All Monsters Must Die (20 page)

There is no normal diplomatic life in Pyongyang, says Cornell in
North Korea under Communism: Report of an Envoy to Paradise
. The North Korean military has built tunnels under embassy buildings so that they can enter them through holes in the floor. At the Swedish embassy, local employees are chosen by the North Korean state. During Cornell's time, the housekeeper was most likely an intelligence officer. Once, when she was serving at a formal dinner party, they heard the crackling sound of audio surveillance equipment under her
joseonot
.

Cornell describes how the staff at the embassy were not allowed any contact with regular Koreans. Even the ambassadors from Communist countries were not permitted to engage in any form of intellectual exchange with the citizens. During a banquet, the wife of the Cuban ambassador tried to discuss North Korean burial customs with a female senior official in the North Korean administration, Cornell writes. She had noticed that there were no burial grounds in Pyongyang. When she asked about it, the official replied seriously: “You understand, here in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea people do not die so much.”

WE SIT DOWN
at a table that Trond has already filled with beer bottles. But Trond can't sit still. He goes over to the ambassador's table and circles it like a drugged circus bear. He slaps one of the Bromma boys on the back, and shoves his business card under the ambassador's nose. The Bromma boys' gazes wander. This isn't how they imagined their last night in Pyongyang. The trip to this bizarre country was supposed to have been crowned with an invitation to supper in a magnificent dining room in the embassy.

BRUNO SITS CLOSEST
to the window at our table. He hasn't shaved and he looks worn out. He is tired of his job in Beijing and he's tired of being single. His business manufactures precision instruments for medical use. It's hard for us to reconcile the image of his large mass with a precision scale that can measure a thousandth of a gram.

Bruno wants to move on. He wants to get a better job in the United States, but he says it's impossible if you've been caught on camera bowing to a Kim Il-sung statue. He's slouching and looks regretful.

“But I didn't bow,” he says in his Schwarzenegger accent. “No, I didn't bow.”

He seems to have forgotten where he is; he's mostly talking to himself. He looks out into the darkness: “No, I didn't bow.”

We don't want to say that we have just seen him bow to a Kim Il-sung statue in the
The Movie of Our Trip
.

* * *

AT HIS OCTOBER
2007 meeting in Pyongyang with South Korea's President Roh Moo-hyun, Kim Jong-il flattered his enemy and acknowledged his desires. President Roh handed over 150
DVD
s to add to Kim's cherished collection, among them popular films and South Korean
TV
series.

Shin Sang-ok said in an interview with the
Guardian
in 2003 that Kim Jong-il preferred action films, “sex films,” and horror films. His favourites were Hong Kong action films, James Bond movies, and
Friday the 13th
. Shin said that Kim Jong-il generally considered all movies to be a reflection of reality. “I had to explain to him that most American films were fictional.”

Kim Jong-il is often openly mocked about his film fanaticism in newspapers and magazines. We are painted a picture of a giant baby who appears in his own infantile cinematic fantasies. To the dictator, a lightsaber and a Scud missile fall into the same category. His gluttony for film goes hand in hand with his decadence, his cognac, and his food orgies.

But you can also turn it around and see Kim Jong-il as a leader who fully understands the political and myth-making power of film. For the Third Reich and the Soviet Union, propaganda wasn't hollow; it was a comprehensive reality for the people.

North Korea's leader has learned that film has the power to simultaneously create, mirror, and reshape the national identity and mentality. The Second World War's victors mirrored themselves in heroic self-representation, while the war's losers made films that broke with tradition — films that helped these nations work through the trauma as they tried to piece together the shards of their shattered identities — Italian neorealism and Japanese monster movies, for example. Shin Sang-ok's melodramas may have served this purpose in South Korea in the 1950s.

IN
OUR ESCAPE
HAS NOT YET ENDED
— the book that the film couple published in 2001 — Shin says, just as Madame did during our conversation, that you have to take the dictator's film knowledge seriously. According to Shin, Kim Jong-il is also an authority on music. The leader can easily identify which instrument in a symphony orchestra is playing off-key.

The book also gives a detailed account of the function of the North Korean film archive. The archive is kept in a building, like a super-brain or a motherboard. Located behind massive steel fences in the heart of Pyongyang, the structure is climate-controlled, fully maintained, and guarded by 250 employees. The symbolism couldn't be more potent.

SHIN AND MADAME
were first introduced to the archive on March 14, 1983. The three-storey building may be the largest film repository in the world. Voice actors, translators, subtitle specialists, projectionists and recording specialists, in addition to security and other types of workers, are employed here. All the North Korean films that have ever been made are stored in a special room.

