Kim Jong-il’s signature jumper has gone on display for adoration by the masses.
Kim Jong-il’s signature pot belly seems to have vanished down the memory hole, however.
During the Kim Jong-il era it was not uncommon to see ordinary North Koreans wearing the Kim Jong-il jumper. It will be interesting to see if its use diminishes in the Kim Jong-un era.
If you visit the DPRK and want to obtain one of these fine garments before they go out of style, the tailor at Yangakdo Hotel will be happy to make one of these for you!
Pictured Above (Google Earth): Construction of the Sporting Center on Tongil Street ( 38.979300°, 125.702961°)
I watched a documentary of Kim Jong-un’s guidance trips in May 2012 and noticed that there was a visit in the video that was never reported in KCNA (neither the .kp nor the .jp versions) . The visit was to the “Sporting Center in Thongil Street”. I have posted the relevant video to YouTube:
According to the chronology of the video, the guidance trip took place sometime between Kim’s attendance of a performance by the Unhasu Orchestra (2012-5-1) and his guidance trip to the Mangyongdae Funfair (2012-5-9). The visit was unlikely to have taken place on 2012-5-2, however, since Kim is reported to have visited the command of the KPA Air Force (which was not reported in the documentary).
I was unable to recognize the people who attended the guidance trip with Kim, so I asked Michael Madden (NK Leadership Watch), who is quite good at this sort of thing, for some assistance. Here is his response:
[Kim Jong-un] was accompanied at that visit by VMar Choe Ryong Hae, Jang Song Taek, VMar Hyon Chol Hae, Gen. Pak Jae Gyong, Col. Gen. Son Chol Ju, Pak To Chun, Hwang Pyong So and VMar Ri Yong Ho. Also in attendance were members of the Guard Command and KJU’s personal secretariat.
Interestingly, KCNA did report that Choe Ryong Hae visited this facility on May 30 and hinted at the earlier Kim Jong-un visit:
Choe Ryong Hae Makes Field Survey of Sporting Center in Thongil Street
Choe Ryong Hae, member of the Presidium of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea and director of the General Political Bureau of the Korean People’s Army, on Wednesday made field survey of the Sporting Center in Thongil Street.
The construction of the modern center for the promotion of the people’s health started at the initiative of the dear respected Kim Jong Un and under his plan. It is now nearing its completion.
There are in the center with a huge plottage hundreds of sports apparatuses of various kinds, recuperation rooms, table tennis halls, a supersonic wave wading pool, etc.
Choe Ryong Hae went round various places of the center associated with footsteps left by Supreme Commander Kim Jong Un with loving care for the people.
Choe underscored the need for builders to fully display the serve-the-people spirit in building, bearing deep in mind the intention of the supreme commander to make the people fully enjoy wealth and prosperity under socialism.
Each sports apparatus is associated with the warm loving care of the supreme commander, Choe said, calling for managing apparatuses and equipment well to provide convenience to visitors on a priority basis.
Going round the meat and fish shop conducive to improving the diet of people, he underscored the need for the officials and servants of the center to fufil their responsibility and role, deeply cherishing their mission as the servants of the people in hearty response to the party’s slogan “We Serve the People!”
He stressed the need for the soldier-builders to thoroughly implement the order of the supreme commander and successfully complete the center as early as possible.
So I am unsure why KCNA never reported on this particular Kim visit. Theories welcome. It makes me wonder what other visits go unreported!
The first collaborative film project between the DPRK and western producers, Comrade Kim Goes Flying, will premier at the 2012 Pyongyang International Film Festival.
As the North’s first romantic comedy feature film, the movie was produced by the communist country in partnership with Belgian producer Anja Daelemans and British-run travel agency Koryo Tours’ official Nick Bonner. The film was shot in Pyongyang with North Korean cast and crew, according to the report.
The biennial festival also plans to screen feature films including “Mr. Bean,” “Elizabeth: The Golden Age,” and a South African movie titled “Cry, The Beloved Country,” the report said, citing Koryo Tours, which runs tour programs to the North for the film fest.
Without giving too much away, the plot of the film revolves around the daughter of a coal miner who wants to be a gymnast in Pyongyang.
