North Korea News Podcast by NK News - Yong Ja Hong: How sports and athletics play into North Korean statecraft

Episode Date: January 1, 2026

Yong Ja Hong, a PhD candidate studying North Korean society, culture and media at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul, joins the podcast to discuss the history of sports in North Korea, even before the peninsula was separated by the 1950-53 Korean War. She recalls North Korean athletes who competed on the international […]

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Hello, listeners, and welcome to the NK News podcast. I'm your host, Jack O'Swetsud, and today it is Friday the 26th of December, Boxing Day, and I'm recording an episode all about sports and athletics in North Korea. And first-time guest here is Yongja Hong, who is a doctoral candidate in North Korean Society, culture and media at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul. That's up in Sam Chongdong, near the old Blue House. Her primary research area is DPRK Athletics, and she runs a YouTube channel, which is at DPRK Athletics, ENG, for English, I presume not for engineering,

and a website, DPRKathletics.com, which both of them aim to bring informed analysis of athletics in North Korea to a wider audience. Welcome on the show, Yongja. Yes, thank you so much for having me. It's been a dream for me on this show, so I'm excited. Okay, I'm glad that that could come true today on the day after Christmas, in fact, yeah. If you had to pick one sports moment that best explains how power works in North Korea, what would it be and what does that moment reveal about who sport is really for in North Korea?

Oh, well, I would really have to choose the episode with Shin Gum Dan. She was a middle to, she was a middle distance runner. And she, just for those who are not sure, middle distance is how far? We're talking like a thousand meters, something like that, you know, with hurdles and everything. She did a few different disciplines. And so she was an athlete in the early 60s. She was really one of the representatives of the Cholima era. She came out, and she participated in the Gnifo Games, which was not the Olympics,

but it was kind of an alternative Olympics organized by Indonesia to kind of go against the Olympics, kind of provide something for nations that were like non-aligned and things like that. How do you spell Gnifo, by the way, putting you on the spot here? G-A-N-E-F-O. Okay, great, because I've never seen it in text before, so great, keep going. And she set a world record at that. It's just a new record in world distance. And so she was really a top athlete.

And so the DPRK actually got permission to participate in the Olympics in 1964 in Tokyo. They actually did the Winter Olympics early that year. I believe it was in a Nordic country somewhere. But in 64, they went to the Olympics and Shin Gumdan was to participate. And so she could have been the DPRK's only gold medal winning athlete at these games. But right before the Games, the Olympic Committee decided that anybody who had participated in Genifo could not participate in the Olympics. So she was not allowed to participate in the DPR. She actually went all the way to Japan.

They were ready to participate. The decision came down like right before the Olympics. And so it was just completely shut down by politics. And it gets better because it was a political reason, was it? I would say it was political because it was the Olympics wanting to shut down Gnifo. So it wasn't really, so it was, you know, their decision to align themselves with Gnifo, I suppose, that shut her down. But what really gets better about it is that her father had actually. fled south during the war and she was raised with her mother in the north and so she never got to

meet her father but a few uh she her name was well known in the south because she was so successful yeah and a professor went out and found her father and she said okay while they're at the olympics we need to arrange a meeting between the father and the daughter in tokyo yeah in tokyo yeah and they did it through the chongyang actually uh they used the pro north korean uh association of of korean citizens in japan absolutely yes and so they um they were going to to arrange the meeting, but then when the withdrawal was announced, then everything went haywire. And they only had a very short window of opportunity, but they managed to do it. And they had a meeting for five minutes. They met for five minutes. They never met again. I think Shindam Dandana

is still alive, obviously. Her father has passed away at this point. But I think it's just kind of testament to the fact that no matter how good you are in the DPRK, no matter how successful in an athlete, you're always victim to either international politics or internal political powers. There's a great documentary about that. It said Korean only was produced by KBS in the 80s, so I'd encourage anyone to look up that on YouTube if they're interested. Wow, what a story. And, of course, reminiscent of equally sad one-time-only family reunion meetings

in the 1980s, 90s, and 2000s, where people came together for a bit longer than five minutes. I think it was a couple of hours. Sometimes it was two meetings over two days. But at the end, they were always put back on the bus and never saw each other again, right? Yeah, it's the same deal. So was Shingham Dunn's meeting with her father, I guess, the first?

In that, you may not know the answer to this, but the first of that kind of family reunions across the border? Yeah, that's really not my area of expertise. Great. Well, that's certainly a very sad vignette that shows that politics really trumps ability and sport in North Korea and around North Korea too, because as you mentioned there, I mean, there's a lot of backroom politics there

in the international arena as well. Okay, so sport as state craft, for newcomers, can you talk a little bit about how sport is positioned in North Korean ideology in terms of, I don't know, mass participation, defense readiness or elite medals? And how has that shifted, that emphasis shifted by era? Well, I would say, you know, it's a really big history, but I'll do my best to crunch it down. Basically, in the 40s, 50s, 60s, it was all about popularization. you have to remember that during the Japanese colonial era, sports really didn't come to the Korean Peninsula until like 1900, and they came on a very small scale through missionaries in the West. Then you get to the colonial era where the Japanese occupied the Korean Peninsula's, Koreans living as second-class citizens. Not many of them had the chance to participate in modern sport.

If you look at the countryside, everybody was still playing traditional games, like they were doing Shietam, the traditional Korean wrestling, things like that. And so then you get to the DPRK being established, and then you have the country side. this socialist philosophy coming in. So the DPRK saying, all right, we've got a popularized sport for national defense and for working, for labor, labor and national defense is the two things. So you need to be, you need to be a good, you need to be strong to be a good worker,

and you'd be strong to be a soldier. And that was the main point up until about the 1970s. And then in the 1970s, they get the opportunity to do the Olympics. They eventually went to the Olympics, the summer Olympics for the first time in 1972. And that was really the kickoff to put in elite athletics and kind of make athletics because it was already popularized. And it's always been a big part of Korean society.

