Monday, July 23, 2012

Things People Don’t Talk about (1): Kim Jong Il Gets No Filial Piety

The most prevalent media speculation around Kim Jong Un’s mystery woman is that she’s his wife. Whatever. But here’s what I don’t get:

The Confucian tradition requires that a dutiful son spends three years in mourning and Kim Jong Il did wait three years after his father’s death before taking up the post of General Secretary of the Worker’s Party of Korea in 1997 and generally laid low in the meantime (though he did assume the post of Chairman of the National Defence Commission in 1994). Yet here was Kim Jong Un, enjoying himself at a pop concert with the smiling mystery woman at his side. (The music itself was eerily reminiscent of early 50s Japanese kayokyoku, or Japanese post-WW II pop music.) Add to that his latest summons to the Japanese chef who apparently doubled as a make nanny for the two younger Kim brothers, and here’s a guy who is not afraid to live it up so soon after his father and Dear Leader’s death.

Is anyone talking about this?

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