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Jet-Setting Heir to North Korean Throne Speaks

January 27, 2009 7:14 AM

By JOOHEE CHO, Reporter, ABC News Seoul

The Japanese media’s obsession with North Korea amazes me. Today, I was channel surfing at a remote hot spring resort room in Kinugawa Onsen and came across NTV's daily evening magazine show called "Real  Time." It was airing an interview with the North Korean leader's eldest son, Kim Jong Nam, followed by an exclusive hidden-camera report on the communist country's black market.

As a reporter covering the Korean peninsula for the past 15 years, I was half surprised and admittedly half envious over their luck at getting those two currently-most-wanted stories on camera. The world is eagerly watching and guessing as to when the famine-struck country might collapse, as well as who will succeed the  "Dear Leader" Kim Jong Il, who is old and reportedly ill.

So, grasping every sense of what little Japanese I could understand, here's what I saw on NTV. They caught Kim Jong Nam in Beijing, wearing a black down jacket with matching black Ray-Ban-style sunglasses. Surrounded by about a dozen reporters, he spoke in broken but comprehensible English.

Asked about his father's health, he replied that he cannot say anything because that kind of information is a "state secret."  A follow-up question: do you want to be the successor? He answered with a shrug. "That is too early to tell. My father will decide when he decides... but personally I'm not interested at all."

As he tried to walk away, reporters continued to fire questions at him. "Do you speak Japanese?" "Do you like Japan?" (Obviously, these reporters were Japanese.) Kim's answer: "No, but I think Japan is clean and economically interesting." Another reporter asked a question in Japanese. With a smirk, Kim replied, "I told you I don't speak Japanese. I speak English and French." 

When another reporter asked whether he wants to travel to Japan, my first journalistic instinct was that that was the end of the interview, since we ask sensitive questions last. Kim Jong Nam was kicked out of Japan in 2001 for trying to enter the country with a fake Dominican passport. He has said he wanted to visit Tokyo Disneyland.

Surprisingly, Kim was not upset; rather, he seemed to enjoy the attention. He simply gave a silent laugh and said, "I cannot travel to Japan since that day a few years ago."

Kim got in a taxi, alone. It was odd to see the Dear Leader's eldest son without a North Korean diplomat or an official escorting him in a limousine, which, after all, gives weight to the theory that he is an outcast at the moment because of his western lifestyle and his birth background.

He was born to a woman whom his father fell in love with, against the late founder Kim Il Sung's approval. She was married to another man at the time. Naturally, Kim Jong Nam's mother was never officially recognized as the first lady, which makes him a child out of wedlock.

NTV cameras followed Kim's taxi to the hotel. They caught up to him in the hotel lobby, this time without his sunglasses: chubby face and double chin, in striking similarity to his father's younger days. He said he was lucky because he can travel freely around the world. Asked whether his father approves, he replied, "Of course. I won't be able to travel without his permission."

While Kim hops around the world, NTV's next report was on the starving people of his country. Shot with a hidden camera inside a North Korean town, the visuals were simply appalling. Children were wandering around the market scavenging for leftover food from trash. One boy was lying down on the roadside, too weak and sick to get up, but people were passing by as if he was not there. The cameraman went back to that spot three days later only to find him still there.

In another scene shot late at night, the cameraman -- whose accent was North Korean -- talked to three young boys shivering in the cold hunched together in the woods. They were orphaned after their parents died of hunger.

North Korea's famine is nothing new. But what was new caught on camera was the vibrant black market. Street vendors sold color TVs, DVDs, cassette recorders, electronic rice makers, and even food mixers.

Next to those shops were lines of young women sitting on plastic chairs holding up cardboards with lists of items they could sell. Most were electronic goods, clothing, shampoo and hair conditioner, and skin care products.

Men with rickshaws wooed customers, offering delivery service. In the outskirts of that main market were older women crouched on the ground selling vegetables. Later, a policeman showed up to chase them away. Selling and buying without government license, especially in the black market, is heavily punished in North Korea.

At the end of the show one thought reverberated in my mind: where humans live, everybody will find a way to make a living, somehow. But those children... in the dark, in the cold...who will help them?

Read more blogs from Joohee Cho

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January 27, 2009 in Joohee Cho | Permalink | User Comments (8)

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