Even before the American and Japanese tourists began videotaping the trolley drinks service on the Air Koryo flight to Pyongyang, it was clear that our trip to North Korea was going to be a stranger experience than we had bargained for. The air-stewardess had already performed a perfectly co-ordinated jack-in-the-box move, darting out from behind a red curtain to demonstrate how to tie a seat belt to the passengers. With no mention of oxygen masks or inflatable vests stowed, she disappeared again, leaving us wondering what was to be done in the not unlikely event of an emergency: the industry air-research company Skytrax labels Koryo the world's worst airline. Banned by the European Union for safety infringements, Air Koryo now flies from Pyongyang to Beijing, Vladivostok, Macau and a handful of other destinations.
The aeroplane was filled with a mostly male mix of North and South Korean, Chinese, American and Japanese businessmen, tourists and returning students. Americans are banned from travelling to the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea (DPRK) for all but one month of the year, during the famed Arirang Games - not an athletic competition, but the grandest propaganda spectacle on the planet. Named after a Korean love song, Arirang tells the tragic story of the peninsula's division. The show features 100,000 performers moving in regimented synchronicity: acrobats performing death-defying dives onto invisible safety nets, lithe gymnasts, busty army babes dancing salaciously in military uniforms and short skirts, and hundreds of martial arts experts chopping blocks and knocking each other out in mock duels. Wholesome fun for the whole socialist family. Held erratically since 2002, with gaps in 2003, 2004 and 2006 when the country was hit by massive flooding, the show runs for more than two months, culminating with the founding anniversary of the country's ruling Workers' Party.
The Arirang Games are a perfect metaphor for North Korea itself: a grand choreographed performance staged for the benefit of outsiders, designed to obscure the inner machinations of an impenetrable world of suffering. Our trip began at the airport in Shenyang, a northern Chinese city home to 10 million people and some of the world's worst pollution. It is one of very few access points to the world's most isolated state, and has a large community of North Korean businessmen and refugees. At check-in, crowds of returnees squeezed trolleys piled with electronics. The North Korean passengers were easily identifiable by the metal badges of allegiance pinned over their hearts. These tokens of loyalty might seem an ideal souvenir, but they are not for sale: the DPRK authorities use them to distinguish North Korean citizens from ethnically-similar Asian tourists, and illicit possession of one is a crime.
The North Koreans were weighted down with plasma screens and Dell and Lenovo computer parts, priceless components in a country where cellphone and internet service are restricted to a few high Party and military officials. At the airport in Pyongyang, tourists are required to hand in their cell phones at Customs. Telephoto camera lenses over 150mm are banned and professional cameras frowned upon. In a historically isolationist country with a past marked by unwelcome foreign interventions, the motives of outsiders are scrutinised with suspicion. I had declared that I was a photographer and was travelling with three camera bodies, five lenses and two laptops, hoping that at least some of my equipment would scrape through. After watching the European businessman in front of me get hassled for 10 minutes, I breezed through the X-ray with just my cellphone and laptop's external wireless modem confiscated. Once you enter the country, you are effectively cut off from the rest of the world. My travel companions were two young American women, both fluent Mandarin speakers with considerable experience in Southeast Asia. We booked our tour through a Chinese company, hoping to see more of the country, and in a more informal manner, than tourists travelling through European or North American bookings. But before departing Shenyang, we were informed that we would be kept segregated from the other tourists and assigned two minders - as Americans are considered a high security risk.
Often referred to as the world's final frontier, North Korea accepts just under 2000 Western tourists every year and offers residency to a handful of foreign businessmen. Barely 100 Western foreigners live in Pyongyang, including diplomats and businessmen. The most famous is Joe Dresnok, a former American soldier who defected into North Korea in 1962 and later starred in several North Korean film productions as a sinister American spy. We coasted over green fields and rushing rivers and landed in Pyongyang. Looking out of the window at the verdant scenery, it was hard to believe that the DPRK has been hobbled by years of famine. The airport itself is a small, Sixties-era oblong building, crested with the image of a smiling Kim Il Sung. As we filed inside, the lights came on, the air conditioning whirred into life. Waiting to have my bags X-rayed I bumped into a European permanent resident, a cheerful trader who imported computer parts from China into North Korea. Once a month, he said, he travels to Shenyang to stock up on monitors, laptops and motherboards. In North Korea, he "donates or sells them at no profit". His hope is that, when North Korea opens up, he will be well-positioned to profit handsomely from the new economy. Since he didn't come across as a staunch advocate of Communist ideals, I assumed he was reaping some additional profit from his sojourn in Pyongyang, about which he remained modest. He described Pyongyang as like any other large city, but with cleaner air. Entry into North Koreans' houses is banned, as is leaving the city for the countryside without permission and an escort. Romantic relations with North Korean women are similarly prohibited. The only locals who would come to his parties are business associates. Looking through the windows, he talked about the small, unmarked jet parked in the runway that he thought contained American nuclear inspectors.
