UPDATE 8
Email from Don Kirk:
First, everybody should be grateful for this interlude. The speech was so boring I had to keep from nodding off, and the Q&A was worse. Then Evan asked his question, and the minister gave quite a coherent and comprehensible reply. At which point, having shaken myself awake, I asked simply whether the biz people who spend most of the dough on the room salons were able to write off the expenses. The minister calmly explained there was a limit to how much they could write off. Fair enough. I did not rpt NOT “insist,” as the Korea Times reported, “the government should bar companies from deducting such expenses from their taxable income.” To be truthful, I don’t think the government SHOULD bar all such expenses. Hell, a lot of business gets done that way. I was just wondering what was the rule. The question was asked more out of idle curiosity than anything else. (I didn’t write a story on the subject and don’t plan to.)
Trust this response will greatly enlighten the multitudes before they turn to something a lot more interesting.
UPDATE 7
Well, at least we know what the 입에 담지 못할 욕설 was now. Probably not the wisest thing to say to a high-ranking government official.
UPDATE 6
This basically how I feel about the whole mess. To wit, it’s not the spat between Mr. Ramstad and the Ministry that’s the problem.
UPDATE 5
UPDATE 4
Ministry of Finance spokesperson Kim Young-min has dropped in to present his side of the story here.
UPDATE 3
I never throught I’d see Pressian go to bat for the WSJ, or sure enough, they didn’t, but their piece on this is interesting none the less.
UPDATE 2
Oh, just in case you didn’t see it, one of the reporters in question, the WSJ’s Evan Ramstad, puts the situation into some context here.
UPDATE
The fun continues!
Yonhap reports that the Ministry of Strategy and Finance has cut the WSJ’s Evan Ramstad off from its information service.
The ministry will, however, continue its regular meetings with foreign journalists and work to broaden their understanding of the Korean economy and culture.
You can stop snickering now.
Kim Yeong-min, a ministry spokesman for foreign journalists, told Yonhap that Finance Minister Yoon Jeung-hyun had a tough time yesterday thanks to senseless question from the WSJ correspondent, but the ministry plans to continue with its meetings with foreign journalists regardless.
Kim said, however, that a Korean journalist wouldn’t ask a foreign minister about room salons, host bars or “entertainment.” He said if the journalist in question were simply ignorant, they would work to help him understand things by strengthening their contact with him, but if he spoke in malice, the problem was serious.
Yonhap retold yesterday’s incident, but with an added twist — according to the news service, after the meeting, a ministry spokesperson told Mr. Ramstad that his question was an inappropriate one for a minister, to which the WSJ reporter responded with an obscenity.
Yonhap says this isn’t Mr. Ramstad’s first offense — in August of last year, he apparently wrote the ministry’s foreign correspondent spokesperson an apology letter for cursing at him. Having cursed again, the ministry think its needs to take measures against him.
Accordingly, the ministry plans to send letters of protest regarding Mr. Ramstad’s swearing and inappropriate questions to the SFCC and WSJ headquarters. It has also decided to stop sending Mr. Ramstad press releases. Yonhap says Mr. Ramstad sent a brief letter of apology to the ministry on Tuesday.
Spokesman Kim said that while fundamentally, the ministry will try to provide foreign correspondents with coverage support coming close to that it provides local journalists, it cannot provide coverage service to foreign journalists who are rude and engage in inappropriate behavior.
He added that this wasn’t an issue about writing good things or bad things about Korea, but rather one behavior. He said the ministry could not deal with a foreign correspondent who curses at a government spokesperson, and that this was an issue of government and national face.
He added that it was terminating its press material distribution service not to the WSJ, but to Mr. Ramstad, who “couldn’t even keep a minimum of fundamentals as a journalist.”
About this all, Hallim University journalism professor Choe Yeong-jae told Yonhap that just as how the overseas correspondents of Korean media companies mustn’t act violently or curse at other countries’ ministers and government spokespeople, the Seoul correspondents of foreign media should maintain basic courtesy as they cover stories. He said a reporter is a person who works in a profession that uses the tool of language to convey information and values, and that for such a reporter to verbally abuse a high-ranking official of a foreign country was unethical.
(HT to thekorean)
ORIGINAL POST
The FT might be towing the party line, but the Ministry of Strategy and Finance — and the local press — still has the WSJ’s Evan Ramstad and CBS Radio’s Don Kirk to kick around.
Yonhap reports that the proverbial “they” say “some foreign correspondents” tried to humiliate Finance Minister Yoon Jeung-hyun at a press conference on the economy by asking “preposterous” questions about things like “room salons” and “entertainment.”
Mr. Ramstad got the ball rolling by asking Yoon an “embarrassing” question, namely, whether Korea’s “room salon culture” made it difficult for Korean women to find employment.
This was a absurd question that demeaned both Korean men and women and revealed the reporter did not properly understand Korean workplace culture. Or so Yonhap said.
Yoon calmly responded to the question by explaining that half the prosecutors recently appointed were women, and that in no country do women enjoy control over the family finances like Korea. He also explained that because Korean were so active in society, Korea’s birthrate was low, and that Mr. Ramstad’s information on room salons was mistaken.
Mr. Ramstad persisted, however, telling the minister that he understood corporate employees take ministry officials to room salons, and asked if there were regulations about this. Yoon refuted this: he wondered where the reporter had gotten his information, noted the ministry has strict rules about that sort of thing, and said he believed this to be completely untrue.
Mr. Kirk also got in the fray. Pointing out that corporate figures spend the most money at room salons, he asked whether the ministry shouldn’t apply strict standards to tax breaks, etc., regarding such entertainment expenditures.
Yoon responded by noting that Korea, there’s a set limit to entertainment expenses, and if it exceeds this limit, companies must pay it from their own profits, and in this regard, there’s no incentive tax-wise.
With questions out of nowhere about “room salons” and “entertainment” coming at a meeting with foreign journalists about economic policy, ministry officials and Korean attendees made clear looks of discomfort, and some foreign journalists, too, look dumbfounded.
One Korean attendee — and mark this down, children, because it’s truly golden — said there are some journalists who, claiming they’ve worked in Korea a long time or know Korea well, insult not only ministers or institution heads but also the entire Korean people. He said if you get to know these reporters, many don’t do their homework, so they don’t know well Korea’s history, culture or economy, or have racial biases.
One Finance Ministry official, who requested anonymity, complained to Yonhap that since 1997, when foreign speculator attacks led to a financial crisis, the ministry has strengthened its briefings of foreign journalists, but poor questions sometimes come up. He said he often feels skeptical as to whether to continue these meeting with foreign journalists.
{ 278 comments… read them below or add one }
The article definitely was a laugh.
Indeed it was. Pure comedy gold.
Not sure if the guys involved felt the same, though.
I am shocked, shocked to find that room salon entertainment is going on in here!
Perhaps Mr. Ramstad should have rephrased the question to something like:
“Mr. Finance Minister, given the clear gender discrepancy that Korea has when compared to other OECD nations, do you think there are enough corporate opportunities for today’s Korean women.”
A little diplomacy would have resulted in better yield. It’s like Ramstad has never been a journalist in an East Asian country before… I’m sure that the response (and surprise) that Yoon Jeung-hyun felt would not have been any different in Japan or China either.
Awww dang, Dong-A changed the article. The first draft on their website was a beauty, complete with such hyperbole as “Kirk’s question insulted all Korean men and women.”
Corporate entertainment?
Bah!
It’s called greasing the wheels of capitalism!
If I were the Foreign Minister I would have replied thusly:
Yes, there are room salons in Korea. Does business sometimes get done in the room salons? Yes they do. Does it make it difficult for women to get employment in the corporate world? I dunno…do I look like a damn sociologist?
But let me ask, do you, as a Western man, feel like you’ve got bigger balls because a Western woman can make more money and be in a higher position than you?
Perhaps. I don’t think I would have asked the Finance Minister about room salons (then again, I don’t write for the WSJ), but the question was not without merit. Especially on Women’s Day, which is why the questions were being posed in the first place.
At any rate, even if the question was perhaps a bit, ahem, bold, the response to it — particularly by Yonhap — says a lot more, IMHO.
“It’s like Ramstad has never been a journalist in an East Asian country before”
these jokers probably thought they were doing some hard hitting investigative journalism. I blame blogs for the demise of their industry.
#9
Some enterprising Korean journalist should head over to the US and ask why CEOs here still make many multiples of an average employee (the highest in the world) in terms of salary and bonuses while unemployment is at the highest levels since the Great Depression.
“the response to it — particularly by Yonhap — says a lot more, IMHO.”
The media in Korea have a different “prime directive” than many of their overseas peers….
Right topic, wrong questions. “The sex industry in South Korea sucks in a sizable portion of the GDP into an untaxed and underground economy. Given that crackdowns have done very little to end this state of affairs, does the LMD govt. have a back up plan?” –> IMO that would have been a much better question. However, the response probably would have been the same.
And then AP should respond with a story calling Korean overseas correspondents lazy, insulting and racist, right?
Yes Rob, but what does anyone in their right mind think a country’s Finance Minister’s would say to a question like that?
Did Evan somehow think Yoon would say: “Ah, yes… our traditional room salon culture… I personally like the one in Kangnam, across the way from the Intercontinental Hotel… yes the one near the trade tower. Ohhh… yeah… you think it’s a flower shop!”
One must recall that the WSJ is a publication with a vast majority 40-50 year old male readership. A lot of aspiring 20 and 30s read it too. Sometimes stuff like “room salon” culture is a welcomed diversion from all that heavy economic and business analysis.
Case in point? The WSJ did have a front page article on Korean “booking” culture in the early 2000′s on the front page.
http://www.tomcoyner.com/across_a_crowded_room_in_korea.htm
Having said that, I generally like Evan Ramstad’s WSJ articles on Korea.
And then AP should respond with a story calling Korean overseas correspondents lazy, insulting and racist, right?
My question is a valid question, which resonates with millions of Americans.
The question asked by Mr Ramstead, you have to admit, is very much a cheap shot, which makes the WSJ seem more like the NY Daily News or the Post.
After being peppered with beauties like “Korean products: World-class or All-world?” and “What time are we meeting at the room salon on Friday?” by Korean “journalists,” I’m sure facing actual questions is the equivalent of humiliating.
Great! Unless you happen to be the grease, dressed in cheap lingerie and getting your lady-bits groped by piss-drunk ‘shi for a living. Much like actual grease, the stain never really washes off.
IHBB,
Was all of # 16 directed at moi?
As others have pointed out, it was Women’s Day. And Korea gets some of the lowest marks in the world when it comes to women’s rights. So I can see a legitimate way that question could have been brought up in a press conference.
Although, since I was not there, I do not know the context of the questions, so it is hard to say more. Had the reporter tried to get comment on this before and been stonewalled by ministry bureaucrats? Was it in reference to something else the Minister had said? I was not there, so do not know.
But certainly high government officials are supposed to be able to handle a couple of odd questions in a press conference. If they cannot deal with something this minor, what are they going to do when a more serious issue comes up?
I’d be the first to admit that Korea probably ranks not too highly by all the usual Western metrics of gender equality, such the number of women corporate executives or whatever.
I seriously doubt that a 50 something year old minister has spent much time pondering the effects of room salons on gender equality. That’s something that one has to ask Korean women themselves, many of whom voluntarily work in places such as room salons and the rest who don’t raise a fuss about it. In Korea, women are not exactly clamoring to be included in the military draft either, to my knowledge, a social duty borne mostly by men.
Funny thing is, despite all the room salons and what not in Korea, Korean women, on average, still seem to lack that vaguely bitchy, chip-on-the-shoulder quality that Western, especially American, women possess for whatever reasons despite things being supposedly better here in the US. In fact, a common refrain among many Western men for preferring Asian women is that Western women are ruined by feminism and try to much to imitate a man instead of just being happy being a woman. In fact, I’ve heard that so many times, its damn near universal.
Hell, if I were a 50 something minister and I was challenged by some uppity waeguk journalist who doesn’t know a goddamn thing, I’d tell him to mind why things are fucked up where he comes from before worrying about room salons in Korea. Then I’d tell him to go fuck himself. Very direct, concise, and gets the message across.
Just the grease.
>some uppity waeguk journalist who doesn’t know a goddamn thing,
Please feel free to read one of Don Kirk’s books (plural) about Korea before saying that. A couple of them are only classics.
Western government officials yes, but Eastern ones I think the proceedure does not follow that line so much.
This was an issue when Toyota’s chief came to speak in Congress. He was grilled like any other CEO of any big American company. However, the take away in Japan and (surprisingly somewhat) in Korea was that Akio was being unfairly judged and admonished.
http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/korea-washington-is-picking-on-toyota/
Ramstead and Kirk have done good work on Korea. We don’t know the context of those questions — i.e. were they tacked on as aside after a long exchange that veered into Women’s Day issues? — and we don’t know how well they were understood by the Yonhap scribe who wrote that screed. We are relying Korean officials’ accounts of this exchange relayed through press club reporters whose careers depend on cosiness with those same officials.
> Western government officials yes, but Eastern ones I think
> the procedure does not follow that line so much.
Well, if you are going to speak at the Seoul Foreign Correspondents Club, maybe you should be prepared for some foreign correspondents. Granted, the Korean FCC is mostly full of Korean journalists, but there are a few foreign correspondents there still.
Ah, but you see, in a country where room salons are ubiquitous, that lack of pondering is a story in itself.
Maybe some indelicate questions there, but not out of place if they were brought out on International Women’s Day vis-a-vis the gender gap. It’s not absurd to think the drinking and room salon culture could be an obstacle for women in the company.
I’ve met about as many “vaguely bitchy, chip-on-the-shoulder” Korean women as I have American women having the same qualities. I’m pretty sure the U.S. doesn’t have a monopoly on women who think their shit doesn’t stink.
Mr. Myxlplyx and Slim bring up a good point: Without knowing the context in which the questions were asked it is difficult to know how appropriate they were. I’d add to that, without knowing the exact English phrasing used it is also difficult to gauge exactly what Ramstand and Kirk were going for.
As a PR flack, part of my job is making sure that my clients know how to answer unexpected questions and know to expect some less-than-obvious questions. To be honest though, If I were speaking to a group of reporters about the economy on Women’s Day, I’d want to be prepared to talk about gender (in)equality’s role in the economy.
“Yoon calmly responded to the question by explaining … that in no country do women enjoy control over the family finances like Korea. He also explained that because Korean were so active in society, Korea’s birthrate was low …”
Shorter Finance Minister Yoon: We provide plenty of opportunities for our women to be homemakers, but they’re too busy taking each other out to lunch.
As bad as Korea is on women’s rights, they are still one of the best
Asian/oriental countries in this regard. If you know anything about
China for example, there is really no comparison. I went to a couple cities in China last year and there were at least 3 “massage” parlors on each and every block….. women there tend to migrate away from their home provinces to ‘work’. I think in China and Korea both, it’s really about money and the fact that doing that kind of work is still accepted as a kind of established social ‘tradition’.
As for the the questions posted to the minister, they already knew what kind of response they’d get. These kind of conservative/nationalistic governments are big in protecting their countries image/pride.
Wasn’t the FT just singled out for praise less than a fortnight ago for saying that “South Korea is no longer the underdog”?
FT “한국 더이상 약자 아니다” 이례적 칭찬”
http://news.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2010/02/25/2010022500454.html
http://www.rjkoehler.com/2010/02/25/whats-this-the-ft-praising-south-korea/
I guess it’s not a case what have you done for me, but what have you done for me lately…
Hmmm… it seems that the Korea Herald isn’t 100% positive on the status of women in Korea either.
http://www.koreaherald.co.kr/NEWKHSITE/data/html_dir/2010/03/09/201003090055.asp
It seems out of place to me. He is the Finance minister, not the Gender Equality minister (or whatever the women’s section is referred to in English).
@ Netizen Kim
“Western men for preferring Asian women is that Western women are ruined by feminism and try to much to imitate a man instead of just being happy being a woman. In fact, I’ve heard that so many times, its damn near universal.”
“…many of whom voluntarily work in places such as room salons and the rest who don’t raise a fuss about it.”