And nowadays, when you're talking about the popularization of athletics, it's really not just labor and national defense. It's also taking the intellectuals who don't do any labor and making them have a sense of collectivism for the society. And it's easier to do than making them go out in the fields and work in the fields in the summer. You just have them particularly on the speed. Did I do this by participating in sport or simply by? by watching and cheering?

Both. Everyone participates in sport. It's really a big society-wide thing, and they have tournaments in all levels. But really from the 70s, 80s, 90s onward, Kim Jong-il was really the guy. Because Kim Jong-il, he didn't care that much about sport. He was really just a military man.

But Kim Jong-il, he was really into sport. I mean, everyone knows him for the propaganda and agitation department, the movies, the music. But really, he was also all about the sport. And from the 70s, 80s-onward, he really pushed forward doing more. different types of athletic disciplines and kind of pushing them into international games. And obviously the 90s kind of crashed a little bit because of the arduous march.

But then you get to the 2000s, 2010s, and then you have the late Kim Jong-il, early Kim Jong-un just kind of another push to really push forth in athletic disciplines they know they can be good at. So we're talking like diving, wrestling, weightlifting, women's football, really mostly disciplines that really require a lot of just discipline, sheer discipline. not a lot of like advanced technique, but just that mental discipline and drive that can really be effective when you're doing, you know, these sort of classical, more classical disciplines. And that's what they win gold medals in. So that's kind of broad evolution of DPRK sport. Thank you. That's great. That was like a whistle stop tour, wasn't it? During the

Cholima period in North Korea, what concrete policy levers did the state pool to mobilize people through athletics? And why did this matter beyond the gym? Well, in, I would say around 1959, 1960, that's when you had the collectivization of agriculture had basically been ended. You had the

Cholima movement had basically started, so you're trying to organize everybody into work teams. You're really working, like you have the Tejan Wern system, you have the Chongzandri method, I'm getting too into the weeds here, but really, the party was controlling everybody, it was direct party control of the factories.

That was important, collectivizing the agriculture, you're getting rid of the private owners of land, making everything collectivized. And so the big, important part of that was athletics. Because athletics, you know, one part of the society is factories. One part of the society is working in agriculture. So you have factories, agriculture, but athletics can be used in both cases. So it was really just pushing, saying that every factory over 1,000 people, has to have an athletics team.

And before work every day, you have to start doing, aerobic, or not aerosthenics. Calisthenics, exactly. It's like in South Korea during the Stemarle movement, right? Absolutely, you're right. I'm so glad you pointed that out. But then also they say it's mandatory for every citizen. I mean, students, workers, teachers, just basically everybody was required to participate in athletics through a cabinet directive that was handed down in 1959. So it was really just a society-wide push to do that.

And I think that's what really sticks out about that. Does this also overlap with militarization of North Korean culture? I think of that because, again, the parallel in South Korea is I spoke to a former economic planner a few years ago, and he was remarking how easy it was for groups that had been together in units during the Vietnam War to then go and work in large infrastructure construction projects in the Middle East. They simply just moved as a unit and worked in a very militaristic style. And I wondered whether that discipline through the military also came through in the sports or whether there was, you know, I don't know, whether there was an overlap there. I mean, I think port discipline definitely has to do with the military. I mean, the military has always, since the times of the Korean War, they say that they founded the Korean military's athletic teams during the Korean War.

Right, because each military unit must have its own teams too, I guess. And maybe like in America, they have Army Navy games in North Korea. Oh, well, actually, they have some, the Army has the best teams in the country for the most part. I mean, I would say a majority of the teams, for example, in the elite football league, the DPRK Premier League, they, the majority, almost a majority of those teams are military associated teams. So, I mean, and not away from the elite sports, obviously the individual units, the Army units have their own games, they have military, they even have military related athletics. I would say from the 60s to the 70s, they really implemented military athletics. We're not talking like basketball, football. We're talking like grenade throwing or like a radio thing, orienteering, or like marching. They're just a whole like obstacle course.

So like all these military-related athletics, it was kind of when the Korean Peninsula got re-militarized in the 60s when there was a little bit more tension. And I think ever since then, I mean, and for a while it was almost more important than regular. athletics until you got to the 1970s. Wow. Yeah, I mean, it's, they all go hand in hand. Yeah, big overlap there. All right, let's look at basketball for one sport in particular.

So why did basketball of all sports become so symbolically important touching leadership, image making, diplomacy, and domestic policy? Maybe if you could give us one great story that connects the basketball court to the Pollock Bureau. Oh, well, I would say that during the 1960s, the 1990s, Kim Jong-il was very, personally interested in basketball. It's hard to say why. It was like because it was it because his son went to Switzerland and then, you know, he wanted to take up the interest of his son. Was it because he started watching Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls? It's really hard to say because Bulls mania was huge back then. And because we can't North Korea or you mean globally.

I just globally. Because, you know, they would get tapes from Japan and it was big in Japan or they might get tapes from China. It was huge in China. So that was how Kim Jong-il would basically kind of get interest in it. But I guess the important thing to know is that Kim Jong-il kind of pushed everything else aside and said, we must develop basketball right now. And this was- Above other priorities. Yeah, above other sports priorities. Yeah. I would say during the, like the 97-98, when you're going through the worst years of the arduous march, all of a sudden he pushes forth basketball. And I theorizes as to like why he would do this. Was it just personal interest or whatever? But I think it was to kind of give them personal sense or like a sense of victim.

something to kind of cheer for when things are going so bad. And then it was eventually removed when Chong Song-Sang-ok, the marathon runner who won at the 1999 marathon games, won gold medal at the 1990 World Marathon Games. So from 96, 97, 98, Kim Jong-il was making, you know, he was ordering every single high school had to have a basketball team. He was ordering every military unit needs to have a basketball team, ordering the construction of courts.

