North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un has threatened Seoul with fiery destruction, but as a remote graveyard on a resort island shows, he has closer links to the South than he might like to admit.
At a cemetery in a hard-to-find corner of South Korea’s Jeju island, there are 13 tombstones bearing the Ko family name — Kim’s relatives through his mother, Ko Yong-hui.
Jong-un is the third member of the Kim family to rule North Korea, following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather — what official hagiography calls the “Paektu bloodline.”
Photo: AFP
But the Jeju graves tell a wider story.
Kim’s mother was born in Osaka in 1952 to a native Jeju islander who emigrated to Japan in 1929, when the Korean peninsula was under Tokyo’s colonial rule.
Many of her family, including Kim’s maternal great-grandfather, are buried on Jeju, their overgrown graves a stark contrast to Pyongyang’s Kumsusan Palace of the Sun, where the embalmed bodies of Kim’s father and grandfather Kim Il-sung lie in state.
Photo: AFP
After Kim came to power in 2011 following the death of his father Kim Jong-il, many experts highlighted his mother’s South Korean and Japanese heritage. Pyongyang has never confirmed it.
The regime “must have feared confirmation would undermine its legitimacy,” said Cheong Seong-chang of the Center for North Korea Studies at the Sejong Institute.
The Kim dynasty bases its claim to power on Kim Il-sung’s role as a guerrilla fighter driving out Japan and winning Korea its independence in 1945.
“Korea-Japan heritage runs directly counter to the North Korean myth of its leadership,” Cheong said.
KIM’S MOTHER
Kim’s mother grew up in the Japanese port city of Osaka, but her family moved to North Korea in the 1960s as part of a decades-long repatriation program by Pyongyang.
The scheme urged ethnic Koreans living in Japan to move to North Korea, part of a drive to “claim supremacy” over the South, said Park Chul-hyun, a novelist and columnist in Tokyo.
“The North saw the Korean-Japanese community as a strategic battleground,” he said, and managed to convince nearly 100,000 ethnic Koreans to relocate to the “socialist paradise.”
The Ko family answered the call, and lived a relatively normal life in the North until their eldest daughter caught the eye of the country’s heir apparent.
Experts believe that Ko, who was a performer with the Mansudae Art Troupe of musicians and dancers, first met Kim Jong-il in Pyongyang in 1972.
She would become his partner in 1975, experts say, and although there is no official record of their marriage the pair had three children. She died in 2004.
“There has been nothing about Ko Yong-hui in official state media,” said Rachel Min-young Lee, a non-resident fellow with the 38 North Program at the Washington-based Stimson Center.
There is not much in state media about Kim Jong-un’s background and heritage generally beyond attempts to show he is the legitimate heir to the Mount Paektu legacy, she added.
EMPTY GRAVE
South Korean media discovered the Ko family graves on Jeju in 2014 — one of the first real confirmations of Kim Jong-un’s South Korean ancestry.
At that time, there was a plaque — known as an “empty grave” in the South — honoring Kim’s maternal grandfather Ko Gyong-taek, even though he died and was buried in the North.
“Born in 1913 and moved to Japan in 1929. He passed away in 1999,” read the plaque, a custom which allows family members to perform ancestor rites even if the body is not present.
The plaque was not there when AFP visited the Jeju graveyard in April.
It had been removed by a distant relative of Kim Jong-un, who was shocked by the media attention and feared the grave would be vandalized, the daily Chosun Ilbo reported.
He said his family “knew nothing about the relation to Kim Jong-un”, prior to the media discovery, the report said.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Approaching her mid-30s, Xiong Yidan reckons that most of her friends are on to their second or even third babies. But Xiong has more than a dozen. There is Lucky, the street dog from Bangkok who jumped into a taxi with her and never left. There is Sophie and Ben, sibling geese, who honk from morning to night. Boop and Pan, both goats, are romantically involved. Dumpling the hedgehog enjoys a belly rub from time to time. The list goes on. Xiong nurtures her brood from her 8,000 square meter farm in Chiang Dao, a mountainous district in northern Thailand’s
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist