How to Leave North Korea, and How Not To

*   There’s a right way and a wrong way to do everything.  See also related posts at DPRK Studies.

*   As much as I’d like to see this Yonhap story as evidence of more cultural infiltration of North Korea by the South, it seems more like an example of the opposite.  In what must have been a very carefully guided and choreographed tour of a P’yang department store, a clerk is wearing earphones, is predictably asked why, and responds that he’s listening to mp3’s he downloaded off the internet.  Excuse me if I  suspect that  this whole episode was predictably staged and gullibly reported.  On the contrary, by all defectors’ accounts, only a tiny selection of North Koreans are permitted access to the internet, and only for the government’s own purposes.