Category: Uncategorized

I’d like to thank the English edition of the Korea Times for reporting on this newest boast of superiority by the North.

North Korea Boosts Cider Production

According to the June 5 edition of Rodong Sinmun, the Workers Party’s newspaper, Kyongnyun Patriotic Cider Factory in Pyongyang is pushing for a rise in production, as well as modernizing its facilities.

The factory is named after Japanese-Korean businessman Park Kyung-ryun, who donated $150 million worth of cider manufacturing machines to set up a factory in the North Korean capital on the 70th birthday of the late North Korean leader Kim Il-sung in 1982. The facility currently produces 5,000 bottles of cider per hour.

Leaving aside sarcasm over the ludicrousness of a ‘Patriotic cider factory,’ it’s actually interesting to see the North Korean media bragging about an investment from overseas North Korean citizens residing in Japan. For those who don’t know, there somewhere in the neighborhood of a million people of Korean descent born and bred in Japan, but for the most part hold citizenship in either North or South Korea, and not Japan. Cash sent from North Korean-Japanese to their often unknown relatives back ‘home’ has actually been one of the things keeping people in the DPRK alive for years now. It is well known in Japan that one of the largest sources of this money is North Korean-Japanese owned pachinko parlors. Some readers may be unlucky enough to have experienced Pachinko, but for the rest- Pachinko is a mind-numbing Japanese passtime best described as a cross between a slot and pinball machine, and the most popular form of gambling in the country. Gambling is illegal in Japan, but Pachinko parlors get around it by giving you ‘prizes’ instead of cash when you trade in your winnings. You take the prize around the corner to an exchange counter (probably with no registered relationship to the parlor itself) where you then sell these prizes for cash, thus evading the letter but certainly not the spirit of the law. In any even, Pachinko’s ubiquity is proof that the government and police have no interest at all in controlling it. The following chart gives an idea of the high level of popularity that pachinko has in Japan.

(Image from here.)

Here is a good collection of links to articles discussing the connection between pachinko in Japan and North Korea.

A recent article in The Japan Times writes that:

[A new] ship bill stipulates that the government can ban, for a certain period of time, port calls by ships from a designated country or those that have stopped at that country.
[…]
The bill is designed to give the government another diplomatic card in its dealings with Pyongyang, allowing Japan to halt the flow of people, goods and hard currency between the two countries.
[…]
It follows on the heels of legislation that revised the Foreign Exchange and Foreign Trade Law, enabling the government to slap unilateral sanctions on the North by halting cash remittances to the reclusive state.

The ‘cash remittances’ mentioned in the article are gifts, donations and investments made by Japan resident North Korean citizens, and the Japanese government is finally making some attempt to control this cash flow after many years of turning a blind eye.

March 8 2004
Can a travelogue which includes Beijing NOT have a picture of Tiananmen?
Tiananmen, whose name means ‘Gate of Heaven’s Peace’ is the main gate to the former Imperial Palace, aka the Forbidden City. There is a moat surrounding the wall, and three bridges span the moat to lead into Tiananmen. The center bridge was reserved for the Emperor himself, so when Chairman Mao crossed the center bridge when he entered the gate to proclaim the establishment of the People’s Republic of China on October 1 1949 he was graphically demonstrating the fall of the Imperial state. Ironically, today the center gate is again closed by chains, and overshadowed by a massive portrait of Mao (which is the backdrop for thousands of Chinese tourists’ photographs every day).

This is the one of the two towers which once guarded Qianmen, the front gate to the walled inner city area of Beijing. The remains of the walls were destroyed by government authorities during the absurd purges of the Cultural Revolution, but luckily the large towers were preserved well.

NTT Japan’s Docomo subsidiary is now offering a satellite based phone service called “Widestar,” offering both voice calls and data transmision.
According to the service’s web site the primary customers are people isolated in mountainous areas or remote islands, or for emergency services like ambulances, for whom reliability is paramount.

One of the more intersting uses they mention is providing data links to electronic signs on highways, to which it would be impractical to run cable. Since the signs are also solar powered (obviously with batteries for night) the system is completely wireless. Some other remote locations they mention are: weather sensors, remote seismic activity sensors (essential in earthquake-prone Japan), dam and river water-level sensors and tectonic movement sensors.

Some of the stats they supply for the network are:
Two N-Star satellites in a geosynchronous orbit 36,000 KM above the equator, covering all of Japan.
Satellite expected lifespan:At least 10 years.
Daterate: 5.6kbps voice mode, 4.8 kbps data mode (perhaps the discrepancy is for extra
error checking for pure data?)
Signal strength: 2 Watts
Date, voice, fax.

I won’t get into all the details of various pricing plans, but for basic voice service it costs 13,000 yen (over $115) to start, and then depending on the time of the call and what kind of phone it’s to calls are anywhere from about $1 to $3 per minutes. As for data, billing is based on 128 byte packets. They have different plans for high and low volume users. The one for high volume costs 25,000 yen to start and includes 110,000 packets. If you exceed 110,000 then each additional packet costs 0.6 Yen, but if you then go over 200,000 packets the price for additional packets (after number 200,000) drops to 0.4 yen apiece.

March 7 2004
We stumbled across this apocalyptic field of wrecked buildings while we got lost looking for the Summer Palace.

The sign says ‘Net Bar’ in Chinese. It’s nice to see that you can still get Internet access even after everything else has been cleared out.

Beijing Duck
March 5 2004

Was it my inability to understand the warnings? Or simply reckless abandon? In any case, I wasn’t about to visit Beijing without trying their most famous cuisine.

I ate at Quanjude with Hyunju when I met her in Beijing, and then when I met Ashle and the two Chad K’s took them there. The three of them seemed sqeamish about eating the duck’s actual head, but those jaw muscles do make some good meat.

Click the link for detailed information on both Beijing duck and this restaurant, which is perhaps the most famous of all serving the dish.

Inside one of Beijing’s famous hutong alleys.
March 5 2004

The unique architecture and neighborhoods of the Chinese capital are being swept away by the rampant construction needed to prepare for the Olympic games of 2008, particularly in the central areas of the city.

More lunacy from Kim Jong Il’s Democractic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea). This is what he considers diplomacy.

In a region where saving face is paramount, the 10-hour stay in Pyongyang, North Korea’s capital, was riddled with slights to the Japanese leader. When Mr. Koizumi, leader of the second largest economy in the world, arrived in Pyongyang, only a midlevel Foreign Ministry official was at the airport to greet him. There was no banquet. Mr. Koizumi ate a box lunch of rice balls an aide brought from Tokyo.

*****

On Saturday, North Korea’s news media did not mention the issue of the kidnappings. Instead, it dwelled on the fact that the leader of Japan traveled to North Korea bearing gifts. In the past, defectors have said, foreign food aid is portrayed by North Korean officials as “tribute” to their militarily powerful nation.