A beautiful day in Lanikai

President Obama vacations somewhere around here.

Have a happy Labor Day, what's left of it.

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Kvetchpat of the day: Do you know South Korea?

KoreaBeat, among other places, highlighted this video by one David Dutton.



A well-done piece of work, one which tough-guy KoreaBeat himself said made him feel "a little misty-eyed with nostalgia."

But wait, to just let this blatant propaganda slide would be disingenuous, nothing more than promoting false advertising.

See, some people think I only write shiny, happy stories about people in Korea holding hands, that I ignore all that bad stuff because I'm trying so hard to protect Korea's image, whatever that means.

Well, on the off chance they're right — and they might be, if you ignore all the critical stuff I write — I thought I would print, without editorial input, the following comment from one of KoreaBeat's commenters, giving it "equal time" as today's Kvetchpat of the Day:

This video is a great example of how camera + editing = lies. South Korea is a depressing country which thinks that e-sports are better sports than real sports. It has a fast increasing gap between rich and poor. Pollution problems that are as the soundtrack sings 'poisoning your body'. The longest ongoing war in modern history with more than a million casualties. South Korea is losing it's soul as its culture is eaten from the inside out by the gaudy golden arches of Americanization. But don't take my word for it that Korea is to anyone but the most shallow tourist a depressing place, just check the suicide rate statistics...the highest in the OECD. Funny though, the video didn't show anyone throwing themselves in front of a Seoul subway train; an event that happens at least once a day here.

Hmm... perhaps I should fisk this, talk about how anyone who has been in Korea for a significant length of time knows pollution is considerably better than before, not worse, and although South Korea has a serious problem with suicide, the Gini coefficient (a measure of the gap between rich and poor) is fairly manageable, but right now my real-world responsibilities aren't giving me the time to do so.

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Death, taxes, and forced sex with soldiers

Over at The Marmot's Hole there is an interesting discussion on Japan's culpability regarding the so-called Comfort Women sex slaves from World War II, in the wake of the Korean Constitutional Court saying that the South Korean government did wrong by the Comfort Women (and, by extension, others who were victims of Imperial Japan and did not receive compensation) by not divvying up the settlement money in 1965 and instead using it for economic development (it was the seed money for the Miracle on the Han). Although I don't think Tokyo doing an end run on paying compensation lets Japan off the hook ethically (or possibly even legally), I've long held that Seoul owes something to the Comfort Women and other forced laborers.

The conversation at TMH is interesting, with folks like Sonagi pulling up ads that are nearly completely in kanji/hantcha (Chinese characters) with hardly any Han•gŭl (Korean characters) at all. Others are talking about the nature and various forms some women were caught up in or duped into the Comfort Women positions back then.

And everybody's favorite Imperial Japan Apologist, Gerry Bevers, had this to say about various forms of slavery that may have been employed to obtain sex slaves on the Japanese front during World War II:

Bonded labor may be consided a form of slavery in many countries today, but in the 1940s it was obviously not considered such in Japan and Korea. You have to consider the times.

Today, some people may consider taxes a form of “bonded labor” because people are forced to pay them even without a signed contract. If you do not pay them, you can go to prison.

So, um, being forced to have sex with multiple soldiers every night for several years was merely a form of taxation in 1943? Okay, then.

Anyway, the order of the day was massacring civilians, torturing and killing people for experimental purposes, forced sexual servitude, and wholesale elimination of entire ethnic groups and other forms of genocide. So, going by Gerry's you-have-to-consider-the-times argument, all that's a-okay.

In response, Linkin' Lawyer Ben Wagner points out that Japan was a signatory on international agreements regarding what was euphemistically called "white slavery" back in those days, something to note when one "considers the times."

I'd also like to point out two things. First, like his arguments that Tokto (Takeshima) actually belongs to Japan, much of his case on Imperial Japan's near lack of culpability for anything bad that didn't really happen to Koreans (Japan's greatest ally!) rests on his speculation that such-and-such was what was really going on. In this case, he supposes (without evidence) that most of the Comfort Women were prostitutes and the true sex slaves were a very teensy-tiny percentage of the whole, if they exist at all.

The second thing is that using sex slavery in recent times — which has been a serious problem in South Korea — to suppose that "voluntary" prostitutes today means women were probably volunteering to be prostitutes back then, is quite disingenuous, and it gets bass-ackwards any cause and effect. What happened in the 1940s may have laid the groundwork for a whole new industry in Korea in the 1950s and beyond, but the existence of a systematic form of white slavery and prostitution in the late 20th and early 21st century had no effect on what happened in the 1940s.

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Well, I wouldn't trust whomever was trying to swallow up my country, either.

Ah, Wikileaks, the gift that keeps on giving us leakage.

I actually found this one quite encouraging: North Korea's Dear Leader apparently doesn't trust Beijing as far as he can throw them (despite his handing over the northernmost reaches of the DPRK to the Chinese).

From AFP:

North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il expressed distrust of his country's major economic prop China during a 2009 meeting with a visiting South Korean businesswoman, according to a US diplomatic cable.

The cable released by anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks summarises a meeting between the US ambassador in Seoul and Hyundai Group chairwoman Hyun Jung-Eun, who had recently returned from a meeting in Pyongyang with the leader.

The cable dated August 28, 2009 quoted Hyun as saying Kim had made a comment about "not trusting" China, without elaborating.

That's nice to know, as I'm quite worried about a desperate regime in Pyongyang handing over the country bit by bit, in order to stay afloat.

The Wikileaks documents revealed some other interesting things as well:

Kim also complained that Seoul's unification ministry tasked with handling cross-border relations had "lost the driver's seat" to the foreign ministry, which he asserted did not understand North Korea. ...

Discussing relations with the United States, he told Hyun he had altered some parts of the Arirang festival to "fit American tastes".

Arirang involves tens of thousands of performers in mass games and artistic performances that praise the communist regime and the ruling dynasty.

The leader reportedly told Hyun he had cut out a sketch depicting a missile launch because he had heard Americans did not like it.

"He had also been advised that South Koreans did not like to see so many soldiers in the performance, so now more students were included," the cable says.

However, Kim described relations with Japan as "far worse than ever before" and Hyun was told separately by a senior official that the leader had ordered Japanese cars banned from Pyongyang's streets.

Wow, so KJI does care what the public thinks. Just not the public in his own country.

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Korea top in the OECD... for suicide... again

The Voice of America has an article highlighting the latest news reports in what has long been an infamous, chronic problem in South Korea: the terribly high suicide rate.

South Korea has the highest suicide rate among the countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

South Korean news reports say about 15,500 people in South Korea committed suicide in 2009. This represents about 28 deaths by suicide for every 100,000 people, or about 42 people on average daily.

The country's suicide rate is the highest among 34 OECD member countries.

The Yonhap news agency quotes a new report by the Ministry of Health and Welfare, which says that suicide is the number one cause of death for people aged between 10 and 40 years in the southeast Asian country.

It says the second most frequent cause of death for South Korean people in that age bracket is traffic accidents, followed by cancer.

Yonhap quotes a ministry official saying the government is planning to open prevention centers throughout South Korea to help lower the suicide rate.

It says a new legislation on suicide prevention passed the National Assembly in March.

I am curious about how the centers will work out, including whether they'll get enough funding from the government and acceptance by the public. Perhaps I should investigate when I'm in Korea next, but in the meantime, past thoughts of mine on the suicide epidemic can be found here (with more links here and here, with some overlap).

UPDATE:
Cory in Korea has a fairly thorough post on the issue, the kind of thing I'd write right now if I had a bit more time. As I suggested in my link about the suicide epidemic just above, as well as in comments on other blogs, one of the biggest problems to overcome is that suicide has come to be seen as normative and even noble. From a public health perspective, this is a disaster of despair.

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A little segue into trains...

I like trains. I enjoy the romance of arriving at train stations and the thrill of smooth travel through the countryside.

And in Japan, the warning sound for people at railway crossings, if you hear it while in the passing train itself, sounds like the shreik-shreik-shreik sound accompanying Norman stabbing someone in the shower in the movie Psycho, but that's not what this utterly pointless post is about.



HT to LOTD. While getting the embed code for the train, I ran across this other short film from Japan. Clever in its premise but even more pointless than the first.

Enjoy the weekend! I'll be watching the University of Hawaii football season opener today. In Hawaii we have no pro football, basketball, or baseball teams, so the UH's football and basketball games are our proxy. Everyone on the island gets into it, even if they've never set foot on the Manoa campus. I'll send pictures of the rickety stadium, which, to tie this in with the original theme of the post, looks like it was put together with rusted railway track.

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HuffPo on the "American imperialist" naval base on Cheju-do

A shark with teeth spelling out "imperialism" tries to devour the island of Cheju-do. This depiction is quite misleading, as the base would be on the southern side of the island, not the east. 

With their latest Korea-related offering, The Huffington Post underscores their need to get a few people conversant in Korean affairs to fact-check some of their posts on the Korean peninsula, because I end up doing a face-palm slap almost every time something about the Land of Morning Calm appears at the HuffPo.

As I wrote in their comments section, the writer of this particular piece seems so caught up in the romance of activism that she has not done due diligence for this story: this is not "US naval base," the writer's insistence notwithstanding.

Far from "imperiali­sm" as the cartoon suggests, this naval base will allow South Korea (not the US) to project its power and better defend its own waters (there's this belligeren­t country and its benefactor right next door), making it less reliant on the US, not more. (I have written about the Cheju base and activists opposed to it here and there, while The Marmot's Hole highlighted it here.)

The base may also make it easier for the ROK Navy to send its ships out to areas where piracy's still a problem (Korean tuna boats and freighters have been frequent targets). Again, this raises South Korea to cooperativ­e partner of the United States, not a vassal state.

In a perfect world, we'd all get along and there'd be no need for big, bad militaries and the weapons and bases they require, but this is the real world, and we need an effective military to remain free and secure, and that military needs bases. This is a case of local NIMBY, egged on by groups that are sympatheti­c to North Korea (or even working on their behalf) and thus have an interest in whipping up anti-Ameri­can sentiment and seeing the ROK government fail.

What the activists don't want you to know is that the naval base will allow cruise ships to call. What better match for the Island of Peace than the Love Boat? 

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Updates to the bus incident

As the facts reveal themselves and opinions are laid out, I've added a few updates to my piece on The Black Guy on the Bus™ incident that are more worthwhile, I think, than the original post.

In the meantime, I could answer three of Metropolitician's worthwhile questions:

The urge to flip out camera phones doesn’t seem to strike when a drunk ajussi flipped out on me in Seoul Station and came at me, yelling and screaming to “get out of Korea” and calling me a “nigger” in Korean because I was taking too long to figure out which Daejeon stop I needed to get off on, right in front of the security guard, who, instead of arresting this guy or even saying anything to him, simply smiled and apologized meekly, came over to me, and said I should just get on the train?

THAT was pretty spectacular. And it’s far, far more representative of any confrontational encounters between foreigners and Koreans, in my experience and observation. And what I’ve been saying is that it wasn’t like this longer ago, when I knew less Korean and less about this place, when I was a bumbling newbie in the 1990′s. I am simply asking these questions:

1. Why does it seem worse now?
2. Why has the media never reported on the pattern of confrontational encounters, which generally go the other way?
3. Why did this particular incident go from being filmed, from cellphone to YouTube, to national scandal?

These are reasonable and useful questions to bring up, and the advent of this scandal offers itself as a perfect moment to enter into a more constructive conversation about it.

Before we begin, let's deal (yet again) with that old chestnut that 껌/깜/검둥이 = Nigger, as Metropolitician is wont to say. I've dealt with as much here:

I have long felt, and The Marmot seems to agree with me, that 검둥이 (kŏm•dung•i) is better represented as "darkie." The word is still insensitive and inappropriate, but it by no means carries the historical baggage — and violence — of nigger. Koreans have not been lynchers of Blacks, they have not legally or physically barred Blacks from marrying Koreans (or anyone else), nor have they enslaved, segregated, red-lined, or systematically and institutionally tried to keep down Blacks. Nigger comes from that violently supremacist mentality, which is far different from the xenophobic race-infused mentality that produces words like 검둥이 (or 흰둥이 for "whiteys"), and that makes it terribly misleading to use them as equivalents when describing racism or attitudes about race.

[Of course, if you're on the receiving end of it, it may be seen as tah-MAY-toh/toh-MAH-toh, but I submit that the latter is far less damaging and much more amenable to change than the former. I also recognize that a WASP WASP-like entity German-Irish Catholic from Long Island (The Marmot) may be the last one to expound on the comparative hurtful usage of 검둥이 or Nigger being hurled at someone, but I'm straight out of Compton, so maybe I've got a little more cred. Just a little.]

In short, whenever Metropolitician goes off about Koreans (who have used 검둥이 or some variant) calling him "Nigger," his credibility goes down a few ticks in proportion to how large the chip on his shoulder is at the time.

That said, does this seem worse now? As some at The Marmot's Hole have pointed out, we have a situation where more foreigners and a dramatically expanded means for putting even minor cases out there for the public to see make for a situation where there could, if one were looking, seem to be more incidents going on even if there were dramatically less. At the very least, I think per capita incidents may be going down even as we read more about them (and Metropolitician does his part to make sure we see them, even as more and more people go to him with their stories).

Then he asks why the media never reported on this pattern of confrontational encounters. My guess is that never is not true. I'll have to look that up, but when Metropolitician uses superlatives to describe what the media is doing, he's almost certainly wrong. (I've made this point when he talks about how the Korean media or police will always make a big deal in the press about drug arrests of foreigners, even though I know first-hand that this is not true.) That Metropolitician may not have seen them doesn't mean they don't exist. Another example of cognitive distortion that stems from the subconscious assumption that what ends up in the K-blogs is an accurate reflection of what's in the Korean news media.

Finally, he asks how this went from being filmed to being a national scandal. Well that's easy: someone went crazy on a bus while being filmed. As others have noted, this was true with many infamous videos where Korean nationals were the subject, including some where some youngish man or woman went off on an older Korean person. Maybe Metropolitician would do well to review the memes post, including #81, "When bad things happen to me, it's because I'm a foreigner," because shit happens to Koreans as well.

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Orange County Crime Story of the Day: Beware of happy emails

When I'm away from Orange County for months at a time (previously in Seoul and lately in Honolulu), my mom would call me up and chat just to make sure I was all right and somewhat closer to getting married and producing grandchildren for her. On rare occasion when I was away for more than six months, I'd make sure to email her while I was in faraway lands like Hong Kong, Italy, or Japan.

Today's OCCSD has made me second guess that tack, for my own safety. Here we have a guy who is being accused of killing his business partner and then obscuring that fact by faking, through a series of emails, a situation where the murder victim was not in contact with his family because he'd gone to Africa for the vacation of a lifetime.

From the Los Angeles Times:

Last summer, Christopher Ryan Smith emailed family and friends with exciting news: He was embarking on an African adventure.

Over the next few months, his emails recounted the highlights. One day he was paragliding near Johannesburg. On another, he was sand boarding in "huge mines" in South Africa where the "sand was softer than snow powder."

In December, the 32-year-old Internet executive from Laguna Beach announced that he was going to Congo and Rwanda. Then, abruptly, all communication stopped.

His worried family in Oregon called U.S. authorities and launched an international hunt, fearing he might have run into trouble in the war-torn region.

But Orange County authorities now say Smith was never in Africa; in fact, he was already dead. They say he was killed inside his office in San Juan Capistrano by his business partner, Edward Younghoon Shin, who used Smith's email account to send the messages.

The thing is, I think I briefly met this Edward guy some years ago, maybe in Irvine. He's not the Edward of the K-blogosphere, though.

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Governor Palin to visit Seoul in October

CNN and AP are reporting that former Alaska Governor and Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin will be going to Korea in mid-October to attend the World Knowledge Forum in Seoul [insert joke here].

She will be discussing "U.S. leadership perspective on how to lead the world out of the latest crisis."

I have no comment except to say I just hope she ends up going to the right Korea.

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Getting schooled by the Class of '15

It's that time of year again, when millions of students go off to college for their first, second, third, fourth, or whateverth year of higher education. This Gen-Xer is going through his second round of grad school, and while I can hang out with the young people and look up on the Google anything the eighteen-year-olds throw my way that I've never heard of, not everyone in the over-thirty crowd (or even the over-25 crowd) is as hip as I.

For the rest of you, there is the annual The Mindset List, produced each year at this time by Benoit College, famous for... I guess famous for annual The Mindset List. The purpose is to help those who weren't born in 1993 — that would be the birth year for the majority of students in the Class of 2015, this year's crop of freshmen — to understand where the '15ers are coming from.

It's a great list to peruse, reminding you, for example, that young people today probably saw the Star Wars films in numerical order (i.e., Episode I, II, III, IV, V, and then VI), making Darth Vader cute instead of scary. They probably never lived in fear of a nuclear holocaust, and Reagan always had Alzheimer's.

It's a long list, so I'm going to do a jump. CLICK HERE to keep reading.

Pariah ship

Remember The Love Boat, where each episode would bring us three couples who found romance against the backdrop of a cruise ship plying the waters off the coast of an impoverished country where violence and mayhem were a way of life?

Well, it's back! But instead of Mexico being the dysfunctionally violent and poor country off whose shores they sailed, this time it's North Korea.

From The Guardian:

On Tuesday, the mysterious state launched itself into the glitzy world of cruise tourism when about 130 passengers set sail from the rundown port of Rajin, near the China-Russia border, for the scenic Mount Kumgang resort near the South Korean border.

Isolated North Korea's "state tourism bureau" has teamed up with a Chinese travel company to run the country's first cruise aboard an ageing 9,700-tonne vessel that once plied the waters off the east coast of the divided peninsula shuttling passengers between North Korea and Japan.

The ship was later used to transport cargo before Tokyo blocked its entry as part of economic sanctions over Pyongyang's missile and nuclear tests in 2006.

Some 500 North Koreans, about half dressed in dark workers' clothes and the others in office and traditional attire, waved off the ship in a choreographed performance on the potholed dock.

The spectators waved North Koreans flags and fake flowers, and let off fireworks to mark the occasion. Carnival music blared from two minivans.

Before the launch, Hwang Chol-nam, the vice-mayor of Rason City, gave a speech lauding the venture as part of the region's push to attract tourism.

Any nationality can visit the area visa-free. They must, however, arrange the trip through designated tour companies.

"Any country, people from America, Japanese, Singaporean, can come to Rason, that's the reality today, and that's the same for the Kumgang special economic zone," he told reporters aboard the vessel. ...

The cruise, which sails the length of North Korea's picturesque eastern coastline, will appeal not only to the adventurous seeking "something different", but also to gamblers wanting to try their luck at the North's casinos in Rason and Kumgang.

This brings up the whole issue of propping up the Pyongyang regime, of course, but I'm guessing some people just don't care or think it's merely a drop in the bucket.

I do take issue with The Guardian's description of Rajin as a rundown port. The Chinese are reportedly pouring a good deal of money into building the area up. I suppose the part off limits to North Korean civilians, however, might still be a bit dilapidated, but the region is enjoying a bit of a Rajin renaissance as China starts looking in that direction for an outlet to the sea that would justify propping up the DPRK.

In fact, one could call this a new Age of Rasŏn. Thanks, I'm here all week.

UPDATED:
The Huffington Post has pictures of the cruise and the cruise ship. It ain't no Carnival Cruise, that's for sure.

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Kvetchpat of the day

Actually, this is more of an anti-kvetchpat rant, as you'll see, but it addresses kvetchpats.

Okay. I'm still in the midst of a major set of work deadlines, but I've found a way to produce posts on the cheap: take notable comments on other blogs and highlight them for their value (or infamy).

So, on one of the posts on The Black Guy on the Bus™, a frequent Marmot's Holeian named milton, fresh off his success with Paradise Lost, wrote the following in response to another commenter, cm (a kushibo favorite), who asked how so many people can have two completely different sets of experiences:

I think theres a number of factors involved.

Pre-departure, people read all kinds of sensationalistic blog posts, articles, forum threads, travelogues, etc. about how “racist” Koreans are. When they arrive in-country, they expect to be treated badly and confirmation bias ensures that they dwell on the burly ajumma who shoved her way out of the bus and the unscrupulous hagwon director who fires people in the 11th month of their contracts, while conveniently forgetting about the friendly ajeoshi who helped repair a burnt out light bulb or the neighbor who helped carry in that load of groceries. People come here expecting Koreans to be racist and so they make sure they find (and imagine and exaggerate) plenty of incidents of racism to fulfill their expectations. People who are looking for trouble are going to find it. That’s human nature. I’ve met more than my fair share of paranoid expats who manage to find racist overtones in every Korean twitch and glance and are convinced that a Korean version of the KKK is lurking behind every shadow.

There’s also the nature of the people who tend to come here. A lot of people (Westerners in particular) tend to go to Japan because they grew up watching Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball, love sushi, and obsess over learning kanji. They go to China because they’re fascinated by Chinese history and hope learning Chinese will give them an edge in the business world. They go to Thailand because they love beaches, ladyboys, and great deals on fake gems. In other words, these people want to be in their host countries and tend to be more forgiving of local imperfections. On the other hand, people tend to come to Korea because they’re looking for adventure and high-paying, easy teaching jobs to pay off their student loans, or in the case of other Asians, because they did poorly on their college entrance exams. They don’t really have anything “invested” in focusing on the positive side of Korea, and don’t appreciate or understand their host culture. For some Westerners in particular, I think there’s some latent disappointment at not being treated like King Whitey, and these folks, with a sense of entitlement, are shocked to be greeted at Incheon by a haggard customs agent instead of Lee Myung-bak and the other tribal chieftains and a harem of Korean virigins for His Majesty’s pleasure. They face further disappointment when they learn that the backwards locals treat them with indifference instead of ooing-and-aahing and mistaking them for Tom Hanks, and that their white skin and English abilities don’t magically open every door in the country.

That said, there is definitely racism here. There are more than enough examples of racism in the media, in the education system, in the national ideology and policy, and other venues to fill several volumes. I don’t doubt (all) of those stories about cab drivers ignoring foreign fares to pick up a Korean fare 5 meters up the road, about foreigners being denied entry into night clubs, about police and bystanders always siding with the Korean, about young nationalistic hotheads deamanding that Yankee go home, or about curmugeoned drunk seniors dressing down Korean women for being near their foreign boyfriends, but I feel that most of the racism is on the “systemic” level as opposed to the person-to-person level. I think a lot of it boils down to how you carry yourself in public and how you behave: if you act like a barbarian and treat Korea like your personel frat house, you’ll be treated accordingly. If you make the effort to adapt, act in professional manner, smile, and be discreet, people will leave you alone.

Frankly, the first part is something I agree strongly with (I pretty much agree with the whole thing, including his earlier discussion of the Expat Echo Chamber and perceived racism), and I've made many of the same points here and there. Many of these themes are covered in my (in)famous memes post, including the notion some folks work from where they think anything bad that happens to them in Korea happened because they're a foreigner (#81).

"They keep staring at me!"

His part about who goes to China or Japan (something with which I'm less familiar) sounds plausible based on what I've heard. And it really does explain this galling situation where some "foreigners" gripe that every little thing is a sign that Korea is "Raaaaaacist!" when in Japan things like "No Gaijin!" housing issues are rampant but so few complain. Were something that big going on in Korea as a common thing, there would be a collective aneurysm among the waaaaagugin. But I digress. (And I'm still trying to fit this into the discussion.)

I would add that the going-to-Korea-as-a-business-decision issue also runs headlong into such Whites having their racial transparency stripped away from them.

So in conclusion, short milton: "Paradise never found."

"We're sending you to Korea."

Any thoughts? Is milton right? Am I too hard on newbies? Should prospective future residents be steered away from some, most, or all blogs on Korea? Are there good blogs for newbies and prospectives?

Is being a kvetchpat communicable? Manageable? Curable? Commendable?

Not mine. See link.

What can be done on the Korean end to make Korea more attractive to people who won't just see it as, ahem, "like a retarded prostitute's pußßy" (apologies for that)?

Will the soft power generated by K-pop help resolve this problem on its own by attracting people who already have a fascination for all things Korea? Will some of them be disappointed that Korea isn't full of middle-aged men wielding hammers against gangsters?

"The mud festival is over. You have to put some clothes on!"

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