North Korea Journal Read online

  For him, a poster must give ‘encouragement and inspiration to people. It should make you feel emotionally connected’. And it should be done whilst the message is strong. Posters are ‘urgent works of art. You have to do it quick’.

  Some of them are fierce and often shockingly anti-American. One imagines they must be created by angry, bellicose zealots, but this elderly propagandist could not be more gentle and modest. As far as I can tell, the atmosphere of the Mansudae Studio is driven by artistic skills as much as by national rage. Or is it just the people they’ve chosen for me to meet?

  I don’t have to agonise over political issues at my next port of call. A stark concrete exterior gives a totally false impression of the pleasure palace that awaits inside the Changgwang Health Complex. In the pillared and domed central hall, the walls and floors are tiled in marble. Coloured fountains welcome you with a play of changing lights. There is an Olympic-sized swimming pool and steam issuing from heat-treatment rooms.

  My eye is taken by a beauty salon and barber’s shop combined. On the way in there is a wall chart showing the fifteen approved haircuts. North Korean men are directed to keep their hair shorter than five centimetres, unless they’re bald, in which case a comb-over is allowed. All of the styles, displayed largely in profile, seem to be exactly the same: short-cropped and tidy. None of them, I notice, dares to resemble the distinctive basin cut of the current leader.

  The salon itself is a crescent-shaped room with basins, mirrors and a row of adjustable chairs, manned, or rather womanned, by formidable ladies in white coats. They will dispense just about anything you want done to your head, short of a lobotomy. I opt for a massage which is duly delivered by a stern lady with steel fingers. Though it’s administered as if it might be a punishment, the overall effect is quite the opposite, soothing me into the most comfortable state of relaxation I’ve experienced since my arrival in Pyongyang.

  The day is spilling into night as we descend on a Korean barbecue restaurant for bulgogi, which is pork or beef grilled over a fire of hot coals, stoked and delivered in a portable grill which is slipped into a section cut into the table. The red-hot braziers, often with flames licking up from inside, are carried around at arm’s length by the waitresses, giving the restaurant more than a passing resemblance to a blacksmith’s forge.

  The meat, with accompanying prawns, is tasty, and rice and kimchi and various sauces are served on the side. To drink, there is a choice of whisky (a Korean favourite) at the bar, soju, the local rice wine, and beer from the Taedonggang Brewery which, a few years ago and before the latest round of sanctions, imported its equipment, lock, stock, but not barrels, from the old Usher’s Brewery in Trowbridge, Wiltshire.

  It’s a small, friendly restaurant with family groups at tables. So Hyang and Hyon Chol, relaxed and off duty, are good company. I sense that tonight they have been given licence to enjoy themselves. As I think have Mrs Kim and the ever-present ring of minders. They’ve given up monitoring all we talk about, and taken to the bar.

  By the time I’m back on the twenty-fifth floor of the Koryo Hotel it’s midnight. I feel as if I’ve been here three weeks rather than three days. We’ve worked hard, but no one’s complaining. We’re all still intoxicated with the strangeness of North Korea.

  IT’S MAY DAY IN THE DPRK – INTERNATIONAL WORKERS’ Day – and the country is on holiday. Sadly the sunshine that has softened our surroundings since we arrived has been replaced by an un-festive greyness.

  Our minibuses head north-east out of town. Leaving the city behind, we pass through thick woodland in the midst of which we glimpse an impressive towered and arcaded building. This, we are told, is the Kumsusan Palace of the Sun, where lie the embalmed bodies of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. I cross a small red line with So Hyang by referring to the legacy of these men in death. Death, she corrects me, is not a word that can be applied to the Great Leaders. ‘To the Korean people they are not dead – they are alive in our hearts.’

  Crossing a bridge over the Hapjang river, one of the tributaries of the Taedong, the road leads to the slopes of Mount Taesong, home of the Revolutionary Martyrs’ Cemetery, where hundreds of those who fought against the Japanese are buried, each gravestone bearing a bronze bust of its occupant.

