It was August when he arrived, a time when the capital city is especially alive. So packing only his knives and clothes, he left his wife and daughters in Japan and flew to Pyongyang. Still, he was restless at home, and the pay was good. He couldn't recount ever having met a Korean. "I knew that Kim Il-sung was the leader of the country. The toilet was a hole in the floor where urine, billowing steam, disappeared into darkness before freezing.įujimoto made us coffee, which helped, and through an interpreter I asked him what he knew about North Korea when, in 1982, he signed a one-year contract to teach sushi-making skills to young chefs in Pyongyang. Inside, it was cold enough to see your breath. Here, Fujimoto's friend owns a battered five-stool karaoke bar, and this is where we met. It was December when I arrived, and a dusting of snow blew through the town's car lots and bare-limbed apple orchards. I had spent six years researching North Korea for a novel, and in that time I had spoken with experts, aid workers, defectorseveryone with a story to tell about life there.
#Jing sushi series#
This winter, I flew to Saku for a series of interviews with Fujimoto. Which is why Fujimoto's is the rarest of stories. Because people rarely defect from the capital, their stories don't make it out, which leaves a great mystery in the center of an already obscure nation. When people do escape, they tend to flee from the countryside, where life is more dangerous. It is a nation where old Soviet factories limp along to produce brand-new refrigerators from 1963. Though North Korea is a nuclear power, it has yet to build its first stoplight. What we know of North Korea comes from satellite photos and the stories of defectors, which, like Fujimoto's, are almost impossible to confirm. (Perhaps 200,000.) We didn't even know the age of the current leader, Kim Jong-un, until Kenji Fujimoto revealed his birth date.
#Jing sushi trial#
(Maybe 2 million.) Also mysterious is the number of citizens currently toiling their way toward death in labor camps, places people are sent without trial or sentence or appeal.
(Best guess: around 23 million.) It's uncertain how many people starved to death during the famine of the late '90s. We don't know how many people live there. When he finally escaped, Fujimoto became, according to a high-level cable released by WikiLeaks, the Japanese intelligence community's single greatest asset on the Kim family, rulers of a nation about which stubbornly little is known. And when the Dear Leader craved McDonald's, it was Fujimoto who was dispatched to Beijing for an order of Big Macs to go. It was Fujimoto who flew to France to supply the Dear Leader's yearly $700,000 cognac habit. It was part of Fujimoto's job to fly North Korean jets around the world to procure dinner-party ingredientsto Iran for caviar, Tokyo for fish, or Denmark for beer. He had seen the palaces, ridden the white stallions, smoked the Cuban cigars, and watched as, one by one, the people around him disappeared. The chef's name, an alias, is Kenji Fujimoto, and for eleven years he was Kim Jong-il's personal chef, court jester, and sidekick.
Loyal to a fault, the chef packed his things and, later that day, bought a ticket for the same country he had so long ago escaped. "I was his playmate from when he was 7 to 18 years old," he recalled. Fujimoto himself had seen it happen, and he remembers thinking at this moment, I, too, might be purged if I go again to North Korea.īut while the chef had run from Kim Jong-il, he had a soft spot for his son.
Luring people back to North Korea to be executed or dispatched to gulags was a favorite trick of the regime.
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