Before you start reading below, I want to let readers know about a DPRK-specific term: “3rd broadcast”. The “3rd broadcast” is a fixed-wire audio transmission that goes directly into the homes of residents in Pyongyang apartment buildings. In these homes, a speaker is mounted to the wall which broadcasts the information much like a radio would–except the signals are coming from a cable, not radio waves. Because the signal it is not broadcast over radio, it is difficult to know what is being told to the captive audience of Pyongyang residents. This broadcast equipment was featured in the film A State of Mind where the narrator commented “it can be turned down, but it cannot be turned off”.
North Korea has begun to focus on promoting the appropriateness of the ‘6.28 Policy’, North Korea’s first attempt at economic change since Kim Jong Eun came to power. This is being done via the 3rd Broadcast, and the reports are even utilizing the controversial term “economic reform.”
“They have been talking on the 3rd Broadcast since the beginning of last week about how ‘respected comrade Kim Jong Eun has selected economic reform measures so as to bring our economy up to world class status and greatly improve the people’s lives’,” a source from Chongjin revealed to Daily NK today.
The source explained the 3rd Broadcast content as “sketching out the nature of the reform policy and saying that we must accept and pursue Kim Jong Eun’s economic policy plan.”
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However, given a history of disappointment, the North Korean people remain skeptical about the policy, the source said.
“Given the barrage of economic reform propaganda we get every single morning, it does seem as though something will happen, but right now it is nothing more than a political sermon; people say that they can only know when actual policies emerge,” the source said.
However, he went on, “It is clearly a change compared to the decades when people couldn’t even speak a word about reform and opening”.
Daily NK previously reported on the presentation of the ‘6.28 Policy’ in citizens’ meetings and that Kim Jong Suk County in Yangkang Province is one of three areas being used to test elements of the policy in advance of full rollout in October.
Previous posts on the 6.28 policy here.
Read the full story here:
3rd Broadcast Promoting Economic Change Daily NK
Choi Song Min
2012-7-23
Economic historians Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast published a paper in 2005 (later included in their book Violence and Social Orders, 2009) titled “The Natural State: The Political-Economy of Non-Development”.
Though written at a theoretical level (not-specific to the DPRK) the authors do what I consider a remarkable job at creating a model that coherently explains some of the inconsistencies and peculiar behaviors of the DPRK government–particularly with respect to economic policy.
Implications of the model: Natural states use economic policy (privileged access to valuable resources or rights) as a mechanism to promote the stability of the ruling coalition. However, since natural orders rely on personal exchange, contracts and agreements cannot be credibly enforced over a horizon longer than the ruler’s life. As a result natural states can achieve some low levels of economic growth but are not able to easily achieve “development” (and there is a difference).
I have pasted some relevant sections of the paper below:
A reader named Justin pointed out to me a North Korea national team Tackla hockey jersey for sale on ebay:
The selling price is US$400, and for those of you who are cynical (like me) the seller “canucks109610” has a great reputation on ebay.
I was curious how the seller managed to come across the jersey so I searched around on the internet and found this story:
Out [sic] latest reader submission comes from international jersey collector and expert Anthony Ferra, who we know from being a fellow board member at the IceJerseys.com forums. He’s also personally responsible for several gems in the Third String Goalie collection, as his pursuits of rare and obscure jerseys has led to him having numerous contacts around the globe which sometimes make available to him some really hard to find and wonderful jerseys which don’t fit his personal collection, but are too hard to find to pass up.
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His “Holy Grail” (or is it his “White Whale”?) remains the elusive North Korea Nike jersey. While he has obtained a couple of more recent vintage post-2002 North Korean jerseys from Tackla, the older Nike era style remains elusive no doubt due to the scarcity of the jerseys, the language barrier between him and any players who may have one, and the isolationist policies of the North Korean government, which limit it’s few hockey playing citizens from having access to the internet in order to even give Anthony a chance to even contact them.
So if any readers out there have a rare Nike North Korean hockey jersey, or they know how to get one, canucks109610 seems like a motivated buyer!
Rüdiger Frank has edited a new book, Exploring North Korean Arts, which was published in April of this year. Other authors include: Aidan Foster-Carter, Koen De Ceuster, Frank Hoffmann, Keith Howard, Kate Hext, Jane Portal, Brian Myers , Dafna Zur, James E. Hoare.
The Hankyoreh has published an interesting about a inter-Korean economic project in Dandong, China.
