Muninn

I read this editorial over at the English version of Hankyoreh:

One out of every four men who married in farming and fishing regions last year married a foreign woman. 90 percent of those women are from China, the Philippines, and Vietnam. Korea has been solving the problem of difficult work others hate to do with foreign labor, and now it is having Asian women take the place of Korean women in farming and fishing communities that Korean women want to avoid.

Experts say that Korea is already no longer a homogeneous society, and that is has already essentially become a immigrant nation. As of last year foreign workers topped 420,000 and foreign wives numbered more than 50,000. Naturally there is a continuous rise in the number of children who have mothers or fathers from China, the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Mongolia, Russia, the US, and Japan. Given the fact Korea has a low birth rate and is aging and how international interaction is on the rise, the trend is going to accelerate. The problem is that our understanding of the situation and our society’s preparedness lags far behind that trend.

Just as has been the case with foreign labor, marriage to foreigners has run into various problems. Many hasty-arranged marriages done with the assistance of professional agencies end in divorce. They say that applications for divorce by marriages involving spouses from China and Vietnam recently almost doubled. Domestic violence against foreign wives is becoming a problem. There are also problems involving the language development and social adjustment of children whose mothers lack proficient Korean language skills.

It is time our country formulate real plans as a multi-ethnic society. To begin with, there needs to be better oversight of the international marriage agencies. Foreign spouses need to be given help in adjusting socially, through Korean language and cultural education. There needs to be counseling for the problems faced by international families. Most importantly we need to have open hearts that accept them as members of Korean society.

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I’m back from Taiwan and continuing my Korean language studies in Seoul. Did some reading, met some friends, and visited Jiufen.

Since she hasn’t blogged it herself, I’ll share a few things Sayaka has told me about living in Taiwan. She often visits a Korean restaurant near Taiwan Normal University. In many Korean restaurants you get free side dishes, including Kimchi. However, where Sayaka goes and a number of places I have been outside of Korea, they list these side dishes as “Kimchi” on the menu and charge money for it. Recently however, Sayaka visited the restaurant with a Korean and he asked, in Korean for Kimchi. The side dishes emerged and, of course, there was no charge for it…

One of the delightful things about Taiwan is its social and linguistic complexity. It isn’t unusual to be speaking with someone in Chinese and have them throw in some Taiwanese dialect (Minnanhua) or switch in and out of the dialect when they are speaking to someone else who understands it. It is fascinating also to see the different occasions and contexts in which each are or can be used. Here are two anecdotes along these lines:
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I recently blogged an enjoyable chat with an elderly Korean gentleman that I had outside the national library in Seoul and shared some of his stories about life in colonial Korea and during the turbulent years that followed.

Today Sayaka and I are spending a leisurely afternoon reading in a Taipei coffee shop (chain) called QK咖啡. Although their motto is “ranQueen ranKing” which seems to explain the Q and the K in their name, we noticed the elderly Taiwanese couple sitting next to us talking about the name. The same couple had earlier taken notice of the fact that Sayaka and I were often using Japanese with each other. When they pointed the “QK” out to each other and read it out loud, our eyes met and I told them, in Chinese, that I just realized that the name is actually quite interesting. When you pronounce “QK” together you also get the Japanese word 休憩 or “kyûkei” which means “to rest” or “to take a break.” Since it isn’t unusual at all to see Japanese words in the names of Taiwanese stores and restaurants (For example, Sayaka lives very close to a coffee shop called 黒潮 (the Japan Current), which has the Japanese pronunciation for these characters, “Kuroshio” written next to it), we believe it simply can’t be a coincidence that the title of the coffee shop ends up a play on a Japanese word (the whole store name read in Japanese also makes a nice alliterative Kyûkei Kôhii, as it does in Chinese, QK Kafei).

