Thirteen Visits to a Country That Doesn’t Exist

North Korea is, in some structural sense, the most complete fiction any government has ever produced. Not exactly a lie—more like a total installation, an entire country built around a performance that can’t stop running because the people inside it have no frame of reference for anything outside. The fiction isn’t maintained for foreign visitors. It’s maintained for everyone.

Hiroji Kubota, a Japanese photographer working with Magnum, traveled to North Korea thirteen times between 1978 and 1992. The images he brought back have a quality that’s genuinely disorienting: pastoral, orderly, occasionally beautiful. Schoolchildren in neat rows. Agricultural landscapes with the light sitting on them just right. Pyongyang in its performed modernity. Everything serene in a way that serene things rarely are.

This is the Disney Route—the path every visitor gets walked along, past presentable buildings and carefully selected faces. No one on the tour sees the camps. No one sees the executions, the hundred thousand or more people classified as political enemies sitting in conditions that most countries stopped maintaining a generation ago. The route exists to produce exactly the confusion these photographs produce: a flicker of something that looks, from a certain angle, like normalcy.

What Kubota’s work documents, whether or not that was the intent, is the performance itself—the sheer scale of effort required to maintain a national fiction. Every clean street, every cooperative face, is evidence of a machinery running underneath. A violence so total it can produce pastoral.

You look at the pictures and something in you wants to go. That’s the point. That’s always been the point.