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In 1948, Kim Il Sung came to power and served as the country’s ruler until his death in 1994.

Japan colonized the Korean peninsula between 1910 and 1945. Kim Il Sung was born in 1912, and his father was later jailed for his activism for independence. Visiting his beaten and bruised father in prison sparked an anti-Japanese zeal in Kim Il Sung, according to his memoir, quoted in “Becoming King Jung Un.”

Both of his parents died young, his father at 31 and his mother at 40.

In 1931, Japan invaded Manchuria, a region of China. Kim Il Sung led Chinese and Korean guerilla fighters in killing Japanese police and soldiers. He and his group then made their way to the Soviet Union in 1940 as pressure from the Japanese troops increased.

There, he received military training and became captain of a Red Army brigade.

Kim Jong Suk was in her late teens when she met up with Kim Il Sung in Manchuria in 1935. First helping in the kitchens, she became a fighter, and Kim Il Sung credited her with saving his life in his memoir. The two married in the early 1940s.

Much about their lives together at this point is unknown. “The records are sort of foggy,” Madden said.

The couple was still in the Soviet Union at the time. Later, officials would alter Kim Jong Il’s birth to a year later, to match more closely with his father’s, 1912.

The Soviet Union and the US divided the Korean peninsula in two in 1945. Despite fierce competition for the role, Kim Il Sung became the leader of the northern portion with the help of the Soviet Union.

Three years later, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was established.

The cause was an ectopic pregnancy, according to Kim Il Sung’s memoir.

Kim Il Sung’s memoir contributed to some of the myth-making around Kim Jong Suk. Not only did she save his life, she sacrificed her hair to use as insulation for his boots.

It was important that she also be seen as nurturing, Pak said: “She supported her husband, the revolutionary.”

In 1950, North Korea invaded its neighbor, quickly capturing Seoul. The war lasted three years, during which the US heavily bombed the northern part of the peninsula. It ended with an armistice but no peace treaty.

Though the peninsula remained split, Kim Il Sung declared it a victory for North Korea.

Two of Kim Il Sung’s children, Kim Jong Il and Kyong Hui, moved to China during the Korean War, away from the fighting. A third child, Kim Man Il, drowned in 1947.

During the war, Kim Il Sung married Kim Song Ae, whom he began an affair with during his first marriage. The couple eventually had at least two sons.

“It’s got to be devastating trauma” for the siblings to return after the war ends to find a new family, Madden said.

As Kim Il Sung continued his rule in the 1950s, he pushed his idea of juche, an ideology of Korean socialism that explained away difficult living conditions as necessary for creating a great nation.

He became part paternal authority figure, part Santa Claus, with the power to both punish and reward.

“After all, without Kim Il Sung, they as a nation and as a people would not exist, which schoolchildren learned in their textbooks and through lectures about their ‘father’s’ heroic deeds and adventures,” according to “Becoming Kim Jong Un.”

Given his mythological status, it was unclear who would rule the country next.

Initially, Kim Il Sung’s younger brother, Kim Yong Ju, seemed a potential candidate for succession in the late 1960s. His children from his second marriage may have also had a claim to the position.

By the late 1970s, though, Kim Il Sung had chosen his son Kim Jong Il as the country’s next leader. While Kim Jong Il lacked his father’s military background and force of personality, he had already secured leadership positions by that time.

“Kim Jong Il’s very ambitious,” Madden said. “He’s got axes to grind.” That included conflict with his stepmother and half-siblings. He used his clout to have his half-brother Pyong Il sent to a distant post.

With his storied history as a guerrilla fighter and decades to build up his deified image, Kim Il Sung was a tough act to follow. “Kim Jong Il did not have those credentials, and they had to make things up for him,” Pak said.

According to legend, a shining star appeared in the sky on the day Kim Jong Il was born. He could walk and talk by the time he was 2 months old. As a kindergartener, he understood military tactics.

One of Jong Il’s earliest posts was cultural arts director of the Propaganda and Agitation Department. A fan of James Bond and Elizabeth Taylor, he parlayed his interest in filmmaking into a way to feed the mystique around his father and his legacy.

He was also known as a partier and womanizer, according to “Becoming Kim Jong Un.”

