What is Kim Jong Il Up to?
Dead Since 2003.
[…]Â but a veteran Japanese expert on North Korea says the “dear leader” is actually dead – and his role is played by a double.
The expert says Kim died of diabetes in 2003 and world leaders, including Vladimir Putin of Russia and Hu Jintao of China, have been negotiating with an imposter.
He believes that Kim, fearing assassination, had groomed up to four look-alikes to act as substitutes at public events. One underwent plastic surgery to make his appearance more convincing. Now, the expert claims, the actors are brought on stage whenever required to persuade the masses that Kim is alive.
The author has been derided by rival analysts of the hermetic communist state. Yet so few facts are known about North Korea’s ruling dynasty that some of the strange things reported in Professor Toshimitsu Shigemura’s bestselling book cannot be readily explained.
“Scholars don’t trust my reasoning but intelligence people see the possibility that it will turn out to be accurate,” he said. “I have identified and pinned down every source.”
The book, “The True Character of Kim Jong-il,” cites sources from inside North Korea and from the intelligence services of Japan and South Korea.
 Just suffered a stroke
U.S. and South Korean intelligence reports that the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il, recently suffered a stroke raise issues that the North’s neighbors have long feared. If Kim is incapacitated or dies, who will take over one of the world’s most isolated and unpredictable regimes, now armed with nuclear weapons? And what will happen to a nation that has long looked on Kim as a godlike figure?
South Korean lawmakers told reporters on Wednesday after a briefing by the National Intelligence Service that Kim suffered a cerebral hemorrhage in mid-August and underwent surgery, but has recovered enough to speak and walk.
Kim Sung Ho, the South’s spy chief, told the National Assembly’s Intelligence Committee that this was not the first time that Kim had been operated on for a circulation problem. There was no sign of unrest in the North, the lawmakers were told.
A spokeswoman for the National Intelligence Service said in an interview later Wednesday, “We have intelligence reports that after intensive treatments, his condition has considerably improved.” She spoke on condition of anonymity, in keeping with agency policy.
In Pyongyang on Wednesday, the Japanese news agency Kyodo quoted North Korea’s No. 2 leader, Kim Yong Nam, as saying that there was “no problem” with Kim Jong Il.
“We see such reports as not only worthless, but rather as a conspiracy plot,” another senior North Korean official, Song Il Ho, told Kyodo.
Kim, 66, was conspicuously absent from a parade on Tuesday to mark the North’s 60th anniversary.