Photo:A compilation by Reuters of pool photographs and images provided by North Korea’s KCNA news agency showing North Korean leader Kim Jong-il from 2004 to 2009. The photograph in the lower right was released this week by KCNA

By Jon Herskovitz

The image the world once had of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, with a trademark paunch, platform shoes and a bouffant hair-do, is gone and may never come back. He has now become a gaunt figure with thinning hair who has trouble walking in normal shoes, let alone ones with heels 8-10 centimetres (3-4 inches) high like he used to wear.

A look at photographs the North’s official media has released of Kim over the past few months indicate he is not a healthy man. There has been an enormous amount of speculation about what is wrong with Kim, 67, including a report from South Korean TV network YTN this week that he has life-threatening pancreatic cancer.

Kim’s health is one of the most closely guarded secrets in the highly secretive North and his actual condition is likely known by a handful of people in his inner circle who risk death or prison camp for themselves and their families if they ever whisper a word about Kim’s problems.

It is a state crime in North Korea to make any comment that questions Kim’s god-like status in the communist dynasty he has ruled since 1994 when his father and state founder Kim Il-sung died.

The most likely way that the outside world will ever receive any reliable information about Kim’s health is if his hermit state invites in foreign doctors to treat him. This appears to have happened about a year ago when he was widely suspected of suffering a stroke. U.S. and South Korean intelligence sources were then able to leak to the media information about what was ailing Kim.

Intelligence sources Reuters spoke to in Seoul would not confirm the latest reports of pancreatic cancer. They did agree on one thing, Kim is still sick.

Kim’s declining health has led to questions in the outside world if the man known at home as the “Dear Leader” still has his iron grip on power over the state he and his father have run since its inception more than 60 years ago.

Within North Korea, images of a weary Kim can actually help him win support among the public.

The North’s state propaganda has built an image of Kim as a person who works tirelessly to better his struggling state. The North’s propaganda says Kim gets little sleep as he travels the country by day and forms its policies at night.

Kim rarely is seen in state media presiding over major state functions or greeting foreign dignitaries. That is mostly left to Kim Yong-nam, the North’s nominal number two leader and its head of state.

If Kim Jong-il looks weak and sickly, it arouses sympathy and support among the North Korean public who feel he has put his own well being at risk working for them.

In the weeks and months ahead, there will likely be more speculation as to what is physically wrong with Kim. Some of the reports will be more reliable than others. But the actual state of Kim’s health will not likely be known until a time the foreign doctors visit again or those nearest Kim feel safe to reveal the secret.

The South Korean director whose movie about a mutant river monster became the country’s biggest box office hit has a new film on what might be an even more terrifying subject — an maniacally obsessive mother.

Bong Joon-ho sat down last week for an interview with Reuters about his new movie called “Mother”that debuted last month at the Cannes International Film Festival and has quickly become one of South Korea’s biggest hits of the year.

The movie is about a mother who goes to extremes to protect her emotionally and mentally unstable son after he is charged with murder. It follows Bong’s movie “The Host,” which was the first South Korean film to make more than $100 million at the local box office.

The following are excerpts from the interview in Korean and translated by Kim Junghyun 

Reuters: How would you describe your movie “Mother”?

Bong: It is a movie that brings this issue of motherhood to the extremes.
This movie is about a mother, but not just a mother. It’s a mother whose son is facing a murder charge. International audiences might find it easier to approach this movie at first as a thriller.

But I believe South Koreans and foreigners, although they might start at different points, would ultimately reach the same point by the end of the movie – two different doors into the movie, and one exit. 

Reuters: What did you think about casting actress Kim Hye-ja, who has played the role of a mother so many times in South Korean movies?

Bong: I was worried and excited at the same time. On one hand I was worried she might not like the role because it was too different from what she has been doing for decades. On the other hand, I had this belief that she must be bored of her stereotypical image, which could be both an honour and a burden.

I spoke to her about the story in 2005 before working on a screenplay. The story I told her back then has the same ending as the movie. So she knew what would come, and she liked it. She said she would want to do it, and that she liked it because it was just so different from what she had done. I was so happy.

Reuters: So you had her in mind in the first place. What would have happened if she rejected the offer?

Bong: The whole project then would have been scrapped, which was why I was nervous. The shocking ending was pretty much set by 2004, so story-wise it took almost five years to be fleshed out. Like wine grapes ripening.

I’ve wanted to do a movie with her since, well, always. And I always thought she needed to appear much more on screen.

Reuters: Compared with your previous works, such as “Memories of Murder”, or “The Host”, “Mother” has much darker ring to it.

Bong: I wanted the story tragic. My previous movies all had a sense of comic relief, but I wanted this to have a different tone. I wanted it to be a movie that was dashing toward a tragic end – a tragedy that is simple but strong, shocking, and sad. It’s no wonder that the ending can be disturbing.

