A kinder and gentler abomination?

I am not the only one who has wondered out loud whether Prodigious Progeny Kim Jong-ŭn could actually turn out to be North Korea's Gorbachev, or at least North Korea's Deng Xiaoping. And in that vein, it's easy to imagine (or at least hope) that a birthday amnesty could be a signal of better things to come.

Or maybe North Korea's Dukakis?

From the BBC:

North Korea says it will grant an amnesty for prisoners to mark the birthdays of two late leaders.

State news agency KCNA said that the amnesty would begin from 1 February, in honour of Kim Jong-il, who died last month, and his father Kim Il-sung.

No information was given as to how many prisoners would be released or who.

Amnesty International estimates as many as 200,000 people are being held in political prison camps around the country.

KCNA said that the amnesty embodied the "noble, benevolent and all-embracing politics of President Kim Il-sung and leader Kim Jong-il".

The Dear Leader's seventieth birthday and the Great Leader's hundredth birthday are both auspicious occasions (yeah, yeah, I know they're dead, but birthdays get marked anyway, just like with Jesus and Buddha, though the latter are likely in an environment closer to room-temperature), and that could be just the excuse that the reformists — if in fact they exist — may need in order to release thousands and therefore nudge things toward normalcy.

We'll have to wait and see.

...

Is this becoming a thing?

First we have "Ching" and "Chong" at Chick-Fil-A, and now we have a Papa John's employee referring to her customer — where it shows up on the receipt — as "lady chinky eyes."

Okay, then. What makes it go from egregiously racist and bad to egregiously racist and worse is the lame-ass excuse offered up by the assistant manager:

"I didn't think [the cashier] was trying to offend the lady in any type of way, but she did. It wasn't meant to harm her in any way. But I apologize on behalf of my staff for that."

Geez, that Minhee Cho is pretty thin-skinned to be offended by that. (You can't see my eyes rolling, but they are.)

To be honest, though, I'm starting to be a little surprised this kind of thing doesn't happen more often, since apparently a lot of food service companies are employing bored, minimally paid, and barely literate teenagers to fill in descriptions and/or names of customers who come into their stores. Add to that litany of adjectives "compromised when it comes to notions about what is acceptable to say in public regarding race, ethnicity, and gender issues."

Yes, I blame rap music and hip-hop and shock culture and all that stuff, where calling people bitches or the N-word is promoted and raised up as normal and acceptable, and where racial or ethnic humor is no longer frowned up but is considered edgy and cool.

That girl who wrote that should lose her job, but perhaps a learning lesson could be snatched from this. A beer summit, but with pizza and no president. People have got to re-learn this stuff of basic decency which somehow inexplicably the American culture seems to have unlearned.

That's right, my 2012 new year's resolution was to turn into an old coot ranting about kids today (except that it's not just kids... it's people the same age as this Gen Xer, as well as our parents).

I've also resolved to lose three or four kilograms and get rock-hard abs, but that's a post for another time.

Resting heart rate: 51 bpm

...

Don't trust Americans who speak foreign languages

Well, that seems to be the message of this ad that attacks Mandarin-speaking former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman, purportedly by a Ron Paul supporter:



As the Washington Post makes clear, we don't know for sure that this really was put together by a Ron Paul supporter, but given the way no small number of them think, it's not a stretch of the imagination to believe that.

Yeah, it might turn out that this is a not-so-terribly-elaborate attempt to hurt Ron Paul, not Jon Huntsman, but I've seen more ham-handed political ads or acts than this, so for now it seems plausible. What I think is more telling about it is how it underscores this persistent American traits of (a) distrust of those who are smart and well educated, (b) being proudly monolingual to the point that those who are fluent in other languages may be regarded as un-American, and (c) historically and hysterically loathing people from Asia as perpetual foreigners.

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The case of Mohammad Salman Hamdani

Well, Happy New Year, everybody. I said goodbye to 2011 and greeted 2012 watching Coldplay perform on television here in Las Vegas, after which I took my young cousin out into the cold (mid-30s at that point) and watched the spectacular pyrotechnics from a safe and sane distance. This was apparently a record-setting New Year's Eve, which is a welcome sign for Nevadans.

