No Kum Sok was chubby because of his father’s managerial job with the Noguchi Corporation. The Japanese conglomerate had built most of Korea’s hydroelectric and chemical plants and linked them by rail.
The company was created and run by Jun Noguchi, a chemical engineer turned mogul. He was known as the “Entrepreneurial King of the Peninsula,” and one of his admirers wrote that while “modern America was created by Columbus’s discovery . . . modern Korea was created by Noguchi.” His extraordinary success in Korea, however, owed as much to colonial manipulation as to capitalist acumen. He used the colonial government to obtain development rights to Korea’s major rivers, where he built hydroelectric dams that powered his chemical plants. By 1942, Noguchi’s company controlled a quarter of all the capital invested in Korea.
As much as Japanese companies discriminated against Koreans, they also needed local managers who could keep the trains of empire running on time. No’s father, No Zae Hiub, did exactly that, managing rail lines that delivered construction materials to hydro plants. He found the job through a relative of his young wife, but he qualified for it because he had disciplined himself to have all the skills the Japanese wanted in a Korean.
No Zae Hiub was born in 1904, the year Japanese gunboats chased Russian ships from Korean ports. He came of age as colonial control tightened, winning awards at school for penmanship and calligraphy, skills highly valued in Japan. Alone among five brothers and two sisters in a poor family, he graduated from a middle school run by foreign missionaries. The Youngsang Middle School was founded by Presbyterians from Canada and was similar to the missionary school in Pyongyang that Kim Il Sung’s father attended.
His teachers and his books made No Zae Hiub pro-Japanese and pro-American. So did baseball. He was the standout pitcher at middle school and, after going to work for Noguchi, played into his thirties as an all-star pitcher for a city league team. In a photograph, No Kum Sok, age three and wearing a pith helmet, sits on a blanket with his father, who is wearing his city league uniform and cap.
An American missionary introduced baseball to Korea, but it was Japan that rammed the game down Korea’s throat. Baseball blossomed in Korean schools in the 1930s and 1940s as courses in Korean history, language, and literature disappeared. The highly structured, drill-focused Japanese way of playing baseball weaned young people from Korean traditions and prepared them for a regimented adult life under tyrannical colonial coaching.
No Zae Hiub embraced baseball and accepted Japanese rule as an inescapable fact of life. He bought his son a baseball glove and taught him to speak Japanese. In their house, he required No Kum Sok to speak Japanese a third of the time. If the boy mastered the language and excelled at school, his father told him, he could attend a top private university in Tokyo and become “a real Japanese.”
The Noguchi Corporation treated No Kum Sok’s father well and transferred him often. The boy lived in ten cities and towns throughout northern Korea before the age of seventeen. The company typically housed the family in a four-room bungalow with free electricity and easy access to subsidized luxuries in the company store. As an only child (an older sister died soon after his birth), No always had his own room, and his father made certain he had a desk for his studies, a radio, and a tall bookcase. The boy grew up with treats and possessions other Korean kids could only dream about—walnuts and colored pencils, toy airplanes and a live turtle, a phonograph, and more than a hundred Japanese and Korean vinyl records. His mother owned an American-made Singer sewing machine, a treasure none of the other Korean mothers had.
No’s father often greeted him in the morning by saying “Good morning,” and required the boy to respond with the same English words. Several of the Japanese books he bought for his son described the wonders of American life: affordable cars, big houses, abundant food, and large universities. Because No was drilled in Japanese at home, he spoke the language fluently when entering his first year at primary school. It was a crucial competitive advantage over other children, especially after 1940, when colonial authorities insisted on Japanese-only schooling. That year all Koreans were ordered to change their names to Japanese. No’s name was Okamura Kyoshi, and he answered to it until 1945, when the Russians marched into Korea.
