All Monsters Must Die

by Magnus Bärtås

  * * *

  AFTER A MEAL of duck and soju at a local restaurant — a standard farewell meal for all tourist groups in Pyongyang — we are driven back to the hotel. The Bromma boys aren’t with us. They’ve long been talking about their dinner with the Swedish ambassador, and tonight’s the night. But the Värmlanders don’t seem to miss them; neither does anyone else in the group, for that matter.

  On the ride back to the hotel, we all begin to get into a Friday-night kind of mood. Trond and Ari are on fire. They are moving up and down the aisle like Laurel and Hardy. A mist of soju rises up toward the ceiling. The Värmlanders are downing beers with the fighter pilot; Oksana’s cheeks are rosy.

  At the front of the bus, Mr. Song holds the microphone and tenderly sings one of his favourite songs, Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind.” His job is almost done and no one has caused too much trouble. Ms. Kim looks happy. In honour of our last night in North Korea, she wears a white joseonot.

  For the whole trip, we have been fawning over Mr. Song and Ms. Kim. We aren’t risking anything by challenging the rules and sneaking off on our own. Tourists who are suspected of being CIA agents might be taken into custody and interrogated for a few hours, but a guide who hasn’t kept his tourists in line can end up in a camp.

  THE PARTY WILL continue at the panoramic restaurant at the Yanggakdo Hotel. But first, we’re invited into a room off the lobby to watch The Movie of Our Trip. The cameraman has hastily cut the material together and added an intolerable synthesizer soundtrack. The film begins with pre-recorded sequences of happy children running in the grass. Then scene after scene unfolds of our visits to various monuments. We quickly grow bored and the group disperses.

  In the elevator we bump into one of Nils’s acquaintances: a tall, blond Estonian man with horn-rimmed glasses wearing a turquoise polo shirt. Nils had hardly expected to run into friends or acquaintances in an elevator at the Yanggakdo Hotel in Pyongyang, but the Estonian doesn’t seem to think it’s at all strange. The man has a Russian passport and has lived most of his life in Siberia. Now he lives in Tallinn, where he is making a killing as an importer of exclusive Italian coffee and exotic types of tea. He spends his money on trips to places like Malawi, Kiribati, and North Korea. The Estonian possesses a strange calm, a near-enlightened glow. The world is his oyster. Through his horn-rimmed glasses he can calmly observe what’s going on in the shadowy corners of the world.

  UP IN THE bar, we find the Bromma boys seated at a table with the Swedish ambassador, who is pale and dressed in a dark grey suit that is slightly too big for him. The dinner at the embassy didn’t happen. They’ll have to satisfy themselves with a Taedong beer. Sitting up as straight as Sunday school students, they listen while the ambassador holds court.

  Sweden was one of the first countries to set up an embassy in Pyongyang. In 1975, Erik Cornell opened the embassy, which for twenty years was the only consulate for all Westerners in North Korea. Others haven’t been as successful. The diplomats at the Australian embassy, which opened the same year as the Swedish one, were given forty-eight hours to pack up and leave after a toga party. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back for the North Koreans, who were unhappy with their approach to diplomacy and behaviour from the start. The Australians were in Pyongyang for only six months. They had thought that they, in typical diplomatic fashion, could negotiate and come to a compromise, and they had also asked to visit prisons and courts. This kind of behaviour was unacceptable to the North Korean government. The Swedish embassy has avoided becoming the annoyance that Australia’s was by taking a soft and accommodating line. They believe that submissive contact is better than no contact at all.

  There is no normal diplomatic life in Pyongyang, says Cornell in North Korea under Communism: Report of an Envoy to Paradise. The North Korean military has built tunnels under embassy buildings so that they can enter them through holes in the floor. At the Swedish embassy, local employees are chosen by the North Korean state. During Cornell’s time, the housekeeper was most likely an intelligence officer. Once, when she was serving at a formal dinner party, they heard the crackling sound of audio surveillance equipment under her joseonot.

