North Korea Relaxes Rules — for 48 Hours

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Electrical engineering student Ri Myong Sop was strolling with a friend in the North Korean capital. A group of journalists approached him to ask what he thought about the visit of the New York Philharmonic.

It would not be anything unusual elsewhere. But in North Korea, being allowed to briefly speak to a random person on the street about what they thought about the American orchestra's concert was a small sign the regime was willing to briefly relax its usual control.

For a 48 hours during the Philharmonic's visit, the reclusive North was ever so slightly more open to the world. And at the concert Tuesday evening, the North Koreans opened their hearts.

The unprecedented visit meant unprecedented accommodations by the regime that keeps foreign guests — who are not allowed to travel independently in the country — under strict control.

As is usual, the nearly 300 members of the New York Philharmonic delegation had to surrender their mobile phones while they stayed in the North.

But after they arrived, journalists were allowed to rent mobile phones that could place international calls — late-model Nokia handsets made for the Chinese market with 2-megapixel cameras.

The North Koreans also set up a press center with speedy Internet access in a circular room that permitted the some 80 journalists covering the trip to send stories and photos to the rest of the world. Technicians helped configure computers, speedily navigating various operating systems and pointing browsers to Google's home page to confirm the connections were working.

No Web sites appeared off-limits, including major news sites as well as American government information on North Korea. The Internet is usually tightly controlled in North Korea and limited to the top elite.

All visitors were shadowed by English-speaking translators, roughly one for every few people on the visit, musicians and journalists alike. Some translators joked with their charges and most refrained from starting every sentence with praise of the country's leadership.

The translators are also responsible for ensuring guests do not see or photograph anything the government believes might portray their country in a bad light.

On a May 2006 visit to Pyongyang, scenes as simple and universal as people waiting in line for a bus were deemed unfit to photograph.

But during this week's Pyongyang trip, photojournalists snapped away from moving buses to capture the full panorama of life on the city's active streets.

Men rode bicycles on snow-covered sidewalks. Women were seen through a salon window getting their hair done. Shops displayed traditional Korean dresses and other clothes. Construction workers laid bricks for a new 10-story building.

Residents appeared well-dressed with winter coats for the subfreezing temperatures. Only the most privileged North Koreans believed to be most loyal to the regime are allowed to live in Pyongyang.

Encounters with residents were very few and very brief, such as the talk with the student Ri, who through a translator stuck to the government claim the United States started the Korean War and said better relations between the U.S. and North Korea were dependent on Washington.

One group of people whom the North Korean translators refused to interact with were their fellow countrymen who were members of the concert audience — who appeared to be made up of top elites.

The American musicians stayed at the Yanggakdo International Hotel, which features a slowly revolving restaurant on the top floor and a Chinese-run casino in the basement. The hotel is on an island in the middle of the Taedong River that flows through the city and was covered this week with a layer of ice.

For the concert itself, South Korean TV channel MBC was allowed to drive satellite trucks across the Demilitarized Zone to bring equipment that beamed a high-definition broadcast of the event to South Korea and beyond.

Inside North Korea, the concert also was shown live on TV, a rarity given most big events such as celebrations that see troops goose-stepping through the main Kim Il Sung square are taped for showing later the same day.

Still, the event — with an emotional finale of the Korean folk song "Arirang" that brought tears to the eyes of musicians and audience alike — received only scant mention in North Korea's main state-run newspaper Wednesday. The Rodong Sinmun daily ran a short story and small photo on page four of the six-page daily, noting the Philharmonic "showed exquisite and refined execution."

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