The Marmot’s Hole

And from the Ministry of Complete Tabloid Crap, we have this tale — the Ilgan Sports reports that on Sunday’s episode of KBS’s talk show “The Beauties’ Chatterbox,” Japanese college student Sagawa Junko caused a stir by claiming that one of her Korean university professors offered to give her a good grade in return for sex.

During the episode, in which the ladies were discussing incidents of sexual harassment they’d experienced in Korea, Junko said that in her freshman year, she’d missed several classes in one of her courses. She then received a call from the professor of the class, who told her that Japanese women are better in the sack then Korean women easier than Korean women, and that if she slept with him, he wouldn’t penalize her for her missed classes. Or so she claimed.

Viewers were shocked.

She followed up her admission by claiming that said professor had propositioned other foreign students from Asia, including another Japanese student, in a similar fashion.

According to the Ilgan Sports, netizens flooded the bulletin board of her Korean university with angry posts, although a few apparently objected to Junko making such a confession on TV. The PD of the show, however, defended the program’s decision to air the admission. For what it’s worth, I could see how it might have been a difficult call — that’s the kind of accusation that can destroy a person’s life.

Meanwhile, in a secret poll taken of the 16 foreign women who appeared on Sunday’s show, 12 said they’d been sexually harassed in Korea.

In an exclusive interview with the Ilgan Sports, Junko said she has no regrets about making her admission on TV, and said her school was investigating the professor in question.

Interestingly enough, another girl who appears on the show, Chinese student Shang Fang, told the Ilgan Sports in a telephone interview that she’d been harassed by the same professor.

Not that we’re looking for intellectually enriching content from any of this, but if you read Korean, the Ilgan Sports’ Song Won-seop actually made the effort to turn this incident into a fairly thoughtful column.

UPDATE: Junko’s school told Star News that the accused individual was not a professor, but a lecturer teaching at the university’s language school on a temporary basis.

UPDATE 2: Star News also notes that Sunday’s program has become a “hot potato” in Netizenland. Some felt ashamed about the girls’ experiences, while at least one noted that the show itself amounts to sexual harassment.

UPDATE 3: The Chosun Ilbo reports that the instructor at Junko’s school — the Korean language institute of Hanguk University of Foreign Studies — has turned in his resignation. The school also noted, however, that Junko said the instructor approached her about grades, but the Korean language institute doesn’t give grades, so her story wasn’t entirely convincing, either.