Inside Pyongyang

Built over 300 feet below ground, the Pyongyang Metro is meant to serve as both public transport and an air raid shelter. There are only two running lines and the stations all have names like Victory, Unification, and Signal Fire. Foreign visitors are only allowed to ride to the final two stops, which are named Rehabilitation and Glory.

The carriages sit in almost complete darkness except for illuminated photos of the country’s leaders near the ceiling. We saw faint graffiti marks on the walls and scratched into the windows, but those were explained away by our guides with a terse, “These trains were imported from Germany.”

PHOTOS BY JAMIE-JAMES MEDINA

etting into North Korea was one of the hardest and weirdest processes Vice has ever dealt with. After we went back and forth with their representatives for months, they finally said they were going to allow 16 journalists into the country to cover the Arirang Mass Games in Pyongyang. Then, ten days before we were supposed to go, they said, “No, nobody can come.” Then they said, “OK, OK, you can come. But only as tourists.” We had no idea what that was supposed to mean. They already knew we were journalists, and over there if you get caught being a journalist when you’re supposed to be a tourist you go to jail. We don’t like jail. And we’re willing to bet we’d hate jail in North Korea. But we went for it. The first leg of the trip was a flight into northern China. At the airport the North Korean consulate took our passports and all of our money, then brought us to a restaurant. We were sitting there with our tour group, and suddenly all the other diners left and these women came out and started singing North Korean nationalist songs. We were thinking, “Look, we were just on a plane for 20 hours. We’re jet-lagged. Can we just go to bed?” but this guy with our group who was from the LA Times told us, “Everyone in here besides us is secret police. If you don’t act excited then you’re not going to get your visa.” So we got drunk and jumped up onstage and sang songs with the girls. The next day we got our visas. A lot of people we had gone with didn’t get theirs. We guess at that point they were on planes heading back home. We flew into North Korea that night. We were supposed to have three days before the games started, but as soon as we got on the ground they told us, “The games are happening now.” So we went straight to the stadium, and there were 40,000 people in the stands, portraying the history of the North Korean Revolution with flip cards. On the playing field before them, about 60,000 people did wild, synchronized gymnastics routines. The 15 of us who made up the audience watched from a marble dais. We were the only spectators. Fifteen audience members for a 100,000-man extravaganza. That was our first day in Pyongyang. The next day, our grand tour began. We went to the International Friendship Museum, which is comprised of 2,000 rooms carved into the bottom of a mountain. The displays are all gifts from different world leaders. Stalin gave Kim Il-sung a train. Mao Tse-tung also gave Kim Il-sung a train. He got hunting rifles from communist East Germany’s Honecker and Romania’s Ceauşescu and all the other Eastern-bloc guys. Madeleine Albright famously gave Kim Jong-il a basketball signed by Michael Jordan. That’s in the museum. The whole thing is really smart, actually, because it shows the people not only that everybody loves their Great and Dear Leaders but also how generous the Leaders are to share their magical treasures. Perhaps the weirdest thing about North Koreans is that they genuinely don’t seem to know that the rest of the planet hates and fears them. They believe (or maybe they really convincingly lie about believing) that the whole world admires and envies them and that they’re the true light of socialism and Juche, which is their leader’s philosophy of communist self-reliance. In fact, a lot of the gifts in the museum say things like “From the Center of Juche Ideals in Santiago, Chile,” or Mozambique. The Juche Center of Mozambique? We find it a little hard to believe that there are Juche schools in southeastern Africa. At the end of the museum tour, you must put on a tie before entering the final room, where you are permitted to view a wax sculpture the Chinese made of the Great Leader Kim Il-sung. You have to bow to the statue and speak in a whisper. After us, these Korean women came out of the statue room bawling their eyes out. They’d met their Great Leader. We were like, “Come on, it’s a wax statue.” But to them, it’s almost like they’ve really met him. They save up money their whole life to come to the museum done up in all their finery, tiptoe up to this statue, and cry their eyes out. And it’s really kind of a shitty statue too. One of the guys we were with said it looked like an old 1950s ad for hemorrhoid cream or something. He was right. It was sub-Madame Tussaud’s quality. (Oh, and they had a wind machine blowing its hair, like it was basking in a gentle breeze. We are not kidding.) VICE STAFF
For more of our trip to North Korea watch The Vice Guide to Everything, premiering Monday, December 6 on MTV at 11est/10cst, or check out The Vice Guide to North Korea on VBS.tv.

