Vagina Monologues in Gwangju.

If you're in Gwangju and you want to hear strangers talk about their genitals, or are interested in seeing what I think is the first performance in the region, then you're in luck. The Vagina Monologues (버자이너 모놀로그) will be in town from March 6th through the 8th. In Korean of course, at the Gwangju Culture & Art Center.

Who the fuck is Dave Franklin and why the fuck is he writing about teaching English in Korea?

It's been a while since I've lived up to my reputation as angriest Korea blogger, and it's high time I defend my title. Today's target is Dave Franklin. So back in January, Franklin, a 37-year-old former "teacher" in Korea, put out a novel English Toss on Planet Andong. It was mentioned in passing on Rate My Hagwon at the time, but I don't read that site so I didn't learn about this book until last week. Here's what an Australian article has to say about it:

The 37-year-old Alderley resident spent more than two years teaching English in South Korea, using his often surreal experiences as the basis for his fourth novel, English Toss on Planet Andong.

“I turned up and saw all the Korean teachers carried sticks,” he said.

“No one had bothered to mention that whacking kids was as commonplace as giving homework. But then again, I never received any training, guidelines, feedback or supervision.

“I was just on my own in a baking hot classroom with up to 40 teenagers laughing at me for looking like a bald, big-nosed alien.”

English Toss centres on a wildly dysfunctional expat teaching community trying to make sense of each other and the local culture.

“I think it’s a recipe for disaster but it’s undeniably big business,” the city-based ESL teacher said.

I'm inclined to believe that review was written by Franklin himself. Anyway, the book is absolute garbage, an embarrassment and disgrace to any self-respecting teacher here, and clearly the most dysfunctional member of his expat community is Franklin himself. You can find just about all of the book available from Google Books. Here's the opening paragraph:

The red dragonflies reversed, zipped forward and hovered outside the hagwon window. Paul Taylor stared at thte sexually conjoined insects, their wings a furious blur, wondering what it'd be like to fly and fuck at the same time. No doubt more fun than filling out student evaluations, a bi-monthly task that again needed completing. He glanced at the unmolested pile of one hundred and fifty or so papers on his desk, each one representing an individual human being whose young mind he was supposedly dedicated to nurturing.

Throughout the book the main character Paul refers to Koreans as Dollies, calls his students Dogs and his classroom the Kennel, and says kimchi looks like an abortion. A one-line summary from an online retailer says

English Toss on Planet Andong is a biting black comedy that centres on a wildly dysfunctional expat community teaching English in South Korea.

though I find the book is to comedy what the author is to education. From page 6:

'OK, time for my gare hokseng.'

She snorted, 'Dog students! You must not call them so!'

Paul shrugged. 'I'll stop when they stop behaving l ike dogs. If you gave me a class of actual dogs the only way I'd be able to tell the difference is the dogs would probably fart less. The only words I've managed to teach them so far are sit and walkies.'

Well, thankfully the dolly translated "gare hokseng," for otherwise I wouldn't know what the fuck that means. Just a note to teachers and potential authors, if you're going to demean and dehumanize your students for not knowing a language, it's best not to fuck up basic vocabulary yourself. From page 9:

Paul dragged himself up the flight of stairs and pointed to the Kennel down the narrow hallway. 'IN' he growled, making them scamper away. Brian slid two metres along the tiled floor in his football boots, banged into the water cooler, dived into the classroom and slammed the door shut in Vincent's face. Vincent turned and grinned, unfazed that he'd almost lost his nose. He yanked the door open, shouted, ran into the Kennel and slammed it so hard the glass wobbled. Paul rubbed his temples and leaned against the weall. Billy [teacher] lounged in Banana's doorway at the far end of the corridor as he eyed two approaching pig-tailed girls. 'Hello, my little wingless angles,' he said in his warm, upbeat voice. 'Please leave your clothes by my desk. It's time to meet Uncle Salty.' Billy leaned closer hissing: 'He's your only family now!' He ushered the giggling girls into the classroom and winked at Paul. 'What . . . ? You know I don't mean it.' Then he rubbed his hands and wandered in after them.

An example of student-teacher interaction from page 15:

'Teacher, marry?'
'You asked me this, Amy. Remember? About a week ago. Sorry to be pedantic, but how many marital statuses of foreign teachers are you tracking?'
Amy wasn't that easily put off. 'Teacher, marry?'
He smiled, the air leaking out. 'No, teacher, not married. Used to be, but not now.'
'Teacher, girlfriend?'
'No, Amy. No girlfriend. If you've got an older sister or aunty perhaps you can help me out Act as a chaperone, even. Shall we say something in the twenty to thirty-five age range? That's nice and broad, isn't it? Oh, and I like them busty.'
She frowned. 'Why?'
He smiled. 'Why, what?'
'No girlfriend, why?'
Paul pointed at his chest. 'Teacher poor and ugly.'
Amy nodded, indicating his ginger hair. 'Very ugly. Are you crazy?'
'A little, Amy. Are you crazy?' A bug-eyed Amy shook her head and scampered back to her desk.
'Page-e, teacher?' Brian called.
'I just told you. Try listening.'

A bit of the classroom atmosphere, from page 18:

[Paul] looked at Sally, coming back to his senses. 'Yes, OK. We see with our eyes. Let's say see.' Two Dogs managed while copying his actions. He tried again. 'See.' This time more than half of the class responded, a good enough percentage. Tommy was one of the abstainers. The child-sized waste of space had retrieved some objects from his bag. However, a miniature pack of cards and a plastic four-legged monster seemed unlikely to aid his quest to master a foreign language.

And dealing with disruptive students on page 20:

He got a black marker pen from his basket, marched toward one of the twins and stabbed a finger in the boy's face. 'Name?'
The child swallowed, 'Joey.'
'Joey? You're Joey?'
'Yes, teacher.'
'Right.' Paul grabbed the lower half of his face, holding him steady as he printed a large 'J' on his forehead. The Dogs found it hysterical. The branded Joey blinked and looked around. Suddenly the centre of attention, he didn't know whether ot join in with the laughter or burst into tears. He touched his forehead as Danny cowered, obviously believing he was next.

Most of the rest of the book focuses on the misadventures of the expats around town, and each character's flawed personalities, and is in all a very poorly-written exercise in navel-gazing. As if there is any other sort of exercise in navel-gazing. By all indications anybody can get published these days provided they struggle with paragraphs and have no sense of style. For characters who hate their lives so much they sure pass comment on the smallest of detail, whether it's the hunchbacked grandmother, the student named Camel Toe, or the quartet of nine-year-olds named Jiggle, Those, Little, and Titties.

Teaching English in Korea can be challenging, and browsing any if not every teacher's blog will reveal that. This one is no exception, and I've spent considerable amount of time and energy writing about the difficulties we face in the classroom, in the teachers' office, and in the neighborhood. In fact, this isn't even the first book published about shitty hagwon; take a look at Prisoner of Wonderland: An ESL Misadventure for what can go wrong. But what we find in Franklin's book is evidence of perhaps the most damning charge against us: that we don't care, that we're unprofessional, perhaps to the point of being dangerous.

The English education business in Korea just might be in bad shape: English test scores are down, private education costs are up, schools are having trouble finding teachers. And all the while native speakers are struggling to fit into a system that teaches almost exclusively toward standardized placement exams, which don't play to our strengths and which make English purely a subject to analyzed rather than a language to be used. Hell, half the time we can't figure out why we're there at all. Those are legitimate issues, and even if blogging about them isn't your thing, we ought to keep them in mind as we try to do our jobs. But "bad shape" is certainly relative; people who earn a comfortable wage and an apartment doing a job for which they have no qualifications perhaps have little else to complain about besides nose-pickers or Koreans who can't speak English.

The one theme that pervades the book is unrelenting maladjustment. Paul's description of Hangeul as

[what] appeared to be the brainchild of a pot-smoking computer game programmer who'd fused Tetris and Space Invaders

or a serving of kimchi as

the slimy pile of vegetables, half submerged in red liquid and speckled with spices, looked like a tiny abortion

or the appearance of Andong, or "Planet Andong" rather, as

one hell of a higgledy-piggledy place, suggesting a contingent of constipated 1950's Eastern Bloc town planners had been given carte blance

or the reason he calls Koreans "Dollies"

Koreans pretty much look the same, eat the same stuff and do the same things. As if cloned

and the descriptions of his job quoted earlier leave the reader wondering what the point of it all is. The other characters aren't much better, or any better-developed---one roomate speaks in uppity prose to confuse Koreans and the other is a fussy, hyperpatriotic 58-year-old Canadian---and Franklin himself in the book reviews gives the impression that he wrote the book 'cause some hagwon done him wrong. If the aim of the book is to make Korea look like an uncivilized wasteland, or rather an alien planet, the perfect setting for exploring the bleakeast and blandest people can half-form he succeeded, but only through rendering his characters so obscene and so ridiculously out-of-touch that you wonder why they never put bullets in their heads and ended the book 375 pages earlier.

I actually have no idea who the fuck Dave Franklin is. This book on Korea is his fourth novel, and Google turns up mention of a Dave Franklin born in 1971 who released a book through the same publisher. In an interview talking about an earlier book, this Franklin says something that touches on a point I'd like to make.

So how important, then, would you say it is for a writer to know his or her subject? "Well, it certainly helps, but it’s a mistake to say a writer has to know his subject. I doubt HG Wells was au fait with invisibility, alien invasions and time machines but he seemed to get by. Some critics argue that "Lolita" is the twentieth century’s greatest novel but Nabokov wasn’t a kiddie fiddler. It’s much more important to simply be interested in your subject. That interest can even be negative e.g. a fear or obsession with something. You just have to write about a subject that’s on your mind a lot. Hence, I write about alienation, popular culture, violence, humour, sex and an abiding hatred of Bryan Adams – often in the same paragraph."

I understand how fiction works, and that by writing characters the author doesn't necessarily vouch for them. Franklin may be no more a dysfunctional sadist than Nabakov, well, than Nabakov was a "kiddie fiddler." You have to question why Franklin would choose to paint this picture of Korea, of teaching, when his audience will have no other concept of either, and thus no basis to pick up on whatever satire he thinks he's attempting. In fact, such fantastic characters should make you read between the lines and explore their loneliness, their emptiness, their pun-sort-of-intended feelings of alienation, but there's really nothing in the novel to persuade the reader to work that hard. Simply put, it's not a smart book.

This brings up earlier discussions the blogosphere has had about expats in Korea and negativity. Me and pretty much every other active blogger has received comments or emails telling us not to write bad things about Korea, trying to correct our "wrong information," or discrediting our opinions because we were foreigners who didn't understand Korean culture. A lot of ink has been typed on the topic, justifying our existence as critics and observers with every right to opinions as anyone else. So I'm not here telling Franklin to somehow unwrite the book, or saying that he's wrong, or suggesting he write about something nice like temples, four seasons, and hanbok instead. I'm wondering why he went the route he did, and what if any goal he had by rendering teaching in Korea as an otherworldly experience. It certainly has no resonance to anyone who actually, as he put it, knows his subject or is interested in his subject. It does pander to those who hold the basest opinions of Koreans and who have no regard for their responsibilities as teachers. Or, since the average person hasn't the faintest idea of Korea, it panders to those who wish to hold the basest opinions of the country, its people, and its English students.

We can debate the term "unqualified teachers" all day long and get nowhere. We can talk in circles about the hiring policies of Korean schools, about how they'll pretty much hire any Caucasian with a pulse and a degree, about how demand trumps discernment. But what we really shouldn't debate is that regardless of our motivations for coming to Korea we owe it to everyone to behave like professionals, like teachers. That doesn't mean don't drink, don't go out, don't travel, don't date, whatever, but that does mean remember why they're paying you in the first place. That doesn't mean don't complain, don't be homesick, don't try, and don't make mistakes sometimes, but that does mean do your best, use your head, and work through it. In other words, you're an adult, fucking act like it.

I'm fully aware that by writing this entry I'm giving more publicity to this small-time book and its nobody author than they'd ever receive otherwise, but it's important to call out attitudes like this when we find them, and distance ourselves from the people who preach them. Everybody talks about getting respect for foreign teachers, about standing up for our rights and fighting back. But we also need to stand up and accept our responsibilities as well, and rather than demanding this and that from Koreans, start holding ourselves up to the standards befitting professional teachers. And to Franklin: great, you got paid, now fuck off.

A woman bought a puppy that ended up being too noisy, so what does she do? Puts a rubber band around its snout for three days. From Kuki News via 100% Perfect Us; pictures pixelated but still disturbing.

Sad story out of Gwangju, where a young woman apparently committed suicide because her boyfriend didn't have her back in an online quarrel.

Even more rough stuff at the National Assembly.

This dude is fixin to fuck you up.



Two guys got double-minors two days ago for shoving inside the National Assembly---and then there was a huge melee back in December---and now this outside the Assembly today. Here's what the KT has to say about their picture:

With “No Admittance” to the National Assembly, a member of the opposition Democratic Party tries to force his way through a crowd of police to enter the building. National Assembly Speaker Kim Hyung-o placed the keep-out order to block the opposition party’s protest against the media bill.

Democracy in action. More pictures from around the internet. (1, 2, 3)




And in other news, Chun Yu-ok (전여옥) of the Grand National Party was attacked today by, reportedly, five or six people, and one 68-year-old woman was arrested. From a gallery from the Chosun Ilbo:

Korea Penetrating!

Here's an awesome excerpt from another one of those books that helps Koreans introduce their country and culture to English-speakers, something I looked at before. It's a sample Q&A from the chapter on soccer:

Did Korea penetrate the soccer world during their recent World Cup co-hosting with Japan?

- Of course. Did you not watch how Korea took the World Cup by storm beating Italy and Spain, two major heavy weights in the world?

- Considering how the Korean soccer team was a mess back in January, and how they barely squeaked by the quarter-finals and still ended up beating Italy and Spain, penetration is an understatement for their mind-blowing performance. Our Korean soccer boys have made us all so proud.

A look at one Korean English teacher's discipline problems in class, a response and commiseration to one woman's book lamenting the abolition of corporal punishment in school.

Foxlife has English subtitles for the sitcom "How I Met Your Mother" (or, for some reason in Korean, 아이 러브 프렌즈) during its 1 am airing Monday through Thursday. Now, who do I have to screw around here to get KBS World and its English subtitles? If it's Suh Ji-young, I'll do it.

Brian's K-blog of the month? A long time ago when a tiger smoked a cigarette . . .

NC State considering a campus in Incheon FEZ.

North Carolina State University, among a few other American universities, is considering putting a campus in the Incheon Free Economic Zone.

The University has been invited by the South Korean government to open a campus in South Korea's Incheon Free Economic Zone, Larry Nielsen, provost and executive vice-chancellor, said.

The Incheon Free Economic Zone is a $200 billion dollar project the South Korean government has created to build a business, residential, and educational city that is "basically Research Triangle Park on steroids," according to Nielsen.

The South Koreans have also invited Stony Brook University, the University of Southern California, the University of Missouri and Georgia Tech University to open campuses in Incheon along with South Korean universities Seoul National, Yonsei, Inha and Hanyang.

"We think this is a really interesting possibility," Nielsen said.

The South Korean government is agreeing to pay for all the universities to take part in feasibility studies to explore the options of opening campuses there.

So far only Stony Brook University has signed the agreement, according to a presentation Chancellor James Oblinger made to the UNC Board of Governors.

However, the University is looking into becoming the second to sign on to this program. On Jan. 8 Oblinger, Nielsen, and Vice Chancellor Charles Leffler proposed to the Board of Governors a request for the University to take part in the feasibility study of a campus in South Korea.

"We hope to get started in the next month, we are just waiting for the papers to be signed by the South Korean government and NCSU," Nielsen said.

That could be very interesting. The article mentions offering biotechnology, engineering, managment and science, though I can't help but think having an American, English-language campus would be a great opportunity to provide MA TESOL programs. Perhaps some type of local distance-learning program could be set up, one that native speaker teachers could take advantage of given their busy schedules, similar to the Teachers' College Columbia University in Tokyo and the three campuses comprising Temple University Japan.

Here's a short video of a "trashout squad," a group that has to remove and throw away all personal items in a home after abandoned from foreclosure. It's hosted by Lisa Ling and it came to my attention because the first house was occupied by Koreans, judging by the soju bottles, ramen box, and red pepper paste. Exceptionally depressing to see how much gets left behind; makes me wonder if there were circumstances other than sudden poverty that forced such a quick exit.

Some details have come out about a 37-year-old Korean student at Oxford University who committed suicide last July, hours after learning his doctorate in Buddhism wouldn't be granted because his thesis wasn't good enough.

Immigration on the look-out for illegal private tutors in Suncheon.

This banner is hanging near one of my schools. Sorry for the poor quality of my cell phone pictures; it says:

Intensive Control Period of Foreigners' Illegal Extracurricular Work For Forced Repatriation
[원어민 불법 과외 적발시 본국 강제소환 집중단속기간]

And there are telephone numbers for the Yosu Immigration Office, the Suncheon Office of Education, and the Suncheon Association of Hakwon (순천학원연합회). It goes without saying that you should always be careful of whom you let talk you into giving private lessons, because word gets around, and even in my teachers' office my colleagues talk about who's teaching their children on the side. You should be especially wary of strangers in the area approaching you out of the blue, as happens pretty much all the time.

Happy graduation.

Congratulations to the men and women who celebrated their graduation this week at Seoul's Mapo Art Center, having completed their grade school equivalencies in a program designed for uneducated and illiterate adults. A few pictures from ceremonies that I think were spread over a couple days.

Old French map gives Dokdo, Sea of Japan to Korea.

An old French map puts Dokdo in Korean waters; evidentally everything to the west of the highlighted line belonged to Korea, including the body of water. When you take a closer look you'll see it also has "Mer du Japon" and Port Hamilton, the latter a naval outpost for Great Britain from 1885 to 1887 on Geomun-do, Yeosu. You'll also notice that the map doesn't accurately depict Gangjin Bay *cough* or much of the east coast, leading one to question why trust the map's veracity on some points when it's inaccurate in others.

Seems like the only time we hear about Jeonju is when something bad happens.

A Food Journey in Korea warns us of the latest culinary disaster to hit Suncheon: Cone Pizza.

Some pictures of the 50,000 won note, set to come out in June.

More rough stuff in the National Assembly.

One of these days some legislation might break out. The Korea Times has some background the photo they ran (not above):

Rep. Lee Jong-kul . . . of the main opposition Democratic Party (DP), scuffles with lawmakers as he attempts to block Chairman Ko Heung-kil . . . of the National Assembly’s Culture, Sports, Tourism, Broadcasting and Communications Committee from invoking his power to table contentious media industry-related bills in a conference room, Wednesday. The main opposition Democratic Party (DP), which has objected to the passage of those bills, claimed that the introduction of the measures was “invalid.”

Some video footage here, in Korean. The referees broke it up pretty quick, though, instead of letting the boys go at it.

This is nothing compared to the brawling that happened this December. Last week it, and 16 other politican brawls were ranked by Cracked.com; South Korea placed an impressive three times. I suspect Koreans aren't happy about that, though; footage from a brawl a few years ago was used in a clothing commercial in New Zealand. That drew a complaint from the Korean Embassy that said in part:

It depicted Korean politics and people in a negative fashion and was therefore offensive to the Korean community in New Zealand.

To the outside observer perhaps Korean politics depicts Korean politics in a negative fashion.

Suncheon to get classy hotel!

Construction of the "Ecograd" (에코그라드) is underway in Jorye-dong, in what will be Suncheon's first classy hotel. Take a look around the website for more information, in Korean, although it doesn't say when the hotel will be finished. Amenities at the hotel include a fitness club, spa, business lounge, wedding hall, seven restaurants, two bars, and nine classes of rooms.

Natalie White's singing in Korean.

*Update: She came to Korea about a week later.



Late to the party, I guess, because I don't follow K-pop sites. But I do like finding examples of non-Koreans using Korean, and using it well. This video of American Natalie White---aka Pumashock---singing Lee Hyori's "U Go Gull" was on the front page of Naver today, and has apparently been relatively big news for about a week. Between it and the Youtube upload it's gotten a little under half-a-million views. Girl group SNSD even saw her remix of "Gee," which has 1.1 million views. A bunch more of her covers on her Youtube channel.

ATEK in the LA Times

The Association for Teachers of English in Korea [ATEK]'s "Equal Checks For All" campaign has gotten some coverage in the LA Times today, in an article that talks not only about the legislation the group considers discriminatory but also about the smear campaigns waged against native speaker English teachers.

The big stories regarding ATEK happened while I was on vacation, so I didn't cover them at all. For some background check out their webpage, and for links to coverage in the news and on the blogs scroll to the bottom of their "ATEK in the news" page.

IHT article on gorosoi.

The International Herald Tribune has an informative article from Hadong today about gorosoi (고로쇠물), a drink made by mixing sap and water, and popular around here this time of year. I talked a little about this drink a few weeks ago here.

New Samsung phone to have safety features for women, children.

From the Korea Herald, which now allows right-clicks:

Samsung Electronics said yesterday it will release in mid-March a mobile phone featured with safety functions for woman and teenager consumers.

The SPH-W7100 phone comes with a safety pin on the rear which is able to emit a shrill beeping sound heard as far as 70 meters when pulled, Samsung officials said.

At the same time, pre-programmed emergency text messages are instantly and automatically sent to designated parents or friends, who can also check the GPS map of the site of the emergency.

When the phone is off during the emergency, the phone will send SOS message and the location information to pre-programmed numbers.

Hmm, too bad I can't use it. I don't like violence, either. Of course, the phones are also designed to be cute as hell.

"As mobiles are ubiquitous IT gadgets, the new phone's safety functions will be very useful," a Samsung official said.

Samsung officials said LED illumination on the phone cover stresses the sophisticated features of the mobile phone.

Why?

Recently, Koreans have become increasingly alert on street safety issues since serial killer Kang Ho-sun, who admitted killing eight people, made the headlines.

Korean volleyball star turned model available from Japanese prostitution site.

The Chosun Ilbo, via Korea Beat, reports that in these times of a favorable won-yen exchange rate, a Japanese website is providing instruction for men to find prostitutes in South Korea. I've been studying Japanese for a little bit and can translate some of the page:

Go outside and get into a taxi, any taxi, and go in any direction for three minutes. Get out, and you've found it.

*cough* Through my, um, research on the topic I see there's no shortage of Japanese websites advertising the services of Korean women (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), just as you'll find pictures of Japanese women on the calling cards here. Those services are available in Japan, mind you, and in a story linked to the above article the Chosun Ilbo looked at one of them.



The article is talking about Korean host and hostess clubs in Japan, and runs the above, seemingly unrelated, screenshot. One of the women looks very familiar.



It's model Han Ji-yeon, formerly a star college volleyball player and currently a model of some sort. It's not unusual to use random models or pictures for websites when you need a generic foreigner or whatever---happens to Koreans in the US, too---so you're probably about as likely to have Han Ji-yeon delivered to your room as you are any woman who looks like the ones on the websites.

e-People, a potentially useful website.

On the SeoulPodcast with ATEK's Tony Hellmann a few weeks back he mentioned a government website, e-People, that he found useful for getting answers from government agencies. Here's a little description of its services from the site itself:

In the e-People service, you can file a petition with the Korean Administrative Agencies in regard to the following matters:

* Requests to explain or interpret administrative affairs - including laws, institutions and procedures - through inquiry or consulting
* Suggestions on improving government policies or administration systems and their operations.
* Requests to solve problems like administrative agencies’ unlawful acts, unfair or passive measures and unreasonable administrative systems, which infringe on people’s rights, cause difficulty or place unnecessary burden on people.
* Require administrative agencies to take actions on other matters

You submit your question, an e-petition, and it gets routed to the proper agency, and according to the interview it takes about a week for you to get a response in Korean and English. It is useful, he said, for dealing with conflicting and misinformation, and with the apparent policy of receiving 20 different answers to 20 different questions from 20 different government officials.

Thomas Friedman in Seoul.

New York Times columnist and best-selling author Thomas Friedman was in Seoul yesterday to give a talk at the Global Korea 2009 forum. Maybe he's still in Seoul, who knows, but anyway the Joongang Ilbo says that in his talk Friedman

emphasized green industry, which has the biggest potential for growth, adding that Korea has already secured advantages in the green revolution with talented human resources and industrial competitiveness. He said the major challenges today are climate change, energy poverty, reducing biodiversity and demand for resources.

The forum also had President Lee Myung-bak, the World Trade Organization head, and a former US Treasury Secreatary, all bigger names perhaps but I focused on Mr. Friedman because I happen to be a fan (sse here for example). Clips of his presentation at the forum were just on the news, and I suspect they'll be available online in the morning.

If you're unfamiliar with Thomas Friedman, Youtube is a good place to start, and on the theme of this forum I recommend some of his interviews from 2008 on America's need for energy independence and innovation. Googling around for this I found an interview with Friedman concerning his 2002 trip to South Korea during an especially prickly time for foreigners. Here's what he had to say about the relationship between the US and South Korea vis-a-vis the former's military presence there:

Well, I had a meeting with a South Korean professor one day, and I didn't really know what to expect, I asked to see a sociologist, and we sat down and he started in with the most virulent anti-American rant, and all I could think was, oh no I came here to get away from that, I've been in the Middle East for 14 months, please, no, not that! And what you find there is an anti-Americanism fed by really three sources, one is traditional old left pro Marxist Koreans who feel that we did prop up their autocratic regimes. Secondly, though, your people object to our military presence, two American soldiers were acquitted last week in a trial for running over and killing two young South Korean girls. It was an accident, but that produced a lot of anti-Americanism. And lastly there is that feeling that maybe Uncle Sam is standing in the way a little bit between our unification with our brother. So it's not the kind of vicious al-Qaida-like anti-Americanism which we've heard about here tonight. But it's there, it's underneath the surface. And just when you think you might have come to the one place where you're not going to hear it, sorry, there is no such place.

You can watch the short interview on the PBS site, an interview that touches on the North Korean nuclear program, South Korea's relative ho-hum attitude toward it, its role in the 2002 election, and the interest in the mesmerizing North Korean cheerleaders. This ROK Drop post is your best source for coverage of the tank incident, its spin in the media, and the resulting xenophobic backlash that echoed for several years and still resounds today.

Pictures above from here and here.

Name that rocket!

The government is looking for names for the first locally-made rocket, set to launch from Goheung, Jeollanam-do, I don't remember when. From now through March 31st you can go to the rocket's website, press the ctrl button to allow the pop-up, and put in your entry. First prize is three million won. I'd like that money, and am mulling over a few possible submissions:

* ROKet.
* Go! Heung.
* Space propose.
* 우주 like to go to space?

So don't touch 'em.

English-language legal services page rates poorly.

This is ironic to me in light of what I've post-dated to come out later tonight, but anyway, a government webpage that provides information and legal services to foreigners has been criticized by some in a Korea Times article for being unhelpful and shoddy. The page is here; an excerpt from the KT article:

``The biggest problem is that it doesn't do what it is supposed to do,'' Art Curtis, an American English teacher, told The Korea times. ``It is supposed to provide simple, easy to understand legal advice for foreigners here. But I find it pretty difficult to understand nearly everything on the site. Its has quite obviously been written by lawyers for lawyers.''

He cited the site's introductory paragraph as a representative example. Its front page says: ``This project builds a new statutory information infrastructure, which regroups complicated statutory relationships and presents them in the context of plausible scenarios, and provides clear interpretations of complicated laws and regulations.''

He said, ``I'm still not quite sure what it means. It feels like you need a law degree to understand this.''

Curtis also complained about its lack of detailed information.

``The site often mentions that if you have a complaint to lodge against an employer, you should contact the labor board that oversees the employer. But it never gives any contact information, or even the names of these bodies,'' he said, adding ``most importantly, they need to ensure that whoever we are told to contact speaks fluent English.''

Another foreigner said a wide range of contents available seem to be Korean-language statutory laws directly translated into English without adding further explanations. ``The site provides only brief and hard to find explanations,'' said Joseph Harte, a professor of law at Kyung Hee University in Seoul. ``Its goal of `regrouping complicated statutory relationships and presenting them in the context of plausible scenarios' doesn't seem to appear.''

Reviewing overall content, Harte said he had found numerous grammar, usage, punctuation, spelling and even typographical errors. ``Unfortunately, this suggests either carelessness or arrogance,'' he said. ``It also leads users to question not only the site's usefulness to its intended audience, but also, unfortunately, its reliability as well.''

Carelessness or arrogance indeed. Like with many English-language materials and services in Korea, you have to commend the idea but shake your head at the half-assed implementation.

Seoul is _________.

On Saturday there was "Discover Seoul Day" before a Manchester United game, where visitors could give their impressions of Seoul, I guess. On the webpage for the event sponsored by the Seoul government you can watch a short video of other MU players giving their impressions as well.

Hmmm, this particular promotion has been going on for a while it seems, because you can watch tons of videos of tourists doing the same thing. For example, "Seoul is karaoke." *cough*

On the international school front: palm, meet forehead.

The Chosun Ilbo has the latest from South Korea's newest international school:

The W150 billion New Songdo City International School will be dedicated in the Incheon Free Economic Zone in April, but nobody knows when it will open for business (US$1=W1,506). It was originally supposed to open in October this year, but that now seems impossible due to lack of foreign students in Songdo.

The school hoped to build its student body from children of all the foreigners suppposed to work at the companies in the Free Economic Zone. So I guess they'll just do what the normally do: let the international schools fill up with Korean kids. At least in Songdo's case it doesn't look like foreigners will be wait-listed or denied entry as Koreans unfairly take their places.

Actually, there was a similar article back in December, which said the school still planned to open, but that they need to ease regulations that put a ceiling---30%---on the number of Korean students.

Anyway, here's a little more information about the international school. Do give the city's website a test-drive; it looks quite modern and comfortable. Just that nobody wants to live way out there. There's an interesting anecdote at the bottom of this post, as well as some videos about Incheon's Tomorrowland Songdo.

Take the train to Jeju.

This is an ambitious proposal that would have the Honam Line extended not only past Mokpo to Haenam and Bogil-do, but clear to Jeju.