"They're very intelligent, thinking people," the European businessman said of the North Koreans. "They are all independent thinkers. But they're also split personalities, they compartmentalise their thoughts. Even I've brainwashed myself when I'm here. I self-censor." Later, he sent me an e-mail quoting a Cold War-era Sting song titled Russians whose refrain runs "We share the same biology; Regardless of ideology." "You give a smile, they give a smile and the world is in peace," he wrote. "And I can tell you: the Koreans do love their children." We handed over our passports and cellphones to customs officials, met our government-appointed minders, Mr Kim and Mr Li, and embarked on four days of intimate association. More convincing as Intelligence Ministry employees than connoisseurs of North Korean history and culture, the disinterested pair stayed by our side from arrival to departure. Our truest experience in North Korea was our tempestuous relationship with them. Mr Kim did not tolerate prolonged loitering and would order us on to the next attraction with a curt "Get back in the bus!" When I would hover off I was invariably recalled with an aggressive "Hey guy! Where are you going?" When the girls drifted away, they were admonished with a "Hey lady!" - American slang delivered with a macho North Korean accent straight out of the dated American films the Pyongyang University Foreign Studies Department loans out to officials looking to introduce themselves to the corruptions of American culture. Later, we watched a covert video on the internet shot by someone masquerading as a tourist that featured Mr Li. This time, he was called Mr Kim. We realised that these were merely generic noms de guerre. Heading into Pyongyang, we traversed an approach of tall white apartment blocks springing out of abundant green spaces. Mr Kim sat next to me to discourage photography while in transit. "We call it our City of Gardens," he leant in to tell me. Until a few months ago, Mr Kim laboured in a small office, translating North Korean propaganda into English. Becoming a tour guide constituted gigantic career advancement. Though he had never left North Korea, he studied Western culture through Hollywood films such as G.I. Jane (which he watched "five-six times" and largely memorised) and the Steve Martin mobster-comedy My Blue Heaven. Now he was one of the trusted few permitted to interact with foreigners, receive tips in foreign currency and eat three lavish meals a day. Pyongyang appeared as an outmoded, otherworldly metropolis; a showpiece capital of wide boulevards and open squares thronged with people brandishing parasols against the August sun. The volume of traffic was astonishingly low. Public transport consisted of hulking old-fashioned blue buses and the Metro - a nuclear shelter that, more than 100 metres below ground, is the deepest in the world and the only one whose station names refer to themes of socialist revolution (Renovation, Victory, Unity) rather than destinations. An increasing number of private cars plied the streets but there were no taxis. The only two cabs we witnessed during our stay were unmanned and parked outside one of the most exclusive department stores in Pyongyang - which was empty. "Is this an expensive area?" I asked, as we passed a district with newly-built whitewashed apartment blocks and a smarter crowd. "No," came the inevitably mendacious reply. "In Korea, all areas are the same." With the Arirang Games approaching, the city sprang to life in the evenings. On our first night, a few lights glinted on one bank of the Taedong River and a complete blackout swathed the other. The next evening, both sides blazed with electric light, as if the government was on a charm offensive to convince visitors of the glories of socialism. Pyongyang is littered with needlessly monumental structures, evidence of a regime obsessed with surface appearance rather than improving the lives of its citizens. Obliged to keep them ignorant of the rest of the world lest they understand the scale of the North Korean economic experiment's failure, the government invested its funds in grandiose, self-congratulatory projects. "Some propagandist western news agencies call NK isolated and lonely," Kim told me discursively. "They say that it is cut off from the outside world. You are here and looking around. Do you see isolation?" I bit my tongue. "Of course not," I said. "I see so much industry, a thriving capital, new buildings, cars everywhere and much Chinese and Korean business." Delighted that I saw sense, he smiled. "Things are no longer like that, this is what the outside world should understand." For someone who had never visited the outside world but pulled himself up by his bootstraps by learning English, then laboured for years in a dead-end translation office before being thrust into the fast-lane with his tour-guide job, North Korea must really have appeared to be going places. The lack of perspective in their cloistered lives became clearer at night, when the guides invited me into the hotel bar to review the pictures I had taken during the day. How were these men, who had never set foot in the West, supposed to judge what did or did not depict North Korea in a negative light? Innocuous pictures - like one of men squatting on the pavement with a portrait of the Great Leader in the distant background - were deleted, while photos that showed what any outsider would immediately recognise as rampant poverty and societal breakdown barely caught their eye. The DPRK slumbers in pre-industrial isolation and poverty. Few statistics are ever published about the country. Its first ever census was only held in 1993. Numbing stories of state-sponsored abuse and famine percolate out from the countryside as the flow of defectors grows. How has Kim Jong Il managed to keep the lid on for so long?
