That being said, I enjoy driving in Korea and don’t find it too difficult at all (figuring out directions to someplace is another story) and as lirelou says, other places are much worse. China’s roads still have less cars than Korea, but are a nightmare and it’s even worse elsewhere.

I’ve been riding a motorbike here for more than 3 years. I’ve had my share of near-accidents, and for certain Korean drivers are alot worse, on average, than those in the states or Australia or Japan. But go anywhere in south-asia or China for worse, and for truly inspired dose of recklessness on the road, try driving through Italy sometime. Nowhere touches Naples for dangerous drivers IMHO.

Keep in mind Korea actually has pedestrians. Where outside of cities like New York, most Americans get in their cars to drive 200 meters. Many sprawling cities in the US don’t even bother with crosswalks, and motorists won’t stop for people at them anyway (crosswalks are just lines painted on the roads after all!). Growing up in sprawling Virginia city, crossing the street was playing frogger.

wedge, #48, perfect example of what I was referring to in #28, you seem to be driving just as badly as everyone else here, and blaming it on them.

Madlew, #47, I’m sure there is some states that do that, after all there are fifty and the driving laws are all different, but for that matter my Korean wife was absolutely shocked last time she saw vehicles rushing through a crosswalk with pedestrians in it, and where do you suppose that was? Gate 52 Yongsan. All three were “foreigners”. Think about that, why would Koreans be shocked about seeing that when it happens all the time here? The answer: It doesn’t, only we think it does because foreigners perpetually bitch among themselves about it until it become reality, then foreigners use it as an excuse to drive badly themselves where other foreigners see this and think “see there it is!” Self licking ice-cream cone.

Yes Korea used to be that bad, a long time ago, that when all this got started (something had to start the cycle). Especially if you talk to Koreans who left here 20 years ago and come back, you’ll find the difference is night and day.

# 44 and all the rest: all of this stuff I see State-side, and per capita, I see less of it here.

BTW: A Korean slang term for the bus lane on the 경부 is “SOFA-lane”, because they see US service members driving in them all the time seemingly with impunity, while the Koreans who try it suffer a different fate in the form of a mailed fine to their home address. In reality its the same, but I’m just showing you guys, the perception on the other side is a mirror image of what yours is… I hope it will cause some of you to realize theres a middle ground.

Here’s a good link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_O2_(Y-DNA)

Anyhow, it really doesn’t matter that much… The gene pool of the human race is so muddy that it’s more or less pointless to classify oneself as 25% anything, since to do so relies on quite a few (probably fallacious) assumptions. I was simply pointing out that it’s fairly paradoxical to claim that the Japanese are 25% ‘Korean’ without also accepting that Koreans are 25% ‘Japanese.’

Your post seems to be misrepresenting the biology. Do you understand what genetic researchers look for when they determine this stuff? I’m no biologist, but as I recall they look for markers from paternal lineage (Y chromosome) or the maternal (mitochondrial DNA). These markers are not like alleles for hair color that can be present grandchildren at 25% from an individual grandparent or something. They are there if you’re descended from a line or they are not if you’re not from that lineage. Either/or.

If Japan is said to be X% “Korean”, the reasoning here is demographic rather than ideographic. Markers that are prevalent in one country has an expression of a certain number of individuals tested in another country and show at a rate of low X%. From this logic, it wouldn’t follow that Korea would also have markers at X%. The point of calling such markers Korean in the first place is that those markers are present at some percentage > X%.

I’ve seen many conflicting and various studies dones in this regard. Lots of them group Koreans and Japanese together. Others show Japan related to Tibetans. It’s problematized because, I don’t think, these studies are systematic and comprise a large enough base samples of subjects for results to be meaningful.

The fact is, Korean and Japanese people share alot of common genes, mainly from stone-age peoples migrating from the north and west down the Korean peninsular and onto the Japanese archipeligo. To claim that one side “came” from the other is naricistic garbage (and yet I hear it all the time). Peoples from outside the area left their genetic footprint on both lands.

Japanese people come from a mixture of the Yayoi people and the Jomon people. The jomon people were on the islands up to 30,000 years ago (actually, at the time some suggest there was a landbridge to Japan), and are not related closely to Koreans. Where they came from is anyone’s guess. The yayoi emigrated from the mainland, and Koreans also share some of their genetic makeup from this group.

Both groups, in the beggining, came from elsewhere and both groups recieved genetic makeup from elsewhere, and from each other, over the millenia. Naturally, the Japanese recieved less new DNA since anyone wishing to pass it on had to first sprinkle it on the Korean peninsular. A good example: the Mongol invaders, who made Korea a dependency. I don’t imagine they were chaste during this time, but they never made it to Japan.

Wangkon936, perhaps this was what the deluded couple you “shut down without embarrassing too much” were on about.