Although I hesitate to respond to such blatantly chauvinistic statements, here we go. Let me count the ways they are wrong-headed.
1. All of the men I know who date Asian women actually find their extreme femininity (in comparison to many Western women) a turn-off. So your “damn universal” statement is nonsense.
2. Feminists would argue that they aren’t “imitating” men at all. In fact one of their primary critiques of patriarchy is that by gendering certain activities and attitudes as masculine and others as feminine men have been able to keep women in a subordinate position.
3. “just being happy being a woman” Connected to point two, Why do you think yourself such an expert on how women can be happy? It would seem that women are in a better position to figure that out.
4. Related to the second statement, whether someone “raises a fuss” about their employment is beside the point. Children in sweatshop factories don’t raise a fuss either, yet we wouldn’t (I hope) condone the practice of employing them in such conditions.
Finally, the WSJ questions were probably ill-chosen. Surely the journalists were not expecting to get an honest or thoughtful response from the Finance Minister. They were simply made in order to be a news story in and of themselves. The Minister’s actual response was, to my mind, fairly impressive in that he obviously recognized the “bait” that he was being thrown and did not jump for it. The newspaper article writer was unfortunately not so intelligent.
I am for greater gender equality in Korea but I don’t think the tactic of a westerner attempting to embarrass the Finance Minister on Women’s Day is a productive one.
Hi,
I’m Evan. Of course, I and many others recorded the press conference. For context for you all, here’s my question from the recording:
“Today is International Women’s Day. South Korea has sort of a terrible reputation for dealing with women in the workplace. It has some of the lowest percentage of women in the workplace and it has the highest gap in pay between men and women of any developed country. So I’d like to ask you if you think that is because men in South Korea like to go to room salons after work and that is a discouragement for women in the workplace. Or if companies decide not to hire women because the men like to go out to room salons, hostess bars and places like that after work. I’d like to know your views on that broadly. And specifically, I’d like to know about the practice of going to room salons at the ministry and if there are policies involving ministry officials who go to room salons when they’re hosted by people who the ministry regulates.”
I won’t discuss the motivation for the question because that goes into stories that I’m working on. Of course, it’s fine for people to criticize me for being inelegant or offensive. I’ll be the first to say that I’m not the most articulate person, especially in a room full of people with cameras, mics etc. But I certainly didn’t think I was being offensive or that it was a “gotcha” question. The connection between the room salon situation and the treatment of women in the workplace seems clear and direct and was even written about last week in the NYT/IHT. I expected Minister Yoon to offer a kind of response that we’ve all heard from government bureaucrats the world over on sensitive topics: an acknowledgment of the problem, along with a statement that things are getting better but not fast enough for anyone who’s attuned to the problem.
In general, in the time I’ve been here, I’ve faced sharp criticism by people in both the Roh and Lee administrations and by some of the companies I’ve written about. I correct errors when they’re pointed out. Before I write a story, every person in it is given an adequate chance to speak and respond to the points made in it. Consequently, I think that much of the criticism that is directed at me (and even my colleagues at the FT, NYT, WP etc) is divorced from the actual coverage and driven more by a differing sense of boundaries and power.
That’s all to be expected, of course. Since I didn’t actually publish a story on this topic, yet at least, this particular episode is different in that the anger was stirred up during the newsgathering process rather than upon the appearance of a finished product.
Evan
Nice one, with sensitivity like that you should get a job as a spokesman. Why not just call it “the little girls’ room”?
Ramsted is another stereotypical male expat in Korea: seemingly caring for the interest of Korean women while dogging Korea and Korean men. I don’t see his questions being a departure from the characteristics of an expat 숫놈.
Netijen Gim:
Korean women, on average, still seem to lack that vaguely bitchy, chip-on-the-shoulder quality that Western, especially American, women possess
- If you were a woman in a country where men can smack you around with impunity, you’d be demure too.
Regarding my # 6 comments on “greasing.” Despite everyone’s best efforts… it happens everywhere:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/09/10/interior-department-probe_n_125437.html
Not to mention this running joke in the pharmaceutical sales industry:
http://peristaltor.livejournal.com/94562.html
The industry had found that there is no better way to get a doctor’s attention then to send a 5-7, blonde, 36c cup, 120 lbs, blue-eyed 20 or 30 something to get crack the door open…
Evan,
Thanks for taking the time to put your questions into full context.
Keius wrote:
I lived in China 4 years and traveled to several major cities. I somehow managed to overlook all those massage parlors even though I read Chinese.
Sonagi,
There would be less in China. It’s less developed from an urban stand point. There are plenty in Taiwan (and a fair amount in Singapore). If you didn’t see any that’s because they are not marketing to you…
nice to get input from the author of the quote…
anyway, I don’t see many shocking things in the whole story: it’s the role of a journalist to report on such things and to slightly “stir shit”, especially on Women’s day ! it’s the way people talk about it and hopefully things improve. It’s also the role of the minister to be ready for such questions, and as Evan say it, to answer with convenient ready-made sentences. there’s nothing new to be learned, it’s just an opportunity to bring the issue to the forefront, nobody’s hurt in the end, and actually the minister managed his way out in an acceptable way, you can’t expect him to single handedly acknowledge the issue, enact and have a law applied & respected, thus inverting deeply rooted social behavior, in response to a journalist question !
again, it’s the Korean press that appears foolish.
and Wangkon> some of your remarks remind me of the dreadful “but you can not understand our special culture”… well, as Korea is doing everything it can to be accepted as a major player on the world stage, it should be ready to handle “international” audiences (not necessarily matching/understanding Korean culture), don’t you think ?
I didn’t know that urban development was necessary for a thriving prostitution industry. Of course, there are massage parlors and even glass-windowed booths illuminated in red, but I saw far fewer in China than I did in Korea. One doesn’t need to be looking for sex to pick out establishments that may sell it. I noticed a few weeks after arriving in Seoul the little dallanjujeom / yangju -maekju places with walled exteriors, glass doors, and tiny windows sometimes decorated with the silhouette of a shapely female. I don’t have a dick, but I do have two eyes with 20/20 vision.
Again with the “johnny did it too” whining.
The fact remains that the practice is so much more pervasive in Korea that one is tempted to regard it not just as constituting a quantitative difference but one of kind.
Admittedly anecdotal, but in 25 years in (pre-Guliani) NYC, exactly one attempt to so suborn my judgment was made (and interestingly, it was not done in furtherance of a business quid pro quo but a personal objective), while in the Hub of Hypocrisy, it happened on an almost weekly basis, always with a transparent and artlessly insisted on pay back.
Perhaps more to the point, I recently was introduced over dinner by a Korean friend to one of the small number of kingpins in the room salon industry who pretty freely answered questions. The most interesting tidbit apropos Evan and Don’s questions in the context of Int’l Women’s Day was that all of ~ 75 women working in one of his salon venues in the hotel across the street from the restaurant were part-timers, i.e., full time day time salary worker/office girls or university students moonlighting for the dosh to make ends meet (whatever that may mean – rent?, tuition? the next Gucci bag?). The mongers of the world moan about the comparatively high cost of one -off P4P in Korea, but most of them miss the fact that, among other things, the exclusion of women from and the discrimination against women in the Korean job markets, makes Korea a happy hunting ground for seekers of long-term subsidized genuine GFE with intelligent, cultured and multi-lingual “good” girls (not the shabbier simulacram thereof with which most of them make do).
#37
Ramsted is another stereotypical male expat in Korea: seemingly caring for the interest of Korean women while dogging Korea and Korean men. I don’t see his questions being a departure from the characteristics of an expat 숫놈.
You know the drill…8 out of every 10 waeguk-noms that winds up in Korea somehow *magically* turns into a shrill feminista. I see this pattern all the time – this is practically a waeguk-nom cliche by now. Maybe they think them playing the role of a “intervening savior of oppressed women in strange lands” or a “white knight” or what I personally call the White Dude’s Burden (TM) will help them score more pussy in some roundabout way…who the fuck knows.
These same unlikely champions of Korea women’s rights or whatever are the SAME clowns that complain about how feminism messed things up big time in the West.
Sonagi,
I went to Beijing and Shanghai for 2 weeks. I didn’t have anyone escorting me around so i wasn’t as ‘aware’ in the big 2. I did however stay in the Guangdong area, and visited several cities including Guangzhu. I did have an escort in those areas….and suffice it to say, he was pointing out all the places i could have ‘fun’. And yes, I did spend an inordinate amount of time getting massages….mostly foot massages.
(Gawd, i miss those cheap massages…..)
Usually went in a group and my escort offered to arrange anything special for me everywhere we went. Suffice it to say, I was one of the few in my group that didn’t partake in the ‘festivities’. I met my wife in China and wasn’t about to risk my marriage for a little side action
I even asked her about it and she told me that half the business in her parents corner store was from those ‘ladies’. She said the vast majority don’t speak the local dialect and they migrated from the Hunan or “Hubok?” area. On another note, my group of buddies went to local clubs alot and we always got our own room. There were always women knocking on those doors asking if we wanted companions…..
Did you actually live there and interact socially with the locals?
Get to be comfortable with them enough that they’d treat you
casually as one of them? I went as an American with money to
spend and footed the bill ‘ALOT’. When your paying, they’ll expose
you to alot of the seedy side of things.
Wow.
br,
That’s a fair critique. I can see how you might think that. For the record I don’t believe that efficient for an economy to “underutilize” 50% of their population in menial and “non-managerial” jobs. Thus, from an economic standpoint, keeping women down the totem pole is not a good policy for the long term.
Japan is, by all definitions, a developed country, but they have historically low gender equality numbers too. I think this isn’t good for them. They are missing a lot of talent and new viewpoints that can help free up their current ossification. Thus, if Japan is still behind in terms of gender equality then there is clearly the possibility that Korea can be too since Korea is generally following Japan’s growth model (and trajectory).
I guess my point is that the Western way of “getting things all out in the open” and “stirring things up” (not to say this is what Ramstad or Kirk tried to do) may not work. It may, on the other hand, just get the powers that be to politely choose to share less information or just information that they feel comfortable sharing. Getting a defensive reply is all they can hope for if they approach their line of questioning in this manner.
Ramstad and Kirk may not know it, but the Koreans view them as wielding tremendous power. Rightly or wrongly, they continue to believe that the currency devaluation in 1998 was an unfair and misinformed assessment of their economy by Western financial insitutions and that “unfair” assessment caused tremendous harm that they feel was in many respects did incalculable damage to their economy. The sting is still there. I believe that remember this and keeping it in mind will help good journalists like Ramstad and Kirk get MORE information and data and contribute to better, truer and more insightful articles in the future.
Yes, I lived there four years and socialized with many local friends and colleagues. I do not think that prostitution is less common in China; rather, I think it is less visible from the street.
I really have to ask how pervasive it could possibly be in Korea.
In comparison to say…Thailand, Vietnam, China, Malaysia, Japan…etc.
The sex trade in those countries are very very pervasive if you’ve ever
visited them, although Japan is alot more discrete about things…and not
as welcoming of foreigners. I’ve gone to alot of places but never to Korea…unless you count the bloody airport.
Most foreign male visitors to South Korea aren’t interested in Korean culture, they’re mostly ONLY interested in having sex with young Korean girls. I hope every Korean girls wake up with this truth.
What was this press conference about? According to the Korean press, it was the finance minister explaining Korea’s economic conditions to foreign reporters. Was this question on country’s social conditions really appropriate for a finance minister? I think the finance minister was startled and taken a back by the direct questions, as well as the Korean press who were covering it.
#49, “I do not think that prostitution is less common in China; rather, I think it is less visible from the street.:”
It’s less visible in Korean streets after the crackdowns of 2004-2006. It’s now far more visible on the internet.
This is interesting. Dong-A Ilbo
Evan, it appears that last August you wrote a letter of apology for swearing at MOFE spokesperson. And when a MOFE spokesperson pointed out after this particular press conference that your question of inappropriate, you swore at them him/her again.
I think that Korean people’s reaction to your question is ludicrous. But even you seem to agree that the manner of your question was borderline inappropriate. And to react that way to a fair point was most certainly inappropriate.
…blah, blah, blah…
DJ Netizen Kim…the master in the action of distraction, on an excursion of diversion, displaying a commotion of emotion. Yo boyyyyyy!!!
BULLSHIT. Most first-time foreign male visitors to South Korea don’t have a clue – until their Korean host takes them on a tour of the local “men’s infrastructure” and then arranges – often without asking first – a tasting.
It’s a silly question since there are/were pay and gender gaps all over the world that have/had nothing to do with room salons, and the Finance Minister should have been able to ignore the room salon bit and explain why the gaps exist.
Married men don’t want their wives working in corporations until there are more women working in corporations. What’s more exciting, fucking your colleague on a desk or fucking a whore in room salon?
Keius, the only reason you were treated casually as “one of them” is because you are an American with money to spend. It is delusional to believe otherwise. When the money runs out, so does the phoney hospitality.
The Korean at #54,
That is pretty damning, if true. In fact, the entire Dong-A article paints Mr. Ramstad in an even more negative light than your brief synopsis.
Mr. Ramstad at 35,
Ordinarily, I am an inveterate critic of Korean xenophobia/nationalism and one of its chief enablers–the scandal-mongering, unprofessional, and plain incompetent Korean press. So my initial, reflexive inclination was to defend you or at least give the benefit of doubt. Yet having read both the Korean’s link and your own statement, I am no longer inclined to do so.
In fact, your effort to provide the “context” actually reveals your question to be even more inappropriate and random–not to mention rude. Sure, perhaps room salon socializing may be one of the many concededly “sexist” features of Korean workplace culture that may collectively provide such a disincentive, but would it really constitute the primary disincentive? Room salon socializing is, after all, “after work” socializing. To put it another way, do talented female Ivy League graduates cite the propensity to visit Scores after a deal consummation as the chief, fundamental objection to working in Wall Street?
In sum, all I see is an effort to discombobulate and embarrass the official, as well as perhaps collect some sensationalist material for your next byline (“Titty bar corporate culture discourages Korean women from leaving the kitchen”).
I am also bewildered by this defense:
“I’ll be the first to say that I’m not the most articulate person…”
You, sir, are an esteemed writer for one of the most prestigious newspapers in the world. You earn your living by manipulating words and making it do wondrous things that us ordinary mortals cannot.
Of course, you may protest that written eloquence and spoken eloquence are not synonymous. But did you not write out or at least think carefully about what you were going to ask beforehand?
Finally, I wholeheartedly endorse Wangkon936′s gold-plated advice at #46:
“I believe that remember this and keeping it in mind will help good journalists like Ramstad and Kirk get MORE information and data and contribute to better, truer and more insightful articles in the future.”
“But let me ask, do you, as a Western man, feel like you’ve got bigger balls because a Western woman can make more money and be in a higher position than you? ”
So which camp are you in, Netshit? Oh, that’s right, the rejected, angry, and on the sidelines camp. With your keyboard. And Anger.
Most Korean male visitors to Thailand** aren’t interested in Thai** culture or golf, they’re mostly ONLY interested in having sex with young Thai girls. I hope every Thai girls wake up with this truth.
**Insert The Phillipines/Filipino, if you prefer.
OK, everybody.
It’s time to think like journalists for a few minutes and try to figure out what purpose it might serve to have a minister-level official on the record talking about room salons. What might it be leading up to? How might that legitimately be used in a story? I can think of several scenarios.
Now ask yourselves why the Dong-A Ilbo, which has a cozy relationship with this minister and the president who appointed him, might be so quick to condemn a journalist who asks the following: “And specifically, I’d like to know about the practice of going to room salons at the ministry and if there are policies involving ministry officials who go to room salons when they’re hosted by people who the ministry regulates.”
This ain’t no dog and pony show, folks.
Even supposing, for the sake of argument, that the above were true — as long as the sex is consensual and not coerced — what’s the problem?
Is your objection to sex a moral one? Or is it the interracial aspect of the exchange that troubles you?
WJC,
I am sorry that my # 46 had as many grammatical errors as it did. I wrote it quickly between scheduled conference calls.
