Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader

by Martin, Bradley K.

  27. Kim, With the Century, vol. 2, p. 183.

  28. Ibid.

  29. Ibid., pp. 381–382.

  30. Ibid., pp. 184, 193.

  31. Since the late Yi Dynasty period, writes Charles K. Armstrong (The North Ko-eran Revolution [see chap. 1, n. 8], p. 95), “discrimination against ‘secondary sons’ (soja), or the sons of upper-class men and their mistresses, had been a social issue in Korea. The 1949 explanation of North Korean law pointed out that in the past, ‘children born out of wedlock to concubines or kisaeng had suffered great discrimination as “secondary sons” (soja) or “bastards” (sasaenga).’ They were not even allowed to call their fathers ‘aboji (‘father’) and were denied entrance to school. This discrimination had continued unabated during the Japanese colonial period. The DPRK constitution eliminated such ‘feudal’ practices and guaranteed that henceforth such offspring would be treated no differently than legitimate sons’ (chokcha).”

  32. “In 1956, at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Khrushchev launched a formal denunciation of Stalin, challenging the supremacy and infallibility of Stalin as a leader. The de-Stalinization was undoubtedly a rude shock to Kim Il-sung. A second trauma occurred in the 1960s, when Mao signaled his wish to groom a political heir after his demise, thus putting the nation in a state of heightened anxiety and uncertainty. In September 1971, Mao’s handpicked successor, .Marshal Lin Biao, revolted against him and allegedly was killed in a plane crash while seeking to defect to the Soviet Union. These incidents convinced Kim Il-sung that he should carefully prepare a smooth political transition” (Kong Dan Oh, Leadership Change in North Korean Politics: The Succession to Kim Il Sung [Santa Monica, Calif: RAND Corporation, 1988]).

  33. Hwang Jang-yop, Problems of Human Rights (2).

  34. Ibid.

  35. Hwang Jang-yop, Problems of Human Rights (1) (see chap. 2, n. 1). Hwang does not address the question of whether Kim’s modesty in those remarks had been merely feigned, as so often seems to be the case with some other self-deprecating portions of Kim’s memoirs—an invitation to others to pile on more praise.

  36. “Kim YJ Makes 1st Appearance in 18 Yrs.,” Yonhap News Agency dispatch in Korea Times, July 28, 1994; Kong Dan Oh, Leadership Change, p. 8.

  37. Kim, With the Century, vol. 2, p. 435.

  38. Choe Pyong-gil, “Following the Conclusion of the Serialization Yu Song-chol’s Testimony, ” Hankuk Ilbo, December 1, 1990 (Sydney A. Seiler translation).

  39. “The Soviet communities ’were a replica of how the Stalinist high officials lived in the USSR, as a privileged elite, separated from the rest of society” (van Ree, Socialism in One Zone [see chap. 4, n. 1], p. 165).

  40. “I never saw anyone in North Korea as fat as his eldest daughter,” he added. “One of her legs is fatter than my whole body. She’s well proportioned [but] unfortunately she insisted on wearing a miniskirt. In North Korea, miniskirts were prohibited to the general population. Only members of Kim Il-sung’s family could wear them. It’s like a privilege for family members to wear them. That heavy daughter of Kim Yong-ju insisted on wearing a miniskirt.”

  41. As cited in Leadership Change by Oh (who maintained the dictionary change indicated not just hereditary succession but the choice of Kim Jong-il). South Korean scholar O Tae-chin also noted the dictionary change in “Three Personalities Rising as North Korea’s Next Generation of Leaders,” Chugan Choson, January 3, 1990, p. 66.

  42. Cho, “Interview of Former High-level Official” (see chap. 6, n. 88).

  43. Choe In Su, Kim Jong Il: The People’s Leader, vol. 2 (Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1985), p. 52.

  44. This information comes from Chang Ki-hong, who had been working in a timber camp in Russia when he defected in 1991.

  45. “Centered around the Ponghwa Medical Clinic, the entirety of the Red Cross Hospital is a research center. Actual practice is done entirely at the Red Cross Hospital under the guidance of the Ponghwa Medical Clinic. Those who are the same age or older than Kim Il-sung, or have the same blood type or physical condition, regardless of whether they are healthy or sick, are subjects of practice. However, no physiological damage is inflicted upon them. Instead, long-term observation of how these patients react to dietary conditions or medication is conducted” (Kim Jong-min quoted in Cho, “Interview of Former High-level Official”). “In Pyongyang there is a large Longevity Institute dedicated to researching ways to prolong the Great Leader’s life, and any foods discovered to ensure longevity are procured from the world over. All living conditions necessary to guarantee Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il’s longevity are meticulously taken care of, right down to the tiniest detail, and maintained at the highest standards possible” (Hwang Jang-yop, Problems of Human Rights [2]).