He was writing directives, which I've not been able to find or get my hands on, I've just heard mentioned, where he was writing about how teams needed to strategize in within basketball. So really, everything was about basketball. There were a bunch of propaganda about basketball. They made a movie about it. And you ask people, I've actually talked to some defectors about it. And I was like, do you remember how in the 90s it was all about basketball? And they were like, yeah, it was really confused.

Why did we all of a sudden have to play basketball? And it was, so, you know, I would say it's kind of emblematic of how if there's a personal win, or they see some sort of kind of advantage out of it that like the the whole focus of the sport policy can change yeah and of going we're all aware of Kim Jong-un's love of basketball but that yeah about Kim Jong-il I wasn't aware of before although I am reminded that in that late 1990s era there during the Ijuice march there was that North Korean basketball I don't remember his name you may he was over two meters tall oh yes it was talk of him maybe joining an NBA team and playing there. But I think there were some medical issues with him having received

steroid injections to his knees. And that meant that he's, you know, he wasn't as healthy as you would want a basketballer to be. And there were also some, you know, America, North Korea problems around that too, right? Some diplomatic problems. I would say it was really more diplomacy than, I didn't hear that about his knees. I knew that he had some nutritional problems that they had to solve when he, because he went to Canada to train for a year. And they, they were able to kind of get him up. But really, it just came down to the State Department of the USA saying no, because of these old Korean War era laws. But I mean, it was up to the point where there were senators in the United States saying that Riem Jong-Hun need to play. There were NBA coaches

writing the State Department or whatever saying that we need to let him play, let him get drafted. And he would have been on a team. I mean, there were several teams interested. But it just never came to be because it was used as a political football. Basically, it's just like Shin Gumdan. This is the other instance of no matter how good Rie Mung Hun is, it was really up to the whims of the NBA. It was up to the whims of Kim Jong-il. And at the end of the day, I think at the four-party talks, and when they were doing that early nuclear negotiation, Rie Myeong-Hun's name was brought up, and the U.S. kind of used it as like a carrot, just kind of say, like, maybe we'll let him play, you know, if you give us some room

in these negotiations. So he really just got turned into a political football, basically. As a counterfactual, have you fantasized how things might have gone between the U.S. and North career if free Myeong-Hun had been allowed to play in the NBA? Oh, absolutely. I think it could have been a cultural bridge because you have to think about Yao Ming. Yeah, yes. In the 2000s about Chinese player. Yeah, and how it really created mutual understanding between cultures. It was a huge cultural victory for the U.S. because, you know, basketball, NBA basketball became so popular over there. And then people in the U.S. saw a Chinese man and they kind of understood what it was.

He wasn't kind of this communist robot, which he would have thought in the 80s and 90s. So it would, I think, I don't, I mean, I don't know if it would change the world. but I think it could have been a really important political bridge and then maybe changed some minds in Congress when they were defunding the whole, what they had the Geneva agreement going on, but then it was defunded a little bit by Republicans in Congress and you think, well, maybe if you're pie in the sky,

but maybe if Riemong Hun had been able to play, then maybe they would have not defunded that and things could have been totally different. But it's really, I just wish it had happened. Yeah. Now, in your research, you break down North Korean sport and basketball into distinct areas. You've already mentioned a couple of them in a previous question. What were the inflection points where basketball clearly moved up or down the priority list?

You've already mentioned when Kim Jong-il in the arduous march, but were there other times when it went down in priority? You know, I would say that during the – it was actually 1940s, Pyongyang was – I mean, I think during the colonial era, during the Japanese era, Pyongyang was really well known for its ball sports, not only football, but also basketball. They were really successful. And that transferred over into early DPRK. So they had a team that they sent to the World Festival of Youth and Students, which I know

you're very familiar with. But the one back then in Hungary in 1947, and their team actually won the whole competition. It was more minor teams. They weren't really facing high-end national teams. It was kind of like club things at that time. But they were really actually very good. And they used, I mean, this is an aside, but I have to mention it. They were, what's so interesting about that team is that at the time, nobody used jump shots in basketball.

Like everybody just stood on the floor and shot. And no one jumped. It was really just stand. I would, you know, if you're interested, just look at a game of basketball in the 40s. It's very stagnant, kind of boring to watch. But the North Korean team, they used jump shots. They used jump passes, which they don't use today. Nobody jump passes today.

So they were using all these strange innovative techniques. and there was a man interviewed who played for one of the opposing teams. And he said, like, yeah, we had never seen a jump shot before. We'd never seen a jump pass. And you have to wonder, like, where did they get these innovative techniques? And that's one of those things that's going to be gone to the sands of time because everybody's related is dead. But, I mean, so anyway, from the 40s to the 50s to the 60s,

I would say it was important because the DPRK felt that they had a chance of winning, especially after what happened in the 40s. That really kind of motivated them to put emphasis behind basketball. basketball create one of the first athletic teams, I think for the Namusong. I forgot what that is in English. Of the Interior Ministry? Yeah, yeah. The first DPRK basketball team was created from that 1947 team, and them along with the football

team were the first two teams in the DPRK. So that it was kind of a high priority in the 50s and 60s that went abroad a lot. There were actually exchanges with some really famous teams in the Soviet Union like Zalgiris Kaunas, which is in Lithuania. and they had I think some exchanges with France team as well and there was just a lot of back and forth but I think by the time you got to the 70s they really started to realize that they couldn't win

and also basketball was really important because at that time women also played basketball women weren't playing football until the 80s so the women team also went abroad and so it was kind of important but I think it kind of decreased in importance in the 70s and 80s because they didn't see it as a discipline in which they could win And so then they're like, all right, push this to the side.