We began an interminable round of sightseeing the many monuments dedicated to hero-worship and the glory of the DPRK's industrial development. The first stop was Kim Il Sung's mausoleum. Fourteen years after his death, he lies in a glass coffin like Lenin and Mao Zedong, embalmed for all eternity in the centre of a grandiose marble palace. Later, we found out that being taken there is meant to be a great honour, bestowed only upon selected foreign dignitaries and visitors. We surrendered our bags and cameras and passed through a walk-in X-ray, over a shoe purifier composed of a mechanical brush and sole wet-wipes, and a wind machine that blew dust off our impure bodies lest we contaminate the Great Leader's eternal resting space. Conveyor belts transferred our motionless bodies down long, air-conditioned corridors. The locals surrounding us stood just as unflinchingly. Dressed in their best workers' overalls, they wore V-necked navy-blue flannels over white short-sleeved shirts. They studiously ignored us when passing though several stole over-their-shoulder glances. Many were in shabby military uniforms; young soldiers, off for field training. Some looked barely older than 15. We entered the mausoleum. It was plunged in an eternal gloom, darker than the previous halls. On four sides, visitors bowed deeply before the Great Leader's body. More protocol officers stared hawkishly. The foreigners executed shallow, awkward bows. The North Koreans bent over easily, with the ease of years of practice. Beyond the mausoleum were exhibition rooms of awards and gifts from foreign leaders. The display cases were packed with medals awarded to Kim Il Sung from every formerly socialist country and non-aligned state, be it Arab, Asian or African. On the walls were blown-up photographs of the elder Kim hobnobbing with a galaxy of self-professed anti-imperialist leaders: Brezhnev, Qadafi, Mubarak, Assad the Elder. The final hall was dedicated to the Great Leader's transportation: his favourite train carriage and an armoured Mercedes 600 SEL took pride of place. Large, anachronistic maps with blinking lights showed the Great Leader's train and aeroplane routes in North Korea and the world. Finally, we were out and back on the undulating conveyor belts. Not a flicker of emotion registered on the faces of the North Koreans around us. It was impossible to divine their feelings about their morbid excursion or their chance to reconnect with the Great Leader. Certainly, there was not a wet eye in the house. I realised that it was all about surface impressions. North Korea is impenetrable. Beyond our 47-storey luxury hotel, isolated on an island with a guard at the end of the causeway, was an entire city swathed in mystery and suffering. The North Koreans may be the last nation with no idea of what societies beyond their country's borders look like. At night, the street-lamps remained dark. Car headlights and lit-up apartment interiors provided some illumination. A lone car crawled across the river spanning the Taedong River. Looking out my window I could only think of CNN's live images from Baghdad in 1991, just before the bombing began, when cameras focused on the bridges spanning the ghostly Tigris that would be the first to go. Over the four days we stayed in North Korea, air-conditioned buses transported us from outrageous Communist confection to obscene Stalinist celebration. The North Korean regime has become adept at negotiating a double falsehood: tricking its people into thinking they inhabit a socialist paradise, while barefacedly lying to foreigners about the scale of the DPRK's monstrous malfunction. In 60 years of ups and downs since its founding in 1948, North Korea went from being the original Asian tiger and one of Southeast Asia's most industrially successful countries to an isolated basket case. The regime has insisted on a suicidal commitment to self-sufficiency, despite presiding over a mountainous country with scarce agricultural know-how. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the suspension of aid, North Korea plunged into a terrible four-year famine that claimed between 250,000 and two million lives. The only comparable tragedy in its modern history was the 1950-53 Korean War, when an estimated two million North Korean civilians and soldiers were killed, largely by American carpet bombing. The scale of destruction was so vast that the American General Douglas MacArthur remarked, in 1951, "after I looked at that wreckage and those thousands of women and children and everything, I vomited." North Korea is the ultimate example of the Emperor's New Clothes, a famine-struck state where chronic malnutrition stunts a third of the children and the government rations food as it does news from the outside world. Visiting a few days before the Beijing Olympics, we asked our guides whether the Games would be broadcast on television. They assumed the patient air of parents addressing