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Comment by tkgally | Hacker News Reader

Side comment: North Korea seems to be allowing tourists to take videos fairly freely now, and some of those videos are appearing on YouTube. While the tourists' movements still seem restricted, the videos offer glimpses into life in North Korea I haven't seen before. For example:

https://youtu.be/HQEYB4QWCjM

https://youtu.be/d7m8hZ67Bz0

https://youtu.be/guZQNMEz9as

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Tourism is open only for Russians. It's been closed for the world since COVID.

My friends were there in 2017, and all photos and videos were looked at by a border officer before leaving back then. The border officer could ask you to delete a photo for any reason, including not putting a Kim in the center of the shot.

With NK's population not having freedom of movement, and checkpoints between cities, it's safe to say getting a real picture of how North Koreans really live is hard.

Was your friend asked to make deletions?

I went there pre-covid and yes they check your camera and tell you which ones to delete. They told me to delete some photos of soldiers. I had transferred photos to an external memory card so didn't matter.

But you're not going to get photos of what life is really like on one of these tours because they take you to places they want you to see.

>Tourism is open only for Russians. It's been closed for the world since COVID.

This is no longer true. They've opened up again in the last year and there's been a small flood of extreme travel of people going. https://youtu.be/TUmEcL3Feo0

It's so strange that in the age of the internet, we still can't find out how North Koreans live directly from them. It's crazy, but at the same time, it's so fascinating.

I recall a PBS documentary that had video of people who snuck across the Chinese border to film. I remember them meeting a 5 year old boy living on the street who said his mom moved away for work and “she didn’t come back”.

Heartbreaking.

That's actually sort of impressive, that a 5-year-old survives without parents or a home.

In the USA they would be immediately scooped up and placed in a protective foster home of some sort. Teenaged runaways can evade capture and return, but a 5-year-old cannot go trotting around wherever they please. I cannot imagine the fate of a girl in those circumstances.

Surely, this boy could not be surviving without support and guidance from elder allies. I am not sure what "fending for oneself" looks like in NK culture, but I can envision a lot of people taking pity and giving help and handouts of some kind.

My impression was that abandoned children sort of live in bands, the folks sneaking across the border brought them food and money. They were in pretty rough shape visually. It wasn’t clear how long they last.

There are some videos on youtube of the non-tourist-restricted side of NK. https://youtu.be/ZdhSuJ47Zqw

Jaka Parker, from what I recall, was a diplomat in North Korea from Indonesia(?) which is why he was able to have greater access to Pyongyang (and beyond?). I don't think he's in North Korea anymore. Nonetheless, his videos are a great resource. And my guess is that tourism to NK in 2026 is from Russian citizens (and maybe Chinese citizens)?

There's also this classic travelog of two railway fans gaijin-smashing their way through a closed route, although it's nearly two decades old: https://vienna-pyongyang.blogspot.com/

One of the best blog reads ever. Up there with the couple who drove through Congo.

That is not “life in NK”, that is an influencer that has been allows to make propaganda video of parts of capital. Read the actual witness of NK people who managed to escape, it’s one of the worst hells on Earth.

I would guess that people that are driven to risk their life to escape might be the ones that have the worst lifes and/or the most negative opinion on North Korea. There can simultaneously be a somewhat wealthy educated upper class in the capital (which would have little incentive to escape), and a very oppressed lower-class.

North Korea independently developed funcitoning ICBMs and nuclear weapons, you can't do that with uneducated starving peasants who are eating rats.

What a weird take.

North Korea has, like all (formerly and currently) communist countries, a decent education system.

An educated population of 20 million people will easily provide you with a several thousand people needed to develop functioning nuclear weapons. Those you need to feed. The rest may, and do, starve.

> I would guess that people that are driven to risk their life to escape might be the ones that have the worst lifes

Generally it is the other way around. The better you live, the more opportunities for escaping you have.

> North Korea independently developed funcitoning ICBMs and nuclear weapons

Maybe because it is not that hard, and it is pretty strong motivator when your only way not to consider rats to be celebratory delicacy is to be exceptionally good at building what The Party wants you to build.

> independently developed funcitoning ICBMs and nuclear weapons, you can't do that with uneducated starving peasants who are eating rats

Boy, you should read Russian history before writing comments like this.

The first video gives me impression that many of them are ... staged. Sorry if i am incorrect.

My impression is that the tourists are being guided along fixed routes in the limited areas of the country that are open to tourists. But there are long shots of towns and the countryside from trains and buses that can’t have been entirely staged. These are the glimpses of everyday life that I find fascinating.

Yeah, the idea that North Korea is putting on a country-sized Truman Show for the handful of tourists seems a bit bizzare to me. Of course they will keep tourists in the better, richer areas, but at the end of the day it's a real country with over 25 million people. Even if it's poor and totalitarian, like any other country that size it has big cities with an upper class of wealthy elites, it has a class of highly educated scientists who likely have a high standard of living (they produce working ICBMs and nuclear weapons after all).

I feel like due to popular portrayal, many people have an almost cartoon-like view of North Korea as "the dystopian totalitarian state" as it's portrayed in like, 1984 or something, forgetting that it's a real country with 25 million real normal people, and that there are just certain things a country has to do to keep existing.

Even with Russia, everyone understands that Putin exists in a balance with military leaders and oligarchs and has to keep them happy. But with North Korea, people are so caught-up in the one-dimensional view of Kim Jong Un as the supreme leader, that we forget a simple fact: one person cannot manage the entire military and all the industry in a medium-sized country, and inevitably there will be other high-ranking people that have a lot of power and a dictator has to keep them happy to stay in power.

It's still the world's largest prison: most North Koreans would be killed on sight or imprisoned for even attempting to leave (i.e., escape). It also has millions of slaves, in fact the highest rate of modern slavery in the world (approximately the same as the US in 1860 before the Civil War). Kim Jong Un executed his uncle in 2013. Privilege or comfort, where it exists, can be stripped by force from an entire family at once for any reason. So, yes, Kim Jong Un is not a literal god on Earth -- there are balances he must maintain within the country to keep his power. Not every North Korean is a slave. You're not wrong about those things. But I feel your description is coming dangerously close to portraying it as a relatively normal country, which it most certainly is not. It is a prison and slave state, one of the most severe in history, enforced via extreme brutality and shielded by nukes against those who would save its people.

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