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North Korea’s Arirang Mass Games are held annually in Pyongyang’s 150,000-seat May Day Stadium. The two-hour performance involves over 60,000 actors, gymnasts, and acrobats mixed with lasers, fireworks, flying cars, and up to 40,000 students manning colored flip cards to form dramatic backdrops depicting battle scenes, a glowing Kim Il-sung, a giant tae kwon do man kicking a plank of wood, and the national flag. The performance ends with a huge globe entering the stadium as everyone sings and dances under a call for the unification of North and South Korea.

This soldier showed us around the USS Pueblo, which is one of the primary attractions in North Korea. All visitors are made to watch a video showing how in 1968, North Korean waters were invaded by imperialist US forces sent to spy on their great land. Local tour guides nod and smile as they tell how the North Korean Navy triumphantly battled the international spies, who were taken prisoner and quickly admitted their mistake.

In reality, the American surveillance ship was based off the east coast of Korea in international waters. On what was scheduled to be its final day of duty, the ship was attacked by North Korean naval vessels. One US sailor was killed, and the surviving 82 crewmembers were taken prisoner and placed in POW camps for 11 months, where they were starved and beaten. The sailors were also forced to pose for propaganda photos released to the US. They would raise their middle fingers to the camera to signal their treatment, claiming it was a “Hawaiian good-luck sign.” Nice!

Years later, it was rumored that the ship’s capture was planned by the Soviet Union, which was looking for a cryptographic machine on board. As the Pueblo is the only captured US Navy ship still in commission, Kim Jong-il has specified that it be used to promote anti-Americanism.

The Mangyongdae Schoolchildren’s Palace was opened in 1998 and serves the children of North Korea’s elite. With 690 rooms, the school offers classes in music, dance, calligraphy, embroidery, tae kwon do, basketball, and computers. In one room about 20 boys were learning Photoshop on ancient Macs. We asked one boy what he wanted to be when he was older and he said, “A political scientist, so I can help fight the imperialists.” He was nine years old.

It is believed that every room on every floor of every building in North Korea features portraits of Great Leader Kim Il-sung and his son, Dear Leader Kim Jong-il. The images sit side by side, hung high to the ceiling and angled down so as to avoid them being hit by any sunlight.

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These girls were also at the school. You go in and they have four-year-olds playing classical guitar and eight-year-old girls playing accordion and piano. They want you to be impressed by how talented everyone is, but it’s pretty unnerving because you sit there thinking, “Jesus, this kid must play piano for the state 12 hours a day to be that good.”

There are around 800 statues of Great Leader Kim Il-sung in North Korea. This bronze beauty stands 22 meters high above the city, marking Pyongyang’s highest point, Mansu Hill. Visitors are made to buy flowers made of cloth, then lay them at the Great Leader’s feet and bow in honor. The flowers are then collected and resold to the next set of visitors. As we were taking photos there, a small commotion happened when a set of birds flew by and almost landed on the statue’s arm. Apparently that would have been a disaster. Our guides insisted that we film or photograph only the entire figure. No cropping him, like shooting just the head. We were using film instead of digital, so they couldn’t tell that we were doing whatever we wanted.

Outside of government officials, party members, police, guides, and translators, North Koreans are essentially banned from talking to foreigners. Every time we tried to take a photo of this group as they worshipped the statue, they would turn their backs or cover their faces. When they finally got up to leave, we could see that some of them were crying at the sight of Kim Il-sung.