introverted, according to his classmates in Switzerland. Kenji Fujimoto, the Japanese sushi chef who’d spent years cutting up fish for the royal family, said that Kim Jong Chol never showed any ambition. Anyway, he seemed to have some kind of hormonal imbalance that made Kim Jong Il think he was “like a little girl” and unsuitable for leadership.29

  Fujimoto had reported that Kim Jong Il anointed his third son, Kim Jong Un, as his successor. He turned out to be right.

  CHA
PTER 2

  LIVING WITH THE IMPERIALISTS

  “Comrade Kim Il Sung told his neighbors: Japs are the bastards who take away Koreans. Their spawn are bastards of the same color. We shall play amongst themselves and if they say something, will attack them together and beat them down.”

  —From a biography of Kim Il Sung’s father, published 19681

  THE SIX-YEAR-OLD KIM JONG UN STOOD BY THE BILLIARD TABLE in the games room of the royal family’s residence at Sinchon, south of Pyongyang. He and his older brother were waiting for their father to come out of a meeting with some officials, including their uncle Jang Song Thaek.

  The boys were dressed in child-sized military uniforms, olive green suits complete with gold buttons and red piping. They had moon-shaped hats on their heads and gold stars on their shoulders. They were little generals.

  When their father entered the room, they stood to attention like soldiers and saluted him, serious expressions on their chubby faces. Kim Jong Il was delighted and wanted to introduce the boys to the officials and the household staff before they went into the dining room next door. Everyone lined up to meet the little princes.

  Kenji Fujimoto, who had moved from Japan to North Korea to make sushi in the royal households, was at the end of the line. He grew more and more nervous as the princes got closer, his heart beating faster with every step they took.

  Kim Jong Chol was first. Fujimoto extended his hand, and the eight-year-old reciprocated with a firm shake. Then Fujimoto put out his hand to the younger child. This one was not so well mannered.

  Instead of shaking Fujimoto’s hand, Kim Jong Un glared at him with “sharp eyes” that seemed to say, “You abhorrent Japanese.” The chef was shocked and embarrassed that a child would stare down a forty-year-old man. After a few seconds that stretched out painfully for Fujimoto, Kim Jong Il intervened to save the situation.

  “This is Mr. Fujimoto,” Kim Jong Il said, prompting “Prince Jong Un” to finally agree to shake hands, although without much enthusiasm. The chef thought there may have been some name recognition. Perhaps the boys had eaten the sushi he had prepared and heard that it had been made by “Fujimoto from Japan.”

  The boy’s reaction made the chef wonder if he had taken on the “anti-imperialist” mind-set that is a key part of North Korea’s narrative, but he may simply have been struck by the oddity of Fujimoto, who could charitably be called idiosyncratic.

  In 1982, down on his luck and unhappy in his marriage, Fujimoto responded to an ad in a Japanese newspaper for a sushi chef in North Korea. It was an unusual career choice, given that Japan was entering its boom years, when bankers in Lamborghinis thought nothing of paying hundreds of dollars for a raw fish dinner. Meanwhile, North Korea was, well, North Korea.

  But Fujimoto got the job, and off he went. He ended up slicing fish for Kim Jong Il for some fifteen years and regularly saw Kim Jong Un throughout his childhood and teenage years.

  When it emerged in 2010 that Kim Jong Un was going to be the next leader of North Korea, Fujimoto instantly became an unlikely source of intelligence on the North Korean leadership, perhaps the most unlikely source until a pierced, tattooed bad-boy American basketballer came along.

  Fujimoto lived in North Korea for a year from 1982—before Kim Jong Un was born—and then returned in 1987 and stayed until 2001. He lived in the Secretariat Residential Block in a compound in Pyongyang that also contained the Workers’ Party of Korea offices and one of Kim Jong Il’s residences.

  The meals prepared for Kim Jong Il by a team of chefs were lavish. There was grilled pheasant, shark fin soup, Russian-style barbecued goat meat, steamed turtle, roast chicken and pork, and Swiss-style raclette cheese melted on potatoes. The royal family ate only rice produced in a special area of the country. Female workers handpicked each grain one by one, making sure to choose flawless grains of equal size.2

  Sushi was on the menu once a week. Fujimoto made lobster sashimi with wasabi soy sauce and nigiri sushi with fatty tuna, yellow tail, eel, and caviar. Seabass was Kim Jong Il’s favorite.

  Because of his role within the inner circle, Fujimoto frequently visited the other royal compounds around the country, including the beachfront palace in Wonsan. He went jet-skiing with Kim Jong Il, rode motorbikes with him—a powerful Honda for Kim Jong Il, a lesser-powered Yamaha for Fujimoto—near the western border with China, and joined him on duck-shooting expeditions in the countryside. They traveled on Kim’s luxury train or in a convoy of Mercedes-Benzes.

  And Fujimoto spent lots of time with the children.

