South Korean engraver Kim Young-sik looks in the mirror every morning and sees the reflection of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il.
As his bouffant-combed hairline recedes, the 56-year-old resident of Seoul is a dead ringer for the rarely seen North Korean of big hair, spectacles and platform shoes fame.
And as the years and the extra pounds mount up, the southern Kim says he is looking more and more like the ”Dear Leader”, as Kim Jong-il is known at home in his northern communist state.
”I pay a lot of attention to the hair,” Kim said. ”Turn a little to the side, people say it’s 100% [Kim Jong-il.] They say I’m exactly like him, except I don’t drink.”
The ”Sunshine Policy” of engagement with the North that began in the 1990s brought greater openness in the South to almost anything North Korean, and with that came an unexpected second career for the Seoul engraver.
Kim got into the Kim Jong-il impersonation business when he auditioned for a movie role about a decade ago and was picked on the spot.
Kim’s day job is still engraving personal name seals in a small business supply shop. But he also moonlights as an impersonator, playing Kim Jong-il in television commercials and bit parts in locally produced movies.
”We don’t have a Kim Young-sik, but we have a Kim Jong-il,” said an official at the South Korean movie actors’ guild, when asked for Kim’s telephone number.
Kim looks so much like the bespectacled leader in Pyongyang that people sometimes jump when they see him in Seoul.
”People are startled to see me walking on the street,” he said.
Kim goes by the title ”chairman”, just like the North Korean leader who runs the country as head of the powerful National Defence Commission.
Moonlighting
Kim is not the only South Korean making money moonlighting as a North Korean leader.
There are other look-alikes who appear in commercials for crab restaurants and music videos, impersonating Kim Jong-il and his father, the North’s Great Leader Kim Il-sung, the leader of North Korea from its founding until his death in 1994.
The North looms large in South Korea, which has a voracious appetite for impersonators, sometimes taking on serious roles in dramas and other times poking fun at Pyongyang’s Dear Leader.
Kim Young-sik’s popularity has not waned in recent months as North Korea first test-fired a barrage of missiles in July and then last month conducted its first nuclear test, which shook financial markets and triggered UN Security Council sanctions.
And in peninsula politics, art and real life can be difficult to distinguish as Kim Young-sik faces daily good-natured ribbing.
”People who invested in stocks have come to me and said, ‘Hey, why did you do that nuclear test and make the stocks go down?”’ he said.
Kim is a soft-spoken man with humble dreams, unlike Kim Jong-il who has played a cagey, defiant and sometimes deadly game with the international community for years.
”I have a dream of becoming a singer,” Kim said.
He says he wants to write a song about the divided Korean peninsula that will touch the hearts of people of his generation, born in the year that the 1950-53 Korean War broke out.
”I want to sing a song that will move those people to tears.” – Reuters