A Capitalist in North Korea

by Felix Abt

  When the first Western-placed North Korean restaurant opened in the Netherlands in 2012, Human Rights Watch (HRW) was quick to condemn it with the usual cliché of famine at home. HRW representative Wenzel Michalski was quoted in the German news magazine Der Spiegel2 as claiming that “while one can enjoy these specialties in Amsterdam, the people in North Korea are starving to death.” HRW prefers to use the mirage of the total isolation of North Korea rather than admit it does have openings to the outside world. Usually, North Korean staff are not only decently treated by foreign restaurant owners during their stay of three years, but they will also get a glimpse into the outside world. It is an eye-opening experience for them, and the sort of international exchange that North Korea needs.

  North Koreans also love to go on picnics. Family and friends gather at parks on their free days, usually on Sundays, where they lounge around and eat on their clothe on the grass. Aside from their noisy laughter and mock sports competitions, others bring musical instruments with them. The locals, it would seem, are not so much different than their southern counterparts after all.

  My wife, pictured sitting on the grass, and I were spontaneously invited by a group of Koreans, who were enjoying a day off at a park, to join them for drinks and food on a national holiday. Koreans merrily dance on national holidays and Sundays, a spontaneous act of joy. Foreigners walking by are sometimes invited to dance with them, skipping the formal permit required for all contact between North Koreans and foreigners.

  In the capital, the locals have one favorite spot: the Moranbong Park, which is the country’s most famous and picturesque one—its name stemming from the peony flower. The landscape is well known for the Moran and Chongnyu waterfalls, the peaceful sights that cascade gently down to the nearby Taedong River. The park is also home to historic relics, including vestiges of the old Pyongyang Castle walls and various ornamental pavilions. The pavilions were restored in the recent past and the area was turned into a “workers’ park,” along with holding a small zoo and an open-air theater.

  For a holiday, a pair of masked dancers entertain visitors in a public park. Masked dance dramas have a long history in East Asia, and the Korean form is known as talch’um.

  Foreign journalists are usually surprised when they visit parks like this one on Sunday, which don’t fit into their expectations that the country is full of suffering. Even Jill Dougherty, a seasoned journalist at CNN who was experienced in socialist countries, having studied in the former Soviet Union and worked as the Moscow bureau chief, was taken aback when she arrived. She asked expatriates whether the dancing and singing in the Moranbong Park was a specially staged show for CNN. They responded that the theater can be seen every Sunday regardless of the presence of foreign journalists.

  Workplaces regularly organize picnics in parks and forest, just like any reasonable company would do around the world to take care of its employees. The PyongSu clique went on picnics from time to time. The gifted musicians among our staff strummed at their guitars and accordions behind the talented singers and dancers, who all entertained us after a good pork and beef barbecue. The rest of the staff merrily danced to the tunes.

  After a barbecue picnic (left), my PyongSu colleagues were merrily singing and dancing (right).

  Music education is an important part of the school curriculum of Korean children which is why so many are good at playing an instrument. Playing music after work is another popular pastime for Koreans. In the case of our staff they regularly remained a little longer at the office to play the guitar and sing together. We also had a ping pong table inside the company building and a volleyball court outside which was frequently used after work. Although I often lost, I enjoyed playing ping pong with my staff from time to time.

  Sports and physical exercises are widely practiced, part of a work unit’s normal activities. The picture on the left shows our staff, including myself, enjoying sports activities. To the right, waitresses do their daily morning exercises.

  While North Koreans spend a lot of time at work, they make plenty of space to have fun together. We celebrated the New Year together with home-made food, drinks and laughs.

  At the parks and along rivers, men line up to play cards of different origin in parks. They also go fishing, and some of them use a primitive fishing setup that has an underwater marker attached to the line, which falls to indicate fish biting. These older fellows enjoy meeting each other to play Janggi, or Korean chess, a board game widely thought to be derived from its Chinese version, Xiangqi.

  The Korean Central News Agency disagreed when it explained that “The origin of the game is still unknown, but it has a long history.”1 These informal games can draw large crowds, enthusiastically following and loudly commenting the game. While the men take on competitive endeavors, the women love signing up for dancing courses where, among all styles of music, they learn salsa and Latin American moves.

  Boating on the Pothong River.

  A brother and sister play badminton during the weekend.

  A grandfather takes out his grandson for a holiday.

  Since the early 2000s, North Korea has been reviving traditional Korean holidays like the Lunar New Year, along with the more contemporary revolutionary holidays. The state is also trying to popularize long-forgotten traditional games such as yut, seesaw and kite flying, a promotional strategy that’s meant to block out the alien influences that they fear are a threat.

  One of these new national holidays takes place on September 12, marking the Korean harvest known as the Chuseok Festival. Ancestors worship is common during these dates, similar to practices in the south. Groups of family members bring bundles of food to the hills, where they bow to graves and place offerings before them.

