by Kenji Fujimoto; translated from the Japanese by Makiko Kitamura; excerpted in Atlantic Monthly. This is just a sample; go read it all.
The author, who writes under a pseudonym, is a Japanese sushi chef. In 1982, at the invitation of a Japanese-North Korean trading company, he started working in a sushi restaurant in Pyongyang. In 1988 he agreed to serve as Kim Jong Il’s personal chef—a job he held until 2001. In April of that year, having realized the extent of the paranoid and oppressive surveillance he was under, he escaped to Japan. In 2003, in Japanese, he published Kim Jong Il’s Chef (Fuso Publishing, Inc.), from which these excerpts are drawn.
Well known in Japan from TV and tabloid coverage, Kim Jong Il’s "Entourage of Delight" is just that—a group of entertainers devoted to providing Kim Jong Il with delight and gaiety. The women of this entourage were frequently summoned to the "Number 8 Banquet Hall" in Pyongyang to perform elegant dances. The stage of this hall was equipped with an elaborate lighting system that included footlights on the sides and even a disco mirror ball hanging from the middle of the ceiling with strobe lights. The floor was also decked out with lights that flashed from below, and floor-to-ceiling speakers pounded out music.
| Toldja juche and disco was his life... |
During a banquet one night a group of five dancers in the entertainment entourage were performing a disco dance. Suddenly Kim Jong Il ordered, "Take off your clothes!" The girls took off their clothes, but then Kim told them to take it all off. They seemed surprised and could not hide their bewilderment, but they could not object to their Dear Leader’s orders. In awkward embarrassment they stripped down and continued their performance in the nude.
| "Har! Socialist honkers! Pak! Gimme some more o' that white slag! Hee! Bring me the sultry wench, with the fire in her eyes!" |
After a while he turned to his cabinet staff members and instructed them, "You guys dance with them too." And soon enough I, too, was ordered to dance. However, he cautioned us, "You’ll dance, but you won’t touch. If you touch, you’re thieves." In other words, I think Kim Jong Il felt these girls were like his own daughters.
With respect to rice, before cooking it a waiter and a kitchen staff member would inspect it grain by grain. Chipped and defective grains were extracted; only those with perfect form were presented.
As I was riding a Jet Ski on a lake near the Chinese border, Kim Jong Il came up next to me and said, "Fujimoto, let’s race. But I want you to take it seriously." He gave the signal to start, and I rammed the accelerator as hard as I could. Halfway through I looked at him and realized that I was leading by about half a boat length. For a moment I thought I was making a mistake, but I remembered that he had said he wanted me to take the race seriously, so I crossed the finish line first. Kim Jong Il said begrudgingly, "You win, Fujimoto."
At that moment I thought maybe it hadn’t been such a good idea to win, and I regretted it a bit. But he had said it was a serious race, so I decided I wasn’t wrong in winning. Until then nobody else had ever won a contest against Kim Jong Il. A month later he once again challenged me to a race. However, this time at the starting line I was surprised to see that he had traded his old Jet Ski for a much larger one. With a different engine capacity there was no way I could win. At this time several areas in North Korea were suffering from floods and food shortages. Whether he was aware of this or not, Kim Jong Il certainly seemed to be enjoying his Jet Ski races. |