I don’t know if I can be so harsh on Evan Ramstad. I find his articles generally informative, fair and accurate and he fills an important gap in English language information on Korean business news and (slight) analysis. Moon Ihlwan at BusinessWeek is far better, but any ways. Yet, I do link to his articles in my postings from time to time.
WSJ search on Evan’s articles. Judge for yourself:
http://online.wsj.com/search/search_center.html?KEYWORDS=EVAN+RAMSTAD&ARTICLESEARCHQUERY_PARSER=bylineAND
To be honest, I would be more interested in an article examining the relationship between the recent ACTA meeting in Seoul (media law, IP law treaty) and its direct relationship to American businesses attempting to control IP law in South Korea.
That would be more revealing than “room salons” or how dirty the current administration is.
Red Sparrow,
Is “poor” and “foreign” treated better anywhere else?
@lmno March 9, 2010 at 9:43 am
“‘or whatever the women’s section is referred to in English’
Nice one, with sensitivity like that you should get a job as a spokesman. Why not just call it “the little girls’ room”?”
OK I looked it up for you Korean ministry is called “여성부” which means Womens Division. In English they call themselves the Ministry of Gender Equality. But I think the Korean name describes better who they are helping and advocating for.
@63
he already answered your question today here in comment 40:
http://www.rjkoehler.com/2010/03/08/korean-momaccused-kidnapper-arrested-in-guam/
…and in many other racist posts in the past. Anyway, if you are surprised by this piece of work, you must be new here.
WangKon936,
For me to chide you for grammatical errors on a Blog comment would be the most egregious case of “pot calling kettle black.”
In retrospect, I may have been overly harsh with Mr. Ramstad, and I do find that his pieces are generally good (and I am–as you know–nothing if not critical a la Iago). And I will go even as far as to say that it is unfair to compare him to someone like Mr. Moon (or Shim Jae-hoon, my favorite “Western” correspondent in Seoul) who is really a native Koreans insiders, possessing the contextual cultural discernment that no transplanted Westerners can achieve.
Further, I did not impugn Mr. Ramstad’s prior work at the WSJ.
Elgin, yeah, but you know how it is… too many people trying to embarrass each other in too many threads so no one really talks about anything all that meaningful at the end of the day…
I mean the question he made was relevant and i personally believe room salon is a disgusting place. But he cursed at government official?? is that an acceptable behavior of correspondent in america?? i’m asking becauase i really don’t know..
WJC,
That’s another interesting point. Guys like Moon Ihlwan and Shim Jae-hoon clearly have cultivated contacts in Korean government and industry so it’s little reason why their articles contain quite a bit more insight and analysis than Ramstad. To me, Ramstad’s articles read too much like press releases with canned data rather than something real meaty. Maybe that’s fine for the WSJ and their work in Asia’s fourth largest economy. I dunno.
Why don’t Korean newspapers raise these questions instead of bloggers!!?
I am very disappointed with the political bias, unprofessionalism and lack of true national pride of so much media in South Korea. Perhaps an NGO entitled “Reporters for Truth” would help more than revising media laws so that newspapers could own broadcast organizations.
Wow, this is a great “happening.” I’ll have to write something about it on my blog, but my wife works as an engineer for one of the major Korean companies, so I’m probably more qualified to talk about it than most. I think a great deal of sexism still exists in the Korean workplace (at least in my wife’s), but she is not sexually harassed. Her position is too advanced. If she were a secretary it would probably be a slightly different story. There’s simply too much to lose in modern Korean society.
There have been a couple of instances when my wife has been sent home so others in the company can go drink and (maybe) screw prostitutes. I’d say it’s happened twice and in both cases my wife has come home crying and angry and justifiably so. She’s worked hard at her company (including drinking) and to be treated differently because she’s a woman belittles her efforts.
However, these two instances have not counted against her advancement in any way shape or form. And two times out of, say 100, is not very many anyway. I might suggest that the fact that she’s a woman has helped her a little…but only in the sense that her bosses are sometimes “surprised” when she does something they previously thought only men could do (and there are a lot of these such things, including “drinking well.”)
this is an interesting issue.
WangKon936 at #72,
Don’t get me started on language/culture deficit of most foreign correspondents in Asia. In this day and age where there is a bona-fide trans-Pacific class of well-educated, bi-cultural Asian-Americans or Asians with long experience in the West, there is simply no excuse not to send a language/culture-fluent correspondent to Seoul or Tokyo or Beijing. It doesn’t have to be old geezers with SNU, Tokyo U of Beijing U connections. Just imitate what the NYT did in hiring a bright, young native in Hiroko Tabuchi to man (or “woman,” to follow today’s debate topic) their Tokyo bureau.
“But he cursed at government official?? is that an acceptable behavior of correspondent in america??”
It’s just another characteristic of an expat with a sense of “western” self entitlement among Asians. But, I would have to say he wouldn’t have behaved in that manner in other two Asian countries, Japan and China. He can be a BIG expat man in Korea.
But I do wish Ramstad well, I hope he goes over to Beijing or Tokyo……..*NOT…. I hope you get fired, and become an english teacher in Korea.
#72: That’s pretty funny. With all due respect to Messrs. Moon and Shim, who are fine journos, the average Korean reporter is spoon-fed everything he writes and has no desire to stir up any pot or outscoop his colleagues from any outlet–competitor or not. At least the foreign guys and gals out there (and a lot of the Koreans working for foreign outlets) have the sac to stir things up and try to report things as they are, not as the government wants them to report.
Kudos to Evan and Don for not being afraid to ask tough questions. It’s up to the minister and his PR people to be prepared.
Wedge,
But ask yourself… what did Evan and Don really accomplish? Nothing.
They didn’t get their question answered and they pretty much ensured that they will never get their question answered. At least not by an official outlet.
China is a relatively closed society with an open mind. Korea is a open society with a closed mind.
Hi,
I’m Young Min Kim, the Spokesperson for Foreign Media at the Ministry of Strategy and Finance, and I would like to present the Ministry’s opinion on this event.
Although we believe that Mr. Ramstad’s questions to the Finance Minister were inappropriate considering the occasion, we also acknowledge the fact that it was within his right as a journalist to ask any question he sees fit.
However, Mr. Ramstad’s actions following the press conference at the entrance of the Seoul Foreign Correspondents’ Club building were not only inappropriate, but also unprofessional to say the least. During a dispute whether his questions were appropriate or not, he shouted profanities at the Spokesmen of the Ministry.
Mr. Ramstad has already been warned by the Ministry for directing profanities against me, and wrote a letter promising that it will not happen again as well as apologizing for his behavior. This being his second offense, we have to be skeptical about his professionalism as a journalist. As a direct result of his actions following the press conference – and not because of his questions – we have ceased to provide Mr. Ramstad (representing the Wall Street Journal) with press service by the Ministry of Strategy and Finance, as we cannot provide coverage service to a journalist who is unprofessional and do not even have the minimum level of fundamentals, regardless of his/her nationality.
However, we will continue to do our best to provide responsible journalists with information and services about the Korean economy, and wish to emphasize that this isolated incident is by no means a representation of the relationship between the Ministry and correspondents.
Thank you.
Pawi,
Another great gravatar. I’ve seen that frightening picture. Kushibo has a good version on his blog down the right side too.
in my opinion, this could go either way. let’s hope for a resolution.
welcome back, cmm. i was wondering where you were. the gravatar is just some innocent ribbing. this thread seemed an approprite place for it.
Agreed. Though it would be even better on the Guam thread.
I was away for a week or two of vacation on the beaches of SE Asia, intentionally not logging on to the MH, to complete the break from my normal world. Did I miss anything good?
Yuna’s a guest blogger… if you think that’s good…
#78: Not a big problem for Evan. So he won’t be allowed to infrequent MSF press conferences for the time being and he’ll have to have someone else at WSJ forward him MSF press releases. No biggie. Unless I missed something, Don didn’t even get a wrist slap. They’ll continue to work here pretty much unhindered.
not really. it’s been boring here for the past couple of weeks. se asia? i hope you had fun, but i’m glad you’re back.
I mean…. Yuna’s become a guest blogger here at TMH.
Wedge, who knows? Maybe we are all making a bigger deal out of this then it really is.
I agree with WangKon – this hardly seems like an effective use of journalistic privilege. Embarrassment aside, did they imagine that they’d accomplish their goal of getting the story through the wasting of so much social capital? I’m no journalist, but that’s surely not the approach I take to get the information I need.
You know, if we’re talking about foreign journalists ‘nutting up’, perhaps Evan might sac up and explain why he’s addressed government employees twice with profanity in the course of his job. I mean, in my experience, that just doesn’t seem like a helpful approach in dealing with government employees. I can’t imagine a police or immigration officer warming up to my request for information through the use of profanity, and by appearances it doesn’t seem to work for reporters, either. Sorry, but that just seems wrong. Perhaps you’d care to explain?
I wouldn’t trust a Korean account on the use–or nonuse–of profanity. Misunderstandings and mistranslations, not to mention misunderestimations, are legion in Korean papers.
Reporters ask tough and embarrassing questions. It’s what they do (uh, except when they are around Obama, but that’s another story). He’s not trying to get a visa application approved or something. As he said in #35 above, he was expecting a regular answer out of the minister and in other countries he’d have gotten a less flustered response.
Wedge,
C’mon. How hard is it to mistranslate profanity?
I too would like to hear from Evan in light of what has been introduced from Korean sources… both primary and secondary accounts.
glad to be back too, well, as much as possible, and considering lounging about the beach for longer isn’t in the cards at the moment.
yeah… yuna, the MH guest blogger. when I saw her post yesterday I thought I’d accidentally typed popseoul.com into my browser. great.
Yeah, where is Evan now to clear things up now that they seem a bit cloudier than he portrayed them in 35.
Maybe he should check his little tape-recorder and transcribe the whole exchange for us. Evan?
mr evan, what do you have to say to mr kim? won’t you respond to his statement? after all, your job may be on the line.
@NetizenKim
Yes, and human ecological models would predict this as well. Agents engaged in intersubspecific competition will tend to advance opportunistic memes in foreign ecologies that they would tend not to, or would less fervently, in their home ecologies.
The usual assortments of ne’er-do-well bodega shelf-stacking savages reduce the argument to one of “white boys” or “re’spec, (yo!)”, while those in the know continue to snicker at the elephant in the room.
Young Min Kim – does it in any way worry you that with all your and your colleagues’ relativist talk concerning correct behavior that you are seeming a tad like the Chinese government? As if your government’s efforts to “correct” thinking about Korea had not given this opinion already. :/
Me neither. Over the years I’ve come to recognize a common Korean tactic is to take exaggerated umbrage at a foreigner’s use of even mild profanity — to seize upon some minor transgression and turn it into a casus belli. There is indeed a difference between swearing to oneself, perhaps muttering in disappointment, and swearing at one’s interlocutor — but in my experience Koreans often do not recognize this difference. Or pretend not to recognize it.
And Americans can be fairly loose with the swears, too. But still, I don’t believe for a minute that Evan was cursing out Korean government officials no matter how richly they may have deserved it.
But as for the calls to explain further, I’d offer Evan this advice: Don’t. No good will come of publicly contradicting the Ministry of Strategy and Finance.
By “international” here you mean Western. Not the regions of the world that comprise most of the world and can more accurately be labeled “international,” ie East Asia, Russia, Dar al-Islam, etc.
Hi,
I’ve signed in again under my real name. Sorry, I have been working and not looked in at the Hole since this morning. Wow, I can see this has really escalated. I have not heard from Mr. Kim or anyone at the Finance Ministry today, but I have certainly heard from a lot of Korean reporters what he said about me and I can see what he said here.
First, it is true that I sworn at Mr. Kim in August and again yesterday to him and his boss Mr. Park. In August, Mr. Kim and several other people at the ministry were sharply criticizing a young woman I work with over a headline in our newspaper for which she had no responsibility and control. Their actions seemed beyond the pale to me and I let him have it good. This was between me and him but he has chosen to make it public.
Yesterday, I swore at his boss after we walked out of the press conference and one of the Korean reporters told me that he and his boss were calling me unprofessional and a “low quality journalist.” I asked them what their problem was, and they yelled at me and I yelled back and I swore again. I was embarrassed for doing that. I apologized in an email a short time later. Today, this effort at conciliation was used against me. I am still embarrassed.
Mr. Kim and his colleagues are PR people doing they’re job, which is to make the ministry look good, the minister look good and promote the Korean economy. As I told him in my email of apology yesterday, it’s my right to ask hard questions and it’s their right to say whatever they want about me. That’s what freedom of speech is.
I’m a big boy and I can take whatever Mr. Kim and his associates want to say about me. From my interactions with him, Minister Yoon also seems to be able to handle whatever questions I (or any journalist) bring to him.
Evan
Korea would be wise to avoid blindly following the West and rushing headlong into the degeneration that has been wrought by the pursuit of women’s “rights” and “equality” that has led to the rise of de facto polygyny in the West.
With the emergent prominence of de facto polygyny (called “serial monogamy” by the current politically correctness regime theocrats or “social scientists,” culture producers, bureaucrats, etc.) there is enormous pressure toward de jure polygyny. Islam appears to be currently the only major sect filling this role in the West. The Fundamentalist Mormons might have had the chance to fill that role in the US if, instead of capitulating to the anti-”Middle America” demands of theocracy, it had taken advantage of the anti-monogamy demands of the theocracy. Though they most certainly would have been targeted for utter destruction by the theocracy.
So control of the West comes down to a battle between the politically correctness regime theocrats and the Islamic theocrats.
@Evan,
Yeah, but can you take what NetKim and the like are bringin’?
@Minjokjuuija
Lay off the bong.
@81
I think it shows an amazing amount of courtesy and concern for
the Foreign Media Spokesperson to stop by this blog. I’d like to thank him.
His comments leave me a bit confused though. If the incident causing offense was “Mr. Ramstad’s actions following the press conference” — namely, that he (allegedly) “shouted profanities at the Spokesmen of the Ministry” — and offense was not taken with regard to the question asked to the Finance Minister, which Ramstad “was within his right as a journalist to ask,” then why does the first Yonhap (3/08) article make it seem as if the opposite is the case? There’s nothing in it about cursing, it’s all about foreign journalists racial prejudice.
http://news.joins.com/article/168/4050168.html?ctg=1100
Then suddenly with Yonhap article two (3/09) it’s all about how foreign reporters “mustn’t act violently or curse at other countries’ ministers and government spokespeople” — as if foreigners never knew that before — and we get treated to a condescending lecture from Prof. Choe on proper reporting etiquette? It certainly seems as if the continuing story is just that foreigners are problematic whether they’re being racists or insensitive to culture or hurling curses as government officials, etc.
http://news.donga.com/Economy/New/3/01/20100309/26718535/1&top=1
I also think Ramstad should comment on the allegations of cursing at government reps. Considering he’s already commented here, and that Spokesman Kim has chosen this blog as a forum to offer a rebuttal, I’d say if a counter-rebuttal isn’t forthcoming from Ramstad, his silence should be seen as acknowledgement of wrongdoing.
Yes, but is this incident does not demonstrate Mr. Kim’s skills very well — other than managing to goad Mr. Ramstad and berate one of his associates for imaginary slights.
I wish both parties better eloquence and discretion for everyone’s sake.
And anyone wonders why Japan might be reluctant to issue the sort of apology that Korea demands?
One toes the party line, rather than doing the hard work of towing (and tugging?) it…
Wow.. I just can’t imagine how this blog has turned into a hole for WSJ reporters and even Korean government officials.
This just tells you how much influential the internet has become in shaping peoples’ opinions.
My only points:
1) Room salons and low economic participants of women in Korea has nothing to do with each other. At least half the blame should be also squarely on Korean women. I still think this is was an inappropriate question to a finance minister. If a Korean reporter in a press conference asked Ben Bernanke, if America’s love affair with guns and wars aren’t the bottom lines for America’s large foreign debt, I can see how that could be translated as a rude question, if not, at least an inappropriate question.
