The Great Successor

by Fifield, Anna;

  Conveniently, North Korea had begun encouraging ethnic Koreans to return from Japan at the end of the 1950s. Never mind that almost all the Koreans in Japan hailed from the South. The Japanese government had supported the idea, seeing it as a way to shrink the ethnic Korean population in their country.

  North Korea, the potential migrants were told, was a socialist paradise on earth—a country that offered free housing, education, and healthcare, where jobs were guaranteed, where Koreans would suffer none of the prejudice that they endured in Japan.

  What’s more, North Korea’s economy was in better shape than the South’s at that time, and the South was led by Syngman Rhee, a ferocious conservative who was viewed as a puppet of the United States.

  Between 1959 and 1965, more than ninety-three thousand people fell for the Kim regime’s sales pitch and moved from Japan to North Korea.

  The Ko family joined the tide. When Yong Hui was ten, they boarded the ninety-ninth repatriation ship setting out to make the 560-mile journey to North Korea. They disembarked in Chongjin, the port city on the east coast and the farthest place on the Korean Peninsula from the Ko family’s ancestral home on Jeju Island.

  For many ethnic Koreans who had left a country that was rapidly turning itself into a world economic power after the war, coming “home” was a huge disappointment. Some killed themselves on arrival when they realized they’d been duped.

  Pyongyang’s version of the life that the returnees led in North Korea was, of course, very different. The North Korean magazine Korean Pictorial featured the Ko family in its December 1972 issue, under the headline “My Happiness-Filled Family.”6

  The photo shows the family gathered around a table in a picture of domestic bliss. Ko stands looking over his wife and the two girls, all cheery at the table, while a grandmother holds a baby boy. Everyone is well dressed and smiling. The room is stuffed with furniture, including a large radio that must have been cutting edge at the time.

  In the accompanying story, Ko Kyon Taek says that when he went to Japan in 1929, he faced hardship and discrimination. Moving to North Korea put an end to that. “There’s no happier family than mine now,” the magazine quotes him as saying. The story also mentions that the eldest girl, a certain Ko Yong Hui who had joined the prestigious Mansudae Art Troupe, had been awarded a medal by Kim Il Sung.

  The following year, that same Ko Yong Hui took the ferry back to Japan. In the summer of 1973, she and thirty-five other dancers from the Mansudae troupe went on a two-month-long, sixty-performance tour through Tokyo, Nagoya, Hiroshima, and Fukuoka—as well as to her birthplace of Osaka.

  But Ko’s identity was already being obscured. During the trip to Japan, the pro-North Korean newspaper Choson Sinbo called her Ryu Il Suk and said she was the main dancer during the performance of a song called “Azaleas of the Motherland.” The newsletter’s writer said that she was the star of the group, but he couldn’t get close to interview her because her fellow dancers guarded her too closely.

  Back in North Korea, the beautiful dancers from the Mansudae troupe were often asked to attend the boozy parties that Kim Jong Il held and to perform for the men in his court.

  Kim Jong Il was smitten with Ko Yong Hui, asking her to sit with him at the parties, another dancer in the troupe later recalled. “Kim Jong Il took such a fancy that he came often into rehearsal rooms to watch her practice,” the dancer wrote in a memoir after defecting from the regime.7 Ko was absent from practice more and more often, and rumors started flying around among the other dancers that she was living with Kim Jong Il or that she had given birth to his baby.

  Ko Yong Hui “married” Kim Jong Il—their union doesn’t appear to have been official, but this is how her sister later described it—in 1975. Their relationship led to a rapid improvement in her family’s status in North Korea. Her father became the manager of Mangyongdae Souvenir Factory in Pyongyang and remained in the capital until 1999, when he died at the age of eighty-six.

  Fujimoto remembers meeting Ko Yong Hui and remarking that she was as beautiful as Sayuri Yoshinaga and Setsuko Hara, two Japanese actresses famous for their good looks. The comparison would doubtless have pleased the movie-mad North Korean leader.