  46. Wen-ko T’ung-hsün (Gwangjou), February 15, 1968, translated and cited in Scalapino and Lee, Communism in Korea, p. 641.

  47. Hwang Jang-yop, Problems of Human Rights (2).

  48. Wolgan Choson (July 1991).

  Here is a description of the main presidential mansion in Pyongyang: “The elder Kim lives opulently just minutes by car from the center of Pyongyang in a palace circled by a moat and reached by a sweeping driveway decorated with playing fountains. Pheasants and red-crested cranes wander freely over expanses of manicured lawns. Last month the elder Kim threw a party for delegates to an Inter-Parliamentary Union conference, a party for 1,200 people held in a hall the size of two full-sized soccer pitches in a marble-lined rotunda next to his own elegant, square residence. At least 20 waiters served each table. The glasses ’were crystal, the cutlery silver and the napkins linen. From a table at the back of the vast dining hall, Kim appeared as a black speck on the edge of a small white disc of table cloth” (Andrew Browne, Reuters dispatch from Pyongyang: “The Great Leader Is an Enigma Even to His Own People,” Daily Yomiuri [Tokyo], June 3, 1991).

  49. Kim, With the Century, vol. 3, p. 350.

  50. Wen-ko T’ung-hsün (Gwangjou), February 15, 1968, translated and cited in Scalapino and Lee, Communism in Korea, p. 641.

  51. Interview with Kim Jong-min, former president of Daeyong Trading Company and earlier a brigadier general–level officer in the Ministry of Public Security (police).

  52. Wolgan Choson (July 1991).

  53. Interview with Kim Young-song. He said this mansion is near Kyongsong.

  54. Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il “like to receive beautiful women as gifts,” he said. “Those who give women are party special department people in charge of that aspect, or bodyguards. They scout the girls and give them as presents.” I asked how the women could be considered gifts if finding them was part of the giver’s job. My source replied: “The girls who are discovered accidentally can be considered gifts.”

  55. Kim in his later years, my source told me, was “still capable of performing in bed, but the methods of arousal are such that I don’t want to talk about them in front of your interpreter. They melt 200-year-old beehives to get a wax supposed to enhance his prowess.”

  56. For Mao’s physician see Dr. Li Zhisui, Private Life of Chairman Mao (see chap. 6, n. 64). Regarding embellishment, Bruce Cumings writes of “a bevy of female servants on the old [Korean] royal model; chosen from among ‘the pretty and healthy virgins’ from elite families, they ’were recruited to serve the king. The ways in which they served him remain in dispute; they ’were not a harem or even his concubines, although liaisons certainly happened. The main idea, though, was to make the king’s life comfortable. Defectors often say Kim and his son continued this tradition, but they of course embellish this practice with endless allegations of frolicking and womanizing.” Unlike some other, similarly dismissive scholars, Cumings at least attempts to marshal evidence that the accounts are wrong. Citing a book by the niece of Kim’s de facto first wife, Cum-ings says that Kim Jong-il “is not the playboy womanizer … of our press. … He is so discreet about his private life that Nam Ok can only relate rumors about the foreign women im
ported to sate his sexual appetites; she never saw any of them, and after reading her account one doubts that Jong Il has much of a libido” (North Korea: Another Country [see chap. 4, n. 25], p. 165–166).

  I must say I don’t see the testimony by Li Nam-ok—herself a defector who ran away to Europe—as particularly useful on the subject of Kim Jong-il’s libido. For a time living as a relative in one of Kim’s households, Li would not have had anything comparable to the window on his life outside that particular household that was available to bodyguards and male cronies, not to mention the female recruits themselves. And it must be noted that Li’s brother, also a defector, was murdered in South Korea by men identified as North Korean assassins after he had gone public with his account of palace life (see chap. 32). In her cautious account, Li clearly attempted to avoid inviting a similar fate.

  57. Kim, With the Century, vol. 3, p. 282. Kim also wrote, “Today an epidemic of hedonism is cutting a wide swath across the rest of the globe. The extreme egoism of caring only for oneself and not thinking about the younger generation has encroached very far upon the minds of many people. Some of them do not have children, alleging that they are a nuisance, and others give up the thought of marrying. Needless to say, it is a matter of personal choice whether one gets married or has children. But what pleasure is there in living without the younger generation?”

  58. Referring to Kim’s practice during his guerrilla days of sleeping with children, Bruce Cumings offers an innocent explanation, calling it “an ancient Korean custom, still practiced” (North Korea: Another Country, p. 106).

