Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader

by Martin, Bradley K.

  American Christians remained concerned about the persecution of North Korean Christians. Recall that Protestant missionaries from the United States, especially Presbyterians and Methodists, had led the missionary effort in Korea from the opening of the country in the late nineteenth century. Staying on through the decades until the 1930s, when the Japanese occupation made their work impossible, they had passed the faith to millions of Koreans—ironically, with even more success in the northern half of the country than in the South. Certainly the Pyongyang regime hoped to influence such groups with the highly publicized church openings.

  Over time, of course, even such externally targeted measures could inject a note of unaccustomed pluralism into domestic society. For the time being, though, the average North Korean probably felt little effect. Indeed, one American Protestant who visited Pyongyang in the fall of that same year, 1989, found evidence that religious belief still cut very much against the grain of the Kim regime. Virgil Cooper, a Seoul-based Southern Baptist missionary, attended services at Pongsu Church. He told me he had found the associate pastor’s sermon to be suitably “Bible based,” but considered it odd that the congregation did not belt out the hymns with the Korean gusto he was familiar with in Seoul. Later, in his hotel, a Christian woman who had seen him at the church approached him. Pointing to the ceiling, she urged him not to talk loudly. Christians remained subject to considerable discrimination and repression, she told him.

  The woman Cooper met, assuming she was a sincere believer, may have been an exception even among the churchgoers. According to a high-level defector, former chief ideologist Hwang Jang-yop, “all the churches in Pyongyang are fake churches built for show. The monks living in the Buddhist temples are of course fake monks. Genuine believers in North Korea cannot profess their faith; only fake believers are allowed to do so.11

  The more immediate question was whether Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il were flexible enough to make far more drastic changes, especially in the economy. The obvious economic policy changes would conflict with the regime’s need to maintain control internally. Stepping up contacts with foreigners via trade and technology transfer would give the people more opportunities to test what they had been taught against other versions of the truth. Solving economic problems would require admitting past mistakes at least implicitly—but Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il were, of course, infallible; any hint of contradicting their past “precious teachings” would weaken their claim to absolute loyalty and obedience. What I saw in 1989 did not give me confidence that major changes would come in timely fashion. In the end, adding up every change that could be detected on that visit produced a list that seemed unimpressive at best and, when compared with the exciting things happening elsewhere in the communist world at the time, downright pitiful.

  It was the heyday of Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika in the Soviet Union, but North Koreans knew little or nothing about Soviet liberalization and restructuring. They did not even know about the popular protests that had been raging next door in China. My guide, a twenty-nine-year-old college English teacher, mentioned that he hoped to go the following September to Beijing to study English and Chinese. I asked him if he knew what had happened at Tiananmen Square. “A little bit” about it was in Nodong Shinmun, the party newspaper, he said. When I told him that China’s army had killed thousands of its own young people, he seemed to try to mask a reaction of surprise. “Students?” he asked. Getting his information from the only source available to him, the party-lining North Korean media, he had not even heard the terms glasnost and perestroika before I taught them to him. Once he understood the meanings, though, he dismissed any need for reform in North Korea. “Our country has no glasnost or perestroika,” he boasted. “Our policy is unchanged for forty years. No one wants to change.”

  My guide and every other North Korean I met, just as in 1979, constantly praised Kim Il-sung for having built a socialist paradise guaranteeing jobs and food, decent housing, free medical care and education. The difference in 1989 was that they also added references to Kim Jong-il, by then no longer spoken of only in code terms but long since officially proclaimed his father’s successor, the “Dear Leader.” A mammoth effort was under way simultaneously to continue building the Kim Il-sung personality cult and to stretch it enough to envelop the junior Kim, who represented the regime’s hope of continuing on without major change or reform. Not only Kim Jong-il’s name but also his picture and his words were everywhere, and his abilities were described in close to superhuman terms.

