How do we know an additional financial shock will hit Korea in March 2009? Because Finance Minister Kang Man Soo says These aren’t the droids you’re looking for, the same tactic he used to such success in staving off the September 2008 financial crisis.
Considering the thought given for aging small towns in the Korean country-side, this article on a small American town asking for ideas from a local college was an interesting idea that cuts out much of the corrupted bureaucratic thinking that kills, stifles and wastes money.
Look, I’d love to see MBC take it up rear for its role in, as Brian puts it, the “Mad Bull Shit,” but this is a tad misconceived, no?
Still, if you’re a Korean-American, maybe there’s still time to join.
Reacting to the recent US State Department warning about the Sinchon/Hongdae area, the Kyunghyang Shinmun reports that foreigners really don’t find the area all that scary.
A reporter from the paper went out to the neighborhood Wednesday night and found it difficult to find the threat. Instead, he found a lot of foreigners hanging out with Koreans, and even foreign travelers going about alone.
Eric, a 26-year-old American English teacher whom the reporter met in front of Sinchon Station, said his foreign female friends call Korea a “safe place,” and that in Migukland, women can’t go out at night alone.
He also said that he’d lost his bag the night before, but he wasn’t worried. In fact, he’d lost his bag some five times in the clubs before, and it was returned every time.
A police official from Seodaemun Police Station said there are about three or four incidents a year involving foreigners in the Sinchon area, and most are just assault cases. He said this means crime targeting foreigners is almost nonexistent in the area.
The same goes for the Hongdae area. A shopkeeper who has run a store in the area for the last 20 years said the neighborhood is an entertainment area, and with a lot of young people, there were some minor arguments and fights, but there were no cases of people singling out foreigners for attack. Both foreigners and Koreans get drunk when they drink, she said.
A Mr. Lee (25), whom the reporter met in front of an area club, said if a foreign woman had been sexually assaulted, it would have become big news.
A police official in Hongdae said if rumors spread that the area was a high-crime neighborhood, what foreigner would go there, and the number of foreigners going to Hongdae was increasing even now.
Marmot’s Note: I hope Mike has his blood pressure pills around when he reads this.
Anyway, I find this news all very surprising, since it was my understanding — thanks to YTN — that the Hongdae area was a “lawless zone” only slightly safer than the Northwest Frontier province of Pakistan. Then again, the Kyunghyang family always had a soft spot for us, I guess.
A star baseball player was apparently charged with the crime of, well, sleeping with a woman after telling her you’d marry her but not really meaning it.
According to the Korean edition of Wikipedia, that really is a crime — it’s in Article 304 of the Korean criminal code, and violations will get you up to two years in prison or a fine up to 5 million won.
I’d hate to see the sentence you’d receive for sleeping with a woman after lying about the size of your dick.
Anyway, East Windup Chronicle has some ideas who the lying bastard might be. Funny stuff.
The KT has changed the piece where they pronounced in a photo caption that foreigners in Hannam-dong are “uppity”. I noted the original here. Of course, the lack of such a glaring coffee-out-the-nose statement only pushed me to read the rest, and it is interesting.
[A relator] said that Korean owners prefer lending to foreigners because monthly rents give them better returns than “chonse,” they rarely cause damage to homes and follow through with their contract terms.
The first line is peculiar in its implications. It would be ration for lessors to want the most for their property, which would explain the preference for renting rather than “chonse”. However must lessees, as consumers, want to pay less. Since they outweigh the lessors in numbers (a fact driven from consistently higher land prices), we end up with more “chonse” leases. The implication of this is opposite what every Korean realtor has expected me to believe, foreigners pay the same in rents as Koreans do.
The second and third are their implications about Korean tenants. That is to say the realtors opinion is that Korean tenants tend to damage their rented premises, and break their leases. While the former I will not comment on, the later is interesting. It reminds me of the wise observation made here that a contract is not a contract, unless of course it helps you.
Hyundai and VW are apparently involved in some sort of ad war in Austria.
I have no idea what the ads are supposed to mean.
(HT to reader)
PS: I promise to get back to regular blogging soon. Just finishing up a project.
There is a mountain-oriented event this coming Sunday that a few of you might possibly be interested in:
Some friends have taken to celebrating the United Nations International Mountain Day (officially Dec 11th) with a little event every year, and this year we’re doing so on this coming Sunday the 7th. There will be some interesting speakers on ecological changes and such, showing of the “Mountains” video from the BBC’s “Planet Earth” series, and even a salpuri dance. I’ll be conducting a small Sanshin-je ceremony to kick things off in the right ’spirit’. It’s hosted by the Korean Mountain Preservation League, with Gangbuk-gu District Office, assisted by others.
