state. Even in death, the “Eternal President” managed to transcend time: The North Korean calendar was revised to begin in 1912, the year of his birth, which became Year 1. The cult of Kim Il Sung was not a natural phenomenon, however; it took decades of careful indoctrination.
The anguished cries of “Father” heard at Kim Il Sung’s funeral reflected the regime’s success in crafting and reinforcing a personality cult and a paternalist state. In this “family,” the father’s authority is paramount, while his love and benevolence are unquestioned. In exchange, the children must be loyal, respectful, and act only in the interest of the family and the father, subsuming the self in the higher collective good. Kim had the legitimate power to punish children who were disloyal, or not loyal enough, and also to help the children redeem themselves. After all, without Kim Il Sung, they as a nation and as a people would not exist, which schoolchildren learned in their textbooks and through lectures about their “father’s” heroic deeds and adventures.
Because children tend to believe in legends more than adults do, to ten-year-old Kim Jong Un his grandfather was probably larger than life. But unlike other children, Kim must have felt the revolutionary blood coursing through his veins and experienced not only pride but also a sense of reflected greatness by virtue of his birth and biology. It must have been overwhelming, like knowing you were related to George Washington or Abraham Lincoln or Santa Claus or Jesus Christ.
Luckily for Kim Jong Un, his grandfather laid the spiritual, ideological, and physical foundations of power, using brutal repression when necessary. But as successful as he was, Kim Il Sung probably could not have become a god without having been a guerrilla first.
KOREA UNDER SIEGE
Today the United States considers North Korea to be a top national security priority, but fifty years ago, most Americans would have dismissed such a concept: that a country about the size of Mississippi or Pennsylvania (and half the area of the United Kingdom), 6,700 miles away from Washington, D.C., could be the focus of geopolitical concern and a primary source of tension in Northeast Asia.
Before 1945 there was no North or South Korea—just one nation on a peninsula that juts off eastern China, with Russia to its north, separated from the Japanese archipelago by the sea to the east. An American missionary who arrived in 1885, when Korea was still a sovereign country, though besieged by its more powerful neighbors, felt as if he had been suddenly transported back to the Middle Ages. Another missionary mused that Korea seemed to be “2,000 years removed from the twentieth century.” Isabella Bird Bishop, an intrepid British explorer, was shocked by Korea’s overwhelming stench and squalor. The “meanness” of Seoul, the capital city, was indescribable, and her description of conditions was uncharitable.
An estimated quarter of a million people are living “on the ground,” chiefly in labyrinthine alleys, many of them not quite wide enough for two loaded bulls to pass…and further narrowed by a series of vile holes or green, slimy ditches, which receive the solid and liquid refuse of the houses, their foul and fetid margins being the favourite resort of half-naked children, begrimed in dirt, and of big, mangy, bleary-eyed dogs, which wallow in the slime or blink in the sun.
Paradoxically, impressions of Korea included not only negative conditions but also romanticized attributes. American missionaries, eager to inject optimism into their readers back home—in part to encourage donations—argued that the Koreans were kind people, hospitable to a fault, a population ripe for Christ. The land itself, they claimed, was truly God’s creation, with abundant flora and fauna. Boasting of the advance of Christianity, Horace Underwood, one of the first American missionaries to Korea, wrote in 1908, “Veritably it has seemed like a chapter from the Acts of the Apostles.”
It was this understanding of Korea—backward but pliant and eager for tutelage—that justified its status as a geopolitical football and ultimately as a colony of Japan, which Bishop described as neat and clean compared with Korean streets littered with decaying garbage. The Japanese legation’s compound within Seoul’s walls was “in acute contrast to everything Korean,” with its neat and bustling shops and clean and dainty houses “where thrift reigns supreme.”
For the first half of the twentieth century, Korea was a battleground on which China, Russia, Japan, and Western powers fought for domination using economic, political, and military means. Japan clashed with China in the First