  This effort was evident during my visit to the Grand People’s Study House, a grandiose pile of masonry billed as the country’s central library and “center of intellectual activity.” Predictably, a gigantic chalk-white statue of Kim Il-sung, seated in an easy chair and reading the Workers’ Daily, dominated the vast lobby. Several rooms of the library were devoted to an exhibit of books published in North Korea. A librarian there, Li Hyung-ran, boasted that more than 1,300 volumes of Kim Il-sung’s works and more than 700 volumes of works by Kim Jong-il had been published. The latter included a fifteen-volume set of Kim Jong-il’s achievements in guiding the country’s literature and art.

  The shelf for Korean literature in general—novels, poetry, criticism— was considerably smaller than the shelf for the works of Kim Il-sung, and even there it was impossible to escape the main theme. Here, said the librarian, was a historical novel, also in fifteen volumes—a fictionalized account of the deeds of Kim Jong-il. And over here, “these are the illustrated fairy tales told by the Great Leader and the Dear Leader,” she said. “And this picture album illustrates the immortal flower Kimjongilia. It was newly cultivated by a Japanese gardener”—and named, of course, for the Dear Leader. Over there, finally! A book bearing a different name in the title. “This book introduces the noble life and revolutionary history of Comrade Kim Jong-suk,” said Miss Li. “She was the most loyal to the Great Leader, an anti-Japanese heroine and a communist revolutionary fighter.” Um, wasn’t she Kim Il-sung’s wife? “Yes, you guessed well. And she also was the mother of Dear Leader Comrade Kim Jong-il.”

  As on my earlier visit, adoration of the elder Kim appeared genuine, even when foreigners would consider that it had gone to bizarre extremes. When the Great Leader appeared for an ice-skating show, the entire audience of Koreans leapt to its feet as one person and bellowed “Hooray! Hooray! Hooray!” over and over and over for close to three minutes. When performers or marchers passed before Kim’s seat in the May Day Stadium during the festival opening ceremony, they jumped up and down on their toes, their arms raised, palms open toward the leader, in very much the posture of a tiny child asking her father for candy, or a dog begging for a bone.

  When I asked my guide about the Kim Il-sung portrait badges that he and every other North Korean “voluntarily” wore on their breasts, he replied, “We want always to have the Great Leader near us. I want to have his portrait on my heart. As you know, the Great Leader liberated the country. He dedicated all his life for the people.” The badges, he added, were gifts from “the Dear Leader Kim Jong-il.”

  My hosts’ idea of a museum to show off to visitors was the International Friendship Exhibition, a massive, windowless stone structure at Mount Myo-hyang, a resort three hours’ ride by train north of Pyongyang. The exhibits consisted solely of gifts from foreigners to the Great and Dear Leaders. “The presents are precious to our country, the pride of our people,” an exhibition guide, twenty-five-year-old Chong Sun-hyang, told me. They showed “how much respect the rest of the world has for the Great Leader,” she said. Four-ton copper doors embossed with the hybrid flower named Kimilsungia (developed by that same Japanese botanist who gave the world the Kimjongilia) swung open noiselessly to admit visitors to a tomblike interior. Inside, the practice was to cover one’s shoes with cloth booties to keep from tracking dirt, then to pad pristinely into the holy-of-holies, where another enormous, eerie, chalk-white limestone statue of the Great Leader seated in an easy
chair loomed over a selection of presents from world leaders.

  Once a visitor had made his way around that first room, there were only forty-four more rooms to go to complete the tour of gifts to Kim Il-sung—a vase fashioned from a lump of coal, from Poland’s Jaruzelski, for example, and a woven saddle from Libya’s Khadaffi. Then there were eight more rooms full of similar gifts to Kim Jong-il, who was represented by another limestone statue. It seemed African leaders had sent the two Kims enough elephant tusks, carved and un-carved, to justify an all-points bulletin by the World Wildlife Fund. The full tour took four hours, and I was assured that only a quarter of the gifts on hand were being displayed at the moment.

