Ji lived through North Korea’s “Arduous March,” the propaganda term used by the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea to describe the famine of the 1990s that killed an estimated 3.5 million people. He survived by eating grass and tree bark, and by foraging through garbage at street markets.

When he was 13, he joined other boys hopping aboard moving trains to take coal he could trade for food. On March 7, 1996, while jumping from one train car to another, he was so weak from malnutrition he passed out mid-jump. When he regained consciousness, he saw the back of the train disappearing down the track before realizing it had run over half of his body.

His younger brother helped stem the bleeding before lifting him into a cart and wheeling him to what passed for a hospital in North Korea during the famine. No morphine, no anesthesia.
“The simplest thing to do was cut off everything. They didn’t try to save my remaining two fingers, they just cut off my hand,” he recalls.

Once able to walk on crutches, Ji was back to foraging for food, which sometimes involved crossing the border into China, a risky endeavor that could have resulted in torture, or worse, if captured. One time he was caught, and he quickly realized that the North Korean authorities were beating him more severely than they were the other hungry kids who had been apprehended that day.

“I didn’t have any friends with disabilities. There weren’t wheelchairs. There weren’t any prosthetics. My greatest wish when I was in North Korea was to be able to walk again.”

In 2006, he and his brother escaped North Korea. Within a month of arriving in South Korea, he was provided prosthetics, and a few years later he founded a human rights activist group, NAUH (Now Action & Unity for Human Rights).

“In North Korea, you are born in to whatever situation you find yourself in. There’s not much room to change it. Even in South Korea, not many people know about this issue of disability rights. But with the recent UN findings on the rest of the human rights abuses in North Korea, the international community has heard a lot more about it.”

Ji has participated in several human rights symposiums and cultural events in a bid to improve North Korean human rights. Through his organization, Ji helps defectors plan escapes to South Korea and other countries and is involved in fundraising to secure financial stability for defectors. Ji is also involved in various activities reporting on the situation through Radio Free Asia broadcasts.