  Cornell describes how the staff at the embassy were not allowed any contact with regular Koreans. Even the ambassadors from Communist countries were not permitted to engage in any form of intellectual exchange with the citizens. During a banquet, the wife of the Cuban ambassador tried to discuss North Korean burial customs with a female senior official in the North Korean administration, Cornell writes. She had noticed that there were no burial grounds in Pyongyang. When she asked about it, the official replied seriously: “You understand, here in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea people do not die so much.”

  WE SIT DOWN at a table that Trond has already filled with beer bottles. But Trond can’t sit still. He goes over to the ambassador’s table and circles it like a drugged circus bear. He slaps one of the Bromma boys on the back, and shoves his business card under the ambassador’s nose. The Bromma boys’ gazes wander. This isn’t how they imagined their last night in Pyongyang. The trip to this bizarre country was supposed to have been crowned with an invitation to supper in a magnificent dining room in the embassy.

  BRUNO SITS CLOSEST to the window at our table. He hasn’t shaved and he looks worn out. He is tired of his job in Beijing and he’s tired of being single. His business manufactures precision instruments for medical use. It’s hard for us to reconcile the image of his large mass with a precision scale that can measure a thousandth of a gram.

  Bruno wants to move on. He wants to get a better job in the United States, but he says it’s impossible if you’ve been caught on camera bowing to a Kim Il-sung statue. He’s slouching and looks regretful.

  “But I didn’t bow,” he says in his Schwarzenegger accent. “No, I didn’t bow.”

  He seems to have forgotten where he is; he’s mostly talking to himself. He looks out into the darkness: “No, I didn’t bow.”

  We don’t want to say that we have just seen him bow to a Kim Il-sung statue in the The Movie of Our Trip.

  * * *

  AT HIS OCTOBER 2007 meeting in Pyongyang with South Korea’s President Roh Moo-hyun, Kim Jong-il flattered his enemy and acknowledged his desires. President Roh handed over 150 DVDs to add to Kim’s cherished collection, among them popular films and South Korean TV series.

  Shin Sang-ok said in an interview with the Guardian in 2003 that Kim Jong-il preferred action films, “sex films,” and horror films. His favourites were Hong Kong action films, James Bond movies, and Friday the 13th. Shin said that Kim Jong-il generally considered all movies to be a reflection of reality. “I had to explain to him that most American films were fictional.”

  Kim Jong-il is often openly mocked about his film fanaticism in newspapers and magazines. We are painted a picture of a giant baby who appears in his own infantile cinematic fantasies. To the dictator, a lightsaber and a Scud missile fall into the same category. His gluttony for film goes hand in hand with his decadence, his cognac, and his food orgies.

  But you can also turn it around and see Kim Jong-il as a leader who fully understands the political and myth-making power of film. For the Third Reich and the Soviet Union, propaganda wasn’t hollow; it was a comprehensive reality for the people.

  North Korea’s leader has learned that film has the power to simultaneously create, mirror, and reshape the national identity and mentality. The Second World War’s victors mirrored themselves in heroic self-representation, while the war’s losers made films that broke with tradition — films that helped these nations work through the trauma as they tried to piece together the shards of their shattered identities — Italian neorealism and Japanese monster movies, for example. Shin Sang-ok’s melodramas may have served this purpose in South Korea in the 1950s.

  IN OUR ESCAPE HAS NOT YET ENDED — the book that the film couple published in
2001 — Shin says, just as Madame did during our conversation, that you have to take the dictator’s film knowledge seriously. According to Shin, Kim Jong-il is also an authority on music. The leader can easily identify which instrument in a symphony orchestra is playing off-key.

  The book also gives a detailed account of the function of the North Korean film archive. The archive is kept in a building, like a super-brain or a motherboard. Located behind massive steel fences in the heart of Pyongyang, the structure is climate-controlled, fully maintained, and guarded by 250 employees. The symbolism couldn’t be more potent.

  SHIN AND MADAME were first introduced to the archive on March 14, 1983. The three-storey building may be the largest film repository in the world. Voice actors, translators, subtitle specialists, projectionists and recording specialists, in addition to security and other types of workers, are employed here. All the North Korean films that have ever been made are stored in a special room.

