When Ju Song Ha was teaching high school in Chongju, a farming town in
northeastern North Korea, classes ended at 2 p.m.—and then the
students got to work. Ju marched the teens into fields blooming with
pink and white flowers. Working in pairs, one student cut into the bulb
of a waist-high plant and the other scraped the sticky white resin into
a cup supplied by the North Korean government. They worked four or five
hours each afternoon among those plants that, by North Korean government
fiat, are known as white bellflowers. In fact,...
