Undercover report on "john school."

A Hankyoreh reporter went undercover at one of the "john school" classes for Korean men busted for soliciting prostitutes here or overseas for the first time. It's an opportunity for attendees to empathize with the victims of the sex trade, as the reporter recounts:

We are told that in the morning there will be classes on the criminality and harmfulness of sex crimes and testimonials from women victimized by prostitution, followed in the afternoon by classes on AIDS education and sociodramas to improve sexual awareness.


Finally, it is lunchtime.

In the photograph above the men are reenacting the moment of their arrest. Whether the reporter realizes it or not, his story reveals the emphasis entirely on the men and the aspect of shame, with little exploration into why what they did may have been wrong. After a day-long, eight period course the men are given a certificate of completion.

I go out first and wait in the smoking area to ask my “classmates” if their sexual consciousness has really changed after completing the course. But nobody approaches me. Even the people I smoked with before are ignoring one another and hurriedly moving toward the darkened street.

Already snowing on Seoraksan.

According to this Chosun Ilbo gallery.

Old department store building collapses in Gangnam.

An old, unused department store collapsed in Gangnam today, with reports saying one person is hurt and one is still missing. The bullding was the former home of a Nasan Homeplace Department Store from 1994 to 1998. Above photograph taken from here, with the photo below taken from this longer article.



A Dave's user who frequently takes photographs of old and abandoned buildings posted this one from May showing the building intact, as well as loads of other pictures from the site. It had sat unused since 1998. He has also posted photosets of the abandoned Woncheon Lakeland, a dead mall in Bundang, and other abandoned buildings in Seoul.

Maybe my students could study this for their next dance competition.

Perfect time as any for this video:

Guam Pacific Daily News on Korean anchor baby tours to the island.

On October 29th the paper ran an article on the Korean websites that organize tours for pregnant women to Guam for the purpose of giving birth there and acquiring US citizenship for their children. The next day the paper reported that one of the websites went down. Actually, now that I checked both websites mentioned in the article are no longer working.

I've heard that the term "anchor baby" is considered offensive these days. Well, I'm much more offended by women stealing US citizenship for their children, so once we put a stop to that we can work on terminology, k thx.

October 31st is Ace Day, so . . . yeah.

I was going to write the first post about Ace Day, but somebody beat me to it. It's a day for giving Ace crackers. Feel free to insert your own explanation. "Anything to steal the thunder from a Western holiday" is mine.

Even dead foreigners can't eat spicy Korean food, I guess.

Korea Sparkle has linked to an article by historian and Marmot's Hole contributor Robert Neff on stories of hauntings in Korea. An excerpt:

According to him, many of the Korean residents of Seoul were convinced that there were Japanese ghosts haunting the streets of Seoul. For some reason the people called them "Yobosang," a derogatory name for Koreans used by the Japanese during that period, and believed that Korean women were especially susceptible to these ghosts. At night, if a woman had to go out into the streets, she carefully packed a packet of ground red pepper and placed it in the roomy sleeves of her jacket to be used as a weapon against the Japanese ghost. According to the local belief, the ghosts could not endure the fiery taste of the red pepper.

Mr. Neff has written about ghosts before; here's another article. The Marmot's Hole post in question seems to be this one, which has plenty more tales of hauntings in Korea. A recurring theme seems to be to avoid apartments and houses with cheap rents, because something very grisly happened there.

There are a couple more experiences with Korean ghosts recounted here and here. From what I've read on Dave's, the "sitting ghost," or sleep paralysis, seems to strike with some frequency over here, sometimes accompanied with an apparition of a demonic-looking old woman. Even my girlfriend has encountered something like this, but she wisely kept her eyes closed.

In addition to my fear of spiders, I'm also very afraid of ghosts, so if you have any ghost stories, feel free to keep them to yourself. My coworkers were not as obliging, and told me about a haunted house in Suncheon that was featured on a TV program a few years' back. They didn't remember where it was, and poking around the internet didn't turn up anything.

Not necessarily related to Halloween, but one story that my students were very afraid of a few years ago had to do with the "red mask lady." Apparently, and this is based off what I've read from other foreigners and on the testimony of ten-year-olds, a woman suffered a mishap during cosmetic surgery leaving her with a "Glasgow grin" similar to Heath Ledger's Joker. She---whether still alive or as a ghost, I don't know---would wander around at night with a SARS mask asking children who happened to be out "do you think I'm beautiful?" If you said "no," she would take off her mask and abduct you. The story is a little muddled here because I heard that if you said "yes" she would say "what about now?" and take off her mask and kill you or abduct you or whatever. There's another account of her here. A Naver search will turn up some books and pictures on the topic. It also turns up a Japanese movie from 2007 whose profile is protected by an age-verification screen. A few pictures below, and a rather unpleasant one here from the movie, 나고야 살인사건.




Wikipedia has more on the original Japanese version of the urban legend:

The legend is said to originate with a young woman who lived hundreds of years ago (some versions of the legend state the Heian period) and was either the wife or concubine of a samurai. She is said to have been very beautiful but also very vain, and possibly cheating on her husband. The samurai, extremely jealous and feeling cuckolded, attacked her and slit her mouth from ear to ear, screaming "Who will think you're beautiful now?"

