When North Korea opened a marathon up to international competitors, one YouTuber realized it was his only chance to get himself — and his camera — inside the totalitarian country.
“I’m not a runner, but they told me you have to be there in a month, and I made all the preparations and made it happen,” Harry Jaggard told The Post. “I’ve been making YouTube videos going to less visited areas of the world for a while now, and North Korea has been on my radar for years.”
The experience, he said, was bizarre: “My tour guide said that you’ll go into North Korea with 100 questions and you’ll leave with 1,000 questions, and it’s so true.”
The 27-year-old Brit had five days in Pyongyang, North Korea, this April and was shocked by how much he was allowed to film for his vlog-style YouTube channel.
“I was not expecting [to be able to vlog] at all. I thought that it would be very minimal, maybe a few clips that I would voice over,” he said. “To have the freedom that I was given was crazy. They were very relaxed.”
Jaggard and fellow athletes were treated to a curated tour of the nation’s capital, including the subway system, war museums, a beer joint, and monuments to the Workers Party and former leader Kim Jong-il.
“They showed us the tour that they wanted to show, it was definitely the highlight reel. It’s like going on a tour of America but only seeing Las Vegas — like the shiny parts,” he said.
Jaggard thinks the country didn’t quite understand what influencers are, and how a simple vlog camera can blow the cover of a country that prefers to keep their image under wraps.
“I don’t think they realize how big some influencers are,” Jaggard, who has 2.43 million subscribers on YouTube, said. “They say no journalists are allowed on the tour, and I think YouTubers are definitely in the gray area, because we’re not technically journalists, but you could argue that my piece was journalism — just not very good journalism.”
Jaggard flew from Beijing to Pyongyang, which he said was “nothing like he expected … clean, grand, and surprisingly peaceful.
“There was tons and tons of propaganda,” he recalled. “It’s literally everywhere you look. I couldn’t read it, but what I got translated is pushing this one ideology that the leader is the best and keeping the country protected from the outside world.”
Though his hotel reminded him of the 1970s, he said it was clean and comfortable. It was also the only place he was able to access internet on the trip. He also said he worried there may be a hidden microphone in his room.
One tour guide told him he had taken a photo with Kim Jong Un — an experience he described as “incredible.”
“We have a great leader. He is the source of our image, our strength, really,” the guide said on video.
“Whenever he visits some place, all the country people are interested in that place, and we really envy the people who [are from] the place, and we envy the people who personally met him.”
He also described the ideology of his country as one of “duty.”
“We fail sometimes, but we find a reason in ourselves, and we try to overcome the problem,” he said. “Our society is based on self-reliance, and our parents are educating us to do so.”
Jaggard was also surprised to hear one of his tour guides matter-of-factly say that COVID-19 was sent via air balloon by South Korea.
“It seems like people are indoctrinated for sure,” he speculated. “Maybe a few of them do know that the outside world is a lot more developed, but there’s just nothing they can do about it, or their whole family will be put through a lot of pain.”
He declined to share all the conversations he had with North Koreans off camera, worrying “it might get them in trouble,” but shared that one of the guides asked him why people like America, whether it’s dirty and why people like Donald Trump. He also inquired about why foreigners don’t like North Korea.
There were only three places where he couldn’t film: A view tower, a supermarket, and a war museum, where he saw a statue depicting a giant crow eating a dead American soldier from the Korean War. He was also shown a propaganda poster of the American Capitol building being blown up.
Tourism to the country had been shut down for five years, but Jaggard had been in contact with British tour companies with connections to North Korea looking for a loophole into the country, which finally came in the form of the international marathon.
200 international competitors came from more than 40 countries. Though Jaggard rarely runs more than five kilometers a week, he started training seriously for a month. And, to his surprise, he actually finished the marathon in 3 hours and 40 minutes.
The memory that will stay with him forever: “50,000 people cheering at the marathon, which I never expected to even finish, so I was very proud of that.”
Tourism was shut down shortly after his visit, with dozens of foreign visas cancelled without warning. Though unconfirmed, CNN reported this may have been due to Jaggard’s video.
His biggest takeaway from his time in the authoritarian nation was the connections he was able to forge with the locals.
“For me, the experience was more about the people that I met,” he said. “They are portrayed to hate all foreigners and hate the West, but that’s not really true. We had so many interesting conversations off camera that were just very heartwarming.”
The message he hopes his YouTube audience walks away with: “The people of North Korea are different from the government.”