naive children and told us that most events would be shown live. Later, we learnt there was no live coverage and the government made a point of downplaying the Olympics - even the DPRK's medal successes - lest the citizens become too curious about their wealthy, post-Communist neighbour. In order for North Korea to succeed in its social experiment of raising a society absolutely devoted to one family and the Communist ideal, North Koreans must be kept sheltered from the reality of how people in much of the rest of the world live. Foreign tourists are obliged to enter this grotesque dance, acting out the roles the state assigns them. We were only there, after all, for propaganda purposes and because the DPRK needs our hard currency. State television cameramen recorded our pilgrimages to the DPRK's state-run temples, promoting the impression that the country is a prestigious holiday destination that anxious foreign tourists pay generously to visit. The night before the opening performance of the Games, I sat in my room, listening to the sounds of Pyongyang slumbering. The DPRK is subject to a permanent curfew. A central switch turns off lights inside apartments shortly after the day's last radio broadcast. That night, the only light came from the May Day stadium, where last-moment preparations continued for Arirang's opening night. The only sounds coming through the open window were of bricks tumbling on some distant construction site. Some lights winked in the dark buildings. A parade ground drill rhythm wafted from the stadium. Then, all sounds stopped, aside from the breeze, an occasional ship's horn, and the repetitive monotone of metal striking metal, as if some lone Stakhanovite worker was still out in the darkness and the silence, fulfilling another quota-surpassing day. At 3am, long after all sound had subsided, an amplified voice started up, slicing the night with slogans.
On the first night of Arirang we drive to the stadium along Pyongyang's funereally empty boulevards. Pyongyang is frozen still an hour before the games begin. Perhaps everyone is at home, waiting for one of the year's few live broadcasts. As we approach the enormous May Day stadium, capacity 150,000, traffic picks up. We come across thousands of schoolchildren concealed under overpasses or marching in unison on the bridges over the Taedong River. Wearing white shirts and black skirts or trousers, they are headed towards the illuminated stadium murmuring in the distance with the hubbub of an enormous crowd. Acrobats and martial arts experts entertain those loitering in the wide spaces outside the stadium. Unlike large sporting events in the West, no peddlers sell popcorn or other snacks. Every few moments, groups of performers dressed in colourful costumes sweep through the crowds. Long lines stretch outside the ticket offices. Clearly agitated by the large concentration of people, our minders bark at us to stay close to them. Loudspeakers blast the swirling crowds with patriotic ditties. Meanwhile, my lady companions are attracting attention. Throughout the trip, countless male tourists have approached them. Now, as the girls join arms outside the stadium and dance a spontaneous waltz, hundreds of heads begin to turn. Astonished students and citizens standing in a nearby line gape at this craven display of individualism. We are about to attend the world's most regimented display of mass co-ordination and here are foreigners engaging in an anarchic jig! A group of South Koreans cluster around them, cameras recording. After the initial shock, the North Koreans nudge each other, break into smiles and stare harder, drinking in every detail. Mr Kim is not impressed. He clearly thinks it an undignified display but does not want to cause a scene by breaking it up. Standing by helplessly, his eyes glare hard behind a cracked smiling façade. Nobody joins the impromptu dancing, except for a paunchy South Korean tourist who takes one girl's hand and twirls her around. Eventually, we are ushered into the stadium. Our tickets are the cheapest possible which, paradoxically, places us pitchside. Once the spectacle begins, we understand why the low-cost seats are so close to the action. In a show where the individual is subjugated to the whole, proximity to the performers is not desirable. The point is to view the shifting tableaux created by thousands of disciplined bodies. For that, the best view is from above. We sit almost exactly opposite the grand stage on which the Arirang saga is to unfold. The stands opposite us shimmer in a blue, green, red and yellow tableau of colour. Grey static flickers over its surface and we realise that we are looking at a human screen, composed of some 30,000 students holding up flipcards to create gigantic visual aids to the unfolding action on the pitch. Never before have I seen a human mosaic. Suddenly, the screen flickers and - with a barely audible rustle - sixty thousand hands flip