Korea Transport Institute, a government think-tank proposed an ambitious plan early January to extend KTX bullet train to Jeju, the largest island in Korea. To realize this grand vision, the institute says, it will need to build the longest underwater tunnel ever built in human history.

Two small islands-Bogildo and Chujado-located between the Peninsula and Jeju will provide convenient stepping stones for the Korean rail builder that will dig this grand underwater tunnel.

The institute says the constructor will first need to build a 28Km-long over-sea bridge connecting Haenam and Bogildo. The rest of the line will be completed by digging a 78Km long underwater tunnel down to Jeju using Chujado as a main drilling station.

If completed, Mokpo, the current terminal of Honam KTX line will be reborn as a departing station for the extended rail section, which will become the host of the longest underwater railway tunnel.

The article says if completed it would take 2 hours 26 minutes to get from Seoul to Jeju via the bullet train. A big problem is that this news comes right after we heard about how unsafe the existing KTX tracks are. An excerpt from a Chosun Ilbo editorial "KTX Is a Disaster Waiting to Happen":

Parts of the cement sleepers supporting the rails of the Daegu-Busan segment of the KTX high-speed train have developed cracks. If the sleepers, which support the weights of the trains and the rails, are damaged, then the rails themselves could twist, leading to catastrophic accidents as trains derail at speeds of 300 km/h. In other words, there are fatal safety flaws in the W7 trillion (US$1=W1,427) bullet train.

Out of around 153,000 sleepers that have been laid so far, 332 have developed cracks. And all of them pose dangers because all of the bolts that go into the sleepers have been discovered to be defective.

According to blueprints, waterproofing materials are supposed to be used to prevent water from seeping in between the bolts but they were not used, so the components absorbed rainwater, which expanded after freezing, causing the cracks to form. All 153,000 ties used the defective components, including the 332 that have developed cracks. So even those ties that seem to be in one piece could end up cracking any time.

Here's an interesting anecdote for you to chew on from Dave's; put as much stock in it as you want:

I was sitting in a bar with a friend in Itaewon speaking to this foreigner maybe three years ago. We started talking about what we were doing in Korea, and he says he's an engineer helping to build the KTX. This is a rough paraphrase of what he said:

That thing is a time bomb. Due to budget and time constraints, they're building it under specification. The tracks aren't made to handle those speeds. You'd never catch me riding that thing.

I can't remember the exact words, but he faulted the Korean side for the issues, citing their desperation to finish it as soon as possible, and at lowest budget.

And in other grand infrastructure news, there are renewed talks about a tunnel between South Korea and Japan.

This is what you missed at the Hamburger Festival.

So here's what they did at the Hamburger Festival in Gangwon-do this weekend:



No word on how much whipped cream, cherries, breaded shrimp, bell peppers, or broccoli they used to top the quote-unquote hamburger. Organizers of next month's Gokseong International Pizza Expo were caught off guard by this project and are wondering how to top this abominable fuck-up. Maybe they can ask Mr. Pizza for advice.

Korean TV to bring us more of America's worst "entertainment."

Korean MTV's latest addition is "트윈스인러브," which ran in the US through February 3rd as "A Double Shot at Love" and is

a bisexual-themed dating competition where 12 straight males and 12 lesbian females live in a house with Rikki (Erica Mongeon) and Vikki (Victoria Mongeon) and compete for their attention and affection.

The trailer running on Korean MTV is here. The first "A Shot of Love" show was with an Asian bisexual, and now . . . twins. What other oversexed fantasies can they explore? Maybe next season some girl will bring home a colored boy. So, this is what passes for entertainment?

Bird thought to be extinct ends up as food.

Here's quite a story from the Philippines.

A rare quail from the Philippines was photographed for the first time before being sold as food at a poultry market, experts say.

Found only on the island of Luzon, Worcester's buttonquail was known solely through drawings based on dated museum specimens collected several decades ago.

Scientists had suspected the species—listed as "data deficient" on the International Union for Conservation of Nature's 2008 Red List—was extinct.

"Hip Korea" to air on Discovery Channel tomorrow night.

"Hip Korea," a show about Korean pop culture with a focus on singer Rain, will air on Discovery Channel Korea for the first time on the 23rd at 9 PM, Korea time. The show followed around the singer for six months.

The Hip Korea crew filmed the star for six months, and the documentary reveals his down-to-earth lifestyle, including clips of Rain casually conversing with his close friend, entertainer Kim Jae-dong about his innermost feelings over a drink and reminiscing his departed mother at her crypt.

Here's what Korea's official website Korea.net has to say about it:

But there seems to be a Korean star who looks like he will stay with us for a very long time, if not forever. It is Korea's hot singer and actor Rain.

Thanks to his well-toned body and dynamic dance moves exuding masculine charm, the 26-year-old has ridden the crest of the Hallyu (explosive popularity of Korean pop culture abroad) or “Korean wave.”

Yeah, I'm going to stop right there.

Gangjin HS students, mayor, wrap up their study abroad in Washington.

12 students from Gangjin spent five weeks in a Washington state high school. The students finished the third grade of middle school, which would put them in the middle of 9th grade. The SnoValley Star has the story:

“Snoqualmie is so beautiful,” Haeun Kim said. “The environment and local culture are just perfect.”

“I think America is a very huge country,” Suin Oh said. She confessed that, before coming, “I was scared,” but after meeting other people her age, she began enjoying herself.

“Everything is cool,” Oh said. “I love America. I’m sure I will come back here.”

During their stay, the South Korean students met their host families and students around the Snoqualmie Valley. Senior Bethany Frieler said Hyeon Ju Kim taught her and other students in an art class how to write their names in Korean.

Regardless of age, all of the South Korean students took five general ninth-grade classes and an elective.

Here's an article from when the delegation of Gangjin dignitaries arrived. An excerpt:

To show his gratitude to the Snoqualmie host families, Mayor Hwang invited them all to visit Gangjin, and even offered to pay for their travel expenses. This drew a cheer from the host families.

“Why don’t you stop by to see Gangjin,” Hwang told the host families.

The host families responded with gentle instruction on making suggestions that don't use "why don't." Also some coverage, in Korean, from the Gangjin Shinmun here and here. The students are on their winter vacation, hence the free time, and picked that particular town because it is a newly-designated friendship city with Gangjin.

McRefugees in Korea.

A news show took a look at McRefugees (햄버거 난인), or people who stay the night in 24-hour fast food restaurants. Visitors will buy something to eat or drink, then sleep in the dining room; the 4,000 won you pay for a value meal is less than it'd cost you to stay in a jjimjilbang or a PC room. You can watch the video here, in Korean; article in English from the Korea Times:

``Those who frequent fast-food restaurants probably haven't been on the streets for long. They still look decent and can afford a cup of coffee,'' he said, adding that subway stations, which have long been popular among the homeless, are seen as dangerous and dirty by ``the picky folks.''

The same reasons gave birth to the buzzword ``McRefugee,'' which describes the new homeless generation in Japan and China who've been relying on the world's biggest fast food chain, McDonald's, to provide evening shelter.

Although these patrons have the courtesy to make minimum orders, businesses don't appreciate the shady-looking crowd camping out all night.

``We try to manage and control the growing crowd to help protect our brand image,'' said Chung, who stressed that Lotteria's general rule is to ban customers from using the facility as shelter.

My first thought? Grab a camera and send the pictures to Singapore.



In all seriousness, this phenomenon---unbeknownst to me already widespread in Japan---must be exasperating for restaurant employees and for patrons who actually came to eat. In the US many McDonald's have gone 24 hours in recent years, and in my own experienes dealing with late-night customers I know that would invite many undesirables. Fights, drugs, drunks . . . and that was just in suburban Pittsburgh. But the phenomenon shouldn't be that unfamiliar to Koreans and other Asians. If you're interested, give the book Golden Arches East: McDonald's in East Asia a read. Part of it talks about how Asian cultures localized the fast-food experience to make it their own. Certain demographics would use McDonald's as a gathering place for meetings, or as a place to sit and talk for hours, which runs contrary to how fast-food restaurants are supposed to work. Here is the author, James L. Watson, talking about McDonald's in Hong Kong in a 2003 interview (.pdf file):

The book, Golden Arches East, outlines in detail how McDonald’s has been transformed to fit the local cultural systems it has encountered in East Asia. This is a process that I chooseto call “localization,” which to my mind is a force as transformativeas globalization itself. During the mid–1990s, for instance, highschool students were responsible for transforming many of HongKong’s McDonald restaurants into after-school social clubs. Late every afternoon hundreds of kids descended on their local McDonald’s; groups bought packets of fries and cokes. They packed them-selves into booths, poured the fries out on a tray and enjoyed a communal snack while gossiping and, supposedly, doing their homework. They stayed for approximately two hours, effectively closing down the ordinary business of the restaurant. Adults who were silly enough to arrive during this period were made to feeluncomfortable. The message was clear: “This is our place now, and we don’t want to see any adults while we are here.”

At first the local McDonald’s management tried to make the students eat faster and leave sooner, but they just sat there. Soon, however, management decided that this was an excellent development because it created the image of McDonald’s as a safe, andtherefore family-friendly, institution: No alcohol, no smoking, noprofanity, and most important in a place like Hong Kong, no triad gangsters. Management hired demobilized Gurkha troops, recently retired from the British Army, to stand at the entrance and followany triad tough who tried to infiltrate the restaurant. No one messes with Gurkhas; this was much more effective than hiring off-duty police officers. Local management began to promote their restaurants as after-school clubs, even in their television ads. Business boomed as parents gave their kids extra money to eat in a safeplace.

Meanwhile, during the mid-morning, post-breakfast period (9:30–11:00AM), another demographic group has taken over theirlocal McDonald’s restaurants. Retired people, predominantlyolder women who live alone, sit in clumps eating pancake break-fasts, talking, and reading newspapers provided free by the com-pany. These older people, like the students, are welcomed by McDonald’s managers. In both cases consumers have appropriated corporate property and converted it into public space. There arevery few alternatives in an overcrowded place like Hong Kong. Older people increasingly live on their own and enjoy congregat-ing in elder-friendly settings. McDonald’s has become a welcom-ing substitute for the disappearing parks, temples, and ancestralhalls that once sheltered Hong Kong’s older citizens.

I'll give you three guesses about what the chapter on South Korea entails. You can read parts of it here via Google Books. A couple of interesting excerpts; the first from page 144:

Since its introduction in the ninteenth century, bread has never been incorporated into the standard meal system; instead it is perceived as a snack food. The Korean term for snack is kansik, literally "in-between food." Meat, on the other hand, has always been a highly valued, desirable food, and it is eaten almost exclusively at mealtime. To attract a steady flow of customers who would make substantial purchases, McDonald's had to represent itself as a place where one ate a full meal, as opposed to a snack bar where people spend little money but stay for hours chatting. To the dismay of local management, most Koreans considered McDonald's restaurants to be snack bars . . . To change this perception, the "value meal" was introduced[.]

From page 146, in the section "Negotiating Gender, Space, and Meanings of Fast Foods":

The ratio of male to female customers in a Korean McDonald's is about 3:7. Eating a hamburger in what is perceived primarily as a children's place is not appealing to most grown men. The food-ordering process at fast food restaurants, where people have to order and pay for the food before they sit down and eat it, makes some Korean men feel uncomfortable. In traditional restaurants, customers pay after the meal is eaten, which usually results in everyone's competing to pay for the whole table. Some men told me that they feel awkward and stingy paying for just their own food. Even before the introduction of fast food, women generally felt more comfortable about dividing up the check. Another reason women like McDonald's is that, like most fast food chains and unlike most conventional restaurants, it does not serve alcoholic beverages. An alcohol-free and child-friendly environment is perceived as an appropriate and safe place for women unaccompanied by male family members or friends.

From page 153:

Management personnel I spoke with in Seoul were confident that McDonald's' could overcome the inherent difficulties of operating in such a complex environment. They were convinced that their company's efficiency and capacity to deliver good food at reasonable prices would overcome the anti-American and anti-import sentiments that inhibit business; they expected customers to put aside political concerns and make purely economic, "rational" choices. Consumers are therefore courted as individuals, not as representatives of political faactions or interest groups. Choosing McDonald's hamburgers over local foods, the management argued, should be taken as an economic decision on the part of an individual consumer rather than as symbolic behavior representing an overarching political ideology.

From page 157:

In Korea, even when friends purchase separate packets of fries, they often pour the contents onto a tray and together eat from the resulting pile. This does not, however, create the same powerful sense of commensality as sharing a rice-based meal. One can eat alone in McDonald's and not feel strange; eating in isolation at a Korean-style restaurant, on the other hand, generates feelings of loneliness and self-pity.

Those final excerpts have nothing to do with McRefugees, really, but the chapter is an interesting read nonetheless. In conclusion, Korea is a land of contrasts. Thank you for reading my essay.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton given Korean name by the ROK-US Alliance Friendship Society.

Introducing Han Hi-sook.

The surname “Han,” meaning Korea, is derived from the Korean pronunciation of the letter “H” in the name “Hillary.” With the conferment of the surname, Clinton will become the founder of the “Sejong Han” family. Secretary Clinton is the first “Han” from “Sejong-ro” or Sejong Street, the main street in central Seoul where the U.S. Embassy is located.

The name “Hi-sook” is a combination of two separate Chinese characters. “Hi” stands for “Shining,” while “Sook” is for “Clear.” “We believe that these are the attributes that have led to the appointment of Hillary Clinton as the 67th U.S. Secretary of State. Her clear vision and politicalinsight will make important contributions in setting the stage for peace on the Korean Peninsula,” added Suh.

Why can't foreigners use free wifi in Starbucks?

Gord Sellar is encouraging people to send a message to Starbuck's, letting them know that foreigners are prohibited from using the free wifi offered in South Korea's locations. Visitors wishing to use the service must login with a national ID number, though foreigners' ID numbers are incompatable with this and many other Korean websites. Gord calls it "discriminatory":

The fact it results from laziness or bad coding or whatever is one thing: the fact it has gone unaddressed although shop staff are aware of it — meaning its a zero-priority issue, where if the connection went down completely, for everyone, it would be a higher priority — makes it discriminatory.

And plus, it's, like, a foreign company to begin with.

* Update: Problem solved?

I don't think you can really fault the Chosun Ilbo for that upskirt attempt.

I mean, they do try their best to get up in there, but then again if you're 25-years-old and don't know how to wear a skirt, I don't think any sympathy is coming your way. Come to think of it, though, looking at Jamie Chung's career trajectory, perhaps that is how she wears a skirt.



Chung is the rock-headed Korean-American actresses starring in ABC Family's TV show "Samurai Girl," and she was at the Shilla Hotel on Wednesday for some stuff with the Dragon Ball Z movie.

"The Westerner working in Korea needs to keep certain philosophic principles in mind."

A Gusts of Popular Feeling post from a few days ago that mentioned the book Korean Patterns jogged my memory a little bit. The book---the bits I've read---has been running through my mind since this past summer. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

In college I was interested in both Korea and TESOL, and knew before my senior year that I wanted to come here and teach. I read everything about the Korean EFL industry I could, though since I went to a mid-sized school in rural Pennsylvania with few journals on the subject and even fewer Koreans, much of what I was read came from the internet. An interesting source of information and insight, though, was and is the great number of dissertations done by Masters and Ph.D. candidates. Since Koreans did come to my university to study TESOL, and came to nearby Pitt and Penn State in even larger numbers, their dissertations were not only useful for their bibliographies but also for what the authors had to say about both Korea and the US.

One in particular stood out, probably because I knew the author. Passages of it stood out so much that when I visited my alma mater this summer I copied them down for use in a "Why do expats in Korea complain so much?" post that I never got around to finishing. It's a dissertation titled Extra consciousness : role of anxiety in the self-concepts of South Korean students in the U.S. from a cultural perspective written by Dr. Jungwan Yang. Part of the book talks about Korean students' experiences learning English both in Korea and overseas, and also the difficulties they've faced while studying in the US. I'm not interested in debating the responses or what they reveal to me---maybe I'll save that for a dissertation of my own---but will rather copy and paste a few excerpts of that section before moving on to the point of this post. The author interviewed a number of Korean students at the university---most were in the TESOL program---and included some of their responses. From "Minji" (pg 109):

After some meetings she cried at the native speaker students' unfavorable attitude to her because

"In Malay, they are Asian, but in here, there are Whites, Blacks...I am just shrinking. In small community, Asian is not many, so Americans watch me, which makes me feeling bad. I wonder why they are watching me. I am daunted of myself."

From the next page:

As another unique point she tried to understand her 'unkind' native speaking American people. She made an effort to find similarity between their negative attitudes toward her and her experience in South Korea about other foreigners: "I looked at foreigners in Korea, too... There must be some parts that I misunderstood... I find that first; I must participate in their communication by myself. At first, I wanted them approaching to me. I thought they hesitated in approaching to me because of me, Asian. But I find that Americans are unnatural to meet new person. So, I think that I need to start talking and approach to them first."

And page 111:

If I go back to Korea, I might not come back again to America. America is like a fantastic amusement park, which seems interesting when seeing that from outside, but actually, entering inside of that, finally I found that there are few things that I can enjoy. Outside is pretty, inside is nothing, different from my expectation."

And my, um, "favorite" respondent "Myungho" (page 123):

There is a limitation in relationships with American classmates. They have no Heart...I don't have any expectations of my American classmates. I prefer Internationals from the same Asian cultural background...It's not comfortable to Be around with Americans. They are too proud, and arrogant. Their smile and Kindness to strangers is good, but theirs are superficial.

The dissertation didn't include transcripts or the original Korean, but I suspect the heart Americans lack is "정," a *cough* uniquely Korean concept of compassion and feeling. The Joshing Gnome has an interesting and critical five-part treatment of that here. Anyway, back to Myungho, who in addition to having "the second highest anxiety score" also said that ""studying in the U.S. college is easier than in Korea." On pages 148-9 is this little episode:

Myungho totally withdrew from classroom participation when his South Korean identity was neglected, claiming that:

My history teacher explained about histories of China and Korea. She lectured Chinese history for almost whole class time. Before 5 minutes left to finish the class, she commented that Korea and China are similar. If there is one thing different, Korean people eat fish for their protein. I was dumbfounded at her ignorance of Korean history. I would like to raise my hand and to point out her wrong knowledge, but I didn't, because I felt that Korea is not important part in her history time.

Their and the author's perception of how Korea was being presented turns up in another significant passage on pages 217-8:

In other words, teachers' methods can make second language learners silenced rather than encouraged by their active participation, which can be found in MInji and Myungho's experiences when their teachers made inappropriate comments about Korea and its cultural / political relations: "Korean culture imitates Chinese"; "We, the U.S. should have attacked North Korea first than Iraq," which are totally based on the U.S.' subjective perspective. In fact, while reading many books realted to Korean history and culture, working on this study, I found many books about Korea written in English are out of date and depend on old information. For example, the Culture and Customs of Korea (Clark, 2000) uses old pictures taken in 1960s or 1970s in order to introduce Korean culture such as the 'traditional costume' (p. 109) or 'middle school students transplating rice seedlings in rows' (p. 122) which are so obsolete. No one can find those scenes today. In spite of the fact that this book was written relatively recently, I wonder why the author depended on stale information. This tendency is not limited to just a few books, but many about Korea written in English. That's why most teachers in the U.S. are stuck on old or inappropriate information of Korea. I think that for Westerners, the image of South Korea stops at the Korean War in 1950, and they don't want to see the current South Korea.

That's a very loaded paragraph, and indeed throughout the whole book I objected to much of what was both said by the students and argued by the author of the dissertation, even back in 2004 when I read it and observed her defense of it. When I revisited these passages this past summer the posts about hypersensitive Koreans and complaining expats---done by Roboseyo, Ask a Korean!, and others---were fresh in my mind. And I was only a week or so removed from school meetings on the topic of trying to fire me based on things I had written on this blog and in the local media. To keep my words brief here, I'll just write that I often feel exhausted by Koreans' need to dictate what information and opinions on Korea are quote-unquote correct and what are not, and all that process entails. In large part I understand why; though the topic merits a big ol' post I'm not prepared to do, so I'll just say I don't think I'd ever have the patience to be a professional Koreanist, knowing how uphill a battle I as a foreign scholar would have.

I was curious about the book she mentioned by name, so I took a look through Clark's Culture and Customs of Korea. I didn't read it, because honestly I find those types of overviews really tedious, but I did find the passages she was talking about. I even photographed some of the objectionable pictures, though a problem with my memory card means they're not available now. (You can find part of the book online here via Google Books.) However I can say with confidence that nothing from the photographs or the passages would be out of place in Jeollanam-do. To write that "No one can find those scenes today" is just plain wrong, and a line like "they don't want to see the current South Korea" is presumptuous, judgemental, and indicative of way more bias and maladjustment than she'd probably admit. I'll even be so bold as to write that perhaps some of the younger generation are not only ashamed of Korea's agrarian past, but for various reasons look down their nose at the less-developed regions outside of Seoul. In fact, rural life has become so foreign and strange to young people that it's the basis of a popular fish-out-of-water TV comedy show, 패밀리가 떴다.

Incidentally, in case you're wondering Clark's book focuses much on Chungcheongnam-do's Geumsan county, Boksu-myeon in particular. Readers who have passed through there can testify to its appearance and to how representative it is to Korea outside of major cities. But let's not forget, there are makeshift gardens planted across the street from Gwangju's City Hall, so let's not pretend South Korea isn't a land of contrasts.

Anyway, I looked around at some of the other books on Korea my school library had. I'll grant that the bulk were about the Korean War, and there were few if any written in the past ten years. But one book in particular caught my eye . . . basically because it was right next to Clark's! I'll bet if Dr. Yang had read it she would have included lots of "9823j9arawejfoi" and ㅅㅂ in her paper. It's titled Korean Patterns and is written by Paul S. Crane, who it turns out has some associations to the missionaries who settled in the Jeollanam-do area in the early 20th century. Anyway, the library's particular edition is from 1978, but as Gusts of Popular Feeling points out, the book is now considered valuable not for what it teaches about Korean culture, but what it reveals about the biases of Western. And there are some doozies! I'll leave it up to you to decide how many of them still hold some truth. From page 89:

In matters of state, the feeling has been that any intelligent man was as good as any other in deciding the future of the nation or the public welfare. An elementary school teacher usually feels quite confident that he could fill in for a college professor, and many young men feel that they could assume the duties of an ambassador.

Fortunately, with the development of more trained people in various fields, there is beginning to be an awareness that trained people can indeed perform more effectively than untrained people.

From page 64:

Although it is now being discouraged, some men still take care of their bodily functions along the street in view of the passing crowds. A woman, on the other hand, is not supposed to be seen in public, and thus must hide someplace to relieve herself. Public facilities are usually not segregated. Children may be observed relieving themselves whenever and wherever the urge strikes them. This practice leads to heavy infestations with hookworms.

From page 68:

Korean men are certainly not asexual. However, men do travel, socialize, and enjoy the company of other men. This does not mean that they are homosexual. A group of men friends go out together to wine shops, cabarets, or kisaeng (기생) houses where they are entertained by trained females. These women, whether kisaeng or barmaids are free and easy, and most uninhibited. They sit close to one at meals putting dainties into one's mouth at a feast, and caress their partners freely. These women exist as the socially acceptable means for all premarital and extramarital relations.

Not to frequent their company is considered by most Korean men to be missing one of the gentlemanly joys of Korea. To go outside this area of easy conquest is criminal and foolish. One, of course, would marry only a virgin. Virginity is often certified before the wedding by the bridegroom's womenfolk. An ageing kisaeng may graduate to being owner or manager of a kisaeng house. A fortunate kisaeng may become the "little wife" of a wealthy patron. Far too often, however, many of these women resort to suicide once their not-so-youthful charms can non longer compete with the new crop coming along.

From page 130:

Racially mixed infants fathered by foreign troops create a problem in a country which has a very strong sense of race. Racially mixed children have little hope of full acceptance in Korean society. Their probable future is in prostitution for the girls and crime for the boys. Many have been saved from this future by being adopted into homes abroad. Black eyes and black hair are considered the only true beauty in Korean society.

And from page 139, under the section "The Westerner Working in Korea":

The Westerner working in Korea needs to keep certain philosophic principles in mind. First, a Westerner can never become a Korean. He will never be completely accepted by Koreans as a "person." He may be accepted by a small group of people who look to him for leadership or benefits.

*cough*

WSI is blunt.

An advertisement for Wall Street Institute I found while navering for something else.



Via Ads of the World, which has scans of two more ads. The above campaign is evidentally out of Thailand. WSI is an adult English academy with locations around the world---and eight in Korea---and while they're correct that a gesture's meaning varies across cultures, I don't know what understanding how they're interpreted has to do with English. The ad says, after all, "Learn to speak English, the world language." Unless the actual aim is to sneak "motherfucker" into a magazine.

Admittedly the above series have more to do with language than a Korean WSI advertisement from a couple of years ago, which implies I guess that learning English will help you in the club.




Given the tagline at the end of the 30-second TV spot---즐기면서 배우는 영어회화센터---the gist is that with WSI you can have fun and learn English, too. Nothing wrong with that, but if that's an acceptable angle, perhaps foreign teachers might be forgiven for wanting to have fun and teach English as well. I'll leave it up to the individual to define what exactly "have fun" entails.



WSI has kept with the theme of "English is Fun at Wall street," throwing what the news sites called an "English Party" last spring at a Gangnam night club. The "Musical Night" brought out "Cats" cast members, and these models in bodypaint:

On the "English teachers are sexual predators" front . . .

Mongdori brings us a recent episode of "Damage," a scripted TV show

that's the unholy marriage of Jerry Springer and Scandal.

So make of that what you will.

"American Kim Kwang Suk" on Star King.

This originally aired on August 16th, 2008, but I just caught it on TV last night. An American, James, did a little set on the popular TV talent show "Star King," singing several Korean songs and playing along on guitar, hence the Kim Kwang Suk comparison. You can watch his performance here, and do watch it, though it takes a few minutes to load. No comment on MC Mong responding to James' self-introduction with a shout of "What's up!"

James, an English teacher at a Seoul high school, also has a YouTube page with a few dozen of his performances; one of his most-viewed is this cover of Kim Kwang Suk's "사랑했지만," with which he also opens the Star King set:



Very good work, sir.

Violence-obsessed Koreans can't get enough of "entertainment" that depicts brutalizing Japanese soldiers.

Well, that title got your attention, didn't it? But replace Korean with American and Japanese with German and we're in business. The teaser for the upcoming Quentin Tarantino movie Inglourious Basterds:

From an United Press International article:

Starring Brad Pitt, Mike Myers, Samuel L. Jackson, Diane Kruger, Cloris Leachman and Rod Taylor, the latest flick from the "Pulp Fiction" and "Kill Bill" auteur is to premiere at France's Cannes Film Festival this spring.

"In my time on the set -- I feel I can say with confidence, that I witnessed the brutal deaths of over a 100 Nazis. It was glorious," movie critic Harry Knowles wrote in a posting on the Ain't It Cool News Web site. "A (expletive)load of Nazis dying. Seriously. If you thought Nazis died in 'The Dirty Dozen' ... brother, you ain't seen nothing yet."

Singapore's Straits Times, running a similar article, titles it "Tarantino's Nazi Hate-fest"; an excerpt:

Starting out as a broad comedy, the film segues into outright horror with Nazi's being hit with baseball bats and machine-gunned in huge numbers.

I'm not sayin' Nazis are good, I'm just sayin'. You have to wonder about people who enjoy such brutal "entertainment," and worry about a culture that produces it with such enthusiasm. The misdirection with the post title ought to throw into contrast the horror we might feel if a famous Korean director proceeded with such a "historical" film, your thoughts on Japanese occupation or World War II notwithstanding.

Daewoo's "uniquely Korean dream" of neocolonialism.

Here's an, um, interesting column in the Korea Times about Daewoo's misadventures in Madagascar, where the firm had planned to lease one million of acres for 99 years to plant corn in order to feed Korea's appetite for the crop. Do be sure to read Robert Koehler's reaction to it on The Marmot's Hole. In short the author of the KT piece, the assistant managing editor of the paper, tried to cast the basic, rather universal economic motivations not as neocolonialism but rather as "Korean psychology." An excerpt:

My conclusion is that whether one calls the Daewoo project an act of neocolonialism or not starts with ``Korean psychology,'' an amalgamation of several elements. One such element, as Shin indicated, is food insecurity. Some say Korea's grain self-sufficiency rate is about 50 percent but this figure can be deceiving, considering much of it accounts for rice and virtually all stock feed, which is imported.

A large number of cattle and pig farmers went under during a food crisis last year. With the situation being as it is, Korea is not safe from ``food riots'' that took place in Mexico and Thailand. Besides, it was less than a half century ago that Koreans had to eat unripe barley, porridge made from it or forage for anything in the forest to eat and survive the spring when their staple food, rice, ran out, and nothing else was available.

Korean mountains are another element. Korea is a small country with one of the highest population densities in the world, and 70 percent of its land is mountainous. And some wonder why Koreans appreciate the vast flatlands in Texas or undulating green pasture in Australia so much.

Daewoo's Madagascar project started with a similar set of psychological elements.

Is this another time for us to "understand Korea's unique situation"? His conclusion:

I feel more convinced than before that Korea needs Daewoo's success in Madagascar, not only to prove that its model is different from the models of Britain, the United States, the Netherlands, France, Germany and Japan during their colonial pasts, but also that it is setting a new precedent for both African states and outside investors to benefit from.

According to a Financial Times article from November, Daewoo's deal would have locked up half of Madagascar's arable land for use by South Korea. From the same article:

The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation warned this year that the race by some countries to secure farmland overseas risked creating a “neo-colonial” system.

Daewoo's plan goes hand-in-hand with the recent political turmoil in Madagascar.

For what it's worth, domestic newspapers here have criticized foreign media outlets (here, too) like the FT for focusing on Daewoo while ignoring similar programs by other nations, and by ignoring the benefits to Madagascar, the country that encouraged such investment in the first place. From the Joongang Ilbo:

One wonders if cultivating nonarable land and planting maize is really neocolonialism, which would imply forcibly taking food from Madagascar’s people.