But then, as you mentioned, Remyong Hun comes and you've got this giant superstar who, you know, is winning a VP at Asian-wide tournaments and things like that. And then Kim Jong-il's personal interest rises back up to the top. And now it's totally gone. I mean, basketball is still popular among the populace. They're still games. But they haven't sent their men's team abroad since 2011. Oh, that's interesting. So even though Kim Jong-un invited Dennis Rodman to come, you know, several times, and then they had the Harlem Globetrotters and they played an exhibition.

match, et cetera, but it didn't really translate into a repopularization of basketball. Is that right? Yeah. I mean, I honestly think, because Kim Jong-un is more interested in football, quite frankly. He goes to football games more often. And I think that at that time, it was really more of a personal interest thing for him. I think that they, the whole thing with that negotiation, and I think that you were going to ask me about it at some point, was that Dennis Robin was not important enough of an NBA player to really bring some of his comrades, I don't know, some of his teammates that were actually very good that would have made for a high-profile game that Kim Jong wanted. But, you know, the DPRK team, they were just too bad.

They were bringing in old retired players. And I mean, more so than Dennis Rodman's personal flubs, that's why it wasn't really able to gain any sort of political traction at that time. So I think that because that thing kind of failed and because they wanted to kind of put their policies and other. sports which they thought they could actually win because they quickly understood that basketball wasn't a sport that they could win in internationally. So it's still popular, you know, at the grassroots level, but I mean at the higher level, it's just not so popular

anymore. Interesting. And what have inter-Korean unity basketball episodes actually achieve beyond optics? Are there any measurable spillovers into federations, youth programs, or club play? You know, I'd say the biggest thing was, um, Zhang Du Yong, the former chairman of Fyanda Asan, who he was the guy who famously he stole a cow. He's from the DPRGives and he stole a cow. He brought the cows back. He did a lot of trips to the DPRK and Jong Du Yong, he

actually was able to construct a gymnasium or a huge stadium. Actually there in Pyongyang so if you go to Pyongyang there's still a Liu Gyeong, Zhongzioong Giang or Lungu Zhang. So there's a stadium named after him. It's named after him. I kept that name. I wonder in the era of post unification talk whether they may have renamed that

along with a lot of other things. Oh, yeah, that's a good question. Yeah, yeah, that's a good question. But he was actually very, you know, personally interested in basketball. He owns two basketball teams here. There's stories of him walking out in the snow to cheer on his local, like a team at a local gym. Just the guy was very pro, very personally interested in basketball. So that's why he kind of drove those 1999, 2003 unification games between the north and the south.

And then I think, sadly, just because there wasn't enough moment, to kind of keep it going on a regular basis that it just kind of fizzled out and not really a lot came from it. I mean, you still had a little bit in 2018 when there was the rapprochement during the mundane era. And you even had a unified a women's team that played in the 2019 Asian games and got a silver medal. But really, I think what might symbolize it is that how you had the 2023 Asian games. You had team DPRK women's basketball players, ROK women's basketball players. They played on the same team four years before, but because the DPRK government, says you can't talk to the people from the south, they weren't even able to communicate.

So it really all went downhill. I still do believe in sports diplomacy, but you've got to have more consistency. You've got to have a consistent exchange if you really want to make any political progress. Yeah, and well, I'm just guessing here, I'm guessing sports diplomacy can't take the lead, right? Like it can be there as a buttress or a support or something, but it can't really be out front, can it, with North Korea? I think, yeah, I mean, I think the politics have to be there first for it to happen. But it can be. be one of the first things that you do. So it's just as long as the environment and rapprochman is there. First, you have the meeting between the high-end leaders, and then that's one of the

first steps towards really real cooperation, reconciliation. Actually, it sounds like there's this potential for at least one Netflix documentary in North Korean basketball. It's fascinating. Yes. Now, let's move on to baseball and softball. You in your research have charted several cycles of introduction and abolition for baseball and softball. Why does North Korean state keep revisiting these sports? And why did baseball end again around 2016? And what does that tell us about policy incentives and resource allocation? Oh, well, it's a baseball is a really intriguing story because you have to think during the colonial era, when the Japanese occupied Korea, the baseball was really popular amongst Japanese people living in Korea. But it was not that

popular amongst Koreans. I would say that. I always thought that it was popularized first by the YMCA here, particularly in Pyongyang, maybe more so than Seoul, but go on. No, no, in Seoul, P.L. Gillette was kind of the forerunner. He was the first person to introduce baseball. Okay. He was a missionary for the YMCA. Right. And that happened here first in Seoul, but then one of his first tours went into the north. So they, there was, there were Korean teams playing baseball. Don't get me wrong. I mean, It's just that they were elites only. I would say a very small percentage of the population. Football was really popular, but baseball was really dominated by Japanese teams because

if you think about it, you need the bats, you need the balls, you need all of this equipment, you need all of this money, you need to know all of these rules. It's not so simple. And so it was just hard to get popularized. And so then in 1946, 1947, the DPRK starts playing baseball like a little bit because the infrastructure was already there. But then, you know, the Soviet government comes in, the new policy priorities of making sport for everybody, not just the elite. Baseball just disappeared. We don't know why it

disappeared. I mean, there were games played, and then all of a sudden there's no mention of it after 1947. And the reason it came back was because of the Chong Nyeong in 1959, because in 1959, that was when the first repatriations of the Chong Nyeong coming. Out of the Paradise on Earth campaign. Yeah, yeah. And so they come in to the, to the DPRK, and, you know, they've been playing baseball their whole lives. They're fans of it. Even a former pro, a Nippon professional baseball player actually was one of the repatriates to the DPRK. And so they played on a low level at like technical high schools. There were a couple of higher level teams like Kikwansha, the team of the Ministry of Transportation, was actually had a baseball team at the time. And then they have a really

good relationship with Cuba. And they do a lot of like not just baseball, but also football and other cultural exchanges with Cuba in the 60s. And so that's what really driven to kind of keep baseball on a low level. But then it just disappears again. And I think later towards the 70s, as those repatriates start to age, because the vast majority of them came in the early 60s, and it just didn't get transferred. And so it just kind of disappeared.

