North Korea

Harry travels on an organised tour with guides and minders throughout, and is explicit about what that means for what he can show. The country’s own framing — self-reliance — is the thing he keeps testing, and the thing he repeatedly declines to reach a verdict on.

Obs: both videos of the trip are now covered. The subtitles on the first one are auto-generated and render proper nouns very unreliably, so names below are used only where the video is unambiguous.

Getting in

The access is the story of the first video, and it is not a tourist visa.

• The borders had been sealed for five years, opened for roughly two weeks, and closed again without warning.
• Harry entered as a marathon runner, not a tourist. He registered through an amateur athletics association to run the Pyongyang Marathon, states on camera that tourism is still closed and that he is not a tourist, and had never run a marathon in his life.
• A five-day organised tour with a group of over 200 people, some running and some not.
• Arrival is thorough rather than hostile: long bag searches and a lot of questions, which he describes as friendly, with a heavy military presence and constant uncertainty about what may be filmed.

The four rules

Recited to camera from memory on the first full day, and the whole trip is conducted inside them:

1. Don’t leave your guide.
2. No photographs without asking the guide first.
3. No disrespecting the leaders.
4. No distributing religious material.

His own comment is that they are basic, and that if you follow them nothing happens — which he offers against his own expectation of consequences for any mistake, an expectation he attributes to the coverage he had watched rather than to anything in front of him.

History and ideology, as Harry gives it

• The DPRK was established in 1948 after the Second World War, and became one of the most isolated countries on earth after the Korean War in the 1950s.
• Three generations of the Kim family, with a stated policy of self-reliance and rejection of outside influence — and, in his words, a country that in practice cannot survive without trade with China and Russia.
• Self-reliance is presented to him as a personal ethic, not a state policy: a local explains that when something fails you look for the reason in yourself and overcome it by your own effort, and that children are raised to do it.
• On the leaders, from the same conversation: whole families visit the founders’ monument on national holidays and birthdays; he remembers Kim Jong-il, who died when he was 13; he has been photographed with Kim Jong-un in a group, and describes feeling drawn to him. People who have met him are envied. Harry’s contrast is that British politicians change too often to know one.

What you are shown, and what you aren’t

The theme both videos share, and the first one makes it concrete.

• The itinerary is designed. Harry says so before landing: North Korean tours are built as controlled experiences, and filming freely will be difficult.
• The staging is sometimes visible. On the Pyongyang metro he tells the camera the people around him are real rather than paid actors — and then, told to mingle and finding nobody will turn round, watches his guides walk people over to be talked to. He names it on camera and doesn’t press further. See expect a script on camera.
• He argues the other side against himself. After a long passage about how clean the city is, he stops and says he is being shown what they want him to see and that this may be one district — then notes how much of it they have driven and walked.
• Buildings that appear unoccupied. Walking a brand-new street at night, every balcony is empty and no lights are on; he asks aloud why and gets no answer.
• A street named after an intercontinental ballistic missile, which he is told is a point of pride because of its range.

Getting around, money and connectivity

• Payment is in US dollars or Chinese RMB. There is no expectation that a visitor uses local currency.
• You pay before you receive the goods. In the department store the money and the receipt come first, and the items are collected afterwards.
• There is no Wi-Fi and no mobile data for visitors, for the entire trip. The one exception he finds is the closed national intranet inside the library in Pyongyang, which has its own browser and its own email.
• North Koreans do have phones, on that internal network. His guide describes television, newspapers and online shopping running on it, and calls online shopping a growing sector.
• Prices he films: a North Korean sports tracksuit at $80; a haircut with a full head, ear and face massage at $8.
• Tipping — he isn’t sure it’s permitted, asks nobody, and does it anyway.

The guided condition

• Guides and security are present at all times, on every part of the trip except the marathon.
• The marathon is the exception, and he treats it as the headline fact of the day: 42 km through the capital and out into the countryside with no guide, no minder and nobody watching. He says visitors have not been able to move around unattended like this for five years.
• Plain-clothes security are visible on the course, recognisable by notably better suits than everyone else, closing off particular roads. His reaction is that he doesn’t blame them.
• The camera changes people. The most useful observation in the video: off camera, people are open — they say what they think, what films they like, what music they actually listen to. The moment a camera is pointed at them they switch into a scripted register and give the approved answer. He describes it as a learned script rather than as dishonesty, and says the same thing at the end of the first video — every good conversation he had happened with the camera off. See expect a script on camera.

Food and daily life

• Cold noodles are the country’s most famous dish, served with fried meat and an egg. He eats them in a restaurant with a birthday party and a live performance going on around him.
• Taekwondo is one of the most popular sports, mandatory in school, graded across nine levels. The exhibition he watches is good enough that he expects someone to get hurt.
• Bicycles, not cars. Outside the capital, on the marathon route, he films a landscape where everyone is on a bike and there is essentially no traffic.
• Slogans are everywhere — painted and mounted along the roads and around the farm complex. He can’t read them and has them translated: patriotism, long live communism, fight for your country.
• The barber’s wall offers about fifteen approved haircuts, which he notes are hard to tell apart. He asks for the leader’s, and the barber turns out to have been waiting for someone to.

Food security and the greenhouses

The set-piece of the day, an hour’s drive out of Pyongyang, is a state greenhouse complex built on a former airfield.

• Vertical farming at a scale Harry has never seen, with supplementary lighting fitted for the upper racks that can’t reach the sun.
• The claim as given to him on site: three state-owned complexes of this kind produce food for the entire country — 25 million people (from video – unverified).
• He handles it by naming the objection himself before showing anything: that the visit exists to prove a point, and that the counter-argument is that people are going hungry. His position is that he cannot settle it — you don’t know, I don’t know — and that what he can say is that the facility is impressive.

What he takes from it is a point about home rather than about North Korea: everything in Britain is imported, and that is taken entirely for granted.

Harry’s verdict

He arrived, by the title’s own admission, having decided to ignore the coverage and go. What he says at the finish line is that the trip changed how he sees the country, that the people he met were genuinely warm and welcoming, and that this is what determines how he feels about a place.

Then the line he uses more than any other, and it lands harder here than anywhere else in the bundle: a government and its people are not the same thing.

Source

• First Tourist in North Korea’s Capital After 5 Years 🇰🇵 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUmEcL3Feo0
• I Ignored Western Media and Went to North Korea 🇰🇵 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJBeJGf6syc