  Chuseok was banned until 2003, and then it was turned into a one-day holiday rather than a longer festivity: the communist party originally considered the practice to be a feudal tradition incompatible with its utopian ideology, although they allowed visits to ancestors graveyards since 1972. On Chuseok Day kids fly kites and play a top-spinning game, two other revivals that have become more popular recently.

  Neolttwigi, a traditional outdoor game popular with women and girls is played during this festival, as well as on the Lunar New Year and other dates. Women stand on each side of the seesaw-like board, called a Neol, and jump, propelling the opposite person into the air. The hobby can be quite a spectacle, because the experienced jumpers do flips and jump-rope while in the air. The game was invented by women from Yangban in feudal Korea, who first used it as a method for seeing over the walls that surrounded their homes. During the Choson dynasty, they were not allowed out of their living compounds.

  Korean wrestling, known as Ssireum, has become popular, too, thanks to the government’s initiative to start the regularly held National Ssireum Tournament. The winner has for the last decade become a national celebrity after three days of competition every August. The hundred best wrestlers from Pyongyang and each province meet to compete in their weight classes, and the winner is awarded a “grand bull,” a gold bull bell and a diploma. I was watching it on a couple of occasions on TV, too, and was surprised how similar it was to the national sport of my native country.

  Soccer is a popular pursuit in North Korea, where the national soccer team became world famous after defeating Italy at a World Championship in 1966. The Women’s national football team became one of Asia’s strongest teams, after it took home the championship of the Women’s Asia Football Cup twice in the last decade. It’s not rare to come across youth, enthused by their soccer idols, playing football across the country in the numerous parks and sports facilities. For most North Koreans, though, volleyball is a more accessible game, because of the courts that dot so many factories and schools. One reason it is probably so popular is because both sexes can play together.

  In a common practice among Korean companies, we played volleyball from time to time.

  Weightlifting and Taekwon-do, the eponymous Korean martial art, ar
e two other popular sports that give North Korea, contrary to stereotypes, its international prowess. The sport’s roots began more than 2000 years ago, although its modern form has been called Taekwondo (the “way of the foot and the fist”) since 1955. It is equally popular in North and South Korea which harbor rival associations. Today, foreign residents even travel to the country to take Taekwon-do lessons with some of the country’s elite masters. The World Taekwon-do Championships, held by the International Taekwon-do Federation (ITF) in Pyongyang, attract some 800 competitors from more than 80 countries and include corporate sponsors like the Egyptian-invested North Korean telecom Koryolink.

  The Taekwondo building in Pyongyang is designed in a shape symbolic of its sport. I would interpret the architecture to reflect on bricks that are supposed to be broken in the sport with a knife-hand strike. In 2012, a much larger modern Taekwondo center was constructed, covering 10,000 square meters and housing a training center, library, conference hall and history museum.

  Buildings like these are symbols of national glory, so it’s understandable why the government puts so much effort into them. For instance, Pyongyang is also home to a beautiful ice rink that, from the outside, looks like an alien spaceship, and its roof is shaped to mimic an ice skating hat. Outside Pyongyang, the residents take advantage of their natural environment rather than relying on these creatively designed monoliths. When the wintertime comes, children who cannot afford ice skates build themselves improvised blocks of wood with, underneath, the blade of a knife stuck onto it. They propel themselves along frozen lakes and rivers with sticks.

  Unlike adults, the children of Pyongyang did not restrain themselves when approaching foreigners to practice English. They would ask simple questions learned in the classroom, such as “How old are you? What’s your name? Where do you come from? Good bye!” They then ran away giggling.

  School boys run up to me for a greeting in English (left), and a girl poses next to me

  At the shooting range in Pyongyang, we could fire rifles and pistols with real ammunition, or the more cautious among us could use electronic shooting gear and electronic targets. But contrary to the impression from the Western press, American figures were not the targets. Even though average North Koreans have heard a lot about the supposedly evil Yankees who deserve to be shot, Americans remain an abstract concept for them. Most have never met one. A few times, I brought foreign visitors for some shooting fun to this place, all in good fun.

  As far as attractions go, the rifle range would ironically be less patriotic than the other options. Foreigners cannot visit the cinema and theater located in every city, which show home-made films only. (International films are banned because they could undermine socialist morals and foster decadence.)

  Foreigners cannot visit cinemas like the one pictured here located in every city, which show home-made films only. (International films are banned because they could undermine socialist morals and foster decadence.)