North Korea spent years isolated from other countries, with a declining economy and a cowed population. “Their tools were coercion, violence, repression, and propaganda to create a culture of fear,” Pak wrote of the Kim family.

By 1994, the Soviet Union had recently collapsed, so Kim Jong Il had also lost his father’s biggest ally. He saw nuclear weapons as the key to holding onto power. In 2006, the country announced its first nuclear test.

While Jong Il didn’t seem to mind the spotlight, he kept his private life under wraps. His wives and domestic partners were hidden in lavish homes around Pyongyang.

He had children with Song Hye Rim, Kim Young Sook, and Ko Young Hui.

“Having multiple wives and children would have undermined Kim Jong Il’s own political leadership succession in North Korea,” Madden said.

His mother, Song Hae Rim, was a North Korean actor who divorced a novelist before having a child with Kim Jong Il in 1971.

Jong Il was worried his father would disapprove of Song Hae Rim, who was born in South Korea, and his son. He kept them isolated but spoiled Jong Nam with foreign comics and TV shows, which were severely restricted to other North Korean residents.

In 1978, Jong Nam started going to school in Moscow and then Geneva. He spent a decade getting an education outside of North Korea.

Ko Yong Hui was an actress who was born in Japan in 1952. When she was a child, her family moved to Pyongyang as part of the country’s program to bring back Koreans who lived and worked in Japan.

“Her connection to Japan is not something that’s acknowledged” by the leadership, Pak said. “The Korean-Japanese history goes back to the colonial period, and it’s a painful period for Korea.”

In the 1970s, Ko Yong Hui was a dancer with the Mansudae Art Troupe when she met Kim Jong Il. They had their first child together in 1981, a son named Kim Jong Chol.

Soon after, his brother, Kim Jong Un, was born. (The exact year of his birth isn’t clear.) Sister Kim Yo Jong followed in 1987.

In 2011, Kim Jong Chol was reportedly seen in Singapore at an Eric Clapton concert. Madden said he’s more artistic and sensitive than Kim Jong Un. “He’s younger than his brother, but his personality is so headstrong and charismatic,” he said of Jong Un.

The siblings went to school in Switzerland and seemed to grow close during their time away from North Korea.

Ko Yong Suk, Kong Young Hui’s sister, took care of Kim Jong Un during his time in Switzerland.

“We lived in a normal house and acted like a normal family,” she told The Washington Post in 2016. During school holidays, they would go to the French Riviera or the Alps. Back home in North Korea, they stayed at their family’s luxury homes or traveled to a private resort on the country’s eastern coast.

In 1998, Ko Yong Suk and her husband defected to the US.

Kim Jong Nam and Kim Jong Chol were both older than Kim Jong Un, leading some analysts to speculate they were next in line for succession.

In some ways, Jong Nam lived a lifestyle similar to his father’s, with a rowdy social life. However, Kim Jong Il may have worried that his son was too Westernized. In 2001, Jong Nam reportedly used a fake passport to try and go to Tokyo Disneyland.

“The first son had been outside North Korea for a long time, and so you can imagine that he would not have the networks or the connections” necessary to run the country, Pak said.

It’s not clear if Jong Chol was passed over or took himself out of the running to be leader. “You need to have some strength and personality if you want to take that title,” Madden said. “And Jong Chol didn’t have that.”

In contrast, Kim Jong Un seemed like his father in appearance and demeanor, Madden said.

“She was a very prominent North Korean elite,” Madden said. She had several roles in the important Workers’ Party of Korea and became a general in the Korean People’s Army.

Though he was once seen as having a powerful role in the government and possibly mentoring Kim Jong Un, Jang Song Thaek was accused of corruption in 2013, according to The BBC.

A military tribunal ruled that Kim Jong Un’s uncle had attempted to overthrow the state, and he was executed by an antiaircraft gun soon after.

In 2017, two women smeared a nerve agent, VX, on Jong Nam’s face at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport. Jong Nam quickly died from exposure to the lethal substance. The woman said they thought it was part of a prank and were later released.

In 2018, the US State Department accused North Korea of being behind the attack. North Korea has denied any involvement.

What role the North Korean leader potentially had in his brother’s death is unclear.

