Did it ever occur to you that maybe you were still watched and "handled" much the same as any other group, you just didn't notice it?
I've got 100 sources saying that the North is a dystopia where brainwashing is common, starvation is not unusual, and the "Dear Leader" is believed to be able to read minds, etc. These sources are diplomats, researchers, former citizens of NK, defectors, and so forth.
I've got one guy on HN who talks about having fun in a drunken boozefest where the guides told dick jokes.
I'm perfectly fine with changing my view, but Occam's Razor here tells me that, at best, both these stories are true. That is, you had the dystopian tour. You had the "indulge the rich westerners while we take their tourist money" version. After all, if you're not a political threat, and they can isolate/watch you, for them it'd be like being visited by a cadre of millionaires. Who cares if they're undisciplined and unruly? Keep them away from the normal folks and let them feel like they're on a junket.
Hrm, that's the not impression I tried to give in my comment. Obviously I was in a dystopia, and it was made very clear that we were being handled - not even the guides tried to pretend we were being shown the North Korea that civilians see. The guy who sat in front of me on the bus was literally arrested on the way out of the airport and is still stuck there! I'm pretty aware of the situation.
The way the North Korea tours work is as following:
1. The government-run North Korean tourist organization partners with foreign tour companies (all based in China, AFAIK). There are several foreign tour companies (Koryo Tours, Young Pioneer Tours, etc), which all cater to different segments of the market and advertise their services differently.
2. Every tour goes to the same locations and in theory gets the same commentary, but the various tour companies can send different foreign guides, and have some power to get different Korean guides. This, combined with the different sections of the market, has a pretty huge effect on your experience on the tour. I went with YPT, which is why it was a party with a bunch of mid-twenties Americans/British Commonwealth guys. If you go with, say, Koryo Tours, you're signing up for what I referred to as the dystopia experience where it's an older, primarily continental European crowd and the guides yell at you for taking pictures. I personally think that this is what the people taking the dystopia tours are looking for - they want to go home and talk about how they braved the tyranny of the government minders and snuck pictures of random rice fields.
On a personal note, I've been to some of the worst places on Earth by most objective and subjective measures, and digging under the skin (and into the dumpsters) of dysfunctional places is a hobby of mine. It's always a little funny to me that if you try to humanize the North Koreans a little (not even trying to make excuses for their government!), the default assumption from people who've never been there is that you're a rube who has been taken in by obvious propaganda.
Do you know if the guy who was arrested actually tried to steal something? Did you see it happen? One of the questions I have about this whole thing is, did they just select someone and charge them with something for hostage leverage or did he actually do something?
Also, in regards to the prior post you were responding to, did you consider that your drunken tour group was targeted by the government? If I were looking to get a hostage by getting someone to step over an invisible line I might give the group free booze and make the environment seem relaxed till it wasn't relaxed any more.
I don't want to get into too much detail on this out of respect for Otto. I wasn't there when he took the poster down, but I definitely believe that he did.
Also, no invisible lines were crossed - we were told very specifically before arriving in NK by the tour company that under no circumstances should we go to the staff-only floor of the hotel and that people had gotten in trouble for going there previously (it's moderately infamous). My memory of that is hazy, but it may even have been in response to a question about that floor from Otto. As I said in another comment, I really don't think that the NK government is interested in oppressing tourists for no reason.
That's how these things always go (15 years is the usual "sentence"). Assuming that the US is willing to play ball, they'll start negotiating now and eventually trade him for a visit from the director of the CIA or some rice or whatever. AFAIK no American since the Korean war has actually served a sentence from the DPRK.
I've got 100 sources saying that the North is a dystopia where brainwashing is common, starvation is not unusual, and the "Dear Leader" is believed to be able to read minds, etc. These sources are diplomats, researchers, former citizens of NK, defectors, and so forth.
I've got one guy on HN who talks about having fun in a drunken boozefest where the guides told dick jokes.
I'm perfectly fine with changing my view, but Occam's Razor here tells me that, at best, both these stories are true. That is, you had the dystopian tour. You had the "indulge the rich westerners while we take their tourist money" version. After all, if you're not a political threat, and they can isolate/watch you, for them it'd be like being visited by a cadre of millionaires. Who cares if they're undisciplined and unruly? Keep them away from the normal folks and let them feel like they're on a junket.