  It’s also the site of the city’s biggest amusement park. We disembark and join the rapidly growing crowds, walking up towards a tall decorative arch, beyond which is a Ferris wheel and a very noisy roller coaster on whose ancient frame cars race by with a screeching roar. In front of the arch, a small number of elderly Korean couples, the women in long, billowy national dress, are dancing, formally and carefully, as if in slow motion. This, I’m told, is the Senior Citizens area. I have the feeling that So Hyang expects me to be more comfortable here.

  Once beyond the arch, the activity is much less decorous. In an open grassy area, loud, hearty and fiercely competitive games are in progress. Rival teams from various state companies vie with each other, stirred up by cheerleaders and yelled on by their friends and families. The garment factory in green versus the ball-bearing makers in salmon pink, are engaged in a game in which contestants have to pick up pieces of paper laid out on the ground. On each one is written the name of three things (they could be musical instruments, bottles, articles of clothing, relatives, lunch-boxes, small children) which they then have to collect and carry as fast as they can to the finishing line. The atmosphere is hysterical. One man has had to take his wife. She falls as she runs with him and so intent is he on victory that instead of helping her up he drags her along the ground for the last hundred yards. I later see him as one of the contestants in the tug-of-war. Maybe he was just training.

  There is so much spontaneous celebration going on that our minders are finding it hard to control where and whom we film. I’m warmly invited to join a dance circle, after which I walk down past a children’s playground where little toddlers ride, ironically, in ancient-looking tin missiles. Every inch of grass and woodland is occupied by festive families or groups of friends, most of whom have a Korean barbecue on the go, and some are insistent on my joining them. Arms stretch out towards me, proffering fresh-grilled morsels on the ends of chopsticks, and tumblerfuls of beer or soju to wash them down. There’s also much dancing to music played at full volume from portable radios the size of small suitcases. I’m pulled into the ring by both men and women and at one point have a wreath placed on my head by the grandfather of a picnicking family. It turns out he’s had more than a few sojus and some of the younger members of the family usher him away from our camera disapprovingly.

  It’s quite a liberating day. I’d expected more supervision, more self-consciousness and more mistrust of ourselves and our cameras. But the revels are unforced and uninhibited in a way which smacks of much greater freedom than I’d expected to see in the Hermit Kingdom. And they’ll go on late into the night.

  Another surprise is that there have been no great military parades to celebrate May Day. The vast expanse of Kim Il Sung Square is deserted as, towards evening, we walk across it on our way to a half-hour river cruise. From the water Pyongyang looks impressive, with her iconic buildings all floodlit and a fine display of dancing fountains, rising, falling, surging and sweeping to the most patriotic music I’ve heard all day.

  NEIL, OUR DIRECTOR, HAS BROUGHT WITH HIM A CAFETIÈRE and an apparently endless supply of Marks & Spencer’s ground coffee, which is doing a great job of boosting morale and augmenting the relatively lean breakfast of omelette, sliced apple and white toast. None of the staff in the breakfast ballroom seem to mind our flagrant violation of the one-coffee rule.

  Today we’re leaving Pyongyang for the first time, taking the Reunification Highway south to Kaesong. The idea of a united Korea is taken very seriously by the North, and it is magnificently symbolised by the Reunification Arch on the outskirts of the capital.

  Modesty of size and design is not a Korean trait. If a statement n
eeds making it needs making big, and this is unlike any arch I’ve ever seen. Two huge concrete maidens in wide skirts, representing North and South, stretch across to meet each other, nearly a hundred feet above the road, their extended arms holding aloft a stuccoed roundel bearing the outline of a united Korean peninsula. It was erected in 2001 to symbolise President Kim Il Sung’s hopes of bringing the two halves of the peninsula together. The emptiness of the road that runs beneath it is a testimony to hope unfulfilled.