But at the same time, the movie does not leave you as a mere onlooker but instead makes you ask questions to yourself, and what you would have done in her place. Many mothers out there may want to go out for a drink after seeing this movie.

Reuters: What do you think about the talk of the sexual nuances in this mother-son relationship and the tricky relation among the characters?

Bong: Yes, this is a sex movie. If you follow the course of a mother in this movie, the movie in a way is about sex. There’s a bloody scene by the end of the movie – I wanted that murder scene to feel like a sex scene.

Reuters: Your films always seem to have had social misfits as protagonists. Why?

Bong: I am innately drawn much more to those people, whom I believe have much more compelling stories to tell and drama in their lives. Plus, I’m rarely around people with money and power – they live on a different planet.      

Reuters: Do you like Cannes?

Bong: As a director, or just a film fan who wants to enjoy the festival, Cannes is the worst place to be. But it must be a paradise for distributors and importers.

I mean, Cannes for a director is really a hellish place. Imagine all those critics and savvy audiences members ready to jump at your movie and tear it apart – your movie which quite often would be shown for the first time in the world. Those hundreds of audiences members – the likes from the “New York Times” and “Variety” – get to see my movie for the very first time, with a sashimi knife at hand to brandish. 

But then at the same time, it’s the hottest place to unveil my work, I must admit. It’s hard to resist Cannes.

(Reuters pictures by Eric Gaillard and You Sung-ho)

                                              By Jon Herskovitz

North Korea says somewhere up in the sky, a satellite it launched at the weekend is beaming to earth two revolutionary paeans: “Song of General Kim Il-sung” for the founder of the reclusive state and “Song of General Kim Jong-il,” for the son who succeeded him when he died.

U.S. and South Korean officials said the North Korean rockets did not send anything into space and all pieces of the rocket crashed into the sea, including the claimed satellite, which might have been North Korea’s oversized attempt to replicate an iPod.

The North Korean report was a a bit of a blast from the past because North Korea made a similar claim in 1998 that it had sent a satellite into orbit playing the exact same two songs.

There is far more to North Korea’s hit parade of songs than the two homilies it said were aboard its rocket. This is a country where soldiers sing, farmers sing, the hundreds of thousand gather in the centre of the capital Pyongyang to dance in special days and a refined teenage girl always has her accordion ready to play a tune.

The North Korea songbook is diverse. It has the dance number “Let’s Dash Forward to Build a Great Prosperous and Powerful Nation”. It has a tune for choral groups called “May the Song of a Happy Soldier Reverberate Far and Wide,” and it has a children’s song called Generalissimo Kim Il-sung Danced With Us.” Here are the lyrics as translated into English by the North:
On the New Year’s,
We danced together hand in hand
We danced out of our wish for his pleasure
The Generalissimo danced with us
Out of his wish for our happy future.
His parental love for us
Moved us to tears.
Our respect and filial devotion are growing.
The Generalissimo danced with us.

I saw this song performed about a year ago at the Mangyongdae Schoolchildren’s Palace when I went to Pyongyang for the New York Philharmonic concert. The school is dedicated to the performing arts and the children, many still of primary school age, sang and danced their way through songs such as “Jingle Bells” and “We are Faithful Only to Kim Jong-il.”

When they grow older, the North Korean song book awaits them. Here is a top 10 list in no particular order of North Korea’s greatest hits:

* “Song of Defending Homeland”
* “The Ten-point Programme of the Association for the Restoration of the Fatherland”
* Let’s Dash Forward to Build a Great Prosperous and Powerful Nation”
* Let’s Hold Higher Rifle of Working Class”
* “Hopeful Is the Future of Us under the Care of the General”
* “May the Playing of My Accordion Resound Forth”
* “Song of the Coastal Artillery Women”
* “We Will Defend the Headquarters of Revolution with Our Lives”
* “Our General is Best”
* “We Have Planted Apple Trees on Mountains”

Perhaps, the next time North Korea attempts to launch a satellite, it might want to load a few of these tunes in order to expand its repertoire.

{Photos of Kim Jong-il with  with scientists and engineers involved in a rocket launch and a protest in Seoul against the launch]

                                                          By Jon Herskovitz

It is not often that I am reminded of Russell Crowe and Meg Ryan in our coverage of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il.  But I thought of the 2000 movie starring Ryan and Crowe called “Proof of Life”   North Korea this week when  served up pictures of its Dear leader Kim and a communist party newspaper with a clearly marked Tuesday date.

This was the first time since Kim’s suspected stroke in August that North Korea has added a clear date as to when Kim appeared in public. The North has reported on Kim appearing several times in public over the past several weeks, but all of those reports have been undated.

 In the movie version, the “proof of life” is a part of the hostage and ransom trade where a kidnap victim holds up a newspaper to offer proof that he or she is alive on a certain date.

