Pyongyang calling: we spent a week in North Korea

one of the things that you know we go there as a country with a personality cult there's pictures of grandfather father and son so that's Kim Il Sung Kim jong-il and Kim joined the current leader absolutely everywhere by the end of the week I started to find it quite creepy this sort of permanent smiles that you couldn't challenge or question even just spending seven days inside a personality cold is quite overwhelming quite disturbing you have to accept reporting conditions there that you probably wouldn't accept anywhere else you're constantly accompanied by minders although they don't like being called minders in our case two very nice guys called mr. Kim and mr. Lee we were never officially told we couldn't go anywhere without them but it was made pretty clear that we were not to leave the hotel and they organized a very packed schedule from early in the morning until late at night went to water park to a zoo to a funfair to a stamp Museum and it was sort of interesting because it felt very much like they were trying to show us a very specific image of ordinary life in Pyongyang I think if you look at a lot of reporting from North Korea it's often focused on sort of regimented mass events and we'd actually asked to see some of that because that's obviously a big part of life in North Korea people have to do a lot of stuff kind of in unison but none of those requests were actually met so we only saw the capital which everybody who studies North Korea says this is a different world from the rest of North Korea it's a city of these quite almost real apartment blocks and they've seem to really love pastel colors and it's all arranged so that real life happens around the back so it's almost like the main streets or show front [Music] the bag Factory was next at the back of one of these apartment blocks when we were going back to the bus I just would have wandered off to have a look there were some people taking cold deliveries there was some people with armbands sitting outside a little sign maybe for a shop selling things and my first indication that this was maybe a little bit sensitive was two women started getting quite cross with me and then the guides who'd been somewhere else came sort of running over and said no no you can't take pictures here you've got to get back on the bus and I realized later it's part of this sort of desire to show this very manicured manufactured perfected image of North Korean society and also maybe that they don't want you to sort of understand some of the details of control and later found out that North Korea apparently has residents committees usually older women to check their dress fits what North Korea sort of unofficial standards consider acceptable we were there for the anniversary of Kim il-sung's birthday which is known as the day of the Sun and is something like a sort of North Korean Christmas really North Koreans strenuously deny that it's a religion but it has pretty much all the trappings of a religion including even a kind of nativity myth as a village just on the outskirts of Pyongyang which is meant to be where Kim il-sung was born the great-grandfather of the president was so poor they cannot afford the house so he became a grave keeper and moved to this house in 1862 under the wise leadership of our president Kim ISM and the great General Kim insomnia our country has become the strongest one of the world last year as you know we accomplished the course of perfecting our national nuclear forces sends to the wise leadership of our respect to the supreme leader comrade kim jong people go there to pay homage to leave flowers they would go to the well and drink some of the revolutionary water to make themselves revolutionary and put some bottles and take it away and then this little sort of farmers cave you see it reproduced all over the country and paintings in posters and while we were there it was the centerpiece and the theme of the Kim il-sung Ghia Kim Jong nearly a flower festival that happens every year in Pyongyang North Koreans take these fans really seriously you can buy books of how sort of identify a perfect human singular that Kim doing in Ihram believe and families are there and everybody's sort of enjoying looking at the flowers taking pictures of each other taking pictures of death Emily mr. Kim and mr. Lee they wouldn't always translate things so it soon became evident after sort of I think just a day or two that nobody in Pyongyang knew that Kim was planning to meet with trunk and whenever we tried to ask questions about that it was related what they would say this is not time for asking political questions they were never outright say nobody knows about this or you're not allowed to do it they would just be incredibly evasive here's this summit that's builders sort of crucial for world peace and you know a big step that Kim is sort of talking up internationally but domestically his own people have no idea that it's going to happen it you know it gives you a sense of how incredibly shut off from the rest of the world people are that you were taken to a lot of sort of places where people are having fun and obviously the back of your mind is always a question is all of this returning with this a show for me I feel like you do get a sense of life in Pyongyang it didn't eat the people who were lucky enough to live in Pyongyang the 10% of North Koreans experts estimate have a security comfortable life at the same time it was interesting and important to see this other side of life because it's very very very hard to leave North Korea and if you do leave your family are often punished for it so there's a lot of people in North Korea who perhaps they want to be there or might want to go somewhere else but don't really feel they have any choice [Laughter] don't forget and we're thinking about difficult places whether that's a sort of extreme dictatorship like North Korea or a war zone like Syria is people do try to sort of squeeze what enjoyment they can from life if there's any chance of that there's a lot of ordinary people who were just trying to get on with their lives get their children to school [Music] to take the risk of being captured except when a Bergkamp rats executed or they don't want to leave all their family behind their cousins their parents their siblings [Music] so many phones in Pyongyang everywhere we went people taking selfies snapping away I mean in that sense you sort of could have been anywhere the amount of phones and the sort of enthusiasm for using them North Korea is sealed but it's not as sealed as it used to be you know information does come in there's a lot of evidence that a lot of North Koreans are watching South Korean soap operas that the penalty for doing that is incredibly high are you risking arrest being sent to a labor camp even execution but people do it anyway some of the experts like I spoke to after I left have a really interesting perspective which was that Kim knew that that awareness of this world was reaching into North Korea that there was some understanding even if it was very limited of what people could access in the outside world that they had internet that they could order things online and so he was sort of creating a North Korean version of that society co-opting the elite or limiting their discontent because what they have might not be as good as what you have outside North Korea but it they can look at anything well actually I have a smartphone I can take pictures I mean that speaks I think to something we saw everywhere we went in Pyongyang which is that Kim jong-un is trying to create for a tiny elite but for an elite who are essential to his continuation in power a sort of simulacrum of a Western consumer society [Music] we went to a shoe factory where there was a sort of display shelf of what looked like Western shoes and so we asked about the music what are these shoes doing here and they said oh they were given to us by the dear leader Kim jong-un to inspire us to make better shoes you think North Korea really is facing off with the West as you know sort of attacking America condemning America criticizing America not trying to copy American trainers unusual soulful school I mean one of the big questions people was asked is should you even go to North Korea is that and is there any point given that it's so stage-managed that you're being sort of constantly what through constantly second-guessing how much this is real how much of this has been set up for me to see to sort of treat me essentially that it's your puzzle but at the same time as a journalist I do actually feel that there is a purpose and a sense in going to places like this and just even if all you're seeing is what they want to present you with their choice of what to show you the questions even that you aren't allowed to ask can be so revealing occasionally we sort of go through a back street and catch a glimpse of another world you know sort of homemade tractor cobbled together from parts or things like that but may see we were being shown this very glitzy front of a country where there are still people getting hungry and where there's absolutely appalling human rights abuse is one of the worst networks of sort of concentration and labor camps that exist anywhere in the world one of the cruelest harshest regimes one of the strictest sort of political punishment systems [Music] so it was trying to balance the chance to get at least a glimpse of North Korea to have some sense of life there or how Kim jong-un was trying to change North Korea while maintaining himself in power without as a journalist forgetting the fact that this was a very manufactured part so we were constantly trying to balance those two things [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] you [Music]

