In front of the Japanese embassy yesterday, members of the far-right HID (Headquarters Intelligence Detachment) Patriotic Youth Association hold a protest I can appreciate—dog heads, affixed with the names of Koreans who collaborated with the Japanese during the colonial era.
They apparently acquired the heads from a nearby restaurant.
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I mean seriously. The Korean must find a better way to express themself.Protesting? OK! But with heads of Dog? What would the international community think if the Japanese will protesting using whale heads?
Someone needs to tell them that they shouldn’t play with their food.
Did that whet your appetite Marmot?
Next time they should have Bee Man, the flag eater and the dog heads, maybe throw in a finger chopper or stomach stabber, and have the KNTO sponsor it. Could be a big tourist attraction.
Any of these guys could become famous pro-wrestlers. I want to see them in the ring!
I lost all interest in Korea’s bitching about what Japan did 60 years ago when I realized that South Koreans have no interest in the fact that Chinese and North Korean policies today, though they are something less than organized impressment of women into sexual slavery, are having a comparable effect on anywhere between 25,000 and 100,000 North Korean women. Almost no one in South Korea cares.
I reserve exceptions for the actual victims of documented Japanese atrocities. I sympathize with them. I dismiss everyone else as full of it.
The fact that Japan has at least transformed itself into a responsible, democratic, law-abiding nation — and that China and North Korea have not — seems more relevant to me than it apparently does to most South Koreans.
Still, the dog heads win extra points for being an extraordinarily novel new way of attracting the wrong kind of attention.
Sure, Canada has Cirque du Soleil, but these freaks put on a better show.
Like how? Trying to disembowel yourself while torching a lawmaker’s home? Firebombing Chinese banks? Harassing students attending the Japanese School?
Cirque du Soleil is in Seoul until June, BTW. Just in case readers didn’t know…
Robert these are not protests. These are acts of crime. Not legal protests.
That’s a protest I can dig. So far off the normal Korean Slash/Burn.
“The Korean must find a better way to express themself” Well, Korea is a democracy, although you wouldn’t know it from downtown Seoul, where it looks like martial law with police buses lined up and protests every day. Now, being a democracy, there are other ways to effect change like petition drives for referendums, voting, etc., but Koreans love their street theater.
I think my previous post was somewhat confusing.I meant
” Trying to disembowel yourself while torching a lawmaker’s home? Firebombing Chinese banks? Harassing students attending the Japanese School?”
that these are not legal protests. These are crimes. It should be differentiated from legal protests.
Whoever brought Cirque du Soleil will lose big money too; the Canadians want too much money for all the personnel they bring. The promoter should try “Cirque du tete des Chien” instead.
Aren’t these guys a bit old to be in a Patriotic Youth Association?
Robert, Please convey my thanks to your aggregator for crediting me with some of your fine posts.
That is a bit odd. I wonder why it’s doing that…
“Cirque du tete des Chien”:) I had to paws when I read that and now I’ll be dogged by it all day.
Sorry.
Frog in the well idiots. All this will do is make South Korea look real bad as country of insane people, and put more eggs in Japan’s basket.
cm: You have to look at it positively—at least they’re not letting the dog heads go to waste!
michael, all your comments have me rolling in laughter!
Thanks Jodi…stuck in the office on a rainy Friday, might as well have some fun….
“HID (Headquarters Intelligence Detachment) Patriotic Youth Association”
Any relationship to Yi Pom Sok’s Korean National Youth, a fascist youth organization that was inspired by the Hitler-Jugend and the Kuomintang Blue Shirts?
PS. Don’t tell these guys, but that whole kukjae thing was borrowed from the Japanese (kokotai) who borrowed it from the German (volkische).
““Cirque du tete des Chien”:) I had to paws when I read that and now I’ll be dogged by it all day.”
Actually, it would be ‘Le Cirque des têtes de chiens’.
All that “Healthy” dog-head soup going to waste. What a shame.
Hey,
They have a dog in the fight.
“….members of the far-right HID (Headquarters Intelligence Detachment) Patriotic Youth Association hold a protest….dog heads, affixed with the names of Koreans who collaborated with the Japanese during the colonial era.”
I was going to ask why thinking that collaborators are dogs doesn’t make the HID “far left”, but then I clicked on the HID link. Didn’t expect to be able to read the Korean, but I was interested to see the picture showing the mass demonstration with the giant flags of US and ROK together. So — I guess that’s what makes the HID “far right”(?)
Gets pretty confusing, trying to keep track of Korean internal politics without a scorecard. And how about the Taft-Katsure agreement? Does the HID see fit to provide Theodore Roosevelt and his Secretary of War William Howard Taft with their own labeled heads?
“Frog in the well idiots. All this will do is make South Korea look real bad as country of insane people, and put more eggs in Japan’s basket.”
Sad, but true. Same with things like chopping off fingers. Regardless of the issue, or who may be in the right, these are the images that stick with people.
Anyway, I’ve always had the impression that protests here are more about “me” - the protesters - than actually trying to win over the audience.
Don’t stick them on the same level as the rest of Korean protestors. They’re a whole different breed all together. Most of the HID guys suffer from mental illnesses due to their harsh training (a level of training brutality that even makes me cringe). So they’re probably not all together in their head.
I’ve seen some of their h2h combat demos. They’re really tough guys.
http://www.fas.org/irp/world/rok/hid.htm
“Headquarters Intelligence Detachment: “The military unit from hell”"
“Unsurprisingly, attempts at self-mutilation or suicide were made. Mr.
Kim remembers how another mate, Min Byung-jin, pierced his own eye with a
nail when he could no longer bear the conditions. And in the early days a
senior agent told him about a trainee who jumped off a 150-meter cliff
during a mountain march — according to the story, as he jumped, he cried
out: “Bastards, live well! I’m going!” As it turns out, the story has
been confirmed; the man was named Lee Hyo-jong, and the suicide took
place in May 1973.”
“If you survived the training, dangerous missions awaited you. Mr. Kim
recalls a mission that took place inside the Demilitarized Zone and near
the Imjin River in April 1984, when a team member, Jang Young-gook, got
blown up by a mine.”
“”With my own hands I had to clean up areas that were plastered
with the beating victims’ flesh and blood,”"
“He says his head would feel like bubble gum after he took a beating: “Your scalp
is so soft that you can stick your finger in and make a dent. Your hair
just falls out.”"
“Indeed, Mr. Jang and Mr. Jung haven’t fared well since leaving the
army unit. Both have trouble dealing with people, and bounce from job to
job, many of them menial labor. Mr. Jang is married, Mr. Jung is not.
“The problem is that we were made to forget everything that has meaning
in society,” Mr. Jang explains. “We were made to be beasts ready to bite
anyone. There is no law for us. If we don’t like something we use our
fists first.”"
They’ve gone through a lot, and there wasn’t any program for that to readjust to normal society.
Oh, btw, I almost this is probably they don’t like guys (from the previous link):
“There was one group on the base treated well: the canines. “The drill
instructors’ dogs were given food that was supposed to be ours,” Mr. Jung
says. “The superiors didn’t even inform me when my father died; but when
a dog died we had to conduct a ceremony and bow in front of a shrine to
it.” In fact, as a team leader, Mr. Jang kept a dog. Once he tied one of
his trainees to a dog’s house for a week because the hungry man had taken some of the dog’s food.”
idiots! that was 60 years ago.
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