  Only a week ago there was a serious accident on the Highway. Over thirty Chinese tourists were killed when their coach left the road and overturned. Kim Jong Un was quick to be photographed commiserating with survivors in the hospital, something that was noted by foreign observers as a rare example of the Korean leadership reaching out rather than covering up.

  There’s not much to see along the way today. Other vehicles go by every five minutes or so. There are few birds or animals or habitation of any kind to be seen. Treeless agricultural land stretches away on either side of the road, dotted with farm workers moving slowly through the fields. When a sharp shower whips in across this exposed landscape they huddle together for protection against the driving rain.

  Being so close to the border with South Korea, Kaesong, just over a hundred miles from Pyongyang, was spared the Allied bombing that flattened the rest of the north in the early 1950s. Now it’s the oldest and least damaged city in the whole of Korea, the only settlement that has real history.

  The best-preserved complex of buildings in the town are part of what used to be the Songgyunwan Academy where Korean aristocrats came to be educated in the Confucian tradition, which prevailed for 600 years.

  I meet up with a local guide and historian in a serene courtyard, linking a series of long, low buildings with traditional upturned-boat shaped roofs, tiles spilling down over the curved corners, supported by stout beams, painted with dragons and lotus flowers. In the grounds there are fine gingko and zelkova trees, some of which date from the time the university was founded. It’s a gentle, contemplative place. At the moment there’s nobody here but ourselves, and a woodpecker, high up in one of the ancient trees, doggedly hammering away.

  The guide tells me that over a thousand years ago, Koryo, as it was called, was a Buddhist kingdom, and there is evidence that human habitation began long before that. Remains have been dated back 30–40,000 years when people from east and north-east Asia settled in the peninsula. By the end of the first century BC the various warring tribes had coalesced into three kingdoms, the northernmost being the Koguryo, who established a capital in Pyongyang in AD 427. Chinese influence had always been strong. The Buddhist religion was introduced via China and later Koreans absorbed Confucian teachings in their schools.

  I’ve been very much aware of how self-contained this country is, with a narrative that seems only to go back seventy years to the founding of the DPRK. So when I ask my guide if past history means anything to the North Koreans, her reply comes as a rather welcome surprise.

  ‘We can learn a lot of lessons from our history,’ she is quick to tell me. ‘If we know the history then we can accept our mistakes and learn from our weaknesses.’

  Though quiet on this wet May morning, the academy is a popular draw for local tourists who want to see what the old Korea looked like, and outside the weighty wooden gates is a shop and post office staffed by women in what we would call folk costumes standing at attention behind glass cabinets full of tourist artefacts. Spoons and chopsticks, jade-green celadon pottery as well as T-shirts and posters, and most popular of all, postcards reproducing the posters. Carousels are stacked with these classic items of propaganda, many of which depict the wrath that would be wreaked upon the Americans by the North Korean forces should they step out of line: graphic images of GIs being bayoneted, rockets smashing into the Capitol Building, the Statue of Liberty being dismembered.

  Our director has an idea that one way of covering this particularly violent manifestation of anti-Americanism would be to film me buying one of these postcards and posting it to an American friend. He suggests Terry Gilliam.

  We take a while to set up, and once the camera is running I duly approach the postcard carousel, only to find that the card I was going to pick out is no longer there. I reach for an alternative, only to find that it isn’t where it used to be either. In fact I can’t find any of the postcards in their original positions. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I notice the nattily suited manager of the shop swiftly removing the remainder of them and handing them to the smiling be-robed lady who swiftly secretes them under the counter. The Basil Fawlty-ish blatancy of the operation leaves me speechless. Neil shakes his head and approaches our minders. What is going on here?

  Mrs Kim, Yung Un and the rather more forbidding ‘Tall Li’ – hooded eyes, glasses – take him aside for one of their discreet discussions. The upshot is that in view of the recent announcement of President Trump’s acceptance of the Supreme Leader’s invitation to meet for talks, it has been decided that selling postcards of GIs being garrotted and the White House smashed to pieces is no longer in the national interest. They suggest I send my friend some other memory of the DPRK, like a nice bird, or a view of Mount Paektu?

