The Ministry of Employment and Labor has said it will improve its oversight over safety codes and penalties for violating safety procedures due to a recent run of industrial accidents at Samsung and Hyundai.  South Korea has experienced rapid changes in such a short period of time, since the industrialization movement in the mid-sixties and one of the largest problems faced by Koreans is the exposure to a greater variety of danger in different forms.

As of 2010, South Korea has the most hazardous environment for industrial workers among advanced countries, according to the Korea Occupational Safety Health Agency (cite).  The rate of traffic accidents is also higher than other OECD countries as well (1.7 % higher).  Part of the reason might have something to do with watching mobile TV while driving according to Ministry of Land, Transport and Maritime Affairs’s poll.  Sixty percent of motorists polled as of a year ago watch mobile TV (cite).

Other public threats to safety are more prevalent than widely known.  Exposure to hazardous materials, such as asbestos have continued and the reported cases of mesothelioma will continue to arise in South Korea until a year 2045 (cite), and not just in construction workers but in average citizens who were unwittingly exposed to asbestos and have no idea where the exposure took place. (cite).

Though some might think that North Korea makes living here dangerous, that is really not so much the case.  Likewise, some “dangers” are more a media fiction, such as the “danger” in South Korea from foreign teachers and the rampant crime and disease they represent (cite).  Danger comes in many more mundane and stealthy forms here though Protestant Koreans have enjoyed looking for danger in far away places so much so that the government has had to bar travel to certain countries due to the past hostage foibles.  To quote Chun Woo-seung of the Foreign Ministry, Overseas Korean National Protection Division:

“The Korean constitution obligates the government to take measures to ensure the protection of its citizens. The duty of the government to protect its citizens is greater than the rights of a few NGOs to go abroad for missionary activities . . . (cite)”

There is even digital danger to be found in South Korea, the kind that can cause a tremendous amount of danger and financial loss: a South Korean manufactured oil rig was leaving its construction site here when it was discovered that its computer systems were completely infiltrated with malware:

The malware spread so thoroughly through the rig’s systems that it infected even the computers controlling its blowout preventer, a critical piece of safety equipment. That infection could have caused the preventer and other systems to be unresponsive if the rig were drilling, possibly leading to a well blowout, explosion, oil spill and loss of life.
The rig shut down for 19 days as workers tried to clear the problem, which has plagued other offshore oil vessels, knocking out their networks and forcing shut downs because of potential conflicts with safety systems (cite).

 

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I’m not really sure what the Comfort Women have to do with Osaka city affairs, but mayor Toru Hashimoto really likes to talk about them. Or Tweet about them, as it were:

“Japan was bad,” he told a party meeting on Monday, the Asahi Shimbun reported. “It is true that we used women to solve the problem of sex on the battlefield.

“Having said that, America, Britain, Germany and France, and even the South Korean military in Vietnam after WWII, they all used women to address the issue.

“Japan was bad, but you all should face up to history. This is what Japanese politicians must say,” the Asahi quoted him as saying.

Hashimoto’s use of Twitter has even got The Ish—who recently blasted Hashimoto for calling Japan’s surprise visits to its Asian neighbors in the 1930s and 1940s “aggression”—advising caution—really difficult to express right-wing historical revisionism in 140 characters or less.

To be fair to Hashimoto, at least he’s saying rude things politely. The same could not be said about his until-recently party colleague Shingo Nishimura, who made quite possibly the most disgusting statement about the Comfort Women I’ve ever read coming from the mouth of a public official:

During his speech, Nishimura also defended compatriot Hashimoto’s statement, saying that ‘comfort women’ had been incorrectly translated to ‘sex slaves,’ according to USA Today.

“‘Comfort women’ is erroneously translated as ‘sex slaves,’ which might encourage anti-Japanese riots and conspiracies,” he said. “We better fight back by telling them that the words ‘comfort women’ and ‘sex slaves’ are completely different and that there are numerous South Korean prostitutes roaming around Japan.”

He then put the final nail in the controversial commentary coffin, joking that he might visit his hometown of Osaka, venture into red-light districts and yell, “Hey, you South Korean comfort women!”

