OK, Kim Heung-sook’s Korea Times column “Once There Was Japan…” was hella goofy, but man…
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Attack of the Angry White Man
This entry was written by Robert Koehler, posted on October 11, 2006 at 11:14 am, filed under Korean Media, Stupid Foreigner Tricks. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.
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10 Comments
Sounds like Ben Griffin is on the verge of the epiphany.
well, at least the guy (mr. kim) admitted he is a mediocre person.
I sure hope Mr. Griffin isn’t an English teacher. Given the incoherence of his rant, I’m going to guess that Mr. Griffin rattled this one off at about 3 a.m. following a heavy night of drinking. If Mr. Kim wants to allegorize his racism against Japan, that’s his problem, but damn, the least the Times could have done was wait for a reasonably well-written rebuttal rather than just printing the first drunken scrawling to cross the editorial desk. Oh well.
Where’s the irony, Mr Griffin? You’re soaking in it. I think it’s cute how he calls the Times a ’serious newspaper’, but I suppose that’s another issue.
I wasn’t very pleased with the penmanship of both writers. However, Mr. Griffin’s claim that the Great Kanto Earthquake and Japanese Impirialism is not connected is not entirely true. At the time of earthquake many Japanese went on a witchhunt for Koreans living in Japan. People believed that these Koreans had poisoned wells and were loiting, however, more stocking was the belief that Koreans were somehow resposible for the earthquake. People today may feel this logic is absurd but it is a fact that some Japanese at the time of the earthquake held this belief. Perhaps Mr. Kim was referring to this event when he was writing about the earthquake.
http://www.kimsoft.com/2003/ka.....ssacre.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.....earthquake
I keep thinking of Lankov’s excellent piece on the 300 years of peace enjoyed by Korea, while Europe (especially Germany) suffered from such cataclysms as the 30 Years War, not to mention Napoleon. The fact that these people continue to hold grudges will continue to hold them back.
If anything, our future “Mario” would be saying there once was a country called Korea, just like there once was a country called Tibet. “Korea was a divided country, with one side prosperous, the other side a poor, wacked-out personality cult. But then the prosperous side got too proud, kicked out its protector the United States, and spurned its natural ally Japan, which was located conveniently across the body of water we now call the ‘South Siberian Sea,’ because of a petty dispute over two rocks we now call ‘Corea’s Folly.’ When the wacky side had its inevitable collapse, China filled the power vacuum, having set the stage by historiographical means, and eventually made the entire peninsula a province, the prosperous side having no allies to check the red hordes a second time. Its final attempts to secure help went for nought as it got held up trying to negotiate a more favorable SOFA agreement.”
As for Griffin, it’s the usual unfocused rant you see in the local newspaper back home.
It’s goofy. But I kinda like it. When in Rome, do as the Romans; when in Korea, abandon logical argumentation as the Koreans do.
I guess Griffin is white? Is he the angry white dude?
I think I read this article on Monday morning after the long Chuseok week. It seems to me that the Times just printed the first thing the editors found in their inbox. It was that piece of garbage that cheered me up and made for a glorious Monday at work.
As for the third comment by Zonath: “Given the incoherence of his rant, I’m going to guess that Mr. Griffin rattled this one off at about 3 a.m. following a heavy night of drinking.”
My mom always told me, never drink and write..there’s a group in Canada called MADW. Mothers Against Drunk Writing. I have a red ribbon tied around my pens and keyboard.
And Mr Griffin was brave enough to sign his name!