North Korean informants risk lives to provide 'real' news
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| A scene from "North Korea VJ" (2011) directed by journalist Jiro Ishimaru showing a 23-year-old North Korean woman named Hyang-ran. Courtesy of ASIAPRESS |
Japanese journalist-documentary filmmaker hires North Korean 'stringers' for fact-based N. Korea coverage
By Park Ji-won
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| Journalist Jiro Ishimaru |
Many reporters fail to report real news about North Korea and some just spread clickbait rumors as sources cannot be tracked anyway.
But this is not the case for Jiro Ishimaru, a 58-year-old freelance journalist from Japan who leads the independent news outlet ASIAPRESS's Osaka bureau and is team leader of its North Korea coverage.
He has been able to provide "fact-based" news about North Korea over the decades through his "informants" inside the secretive nation who risk their lives to provide him with "real" news.
Some of his findings are included in "North Korea VJ" (2011), the opening film of the first and the 10th North Korean Human Rights International Film Festival, which was held online between Nov. 6 and 8.
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| Pictured is a scene from "North Korea VJ" directed by Jiro Ishimaru. Courtesy of ASIAPRESS |
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| Pictured is a scene from "North Korea VJ" directed by Jiro Ishimaru. Courtesy of ASIAPRESS |
The film lays bare the face of North Korea's severe poverty and human rights violations, two things the country has tried hard to hide. North Korean citizens, many of them young orphans, were starving even after the country's worst famine, known as the Arduous March in the late 1990s, and stand defiant against the government officials who tried to repress them. It also shows the North's citizens who created their own market economy.
He first tried to gather sources by himself, but gave up due to the North's surveillance and soon took an eye on citizen journalism.
"The principle of journalism is to go to the field and meet people. So I went to North Korea but I was put under government surveillance and the North Korean government authorities only showed me what they wanted to show …. I gave up reporting by myself and started to build the system in 2003 through which North Korean people can do the news by themselves because they are the only people who can witness the facts and secure evidence of North Korean people's life on the spot, which I think is very important and powerful," Ishimaru told The Korea Times during a Zoom interview on Friday.
"As you can see with the situation in Syria, it is very dangerous for foreign journalists to enter the country as there is ISIS and the repressive Assad regime. Citizens disseminate news by themselves. The movement of fostering those citizen journalists is active in Europe. We started (the citizen journalism with films) some five to six years earlier than others."
He visited the North three times and traveled to China 90 times to meet about 900 North Korean people while releasing exclusive stories on North Korea by getting sources from their informants for ASIAPRESS and commentating on political issues related to the Korean Peninsula.
"North Korea VJ" is made through the system. Three North Koreans recorded people's lives between 2004 and 2011 with hidden cameras and gave the data to Ishimaru's team which met them near the border city in China.
Building the system was not easy. It took nearly a decade to establish the current relationship with his team members, now consisting of 10 paid North Korean freelance reporters in various regions in North Korea. It takes at least a year to figure out whether a candidate, who is financially motivated, is reliable or not because it takes one year on average for North Korean people to make a round trip between North Korea and China. Once his team and the candidate started to trust each other, he reveals its identity and explains the mission of finding facts. During the trust-building process, the North Korean people are given some simple tasks and money while learning how to find news.
"It is important to continue to go to China and meet people who have left North Korea legally or illegally. At first, we are wary of each other, but since we are human beings, we can judge to some extent whether we are reliable for each other by meeting and talking many times. After the process, we start small projects together and keep building trust with each other by keeping promises. We repeatedly stress the importance of delivering the news to the world for the North Korean people. It's very simple, but basic things to all journalist jobs."
Some footage was also introduced in South Korean public broadcasts, along with foreign broadcasts BBC and CBS, surprising many with the tough reality that North Koreans have faced, prompting initiatives to help the people in North Korea.
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| Jiro Ishimaru interviews a North Korean defector in Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in China's Jilin Province, in September 2008. Courtesy of ASIAPRESS |
He said that the human rights situation in the North is improving now compared to the time when he released the film, partly because the country's economy grew thanks to homegrown market activities, or Jangmadang, and media reports revealing the cruelty of the regime.
"We, journalist and the international community, were able to change North Korea slightly by reporting on the regime's human rights violations. I heard that North Korea's government authorities try not to torture imprisoned people … You can easily see people suffering in our videos. But you can also witness that ordinary citizens in North Korea are working hard and transforming the society through jangmadang."
But as political freedom is still not guaranteed, North Koreans still live in abusive conditions, he added.
But in terms of human rights violations on ideology, citizens have no freedom of thought, expression or action as society is formed to support the Kim family based on by its unique Monolithic Ideological System."
Curiosity on Korea
As a student, he was simply curious about the "invisible" country. "The North was the only Asian country failing to achieve economic growth. I simply wanted to know why. And after I witnessed the wave of democratic movements in South Korea in the 1980s, I decided to study Korean in Korea. (Thanks to my Korean language skill), I was able to meet both South and North Korean people in the 1990s and got curious about the North."
To learn more about the Korean Peninsula after graduating from university and working for an ad company for about two years, he applied for a reporter position in the Mainichi Shimbun, one of the largest Japanese daily newspapers, to become a specialist on North Korea from the beginning. But he didn't take the job because he didn't want at least seven years of work experience in rural areas in Japan which was a requirement to become a specialist. So he just decided to become a freelance journalist to focus on North Korea.
He is now one of the most credible North Korea experts in Japan with nearly 30 years of experience, but he had to put himself in danger many times to get sources.
"I was detained by Chinese soldiers and police near borders many times, which I don't want to elaborate further," he said.
The journalist added that it gets more difficult to get information from his team members in North Korea and communicate with them as border security is getting tighter as time goes by along with the development of technology.
"We stopped video projects from around 2015 due to safety concerns after the North stepped up its crackdown. I heard there are more surveillance cameras in the cities and pat-down searches than before … We, however, receive texts and images from our contacts from time to time through Chinese mobile devices."
His North Korean team members are developing its ways to deliver data to avoid intensified surveillances.
"We are putting our efforts to obtain classified documents because those can be filmed at home while footage is hard to carry and deliver. By releasing the secret documents, we are proving our reports."
ASIAPRESS recently obtained a classified document that showed North Korean leader Kim Jong-un acknowledged the spread of COVID-19 in the North as well as police guidelines in handling COVID-19 in North Korea, which includes killing people or animals who cross the border and enter the North.
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| Jiro Ishimaru, center, poses with North Korean commanders near the Tumen River in December 1995. They said "I need food." Courtesy of ASIAPRESS |
Despite dangerous risks, he's unwilling to give up not only because his work is important to give the world understanding of North Korea but also because his contacts have become part of his life and a source of motivation.
"Along with the human rights activists and experts, we would like to keep reporting on North Korea to make the world more understanding of the country which may be able to improve its human rights situation."
"It was not easy for Japanese people to get involved in issues related to the Korean Peninsula and work with North Korean people," he said. "But I feel so happy that I was able to do that. I learn a lot from North Korean people and became friends with them. They are not my family but I am worried about them. This is the reason and the motivation making me keep working on North Korean issues."
He hoped that the situation would get better so to come up with another documentary video which can show the daily lives of ordinary North Korean people amid COVID-19 because it is part of the Korean people's history.
"I wanted to show that North Korean society was in the middle of a huge transformation in 'North Korea VJ.' But in the next documentary, which our team stopped making due to safety concerns after failing to receive footages from our sources several times, I hope that we can talk about the individual stories of the filming members and share their adventures while filming. Ordinary North Korean people can show their ordinary lives like vlogs. They can document what they normally do and what happened to their lives because of COVID-19. It is the history of Korean people in such difficult times, written by North Korean people, which would be very rare documents in world history. I hope South Korean people can also learn something from them."
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| A North Korean market, called "Jangmadang," is being held in Hyesan, Ryanggang Province, North Korea, amid COVID-19 pandemic Sept. 5. The photo was taken using a telephoto lens from Changbai Korean Autonomous County in China's Jilin province. Yonhap |