post-genocide Rwandan prisons or Equatorial Guinea? And how about the U.S., which is home to the highest documented percentage of prison inmates in the world?
GLORY OF THE NATION
The Arirang Mass Games, as the popular event is called, takes place in the May Day stadium in Pyongyang, which is spacious enough for an audience of 150,000 people. Every year more than 100,000 participants attend—double the number of spectators. The Guinness Book of World Records ranked the spectacle in 2007 as the world’s largest performance.
Thousands of gymnasts perform acrobatics, synchronizing their maneuvers to create wonderful kaleidoscopes on the field. Students form giant changing mosaics by turning the 150 pages of large books in their hands, to name another example. For Koreans, such glamour brings razzle-dazzle to an otherwise colorless life; the games also give tasks to the unemployed or underemployed, of whom North Korea harbors a great number. People around me seemed happier around the time of Arirang each year.
According to Rodong Sinmun, the party mouthpiece, millions of North Koreans and foreigners have witnessed the games, although the numbers don’t quite add up and are probably part of a propaganda push. Still, it’s safe to say that hundreds of thousands of people, if not more, have performed and watched the games. I visited for the first time in 2002, when the tradition started, and a few more times in the years after that.
The exhibition was bedazzling and probably quite effective propaganda that raised the profile of the DPRK. More importantly, though, it presented one interpretation of Korean history as seen by the party and its leaders; the games reflected on how they felt their nation should be regarded by the masses: the dancing and gymnastics, all in unison, gave off an image that North Korea was a happy, socialist country and a paradise. The appearance of solidarity further reflects on a notion that North Korea could mercilessly crush and destroy any foreign invader, with the entire nation standing behind a single cause.
During my first visit, I was still unfamiliar with North Korea and didn’t fully understand what was going on. There were so many symbols displayed and as a foreigner I couldn’t quite follow them. As time went by, I learned to better understand the Korean symbolism that played an important role in these mass games but also in many other circumstances. The sea of red flowers, for example, represents the working class, and the purple color stands for Kim Il Sung, as a purple orchid had been named after him as Kimilsungia. And the rising sun is a symbol for Kim Il Sung, venerated as the sun of humanity.
I paid around 150 euros for the second-best possible ticket, one step below the best seating. Twice I was driving my car with staff to the stadium when I was stopped every thirty meters or so by officials asking for ID. Before walking into the stadium, they ordered me to leave my mobile phone, camera, wallet, and keys in the car; it was obvious that Arirang had attracted a high-ranking guest. Indeed, I was sitting about twenty rows behind the Dear Leader himself, Kim Jong Il. He was sitting in the front row with a foreign guest and a lineup of Korean dignitaries, surrounded by plain-clothed secret service officers.
THE FLOWERS OF PYONGYANG
Flower exhibitions, sometimes consisting of thousands of blossoms, carried heavy symbolism during the two most revered public holidays: the birthday of Kim Jong Il on February 16 and the birthday of Kim Il Sung on April 15. Government agencies, organizations, and individuals exhibited flowers outside their buildings.
Two species of flower were exhibited in the Kimilsungia-Kimjongilia Exhibition Hall, a building made of bricks and mortar but that had some characteristics of a greenhouse. The center was appropriately named after the Kimilsungia and the Kimjongilia species. Kimilsungia was bred by an Indonesian botanist in 1965 and Kimjongilia by a Japanese one in 1985, and both offered them as gifts to North Korea.
I observed a flower exhibition of Kim Il Sung’s birthday on April 15, 2008. In addition to the two dynastic flowers, the government put on display 7,000 various trees, plants, and flowers representing several hundred species. Everywhere the eye could see, ministry buildings, hospitals, and People’s Army offices showed off their flowers on two floors of exhibition space. The booths also carried national symbols such as country and party flags, and reproduction models of important national monuments. In the center of the exhibition a plaque read: “The great leader Comrade Kim Il Sung will always be with us,” “Juche,” and Kim Il Sung’s quote “The people are my God.”
I understood how pivotal this day was to the North Korean people, so I decided to chip in on behalf of PyongSu. At the two main exhibitions every year, I brought along flowerpots of the best quality and presented them with a placard displaying my name and the PyongSu logo. The Ministry of Public Health placed my donation at its booth, and the flowerpots became famous around the country because they were the only ones offered by a foreign boss of a domestic enterprise. When journalists interviewed me, I offered praise for the showcase and added my own advertising angle: that our quality-and service-minded pharmaceutical company could never be absent from such a prestigious exhibition.
Of course, the press spun my commentary into an entertaining propaganda twist, but I didn’t mind. Later on television, a euphoric reporter described me planting and growing the flowers myself—and, to add, with the loving care that is usual for patriotic Kimilsungia and Kimjongilia flower growers. I did not mind the propaganda. On the contrary, it helped boost our sales more than any advertising campaign could ever have achieved.
Western journalists have continued to write to this day that there are no advertisements to be seen in North Korea. The exceptions, they often write, are displayed on billboards promoting domestically assembled cars and the Koryo Link, a mobile phone telecom joint venture between the North Korean telecom and the Egyptian Orascom company.
Kimjongilia flowers donated by this tributary foreigner. The relatively small gesture was paid back multiple times.
In 2006, the government-run Korea Central News Agency (KCNA) published a fascinating news item about the newly founded Korea Advertising Company. The group reported that the company, “which is doing commodity and trade advertising activities in a uniform way, makes and sets up advertising mediums of various forms and contents in streets, stadiums, and international exhibitions and extensively advertising them through newspapers, TV, and Internet at the request of local and foreign industrial establishments and companies.”
Today, the advertising firm belongs to the Foreign Trade Ministry and is run by a former student of my project, the Pyongyang Business School. No matter how harsh the socialist regime, those journalists should remember that where there are markets, there are advertisements. And by looking at opportunities in the advertising industry, North Korea made quite a leap that signifies deeper market changes.
SUBVERSION AND PROPAGANDA?
Whenever I ordered foreign literature, consisting mostly of commercial and technical books, my staff had to submit them to the authorities for a review. The censors made sure my potentially dangerous material contained no hostile propaganda.
ABB, which had a strong presence in South Korea, made a faux pas when they began sending us their Korean-language literature from Seoul. They thought it would make more sense, since those books were written in Korean and were cheaper to send. But the authorities found glamorous photographs of their southern neighbor, which looked like counterrevolutionary propaganda—the high standard of living down there, they thought, was too good to be true. To get by them, we had to remove ABB’s South Korean address and replace it with ABB’s Pyongyang address using stickers. The authorities noticed the tactic but didn’t seem to care.
We had other awkward encounters with the ideology police, of course. I sometimes bumped into inspectors who arrived at our office after 7:30 P.M., when I was