to throw up a list of North Korean cities bathed in the red, blue and white of the DPRK flag. Now, men in white uniforms holding large azure-coloured banners march out. They are followed by green, pink and yellow lines of women in traditional dress with vivid cheerleader-like pompoms in their hands. Suddenly, they sweep out onto the pitch, spread out and begin a perfectly-timed dance routine. Above them, the human screen throws up images of disciplined workers, children tapping away at computers, resolute pioneers and even electricity poles. The greatest show on earth is underway. While the Olympic opening ceremony in Beijing was criticised for being narratively weak and occasionally ponderous, the 100,000 spectators at the Arirang Games hardly have time to catch their breath as the scenes shift with extraordinary speed and grace. A couple of thousand women sporting golden robes and rising sun headdresses flood the pitch with reflected light. They extend glittering fans to the night-sky, gracefully undulate their bodies and simulate waves of luminosity. In the stands above, batteries of ancient spotlights pour an anaemic reddish hue on scores of audience heads. This primitive but technically sophisticated human ballet continues with a bewildering succession of costumed performers. The dancers, acrobats and soldiers who participate are not paid. Being chosen to participate is an honour, Mr Li later tells us. Performers train over six months for eight hours a day -at dawn before school and again at night. The night's festivities climax with an inflatable plastic globe floating over some 100,000 performers on the pitch. A rousing call for reunification brings many of the South Korean tourists in attendance to tears. "It's amazing and frightening at the same time," said one Irish tourist at the end. "That kind of discipline is not natural in people." At the exits, thousands of people pour across the concrete open spaces outside the stadium. A disorderly traffic jam develops as hundreds of buses and private cars vie to leave the stadium. It is the only time we encounter anarchy in North Korea.
The show is over, but the touring continues. After witnessing Arirang, I realise Pyongyang itself is but an enormous stadium containing an even larger spectacle: the DPRK. On the few occasions we lose our minders and walk the streets of Pyongyang, we catch glimpses of the paranoia surrounding every aspect of life in the DPRK. Ordinary people immediately raise their hands and wave me away when they see my camera trained on them. On the occasions that I took the shot anyhow, my alarmed subjects approached our minders and reported us, presumably to cover themselves should the secret police detain them for having unauthorized contacts with foreigners. Only one man, an influential-looking official with Kim-like bouffant hair and a dark, pressed and seemingly-tailored Mao jacket and trouser suit, out for a stroll with his daughter, smiled genially and posed. The duplicity was ever-present, from the lines of recently painted, roadside high-rises obscuring dingier tenement blocks to the exhausted-looking workers washing clothes in the rivers, napping on the tarmac or driving their oxen and ploughs through the fields. The empty highways boasted perfectly pruned grassy verges, but gaping holes littered the tarmac. People moved about in abject poverty, lacking even bicycles. In Pyongyang, the monumental architecture and broad boulevards were undermined by derelict apartment blocks lacking windowpanes, in whose cramped balconies clothes were strung out to dry. What kind of state invites foreign tourists, plies them with a barrage of never-ending food to demonstrate abundance, inflicts intrusive minders upon them but still expects threadbare stratagems like landscape facelifts to keep visitors fooled? Only a state whose devotion to terrorising its citizens has made it abandon any hold on reality. Years later, the cowed masses continue to marvel at the emperor's clothes. Lulled into complacency, he forgets that he remains naked in the eyes of visitors from foreign lands. In the DPRK, the government has lost perspective to such an extent that even when maintaining appearances is essential the ability to do so convincingly is lost. Even if I could get off the island and walk Pyongyang's boulevards, even if I turned off them onto the dirt tracks snaking away from the urban façade put on for the foreigners, even if I entered an apartment building randomly and knocked on a door, the family inside would hardly speak to me and risk inviting the wrath of the state. For a people raised to distrust the infection of foreign ways, why take such a mortal risk? Instead, they are shepherded by officials into human tableaux of progress, rural blossoming, urban flowering. It is Arirang on a grand scale: the whole nation a stage, its captive citizens mere players.
Iason Athanasiadis is an Istanbul-based writer and photographer.