By Tongil Tours founding partner Alek Sigley who organised, led, and took part in the program.   Tongil Tours is excited to report that this summer we successfully ran our first ever Korean language study program in North Korea. As specialists in educational tourism to North Korea, and believers in the power of education to enable much needed cross-cultural understanding between North Korea and the outside world, this program is very much something that has been close to our hearts. Language being the primary medium through which culture is transmitted, we feel that there is no better way to further such cultural understanding than through studying the Korean language in a North Korean university. The Background: Foreign Students in North Korean Universities in the Past This program is something that we’d been aiming for since the very beginning. We started inquiring when Tongil Tours first started in 2013. With the… [Read More]

By Alek Sigley. We had the great pleasure of seeing our friend Park Yeongi’s (박영이/朴英二) new film, Sky Blue Symphony, at the DMZ Film Festival in Seoul last week (check out the trailer at the bottom of this post). The film is a documentary that follows a group of Zainichi Korean (ethnic Koreans living in Japan) high school students on a trip to North Korea. They, like many others in their community, identify the North as their homeland, despite having grown up in Japan and tracing their ancestry to the South. The film does a good job of summarising the complex historical connections between the Korean schools in Japan and North Korea, which those not familiar with modern East Asian history may find perplexing (if you’re interested in reading more on Zainichi Koreans and North Korea, see Tessa Morris-Suzuki’s Exodus to North Korea and the work of Sonia Ryang, Andrei… [Read More]

Peter Sukonek – Tongil Tours partner and North Korean Art and Architecture Tour tour leader TONGIL TOURS DESTINATION HIGHLIGHT: The National Gallery of the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea–and the most important painting in the DPRK. It’s the one art object in North Korea you do not want to miss — and yet many do not realize its significance. It is a painting entitled “Evening Glow Over Kangsǒn” (강선의 저녁노을), pictured below. Painted in 1973 by Jŏng Yŏng-man (known as the most important North Korean painter in DPRK history) every North Korean to whom I have ever mentioned Evening Glow Over Kangsǒn knows it well and declares its importance. It is certainly a national treasure for the North Koreans. What is interesting about the object is that it does not contain an image of one of the Kims, and yet it is still considered the most important North Korean… [Read More]