2) Swearing at government officials (no matter how richly they deserved it), or having a history of swearing at foreign officials, in a foreign land is not always a good ideal. You are not at home, you are in Korea. The foreign government reserves the right to not talk to you anymore.
3) The Korean press as usual goes over-drive, and turns this into a national pride issue. What turns out to be a spat between some Korean government officials and a foreign reporter (which should have been treated as such), is turned into a hurt national pride issue, with this story hitting all over the front pages. Everything is about national pride. Jesus, get over it.
lmno — actually, this ties in with what is actually bothering me about this mess. Leaving the spat between the Ministry and Evan for a moment, Yonhap’s race-baiting and mudslinging has been absolutely atrocious. If anything is going to “make Korea look bad,” it’s not so much the ministry but Yonhap. Spokesperson Kim points out, “내신 기자라면 일국의 장관에게 ‘룸살롱’, ‘호스트바’, ‘접대’ 같은 질문을 했겠느냐?” Fair enough. But if, let’s say, a Korean paper’s London correspondent asked a rude question to Alistair Darling and the BBC turned around and reported it like Yonhap is doing now, it would make the UK look like a bunch of hypernationalist, insecure yahoos, even if the Treasury handled it with the proper decorum.
Or an acknowledgement that he has better things to do than spending time commenting on blogs.
#103 “I’d say if a counter-rebuttal isn’t forthcoming from Ramstad, his silence should be seen as acknowledgement of wrongdoing.”
He already wrote he wrote an apology to the Korean official. So he has acknowledged the wrongdoing. Perhaps the prior confrontation he had with the Korean government officials had some effect on Mr.Ramstad’s decision to ask that question in an international press conference to embarrass the *male* Korean official. This is probably nothing more than a tit for tat bad feelings.
1. I used to gently poke fun when it was claimed that movers and shakers regularly read this blog, but I expect Banky Moon himself to weigh in any day now.
2. Did Ramstad swear at the minister in English or Korean?
3. It might, as alluded to by a commenter, be interesting to know if Korean or other foreign reporters, have similarly tried to embarass our own leading political lights such as Elliott (“Customer 9″) Spitzer or David “Blind Man’s Bluff” Paterson.
#108, exactly my point. The Korean media is at it again. They’re the real problems.
“Or an acknowledgement that he has better things to do than spending time commenting on blogs.”
You are under-estimating how much influence your blog is having. It is obvious, it’s a window of view to Korea. A lot of people, including some highly important people (foreign or Korean) are reading your blog. I would not surprised if some of the policies are/were influenced by this blog. I’m serious, really.
Is this swearing, etc. a by-product of Rupert Murdoch’s purchase of the WSJ?
Well i made my first my first stash of money working in one of the many forex&futures chop shops that dotted the American landscape in the 90′s i don’t remember one single friday night that ended without
hookersstrippers, booze and blow, but this time being a Korea apologist is not my point. What interest me is this IHBB comment:Sorry with all the due respect that’s liberal piety BS, these women are not illiterate Nigerian village women forced to sell themselves under the threat of a vodoo spell (we have plenty of cases like that here). These are women brought up in a modern country, in apartments full of every kind of electronic trinket, well fed, with acccess to appropriate healthcare and education, as Sperwer kinda pointed out.
Prostitution exist of course cos there’s lot of demand, but also cos there’s lots of supply. In fact i suspect that as humiliating, degrading etc. being grease in cheap lingerie might be it still beats rotting your lungs and working your fingers to the bone 50 hours a week at the assembly line
Not after the Korean government yanks his press privileges.
All I know is that there’s nothing roundabout about it. It’s as quick is instant ramyen. Boil the water/cook the story of empathy for women’s plight and bam: delicious noodles/young Korean uni student tail. Happy times!
Oh, I assure you buddy, a good portion of them wake up with this sweaty truth every weekend. I know I’m doin’ my best to let as many as I can know. Safely, of course.
True, but there’s only a lot of supply in Korea – and make no mistake there is a LOT of supply – because, contra cm’s amazingly obtuse #107.1, there is a relative dearth of good jobs available to women in Korea, often for un-apologetically discriminatory reasons [see the unreconstructed misogyny rampant on display in #101], leading a surprising number of women from surprisingly good backgrounds to make a surprising but understandable choice.
@Sperwer
Can you specify the “unreconstructed misogyny rampant on display” in my comment?
Why do these reporters have jobs with these companies?
Do they have any academic or social data to back their claim? Do they speak Korean? Have they worked in a Korean company? How many? What type of work? My guess is aside from a few questions asked, a few stories or suggestions heard, these two don’t have a clue what they are talking about.
These questions also clearly demonstrate the lack of understanding or knowledge of Korean society. Questions of why there are so few women in the work place compared to men could have been answered from a variety of answers. But to clearly disregard the answer and automatically assume that it had something to do with room salons or inequality for women reveals a clear agenda. One could have asked these questions in the US in the 1950’s or 1960’s. Would we have assumed that the lack of women in the work place had more to do with prostitutions and the sex industry instead of culture and family structure?
Additionally, having worked with Korean companies, in Korea, during my employment with these companies, have I or any associate of mine within the company gone to a room salon or hostess bar for the company or because of the company. Additionally, I have never witness a female employee being treated badly or unfairly because she was a female. Am I saying this never happens? Not at all, I am sure there are some abuses. But this is testament from someone who has had professional experience with Korean companies ranging from large and medium size companies and in fields of IT to financial. I was lucky enough to make some great friends along the way. Perhaps the best lesson has been in understanding the Korean people and the unique culture of Korea; two key points that are obviously lacking from these two reporters. More importantly, two key points that I would expect employees of established media companies would want and expect from their representatives in any country. For these two reporters to disregard that, demonstrates that they are clearly incompetent.
Mr. Ramstad’s offer of explanation is perhaps the most ridiculous part of this situation. He offers up that he isn’t “the most articulate” or that he won’t discuss the motivation of this incident “because that goes into stories that I’m working on.”. So he wants to write a story or an article about this? Mr. Kirk and Mr. Ramstad are reporters, report the news, don’t be the news. Otherwise it is like reporting on news of a fire after having started the fire.
Their actions as “professionals” are in question and rightly so. You would think that someone who is a journalist might be a little more “articulate” than the average. If the “room was full of people with cameras, mics etc.” then perhaps the way would have been to prepare first by having a well articulated question before hand. Using profanity, especially in a press meeting just makes this ludicrous. Again, how does this man have a job with WSJ?
He states “In general, in the time I’ve been here, I’ve faced sharp criticism by people in both the Roh and Lee administrations and by some of the companies I’ve written about. I correct errors when they’re pointed out. Before I write a story, every person in it is given an adequate chance to speak and respond to the points made in it.” If he is wondering why he still gets these “sharp criticism” maybe he needs to get his agenda out of the way and report the news. Usually if someone knows you’re a reporter and tells you one thing and then after it gets published they are criticizing you, it means you did not accurately report them or their words. It means you put a spin and then you took your gloves off and claim no responsibility. As professionals, they should know and understand the privilege of representing some of the most respected news agencies around the world. They clearly tarnished this and have put in question the reputation and credentials of these organizations.
You see, I can understand if they work for an organization that publically announce their position, an organization that is politically involved and have established a stance on certain subjects or issues. If they where missionaries or in extreme cases, members of established radical groups, then I can understand. They would have clear political or social agendas. But for people professing to be professionals and representing major news media groups, this is unacceptable.
Perhaps the most appalling realization is that there are people who read their “news” and attach the same trust as they would if they were any other news statements or reports from CBS or WSJ. Then we wonder why the public continues to lose trust in the media. I, for one, now have no choice but to start questioning the validly and truth of news and reports from these organizations, especially if these two are retained and kept in employment with WSJ and CBS respectively. Regardless to say, I will not value any reports from these two as clearly they report with agendas of their own.
It has been a long practice of nations and cultures to impose, vilify, and condemn other societies because they are not like or living up to their own expectations. That make this petty, ignorant and, most of all, shameful. It’s disrespectful to the host country, it’s insulting to other Americans and it creates a very negative image of WSJ, CBS and of the US.
Or it means you cross-check to verify accuracy rather than blindly regurgitating quotes from politicians with an agenda.
Journalism 101.
Which in that case, you made the refrence that you cross-checked to verify accuracy and stated the information source. But if this is the case, why would you be criticized?
Prostitution decreases when the “price” (broadly construed) of extra-marital/pre-marital sex and female virtue decreases. Better jobs or more money for women doesn’t necessarily lead to a decline in prostitution. Greater economic participation and material independence of women has correlated with the greater extra-marital/pre-marital sexual participation by women that drives the decline in prostitution. When it starts being given away for “free” or cheaper, the prostitutes get driven out of business.
Writing Class – Junior High at least.
@Knightwraith
Your second comment was a much more efficient effort at exposing your naivety.
Really? Since you want to start name calling, your an idot.
I’d like to buy an “i”.
The “rony” is rich.
First of all, dealing with (or manipulating) the press in the correct way is a very very important and necessary part of any government, and in the end it was what Tony Blair was accused of doing (too well) via Alistair Campbell who had to go when things got bad.
Spin doctoring is light-years ahead along with fairness of media, and the role of the mass communication in countries like the UK, so it’s futile to compare South Korea to places like the UK.
Having said that, there are a number of issues here:
First, even the choice of the word “Room Salon =룸 싸롱” in its direct Korean usage – it’s not exactly a formal word, it would be something strange or taken as a provocation if used in a formal setting – I would go as far as it being ” Minsiter, could you answer the fact the reason that the gender equality is present is because British women are all working hard as hoes?” – now, Alistair Darling wouldn’t be bringing the national media to jump on this foreign correspondent, especially if he made the mistake due to not knowing the language, but it’s still funny and would bring into question his professionalism.
So some other word could have been used to describe the “women who work in establishment” 유흥업소에 종사하는 여성들? etc
“Your an idiot.”
One piece of dimwittery that NEVER grows old.
Lame, bored much are yah? Not enough spices in your life?
Above Criticism
It’s an oldy but a goody!
With specimens such as yourself around, life is never boring.
Is that what you do Iceberg, go around blog sites and look for “specimens”? Honestly, you do need to get out more. Look I understand you couldn’t cut it as a journalist and such but uh, there is more to life.
Think Iceberg think!!!
Quickly now with the comebacks, your boring me.
Beats going around blog sites and writing a dozen paragraphs of ignorant drivel. Nice talking with you YoungRocco. Buh-bye.
Come on dude, faster. What’s wrong?
Awe, giving up so soon, but I’m just a naive guy, can’t hack it?
gender equality = gender inequality
Secondly, the issue that Evan Ramstad has raised, the complete discordance in what Koreans (or East Asians) seemingly try to achieve and what they put up with. i.e. having a 여성부 at all and putting posters up like “Women’s happiness is the happiness of the country” (or some campaign that was there last year with the slogan 여행) while the pervading practice of having paid women in clubs come and liven up the parties etc. – it is an interesting one.
The 여성부 was set up to address the changing demographic of more women at work anyway. It will need to be addressed in another thread, but I would say this is a universal issue, not just a Korean or East Asian issue. The conflict is there but I don’t believe it is serious as the non-Koreans worry about. What we need to worry about are the North Korean women being sold in China.
This sort of attitude change cannot happen overnight or cannot be force on by the outsiders, as the country develops and if the women themselves want more say at work and in government it will happen naturally.
Enlighten us, Oh wise and powerful Iceberg. Bless us with your wonderful mind and your intellegent drivel compaired to all us ignorant drivelers.
#117, that’s a little too harsh, don’t you think? I’ve read Don Kirk for years, wasn’t he used to be reporting from Korea, with Businessweek?
Going back to the subject of low economic participation of Korean women, a big part of the blame should also go to the Korean women and their mentality. I’ve been trying to get my Korean wife working for a number of years without success. Her belief which is largely influenced by people around her – including her own mother is the biggest problem. Her excuses are that there’s nobody to take care of the kid, and the home. Her own mother has the firm belief that a wife’s place is in the home, she should be there to take care of the kid, cook, clean, and wash. Korean women typically quit their work after they get married and have children, not necessarily because they don’t have the choice, but because many simply don’t want to. If women’s rights are going to advance in Korea, it should be the women who should lead the movement and demand changes. They have that choice but a clear majority have shown me that Korean women are perfectly happy with status quo – which is they control the household finances yet the women don’t have to put up with working 12 hour days under intolerable conditions, dealing with difficult Korean bosses.
I think Don’s been in Korea longer than I’ve been alive. I tend to give guys who covered the Gwangju Uprising the benefit of the doubt.
We have the kyopos on one side, more or less saying that what the WSJ and CBS journalists did was wrong and that the reaction from the MSF was understandable. And we have the non Koreans on the other saying that the MSF were making a big fool out of themselves. Some things in TMH doesn’t change.
Like it or not room salons are a fact of life in Korean corporate and government culture, including tall and pretty twenty somethings escorting short and fat forty fifty something geezers to their motel rooms. Which means that the reporters in questions had every right to ask those questions considering that the Minister in question is more or less responsible for looking over those corporations. I have give credit to the Minister for handling those questions with dignity. Unfortunately I can’t say the same for his underlings. Unless of course (and it is possible) the Minister in question ordered his underlings to muzzle the reporters.
quoting Knightwraith:
“But this is testament from someone who has had professional experience with Korean companies ranging from large and medium size companies and in fields of IT to financial.”
Of course you have such experience. It is clear you are one of those flunky Gyopos from one of those Korean companies that Evan Ramstad has annoyed. Unless you are really prepared to risk losing face in front of your masters, the best thing you can do now is stop commenting.
@ Sperwer # 116: this is the first and probably the last time i kinda agree on something with you. The things you say about the status of women in modern Korea tend to match what my wife and her family report to me.
From what i understand as a young woman in Korea you enjoy a relatively lively lifestyle, materially comfy, you have acccess to education and you’re also free to party and, with some discretion, fuck around. The glass ceiling is fairly thick if you try to make something more, and appropriate for your level of education, out of your life.
What i can’t really drag myself to do is feeling particularly sorry for the plight of these women: does the situations suck ? Sure. Is it unfair ? Sure. Are these women miserable and fucked up in the head ? Very likely. Is this detrimental long term for the whole country ? Again, very likely. Said so in the grand scheme of this “Life’s a bitch” world they are still people who had plenty of choices to live a different life that doesn’t involve entertaining ajoshis with their body.
I mean if back then (sorry little crime glorification moment) i told a judge something like:” Ehm dude i live in a council house shithole with my mom, who works a shitty job. My moronic dad can’t hold on to any regular job for more than 3 months and pays child support once in a blue moon. I mean i deserve better than this, i’m intelligent and motivated and you know, everybody around has a Sega Megadrive, Armani jeans and dance club money and the only way for me to get these things was robbin, stealin and dealin” Well i think something along that line would not have got me anywhere…unless the judge was some left-wing or catholic nutcase.
Now i won’t bring up the poor African women example again but even in Korea there are bigger issues to tackle for foreigners interested in the social illnesses of the country. For example something that shall i say ? disgusted even an unabashed Korea enthusiast like me was the situation of senior citizens.
These ajoshis and ajummas who worked like beasts of burden to build the modern, prosperous Korea of today seem to have been thrown for the most part in the dumpster like a broken piece of machinery.
i remember vividly last summer walking around the Hankan gro ni-ga street in Yongsan, a place dotted with little shops and lots of poorer-looking older people. One of them, a tiny guy, was pulling an enormous cart stacked with cardboard leftovers, the guy looked like he was about to fall and croak. Next to us there was this young, tall (very tall), trendily dressed, college-age couple holding hands and looking happily spaced-out, completely oblivious of the suffering of the man next to them, a man who could have been their grampa.
A loud “What the fuck” comment slipped out of my mouth, much to my partner surprise.
