Cheers and applause rang out from attendees at a meeting with senior secretaries and aides in the small conference room on the third floor of the Blue House’s Yeomin 1 Pavilion on the afternoon of Apr. 30 as President Moon Jae-in emerged from his office just next door. Smiling bashfully, President Moon joined along in the clapping.
“Who told you to do this? It’s nice, anyway,” he said.
The topic of the meeting – the first since last week’s inter-Korean summit – was the outcome and follow-up measures for the summit, but Moon’s advisers couldn’t hold back their curiosity. Facing their onslaught of questions, Moon shared some behind-the-scenes stories from the summit.
Asked for his impression of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, President Moon described him as “forthright and polite.” Presidential Security Service director Ju Young-hoon added, “When President Moon and Chairman Kim were getting on the elevator with their wives to go up to the dinner, Chairman Kim gestured for President Moon to go first, and when [North Korean First Lady] Ri Sol-ju made to get on, he gently took her hand so that [South Korean First Lady] Kim Jung-sook could go first.” Moon was born in 1953, while Kim was born in 1984. (In Korean culture, age and seniority are big determinants of professional norms and social etiquette.)
Moon also talked about his meeting with Kim on a bench at Panmunjeom’s pedestrian bridge, which was broadcast around the world without audio.
“During our stroll on the pedestrian bridge, we were so focused on talking that I wasn’t able to look back, but when I saw the footage at the Blue House after the meeting I thought it was nice to see,” the South Korean president recalled.
“It was really pleasant to see the landscape with the sounds of birds. I didn’t know it was that nice,” he added to uproarious laughter from attendees. “Bad things are never entirely bad. If we do a good job of preserving the Demilitarized Zone, it will come back to us in the end as a major asset,” he continued.
A Blue House senior official explained, “On the pedestrian bridge, it was apparently mostly Chairman Kim asking questions and President Moon speaking ahead of the North Korea-US summit.”
Moon also shared an example of a “wise answer to a foolish question” concerning the hotline between the two leaders. During their encounter, Kim “naively” asked, “Will you really pick up the phone any time I call?” to which Moon replied, “That’s not how it works. We have our staffers set a time beforehand, and then one of us calls the other,” a Blue House senior official reported.
Kim, a well-known fan of basketball, was also quoted as suggesting that the sport be used to initiate inter-Korean sports exchange.
“Chairman Kim suggested starting with basketball rather than Seoul-Pyongyang football [matches] when we do inter-Korean sports exchange,” Moon said.
In response, Kim was quoted as saying, “We were strong back when we had Ri Myung-hun, who was the tallest player in the world [at 235 cm], but we’ve been weak since he retired.”
“I don’t think we’d be much of a match for South Korea. There are a lot of players over 2 meters in South Korea, aren’t there?” he reportedly continued.
Trump can have the Nobel Prize, we’ll “take the ‘peace’”