A former U.S. State Department official summed up the situation: “We know less about North Korea than they know about us.”
Journalist Melanie Kirkpatrick, a longtime member of the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal, published another North Korea book in September 2012. She portrayed North Korea as a “hellhole” that was “rife with suffering and starvation.” The country, she added, “keeps its citizens in the dark ages.” “Foreigners and foreign goods are kept out” is another tall claim of hers. Had that been true, I would, of course, not have been able to sell foreign goods in North Korea.
Yet looking more carefully under the veil, it becomes clear that these stories represent a single slice of North Korean society. A professor from the Australian Defence Force Academy who spent six months from 2010 to 2012 teaching English to North Korea’s future leaders opposes Johnson’s and Kirkpatrick’s views. In North Korea from inside the Classroom, Professor Stewart Lone, wrote: “Having spent a good deal of time in the company of more than 400 North Korean teenagers, I dismiss the idea that everyone lives in fear and privation.” He later told news.com.au: “I saw young people who were secure, contented, and proud of their society.” “The stereotype of North Korea … is the contemporary version of ‘the yellow peril’ and follows many of its key features (irrationality, brutality, docility),” he added in his book, referring to the hysteria in Western countries over the rise of Japan in the early twentieth century.
Another American literature professor who teaches in South Korea, Bryan R. Myers, summarized North Korean propaganda in a more thoughtful—even if flawed—way in his 2010 book, The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters. His problem was that he took the propaganda more seriously than North Koreans do themselves. His claims were shaky: he argued that the basis of North Korean ideology is race, not the more commonly cited mix of socialism, Juche, and Songun. He even called Juche “window-dressing” for foreigners, a rather absurd claim given the reality that the state carried out huge efforts to teach Juche to its people.
During exhibitions students from different universities approached me at my exhibition booth to practice English. I often asked them what trade they wanted to take up when they finished university, and why. The answer was often quite patriotic: “I want to be an electrical engineer to help electrify my country to stand on its own feet in accordance with the Juche idea.” Another said, “I want to be a medical doctor to help my countrymen to be healthier. I agree with our Juche idea, which aims at strengthening our health system and at making it independent from foreign countries.” These were their actual beliefs, and didn’t fit into any narrative of “window-dressing.”
A few other claims are questionable. Myers claims that the North Korean personality cult is an idea imposed by Japanese colonialists. I think the concept arose out of Stalin’s personality cult, or even more from a historical undercurrent stretching back to thousands of years of Chinese overlord emperors. Myers doesn’t fully address how three decades of a Japanese administration could upend these more entrenched forces at work.
Myers further claims that the party, in its propaganda, portrays North Korea’s leadership as motherly figures, not fathers. But he doesn’t explain, then, why the Korean War is called the “Fatherland Liberation War” instead of the “Motherland Liberation War.” The North Koreans who talked to me about the “father of the nation” or the “father of all Koreans,” referring to their leader, never mentioned any mothers of the nation.
My company’s staff members reminded me that company bosses in North Korea were expected to behave like good “fathers” with the staff. I used to reply half-jokingly that I, as their father, would expect the respect and obedience from my large family—as is typical in a traditional Confucian Korean family. Had my staff called me “mother,” Myers would have been believable. The expression “father” was used not only for the English translation but also in Korean.
Other North Korea experts such as Professor Leonid Petrov and Professor Victor Cha have continued to ponder the country’s isolation, especially whether collapse would come about from information entering the country.4 It completely escaped their attention that years before, in the mid-2000s, a quiet but radical “information revolution” had already taken place in North Korea. Memory sticks and USBs became popular when they were more affordable. Foreign music, movies, and even e-books were stored or exchanged on these easily concealed sticks. More people started talking about famous movies; I was surprised that they knew films like Kill Bill and The Pianist.
At the beginning of my stay in North Korea, I offered nice gifts to prospective partners, such as a pair of fine leather shoes, a bottle of Scotch whisky, or a large box of Dunhill cigarette packs for the men. For the ladies, I handed over a beautiful silk scarf, a brand-name perfume, or a piece of jewelry. But when people became so keen on getting a USB to watch foreign movies, I stopped offering expensive presents and gave them those tiny electronics. One male recipient laughingly told me that USBs had become so popular that women would carry them under the bra to have them well-cushioned. He didn’t tell the full truth. They were being kept away from preying authorities who would have loved to know what was stored on these accessories.
A MONOLITHIC COUNTRY?
When I first arrived, I had a singular, bland image of North Korea, envisioning it as a place where everyday life is choreographed and controlled. I had learned from media and book authors that North Korea is a country where everybody marches single-mindedly to the tune of the leadership, physically as much as mentally in goose step. It was a country, I assumed, where orders would come from the top and everybody would mindlessly execute them or else risk being thrown into a gulag.
That was hardly the truth. I was in Pyongyang when there was a soccer game in 2005 between the allied countries Iran and DPRK. To my total surprise, a full stadium of North Korean fans got so excited that they started shouting abuse and throwing objects against the Iranians, a absolutely politically incorrect and outrageous act by their standards. The security forces struggled to maintain order. The Iranians even complained that they feared for their lives, a worry that they did not overstate. The world soccer governing body FIFA soon punished North Korea for crowd unrest. I knew North Koreans who were at the game and behaved like hooligans. But they did not disappear, thrown in a prison camp for potentially damaging the nation’s relationship with Iran, as the Western media would have you believe.
I have also seen drivers getting out of their cars, shouting and yelling at the traffic police for perceived missives, men defiantly smoking under the watchful eye of guards of public buildings or the Pyongyang Metro in nonsmoking areas, and farmers pushing their carts in the prohibited opposite directions of a one-way street despite the presence of police. I also knew people who traveled across the countryside even though they did not have the permits that the government still requires for moving around in the country. Some workers did not attend the compulsory weekly ideological training sessions, playing hooky so they could set up their own little capitalist businesses. In what was once the world’s most radically demonetized country, American dollars, euros, and Chinese yuan were used regularly to bend laws, overcome old habits, and grease the emergence of small businesses.
So, not everyone ends up in a gulag for infractions of socialist laws. I have been told the opposite by people who believe they know North Korea better than me, and who criticize me for not sharply condemning human rights abuses in this country. While I clearly disavow any human rights abuse in North Korea and anywhere else in the world, I’m a businessman who has never visited any gulag or prison. I am not a human rights expert.
Human rights activists claim that 150,000 to 200,000 people are inmates of such camps, while the