  Shut into compounds in Pyongyang, being schooled at home by tutors, spending the summers alone on the beach in Wonsan, Kim Jong Un had a solitary childhood. He and Jong Chol had no friends—they didn’t even play with their older half brother, Jong Nam, who lived his own entirely separate sequestered life—and their little sister was too many years younger than them to make her a good playmate.

  This seems to have led them to seize on any opportunity for outside company. Even a princeling who wanted for nothing wanted friends.

  To find out what Kim Jong Un was like as a boy, I got on the bullet train from Tokyo and zipped out to Sakudaira, a small town in the Japanese Alps where Fujimoto—a pseudonym, which he says is needed for his protection—was living.

  “He was a bit lonely when he was little,” Fujimoto told me over lunch in the sleepy town. “I became a kind of playmate to him; we became like friends.”

  I had seen photos of Fujimoto, so I knew he wore a kind of disguise to obscure his identity a little. Still, it was jarring when I emerged from the station to find him waiting for me: a black bandanna with a white skull motif on his head, purple-tinted glasses, a huge watch and diamond-encrusted square ring that were more rapper bling than low-profile witness protection scheme.

  On my first trip to see him, when we had gone upstairs to a private room in the Chinese restaurant, Fujimoto gave me his business card. It featured a photo of Kim Jong Un embracing Fujimoto on one side, and on the other it read, “If you want to talk about North Korea, call me.” He carried a clipboard holding Japanese newspaper clippings from his most recent trip to Pyongyang and some photos that he’d had printed out in A4 size. With so few outsiders having met the young North Korean leader, Fujimoto had become something of a Kim-Jong-Un-ologist.

  The presence of Fujimoto in the royal household was a contradiction in the regime. While North Korea’s existence was based on its rejection of the United States and its vision for a democratic world order, it was also built on a hatred of Japan.

  Korea had suffered greatly during its colonization by imperial Japan in the first half of the twentieth century. In the previous decades, Japan had embarked on an aggressive expansion in Asia, defeating both China and Russia militarily and taking control of the entire Korean Peninsula. Japan made Korea its protectorate in 1905 and then formally annexed the peninsula in 1910, starting thirty-five years of often-brutal colonial rule.

  Toward the end of this period, Koreans were forced to take Japanese names and speak Japanese at school and work. Once World War II started, men were forced to work in Japanese factories and mines to help the war effort and were conscripted as soldiers into the Imperial Japanese Army. Tens of thousands of Korean girls and women were forced to become sex slaves for Japanese soldiers in “comfort stations.”

  When Japan was defeated in 1945, it had to give up control of the peninsula to the victors. In both halves of the Korean Peninsula, the memories of this period run deep, even to this day.

  The Kim family had built its regime on Kim Il Sung’s anti-imperialist, anti-Japanese credentials: the Japanese “hated General Kim Il Sung the most among thirty million Koreans,” a biography published in 1948 noted approvingly.3

  For decades after Japan’s defeat, the North Korean regime found it helpful to keep the hatred burning strong. It also took provocative acts of revenge. Starting in the late 1970s and continuing through the 1980s, North Korean spies abducted dozens of Japanese c
itizens, snatching them from beaches and parks on Japan’s west coast and bundling them into boats.

  Once the Japanese abductees were in North Korea, the regime’s agents worked to break them psychologically and then, once under control, put them to use as spies or language teachers.4

  The Japanese government officially says that seventeen of its citizens were taken to North Korea, which has acknowledged thirteen of them. The most famous of the abductees is Megumi Yokota, a thirteen-year-old who was taken on her way home from school in 1977. North Korea allowed five of the abductees to return in 2002 but says eight of the others—including Megumi—died in North Korea.

  To this day, North Korea still regularly demonizes Japan in its state media, denouncing “Japanese reactionaries” and threatening to turn the country into a “nuclear sea of fire.”

  But there’s one important detail that state propaganda never reported: Kim Jong Un has a strong personal connection to Japan. His beloved mother was born there.

  In 1929, when the Korean Peninsula was under Japanese colonial rule, a man called Ko Kyon Taek, the twenty-six-year-old son of a boatman, moved from the southern Korean island of Jeju to Osaka, a Japanese city that was becoming home to an increasingly large Korean community.

  He settled in the area of Ikuno, a part of central Osaka that is still a strongly Korean neighborhood. There, he worked at a factory called Hirota Saihojo Sewing Plant, which had stopped making business shirts and started making military uniforms and tents.

  After the end of the war, as Japan was rapidly trying to rebuild itself into a modern and democratic nation, Ko and his wife built a family: first, a son and then, on June 26, 1952, a daughter that they named Yong Hui.

  Yong Hui went by the Japanese name of Hime Takada at her public elementary school in Osaka. She loved to perform and sang hymns in a church choir every Sunday. Four years later, a sister arrived. Her name was Yong Suk.

  After the war, their father got in trouble with the police. He was rumored to be operating an illegal boat connecting Osaka and Jeju and was reportedly ordered to be deported. There were rumors that Ko was also a womanizer and had multiple children by different mistresses. To cut ties with these other women and get himself out of hot water, Ko decided to hightail it out of Japan.5