Ping Pong in Pyongyang

A rare glimpse inside a forbidden city

Much as it first breached the Bamboo Curtain of Mao Tse-tung's China in 1971, Ping Pong served the cause of diplomacy last week and opened a crack in the very closed door of another Communist Asian country: North Korea. To the cheers of waving schoolchildren lining scrubbed and decorated streets, 900 table-tennis players from 70 countries--including the U.S., but not South Korea and Israel--arrived in Pyongyang for a 13-day world championship. TIME Tokyo Bureau Chief Edwin Reingold was among the few Western journalists in North Korea. His report from the rarely glimpsed capital:

Pyongyang is a city built on a grand scale, where everything seems keyed to the country's heroic selfesteem. Broad avenues and vistas sweep toward tall monuments that honor the struggle for liberation and pay homage to President Kim Il Sung, whose name and image are everywhere. Even the stations of the subway system, which rivals Moscow's, have such exhortative names as "Rehabilitation" and "National Building" and bear huge frescoes of the President.

The single-family dwellings that used to house most of the city's population of 1.3 million have been replaced by towering apartment blocks, "because they are more efficient to heat," as one official explains. Journalists were discouraged from wandering off on their own down side streets. But, even along the main avenues, those familiar with the teeming pavements and traffic jams of Seoul, the South Korean capital, were surprised by the small number of people in the streets. The official explanation is that since the industrious North Koreans are exhorted to toil eight hours, study eight hours and sleep eight hours during the six-day work week, there is little time for idling.

Instead, one sees thousands of children marching to and from school singing songs about the great and fatherly Kim Il Sung. In one nursery school that I visited, the youngsters first bowed, to his childhood portrait, then had to recite the tale of an incident from his life.

Besides the revolution, love of country and eventual reunification with the South, the central message promulgated by President Kim is juche (pronounced joo-chay), which roughly translated is "mastery of one's destiny." Applied nationally, it means that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea must be utterly self-reliant. Everything, in fact --from trucks and locomotives to scissors and machine tools--is homemade. A plant manager is apt to boast that no foreigner has ever been involved in his operation. "The quality might not be too perfect," one official admitted about consumer goods, "but they are good enough for us because we made them ourselves."

Anxious to replace the Korean War armistice with a solid peace treaty that would get U.S. troops out of South Korea, the government is now renewing efforts for a dialogue with Washington. Accordingly, earlier anti-American hostility has faded considerably. The radio is alive, improbably, with the music of Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald. And none of the U.S. visitors encountered any disagreeable incidents. The toddler who spat at me when I took his picture apparently was too young to have got the new line straight.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.