The city’s relatively new (appointed last year) chancellor, Korean-American Michelle Rhee, is trying to change that.

Her appointment last year raised some eyebrows:

Her appointment stunned the city. Rhee, then 37, had no experience running a school, let alone a district with 46,000 students that ranks last in math among 11 urban school systems. When [Mayor Adrian] Fenty called her, she was running a nonprofit called the New Teacher Project, which helps schools recruit good teachers. Most problematic of all, Rhee is not from Washington. She is from Ohio, and she is Korean American in a majority-African-American city. “I was,” she says now, “the worst pick on the face of the earth.”

Her biggest reform so far is the ongoing process of removing ineffective teachers and administrators from the system, that has naturally gotten her off of the Christmas card list of the teacher’s union, some city officials and at least one blogger.

Perhaps someone in the ancestral homeland would like to hire her to clean things up in hagwonland.

Dr. Lee, however, stated tonight that she now realizes that the situation is much worse than she originally described in her lecture and, sure enough, when I come home and look at the Joongang-Ilbo, one sees the KTEWU (Korea Teachers and Educational Workers Union) at work again, protesting lectures given at Seoul High Schools because their version of Korean history is not presented.

Naturally, the KTEWU mentioned the Japanese as a pretext for protesting.

Or so a hearing on “Seoul Taxi Design” held at the Seoul City Hall annex yesterday decided.

Actually, one of the professors who participated said it wouldn’t be orange, per se, but rather a more traditionally Korean version thereof.

I kinda like it, actually.

Here’s just a sample:

But it has not been easy for him to work his office job and this one, as he has for over four years. To track down the locations of foreign teachers using drugs he spent 150 days in bitterly cold weather, outworking the police, not going home. Many times he has asked schools to fire foreign teachers who make a hobby out of having sex at knifepoint, tracked down foreign lecturers who bring venereal disease, and warned security guards and hagwon authorities about kidnappers.

Read the rest on your own.

59.8% of Koreans believed Sino-Korean relations were poor, a major deterioration from 34.5% in 2007. This compares with 16.4% of Chinese who view the bilateral relationship as poor, up from 6.6% in 2007.

As you’d might imagine, 76.8% of Koreans viewed the Korea-Japan relationship as bad, up from 67.7% in 2007. 50.4% of Japanese, meanwhile, held a similar view of bilateral ties, down from 54.8% in 2007 (read: no more Roh Moo-hyun).

However, Japanese took a decidedly negative view of Sino-Japanese ties, with 75.8% of Japanese saying the bilateral relationship was not good, up from 66% in 2007. Chinese, on the other hand, were significantly more optimistic, with only 37.4% saying Sino-Japanese ties were bad, down greatly from 65.2% in 2007.

What’s even more interesting is that the younger the respondent, the more negative he tended to answer. In Korea, 66.7% of those in their 20s said the Sino-Korean relations hip was bad, compared to 53.7% in their 40s and 53.6% in their 50s and above. The same phenomenon was present in Japan and China. The Northeast Asia Foundation believes this reflects the ethnic nationalism of young netizens and youth insecurities about unemployment.

The survey, conducted by pollsters World Research, was conducted on 500 people each in Seoul, Tokyo and Beijing between Nov 6 and 10.

The Chosun Ilbo added some more details:

Asked about history-related issues that should be resolved most urgently, 85 percent of Korean respondents cited the Dokdo islets. Some 50 percent of Chinese respondents and 55.4 percent of Japanese respondents cited the distortion of facts in history textbooks.

Among Koreans, 96 percent were keenly aware of the Dokdo issue, up from 92.7 percent in 2007. But in Japan interest in the matter is dropping, from 75.2 percent in 2007 to 67.8 percent this year.

Some 63.6 percent of Japanese respondents approved of their prime minister’s visit to the militarist Yasukuni Shrine, up from 48 percent the previous year. But more had been persuaded that the body of water between Korea and Japan should be referred to as both the East Sea and the Sea of Japan, up from 17 percent to 25.6 percent.

I’m surprised awareness of the Dokdo issue in Japan was even that high.

In the Yonhap piece, Yonsei professor Baik Young-seo (who is also cited in the Chosun piece) said the results were influenced by things like harmful Chinese food imports, tensions around the Olympics and hate. Korea’s relatively negative view of its relations with its neighbors reflects a sense of historical victimization, he said, but it could lead to Korea responding to international issues in an emotional way.

No shit?

Now, as you know, Fido is usually served in a soup or stew in the South… something a little like this:

Good stuff.

(HT to reader)

• Over at Japan Focus, there’s a very interesting story about the 1948 protests by ethnic Koreans in Japan following the US-ordered closure of Korean schools. Of particular interest is the not-particularly-high-esteem — at times racist contempt — in which the Koreans were held by US occupational authorities and, one might imagine.
• Ever wonder how the former Korean royal family is doing? The JoongAng Ilbo (English) details their plight. I guess what you think of it depends on what you think of monarchy in general.
• A painting of the torture and questioning of Bishop Simeon Berneux in 1866. His death led to the 1866 French assault on Ganghwa-do, which forms the background of this “war of words” between Korean and French experts over looted Korean historical documents. The French — unlike the Americans — are holding firm.
• Your Uplifting Korean Multiculturalism News of the Day — We have an American actor on an MBC program getting busted for drug smuggling, while the Weekly Dong-A magazine (Korean) looks at the joint investigation to eradicate the hawala networks used to illegally transfer funds between Korea and Pakistan — some of the money handled in these transfers is believed to be the Taliban’s.

A policy group is advising U.S. President-elect Barack Obama to make permanent the current six-nation talks that are focused on North Korean denuclearization. According to the Brookings Institution, a progressive think tank in Washington, these talks should become a permanent regional framework.

“A permanent regional framework”? Really? I guess they came to that conclusion based on how amiable North Korean negotiators are. How willing the North is willing to reach a compromise in open ended discussions. Now NK abides by its previous commitments in such a reasonable and reliable way it makes deadlines and timetables superfluous. 

Forget the preliminaries, lets put these “special” thinkers on the short bus for the Nobel Peace Prize now.

Song was discussing his salad days, when he and his wife moved to New York in 1985. Song ran a street stall selling watches, while his wife worked in a nail salon. Well, on the first day, he finished work and went to pick up his wife, he said. But he felt strange when he saw her in a corner washing the feet of some fat black woman. He was enraged — here was his well-bred and smartly dressed wife washing the feet of a black woman.

Well, Song’s not a complete dolt — later that day, feeling he’d forced his wife to sacrifice by bringing her to Migukland, he carefully asked her how her day had been. Well, luckily, his wife was a happy sort, so she quite excitedly reported how she’d stripped the dead skin off some black lady’s feet, and so much had come off. Satisfied that his wife was enjoying the adventure, he felt relieved.

Some viewers, at least, were not impressed. One netizen castigated Song, saying if he made a statement like that in the United States, he’d be filing for bankruptcy by now. It was shocking that a person who understood the United States could make a statment like that when the repercussions of such racism were so great. Another said, basically, it was his wife’s job to give foot massages, so why was massaging the feet of a black woman so much worse?

The station came in for criticism, too, for thinking so little of the comments that they actually used subtitles, apparently, to stress them, which could promote occupational and racial-based discrimination.

Marmot’s Note: Well, aside from the irony that this comes from a man lauded for his show’s ability to transcend linguisitc and cultural boundries while at the same time promoting Korean culture overseas, it’s further evidence of something I said on the SeoulPodcast last week, namely, experiences with multiculturalism overseas does not necessarily lead to a heightened appreciation of said multiculturalism.

(HT to reader)