What’s more, Madagascar’s government will take 30 percent of the profits made by the maize farm in the form of corporate taxes and tariffs.

It is entirely for Madagascar’s government and people to decide whether to leave this land undeveloped or to sign a 99-year lease with Korea and in return get investment and farming infrastructure.

In any case, Britain’s D1 Oils is already running a large-scale jatropha oil farm in Madagascar for the production of biodiesel. Many French companies own plantations there as well. One wonders why the U.K. newspaper criticizes the Korean company while averting its gaze from European firms involved in the same business.

Solid points.

Korea has been dependent on imported grain for a long time and Daewoo Logistics is simply trying to secure farmland overseas for our survival.

Could have been phrased better I think. Perhaps a country, and a media, that so often bemoans its history of colonialism and exploitation at the hands of foreign powers should be more sympathetic of its actions overseas.

Foreigners + Kimchi + Camera = GOLD!

Well, bronze in this case. Walking through the Gwangju bus terminal last weekend I ran into a nice collection of photographs of local people and places. Turns out they were entries in a photography contest that was held last fall (2008 광주관광전국사진공모전). One of the top entries was a picture of two foreign women gushing over kimchi at the 2008 Gwangju Kimchi Festival. I had seen these two women many times before, as their pictures ended up on a lot of the news sites. See this post for a small collection.



I wonder if they knew about the photo contest, or about their pictures turning up on all those news sites back in October. One woman I know had pictures of her used for Kimchi Festival promotional material without her permission or even her knowledge. Though we do often get preferential treatment at smaller festivals, I long for the day when foreign visitors to them stop being such novelties. One can't expect privacy at a festival, I know, but one should be able to expect an afternoon without big camera lenses stuck in your face. It's a tricky issue: you've got Korean privacy rules, regulations, and norms on one hand against the tradition of public performance and hamming it up for the cameras on the other.


Japanese monkeys enjoying a dip in a hot spring. Same thing.

Anyway, foreigners making kimchi is one of the most remarkable sights you're likely to find in Korea, and hence it never fails to draw photographers. Can you think of anything more curious than non-Koreans making a traditional Korean dish? I can't, either. I know the one thing I'm missing from my flickr page are some good shots of foreigners awkwardly fumbling with my country's representative dish. Xenu knows it, too, which is why he blessed us with the Hamburger Festival in Gangwon-do's Yeongwol county this coming weekend. What a hoot! I swear, if I see an Asian person wearing our blue jeans or a traditional sweatshirt I'm going to poop my pants.



So I'm curious, how do you feel about being photographed at things like this? I don't care for it, but my girlfriend thinks I'm way too uptight about it. I guess I'm hung up about the novelty factor, for one, and also that you never know how your likeness will be used or where your face will end up. For those of you who have strong feelings one way or another, how do you deal with photographing other people? I mean, a woman at a market, a man in costume at a parade, a protestor shouting something at a rally. Off limits?

"The she couldn't...come back home forever."

Here's something I stole off the blog of another Pittsburgher, who as a Fullbright Scholar in Jeju received this as one of her students' essays.

When I was young in internet cafe, I read a story which made me feel more sadder about the tragedy in Daegu. Once, there was a high school girl in Daegu. One day her school planned to go travel. For that, she had to buy many things like clothes, shoes and bag as other girls did. She had inflated dream for that travel. So, she told her mother to buy those things for her since her father had passed away and her mother had disease, there was no room for them to buy those things. Although she knew that, she always talked about those to her mother. But she refused. Finally she became upset and she said to her mother, "If I were you, I would buy expensive bag and a beautiful skirt. But you don't. I can't understand you."

After saying that, she just went to school. Because her daughter said that word which hurted her the girl's mother felt sorry about that and worried about her daughter. So, she drew her all money which remained in her count. And go to department store to buy those things. She bought very beautiful clothes which she thought would be suitable to her daughter. And she bought small and cute shoes which can protest her foot against long trip. Although there is a pain by her disease, she overcame that and sended a message to her daughter by her cell-phone.

"My lovely daughter, I'm sorry for my disability that can't buy you expensive and luxurious clothes which you have hoped. I have been very sad about it. But, I bought cute shoes and very lovely T-shirt for you. I hope that you like it. And remember, although I have no ability to satisfy you, you've my best person in the world."

When the girls received that message, she was very happy, but in other side, she was very sorry for her rudeness for her mother. And she decided she would do well to her mother when she arrived. Though it passed an hour since the message arrived, Mother didn't come back home. With heavy worry about her mother, she turned on the TV. In that TV, the news reported that their was a big fire in the subway and there was no way to remove the smoke and fire. Recent people called that accident "Daegu Subway Accident." By that accident, lots of people died and there are even more people who suffer from the trauma of the accident.

Her mother was one of them. She was back to home by subway. Then a crazy man made a fire in the subway and go away, with grasping, the shopping bag for her daughter. She became a victim of the accident. The she couldn't...come back home forever.

After I read that story, I couldn't make my tears stop release. Although I don't know if the story is real, I can feel mother's love from that story. Despite of the giant fire she grasped her gift for her daughter by the lover of her daughter.

I could look back my behavior for my precious person. Furthermore, I became furious about the accident who took that love between the girl and her mother. The man who made a fire made it because of his mental disease. I couldn't believe that one's disease can remove the precious love. This story let me think about so valuable things. It is the memorable story that I have ever read.

Today is the sixth anniversary of that fire, which killed at least 198 people.

Hamburger festival in Gangwon-do this weekend.

A hamburger festival is coming to Yeongwol county's famed 다하누촌, a beef market named after the city of Dahanu in India. Wikipedia says the name derives from Dahanu Goan, which means "village of cows." Anyway, ironic since in Yeongwol the cows are for eating. Here's an article on the area from last September; an excerpt:

Dahanuchon, which literally means Korean beef village, is located in a small town in Kangwon Province with a population of just 700. In the past 13 months, the village has had over 1.4 million visitors: 2,000 visitors come each day during the week, 5,000 a day on weekends, to purchase or taste pure Korean beef.

The village, originally named Supdari Village, began seeing a dramatic change on August 11, 2007, with the opening of a direct trading market for Korean beef. With the cattle being procured directly from ranches and then slaughtered, beef from the village could now be sold at a price that was competitive thanks to a simple distribution system. The product was branded as Dahanwoo, highlighting the fact that it was pure Korean. Without the margins that come with local procurers, wholesalers and retailers, prices are significantly lower. First-class cuts such as sirloin, ribs and marbled are sold for W28,000 (US$25) per 600 grams (24 oz), which is 30?40 percent less than at supermarkets in the city.

Court throws out case against PD Diary, producers not accountable for protests.

Last September nearly 2,500 people filed a suit against MBC's PD Diary,

claiming that the distorted TV show caused candlelight protests and damaged the livelihoods of some citizens.

They were after a million won a piece. Yesterday the court threw out the case. From the Korea Herald:

A report aired by broadcaster MBC in April of last year suggested that those who consume U.S. beef could contract the human form of mad cow disease. Following the broadcast in a popular investigative news program "PD Notebook," tens of thousands of Koreans took to the streets to protest a Seoul-Washington agreement reopening the Korean market to U.S. beef.

In its verdict, the Seoul Southern District Court ruled that while the information in the program may not have been accurate, the producers could not be held accountable for the protests that ensued.

Lee Heon, a legal representative for the plaintiffs, said the group will appeal the ruling.

Story in Korean here, source of the above photo. In December some 1,000 Korean-Americans also joined up with lawyer Lee Heon and his group "Lawyers for Citizens," filing suit because the mass hysteria of Koreans on the streets caused them humiliation and ridicule overseas. Curious whether that suit will be thrown out, too, as the program was evidentally not responsible for the panic. I know I have yet to see a penny from the humiliation and ridicule I endured hearing about 크래이지 카우 and the nefarious plots of my government.



You stay classy KTU.

Qatari President of Asian Football Confederation in trouble with Koreans.

Believing that Koreans have launched a campaign to keep him from being reelected, AFC President Mohammed Bin Hamman used a turn of phrase of questionable judgement:

"Some people have launched a campaign against me, maybe they don't like me, a man from the desert being at the helm," Bin Hammam told Qatari television station Al Kass.

"Shaikh Salman is not doing this on his own, he is doing this at the instruction of others, especially people in the (South) Korean federation," he said.

After the interview, Bin Hamman sought to play down comments that he had threatened to “cut off the head” of new KFA chief Cho Chung-yun.

"It is a popular, harmless and widely used Arabic metaphor," Bin Hammam said. "It means to halt someone's plans or nip in the bud someone's progress."

The Korean Football Association is demanding an apology.

Value of gold reaches all-time high here.

People are melting down their gold jewelery as the price of the metal has reached an all-time high, says the Joongang Ilbo.

Gold rings are melted down at Korea Gold Silver Refining, a company that trades jewelry and purchases and recycles gold, at the company’s office in Jongno, downtown Seoul yesterday.

People rushed to sell any and all gold they owned as the value of the precious metal reached an all-time high yesterday of 191,000 won ($131) per 3.75 grams of pure gold.

IMAX theater coming to Gwangju in May.

There has been construction underway at the excellent Gwangju Bus Terminal for a while, as they're putting a few more floors onto the east side. When construction finishes in May there will be a music hall, a performance stage, and Gwangju's first IMAX theater. Wikipedia explains what that means:

IMAX (short for Image MAXimum) is a film format created by Canada's IMAX Corporation that has the capacity to display images of far greater size and resolution than conventional film display systems. A standard IMAX screen is 22 metres (72 ft) wide and 16.1 metres (53 ft) high, but can be larger. As of 2008, IMAX is the most widely used system for large-format, special-venue film presentations.

Below is an artist's conception of the site back in 2007; you can see what it looked like last month from these photographs.

LA Times on Korea's vigilante paparazzi.

The LA Times has an article about Koreans who earn money by capturing law-breakers on film.

Amid the nation's worsening economic crisis, officials say there are fewer government investigators to maintain public order. So they increasingly rely on a bounty-hunter style of justice.

Many paparazzi are out-of-work salary men, bored homemakers and college students who consider themselves deputized agents of the South Korean government.

To meet a growing demand, scores of paparazzi schools have sprung up nationwide, charging students $250 for three-day courses on how to edit film, tail suspected wrongdoers and operate button-sized cameras.

Although accurate numbers are hard to come by, schools estimate that 500 professional paparazzi now work in South Korea, where most celebrities still walk the streets unhindered.

But not for long -- at least one paparazzi academy is offering a course in stalking well-known people.

Few officials question the ethics of arming a citizenry against itself with zoom video and long-range lenses.

"They don't violate any laws, so there's no reason to restrict them," said a National Tax Service official, who declined to give his name. "They don't infringe on others' private lives, do they?"

Daylight saving time coming to Korea.

From the Korea Times, which says President Lee Myung-bak plans to introduce daylight saving time "to save energy and improve quality of life":

As part of plans to promote green industries, the government will soon introduce DST, which has been adopted by 27 of the 30 member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Only South Korea, Japan and Iceland have yet to put DST in motion.

The measure is expected to draw a fierce backlash from unions, which have argued employers might abuse it to force employees to work longer. Union activists claim that it is still premature to launch DST because South Koreans work the longest hours in the world even though the country enforces a 40-hour workweek.

This day in history: New Kids on the Block come to Korea.

Scan from this blog, click to enlarge.

On February 16th, 1992, the extremely popular boyband New Kids on the Block arrived in Seoul for a concert on the 17th. You can find video of their arrival and concert courtesy of youtube:



That's interesting footage in and of itself, but I suppose the most significant part of their visit and was a day later one fan died and dozens more were injured during a stampede at the concert. From a February 18th article from the Chicago Sun-Times titled "30 Korean teens hurt in crush at New Kids concert" and available as a pay-per-view:

A stampede at a concert Monday by the singing group New Kids on the Block left about 30 teenagers injured, witnesses said.

The accident occurred 40 minutes into a concert by the teen idols at a gymnastics hall in Olympic Park before 16,000 people, the witnesses said.

About 200 fans, most of them teenage girls sitting in front rows, stood up and swarmed around the stage, they said. Hundreds of other fans pushed from behind, crushing those in front. The performance was halted, the witnesses said.

The American singers, unhurt, were escorted away by about 20 security guards.

"It was pandemonium," one witness said. "Many girls lay unconscious on the floor, some screaming in pain."

The pop group, which was mobbed when it arrived at Seoul's Kimpo Airport on Sunday, is on a concert tour of 45 cities in 23 nations.

A day later, an article "Korea teen dies after New Kids concert frenzy" from the same paper available now as a pay-per-view:

An 18-year-old South Korean high school student died Wednesday from injuries suffered when frenzied fans stormed the stage during a concert by the rock group New Kids on the Block.

A hospital spokesman said Park Chong-yun, among at least 50 fans hurt during Monday night's concert, lapsed into a coma Tuesday. She died early Wednesday morning.

News reports said prosecutors have sought an arrest warrant for Hong Hyon-pyo, 33, president of Sorabul Records, which sponsored the concert. Prosecutors allege the promoters sold more tickets than there were seats in Seoul's Olympic Gymnasium.

The rowdy behavior of the teenage fans has shocked staid South Korea, where teenagers are expected to study, respect their elders and not make a fuss.

"The picture that our teenagers have portrayed to us during the concert has left many people in shock," the influential Dong-A Ilbo newspaper said.

The concert before an audience of 15,000 had to be stopped after the stage was stormed but resumed 3 1/2 hours later.

I haven't found much information about this incident anywhere, and it was grudgingly and as a last resort that I signed up for a free trial with High Beam to retrieve those two articles. But I did find this article (.doc file), perhaps from Click Korea from 1993, on the burst of popularity of Seo Tae-ji and of newer styles of Korean pop music, and of how authentic Korean pop music even is:

Rap and the “Seo Tae-ji syndrome” took the older generation by surprise, but they should have been warned. The first sign came last February when American teen idols, New Kids on the Block, hit Korea. Their effect was both devastating and eye-opening. Starting with a melee upon their arrival at the airport, their visit ended with an aborted concert and 50 hysterical female fans in hospital.

Organizers of the concert took their share of the blame for their lack of proper planning and their greed in filling the concert hall beyond capacity. The brunt of the attack, however, fell on the young fans. “What is wrong with them?” people asked “How can they act so crazy? Where did this behavior come from?”

The New Kids phenomenon was branded an undesirable import. With rather misguided intentions, the Culture Ministry promptly moved to ban any concert that had the potential of arousing similar hysteria. Paula Abdul was allowed in, but Michael Jackson never had a chance.

The whole article is interesting, especially when it talks about local artists mimicking and thereby "filtering" foreign musicians and styles, so give it a read. However I haven't been able to find anything else about the New Kids or the Culture Ministry's policies toward raucous concerts. All I know is that Michael Jackson "reportedly loved" bibimbap when he eventually came to Korea.

I wrote the bulk of this post about a week ago, before news that a mountain-top stampede killed four just a few days ago. But I'll leave the rest of the post as-is in case people want to read about a couple other recent stampedes. In 2005 11 people, including eight between the ages of 54 to 76, were killed trying to enter a concert in Sangju. From CBS News:

Concertgoers trying to enter a stadium Monday sparked a stampede, killing eight women and three boys, and injuring 72 others, officials said.

