Adam Johnson, a professor of creative writing at Stanford University, tried to create an account of the mental life of the citizens of Pyongyang with his new novel, The Orphan Master's Son. It is the story of the many vicissitudes of a North Korean everyman, Pak Jun Do: raised as an orphan, he enters the army, joins a special forces team to kidnap Japanese, learns English, and gets sent to a gulag, from which he mysteriously emerges as a high-ranking official.  

Two months into the reign of Kim Jong Un, North Korea remains impenetrable. "I'd much rather trade my story for a North Korean telling his own story," said Johnson. "We won't know if my version is right until North Koreans are able to tell their own stories."

What follows is an interview with Johnson about the gulags, fictions, and lacunas of North Korea, edited and condensed for clarity:

"In the stories we tell ourselves in the West, we expect to be the central character in our own narrative; we are a society of individuals and no matter how much we love others, they're secondary characters. The DPRK is exactly the opposite. There's one national narrative, tailored and maintained by script writers and censors. In a totalitarian world that script writer is responsible for everything that happened.

If you're a secondary character in North Korea, your aptitude for certain things and your class background sends you down paths, maybe to be a doctor, or a peasant farmer, or a soldier, or a music player. Your own wants and desires are only going to get in the way of the role you've been given and that you have to play if you're going to survive.

We have pretty clear information about citizens outside of the capital. We know how much food they eat, how much they ‘volunteer,' how much propaganda they consume; we have a portrait of the average person. Pyongyang is the mystery. Residents of Pyongyang tend not to defect because they're the top 3-4 percent of the nation.  If you're in Pyongyang you've made it. These people are the unknowns.

It makes me dubious about people claiming to be experts there. Maybe they're getting briefings-but what we have publically is testimonies from defectors that are completely unverifiable.

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The outpouring of grief in North Korea over the death of Kim Jong Il -- captured in an FP slideshow today -- has many people asking the same question: Are the copious tears shed for the authoritarian ruler real, staged, or -- more unsettling yet -- a product of brainwashing?

We can't know for sure, of course. But there's plenty of speculation. Reuters notes that while grieving has been coordinated in North Korea, there have also been reports of spontaneous outbursts of sorrow at gymnastics competitions and village loudspeakers. The Washington Post's Philip Kennicott thinks many of the tears, like those following the death of Josef Stalin in Russia, are genuine -- the products of concern about stability and continuity, "mass hysteria," and the inability to "conceive of life without the Dear Leader."

Others are more skeptical, however. In an appearance on PRI's The World last night, British professor Hazel Smith, who lived in North Korea for two years, suggested that those doing the crying represent the minority who've benefitted under Kim Jong Il's rule, pointing to footage broadcast by North Korean state media of wailing students from Pyongyang's No. 1 Secondary School as evidence:

Pyongyang No. 1 Secondary School is where the elites go to school and where they would have been filmed by the North Korean TV to show all this grief in order to put on a show for the world. So the main question is what about the rest of the people? Most people think that Kim Jong Il doesn't provide them with a decent life, enough food to eat, that they've suffered a calamitous degradation of their lives economically over the past 20 years.

So what has mourning in the impoverished country looked like? The first instance of public grief came on Monday morning in North Korea, when a television presenter dressed in black haltingly announced Kim Jong Il's death:

Over the past two days, the state-run Korean Central News Agency has released a series of videos showing the North Korean people -- mainly those in the capital -- "overcome with grief." In the clip below, employees of the Kwangbok Area Supermarket in Pyongyang -- which Kim visited during a "field guidance" tour only days before his death -- rush to a stage where the North Korean leader's picture is displayed, fall to the floor, and weep hysterically. One worker says she welled up with tears when she caught a glimpse of Kim's "haggard face" during his visit to the supermarket, according to a KCNA translation.

In another video released today, North Koreans young and old weep before a photo of Kim Jong Il at the April 25 House of Culture in the capital. "I can hardly believe his demise," one young woman shrieks. Another woman, the curator of the Jonsung Revolutionary Museum, adds that Kim "did not even allow the people to erect his statue and monument." She pledges fealty to Kim's revolutionary cause and to the leadership of his son and successor, Kim Jong Un. 