  I could only speculate that, after decades of indoctrination and purges, those North Koreans who remained alive and not in prison had by and large bought into the entire program. “But what if someone wants to say: ‘I don’t believe in the Great Leader?’” I asked my guide. “You don’t understand,” he replied. “All our people believe in the Great Leader. … There is no one in the country-who doesn’t believe.”

  No doubt one big reason people could still muster loyalty for the elder Kim despite the economic and other failings of his regime was that in his public and television appearances he came across as an engaging figure. On television during my 1989 visit he was shown striding along with the somewhat shambling gait of an elderly but still reasonably healthy man (perhaps the longevity research had helped—although the camera never showed the grapefruit-sized tumor on the back of his neck). He smiled confidently, taking the inevitable tributes graciously. In his public appearances he spoke in a gravelly, avuncular voice. He seemed very much the politician.

  The campaign to transfer to Kim Jong-il his father’s deity status was in full cry at Pyongyang’s Revolutionary Museum of the Dear Leader Comrade Kim Jong-il. The museum, which kidnapped movie director Shin and actress Choi had visited during their stay in Pyongyang, consisted of twelve rooms set aside at the younger Kim’s alma mater, Kim Il-sung University. A student guide told me that at age eight the prodigy read Lenin’s “State and Revolution” and wrote a commentary on it. When he was eleven during the Korean War, Kim Jong-il wrote these immortal song lyrics: “Father General, you will build a paradise in this land of heroes who crush the Yankees.” When he entered college a few years later, the guide said, practically the first thing the precocious teenager did was to climb a campus hill and there compose and recite a poem that included this line: “Learning the leader’s great idea, I will be the master of the revolution.”

  The guide sang the 1953 song and requested special care with cameras to make any photos showing the Dear Leader “beautiful.” Then she proceeded to point out paintings that showed the cherubic Kim Jong-il of a quarter century before, always at the center of things, striking sagacious and leaderlike poses as fellow members of the class of 1964 beamed up at him in evident adoration. Studying alongside Kim Jong-il, said a fellow student’s diary entry that was on exhibit in the museum, was “my pride and honor.”

  A mural at the West Sea Barrage, a gigantic, recently completed public works project to regulate the water level of a river mouth near the port of Nampo, showed Kim Jong-il in his role as the executor of his father’s will. The Great and Dear Leaders stood together, the younger man’s overcoat flapping heroically in the breeze, his left boot lifted up on a high piece of the machinery. He gestured with his left hand to show his smiling father what he had built. The Dear Leader, in that picture very much the energetic young man of action, wore his trademark jumpsuit with zipper front, while the Great Leader appeared in Western suit with tie, the costume he had adopted as elder statesman.

  Without having been either a guerrilla hero or the father of the country, Kim Jong-il needed some basis for legitimacy as the country’s leader-designate. He hoped he had found it in his role as chief commentator and expositor of his father’s juche philosophy. “As you know the Great Leader created the juche idea during the struggle against the Japanese imperialists,” Kim Ho-sok, director of Haksan Cooperative Farm, told me. “Then the Dear Leader Comrade Kim Jong-il developed and enriched the juche idea.”

  The succession had been as carefully prepared as could be imagined, and there were no discernible signs of opposition. Still there was reason to suspect the junior Kim might prove unequal to portrayal of the living-god role he was to inherit. Kim Jong-il’s credentials as a god-king were sketchy. Among the few foreigners who had met him, some had described him as testy—totally lacking in charm or grace, not to mention the sort of charisma or presence that bespeaks a world-class statesman. Indications were that he was well entrenched as the successor, so much propaganda having flowed about his magnificent qualifications that youngsters and perhaps some of the more credulous among their elders might have begun believing it. But it seemed he was no Kim Il-sung. Foreign and South Korean analysts wondered whether, if a major crisis arose after his father’s death and his own accession to the top job, he could weather it.

  Although still largely a figure of mystery, Kim Jong-il was well known for having brought North Korea a surface modernity in fashion and popular culture. He had encouraged girls and young women to fix themselves up, wear makeup and look nicer. North Korean women—among the most beautiful in the world to begin with—obviously were taking far more care with their appearance than a decade earlier.

