North Korean soldiers wave along the Yalu River, near the North Korean town of Sinuiju, opposite to the Chinese border city of Dandong October 7, 2014. (Photo by Jacky Chen/Reuters)

This picture taken on January 14, 2021 and released from North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on January 15 shows Pak Jong Chon, chief of the General Staff of the Korean People's Army, during a military parade celebrating the 8th Congress of the Workers' Party of Korea (WPK) in Pyongyang. (Photo by KCNA via KNS/AFP Photo)

In this Thursday, June 14, 2018, file photo, students wear virtual reality goggles during a science class at Pyongyang Teachers' University, a teacher training college, in Pyongyang, North Korea. (Photo by Dita Alangkara/AP Photo)

Young women wear kimonos to mark “Coming of Age Day” to honour people who turn 20 this year to signify adulthood, in Yokohama, Kanagawa prefecture on January 9, 2023. (Photo by Philip Fong/AFP Photo)

Agricultural workers are rice-transplanting at the Namsa Co-op Farm of Rangnang District in Pyongyang, DPRK, on Tuesday, May 25, 2021. (Photo by Jon Chol Jin/AP Photo)

A man covered with mineral-rich mud smiles on a bank of lake Tus in Khakassia region, southwest of the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, Russia, July 16, 2016. (Photo by Ilya Naymushin/Reuters)

Associated Press photographer Wong Maye-E tries to get her North Korean subjects to open up as much as is possible in an authoritarian country with no tolerance for dissent and great distrust of foreigners. She has taken dozens of portraits of North Koreans over the past three years, often after breaking the ice by taking photos with an instant camera and sharing them. Her question for everyone she photographs: What is your motto? Their answers reflect both their varied lives and the government that looms incessantly over all of them. (Photo by Wong Maye-E/AP Photo)

In a photo taken on September 11, 2019, North Korean students pose for photos in Chonji lake, or “Heaven lake”, as they visit the crater of Mount Paektu, near Samjiyon. Mount Paektu has long been considered the spiritual birthplace of the Korean nation and is a place of pilgrimage for tens of thousands of North Koreans every year, who are trained from birth to revere their leaders. (Photo by Ed Jones/AFP Photo)