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.
And so, in the wake of US President Donald Trump’s trip to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), all the experts on the Strait of Hormuz suddenly became experts on US-China-Taiwan relations. The Internet has certainly expanded human knowledge. Lots of these sudden experts made noise this week about Trump’s words after the meeting with PRC dictator Xi Jin-ping (習近平). Trump is going to sell out Taiwan! Longtime Taiwan commentator J. Michael Cole summed the situation up neatly in the Guardian: “We need to keep in mind that he has a tendency to say many things — sometimes contradicting himself within
There is considerable frustration and confusion among many, both in Taiwan and abroad — including in Washington — as to why the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) seems so dead set on using their legislative leverage to slash defense spending and disrupt the ability of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) administration to function. Are they pawns of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)? Are they traitors? In reality, there are multiple reasons. In the first column in this series on this subject, “Donovan’s Deep Dives: How and why the TPP and KMT help Beijing” (Sat May 16, page 12), we examined three
It took 12 years and months of standing in the same mountain location for director Liang Chieh-te (梁皆得) to capture a few seconds of footage: Taiwan’s largest resident raptor locking talons with its mate and spinning through the air in a courtship ritual. With only about 1,000 left in the wild and very short flight windows, the mountain hawk-eagle remains among Taiwan’s most elusive birds. The species generally produces only one offspring per year. Using forest cameras, the film crew and research teams document the arduous process the monogamous pairs go through for the chick to hatch and grow up, weathering
May 25 to May 31 Few believed that apples could be cultivated on a commercial scale in Taiwan’s high mountains. When horticulturalist Cheng Chao-hsiung (程兆熊) first proposed the idea in 1955, both American and Taiwanese colleagues dismissed it as implausible, arguing that temperate fruit could not be reliably grown on a subtropical island, especially on rugged terrain. However, it was this terrain in the Central Mountain Range where many Chinese Civil War veterans were resettled in the late 1950s. With limited job prospects and no family in Taiwan, they were placed on cooperative farms aimed toward self-sufficiency. Some say the conditions
RSS