But then Kim Jong-il comes in in the 1980s, and he's like, we need to try new sports, we need to do new things. And so then baseball and softball all of a sudden get redistributed. But the issue was they're playing against teams that have such a big, long baseball traditions and you're trying to get people who are picking up baseball as adults to be competitive in international competition. It's not going to happen. And so it just continued kind of as this zombie for a really long time.

Like the men's team went abroad only a couple times in the early 90s. The women's team continued to go abroad up until, I think, the mid-2000s, the softball team. And they, but like there were only a couple of teams. There would be like a domestic league, but there would just be two or three teams playing against each other constantly on one field. And so it was just, like, eventually, I assume that in the 2006, there's no corroborating reports, but all you can do is assume that they just gave it up because it was just like, we're not going to win at this internationally. There's no real popularity for this domestically, and they just didn't push it out far enough, and people are

always picking up the game too late because they wouldn't start playing until they were 12, 13 years old. So I think what it really says is that sports get introduced and abolished kind of in a accordance with what the leadership wants, but also in accordance with what the international flavor is at the time. I think a lot of women's sports like women's softball started because there was more of an international space for them to play in. So it's really all in accordance with the leadership's wants and then the international environment and then the viability of doing it nationwide because, you know, equipment is hard to get and they would have to learn how to manufacture and everything like that. So is there anything left at the moment? Is there

baseball or volleyball, sorry, baseball or softball happening in North Korea right now? The absolute last mention I've seen in any state media in all the sporting journals that I've gone through, it was 2016. I believe, I mean, the NK News, there's a report about how the baseball stadium in Pyongyang was raised over. They still played a lot in Nampo. It was basically just an empty dirt field. But it's just, it just, baseball, softball completely disappeared from the record books. I mean, my records are incomplete, so I can still be proven wrong. But yeah. I do recall in the last year or two talking to somebody, and I forget now who it was, that on a satellite photograph spotted what looked to be a perfect baseball diamond somewhere

way outside of Pyongyang, like up in the northeast. But we weren't able to find out more about that at the time. Yeah, I know that they play in Nampol, and I think that they may play there as well. But I mean, really, all you need is a field. You can easily convert a football field to be a baseball field as well. Right. How much did material constraints kill baseball? You know that There's high equipment demand. You've already mentioned the bats and the balls and the helmets, et cetera, compared with football or volleyball. And of course, land use pressures that make dedicating flat space, higher to North Korea.

What did that mean in practice for schools and work unit clubs? Oh, I think, you know, I don't, I think that the land use issue was always, I think that that was also the land use issue was important in the 40s as well. I mean, that's probably why they gave it up because they're like, we need to use this for football or basketball or volleyball because it takes up so much land. actually when I met with a man from the Chongyang, you know, he was talking about what he knew about a sport in the DPRK and he said, yeah, I mean, baseball requires a lot of land. So I think that land use is a huge thing as well as, I mean, we know that the DPRK reclaims land, like that

just from the sea constantly because they need more of it. And then also the equipment is also an issue. I think that sanctions don't affect the sporting equipment economy as much as we think because they have a lot of domestic producers. They're actually competing, several different competing companies producing athletics equipment, but then they would really need an incentive to do it. And I think that the material constraints are one part of it, but then also there needs to be kind of this political organizational capital that would really push it out because people don't just kind of play baseball on their own.

You kind of have to, nobody really does sport on their own. It's all like organized, right? So you need to kind of have more organizations pushing it in. And as it was, I mean, people were picking it up at the age of 12. So it was just the popularity wasn't there. How feasible is it to have a single field used for multiple sports? Oh, I'd say it's very feasible. I think that with baseball, you know, in international standard, you have to have a mound, right?

So you have to kind of construct a mound in the middle of the field, and that would be troublesome. But from what I've seen of pictures of them playing baseball, they just didn't bother with that. They just pitched on flat land. So it's very viable from the beginning of the DPRK They were always very adamant on don't just play football on this field We need to have this field for football, also baseball, also basketball, also baseball or just whatever And they play basketball outside basically on dirt courts a lot of the time So really they are experts at it and they definitely do do that

Now I understand that the president of world baseball Ricardo Frakari went and observed a baseball demo in Pyongyang when was that and what was the result or the outcome of that? Oh, I believe that was a couple of months ago. And, you know, it was all very tight-lipped. I mean, he didn't really say anything about it. But well after 2016, though. Oh, yes, yes. But he went there just to discuss on Baseball 5, which is this new variant on baseball.

This is a low infrastructure variant, is it? Yes, yes. A smaller field? Yeah, it can also be indoors. I think mostly when I've seen it played, it's not on a field. It's almost like on a court, like a basketball court. outdoors, but we're indoors. But it comes from Latin America. It's like five-person baseball. There's no bats. You use kind of the small rubber ball and you throw it and you kind of like run around

the bases. It's kind of like a schoolyard game almost. And so like Cuba's very good at it, for example. So less equipment is needed. Yes. Yes. And so it's viable to do, but it's like do they have the incentive to do that. Do they want to be really good at baseball five internationally? They did do a demonstration game for Ricardo Flacari. Right. Is he pushing that? Is he, I mean, I imagine he might be favored, you know, traditional baseball, but is he interested in baseball five in North Korea? Oh, I'm sure he would be. I mean, I think that what the DPRK is really looking for, though, is funding. Because, for example, hockey, women's ice hockey and men's ice hockey, the DPRK plays it only because, and since teams internationally, only because the international ice hockey federation pays for them to go.

That makes sense, because that is a very equipment-heavy sport. Yeah, and they're not good at it. And so, like, even though they're not good at it, they'll go if they're paid to go. Whereas like at the basketball team, the FIBA is not going to pay for their basketball team to go. So they don't send their men's basketball team abroad. So if Baseball 5, if Ricardo was willing to pay for the Baseball 5 team to travel to international competitions, the DPRK would be all over it. But as it is, I think that the prestige is too low. I think that the prestige of the sport would have to be higher for them to have a real interest in it.