Having thus broken the ice, the Taiwanese couple asked Sayaka if she was Japanese and started to speak to us in absolutely fluent Japanese. We complimented their Japanese and they said that they had both spoken Japanese as children through until they graduated from junior high school. If they graduated from junior high school in 1945, which at least the husband claimed to have, that would now make them about 75 years old. With this as an opening, we asked them all sorts of questions about their lives back during this time. As in my other encounters of this sort, they had lots of fascinating stories.
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Some of my friends complain that my wordy weblog isn’t particularly useful to read when trying to find out what I’m doing or to figure out quickly where exactly I am in the world (I’m in Taiwan this weekend, back in Seoul next Tuesday). While for longer stays I update my address on the contact page, I have created a special page here on this weblog which keeps a running tab (including shorter trips) on exactly where I happen to be at this time:

Where am I?

This link will also be accessible from the list of links on the right of this blog.

I did a little sightseeing yesterday, joining two friends on a trip to the Seodaemun Prison History Hall (서대문형무소 역사관) near Dongnimmun (독립문) station and inside the Independence Park. The museum is dedicated to recording Japanese torture and cruelty towards the “patriotic ancestors” of the independence movement. The prison in question, built by the Japanese just prior to annexation, continued to be used well into the postwar period, but it is now overwhelmingly used as a symbol of colonial atrocities and you will find no mention of its postwar legacy. I think many of my observations about the place have been shared by others, including some of the comments made by an Adam Bohnet here.

Technorati Tags: Korea

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Wow. Marmot’s Hole just blogged about some pictures drawn by children on display in a subway station. See the pictures here, with a second set of photos here. If these pics go down for any reason, contact me and I’ll mirror them.

I am almost inclined to believe this is some kind of prank, especially since the poster, someone named “Gord” appears to have completely bought the Japanese right-wing nationalist narrative of the colonial period in Korea. Perhaps his love for comics eventually led him to spend a little too much time with the illustrated books by Japanese fascist writer Kobayashi Yoshinori.

However, the pics seem to be legit. I find it so hard to imagine organizing an entire group of children/teenagers to produce such a huge collection of artwork showing such amazing hatred for Japan. Another posting on the website says they come from this junior high school. Notice the much more watered down selection of pictures from the collection the school chose to include on the school website here. They include only “positive” images of patriotism. There are some articles online about this in Korean which I haven’t read but those of you who can might want to check out here, and here.

There simply can be no better follow up on my posting yesterday where I mention the large numbers of children at the prison museum that I argued cultivates a blanket hatred for Japan.

These pictures are absolutely amazing, and will regrettably feed the arguments of right-wing Japanese who wish to portray, wrongly, Koreans and Chinese as all rabidly irrational nationalists who spew nothing but violent threats and lies about the past. This serves neither the purpose of encouraging a productive and careful consideration of the tragic legacy of war and imperialism in East Asia, nor serves the future of grass roots level relations between the peoples of this region. Neither do, however, the pictures in question and the people and institutions which instigate the emotions that motivated these students.

UPDATE: Ok, some of you have read the comments and I’m starting to get bizarre emails as well. Apparently my English above, designed to show my shock at the pictures, was too difficult and a number of readers think I am claiming that the pictures are a fabrication when I say “I am almost inclined to believe.” For the record, I think the pictures are real. Zheesh…

UPDATE: I just got an email from someone nice enough to send me a link to an article discussing Korean reactions to the pictures. He notes that the general majority seemed to have an adverse reaction to the pictures.

Check out the 10th History Carnival, a collection of links to articles related to history in the blogging world.

I found most interesting a connected series of postings at Chapati Mystery related to empire: 1. Canned Food, 2. The E Word, 3. The Case of the Americans, 4. Absent-Minded Imperialism and the Doughnut Effect, 5. Black Legends, and 6. Back to the Colony.

I have had some of the most interesting conversations talking to random old people and as someone who is interested in the history of East Asia, I especially enjoy those who I have met while on this side of the Pacific pond.

