To trade real freedom for an imaginary paradise

Whom do you suppose became Japan's most knowledgeable expert on North Korea's Kim family? A Japanese chef, who was Kim Jong-il's personal chef for eleven years, until he escaped. Adam Johnson writes in GQ,

It was part of Fujimoto's job to fly North Korean jets around the world to procure dinner-party ingredients—to Iran for caviar, Tokyo for fish, or Denmark for beer. It was Fujimoto who flew to France to supply the Dear Leader's yearly $700,000 cognac habit. And when the Dear Leader craved McDonald's, it was Fujimoto who was dispatched to Beijing for an order of Big Macs to go.

We know very little about North Korea.

We don't know how many people live there. (Best guess: around 23 million.) It's uncertain how many people starved to death during the famine of the late '90s. (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. (Perhaps 200,000.) We didn't even know the age of the current leader, Kim Jong-un, until Kenji Fujimoto revealed his birth date. (January 8, 1983.)

What we know of North Korea comes from satellite photos and the stories of defectors, which, like Fujimoto's, are almost impossible to confirm. Though North Korea is a nuclear power, it has yet to build its first stoplight. The phone book hasn't been invented. It is a nation where old Soviet factories limp along to produce brand-new refrigerators from 1963. When people do escape, they tend to flee from the countryside, where life is more dangerous. 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. Which is why Fujimoto's is the rarest of stories.

Johnson flew to Japan to interview Fujimoto (not Fujimoto's real name).

If the Dear Leader had a great fear, it was this: abandonment. As a 4-year-old, Kim was deeply wounded by the death of his brother, who accidentally drowned, an event Kim likely witnessed. Two years later, his young mother died of an unknown ailment, and after his father, Kim Il-sung, remarried, his new wife rejected young Kim and his sister in favor of her own children.

He told his mother that he had decided to become a sushi chef, and at the age of 16 she apprenticed him to master sushi chef Senjiro Shibayama, owner of Sushi Sen in Tokyo's posh Ginza district. Apprentice is a kind word. For the next five years, Fujimoto would live as a slave, toiling to satisfy Japan's most exclusive clientele. Diplomats dined at Sushi Sen, as did moguls and CEOs.

Fujimoto's father had taught him to never question or criticize. He also gave his son the gift of a high tolerance for uncertainty, erratic behavior, simmering danger, and sudden violence. The sushi master was to complete Fujimoto's résumé as a dictator's sidekick by teaching him how to cater to the powerful elite, a realm where relationships were maintained through favors, discretion, loyalty, and extreme supplication.

Johnson explains how Fujimoto became a sort of nanny to Kim Jong-un, a position he would hold from the time the boy was seven until he became eighteen.

Fujimoto introduced them to video games, remote-control cars, and most important, basketball. Fujimoto's sister in Japan sent him VHS tapes of Bulls playoff games, so Kim Jong-un's first taste of Western hoops came from watching Jordan, Pippen, and Rodman — men who became his heroes.

Back to Kim Jong-un's father:

While Kim fretted about appearing like a powerful leader, his ignorance and hubris soon led his nation into famine and economic ruin. When he had taken power, the nation's food production had been considered a minor success. Rice blossomed white in the fields in the south; and across thousands of hectares, corn stalks broke upward through the soil. In recognition, the agricultural minister had been designated a hero when he died and was buried in the Patriots' Cemetery. But Kim Jong-il wanted more. He ordered the new agricultural minister to improve crop production by cutting down trees on hillsides to make room for terrace farming. Come the next rainy season, that deforestation would cause the flash floods that would destroy the crops that would cause the famine that would slowly kill 2 million people.

Fujimoto, however, would miss the famine. In 1996, while on a trip to Japan to buy fish at the Tsukiji market, he was arrested at Tokyo's Narita Airport.

At the time of his arrest, Fujimoto was traveling with Kim Jong-il's Chinese interpreter, a man whose Dominican passport raised suspicions. This made customs authorities look more closely at Fujimoto's passport, and they soon realized they were in possession of the world's most knowledgeable person on the inner workings of the Kim regime. They would spend the next eighteen months questioning him.

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