According to the article:
Taking its name from the traditional song “Arirang,” Ari Sports was established in Nov. 2011 with a 500 million won investment from the city of Incheon and 23 workers from North Korea. It is managed not by a North or South Korean organization, but by China’s Yunnan Xiguang Trade.
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The football sneaker and sports clothing production plant was originally planned for Pyongyang’s Sadong District. Efforts began in 2008, and the building was nearly complete when the May 24 measures were passed in 2010 and it had to be abandoned. The factory in Dandong is a temporary structure erected in its stead.
Inter-Korean Athletic Exchange Association standing committee chair Kim Gyeong-seong said, “It’s frustrating not to be able to use the good land and facilities we had in Pyongyang.”
“I hope we are soon able to produce and sell soccer shoes and clothes in Pyongyang,” Kim added.
Song said, “Things are difficult right now between North and South Korea, but if we all work together we can overcome it.”
He added that the company was a “small but meaningful project taking place at a time when economic cooperation has been shut off.”
The company has received orders for three thousand pairs of soccer shoes as of May. It currently plans to produce and sell two to three thousand pairs a month. To achieve this, it is organizing a football contest for working people nationwide at the first Incheon Peace Cup event to commemorate the June 15 Summit on June 16 and 17.
I have never heard of this project and I have been unable locate any other articles on the factory. Despite its relative obscurity, however, the North Korean workers know how to deal with the foreign press (they stay on message):
On June 9, the company was visited by around fifty participants in the Incheon-Dandong-Hankyoreh West Sea Cooperation Forum, including Incheon Mayor Song Young-gil and Hankyoreh Foundation for Reunification and Culture chairperson and former Unification Minister Im Dong-won. Located in a farming village on the outskirts of Dandong in China’s Liaoning Province, Ari Sports has 1,600 square meters of floor space on a plot of land also measuring 1,600 square meters.
North Korean workers expressed their frustration with the inability of economic cooperation projects to move forward due to the state of inter-Korean relations. Workers Kwon Ok-kyong, Kim Kum-ju, and Kim Myong-hwa said they wished production and sales could proceed smoothly.
When asked about working at the company, Cho Sang-yon said, “Well, it’s not as good as working in my home country.”
Pak Hyok-nam said, “I’d like to see bigger economic cooperation projects between North and South.”
I have been unable to learn anything else at all about this project. If you are able to find company logos, web page, photos, or even factory locations on Google Earth, please let me know.
Read the full story here:
Factory in China continues producing soccer shoes in spite of frosty relations Hankyoreh
Kim Kyu-won
2012-6-11
Arirang News has posted a video on the changes in consumer culture in the DPRK. It highlights just how much things have changed since the days of Kim Il-sung:
Chinese tourists will have visa free access to the border regions linking Yanbian Autonomous Region, Rason Special Economic Zone and Russia, according to a report originating with Jilin Radio that surfaced in South Korean media today.
The report doesn’t give an date for implementation, but does state that the previous tourism agreement governing the border region (signed in 2010) will be streamlined. It still takes 10 days for a Chinese traveler to get permission to visit Rason. This process will drop to 2-3 days.
If accurate, this could go a long way towards boosting tourism in the SEZ. After all, a Beijinger or Shanghaiian might well be more willing to spend the money to visit the region if they can get two countries in the same trip. At the risk of overgeneralizing, Asian tourists seem eager maximize passport stamps above all else on international tours. This desire could be effectively exploited if Rason and Russia’s Primorsky Krai province coordinate their marketing.
Also, now that the road to Rason is paved, the ease with which Chinese gamblers can reach the Emperor Casino and Hotel greatly increases and arguably makes the destination seem more normal and therefore attractive. One wonders if the casino’s fleet of crimson humvees, once needed to whisk high-rollers along the laborious dirt road from, will now be replaced by Mercedes or Lexuses. (Lexi?)
Last year, the SEZ experimented with self-drive tours for Chinese citizens, though there has yet to be any follow-up on it.
For westerner tourists thinking of visiting Rason, we recommend Krahun, a company that has had a presence in Rason for over a decade and know the region exceptionally well.
Read the full story here:
Visa Free Rason Tourism for Chinese Citizens
Choson Exchange
Andray Abrahamian
2012-5-29
