By Bob Faulkner  |   Submitted On July 23, 2014

Helicoptering over North Korea

I continue to survey the landscape of 2014 North Korea, as in a helicopter. Keeping my distance for now. But truly interested in what has happened since I have had to be away. Five years can mean a lot of changes. As I stated in an earlier article, the changes have not been all that noticeable, and some of my report has been offered before.

As a guide to my survey, I have borrowed from some books on the market, the list of which will help you update your own searching. An amazing group of authors have penned the tragic history of a nation gone wrong.

Out there today, written in the last five years, are such works as Nothing to Envy, Denrick; NK, State of Paranoia, French; Dear Leader, Jang; Escape from camp 14, Harden; North Korea on the Inside Looking In, Ringhneer; Capitalist in North Korea, Abt; Escape from North Korea, Kirkpatrick; Supreme Leader, Minute Help Guides; Exposing North Korea’s Menacing Leader, Okama; The Last Days of Kim Jong-Il, Bechtol; Successor Kim Jong Un, Lee.

As in all helicopter research, my view is limited. There are many more books you could read. And I offer no guarantees about the political spiritual content of these books. We are still a long way from the goal of touching God’s people in that nation. First, the nation itself. I think that in reading these books you will begin to grasp a little of the heart of the nation from a human perspective.

Soon we must land this craft and begin our search for the real treasures of Chosun.

In a 2012 book by Victor Cha, The Impossible State, I was able to glean more facts about what has been going on, but actually what is not new. The facts are Victor’s, the wording is all mine.

• The Pyongyang airport has essentially no traffic. Propeller planes are visible to incoming flights. Upon arrival you will hear… nothing. No car sounds. No birds. Eerie.
• Should you choose to visit a school, were it allowed, you would hear lessons in grammar that go something like this: “We killed Americans. We are killing Americans. We have killed Americans.” Thus goes a typical teaching on the tenses of the English verb. The strange thing, if that is not strange enough for you: English, the language of these dead Americans, is required study in all schools.
• Shall we study math? If there are 537 American soldiers, and you shoot 436 of them to death, show many American soldiers are alive still?
• Economists, check this one out. The value of North Korea’s mineral deposits is 140 times the GDP. North Korea is sitting on great wealth. And can’t afford to extract its fortune because of lack of equipment and energy. So much potential is being processed into the military that all other processes must wait.
• Meanwhile, Big Sister China is eyeing those resources greedily. China continues to grow. China needs minerals. For years now, she has been doing “joint ventures” with the North Koreans, giving them needed cash, while taking away slowly their needed minerals. How long can this last? And we all thought that China just cared about baby sister NK because of the historical ties.
• China actually has many motivations for putting up with rascally North Korea and its evil dynasty. For another reason, if NK collapses, where do all those hungry Koreans run to? They already have infiltrated that section of China where the two countries meet. And this, under threat of imprisonment, torture, and death at the hands of its government when China sends them back, as they do on a regular basis. Imagine the flow of recently freed citizens looking for money and food and housing. Could China bear it? For now, they say no. Of course, many of these folks would run south, to their own people. But how many? And would South Korea receive them? They have trouble doing so now, or so I am told…
• China must then consider a world with no North Korea, where on her actual border there is a West-leaning capitalist nation, influencing directly her people, her very way of life. No, North Korea must stay.
• And North Korea knows its place in China’s “heart.” She literally gets away with murder, knowing China has her back. From the days of the Korean War when Red Chinese soldiers turned the tide and almost gained all of Korea, until the present days of her silence when North Koreans are torpedoing ships and bombing islands, China must be cool. Not even a word about nuclear weapons? How far will China go in its support of this rogue regime?
• Enough of China for the moment. Let’s visit the jail of North Korea from this same distance, and see why people are there. Later we hope to hear names, and stories, and the name of Jesus. Our faith will rise. First, the helicopter view. The nation as it is. Use a cell phone that was made in China and therefore can reach outside the country, and you go to jail. Watch the wrong (aka Western) DVD and you go to jail. Hum a South Korean pop song, and you go to jail. Let someone discover that in the past your parents collaborated with the Japanese, and you go to jail. Jail can mean torture and death.
• Try to escape the country, soldiers are told to shoot to kill you. Public executions tripled in 2011.· There are other ways to die, of course. Starvation is still an option, though there has been some improvement in living conditions. Your average meal will be a small bowl of boiled corn, sprinkled with pickle pieces. You may have beef once a year. You will not want to buy foods that spoil, unless you are one of the 10% of apartment dwellers who own a refrigerator. And hopefully the market is close by, because it is unlikely you are one of the 3 in every 90,000 citizens who owns a car.
• But there are at least cell phones now? The local sort. Computers also can be found here and there, but not connected to Internet. In South Korea, they say, are the most online subscribers and smart phone users per household, in the world. Just a few miles north, it is possible to see lines of up to 30 people waiting to use the public (and therefore monitored) telephone.
• North Korea gives us so much to pray about. Remember to keep ample supplies of the joy of the Lord on hand while surveying this darkness. More depressed people is not the Lord’s goal in showing us other lands and other ways. We are looking for ways to send His light. How will that happen if the darkness engulfs us?