There is the retired farmer in Tateyama city who told me about his wartime experiences as a sailor delivering supplies to Japanese troops in China and the almost decade long romance he had with a Chinese woman there. Although he married a Japanese woman after the war, he got very emotional when he told me, a complete stranger, about that relationship that ended with Japan’s defeat.

There is the very old man I befriended in a park near the zoo in Yokohama who told me all about growing up in the city. He claimed to have been “saved” by American generosity twice, once as a mere baby, when some food packages sent from the US after the huge earthquake of 1923 reached his family, and once when he attached himself to a US occupation soldier after showing off some elementary English. The soldier apparently gave him some kind of ration cards that he claimed saved his family from starvation. He told me about watching Japan’s gradual wartime collapse from the accounting office of a Mitsubishi airplane factory during the war and later became my personal guide through Kamakura (even showing me some of the back entrances to my favorite temples). He boasted that he had over 20 pen pals in various English speaking countries. My favorite conversation with him was in a graveyard in Kamakura just after he had told me about all the places he had visited in Japan. I asked him why he had never travelled outside of Japan, despite working several decades after the war as a photographer for SAS and other foreign airlines. I remember his reply, in English, as, “Why do I need to go outside of Japan when there is so much left around me that I have yet to see.”

There was the old man who caught me taking notes at Yushukan (the nationalist museum attached to Yasukuni shrine) in front of their (as usual) very twisted portrayal of the 1939 Nomonhan incident. He nonchalantly leant over my shoulder, consulted my notes, and then said in Japanese, “I was there.” We sat down and he told me about his experiences stationed on the Manchurian borders working in some kind of artillery unit. I don’t remember much from his brief description of the actual confrontation except the fear that he and his fellow soldiers felt when faced by the formidable Russian forces.

Today I had another one of these experiences, this time, sitting just across from the entrance of Korea’s National Library.
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I had to read a little story for Korean class today which I guess is a fable or fairy tale of sorts. It is one of those “origin of natural phenomena” stories with an added moral message urging filial piety. I had forgotten how much I love these kinds of stories and would love to write a few of my own some day. The story is called 청개구리 (靑개구리) or “The Tree Frog” and I have found a dozen or so variants online. Here is a rough summary of the version we were assigned for class:

The Tree Frog

Once upon a time there was a family of tree frogs who for a time lived happily enough. However, the son was a mischievous little frog and never did what his mother told him to do. One day, when the wind was blowing hard, she told him to play inside, but he disobeyed and played outside. When the rainy season came and the rain poured down, flooding everything, his mother again told him not to stray far from their home but again he disobeyed his mother because he thought that all the water would make it even more fun to explore.

In this way the misbehaving young tree frog brought no end of worry to his mother and she became gravely ill and deeply depressed. And yet still the son paid no attention to his mother’s commands and did as he pleased.

The mother frog’s condition continued to get worse and she asked her son to hear her last wishes. While her son had disobeyed her all his life, he was made to promise to obey her last request. Instead of burying her in a mound on the mountain, she wanted to be buried along the water’s edge. Upon uttering these last words, the mother frog passed away.

At that moment the son was overcome by grief and realized that his mother’s death was due to his own selfish behavior. All his life he had ignored his mother’s commands and this was why her sickness eventually consumed her. He resolved to be faithful to her wishes in this last command and buried her in a tomb by the water’s edge.

That is why, when the rain pours down, the tree frog will go to his mother’s tomb by the water’s edge and cry out in grief, “kaegol, kaegol” (개골개골)

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The new academic group blog at Frog in a Well, 井底之蛙 launches today. It will primarily focus on the study of Chinese history. Postings will be in English, Chinese, or a mixture of both. We have over half a dozen contributors, all graduate students and professors studying China, and I hope that this new academic group blog will take off and produce some high quality postings soon. Keep an eye on it in the next few days as our starting lineup introduce themselves.