The urban legend picks up from this point, stating that a woman roams around at night (especially during foggy evenings), with her face covered by a surgical mask, which would not be especially unusual, as people with colds often wear masks for the sake of others in Japan. When she encounters someone (primarily children or college students), she will shyly ask, "Am I beautiful?" ("Watashi kirei?"). If the person answers yes, she will take off her mask and say, "Even like this?" At this point, if the victim answers "No," she will slay them (in many versions, her weapon is a pair of scissors). If the victim tells her she is pretty a second time, she follows the victim home and slays them in their own doorway, due to the fact that "kirei" (きれい), Japanese for 'pretty,' is a near homophone of "kire" (切れ), the imperative form of "to cut". In other versions of the myth if you reply yes again she will give you a large blood soaked ruby and walk away.

During the seventies, the urban legend went that if the victim answers "You're average", they are saved. When the urban legend was revived around 2000, the answer that would save you was changed to "so-so," with the change that this answer causes the kuchisake-onna to think about what to do, and her victim can escape while she is in thought.

Korea to send gunboat to Somalia, Somalia to say "thank you."

Ah, wait, I think I got that wrong. South Korea is looking to send a gunboat to Somalia to help prevent piracy. Ah, you never can tell.

Also from the Chosun Ilbo today, Koreans are drinking more because there's a recession on. And it's always curious how old news stories will get bumped up to Chosun's most-viewed list. Today it's one from 2005 about a naked dairy fight.

“The law defines ‘licentious or lascivious acts’ as behavior that stimulates the sexual desires of ordinary people and incites arousal, and this behavior may damage or distort the normal sense of shame that should accompany such acts,” the court said in its ruling. “This applies to the obscene act of young nude female models whose bodies are caked in wheat flour spraying each other with yogurt from vaporizers until the naked form underneath is revealed.”

I see. It's a little late to be telling you this, since you already clicked on the link, but the English-language version of the Chosun Ilbo went ahead and posted pictures of that promotion, presumably to illustrate what constitutes a lack of artistic merit. I really have no objection to attractive women or to staring at pictures of them, but it kind of sucks that the because of the large number of bikini-clad or nude models even the biggest portals or news sites are often unsafe for work.

Ten-year-old student in Gwangju kills himself.

With a note saying "Mom, dad I really don't want to live in this world, so I'm going to kill myself. Take care." So reports The Hankryoreh. His father found him on Tuesday, but I haven't seen the story elsewhere. It wasn't very long ago that we learned about some of the objections a teachers' union and others had to standardized testing among elementary school students.

Riot policeman found dead, probably a suicide.

As per the Korea Times "Riot Policeman Kills Himself," a 19-year-old riot policeman was found hanging in a stairwell. The article says he was a suspect in a theft, but by wording the title the way they did they're drawing an implicit connection between his death and the violent protests that took place this summer, in which riot policemen were attacked with weapons and were subsequently falsely accussed of killing and sexually assaulting protestors. The family doesn't believe a suicide likely and is demanding further investigation.

Six English hagwon franchises fined.

From the Korea Herald, "The Nation's No. 1 English Newspaper" that you can't link to and from which you have to pay to read poorly-formatted articles over two weeks old:

Six hagwon franchises, including Wall Street Institute Korea, were slapped with fines yesterday for misrepresenting fees or issuing false ads.

The Korean Fair Trade Commission ordered them to pay a total of 167 million won in fines, a month after President Lee Myung-bak called for measures to curb excessive hagwon fees.

Five hagwon chains specializing in preparing students for admission to elite high schools were found to have coerced its offline students to take online courses as well.

A Ferma Edu branch in Suwon, Gyeonggi Province, for instance, charges 88,000 won for an offline math course for eighth graders. But it required students signing up for its offline lessons to pay for its 182,000-won online courses as well.

Wall Street Institute Korea advertised a three-month course that did not exist for 1.55 million won to delude students to think it was giving a 46 percent discount for its nine-month program at 2.49 million won, the FTC said.

Four other hagwon issued false ads saying they had the largest number of elite high school students.

Some 66,421 people were found to be paying for lessons at 168 branches of the six chains - Ferma Edu, Topia Education, JLS, Yes Youngdo and Koreapolyschool - which teach elementary through high school students, and WSI which teaches adults English.

Awww. good morning.

Naver has also been running pictures of baby pandas in Sichuan's Panda Protection Center. I don't think you can get much cuter than that.

TKD in the NYT.

Currently the third-most-viewed story on Naver is a photograph of this advertisement which ran in the New York Times.



Naver also has a look at the Korean and Japanese words in English dictionaries. And from Yahoo today, this story. *cough*

Good idea, bad idea.

It's Halloween season, which means it's time to contemplate all the parties I wasn't invited to and time to do an obligatory costume post. Last year taught us some important lessons. As this Jeollanam-do teacher demonstrates, it's a good idea to dress as a traffic cone and win $500 at a costume contest in Seoul.



But as this anonymous partier in Seoul shows us, it's a bad idea to dress as Christopher Paul Neil less than two weeks after he was arrested in Thailand for molesting children.

>

Residency restrictions for international schools.

As reported in the Chosun Ilbo:

Only those who have lived abroad for more than three years will be allowed to enter a domestic international school next year, regardless of their citizenship or status. The Ministry of Education, Science, and Technology announced the new law regarding the establishment and operation of international schools on Monday.

The regulation says Korean nationals must have resided for more than three years in a foreign country to acquire admission to an international school. Furthermore, only 30 percent of the entrance quota will be allocated to Koreans.

In what I consider one of several disgusting trends in education here, Korean parents have been purchasing residency in another country to allow their children to attend international schools in South Korea. The Chosun Ilbo took a look at Ecuador in May:

The easiest way to get your child into a foreign-language school in Korea is to obtain permanent residency in Ecuador. Five days in Ecuador is enough, since all the paperwork can be done in a day. This is what five parents were told by a study-abroad agency in Gangman, Seoul, last week. One mother who gave her name as Han (41) decided it was worth it so her six-year-old daughter can beat the prohibition on Korean children studying in international schools.
“By investing only five days, you can save a lot of money and send your child to an international school here. Your child can learn English without having to go abroad for years, and you don’t have to spend enormous amounts of money overseas,” Han said. Since it costs at least W40-60 million (US$1=W1,049) a year to study in Canada, Europe, or the U.S., international schools in Korea are a tempting option for Korean parents.

. . .

As the merit of going to international schools in Korea is being spotlighted, Ecuador is gaining popularity as the easiest country to get permanent residency. There are plenty of adverts for such offers as Ecuadorian permanent residency for only US$9,000. To promote the economy, the Ecuadorian government amended laws at the end of 2005 to encourage investor immigration. An official at the Korean Embassy in Ecuador said Korean parents with children who came to get permanent residency can frequently be spotted in the lobby of hotels in downtown Quito, the capital.

That article says the number of Koreans studying in South Korean international schools is over 25%, while the article at the top of the page said the quota will be set at 30%. You can read a little more about this trend on The Marmot's Hole.

Having a large percentage of Korean students in an international school not only keeps foreigners' children out but could turn the school into a glorified ESL academy, where the curriculum is adapted to meet the needs of language learners rather than the demands of the subject. That isn't to paint all Korean students with the same brush, because there are special cases, and a three-year residency requirement will get rid of a lot of the slimy ones, but I cringe when I learn of parents buying residency from another country so their kids can attend schools set up for foreigners. That's not only an indictment of English-hungry parents, but also of the rigorous life of a Korean student and the dismal reputation of Korean public schools that parents would take such measures to avoid both foreign-language high schools and mainstream public schools. Your thoughts?

This weekend: Hampyeong Chrysanthemum Festival, Namdo Culture Festival, Suncheon Bay Reed Festival.

This weekend is the start of the Chrysanthemum Festival (대한민국 국향대전) in Hampyeong county, which also hosts the Butterfly Festival each spring. I saw some brochures for this a few weeks ago and it looks absolutely gorgeous. Take a look at some photos from this blog, from whence I stole the above photo, or run a Naver search for more. It starts on Wednesday the 29th and runs through November 23rd.

Also the start of the Bay Reed Festival (순천만갈대축제), which actually will start on Tuesday and will go to November 4th. Held at Suncheon Bay, accessible via city bus 67. I wrote a little about it for the Korea Times a few days ago, so have a look at that and drive up my readership to learn more.

In an example of ridiculous overlap, in Suncheon there's also the Namdo Culture Festival (남도문화제), held at Palma Stadium (팔마체육관) from Wednesday the 29th through Friday, a little bit down the street from Homever. It will feature traditional performances and games from the province's cities and counties. You can find some pictures and stuff from years past via a Naver search; the festival seems pretty sparsely attended. Maybe because it's held during school days.

Koreans distorting American currency, culture.

At the Gwangju Folk Museum there is a small display on currencies from around the world. They have a selection of American bills, including the following:



I first read about that distortion of American culture on the Galbijim forums last February, but didn't see it for myself until the Kimchi Festival last weekend.

A few days ago I was browsing a local bookstore's magazine section and came across one for kids to acquaint them with other countries and cultures. This particular one had a significant portion devoted to the US.



The flag on the cover is incorrect, as our flag has fifty stars to represent our fifty states, rather than the twelve stars and two orbs depicted above. What's more, our flag has thirteen stripes to represent the original thirteen colonies from when England occupied our land; implying fourteen is just insulting. There was a little section about currency, and below you'll see the one-, five-, twenty-, and fifty-dollar bills, our four pieces of paper money that have presidents on the front.



Two of the four are the latest editions, but as every American knows that twenty-dollar bill is a 1929 edition, as pictured below.



