The joy of modern appliances in North Korea

Oh, the magic of modern conveniences!

Back in the American 1970s, realtors used to write “ALL MOD CONS” in flyers to indicate the presence of life-changing, labor-saving devices such as electric washers and dryers, and (don’t swoon) gas ovens. Then along came the slow-cooker, and suburban homemakers took off for paying jobs in the city. At least where I lived, that is. Without reliving my entire polyester-clad, ABBA-soundtracked, red-headed American childhood, I wish to make the following point: Sometimes a single household appliance can shift the world on its axis. And right now, Korea-watchers are pondering precisely this possibility.

In pathologically secretive North Korea, nothing says “status” in 2008 like a smuggled South Korean rice cooker. And it seems even cadres in one of the world’s last bastions of communism have developed a preference for high-end brands. According to my colleague Sungwoo Park, the brand at issue here is something called a Cuckoo cooker.

“Cuckoo” in Korean is a homonym for the sound of steam escaping from a pressure valve on the top of the appliance. In most of Asia these days, rice prices are soaring and people are going very hungry. But the North Korean elite has found a new way to flaunt its clout: with Cuckoo cookers smuggled into the country, presumably through China.

“It is not the majority, but a small number of people in North Korea who own this rice cooker,” one North Korean defector who arrived in South Korea in April said in an interview. “It is mostly people who are connected to customs officials, and who use their influence to purchase this item.”

North Korea’s legitimate economic activity has plunged since its main patron, the Soviet Union, collapsed in the early 1990s, but experts cite a thriving trade in counterfeit currency, weapons, and other international contraband whose proceeds never appear in any published statistics—and a whole micro-economy based on corruption.

Nicholas Eberstadt, a North Korea expert at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, has estimated that the country imports nearly twice as much every year as it exports, suggesting a massive black market in both directions. This has allowed wily, well-connected North Koreans abundant means of obtaining smuggled gadgets and appliances to convey their alpha status. These include music players, color television sets, and foreign mobile phones, all fairly standard status symbols in impoverished countries worldwide.

But rice cookers?

Even the CEO of Seoul-based Cuckoo Electronics was surprised to learn that his company’s flagship product had acquired such status as smuggled lucre. “We didn’t know that the pressure rice cooker we manufacture was popular in North Korea. We found out through the media,” Sung Young-Tae said. “We do not export this product directly to North Korea, and most probably rice cookers we export to China

Experts say this is just one more example of the widening chasm between the handful of haves and legions of have-nots in perhaps the world’s most tightly closed country. I wonder what will happen when the starving masses find out that the privileged few don’t just have plenty of rice but high-tech devices in which to cook it… and what might transpire if the elite start sneaking in all those crock pots that changed life as we knew it 25 years ago.