Interestnigly enough we had a few days ago a thread about the long-term consequences of the brutally rapid Korea development (BTW great post Wangkon) and it wasn’t nearly as popular as this one. Why ? I think the sudden interest of all these waeguks in Korean injustices might have something to do with the points exposed by NetizenKim @ # 45
Sorry, had to leave in the middle so was writing very quickly –
Finally the most interesting issue of this getting out in the KOREAN press, and being presented this way –
In a way, I wish it the foreign press side was better represented and more innocent (e.g. that Mr. Ramstad had no previous dealings) because then it would just show up that gov+Korean press were one-voiced to quickly highlight everything as us against them. However, the matter doesn’t seem so straightforward due to Mr.Ramstad once having lost his temper at the wrong place at the wrong time.
@ gangpehmoderniste
1. Lack of compassion for the plight of Korean women.
2. Never (with one exception) agrees with Spewer
3. Reverence for the elderly
4. Self-proclaimed “unabashed Korea enthusiast”
5. Respect for Netizen Kim
Need I give you my conclusion?
My conclusion is that he Korean wife to be is a very lucky lady.
he->his
It’s not a nice and a smart thing to say “F*** You” to a high ranking Korean government official IN KOREA. That’s pretty low class.
I don’t care what the reason is, good or bad. Nothing justifies this behavior (if this is true – and I don’t doubt it was, if the WSJ reporter has already wrote an apology for this behavior previously).
If you’re a professional, you should act like one.
“My conclusion is that he Korean wife to be is a very lucky lady.”
Since she will be marrying an ajoshi and not some foreigner, how more lucky can you get.
There is a lot of misplaced umbrage here by the usual suspects wth there usual trite memes, and especially by that new piece of work, Knightwraith, who probably has no business reading serious newspapers anyway.
The Choi Sang-hoon story in the NYT a week or so ago, to which Evan R refers indirectly, quoted experts as saying the Room Salon and nightly drinks with the boss culture as a key form of glass ceiling that exists for Korean women in corporate Korea. Women don’t want to do that even if they are welcome to those nightlife excursions. I’d bet many younger Korean men would rather spend time with their families or friends than take part in those outings. Prostitution is only tangential here and doesn’t even look to be part of Evan R’s line of questioning.
I’d say Yuna is spot-on here: “I wish it the foreign press side was better represented and more innocent (e.g. that Mr. Ramstad had no previous dealings) because then it would just show up that gov+Korean press were one-voiced to quickly highlight everything as us against them. “
You know, Slim, that being said, having thought about it, while the “room salon culture” does have an economic impact, the question might have been better put to the whatever-they’re-calling-the-여성부-nowadays, not the Minister of Finance. To take what Netizen Kim said and use it for good, Minister Yoon is not a sociologist and probably just wants to talk about the call rate or something.
As far as I know, it’s not a nice or a smart thing to say it to a high-ranking official ANYWHERE. Even in Canada!
Yuna: ehm thanks ** blush**
Awarren: LOL let’s see your points:
Well you know my philosophy, life’s a bitch, dog eat dog etc. etc.
Hard times are comin your way
You’re gonna have to rise above it some day
Organize your life and figure it out
Or you’ll go under without a doubt
Wonder if there’s some other former HC kid who get this quoting
The coolest typo i read on the interwebs in a while
With the possible exception of my obnoxious neighbour, some rude, arrogant and completely whacked-out ancient lady. I tried to off her several times blasting very loudly the finest Italian music but she’s a thick-skinned bitch
What can i say ? We all have our own perversions i guess
As long as he doesn’t demand to start managing my networth
But that’s ok, Ajoshi Guido, i love that
Here is Alistair Campbell more recently, talking glib about his fine fine art with Michael Portillo in pink, who, incidentally was the MP of my borough. I have a feeling the Korean government could bring Alistair Campbell to deal with the foreign press, Hiddink style.
In Korea, 손석희 is much respected – he had on a very good TV program (MBC) late night, where Koreans put on their proverbial civilized suits and managed to talk civilized about issues. There was some controversy when he went (on whether he *had to go*) as part of the MBC-government discord.
@100
Thank you to Evan for weighing in and being so honest about things. Unfortunately those are the only kind words I have.
I never thought I’d say this but you have to respect their unique culture. And by “unique culture” I mean Koreans’ social Darwinist belief that the world is nothing but a battlefield between the races and nations and the accept the cold hard fact that anything non-Koreans do will reduced to such a formula by Koreans.
As much as Mr. Ramstad (or anyone else) may want things to remain just a spat between individuals, it’s not gonna happen. It will be about all western journalists, about all westerns, and finally about all non-Koreans. The WSJ should know that and send reporters that can act accordingly. Sending reporters to Korea is just like sending diplomats, it’s a position where you don’t want hotheads or loose cannons screwing things up for the rest of us.
@ 108
It would be wonderful if ‘the home team’ was circumspect and mature enough to ” get” how much they were actually screwing things up for themselves in the long run by looking like “a bunch of hypernationalist, insecure yahoos” but that ship is far up de-nile — it won’t be back any time soon.
As a gesture of my goodwill and gratitude allow yours truly to extend a helping hand by entertaining your womenfolk employees.
Awarren,
Given that gangpeh’s wife-to-be has a teenage son… I’d hazard to guess that she’s no spring chicken either.
Honestly, I don’t understand Mr. Ramstad’s nonchalant dismissal of his profanity-hurling behavior. “I am a big boy,” so maybe he’s implying you should just swear back and me and we will call it even? The more he writes, the more he chips away at his unstable, disintegrating foundation.
Is this what WSJ reporters normally do when they clash with government officials in the U.S.?
Or is it more a case of this:
“For some reason, the [American] people I meet in my country are not the same as the ones I knew in the United States. A mysterious change seems to come over Americans when they go to a foreign land… They’re loud and ostentatious.”
Awarren,
What’s wrong, did some Korean lady drop you? Was your ity bity heart broken in Korea? Look you obviously got anger issues with your “Master” in Korea. But look I understand your angry, you had to come to Korea because you had no other choice.
Whether or not I am Kyopo, doesn’t really mix into this does it? Clearly you don’t like my views, fine. How very un-Korean of you to slam me, Kyopos, or anyone else that might or might have worked with Korean companies. How very high of you to make this an issue of race.
Really AWARREN, you’re a very small man with some deep rooted inferiority complex. Obviously you’ve been in Korea too long. Get your pathetic life, your prejudice views and your anger issues back to your own country. Your making the rest of us who like to travel, visit or work in Asia look bad.
BTW, If you think the WSJ reporter did no wrong, then you haven’t worked a day in a real office, let alone know the definition of representation or responsibility.
Your a loser and judging by your comments and views, you already know that don’t cha?
A Foreign Minister, giving a press conference, I would hope is capable of answering “tough”, “probing”, “inappropriate”, “irrelevant”, “embarrassing” questions. I think this Minister did exactly that. He answered with a professional, “coherent”, and a “comprehensible” reply.
A journalist, should be able to handle criticism and a little push back from Ministry officials, if the said journalist is seeking any kind respect from the Ministry. This journalist failed in that respect.
this issue is really simple. this issue isn’t about room salons or the right of westerners to do whatever they feel like doing wherever they are in the world. this issue is about boundries and mr evan crossed that boundry by telling a korean official ‘fuck you’.
i wonder what would happen if one of the posters here told the marmot ‘fuck you’. we all know the person would be banned.
this issue is about boundries. me evan crossed that boundry. that’s why he better start looking for another job.
lastly, a word to mr kim at the ministry: you better be very careful in using this blog as a gauge of western opinion since most of the posters here have a self-created image to uphold.
lastly, can i ask you something, mr kim? why do koreans seem so desperate to have whites praise them? i’m korean and really don’t give a shit what whites think of koreans. you and korea would be wise to do the same.
#141
I’m a Kyopo, and to tell the truth I’m actually glad that this is a news event and it’s being escalated the way it is. I work at the management level of a Canadian international company but have worked albeit shortly in corporate Korea as well. Frankly speaking If this ‘news’ actually goes further in debate and gains more press, I’m all for it. The room salon culture is so prevalent in corporate korea that it even spreads abroad…Even here in Canada there’s room salons set up for korean ‘businessmen’. I as a kyopo find it a shameful facet tied into business life there and actually a detriment to the view of business conduct in korea given abroad and as a kyopo know that this is something that won’t easily change either as it’s so ingrained into the culture now.
It’s seems koreans particularly men try to dismiss the salon culture, hide it under nationalistic pretenses or pride and I for one am thankful that the light is shining on it and getting the defensive responses it has. I think helps it further to bring it out from under the carpet where everyone wants to keep it. I would like to think that such dialogue would help to encourage some change although as a Korean I know stubbornness is another trait which will hamper it. My own humble opinions on the whole matter.
I also find the whole blaming ‘western’ and perception argument a bit old. I read a variety of news from different sources and if your going to use hypernationalism/bias’s sheathed with false legitimacy via any kind of excuse you should start looking at all news that do it, and you’d start looking inward first. (I’m talking about you, Koreatimes
)
To any one who cares, here are a few Korean news publication articles in English:
http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2010/03/116_62093.html
http://www.koreaherald.co.kr/NEWKHSITE/data/html_dir/2010/03/10/201003100060.asp
http://joongangdaily.joins.com/article/view.asp?aid=2917607
Here’s an earlier Joong Ang Daily article:
http://joongangdaily.joins.com/article/view.asp?aid=2917564
This is turning into a farce over some spat between a Korean government official and a foreign reporter turned into a grave national slight by the Korean press.
We now have another reporter, Don Kirk reading and replying to this blog via Email.
Who else is reading this blog? Lee Myung Bak? President Obama? Kim Jong Il? US Ambassador? (hi there Ms Ambassador, what’s your ID here? Just curious)
This is surreal….
http://www.google.co.kr/search?complete=1&hl=ko&q=%EB%A3%B8%EC%82%B4%EB%A1%B1+%EB%B2%95%EC%9D%B8%EC%B9%B4%EB%93%9C+%EC%A0%91%EB%8C%80&btnG=Google+%EA%B2%80%EC%83%89&lr=&aq=f&oq=
<—– Re-member 청와대 비서관's case.
And well, Korean women support Evan Ramstad. Cheers.
I request urgently the opinion of CL, Dara and Bom on this issue. Minji, being underage, shouldn’t hang out in this, with all the due respect, cesspool
DooBoo (and others),
I don’t think a lot of people here are debating whether or not there is gender inequality in Korea (or the rest of Asia for that matter) or that the room salon culture is a prevalent one in Korea.
Prevalent yes. Widespread enough where it is a main cause of what’s keeping Korean women in the workplace down? I don’t know about that. I’m not even sure if it’s as wide spread as Evan would like to think given that going to the room salon all the time is an expensive proposition and not all companies are that rich (and not every company in Korea is a rich Chaebol). I’d say it’s more of an “upper management” event where “middle management” is sometimes (but not always) invited. Samguyopsal and soju is a lot cheaper than a room salon with imported liquor and I’d wager that it is the more common “dejour” post-work related activity among co-workers.
Personally, I don’t know what comes first. The chicken or the egg. Are there a lot of room salons because women are not given enough responsibilities commensurate with their education and intelligence level or… (as Evan appears to imply) are there not enough women in positions of note because they do not (or do not want to) partake in room salon related activities? Well, one doesn’t have to be mutually exclusive of the other I suppose. And to quote others, I’m not a sociologist so I can’t make definitive comments either way. One thing I know is that the Minister of Finance is not qualified to answer the question that Evan presented to him. It would be like asking Ben Bernanke or Timothy Geithner if America’s high teen pregnancy rate contributed to America’s gender pay gap (which I think is at 20-19% and is in the middle of the OEDC pack) and if large segments of America’s society’s aversion to abortion as a common alterative was holding women back. I suppose a reporter can ask that question. It’s a free country. But should that reporter expect an informed response from a person not qualified and not prepared for that type of question? What was this reporter really trying to accomplish any ways?
Now… back to the larger issue of gender inequality in Korea. Well, Korea ranks dead last in the OEDC in pay gap. There is a 38% gap in male vs. female pay in Korea. But it’s not just a Korean problem. The pay gap is 33% in Japan and Japan should be 20 year ahead theoretically in development vs. Korea, particularly from a sociological perspective. I’m sure Taiwan is somewhere in the mix too. I couldn’t find statistics for Taiwan. Taiwan is not an OEDC member, strangely enough (there are only two countries in the continent of Asia that are in the OEDC and that’s an interesting question all in its own). Hell, take even a former British colonial holding like Singapore. Its gender pay gap is 27%, which would put it in a better spot than Japan and Korea but still below any Western country in the OEDC. Let’s just say that gender equality is bad in Asia period. But that brings up an interesting question. Why is gender equality bad in relatively developed East Asian countries? Well, I think all these countries share a particular sociological model. Confucianism, right?
Confucianism has it’s pluses and minuses. High degree of social organization and order is a plus. A reverence for education is another plus. Individual thinking, spontaneous creativity, creative destruction and yes, immediate gender equality is not one of Confucianism’s pluses. Confucianism has it’s warts, but it was the card that East Asia was dealt with. They have been marinating in that stew for 2,000 years. You can’t expect these people to immediately discard it. And it must be said that the developed Asian countries have changed a lot and not just economically. Hell, Japan finally became a “normal” multi-party democracy last year! Taiwanese, Koreans and Japanese have adopted dress, technology, architecture, art, literature, education methods, liberal democracy, freedom of press, multiparty systems, etc. from the West at a relatively fast clip. Singapore and Hong Kong have adopted Western methods at a faster clip but only because they were former Western colonies. English is, effectively, a first or second language in those statelets. The developed Asian nations have gone through tremendous change in the past 30-40 years socially and economically. Much of that change has tilted West. I don’t think anyone who knows something about the subject would deny that.
Gender equality, particularly in the work place makes sense. As I said before, it makes social and economic sense, particularly for a nation that has recently reached developed status. Unfortunately, Korea has several “social inhibitors” THAT IT SHARES WITH OTHER NATIONS IN ITS REGION that make gender equality a work in progress. Thus, as others have said that we are “tired” of the cultural explanation, etc., there just isn’t a way to escape the cultural explanation for Korea or any other country for that matter. I mean… America became a democracy in what? 1787 around abouts, right? Blacks were 4/5s of a human being until when? Around 1865? A passage of 78 years? And blacks didn’t get all the bull shit inhibiting their rights until (theoretically) the passage of Civil Rights Act in 1964. A passage of 177 years. Women didn’t get the vote until 1920. A passage of 133 years? And actual gender equality? I wonder what the gender pay gap in the U.S. was as recently as the 70’s? Could it have been in the 30 percentile as well? Maybe…
Who here likes the AMC series Mad Men? Good show, huh? I think one of the reasons for the show’s popularity is that it showed you late 50’s /early 60s’ era American culture (in a high stakes, corporate and male chauvinist setting) with all its idiosyncrasies and vulgarities hypocrisies, no holds barred. I’d say that today’s Korean society is comparable to the society that America had in the 50’s and early 60’s. Generally nice people and well meaning, but a little racist, a little xenophobic and thinks that a woman’s proper place is in the home. I wonder what the gender income gap is in that show? Probably 200%-300%, huh?
Listen, this is most certainly not me raising these points to call America a hypocrite. I don’t think it is. I raise the points to state the simple fact that it took America a hundred or hundreds of years to get to where it is today. There was struggle, there was disagreement, there were fights within the family. There were mistakes made along the way, it took decades to correct those mistakes. Lessons were learned. Lessons were forgotten then reapplied. It takes a lot of hard work to get from point A to point B or C or F or whatever. In some cases, quite literally, some misogynist generations had to expire before society could progress again. Eventually, the liberal, balanced democracy and free society that we enjoy today took so very long to achieve that it’s almost taken for granted and the struggle to get there almost forgotten except for fuzzy history lessons in elementary or Jr. HS. Again, to come into this discussion without an understanding of a little culture and a little history is, IMHO, inexcusable and just plain ignorant. Silver dollar belt buckle and mullet wearing level of ignorant (metaphorically speaking).
