Anna Broinowski - Aim High in Creation! - A One-of-a-Kind Journey Inside North Korea's Propaganda Machine

WHEN I ARRIVED IN BEIJING AFTER three days in Pyongyang, the first thing to hit me was the smell. Capitalism smells of plastic. Sterile, hot off the production line, and ready for use. I looked around with my new ad-free eyes, astonished how often I was being told to buy something. Shiny people waved mobile phones and deodorant on every wall I passed, girls in hot pants gave out Red Bulls on the escalators, and in the ultimate multi-brand attack, a Mini convertible sat in the middle of a park, covered in Coca-Cola stickers—as boys in Apple shirts displayed the car’s stats on their tablets, distributing free Cokes from the trunk. The whole tableau was framed by a retro poster, showing heroic young things rising from the back of the Mini, thrusting Cokes in their fists against a blood-red sky. It was clever and fun, a slick nod to communist chic. I would’ve enjoyed the irony if I hadn’t just come from North Korea. Instead, it made me feel faintly sick.

The world had been busy in the time I’d been away. Psy’s hit “Gangnam Style,” with its frat-boy humour and sexy chorus, had crossed every cultural barrier on the planet to become the first YouTube video to reach one billion hits. As Psy galloped across Seoul’s glittering vistas, touting his horse-and-champers lifestyle as a sugar daddy from the posh hood of Gangnam, the Western media was poring over revelations from North Korea’s most famous chef, Kenji Fujimoto. Astoundingly, Fujimoto, the man I’d spent months trying to track down in Japan, had been in Pyongyang the whole time I was there. I wasn’t surprised the North Korean news hadn’t run anything on Fujimoto’s visit: if the regime didn’t want its people to know their Leaders lived in palaces, it sure as hell wasn’t going to advertise the fact those palaces once contained a Japanese man who was paid €45,000 a year, owned two Mercedes, regularly flew to Okinawa to buy fresh abalone for Kim Jong Il, and woke up after one debauched night with Kim’s Joy Division babes and North Korea’s most famous singer, Om Jong Yo, to find his pubic hair shaved and a wedding ring on his finger.

Fujimoto described his secret meeting with Kim Jong Un and his new girlfriend to the fascinated world. The fact the young Leader even had a girlfriend had only just been discovered when an attractive woman was photographed beside him at a concert, holding a Louis Vuitton bag. Now Fujimoto, who’d escaped a decade ago and written three tell-all books about the decadent excesses of Kim Jong Il, was back in Pyongyang to sing the praises of Kim’s son:

I jumped up to hug him, shouting “Comrade General” and instantly burst into tears… He hugged me back, the first hug in eleven years. I said, “Fujimoto the betrayer is back now,” and I apologized for all I did and all I disclosed about him. He said, “OK, don’t worry anymore.”

Of Kim’s new girlfriend, Ri Sol Ju, Fujimoto enthused: “She was just so charming. I cannot describe her voice, it’s so soft.… She said to me, ‘Welcome to the Republic. Our Comrade the Supreme Commander missed you the most.’” The Asahi Shimbun ran a picture of the manly Kim Jong Un cradling the sobbing Fujimoto in his arms.

Fujimoto’s peace-making mission had an ulterior motive: he still had family in Pyongyang. When he fled to Japan in 2001, Fujimoto left behind kids and a wife, Om Jong Yo: the singer he’d woken up married to after that Cognac-fuelled night in the palace. Now he needed to make sure they were safe. During his reunion with Kim Jong Un, the chef promised: “If I go back to Japan safely, the reputation of Supreme Commander Comrade General would soar enormously”—and went on to talk him up to every news channel who’d listen. Pyongyang had “changed drastically since the Kim Jong Un era started,” he asserted, describing seeing “plenty of goods in shops. That’s already a big difference. There was nothing there ten years ago.” Humbled by the graceful hospitality of the new Leader, Fujimoto was “surprised how gentle a person he is.”

“Gentle” is no longer a word that springs to mind now that Kim Jong Un has murdered his powerful uncle, Jang Song Thaek, for being “despicable human scum”; assassinated Jang’s children and grandchildren for guilt by association; and allegedly gunned down an old girlfriend, Hyon Song Wol, and members of her Unhasu Orchestra and Wangjaesan Light Music Band, for “making porn.” But at the time, the Pyongyang Kool-Aid was fresh in my veins, and I naively accepted Fujimoto’s claims. I googled the report about North Korea executing a traffic lady for sneezing and discovered it was just another YouTube hoax. This fuelled my desire to defend the North Koreans from ridicule; I thought it unfair their Leader should be attacked in the same way as his father, before he’d had a chance to prove himself. The country I’d seen was vibrant and full of optimism; I imagined it was only a matter of time before it would open up, like China, under the technologically savvy Kim Jong Un.

The odd sensation of viewing my world through a North Korean lens, and finding it lacking, intensified in Sydney. I took my daughter to Luna Park on the sparkling harbour, and all I could see were bulges of fat hanging over cut-price jeans, as junk food–munching families waddled between substandard rides. I watched twentysomethings queuing outside Apple for the latest iPhone and felt pity for these aspirational patsies of capitalism spending their wages on something designed to be obsolete within a year. I drove past American sailors, fresh off the US frigates at Woolloomooloo, pawing their way through Kings Cross as if they owned the joint, and envied the North Koreans for having the cojones to kick them out. At a Taylor Swift concert, I watched two scowling teenagers bark at their father to photograph them in front of the stage and was appalled by the fake smiles they turned on for the shot, only to snap back to rudeness once their glamorous update was online.

The trash in the streets, the drunks on the beaches, the tarts on the billboards, the beggars outside Gucci—all of it coalesced in my mind as a righteous new mantra: This Would Never Happen in Pyongyang. On TV, Chevron flogged “natural” gas as the answer to global warming, assuring viewers that “we have more in common than you think,” while unseasonal bushfires raged in the Blue Mountains. The blazes had been triggered by a routine military training exercise—a fact that baffled Defence as much as everyone else, given October is normally quite cool. But when the firefighters said global warming was to blame, the media shut them out of the debate. Prime Minister Tony Abbott, a God-bitten conservative who had called climate change “a load of crap,” tore down the former government’s price on carbon as “socialism dressed up as environmentalism,” and I yelled at the screen: “This Would Never Happen in Pyongyang! ” Socialism stood for free healthcare and education for all. Even in North Korea, the population was 99 percent literate. I was outraged that Abbott—or anyone else—could think it was a slur.

The affluenza that had made Sydney one of the world’s most expensive cities also infected my private life. My ex, keen to establish a new life with his girl, was harassing me to sell our house. As I sat in my study watching North Korean propaganda movies, he’d turn up and wave bank documents in my face. We brawled like toddlers: I’d scream and refuse to sign; he’d punch holes in the door. “This Would Never Happen in Pyongyang, ” I’d mutter, as I covered the holes with paper, images of happy North Korean couples strolling by the Taedong River fresh in my mind. I knew divorce was stressful—but that didn’t explain how the gentle, sensitive man I’d loved had become so aggressive. Then I discovered a psychiatrist had diagnosed him with temporary depression and stress. I hid behind my mantra and ignored his pain, disgusted by Big Pharma’s hold on the First World. Depression is a luxury the North Koreans cannot afford, I told myself callously. When North Koreans are stressed, they get on with things, or they don’t survive.