Who is Kim Jong-un's mother? Why her past is shaking North Korea’s propaganda narrative

Ko Yong-hui, mother of North Korea's Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un, has a secret past that is shaking the core of the North Korean propaganda machine. A new book published in Japan reveals that Ko Yong-hui was born and raised in Japan, and came from a precarious background, which Kim Jong-Un would have preferred to be left alone in the dark.

Who is Ko Yong-hui ?

The book titled ‘Ko Yong-hui: The Zainichi Korean Who Became Kim Jong-un’s Mother’ was authored by journalist and author Yoji Gomi and was released last month. The book draws from the interviews of the relatives of Ko, who are still based in Japan. Her father, Ko Gyo-taek, was originally from Jeju Island in South Korea. It reveals that the father of Ko Yong-hui was a Zainichi Korean smuggler. He was arrested in South Korea for trying to smuggle Japanese clothing, before fleeing to North Korea to escape legal troubles. North Korea was allegedly building a socialist utopia, which appealed to Ko Gyo-taek, who left with his 10-year-old daughter, Ko Yong-hui, to start fresh.

The book does not reveal much about the childhood of Ko Yong-hui; it skips to the part when she had joined the renowned Mansudae Art Troupe in Pyongyang in the early 1970s, where he attracted the attention of Kim Jong-il, who had been married twice already. Ko Yong-hui became his second mistress. She lived in a luxurious villa near Pyongyang after being moved to the coastal city of Wonsan. She bore three kids. Kim Jong-Un was the second-born.

How is it challenging the propaganda narrative of North Korea?

This is detrimental to North Korea’s state ideology, which heavily relies on the disdain and hatred for the Japanese colonial legacy and the supremacy of the Kim bloodline.

“North Korea has long propagated the narrative that the Kim family single-handedly achieved independence for the nation,” said Gomi in an interview with This Week in Asia. “However, revealing that the mother of the (North) Korean leader was a zainichi Korean – a group that is subject to discrimination in the North to this day – would undermine the regime’s prestige and legitimacy.”

The Kim clan has always promoted the purity of a fabricated genealogy, “Mount Paektu bloodline”, named after the iconic mountain that borders China, and legend has it that it was the site where Kim Il-sung, the grandfather of Kim Jong-Un, led rebel fighters to struggle against the Japanese occupation. His son, the father of Kim Jong-Un, Kim Jong-il, was born in a guerrilla hut on the slopes of Mount Paektu. However, many Western historians dispute such claims as propaganda and claim he was born in the Russian refugee camps during World War II.

The revelations are believed to have a strong domestic influence. North Korea had quietly produced a documentary about Ko in 2011, ‘Mother of Great Songun Korea’, which is now removed from the archives as foreign media started to trace her background. A defector who became a researcher tells Radio Free Asia, that it is a political liability, "The regime fears even a small crack in the illusion of revolutionary purity.” However, some scholars argue that this could open up conversations about diasporic history and reconciliation, though that seems unlikely under the current regime.