The accident occurred at about 5:40 p.m. (0840 GMT) in the city of Sangju, 165 miles southeast of Seoul, when 20,000 people were waiting to enter a stadium for a concert that had been organized by a television network, said Kim Sung-in, an official with the city government's disaster management division.

Kim said 11 people died when one of the gates opened to let the audience inside, and that the death toll could rise by another one or two.

Another city official said the dead were eight women aged from 54 to 76, along with three boys aged 7, 12 and 14. Another 72 people were injured, said the official, who refused to give his name.

"There were elderly people in the front, and when pushed from behind the elderly people in the first row fell, leading to a chain reaction of falling and being crushed," Kang Mi-kyung, an eyewitness, told South Korea's Yonhap news agency.

You might also remember a few years ago at Lotte World, a big stampede injured dozens as they were all trying to enter the park. The reason so many were trying to get in was because admission was free that day . . . in order to build good publicity after a man was killed on a roller coaster a short time earlier. From the AP:

Tens of thousands of people crowded to get free admission to an amusement park in Seoul on Sunday, triggering a stampede that injured 34 people, officials said.

About 50,000 people were waiting outside the Lotte World theme park on the first day of a six-day free-admission event when the accident happened, said Kim Heung-kyu, an official in the park’s operational department. Television footage showed the crowd swaying back and forth in front of a gate before the stampede occurred.

The Songpa Police Station said 34 people were injured in the accident. Injuries ranged from broken bones to abrasions, Kim said.

. . .

The theme park organized the event in an effort to improve its image after a person fell to his death during a roller coaster ride at the park earlier this month.

The purpose of including these last two seemingly unrelated examples isn't to pretend that stampedes only happen in Korea, or to bash Korea via conflation. But the actions of these teenagers, which had shocked "staid" South Korea in 1992, seems less shocking when you look at other examples . . . or watch people getting on the subway. Newspapers often say things like

The picture that our teenagers have portrayed to us during the concert has left many people in shock.

But it's not as if their behavior is exclusive to teenagers. While we don't hear about stampedes very often, the behavior of the kids in the above video isn't unfamiliar to anyone who watches television or sees how wound up their students get over their favorite pop stars. Hell, whenever they do a surprise concert at school, you'll see scores of enthusiastic teenage girls rush the stage.

Anyway, the band is back together and touring venues large and small in North America. They haven't announced any dates for Asia, much less Korea, and it's probably smarter that way.

Necessity drives skilled foreign-language speakers to a new profession.

The plan to have "luxury cabs" for foreign tourists---criticized on this site and by others---is apparently still going into effect, and the poor economy has pushed some apparently quite skilled speakers of foreign language into the taxi profession. An excerpt from the article "Overseas Degree Holders Rush to Drive Taxis for Foreigners"---a title that conjures up images of rickshaws and plump governors' wives---from the Korea Times:

In January, the Seoul Metropolitan Government started recruiting taxi drivers capable of speaking foreign languages fluently for a squad of ``luxury taxis for foreign tourists'' that will run from March.

Among nearly 900 applicants, it initially sorted out 235 in the first screening procedure and will announce some 150 successful candidates by the end of the month.

Kim Jin-baik, 46, is among the applicants who passed the screening. He speaks English and French fluently, having graduated from a French university.

After living in European countries for about 15 years, he returned to Seoul in 2006 and had worked at a big company until recently. However, he had to quit and has worked as a cabbie for a taxi firm for about three months.

Like any other taxi driver, he is struggling to make ends meet amid fewer customers due to the weak economy.

``It's a tough job. I have to spend almost half a day behind the wheel for a low income,'' he said. But he is holding onto the job on hopes for winning the right to own and run one of the individual taxis given to those with at least four years of taxi driving experience.

. . .

``Some interviewees were so fluent in foreign languages that we had a difficult time understanding what they said,'' said a Seoul government official and interviewer. ``We expect that they, with proficient language skills, will help upgrade taxi services for foreign customers.''

It is encouraging---of course a little depressing, too---that there are so many skilled applicants, and not simply people who say "no go" in five different languages. After all, considering what passes for "English" or "foreign language skills," it's all right to be cynical.

I think taxi drivers---or those in any profession---who are able to provide quality service in a foreign country to those who don't speak the local language are justified to charge more money. However, what many are afraid of happening is that in some parts of town you'll only be able to get these "luxury" cabs; perhaps convenient for some, but others will resent spending 20% more for a transaction that can be completed by pointing to an address on a business card or by saying a simple amount of Korean.

And contrary to popular opinion, I find taxi drivers in Korea to generally be kind and patient . . . but then again I never try to go anywhere difficult to understand. One of the charms, depending on my mood of course, is chatting with a cab driver in my terrible Korean; they're not only eager to communicate, but it's one of the few chances I get to speak more than two words in Korean to anybody. The same conversation would be extremely tedious in English because we encounter it seemingly a million times a week.

Many foreign tourists of course would appreciate the luxury taxi service, whatever the mark-up. My parents, for example, should they ever be in Seoul without my help, wouldn't want to fumble through a bunch of business cards or try to pronounce something in a language they've never heard. They've been through too much to be made to feel stupid. Likewise some who live here, and who in the height of arrogance speak English to everyone anyway, will enjoy the service. But hopefully the call service---which it is slated to be now---won't mean foreigners have a harder time getting normal cabs if they choose to.

Tangentially related, but you've probably noticed that many taxis have "free interpretation" on their windows, which means that they're able to call someone who theoretically can facilitate conversation between the passenger and the driver. But Korea Beat translated a story last year about how many cab drivers refuse to use them because it doesn't foster "jeong," or good feeling, between the customer and driver.

Also tangentially related, but after seeing an interview with the author during vacation I'd like to check out the book How Starbucks Changed My Life, and would encourage you all to watch a little bit about it, too. Managing a McDonald's through high school and half of college, thus spending most of my formative years---and most of my weekends---in a dirty uniform and over a grill, taught me a lot of important lessons that I unfortunately forget from time to time. Though Americans have come to look down on customer service jobs in a way that, seriously, frightens me, let it be known that there's nothing embarrassing about a hard day's work. And almost nothing as fulfilling, as that author has learned.

Vulgar Pizza Etang commercial?

Last week a contributor to Korea Beat translated an article about swearing on prime time TV programs. Perhaps concerned viewers might be interested in this commercial from Pizza Etang:



I'm not sure if my favorite part is "fuck fuck motherfucker" or "맛있겠다 nigger." Pizza Etang commercials have gotten the attention of bloggers before for their quirkiness and word-play. The above video, if you didn't watch it yet, plays out like a comic book, mimics the speech of an old-school Kung Fu movie, and has implied swearing that is supposed to be a mispronunciation of the Korean words in the speech bubbles. The above-linked East Windup Chronicle post points us to some deconstruction of an earlier Pizza Etang commercial from Slice:

This video features South Korean rapper Mr. Tyfoon appearing in a commercial for the Asian pizza chain Pizza Etang, where he combines West Coast gangsta rap flair with Konglish, a mashup of Korean and English. Here’s the Wikipedia definition of Konglish: “The words, having initially been taken from English language, are either actual English words in Korean context, or are made from a combination of Korean and English words.”

It may sound incredibly similar to English, but it’s decidedly not. Context helped, but still, my mind reeled, trying to keep up but only recognizing a word or two; I felt like I had a broken Babel Fish in my ear. Mr. Tyfoon’s unique, contemporary speaking style is so new and radically different from traditional Korean that even my native Korean friends living in the U.S. couldn’t figure it out.

At times they are also implying Korean curse words. If you're like me, you don't want "fuck fuck motherfucker" or "nigger" in a commercial, implied or otherwise. It's another example of stripping English of its meaning by rendering it ridiculous.

The video above is a minute-long version; you can find a thirty-second version here. Thanks to a reader for the e-mail submission.

Joongang Ilbo surveys men's and women's attitudes toward proposals.

Here's an interesting article, in which the JI surveyed 196 Koreans on their idea of the perfect proposal. It's funny for its contrasts, but a little troubling for its materialism. An excerpt:

Women sent another warning to guys: Don’t skimp on proposal events. Thirty-four women said they don’t want to feel as though their men tried to keep costs to a minimum.

Take our first anonymous woman, a 30-year-old office worker called Kim. On Valentine’s Day last year, her boyfriend of one year told her he wanted to take her somewhere special. She had been considering marrying him and Kim sensed he was about to pop the question.

But, alas, her expectations only bred disappointment. Kim was led to a cheap motel, where girls who looked to be at least 10 years younger than she were hanging out in the lobby. She broke up with him right away. The man had prepared flowers and wine inside a room, but Kim was convinced this was no occasion to skimp on the finances.

Speaking of money, we have one more message for men. Diamonds are indeed a girl’s best friend. In our survey, 61 women said they would like a diamond ring as part of the proposal package, compared to just 19 men who said they thought a diamond ring was appropriate.

Do be sure you check out the handy chart at the end of the article. For example, 35 men surveyed said they considered "hiding the ring in food" as the best proposal, whereas 21 women ranked it the worst.

So I'm relieved that I'm with someone from the other side of the Sea of Japan. But it does raise the question, what are all these young women buying for their men? I mean, if he's putting down thousands of dollars for a ring that will be forgotten in a few months, what type of expensive engagement gifts are women buying for him? Sorry, "vagina" doesn't count.

Tangentially related, but last month I ranked some of the most hated English phrases in Korea, and gave "propose" an honorable mention. Some people didn't get that inclusion, so here's a recent example from Baskin Robbins:



I have no idea what it's suppposed to mean.

Do some daytime drinking while you watch "Daytime Drinking."

The above image from the Joongang Ilbo has the caption:

Cinema Gwangju in Gwangju, South Jeolla, offers makgeolli, or traditional rice wine, and instant ramen to audiences at the opening of the low-budget indie film, “Daytime Drinking.”

From this summary the movie sounds watchable. Trailer here. The rest of the caption reads:

The movie is attracting attention after the documentary indie film “Old Partner” became a surprise hit.

Gusts of Popular Feeling has more on that, and the invasiveness of the filmmakers and the movie's subsequent fans.

Some Maryland legislators have been talked into using "East Sea."

From Korea.net, the official government website:

Maryland's state senator Jay Raskin and nine other state representatives held a press conference On Jan. 28, saying that it is unfortunate that textbooks and maps have been using inaccurate facts because of historical misinterpretations, and that “for the sake of future education, the historical inaccuracies must be corrected.”

Maryland state representative Susan Lee said that various historical records prove that the correct name has always been “East Sea,” but was coercively changed during Japanese imperialism. She emphasized that this should be an issue not just for Koreans and other Asians, but an issue for global history and world culture.

Lee's fellow state representatives mentioned that they were not suggesting completely renaming the sea, but using both names in the texts.

Many Korean Americans in Maryland have been lobbying for the change since Jan.14, the first day of the state's legislative session. Advocates now seek to expand their efforts to the Virginia state legislature, and to contact political leaders in New York, Boston, and California, to gain support for their objective.

Well, that's rather unfortunate; to supplant what's considered coercion by coercion. My thoughts on the Sea of Japan issue here.

As an aside, while I was googling around for more information on this article, I came across a blog entry from 2002 written by one man who had his site, and his inbox, attacked by VANK because of an "incorrect" map with Sea of Japan on it.

The most popular woman in Korea?

I'm really sick of seeing this woman's face on every site I visit:

Nude beach coming to Jeju?

Fresh off the news that there are now more men than women on Jeju, The Korea Times asks, "Is Korea Ready for Nude Beach?" The short answer is "no," though here's a longer excerpt:

Jeju Island officials are considering a plan to turn one of its tourist spots into the nation's first ever nudist beach in a bid to attract visitors from across the world.

Jungmun Beach, a favorite summer vacation spot among Koreans, has reportedly attracted ``undressed" foreigners who apparently wish to enjoy the sun while naked.

The Jeju government believes that if the area were designated as a nude beach, more foreigners would be attracted to the island and enjoy its natural beauty.

``It will be the nation's first and the island will compete with world-renowned places such as Nice in France or Lighthouse Beach in the United States,'' said Kang Tae-seok, a Jeju government official.

During a recent meeting, most residents were reported to have shown a positive response to the place, based on the assumption more foreign tourists would visit the island.

Yes, there are nude beaches in foreign countries, but the above is a pretty base assessment of the tastes of foreigners and foreign tourists. My first thought was that this plays into the image of the hypersexual, promiscuous Caucasian; after all, they always use foreign lingerie models on TV, and often use bikini-clad foreigners in advertisements and in the newspaper. I'm curious, then, if they'll make it foreigner-only in order to ensure privacy from gawkers, from cellphone cams, and from quote-unquote journalists. Or privacy from . . . well, the average Korean, who let's be honest can turn many an innocuous encounter into a stressful one with stares and catcalls. We turn heads in the supermarket and in the hallways at school, so I can imagine the situation would be greatly amplified at a nudist beach.

But of course most tourists to Korea aren't Caucasian, and it occurred to me that this would indeed present an interesting tourism opportunity as the only official nudist beach in Asia. I suspect you'd find pockets of interest among visitors from neighboring countries. Korea has made a name for itself as a medical tourism destination---even clinics in Taipei advertised their Korean-style procedures---so it's not unrealistic for lightening to strike twice. The only question is whether Koreans would take pride in that source of popularity: so much time spent pushing the food, the clothes, and the break dancing, only to have the foreigners come for the nudity. Come to think of it, I don't take pride in that source of popularity either.

While I don't think Jeju should put the interests of imaginary foreign tourists ahead of its actual residents, I don't think you can cite offended Victorian sensibilities when it comes to sexuality or nudity here. Though the KT article mentions a previous attempt at a nudist beach stopped because of a "public antipathy toward nudity," I feel a healthier attitude toward it here than back home. There are, of course, public bathhouses in every neighborhood: quite popular and quite relaxing. And who can forget "Jeju Loveland," a sex-themed sculpture park that I won't link directly to since I'm at school. As a poster on Dave's said:

So you can drink from an ejaculating fountain at Love Land, but a nude beach down the street would be indecent... hmmm.. Korea is funny

Designating a nude beach for foreigners, though, seems to run counter the aims of a nude beach to begin with. In spite of what some will tell you, the point of a nudist beach isn't to stare at attractive young women, it's to feel free and relaxed. As you can see, in this post I've conflated nudist beaches with sex, implying that the point of the former is to stimulate one's appetite for the latter. Given the way foreign women are rendered as sexual objects in the media, and foreign men as sexual predators, the beach won't represent anything other than a proverbial orgy. And, without strong domestic interest, this would just be an unwelcome foreign imposition.

No one cares about Dokdo. (We told you so).

I have no idea if this is real, but it's either a good find or a good Photoshop by The Party Pooper.

* Update: Damn.

More evidence that Korean holidays are too depressing.

In keeping with my theory that Korea has imported fun, gift-giving holidays from the West because its big native holidays revolve around dead ancestors or foreign invaders, we have Valentine's Day tomorrow. In Korea, the girlfriend or wife will give a present to her special man. On March 14th, "White Day," the opposite. So that's that, a small entry for today.