  Later, when Shin and Madame were given free access to the collection, Shin made a discovery: he found the missing negatives of the first version of the Shim Cheong myth from 1972. He had sent it to Kim Guh-wha at Shin Films in Hong Kong so it could be subtitled in Chinese. It was clear that the same man who had sent these negatives to Kim Jong-il had also lured Madame into the trap.

  During our conversation, Madame had mentioned an audio recording of an hours-long monologue that Kim Jong-il had delivered in October 1983. Madame, taking a great risk, had secretly recorded forty-five minutes of it. Military intelligence services consider her recording to be one of the leading sources in revealing the dictator’s psychological make-up. It speaks volumes about how Kim Jong-il views the role of culture in winning over the masses:

  We send our people to East Germany to study editing, to Czechoslovakia to study camera technology, and to the Soviet Union to learn directing. Other than that, we cannot send our people to go anywhere since they are enemy states. No France, no West Germany, no Great Britain. We especially have to have conduct exchange with Japan, but we cannot even allow [North Korean] people to watch Japanese films. We end up analyzing foreign films to imitate them but there is a limit to what we can do, but our efforts have brought no progress. I have been struggling with this problem for five years [since 1978]. All we ended up doing was to send a couple of people to the Soviet Union after the liberation and to establish a Film Institute, but they are not that impressive after all. I acknowledge that we lag behind in filmmaking techniques. We have to know that we are lagging behind and make efforts to raise a new generation of filmmakers.

  Considering Juche Thought’s emphasis on self-reliance, it may seem illogical to kidnap people from the outside world simply because you need them. But perhaps the need for specialized skills was greater than the Juche ideal of self-reliance.

  As the head of cinematic arts, Kim Jong-il had decided to make a concerted effort to liven up North Korean film. His obedient workers in the state film industry knew the appropriate topics to cover and that cinema was a tool for political education. But their productions were mind-numbingly dull. Shin Sang-ok was a star who had fallen out of favour, and Madame Choi was a legend. He needed their raw talent to gild his existence and to get the art of cinema back on its feet. Above all, it seems that Kim Jong-il was searching for the key to melodrama. He felt that if you perfected the art of the melodrama, then you could engage people’s emotions. This was the crucial secret ingredient that would elevate North Korean propaganda.

  DAY 8

  Little Boy

  THE CODE NAME for the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was “Little Boy.” When the artist Takashi Murakami gave the same name to his 2005 exhibition about post-war aesthetics in Japan, he wanted to shed light on a national trauma. The Americans dropped two atomic bombs. Japan lost the war and ties to its ancient samurai traditions were cut. According to Murakami the bomb castrated the Japanese men and infantilized the country. The Japanese post-war constitution was a carbon copy of America’s, with one exception: the unique Article 9, stipulating that Japan would never arm itself again. Japan’s fate was sealed, and what followed was the nation’s descent into a world of cute. Japan became kawaii (the Japanese word for cuteness) and Japanese men became “Little Boys.”

  The poster for Little Boy depicts a decorative, flattened mushroom-cloud shape that melds the atomic bomb with the plasticity of the cartoon character Barbapapa. The exhibition was a symphony of pop-culture objects and images from the otaku-king’s kingdom: kawaii objects, monster movies, anime, manga, and art. With Godzilla’s direct link to the bomb, the monster was featured prominently. “Otaku” is the name that was given to a group of Japanese people who, during the economic bubble of the 1980s, turned their back on society and instead obsessed over their hobbies: collecting dolls, model-building, reading manga, and full-time idol worship.

  Takashi Murakami’s approach can be compared to Andy Warhol’s. He doesn’t add anything to the culture; instead, he copies it, blows it up in scale, and increases its value. He endows it with clarity and highlights its sorrows and its pains. Of his Mickey Mouse–like character, Mr. DOB, Murakami says: “He is cute but has no meaning and understands nothing of life, sex, or reality.” Murakami leaves the true meaning of cuteness open to interpretation — is it about camouflage, working through a trauma, or an embodiment of helplessness? And in that case, who is helpless: the stuffed animal or those who worship it?