KCNA is publishing article after article about the country's "veritable sea of mourners" (5 million strong in Pyongyang alone, per the news agency) whose "wailing voices are rocking heaven and earth." This Russia Today montage captures some of the other scenes that have been playing on North Korean television, including that shot referenced above of students from No. 1 Secondary School (at 1:00):

In another instance of grieving today, Kim Jong Un made his first public appearance since his father's death, visiting Kim Jong Il's coffin and saluting military officials in what smacked of a symbolic transfer of power:

What's perhaps most striking about all the images above -- the hysterical, collective weeping, the ascendant son visiting his father as he lies in state -- is how closely they mirror the scenes that came out of North Korea in 1994, when Kim Il Sung died and Kim Jong Il assumed power. Check out this footage from that period:

"He is the eternally immovable mental mainstay of the Korean people," KCNA declares today of Kim Jong Un. One can't help but feel like history is repeating itself.

Update: In an analysis on Wednesday, the New York Times notes that the convulsive grieving in North Korea is "an accepted part of Korean Confucian culture," a practice compounded by coercion and Kim Jong Il's cult of personality. "Not hewing to this tradition would invite social and state opprobium," the paper writes. Indeed, according to ABC News, a North Korean defector once wrote that in the wake of Kim Il Sung's death in 1994, "The party conducted surveys to see who displayed the most grief, and made this an important criterion in assessing party members' loyalty."

Next April, North Korea plans to partially open the Ryugyong Hotel, a quarter century after ground was first broken for its construction. The new opening date coincides with the 100th birthday of North Korea's founding father, the late Kim Il-sung.

The Ryugyong has been referred to in the international press as the 'Hotel of Doom' and "the worst building in the world". During its intitial construction phase, which began in 1982, the clunky but imposing outer space pyramid dwarfed its neighbors on the Pyongyang skyline and had been honored on stamps. But by 1992, continuing to mirror the state of North Korean affairs, the completed but empty 1,080 foot shell was underfunded, abandoned and airbrushed out of official photos.

Through the years of neglect, the 105-story Ryugyong's potential as the highest hotel in the world was surpassed four times by taller (completed) hotels and, though it once might have been the 7th largest skyscraper, it currently ties at #40.

The resurrection of the Ryugyong is said to come as a result of resumed funding by the Egyptian Orascom Group. It's been reported that new construction has already begun and that the forthcoming hotel might boast as many as five rotating restaurants. Critics may argue that North Korea could make better use of the 2 billion dollars it could cost to bring the Ryugyong back to life. But if all goes according to plan this time, the Ryugyong Hotel will soon be an enigma in a country not especially known for its hospitality industry.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Il traveled to Russia this week, his first visit to his country's former Cold War ally in nine years. Kim rode an armored train to eastern Siberia to meet with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, crossing the Russian border on Sunday, Aug. 21, touring the Bureyskaya hydroelectric power station, and meeting with Medvedev on Wednesday. Medvedev flew 3,500 miles across Russia to a Siberian military base for the meeting.

Kim promised Medvedev a moratorium on the production and testing of nuclear weapons, a move that could help restart nuclear disarmament talks, stalled in 2009. North Korea has been isolated both economically and diplomatically since March 2009, when it conducted a second nuclear weapons test. Both the United States and South Korea demand concrete action from North Korea before they return to the six-party talks.

Kim's weeklong trip to Russia is also expected to focus on trade talks and gaining economic and political support from Russia. North Korea is facing chronic food shortages and factory closures thanks to punishing international sanctions. Russia pledged 50,000 tons of wheat to North Korea and also discussed energy and infrastructure projects, including a pipeline carrying Russian gas to South Korea through the North.

According to the Christian Science Monitor, Kim is also concerned about the downfall of Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi and Middle East unrest in general. While North Korean media has not been reporting on the Arab Spring, news of the uprisings has been spread through radios and word of mouth from people who have illegally crossed into China and back. "That dynamic is probably much more alarming to Kim Jong Il than anything else," Lee Jong-min, dean of international studies at Yonsei University in Seoul, told the Monitor. "He's prompted by the need to bolster his power."

