Dear Leader Dreams of Sushi: What life was like serving Kim Jong-il and his heir
North Korea is a mythically strange land, an Absurdistan, where almost nothing is known about the people or, more important, their missile-launching leaders. There is, however, one man—a humble sushi chef from Japan—who infiltrated the inner sanctum, becoming the Dear Leader's cook, confidant, and court jester. What is life like serving Kim Jong-il and his heir? A strange and dangerous gig where the food and drink never stop, the girls are all virgins, and you're never really safe. Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Adam Johnson on the man who survived all the craziness
The sushi chef was leaving his apartment when he noticed the stranger outside. He could tell by the man's suit—black and badly made—that he was North Korean. Right away, the chef was nervous. Even in his midsixties, the chef is a formidable man: He has thick shoulders, a broad chest; the rings on his strong hands would one day have to be cut off. But he'd long since quit wearing his bulletproof vest, and the last time a North Korean made the journey to visit him in Japan, a decade ago, he was there to kill him.
The chef's name, an alias, is Kenji Fujimoto, and for eleven years he was Kim Jong-il's personal chef, court jester, and sidekick. He had seen the palaces, ridden the white stallions, smoked the Cuban cigars, and watched as, one by one, the people around him disappeared. It was part of Fujimoto's job to fly North Korean jets around the world to procure dinner-party ingredients—to Iran for caviar, Tokyo for fish, or Denmark for beer. It was Fujimoto who flew to France to supply the Dear Leader's yearly $700,000 cognac habit. And when the Dear Leader craved McDonald's, it was Fujimoto who was dispatched to Beijing for an order of Big Macs to go.
When he finally escaped, Fujimoto became, according to a high-level cable released by WikiLeaks, the Japanese intelligence community's single greatest asset on the Kim family, rulers of a nation about which stubbornly little is known. We don't know how many people live there. (Best guess: around 23 million.) It's uncertain how many people starved to death during the famine of the late '90s. (Maybe 2 million.) Also mysterious is the number of citizens currently toiling their way toward death in labor camps, places people are sent without trial or sentence or appeal. (Perhaps 200,000.) We didn't even know the age of the current leader, Kim Jong-un, until Kenji Fujimoto revealed his birth date. (January 8, 1983.)
What we know of North Korea comes from satellite photos and the stories of defectors, which, like Fujimoto's, are almost impossible to confirm. Though North Korea is a nuclear power, it has yet to build its first stoplight. The phone book hasn't been invented. It is a nation where old Soviet factories limp along to produce brand-new refrigerators from 1963. When people do escape, they tend to flee from the countryside, where life is more dangerous. Because people rarely defect from the capital, their stories don't make it out, which leaves a great mystery in the center of an already obscure nation. Which is why Fujimoto's is the rarest of stories.
This winter, I flew to Saku for a series of interviews with Fujimoto. I had spent six years researching North Korea for a novel, and in that time I had spoken with experts, aid workers, defectors—everyone with a story to tell about life there. Yet I hadn't spoken to Fujimoto. It was December when I arrived, and a dusting of snow blew through the town's car lots and bare-limbed apple orchards. Here, Fujimoto's friend owns a battered five-stool karaoke bar, and this is where we met. Inside, it was cold enough to see your breath. The toilet was a hole in the floor where urine, billowing steam, disappeared into darkness before freezing.
Fujimoto made us coffee, which helped, and through an interpreter I asked him what he knew about North Korea when, in 1982, he signed a one-year contract to teach sushi-making skills to young chefs in Pyongyang.
"I didn't know much about it," he said. "I knew that Kim Il-sung was the leader of the country. I knew about the thirty-eighth parallel. That's about it."
He couldn't recount ever having met a Korean. Still, he was restless at home, and the pay was good. So packing only his knives and clothes, he left his wife and daughters in Japan and flew to Pyongyang.
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It was August when he arrived, a time when the capital city is especially alive. The summer days are long, yet the hard work of fall harvest—which requires the forced labor of all Pyongyang's inhabitants—had yet to arrive. Families were picnickingon Mansu Hill, while young couples strolled along the Taedong River. By day Fujimoto labored for ten-hour stretches at the cooking school, showing eager trainees the art of sushi. At night he retreated to the Pyongyang hotel where he lived with other guest workers—mostly Chinese technicians and engineers—and strummed old Japanese ballads on a guitar he bought at Pyongyang's Number One department store. Read More:
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It was August when he arrived, a time when the capital city is especially alive. The summer days are long, yet the hard work of fall harvest—which requires the forced labor of all Pyongyang's inhabitants—had yet to arrive. Families were picnickingon Mansu Hill, while young couples strolled along the Taedong River. By day Fujimoto labored for ten-hour stretches at the cooking school, showing eager trainees the art of sushi. At night he retreated to the Pyongyang hotel where he lived with other guest workers—mostly Chinese technicians and engineers—and strummed old Japanese ballads on a guitar he bought at Pyongyang's Number One department store. Read More:
