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Category: Korean Society

March 2, 2009

Quote of the Week

Kurt Campbell, the new Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, actually stated it in an academic paper some time ago, but still …. The report urges Seoul and Washington to keep publicizing the importance of their bilateral relations at home. Historical issues are dogging Korean-Japanese relationship, it notes, and urges Japan to stop provoking Korea but adding that Korea’s excessive response allows the issues to remain burning. It warns that Seoul’s noisy protests over the Dokdo...

Categories Korean Society/South Korea
February 4, 2009

North Korean Johns in Need of More Effective Consumer Protection

As a worker at a state enterprise, at Chongjin city, North Hamkyung Province, he came to Pyungsung City on a business trip. As a beautiful woman approached him and said the motel had a warm cozy room as well as a “high-class waiting room” (rooms where prostitutes wait for travelers who want sexual intercourse), he went to a one-story house in Yangji-dong. [Open Radio for N. Korea] What could possibly go wrong with a story that begins like that? For...

Categories Human Trafficking/Korean Society
January 26, 2009

That Rabbi was such a nice man. Maybe I should send him another ham.

South Korean President Lee Myung Bak, who as mayor of Seoul awkwardly offered the city to Almighty God, was recently rescued from the brink of a social and sectarian fiasco when a staffer prevented him from sending Chuseok gift sets of dried anchovies to a group of Buddhist monks (link is in Korean). Fact 1: Buddhist monks are required to abstain from eating living things. Fact 2: 22.8% of President Lee’s constituents are Buddhists. So many mouths. How can one...

Categories Korean Politics/Korean Society/Unintended Humor
January 23, 2009

As KCTU Calls for ‘All Out War,’ Rally Attendance Declines

The thugs at the Korean Confederation of trade unions see opportunity in their country’s bad economic times, reports the sympathetic Hankyoreh: The KCTU plans to launch an “all out war” against the Lee administration in February, since it has again made known its intention to have the ruling Grand National Party pass revisions to laws on irregular workers and the minimum wage in the extraordinary National Assembly session scheduled for that month. The KCTU plans to launch its offensive with...

Categories Anti-Americanism/Korean Politics/Korean Society/The Fifth Column
January 16, 2009

Korea Invents New Form of Child Exploitation

Korea’s entertainment industry, legal “profession,” and police force join forces to shake down kids: “We have struggled to find a way to stop the abuse of the justice system,” said Hwang Un-ha, Daejeon Jungbu Police chief. “So we decided to exercise the right of police to refer cases for summary trial. It was a solution to save kids. [Joongang Ilbo, emphasis mine] How compassionate of them. Copyright holders, however, are upset, claiming that the matter must not be treated lightly....

Categories Korean Law/Korean Society
December 9, 2008

Roh Legacy Death Watch

There are two entries in this merry vigil: – Roh’s brother ordered jailed over a bribery scandal. – A left-wing agitprop history textbook heads off for the ash-heap of …. Still, the counter-revisionism is going a tad too far when episodes like Kwangju are flat-out written out of history. The idea is to put historical events into their proper context. Kwangju no more defines South Korean history or its modern reality than the Pullman Strike defines American history or its...

Categories Korean Education/Korean Politics/Korean Society
November 26, 2008

Tokdoheit 451: Let’s have an essay contest!

There appears to be no end to Korea’s passion for insignificant, isolated scraps of land. Some 85.5 percent of the 451 islets in the Apnok (or Yalu) and Duman (or Tumen) rivers on the border between North Korea and China properly belong to the North, an academic claims. Prof. Suh Kil-soo of Seokyeong University makes the claim in a study of the border along Mt. Baekdu and the two rivers, which will be released in a seminar of the Koguryo...

Categories China & Korea/Korean Society/Unintended Humor
November 19, 2008

Can we finally dispense with the whole “no gay in Korea” myth … ?

… now that the Korean Supreme Court is considering the case of a certain “Sergeant A?” A sergeant identified only as “A” was initially booked on a charge of making a sexual attack on a private in a platoon that he led, but the suit against him was dropped with the victim’s consent. However, the sergeant has been newly charged for violation of Clause 92 of military criminal law.  [Joongang Ilbo] In the American system, cases very rarely become “test...

Categories Korean Law/Korean Society/ROK Military
September 30, 2008

Korean Kids Face Twin Perils: Poisoned Chinese Milk, Moms Who Use them as Human Riot Shields

Update, 12/08: Here’s how history will record this whole ridiculous episode. BY NOW, WE KNOW THAT THERE WAS NEVER ANY SCIENTIFIC SUBSTANCE BEHIND all of those “Mad Cow” protests in Korea over the imports of U.S. beef.  So why so little protest over melamine contamination in food imported from China poses an actual, no-sh*t health risk to Korean kids who drink powdered milk?   It might even be a greater risk to the health of Korean kids than strapping them...

Categories Anti-Americanism/China & Korea/Korean Society/The Fifth Column
August 17, 2008

What Ranch Country Thinks of Korea’s Beef Protests

Update, 12/08: Here’s how history will record this whole ridiculous episode. As Korea heaves a meek “never mind” to a national crisis based on exposed falsehoods and manipulated by an  anti-democratic fifth column, American Korea-watchers may be tempted to  assume that the episode passed without being noticed by most Americans.  That’s not a safe thing to assume for my part of the country, the part that produces most of that beef.  If you’re not from that part of the country,...

Categories An Alliance?/Anti-Americanism/Korean Society/U.S. & Korea
August 11, 2008

The Freedom of the State’s Press to Deceive the People Shall Be Abridged

[Updated below] In the wake of a court’s decision ordering a retraction of a distorted, sloppy, and  false  MBC report that triggered massive anti-government protests, Lee Myung Bak is moving to clean house.   A principled approach would be to ask why Korea’s government (or for that matter, ours) is in the business of broadcasting the news anyway and just saw off this vestigial limb.  Instead, Lee is being Lee and conducting a purge. The shakeup culminated on Friday at national...

Categories Anti-Americanism/Censorship/Korean Society/Media Criticism/The Fifth Column
July 31, 2008

Court Orders MBC to Broadcast a Retraction on Mad Cow Report

A Seoul civil court on Thursday found an influential MBC report on U.S. beef health risks “wrong” and ordered the major broadcaster to air a correction, upholding the government’s complaint over the critical coverage.    “PD Notepad should broadcast a correction of its wrong piece on mad cow disease,” Judge Kim Sung-gon of the Seoul Southern District Court said in the verdict. The Ministry for Food, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries raised a complaint against the popular MBC current affairs program,...

Categories Anti-Americanism/Censorship/Korean Society/Media Criticism
July 30, 2008

Tokdo: Now Officially the Dumbest International Crisis in History

… thus supplanting all of that Seige of Troy unpleasantness. I cannot say that South Korea would be much the worse for having dismissed Ambassador Lee Tae Shik from his post, but that is incidental to the skull-smacking stupidity of why: The government on Monday decided to call Korean Ambassador to the U.S. Lee Tae-shik to account if it is found that the embassy did not react promptly to the U.S. Board on Geographic Names listing Dokdo under “undesignated sovereignty.”...

Categories An Alliance?/Japan/Japan & Korea/Korean Politics/Korean Society
July 29, 2008

In Seoul, ‘Mad Sheep’ Protests Descend into Radical Violence

Update, 12/08: Here’s how history will record this whole ridiculous episode. The herd has gotten leaner, and meaner:  Around the Seorin Rotary in Jongno, another 80 protesters besieged a traffic police officer and an auxiliary police officer from Jongno Police Station, and stole three two-way radios. Demonstrators also broke the windows of a police bus in front of the Samsung Tower, and flattened tires. Two police officers were taken to the Boshingak Pavilion, had their shirts taken off, and were...

Categories Anti-Americanism/Korean Politics/Korean Society/The Fifth Column
July 10, 2008

It’s Official: South Korea Is a Lost Cause

After opening last week in 350 theaters across South Korea, “Crossing” is now showing on 289 screens. As of Tuesday, 654,000 people had seen it ““ a modest number by local box office standards. In fact, the film’s producers are not certain if they will recover the investment of $4 million ““ a hefty sum by local standards. “Crossing” aims to remind South Korean viewers of an issue that they tend to overlook in a society concerned with its own...

Categories An Alliance?/Korean Society/U.S. & Korea/Uncategorized
June 28, 2008

Mad Sheep Disease

Update, 12/08: Here’s how history will record this whole ridiculous episode. It is an inviolable rule of today’s South Korea that all social movements will eventually become violent and anti-American.  So inevitably, a movement  that was, at first,  ostensibly about food safety has descended into a violent anti-American riot, with protestors ransacking the offices of newspapers that don’t  echo the street’s bleat.   I’d love to know a little more about who  the shepherds are: Junior Naver, the children’s site of...

Categories An Alliance?/Anti-Americanism/Korean Politics/Korean Society
June 3, 2008

The Washington Times Reviews “Crossing”

Avoiding the melodrama of many South Korean films, “Crossing” is relentless in its detailed, docudrama approach. A cross-border trader and his family are seized by secret police in a midnight raid. Ragged orphans beg in destitute markets. Camp guards kick a pregnant woman in China in the stomach. Kim Tae-kyun, the film’s director, said he did not retain Mr. Yoo, a high-profile defector, as a consultant for fear of creating a political incident while filming in China. Last year, Mr....

Categories Appeasement/Korean Society/Refugees