I believe the actual comment was something more along the lines of “Japan is swarming with Korean prostitutes.” He did get expelled from his party for that statement, and even Hashimoto was apparently appalled by it. Still, I suppose we should be thankful in a way—the feeling I’ve gotten is that these guys really believe that not only was Japan blameless for the Comfort Women, but also that the Comfort Women were essentially a Korean problem, that Korea is a nation of whores. At least Nishimura was being honest.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is now comparing the Yasukuni Shrine to Arlington National Cemetery:

Abe cited a Japanese history professor, Kevin Doak of Georgetown University, who said that visiting the Arlington National Cemetery, where Confederate soldiers are buried “does not mean endorsing slavery.”

Fair dinkum, but then again, I’m unaware of anything like the Yūshūkan on the grounds of Arlington. Excuse me if I’m mistaken.

The UN’s Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights is reportedly calling on Japan to take measures to prevent hate speech directed at the Comfort Women. I like the altered Korean flag in the protest photo—who said the Japanese right doesn’t do irony?

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Well, somebody had to post it.

According to the World Values Survey, India and Jordan are pretty racist, while the English-speaking world and Latin America are relatively less racist. And then there’s Korea:

South Korea, not very tolerant, is an outlier. Although the country is rich, well-educated, peaceful and ethnically homogenous – all trends that appear to coincide with racial tolerance – more than one in three South Koreans said they do not want a neighbor of a different race. This may have to do with Korea’s particular view of its own racial-national identity as unique – studied by scholars such as B.R. Myers – and with the influx of Southeast Asian neighbors and the nation’s long-held tensions with Japan.

A professor who studies ethnic conflict discusses why we shouldn’t infer too much from the survey.

So, are Koreans really that racist? Hard to say, really. I could easily see one in three Koreans saying they don’t want a neighbor of a different race; then again, I could easily see one in three Americans thinking the same thing, even if for reasons of political correctness they’d never say so, even in an anonymous survey. Even assuming the survey numbers of correct (and there may be reason to doubt that, too—HT to Kasif), would that mean the one third who responded they didn’t want a neighbor of a different race necessarily think that folk of different races are inferior? Or does it simply mean they’d prefer a neighbor with whom they share linguistic and cultural similarities?

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The soft power, “peaceful rise” concept seems lost on the Middle Kingdom. The intimidate the crap out of everyone, especially Japan, The Philippines and Vietnam tact is apparently the plan of action.

Now, the PRC is claiming Okinawa.

It started with two Chinese academics earlier this month saying Japan’s claims to the islands were nonsense and that Japan’s annexation of the Ryukyu kingdom in 1879 amounted to an invasion, with the sovereignty still open for debate.

The use of the word “sovereignty” is a real rib tickler that one. Are the Chinese planning on reinstalling the old ruling class and letting them go it alone?

Now, a Chinese general has tossed in his take.

Luo Yuan, a two-star general in the People’s Liberation Army, raised the territorial stakes again this week, saying the Ryukyus had started paying tribute to China in 1372, half a millennium before they were seized by Japan.

Yuan took a nice little stroll on the rhetorical tightrope:

“Let’s for now not discuss whether [the Ryukyus] belong to China, they were certainly China’s tributary state. I am not saying all former tributary states belong to China, but we can say with certainty that the Ryukyus do not belong to Japan.”

Perhaps the islands are just some outcropping in no man’s land and I should lay my claim for a little beachfront property while I can.

You can read the rest on the unfolding Okinawa gripe, as well as the expected playing of the “Hashimoto card”, here.

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South Korean Biochemical Drill in the subway, May 8, 2013

Have a relaxed weekend here in Korea.

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Today is May 18, 33rd anniversary of the Gwangju Uprising–one of the most significant events of South Korea’s march to democracy. On May 18, 1980, the Chun Doo-hwan dictatorship mobilized paratroopers against the protesting citizens of Gwangju, and massacred hundreds of them. But Korean conservatives, many of whom trace their roots to Chun Doo-hwan and the fascist dictators before him, never quite warmed up to memorializing the Gwangju Uprising. Lee Myeong-bak, for example, never visited the annual Gwangju memorial during his presidency except in his first year as the president.

Since we now have the dictator’s daughter in the Blue House, the Gwangju denial has gone to a new low. It has been a persistent conspiracy theory in Korea’s far-right websites that Gwangju Uprising was actually the work of North Korean special forces who infiltrated the city. Channel A and TV Chosun, two cable TV stations owned by the two large conservative newspapers Dong-A Ilbo and Chosun Ilbo, just gave a new level of legitimacy to such claims by airing an interview with North Korean defectors, who claimed that North Korea indeed staged Gwangju Uprising.

