As an American visiting North Korea for the Pyongyang International Sports and Cultural Festival for Peace, I expected to see a show.
North Korea is probably the most tightly controlled and isolated nation on earth. It was ruled for decades by Kim Il Sung–better known as the “Great Leader”–who built up a tremendous cult of personality and ignored virtually every ethic of international diplomacy. When he died a year ago, power passed to his son, the “Dear Leader” Kim Jong Il, about whom little is known.
Travel to North Korea has long been strictly limited, and tourist visas are rarely issued to Americans. So if the government was letting us in, I reasoned, it had to be planning a major propaganda fete. However, though I expected a performance of some sort, nothing could have prepared me for the one we were given.
Our introduction to Pyongyang came at dusk when our three guides–who would almost never leave our sides–instructed our group of seven Americans, four Japanese and two Brits to board a mini-bus that would take us to dinner. The restaurant seemed far away , but when we asked for permission to walk home, it was given.
To my surprise, my first impression of Pyongyang was of a spacious and pleasant city. The air was mountain fresh, the streets pristine, and the architecture sometimes interesting, never hideous. The riverbank, lined with stone benches, seemed to beckon poets and dreamers. In the night sky, an electric flame flickered on the Tower of Juche Idea, Pyongyang’s monument to Kim Il Sung’s philosophy of self-reliance.
As we walked, I half began to suspect that I was not in a city but on a very large stage set. The streets were virtually devoid of traffic; even bicycles are tightly controlled in North Korea, and only the privileged few own them. Yet I noticed that all pedestrians used underpasses when crossing major streets, almost as though they were pretending there was a lot of traffic.
But of course when it came time for us to cross an empty street, we automatically started across at the corner. Our guide stopped us at once.
“We had better use the underpass,” he said.
“But, there are no cars,” I pointed out.
“Yes, but suppose a car came and something happened and they want to see your passports and they find you are American. Sentiments to Americans are not very good-people still remember the American bombs and soldiers who came here to eat us-and you might get hurt.”
We used the underpass.
As we walked on, my sense of being on a stage set only grew stronger. There were no trash cans anywhere, but neither was there any trash. No laundry hung from any window. There were no plants on any balcony. The city was dark, except for multicolored neon signs that praised the Great Leader. Looking up to examine an apartment building more closely, I saw a man painting his window frames. At 9:30 on a work night, this struck me as odd. Glancing higher, I saw that eight other people in the same building were also painting their window frames. And in the next block, I counted at least a dozen more painters in other buildings-finishing touches to the set?
It seemed that we had arrived in Pyongyang before the opening curtain. But when we awoke the next morning, the show was in full swing.
Our first day set the pattern for the week. We were told to be on the bus at 8 a.m., but-much to our guides’ chagrin-somebody inevitably overslept and thus made us late for every activity of the day. We were not told where we were going, or when we would return, and were never asked what we ourselves would like to see or do.
Our first destination was The Grand People’s Study House, a beautiful building that holds North Korea’s national library. The Study House, we were told in English by a pretty young librarian, has a 30 million book “capacity” and had been built entirely by Koreans with no outside help. After giving us time to gaze at a huge marble statue of Kim Il Sung, the librarian ushered us into a hall devoted to books written by and about Kim. Other rooms, she assured us, contained books about “other sciences.”
The Kim Il Sung Study Hall was filled with people studiously engaged in reading the Great Leader’s works. His portrait hung on the wall and a red banner emblazoned with the words “The Great Leader Kim Il Sung will always be with us” hung from the ceiling. The desks, which had surfaces that could be tilted, had been specially designed by Kim Il Sung after he came to the library and saw that people had difficulty reading his works on a flat surface.
Gently, the librarian pulled a book off the shelf and told us that the Great Leader had written more than 30,000 pages in his life.
“Which of Kim’s books is the most popular?” someone asked.
The librarian looked startled, as though such a question were unheard of.
“Why, they are all popular!” she exclaimed indignantly. “We like to read all of them.”
“But we are foreigners-we can’t read all of them. If we could only read one, which one would you recommend?”
“They are all worth reading.”
We looked to our guides for an opinion, but none was forthcoming.
“You see,” said the librarian more patiently, “the Great Leader was a greatly famous man. Everybody knows him and wants to read all his works. Former President Jimmy Carter knows him, too; he was so impressive.”
Our next destination was the mass gymnastics display, held daily for a month to commemorate King Il Sung’s April 15 birthday. After a quick stop at the Arch of Triumph-built to “glorify and eulogize forever the Great Leader Kim Il Sung’s immortal exploits”-we walked up to Kim Il Sung Stadium.
The sounds of children marching and singing filled the air. But as we got closer, we saw that the children-lined up in perfect military formation and segregated by age and sex-appeared to be very upset.
