King Arthur

Kim Jong-Il and the Superheroes

If Saddam Hussein’s court of fortune-tellers, soothsayers and sorcerers was like something out of set-piece, Tolkienish fantasy fiction, then his fellow tyrant, the mercurial north Korean Kim Jong-Il, has fashioned himself an image and a narrative more familiar from Marvel comics and superhero movies.

‘Superstition’, as in traditional magic, is officially decried in Communist North Korea; but defectors have painted a picture of a population which in its despair and chaos is turning more and more to ‘jeomjaengi’ (fortune-tellers) and exorcists. So prevalent has this become that there is no longer quite the campaign against it that there used to be. Indeed, many North Korean officials now consult jeomjaengi frequently themselves. Meanwhile, their ‘Dear Leader’ is a firm believer in all kinds of prophecies and signs: learning that it had been said that one of a triplet would one day replace him, he has had all triplets born in North Korea taken from their parents and put in State orphanages where they can be carefully watched. His fixation with the significance of his own birthday, February 16 th, has led him to use the numbers ‘2’ and ‘16’ wherever possible, including on his many cars.

Kim Jong-Il has a great love of magic, most specifically of the illusionist kind. He patronises various stage magicians in North Korea, and is said to particularly favour beautiful, leggy girl magicians, who put on private shows for him and his closest cronies. His favourite magician, though, is not North Korean but Japanese: the celebrated Princess Tenko. Once a singer named Marie Akose, the strikingly beautiful, Gothically-clad magician became apprentice to a noted Japanese sorcerer, Tenko Hikida, in 1976, and took on the name Princess Tenko after his death. So famous is she, not only in Asia but all over the world, for her amazing razzmatazz shows, which have been described as ‘Madame Butterfly meets Star Wars’ , that Mattel make a Princess Tenko doll, and there is a syndicated worldwide TV cartoon based on her adventures, ‘Princess Tenko and the Guardians of Magic.’

Kim Jong-Il is obsessed with Princess Tenko, and this led to a bizarre international incident. After he managed to entice her and her staff to Pyongyang to perform in a festival some years ago, he invited her back every year. Then came disaster—on such a visit to North Korea a few years ago, Princess Tenko fell ill. The North Koreans then attempted to hold her in the country, using her illness as an excuse, and it was feared they would kidnap her, much as they had kidnapped some prominent South Korean film-makers some years before. Princess Tenko managed to escape, with help from her embassy; but since then, Japanese newspapers have reported, she has been harassed by hundreds of mysterious phone calls, always at 2.16 pm(note Kim Jong-Il’s magic numbers) which attempt to entice her back to North Korea and the ‘Dear Leader’ who misses her so..

Kim Jong-Il has the typical tyrant’s pretensions to artistic creativity, and he is the composer of several operas and books on art criticism. But it is films that particularly interest him; he is an avid film-watcher, with tens of thousands of videos and DVDs (an avid interest in film is also not an uncommon trait in dictators). If Saddam Hussein’s favourite films were ‘The Godfather’ and conspiracy movies such as ‘Enemy of the State’, Kim Jong-Il’s tastes run more to the gung-ho superhero style: the modern version of the demi-god with semi-divine powers who overcomes all enemies. He loves the Rambo movies, for example—but his favourites are the James Bond films. Strangely, in the eyes of most Westerners who would more likely see him as a macabre spoof version of a James Bond villain, it appears that the diminutive dictator sees himself more as following in the footsteps of 007. He has expensive James Bond tastes in wine, cigars, and lovely girls—though definitely not in the sartorial department! And he projects himself as his country’s 007, battling innumerable enemies with style, grace and amazing powers. He must have thought the James Bond narratives were tailor-made to his image, which would have made the shock even greater when he saw the latest Bond film, ‘Die Another Day’. I am not the only commentator to have a slightly half-baked theory that the whimsical North Korean tyrant’s recent dangerous nuclear brinkmanship might well have been triggered by his spiteful rage, his sense of personal betrayal, over the portrayal of North Korea in ‘Die Another Day’. Raging that the film ‘clearly showed that the US is the root cause of all disasters and misfortune of the Korean nation and is an empire of evil,’ he demonstrated the tyrant’s absolute belief in the complete permeability of fact and fiction. In a hermetically sealed world such as Kim Jong-Il’s, a fictional superhero’s deeds are more real than the fate of his own people.