Later, when Shin and Madame were given free access to the collection, Shin made a discovery: he found the missing negatives of the first version of the
Shim Cheong
myth from 1972. He had sent it to Kim Guh-wha at Shin Films in Hong Kong so it could be subtitled in Chinese. It was clear that the same man who had sent these negatives to Kim Jong-il had also lured Madame into the trap.

During our conversation, Madame had mentioned an audio recording of an hours-long monologue that Kim Jong-il had delivered in October 1983. Madame, taking a great risk, had secretly recorded forty-five minutes of it. Military intelligence services consider her recording to be one of the leading sources in revealing the dictator's psychological make-up. It speaks volumes about how Kim Jong-il views the role of culture in winning over the masses:

We send our people to East Germany to study editing, to Czechoslovakia to study camera technology, and to the Soviet Union to learn directing. Other than that, we cannot send our people to go anywhere since they are enemy states. No France, no West Germany, no Great Britain. We especially have to have conduct exchange with Japan, but we cannot even allow [North Korean] people to watch Japanese films. We end up analyzing foreign films to imitate them but there is a limit to what we can do, but our efforts have brought no progress. I have been struggling with this problem for five years [since 1978]. All we ended up doing was to send a couple of people to the Soviet Union after the liberation and to establish a Film Institute, but they are not that impressive after all. I acknowledge that we lag behind in filmmaking techniques. We have to know that we are lagging behind and make efforts to raise a new generation of filmmakers.

Considering Juche Thought's emphasis on self-reliance, it may seem illogical to kidnap people from the outside world simply because you need them. But perhaps the need for specialized skills was greater than the Juche ideal of self-reliance.

As the head of cinematic arts, Kim Jong-il had decided to make a concerted effort to liven up North Korean film. His obedient workers in the state film industry knew the appropriate topics to cover and that cinema was a tool for political education. But their productions were mind-numbingly dull. Shin Sang-ok was a star who had fallen out of favour, and Madame Choi was a legend. He needed their raw talent to gild his existence and to get the art of cinema back on its feet. Above all, it seems that Kim Jong-il was searching for the key to melodrama. He felt that if you perfected the art of the melodrama, then you could engage people's emotions. This was the crucial secret ingredient that would elevate North Korean propaganda.

DAY 8

Little Boy

THE CODE NAME
for the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was “Little Boy.” When the artist Takashi Murakami gave the same name to his 2005 exhibition about post-war aesthetics in Japan, he wanted to shed light on a national trauma. The Americans dropped two atomic bombs. Japan lost the war and ties to its ancient samurai traditions were cut. According to Murakami the bomb castrated the Japanese men and infantilized the country. The Japanese post-war constitution was a carbon copy of America's, with one exception: the unique Article 9, stipulating that Japan would never arm itself again. Japan's fate was sealed, and what followed was the nation's descent into a world of cute. Japan became
kawaii
(the Japanese word for cuteness) and Japanese men became “Little Boys.”

The poster for
Little Boy
depicts a decorative, flattened mushroom-cloud shape that melds the atomic bomb with the plasticity of the cartoon character Barbapapa. The exhibition was a symphony of pop-culture objects and images from the
otaku-
king's kingdom:
kawaii
objects, monster movies, anime, manga, and art. With Godzilla's direct link to the bomb, the monster was featured prominently. “
Otaku
” is the name that was given to a group of Japanese people who, during the economic bubble of the 1980s, turned their back on society and instead obsessed over their hobbies: collecting dolls, model-building, reading manga, and full-time idol worship.

Takashi Murakami's approach can be compared to Andy Warhol's. He doesn't add anything to the culture; instead, he copies it, blows it up in scale, and increases its value. He endows it with clarity and highlights its sorrows and its pains. Of his Mickey Mouse–like character, Mr.
DOB
, Murakami says: “He is cute but has no meaning and understands nothing of life, sex, or reality.” Murakami leaves the true meaning of cuteness open to interpretation — is it about camouflage, working through a trauma, or an embodiment of helplessness? And in that case, who is helpless: the stuffed animal or those who worship it?

YOU COULD SAY
that Kim Jong-il is a super-
otaku
, a nerd who has unlimited resources to stage his own passions. You could also say that he created his own interpretation of the neo-liberal term “soft power.” Soft power, a concept developed by the American political scientist Joseph Nye, refers to a country's ability to assert its influence not by military force or with economic strength, but with its ability to create an attractive culture. In soft power, pop culture is used to disseminate hidden political messages on a meta-level.

