In North Korea, a state that issues official titles for nearly every occupation, one role has never appeared in any labor ministry handbook. Officially described as a performance troop, the unit was in practice a state-run group of thousands of young women selected to serve the Kim family as entertainers, attendants, and, in some cases, sexual companions. Between 1978 and 2011, high schools across the country served as recruiting grounds for this secretive institution. Recruitment often began without warning.
Defector testimony describes personnel from Section 5 of the Workers’ Party Organization Department visiting senior girls’ high schools, presenting teachers with lists of names, and escorting selected students into hallways without explanation. Inspectors measured height, examined hands and ankles, and reviewed family political backgrounds. According to a classified recruitment document later published in defector testimony, local officials forwarded the top 100 candidates from each school to Pyongyang, with roughly one in ten passing the medical inspection. The annual intake totaled approximately 30 to 40 teenage girls plus about 15 boys brought in as servants.
Families were told their daughters had been chosen by the country. In exchange for cooperation came promises of money, status, and improved housing. Refusal, however, carried the implicit threat of labor camp detention. At the central inspection in Pyongyang, selected girls underwent what former members described as a humiliating process.
They were stripped, measured, and examined for scars, birthmarks, and vaccination marks. They were asked about their sexual history and made to read aloud so inspectors could assess the softness of their voices. The criteria were exacting: candidates had to be virgins, confirmed by medical exam, with no visible blemishes and unblemished skin judged as symmetrical. They could not exceed 165 centimeters in height, a rule defectors attributed to Kim Jong-il’s own short stature, reportedly around 157 centimeters, and his dislike of looking up at women.
One defector, identified as Mi Hyang, recounted her experience to Marie Claire magazine in 2010. She was 15 when officers took her from her classroom, examined her, and informed her that her birth name sounded too rural. They renamed her Mi Hyang, and she was forbidden from speaking her original name aloud for the next decade. The pleasure squad was divided into three teams.
The Gamujo handled song and dance performances at state banquets and official functions. The Hungbokjo served as a massage corps for senior officials, with armed bodyguards present during sessions. The Manjokjo, the third team, reportedly provided sexual services to Kim, his close associates, and selected guests. The North Korean government has denied the existence of this third team, describing such accounts as slander invented by Western imperialists, though multiple former members have published memoirs detailing their time in the unit.
New recruits went through six months of training covering banquet service, folk dances, poetry recitation, massage techniques, and etiquette for interacting with generals. Some were sent abroad for additional polish, reportedly including trips to Eastern European resorts during the Soviet era, always under close supervision. Upon completing training, recruits faced what was called an interview: a private meeting with Kim Jong-il who decided whether they would be accepted into the final group. Those who failed were reassigned to lower-status teams.
Kenji Fujimoto, a Japanese chef who served Kim under the pseudonym, later wrote a best-selling memoir describing private parties at the leader’s Pyongyang residence. His account describes a marble-floored ballroom, loud disco music, and rows of young women in matching outfits who entered silently. At a certain point, Kim ordered the women to undress and then instructed his guests to dance with them, adding a specific rule: dancing was permitted, but touching was not, on pain of being treated as thieves. South Korean actress Choi Eun-hee, who was kidnapped to North Korea in 1978 along with her ex-husband, director Shin Sang-ok, to produce films for Kim, recalled attending a dawn party where the leader arrived drunk and demanded songs from visibly exhausted young women.
She described him as charming, terrifying, and constantly intoxicated in a manner that felt both sad and dangerous. Contact with family was strictly forbidden. Recruits could not write letters, make phone calls, or send photographs. Their parents received only small monthly payments from the state, with no address or information about where their daughters were stationed.
Members lived in secure compounds, often in the gated Pyongyang suburb of Changwang or at coastal facilities like the Wonsan Villa, surrounded by soldiers, dogs, and electric fences. Lee Young-guk, a former member of Kim’s personal security detail from 1978 to 1988, wrote a memoir describing life inside the compounds. He confirmed that guards were ordered not to make eye contact with the women and described the eventual retirement process, in which many former Manjokjo members were married off to bodyguards like himself. The arrangement ensured that both spouses depended on silence: a talkative bodyguard would lose his privileges, and a talkative wife would send her husband to a labor camp.
Retirement officially came around age 22, though some sources place the upper limit at 25. Retirees received a lump sum of roughly 4,000 US dollars, imported appliances such as refrigerators and microwaves, and signed another secrecy oath. They were then typically married to senior foreign affairs officials or personal bodyguards, men cleared for international travel and trusted to keep state secrets abroad. The institution drew on a long historical precedent.
During the Joseon Dynasty, which ruled the Korean Peninsula from 1392 to 1897, the royal court maintained a class of women known as gungnyeo who handled domestic duties and, depending on rank and royal preference, sometimes served as concubines. The system was codified in 1428 by King Sejong the Great. When the kippumjo was introduced in 1978, its founder, Ri Dong-ho, then first vice director of the United Front Department, adapted this five-century-old structure for the modern regime, replacing silk hanbok with matching banquet outfits and calligraphy lessons with cognac service training. Kim Jong-il died of a heart attack on a moving train in December 2011.
Shortly afterward, the pleasure squad attached to him was officially disbanded, with members paid out, married off, and sent home. For about three years, the institution appeared dormant. Then, beginning around 2014, defectors in South Korean intelligence reported that the squad was being rebuilt, with officers once again visiting schools. The new recruits were younger, in some reports as young as 13, and the selection criteria had relaxed somewhat since Kim Jong-un is taller than his father.
The numbers were smaller as well, roughly 200 women compared to the approximately 2,000 maintained under Kim Jong-il. The parties reportedly continued in much the same format as before, at compounds including the Wonsan Villa where Kim Jong-un is rumored to spend significant time. The rules remained recognizable: drink the cognac, dance to the disco, do not touch the women without permission, and, for the women, forget whatever happened by morning.
The next train of new recruits was already on its way to Pyongyang.
