Word: pyongyang
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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...week later, on the aging Chosonminhang airlines plane into Pyongyang -- the carrier runs only five flights a week, linking the capital to Moscow, Beijing, Khabarovsk and Sofia -- the Briton was the only sightseer in evidence. Most of the passengers were North Koreans (easily identified by the badge depicting President Kim Il Sung that every North Korean must pin over his heart) and Japanese businessmen, apparently undeterred by the fact that North Korea is the only country that Japanese nationals are not permitted by their government to visit...
...last great communist dinosaur is beginning to stir. As national alliances have been radically redrawn over the past year, the longest-running dictatorship in the world has found itself increasingly abandoned by the two patrons, Moscow and Beijing, that it has always managed to play off against each other. Pyongyang's sense of vulnerability was only sharpened when the Soviets, who account for 50% of North Korea's trade, established full diplomatic relations with South Korea in September. China, meanwhile, enjoys $3 billion a year of trade with Seoul, at least three times more than with its ostensible ally...
...Korea is being forced to swallow its principles and make friends with the countries it has long loved to vilify. September saw the first high-level meeting between North and South Korea; a second round of talks was conducted last month. And just days before the Moscow-Seoul accord, Pyongyang asserted its eagerness to normalize diplomatic relations with Japan, its bitterest enemy of all since the brutal Japanese occupation of the peninsula from...
...Pyongyang street, however, still proceeds as if no one has told him that the cold war is over. North Korea seems stuck in some vanished black-and-white era of dark, Soviet-made limousines and gray, featureless concrete blocks (when a visitor pulls out a camera, a local asks him, in astonishment, "Color?"). The dominant image of the capital is of neatly dressed people in groups walking soundlessly through silent avenues of empty high-rises...
...national anthem proclaims, has enough resources to build $500 million stadiums, but its citizens must get by on about $50 a month. "These people have hard currency -- they are not so hopeless as ((the people in)) many other countries I deal with," says a European who is in Pyongyang to reschedule a debt that has gone unpaid for 14 years. "But they just use it on monuments, more monuments -- unusable things...