Are there any internal policy signals in the DPRK that would tell you that it's being genuinely adopted? No, I've not seen any news of it outside of that. And they really do have a lot of news reports about, like, new variants of sport. If you just watch KCTV, sometimes they'll have a really short documentary. Like, oh, here's this new sport they invented, you know. But as far as how much do they, like, adopt these new sports, there's really nothing about baseball five that I've seen outside of that meeting. Now, I want to talk a bit about women in sports in North Korea.

So in DPRK film and TV about sport, you show female athletes, gaining more decision power over two decades, yet still bounded by propaganda rules. So what changed on screen and what stayed rigid underneath? Well, I would say, you know, the female athlete, I think during the Kim Jong-il era, you had female athletes who were very much, it was almost like a stage play,

it was very stilted, it was very structured. But it wasn't like, there wasn't a lot of like humanity to it. And I think, I mean, there was humanity, obviously. I mean, there were some great writers, there were some great films. But just in the characters, they would act like they were on a stage play rather than kind of acting naturally. And then as they pick up that influence from like Chinese dramas or ROK dramas, and they kind of reset their whole film industry in the 2010s, they almost shut it down. And then they sparred back up on a small scale.

They focus more on TV dramas. You see characters become a lot more human. And that's so true for the sporting athletes as well. So during the Kim Jong-il era, you have these women athletes. who are super submissive. They're only going to follow what the male authority figure says in their life or they're just, or what the party says that they're supposed to do, they're going to commit ultimate sacrifices. Just to clarify for our listeners, we're talking about actresses playing athletes, right? So these are not the athletes themselves. No, they're at the athlete. Well,

how they're portrayed in the film. Ah, okay. Got it. So it's kind of like. So they're portraying real life North Korean athletes on film? Yes, yes. It's always based on a real, I mean, not all, but In all of these cases I'm talking about, it's based on real historical athletes, kind of based on their stories. Any dramas made about Shingumdan? No, I wish. Only that ROK documentary that I've mentioned. But the ones there are the Marathon Runner, who won the 1999 World Championship Marathon, the only kind of world championship won by a DPRK, like Track and Field Athletes.

There was also the table tennis player Bakyongsun, who won the table tennis championships, I believe, in 1970. 76 and 1977. And then also about DPRK women's football team, one of the first ones to win one of the lower tier world championships. So it was all about all of them. But really, these women, as you get to the 2020s, I think anybody who has any kind of interest in DPRK film and all and speaks Korean because it's unfortunately not subtitled,

Majimak Han Al, or the Last Ball, is a fantastic five-part documentary series about the table tennis player I just mentioned. And you see just, it was made in 2022, I believe, and it's just so viscerally like she's really willing to kind of challenge and take things into her own hands. Obviously, she's still under the broad propaganda strokes, but kind of in her personal life and how she's portrayed. It's a lot more human. It's a lot more believable. And she's allowed to challenge authority to a certain extent. And obviously, even though in the end,

she gets pushed back to collectivism, she still has a little bit more wiggle room. And is just portrayed so much more realistically. So I think that that's kind of the trend that we're seeing in order to kind of keep people interested because if you keep making these same stilted things about people are totally submissive, then it's not going to have any mass appeal. Yeah, so these shifts in the media portrayal,

are you able to link that to anything actually in the sport, in the world of sport itself? Like do women seem to have a, women athletes seem to have a greater agency now than they did in previous decades? I, you know, it's obviously not done in a vacuum. I would say that definitely, you know, you have film like Bend It Like Beckham was a very popular and broadcast on DPRK TV. And that's a film where you have very independent women football athletes kind of portrayed upon the screen. So obviously I think that that has to have some sort of an effect, kind of the international movement of how we have more women's sports, the diversification of women's sports, you know, greater independence and liberation of women just broader, you know, worldwide international feminism definitely had an effect. I mean, they wouldn't be playing women's sport in many categories at all if it weren't for the development of that internationally.

Are there women boxers or other, what, wrestlers in North Korea? Oh, yes, definitely. Okay. It's interesting, because I remember one of my fascinations is North Korean comic books, and one from 1990, Volume 1 of a Sick and Twisted World, shows a lot of vignettes about how awful the world is, and especially South Korea. And one of those stories was about South Korean female boxes.

And, oh, look, here's an example of what a sick and twisted society, South Korea is, that they allow women to box there. It's interesting now that North Korean women are allowed to box, too. So maybe they don't circulate that comic book anymore. Oh, yeah. I mean, they're winning gold medals internationally. They're boxers, actually. But they didn't start doing that until the 80s and 90s.

That was all the reform of Kim Jong-il, where the women started to wrestle in box. It was, if you look at any book from the 60s, 70s, they're going to say that, yeah, that, like you said, absolutely abhorrent. I mean, it's not, but that's what they said. Now, walk us, moving to sort of the pathway to the world of sport, from school yards to national teams, walk us through a North Korean student's pathway in sport today. They presumably get some physical education in school. They'd be joining a local club, and would they be scouted? How does that work? Where are the choke points and the accelerators in that pathway? So you start, I mean, you could start, you could be, if you are an elite athlete, you could be from

anywhere. Obviously, if you're in Pyongyang, maybe you have a little bit more access to better equipment. But fundamentally, everybody goes to primary school, elementary school, it's Sohacko, and they go there until they're 12 years old. And there are a variety of sports offered there, generally the more popular ones. And that's where you'll have your first team. And you will be picked or you will be selected when you get to be, so like for a ball sport, like football, basketball, whatever, that will be around the age of 12. But for like gymnastics, that will be around like the age of six or seven. So it really depends on the sport.

