How long until they come knocking on my door. I was online last night, and I was following a trail of articles about North Korea’s soccer team, which is playing in the World Cup in South Africa this year, in the championship for the first time since 1966. We had been talking briefly about it in my 6th grade after-school class yesterday afternoon.
This got me onto the subject of 정대세 (Jeong Dae-se), the North’s star player (see picture). He is, in fact, Korean-Japanese, and has never lived in North Korea (except for recent stints training with the national team). He plays for a pro team in Japan, has done television ads and product sponsorships for South Korean media, and is very publicity-savvy. A fascinating member of the “Chongryon,” which is a weird semi-for-profit pro-North-Korean organization in Japan, that runs everything from businesses to schools to functioning as the North’s de facto embassy to the Western world (since the North has few formalized diplomatic relations). I guess this soccer player grew up attending Chongryon schools.
So I was looking at Chongryon in wikipedialand, and getting all fascinated. And so, curiously, I decided to follow a link to Korea University, which is the Chongryon-run university in Tokyo (hence a training-ground in the North’s official ideology of Juche, among other things. Juche has always fascinated me.
And there, instead of viewing the Korea University website, I was looking at a very scary “police warning” page (in Korean, of course), saying the site was deemed dangerous and banned. Hmm….
One doesn’t run up against the Korean national police firewall very often (at least in my experience). I wonder if they’re going to come looking for me, or open a file in Seoul? Will they come knocking on my door?
