THE REGIME IN North Korea is looking for a new leader – but will he come with a new face? South Korean newspapers have been suggesting that Kim Jong-Un, son of current leader Kim Jong-Il and heir apparent to the regime in the North, has had plastic surgery to boost his resemblance to his paternal grandfather.
Official photographs of the 27-year-old were released last week: the first snaps of Kim Jong-Un since he was a young teenager.
The Dong-A Ilbo newspaper in South Korea reported that the Kim dynasty was hoping to present Kim Jong-Il’s youngest son as a “reincarnation of North Korea’s late founder”, his grandfather Kim Il-Sung.
reflect his resemblance to his forebears, with the same pouchy cheeks, cleft chin and slightly-downturned mouth common to all three generations of Kims.
Toshimitsu Shigemura, a professor at Tokyo’s Waseda University and author of a number of books on the North Korean leadership, told The Daily Telegraph:
A lot of people in South Korea have pointed out that Kim’s face is very different from when he was young, particularly the shape of his chin. From previous photos, everyone had remarked that he looked nothing like his grandfather, so the change is quite dramatic.
Kim Jong-Un, son of Kim Jong-Il’s third wife, a former dancer who died of breast cancer in 2004, has lived in the shadows for most of his life.
It has been variously reported that he spent the 1990s studying under a false name at a school in Switzerland; reports from Seoul say he has never left North Korea at all.
His sudden plunge into the limelight suggests that Pyongyang is preparing to introduce him as North Korea’s next leader. Kim Jong-Il suffered a stroke in 2008 and is thought to be increasingly frail.
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