And you get selected and then you go to a boarding school. There are boarding schools basically in most cities, in most, um, uh, dole was that provinces. Uh, and you go to these boarding schools and you basically become a full-time athlete. I mean, you attend maybe something like a third, like a third of the normal classes. And you really just focus on your athletic career. There are regular checks to make sure that you're meeting all of your athletic standards. And then if you don't meet it, you're just sent out.

and back into the regular school. And this continues on until you're about 18 years old. And I should say that in ROK, there's a similar system here where a lot of people will enter elite schools are just around the world. Norma and nowadays, there's sports. They've always had these sport academies. I think since like the 70s,

they've had these dedicated boarding schools for kids age 12 to 18. But now in each province, they're making specific schools for football. So the football used to be part of that broader school, but now people, football athletes all go to their own school, which was started by Pyongyang International Football School in 2014. So anyway, normal. So if you're an athlete, you're from like birth to like 12 years old, or like from 6, 5 to 12 years old, primary school, you're just in the normal school.

Then from 12 to 18, you play at the elite boarding school. Then when you're 18, if you're good enough, you go to a athletics team. and you play on the athletics team generally from the time you're about 18, 19, until you're about 26. When you retire, it usually isn't up to you unless you're super elite. It really depends on whether you're meeting standards and whether the team wants to continue funding you. And sometimes you might go to university and then go to a team, but it's rare or you might go from a normal school to an athletics team, but there's usually like a bribe involved in that from what I've heard from defector accounts. But basically, once you go to the athletics team, again, it's really strict. You have to

meet checks, you know, you're basically living in another boarding school and like living in the team facilities. And then once you retire, you basically kind of, and of course there's like, there's a university that has, if you go to like Joseon Cheyukakio or something like that, there's a Jolson Athletics University. So athletes might go there as well or elite athletes might go to Kim Il-sung University. They have a really strong athletics team that actually competes with the normal athletics team. So it's almost like its own thing. So basically, once you get done, you retire around you at the age of 26 and you have to fall back on. something else. So you have to kind of basically change your profession. I mean, if you were an elite

athlete, you might have access to a better political career, but if you're just normal, you might end up having to work in the local office or the factory or whatever. Has North Korea gone through any international doping scandals in the same way that East Germany did back in the 80s? No, but it's interesting because before all that doping stuff came out, Kim Jong-il in the 80s was making speeches about we need to look to East Germany because very famously, they punched so far above their weight because of the coping scale. I mean, they were getting like third most medals in the Olympics, even though they're this tiny half of a country. And the DPRK was like, we need some of that. How can we follow this? In the 80s, they were pushing for it. But nothing ever really came

of it. There are, they have had some doping scandals, but I think that it's not any more than a country like Russia would have. It's not like super egregious. And if you actually look at athletic journals, and you look in them. They have articles about like, okay, new doping regulations are coming out. This is what we're going to have to start testing for. And over the past 10 years, these descriptions of doping have gotten more and more sophisticated. So you really think that they are playing by the rules as much as they see necessary. And there's propaganda about following the rules and not doping. I mean, I'm not going to say doping doesn't go on. It definitely does go on to some extent. I think that that's true of a lot of other countries, though, as well.

and I think it really comes down to kind of that individual level of corruption of the individual or whether they think they could get around X, Y or Z, you know, type of thing. Now, in the era of COVID, North Korea shut down everything and nobody was coming or entering the country. And that put a halt to all international competition for several years there. And, of course, sanctions that still exist from the United Nations and other organizations don't help. So where are we, where's North Korea now in terms of international competition? Has it fully recovered and what metrics do you watch to gauge recovery or perhaps further retreat? I think that the COVID situation, it really did shut down athletics.

I think that the main effect it had was that a lot of young athletes who might have been really good at that time. For about three years, they weren't able to go abroad. So you could have had the prime of your career cut, basically. But once they came out of COVID, they came out of COVID storming. I tell you what, they've won so many medals since then. It's almost like they were in, I don't know, I'm thinking of Dragon Ball Z where they were in a hyperbolic time chamber or something. They were just somehow the being in the isolated environment helped them to be good or something. But ever since then, I mean, they didn't really participate in the 2014 Paris Olympic, basically because they weren't able to participate in a lot of the preliminary competitions that would have raised their profile enough to like qualify for the.

events but after that I mean in the Asian games they're still winning a lot of medals their women's football team is doing amazingly I mean their under 17 team just scorched the entire world competition I mean there was nobody even close to them as they just pranced to a gold medal so like really the I think that all of that effect is basically gone I would say that but if you want to look at like how the DPRK is going to do in the future you really just kind of have to see what athletic events they're going to, how many medals they're winning, how many teams are being allowed to go abroad. Is it just the disciplines they're winning at or are they going for more disciplines and are domestic club teams going abroad as well, not just the national

teams? So give us the top three sports to watch North Korea in? Well, I mean, are we talking about are they going to win or is it entertaining? Okay, let's stick with entertaining for now. Oh, entertaining. Let's see. Women's football, watching any DPRK women's football team, I actually traveled to see their club team, which is their only business-based team, Nekohiang, play an international play in Laos and Myanmar recently. And they're very fun to watch. They're a very competitive team or any of their lower level women's national football teams. But I would also say that diving, I think if you can get into diving, their diving athletes are very good, and they are coming up to be one of the best nations in the world in diving.

And then these disciplines aren't necessarily very fun to watch in my view, but I think a lot of other people watch them like weightlifting or wrestling. These two disciplines, they are World Elite's in. Or if you're into Tequando, of course, they are going to be one of the world's best teams in Tequandot. So that about covers it. But I mean, it really just depends on what sport you want. I have a friend of mine who's a huge fan of DPRK, women's ice hockey. and he goes out to see their team every year

as they travel usually to Europe and even though they're really bad he really enjoys going and watching the game so it just depends on what you like you know In your Cholima analysis you talk about how athletics helped to cement mass mobilization and later nationalism if Pyongyang tried to

recholima sport today what policy ingredients would we recognize and would they still work? You know recholima sport I think it's kind of hard to define what that is because I mean back in the day It was really about popularizing sports. It was about motivating workers to work harder.