The fifty-dollar bill is a 1997 edition, and not the most-recent 2004 one. All this comes shortly after I discovered a 2007 Korean movie was using 2001-edition five-dollar bills for action that takes place in 1971, suggesting that Koreans were able to travel through time and bribe officers with currency from the future.



I told my parents about this problem and they said that our eight-year-old cousin came home from school crying because of what the other children said about him and his ugly currency. My dad, who can find both Koreas on a map, is afraid of what these representations will do to our country's reputation. With the dollar as weak as it is, we mustn't allow it to be devalued any more in the eyes of foreigners who believe we cannot afford new money.

Following the example of South Korean outrage at a Singaporean textbook, I encourage all Americans to tell their government to aggressively protest these distortions of our currency and culture. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice must pressure the magazine and the museum to remove this incorrect information at once. I also think the American embassy would be interested to know that Korean adolescents are getting a warped view of the United States from these examples, and that the ambassador should adjust her behavior accordingly. As a developing nation it is our duty to protect our image from powerful countries that wish to do us harm by controlling our history and misrepresenting our culture. We must work to correct the opinions foreigners have of our country, and we have to fix the mindset of yellow people like that.

Spider catches, eats bird.

Fuck you spider.

According to this article it's a Golden silk orb-weaver spider, of which there are many species including the "banana spider" we routinely see in Korea---living at my school god damn it---and its more colorful relative the nephala clavata. The bird is a Chestnut-breasted Mannikin, which are about four inches long.

Private kindergartens hiring "questionable foreign teachers."

In an article that says 96% of private kindergartens offer English classes, a politician with the Democratic Party said:

Choi said there are many unqualified English-speaking teachers at the kindergartens. ``We’ve found that many kindergartens are hiring questionable foreign teachers,’’ Choi said.

jasfoj3wa98euf9dqewu. That was frustration, by the way, for those confused by how I express it in words. 44% of these kindergartens employ foreign teachers, according to the article. Some of them may be questionable, I dunno. I mean, you flip through the news and it looks like Koreans and Iranians and Africans have no problem passing themselves off as native speakers. Oh, you mean of questionable quality? Maybe. But that'll happen whenever you approach random white people in your building and offer them preschool classes at 30,000 won per hour, as happened to me and several other foreigners at a former hagwon. After all I don't suspect many certified kindergarten teachers from the US are lining up to teach over here, and there are of course no training opportunities provided foreign teachers here for any level. Throwing the anti-foreigner crowd a bone is a hell of a way to distract readers from the "keeping up with the Kims" mentality that dictates 96% of private kindergartens teach English. The article doesn't say anything about "questionable owners" who don't put any thought into who they hire to teach little kids.

Kindergartens seem to be a favorite target of whomever does the targetting; a few months ago we read about a crackdown underway in Daejeon, the city that seems to deeply resent its native English speakers. I don't have a transcript of Choi's remarks, so I don't know if he also painted Korean teachers with so broad a brush. You know, the young women who tape the mouths of their students shut? Or who lock them outside naked on a January day? That's two cases of "questionable" Korean preschool workers, two more than the number of "questionable" foreign teachers that've turned up.

Might also want to add another zero to the end of the monthly tuition figure of 25,000 won. For $20 bucks a month, shit, they could learn English from a parakeet for all I care.

Vietnam War Memorial Village opens in Hwacheon.

The Chosun Ilbo has some information about a Vietnam War Veterans memorial village (베트남 참전용사 만남의 장) dedicated in Hwacheon county, Gangwon-do yesterday. It is built on the site where some 300,000 Korean soldiers trained for their service in Vietnam, and includes replicas of the tunnel network used by the Vietnamese.

The governments of Gangwon Province and Hwacheon-gun began construction of the memorial village in 2000, in the belief that it was necessary to build an educational center offering lessons about war. The provincial and county governments spent a total amount of W18 billion (US$1=W1,363) on a 140,000 sq. m lot in Oeum-li, to build a memorial hall, a monument, mock barracks, and six traditional Vietnamese houses, an exhibition hall for field combat equipment, a mock training camp, a drill ground, and a picnic site.

Early this month, the local governments completed a replica of a 157 m-long tunnel furnished with six exhibition halls, including an armory and war council room. Gangwon Province and Hwacheon-gun said they have agreed with a nearby Army unit to operate mock training classes, including a ranger school and a rifle range. At the dedication ceremony on Thursday, the flags of the eight military units that participated in the war will be hoisted, with troops to be attired in combat fatigues of the period.

Here are a few photos stolen off the wire.












South Korea lost 4,407 soldiers and had 11,000 wounded during the war. South Korean soldiers earned quite a reputation for brutality while in Vietnam, a holdover from their abuse of Allied prisoners-of-war in World War II. But as always, "war crimes" remains redundant, and you'll find stories of savagery among any group of civilized people forced to murder for a living. Worth pointing out that South Korean politicians have made overtures of peace toward Vietnam following the war, including President Kim Dae-jung who in 1998 "expressed regret" over atrocities.