Tears were streaming down the girls’ faces and the somber-faced boys looked as if they would burst out sobbing at any minute. Horrified, I asked one of our guides what was wrong.
“The children are sad,” he explained, “because this is the first time the Great Leader will not be here to see the mass gymnastics display. They are singing, `We want to see the Great Leader Kim Il Sung! Why can’t we?”‘
We followed the children into the stadium where 50,000 other kids were already performing. On the field, thousands of girls swayed like a field of wheat as they sang the praises of socialist agriculture. When they ran off, they were replaced by thousands of boys who climbed on top of each other to form human skyscrapers as they glorified the achievements of socialist laborers.
But the activities on the field were only half the show. In the stands behind the gymnasts, tens of thousands of children sang, accompanying themselves with colored cards that they used to form giant murals in what can be best described as a symphony of colors. Murals were coordinated with the lyrics of the songs, and changes were lightning fast. The words “Korea is one country” were illustrated by a bright red map of a unified Korea with a shining star to indicate Pyongyang. When the Great Leader’s name was mentioned a second later, the cards were flipped to form a portrait of his beaming, bespectacled face. For a musical history of the Korean War, gymnasts used martial arts to portray the “defeat” of the “US imperialist aggressors” while the colored card holders painted battle scenes and weaponry.
The show was mesmerizing, and I watched until the end when thousands of 7-year-olds flooded onto the field, hung their heads, and sobbed as they sang, “The Great Leader’s face is like the sunlight. Why isn’t he here with us?”
Confused and disturbed, I wondered whether the children’s grief was genuine, or if they were simply crying on command. Reading my confusion, an American of South Korean ancestry hurried up to me and shouted, “None of this is real! You know that, right? They are brainwashed-they are all brainwashed!”
Later we were rushed off to the opening ceremonies of The Pyongyang International Sports and Cultural Festival for Peace, held in the 150,000-seat May Day Stadium. The stadium was full, and from our seats on the field we could see all around us. Balloons streaming the words “independence,” “welcome,” “peace,” and “friendship” floated above the crowd. Roughly a sixth of the seats were reserved for thousands of children who made murals with colored paper fans. The rest were occupied by families in formal dress, the men in suits and ties and the women in flowing traditional gowns.
Astoundingly, the centerpiece of the entire festival was to be a pro-wrestling tournament, so all eyes were turned toward the wrestling ring, which was set up in front of a huge portrait of Kim Il Sung. Special guest Muhammad Ali was escorted into a VIP seat to courteous applause and then numerous speeches were made about international solidarity, the bright future of Korea and the great contributions of the Dear Leader Kim Jong Il to the sport of professional wrestling. The guest of honor was Kanji Inoki, a Japanese professional wrestler and politician. Inoki, as he is known, was discovered and trained by North Korea’s national hero Rikidoozan, and had vowed to hold his last professional match in his teacher’s homeland.
When the speeches were over, a referee explained the rules of the sport, the stadium lights were dimmed, and the first match began. It seemed odd that the audience needed the rules explained, but it was even odder that all the contestants were Japanese and American. In full regalia, the wrestlers ran out to snippets of Deep Purple and Van Halen while the crowd watched in total silence. The sound effects were amplified, so the grunts of the wrestlers and the smack of their bodies hitting the mat resounded eerily across the hushed stadium.
After six matches, the opening ceremonies concluded and our guides ushered us from the stadium. As we walked out, the entire audience of 150,000 stood up and waved goodbye to us. All had bright smiles on their faces and all waved with their right arms fully extended, like the chorus might at the end of a musical.
And thus went each tightly scheduled day: frenetic “sightseeing” punctuated by entertainment. The entertainment was of all sorts-mass gymnastics, history plays, school plays, mass dancing, professional wrestling, colored-card turning, acrobatics. But as the week wore on, I found it increasingly difficult to draw the line between what was “theater” and what was “reality.”
Sometimes the answer was obvious. For instance, at the closing ceremonies of the Peace Festival-held the day after the opening ceremonies-the denouement was a wrestling match between Inoki and a bleached-blond American named Rick Flame. The American was winning for much of the match when suddenly he began leaping onto the ropes and belly-flopping onto the mat. Taking advantage of these “mistakes,” Inoki began to crush him, and the match ended with the American literally on his knees, wringing his hands in a plea for mercy.
Other times the answer was less clear. When we were carted off to a park for a picnic, we found that a history pageant involving song, dance and hundreds of actors was being performed on a sunny field. Were such performances held even when foreigners were not present? Off in the forest, but visible from the road, groups of Korean women in traditional dress picnicked, played accordions, sang and danced. The scene was idyllic. But was this how ordinary people around Korea celebrated May Day? Or, could it be that these people had actually been planted by the government?
