Check out Adam Greenfield’s take on his visit to the Land of the Morning Calm — it’s a good one.
(Hat tip to Kirk, who apparently has the time to find good stuff, despite being inundated with crap from VANK)
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8 Comments
(CORRECTING TYPOS) He might have noticed, for example, that there are few foreign cars of any kind on the roads and few foreign consumer goods on the shelves of stores.
Could those of you able to reach them please tell the idiots at VANK that each time they spam potential sympathizers, the recipients become more and more pro-China in the dispute over Koguryo?
That writer is capable of a good turn of phrase. But he puts the lack of Japanese goods down to pain and suffering from the past, when there is a more accurate and simpler answer: modern Korean protectionism. He might have notice, for example, that here a few foreign cars of any kind on the roads and few foreign consumer goods on the shelves of stores.
And the thing to remember with the lack of Japanese consumer goods is the abundance of
Japanese technology and parts (don’t ask me for figures), so the more Korean-made gadgets are
exported the more Korea needs to import from Japan. Isn’t Korea’s trade balance with Japan
continuously in the red?
“But he puts the lack of Japanese goods down to pain and suffering from the past, when there is a more accurate and simpler answer”
slim, no he doesn’t. He clearly says that this is at a crude level of approximation, that there are other causes. Try reading it again, a little more carefully. Plus his description of New York City is dead accurate.
adam is obviously intelligent, yet he links favorably Conor and kimsoft…
what’s up with that?
Lots of received notions and superficiality in Mr. Cool’s anal-ysis. Anybody who writes “Phil Dick would have understood” is a twat. Saw a bio of him that says he wrote “a paper called a minimal compact about open source constitutions for nation-state sized governance.” Too clever by half.
Read my observation carefully, Tom. With all due respect, he applies the “crude level” disclaimer to the Japanese colonial period and then goes on to ascribe the Japanese-brand-free environment to the mix of past sufferings: a collective psychological non-tariff barrier. I don’t expect insightful political economic analysis in an impressionistic travel piece, but I couldn’t let that facile oversimplication stand. That said, Greenfield is a nice stylist, if a touch pretentious.