WAIT WE'RE NOT FINISHED. Actually the 14th of every month is a holiday of some sort, apparently. January 14th is Diary Day. April 14th is Black Day, of course, for the men and women who don't have someone to love. June 14th is Kiss Day, August 14th is Green Day, November 14th is Movie Day, and December 14th is Hug Day. To my knowledge none of these extra ones are celebrated, but let's be patient. And need further proof that my theory holds true? All the holidays' revolve around spending money and giving gifts, and all the holidays' names are hangeulized English.

Big water shortage in Gangwon-do.

Wow, I had no idea this was going on until reading Gangwon Notes today. From an article two days ago:

According to the Ministry of Environment, 99,244 people living in 807 villages nationwide are currently suffering from an acute water shortage. About 275 villages including Samcheok in Gangwon Province, Chungju and Gongju in Chungcheong Province, among others, are forced to rely on water trucks or fire engines to carry water to them four times a week. At the same time, Taebaek in Gangwon and Okcheon and Yesan in Chungcheong have also restricted water supplies to specific times.

About 17,000 households in the Taebaek area are surviving on about 50 percent of what is needed daily, with tap water running for just three hours a day.

``If the tap water runs once or twice in the morning, we save water for laundry and dish washing. We fetch potable water from a spring on the mountain, which takes about 20 minutes on foot,'' a 65-year-old resident said.

In 2008, the southern part of the country had a mere 46 percent of the average rainfall in previous years. The total rainfall in 2008 was 158 milliliters, the third lowest since 1973.

The weather phenomenon La Nina ― an increased cooling phase in the eastern Pacific with a strengthening of trade winds causing a dry period ― has affected the Korean Peninsula and caused the drought, weather experts say.

And more about the situation in Taebaek city:

“Some schools provide bread and milk for lunches because they can’t cook cafeteria meals,” [Mayor] Park [Jong-gi] said.

. . .

Tap water supply was completely shut off for 3,250 people living in eight mountainous villages in Cheolam and Jangseong, making it necessary for people to visit natural water sources in the region every day to get their drinking water.

Here's some on-the-ground coverage from Dave's ESL Cafe.

A good day for bad columns.

First there was this instant classic, and next comes another one, about Korean-Americans using their influence to get more Americans to do what Korea wants.

Korean-American power is influencing local school boards, local councils and the state legislatures to accept the joint use of the terms East Sea and Sea of Japan and Korea's undisputed sovereignty of the Dokdo islets.

Local and state politicians are enlightened by Korean-American influence on the issues of the unknown sea and islets. American people are the least educated on international affairs, especially on East Asian affairs.

They need education on these. Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin did not know how to distinguish Africa as a continent and a nation. This is just one good example.

The U.S. Library of Congress's map of Korea has been corrected. However, many American people, including so-called intellectuals, think Dokdo is a disputed islet between Korea and Japan. Korean-Americans are now approaching American politicians with their voting power.

Power in democracy is dependent on the strength of voting power. Korean-American power is small but growing and increasingly influencing American politics. This is one very fortunate story in Korea's competition with Japan.

Japanese-American power exists, but it is not comparable to Korean-American power. The Korean-American community is a new Korea frontier.

Not worth explaining my thoughts on this topic again, but I just wonder why, if they're so smart, do they keep calling it the East Sea? An article from this fall reported that 95% of Koreans believe the body of water should be labelled the East Sea. The above column about influence and lobbying---written by a man notorious around here for his bad, bad poetry about Dokdo---is ironic since one of the chief objections to using Sea of Japan or Liancourt Rocks in English is that it's seen by some as a manifestation of Japanese influence and lobbying, and thus a resurrection of Japanese imperialism. Then again, the whole issue is rather ironic; protesting the name "Sea of Japan" because it is biased toward one country, and suggesting "East Sea" as an alternative even though the sea is east of Korea alone.

Choi has written about the Sea of Japan issue before, both in verse and in prose. He advocates using both Sea of Japan and East Sea on maps, even though there is no historical precedent for using the latter in English.

Fairness should be derived from the political history of the land and the sea, and historic international relations between countries. The Sea of Japan and the East Sea are the two legitimate names of the waters between Japan and Korea. The Sea of Japan, eliminating the East Sea, has been the prevailing name since Japan emerged as a powerful military nation around the turn of the 20th century and colonized Korea in 1910.

This is part of the sad and unfortunate political history of Japan and Korea. Modern mapmakers should recognize the lost name of the Korean people and their sea under Japanese rule and should print the two names of the sea for the purpose of restoring the dignity of the once colonized nation. The two names in this case reflect the existence of the two nations, and remind people that their history is one of unequal relations. One name over the sea between Japan and Korea is not just and fair.

The problem with writing about nationalistic issues like this is that somebody like me, who implicitly belittles the conflict, becomes just as involved in it as the people doing the agitating in the first place. I read about people trying to change it to "East Sea" and my first thought is "I gotta write a letter to somebody about that shit." Well, if I knew who to write a letter to, or if I took a few minutes to find out, I think I might just fire one off reminding cartographers or policymakers that the prevailing English name of a body of water oughtn't be changed in accordance with a "It's ours by default because Japan was bad" line of reasoning. About as legitimate as foreigners trying to get Koreans to stop calling us "외국인," come to think of it. But if that angle doesn't work, they can always compare the Holocaust with Dokdo:

Why did the United States participate in the European War? The American people should watch Adolf Hitler's victory after victory. They could not. Why not? The human conscience. Isn't it?

Why did the U.S. participate in the Korean War? The U.S. could watch the North Korean invasion of South Korea and accept the unification of Korea under Kim Il-sung's communism in 1950. President Harry S. Truman could not just watch the war, and sent the troops to save South Korea. Many GIs were killed. Why? Human conscience and a sense of justice.

Justice can be served with human conscience. Now, American people and European people do not serve justice when they are standing neutral between Japan and Korea on the matter of Dokdo. As a matter of fact, they are disturbing the sense of justice.

That's post number 45 in the "Liancourt Rocks" category, for those keeping score at home.

"고로쇠물 마시러 간다."

Collecting sap into a large jug.

It's about that time for drinking 고로쇠물 (gorosoi) a drink made with water and syrup from 고로쇠나무, the painted maple. "고로쇠물 마시러 간다," or some corruption of it, is apparently what you say when you're off to drink some. Both this year and last my schools went to remote locations in Gwangyang and ate goat along with it. This year it was 염소떡갈바, goat ddeokgalbi, pictured below courtesy of my cellphone.



The gorosoi was clear, odorless, and pretty bland. No photos of it because it looks unremarkable. The meat on the other hand was delicious, and now you know where you can take me for my birthday next year.

Gorosoi is available, and thus popular, in the mountainous areas where that maple grows. It is considered "good for health," especially for the stomach. More from Gwangyang county's page:

- It was said by tradition that it is effective for stomach diseases, neuralgia, hypertension, arthritis, urinary diseases, etc.
- According to 'Book of Jangbaeksan Medicinal Herbs' in China, it is effective for neural paralysis and quadriplegia.
- According to master's thesis at Dankuk University (Cho Sun Ik, 1995), it has anticancer effect inhibiting tumor cell.

And one of the legends associated with it:

While an old man walked a mountain road, he had his leg broken and couldn't walk. Then he saw a rabbit drink sap from a tree and he also drank it for some days and his leg was cured and he could walk. So it was called Golisu, meaning 〃water beneficial to bone〃.

Jeollanam-do's Gwangyang is apparently regionally well-known for the product, and Gwangyang, Pohang, and Yangpyeong, in Gangwon-do, have Gosoroi festivals each March, so keep your eyes open for those.

Easy to forget how depressing the US can be.

Here's a paragraph on current events in American pop culture that caught my eye while reading a Pittsburgh sports blog. It starts out by referring to the revelation that star baseball player Alex Rodriguez---thought to be the antidote to Barry Bonds---took steroids while playing for the Texas Rangers:

But to wrap up the steroid talk, does anything really surprise you at this point? Seriously, let's take a look at some of the things that have happened in the last week or so: a female rapper performed at the Grammy Awards while nine months pregnant; a pop star's weight gain is being covered like a national tragedy; a mother of six has octuplets; the Super Bowl winning QB claimed he played with broken ribs, a claim which isn't exactly embraced; and a male rapper beats up a female pop star, delivering injuries described as "horrific". Really, are we nearing the point where we are numb to shock as a society? It's almost become a sick game of can you top this? If Michael Phelps was the #1 story last week, he's falling faster than a BCS team losing to a mid-major this week.

I'm sure there are more examples to add, but except for a few . . . exceptions, I don't pay attention to what the kids are into back home. Of course each time I visit FoxNews.com I'm almost convinced it's reporting on modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah.

"Does any other country have as dramatic a story as ours?"

Wow. Here's quite a column from the Joongang Ilbo. What's your favorite part? I think mine is:

Four decades of economic development have produced world-class youth. The average height of young Koreans is taller than Japanese and Chinese, and on par with Italians. Did they inherit a height gene from the same ancestors who suffered from poverty and starvation?

23 students from Suncheon accepted into prestigious Seoul National University.

This announcement was made with pride during a meeting of local English teachers this afternoon, and is in the papers, too. From the five cities in Jeollanam-do, 23 students from Suncheon, 20 from Mokpo, 13 from Gwangyang, 9 from Naju, and 3 from Yeosu were granted admission to Seoul National University, considered the top university in the country. In an comment to an earlier post, which I can't find right now, somebody asked me about admission statistics for Jeolla students trying to enter prestigious universities in Seoul. I'm not any closer to digging those up, but I was nonetheless pleased to find out about these numbers.

Gwangju police arrest suspect in murder of Chonnam University professor.

Gwangju police have arrested a Mr. Park (28) for the murder of a Professor Kim (52) of Chonnam National University. Professor Kim was killed shortly after midnight on February 4th at her house in Nongseong-dong. Mr. Park, a boiler repairman, said he was angry that Professor Kim didn't pay the 40,000 won owed him on the 3rd, so he returned a few hours later and strangled her with a scarf.

Four people die during traditional mountaintop grass-burning ceremony.

Sad news during a festival, from the Korea Times:

At least four mountain climbers were killed and 30 others injured as of 11:00 p.m. Monday in a mountain stampede during a traditional grass-burning event in Changnyeong, South Gyeongsang Province.

A fire set by municipal officials on a pampas grass field on top of Mount Hwawang flared out of control due to an unexpected wind, forcing onlookers to jump off a cliff, witnesses said.

Casualties are expected to rise as more than 15,000 people participated in the event, held every three years to mark the first full moon of the Lunar New Year.

More in the article, and from the Joongang Ilbo. Pictures below from various news sites.

Don't drink the water at this Japanese spa's chocolate bath.

The chocolate spa is back at Japan's Yunessun Spa Resort, shows the Korea Times. Why, you ask? Why not?

Japan Probe brought the story last year, telling us that the spa also has a green tea bath, a wine bath, a coffee bath, and a curry and rice bath. Check out this post of Yunessun's ramen bath for more pictures of the spa.

Sleeper trains criss-cross Korea as part of new "rail cruise."

Interesting news from the Joongang Ilbo last month. An excerpt:

The journey from Gyeongju to Chuam is part of a three-day “rail cruise,” a luxury train package that Korail has ambitiously modeled after the Blue Train, a luxury rail experience that cuts through the heart of South Africa.

The trip works rather like a sea cruise. Each day passengers are dropped in major cities across the country and a local guide picks them up at the station and takes them sightseeing. After the tour, the passengers board the train and head to the next destination.

The "Simile" line stops in Suncheon, though the trip begins from Seoul. A little more from the article:

Korail offers four package tours. “Haeoreum,” a two-day route, stops at Jikji Temple, Gyeongju, Chuam and then returns to Seoul. “Simile,” another two-day tour, heads to Mokpo for a ferry ride, stops at Suncheon for sightseeing, and then heads to Namwon, the home of Chunhyang, the heroine of a popular folk tale. “Channuri,” a three-day tour, takes in Gwangju, Busan, Gyeongju and Chuam, in time for sunrise. “Aura,” another three-day tour, stops at Mokpo, Gyeongju and Chuam.

And

The facilities inside Haerang were originally aimed at meeting the standards of a luxury hotel.

Each suite comes with a TV and a private bathroom with bidet, which caused quite a fuss. The rooms, though tiny, are warm enough to walk around in shorts.

In the dining car, guests can sip free wine and help themselves to a bowl of fruit and biscuits by the counter.

Eh, I like trains and hotels so this sounds like fun, but it's pricey. Ordinarily it costs between 1.5 and 2.39 million won per room---depending on the duration, the room type, and the number of people---though through February 28th the range is down to 1.2 and 1.8 million. More details and pictures here, in Korean.

There are a bunch of other train tours available from Korail, but I can't link to them directly. Does anyone have any experience with them?

Suicidal cow in California commercial?

Via Funk Seoul Sister comes this advertisement for Real California Milk.



I don't know whether to make a crass joke about prostitution or Mad Bull Shit.

She likes "I'm fine thank you and you."

A blog with a long name has some humorous English interview tips for Koreans.

1. Man or woman, give me a firm handshake. You are not Queen Elisabeth 1, and I am not Sir Walter Raleigh returning from a starchy, tuberous crop-finding mission. I'm not going to kneel down and kiss your hand. Ergo, do not place your dainty little hand in mine like you re putting a cherry on a sundae.

. . .

3. When asked your name, please dont reply "Mr./Ms X". Actually, I am interviewing you. If anyone's getting called by their title, it's me. Plus, Im usually 5-10 years older than you.

. . .

6. Dont assume I know nothing of Korea, the Korean language or Korean culture. If I am sitting in an office interviewing Koreans for a position at a Korean company there is a likelyhood that I have a modicum of local knowledge. So, if I ask you where you live or where you went to university, dont reply "Maybe you dont know it." That is why I asked you. I am trying to have a conservation with you.

Because for some reason I can't leave comments on her post, I'll have to instead link to the most awesomely bad Korean English interview here.

Don't interrupt the foreigners when they're eating, k thx.

From the Korea Times:

A 71-year-old man was booked for hitting a restaurant staff member who was trying to stop him from talking to a foreigner at the establishment, police have said.

Seoul Gangseo Police on Saturday apprehended a man identified as Lee for beating a 60 year-old identified as Jeong at a restaurant in Naebalsan-dong in western Seoul last Friday. Lee was reportedly trying to approach two Scottish men who were eating at the premises while Jeong attempted to restrain him.

Lee was said to be drunk and told police that he was simply trying to ``learn English from the foreigners.''

The KT's headline? "Man Booked for Trying to Talk to Foreigners."

"Snow Namdaemun" in Sapporo.

Via East Windup Chronicle is this picture of a "Snow Namdaemun" at the Sapporo Snow Festival constructed, as ROK Drop tells us, with help from the Japan’s Self-Defense Force. EWC says that according to a live web cam---which doesn't work for me---you'll notice there's a Japanese flag in front of it, although I haven't found any photos confirming that.



But on the topic of flags is news that a Korean flag near the sculpture was being flown upside down at the opening ceremony. I came across that news via a blog set up for Korean students practicing their writing. The student-poster concluded with:

This happened because of us: Koreans. If we had cared enough about our flag as much as we cared about ourselves this wouldn’t have happened. Also, some Korean students don’t even know how to draw their flag. It is a serious problem. I wish this could be a good opportunity for us, Koreans, to think about our flag and love our country.