After the 4 hours of events are finished we will all enjoy food and drinks at the fifth floor cafe, with a beautiful view of all those mountains. It should be a very nice time… If interested, click on the KMPL link above to get the full details, and also see response #1. Let me know if you have any questions.
I’ve been a tad busy this week, so I haven’t been able to post much, but this needs to be noted:
At the same time, the government has been waging an all-out war against the foreign media, actively responding to critical reports by the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal and others that it previously ignored.
It has issued a number of press releases refuting media reports, that it claimed distorted the facts of the world’s 13th largest economy, and exaggerated the difficulties facing Korea in the wake of the global credit crunch and economic slowdown.
Officials from the National Intelligence Service are said to have held a meeting with the correspondent of the Financial Times here in October at the height of the government’s war against foreign media.
Bringing the spooks to talk with foreign correspondents? Sheesh, who the hell at Cheong Wa Dae thought that was a good decision?
The Chosun Ilbo reports on the mention of Hongdae and Shinchon in a section on safety and security on the Republic of Korea information page at the US State Department travel website:
U.S. citizens and their families, especially young adults, are advised to exercise prudence and caution when visiting the Hongdae and Sinchon areas of Seoul. These areas, where many night clubs are located, have occasionally been the sites of bar or street fights and harassment involving Westerners.
The Chosun Ilbo article details without commentary other information from the crime and traffic safety sections on the State Department’s Republic of Korea page.
Yesterday, near the DMZ, it was a beautiful day for flying balloons — especially propaganda filled balloons — and Park Sang Hak, a North Korean defector and leader of the balloon brigade, was there to take advantage of it. Unfortunately there was also a group of anti-propaganda-balloonists who didn’t appreciate Park’s efforts.
“A balloon-driven rumble broke out. Scores of police struggled to keep it from turning into a full-blown riot. Before it was over, Park kicked one of the counter-protesters squarely in the head — a blow that sounded like a bat whacking a hardball. He spat on several others who were trying to rip apart bags of leaflets. He pulled a tear-gas revolver from his jacket, and fired it into the air before police grabbed it away from him.”
Park managed to get one balloon aloft, but the other balloons were ripped to shreds spilling their thousands of valuable leaflets all over the ground. These leaflets are not only valuable because they inform the average North Korean of Kim Jong-il’s sexual depravities and expensive taste in wines — but they also make the lucky finder richer.
“Park says he has sent nearly 2 million anti-Kim leaflets north by balloon. Since April, he says, each of the water-proof leaflets borne by his balloons is attached to a U.S. dollar bill.” According to Park: “Because of my balloons, the North Koreans are rounding up anyone with one dollar.”
You can read the rest of the Washington Post article here.
It is that time again folks.
Yep, time to share my latest piece over at the KT. This one is on the ongoing conflicts with the Gaeseong Industrial Complex.
One bit:
Did the “running dogs” of South Korean business really think that they would do any better? Considering North Korea’s record with foreign investors, it is hardly a shock it would not care how its actions would affect the South Korean businesses that have invested in the Gaeseong complex.
(Yes, South Koreans are “foreign investors” in North Korea.)
Michael Breen has a good piece on Gaeseong in the KT that covers some of the same ground.
Despite having one of the highest rates of spending per student among large school systems in the United States, the Washington D.C. public school system (how can I put it gently?) sucks.
The city’s relatively new (appointed last year) chancellor, Korean-American Michelle Rhee, is trying to change that.
Her appointment last year raised some eyebrows:
Her appointment stunned the city. Rhee, then 37, had no experience running a school, let alone a district with 46,000 students that ranks last in math among 11 urban school systems. When [Mayor Adrian] Fenty called her, she was running a nonprofit called the New Teacher Project, which helps schools recruit good teachers. Most problematic of all, Rhee is not from Washington. She is from Ohio, and she is Korean American in a majority-African-American city. “I was,” she says now, “the worst pick on the face of the earth.”
Her biggest reform so far is the ongoing process of removing ineffective teachers and administrators from the system, that has naturally gotten her off of the Christmas card list of the teacher’s union, some city officials and at least one blogger.
