The Sun Tyrant: A Nightmare Called North Korea

by J.P. Floru

When Londoner JP Floru tags along with three friends running the marathon in Pyongyang, little could have prepared him for what he witnessed.

Shown by two minders what the regime wants them to see during their nine-day trip, the group is astounded when witnessing people bowing to their leaders' statues; being told not to take photos of the leaders' feet; and hearing the hushed reverence with which people recite the history invented by the regime to keep itself in power.

Often, the group did not understand what they were from the empty five-lane motorway to the missing fifth floor of their Yanggakdo Hotel on an island in the Pudong River; many answers only came through extensive research of the few sources that exist about this hermit country.

Shocking and scary, The Sun Tyrant uncovers the oddities and tragedies at the heart of the world's most secretive regime, and shows what happens when a population is reduced to near-slavery in the twenty-first century.

Genres: Nonfiction

267 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 20, 2017

Reviews

[Gayla Bassham · Rating 3 out of 5]

About a quarter of the way through this book, the author says this: "My minder feared he had lost me. Would he have been fired, or been sent to a concentration camp? I decided to give him a few more frights, just for the sport of it." It was at this point that I decided the author was a terrible person.

The book is an interesting enough account of a tour through North Korea, shortly after Otto Warmbier's ill-fated tour. I found myself so annoyed by the author's flippancy and what I perceived as his rather shallow understanding of what real life was like for most North Koreans that I couldn't focus on the actual descriptions. And truly, if you've read much about North Korea (I have read a great deal at this point) this is mostly review. If you haven't, skip this and pick up Barbara Demick's Nothing to Envy instead.

[Alison Grausam · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m over the “traveler does dumb things abroad” genre.

[Craig Rowland · Rating 3 out of 5]

JP Floru spent nine days in the DPRK in early 2016 and The Sun Tyrant: A Nightmare Called North Korea is his travel diary. It was irresistible to compare travel experiences since I spent nineteen days travelling throughout the country in 2011 yet saw far more than Floru. His book seemed sorrowfully lacking and rather dull since tour companies do offer more extensive packages which unfortunately he didn’t take. I did recognize many of the sights and could anticipate what would happen next, as the museums and war memorials are mandatory stops on any tour. To compensate for his lacklustre experiences I found that he dramatized the mundane, overcompensating for what he didn’t find elsewhere. Thus every landscape he saw was treeless and grey, all pottery was mud-coloured and all the locals unsmiling automatons.

Tourists to the DPRK are informed beforehand what will happen when they visit the statues of the Great Leader Marshal Kim Il Sung and the Dear Leader Comrade General Kim Jong Il. The protocols can become pretty tedious but one does not go to the DPRK without doing any homework in advance. You go there knowing what is going to take place, and if you object to bowing before the statues of the leaders and laying flowers at their feet, then you had better stay home. The same goes for visits to any buildings or so-called tourist attractions. You can’t really act surprised when your group is herded through museum rooms while being fed propaganda about the Korean War. That said, Floru never seems to get his head around it, and bemoans again and again having to endure the Northern spin on things. His description of his minders and hosts was eye-rolling unfunny, as he introduced each one the same way every time:

“Our minder, in a long, black velvet robe with diamanté sequins and regulation socialist perm, welcomes us.”

I get why he did this: to emphasize the lack of individuality in the country and their painstaking verbose way of referring to people (as when I made a facetious reference to the two Kims in the second paragraph). But to introduce each host the same long-winded way? Definitely not funny.

Floru was in an obligatory group tour, and he learned the secret to taking verboten photos:

“Then again, however, it’s a pretty good idea to travel to North Korea in a group as you meet far more people than on an individualised tour; your fellow travellers are a support network in case of trouble, and they can distract the minders while you take illegal photos.”

In my case, however, I didn’t have to rely on distracting the minders. My group had its share of delinquent photographers who were always being followed by the minders. That left the rest of us free to photograph whatever we wanted when we realized no one was watching us.