How outrageous are these claims? It is so outrageous that Cho Gab-je, the arch-anticommunist who has not hesitated to label all progressives North Korean shills, wrote an article to tell fellow right-wingers not to buy this conspiracy theory.

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Depends on how you feel about Gaeseong Industrial Complex, this is either trivial or monumental. Gaeseong Industrial Complex is currently sitting idle, with South Korean companies unable to retrieve the raw materials and finished goods on the other side of the Armistice Line. As it turns out, on the day when the last contingent of South Koreans (who were South Korean government officials who were overseeing the GIC) were leaving, North Korean officials told them that they would allow South Korean business owners to visit the Complex to pack up the raw materials and finished goods. North Korea would also allow the South Korean business owners to send personnel to perform minimal maintenance to the machinery. The South Korean officials simply said the offer was beyond their pay grade, and left the GIC.

This offer was not known until today, when North Korea broadcast this fact on their television news. South Korea’s Ministry of Unification confirmed that there was such an offer, and admitted that it did nothing. Ministry of Unification also said it did not transmit to North Korea the GIC business owners’ request to visit the Complex to retrieve the raw materials and finished goods.

If you think that GIC should have been closed, this is a non-event. But if you think that GIC should have been saved, this means that the Park Geun-hye administration essentially kicked away the last chance to save the GIC. Regardless of how one feels about the GIC, its closure is significant. If the GIC closure becomes permanent, North Korea-South Korea relationship essentially reverts back to the 1970s, during which there was no exchange or communication between the two Koreas.

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South Korean footballer Ki Sungyong(24, Swansea City) is set to marry the pretty actress and straight-talking presenter of the SBS Interview Show “Healing Camp” Han Hyejin (32) in July. Here he is on the talk show last year before they started going out, saying that he prefers older women, and cannot stand the “oppa” addressing from younger girls – he also confesses that Han is his type and that he would marry (somebody-like-her) straight away.

Ki, the midfielder who scored the winning goal against Team GB (in the penalties) for Team Hong Myungbo in the 2012 London Olympics, is quite well known for his 욱하는 성질 (literally “Uuk”-hanun character – Uuk-hada means to get angry/emotional/to see red – the sound characterizing anger brimming over in the throat), and lack of self-control. On the same episode of the show (episode 58*) which you can watch in its entirety he talks about his character on the field, about the team, about the bronze-medal and the controversial goal ceremonies, and about his friendship with Ku Jachul (FC Augsburg). It’s quite interesting.

Personally, Ki Sungyong really reminds me of many Korean boys/men I have met both in Korea, but mainly outside Korea. Some of them very nice, bright and confident who have spent their formative years battling some sort of prejudice outside Korea (I guess maybe boys have it harder) turn quite nationalistic in a simplistic sense.

Here’s hoping that their marriage is long and happy. It was sad to learn that another one of Ki’s friends, Cha Duri just divorced his wife. It cannot be easy for the Korean footballers and their WAGs following their celebrity husbands to less-known cities abroad.

*Correction: I forgot that there are usually two episodes of one interviewee in the Healing Camp. In Episode 59 which I am watching now Ki actually mentions the loneliness and the unglamourous lifestyle of a lonely Korean footballer in an European team -he says he’s had to eat 계란밥 (raw egg + rice + soy sauce for 1 month – lack of Korean food/material) -sniff sniff

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In an engrossing and sagacious LRB review of Victor Cha’s “The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future,” Richard Lloyd Parry takes the reader on a journey through the last few decades and on into the future of North Korea where more of the same is sensible and certain.

First, we go to Kaesong where the Choco Pie showed how North Koreans are just like everyone else–consumers and capitalists eager for new products:

Within a few months, the bosses from Seoul began slipping their North Korean workers a Choco Pie or two as a perk. In part, this was a response to the Kaesong wage regime: rather than being paid directly, salaries were processed by the North Korean authorities, which then handed over the money minus hefty deductions. The Choco Pies were a small piece of South Korean largesse, but it was difficult at first to know how enthusiastically they were being received. The fact that Orion wrappers were nowhere to be found in the rubbish bins of Kaesong might have suggested indifference, but the opposite was true: the local workers, most of them women, had quickly realised that the Choco Pies were too delicious and valuable to eat. Kaesong employees, the best paid in North Korea and among the worst paid in Asia, were hoarding their pies, and selling them on at remarkably inflated prices: as high as the equivalent of $10 a piece, a large proportion of their monthly take home pay. The cakes found their way onto the black market in Pyongyang; corrupt soldiers in Kaesong, who routinely exacted ‘fines’ from the South Korean managers, began to accept, and sometimes require, payment in chocolate and marshmallow. By some estimates, 150,000 Choco Pies were being dispensed in Kaesong every day.