Perhaps someone in the ancestral homeland would like to hire her to clean things up in hagwonland.
I came back this evening after I ran into Professor Lee In-ho, former Korean ambassador to Finland and Russia and lecturer, whose lecture “Rewriting Korean History” explained just how South Korea’s flawed political and educational systems have led to the anti-Americanism in South Korea and the glorification of the North Korean state by South Korean teachers and students.
Dr. Lee, however, stated tonight that she now realizes that the situation is much worse than she originally described in her lecture and, sure enough, when I come home and look at the Joongang-Ilbo, one sees the KTEWU (Korea Teachers and Educational Workers Union) at work again, protesting lectures given at Seoul High Schools because their version of Korean history is not presented.
Naturally, the KTEWU mentioned the Japanese as a pretext for protesting.
If New York’s got yellow cabs, and London black cabs, Seoul will have orange cabs from next year.
Or so a hearing on “Seoul Taxi Design” held at the Seoul City Hall annex yesterday decided.
Actually, one of the professors who participated said it wouldn’t be orange, per se, but rather a more traditionally Korean version thereof.
I kinda like it, actually.
The interview of the very self-sacrificing founder of the anti-English Spectrum cafe I linked to last week has been translated for your reading enjoyment, thanks to Korea Beat.
Here’s just a sample:
But it has not been easy for him to work his office job and this one, as he has for over four years. To track down the locations of foreign teachers using drugs he spent 150 days in bitterly cold weather, outworking the police, not going home. Many times he has asked schools to fire foreign teachers who make a hobby out of having sex at knifepoint, tracked down foreign lecturers who bring venereal disease, and warned security guards and hagwon authorities about kidnappers.
Read the rest on your own.
Here’s a shocker — according to a poll conducted at the behest of the Northeast Asia History Foundation, Koreans viewed China and Japan much more negatively than Chinese and Japanese viewed Korea.
59.8% of Koreans believed Sino-Korean relations were poor, a major deterioration from 34.5% in 2007. This compares with 16.4% of Chinese who view the bilateral relationship as poor, up from 6.6% in 2007.
As you’d might imagine, 76.8% of Koreans viewed the Korea-Japan relationship as bad, up from 67.7% in 2007. 50.4% of Japanese, meanwhile, held a similar view of bilateral ties, down from 54.8% in 2007 (read: no more Roh Moo-hyun).
However, Japanese took a decidedly negative view of Sino-Japanese ties, with 75.8% of Japanese saying the bilateral relationship was not good, up from 66% in 2007. Chinese, on the other hand, were significantly more optimistic, with only 37.4% saying Sino-Japanese ties were bad, down greatly from 65.2% in 2007.
What’s even more interesting is that the younger the respondent, the more negative he tended to answer. In Korea, 66.7% of those in their 20s said the Sino-Korean relations hip was bad, compared to 53.7% in their 40s and 53.6% in their 50s and above. The same phenomenon was present in Japan and China. The Northeast Asia Foundation believes this reflects the ethnic nationalism of young netizens and youth insecurities about unemployment.
The survey, conducted by pollsters World Research, was conducted on 500 people each in Seoul, Tokyo and Beijing between Nov 6 and 10.
The Chosun Ilbo added some more details:
Asked about history-related issues that should be resolved most urgently, 85 percent of Korean respondents cited the Dokdo islets. Some 50 percent of Chinese respondents and 55.4 percent of Japanese respondents cited the distortion of facts in history textbooks.
Among Koreans, 96 percent were keenly aware of the Dokdo issue, up from 92.7 percent in 2007. But in Japan interest in the matter is dropping, from 75.2 percent in 2007 to 67.8 percent this year.
Some 63.6 percent of Japanese respondents approved of their prime minister’s visit to the militarist Yasukuni Shrine, up from 48 percent the previous year. But more had been persuaded that the body of water between Korea and Japan should be referred to as both the East Sea and the Sea of Japan, up from 17 percent to 25.6 percent.
I’m surprised awareness of the Dokdo issue in Japan was even that high.
In the Yonhap piece, Yonsei professor Baik Young-seo (who is also cited in the Chosun piece) said the results were influenced by things like harmful Chinese food imports, tensions around the Olympics and hate. Korea’s relatively negative view of its relations with its neighbors reflects a sense of historical victimization, he said, but it could lead to Korea responding to international issues in an emotional way.
No shit?
Korea News via Google