Two Traitors and Their Tales

There have been two revealing articles published by the New York Times in the past week or so, both about outsiders to North Korea who through different circumstances became personally acquainted with the notoriously secretive Kim dynasty that rules North Korea. One is about Kenji Fujimoto, the pen name of a Japanese man who was Kim Jong-il’s personal sushi chef from the late 1980s to 2001 when he escaped North Korea. He has been well known to all those studying North Korea since then for being one of the very few people to have known the Kims personally and lived to tell about it outside the country. Another remarkable aspect of his story has been his decision to write about his experience with them in detail, which culminated into three books published in Japanese with titles like Kim’s Chef and The Honorable General Who Loved Nuclear Weapons and Girls. None of them have been translated into English so far. In these memoirs the Kim family is portrayed as one indulging in a nearly surreal amount of decadent hedonism. But for once the latest story about him adds a new chapter; after being so fearful of potential reprisals by the regime that he had reconstructive surgery, he received an invitation to the North in June by Kim Jong Eun. After some reluctance he finally went back, presumably taking the risk to see his family there. Kim forgave his betrayal, an impossibility under Kim Jong Il. Apparently enough has changed in Pyongyang to make some kind of an impression on him, and though his accounts of a modernizing living standard in Pyongyang are consistent with those of visiting journalists, he’s careful not to make any conclusions about the rest of the country.

The other article is about Kim Young Hwan, a South Korean student activist whose virulent anti-Americanism and pro-North stance helped galvanize the underground activist movement which opposed the government of South Korean dictator Chun Doo Hwan in the 1980s. While the movement was unabashedly pro-democracy, Kim naively believed North Korean propaganda that claimed it was more democratic than the South, and he steered the movement in a pro-North direction, blaming American imperialism for the ills he and so many other South Koreans had suffered. Since the US had refused to intervene when Chun Doo Hwan ordered the South Korean military to slaughter students in the 1980 Gwangju massacre, the sentiment quickly echoed throughout the movement, and even today this stance is the status quo throughout much of the South Korean education system. He even joined North Korea’s ruling Workers’ Party. He eventually received an encrypted message from Radio Pyongyang to board a boat taking him North to meet the Great Leader in person. Ironically it was his personal meeting with Kim Il Sung which helped change him and his views completely. Apparently the aging supreme leader was no better at explaining the North’s juche philosophy than anyone else was, and his mind was stuck firmly in memories of the 1930s anti-Japanese guerrilla struggle to liberate occupied Korea, a chapter of history that North Koreans hear about in their propaganda to no end. This revelation jolted him, and though he went so far as to accept money from the North to establish a political party for overthrowing the South, his eventual discovery of the rampant and egregious human rights abuses from those fleeing the 1990s mass famine there inspired him to actively change sides and become a vocal critic of North Korea. Ever the activist, he helped establish an underground network in China to help North Korean defectors evade the Chinese authorities who are all too happy to return them to the North. He was eventually caught and interrogated. In the Times article, I've found the memory of Kim Il Sung’s rambling nostalgia to be the most revealing note, one of endless signs that the ideological integrity of North Korea is a complete mirage. It is no coincidence that the man who actually invented North Korea’s cornerstone juche philosophy, Hwang Jang Yop, became its highest ranking defector and one of the most vocal opponents of the regime.