Channel: The Guardian

Views: 1,304,742

Rating: 4.5044727 out of 5

Keywords: world, politics, north korea, korea, kim jong-un, kim jong-il, kim il-sung, guardian, dictatorship, swimming pool, dolphinarium, factory, karaoke, girl band, juche, pyongyang, documentary, north korea documentary, north korean propaganda, north korea military parade, inside north korea, north kroea vlog, north korea dolphins, north korea funfair, north korea school, cult, north korea visit, visiting north korea, visit north korea, going to north korea, north korea 2019, north korea trip

Id: LJRTzsW3GT4

Length: 13min 15sec (795 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 24 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/SyncTek]

As with a lot of people I got fascinated with North Korea and started looking up all the videos I could find.

It is only recently that really high quality videos have started to come out but you will quickly find out that they more or less have the samething in them.

None of these videos present anything new. They show what they regime wants them to film and nothing else.

[u/[deleted]]

This video is stupid.

We have seen this video a millon times from a million different outlets. And it's nothing but propaganda. Poor propaganda sure, but propaganda none the less. They only film what the regime wants them to film.

And what's worse I bet nickels to pickles that the Guardian paid for the access.

This is softball journalism that does nothing for anyone.

[u/renderline]

She questions on how much value there is showing this and then defends it, thing is there are so many videos like this, it's literally worthless. It's like reporting on the same thing with the same viewpoint.

[u/Ahh_forget_about_it]

I thought that bit towards the end about Pyongyang culture was really interesting. The idea that Kim is creating a sort of 'fake', North Korean version of western consumer culture is a fascinating idea. Because the video is right, people from N. Korea do find out and know about life outside of their country, even if it's a really limited, stunted version of that life.

Giving the people (and by people I mean the elites that get to live in Pyongyang, not the starving and poor farmers who make up most of the country) their own version as a way to satisfy them is pretty smart on the government's part. Give them just enough to make them feel like they're part of that consumer culture, but not enough freedom to actually go against the government or demand more.

[u/[deleted]]

I hope that these journalists realize 90% of the money they spent in pyongyang went towards either 1. developing a nuclear weapon in which to hold the world hostage or 2. maintaining concentration camps which work entire generations of families to death

but I guess thats okay, because the NK propaganda ministry got to bamboozle another idiotic western optimist into forgetting the millions of people the NK government starves on a 10 year cycle...

[u/bagged_]

Let's send a reporter who has little ability to connect or communicate with people living there. She might as well have stayed home and read a brochure.

[u/duglock]

Considering she is a british journalist she probably thought that NK wasnt more to the left.

[u/General_Juicebox]

BREAKING NEWS: North Korea is a Shit Place to Live

[u/[deleted]]

@10:30 she says, "Unusual sole for a sports shoe." Those are Asic TOW 727 weightlifting shoes. They're awesome.