That's rather . . . vague. The lone commentor added:

It is very true that most Koreans do not know how to draw a flag. I agree that it is important to understand the symbolic meaning behind a flag. However, the Japanese are not stupid. I think it was an intentional way of showing Korea that they are still above us.

In December I was teaching a lesson about the Korean flag and was surprised by the number of students who didn't know how to draw the flag. So while it's embarrassing I'm sure to see your national flag flown upside down, I'm going to venture it was ignorance rather than an intentional sign of disrespect. And given how often the same error occurs among Koreans, let's not get too worked up about it.

Ham Tae-shik to be evicted from Jirisan home after 40 years.

From the Facebook group "Save Mr Ham Tae-sik":

Mr Ham Tae-shik, the venerable shelter keeper of Piagol in Mount Jiri, South Korea, has been living in the mountain for over 40 years. He was monumental in convincing the Korean government of the late 1960s to establish a national parks program in Korea, and he opened Korea's first mountain shelter in 1970.

Despite Mr Ham's significant role in the history of Korean national parks and continued service to the well-being of his nation, the Korean National Parks Service, after several years of pressuring Mr Ham, are evicting him from his mountain shelter home.

Mr Ham, who is nearly 81 years old, had been living in the mountains for nearly 20 years by the time the Korean National Parks Service was established.

The Facebook group directs you to sign a petition to allow Ham to stay.

Please sign our petition to save Mr Ham and his home. Help send the message to the KNPS that given his past and continued service, Mr Ham deserves to stay in the mountains and continue to live the life that he loves: in service of the mountains and the mountaineers that visit them.

More from the thread on Dave's ESL Cafe:

Thats quite terrible. I know Mr Ham. I've shared many a cup of tea and bowl of Ramien with him over the years. He is one of the kindest most gentle, wisest people I have ever met.

For those who don't him. He has been living on the mountain for 40+ years not because he is some nut. But because he loves Chri-san more than anything elese in the world. Without him is is unlikely the K govt would have made Chri-san a national park.

One of the true pleasures of hiking on Chri-san is the chance to run into Mr Ham and chatting for a few minutes. It'll be sad if the Govt can pull off this eviction.

Kim Ja-young's apology for (Korean) Nazism.

Interesting opinion piece in the Korea Times earlier in the week about one woman's reaction to South Korea's use of Nazi imagery in bars, restaurants, and commercials. Here's a bit of the article:

Recently I began a friendship with a Jewish man. He is the first Jewish person I have met in my life. We talked about Korea and some other countries where he has lived or traveled.

While listening to his experiences in Korea I felt embarrassed when he talked about seeing a jazz bar in Mokpo, South Jeolla Province, which painted on its exterior wall a portrait of an infamous Nazi SS officer standing on a tank. Really? Could there actually be a Nazi bar in Mokpo?

This reminded me of Brian Deutsch's article, ``Insensitivity About Nazism," which appeared in the April 22, 2008, edition of The Korea Times in which he discussed a Nazi-themed cosmetics ad campaign in which a well-known Korean actress appeared dressed as a Nazi officer, holding a cap emblazoned with a Nazi style logo.

I recall seeing this ad on Youtube. In the background were the sounds of shell-firing rounds, the German language and the text ``Even Hitler could not get East and West at the same time." This Nazi-themed ad was hardly an issue in Korean society and was largely ignored by the Korean media.

Frankly, when I watched this ad with my friend, we just laughed. Even though the commercial showed Nazi propaganda or made mention of Adolph Hitler, I don't think it bothered most Korean people's conscience, including mine. Surely, most Koreans have sympathy for Jewish people because we suffered similar cruelties by the Japanese invasion and subsequent occupation. I believe that when pressed, most Koreans would express having bad or negative feelings about Hitler or Nazism or fascism in general. However, the problem is that we don't appear to have much interest in people's business or problems other than our own.

I recall that my friend and I talked about what it would have been like if the actress in the above-mentioned ad had dressed in a colonial Japanese military style and the sentence was ``Even Ito Hirobumi, who was the biggest culprit behind the Japanese colonization of Korea, could not get all of Asia." At the very least, the following day the cosmetic company headquarters would have been egg-bombed by protesters, I reckon.

It is interesting that a Nazi-themed advertisement was not controversial until it stirred up discontent by expatriates living in Korea. It is surprising and shameful that after being chastised in the international news, neither the Korean cosmetics company nor the ad agency apologized and excused their actions stating they just wanted to highlight the ``revolutionary" aspects of Hitler.

The coverage from last spring is spread out on this blog over a few different posts, though they're a little awkward to read because of so many updates and amendments. The two most relevant I guess are

* "Coreana wants the ads removed from Youtube."

* "New Coreana Nazi video pretty much the same as the old Coreana Nazi video."

so give them a read if you're not familiar with the story.



Ms. Kim closes her piece with:

As a Korean and friend of a Jewish person and member of this global village, I want to apologize about the Nazi-themed cosmetics advertisement and bars that feature Nazi imagery here in Korea. I hope my apology will be considered acceptable.

There is no need for her to apologize to anyone, though it's a thoughtful gesture in a thoughtful article. Now, let's keep in mind that we oughtn't push our Western perceptions and meanings on Koreans who most likely don't hold the same values. After all, to cite a more trivial example, how sick are we of hearing about Dokdo, a territorial dispute that is of utmost importance to Koreans but meaningless and borderline offensive to Westerners? In fact, I resent being told how to call the Sea of Japan in my own language, and dislike having our language and politics dictated to us on the Liancourt Rocks matter by ethnocentric foreign special interest groups.

Obviously Koreans generally don't have such a strong reaction to Nazism and its symbols as Westerners, just as many of us harbor no animosity against the Japanese. Yet the point of the campaign last spring to remove the ads and get a satisfactory apology, and of smaller rants in protest of the bastardization of our language and culture, is to remind people that while each culture interprets things for itself, symbols oughtn't be entirely divorced from their historical context. That's why we were upset by the flippant use of Nazi imagery in the commercials, and that's why we cringe when we hear Koreans saying "oh my god!" or "sexy" all the time. It's arrogant to dictate only one possible meaning for a symbol or phrase, but it's equally so to adopt them with no regard for their preexisting meanings to other people.

Han Ji-yeon is proud of her new breasts.

Former college volleyball star Han Ji-yeon first appeared on this site back in December. Here she is again with a new photogallery that shows off her new breasts, again with the subtlety and grace usually reserved for actresses on CSI.

Korea Sparkling Widget neither sparkling nor "Sparkling."

Even though I was voted "Sexiest Korea Blogger" and "Best Korea Blogger Under 30" this month, I didn't have the visibility last month to get a spam comment inviting me to try it out the new Korea Sparkling Widget from the Korea Tourism Organization. All the other kids got one. But it looked like shit when I saw it for the first time, and it's proven unpopular with the bloggers. Stafford lampooned first it on Hub of Sparkle, and Charles Montgomery went at it on his blog, watching and listing a bunch of the short animated scenarios. An excerpt from his site:

Watching this widget reveals far more about what Korean thinks about foreigners (uncouth idiots) than it reveals any reason a foreigner would want to visit Korea.

I watched this thing for about 15 minutes and jotted down its little scenarios, which I reproduce below. Seventeen out of the twenty-four scenarios unarguably reveal David (our waegook hero) to be a dangerous idiot. What kind of brilliant marketing scheme is that?

Montgomery took it to the Korea Times a few days ago.

I watched some 24 vignettes during my viewing, and in 17 of them, Dave, the foreigner, was represented as a dangerous idiot who brings danger and shame wherever he goes. In one case he kicks a Korean in the testicles, in another he falls off of a ladder while hanging lanterns, is hit with a stick and pierced by an arrow and shocks an entire family of Koreans by entering their house with his shoes still on.

These are not messages that would appeal to any potential tourist. Rather, they paint Korea as a dangerous place full of potential social pitfalls. It's possible that these vignettes are meant to be humorous. If so, it's another mistake. How many countries with more successful culture-tourism campaigns use Three Stooges-type humor for self-promotion?

Most public school teachers will note that the scenarios on the wicket---which Montgomery listed on his post---are similar to those we find in our English textbooks. They often feature dialogues and readings of Westerners embarrassing themselves in Korea. You'll invariably find chapters about spicy food or tricky chopsticks or white kids who stomp through the Korean house with their shoes still on. Hell, one of the songs from the elementary school curriculum is of a Western kid going "Don't take off your shoes / Don't take off your shoes / We don't take off our shoes in the house." As if they couldn't think of any other way to teach "do" and "don't" other than drawing on something that makes us look boorish. Like an elementary-level Korean textbook with a dialogue about ordering dog soup, or a song that goes "Don't cover your mouth / Don't cover your mouth / We don't cover our mouth when we cough." Or maybe there'd be a skit about how Korean families don't even know enough to capitalize the name of the kid they're hosting, right "david"?

Montgomery closes on a positive note in his KT article:

The good news is that this represents an opportunity for the KTO. The initial idea was a good one. Creating a useful and interesting widget, and spreading it through a partially viral marketing campaign, was an inspired idea. Unfortunately, the widget as currently designed is unproductive, perhaps even destructive, and the target locations chosen for it do not seem chosen to maximize impact.

I hope that the KTO will go back to the drawing board on the widget, and this time involve some input from members of the target audience, perhaps even involving the same bloggers the KTO has targeted as potential hosts of it. The widget itself needs new content and the effort to place it on websites needs to be re-aimed.

There are many interesting and beautiful features of Korea that could be presented by it. Additionally, Koreans can be quite friendly and hospitable. It is these kinds of elements that Korea should put at the front and center of its culture-tourism marketing, not poorly-animated slapstick demonstrating what goes wrong when cultures collide.

Yes, the foreign buffonery is very tiring, the tendency to show us making mistakes or embarrassing ourselves or just acting foreign, and it's hard to find positive Western role models on Korean TV, examples of teachers not making asses of themselves or otherwise rendered ridiculous. (Though we must remember that Korean TV in general enjoys slapstick and fish out of water humor. And we might also try looking to those outside the English-speaking foreign community for examples of more successful integration). Moreover, you have to question the target audience of the widget: somebody not in Korea or not familiar with Jeollanam-do won't get the short about the Jindo Moses Miracle, to say nothing about feeling alienated by the white guy's actions, while people already in Korea will just roll their eyes at the same tired stereotypes of awkward foreigners.

Anyway, and this is me writing without putting much thought into it, what about putting together a widget that scrolled through a list of upcoming festivals or cultural events? I'd be interested in checking out something that told me what was going on every month, or when a concert was coming to town, or what festivals are happening each weekend.

Korea's Pussycat Dolls and their first video.

This came out a couple of weeks ago, but you might be interested in After School's (애프터스쿨) first video. The girl group was assembled as Korea's Pussycat Dolls, and in the video for "Ah" they opt for the tried-and-true sexy schoolgirl look.

Brian in Jeollanam-do takes two 2008 Golden Klog Awards.

Thanks to all the organizers of and participants in Hub of Sparkle's 2008 Golden Klog Awards. Congratulations to Korea Beat for being voted the Best Korea Blog of 2008. Brian in Jeollanam-do was voted

* Most Thought Provoking Korea Blog
* Angriest Korea Blogger

I got back to Suncheon tonight from three-plus weeks overseas, and I'll have more on that in a couple days, and more comments on these award proceedings later, too. But for now, thanks again to my readers and to everyone who voted for me or for anyone else. And thanks to all the teachers, professors, students, parents, writers, and everyone else out there who made 2008 a very good year for Korea blogs. I hope 2009 will be just as fruitful and productive for me, both on this site and in the classroom. Just a little less angry, maybe.

68-year-old Jeonju woman has failed driving test 771 times.

Wow, Jeollabuk-do just made international news. And not for lion-tiger fights this time. An excerpt from AFP:

SEOUL (AFP) — A dogged South Korean grandmother has failed her driving test 771 times, police said Thursday, but a local newspaper reported she will keep trying.

The 68-year-old, identified only by her last name Cha, has taken the test almost every working day since 2005 in the southwestern city of Jeonju. She failed again Monday for the 771st time.

"It was a record-breaking number here," Choi Yong-Cheol, a police sergeant supervising the test in the city's Deokjingu district, told AFP.

"I wonder if she will try it again for a 772nd time."

The Korea Times said Cha will in fact be back for another attempt.

Jokes about Koreans' generally shitty driving and attention to traffic safety aside, the case here is likely that she is old, poor, and can't read.

Test of Proficiency in Korean registration has begun.

From yesterday, and will be open through February 16th. Visit the official TOPIK website---specifically the .pdf linked on this page---for more details about registration and the exam. The test will be held on Sunday, April 19th in South Korea, and Gwangju's will once again be at Chonnam National University.

If you have websites or resources you've found helpful for the six-level exam, please add them in the comment section. Remember, previous exams and their answer keys are found on the official website. I'm going to see if I can't get up to Level 3 this time, but having neglected my studies for, like, ever, I'm not confident about my chances.

Hwasun's Amortel (아모르텔)

I'm writing this in January but I only published it in February, to help fill the void while I'm on vacation. I had planned a bunch of other posts in January and February, but they're really long and I didn't have enough time to prepare them. So, it'll be another short write-up on a local motel. Last month, in another post-dated entry, we read about the Jungfrau Motel in Hwasun county. Today it's the Amortel.

I mentioned this one in my longer entry on love motels, remarking on the goddamn telescope in the room. The Jungfrau's VIP room also has a telescope, so maybe it's not that special. But I'll tell you what, the Amortel looks like an excellent motel. There are five kinds of rooms, ranging from 40,000 to 100,000 won per night. All of the rooms look good, but if you're going to make the trip out there, you might as well splurge on the four-room VIP room. Both the VIP and the Special rooms have access to a balcony with a shower, steam sauna, bath, and goddamn telescopes. Take a few minutes to browse the photos on the motel website; that'll be far more interesting than me talking about everything.


Balcony of the VIP room.


A look inside the VIP room.


The loft in the Special room.


In the Semi-special room. What a disconcerting name, but included here so you can see it's got a tub.


The Equalizer.

Like the Jungfrau, the Amortel is located near Dogok Spa Land, a bit of a drive from Hwasun-eup---the main town in the county---but would thus be accessible via buses 200 and 318 from Gwangju. Hwasun itself is boring---as is nearby Gwangju, come to think of it---but the motel could be either a nice change of pace for night, or a starting point for trips into Boseong, Damyang, Yeonggwang, or the other attractions in Jeollanam-do.

What studying English for seven years will do.

I saw this linked on Otto's site a while back, but I can't find the exact page.



It's always embarrassing when you get asked relatively simple questions but you don't know how to respond. For example, it wasn't until last year that I became familiar with the ~ㄴ지 얼마나 됐다 construction, which is used for asking how long since you've done something. So, we routinely hear something like "한국에 온지 얼마니 됐어요?," or How long since you've come to Korea? When you hear it and judge the context clues you can probably figure out what it means, although without recognizing the sentence pattern it can be tough to answer something more intelligent than "this many."