Jeju, South Korea: North Korean leader Kim Jong Un threatens Seoul with catastrophic destruction, but as a remote cemetery on a resort island, he maintains closer ties with the South than he might like to admit. .
In a cemetery in a hard-to-find corner of Jeju Island, South Korea, there are 13 tombs bearing the names of the Ko family — relatives of Kim through his mother Ko Yong Hui.
Jong Un is the third member of the Kim family to rule North Korea, following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather – which official biographers call “Paektu Bloodline”.
But Jeju’s graves tell a wider story.
Kim’s mother was born in Osaka in 1952 to a native Jeju islander who emigrated to Japan in 1929, when the Korean Peninsula was under the colonial rule of Tokyo.
Many of Kim’s family members, including his maternal grandfather, are buried on Jeju, their high graves opposite Pyongyang’s Kumsusan Palace of the Sun, where the bodies of Kim’s father and grandfather, Kim Il Sung, lie in the kingdom.
After Kim came to power in 2011 following the death of his father, Kim Jong Il, many experts shed light on his mother’s South Korean and Japanese heritage. Pyongyang has never confirmed this.
“The regime should be afraid that confirmation will undermine its legitimacy,” said Cheong Seong-chang of the Center for North Korea Studies at the Sejong Institute.
The Kim dynasty based its claim to power on Kim Il Sung’s role as a guerrilla fighter driving Japan out and helping Korea win its independence in 1945.
“The Korea-Japan legacy directly contradicts the North Korean myth of its leadership,” Cheong said.
Kim’s mother grew up in the Japanese port city of Osaka, but her family moved to North Korea in the 1960s as part of a decades-long repatriation program by Pyongyang.
The plan urged ethnic Koreans living in Japan to move to North Korea, said Park Chul-hyun, a novelist and columnist in Tokyo, which was part of a campaign to “claim supremacy” in the South.
“The North saw the Korean-Japanese community as a strategic battlefield,” he said, and managed to persuade about 100,000 ethnic Koreans to relocate to “socialist paradise.”
The Ko family answered the call, and lived a relatively normal life in the north until their eldest daughter caught the eye of the country’s heir.
Experts believe that Ko, who was an artist in the Mansudae art troupe of musicians and dancers, first met Kim Jong Il in Pyongyang in 1972.
Experts say that she became his partner in 1975, and although there is no official record of their marriage, the pair had three children. He died in 2004.
“There is nothing in the official state media about Ko Yong Hui,” said Rachel Minyoung Lee, a non-resident fellow with the 38 North program at the Stimson Center in Washington.
He said that the background and legacy of Kim Jong Un is not beyond the state media’s efforts to generally show that he is the legitimate heir to the Mount Paektu legacy.
South Korean media discovered the graves of the Ko family in Jeju Par in 2014 – one of the first real confirmations of Kim Jong Un’s South Korean ancestry.
At the time, there was a plaque – known in the south as the “empty grave” – honoring Kim’s maternal grandfather, Gyeong Taek, even though he died and was buried in the north.
“Born in 1913 and moved to Japan in 1929. He died in 1999,” read the plaque, a practice that allows family members to perform ancestor rites even when the body is not present.
The plaque was not there when AFP visited Jeju Cemetery in April 2022.
It was removed by a distant relative of Kim Jong Un, who was shocked by the media attention and feared the tomb would be vandalized, the daily Chosun Ilbo reported.
The report said that before the media search he said that his family “knew nothing about relations with Kim Jong Un”.