Nowadays we find Vietnam in the news over here most often because of the young Vietnamese women sold to South Korean bachelors. For an interesting collection of contemporary articles on South Korea in Vietnam, and a little on its lingering influence on the put-down of the Gwangju Uprising of 1980, take a look at Gusts of Popular Feeling's "South Korean troops in Vietnam."

Labor violations at Kiryung Electronics Factory.

The Hankyoreh ran this photo today outside the offices of Sirius, whose satellite radios are built by Kiryung Electronics Factory in Seoul. The above demonstration took place in New York on Tuesday because of "Abusive Sweatshop Conditions at the Kiryung Electronics Factory in South Korea." You can find a long summary of grievances from the National Labor Committee; an excerpt:

* Over 250 production line workers at the Kiryung Electronics factory have no rights and are held under conditions of constant fear.
Married women are limited to just three-month contracts so they can be fired if they become pregnant.

* Workers can be fired for using the bathroom, requesting to leave “early” when the regular shift ends at 5:00 p.m., for arriving a few minutes late, for asking for a sick day, or being unable to work on a weekend or national holidays.

* Forced to work 13 to 14-hour shifts, six or seven days a week, sometimes going for up to three months without a single day off. There are also grueling all-night 24-hour shifts two or three times a month. After toiling all night, workers must still report for their next shift at 8:00 a.m. the following morning, leaving them working a 38-hour shift. Workers report toiling 100 to 120 hours of overtime a month.

* Workers making Sirius Satelite radios earn just $145 a week, despite the fact that the cost of living in Seoul is just as high, if not higher, than in New York City.

* Paid below-subsistence wages, workers and their families must subsist on rice and kimchee (pickled cabbage).

* The work pace is so grueling that workers cannot even raise their heads, talk or use the bathroom. The women must learn to “hold their bladder,” but report that they sometimes “leak.”

* In the face of discrimination against pregnant women, the lack of rights, grueling hours and below-subsistence pay, the workers organized a union in July 2005. Management immediately threatened to fire the women, who then occupied the plant staging a sit-down strike. The sit-down lasted 55 days before the workers were driven from the factory by riot police.

* Kiryung management informed the workers that at the insistence of Sirius Satellite Radio, production of the radios would be relocated to a low wage factory in China.

* Hired goons also attacked the strikers, stomping, kicking and beating the women.

* For 1,160 days, the women have continued their strike, setting up a tent city in front of the main gate of the factory. Over 1,000 supporters joined a one-day hunger strike to support the workers. The head of the local union at the Kiryung factory went on a hunger strike for 94 days before being hospitalized in mid-September 2008.

* The struggle for justice continues, as a delegation of striking workers travels to the U.S. on October 15 to confront management at Sirius Satellite Radio and to seek the support of the American people in their just struggle.

The Hankyoreh is to journalistic integrity what a crackhead is to responsiblity, but it nevertheless has painted a pretty damning picture of the factory and its union.

Singaporean elementary school text shows picture of Korean homeless.

*Gasp* Naver has the story, brought to us by Michael.



Some exception might be taken with using a foreign country's homeless rather than their own, with saying a country has insufficient housing for everyone, or with writing something like "even with our limited land, our government is able to provide sufficient housing for the people." Hell, I'll bet many are just upset because Korea makes Korea look bad, and other countries oughtn't be airing its dirty laundry. Ironically today's lesson in my English textbook has the following passage:

My father says that Koreans are one of the hardest working peoples in the world. And I think it's true. I live in Dallas, and I have some friends from Korea in my neighborhood. Their parents work very hard. They usually start work early in the morning and come back home late at night. And they do their best for their children to have a better education. They know what's important in life.

The not-so-subtle implication is that other cultures don't work for their children and don't know what's important in life. Looking through foreign textbooks is a popular pastime of many government officials and private citizens. Looking through domestic textbooks for similar distortions, though, doesn't inspire the same passion.

"Global Love of Reed and Hooded Crane."

The Korea Times has a really great article on the upcoming Suncheon Bay Reeds Festival. *cough*

While I was looking up stuff I looked at the Suncheon Bay website, but it doesn't make any sense. Right off the bat it has some weird bullshit on the page:



Swampy? It's perhaps the most significant place in the city and you go with "The five coastal Swampy land of the world" to lead off? The only time you see something called Swampy is when a porn star has a bad manager. Even I have no idea what that means. Actually, okay, I think it refers to the bay being the fifth-largest in the world, which I've seen reported by the Suncheon city website (click entry 22). I haven't, however, seen that confirmed elsewhere, and Suncheon Bay never turned up in any books on the significant wetlands of the world. For instance, neither Suncheon nor Korea are even mentioned in this book The World's Largest Wetlands. Matter of fact it's only the second-largest wetlands in Korea. You can take a look at the list compiled by the Ramsar Convention and see that tons in just the first couple countries are larger than Suncheon Bay. That's not a knock against Suncheon, because it is extraordinarily beautiful there, but you can't just say whatever the hell you want because I'm fixin to call you on it.

I sent off an email a while ago to Suncheon to offer my help as a copy editor. It's nice that they do make the effort to include some news on their websites, but Christ, the English portions are either unreadable or factually wrong. I haven't heard back, just as I hadn't heard back from Gangjin, but it occurred to me that there are, like, a few dozen native English speakers working through City Hall plus scores more working in Suncheon public schools. If getting it right were a priority they wouldn't have to rely on unsolicited emails.

Actually, I came across something else interesting while spending Tuesday afternoon writing up the story. From the piece:

The festival's namesake the hooded crane is especially beloved, and practically every exhibit of the Eco-Museum is devoted to it. Classified as a vulnerable species there are roughly 10,000 left in the world, and its numbers are being further reduced by the constant reclamation and development of wetlands in South Korea and China.

However, very few of these birds actually spend time Suncheon, as an estimated 80 percent in 2005-2006 wintered in southern Japan, according to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.

The IUCN Red List page looks to be down now, but I do recall some of the figures on the site, including one which said only about 110 of the 11,000 hooded cranes in the world make their home in Suncheon at some point of the year, compared with the over 10,000 in southern Japan.

World's largest sun-tracking solar plant now operational in Shinan.

Stolen from here.

According to the Donga Ilbo. It is the size of 93 soccer fields, and will provide energy to 10,000 homes. Shinan, or Sinan, is a county in Jeollanam-do comprised entirely of islands. About 830, 111 inhabited, according to Naver, and 1,004 according to the official site. There are only 21,636 households in the county, and 46,137 people. Lots of gorgeous islands and beaches over there. There are some boat tours of the islands leaving from Mokpo; anyone have details?

Double-d in the place to be.

Hip-hop group Dynamic Duo (다이나믹듀오) will be playing a concert in the "Hub City of Asian Culture" on Saturday, and it's too bad I won't be able to make it. They seem to come through a few times a year, so maybe next time. Youtube has a few of their songs online, which I'll include as an introduction to the group.

"Insomnia" with Bobby Kim is one of my favorites. Youtube has two versions: the video and a live performance.





One of their better-known songs is "Ring My Bell." It samples the music and the chorus, but it's in Korean of course, so I'm not sure if that's considered a remake or what.



The video for "Go Back" has a couple of weird white people including, I'm pretty sure, the Russian woman 아냐 from the "lingerie fashion show" titled 5 Girls.



There are also a couple of decent live performances featuring the group and other members of "The Movement": Lee Ssang, Drunken Tiger, Bobby Kim, Yun Do-hyeon, and others. That Eun Ji-won joint is tight.



Drunken Tiger is sick, too.



Lee Ssang is probably my favorite, but even they can remind us why it's a bad, bad idea to try an English song phonetically.

A couple other good Dynamic Duo songs:





The last one is "Funk the World," but their pronunciation is a little off so I'd maybe leave it out of the office.

Anything we can do for these women?

I'm just talking out loud because I have no idea what resources already exist for the thousands upon thousands of foreign brides bought by Korean men every year. Women, and men, the world over marry for money and to better themselves, and plenty marry not out of love but rather out of need, so the plight of these women here isn't unique. Moreover, you'll find women all over the world willing to move to other countries to support themselves or send money back home, so that South Korea is exploiting its poorer neighbors isn't, again, unique. It just turns your stomach, though, to read stories like this:

The 44-year-old Hamyang County farmer, identified only by the surname Kim, married a 20-year-old Vietnamese woman last December. Kim has a speech impediment because of his mental disability and lived with his parents until he got married. According to Lee Sang-do, a police offer at Hamyang’s Seosang Police Precinct, it was the second time he had married a Vietnamese woman.

The marriage, however, didn’t last. Kim’s bride ran away a few days after the wedding. Not knowing why his wife left him, Kim decided to make the journey to Vietnam to find her. Despite his mental disability, on Oct. 16 he took a bus to Incheon International Airport and boarded a plane to Vietnam.

Unable to speak Vietnamese, he quickly ended up on the streets. He was found by Vietnamese police last Saturday night, after two days in the country.

It turned out his wife is still in Korea, although the article makes no mention of what did, and will, happen to her. How desperate a situation do you need to be in to sell yourself to a disabled man in rural South Korea? How about the man's family who had no qualms about letting their 44-year-old man marry a 20-year-old woman when he obviously couldn't provide for her or take care of her? And who knows what will happen to her now that her visa is in jeopardy.

According to a New York Times article from last year, in 2005 marriages to foreigners accounted for 14% of all new marriages. The number is higher in rural areas, for example, in Hampyeong county where 37.6% of marriages were international in 2004. While that Joongang Ilbo article says that "104,290 foreign women had married Korean men as of June," it doesn't put that in context or give a starting date for that figure. It becomes a little tricky because during the Vietnam War some 300,000 Korean soldiers and staff brought back Vietnamese wives, a figure that seems really high. An estimated 5,000 Vietnamese women marry a South Korean man every year and settle in Korea, but as you can imagine not many of them are happy. 3,665 international marriages ended in divorce in 2007, and there are a couple recent shocking stories involving Vietnamese brides and their suspicious deaths. Earlier this year a man in Daejeon was given a "relatively heavy punishment" of 12 years in prison for beating his 19-year-old Vietnamese bride to death. And in February a 22-year-old Vietnamese woman fell to her death from an apartment building, and though her death was ruled a suicide---and her 46-year-old Korean husband had her body cremated before any forensic investigation could be done---the woman's diary and other circumstantial evidence suggests homicide. Remember that earlier in the year a KT editorial started a profile on these two cases with the following introduction:

One killed herself. Another was beaten to death. A third was divorced after her duty as a surrogate mother was fulfilled.

