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North Korea
AsiaEast Asia

North Korea’s Kim Jong-un has closer ties to South Korea than he likes to admit

  • At a cemetery on South Korea’s Jeju island, there are 13 tombstones bearing the Ko family name, Kim’s relatives through his mother, Ko Yong Hui
  • Kim’s mother grew up in Osaka, Japan, but her family moved to North Korea in the 1960s as part of a decades-long repatriation programme by Pyongyang

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A tombstones bearing the Ko family name, relatives of North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un through his mother, Ko Yong Hui, is found at a remote area on the resort South Korean island of Jeju. Photo: AFP
Agence France-Presse

North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un has threatened Seoul with fiery destruction, but as a remote graveyard on a resort island shows, he has closer links to the South than he might like to admit.

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At a cemetery in a hard-to-find corner of South Korea’s Jeju island, there are 13 tombstones bearing the Ko family name – Kim’s relatives 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 – what official hagiography calls the “Paektu bloodline”.

But the Jeju graves tell a wider story.

Photo shows the entrance of a graveyard with tombstones bearing the Ko family name, relatives of North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un through his mother, Ko Yong Hui, at a remote area on the resort island of Jejju. Photo: AFP
Photo shows the entrance of a graveyard with tombstones bearing the Ko family name, relatives of North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un through his mother, Ko Yong Hui, at a remote area on the resort island of Jejju. Photo: AFP

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 Tokyo’s colonial rule.

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