Kim has visited China five times since 2002, the year of his last trip to Russia, when he met with then-President Vladimir Putin.

More photos below the jump:

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North Korea won't tell its citizens this, but the Hermit Kingdom is broke. Luckily, ever-ingenuous Dear Leader Kim Jong-Il and his government have a new plan -- sell carbon offsets for cold hard cash. The isolated Stalinist enclave has a series of hydropower projects that it hopes to leverage with the United Nations' Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) scheme, which allows developing countries to partner with typically richer countries looking to reduce emissions under the Kyoto Protocol. The industrialized countries (or companies from such countries) earn carbon credits, while the host country gets cash from the sale of these credits.

Since 2006, over 2,000 projects have been approved -- according to the New York Times, 40 percent of the projects are located in China and most involve hydropower. In 2008, carbon credit transactions totaled close to $7 billion.

According to Reuters, North Korea is looking to get approval for three hydro power plants of 7-8 megawatts in the northeast part of the country.

North Korea -- currently facing sanctions over its nuclear weapons program -- faces serious challenges in selling carbon offsets. Aside from serious economic mismanagement, Reuters lists a whole host of reasons why these projects might not make it past the brainstorming stage:

"Even if they open up, who in the world wants to pay for North Korea that is blamed for its nuclear weapons programme?" said Choi Soo-young, a senior researcher at the Korea Institute for National Unification.

Cho said the UN needed to prevent outside cash going into its nuclear development activities, while Luckock, of global law firm Norton Rose, said: "Their limited access to hard currency has to be a concern for buyers - the damages clauses will carry limited weight without some security there."

Another challenge is that North Korea would have to make public its energy consumption and generation data and disclose information on the amount of energy linked to the hydro project.

"Annual inspection, constant measurement and energy flow posting on the [UNFCC] website - all these things are new for North Korea," [Bernhard] Seliger [of the Hanns Seidel Foundation of Germany] said.

North Korea has a history of serious flooding disasters, although these might be better solved through fixing the country's drainage systems and reversing the effects of enormous deforestation.

Of course, enabling North Korea's nuclear program might be good for the environment in other ways: NASA recently used computer simulations to prove that a "limited" nuclear war might temporarily halt global climate change.

Almost every day, there's a completely bonkers, factually dubious story in the South Korean press about North Korea (which admittedly is a pretty strange place). Today is no exception. Here's Joong Ang Daily with an article about how a train supposedly bearing birthday gifts for Kim Jong-un, the heir to the Kim family dynasty, went off the rails:

The train was comprised of more than 40 train coaches, and eight of them were derailed, the radio station [Open Radio for North Korea] reported. The train was filled with presents for Jong-un’s upcoming birthday, which falls on Jan. 8, including luxury goods such as wristwatches and televisions in bulk, it said.

And here's a story in Yonhap, the South Korean wire agency, about the latest consumer crazes up north:

Skinny jeans, blue crabs, pig-intestine rolls and even human manure were some of the hottest items among North Korean consumers this year, according to a South Korean professor who has interviewed recent defectors from the communist country.

Kim Young-soo, a political science professor at Seoul's Sogang University, said in a conference on Tuesday that adult movies, television dramas and instant noodle "ramen" made in South Korea are also selling "like hot cakes" in North Korea.

Is China through with North Korea? That's the Guardian's takeaway from the exchanges between American diplomats and their Chinese and South Korean counterparts in the first batches of State Department cables released by Wikileaks on Sunday and Monday. "China has signalled its readiness to accept Korean reunification and is privately distancing itself from the North Korean regime," Simon Tisdall writes, and goes on to note evidence of "China's shift:" Nods of approval from Chinese officials for a single Korea governed from Seoul, expressions of alarm from Beijing about Pyongyang's 2009 missile tests, and a Chinese official's complaint that Kim Jong-il's regime is behaving like a "spoiled child."

It's all in there -- but sifting through the Wikileaks cables, that reading strikes me as a bit breathless. It's true that there are a couple of significant nods toward the idea of reunification. One comes in a 2009 meeting between Richard E. Hoagland and Cheng Guoping, respectively the American and Chinese ambassadors to Kazakhstan, at a hotel restaurant in the capital city of Astana. (Hoagland, incidentally, is a great reporter -- his account of the meeting is some of the best reading in the Wikileaks files.) "When asked about the reunification of Korea," Hoagland writes, "Guoping said China hopes for peaceful reunification in the long-term, but he expects the two countries to remain separate in the short-term."