  59. From an interview with a former official of the regime.

  60. I heard this from Kang Myong-do, who was sent to the same revolutionary work camp five years later.

  61. Oh Sang-ik, “Public Executions in the DPRK,” Wolgan Choson (January 1992): pp. 472–491 (Sydney A. Seiler translation). Oh, a lawyer, writes that Asia Watch and the International Human Rights Commission revealed this case based on testimony by a defector who had been a State Security official in North Korea.

  62. Hwang Jang-yop, Problems of Human Rights (2).

  11. Yura.

  1. Peter Hyun, “My Comrade Kim Il-sung Has Erred in Personality Cult and Power Succession,” Wolgan Choson (February 2002), trans. Lee Wha Rang as “Lee Min—the Unsung Heroine of the Korean Independence War, Part II: Prolog,” Korea Web Weekly, http://www.kimsoft.com/war/leemin2.htm.

  2. Testimony of Park Jae-dok in JoongAng Ilbo, October 4, 1991, cited in The True Story of Kim Jong Il (see chap. 3, n. 61), p. 12.

  3. Kazuko Kobayashi, “I Was a House Maid of Kim Il-sung,” in Records of Returnees from Abroad (Tokyo: Mainichi Shimbunsha, no publication date given), pp. 119–122, cited in The True Story of Kim Jong Il.

  4. Choe In Su, Kim Jong Il, vol. I (see chap. 10, n. 43), pp. 8–9.

  5. Testimony of one Mo, former assistant to Agriculture Minister Kim Il, who defected to South Korea in 1960, in Jayu Kongron (April 1983): pp. 164–166, cited in The True Story of Kim Jong Il, pp. 36–38. The author says that, once the facts of the drowning had been investigated and ascertained, Kim Il-sung “kept it a secret” and ordered gate guards, who had seen the boys playing in the pond but were not watching them carefully enough to prevent the drowning, not to talk about it.

  Bruce Cumings (North Korea [see chap. 4, n. 25], p. 138) says Kim Il-sung “was so deeply distressed at the drowning of his younger son in 1947 that he had a mudang [shaman] carry out rituals on the very spot a decade later; the ‘captured documents’ in the U.S. archives contain long scrolls written by Buddhist monks, trying to assuage his loss and pain.”

  6. Choe In Su, Kim Jong Il, vol. I, pp. 49–51.

  7. Lee Young-hwa, Rescue the North Korean People, leaflet, Osaka 1995, quotes scuttlebutt in Pyongyang as saying Ms. Kim raised the boy “as if he were her own child.” Kang Myong-do, a defector to the South who claimed to be a Kim Il-sung relative on the maternal side, named Kang Bo-bi as the first cousin. See Kang Myong-do’s testimony, compiled by Tae Won-ki, in a twelve-part series in the Seoul daily JoongAng Ilbo, starting April 12, 1995. For the Ri Ul-sol story see Kim Il-sung, “Nurturing the Root of the Revolution: How Kim Jong-il Became the Heir,” chapter of With the Century, trans. Lee Wha Rang, Korea Web Weekly, http://www.kimsoft.com/war/r-23-9.htm. Lee Wha Rang in notes to this translation supports the view that it was Kim Ok-sun who raised Kim Jong-il.

  8. Choe In Su, Kim Jong Il, vol. I, pp. 62–65.

  9. Ibid., pp. 67–68.

  10. Ibid., pp. 69–70.

  11. The True Story of Kim Jong Il, p. 49.

  12. Choe In Su, Kim Jong Il, vol. I, pp. 77–117. The memo is quoted on pp. 85–86.

  13. Ibid., p. 118.

  14. Hwang Jang-yop, Problems of Human Rights (2) (see chap. 6, n. 104).

  15. Kang Myong-do testimony in JoongAng Ilbo, April 12, 1995. Choe In Su, Kim Jong Il, vol. I, pp. 16–17, observes, “Busy with state affairs, the father leader could find no special time for the education of his son [Kim Jong-il]; his daily life was in itself the process of bringing up and guiding his son in a revolutionary ’way.”

  16. Choe In Su, Kim Jong Il, vol. I, pp. 168–177.

  17. Hwang Jang-yop, Testimonies of North Korean Defectors: True Picture of North Korea According to a Former Workers’ Party Secretary (see chap. 7, n. 15).

  18. See, e.g., Choe In Su, Kim Jong Il, vol. I, p. 203.

  19. Tak Jin, Kim Gang Il and Pak Hong Je, Great Leader Kim Jong Il, vol. I (see chap. 5, n. 15), p. 22. A former high official who knew him told me that according to his recollection Kim Jong-il also enrolled for a second time at Mangyong-dae School after leaving Namsan.