Had I been in Seoul, I would have marched from my apartment down to Chongno to either watch or hear the new year literally being rung in. One thing that was cool, though, was that NBC Nightly News highlighted the Seoul celebration in their December 31 broadcast.

Anyway, I'm still on the Mainland stamping out sparks and putting out fires in what has become a sometimes amusing but sometimes hair-pullingly galling health, financial, and emotional drama. Some day I may write about my big adventure in prose form; in the spirit of Shakespeare, whether t'is ultimately a comedy or a tragedy will depend on whether we all get out alive. 

I will be back to regular posting more either later in the week or by the middle of the month. The odd thing is, though, that Kim Jong-il's death and Kim Jong-un's cosmetic rise has pushed my hit rate up far higher than usual, even though I'm hardly writing any new stuff.

In the meantime, though I'd like to nudge you toward this story in the New York Times, about a Muslim Pakistani-American who was killed in the 9/11 terror attacks when he was responding to the emergency:

He was buried after the Sept. 11 attacks with full honors from the New York Police Department, and proclaimed a hero by the city’s police commissioner. He is cited by name in the Patriot Act as an example of Muslim-American valor.

And Representative Keith Ellison of Minnesota, one of two Muslim members of Congress, was brought to tears during a Congressional hearing in March while describing how the man, a Pakistani-American from Queens, had wrongly been suspected of involvement in the attacks, before he was lionized as a young police cadet who had died trying to save lives.

Despite this history, Mohammad Salman Hamdani is nowhere to be found in the long list of fallen first responders at the National September 11 Memorial in Lower Manhattan.

Nor can his name be found among those of victims whose bodies were found in the wreckage of the north tower, where his body was finally discovered in 34 parts.

Instead, his name appears on the memorial’s last panel for World Trade Center victims, next to a blank space along the south tower perimeter, with the names of others who did not fit into the rubrics the memorial created to give placements meaning. That section is for those who had only a loose connection, or none, to the World Trade Center.

A tragedy on top of tragedy that, frankly, reminded me of this bit of satire I wrote in August 2010 during the "Ground Zero Mosque" nonsense.

... 

Kim Jong-il rides to hell in a Lincoln

More on this later (serious family issues on the Mainland right now) but I think it may be highly significant that we are being allowed to see so much of the Dear Leader's funeral, as well as the fact that his hearse was a 1976 (?) Lincoln.

http://m.jalopnik.com/5871526/kim-jong+ils-last-ride-was-in-a-1976-lincoln-hearse

This succinct email was sent from my iPhone.

Merry Christmas from Monster Island

Expect a return to regular blogging after the holidays (my dad has been in the hospital, too, but he's okay now).

And this nativity scene was not staged. I swear I found it that way.



...

Dear Dead Leader

ORIGINAL POST BY iPHONE:
Holy crap! It's a Christmakkuh miracle! I turn on my phone after a six-hour flight to California, and my inbox is flooded with news reports and private emails informing me that Kim Jong-il is dead, and why haven't I written anything about it.

I'll write more on this when I get settled, but I'm guessing in the next days or weeks we will find out if Kim Jong-ŭn really is (or is not) The Kim Who Wasn't There™.

(from here and here)

UPDATED (TWO HOURS LATER):
Wow. Where to begin. I guess if you want the latest news, you can go to the Los Angeles Times or perhaps The Marmot's Hole. Everyone is asking what will happen next. The answer is, beyond Kim Jong-il receiving some sort of unending torture in an inner circle of Hell, no one really knows.

Right now, everyone is looking at Kim Jong-ŭn. And Kim Jong-ŭn is crapping his pants. He's not even thirty and he's supposedly been tapped to lead the country. Right.

If you don't already know how I feel, read this and follow the links that tell you all about The Kim Who Wasn't There. Although The Marmot's Hole is reporting that Kim Jong-ŭn was "named... as his father’s successor," I'll believe it when I see it.

Before I go any further, let me tell you of two posts I was working on but was waiting until vacation (which began today) to write. Bear in mind, they are going to make me sound very, very nutty. The first was going to be a follow-up to my original "The Kim Who Wasn't There" post, basically a similar analysis of how much the KCNA (North Korea's central news agency) actually mentions Kim Jong-ŭn, which is not much. I was timing the analysis for the week around the first anniversary of him being named co-chair of whatever committee it is that he's pretending to run.

The second was a bit more out of left field. I was actually sitting down to analyze how much Kim Jong-il travels to give guidance and how much that keeps him away from Pyongyang. I was doing this in order to suggest that — get ready for this — Kim Jong-il might be a mere figurehead himself. Wow, wouldn't that ever be a trip (literally and figuratively)?

Some, of course, might think that really it was one of the KJI doppelgänger doing all the guidance, but I was starting to wonder if KJI really had all the power we have supposed he did. After all, the guy apparently nearly died from a stroke two or three years ago, and then went through a long recovery. Just who the hell was his Edith Wilson, if he had one at all? Maybe, just maybe, the ruling generals or nappŭn nomenklatura (see how I did that?) sorta got together and formed a junta or an oligarchy or something.

And where would that leave supposed designated heir Kim Jong-ŭn? Maybe they really do need a figurehead. Maybe they need a uniting force and a source of legitimacy. Maybe they have decided that Kim Jong-il's only son who is not crazy or possibly gay but is a team player must be the figurehead.

And if that's true, then my speculation that Kim Jong-ŭn would end up wielding no real power is still true. Not that he (or his supporting faction) wouldn't try. But just what can a figurehead do? I have wondered aloud if Kim Jong-un could possibly be North Korea's Gorbachev. Maybe the English-speaking, Swiss-educated KJU might just have some ideas of his own about opening up the country, and even his nominal power might be just enough to nudge the regime in that direction.

It all comes down to China.
But ultimately, whether or not Kim Jong-un will be in power as a figurehead, a leader with real power, or none at all, will depend on China. In the past, I and others have spoken about the ominous prospect of China working to turn North Korea into Inner Cháoxiān Autonomous Prefecture. China has a great deal of control over the DPRK and it does not want to relinquish it. It certainly does not want the Koreans to unify and have a US military presence at its backdoor.

And so China has been doing whatever it can to prop up the North Korean government. They started doing this during the Korean War and they've been doing it since. But lately they themselves have found the Pyongyang regime belligerent and unwieldy, even an embarrassment to Beijing. And don't think for a minute that China wouldn't give their blessing to even a transfer of power to a figurehead unless they had assurances that the post-KJI North Korea would be better behaved.

And here is where I'm actually kinda sorta glad that China is holding the reins (at least for the time being), because China has been prodding North Korea to follow a path similar to Deng-era China, and to integrate North Korea (economically at least) with China's northeastern provinces (i.e., a process I call the Manchurianization of North Korea).

North Korea has been opening in ways thought unimaginable just a few years ago. North Korea has brought in cell phone service, eventually becoming the world's fastest growing mobile market (more posts here and here). News reports said recently that they topped 1 million (in a country of about 22 million).

There are also things like Western-style coffee shops, television commercials for beer, and other trappings of the West as seen through Chinese eyes. In other words, China has lately been trying very hard to re-make North Korea in its own image.

And just what does all that mean? China does not allow a whole lot of dissent. Two decades after Tianamen Square, China is still authoritarian. And if North Korea follows a Dengesque path, you should expect North Korea to also be authoritarian as long as China is. Unless...

What if North Korea goes off China's game plan?
The only thing that could change the trajectory of North Korea being pulled toward Deng-era reforms that would bring it closer and closer to China would be unification. The question now is whether that can happen or not. The generals and the politicos in North Korea have no interest in giving up their own power and possibly risking arrest, imprisonment, and even execution which might result if North Korea allowed itself to be absorbed by a democratic South Korea. (I think there's a way to convince them while keeping that in mind, but that's another post for another time.)

But what if there is an uprising? What if Kim Jong-un just isn't cutting it as a figurehead or a real leader? What if the people have caught a whiff of the jasmine revolution and think now is as good a time as any to make a real change? Don't forget that in 2009 the regime dealt a body blow to almost everyone in the country — including many who had once felt quite loyal — with the Great Currency Obliteration. That has been, I believe, a real game changer in people's attitudes toward the regime, a moment where they suddenly realized, "These people aren't on my side."

Kim Jong-il died at a time when there are already food shortages, and the bitter winter will only make it worse. This is a precarious time to be changing leadership. Beijing itself may not be able to control what results. The biggest thing they have going their way, however, is that much of the population lives in rural pockets that are kept from communicating with each other. If there is a North Korean Spring, à la the Arab world, it will only be because of some very diligent people risking their lives to bring the message to the masses wherever they are.

So, in conclusion, with 3.5 hours of sleep and having just come off six hours of flying, these are my thoughts. I still think Kim Jong-un's faction does not have his power solidified, and I think there's a good chance he will either be squeezed out or allowed to be merely a figurehead. China will continue to push for reforms that make North Korea more like Deng-era China, but a popular uprising could easily thwart their plans to integrate the DPRK more with the Northeastern Provinces.

What would a North Korean spring look like? How would China react? Could we get China to back off a bit by (a) agreeing to keep their port facilities at Rajin and (b) promising that the US military will not be stationed in any territory that had been the Democratic People's Republic of Korea?

So much to think about. And I'll probably rewrite a lot of this in the morning.

UPDATE FROM THE NEXT MORNING:
Before I start, I'd like to add a few links to other blogs, who are as interested in this story as I. Make no mistake: this is the biggest story of the year and, depending on how things go, possibly the decade. So here are links from the biggies that cover North Korea regularly: One Free Korea, and Daily NK (which is like a news service, so just go there and see all the KJI-related articles).

I will forgive Asiapundit brazenly linking to themselves, just because that's something I would do, too, so go to this link and read the Marmot's Hole-worthy post they put up (frankly, others doing that meant I didn't have to, and I could thus concentrate on my theses about what might happen in the future — hint: the answer is likely to involve continued Manchurianization). Roboseyo has some thoughts. If you know of any others I've missed, please feel free to provide them in the comments.

And soon we'll start hearing from the experts on North Korea, as well as the pundits who liken themselves as experts on North Korea. And then we'll have a new round of blog posts on people talking about how North Korea expert Selig Harrison is nucking futs (and possibly on the take?).

Now for a couple things I forgot to mention in my bleary-eyed post from last night.

First, a huge dollop of honesty: I may not know what the fudge I'm talking about. Nobody does. And five, ten years from now, a lot of us will consider ourselves lucky if no one was keeping score.

Some honest punditry.
But here's where I get a little more honest: I was completely wrong about what would happen with North Korea back when the elder Kim died, and if only I'd been blogging in the mid-1990s, you'd know that.

See, I've been a news junkie ever since late elementary school, when I delivered newspapers. And that plus our own connection to Korea meant my young self would follow news on North Korea long before Kim Il-sung kicked the bucket in 1994.

And I was confident back then that Kim Il-sung — who at that point had ruled the country for four decades — was the only thing in the way of unification. So my late teen self actually bet someone fifty dollars (where was my late teen self getting that kinda money? ) that within five years of the Great Leader's Death, the two Koreas would be unified.

How's that prediction working out for you, late teen kushibo? (Good thing the person I bet kinda forgot; for a teen, that was Romney betting money.)

And so this is just me being honest. I was optimistic and perhaps naïve, but the thing is we all were. But there were so many things we didn't account for, such as Kim Jong-il's own ruthlessness (seriously, the guy looked like some sort of fat Korean Bill Gates, and who could imagine Bill Gates being evil?), and China's own willingness to support evil in order to maintain a satellite state (we thought they got that out of their system in 1950).

So now maybe we're overcompensating. We think North Korea's "leadership" doesn't have the capacity to move beyond dynastic dictatorship, and we worry that North Korea's people can't do anything but cower in fear. And we now understand that China will do whatever it can to ensure that North Korea doesn't become part of the string of pearls the United States intends to use as a choker.

But are we overcompensating too much? (By definition, any overcompensation is too much.) Is North Korea something that even Beijing cannot tame enough to use for their purposes?

A bulimic state cannot stand?
And that leads me to the other thing I forgot to mention last night: the purges. Right now on Capitol Hill in the US, we've got the leaders of Freddie and Fannie up there talking about charges that they'd misled the public. Now imagine that they were in fear that they would be taken out back and shot, and their families rounded up. That's what happened with the guy who was the scapegoat for the botched currency reform.

And that's just one example. You move way up the ladder, having been noticed for your competence but patiently and obsequiously playing the sycophant, and then you risk losing it all on a whim to a bullet through the skull when you piss off the wrong person.

"I can't work under these conditions!" is what you want to scream, but that's a guaranteed trip to the salt mines. So maybe you just wait, bide your time, until the old man's son is dead, and then we'll retake the asylum and set things right. Right? Right?

Notice a resemblance?

I mean, we don't want to have to wait until the son of the old man's son is also dead, do we? Junior the First, if he really was in charge, was only interested in selling off the country and buying coke. Sure, he kept all of us in Pyongyang living large, but we were always living in fear of the boom coming down. Maybe if we get rid of his son, we can actually move toward being a normal country where we are still the elite. Right?

They've just got to be thinking that way up there. I mean, Junior Junior has no real knowledge of how to run a country. He's weak, and possibly as whimsical as his dad, and that's a recipe for disaster, right? Best to off the kid — or put him in a figurehead role — and move on. But will the powerful Kim Jongsuk (his aunt) allow for that? Maybe we need to wait for her to croak.

So what I'm getting at is that the generals and the top bureaucrats have a deeply personal incentive to not stick with the status quo. And that could upend whatever plans China has (or maybe bolster them, depending on China's plans and how they feel about Round 3 of a Kim Dynasty).

Okay, I'm starting to blab again. So many thoughts in my brain right now, and I need some breakfast.

(And say what you will, but the flood of tears for the Dear Leader that will be seen on video clip after video clip, some of them from deep human emotion and some of them crocodile, were exactly what happened when the Great Leader seventeen years ago. Do not be alarmed, do not be shocked, do not adjust your set.)

...

RE-UPDATED: Shots fired at Chinese consulate in Los Angeles

You just know this place is filled with lead paint.

UPDATE 2:
AFP is reporting that the person arrested was not Korean but, in fact, a Chinese-born activist:

A Chinese-born activist has been booked for attempted murder over a shooting at China's consulate in Los Angeles after a human rights protest there, police said Friday.

Jeff Baoliang Zhang, a 67-year-old originally from Shanghai, turned himself in to police a few hours after Thursday's shooting, which left a number of bullet holes in the front of the diplomatic building.

"A lone gunman fired several shots at the local Chinese consulate after participating in a protest at the location earlier in the day," the Los Angeles Police Department said in a statement.

"Acting independently from the other protesters, he opened fire on the consulate building and then drove away in his car."

The LAPD said it appeared the suspect was acting alone.

So the possibility I mentioned turned out not to be the case. And for that, I'm glad. It would be very, very, very bad if South Koreans or Korean-Americans are avenging someone's death by attacking or trying to kill random people who have nothing to do with the murder.

Don't get me wrong, the ROK Coast Guard and the ROK Navy need to use adequate force to patrol and protect South Korean waters and South Korean people, but shooting up the consulate has nothing to do with that. We must take the high road, and I'm glad we can still do that.

UPDATE 1:

LAlate.com is reporting that the person who turned himself in is "a 65-year-old Chinese man with grey or white hair." Frankly, I don't know if they wrote Chinese because they know his specific ethnicity or if they are assuming so because the police description was of an "Asian" man and there have been ongoing protests involving mostly Chinese people. Having been in journalism for a while, I'm skeptical: we hope it would be the former but it is, more often than not, something like the latter.

I'm not saying I'm right, that it is a Korean angered by the Coast Guardsman's murder; I think it is equally possible that it's a Falun Gong protester or even a random drive-by. But the timing with the recent Korean-Chinese tension makes it quite a coincidence. Frankly, though, despite having written this post, I'm hoping it's not a kyopo or KoKo.

ORIGINAL POST:
Though I haven't seen the person identified yet, reports are saying a white-haired Asian in his 50s or 60s is being sought was arrested after turning himself in (for earlier pre-arrest reports, see here, here, here, and here). He had apparently been protesting in front of the building before shooting at a consulate security guard named Cipriano Gutierrez. Nine shots were reportedly fired.

Given the escalation of tension* between Beijing and Seoul over the murder of a ROK Coast Guardsman by Chinese fish pirates, including something being fired at the ROK embassy in Beijing and someone trying to ram the PRC embassy in Seoul with his car, one can't help but wonder if this is related to all that.

Seriously, if this is the case, this is getting out of hand. China has behaved badly when it comes to this whole issue of Chinese boats behaving violently when they're caught illegally fishing in ROK waters or the South Korean EEZ, but none of that warrants shooting at the consulate. The folks at the PRC consulate in L.A. have nothing to do with any of this.

* Tensions include a Chinese protester peeing on a flag, though I'm not convinced that wasn't just a coincidence that the flag happened to be where he was peeing. I mean, in Seoul there are flags everywhere, and that's exactly where Chinese pee. Ha ha! I keed! I keed! I keed because I love... to keed!

South Koreans protesting in front of Chinese embassy in Seoul.
Their signs read, "Forget Dorothy... Surrender Toto!"
There, no one can accuse me of not providing
equal time on the whole national mockery thing. 

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Crunky chocolate bar, a Japanese original?

Over at ROK Drop and Japan Probe there is a discussion on the supposed propensity for Koreans to copy Japanese products.

I've written on this in the past, but the upshot is this:

• This has been a chronic problem in Korea that still lingers (but to a much smaller degree than before). In the past most of the copied products were not sold in Korea at all, so represented no real loss to the Japanese (or other countries') business, but now, even though it's a much smaller problem, the potential losses may be more acute. 

• Many of the examples provided, however, have actually been legitimately licensed copies, owing to a number of commercial partnerships across the Tsushima Strait (Otsuka Pharmaceuticals in particular has its fingers in many pots in Korea).

• In many respects, some Japanese companies are no better. Witness the case of Nara Dreamland or the Crunky chocolate bar. In fact, for the longest time I thought it was a Korean company that had done the Nestle Crunch knockoff, but it was a Japanese one (Lotte Japan, that is, though one could argue it's as much a Korean company as Japanese). 

I snapped the picture of the Crunky bar just a few weeks ago in the Ala Moana branch of the Nijiya Supermarket, which has some killer Hiroshimayaki.

Anyway, this would be a more interesting topic if it hadn't come to be dominated by Korea bashers (much the same as what happened with my post on the Corea and Korea spellings).

...

Morningstarbucks

Pyongyang is going to capitalist hell in a hand basket. They've apparently opened their first (?) Western-style coffee shop, which means decadence is just around the corner.

From the Korea Herald:

North Korea has introduced a Western coffee shop in Pyongyang, a source said Tuesday, the latest case of embracing foreign cuisine in a country grappling with chronic food shortages.

The North has been struggling to keep outside influences from seeping into the isolated country out of fear that they could eventually pose a threat to leader Kim Jong-il’s autocratic rule.

The North has routinely called on its 24 million people to guard against Western influences, describing them as part of psychological warfare designed to topple the communist regime.

The government, however, has set up Western-style restaurants in partnership with foreign companies and an international relief agency since 2005, according to the source.

In October, a coffee shop opened inside a national museum near Kim Il-sung Square through an investment by Helmut Sachers Kaffee, an Austrian coffee producer and bakery supplier.

The Austrian company has trained North Korean staff to make coffee and bread, said the source.

A cup of coffee costs 2 euro, a price that is out of reach for ordinary North Koreans who make an average of 3,000 North Korean won a month. The North Korean won was traded at 134 won to one euro in November according to an official exchange rate, though the euro is believed to be much stronger in markets like the U.S dollar.

I blame the Chinese. And by "blame them" I mean thank them for turning into crony capitalists themselves who want all the trappings of the West, and then letting them slowly but surely permeate into the DPRK.

Sure, the North Korean hoi polloi won't be able to afford an espresso or — gasp! — a cafe americano (do you think they'd serve that?), but the elite will be able to. And those same elite (who now have 1 million cell phones) will demand more and more of the Western conveniences and comforts enjoyed by Chinese in Beijing. Or rather, they'll tolerate less and less inconvenience. And Kim Jong-il will stand there on the dais and dismiss their cries by saying, "Let them eat scones."

Seriously, this is the death knell of the regime, though not necessarily the republic itself.

...

They should have done this years ago

To mark the 1000th weekly protest in front of the Japanese (which, by my calculations, would mean they started in 1992, which sounds about right), supporters of the former Comfort Women (위안부, 慰安婦) have erected a simple statue to be a constant reminder to the Japanese government officials of this horrific thing that the victims cannot forget and which the Japanese right-wing would like to ignore or even deny. (The BBC also has the story.)

The statue is very simple. It depicts a young Korean girl in traditional Korean clothing, an everyday hanbok. She is dressed as these women might have been around seven decades ago when they were kidnapped, forced, duped, or otherwise coerced into work that turned out to be sex slavery on the front lines of the Pacific War.

She is depicted as a few years younger than many of them were when they were taken. For some, she is about the same age.

Frankly, this is brilliant. A simple statue that is a patient, ever-present, never-forgetting reminder. The surviving Comfort Women are in their eighties and nineties, and the Japanese government's strategy has been to just wait for them to die so the problem will go away.

Of course, the issue is not a simple one. There are questions as to whether the normalization treaty — which none of the women signed, of course — dismissed these women's legal claims. There's also questions as to whether the South Korean government of the Park Chunghee era, which took the bulk of loans and grants Japan offered and invested it in the development of the nation, owes them money as well.

There's also the question of whether any official thing that happened before the 1990s can be taken as compensation for the former Comfort Women, given that up to that point Tokyo had been vehemently denying any official involvement in the mobilization of these sex slaves.

But ultimately, the statue is not about that. Because even with a generous compensation package and a heart-felt expression of absolute apology (one that is not followed by right-wingers going "but but but"), this horrific action must be remembered. Forget lawyers and government accountants and political wranglers; it simply should not be allowed to die along with its victims.

...

In case you're free in Orange County tonight...

... why don't you join the annual Undie Run at Chapman University.

It should be a real treat tonight, with temperatures dipping into the low 40s (about 5°C).

Of course, in Hawaii we have the same thing. It's called the beach. And we have it every day. 뿌야!

Yeah, it's all kind of goofy, but it shore beats the other news coming out of Orange County.

(And frankly, I didn't realize there were still so many White people in Orange County... really hot White people. Note to self: must look into working at Chapman University after graduation.)

...

There's no need to be afraid at Christmastime

It's that time of year, when good cheer, egg nog, and ubiquitous baked goods warm your cockles, or something like that.

It's the time of year when, for no good reason other than my own curiosity, I check to see if there is snow on Manua Kea. And indeed, today there is:

Someday I will see and touch snow in the tropical Aloha State. And possibly go snowboarding or even skiing for a few yards. It's like the Holy Grail to me.

It's also that time of year when various Protestant groups in South Korea put up "Christmas trees" close to the border with North Korea, at a place called Aegibong (애기봉전망대), to remind them that there is peace, love, and religion outside of the Juche faith of self-reliance on the Dear Leader.

This is last year's "tree," which actually contains no real tree.

What SoKos see as thumbing their nose at Kim Jong-il, the NoKos see as giving the finger. Pyongyang has warned of "an unpredictable situation" if the techno tannenbaum remains.

Well, I hate to break this to you, honey, but thanks to y'alls, we're always in an unpredictable situation. Call us when your crazy is mo' crazy. The only war on Christmas I foresee is the one that's happening in the imagination of conservatives.

Well, no. Scratch that. Just be normal for a change. Like your friends and benefactors the Chinese. Oh, wait. No. Scratch that, too. (An epic rant on that is coming, just be patient.)

Peace on Earth, good will to all men.

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