The Prison State of North Korea and its Genial Inmates

“Is Australia divided into a North and South as well?” asks my tour guide Mr Li. Resisting the urge to make a joke about the Northern Territory, I tell him that it is not. Such was the type of naive, yet always cordially couched questions about Australia that I fielded during my visit to North Korea.

North Korea is a nation of 23 million prisoners—physically and psychologically—but it is important to separate the regime from the perpetually violated, yet often still jovial, and always inquisitive, people who have the misfortune of living in the last truly rogue state.

Arid land, emaciated husks of livestock (their owners not dissimilar), and a myriad other abject miseries fly past the window of the 17.27 to Pyongyang. Local farmers stare wide-eyed, some waving at perhaps the first foreign person they have ever seen.

The city of flat soil, Pyongyang, is by far the most gentrified in the nation, yet the bleak hopelessness which defines rural life doesn’t ebb when you…