No’s father believed Japan would win World War II—and so did his son, whose teachers told him that the emperor Hirohito was a living god. They explained to the boy that Korea did not actually exist; it was a part of Japan, and so was he. By 1944, when he was twelve and in his last year of elementary school, the brainwashing was complete. The boy previously known as No Kum Sok desperately wanted to help the Japanese fight back against the massive American fleet that was transporting marines and soldiers to attack Saipan in the Pacific. Tokyo advertised in Korea for young aviation cadets willing to serve their emperor and prove their patriotism by dying as kamikaze pilots.
No needed his father’s permission before he could formally volunteer. The boy found him at home, sitting on a cushion in the living room. No asked his question while standing close to his father, expecting to be praised for bravery and love of Japan. But the moment his father understood the request, he erupted.
“You want to dive into an American warship?” he shouted. “Are you crazy?”
Smarting from embarrassment, the boy understood for the first time that there were limits to his father’s embrace of Japan: he was a Korean pragmatist, not a Japanese patriot. The emperor was not worth dying for. The boy’s suicidal aspirations melted away. So did his conviction that Japan would win the war.
III
The Japanese put a bounty on Kim Il Sung’s head, dispatched a posse to kill him, and made him the most wanted partisan leader in Manchuria. But they never caught up with him.
It was the Chinese Communists who nearly did him in. They arrested Kim as part of a witch hunt that went after ethnic Koreans in Manchuria. Although Kim survived, at least a thousand Korean partisan fighters and Korean civilians were tortured and killed in the 1930s on baseless charges that they collaborated with the Japanese colonial police. Chinese Communists killed Koreans for spilling rice while eating, sighing in public, or fleeing a Japanese prison rather than staying put for execution.
This obscure racist purge on the eastern fringes of Manchuria—called the Minsaengdan incident—nearly destroyed the common struggle of Chinese and Korean Communists against Japan. More enduringly, it seared paranoia into Kim’s character. As a guerrilla leader and later as a dictator, he never forgot and rarely forgave anyone who crossed him. The tense relationship that North Korea has today with China—a mix of dependence and suspicion, cooperation and contempt—can be traced back to the rage that he felt as Chinese Communists tortured and killed his Korean comrades. Kim called it a “mad wind . . . [Koreans] were being slaughtered indiscriminately by [Chinese] with whom they had shared bread and board only yesterday.”
The Minsaengdan (People’s Livelihood Corps) was a small militia created by the Japanese police, supposedly to protect Korean civilians from bandits in eastern Manchuria. But Chinese partisans saw it as part of a massive Japanese effort to use Korean spies to destroy the Communist movement. For two and a half years, Chinese partisan leaders operated on the assumption that Koreans in eastern Manchuria were pro-Japanese. Because Koreans (including the parents of Kim Il Sung and hundreds of thousands of exiles from the Korean Peninsula) were in the majority in the region, there were a great many people to arrest, interrogate, torture, and kill.
The purge killed or scared off nearly all the senior guerrilla commanders in eastern Manchuria who were ethnic Korean. After his arrest in 1934, Kim escaped execution because he spoke Chinese well and had important friends in the Chinese Communist command. He was also perceived as being too young, at age twenty-two, to be a spy for the Japanese.
In his memoirs, Kim says that he confronted the Chinese Communists at a party meeting and persuaded them to end the purge.
“Comrades, stop gambling on people’s destinies,” he claims he told the Chinese. “The only way to redress the murder of thousands of martyrs on a false charge of involvement in the Minsaengdan is to stop this pointless murder and concentrate all our efforts on the struggle against the Japanese.”
There is a dispute among scholars about whether Kim even attended that meeting. But historians agree that it was in the mid-1930s, as the Chinese Communists realized the purge was crippling their fight against the Japanese, that Kim became the preeminent Korean guerrilla leader. He seems to have been the last Korean leader left standing.
Kim then put together a new guerrilla unit, consisting of ethnic Koreans who had been arrested and held as traitors. At a Chinese guerrilla outpost called Mount Mann, he freed a hundred of them and burned their criminal files. “When the bundles of papers turned into flames, the men and women [who had been under suspicion for years] burst into tears. They understood me,” Kim wrote.