Parry, the Asia editor and Tokyo bureau chief of The Times (London), then reasons that war will never happen, offering the grim assessment Clinton received when he contemplated war in 1994:

Put out of mind any notion of a decisive second Korean War. An escalation from small beginnings cannot be ruled out, but none of the parties with a military presence on the peninsula – the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (the North), the Republic of Korea (the South) or the United States – will embark on a full-scale attack because it would end catastrophically for all of them…

Commandos infiltrated by submarine would cause terror and havoc in coastal cities in South Korea. Thousands of artillery pieces secreted in tunnels just over the border would bombard Seoul; some of the shells would be armed with poison gas. When Bill Clinton was contemplating a ‘surgical strike’ on the Yongbyon nuclear plant in 1994, he was told that the war that would almost certainly follow would kill as many as a million people (including a hundred thousand Americans), cost the United States more than $100 billion, and cause a trillion dollars’ worth of damage in north-east Asia, most of it in South Korea – and those figures are two decades old. The guerrilla insurgency and prolonged civilian resistance, which would follow even a swift victory, would make Iraq look like a simple mopping up operation.

Cha, who served in the George W. Bush administration and was deputy head of the U.S. delegation to the Six-Party Talks, finds himself, according to Parry, in the difficult position of explaining the failures of the administration while trying to justify them (all of this done with some fascinating accounts):

Cha’s anecdotes evoke an administration in which the president’s ‘loathing’ expressed itself in frat house boorishness on the part of his diplomatic teams. At one point, officials from the State Department and the Treasury came close to a fist fight over a difference in approach. At another, members of the US delegation could be heard ‘giggling loudly’ at the film Team America, in which Kim Jong Il is represented as a grotesque singing puppet. ‘One of our members, a jaded foreign service officer, thought it would be “funny” to take the iPod into the adjacent room and show it to the North Koreans,’ he recalls. ‘We decided against this impromptu introduction to American pop culture, and probably avoided a diplomatic incident.’

Enter China, North Korea’s reluctant and frustrated benefactor and, according to all parties involved, the only player with any pull. Parry calls Cha’s reasoned conclusion that China will never abandon the North, “the most sophisticated account I have seen.” Central to Cha’s argument is China’s “economic extraction policies,” well underway across the globe and, says Cha, in North Korea:

The standard explanation points to China’s long border with North Korea and the chaos of refugees and fleeing soldiers which could follow a regime collapse in Pyongyang. But Cha identifies a stronger reason: the valuable cross-border trade, and the coal, iron and minerals which China extracts from the North. Copper, gold, zinc, nickel and rare earth metals like molybdenum can be mined more cheaply in North Korea, and with even fewer concerns for health and safety. China keeps the North afloat through gifts of cash, grain, as well as ‘friendship prices’, not out of fraternal feeling, but ‘to sustain a minimal level of stability and subsistence so that China can continue its economic extraction policies.’ It encourages Chinese-style economic reforms not for reform’s sake, but because they will suit Chinese business. ‘It is an illusion to believe China will work with the United States and the Republic of Korea on denuclearising North Korea as its top priority,’ Cha writes, in a sentence devastating to American policy.

In line with what most North Korean wonks like B.R. Myers and Andrei Lankov assert, the North’s leadership has never been crazy, given its position and game plan. Parry puts this in perspective:

As a small but strategically positioned country surrounded by large and powerful neighbours, Korea was battered by invasion and exploitation for centuries. Allied victory in 1945 brought an end to Japan’s colonial rule, but replaced it with something even worse: the country’s division between two dictatorships which, until South Korean democratisation 25 years ago, were evenly matched for ruthlessness and brutality. The civil war killed millions as it lurched along the narrow peninsula and ground to a stalemate in a temporary armistice. The Korean War, in other words, never formally ended – and the Korean People’s Army has never stopped fighting it.