Okay, WK I hear you but we don’t live in a male chauvinist, overtly racist and outwardly homophobic world anymore. Shouldn’t Korea be put to a higher standard? Absolutely, it should. Korea’s democracy may only be 22 years old but it’s had the advantage of having access to all the lessons that past democracies had to muddle through in their histories. It should learn more and learn it faster! However, I would argue that it has and continues to. 22 years removed from military dictatorship. Where they are today? Not bad. Not great, mind you, but not bad. However, if in the next 10-15 years the gender income gap is STILL 38-33% (it’s at least got to be better than Japan’s! C’mon! It should at the very least be at Singapore’s current level) then there is a big problem and Korea needs an intervention. Hell, I’ll be the first one to advocate it.
So, in closing, it’s absolutely okay for a journalist to ask any question he likes in a press conference. South Korea is a free country- kinda, sorta, I guess. However, I don’t think it’s okay for him to be a total jerk about it.
the reporter was clearly in the wrong for swearing. but i applaud him for asking the questions. perhaps, not the right time, place and manner. but i wish more foreign correspondents would put pressure on the korean government regarding this issue. and i hate korean media. that is all.
According to the reports circulating, that’s not what happened.
Once again, I’d like to point out the fact that there is a profound difference between a direct “F you” and letting an f-bomb go during the escalation of an argument, WTF-style. As I wrote above, conflation of the two as if they were one and the same is a Korean tactic (or common misunderstanding, although I believe it’s a deliberate tactic).
What arrogance for the Ministry spokesman and his boss to goad the Wall Street Journal reporter with very direct insults, and then to react in this manner when the insulted American predictably gets a little salty in the presence of their Royal Majesties.
The room salon business culture is what built Korea from devastated, hopeless shithole to what it is today.
If the West wants to pretend men and women are exactly the same, dabble in interesting social engineering experiments, waste time having never-ending “gender wars” and constantly having to reinvent the wheel as to who does what between a man and a woman…that’s fine.
The US Navy recently announced that it will be allowing women into the submarine fleets. Let’s think about this one for a moment. Before when it was an all male service, no one had to worry about having separate restroom facilities, or bumping into each other in tight, confined spaces, and every crew member showered together. Now what? Just because there’s gonna be one or two women in the crew they’re gonna add extra bathroom and shower facilities to the submarines in the name of Political Correctness? We’re talking about submarines…it’s not like having a house and getting supplies from Home Depot to add a extra bathroom in the basement. This is the kind of absurdity that arises when you indulge in fallacies that men and women are the same, which is part of the doctrine of Political Correctness. If we could just accept that men and women are NOT exactly the same, and that for the most part women do not belong in combat situation alongside men, and especially not on a submarine, then we wouldn’t be having these kinds of issues and we could all focus on other matters, like national defense, but NO.
Is it really too much to ask Westerners to keep their own ways of doing things to themselves and not try to impose it on others or are they really that obtuse and obnoxious at the same time and can’t help it? If I had a choice between room salons and a business culture where you, as a man, could get sued for sexual harassment for looking at a woman funny, then I’d easily choose the former in a heartbeat.
Let’s see what gender parity in the workplace has done for the West: in the 1950s, a family with a single breadwinner’s salary (which was usually the man) could comfortably afford a house, a car, send the kids to school, and other amenities of middle class existence. Now, you have both men and women working and they can barely keep up with the cost of living and the middle class is doing a vanishing act. Some fucking progress.
The problem is you got too many Westerners running around thinking they know it all and think nothing of imposing their unsolicited worldview on others and are totally oblivious to the fact that the rest of the world thinks they’re giant pricks. Especially Americans…which is probably a consequence of the fact that America constantly acts like the world’s mother-in-law and poking nose in other people’s business.
NetKim,
Sometimes I think you mean well but…
I got a headache…
There are so many things I would have cited as reasons behind Korea’s post-war economic successes, but I never would have guessed it was room salons that actually did it. Fascinating.
Red Sparrow,
Americans with money are treated very well
Very very true. I’m under no delusions that my treatment wasn’t
due to money
there….and are also very big targets. It can be very dangerous as well…
which is why i always went with a group…unfortunately. I saw some
things i really wish i hadn’t.
That doesn’t change the fact that the sex industry and that specific
culture there isn’t what it is. Even when i wasn’t with that group,
they went about those kind of activities anyway….
The Western press, as one of its greatest practitioners and theoreticians, Walter Lippmann, showed almost 80 years ago, serves to reflect and advance the views of the governing elite. In practice, it is basically a branch of government, a propaganda arm or “intelligence bureau” as Lippmann proposed in his book Public Opinion.
Since the Western press reflects the views of the governing elite (and comprises a segment of the elite), naturally there are conflicts of interest between it and the Korean governing elite and by extension Koreans. Koreans need to be cognizant of this fact and understand that it is likely to be a futile strategy to try to beat them at their own game which they are masters in. It is probably a far better strategy to control and exert sovereignty over one’s own media space
And I agree that it is silly to play the race card and complain. The race card is reserved for and most effectively utilized by certain groups in the West. It is less effective for Koreans (relatively speaking) in the West, and basically completely ineffectual outside of it. Especially when it is used against those who consider themselves to be supreme “anti-racists” and seek to advance global leftist hegemonic supremacy, to extirpate any and all different cultures, and to homogenize the entire planet.
NetKim,
I think Korea’s success might have more to do the country’s ability to gain access to American markets while keeping its own closed than with room salon culture.
It was nice to see you announce that a business culture that involves women being treated as servants for men’s sexual desires is better than one in which women might have some sort of defense against being forced to provide BJs to keep their jobs. I appreciate your honesty.
@#160
“lastly, can i ask you something, mr kim? why do koreans seem so desperate to have whites praise them? i’m korean and really don’t give a shit what whites think of koreans. you and korea would be wise to do the same.”
I actually agree with this. So who cares if the foreign reporter thinks Korean men are room salon/whore mongers. It’s nothing to be proud of, but it’s true anyway for a significant portion of Korea’s population. Why get your knots all twisted over this? If the problem is the reporter is being impolite, then ban him and that will be that. Why treat this as some grave national insult against Korea? I’m not directing this question at the finance minister who answered all the questions politely (disagree with his position or not). I’m talking about the Korean reporters and some of the Korean government spokesman who are reporting this with a nationalistic angle, and the old condescending “you don’t understand our culture”.
This should have been treated as a joke, something to laugh at, instead the whole country is going to gnash at their teeth, because some foreign reporter insulted Korea, oh my god.. .
As a country, Koreans have a deep sense of inferiority and insecurity complex that’s evident here – and the need to be respected by the world. It’s like the kid who tries hard to become popular in class. The country would be fully mature once it shakes off these complexes. What Koreans need.. is to learn how to laugh at themselves sometimes, and stop trying so hard to be popular. Sometimes you can hurt your own international PR efforts by being overbearing and trying to correct every different view points that don’t agree with how you view things.
If he said fuck you to the government official of korea(high ranking) whether his question was legimate or not, it shows his chracteristics. His manner was not appropriate and eventhough his question might be relevant to the women’s appreication day, this is not an acceptable behavior. I wonder how you expats would react if korean correspondent asked the republicans about why they enjoy gay sex in the washroom or fuck their secretaries and swear at them in korean language (sibal noma). I’m damn sure that you people would blog about it for months and go mad angry.
Brendon Carr,
equivocation = “Once again, I’d like to point out the fact that there is a profound difference between a direct “F you” and letting an f-bomb go during the escalation of an argument, WTF-style. As I wrote above, conflation of the two as if they were one and the same is a Korean tactic (or common misunderstanding, although I believe it’s a deliberate tactic).”
You know…if the quotes are accurate, I think that Evan did have the right to pose those questions. It would have been better had he worded them in a manner more in line with the setting though. Most like he was just trying to get a rise out of guy and hoping he’d say something a bit more stimulating that the same old party lines. The officials response was pretty much as expected.
Quite frankly, nothing much should really have been made out of it imho. The only problem really is with the swearing and profanity. In the position that he’s in, Evan should really have handled his temper better considering the kind of work he does.
Perhaps… but I would have expected more from someone reporting for the WSJ… I mean it’s not TMZ or something… right?
I used to subscribe to the journal. Very logical and well-reasoned editorial section with a nice Libertarian leaning. Then Murdoch got his greasy hands on the paper and the quality started to deteriorate. He hasn’t turn it into The Sun yet, but I imagine that is his goal. Maybe Ramstad is working under direct orders from Murdoch to get more sex in the journal!
#181, the reporter definitely tried to get a rise out of the Finance Minister.
The reporter practically accused the Finance Minister and his office of being fans of Room Salons.. I mean.. yeah, maybe it’s true, or maybe it’s not… we’ll never know, but that’s not the point, but that kind of question (or more likely an accusation) in an international press conference? I can understand why they would be, shall we say, a little upset?
Why so confrontational if that wasn’t the true intention?
I still subscribe to the journal… and I haven’t noticed the decline as much as you have… but I do see it seeping in… especially in the opinions and editorials section…
This entire thing is really blown out of proportion by the media.
But i remember reading an article by some guy named Roboseo or something like that that said that, in Korea, with the bad rep that English teachers are getting, that a single English teacher represents ALL English teachers. I think the same applies with all foreign elements of Korean society. The profanity by Evan unfortunately reflects badly on his peers.
Bad move really.
And as bad as it is….and i don’t want to agree with NetKim….he’s got a
point about gender equality in Korea. If i were a human resource manager/boss in a Korean Corp., and i was hiring a woman who believed that women should go back to cooking and cleaning after marriage and children……would i be inclined to give her the same pay scale as a guy who you could be more sure of? What of the time and investment the company has to place in the individual? If she gets pregnant, and leaves her position permanently, where does that leave you? More risk, less pay. Sorta stinks but that’s what it is probably like.
Another thing to consider. I may be stereotyping but alot of Korean women get good jobs, education, etc….so that they can find a good husband…
I think that the ‘general’ mindset of Korean women is as much cause for their problems as is the mindset of the men.
Hell… it’s a cultural thing.
Let’s get one thing perfectly clear: your an idot, your a loser and your going to use hypernationalism/bias’s.
Hey guys…. just in case any one is interested… gender wage gap OECD graph:
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/09/the-gender-wage-gap-around-the-world/
Wow…just wow lol. My first direct attack here
and no, i’m not going to respond in kind.
Just an fyi, i think Korean nationalism is a load of BS.
‘nuf said
The US went through that phase in the past as well.
But i’m a realist and to have any kind of meaningful discourse, it
helps to be able to stand in someone elses shoes and try to see their
point of view. *cough* open mind
Germany as the worst non-Asian performer? I would have never guessed that.
Any insight on this? Gangpeh?
The room salon business culture is what built Korea from devastated, hopeless shithole to what it is today.
I’m picturing Netizen Kim running a power-point presentation to the US strategic command in Afganistan: “Forget education and industry, Gen. McChrystal, the key is hand-jobs, hand-jobs I tell you.”
On your other comment about western men becoming feminists in an effort to get laid, I think anyone – western or otherwise – with a mother, sister or daughters, is likely to be disgusted by corporate-condoned, large-scale whoring. (On the other hand, I concede that causes can become fashionable – just look at Free Tibet)
But dude, seriously, time to get over the western man-hate – it’s clearly eating you up.
My take on this whole fiasco.
1. Evan Ramstad clearly acted in an unprofessional way. There are a number of much better ways he could have framed his questions, as Robert and Yuna pointed out. While I agree there is a problem with the culture of whoring in corporate Korea, Evan’s clearly projected his western frame-work of ethics and morals on the Korean establishment in a clumsy and arrogant way. Tact is the key work here, kiddies.
2. Aside from a few non-committal comments by Yuna, why don’t we hear more on this issue by Korean women? In my five years in Korea, I heard a fairly equal number of complaints and disgusted comments by western women and men on the matter (the latter clearly trying to get laid ;p), but no adverse complaints – or opinions of any sort, now I think about it – by Korean women. Without some sort of input by the group at the center of this debate, it strikes me as a lot of man-noise to little end.
3. Agree with gangpehmoderniste: there are bigger issues that need attention, like the treatment of old people in Korea. Whoring gets all the press, (fashionable cause?) but watching 80-year-olds bent double dragging carts full of cardboard so they can buy enough rice to eat at the end of the day is a national shame, particularly given the current wealth of the country. Korea claims treat its elderly with esteem – bullshit. Korea has the highest rate of elderly poverty in the OECD bloc, and by a comfortable margin. Let’s talk about that occasionally.
Also, on Brenden’s point:
Once again, I’d like to point out the fact that there is a profound difference between a direct “F you” and letting an f-bomb go during the escalation of an argument, WTF-style. As I wrote above, conflation of the two as if they were one and the same is a Korean tactic (or common misunderstanding, although I believe it’s a deliberate tactic).
I agree 100%. Played a lot of football (soccer) in Korea, and every few games the Korean teams would explode in anger at a supposed slight — when one of our players swore to himself. Lost count of the number of times we tried to mollify an angry mob by explaining that the player wasn’t cursing them, he was just cursing.
In saying that, I can’t see how audibly swearing – to yourself, under your breath – is ever acceptable in a business environment, particularly when the atmosphere is already charged and hostile. Again, strikes me a lack of tact.
Finally,
“Your an idiot.”
Pure comedy gold. Unless you’re an English teacher. In which case I feel myself deflate slightly.
One word: lebensborn.
As per “Hannara”:
I, for one, would laugh since I feel they deserve such and more. Please try doing so sometime.
“Hoju_saram” sums it up many issues very nicely too. No one has distinguished themselves well in this tawdry episode.
hoju and Brendon,
I think Evan addressed the “swearing” confusion by admitting that he sore at them… not just merely swearing in front of them.
Btw… I generally like most of your comments hoju. You have a fairly balanced and thoughtful way of responding and interacting. I don’t know why you don’t comment more.
@NetizenKim
Remember, religions or moral systems whether they’re Scientology, Marxism, liberalism, feminism, etc are just collections of memes. Human ethology shows that people generate, manipulate, communicate, transmit memes for a whole host of reasons. They serve as a means of forming and cohering a group identity against other groups (ie our tribe believes this, that ‘bad’ tribe over there believes that), of intragroup status competition and display, of advancing one’s own or group’s interests, of infecting others to serve particular interests, etc. I suspect many of these various reasons are involved here. Many of the carriers seem to be acting as extended phenotypes. Also the worst, most deadly memes are by definition the most virulent, that is they induce their carriers to spread them.
hoju_sorum,
You might have to consider the strange possibility that it doesn’t bother them as much as it does the vociferous one on this blog.
Where does this come from? You guys must have additional accounts of what happened. ???
‘On your other comment about western men becoming feminists in an effort to get laid, I think anyone – western or otherwise – with a mother, sister or daughters, is likely to be disgusted by corporate-condoned, large-scale whoring.’
you got that shit right, mate.
Assuming that #100 above was actually written by Evan Ramstad (a fair assumption, no?), that is what happened:
In #98 above, you draw distinction ‘between swearing to oneself, perhaps muttering in disappointment, and swearing at one’s interlocutor’. Yet, according to Mr. Ramstad’s own description, he swore at one person in one situation, and to two persons in another.
I’m not trying to play some sort of word game, but rather point out that Ramstad admits that he didn’t mutter the profanities to himself. Truly, his decision to make that clear to everyone here is commendable – to be frank, I hadn’t expected it, and I am impressed that he seems open about disclosing his actions.
Considering his interest in describing events as they occurred, even when they cast him in a less favorable light, should make people more willing to listen to the complaints he might have had. But that aside, using profanity in the way he did – and, again, as he admits he did – is simply not an acceptable action, and the Ministry was correct in expressing their ire.
Hear hear, gbnhj.
Sorry about the html tags mess – there should be a closing tag after ‘First, it is true that I sworn [sic] at Mr. Kim in August and again yesterday to him and his boss Mr. Park’, and the rest is non-blockquoted.
I responded to Joshua at OnefreeKorea but it’s awaiting moderation (probably because my last noun got caught up in the filter). I thought I might post the same here, too, though some of the stuff is repetitious:
“With all due respect to Mr. Stanton and the (metaphorical) client(s) he is defending, I cannot agree with the implication that this is a proto-typical case of the South Korean government/media bleating about any legitimate foreign criticism. Indeed, I see what Ramstad did as more muck-throwing than muckraking. But let me start with the “who” aspect:
1. I do not see a compelling reason to rope Mr. Kirk and Ramstad together and then present a defense of both. It almost seems like an attempt to exonerate by association of sorts, given that Mr. Kirk’s name rightfully commands a lot of respect among long-time Korea watchers.