By saving these fighters, Kim created a core of followers who would serve him for the rest of their lives—and help him create and manage North Korea. The Minsaengdan suspects—and twenty orphaned Korean children rescued at Mount Mann—came to see Kim as a “parental leader.” They joined him to fight the Japanese in Manchuria and later followed him to North Korea, where they helped him run the country. Four of the rescued orphans grew up to become directors of a North Korean school that taught generations of the North Korean elite how to worship the Great Leader and do his bidding.
After 1934, the anti-Japanese war in Manchuria gathered momentum. Working again with the Chinese, Kim led raids that secured his notoriety. In addition to the raid on Pochonbo, Kim’s men famously lured a Japanese expeditionary force up a snow-covered hill where other guerrillas were camouflaged beneath white cloth. They reportedly killed or captured twenty-seven Japanese officers and soldiers.
The movement was built on “love and trust and unity,” Kim claims in his memoirs. A spy for the Japanese, a woman named Chi Sun Ok who spent nearly a year with Kim and his fighters, reported that Kim was indeed an idealistic leader who, between attacks and retreats, preached endlessly to his men about international Communism and Korean nationalism.
But in the freezing Manchurian hinterlands, love and ideology did little to provision Kim’s guerrillas. To feed and clothe them, he extorted protection money out of opium and ginseng farmers. He terrorized Chinese and Korean landowners, using blackmail, hostages, and murder. His men stormed into villages, press-ganged young men into service as soldiers, and demanded ransoms.
“If you do not bring [money, food, and clothing] by tomorrow noon,” said one note delivered to a Manchurian village, “we will cut off ears of one of the kidnapped and will return him to your families, and if you do not comply within three days, we will cut off heads of the kidnapped and return them to you.”
In Kim’s politics, as in his daily struggles to find food, there was never a question of whether the ends justified the means. He had become a thug with a cause. But thuggery was not nearly enough. In Manchuria, the Japanese had too many troops and too much firepower. Few of the young men Kim forced to become fighters believed his lectures about Communist revolution or a Korea that would one day be free. Many deserted at the first opportunity. By the late 1930s, the guerrilla war was lost. Kim fled into the far east of the Soviet Union, seeking sanctuary near Vladivostok, where he was immediately arrested.
IV
When World War II ended, so did the cosseted childhood of No Kum Sok. In August 1945, Americans dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan surrendered, and Russian soldiers stormed into the newly invented North Korea.
No was thirteen and living with his parents in a Noguchi Corporation bungalow in Kanggye, a city near the Chinese border, as units of the Soviet Union’s Twenty-fifth Army rolled in on trucks. It was an army of louts. “The immoral behavior of our men is horrible,” a Soviet officer wrote. They had been conscripted into a Soviet army decimated by war in Europe. Some regarded Koreans as racially inferior conquered enemies. As the Japanese quickly surrendered or fled south, the young Russians, many of them illiterate sons of peasant farmers, settled in for several delirious weeks of pillaging, raping, and drinking.
No watched them loot stores in Kanggye, where they seemed to take a particular interest in wristwatches. Soldiers wore several on each arm, rarely bothering to set or wind them. They were crazy for anything alcoholic. No saw them drink antifreeze and vomit in the streets. He heard stories from his neighbors about Russians bursting into houses, where they raped mothers and daughters in front of their families. This became a routine practice across northern Korea. Terrorized women began dressing as men to escape assault in the streets. Soviet troops were sometimes disciplined for rape, via a firing squad, but it was relatively rare. Industrial-scale looting began, with soldiers loading timber, grain, machinery, and fertilizer on trains for transport back to the Soviet Union. Within two blocks of No’s house, Russian troops set up one of these large operations inside a Japanese military depot with a dozen two-story, redbrick buildings stocked with boots, uniforms, medicines, rice, and underwear.
