Kim Jong Il is dead… long live Kim Jong Il!

Waseda University professor Toshimitsu Shigemura claims in this week’s Shukan Gendai that North Korean leader Kim Jong Il passed away in the fall of 2003 and has been replaced by a body double.

Note that the Shukan Gendai is not the World Weekly News. JT has an English overview of the article which lists some of the “evidence” for Shigemura’s theory. Some of it seems pretty circumstantial and full of strange assumptions (eg. why would fear of death push KJI toward reconciliation with the outside world?).

Body-double rumours have been bandied about for years, and if true this would have an immense impact on the North’s relations with the outside world. However the consequences of such a revelation would impact the policies of other countries as well. For example, the Shukan Gendai interviewed a Japanese government official involved in the Koizumi’s administration Pyongyang visits of 2004 who said:

Rumors of a dummy Kim began circulating after the summit. Some of us said we should have Kim’s voice prints analyzed. But if we did that and proved the prime minister had been conferring with a double, it could have destroyed the Koizumi administration. So we didn’t proceed.

This brings about the conjectural question: if the members of the Six Party Talks suspected or knew that KJI is dead, would they continue for political reasons? As I have pointed out before, it might be that America needs KJI to maintain its forward position in northeast Asia. It might be better if we didn’t know whether KJI was truly dead or alive.