Kim Jong-il's Sushi Chef
gq.com
gq.com
If one day, decades ago, a teenaged boy's co-worker and friend hadn't wanted to live like "normal" folks instead of scroungers, and shared a sushi dinner with his friend, Dennis Rodman probably wouldn't have ended up visiting the DPRK decades later, causing all the resulting foofaraw. But for that one little choice, a subsequent event that at least flashed across the awareness of most of the First World, and who knows how much of the rest of it, wouldn't have happened.
It's not necessarily something of geo-political consequence, but if that's not the notional "butterfly flapping its wings in China", I'm not sure what is.
Overall I suspect that's for more impact than who's making sushi in NK as I don't think most presidents would have gone back to Iraq for instance. And without the Iraq war I don't think we would have the backlash that lead to healthcare reform etc.
Taking America going to Iraq war, it might be a disturbing fact, but America wanted to go at war back then. The bloodlust of a common, red-blooded, mall-shopping American in the wake of 9/11 is the foremost reason the U.S. ended in two prolonged conflicts. Yes the reasons for Iraq were pulled from the hat, but the nation was eager to be deluded. Not a conspiracy of two men in DC: can anyone really imagine the USA not invading anyone after the 9/11 attacks?
But again what's happening here is that in democracy, the influences become averaged with certain cut-off of extremes, like a signal through a band filter. The politics becomes statistical, as opposed to heuristic deal in feudal countries like North Korea, and as such becomes harder to disrupt.
I don't think that's fair. We American citizens were told directly that Iraq had WMDs and an attack on us was imminent.
If we were 'eager' for anything it was to stand together as a country. Most of us believed that the president had done due diligence (after all, he had access to intel that we didn't) and trusted him to do a competent job of analyzing the threat.
We were wrong in that trust.
Maybe "official Washington" (whatever that is) knew differently, but the Bush administration was selling the public on the vision of a mushroom cloud in front of the white house.
But we did: we invaded Afganistan very quickly. Honor was basically satisfied, and that was why the Bush team had to whip up all the stories about the secular Baathists partnering with the religious fanatics of AQ and also were working on WMDs to attack the USA etc.
But then it was a man-hunt, not a war. Honor was satisfied: a country's government which was seen as complicit and responsible was destroyed. Quibbling about Omar or Obama is like saying that the American public wasn't satisfied by the conquest of Japan in retribution for Pearl Harbor because the Emperor wasn't deposed and put on trial.
> And it wasn't just the Bush team whipping up support-- Congressional Democrats almost all voted to authorize force and the New York Times reporting supported WMDs as well.
Certainly. Once the drumbeats of war started.
There are multiple presidential candidates in most developed democracies, but chances of national politics taking really unpredictable turn remain low.
But back to the dichotomy: I have no reason to believe Fujimoto was predestined for sushi. On the other hand, I would be shocked to know that the rich kid, though he couldn't have known at the time, held direct power over Fujimoto's future. What if the kid wanted to play soccer? Or play Pacman in an arcade? Or launch bottle rockets? Could Fujimoto have been equally good at those things?
Ha! I never realized that was actually a word.
edit: a word
Did you know that since that article was shared here, the PNG govt is trying to push forward very tough laws to clamp down on the nastiness that goes on there. They're bringing back the death penalty, and it will now also apply to rape, violent robbery, etc.
> The prime minister also announced that the government would repeal the controversial 1971 Sorcery Act, which acknowledges the accusation of sorcery as a plausible defence in murder cases
> Prime Minister Peter O'Neill said violent crimes were becoming too frequent and that "draconian" measures were required.
> "There will be maximum penalties that have never been seen before in this country"
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-22366075
> Parliament last week resurrected the long-dormant death penalty and approved five methods of execution: hanging, firing squad, electrocution, lethal injection and asphyxiation.
It's been a great book thus far.
The personality of the protagonist is interesting to think about. Disturbed individual or hero? Both? We are presented with his actions, wonder what was going on in his head. Left his wife and kids to live for 3 years in a strange country. Did it again for 10 years. Remarried there to someone who doesn't speak his language. Had other kids. Left them.
A hero because, I guess there are few who would do that. Provided an interesting insight into the inner circle (but I don't the sacrifice for humanity's lack of information on Kim's family is what drove him). Very disturbed person as well. The childhood probably left some pretty large scars on him. Abandoning his family many times over is disgusting to think about, the scars it will leave on his children are no less harsh than those left on him by his father.