  YOU COULD SAY that Kim Jong-il is a super-otaku, a nerd who has unlimited resources to stage his own passions. You could also say that he created his own interpretation of the neo-liberal term “soft power.” Soft power, a concept developed by the American political scientist Joseph Nye, refers to a country’s ability to assert its influence not by military force or with economic strength, but with its ability to create an attractive culture. In soft power, pop culture is used to disseminate hidden political messages on a meta-level.

  For the past ten years, soft power has risen to become one of the most important economic and political means of persuasion in Japan, and Takashi Murakami has been its prophet. “Cute” in today’s Tokyo is all-encompassing. The term “kawaii” has become a pop-culture buzzword, but it also manifests across the city: in advertisements, clothes, costumes, accessories, signs, vehicles, and architecture. The streets are filled with the sound of teenage girls calling out “Kawaii!” The Asahi Bank features Hello Kitty’s predecessor Miffy on its ATMs; Monchhichis, stuffed toy monkeys, adorn packets of condoms; Nippon Airways paid one million dollars to license the famous Pokémon characters in order to plaster them on a few of their Boeing aircraft. On signs advertising the Japanese army — the army that is officially called the Japan Self-Defense Forces — soldiers are depicted as cute action figures.

  THROUGHOUT HIS ENTIRE career, Kim Jong-il has loved illusion, drama, and performance. The more lavish the better. His people are schooled in theatrics, which also seep into their daily lives. Through song, gestures, and costume they embody the utopian nation every day. But by 1978 the leader wanted to reach new heights. For this, he needed melodrama.

  Kim Jong-il was clearly dissatisfied with his country’s attempts at the genre so far. In a conversation recounted by Shin Sang-ok, he complained about North Korean film: “[The] works have the same expressions, redundancies, the same old plots. All our movies are filled with crying and sobbing. I didn’t order them to portray that kind of thing.” He wanted real melodrama, not just buckets of tears.

  Threats instil fear in a populace. But the threat of an uprising is ever present. Maybe the dictator wanted to complement his harsh methods with softness as a way of winning the hearts of his citizens. Clearly, he had demonstrated an intuitive understanding of soft power when he called for his people to engage in the delicate business of kidnapping Choi Eun-hee and Shin Sang-ok. He seemed to have won over the now hyper-disciplined bodies of the citizens, bodies that took part in parades and performed synchronized gymnastics, all in
a neat row. But by making use of the beautiful, the cute, the comic, and the dramatic, he penetrated their inner lives too.

  * * *

  IN THE 1980S, Kim Jong-il often travelled in his armoured train to cities in North Korea and the Soviet Union. But on several occasions he also took the boat to Tokyo, presumably to secretly watch Hikita Tenko’s magic shows at the Cordon Bleu show pub in Akasaka.

  As a young singer in the mid-1970s, Mariko Itakura had inherited a famous male magician’s act. Oddly enough, she also took over his name and his debts and transformed the act into a great success. Part alien and part anime queen, she delivered hi-tech acts in nightclubs in Macao, featuring lasers and flying unicorns. With her waist-length black hair and wearing a tight red dress, she performed a water tank escape act. She turned her business into a minor empire with its own TV series, perfume, wine, and fashion collections.

  Hikita Tenko is the name of one of her two alter egos, and was the name she inherited along with the act. As a character, Hikita is shy and doesn’t say much. She is forced to work hard during the performance — nothing comes for free — and she reacts to pulling off her escape act with a vague sense of surprise. Japanese men like cute women, women who need to be protected, and they feel threatened by strong ones. But her other character, Princess Tenko, who performs outside of Japan, is powerful and determined. She is an eternally young heroine.

  Every year, Princess Tenko announces that she is twenty-four years old. She says that she wants to live up to the Princess Tenko figures sold by Barbie-manufacturer Mattel, Inc. So, like a doll, she can’t change her hair, age, or appearance. So far, she has managed to maintain her doll-like appearance. But of course this isn’t sustainable in the long term. So, who knows, perhaps in the future she will be replaced by another Hikita Tenko — whether male or female.