Pronunciation of Kim Jong-Il

[j] is a convention meaning “the letter J” as opposed to /j/ “the sound of the letter Y in ‘yes.’” There is a [j] in Beijing: it’s the fourth letter in. There is no /j/ sound, neither in Chinese nor in any English pronunciation of it.

ETA: Of course there’s no [j] in Chinese full stop, only in the standard romanization of Chinese words. In that sense, both Beijing and Peking are attempts to render 北京 (pinyin běijīng).

Too late for the edit window: I see that brackets are also used conventionally for phonetic IPA symbols, as opposed to slashes for phonemic IPA symbols. I’m not a linguist by profession, and the convention I’m used to is obviously non-standard, so I apologize for any confusion.