Chairman Kim Jong Il was on the road of field guidance for the people till the last moments of his revolutionary life.

The distance he covered is more than 669 844 kilometres, equivalent to a travel round the earth nearly 17 times.

A great number of anecdotes were produced on the road.

Nap and rice-ball

In 1977 Kim Jong Il provided field guidance at a major construction site overnight and made his way home at dawn.

When the car had just left the construction site, he leaned on the backrest and fell fast asleep. He had been tired with his continuous work as he could neither find time to sleep on the day before. Regrettably, however, he woke about ten minutes after the car began to run.

When an accompanying official said that taking a nap was rather inferior to not having a sleep, he said: I didn’t know how good a nap was before. Whenever there was a lot of work to do and I got extremely sleepy, I would have a short sleep in a chair, and from that time I came to know the taste of a nap. A nap is unsatisfactory as a sleep, but it is a good sweet sleep that relieves fatigue intensively. For me, the nap is the sweetest.

The Chairman often had rice-balls on his inspection tours.

A rice-ball is made by filling a lump of boiled rice with a side dish and eaten in hand.

One day the Chairman left for field guidance on the east coast at dawn after working all night.

When the car reached a mountain bend at midday, he stopped the car, proposing having a light meal there.

He and officials sat around a broad and flat rock and each of them had two rice-balls for a meal.

The Chairman said rice-ball was best to bring and eat on a long journey.

Rice-ball is good as it is easy to prepare, takes less time to eat and causes no trouble to local officials or inhabitants, he noted, adding it can be said to be an ideal meal on journey for revolutionaries.

Method of calculation

One April day Kim Jong Il convened a consultative meeting of officials.

The meeting discussed the issue of setting up a new process at the Pyongyang Wheat Flour Processing Factory.

But nobody could come up with a good plan.

At that time the grand nationwide projects were going on to build many monumental structures in the run-up to the Sixth Congress of the Workers' Party of Korea. Therefore, it was impossible for the officials to plan a new construction project.

At that time Kim Jong Il said: You can provide the people with nothing if you are only given to calculation. Think of your mothers, everyone. If there is no cloth, they dress their children even by making clothing with their sole clothes and if there is no rice, they feed their children even by cutting their locks of hair and selling them to buy rice. Such persons were your mothers. Only with such selfless love can you do even one more thing for the people.

Pointing to the need even to use up state funds unsparingly if it could provide the people with a happy life, he said that it was his own arithmetic and the calculation method of the Workers’ Party of Korea not to give precedence to economic benefits if it was for the good of the people.