The other is some intelligence relayed from South Korean then-Vice Foreign Minister Chun Yung-woo, who told U.S. Ambassador Kathleen Stephens that Chinese officials "would be comfortable with a reunified Korea controlled by Seoul and anchored to the United States in a ‘benign alliance' -- as long as Korea was not hostile towards China." The breaking point, Chun reportedly told Stephens, was North Korea's 2006 nuclear test, after which Chinese officials were increasingly willing to "face the new reality" that North Korea had outlived its usefulness as a buffer between Chinese and American forces. Chun (in Stephens's paraphrase) notes that the "tremendous trade and labor-export opportunities for Chinese companies" in a newly opened North Korea might would make reunification easier to swallow, and points out that in any case, "China's strategic economic interests now lie with the United States, Japan, and South Korea -- not North Korea."

Otherwise, Beijing's sharpest words -- such as Vice Foreign Minister He Yafei's remark that the Kim regime is acting like a "spoiled child" trying to get the attention of the "adult" United States -- came mostly in the wake of Pyongyang's April 2009 missile test, in the context of Beijing's efforts to engage Washington in bilateral talks with Pyongyang, Kim Jong-il's principal diplomatic goal at the time. Beijing's emissaries mostly just seem to be trying to keep the Americans at the table.

David E. Sanger's take in the New York Times better captures the essence of the cables, which is to say their ambiguity -- based on the selective evidence here, Beijing seems only somewhat less in the dark about what exactly is going on in Pyongyang than North Korea's enemies. Other corners of the Wikileaks trove are rich in plot and detail: the Obama administration's slow disenchantment with Turkey, byzantine Azeri-Iranian money laundering schemes, Yemeni President Ali Abdallah Saleh's entanglements with the U.S. military. The North Korean cables are mostly a lot of chatter around the edges of a giant question mark. As Sanger writes, they "are long on educated guesses and short on facts, illustrating why their subject is known as the Black Hole of Asia." The dominant mood of the Chinese diplomats who appear throughout them is exhaustion -- a sense, plenty familiar in Washington and Seoul, that no one really knows what to do next.

All the usual caveats on North Korean regime speculation apply, but some analysts seem to be suggesting that North Korea artillery assault on a South Korean island this morning may have been ordered by heir apparent Kim Jong Un or at least related to his succession. The Sydney Morning Herald writes:

NORTH KOREA has burnished the leadership credentials of its 26-year-old dictator-in-waiting with a deadly artillery attack on South Korean territory, causing its neighbour to return fire and scramble F-16 fighters.

Two South Korean marines died, and at least 12 were wounded. There were reports of civilian injuries and houses were set ablaze as scores of shells fell on Yeonpyeong island.

A North Korea expert at Beijing's Central Party School, Zhang Liangui, told the Herald that Kim Jong-un was deliberately destabilising the environment in order to mobilise the military and consolidate his power. [...]

Chinese North Korea specialists believe the brinkmanship is designed to mobilise the country around the anointed successor of Kim Jong-il, his son Kim Jong-un.

Time's Bill Powell adds:

Kim Jong Il's casino and Disneyland-loving son Kim Jong Nam is back in the headlines after kinda, sorta opposing his family's succession plans in an interview with the Japanese media:

Speaking in Korean, he told Japan's TV Asahi, in an interview from Beijing aired late Monday and Tuesday, that he is "against third-generation succession," but added, "I think there were internal factors. If there were internal factors, (we) should abide by them."

"I have no regrets about it. I wasn't interested in it and I don't care," Kim said, when asked whether he is OK with the succession plan.

Kim said he hopes his brother will do his best to bring abundance to the lives of North Koreans and that he stands ready to help from abroad, according to a dubbed Japanese-language version of his remarks.

Kim Jong Nam was once considered the favorite to succeed his father but fell out of favor after he was caught trying to enter Japan with a fake Dominican passport bearing the name Pang Xiong, which means “Fat Bear” in Chinese.