For the past ten years, soft power has risen to become one of the most important economic and political means of persuasion in Japan, and Takashi Murakami has been its prophet. “Cute” in today's Tokyo is all-encompassing. The term “
kawaii
” has become a pop-culture buzzword, but it also manifests across the city: in advertisements, clothes, costumes, accessories, signs, vehicles, and architecture. The streets are filled with the sound of teenage girls calling out “
Kawaii!
” The Asahi Bank features Hello Kitty's predecessor Miffy on its
ATM
s; Monchhichis, stuffed toy monkeys, adorn packets of condoms; Nippon Airways paid one million dollars to license the famous Pokémon characters in order to plaster them on a few of their Boeing aircraft. On signs advertising the Japanese army — the army that is officially called the Japan Self-Defense Forces — soldiers are depicted as cute action figures.

THROUGHOUT HIS ENTIRE
career, Kim Jong-il has loved illusion, drama, and performance. The more lavish the better. His people are schooled in theatrics, which also seep into their daily lives. Through song, gestures, and costume they embody the utopian nation every day. But by 1978 the leader wanted to reach new heights. For this, he needed melodrama.

Kim Jong-il was clearly dissatisfied with his country's attempts at the genre so far. In a conversation recounted by Shin Sang-ok, he complained about North Korean film: “[The] works have the same expressions, redundancies, the same old plots. All our movies are filled with crying and sobbing. I didn't order them to portray that kind of thing.” He wanted real melodrama, not just buckets of tears.

Threats instil fear in a populace. But the threat of an uprising is ever present. Maybe the dictator wanted to complement his harsh methods with softness as a way of winning the hearts of his citizens. Clearly, he had demonstrated an intuitive understanding of soft power when he called for his people to engage in the delicate business of kidnapping Choi Eun-hee and Shin Sang-ok. He seemed to have won over the now hyper-disciplined bodies of the citizens, bodies that took part in parades and performed synchronized gymnastics, all in a neat row. But by making use of the beautiful, the cute, the comic, and the dramatic, he penetrated their inner lives too.

* * *

IN THE 1980S,
Kim Jong-il often travelled in his armoured train to cities in North Korea and the Soviet Union. But on several occasions he also took the boat to Tokyo, presumably to secretly watch Hikita Tenko's magic shows at the Cordon Bleu show pub in Akasaka.

As a young singer in the mid-1970s, Mariko Itakura had inherited a famous male magician's act. Oddly enough, she also took over his name and his debts and transformed the act into a great success. Part alien and part anime queen, she delivered hi-tech acts in nightclubs in Macao, featuring lasers and flying unicorns. With her waist-length black hair and wearing a tight red dress, she performed a water tank escape act. She turned her business into a minor empire with its own
TV
series, perfume, wine, and fashion collections.

Hikita Tenko is the name of one of her two alter egos, and was the name she inherited along with the act. As a character, Hikita is shy and doesn't say much. She is forced to work hard during the performance — nothing comes for free — and she reacts to pulling off her escape act with a vague sense of surprise. Japanese men like cute women, women who need to be protected, and they feel threatened by strong ones. But her other character, Princess Tenko, who performs outside of Japan, is powerful and determined. She is an eternally young heroine.

Every year, Princess Tenko announces that she is twenty-four years old. She says that she wants to live up to the Princess Tenko figures sold by Barbie-manufacturer Mattel, Inc. So, like a doll, she can't change her hair, age, or appearance. So far, she has managed to maintain her doll-like appearance. But of course this isn't sustainable in the long term. So, who knows, perhaps in the future she will be replaced by another Hikita Tenko — whether male or female.

IN A 2007
interview in the
Japan Times
, Hikita Tenko revealed what had happened during the trips she made to North Korea.

In 1988, she visited Pyongyang to perform at the Spring Friendship Art Festival. She discovered that the city was in the process of building a special Princess Tenko theatre. Her hosts suggested that it would be best for her to settle in Pyongyang.

But she didn't have any plans to move to North Korea. She was Japan's most famous illusionist and performed across the globe, and she spent long periods of time in the United States. In 1994, 165,000 people saw her shows at Radio City Music Hall in New York City.

After some discussion, she was allowed to go back to Japan, on the condition that she would return in a few months. Tenko didn't want to go back to North Korea, but she was subjected to an intense campaign of persuasion. Mysterious things happened in her home. A highly collectible Mickey Mouse figurine was stolen from her car. After a while, she found it in her apartment. Then her family was put under pressure, and in 2000 she finally gave in and decided to return to Pyongyang, where she performed for Kim Jong-il and was invited to his palace.

“What did you talk about with Kim Jong-il?” asked the reporter for the
Japan Times
.

“Well, about the world of entertainment and about illusion . . . but also ordinary things,” Tenko replied.

She was given a snowy-white Pungsan, an ancient and rare breed of North Korean hunting dog. The two other puppies from the litter were given to South Korea's then-president, Kim Dae-jung, during his historic visit with Kim Jong-il in June of that same year.

