The commentary about Hong Kong cops and their rule of law in context of the violent Korean demonstrators arrested in Hong Kong [h/t The Marmot's Hole and SimonWorld] made me thinkthe following…

I regret that you took my comment so personally. I wasn’t assuming that you had an agenda in asking the question. On the other hand, as I have read some of your previous posts, you have been pretty vociferous in exchanges with me and others about taking to task anyone who has the temerity even to suggest that there were any positive effects of the Japanese colonization of Korea, [even if (as I believe) such can't possibly justify the Japanese takeover], and defending, explicitly or implicity, those apologists for Korea who try to pass the buck for a lot of homegrown nonsense to the Japanese. So I guess I was a little concerned from the way you phrased the question that you were seeing the issue through a distorting lense. If, as your subsequent remark indicates, you are willing to consider the probability that the Japanese refashioning of the traditional Korean legal system was a step forward, albeit a flawed one, I’m delighted. Indeed, I think that a convincing case can be made that, like the continuation of the Japanese-inspired colonial era economic system in post-war Korea, with Korean managers silling in for Japanese, “the vestiges of colonial-era judicial administration were kept around because they were either an improvement over the past”. More to the point in the current discussion, though, in both cases, such systems also were more continuous and congruent with pre-colonial patterns of Korean-style authoritarian socio-political organization and hence have been more persistently difficult to change.

My question wasn’t loaded: you claimed to be knowledgeable about this and I was asking your opinion out of genuine curiosity. No agenda whatsoever.

I asked about “pre-colonial carry-overs” because the colonial period could logically be seen as an end of the “previous centuries of authoritarianism” that you cited. Again, no agenda in mind whatsoever (in fact, if I were in proper academic mode, I could probably make a case that the vestiges of colonial-era judicial administration were kept around because they were either an improvement over the past or they were seen as an improvement).

So now… ah, fuck it. I appreciate that you took the time to write a lengthy couple of responses to my question, and I will read them later. But I pretty much stopped at the end of your sentence above because I’m too busy and too stressed out over a computer problem right now to have to sift through the baggage of another high-tension thread which I fear your statement above indicates.

So for now I’ll just say that I resent your assumption that me just mentioning the word “colonial” makes what I write “loaded” with anti-Japanese implications. With all due respect, maybe it’s you who needs to be more cautious about what it is you infer, at least in this case.

My apologies for filing the last dispatch in triplicate. Blame it on the increasingly convoluted maze one must negotiate to post comments now, and the snail like pace of my connection today.

Re the latter of your questions, a creditable start has been made with the efforts to introduce a jury system and to create some institutional checks and balances within the the justice system by bifurcating the investigative and prosecutorial functions and assigning the former to the police - a cause in favor of which Weisbart has written. (On the other hand, the other current intitiative to put citizens on judicial panels is a really bad idea.) Much more needs to be done along these lines, but the technical details are way beyond the remit of this forum.

Re the former, let me start by noting how loaded your question is; you imply that the defects of the Korean legal system are attributable to the Japanese occupation. The Japanese colonial legacy is in this, like most things, mixed. It was unquestionably authoritarian, but at the same time it served to introduce modern (and Western) legal (and political) concepts to Korea in a systematic way. The Meiji constitution and legal system generally were modeled on the late 19th century German version of the European civil code system. The fact that it was subverted and used by the militarists for their own purposes - both in Korea and Japan itself - is mostly besides the point, except as an illustration of the futility or at least frequently counterproductive effect in the short run of attempts to impose rather abstract ideologies in a top-down fashion - particularly in cultures such as Japan’s and to an even greater extent Korea’s where the structure of the traditional society was strikingly and oppressdively authoritarian and more or less without intermediate autonomous loci of political legitimacy, authority and power. In other words, Korean authoritarianism long-predated the Japanese colonial period, and arguably was more pervasive than the contemporary Japanese version because of the relatively greater lack of sources of intermediate political power. The one great thing they had in common was a broadly “legalist” conception of the function of law and legal institutions as instruments by which the state (and those who controlled it) enforced its and their will on the populace more or less without regard to the consent of the governed. Albeit generally somewhat attentuated, and with some genuine exceptions and a lot of phoniness among many exceptions manque on the Korean left) that I submit is still the prevailing ethos of the law and the legal profession in Korea.

HongKong police should have beat the crap out of Koreans!

Anyway, Koreans protest exactly the way Kimbob described, and it’s not going to end anytime soon unless the gov’t imposes the rule of law in Korea in an open and consistent manner, e.g. punishing protestors for attacking police just as police are punished for alleged abuse of protestors. There’s little hope of that occuring while Roh is in office; hopefully the next president will be less shortsighted.

Any specifics on pre-colonial carry-overs that make the system “profoundly anti-democratic”? Any specifics on how to fix them?

I don’t agree that the “justice system … is the last bastion of dictatorship here on the peninsula.” The problem is deeper and worse. The Korean legal system is a complex of institutions that taken as a whole is wholly deficient for a genuinely democratic society and, while some of its most mis-shapen limbs were made that way by the dictators, the fundamental character of Korean legal institutions was formed by previous centuries of authoritarianism that reified a theory of law and the status of those who practice and enforce it (at the prosecutorial level) that is profoundly anti-democratic. Having more than a passing interest in these matters, I have read the previous articles of yours to which you refer with interest and applaud your interest in promoting change. Success, though, will require a sharper scalpel and a better hand to wield it than that of the Great Pretender and his Roh-Nothings. Their purpose seems only to get the hands on the legal levers to work their own oppressive ends.

The motto in Korea is that if you demonstrate peacefully, nobody will pay attention to you. But if you are loud and violent, then you are going to earn attention. Well I say it’s about time to change that perception to ‘if you become loud and violent, then all you’re going to get earn is jail time, not attention’.