There's also a middle son, Kim Jong Chul, who Dear Leader reportedly simply derides as "girlish."

Granted, I've never spent time with any senior North Korean officials or participated in high-level nuclear negotiations, but former President Jimmy Carter's New York Times op-ed today, "North Korea wants to make a deal," seems so bizarrely credulous that one hopes he had an ulterior motive in writing it.

Carter says that during his recent visit to Pyongyang in order to secure the release of U.S. prisoner Aijalong Gomes, he received assurances "clear, strong signals that Pyongyang wants to restart negotiations on a comprehensive peace treaty with the United States and South Korea and on the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula."

Here's how it went: 

In Pyongyang I requested Mr. Gomes’s freedom, then had to wait 36 hours for his retrial, pardon and release. During this time I met with Kim Yong-nam, president of the presidium of the North’s Parliament, and Kim Kye-gwan, the vice foreign minister and chief negotiator for North Korea in the six-party nuclear talks. Both of them had participated in my previous negotiations with Kim Il-sung.

They understood that I had no official status and could not speak for the American government, so I listened to their proposals, asked questions and, when I returned to the United States, delivered their message to Washington.

They told me they wanted to expand on the good relationships that had developed earlier in the decade with South Korea’s president at the time, Kim Dae-jung, and Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi of Japan.

They expressed concern about several recent American actions, including unwarranted sanctions, ostentatious inclusion of North Korea among nations subject to nuclear attack and provocative military maneuvers with South Korea.

Still, they said, they were ready to demonstrate their desire for peace and denuclearization. They referred to the six-party talks as being “sentenced to death but not yet executed.”

Yes, nothing like a good North Korean death sentence joke to set everyone at ease. 

Carter acknowledges that North Korea continued to process plutonium during previous rounds of talks and that the most recent round of negotiations stopped in 2009, the same year that North Korea "conducted a second nuclear test and launched a long-range missile." Indeed, over the last two decades, Kim Jong Il has perfected a game of periodically promising a return to negotiations -- in return for aid or a loosening of sanctions of course -- while continuing to build a nuclear weapons program. Why is this time different? Carter doesn't really explain. 

It's all the more bizarre that the former president would choose to carry Pyongyang's water, since he wasn't even treated particularly well during his visit. In contrast to the high-profile meeting between Kim Jong Il and Bill Clinton, Dear Leader hightailed off to China when Carter showed up, leaving him to meet with lower-ranking officials. 

And as both Senator Joe Lieberman and Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell have pointed out today, the fact that Carter doesn't even mention the recent sinking of the South Korean warship Cheonan raises serious questions about his analysis of the situation. 

It's also not quite clear what Carter's intentions are in putting in a good word for North Korea. If he's urging the Obama administration to resume negotiations with North Korea, that's already official policy. As Campbell says, North Korea's recent appeals for talks are already "well known to us."

There's not really any news here and in the end the piece reads like a defense of Carter's international relevance after a high-profile snub in Pyongyang. 

It seemed for a while that there would be no repercussions for North Korea's national soccer team after their dismal performance in the World Cup earlier this summer. Of course, this being North Korea, the team -- and especially its coach -- have not gotten off lightly. In a six-hour "grand debate," the entire squad (minus it's two Japan-based players, who surely must think themselves two of the luckiest people on the planet) was berated by Sports Minister Pak Myong-chol, and were then forced to publicly denounce their coach. The manager, Kim Jong-hun, was accused of "betraying the young General Kim Jong-un," the son and heir apparent of Kim Jong-Il. He has reportedly been forced out of the Worker's Party and forced to work as a construction laborer.

It's not like North Korea ever had a chance of success. They were pitted in the "Group of Death" with Brazil, Portugal and Côte d'Ivoire, arguably the toughest group in the whole tournament (regardless of Brazil's early exit and Portugal's dull 1-0 loss to Spain). Holding Brazil to a 2-1 scoreline in their opening match should have been enough of a moral victory for Kim Jong-Il, but he doesn't see it that way. (Shocking.)