Nonetheless, Mr. Kirk did not first broach the indelicate topic, nor did he respond with a profanity-laced temper tantrum when privately reprimanded. Nor is he, to my knowledge, a recidivist when it comes to boorish behavior toward officials of his host country. Finally, and understandably, the controversy has revolved around the (in)appropriateness of Ramstad’s questions and his subsequent (and now it turns out preceding), rude behavior.
So let’s leave Mr. Kirk out of this.
2. While the room salon culture is indeed pervasive in South Korea, I maintain that Ramstad’s question was out of place en toto, even abstracting the issue of sensitivity to local cultural norms (the knowledge in which Ramstad seems woefully deficient).
To begin with, and as others have pointed out, the Finance Minister was not exactly the right person to ask what is primarily a sociological question.
Second, as a matter of commonsense, I fail to see how the prevalence of the room salon culture can be the primary cause of South Korean women’s reluctance to enter the workforce. Aside from my methodological allergy toward mono-causal explanations: Is it not more commonsensical to assume that that primary cause could be something much more mundane? Start with the tremendous wage gap based on the gender. People work, among other things, to make money, do they not? Or if you want a more abstract or airy explanation: What about the all-encompassing pressures of a relentless, Confucian socialization process that indoctrinates women into believing their place is nowhere else but home, sweet home? Most young Korean women I know quit working when they got married simply because that’s how things have been done since time immemorial, and that’s how their expectations were shaped from their earliest days. Yet, Ramstad picks, pardon the pun, the most sexy mono-causal explanation designed to do nothing but offend (and perhaps sell papers: “Titty bar corporate culture discourages Korean women from leaving the kitchen”!).
Third, that Ramstad’s primary intent was to rile up the good Minister seems almost demonstrated by his gratuitous ad hominem question that directly targeted the Ministry’s own practices in regard to room salon.
Again, I ask: Why was all this necessary?
3. Finally, Mr. Stanton side-steps Ramstad’s most egregious transgressions by professing ignorance: i.e., Ramstad’s history of profanity hurling episodes toward the Ministry officials. But the profession of ignorance in this context is a weak defense, because Ramstad himself explicitly admitted it happened. So I am afraid that we must take a stand regarding whether it is proper for a foreign correspondent to swear at public officials when he does not get his way–regardless of the provocation.
Now it appears from Ramstad rather nonchalant “apologia” of sorts at Mr. Koehler’s Blog that he considers the said behavior rather everyday when it comes to interaction between reporters and public officials. In fact, he appears miffed that the Ministry belated publicized his past spats with it. He’s a “big boy,” and it almost seems like he’s implying that the insulted person should have f-bombed him back and then called it even.
I do not think Ramstad actually believes all this (would he have acted the same way if he were a correspondent in Washington or London?).
Instead, the pattern seems to indicate we have a journalistic variant of the “Ugly American” syndrome–rather characteristic of how some (I deleted the original adjective “many”) American correspondents in East Asia behave: With insufferable hubris and utter obliviousness to the local context.
And if Ramstad does actually think what he did represents the proverbial par for the course for his job, I wonder whether he possesses the requisite contextual cultural discernment for the job. There is a fundamental difference between asking tough, probing questions at opportune moments and being an ass always.”
Like, say for example, the way that racial nationalism is spread/taught in Korea?
Mr. Kirk and Mr. Ramstad were first roped together in some Korean media reports of the press conference. See the original post for one example and see update #8 for Mr. Kirk’s clarification on a KT report.
Lady Sonagi,
I am aware of that; but most of the fire has been directed toward Ramstad, and, in particular, the controversy has more or less settled on the propriety of his profanity-hurling episodes.
“Lady Sonagi”…that kills me.
(Not that Sonagi’s not a lady. Just the sound of the expression…).
Iceberg,
Well, it’s a good thing we’ve never met, because I’d probably call her “miguk nangja” or something
I think you might have just made her day.
“I think that the ‘general’ mindset of Korean women is as much cause for their problems as is the mindset of the men.”
That’s what I been saying all along. Maybe Korean women don’t get bothered as much as the Westerners. If there are injustices that Korean women feel they need rectifying, they are more than welcomed to express their feelings and protest. After all, nobody is preventing the women to form women’s rights groups and fight for their rights. It’s also the Korean women who also have the same mindset that Korean men are accused of when it comes to women in the work place. This is still a heavily neo-Confucian society, despite its modern trappings.
“I’d like to point out the fact that there is a profound difference between a direct “F you” and letting an f-bomb go during the escalation of an argument, WTF-style.”
That’s still pretty bad. Why did the reporter apologize then? What was that apology for then? Are you saying it was just lip service?
I take it that not only have you no experience with this situation (I’ve been in it myself, after an ill-advised WTF moment), but you also have never been married.
My age and carnal knowledge disqualify me as a 낭자.
All interesting observations. Something to file away for the future. But for now , has no bearing on this incident.
Brendan, read what Mr. Ramstad wrote.
“First, it is true that I sworn at Mr. Kim in August and again yesterday to him and his boss Mr. Park
Yesterday, I swore at his boss after we walked out of the press conference”
He admitted twice he “swore at Mr. Kim” and his boss. He admitted swearing at high ranking Korean government officials, in front of them. Nowhere does he say it was just one of those WTF moment (even though that’s still not a good excuse).
I am married, so I know you’re saying the apology is just lip service. But doesn’t that play to the Korean government’s official complaints that Mr. Ramstad’s apologies aren’t sincere, and that they don’t buy his apologies?
Whichever you try to word it, put it, or sugar coat it, it just does not look good on Mr. Ramstad’s professionalism. And repeating Mr. Woon Joon Choe’s questions, if Mr. Ramstad would act similarly(swearing) against officials in Washington, or London, or Ottawa… I have a suspicious feeling that it’s driven by arrogance.
Although the fact that this story is now national news is ridiculous and additional comments run the risk of just making it worse, I think people are losing sight of the fact that this ministry official started it all last year when he seriously berated a junior WSJ Korean staffer over the headline to her story which was actually neutral or mildly positive toward Korea (that the press guy is too ignorant to know that an editor in another country writes headlines is another story). Like a good boss, Evan stood up for his employee.
Clearly Evan regrets using profanity in the recent instance and apologized, and that’s where it should have ended. For the official to run to the Dong-A (or give the Dong-A the go ahead to print) with what should have been a private matter shows a big inferiority complex and does not reflect well on the ministry.
And to follow up to Hoju and Brendon I’ve seen numerous times where a Korean mistakenly thought an F-bomb was directed at him and got his panties in a twist (and a reporter could easily make the same mistake). That’s what I meant in my comment way above somewhere.
Except that the fact of having apologized may or may not offer any insight into whether or not the person offering the apology was in fact “wrong”. Sometimes, especially where the other party is demanding apology and you’re not wrong (or the other party is clearly overreacting), it’s best to swallow hard and just say it.
This matter is not sufficiently newsworthy to make the news. That it has is a consequence of one peculiar aspect to the whole situation that has been overlooked. That is, the role of the local press in the minister’s news conference with the foreign press.
For all its efforts over the years to overcome this zany them-and-us mentality and be treated equally, the foreign press – most of whom are Korean – gets treated separately. To reinforce the foreign press’ outsider status, the local press tags along to report, not on what the minister is saying, but on the fact he is giving a news conference to the foreign media.
My read:
- Evan’s question: this discussion is irrelevant. This was a news conference not a lunch for diplomats.
- Evan’s F-bomb: in my experience, as a former press club president and now as a PR person, I find the tension between reporters and press handlers to be entirely natural given the conflicting professional concerns of both parties. There are occasional frustrations. Some people have short tempers and some have long noses. They’re not news unless a crime is committed.
- MOSF and WSJ: The ministry is damaging Korea’s image. You can’t beat up The Wall Street Journal and then complain when people say you’re aggressive. This may seem unfair but life is unfair. Here’s the rule of thumb: reporter may insult an official, but official must take it. Why? Because the official has a professional interest in getting his message out via the media.
- Public servant or mandarin: The actions of the ministry in prodding the press, claiming he is insulting Korea, slagging him off, handing out partial information, misportraying his emailed attempt at reconciliation as an admission of guilt, and complaining to his editor are all driven by a righteous indignation that he insulted a government official. Boo-hoo. There is no mystical Korean cultural factor here to be sensitive about. They are no longer mandarins. They are public servants. Evan’s taxes pay their salaries.
Wedge & Mr. Carr,
Ramstad explicitly said he swore “at” several officials.
so … to summarize here: Mr Ramstad should have used the colloquial “Puck” instead of the America “Fuck” .
One thing we all agree on, the local press should not have made this into a big news. It would not have been news at all, if the Korean press did not interject with jingoistic nationalism. This has gotten way out of proportion, it’s ridiculous.
Rule #1 of Flight Club. Don’t throw profanities or shoes at government officials.
@cmm
There are two forms of transmission: horizontal and vertical. Virulence is how pathogenic something ie how much fitness it harms. Horizontal transmission increases virulence, vertical transmission decreases it.
낭자… just added that to my vocabulary. thanks WJC.
A serious question to foreign correspondents in Korea. Compared to other countries in Asia (particularly East Asia) is Korea “harder” per se to report on? Serious question. I can imagine that journalists in Korea get less resources then journalists in Tokyo, Beijing and Shanghai, but other than an issue of resources, is Korea a harder place to get info, sources, etc.?
cm,
I would submit that it has gotten out of proportion on this blog only. Korea as a whole is moving along like nothing happened.
I got my “then” and “than” mixed up. Apologies.
mjjㅇj, that was a yes/no question. Not sure that your answer said either, or if it was just more verbal 설사. Do you mind having another go at my original question, in layman’s terms as much as possible, as not all of us are as well versed in sociology jargon as you. Too much of it obviously turns people off and marginalizes your attempt to make your points here, as suggested by the responses you get above and by your abysmal comment ratings.
TK, great line. I say we all memorize this permalink or at least it’s message as it could be accurately applied to a great deal of the (non Open Thread) posts here that exceed 100 comments.
Interesting comments by Korean netizens at Chosun Ilbo here.
http://m100.chosun.com/svc/guest/list.html?article=2010031000632&art_date=201003&title=WSJ+%B6%F7%BD%BA%C5%B8%B5%E5+%26quot%3B%BF%E5%BC%B3+%BA%CE%B2%F4%B7%B4%C1%F6%B8%B8%2C+%B7%EB%BB%EC%B7%D5+%C1%FA%B9%AE%C0%BA+%C7%DF%BE%EE%BE%DF%26quot%3B&pn=1&artcode_dir1=dirname&art_site=WWW&artcode_id=4
Most Korean comments in this article actually applaud and support Mr. Ramstad. They seem to say “it was a question that needed to be asked”, and “who hasn’t seen stupid government officials wasting tax payer’s money on entertainment – they deserve the question, and the finance minister should answer the reporter”.
But she’s sure to be rolling her eyeballs at this bit of presumptuously condescending twaddle.
cm at #224,
Your claim is factually inaccurate.
If, as suggested by one of the other Holenoscenti, the backstory to this, as evidenced by the “special” briefings for foreign press tyros, is “Korea’s” lingering upset with the ’97 financial crisis – in particular, that the crisis was caused by biased reporting and failure to understand Korea’s “special situation” (echoes of Chryssie Hinds in my ears) not the actual structural conditions of the Korean economy, you can be sure that rather than moving along “Korea” is simply adding this to its elephantine memory of slights and insults to be avenged in a manner wildly disproportionate to the actual offense. It may be pushed onto the back burner for awhile, but beware the return of the repressed.
cm when I clicked on that the first link was spam for “ZAMZAZA.COM,” clicked on that, first thing I saw was “도우미찾기” ㅋㅋㅋ
mbreen, I wholeheartedly agree with you. not that anyone matters, but I was preparing a comment in the same lines and you stole my words… thanks !
Sperwer,
You may have a point there…
Also, if you remember… both of us agreed that a more developed business services sector may help with Korea’s gender equality gap…
#226,
Won Joon Choe, not really. Since the last time I looked at the comments few minutes ago, there were 10 more comments added mostly along the lines of “bastard reporter, don’t they have room salons in America, they should worry about their own back yard” – which all cancels out the earlier comments that supported the foreign reporter. So the arguments seems to be going back and forth.
WangKon:
Yes, just not the “men’s infrastructure” segment, which is way overdeveloped here.
Also, ROKGOV has to stop controlling the services market, e.g., the recent interventions in the telecom sector in which ROKGOV orchestrated (i) restraints on competition among domestic players, and (ii) blatantly anti-competitive measures to divide up the add-on apps market among the same domestic players at the expense of both domestic competitors and foreign players. Such moves only serve to reinforce the already amazingly entrenched domestic interests in ways that most directly adversely affect Korean consumers and in a trickle down sort of way buttress the barriers against greater participation in the Korean economy by women and other relatively “disadvantaged groups” across the board ( e.g., SNU vs. other SKY graduates; SKY graduates vs. the next tier and so on down the steep hierarchy of the Korean status system).
I hear netizen opinion was 80-20 against Mr. Ramstad yesterday, but that it’s gone to 50-50 today. This could become quite embarrassing to the government and a good lesson on when to sip from a nice, hot steaming cup of STFU. And it is a fairly big story outside the Hole.
#214: Yes, I know. I was simply explaining my previous comment.
cm,
I did an arithmetic count. When I posted it was 16 against Ramstad and 11 for. And at no point did pro-Ramstad votes out-number the antis (the first 7 posts were antis, so it’s kinda hard to overcome that when the posting sample is so small).
Look, I know it’s a minor, irrelevant point, but I corrected you for two reasons:
First (if your original post was simply one of failure to be thorough), it’s generally not a good idea to be so loose with facts that can be easily (in this case immediately) checked. Frankly, I am sick of wading through bogus, easily refutable factual claims online. I mean, if you are going to make a half-assed claim, then make a subjective, un-empirical claim where you cannot be definitively proven wrong.
Second (if your original post had a hidden political agenda), I reserve a special place in my own Hell for those who deliberately exploit other people’s lack of lack of expertise in something (in this case, their lack of Korean fluency) to peddle lies.
@Sperwer
Re this and the broader issue of Korean gov’t involvement in the economy, why?
“Such moves only serve to reinforce the already amazingly entrenched domestic interests in ways that most directly adversely affect Korean consumers and in a trickle down sort of way buttress the barriers against greater participation in the Korean economy by women and other relatively “disadvantaged groups” across the board”
not to mention the political implications
Why would say more and cheaper baubles and trinkets be necessarily a good thing, especially in light of the tradeoffs resulting from the gov’t not intervening?
And why would greater participation in the Korean economy by women and other “disadvantaged groups” be necessarily a good thing in light of the tradeoffs that would result from it?
I don’t consider clothing, foodstuffs, housing, utilities, etc. baubles and trinkets. If you want to live in 17th century Pyongan, I hope you find that time machine.
What trade-offs “necessarily” would result – a more just and equitable society with more opportunity and higher levels of utility across the board (if not for the hyper-elite manque like you)?
That’s a strawman.
Of course there are tradeoffs involving social stability, family life, traditional values, etc., all of which you may dismiss and not care very much about but there’s no reason why anyone else or any other culture has to. It’s preposterous to think that there are no tradeoffs and only “a more just and equitable society with more opportunity and higher levels of utility across the board” will result. In America over roughly the past 50 years, the cost of nuclear family formation and reproduction has gone up 4 folds. Real wages have been stagnant since the early 70s. Income inequality has risen and is very high. There is the emergence of de facto polygyny. All the hedonic regressions in the world can’t conceal that America hasn’t become “more just and equitable.” All of these things have social implications that will likely play out in a negative fashion over the coming decades. My point isn’t to bash America or claim that Korea has no social ills. It’s to point out that there are very real tradeoffs.
