What the cook saw
Kenji Fujimoto was accepted into Kim Jong-il's inner circle during a 13-year stint serving North Korea's first family. The Japanese sushi chef gives Julian Ryall his take on the communist dynasty's latest leader
From the outside, the key players in North Korea can seem like characters in an improbable science-fiction movie. The arch villain lives in a sumptuous palace and his scientists have built a nuclear weapon; his scowling henchmen wear outsized hats and too many medals; and the state-run media employs colourful hyperbole as it threatens to reduce the cities of its enemies to "seas of fire".
Behind the scenes, however, the life of the ruling family of the world's most isolated and unfathomable nation is closer to being like a soap opera, according to Kenji Fujimoto, a man who has been admitted into the inner circle. The tale he tells is one of sibling rivalries, adulation for Jean-Claude Van Damme's acting skills and hippo steaks.
Fujimoto - who served as the late Kim Jong-il's personal chef between 1988 and 2001 - is arguably the most authoritative source outside of the country on the antics of the ruling Kim family and what goes on behind the closed doors of their Pyongyang palaces.
Shortly after he fled North Korea and returned to Japan, where he remains, fearful for his life and unwilling to reveal where he lives, Fujimoto was criticised for tales he told in his 2003 memoir, I was Kim Jong-il's Cook, on the grounds that they were just too tall, too fanciful.
But Fujimoto - a pseudonym - was welcomed back to North Korea by Kim Jong-un in July last year and was not punished by the new leader for what he had written. His credibility had already risen after he correctly predicted Jong-un would be selected to take over from Jong-il, his father, who died in December 2011, in preference to his older half-brother, Kim Jong-nam.
Furthermore, when talking with Fujimoto face to face, his anecdotes have a ring of truth about them, not least the one about the time he nearly killed Kim Jong-il and his extended family in a boating accident.
"Kim gave me a motor yacht back in the mid-1990s and I guess it must still be moored in Wonsan," says Fujimoto, dressed in a checked jacket, dark glasses and his trademark black bandana. "He had challenged me and another one of his circle to a race aboard two motor yachts and the winner would get to keep the boat.