Whereas, like, today, you don't necessarily need a lot as much, like, physical labor as you did back in the day because there's machinery. I mean, obviously, there's sanctions, things like that that make it that you have to do a lot more physical work. But really, there's a lot more intelligence. Yeah, there's a lot more office workers nowadays. So I would say the main thing would be keeping office workers doing athletic competitions in order to increase their sense of collectivism, like I was mentioning earlier. I think that that would kind of be continuing the spirits of Cholima. But I don't think that there's kind of a need to like re-invigorate the spirit of Cholima because it accomplished its mission and there's not really kind of a modern equivalent need for it.

How does North Korea do in marathon running, both men's and women's? I'm thinking about that because of the annual tours to participate in the Pyongyang International Marathon, which is run coincidentally on the same day as North Korea's own domestic. marathon but they the serious runners start earlier and the foreigners who were just there for a bit of fun that they you know they get let go later yeah um well the uh the in 1999 aside from that world championship and then aside from chingumdan who i've also mentioned they're really haven't oh and then there was someone who won a marathon i think in czechoslovakia in the 80s there was a man who they made a film about him as well um but there uh jilsson nad dario ra he was actually made by

uh oh the kidnapped director shinsnook yeah it was made by his film studio a very very good film but basically they aren't very good they usually put way back in the pack they'll usually send one or two athletes but they will just uh not be competitive uh so they're they're not elite in that category by any means okay interesting because they obviously do um devote a lot of resources to it certainly there are a lot of a lot more north korean runners than there are foreign runners on the day of the marathon in april each year so there's a lot of them presumably they're going you know they're being trained at school or something like that yeah i think that's a lot more about mass athletics, bringing it out to the people, you know. Lastly, are there any widespread myths

about North Korean sport that your research contradicts? Well, it's not out right now, but I'm working very hard on my master's thesis, but I mean, not doctoral thesis, being a total shut-in right now. But I'm bringing a lot about the football. And I think that a lot, if you read a lot about what's written about football on the internet, it's so wrong. I think that the main misconception people have is I've seen people, especially here in the ROK, say that they don't have a, they don't have a league. Like they, I've had people like legitimately who know football really well and they say, oh, DPRK doesn't have a league. And I'm like, of course they have a league. You know, or they'll, um, yeah, and I think some of those matches are actually

played at the Pyongyang Stadium on the day of the marathon, because while we're out there running, really? They have a, to keep all the spectators in the crowd, uh, in the stadium entertained, they have a football match or perhaps two, uh, while the marathon's being run. So otherwise people wouldn't stay there, I imagine. Huh? That's, that's fantastic. You're, you're, you're, teaching me. I never knew that, but that's really cool. Yeah, you're right. They play a lot of the matches there. I think the one thing to understand is that all of the teams are in Pyongyang. All of the elite teams are in Pyongyang. The vast majority of them, 99% are attached to a sort of higher ministry. So most of them are military, so like Kalmeiki is Navy, Cheeby is like

Air Force, but then you also have the 25th April team, which is the team created by Kim Jong-il in the 70s, you have just, they're all under some sort of ministry, Kikwancha, I just don't need to go on, but like, they all are attached to one ministry or another. And if you look online, a lot of people will say, like, oh, well, this team has a, their home stadium is in like Ham Hong or, oh, their home stadiums in Chenery. This is totally false. They're all in Pyongyang. And they kind of, the league will kind of travel around the country to kind of show the teams to like out the outer regions, but really in the outer regions, you don't have any elite sports teams. You will have like a provincial-wide sports team and a city-wide sports team that are kind of managed by the

local on people's committees, but you won't have any sort of high-end football team. So I think that if you read any... Is that because anyone who's really good, eventually just gets sent to Pyongyang? Yes, yes. They call it like going to the center, I think, in Korean. So if you're a provincial sports manager, director, it must be kind of crushing that every time somebody comes up from nothing and you watch them get sent to the center and you know you stay there and humming or wherever you are it's funny because that was a in a novel i read called mulchengi there was a conflict about that where there was actually a local a sports team manager who uh had all of his good athletes sent to the center so his team was always losing and then he eventually quit his job

because i mean in the story you know he quit his job and then he went to work at a local construction site because he's like oh i must be a terrible manager then one of his athletes because it's internationally famous comes back home and he's like we need to get this guy back coaching football again. I don't know whether it's true or not, but this is definitely a conflict or you might have, there were actually, I think, in a Rungu Kamdok, a story about a football manager, there was a local manager who actually wanted to keep his athlete for the team and didn't make the sacrifice for the greater nation by sending them to one of the central teams. So that is definitely a big issue in the DPRK. So I guess my big takeaway is that sports and

And elite sports in North Korea, it's very centralized, right? It's top down, it's government run, and it's Pyongyang-centric. Yes, 100% correct. There you go. Thank you very much. I'm going to once again plug your YouTube channel at DPRK Athletics ENG and also the website, DPRKathletics.com. Any final thought to leave us with Yongja?

No, it's been fantastic having he here, and it's been fantastic being here. And if anybody's interested in my work, go to those two. I've got a lot of lectures about my work out on my YouTube channel I've also got some travel logs that I do to go see DPRK Athletics and I do have a couple of documentaries so be feel free to stop by, feel free to hit me up if you know about a great postdoc position for me to take or if you just want to talk about DPRK Athletics

email me at HYJ1991 at Proton.me Anyway, thank you. Okay, good luck with that PhD. Thank you very much for being on the show. Thank you. Score more for less with our NK News Shop discount campaign. Ready to upgrade your wardrobe with some unique flair? At the NK News Shop, podcast listeners buying any two items from our t-shirt or hoodie collections

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and to our post-recording producer genius Gabby Magnuson who cuts out all the extraneous noises, awkward silences, bodily functions and fixes the audio levels. Thank you and listen again next time. Thank you.