What did he see in Princess Tenko? Was he entranced by her extravagant aesthetic? Or did it have something to do with the act of illusion itself — the ability to defy the laws of physics and turn fantasy into reality? Were the magic acts more real and more convincing than film? Maybe it had something to do with her eternal youth and beauty, or the mysterious assumption of identities throughout her career? Hikita Tenko seemed to have mastered the art of creating an image of herself, and then imitating that same image.

After her meeting with the North Korean leader, Tenko was informed that it had been decided that she would move to Pyongyang. An excellent solution for all, it was agreed. Everything had been arranged to the highest standard: she was going to be given a beautiful house with domestic staff; a theatre that was specially equipped for grand illusions had been built for her. But Princess Tenko didn't want to be the singing nightingale trapped in the emperor's palace. She protested, but felt powerless. Soon she fell ill. North Korean doctors furnished her with medicine that made her even weaker. The German doctor Norbert Vollertsen paid her a series of visits at the hospital. He was working for the German relief organization Cap Anamur in North Korea and would later write a report about the terrible living conditions in the countryside. During one visit, Vollersten advised her to stop taking her medicine. But the North Korean doctors flew into a rage and forced the German to leave the room.

Hikita Tenko spent one month in the hospital in Pyongyang before she was on her feet again. She explained to the guards that she had to travel to the United States to record the final voiceover for the animated
Princess Tenko
series. For this, she was irreplaceable. She swore that she would return immediately. Princess Tenko slipped out of Kim Jong-il's cage and flew home to Japan. There, she was assigned a police escort. The Japanese secret service wanted to know every detail about her visit with Kim Jong-il.

* * *

CUTENESS AND FEAR.
There's an important similarity between
Godzilla
and
Pulgasari
: the ambiguous treatment of fear as a theme. In both films, the monsters are expected to be terrifying: they are harbingers of destruction, they run wild, and they can eradicate all things human. But they also have another, palliative side. By the 1960s movies, the Japanese Godzilla monster was furnished with far fewer teeth. Its eyes were bigger and its mouth was turned up into something of a smile. The costume was rounded out to give a softer impression, and the monster's battles were inspired by wrestling matches and animated series. The wrestling star Rikidōzan was incredibly popular at the time and the fights were modelled on his matches. When
Monster Zero
was being shot in 1965, the film crew protested Godzilla's victory dance after it knocks out the terrifying three-headed lizard King Ghidorah. It was far too ridiculous, they said. But Tsuburaya insisted the dance would make the children happy.

In
Pulgasari
, Shin stressed this ambivalence between fear and cuteness by portraying the monster as a playful and, frankly, cute character. As a baby, Pulgasari is an animated doll with playful eyes. In one scene, the monster jokes around with the heroine and her brother, and they laugh delightedly at its hijinks.

IN THE PERIOD
after Shin Sang-ok escaped from North Korea, the monster's journey into cuteness reached its final destination. In 1986, Shin and Madame were given U.S. residency permits. They had the opportunity to withdraw from the spotlight and live out their days quietly, but Shin wasn't made for sipping ice tea under an umbrella. In the coming years, Shin was hired to direct
3 Ninjas Knuckle Up
, the third film in a series of American children's movies, and he was also made an executive producer on
3 Ninjas Kick Back
and
3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain
.

In 1996, he wrote the script for
Galgameth
, a benign fantasy film. The film was released without fanfare and went straight to video, ending up among the rows of other neglected
VHS
tapes in the children's section of video stores. But those who know the film's backstory understand its value.
Galgameth
is the last branch of the monster family tree that began with
Godzilla
in Japan, continued with
Pulgasari
in North Korea, and ended there in Hollywood. And it was Shin Sang-ok who was responsible for this fantastic arc.

Most of the film was shot in a castle in Romania. In contrast to
Pulgasari
, the production is virtually flawless. The story follows a little prince who wakes up sad. The king is dead. The prince has cried himself to sleep, still shielded from the grim knowledge that his father didn't die of natural causes. The power-hungry black knight, El El, poisoned him and is preparing to usurp the throne. But before the beloved father died, he presented his son with a valuable gift: a small stone sculpture of a strange creature. He called it Galgameth. When the prince's tears land on the sculpture something happens and, during the night, the figure is cloaked in a cloud of stardust.

In the light of dawn, the prince discovers something moving under his blanket. A little lizard-like creature is there, looking at him with round, playful eyes. The prince regards the monster with surprise. The creature leaps onto the chandelier and sinks its teeth in: the monster has an appetite for iron. It doesn't take long for the creature to grow several times its original size. Neither sword nor lance can pierce his armour-like body. Galgameth leads the charge against the black knight. The people are victorious, but the monster has to sacrifice itself for the cause. All monsters must die.