As for the bigger picture, hyper-individualism and hyper-capitalism is fine. Certain groups, individuals, cultures may prefer it and be better suited to it. But why does the entire world need to adopt it? Why this need and impulse to universalize it? Why does the entire world need to be the same and homogenized? What is wrong with true diversity?
I’d like to know a bit more about this research Ramsted is doing on Room Salons and what his WSJ expense budget is…
No it’s not, especially when these necessities of life are priced significantly in Korea than they need to be given international market conditions.
But your “baubles and trinkets” surely was a strawman.
As for the rest, you have simply asserted that there are certain trade-offs; you haven’t presented a plausible argument that the social choices (that you deplore for other reasons) have produced the socials ills you catalogue, let alone adduced any convincing evidence regarding the necessary connection between them. All that’s one display in your posts are your prejudices.
Have another drink or whatever else you rely on to palliate your yearning to be some sort of privileged elite in an imagined timeless society of ease for you and penury for everyone else.
All you’ve done is simply asserted neoliberal boilerplate and utopianism. All that’s on display in your posts is that you can quite ably mouth the dominant platitudes of the day.
I don’t have any yearning to be part of some imagined privileged elite lording over others. Those aren’t my interests or ambitions. If you want to see an entrenched, incestuous, privileged elite of rent-seekers, you don’t have to look at Korea. You can find it in the US, once you get past the mental blocks that are those cliches like “land of opportunity” and “freedom” and start to look.
But ultimately, you still can’t get to the root of the matter. You can’t answer the most important, most fundamental questions: Why does the entire world need to adopt this? Why this need and impulse to universalize it? Why does the entire world need to be the same and homogenized? What is wrong with biodiversity?
Hi, this is my first post after a few years of reading.
That said, the sheer coincidence of Mr. Ramstad’s problems with his reporting on local habits, and “The Cove” winning the Oscar for best feature-length documentary, happening almost simultaneously finally got me on board and in the discussion here.
While I condone neither whoring nor dolphin slaughter, I found myself wincing almost non-stop through the film, especially as the Americans cried over literally bloody Flipper while Japanese fishermen smoked and drank nearby; and because of the former, not the latter.
When Oscars are handed out for such James Bondish cultural obtuseness, those being criticized are most likely to harden their stance; whether it be by feasting on mercury-laden mammal, not answering questions or revoking press passes.
Those above who’ve pointed out that the thoughts of Korean women are of the utmost importance here are correct. Moreover, when such a question is asked in the proper context by a Korean woman, the onus will be on the spokesman to answer and answer well, not on the rest of us to wade through the swamp of cultural sensitivities and moral absolutes.
Whether or not such a question will be posed by such a woman in the near future is not in any way up to me, and I can accept that.
Nope, that’s all you; you reflexively assume that any criticism of Korea’s addiction to gross over-regulation necessarily implies adherence to your bugaboos of extreme individualism, blah, blah, blah.
On your para 2, if you think there is some equivalence between the centralization of wealth, power, status and privilige between Korea and the US, you’re simply incapable of making discriminating judgments. The US has problems, but it’s still a better place than Korea.
The answer to your third set of questions is “nothing”. Diversity is good. Based on my own experiences in the world of physical culture, I am certain it exists and that it’s a good thing. I just don’t believe in giving some people the benefit of “their” diversity on my nickel – if that’s bona fide diversity at all and not just free-loading.
As many have already said, there was nothing wrong with the question on room salon ‘culture’ itself, even if it was provocatively ‘framed’. A confrontational and provocative attitude among reporters seems to me desirable and, if anything, we need more of it in the West today (google what Fisk has to say about reporting on Iraq, for instance).
So the issue is swearing at an official, which should be condemned as unprofessional – with one caveat. We don’t know the full story. Perhaps, as Evan Ramstad hints, there was some provocation that could justify his reaction. The simpler explanation is that he just lost his temper inappropriately but there may be more to it.
Biodiversity is real. There are conflicts of interest. Your criticisms regarding “gross over-regulation” are fine but ultimately the important fundamental point is that there is variation between population groups, and that social/economic arrangements will tend to have different effects on different population groups. There is no one, true, best arrangement optimal across all population groups, and there’s no reason to accept one that is promoted as being so.
As for your “nickel,” you can of course always spend it elsewhere, or if you feel particularly aggrieved as a taxpayer supporting the defense of Korea you can write a letter to your Congressman and complain that the US shouldn’t be defending a country on the other side of the world where efficient markets and the law of one price don’t hold. Or start working on that global government so that the entire world is one homogenized market and you don’t have to suffer the gross indignity and inconvenience of paying extra when 6,000 miles from home.
While you’re condescending to permit me all those options, I trust you will also permit me to point out that the Korean emperor has no clothes when he claims the right to be diverse without footing the bill.
The facts, as relayed to me by a reliable source, are that Ramstad did not swear “at” the official (i.e., he didn;t say “Fuck YOU”) but, as Brendon earlier has suggested, in both instances just let go an F-bomb (what the fuck?).
It’s also evident that in both instances he was more or less deliberately provoked – once, by an official having the presumption to upbraid a junior (Korean) WSJ staffer, and, in the current instance, by bad-mouthing Ramstad behind his back for asking a relevant, but in terms of the Ministry’s agenda, an impertinent question at a press conference.
In both instances, the conduct of the Ministry officials was unprofessional and objectionable. It’s mildly deplorable (even if understandable) that Ramstad was provoked into equally unprofessional and objectionable conduct. And it’s really a shame that he succumbed to the all to typical Korean demand for an apology that was undeserved and unwarranted in the circumstances, certainly without an initiating apology from them as the originally offending party – since the Korean side clearly had no sincere interest in conciliation, but only in using Ramstad’s conciliatory attitude as a weapon with which to “prove” his perfidy.
I hope that when WSJ replaces him they don’t reward the ROKGOV goons with a complaisant wanker but someone who’s as pugnacious as Ramstad but has mastered the art of speaking softly while carrying a big stick.
This is a respectable, well-articulated opinion but it’s still an opinion and not a matter of fact. preference for different places is highly subjective, some people are perfectly fine herding camels and napping under the sun all day, some others clearly are not.
Even if we stick to material amenities things are not always so clearly quantifiable.
I for example found life in the US overall kinda unpleasant and extremely difficult. For being such a service oriented economy the status of some key services like telecom/internet/cable (where by the way the most shameless monopoly rules) is simply appalling. I remember when i married and moved to the suburbs waiting one whole summer to get a digital cable line (it takes 4-5 business days here in goofball Italy). I remember atrocious cell phone service with phones that disappeared in Europe in the early 90′s, limited roaming and fucked-up bills.
I also remember that basic necessities like clothing and food, while being much cheaper than home, were of very bad quality. If i wanted anything vaguely comparable to what i could get at home it cost me 3-4 times the Italian price: a chain like Whole Foods for instance sells with a ridicolous price tag shit found here in every grocery store, barred Lidl or Penny.
A thing i found shocking were real estate taxes: thousands and thousands of dollars a year, here we pay nothing, up til 2 years ago we had some RE taxes: for my place (a very nice 2300 apartment in a fashionable area, sorry no mean to brag, just to quantify) i used to pay 70 euros a month.
Not to mention the cost of a subpar education or a very normal and standardised healthcare (8 grands for 2 days in a hospital to deliver the baby).
My point is not bashing America and praising Korea or Italy or any other place, what i mean is that, among relatively developed nations,
preferences may vary wildly according to personal necessities: if your priority in life is spacious affordable housing clearly the Midwest is a great place while Japan a hellhole. If you want good quality clothing at good prices i would suggest small town Northern Italy over Wyoming or Sweden…you get the point.
On a personal note let me add that nodays American goods&services account, directly AND indirectly) for no more than 15%-20% of my basket of consumption, and i live a perfectly modern and comfy life. Not cos i boycott them or shit like that, but cos i don’t need them or don’t like ‘em.
There’s a huge convergence goin on in the world…this planet doesn’t need America, doesn’t need Korea, doesn’t need anybody else, nowadays we all pretty much know how to do the same things.
“Footing the bill” in the postwar American order has also meant exporting goods and recycling the receipts in the US financial system and supporting the American economic/trade order. In this way Korea has participated to some degree. It’s disingenuous to suggest that Korea hasn’t provisioned for the arrangement at all and to suggest that US military defense is some sort of pure act of charity. US military presence in NE Asia is (or at least was) not due to any affection for some random, strange country on the other side of globe or to the power and influence of domestic elements, but due to the pursuit of American geopolitical interests (whether real or perceived). As well it should be.
And since when was the arrangement that in return for US military defense Korea must do any and everything that the US gov’t and or random US citizen Sperwer says and can’t pursue its own policies and interests on various matters? That might be your imperial fantasy but it never comprised the arrangement. If that’s what you want or wanted, then be explicit about it, and tell your government to be explicit about it, to ditch the soft imperialism vis a vis Korea, to practice hard imperialism, to force Korea to do what FedGov and Sperwer tell it to on all matters foreign and domestic, to exact tribute, etc.
For those who dwell on “He didn’t say fuck you”
If he’d said “I fucking love you guys man” it would have been unprofessional – “아, ㅅㅂ . ㅈㄴ 답답해 미치겠네” it is something not to say to anyone in a professional setting. By going into detail like this to excuse him for his outburst while calling the Korean government officials for what they said unprofessional (their retort is a perfectly acceptable in a heated spat between a government official and a journalist – calling someone unprofessional and a low-quality journalist)
Hell, if I’d said WTF in front of my tree-hugging crocs-wearing supervisor, she still would not have been amused.
Yuna,
I venture to say that if you in any way seriously contradict your supervisor, especially in a manner that expresses ANY sort of derogation of her point of view, she would not be amused.
BTW, I didn’t excuse Ramstad’s outburst; I only sought to put it in proper context where, despite his vulgarism, one really has to ask who bears the responsibility for starting things down the wrong road.
Dust this one off the next time the Assembly holds another rumble.
^ correct, Korean parliamentarians aren’t exactly well respected, guess why? Nobody said they were professionals. So it’s OK to criticize them, but Westerners shouldn’t be?
#255
^ so in other words, Western reporters get blank checks, while Korean government officials don’t, and the Korean reporters don’t. Sounds to me exactly like you’re excusing his behavior. Not to mention Mr. Ramstad himself has admitted that he did swear at not one, but two Korean officials on two different occasions. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I think this whole thing is ridiculous and has gotten way out of proportion, nor do I hate Mr. Ramstad . But it’s the attitude of some of the commentators that bugs me the most. So Koreans shouldn’t piss Western reporters off or they’ll start writing negative international stories on Korea. Probably true, but they way some people put it, is a complete turn off. Until we hear more from this unrevealed source that claims it was nothing but a F* bomb, we’ll have to accept Mr. Ramstad’s own written words that he did swear at the officials.
I said no such thing, believe no such thing, and don’t know how you got to that particular point from my post.
Who cares if they write negative stories, like media in this post web 2.0 world still holds any relevance. To quote NetizenKim if i was the Prime Minster of my country or any other country “Go fuck yourself” would be the sentence the foreign correspondents whould hear the most. This people are poor, penniless goons working in a precarious industry, they hold no power whatsoever over anybody.
Some scumbag financier who was busted here in the 90′s in a scandal involving some shady M&A transaction once said that journalists sell themselves for a slice of salami….truer words were never spoken.
And all the negative articles in the world won’t do shit to Korea, my country has been for the past 15 years (since a certain guy descended into the politics arena) the favourite target of international liberal media, who depicted us as a mix of Iran, Rwanda and Argentina circa 1978. Despite that we still buy cars at record rate, suck up a significant amount of the world luxury goods, our families have some of the lowest debt amount and highest net worth in the world and overall we are weathering through the current crisis in a less disastrous way than celebrated (til 2 years ago) euro shitholes like Spain, Ireland, Finland, UK etc.
It’s time for Korea to grow confident and arrogant, mind you i said arrogant and not neurotic
#259, once again, let me clarify, I don’t really care what Western press write about Korea. It’s the condescending attitude of some commentators here that irks me a bit.
Having said that, more drama.
http://koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/biz/2010/03/123_62154.html
I really have to question the wisdom of a high ranking Korean government official go on a defensive public campaign over this reporter when there are other far pressing matters.
Seems to me government officials ’round the world deserve an f bomb strike a bit more frequently.
This indignation amuses me greatly. It’s rarely honest ‘cept when done by a tut tutting blue-haired granny.
I’ve seen Korean government members swearing at each other on camera at the National Assembly, slapping, shoving, screaming and climbing over each other in parliament. It’s well known among Koreans that their politicians are prone to the most infantile antics. As for example,
http://www.youtube.com/v/X4wn70xPxzc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJdZ0TocTlo
So, making a bid deal about the F-word is clearly just a revenge tactic designed to have Evans removed from his post. Evans’ mistake was apologizing. It’s obvious that after the press conference Ministry officials chastised Evans for asking interesting but uncomfortable questions. These PR men then cast aspersions on the quality of his person, for which Evans replied in kind.
The wrongdoing here is in the Ministry decision to withhold press releases and materials from WSJ – an action typical of the ongoing efforts to reign in and control media and opinion in this fast-fading democracy.
cinemagauche,
Big difference between national assembly leaders quarreling in session and a press conference.
Oh Nigel, welcome. It’s been awhile.
@263 If you’d read carefully, you have noticed the altercation took place after the press conference. And in any case there is no big difference – standards of behavior should apply across the board if you subscribe to them.
Since I don’t, I don’t see what the fuss is about. Grown men whining over so called “profanities” – as if ‘fuck’ is such a heavy blow to the fragile ego of PR men. I don’t see why any particular word should be taboo anywhere. Exclamatory words like fuck! or fuck you! do not amount to insults in my mind.
“Yes, I lived there four years and socialized with many local friends and colleagues. I do not think that prostitution is less common in China; rather, I think it is less visible from the street. ”
Ah, the usual Sonagi sidestep and wriggle….
Nope. Go back and read the entire exchange between myself and the other commenter. He first remarked that prostitition was on every street corner in China. I questioned where he had lived or visited and the exchange continued. As I recall, you have a habit of jumping into conversations without knowing the full context.
I’m not sure why Rammstein gets credit for introduction of the iPhone and Blackberry — Carr pointed out the precise nature of the non-trade barriers years ago.
“Also, if you remember… both of us agreed that a more developed business services sector may help with Korea’s gender equality gap…”
Surely al this started with questions about the well developed service sector in korea….
Perhaps you should try re-reading your own comments Sonagi.
He claimed every corner which was clearly hyperbole, and followed and observation that Korea was better than say China. You claimed in response that you couldn’t see any, despite your unique and oft repeated Chinese skills!!! The clear inference being that it was not worse in China!!!
When further challenged, you wriggled “Oh I didn’t say it wasn’t worse in China just it was less visible” Despite claiming that even with your oft repeated Chinese skills you couldn’t see it at all!!!
“I lived in China 4 years and traveled to several major cities. I somehow managed to overlook all those massage parlors even though I read Chinese.”
following an observation
As I recall the famous florid conversation you claimed I jumped into without knowing the context, was one which was impossible to know the context without having read some completely different posts between you and your muse some time before. i.e there was no such context without a historical knowledge of which you gave no clue in said post.
The quote of mine was in response to this remark:
You correctly recognized the hyperbole in the above comment yet interpreted my response to the obvious exaggeration as the other extreme of denying the existence of massage parlors at all.
You used a series of 3 quotation marks every time you stated your interpretation of my comment!!! Even you, apparently, realize how ridiculous the idea is!!!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Those look like exclamation marks to me, Sonagi.
Jeffery Hodges
* * *
The official answer should have been “There is no room salon in Korea. No Korean woman sells sex”.
Then, this report could have gone to all RS to do an expose, on company money.
Dogbertt # 268 opined:
“I’m not sure why Rammstein gets credit for introduction of the iPhone and Blackberry . . .”
I totally agree. Rammstein should get credit for none of this . . . though their role in the iPod phenomenon is yet to be looked into.
Jeffery Hodges
* * *
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