Along with having a job title that makes him sound way cooler than he has any right to be, the supreme leader of North Korea, Kim Jong-un is literally the only person in the whole of North Korea to sport that exact name, because officials made sure that everyone who did, changed it.
Due to the secretive and ass-backwards nature of North Korea, exact figures on just how many people had the name “Kim Jong-un” before he rose to power aren’t available. That said, the fact that officials saw the need to make anyone with this name change it, indicates that someone out there had it. And boy do we feel sorry for them.
While details are pretty sparse, a leaked document from early 2011 showed that officials asked the army and police to “persuade” anyone they found called “Kim Jong-un” to voluntarily change it to something else. Seeing as North Korea is a country synonymous with “murdering the shit out of anyone who does anything wrong“, we’re guessing people changed their name pretty quickly when the men with guns told them to regardless of whether or not they knew why or how good they’d gotten at signing their signature to make it look like a dick and balls.
But here’s the weird part, you may have noticed that we said this rule was enforced at the beginning of 2011, which was a full 12 months before The Dear Leader, Kim Jong-il died. Apparently North Korean officials were just taking precautions in case Kim Jong-il died and Kim Jong-un rose to power while other people in his country had the same name, which we’d presume would be like, super awkward for everyone involved.
But North Korean officials didn’t just stop at making people change their name, everything from birth records to the names people unfortunate to share their name with Kim Jong-un had written on their freaking driving license was changed permanently and retroactively so that there was no evidence that they once had a different name. It’s probably a good thing tattoos aren’t popular in North Korea because we’d hate to imagine what officials would have done to anyone who happened to have the name Kim Jong-un tattooed onto themselves, we’re imagining it would have probably involved a specially trained hive of bees and a single smear of honey on the right limb.
We’d joke about them walking into hospitals and yelling at babies, but according to The Guardian, officials literally told hospitals to straight up reject any birth certificates they received bearing the name Kim Jong-un. Which is a shame considering how much the real Kim Jong-un looks like a baby.