Look for Bob Faulkner’s creations on http://sermonaudio.com and http://www.youtube.com/user/TheProfessorEnglish, including a through-the-Bible course, works about the Christ, the antichrist, the rapture, the church, prophecy and the persecution in North Korea. Look also for series on Muhammad and Islam, written for Christian believers. All of these works are now in book form available at Amazon.

As for me, I’m a man found of God over 55 years ago, called to the ministry, now retired from school teaching, and serving the Lord as a nursing home minister, street preacher, writer, and teacher.

North Korea is a perennial news highlight, but in 2012 the isolated country seems to stand at a crossroads. The death of Kim Jong-il and the ascendance of the former leader’s heir apparent have pundits around the globe speculating the isolated country’s next move. Will the change in leadership make the North Korean government more reactionary? Or will it provide an opportunity for the country to open up to new reforms?

These are the questions of the day for most of us who have little to no contact with North Korea on a daily basis, but for Simon Cockerell, General Manager of China-based Koryo Tours, there’s no real concern of disruptions to business as usual. A British national, Cockerell has served as a tour guide into North Korea since 2002, and has worked closely with North Korean counterparts to bring an increasing number of visitors to the DPRK. In turn, Koryo Tours’ staff has grown from a mere two to twelve, and the number of annual Western travelers with Koryo Tours has increased from 300 to 3,000 in the last ten years.

But there’s more to Cockerell’s story than just numbers. As he himself mentioned, “I’m lucky enough to have a job, that I’d do for nothing, and luckily I don’t have to.” Here’s Cockerell’s story as well as testimony about working with a North Korea we don’t hear much about, one that’s surprisingly cooperative and willing to work with expatriate professionals across the table.

AsianTalks: First, a couple of housekeeping questions. What brought you to China, Koryo Tours, and how would you describe your experience of working with North Koreans?

Simon: I’ve been working for the company since March 2002, so for 10 years now, the company itself has been running since 1993. It was founded by two British guys. The one who was running it when I joined, I knew him through this amateur football league in Beijing. He was looking for someone to work with him, and seemed to think I might be the right person. So that’s how I fell in with that crowd.

With regards to the North Koreans we’ve been lucky to deal with the same people for a very long time. We work mainly in the fields of tourism and film. We’ve had the same partner in tourism for nearly 20 years, and the same partner in filmmaking since we started that, in the late 90s. So the key really is to find somebody you trust and to work with them, and we’ve been lucky enough to do that.

AsianTalks: Outside North Korea, we have very little knowledge of how businesses there operate. Do you have any insight into the country, especially in light of recent events?

Simon: We don’t deal with the government, we don’t deal with the travel company, we deal with specific people in everything we do. So really it’s about cultivating relationships with them. I mean, after all, this is true everywhere. But this is particularly true in East Asia. And, it’s even truer in North Korea. Your strength is the strength of your relationship with whom you work with.

And the people we work with are lovely. They’re very, very nice. If they weren’t we would work with somebody else. So it’s mutually beneficial, both on a business and personal level.

Working with North Koreans is never boring. It’s always interesting. But the highlight is, mixing with people as much as you can, and getting on with people on a personal level. I’ve been doing this a long time, and I’ve been to North Korea a surprisingly large amount of times, so I don’t find it exotic to deal with North Koreans anymore. And some of the North Koreans are our very close friends, I like getting along with them, it’s nice to see people grow in your eyes. A lot of the tour guides we had ten years ago, now they’re in their thirties, so you watch people grow up, get married, have kids, and it’s nice just to see a bit of normality there. Their aspirations tend to be similar to other people’s.

