Kim Il-sung was born on 15 April 1912 in the village of Mangyongdae, which is now a suburb of North Korea's capital Pyongyang.[9] He has been long identified with the Sun[2] and is frequently called "Sun of the nation".[3] He adopted his name Il-sung (Korean: 일성; Hanja: 日成), meaning "become the Sun"[11] before the early 1930s as one of his noms de guerre.[12]