After the Russians arrived, No’s family did not have enough money for food. They stopped eating meat. His father was still expected to manage the railroads, but he was barely paid. The Noguchi company store had been cleaned out. The Russians cut phone and mail service with Noguchi headquarters in Seoul, which was south of the thirty-eighth parallel in a new and suddenly foreign country ruled by the U.S. military. To eat, No’s parents sold many of the possessions that had made the family upper-class: the Singer sewing machine, the phonograph, and all the records.
His parents warned him to stay clear of the Russians. But No spied on them as they swarmed around the Japanese military depot, noticing their eagerness to trade nearly anything for drink. They seemed to especially like sool, a Korean spirit made from rice. No’s father kept a large bottle of it in the house. One morning, No poured some into a small bottle and brought it to the depot as a friendship offering for the Russians. The guard at the gate was dubious. He pushed the bottle to No’s lips, forcing him to take a drink. Satisfied it was not poison, he escorted the boy to an inner courtyard, where No saw a dozen Russian sergeants sitting around a table, eating boiled chicken and black bread. They were delighted with the gift of rice spirits and returned the favor by giving the boy two pairs of Japanese leather boots, each pair worth a month’s wages.
While No was inside the depot, he noticed that local Koreans were loading Soviet trucks with boots and other goods. He asked one of them how he had gotten the job. Line up before sunrise, he was told. The next morning, No was there, the youngest and smallest kid in line. He flexed his biceps for amused Russians and was among twenty Koreans chosen to help them steal Japanese goods. His pay was extraordinarily generous. For a day’s work, the Russians gave No two more pairs of boots, a hundred pounds of rice, and a dozen pairs of socks. He and the other Koreans also helped themselves to all the underwear they could hide beneath their clothes and still manage to walk. The boy shuffled home wearing five undershirts and five pairs of undershorts. An unexpected bonus was lunch, No’s first chance to eat Russian-style: butter, cheese, and salami. The next morning, he was back in line and again scored a big bag of rice and several years’ worth of boots and underwear. On the third day, as word spread about the benefits of helping the Russians, the line of job applicants started forming at midnight. There was a near riot. Teenagers tried to climb the depot’s wall. One of No’s neighbors was shot in the leg and crippled.
By October 1945, lawlessness in Kanggye and the rest of northern Korea had been brought under control after Stalin himself ordered the commander of Soviet occupation forces to “strictly observe discipline, not offend the population, and conduct themselves properly.” That order came too late to alter the views of No’s parents, who saw the Russians as “barbarians” whose arrival had wrecked their l
ives. In the next two years, about two million Koreans abandoned their homes and possessions, heading south to the American zone, sometimes on foot, to escape Soviet occupation.
Worried about his pension, No’s father risked a journey to Seoul. With half a dozen colleagues from his company, he traveled by train to the last station north of the thirty-eighth parallel and hired a guide to lead them south. In Seoul, the office of the Korean branch of Noguchi was empty. There would be no pension. No’s father wandered around Seoul and, as he later told his son, was impressed by the American soldiers in the streets. They were clean, smartly dressed, and well behaved, especially in comparison to the Russians back in Kanggye. He bought his son an American-made toothbrush and a poster of South Korea’s new leader, Syngman Rhee.
No’s father liked what he saw in South Korea, but he was afraid to move his family there. He still had a company-provided house and a railroad job. He doubted he could find a job or a place to live in the South and worried that his family would go hungry in the South’s chaotic, strike-crippled economy.
So they stayed on in Kanggye, where No attended middle school and, following his father’s lead, became known as the most pro-American kid in his class. For a while, the Russians tolerated some freedom of expression in the school, in part because few teachers were trained in a Communist curriculum. No earned an A in English and latched onto his Japanese-trained English teacher, who coached soccer and was vocally anti-Communist. The teacher was later fired and fled to South Korea, where he served in the army.
School soon began to change. No was required to join the Korean Democratic Youth League, a Communist group. Teachers tried to stamp out religion, requiring No to repeat, “There is no God, no mystery, no secrets of life. Everyone can know everything.” In a political science course called “People,” No’s teacher said the United States was a poor country.