1 Won Arirang Mass Games

North Korea's Arirang Mass Games were revived in 2002 after a decade-long hiatus, relaunched as a direct response to the famine years of the mid-1990s — a calculated assertion of collective strength at a moment when the state's authority over daily life had visibly fracked. The 2002 performance involved an estimated 100,000 participants and was explicitly tied to Kim Il-sung's 90th birth anniversary commemorations.

Aluminum collector issues from the DPRK in this period were produced in small quantities for the hard-currency tourist trade, not domestic circulation. Most North Koreans never handled foreign-facing commemoratives at all.