I travelled to the DPRK in 2011–before the death of the Dear Leader Comrade General–when all visitors had to surrender their cellphones before departure. Floru and his group had the luxury of bringing their phones with them, and, while visiting the DMZ:

“What I didn’t observe at the time and heard only later is that virtually everybody else in my group uses this moment to send text messages to their loved ones across the world using the South Korean mobile phone network.”

Policy at the time of his visit precluded a visit to the Joint Security Area blue huts that straddle the actual border. I was able to go inside one of them.

I can understand that with so many Koreans sharing the surname Kim, keeping track of people might get confusing. He mixed up the birthplace of Kim Jong Il, incorrectly assigning him to Mangyongdae, and much to his embarrassment, identified Kim Jong Il’s mother as Kim Sŏng-ju, which is not the name of his mother (that’s Kim Jong Suk) but rather the birth name of Kim Il Sung. Floru made other Kim errors, and some of them weren’t even cases of mistaken identity. On two occasions he referred to King or Kin instead of Kim.

A nine-day trip to the DPRK that excluded some Pyongyang sights and other cities outside of the capital did not make a very interesting read. The author didn’t even include any photos. I found the footnote text too small to read without a magnifying glass and the asterisks indicating them within the page text were so small my eyes always passed over them. Thus when I got to the end of a page I always had to reread it in order to find the place where the footnote referred. For a longer DPRK country-wide tour, visit my blog.

[Dave Carr · Rating 1 out of 5]

The foreword being written by Jacob Rees-Mogg should have been a big enough tip-off for what was to come in this book. I thought the author came across as a smug prick throughout and I didn't buy it when he talked about mugging off his minders whilst in North Korea. After googling the author's name the phrase 'you're not that guy pal' came to mind.

There are of course very valid criticisms that can be made of the North Korean regime. I just find them a lot more credible and genuine when coming from a North Korea defector who has actually lived in the country than some Tory twat who did a 9-day trip with a travel agency. 2/5.

[Jonathan Fryer · Rating 5 out of 5]

North Korea has been a lot in the news recently, as people speculate whether Donald Trump and Kim Jong-Un will be 2018's bromance. Kim got his practice in, by bear-hugging his South Korean opposite number, Moon Jae-In, on the DMZ the other day. I have been to the South but not the North, so was fascinated by this travelogue-cum-political-commentary by the Conservative activist JP Floru (who coincidentally fought at least one European election at the same time as me). As one might guess from the subtitle of his book, "A Nightmare Called North Korea", he basically hated it, and indeed knew he would before he went. Hence some of the one stars his book has received in Amazon from people whose socialist devotion is offended. But this is by no means just the jottings of a hostile short-term visitor. Floru has done his homework, reading quite a lot of relevant books and media reports, not least from North Korean defectors, and he has a nice sense of humour and irony (totally lost on his North Korean minders), while repeatedly referencing George Orwell. I don't know if he bother to study any of the ubiquitous tomes on juche, the North Korean political self-reliant ideology, that emerged from the Kim dynasty's pens; it would have been interesting to know more about the myth that the people are expected to adhere to. However, Floru's style is accessible and the pace keeps up well. It quite makes me want to visit Pyongyang myself, lover of the bizarre that I am.

[Nicola Sivier · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading Dear Leader has given me an interest in North Korea so I found this book by chance in the library.
It tells the account if the author’s 9 day sight-seeing trip to NK and is an interesting tale of the aspects of the country they were allowed to see - and list can be learned from what they were not allowed to be shown.
A fascinating country with a regime that really beggars belief.

[Raakel · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author is quite smug but the book offers great insight into the strange and shocking aspects of life in North Korea, especially if you don’t know much about the country. The writing style and structure make the book easy to read although it is full of information and facts which can get a little bit tiring. All in all an interesting and entertaining book.

[Natasha · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very much a western perspective into North Korea with the author coming off as smug at times. Having academically written about North Korea, this book more covers the tourism side of North Korea. For finding out what life is actually like in North Korea, this book understandably falls short yet does present want North Korea wants people to see which in itself is interesting.

[circle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pyongyang does not mean willow trees and for the love of god stop saying hoop dresses!

[Mannah Hacaulay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Describes what it’s like to visit North Korea SO WELL I loved this, and the author is BAE 10/10