The latest issue of GQ features a gripping profile on the long-time sushi chef to Kim Jong-il’s entourage.
Kenji Fujimoto (alias obvs) was the Johnny Drama (he cooked) and the Turtle (he bought the Dead Leader all of his drugs, in this case, French cognac and Big Macs) to Jong-il’s Vinny Chase. Their relationship was largely like Morgan Freeman and Jessica Tandy’s in Driving Miss Daisy with Fujimoto sharing old VHS tapes of reruns of "Iron Chef" and reassuring Jong-il of his loyalty while Jong-il kept Fujimoto out of re-education gulags. Meanwhile, Jong-il had a Voldemort-like obsession with immortality, often quizzing Fujimoto on whether shark-fin soup could ward off cancer. I could use another pop culture reference, but I try to keep it to three references per post.
While I may attempt to keep my love for pop culture from bleeding too much into my work, the Dead Leader thrived off of it. One of his favorite movies was Clint Eastwood’s In the Line of Fire.
GQ with a delicious anecdote:
Here Shogun-sama suddenly stood. "This is the best scene in the movie!" he announced. He turned to his secretary and pointed at him. "This is how you protect me," he said. Then he shouted at his security team, "You have to protect me as the Secret Police in the movie do!"
And if the Dead Leader wasn’t needy enough, the profile extensively details the numerous "loyalty tests" that Jong-il would make people go, including jet-ski races, hundreds of kisses on the cheek, and setting up a sting in Japan—all to examine the bounds of Fujimoto’s devotion. Even Stage-One clingers aren’t that bad. If you thought you were a picky eater, the Dead Leader would like to raise you his small corporation of food inspectors who would inspect every grain of rice that had to be in cooked in the fires of Nork Mt. Doom, where folk legend says the Dead Leader was born, underneath a double rainbow and newly born star. Not a single rainbow, a double rainbow.
America owes Fujimoto a great debt of gratitude. If it wasn’t for him showing the current Nork King, Kim Jong-un old Chicago Bulls tapes growing up, we wouldn’t have—out of all 313.9 million Americans—the Worm as our current Nork Ambassador. Thank you, Fujimoto. In the Democratic People’s Republic, when they play basketball, they chase down periods with vodka shots. Even if Jong-un is belligerently drunk, he might still shoot better than Obama.
For as much as the Norks claim to hate America and want to nuke us, they sure want to be us. When Fujimoto returned to Pyongyang for the Dead Leader’s funeral, he noticed how the funeral possession carried his casket, as if he was a democratically elected president. The Dead Leader would want to jock '40s style.