North Korea likes to do things its own way and in the official media, there is one picture that shows Kim in a winter coat, fur hat and ski gloves at a library standing behind his subjects as they stare into computer monitors. The next photograph shows a computer monitor with the on-line version of the North’s communist newspaper bearing Tuesday’s date. There is no picture of Kim and the newspaper together, but this is the closest North Korea has come to offering a proof of life, or better yet, a proof of recovery since Kim’s suspected illness.

State media has also been issuing reports and pictures of  what are called “field guidance visits” by Kim in recent months to places such as army units, factories and chicken farms. In most of these pictures, Kim seems a little bit thinner than he did about a year ago. He is almost always seen wearing a heavy coat, sunglasses and gloves.

But try hard as they might, the North Koreans have been unable to fully convince the rest of the world about Kim’s well-being. ”The fact that they cannot provide conclusive photographic evidence that he is alive now shows me that he is incapacitated,” says Brian Myers, an expert on the North’s propaganda at Dongseo University in South Korea.

There is still no clear and timely evidence, such as Kim attending a large ceremony or meeting visiting officials, that would indicate he has fully recovered.

The head of South Korea’s intelligence service was quoted as telling a parliamentary committee there is no evidence that the photos of Kim have been doctored but there is also no proof of when the pictures were actually taken.

There has been speculation in the South’s media that Kim is showing the lingering effects of a stroke with mobility limited in the left side of his body. Several local reports also note that Kim is no longer wearing his trademark platform shoes, saying he has more difficulty balancing after the stroke and the shoes are too dangerous for him to wear.

Within North Korea itself, people were probably aware of persistent reports about Kim’s health, analysts say. They point to a word-of-mouth network that has grown stronger in recent years.

And the average North Korean probably feels that that Kim is well in control due to all the pictures they have seen in official media over the past few weeks.

Whatever it is, Kim’s health is one of the most closely guarded secrets in the highly secretive North that is known only to a small inner circle. North Korea has yet to convince a lot of people that Kim is healthy, and until that happens; we are likely to see thousands of words of speculation until we get that one definitive picture.

                                 By Jack Kim
North and South Koreans have been divided for more than 50 years by one of the world’s most heavily fortified borders. When we come into contact, it is almost always in small and carefully arranged visits.

I was a part of a South Korean group that recently spent four days in the North. Over the course of countless hours of contact with the North Korean minders assigned to our group, conversation turned from heated discussion over international politics and inter-Korean troubles to nationalism and sports. 

We had been told by the officials from the group in the South that arranged the trip to avoid any discussion of the North Korean leader Kim Jong-il because this highly sensitive subject would invariably lead to awkward discussions and raise tension.

But there was enough time to get a glimpse of the softer, human side of North Korean officials who were supposed to be tough, propaganda-conscious apparatchiks armed with skills to respond to any kind of challenge to the communist state’s leadership or its ideology.

The minders, usually mid-level cadres in the bureaucracy, would invariably break into warm smiles when we raised the subject of family, either ours or theirs, just to change the subject after a tense discussion on politics. They willingly talked about life at home.

“You have experience keeping a living?” a North Korean “guide” asked, using an expression that was not immediately clear in meaning, to ask whether I had a family. When I said I had a wife and a one-year-old daughter at home, he broke into a grin and said the girl would be “at an age when they are so adorable” and that I must sorely miss her.

He said he himself had a boy and a girl “all grown up,” meaning they were in primary school. Later on, as I prepared to head home, he said he had to meet another group of South Koreans who were arriving later in the day. He would be staying with them at their hotel. And that would make it eight straight days away from home, he said.

                                                           By Jack Kim
For about eight straight years I’ve been covering North Korea, one of the world’s most closed countries with a human rights record that is roundly criticised as one of the worst on the globe.

So it came as a surprise when a North Korean “guide” said on my seventh visit to the communist state that when it comes to restricting freedom of movement, South Korea’s spy agency makes life tougher for North Korean visitors to the capitalist neighbour.

“They even follow you into the hygiene room and wait there until you’re finished!” a North Korean handler said as his voice rose in indignation when describing the treatment given to North Korean visitors to the South.

South Korea’s National Intelligence Service agents limit a North Korean visitor’s movement from floor to floor and ban any kind of excursion unless in a group tour. They also follow visitors into public restrooms.

“Conducting official duty” is the explanation when asked what they thought they were doing following you into the bathroom, the North Korean guide said, adding it is presumably to make sure you’re not receiving secret instructions from the North or being handed a secret message from a double agent in the South.

We on the other hand as part of a South Korean group were free to wander anywhere inside the hotel, be it a drunken lurch from the sky lounge to the lobby bar (“tea shop”), for a browse through the bookstore or venture out the main door for some fresh air or a smoke.

But it did seem a bit excessive to be following anyone into the bathroom and wait in there until that person is finished, which is why I asked the NIS for official explanation. The agency did not immediately have a comment.