by the regime to repatriate ethnic Koreans living in Japan.
Ko, a beautiful young woman with large eyes and a delicate oval face that would grow fuller over the years as she got older and plumper, was a dancer in the Mansudae Art Troupe when she caught Kim Jong Il’s admiring eye in the early 1970s, right around the time that Kim Jong Nam was born. Ko reportedly convinced Jong Il to exile her competition, Song, to Moscow, reflecting her determination to keep her own children first in line for succession. The defection of Song’s sister, whom he had trusted to take care of Jong Nam in Europe, might have factored into Kim’s decision to scratch his first love from his life—now tainted with the disloyalty of her kin—and made him more receptive to Ko’s maneuverings.
By the time that Jong Nam returned to Pyongyang in 1988, his father was busy with his new family and the affairs of state, since he had by then been publicly appointed as Kim Il Sung’s successor. Jong Nam began working in various government posts.
The firstborn’s presence in Pyongyang in proximity to the two other sons began to engender much speculation about who might potentially succeed Kim Jong Il. The odds favored Jong Nam, as the eldest, yet he would not be the one groomed for several reasons. For one, the elder Kim might have judged that Jong Nam was tainted by foreign influence based on reports from his son’s guardians and staff appointed to keep watch over him. Kim had been enraged and frustrated with his son’s behavior over the years. While in Geneva, Jong Nam would frequent nightclubs and hang out with Western women, leading his father to threaten to banish him to work in one of North Korea’s dreaded coal mines. In the early 1990s in Pyongyang, Jong Nam, probably during a night of heavy drinking, blindly fired a gun in a club for foreign guests at the Koryo Hotel. In 2001, international media reported that Jong Nam had been detained in Japan with a fake passport in a failed attempt to go to Tokyo Disneyland, an embarrassment for his intensely private father and for a regime sensitive to such public humiliation. By many accounts, Jong Nam regularly enjoyed partying, traveling, shopping, and womanizing, and these impulses appear to have outweighed his desire to govern the isolated nation. Still, this kind of playboy behavior was not inherently disqualifying since Kim Jong Il similarly indulged himself throughout his life.
More concerning to his father was that Kim Jong Nam had reportedly suggested North Korea undertake policy reform and open up to the West, a reflection of his extended studies abroad and his unhappy isolation as a child forced to grow up alone in a gilded prison. This opinion angered his father. In a 2012 interview with a Japanese reporter, Jong Nam recalled, “I grew further apart from my father because I insisted on reform and market-opening and was eventually viewed with suspicion.” He tried to explain their estrangement: “My father felt very lonely after sending me to study abroad. Then my half-brothers Jong-chul and Jong-un and half-sister Yo-jong were born and his adoration was moved on to them. And when he felt that I’d turn into a capitalist after living abroad for years, he shortened the overseas education of my brothers and sister.”
The lives and education of Jong Chol and Jong Un are even more shrouded in mystery, with the most significant observations coming from Kenji Fujimoto, a pseudonym adopted by Kim Jong Il’s sushi chef, who became the boys’ playmate after being admitted into the leader’s elite circle. Fujimoto recalled that the two young boys were referred to as princes and the daughter as a princess. Like Jong Nam, both boys were tutored at home until they were dispatched to an expensive school in Bern, Switzerland, in the 1990s. The cumulative tuition at the school for a student enrolled from kindergarten to the twelfth grade was $300,000, which suggests that the Kims’ classmates were from powerful and wealthy families.
Jong Chol, the older of the two, was deemed not tough enough to succeed his father, although his mother reportedly once suggested to Kim that Jong Chol should be the heir. Fujimoto described him as gentle and interested in music. One of Jong Chol’s friends recalled that he “is not the type of guy who would do something to harm others. He is a nice guy who could never be a villain.” His friends