  But Ko Yong Hui was more than a trophy wife. She was often up late at night, poring over paperwork with Kim and offering her opinions. Once, when a bodyguard was drunk and waved his gun at Kim Jong Il, Ko is said to have thrown herself between the men. She may have been born in Japan, but she had proven herself a true patriot, loyal not just to North Korea but to her powerful husband.

  Chef Fujimoto’s second encounter with the boys was a happier one. They were still at the compound in Sinchon, and everyone was in the huge garden. Fujimoto was flying a kite. The boys were enthralled.

  “That’s good. Thanks to Fujimoto, the kite is flying,” Ko Yong Hui said to her sons. Kim Jong Un was excited, and the episode seemed to help break the ice a bit. About a month later, Fujimoto said, he was asked to become the boys’ “playmate.”

  He was very surprised. He was a grown man, and they were little boys. But it was impossible for him to say no. He wondered if it was because he was a foreigner and therefore somewhat exotic to the boys. They had admired his shoes: a pair of Nike Air Max sneakers, the height of cool in the early 1990s. Kim Jong Un asked if they were genuine, showing that he was used to people with counterfeit goods. Fujimoto assured him that he didn’t wear fakes.

  But perhaps Fujimoto just seemed to offer a bit of fun. After all, the boys had few other options in their isolated royal court.

  Whenever he could, Fujimoto took Ko Yong Hui and the two “princes” angling for seabass on Kim Jong Il’s private boat. Every time Fujimoto caught a fish, the young Kim Jong Un, still in elementary school, would demand to hold the fishing rod and then cry out happily, “I caught it!”

  The boys developed a fascination with Japan after traveling there with their mother in 1991. With fake Brazilian passports in hand, Ko Yong Hui took her sons with her on a trip to Tokyo. Although Japan was North Korea’s avowed enemy, there was still a sizable community of ethnic Koreans there.

  So while the regime spurted forth anti-Japanese hate, Ko Yong Hui went shopping in Ginza, the upmarket district in central Tokyo that was world famous for luxury, and got her hair done by people known at home as “imperialist aggressors.” She took the boys to Tokyo Disneyland, where they were drawn to a 3-D attraction with a moving chair. The boys loved it so much that Ko had her staff inquire about its cost.

  She wanted to get one to take back to North Korea for her children, Fujimoto told me. But even for the North Korean royal family, the price was prohibitive. Still, for years after, they talked about their trip to Tokyo Disneyland and all the rides they had been on, trying to decide which one was the most fun.

  The boys also appeared to be learning some Japanese. Kim Jong Un remarked to Fujimoto that it was strange that Japanese people had greetings for different times of the day—good morning, good day, good evening—while Koreans used only one no matter the time.

  Kim Jong Un one day asked Fujimoto to write “wave” in Japanese. The boy had been learning the Chinese characters that are the basis of both Japanese and Korean, and he wanted to see if they stayed the same in both languages. Fujimoto wondered who was teaching the boys Japanese.

  Once, when the royal entourage was at the seaside residence in Wonsan, Kim Jong Un asked two young women on the compound to sing two specific Japanese songs to Fujimoto. They were famous songs about feelings of longing—one about a girl who was taken from the city of Yokohama by foreigners and the other about a mother crow crying while waiting for her child.

  Fujimoto would later wonder if those two women had been victims of abduction. Had the royal children been taught by Megumi Yokota, the Japanese teenager abducted on her way home from school? She would have been in her late twenties at the time, and those songs were just the kind that a girl taken from her home might sing.

  Another time, Kim Jong
Un was drawing the Juche Tower, an obelisk with a red flame on top in central Pyongyang that is the monument to North Korea’s philosophy of “self-reliance.” While he was drawing, Kim Jong Un asked Fujimoto about Tokyo Tower, a red-and-white structure reminiscent of the Eiffel Tower that was built in the 1950s and quickly became a symbol of Japan’s postwar revival.

  Kim Jong Un asked Fujimoto to draw Tokyo Tower for him and declared the picture to be cool. He carefully put the drawing into the box where he kept his own. Fujimoto felt pleased. He was getting closer to the boy—and being in the child’s good graces increased the chef’s stature in the Kim household.

