Ølberg

Ølberg I was well on my way to spending a lazy Saturday reading on the couch but the wonderful weather outside convinced me I should hop on my uncle’s bicycle and go for an afternoon ride. I have blogged a little bit about some of these delightful afternoon rides that I took to Mosterøy and Rennesøy last summer. Today I rode along the western coast, passed the airport and Sola beach to the area known as Ølberg, now perhaps best known as the location of a small beach, harbor, cafe, and a few recreational cabins.

Farmland
My hometown, Stavanger, is on a peninsula, north of which are to be found countless islands and the thousand meter tall cliffs that hang over the deep fjords such as Lysefjorden. To its south until one reaches the town of Egersund there is a stretch of land known as Jæren. The land south of Ølberg already resembles the larger region of Jæren and the terrain, which is mostly farmland up this point, is dominated by rolling hills and very rocky grassland, dotted with the occasional grazing grounds for sheep. The coastline is also very rocky, and one can occasionally find fascinating layered rock formations there.

IMG_2460.JPG IMG_2456.JPG

After basking in the sun on the rocks near Ølberg, I rode a few kilometers south to the village of Tjelta before turning back towards Stavanger. Tjelta is a strange place and along the coast there I found a number of huge houses that I could only describe as decadent. Apparently some rich construction magnate lives here. He may have been the old man I saw driving an antique automobile back and forth along the road I passed. He may have been related to the child I passed who was driving a full-sized golf cart down the hill towards another house (the kid could not have been more than eight or nine years old, his head barely reached over the golf cart’s steering wheel. I almost fell off my bike staring at him in wonder).

Bunker at Tjelta One thing I thought about as I rode was how the landscape of Norway’s coastline still bears the scars of World War II. I must have passed at least half a dozen German bunkers on ride today. The thing which stands out the most at the small harbar at Ølberg is the bunker on top of the hill. Throughout Stavanger and the entire region (probably most of the more strategically important coastline of Norway) the empty shells of these bunkers can be found along the beaches, coastal cliffs, and embedded in the hills near the coast. Some of them have been filled in by local farmers, others serve as hangouts for local youths and gangs and are filled with graffiti and trash. Bunker at ØlbergThe remains of the bunker at Ølberg was somewhat more elaborate than most, as a number of passageways and the concrete base of what may have once mounted a coastal cannon or other structure also remains (some more pictures here, here, and here) They are a constant reminder of the fact that German forces once occupied the country and peered across the water on the lookout for any potential British invasion force.

I’m sure these bunker remains and other similar sites are to be found in many places around Europe and these visual reminders of the war must invoke complex memories for many. For children, however, these sites are often just exciting or mysterious locations to play games or engage in mischief. In my own case, the German bunker in my grandmother’s neighborhood where I played every summer as a child (on the hillside less than 60 meters from where I now type this blog entry) was filled in by a local farmer. That didn’t stop me and another childhood friend from trying to pry loose a large rusted piece of something (it was a long tube of some kind) from the rocks in the bunker. We imagined it was part of some wartime weapon. As I lifted the piece and my friend tried to remove some of the rocks under it. However, I lost my grip and the rough edge of the rusted metal badly tore the skin from the back of my friend’s hand as he tried to remove it. I took it at the time as a sign that such things are best left undisturbed.

George Will on Yasukuni

A friend pointed out an article about the Yasukuni issue, “The Uneasy Sleep of Japan’s Dead” by the Washington Post’s conservative commentator George Will which I found deeply problematic. I find the article to be a short but good example of a particular type of writing about Japan’s relations with its neighbors and the sensitive issues related to history and memory which employs a rhetoric that is effective in creating sympathy for Japan’s position but seriously flawed.

This kind of writing portrays Japan as a friendly, civilized, and eminently rational state surrounded by dangerous and evil neighbors. Japan, the writer will claim, is provoked and insulted, and forced to react to this outside pressure either by concessions or the rare and just stand against its attackers.

I find this style of writing particularly annoying not only because it is essentially a perfect reproduction of the Japanese nationalist line on foreign policy, but because it resembles the writing of so many of Japan’s misguided supporters in earlier times. This kind of expository can be found in the English language newspaper articles and books written by those friendly to Japan from the end of the 19th century and through the Manchurian incident of 1931. In earlier times it showed the degree to which contemporary diplomats and politicians within Japan were able to successfully portray themselves as enlightened members of the world club of nations while continuing to describe their neighbors as, at best, half-sovereign unruly children awaiting the benevolent and guiding hand of the Japanese empire. Both then and now, this kind of writing essentially avoids the need to address the problem at hand face on, since any accusations can be dismissed as the pernicious ranting of outsiders.

