Category: Korea

Asian History Carnival 2

Welcome to the 2nd bi-monthly Asian History Carnival. Thanks to those who offered submissions to the carnival. I think we have an excellent spread of region and time period but my choices reflect the range of submissions I received for inclusion and the limits of my own online reading. Remember, if you feel your region was neglected or that excellent postings went unmentioned, consider nominating them for the next carnival, to be held February 2nd, 2006. If you are interested in hosting the next asian history carnival, please contact me at konrad [at] lawson.net. We will post information on the next hosting at the carnival’s homepage as soon as we have a host.

And now for the postings:
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Another Reason to Improve My Korean

I finished my summer of language study in Seoul and I’m on my way to Norway. I’m writing this in Dubai airport while waiting for my flight to London. I’m enjoying a McDonald’s “McArabia Meal” which the advertisements assure me will offer me an “authentic taste” of this region. I knew I could trust the golden arches to provide me with a taste of the real Arabia.

My journey here was interesting one, and gave me a last reminder of how nice it would be if I could really speak Korean well.

While waiting to board the plane, suddenly a crew of police sniffer dogs came to the gate and sniffed everything. While Seoul’s airport has lots of security guards marching around in pairs with very impressive looking semi-automatic weapons, I was surprised to see that the KP team was soon replaced by about a dozen armed security guards who took up positions around the seating area of our lounge, surrounding us and watching over our “perimeter” while we waiting for the boarding announcement.

I couldn’t figure out what the fuss was all about so I looked around for politicians or other famous personages. The only person who looked out of place was some military officer who had two or three rows of those badly matching but very colorful collections of little badges on his uniform that, you know, all those generals and stuff wear. I thought perhaps he was our illustrious passenger but he seemed to be showing deference to a group of men who from a distance looked like perfectly casually dressed business men. It was hard to see because they were surrounded by a bunch darkly tanned identically dressed guys who looked something like a team of teenage high school basketball players going on a school trip.

When we boarded, I was surprised to see the security guards surround the team of youngsters and escort them through the first line and onto the plane, outside of which they then took up positions. The young men all wore light blue Umbro brand shirts, Umbro shorts, and identical Puma sneakers.

The fancily decorated military guy wished the men accompanying the team farewell and the rest of us were allowed to board the plane, passing by the security guards stationed at the plane entrances. By this time, I kind figured out what was going on…and had guessed that they were most likely some kind of athletes from the old Democratic People’s Republic of Korea up north.

I didn’t think much more about it until a few hours into our flight when I got into a conversation with a Dutchman at the back of the plane. He was telling me about his adventures working at the UNDP in Korea in the 1970s and the challenges of getting married to his Korean wife at that time. He then mentioned in passing that the snoring pile of athletes sprawled all over the back few rows of the plane were none other than the North Korean national soccer team…
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Ring Derivatives

Korea and Japan both have really led the way in the whole genre of horror which appeals to a new generation of youth, especially women. America and Hong Kong are following behind, translating and redoing some of these movies (Ring, Grudge) or making others in the same vein (White Noise, the Eye) but many of them have a very derivative feel.

Of course there is lots of borrowing the other way as well, and much of it to great effect. The beautifully filmed Korean movie “A Tale of Two Sisters” (which I highly recommend despite many contradictions and loose ends) borrows heavily from US movie plots, and comes off as a combination of “Sixth Sense“, Japan’s “Audition“, “Identity” and a few other psychological thrillers. This sort of mixing and matching of ideas is what creating culture is all about.

Some of the stuff coming out though is really scraping the bottom of the barrel. The Korean version of the Japanese “Ring” was really awful. The Japanese mini-series version of the story also sucked. The sequels got a bit too scientific and Darwinian in their message. Other Japanese and Korean movies coming out recently are also trying to capitalize on the bizarre but terrifying example of the “Ring” have made ridiculous versions of a similar concept.

Many of these movies involve some kind of object (like a cellphone, or a stereo and its white noise) being cursed or otherwise being connected to the world of the dead. Today I saw one example of how bad it can get. A horror movie showing on SBS here in Seoul this evening is clearly a knockoff of the same idea. In the “Ring” (I know this sounds stupid but the Japanese movie is really a classic) a cursed video, when watched, shows a bizarre female figure. Those who watch the movie are cursed (mostly school girls) and the frightening long black haired female figure kills them a week later or something. Long black-haired ghosts seem to be a consistent theme here, but they will be familiar to anyone who has read old Japanese ghost stories or seen the movie Kwaidan. In tonight’s movie, instead of a cursed video, the school girls are slain by:

A cursed sticker-picture vending machine

When their picture gets taken in the machine, a mysterious and horrifying female figure is seen behind them in the picture, foreshadowing their impending death.

Dokto Saturation

Anyone who has spent any time in Korea is familiar with the irredentist issue of the Dokto/Takeshima/Lioncourt islands. This is one of the hundreds of issues around the world where two or more countries both claim the same hunk of rock as their own. Both sides bring out cute historical maps and literary accounts to suggest that “their” people or “their” nation claimed the territory first and like children on a playground try to project these historical references or claims into the modern present. That we are still engaged in this kind of idiocy in the 21st century is a tribute to humanity’s lack of intelligence.

Dokto Somehere North of Here

The two pieces of rock inconveniently dare to emerge from the water somewhere north of the red arrow (see the string of black shadow like blobs, probably one of those, but not enough land to show up in this Google satellite photo, please don’t try to explain exactly which one it is in the comments – I really couldn’t care less, another map here) To be honest, I’m so sick of the whole thing: I have reached Dokto saturation level and this posting will be my first and last on the topic…
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Korea: A Multi-Ethnic Society?

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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Seodaemun Prison Museum

Prison Wall
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.

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Korean Children’s Drawings

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.

A Little History Outside the Library

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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