President Kim Il Sung met over 70 000 foreign people from 136 countries from the post-liberation period to the last of his life.
It is nearly 50 years. This shows that the President met more than 1 400 foreigners a year and nearly four every day.
The foreigners Kim Il Sung met were those of broad strata such as politicians, journalists, pressmen, diplomats, men of religion, workers, peasants, soldiers, scholars, students and innocent children.
During his lifetime, the President often used the word “friendly relations”.
Every time he met them, the President promised to be close friends with him. When he met them again, he kindly called them old friends of his and deepened human ties.
The President met so many foreigners in his lifetime and deepened human ties with them.
It was not because he was the head of a state.
Recollecting international communists who joined him in flames of the war, the President wrote in his reminiscences With the Century… A feeling of friendship is a human feeling and therefore, it can be firm only when it is established through concrete human relations, and it seems that the feeling that has been established in such a way will not cool no matter how much time passes.
The President regarded relations with foreigners as human relations rather than simple political and diplomatic relations or business ones.
