Freedom comes in many forms, as does "unfreedom." You can be a prisoner in prison, a prisoner in a prison-state, a prisoner in your job, a prisoner in your joblessness. Who is freer — a poor person in a free country, or a rich person in an "unfree" country?
Japan, by most standards, is a free country. North Korea, by all standards, is not.
Journalist Park Sun Min, interviewing residents of Pyongyang for Shukan Bunshun magazine, asked a woman of 50 what she would most like to have. A radio, she said, "so I can know what's going on in the world." She stands out among the 13 other interviewees, who all emphasized material deprivation. She and only one other among the 14 expressed dissatisfaction not related to a straitened economy.