Let us take a closer look at Will’s article in order to offer more concrete criticism. Let us reduce the article to a series of more basic clips:
Continue reading George Will on Yasukuni

Dagbladet and Wikipedia

There are many complaints about how students these days are increasingly using Wikipedia as a source in their papers and other writings. There have been some cases where the media has been caught using them. However, I was surprised to find out how openly Norway’s Dagbladet newspaper would reveal the fact they had used the only user-maintained encyclopedia.

In today’s issue of Dagbladet there is an interesting article («Hvem skriver jeg for?») about the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk. The article touched on the relationship between the rise of the novel and the rise of the nation. Pamuk optimistically claims that, “The art of the novel is no longer connected to the nation-state in the same way it was before.”

Above the article was a separate column with some biographical information about the Orhan Pamuk, including information about a 2005 case brought against him for his «fornærmelser mot det tyrkiske folk» after he made some comments about the Turkish mass killings of Armenians.

At the bottom of the article, the source (“kilde”) was listed:

Kilde: Wikipedia

This is kind of disturbing. Wikipedia is a wonderful experiment and I use it all the time for casual searches. However, it cannot be the final source for either academic research, or I would hope, media articles. It should serve as a first or casual check – to be followed by confirming information independently. I’m almost as surprised that Dagbladet would openly admit that they have simply listed some Wikipedia entry data for his biography than that they used the material itself.

Norwegian Schools and Views on Education

I’m waiting for my flight to Stavanger here in the beautiful and extremely expensive Oslo airport (Bottle of water: $3.17, Strawberry Yoghurt $2.70, Small Cheese and Ham Roll $7.77, etc.) and reading today’s Dagbladet (I think it is usually considered a somewhat leftist Labor party supporting and populist paper). In a series of articles entitled “Norwegian Schools in Crisis” there was one piece listing the results so far from a series of studies on Norwegian education and comparisons with several other European countries and the US. Below are a few of the conclusions so far according to two professors Anne Welle-Strand and Arild Tjeldvoll:

–Too many bad teachers Apparently there a lot of under-qualified and not sufficiently trained teachers in Norway, including some recruited straight out of secondary school (C: can this be true? Am I not understanding this correctly: “I flere år er det blitt rekruttert svake kandidater fra videregående skole.”)

–Not enough specialization While teachers in other countries focus on one topic or one grade level, Norwegian teachers often follow their class from one year to the next. This has resulted in many Norwegian primary school teachers lacking in specialized knowledge. C: I remember this when I spend a brief time in Norwegian elementary school (Sunde Skole). I have often wondered what the pros and cons of this system must be.

–Strong opposition to evaluations and student testing The researches sees this as the biggest problem with trying to raise quality. C: I agree to a point that this can be a problem but I would want to guard against the opposite problem which arises in places which go way too far in trying to quantify progress and knowledge with elaborate testing and evaluation schemes.

–An ‘Anti-Knowledge View” («anti-kunnskaps-syn») These researchers claim that over-emphasis on the socialization aspects of education has gotten in the way of knowledge and hurt Norwegian’s ability to compete internationally.

-The results of a study of OECD countries. last year showed that only 47% of Norwegians surveyed believed that “education was important.” which was 20% below the average responses in other countries.

A Japanese Company Man’s First Norwegian Encounter

I spent a few hours napping in a departure lounge of Frankfurt airport this afternoon waiting for my Oslo flight. Sitting behind me was a middle aged Japanese man, an engineer of some kind who works on those traffic computers found in cars. He is off to Oslo on a business trip and it is apparently his first time to Scandinavia.

I learnt all of this because I overheard his conversation with a young bespectacled Norwegian girl who is on her way back from spending five weeks in Nagoya and Nara on a Lion’s Club exchange program. She is from Trondheim and school is starting again tomorrow. She might have to spend the night at the airport though because her flight arrives late and she may miss the last bus back to her hometown, some forty five minutes away. I couldn’t help wondering if she was from a town near my own mother’s hometown which is also a bit of a drive into the country from both Trondheim and its airport.

I heard large chunks of the conversation as I dozed in and out of sleep and concluded that the whole thing must have been quite a shock for the poor Japanese man. They spoke in English to each other but he had great difficulty expressing himself in the language. He had problems on all fronts; pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary. I don’t think he understood everything she said either, since the woman had to repeat herself often and his answers often seem to be in response to questions other than those she had asked. Other times he seemed to just be at a loss for words.

The woman did 95% of the talking and she had quite a bit to tell her new friend about what she thought about Japan and what Norway was like. She told him that she had visited a factory in Nagoya belonging to the company he worked for and she said they made many “clever” things. She also said she visited a factory where miso was made, and her disgust at this process put an immediate and permanent end to her miso consumption.

She told him she was worried about how he would react when he got to Norway and discovered how short he really was. “You are so short. Japanese are all so very short. I thought I was short since my boyfriend is 185 but you are really short. Why are you all so short?” I heard only a long “Uhhhhh…” in response before she continued with more of her observations.