Maybe not a hero - but he's certainly an innocent bystander for the first few years of the story. He's not aware of all the evil that surrounds him which makes him so interesting.
Or at least, not directly. He introduced Jong-Un to basketball and both him and his father to a lot of western culture, influencing to the point to where Jong-Il's burial is modeled after a movie they once watched.
No, just yet another human being with contradictions, light-heartedness, courage, blindness, dreams, and sins.
Just a unique destiny. One should refrain from judging him. Who are we to judge a Japanese old man who crossed unadvertently the path of an ugly dictator, and managed to survive, and became half-addicted?
Could someone explain how Austria permitted slaves to be held within its borders? Is this some sort of diplomatic privilege? This would be 1986 [1].
edit: Or a parallel (?) situation, Cuban athletes "escaping" from government minders inside the USA (2002 [2]). What power do foreign government agents have in these situations?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choi_Eun-hee
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Cuban_soccer_players_w...
Of course there is no official way to hold slaves in Austria. However stories of foreign diplomats that hold "household staff" under slave like condition surface with saddening regularity.
Very often they are stripped of their passports in a country where they don't speak the language, so their perceived options are very limited.
Being a UN seat with a lot of diplomats certainly aggravates this problem, as do the restrictive immigration laws, that do little to protect people that want to escape from such circumstances.
Also in the case of the actress, her perceived options might have been very limited, while in practice the "only" thing she would have to fear after defecting would be assassins sent after her. Scary enough.
So I also think the question shows a limited view of the world, but is not offensive enough to accuse someone of being brain damaged.
Guns and strong arms, I can only assume..
"Could someone explain how Austria permitted slaves to be held within its borders?"
I agree with Dominik that that is a rather offensive question. Ofcourse it doesn't, even Kim himself did not believe she was a slave still, of course she was and felt that way.
There's only one way to assert that you are not a slave, and that is to test your freedom.
The sushi chef was leaving his apartment when he noticed the stranger outside.
He could tell by the man's suit—black and badly made—that he was North Korean.
Right away, the chef was nervous. Even in his midsixties, the chef is a
formidable man: He has thick shoulders, a broad chest; the rings on
his strong hands would one day have to be cut off. But he'd long since
quit wearing his bulletproof vest, and the last time a North Korean made
the journey to visit him in Japan, a decade ago, he was there to kill him.
"Kim Jong-il soon summoned him. Yes, Shogun-sama admitted, he'd sent an assassin to Okinawa, but he urged Fujimoto to forget about it. He was still alive, wasn't he? It was Kim's wife, Ko Young-hee, who'd reminded him of how funny and lovable his Japanese friend had been. Thus the killer was recalled."
"..and the last time a North Korean made the journey to visit him in Japan, a decade ago, he was there to kill him."
"he signed a one-year contract to teach sushi-making skills to young chefs in Pyongyang"
Was this just in the classified ads? I thought North Korea was closed off from the world and Japan an enemy. Was this a low point in military tensions?
Similarly what kind of flights went between Japan and DPRK?
indiecore 14 minutes ago | link [dead]
I don't think they had sushi in the west then.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_sushi#Appearances_in...
Wikipedia was pretty unhelpful but there don't seem to be many western references until the 1950s and it probably wasn't popular until the 80s when Japanese culture started getting big.
The term "sushi" does seem to skyrocket around 1980: http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=sushi
My point was that if the dictator wants some sushi, then enemy or not, hes gonna get the best guy for the job, and where else do you look for a sushi expert than Japan? Thinking about it more, how much of a missed opportunity this was for Tokyo, they could have had the perfect spy planted right next to King Jong-il!
The main catch is that Japan's "North Koreans" may be internally registered as such, but they're actually descended from people who were in Japan before 1948 and for most part have never even been to North Korea. This is all further complicated by the fact that Japan doesn't actually recognize North Korea as a state and holds on to the fiction that South Korea is the sole legitimate country on the entire peninsula. Wikipedia has a capsule summary:
It's fair to be somewhat puzzled over it though; as mentioned in the article even today there is still quite a lot of animosity towards Japan in North Korea. I suppose it just goes to show that either the top Korean officials don't totally buy their own propaganda or that people are capable of amicably interacting with other people on a personal level even when they are at odds in the greater scheme of things - or some combination thereof.