  20. Yun Ki-bon, The Land of North Korea in My Memory (Seoul: Kapja Munhwasa, 1973), cited in The True Story of Kim Jong Il, pp. 49–58.

  21. Choe In Su, Kim Jong Il, vol. I, pp. 249–250.

  22. JoongAng Ilbo, January 14 and 28, 1993, quoting Kang Yong-gu, former superintendent of Namsan Junior High School, and Kim Dan, a classmate of Kim Jong-il’s among others who had known him at Namsan and later moved to Russia, cited in The True Story of Kim Jong Il, pp. 59–60.

  23. Choe In Su, Kim Jong Il, vol. I, pp. 129, 134–135.

  24. Ibid., pp. 141–147; Tak, Kim and Pak, Great Leader Kim Jong Il, pp. 38–39.

  25. Choe In Su, Kim Jong Il, vol. I, pp. 74–76.

  26. Ibid., pp. 178–181.

  27. Kang Myong-do testimony in JoongAng Ilbo, April 12, 1995.

  28. Choe In Su, Kim Jong Il, vol. I, pp. 184–187.

  29. Ibid., pp. 190–195.

  30. Hwang Jang-yop, Problems of Human Rights (2).

  31. Ibid.

  32. Ibid.

  33. Tak, Kim and Pak, Great Leader Kim Jong Il, vol. I, pp. 50–51.

  34. The True Story of Kim Jong Il, p. 59.

  35. Hwang Jang-yop, Problems of Human Rights (2).

  36. People’s Korea (a Chongryon newspaper in Tokyo), September 16, 1995, quoting a September 1, 1995, dispatch by Pyongyang’s Korean Central News Agency.

  37. Interview with Kim Ji-il, who defected to South Korea in 1990 while pursuing graduate studies in physics in Kharkov, Ukraine.

  38. Choe In Su, Kim Jong Il, vol. I, pp. 298–301.

  39. Adrian Buzo makes the comparison regarding the two older men in The Guerilla Dynasty: Politics and Leadership in North Korea (St. Leonards, Australia: Allen & Unwin, 1999), p. 43 and fn. 34.

  40. See Choe In Su, Kim Jong Il, vol. I, pp. 261–267.

  41. Ibid., pp. 311–316.

  42. Ibid., pp. 323–326.

  43. See, e.g., the photo facing p. 80 in Tak, Kim and Pak, Great Leader Kim Jong Il, vol. I.

  44. Kang Myong-do testimony in JoongAng Ilbo, April 12, 1995.

  45. Tak, Kim, and Pak, Great Leader Kim Jong Il, vol. I, p. 90.

  46. Choe In Su, Kim Jong Il, vol. I, pp. 218–223.

  47. Ibid., pp. 317–319.

  48. Among the other officials who lived in the neighborhood ’were
Choe Yong-gon, Kim Il, Kim Dong-kyu, Im Chun-chu, Pak Song-chol, Li Jong-ok, Kim Chang-bong, Chon Mun-sop and Ji Kyong-soo.

  49. Among the young people at Choe Yong-hae’s home that day, I was told, were Choe Young-sook, daughter of Choe Yong-gon; Pak Choon-sik and Pak Choon-hoon, sons of Pak Song-chol; Ji Kwang-jae and Ji Kwang-hwa, children of Ji Kyong-soo; plus the young men’s girlfriends.

  50. “S. Korean Agent Reports North Has Executed at Least 50 Officials in Purge,” Seoul-datelined dispatch from Agence France-Presse.

  51. Choe In Su, Kim Jong Il, vol. I, pp. 331–333.

  52. Ibid., pp. 333–336.

  53. Ibid., pp. 337–340.

  54. Ibid., pp. 341–346.

  55. According to The True Story of Kim Jong Il, p. 65, the thesis was published in full in the party theoretical journal, Kulloja (Worker), .March 1985 issue.

  56. Kim Kyeh-won, “Bulgarian Envoy Recalls Memories of Kim Jong-il,” Korea Herald, January 16, 1991.

  12. Growing Pains.

  1. Songbun is discussed in Armstrong, The North Korean Revolution (see chap. 1, n. 8), pp. 71–74; and in Helen Louise Hunter, Kim Il-song’s North Korea (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1999), chap. 1 ff. The latter book is a declassified Central Intelligence Agency study originally done in the early 1980s.

  2. I interviewed Ahn in August 1996.

  13. Take the Lead in World Conjuring.

  1. Kim Jong Il, Some Problems Arising in the Creation of Masterpieces (Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1989), p. 4.