He is according to Waseda University professor Toshimitsu Shigemura who’s written a book called “The True Character of Kim Jong Il.” One of the assertions in the book is that the Dear Leader is dead.

From Japan Today:

If true, the implications are potentially vast. Among them: former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s summit partner during one or both of his landmark visits to Pyongyang in 2002 and 2004 was not Kim himself but a dummy—the stand-in Shigemura claims has been fooling the world for at least five years.

A dictator having one or multiple doubles is a familiar notion since Iraq’s Saddam Hussein was shown to have deployed them. But Saddam was alive at the time. Kim, in Shigemura’s scenario, was not manipulating a look-alike; he was replaced by one.

I can actually remember around 2003 Kim getting very sick and disapearing for several months. I’d recently arrived in Korea and there was a lot of speculation by the Korean media that he was on death’s door.

Was the flurry of diplomatic activity in which the world saw Kim engaged during those years mere sleight of hand? The “hermit kingdom” seemed all of a sudden to grow remarkably outgoing. In June 2000 Kim hosted the historic summit with South Korean President Kim Dae Jung. The following month, he received Russian President Vladimir Putin. In October his guest was U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. In January 2001 he visited China; in August, Russia. In September 2002 there occurred the first summit with Koizumi, culminating in Kim’s admission, after decades of denial from Pyongyang, that North Korean agents had kidnapped Japanese nationals. August 2003 saw the launch of the Six Party talks aimed at North Korea’s nuclear disarmament.
“Then suddenly,” writes Shigemura in Shukan Gendai, “the pace slows.”