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Late North Korean leader Kim Jong-il with his wife Ko Yong-hui

The deeds of Ko Yong-hui, Kim Jong-un’s mother, receive unusual attention in Kim Jong-il’s Oct. 8 final instructions, where they occupy a whole paragraph, Japanese newspaper the Mainichi Shimbun reported on July 21.

In his dying wish, Kim Jong-il said that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un was able to become the heir to the revolution thanks to the “outstanding effort and deeds of his mother,” Ko Yong-hui.

During an interview, Atsuhito Isozaki, an associate professor of North Korean politics at Japan’s Keio University, described this document as “the primary source contributing to our understanding of how North Korea attempted to guarantee the successor’s legitimacy and of the logic it used.”

The “October 8 Final Instructions,” which records the final instructions that Kim Jong-il gave to party leaders immediately before his death at the end of 2011, take up 12 pages of the 25-volume “Selected Works of Kim Jong-il,” which was published in Aug. 2015 in a revised and expanded edition by the North Korean Workers’ Party Publishing House, the newspaper reported on Thursday that it had confirmed.

The “October 8 Final Instruction” combines statements that Kim Jong-il delivered to members of the central committee of the Korean Workers’ Party (KWP) on Oct. 8, 2011 (two months before he died) and on Dec. 15, 2011 (two days before he died).

Ko Yong-hui, Kim Jong-un’s mother, is considered to be of low status because she was born to Japanese of Korean descent. While the North Korean government referred to her by the honorific title “Respected Mother” in the first half of the 2000s, it eventually stopped doing so.

But since Kim took power in North Korea in 2012, the phrase “Mother of Pyongyang” has begun to appear in media such as the KWP’s official newspaper the Rodong Sinmun. The inclusion of an entire paragraph about Ko Yong-hui in Kim Jong-il’s final instructions appears to be part of the same pattern.

Following Kim Jong-il’s abrupt demise, North Korea has used his final instructions to justify Kim Jong-un’s control of the country.

Newspapers have reported that Kim declared in his final instructions that “The Korean People’s Army must be thoroughly infused by a revolutionary military ethos and must create a strict chain of command in which the entire army moves as one at a single command from Comrade Kim Jong-un.

By Gil Yun-hyung, Tokyo correspondent

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