The end of the Cold War increased the DPRK’s already acute sense of crisis and isolation. Its founding leader, Kim Il Sung, died in 1994, around the time that the economy collapsed and the famine began. Just across the barbed-wire and mine-encrusted demilitarised zone is the superbly trained and equipped South Korean army backed up by American soldiers and fighter jets. In Japan there are more US troops, and a fleet of aircraft carriers, with another army to hand on the Pacific island of Guam. This is the view from Pyongyang: to the north, the predatory irritation of the Chinese and, in every other direction, lethally armed and impatient hostility. Kim Jong Un is a great deal more scared of us than we are of him – and he has good reason to be.

In the end, writes Parry, the status quo remains the only option going forward, however bitter that may be–none of the players could stomach the alternative:

The sorry truth is that North Korea’s state of political undeath suits the most powerful players in the game better than any alternative. Until twenty years ago, the desire for national reunification was painfully felt by South Koreans; today, the political and social cost of integrating the strange, impoverished people in the North makes it positively undesirable. For Japan, the prospect of a unified peninsula is exciting in the short term (new markets, a check on South Korean competitiveness), but alarming for its end result: a union of 74 million people with distinctly funny feelings about Japan. For the United States, the prospect of another nation to rebuild, with Iraq and Afghanistan barely under control, is nauseating. For China, the removal of the North Korean buffer would force a drastic renegotiation of the strategic balance in the Asia-Pacific. Only one group would benefit unconditionally from change in the North: the North Korean people. But the rest of the world has always found more important things to be taken account of in North Korea than the lives of its inhabitants.

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This from the Korea Times:

The government has asked the authorities in Washington to Expedite their investigation into allegations of sexual harassment against presidential spokesman dismissed Chang Yoon-jung.

“We expressed our willingness to Cooperate in the ongoing investigation. We also requested a fast-track APPROACH, Korean Ambassador to the U.S. Choi Young- Jin told reporters there  said that diplomatic and judiciary channels were used to convey the message.

The “Chang Yoon-jung” name and questionable grammar is quoted directly from the KT website. Either Yoon Chang-joong changed his name and is preparing to slip into seclusion or the copy editor is eying the three-day weekend. And I can’t blame them for that, as I am doing the same.

Marmot’s Hole Bonus!

Speaking of posteriors, the Korea Times sidebar ads offer up some especially provocative imagery today.

Dunno if they are targeted spots intentionally designed to feature sexy buttocks (one clad in a schoolgirl uniform) alongside a guy having a heart attack, but hey, I’m not complaining.

Happy birthday, Buddha. If you could only see us now.

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For your viewing enjoyment, I’ve posted some shots of Busan’s Samgwangsa Temple I took Sunday evening.

The lanterns should be up until tomorrow evening.

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South Korean pro basketball player Lee Hyung-ho may have driven a little too hard to the goal of stopping teen smoking when he confronted several middle school-aged girls puffing it up on a public playground.

After the girls cursed at him for intruding, Lee grew angry and smacked them on the top of the head with the palm of his hand. Some parents of the girls involved filed charges and Lee was booked without detention for assault.

Korean netizens, and even one of the parents, have risen to Lee’s defense saying he should be praised for his actions.

One Twitter account read: “Good for you, Lee Hyun-ho. It’s awesome that you spoke out with courage.” Another said, “Considering how things are these days, a man like Lee should be given an award for his act.”

Though the kudos are rolling in, Lee says he could have handled the situation better.

“I was with my wife and 4-year-old daughter when I saw them,” Lee said. “It was a shock, but I understand that I should’ve addressed their misconduct in a better manner.”

I wasn’t there to witness the intensity of the smacks on the head, but yeah, a guy that big probably would’ve have been fine just telling them off.

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Prosecutors this morning launched raids on the offices of about 30 construction companies and subcontractors to search for evidence regarding corruption in the Four Rivers Project.

All the big names were represented: Hyundai, GS, Daewoo, Samsung, SK, POSCO, etc. In particular, prosecutors were looking for evidence of slush funds and bid collusion. A civic group accused one major construction company of putting together a 5 billion won slush fund on Sector 6 of the Hangang River alone by paying inflated construction costs to a subcontractor, with part of the inflated costs coming back to Hyundai in the form of cash.

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TV Chosun has video footage of North Koreans smuggling stuff across the border as security personnel pretended not to notice.

Prostitution is taking place pretty openly, too—they got footage of a soldier stopping a pimp, who shouts back, “Where’s your evidence?”

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And in today’s Japan Facepalm Moment

2013051500236_0

No idea if this was bewilderingly accidental, intentionally offensive, or just the Japanese government taking the piss.

Stephane Mot has more on this at his blog.

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