  As Kim Jong Un warmed to his unlikely buddy, he became more overtly friendly. The boy was mad about basketball, and Fujimoto once brought back heavy-duty tape from Japan so he could make a court with it. One day, Kim Jong Un gave Fujimoto a photo of Ri Myong Hun, North Korea’s most famous basketball player. Ri was an astonishing seven feet, eight and a half inches tall and played center for North Korea’s national basketball team. In the 1990s, there were rumors that Ri—nicknamed Michael Ri because he idolized Michael Jordan—was going to play in the National Basketball Association. He went to Canada and was scouted by numerous teams, but it went no further. Ri joining the NBA was deemed a violation of the United States’ Trading with the Enemy Act.

  Back in North Korea, the basketballer loomed large in the young Kim’s life. At Kim Jong Il’s funeral in 2011, Ri’s giant figure could be seen towering over the other mourners. He was also there a few years later when Dennis Rodman arrived for some basketball diplomacy.

  Still, even as Fujimoto became a fixture in the royal household, Kim Jong Un reminded the sushi chef of his place. While Jong Chol addressed him with an honorific Korean suffix that loosely translates to “Mr.,” Jong Un continued to refer to him by the disrespectful “Fujimoto.”

  If Kim Jong Un had been any other child or, rather, any other rich kid, these episodes would be considered normal spoiled-brat behavior. But because there is so little other information about him, these stories have taken on an outsized significance. Analysts and experts pore over such anecdotes for evidence of character flaws or influences that might somehow have shaped this man.

  They listened as Fujimoto described a time when Kim Jong Un defied his mother’s orders to remain seated at the table while everyone else finished their dinner. “Let’s go, older brother,” he said to Jong Chol, and they ran outside.

  There was another time, when Kim Jong Un was about ten years old, that the young princeling became very angry at his aunt, Ko Yong Suk, for calling him “little brother.”

  “Don’t treat me like a child!” the child yelled. So Fujimoto suggested calling him Comrade General, and the boy liked the name. “Everyone started calling him Comrade General after that,” Fujimoto told me, chuckling, during one of our meetings in Japan. “So I’m like his godfather.”

  What he didn’t mention was that Kim Jong Un wasn’t the first Comrade General. Kim Jong Nam, the firstborn son of Kim Jong Il, had also been called Comrade General when he was the same age, about a decade before. But the winds had shifted, and it was now the third son who was favored as heir.

  Certainly, the boy grew up thinking he was special. Fujimoto recalls Comrade General Jong Un’s eighth birthday party, which he said took place in a party hall at the royal compound in Wonsan. It was attended by high-level officials rather than other kids.

  Kim Jong Un was dressed in a black suit and a bow tie and was presented with bouquets of flowers. He looked quite uncomfortable. When the chef took his place at the table, he noticed another piece of paper next to the printed menu. It was the lyrics to a song called “Footsteps.”

  After toasts and congratulations to the young boy, the Pochonbo Electric Orchestra, North Korea’s most prominent band at the time, famous for playing synthed-up versions of songs lauding the regime, played the song. It was easy to sing along after hearing the tune once, Fujimoto said, and soon everyone was joining in.

  Tramp tramp tramp

  The footsteps of our General Kim

  Spreading the spirit of February

  Tramp tramp tramping onwards…

  Bringing us closer to a brilliant future

  Tramp, tramp, tramp, ah, footsteps.

  Kim Jong Il was born on February 16, and his birthday was celebrated with great fanfare every year. The message was unmistakable to everyone there: Kim Jong Il’s successor, another General Kim, would lead them into the future.

  From that moment on, even high-ranking officials bowed and deferred to Kim Jong Un whenever they saw him, his aunt and uncle told me. It was impossible for the boy to grow up as a normal child when the people around him were treating him like that, they said. And he quickly got used to giving commands.