“There are definitely people in KJU’s ear who would be stoking tension between his brother,” Madden said.

Kim Han Sol spent most of his childhood in Macau, China.

He periodically gave interviews. In 2012, the teenager said, “I’ve always dreamed that one day I would go back and make things better, and make things easier for the people back there.”

In the 2017 video, Han Sol said he was with his mother and sister. The video was edited but ended with Jung Nam’s son saying, “We hope this gets better soon.”

“Kim Yo Jong has unfettered access to her brother,” Madden said.

Her role has expanded in recent years beyond promoting Kim Jong Un’s image to include acting as a political advisor and becoming involved with the military.

“She’s kind of an attack dog,” Pak said. “She says nasty things about the South Korean president and South Korea and about the US.”

Kim Yo Jong appears to have two young children, who may one day play a role in a future leader’s cabinet.

“I would anticipate the sister’s children being supporters,” Pak said. “But their place in the inner circle is completely dependent on how much they show their loyalty to the leader,” she added.

Ri Sol Ju was born in 1989. She’s played a bit of a first-lady role, attending summits and delegations alongside her husband.

“He can present her as a vision of what North Korean motherhood or womanhood should be,” Pak said. “She’s supportive. She’s pretty. She’s dressed in a very modern way and in a non-threatening way.”

More recently, she’s been less in the public eye. Reports state that she has three children with Kim Jong Un. They were born in 2010, 2013 and 2017, according to reports.

When basketball player Dennis Rodman visited Pyongyang in 2013, he met Ju Ae, and subsequently revealed her name in an interview with The Guardian.

Pak said the perception of a revolutionary aura is important in a potential successor.

“If we’re looking at succession, you would want to craft that narrative of somebody who is devoted and committed to advancing and possessing a nuclear weapon program, that has the luster of revolution, that the revolutionary blood is coursing through her veins,” Pak said.

Though her existence was known prior to 2022, the year marked Ju Ae’s first appearance documented by North Korean state media at an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile test.

Little to no information is known about Ju Ae’s two siblings, or why she’s earned the limelight over them. CNN reported that Kim Jong Un’s first child is a boy, although he has never been seen publicly.

Still, she has become increasingly visible within the country. In images released in March 2024 by the Korean Central News Agency — and not independently verified — Ju Ae and her father were seen visiting North Korea’s Kangdong Greenhouse, an extensive agricultural facility in Pyongyang.

In other photos released by the agency in December, she was seen visiting a new tourist area in the southeastern city of Wonsan with her father. Other photographs purportedly show them attending military drills and the launch of a warship in April.

In images released by the KNC, the father and daughter visited amenities in the Wonsan Kalma Coastal Tourist Zone last June.

They were joined by Kim Jong Un’s wife, Ri Sol Ju, who until then had not been seen in state media photos since January 2024, Newsweek reported.

In September 2025, China held a summit for world leaders that marked the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II. Kim Jong Un attended the event and was notably accompanied by his daughter.

The summit was Ju Ae’s first known trip outside of North Korea.

In February, South Korea’s National Intelligence Service told legislators that they believed Kim Ju Ae is at a “successor-designate stage,” the AP reported. This is a new development from the agency’s previous characterization of “successor training.”

The supreme leader’s health has been the subject of speculation on multiple occasions, most notably during lengthy disappearances in 2014 and 2020. This makes the question of his successor all the more pressing.

Kim Jong Un is known to be a heavy smoker, and both his father and grandfather suffered from heart problems. In recent years, the supreme leader has had notable sudden weight loss, the BBC reported.

Ju Ae has been increasingly seen by her father’s side at all kinds of events, like last month’s testing of sniper rifles after Kim Jong Un presided over North Korea’s ruling party congress.

This week, Ju Ae accompanied her father to a munitions factory, where she was seen firing a pistol.

“She’s definitely had protocol lessons,” Madden said, from comportment to how to shake hands with officials. “I’d say her mom and her aunt Kim Yo Jong would definitely be involved in that stuff.”

Whether or not it’s Ju Ae who inherits the title, her presence is meant to cement the notion that there will be a fourth-generation leader from the Kim family, Madden said.