North Korea's subsequent 7-0 decimation at the hands of Portugal, the first ever sports program live broadcast on North Korean TV (and almost certainly last ever), surely raised the ire of Dear Leader. Of course, if he wanted to pin the blame, he should look in the mirror. Reportedly, it was his demand that the team play more aggressively that created gaps in the side's defense.

Perhaps, though, this is a sign of progress. A South Korean intelligence source told Chosun Ilbo, "In the past, North Korean athletes and coaches who performed badly were sent to prison camps." We'll see.

Given how stubbornly Kim Jong-Il appears to be weathering his reportedly grave illness, you might think North Korean healthcare is more or less intact -- even the Dear Leader must get a boost from modern medicine. But a chilling report released today by Amnesty International is an all-too-clear reminder that the luxuries (or in this case, just the bare necessities) of royal treatment in Korea are a far cry from the horrors of everyday existence: based on the accounts of 40 North Korean defectors and health professionals, Amnesty investigators reveal just how backward the country's healthcare system truly is.

Drained of the most basic -- and most important -- resources (everything from pills to power), hospitals in North Korea are barely functional. Doctors make their rounds by candlelight, and patients endure major operations without even the mildest anesthesia. And that's only if the ailing can make it to a hospital in the first place: many patients must make many-hour treks to consult with their inept doctors -- appointments that invariably spell further trauma. One interviewee describes his harrowing amputation (anesthesia-free, of course):

Five medical assistants held my arms and legs down to keep me from moving. I was in so much pain that I screamed and eventually fainted from pain," said the man, identified only by his family name, Hwang. "I woke up one week later in a hospital bed.

Under North Korea's official health care program, all citizens are entitled to free medical treatment -- and state officials insist they truly receive it. Yet World Health Organization figures give the country a failing grade: North Korea spends less than one dollar per person per year on health -- a meager sum that makes it the world's worst performer.  First-person accounts in the report only confirm this picture. According to one defector and former doctor:

People in North Korea don't bother going to the hospital if they don't have money because everyone knows that you have to pay for service and treatment.

Without the right bribes - cigarettes, alcohol, or just plain cash -- most Koreans don't stand a chance. In short, says the doctor: "If you don't have money, you die.''

How come the North Korean national team that managed to lose by only one goal to Brazil -- a win, essentially -- got beat down so brutally by Portugal? According to some sources,* Dear Leader himself may be to blame:

Quoting a source, RFA reported that after watching the match against powerhouse Brazil, in which North Korea recorded a respectable 1-2 loss with a tight defense strategy, Kim Jong-il said that although the team played the first half well, it lost because it only focused on defense in the second half. He then gave orders for the team's defenders to be positioned forward and even specified where each defender should be standing in the field.

According to the source, Kim "gave orders twice" to a responsible official dispatched to South Africa during the game against Portugal on June 21. The orders were delivered to North Korea manager Kim Jong-hun and implemented in the game. Despite the widening gap in the score, the North Koreans team stuck to their hopeless strategy and lost 0-7.

Perhaps he should stick to golf. 

*All the usual caveats about wacky North Korea stories based on defector reports. 

A heartwarming scene from The Red Balloon it was not: when South Korean schoolchildren launched fifty balloons into the sky on Thursday, no one stopped to oh and ah. The man who spotted the air-borne rubber fleet twenty miles outside the capital city Seoul mistook the colorful orbs for parachutes and instantly raised the alarm. A military and police investigation was quickly mounted, only to conclude that the would-be North Korean invaders were in fact the steadily deflating remains of a local school celebration.

The incident is one more laugh for international observers -- and one more sign of just how high tensions are running in South Korea in the wake of the March 26 explosion of the Cheonan. (This isn't the first false alarm on the Peninsula in recent weeks: the discovery of an abandoned diving suit on the heels of an unexplained coastal explosion set police on high alert. Thankfully -- or just embarrassingly -- investigators concluded nothing was awry.)

But for South Korean security officials, it's better safe than sorry: facing strong criticism within the country for their mishandling of the Cheonan incident, top military leaders stepped down, and remaining forces pledged to improve their level of responsiveness.

(Balloons have been the source of Korean controversy before: read about this defector's helium-powered propaganda.)