When Google Maps announced in January that they were about to publish satellite images of North Korea, the world waited with baited breath. Here was an unprecedented opportunity to see the world’s most shrouded state. But as users zoomed into the mountains and towns – and even the gulags – it became clear that the outside world was no closer to understanding the lives of regular people in North Korea.
The arrivals board at Sunan International Airport in Pyongyang is perhaps the most emblematic image of the DPRK’s separation from the rest of the world. It’s not often switched on, despite the odd scheduled flight from Beijing, Shenyang, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok and Vladivostok. So the board sits still, no clanking letters changing to announce the latest alighting of cheerful visitors. The airport is not even equipped with Instrument Landing Systems; if the weather is bad, flights are cancelled or even turned back en route.
Tourist visas are only granted to residents of countries with diplomatic missions in Pyongyang, and even so only under strict conditions: the entire trip must be fully booked – flights, accommodation and insurance – far in advance for a visa to even be considered.
They are often turned down. Upon arrival, the mobile phones of foreigners are tightly packaged and locked in the airport for the duration of their stay.
Beyond the airport, precautions tighten. Visitors are not allowed to travel alone in the country and must be accompanied by an experienced guide at all times. In Pyongyang, there are only two hotels equipped for tourists. Most westerners are accommodated in the Yanggakdo International Hotel, situated on a small island in the centre of the Taedong River. Here, the main doors are reportedly locked at sundown and speculation is rife about the use of the mysteriously inaccessible fifth floor.
Cameras are allowed, but their owners are instructed to ask permission before every picture taken. They are subject to inspection at the airport and may be confiscated or have the memory wiped. Pictures of the country are thus rare, despite a relatively steady influx of small parties of visitors. North Korean policy is meticulously designed to present guests with the most carefully manicured facet of its society, but if something slips through the veneer, officials are at hand to deal with the evidence.
Same difference
Pyongyang is a city of sprawling boulevards but little traffic, where a solitary bus trundling down a four-lane highway is an eerie but regular sight. However, since Kim Jong-un assumed the reigns of the Kim dynasty in the wake of his father Kim Jong-il’s death, the number of smart cars zipping down the avenues is said to be slowly increasing.
Many had hoped that the son’s ascension would signal a break away from the father’s notoriously hard-line approach to governing. There are certainly more mobile phones, even if they are blocked for international calls, but food prices have spiked – partly because of drought and partly because a bungled rocket launch led to the US withdrawal of food aid.
“People were hopeful that Kim Jong-un would make our lives better, but so far they are disappointed,” said a Mrs Park, who spoke to the New York Times under the condition of anonymity during government-sanctioned trips to Dadong in South Korea, where herself and three other North Koreans spoke to the media. North Korean society can be divided into three political castes. At the top are the regime’s elite, who supposedly rarely interact with foreigners and live in exclusive and relatively luxurious villas, apart from the rest of the population. Then there is the outer elite, city-dwellers implementing decisions from the top. At the bottom are the population from the embattled countryside; these are the citizens most likely to bear the brunt of famines and extreme poverty.
But according to John Everard, Britain’s former ambassador to North Korea, despite the many difficulties that average North Koreans face, they are a nation like any other: “It is a country with real people, whose everyday concerns are often not so very different from our own: their friends, how their children are doing at school, their jobs and making enough money to get by.”
Carefully manicured
Like millions of us around the world, an average Pyongyang citizen might get up in the morning and take the tube to work. The difference is that the Pyongyang underground system, while immaculately clean, regularly leaves commuters trapped underground for hours on end. Frequent blackouts cause this, and are apparently worsening as 2013 progresses.
And the jobs the citizens seek to reach may seem unusual too. To maintain the polished façade of the city many people must work to perfect the details – sweeping streets with bundles of twigs and removing grass, by hand, from gaps in the paved plazas. A North Korean’s day will also be filled with civic pursuits, like rehearsals for ‘mass activities’ – rallies, parades, or meetings to “sing songs about Kim Il-sung”, Jong-il’s father and the nation’s ‘Dear Leader’ and ‘Eternal President’.
It is hard to tell what North Koreans make of the propaganda permeating their everyday lives. It was widely reported in the western media of World Cup football results being misreported in the state news, in favour of the North Korean side. A common story in the DPRK is that the mountains actually broke into dance celebrating the birth of Kim Il-sung.
North Koreans are also taught, via emotive billboards, to hate Americans, “but most of them did not,” claims Everard. Visitors regularly report a warm reception from the native population, with many people happy to pose for the camera of a curious tourist, yet state officials still spread word that February’s nuclear test was in response to US hostility.
Since Kim Jong-un has been in power the look of the streets has changed. People are allowed to wear more westernised clothes, once considered another capitalist affectation, and it is now possible to spot the odd Adidas cap or Mickey Mouse backpack alongside standard-issue ‘Juche fibre’ attire. They stroll around the city, often sharing the burden of their plastic bags in linked formations. It is hard to think what such little bags could carry that would warrant the strength of two adults. Perhaps it is another facet of North Korean life that westerners cannot possibly understand, every burden – and every blessing – however small, will be shared. Like the poverty, like the famine, like what little income city workers send home to their relatives in the countryside.