No, these are not stories about ill-fated black women before slavery was prohibited in the United States.

There was a Joongang Ilbo opinion piece in May titled "End the marriage industry" which implores South Korea to end the trade of immigrant women, citing among other things the staggering discrimination foreigners face here. The piece concludes:

A country is globally rejected or respected for its policies and behavior towards women. Korea must legislate against the business of buying and selling foreign wives.
The government should immediately crack down on this shameful practice.
At the same time, the government must grant quick citizenship to the foreign wives already living here so that they can have full equal rights under the law.
It is time for Korea to protect its minority citizens.

And it's my duty to repost the following banner any time a story like this comes up. It was hanging in Jeollabuk-do, and advertises that Vietnamese women won't run away. Rather ironic when we consider today's story.

Very ambitious violence.

If 10,000 bees ever gather at your house, this is one way to handle it. Excellent photographs, too.

KOTESOL conference this weekend in Seoul.

Any teachers in Seoul or able to visit easily might want to attend the KOTESOL conference this weekend at Sookmyung Women's University. In kimchi-icecream's words:

It is a great time to network with other teachers (foreign and Korean) and meet people who care about teaching, and want to improve their teaching skills and resources.

His massive blog entry has tons of information including registration info, directions, and an overview of the last conference, so please give it a read.

Of local interest, sort of, is presenter John Linton, MD. The KOTESOL website is down right now so I can't take a look at the gist of his presentation, but he is the director of Yonsei University Medical Center's Severence Hospital, is perhaps the most prominent foreign doctor in the country, and is a descendant of the first missionaries to arrive in Suncheon and Jeollanam-do. The Linton Family continues to fight tuberculosis in Suncheon today, and continues to make trips to North Korea to perform medical work there.

Want some Halloween cake?

Suncheon's own A Food Journey in Korea has a recipe for a delicious-looking Chocolate Whiskey Cake.

"I throw, you catch. It's not that hard."

Do you ever catch yourself acting like this around your students? I don't mean the drinking, tattooing, and cussing, I mean having such high expectations of them and getting pissed when they don't do what seems to you like the simplest of tasks? I do sometimes, but not to such comedic effect.

More about Jeju's foreigner ghetto.

I wrote about Jeju's foreigner ghetto, or rather "English Town," last month, and yesterday the Joongang Ilbo put up an article telling us more about this 1.4-trillion-won project.

It’s a highly ambitious plan and one fraught with challenges, especially given the uncertainty of the global economy.

But, if it works, the English Education City on Jeju Island could transform the island into an education hub.

God damn it, the h-word.

JDC hopes to collaborate with known international schools in building the city in Jeju.

“I can’t say the specific names of all the schools interested at this point but several schools including [in the U.S.] Phillips Academy, Andover; Phillips Exeter Academy, Milton Academy and others are showing interest. Officials at the schools like the idea and we’re currently in the process of holding talks,” said JDC’s Kim Seung-kwan.

“We’re asking the schools to allow us to use their names for the new institutions, though many are reluctant at this point. For example, New Songdo International City reached an agreement with Milton Academy but failed to reach an agreement on the name,” said Kim.

LOL, I'm sure they'll go ahead and use them anyway, it's not like anyone ever checks up or holds anyone accountable. They're also coming up with some innovative schemes to round out the white population:

To create an English-speaking environment, JDC has some interesting plans. “We hope to attract seniors from English-speaking countries to live on Jeju Island either for the short term or long term. They can do a variety of jobs around the English Town,” said Kim of JDC.

We heard a similar line of thinking with the Muan American Town, where retirees could come live and teach English for free. I've written plenty about why English Villages and Towns suck, the chief reason being a lack of commitment to truly learning the language. Moreover, in the case of the Paju English Village, an investigation found that it's not an English-only environment at all. The novelty wears off quickly, and people realize that they could have had the same education with a phrase book and some quality time in front of Youtube. We already read that these village are losing money all across Korea, so why the impulse to build an even bigger one?

Above all, these are built to stem the tide of Koreans who travel overseas to study, but what people really don't realize is that these towns and villages are hardly authentic. You'll know what I mean if you've ever tried to install an English-only policy at school: nobody follows it and you yourself have to simplify the language greatly to be understood. What you gain in comprehensibility you lose in authenticity, so that I wonder how often students and teachers have ever heard a foreigner speak Engish at a normal pace. That problem becomes amplified when you create foreign community of retirees, professors, teachers, and whomever else they import, a community that wasn't allowed to form organically. And it points to the ambivalence of English education here, the lack of a clearly defined reason for learning the language. People might study a language to enter that language community and share information with its speakers, something best accomplished by going abroad and actually meeting them. However, since English is essentially a domestic product here---used for domestic job interviews, to enter domestic colleges, and used on domestic tests---the native speaker is superfluous, as we've seen in the schools. If that's the case---and nothing really wrong with that since people study languages to simply read and write texts, too---there's no need to create an English-immersion community or to, ironically, isolate it on an island.