The recent changes in North Korea doesn’t really affect the way we operate, not yet anyway. There are a lot of people who claim to be North Korean political experts but that’s easy to say. Whether there will be any substantive change there, and whether that change will affect us, we honestly don’t know. But it is early days, so we can hope things will get better for people there.

AsianTalks: And what’s it really like to go inside North Korea and see the country, albeit in a limited format, given the travel restrictions?

Simon: I think for the people who are going to North Korea anyways, for them it doesn’t take bravery to go there, because it’s not risky, but it’s perceived as risky. But it’s very safe. Safest place I’ve ever been.

A lot of people do generalize about North Korea, but I think that’s a result of – not much information coming out of the country. The state itself has a very wary relationship with foreigners. They’re obviously a highly nationalistic culture. Their guiding philosophy of Juche is one of Korean unity, rather than communism or socialism. It’s based upon race.

There is a list of places foreigners can go. This list expands every year. Sometimes lots of new places open up, sometimes very few. But it’s certainly not possible for foreigners to go in and wander willy-nilly. There’s not much flexibility.

But the popular idea that the government dictates where everyone goes is simply not true. Most of our tours are bespoke tours, where we send people lists of what they could do.

AsianTalks: Koryo Tours has also made films inside North Korea, including documentaries such as The Game Of Their Lives, A State Of Mind, and Crossing The Line, which was screened at the Sundance Film Festival in 2007. Could you talk about how your team received permission to film, and the bureaucratic hurdles you had to overcome?

Simon: Well one of our first films, The Game of Their Lives (2002), took about five years of negotiation to get permission. It’s not a controversial subject, in fact that film’s been on TV in North Korea dozens of times. Everyone’s seen it. Still it took a long time to gain the trust, to make the connections.

The North Korean partner in the film production, we’ve had the same partner for all three films. But to gain their trust, to let you bring in your camera equipment, when they have no control over the edit or the subject of the film after you take it out of the country, that’s the first trust to gain.

And after The Game of Their Lives became a success in North Korea, a critical success, they liked it, they thought it was good, so on the back of that we asked for permission to make the second film, which was about two girls performing in the Mass Games. We just asked for one actually, and they ended up providing two different families. Filming in people’s homes, it had never been done before, so the film is really ostensibly about the Mass Games, and it’s really about the lifestyles of people in Pyongyang.

AsianTalks: Your company utilizes translators or interpreters in your tours. How important is their role, and why must they go beyond just skimming the surface of explanations of North Korea?

Simon: Every group that goes to North Korea must have two tour guides, and it’s easy to say they’re minders or guards, but those are something else. Minders are people sent by the government, but they don’t spy on you, they don’t brainwash you, they just try to explain how tall something is, or what the Juche idea is. We pick the ones that we work with, because like anyone, some of them are very nice, some of them less so. But they are exceptionally fluent English speakers.

But depending on what language is needed, our North Korean counterparts have guides that speak Thai, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, French, German, all sorts of languages. So the people we get, they will direct the tour in the language as required, but they will be able to translate anything from Korean.

And the people who go to North Korea, it’s not like going anywhere else, so they’re really into it, they want to know the detailed explanations about complicated political concepts. And a lot of people, they read up a lot on North Korea, but still it’s fair to say most people know nothing before they go in. So to have a cooperative farm system explained to you, to know the difference between the army first policy, it requires a detailed fluency in English, and an understanding of those issues. And that’s what our translator-guides do.

So being a tour guide is hard! It’s not just “Here’s the Forbidden City,” and “Let’s go to a jade shop, where I get 20 percent of the money you spend.” It’s really a complicated job in North Korea, and an important one.

Elizabeth Shim joined http://www.asiantalks.com as editor-blogger in 2011. AsianTalks’ mission is to inspire our readers to discover the transformative potential of living, working, and thriving in the Asia-Pacific region. Created to fill an information void for forward thinkers about living and working in a cross-cultural environment, the blog places equal emphasis on the challenges and rewards of globalization. Visit our blog and subscribe to our newsletter today!