As I said, the US government doesn’t ban travel to NK.
The personal names and titles don’t really matter all that much for postal delivery. What’s important, of course, is the ZIP code, the state name/abbreviation, the city name/abbreviation, the street name, and the house and apartment numbers. If you and your cousin “gummed up the works,” the most that would’ve happened is that the machine would reject the letter and then a human would sort it. Cyrillic letters are just close enough to Latin letters that the machines might not have rejected it either, depending on the particular letters you chose.
Along with a powdered donut…starving DPRK customs official eats the donut, letter arrives to Kim Jong Un with nothing left but powdered sugar, panic ensues!
OK, please don’t take that seriously.
I’ve just been on holiday to Jersey (British Channel Islands), including a visit to the Jersey museum of island life. An exhibit there tells of how during the German occupation of the islands 1940 - 44, for some of that period anyway, correspondence (severely restricted) was possible between the islands’ population, and relatives / friends in Great Britain, via the Red Cross in a neutral country. The islanders were allowed to send messages only of 25 words maximum.
So was I. One poster in that thread claims that mail from Switzerland to Britain continued throughout the war using sealed trains through occupied France. But no word on Allied–Axis mail.
His actual words are: “Diplomatic pouches, and the mail (I guess) went from neutral Switzerland through (combatant) France on a twice-weekly sealed train.” This statement is not altogether precise; but I’d be inclined to interpret it as referring to the early and late phases of World War II, when France was a literal, Allied combatant: i.e. before, and after, the four years of German occupation. With the putative sealed-train-through-occupied-France deal – what would have happened when the train reached the French coast? Put the mail on a boat to the neutral Irish Republic, and then on another boat from there to Great Britain?
I don’t see why it would have had to go through Ireland. Presumably the Swiss mail and diplomatic bags were loaded off the Swiss train and onto a Britain-bound Swiss ship. (The Swiss merchant marine had plenty of ships, not only in inland waters but on the high seas.)
United States Postal Service: “Country Conditions for Mailing — Korea, Democratic People’s Republic of (North Korea)”. Basically put your letter in the USPS mail, but don’t send anything prohibited.
A fellow in Japan brokers mail from South Korea to North Korea (trying to reunite families), but for UN prohibited items he re-mails from China. When it can’t be mailed via China, he uses a fellow named Shim Goo-Seob:
psychonaut: I’d reckon greatest likelihood is, you’re being humorous here – however, find self wondering, just a very little. A while ago, I was reading a novel (very recently written and published) with a World War II setting. Among other things, it involves the heroine – an American journalist in London in early 1941, before the USA’s entering the war – having nagging thoughts about what might be happening to the Jews in Hitler’s Europe, and thus taking it upon herself to go there and investigate re that matter.
“Conventional knowledge” says that in WWII, it was possible for citizens of neutral countries to travel between one combatant nation and another on the opposing side, but to do so required jumping through complicated hoops re transit via neutral countries. The novel claimed that in 1941, by some very strange bureaucratic quirk, regular boat services continued to operate between Britain and German-occupied France: our heroine just pays her fare, gets a train from London to Dover, and sails over on the daily boat to Calais.
My reaction to that, was that the book’s author must be extremely ignorant. Apart from anything else, who the fuck would actually be operating these supposed boats? But, psychonaut, you supply an imaginable answer… I’m getting slight, but worrying, “perhaps everything we think we know, is wrong” twinges.
I wasn’t being humorous, but keep in mind that I also wasn’t the one who claimed that Swiss surface mail continued to be sent to Britain during the war. I simply provided a plausible explanation as to how part of the transport might have been made. That neutral shipping in Europe continued during the war is well documented – it was dangerous, irregular, and at much reduced levels, but it did happen. At least in the case of Sweden this included some passenger ships used to transport civilians between warring nations.
Thanks for this link – much fascinating, and heartening, material. Further re Sweden’s civilian shipping fleet in World War II – once again, the Channel Islands. I have a bit of a personal connection with same, in that an uncle of mine (mainland British, not a native islander) was caught there by the fall of France in 1940, and spent the rest of the war in the islands under German occupation.
I made an error in my earlier post, by saying that the islands were occupied 1940 – 44; in fact, the Germans stubbornly remained there until the very end of the war in Europe, May 1945. The final most-of-a-year was the hardest time in the Channel Islands, for all concerned; the islands had been supplied from France – after that country’s liberation by the Allies, that arrangement could not continue, and food shortages became truly desperate. There would probably have been many deaths from starvation, except for a half-dozen voyages made by the Swedish ship Vega, in the service of the Red Cross / Order of St. John, to the Channel Islands in late 1944 / early 1945, bringing food and medical supplies for the islanders. To their credit, the occupying German authorities – whose people were also very short of food – were meticulous in seeing to it that all this relief material went to the islands’ civilian population, for whom it was meant. The Channel Islanders still hold sentiments of gratitude and affection toward the Vega and those who manned her. One feels that for sure the Swedes did their bit, in an other-than-usual way, as regards World War II.
What makes you think that they would “steam it open” or in any way try to hide that they were reading the correspondence? Many years ago, a friend of mine was in Amsterdam and mailed an envelope with a letter and along with a bit of hashish in it to several of us. One actually made it through. The others were cut open and the hash was removed. The rest was put in another envelope along with a note from US Customs and forwarded on.
I don’t know how mail gets there exactly, but I’ve sent mail from the US to the DPRK and it’s gotten there sometimes, and I’ve gotten mail from there. But one out of pretty few times it might never have gotten there: I sent Euro cash per the government publisher’s instruction for a book, no US $'s they said. They said it never got there. It wasn’t much, and part of the idea was to just to see what would happen. However it was via mail they told me they never got the money after I followed up.