By midweek, however, I became convinced that virtually everything I had seen was theater on the grandest scale imaginable, albeit theater in which many of the participants probably did not even realize they were acting. The turning point came on a day when we were taken to a school and then to the Children’s Palace.
The elementary and junior high school’s physical plant resembled any suburban American public school, except that the hallways were filled with photos of the Dear Leader and his alleged birthplace, a log cabin in a “secret camp” on Mt. Paekdu. But there the resemblance ended.
Touring it, we saw classrooms full of silent, rosy-cheeked children hard at work. In English class, the teacher interrupted recitations so we could help the children practice their English. The kids answered our basic questions and then queried us: Where were we from? Did we love Korea? Did we love Korean children? Did we love the Great Leader Comrade Kim Il Sung?
From English class, we were ushered into an empty auditorium. Seconds after we sat down, the curtain rose on an elaborate series of song and dance acts performed by kids ranging in age from 7 to 16. The girls wore heavy make-up and frilly dresses, the boys wore sequined shirts and white pants. All exuded confidence and handled the microphone with practiced ease. Music was rather incongruously provided by an electric keyboardist, a drummer and several girls in mini-skirts strumming on electric guitars.
Naturally, the songs and dances were all about the wonders of socialist Korea or the Great and Dear Leaders.
When the show was over, the children-singing “Our Great Leader Kim Il Sung Will Always Be With Us”-danced off the stage, attached themselves to our arms, and escorted us down three flights of stairs and out the door to our bus.
The school made me seriously doubt the spontaneity and naturalness of many things we had seen. But, at the sumptuous Children’s Palace, where children engage in after school “studies,” I became convinced that everything we had seen and would see was government-directed theater for which North Koreans are trained practically from birth.
Once again we had to sit through a show. The act that left me most aghast here was called “The Winter Dance.” In this routine, children danced merrily around with a shovel, planting things.
Then winter descended and a snowman-clearly meant to represent the U.S.-appeared in the corner of the stage. Without warning, the shovel turned into a nuclear bomb and the boy plunged it into the snowman. The children danced around angrily until the “bomb” fell sideways out of the snowman and his hat fell off. Then, for the finale, a boy danced over to the snowman, knocked his head off and kicked him off the stage.
“We’re not in Kansas anymore,” a British member of our group summed up as we exited the “palace.”
The allusion to Oz was fitting. Other comparisons that sprang to mind were to a warped Disneyland, a religious cult and China in the throes of the Cultural Revolution.
It was simply mind-boggling to think that every single thing we had seen thus far had been orchestrated by the government, from the people studying “Kimilsungism” in the Grand People’s Study House to the women singing and dancing in the forest. Indeed, I was hard-pressed to envision the degree of coordination and control that went into organizing 50,000 school children to do mass gymnastics, or 30,000 adults to perform synchronized May Day dances in Kim Il Sung Square. And compared to directing the individual actions of the two million inhabitants of Pyongyang, these were mere plays-within-the-play.
But, based on the performance we were given in the schools, it suddenly seemed clear to me that Pyongyang was not simply a stage set, but a live theater filled with people playing roles for our benefit. Even as I became convinced of this, I was not at all sure that the players on the stage thought of all this as “acting” in the sense of pretending to be something they were not, or trying to dupe us.
On the contrary-and to my dismay-as the week progressed, I became convinced that the boundless love many people expressed for Kim Il Sung was genuine. Shut off from virtually all contact with the outside world and trained-“brainwashed,” if you will-from childhood to believe that the Great Leader is their father and that he has saved them from the evils of “the U.S. imperialist aggressors” and the “South Korean puppets,” it may have seemed perfectly natural to them to answer their government’s call to serenade the enemy.
And, perhaps more to the point, they have been performing their whole lives anyway, in mass song, dance and gymnastics displays, and they have never had any choice in the matter; is it “acting” if you’ve been doing it your whole life? Somewhere in the country there had to be those who wouldn’t or couldn’t fill their assigned roles-just as I never heard a dissident voice in Pyongyang, I never saw a single handicapped person-but what happened to them was beyond my imagination.
Of course if you walk onto a stage on which a play is in progress, you become a part of the show whether you want to or not. The Pyongyang government’s intended role for me and the other “capitalist” tourists was obviously to be propaganda tools, both in our own countries and in North Korea.
As far as using us for external propaganda purposes, I’d have to conclude that Pyongyang failed totally.
For internal propaganda purposes, I would argue that they were only slightly more successful. We were filmed almost everywhere we went and often sought out by journalists. We responded by photographing the cameraman as he filmed us and by answering journalists’ questions with honest but nondescript statements such as “I’ve never been anywhere like this before!” The regime of course can use photographs of us staring at Kim Il Sung’s statue and caption it as Americans who have come to pay homage to the Great Leader.