  In the end I have to content myself with sending Terry an image of a red star and the shining face of a happy child. This will surely mystify him.

  We’re to spend the night at the Kaesong Folk Hotel. It’s a lodging that aims to attract both North Korean and foreign tourists by playing heavily on the traditional, with a rabbit warren of rooms around small courtyards. A stream crossed by quaint bridges, more scenic than functional, runs through the place.

  Before dinner, they lay on folkloric activities – singing, dancing and one that’s new to me, rice-pounding. This exercise in ritual humiliation involves my two guides and me wielding massive mallets to pound a lump of dough so that it can be loosened up and used to make rice cakes. The dough is soon so congealed that it’s almost impossible to raise the mallets without putting your back out, which seems to be the point. The chefs stand by stony-faced. They’ve seen this happen so often they don’t even laugh any more.

  Dinner is a curious affair, taken in a room almost empty except for a thousand small pots. My room turns out to be quite ample; a lot of bamboo – bamboo mat, bamboo blinds, bamboo hangings around the door. It has painted panels, trees and flowers and lovingly executed calligraphy in the Japanese style. Could it be a nod to the legacy of the Japanese occupation of Korea, such a dominating feature of the first half of the last century?

  I SLEEP WELL ON A TATAMI MAT WARMED BY ONDOL, an underfloor heating system which, like the Roman hypocaust, uses hot air from wood fires beneath the tiles. Peeping through the side of my bamboo blind I see that the weather has turned infinitely more promising for today’s journey to the North Korean side of the Demilitarized Zone.

  I’m told the man that I shall be speaking to – a North Korean military officer – will be there to answer questions about anything I care to ask, which promises to make our encounter very different from those I’ve been allowed so far. This could be a rare chance to talk politics.

  We all gather at the hotel reception. Things are easier with our minders now. We eat with them in the evening. We see them on the bus. Though they don’t talk to us much while we’re working, they are beginning to emerge from their dark-suited uniformity. Mrs Kim is less stern than she first appeared. She’s a maternal lady with one son, and quite teasable. Like us, she and her team are learning as they go, trying their best to understand what we want, and calculating how much they can safely give us. It’s a simple equation. The more they trust us, the more we shall be able to see.

  This morning the signs are promising. I’ve been seen openly writing these notes, and dictating into my voice recorder. So far no one has asked to look at, or listen to, anything.

  It could be the Kaesong effect. This feels like a comfortab
le, relaxed town. It’s spring, the trees are in blossom, the place is well kept. The people seem happy, and among buildings that are centuries old, it’s easy to forget the trauma of the last seventy years. As we climb into the bus to leave, I’m aware that where we’re going next is the complete opposite.

  The strip of land that divides Korea into communist North and capitalist South is known as the DMZ, the Demilitarized Zone. It was set up by the North Koreans, Chinese and the UN after the armistice in 1953, to replace the notorious 38th Parallel, the old border line, which had its roots in the ideological partition of Korea between the Soviet-backed North and the American-backed South at the end of the Second World War.

  In 1950 fighting began in a bitter civil war which both sides blamed the other for starting. The North Koreans took Seoul but the United Nations forces under the command of US General Douglas MacArthur rallied, pushing the DPRK forces back across the border. The Chinese then threw huge numbers in defence of their fellow communists and pushed the UN forces back south of Seoul. Stalemate set in, and it was only after newly elected US President Eisenhower allegedly threatened to use atomic weapons against the North that the two sides came to the table, bringing a halt, but not an official end, to hostilities.

  The DMZ is a buffer zone, 2.5 miles wide and running 160 miles from one side of the peninsula to the other. It is meant to be a weapons-free area, though officers are allowed to carry a pistol. Two hundred and forty farmers work on the North Korean side of the DMZ, in what must be some of the most lethal agricultural land in the world. I ask if the farmers of the DMZ are specially chosen. Heads are shaken.