Interesting... Remember when there were reports that they were taking down Kim's picture from public places?

"In the years before he died, Kim took some really big decisions on North Korea's relationships with the outside world," says the professor, pointing to the historic June 2000 summit with South Korean President Kim Dae Jung, a visit from Russian leader Vladimir Putin the following month and then US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in October 2000.

The following January he was in China, met Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi in September 2002 - and admitted that Pyongyang had abducted Japanese nationals to train its spies - and August 2003 saw the opening of six-way talks on halting North Korea's nuclear weapons programmes.

Then, suddenly, Kim disappeared, says Shigemura, and there was chaos in the upper echelons of the country's leadership. "I have been working on the book for four years," said Shigemura, a former journalist for the Mainichi newspaper who was posted to Seoul for six years from 1979 and then served for another five years in Washington D.C. A North Korean agent told him in 1995 that he had met one of Kim's doubles - there have been as many as four - and that he used them to stand in at outside ceremonies because he was fearful of a coup.

After Kim's death, a group of four very senior officials in the regime decided to protect their own positions by making the stand-in more permanent. Whenever anyone meets the North Korean leader, Shigemura says one of the four is alongside him "like a puppet-master."

If it turns out he did die in 2003 and they are covering it up, it would be a shame. That would mean he never got a chance to see Team America.

It wouldn't be all that weird as compared to everything else the North Koreans do. It did take awhile for power to fully transition from Kim Il Sung after his death to Kim Il Jong. So logic would follow that it would take awhile for it to transition from Kim Il Jong to Kim Il Nam, assuming the whole succession process there didn't go completely off the rails.

In Jong's case, it was because he was an alcoholic playboy. In his son's case, I think it's a combination of too many video games and getting caught with his family in Japan trying to visit Disneyland.

If it is true, then North Korea is officially the most crazy regime ever. If it isn't, it's still pretty crazy that North Korea is so cut off from the rest of the world that people are wondering if their leader is dead.