  Our hosts invited the foreign news media contingent and some others attending the festival to a banquet held in the Mongnankwan, an immense marble hall decorated with crystal chandeliers and fitted with the latest audio equipment. Young female members of the Pochonbo Electric Band, named for the site of Kim Il-sung’s successful 1937 raid on the Japanese, entertained us. The band’s musicians played peppy music, influenced perhaps to some extent by Western rock but more by the Japanese and South Korean versions. (I was amused to recall the uncomprehending stares of ten years earlier in response to my mention of rock ’n’ roll.) Dancers, stunning young women, came out in costumes so skimpy as to suggest we were being treated to a striptease. Then the guests were invited to dance with women from the stage, who had more or less clothed themselves for that duty. I danced with one. (It was only several years later, after I learned of the existence of the Happy Corps, that I was told my dance partner and her entertainer comrades had been corps members.)12

  While the rock played by Kim Jong-il’s band members was for us foreigners, I found that the genre was being introduced to Pyongyang’s young people just then by festival visitors from abroad who had brought cassette tapes of their favorite music with them. I saw youngsters who did not disguise their appreciation of rock music that foreigners were playing in and out of their high-rise lodgings. One young ’woman shook her booty to the beat as a parade passed by. I thought the loss of musical innocence probably foreshadowed bigger changes in attitude.

  Visiting the Korea Feature Film Studio I had a chance to check out the results of the junior Kim’s vaunted efforts to inspire filmmakers to create more appealing works. The outdoor sets maintained at the studio represented a rural village, with thatched huts surrounding the landlord’s grand house; a Japanese street in the 1930s; and a Chinese street in the same period—all used in epics about the Great Leader’s struggle against Japanese colonialism and landlord greed. A back alley filled with girlie bars depicted what the North called the decadent, exploitive lifestyle of contemporary capitalist South Korea—a staple of the studio’s films promoting reunification on the North’s terms. Studio officials boasted of twenty visits by Kim Il-sung since the studio’s founding in 1947—and 320 by Kim Jong-il. “The Dear Leader, Comrade Kim Jong-il, leads our art and literature to a brilliant future,” explained studio spokesman Li Sok-kyu. “He gives precious teachings for good films.”

  The studio was filming a swashbuckler, set in olden times, featuring a hero who employed swordplay and the Korean martial art of taekwondo to wipe out dozens of enemies at a time in the style of Hong Kong kung fu epics. Apparently the film was aimed m
ore at light entertainment value and box-office appeal than heavy political ideology. It was not difficult to imagine that Kim Jong-il would need all the box-office appeal he could muster to deal with what lay ahead.

  TWENTY

  Wherever You Go in My Homeland

  One day during the 1989 World Festival of Youth and Students, my guide excitedly said I “would be meeting a high official. “The Dear Leader?” I asked. No. The VIP turned out to be Professor Kim Jong-su, who soon arrived and invited me to a folk festival. In a lovely woodland setting, the site of the ancient tomb of a dynastic founder, we watched performances of traditional skills such as spear-throwing and then tucked into a copious picnic feast.

  Once again I decided not to bring up the matter of my host’s dual identity. In any event, he did not repeat his orphan story this time. Indeed, in the course of our chat, it turned out that Kim Jong-su had a mother, then still living. I mentally noted that interesting fact but said nothing, making allowance for the likelihood that one who had lost only his father might be considered orphaned, particularly in that patriarchal, still Confucian-oriented society.

  Kim Jong-su quoted his mother on the extent of improvement in living conditions since the old days, when inferior grains had to be substituted for scarce rice. He recalled that, in his own youth in the 1940s and 1950s, times were so hard that a kind of grass or hay had to be mixed in to make pounded-rice cakes. Recently, he said, his children had been complaining about how bland everything tasted. He had given them some old-fashioned rice cakes with just a little hay in them, he said, and the youngsters had pronounced the taste wonderful.