North Korea's 1990s famine

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week’s Witness History episodes from the BBC World Service. We learn about how Play-Doh evolved from a cleaning product to a childhood favourite and the creation of one of the best-selling board games of all time, Catan. Our guest is the e ...  Show more

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. We learn about how a Norwegian businessman brought salmon sushi to Japan in the 1980s. Our guest is cookbook author Nancy Singleton Hachisu, who tells us more about the history ...  Show more

Communist North Korea suffered a devastating famine in the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union which had been one of the country's main supporters. Hundreds of thousands of people died of starvation. Some estimates put the death toll at more than two million. Josephine C ...  Show more

Exclusive interviews gathered inside the world’s most isolated state suggest the situation is the worst it’s been since the 1990s, according to experts. The BBC has secretly interviewed three ordinary people in North Korea. They told us that since the country’s border closure in ...  Show more

Filmmaker Yonghi Yang grew up in Japan in the 1960s, as part of Osaka's large ethnic Korean community. Facing anti-Korean prejudice in Japan, and inspired by the North Korean regime’s promise of a socialist paradise, her parents made the momentous decision to send their three tee ...  Show more

North Korea is reported to have detained a serving US army soldier who crossed the heavily-fortified border from South Korea without permission. The US State Department says the captured solider crossed "willfully and without authorisation" into North Korea. It's unclear if the m ...  Show more