And, if I’m going to be honest, I have to admit that we did all fall into role a bit; when I heard myself ask the question, “How many times did the Dear Leader come to the film studio to give on-the-spot guidance?” with a straight face, I could hardly believe my own ears.
But while North Korea’s leaders may have been able to apply every resource of the state to directing an extravaganza show of “the best socialist country in the world” using players who are literally born into their roles, in the end they could not script us.
They tried, of course. Our tight schedule was a means of controlling us-we got around it by sneaking out after we had been dropped off at night or by going out to explore at dawn. They forced our group to buy flowers at Kim Il Sung’s statue, but they couldn’t force me to lay them at his feet. The next time authorities insisted our group buy flowers to lay at a martyr’s cemetery, we simply refused.
More important, neither could the North Korean government script our interaction with the people we encountered. The families we lived with saw that even we Americans were nice, normal people, not the “beasts” of government propaganda. With random people we saw-at the festival, in performances, in schools-we always strove to have some sort of friendly interaction, despite the language barrier.
We asked provocative questions and were frank with our opinions. After touring the Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum and hearing the distorted North Korean view of the war for the umpteenth time, I told the guide that I disagreed with her, and why. Outside, when one of our own guides again referred to America as “the enemy” and our soldiers as “beasts” I told him that my father had fought in the war and that my father was a wonderful man, not a beast.
Our most meaningful interaction was, in fact, with our three guides because they spoke English and because we spent 18 hours a day with them. The relationship was tense at first. They made comments that were not only anti-American, but also just plain rude.
But our collective relationship with them warmed throughout the week. They stopped saying gratuitously mean things about America and began to treat us as individual human beings. We developed inside jokes. When we complained about being dragged from one museum to another, they sat down to negotiate with us how we would spend our last two days, and did their best to change the schedule according to our wishes.
On our last night in Pyongyang, the tour company that brought us in arranged a party for all 80 of us Western and Japanese tourists. At the party, our guides drank and danced with us till past midnight. And in the bus on the way back to our home stays, they sang folk songs for us and even asked us to sing for them. We obliged with “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” and “Amazing Grace.”
When it came time to fly back to Beijing the next morning, nobody was sorry to say goodbye to North Korea. But we were sorry to say goodbye to our guides, especially the one who had warmed to us the most. Though we had disagreed on every political and historical topic we’d discussed, we had no trouble agreeing with his goodbye wish to us.
“Who would have thought?” he said sadly. “Sworn enemies become friends. Let us hope that we are pioneers. Maybe someday our countries will also be friends.”
IF YOU REALLY WANT TO GO…
Is it legal to go? Though the U.S. doesn’t recognize the North Korean government and therefore has no diplomatic relations with Pyongyang, citizens may travel to North Korea without special permission or passport validations from the U.S. The only restriction: Spending is limited to items “ordinarily incident to travel,” including food, lodging, personal items, etc. The only caution from the State Department: With no embassy or consulate there, “the United States is unable to accord normal consular protection.”
Getting there: On your own, it’s not easy. In theory–that is, if you can get a visa–Chosonminhang, the North Korean airline, has twice-weekly flights into Pyongyang from Beijing (Tuesday, Saturday). Fares from Beijing are $120 one way, $230 round trip. Cathay Pacific Airlines (800-233-2742) can get you to Beijing for as little as $1,573 round trip from Los Angeles, then arrange the connection; United’s lowest Beijing-L.A. fare is $1,627. If you happen to be in Khabarovsk, on the Chinese border near Japan’s northern islands, Aeroflot (212-265-1185), the Russian airline, flies into Pyongyang from there. Fare: $600 round trip. There’s also a weekly flight from Bangkok and a couple each week from Moscow.
Train service between Beijing and Pyongyang (about a 24-hour ride vs. two hours by plane) is priced similarly to flying.
Getting in: You’ll need a U.S. passport and a visa from North Korea. Good luck on the visa. There is no North Korean embassy or consulate in the U.S., Canada or Mexico; the nearest is in Havana. In any case, North Korea issues few tourist visas to Westerners. For information, you can try writing Democratic Republic of Korea, Calle 17 752, Esq. a Paseo Vedado, Havana, Cuba; or phone 011-537-30-7428.
Maybe the best bet: Wings of the World, a Buffalo-based tour operator (800-465-8687) that specializes in non-standard destinations (Burma, Cuba, Papua New Guinea, etc.), runs fully escorted, all-inclusive North Korea trips monthly from April through October. The operator also takes care of the visas. “We are an approved company,” said rep Richard Thaken. Cost: $5,595 (per person, double occupancy) from Los Angeles; from Chicago, add $275. Single supplement, $795.