To sum up my thoughts, I'll plagiarize myself:

Anyway, when I first began following this trend in 2004 or 2005 I thought to myself "Why would people want to build English Villages in a country where don't talk to the foreigners they already have?" What's with always having to compartmentalize English---and foreigners---and make it something you have to go out and study? What's with the need to make it self-contained, whether in a school, in a town, or on a tour bus? The hundreds of hagwon in your own town aren't enough? The native speaker at your school isn't enough? The foreigners you pass every day on the street and yell "HellOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO monkey" at their back after they've walked by aren't good enough? The white guy you ignore all day at school and then approach for private lessons later isn't good enough? The half-dozen channels devoted to English education aren't good enough? The thousands upon thousands of Korean-language websites devoted to learning English aren't good enough? It's come to this?

There's nothing wrong with building and going to theme parks, which is essentially what these villages are, though again I find them to be like using sledgehammers to kill mosquitos. I think they'd be fun for a visit once in a while, but they're not as authentic as they're cracked up to be, and they're not going to churn out millions of English-speakers. Decades of decades-long English study hasn't done that yet. I was going to include a line about building a hypothetical Chinese Village in Pennsylvania and hiring spitters and rude shopkeepers, but I'll leave that out. You get what I mean, though. The English Education City is to an authentic language community what "Love Story in Harvard" is to the Ivy Leagues.

Dog meat ramen.

Swiped this off Naver, by popular demand. This is a Chinese product, I believe, but interesting that the label is also written in Korean.



I'm getting hard just by looking at it. Of course, if it's ramen, or Chinese, we ought to write "dog" "meat" ramen.

Gwangju's "Hub City of Asian Culture" plan struggling.

Well, raise your hand if you couldn't see that coming. Phil's the only one? See, I told you he was the biggest douche in Jeollanam-do!

Remember I said yesterday that Gwangju was calling itself the "Hub City of Asian Culture"? Well, that whole thing is expected to yield a 100 billion won loss this year.

``It is not desirable for the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and the Gwangju City government to spend taxpayers' money for a plan which is expected to generate massive losses in the future,'' said Lee [Bum-rae of the Trade Federation Grand National Party].

. . .

Since 2004, the culture ministry and the Gwangju city have pushed for the single largest cultural project in the country's history, a campaign pledge of former President Roh Moo-hyun in the 2002 election.

Under the plan, the two are scheduled to establish an Asia Culture Complex by 2012, and the Asia Culture Institute and other cultural sites by 2023 in the southwestern city.

The government will finance 52.8 percent of the money needed to complete the project and the private sector and the local administration will pay the remainder. Completion of the entire project is slated for 2023.

Well, actually, I don't know enough about this plan to make educated comments on it. Unlikely anyone does, actually, given the incongruity of long-term planning with what we've come to know, but I must say I do enjoy ambitious projects like this, and am a big fan of all the development going on in Jeollanam-do. That area of Gwangju, in front of the Old Provincial Office, will be radically different when this is all finished. Here are some pictures from the official site; there's an English version, too, but it doesn't make any sense.






And let me just say to all these Naver bloggers that if you're going to steal photos from another site and put them on yours without attribution, don't be even more of a dick by disabling right clicks. It just means I have to spend another four seconds of my time playing with the print screen button.

Also related, I was down in that area a couple weeks ago and I snapped a picture of the name of one of those under-construction buildings so I could research it a little later. I love what these children are doing (click to enlarge):



Just like the City Hall in Seoul, the Provincial Office in Gwangju will be getting a new look, as you can tell from the pictures above. You can also see that the rotary in front of the Hall will be gone, and it looks like vehicle traffic will be directed elsewhere to make way for the large pedestrian areas. Some people (1, 2) aren't happy about the demolition of the city's history to make way for the Culture Complex. Lots of photos you'll see of the Gwangju Massacre show scenes unfolding in front of the Provincial Office and along the main street leading up to it, and as a matter of fact every May 18th they march a parade down Chungjangno to the Provincial Hall and hold recreations of the combat. It was also the site of large protests against American beef and some massive cheering during the 2002 World Cup, and remains pretty much the center of downtown Gwangju.



Here's a shot of the Provincial Office and surrounding area taken in 1999. The area looks a little different already, as many of the buildings around it have been torn down. Below that is a shot of the Provincial Office in 1909, though it's not the same building.




Unfortunately I can't find too many decent shots of the area prior to 1999, but here's a really neat gallery of a set used for a movie about the Gwangju Massacre. Quite eerie, considering how much of the area still looks the same.