  As a boy, Kim Jong Un had been mad about all sorts of machinery, model planes and toy ships in particular. He wanted to know how they flew, how they floated. Even when he was eight or nine and still in Pyongyang, Kim Jong Un would stay up all night doing experiments with his machinery—and insisting on speaking to some expert or other even in the wee hours of the morning if he couldn’t figure things out by himself. When he had questions or when something didn’t function well, he would call for a nautical engineer to come and explain it to him, no matter how late it was, his aunt told me.

  This, for her, revealed an aspect of his personality that had two sides: on the one hand, he had an incredible level of concentration, but on the other, he had a tendency to get hooked on an idea and take it too far. She didn’t use the word “obsessive,” but this was the trait she described. In fact, when later living with them in Bern, the boy always wanted his aunt and uncle to buy him model planes from the toy store or to take him to a park where enthusiasts used to fly their crafts, and the obsession would last long into his adult years.

  Kim Jong Un himself seemed to confirm this years later, when he was heir apparent. “I have formed a close attachment with planes and warships since my childhood,” he told a military official who asked his advice about a new model of gun one day in 2010.

  He told the official how, as a child, he made a runway in the backyard of his house and played with his toy planes out there. The official took this as further proof of Kim Jong Un’s unrivaled qualifications to lead, according to the North Korean version of events.8

  It also explained his later becoming a pilot who would fly himself around North Korea, even building a brand-new airstrip at Wonsan so he could land near his summer residence. These days, when intelligence analysts comb through satellite images to figure out whether North Korea is going to launch a missile, one of the things they look for is Kim Jong Un’s personal plane at a nearby airstrip.

  Although Kim Jong Un’s adolescent years coincided with the national famine, the Great Successor experienced none of its privations and probably never saw the suffering of his fellow North Koreans in person. Instead, he grew up in a world where everything revolved around him. Not only did he have specially appointed friends like Fujimoto, but he had teachers and coaches and cooks and bodyguards and drivers.

  He grew up feeling like the most special little boy in the universe, a boy who would espouse self-reliance while, in fact, being reliant on this army of servants and supplicants and tutors.

  Kim Jong Il’s various children were shut into walled compounds with fifteen-foot-high iron gates or sequestered in the beachfront compound in Wonsan, where life was pure luxury. There were Sony televisions, computers, and video games so they could play Super Mario. There were pinball machines and grand pianos, Yamahas and Steinways, in every house.

  The children had huge playrooms filled with more toys than any European toy store. There were mountains of Lego and Playmobil; boxes of jigsaws, more than they could ever get through; and plastic pistols with surprisingly realistic bullets. There was every kind of four-wheeled toy imaginable, but Kim Jong Un also had a real vehicle and a real gun: a car his father had had specially modified so the little boy could drive
it at age seven and a Colt .45 pistol that he wore on his hip when he was eleven.

  The houses had large, soundproofed cinemas with wood paneling to improve the acoustics and a black velvet curtain that would open when the lights went down. The children could sit in the soft armchairs and watch Ben Hur, Dracula, or James Bond movies.

  In the kitchens, there were cakes and French pastries, smoked salmon and pâté, and tropical fruits like mangos and melons. They wore clothes made especially for them with British fabric that arrived by the Samsonite suitcase load. They brushed their teeth with imported Colgate.

  There were gardens so large that they called them parks, with artificial waterfalls running into artificial lakes. They got around the compounds in golf carts or on mopeds. There were bears and monkeys in cages. Some of the compounds had large swimming pools; some had indoor and outdoor shooting ranges.9

  Kim Jong Un passed his days listening to Fujimoto’s Whitney Houston CD on the sushi chef’s Walkman or playing basketball on courts at the official residences—often with kids brought in especially to play with the princes.

  Kim Jong Un would obsessively analyze the basketball games, Fujimoto said. He would point out players’ strengths and weaknesses, praising those who he deemed to have played well and scolding those who had not.

  “He had the ability to make good judgments with solid reasoning; he knew when to praise and when to criticize,” the chef recalled. When Kim Jong Un would talk about how harshly he’d criticized a player, he’d smile. He seemed to be practicing the art of command, and he was enjoying the terror that his absolute authority could inspire.