  Even more spirited is the “Museum of the Revolutionary Activities of Comrade Kim Il Sung,” a generic museum located in every provincial capital. The exhibits depict the country’s revolutionary history, framed along the lines of the exploits of father and son Kim. And, to finish, revolutionary operas and musicals are common at the theaters, spectacles that foreigners attend. I have watched a couple of revolutionary operas where the heroic Korean people, fighting off Japanese suppressors, were cheered.

  Being cultured

  Occasionally, the government invited foreign musicians to perform their work for North Koreans in the myriad of concert halls and theaters. The Pyongyang Spring Festival, to name one example, was first of its kind, today held every other year and allowing North Koreans a glimpse into the outside world of foreign film, theater, and art. The cost was in their range, at 20 to 30 Euro per performance for foreigners and a smaller amount for locals. Festivities like these show the regime isn’t entirely isolated, after all.

  North Korean and foreign artists perform at the Pyongyang Spring Festival.

  The grand finale of a perfectly choreographed entertainment show at the Mangyongdae Children’s Palace. The children perform a loyalty song to Kim Jong Il for their parents and other visitors.

  On special occasions, children perform games at school for their parents.

  Kids take a bath in central Pyongyang, with a department store on the left. Koreans are called upon in propaganda posters and in training courses to behave in a “revolutionary soldier spirit”. Still, the adults passing by did not scold the children for their unstately playfulness. They probably remembered that Kim Il Sung said that “children are the future and we should treat them as kings.”

  Between North Korean and foreign children, there are no politics and therefore no barriers. My daughter and her friends play here with balloons.

  Schoolchildren and students get on their way to the Grand People’s Study House, which houses millions of books. It also has an extraordinary conveyor belt, a sort of futuristic contraption, that brings their choice of patriotic tome straight to their reading table.

  Adults and students join demanding rehearsals, spending hours perfecting the practice of transforming from one figure to another. Here, they practice forming the shape of a tiger on Kim Il Sung Square, a photo taken from the top of the Juche Tower.

  On the day of the leaders’ birthdays and in particular on important round anniversaries, such as the 60th anniversary of the Korean Workers Party in 2005, there was an atmosphere of festivity. Around town, partygoers sat in front of open-air concerts by various bands, men threw darts at balloons in festival games, and people cheerfully dawdled around food stalls, nibbling away at pancakes, fritters, pizzas and cotton candy.

  It’s not rock ‘n’ roll, nor blues, or anything of that sort. But this student band entertains the masses with patriotic country music, North Korean style, on a 2007 holiday, in front of the Juche tower.

  More colorful food stalls have appeared over the last years, a sign that traders are taking to themselves to sell products in this socialist country. On ordinary days the street scene looks like on this picture. But on national holidays, large crowds line up at food stalls to get sausages, ice cream and other cheap street meals.

  On Sunday afternoons during the winter, Pyongyangites shuffle around the roads clearing snow from a ten-lane motorway by hand. During the spring clearing, they clear out the Pothong River of stilt. It was nothing extraordinary to see schoolboys on some days with brooms and other cleaning utensils returning home from another activity called voluntary such as, for example, cleaning revolutionary monuments.

  Plastered around city walls, propaganda posters heralded the arrival of what they then called “The greatest national holiday: February 16.” It was a reference to Kim Jong Il’s birthday, and preparations started months in advance. School children learned poems and workers learned patriotic songs and dances, all leading up to the festivity.

  To name one example, the second National Pencil Drawing Festival for school children was held in 2008 to celebrate Kim Jong Il’s birthday. Even kindergarteners participated and some made drawings entitled: “Let’s cut the throat of U.S. imperialism!” When the day itself approaches, everybody takes a day off for a picnic and relaxation.

  February 16 is a sort of Sabbath of relaxation, as North Koreans celebrate the late Dear Leader’s birthday. It’s commonly a day for photoshoots: My toddler loved, of course, to be surrounded by teddy bears and snowmen for a photo-op near the Juche Tower. The set-up belonged to a private micro-enterprise; by North Korean standards, the investment in this area and the expensive camera was significant. For 200 won, North Koreans could have their pictures taken here, and in their culture they were seen as a valuable family treasure.

  Concerts are held during public holidays.

  Synchronized swimming is a national spectacle held on holidays, along with all sorts of other pastimes.

  On February 16 and April 15, the birthdays of father and son Kim, people da
nce on public squares. Foreigners, like this one, are invited to join them.

  After a selection process, children can become member of the Young Pioneers as early as nine years old. The ceremony takes place on February 16 (Kim Jong Il’s birthday), on April 15, (Kim Il Sung’s birthday) and on other important national holidays such as National Day on September 9, when the DPRK was founded.

  Army Day on February 8 is also a popular day, signifying the founding of the army. The award of the membership is a great event for the child and the family. During a gala celebration at school in presence of their families, the new Young Pioneers receive their red tie and pin. It is the first step of a Korean to becoming a member of the Korean Workers’ Party.