The next time I focused in on their discussion I think they were discussing her home-stay situation in Japan. I suddenly heard her say, “You know in Norway we share….you know women and men….we all share. My boyfriend—he likes to cook. He cooks all the time. And the clothes, he loves to wash the clothes. You see we share in Norway, not like you.”

I’ll have to ask my mother how normal it is for men around Trondheim to be such dedicated fans of cooking and laundry. If it is true, I think we should make these northern domestics into our national mascot. At any rate, I think this business man has received a sufficient warmup for his journey to the north where he no doubt believes that no question is too direct, no physical feature spared comment, and no gender inequality goes unpunished.

Biblioteksvar.no

I just read in today’s Aftenposten that you can ask Norwegian librarians, via SMS, chat, or email, pretty much anything you are wondering about and they claim they will answer within a day. Here is the small article which announced this service:

Lurer du på hvor langt det er mellom Røros og Trondheim, hvorfor myggstikk klør eller om pingviner smaker godt? Svaret er bare en tekstmelding unna. Hver ukedag sitter landets bibliotekarer klare til å svare på spørsmål fra nysgjerrige nordmenn på http://www.biblioteksvar.no/ Ved hjelp av sms, chat eller epost, kan du spørre om hva du måtte lure på – Vi lover å svare i løpet av en dag, sier Greta Bruu Olsen (NTB)

Asia History Carnival #6

I’ll be hosting the 6th Asian History Carnival at Frog in a Well – Korea on August 8th! We are looking for good posts on Asian history posted around the internet in the past month or two. For more details, check out the Asian History Carnival homepage.

Please nominate postings for the carnival here. If you use del.icio.us to tag your links, another way you can nominate postings is to simply tag them “ahcarnival” (http://del.icio.us/tag/ahcarnival/) and I’ll look through the tagged postings when the time comes. The deadline for nominations is August 7th.

Bring out your dogs!

My favorite language teacher here at the SNU language program (the same teacher whose stories about student stereotypes and protest culture I talked about in an earlier posting) told us a few interesting things about dog meat in Korea. Again, this posting probably won’t be anything new to those who know Korea well but life here is full of new discoveries for people as ignorant about Korea as I increasingly feel. I am ever reminded that, “A little Learning is a dang’rous Thing.”

I think many people, including those who have never visited Korea or have had the opportunity to study it, know that they eat dogs here. Now, I had my share of dog meat in China—more than my share, actually, as I did not really care for the dish that was served at a Guizhou restaurant near my dormitory in Beijing. However, dog meat isn’t exactly topping the menu in either country and has often been used as a convenient way to dismiss the two countries for their barbarism.

I remember playing pool one night with some friends in New York a few years ago. I was wearing my Qinghua University T-Shirt and a woman spoke to me suddenly and asked me if the writing on the shirt (the name of the university) was in Chinese. I said yes, and she proceeded to tell me why she could never travel to China, “You see, I never travel without my [her dog’s now forgotten name here] and if I took [said dog] to China, I would be too scared that someone would snatch her away and eat her.” I was perhaps just as surprised that she could travel on short vacations anywhere outside the US with her dog—given all the regulations on potentially disease-carrying pets—as I was her at her fear of starving Chinese dog thieves.

I have not eaten any dog meat (개고기) here in Korea yet, or visited the dog meat market here in Seoul. I think the market is only held twice a month, with the 5th day of the month being one of them (hmm…that would be this Saturday…) Again, however, despite the fact that summer is the season for eating dog meat, according to my teacher, it isn’t nearly as common as it used to be. What I say below is entirely based on her own claims and I haven’t confirmed any of this.

My teacher claims that the consumption of dog meat has steadily declined over the years. The “summer delicacy” in Korea has gradually gone from being dog meat dishes such as dog meat soup or Bosintang 보신탕 and chicken to being more than anything, the ubiquitous Samgyetang 삼계탕 soup. She believes that Samgyetang has essentially replaced Bosintang in Korean food culture.

She made two further observations about this shift and the decline of dog meat: 1) There is increasing opposition from pet owners who object not only to the fact that dogs are eaten, but also to the cruelty towards the dogs in the killing process. 2) This reflects, in a way, the economic development of Korea, as the owning of (but perhaps more importantly, the love towards) pets and a general sympathy for animals reflects changing priorities in society.

One aspect of dog meat consumption which adds to the disgust many already might feel comes from the killing process. My instructor explained that before they kill the dogs, they often put them into a special bag and beat the dogs severely or simply beat the dogs slowly to death. Why would they do this? She says that while being beaten the dogs release all sorts of hormones in their excitement, all of which help make the final product more delicious. My teacher added as a side that this was exactly why cats play with their mice for so long before killing them, something I had not heard before.

I asked a fellow foreigner here about this process and he claims to have witnessed the beating process at the dog meat market (they didn’t use a bag, he said, but just beat the dog slowly to death in a pen) and he said it was enough to put him off dog meat forever. He said he contemplated briefly setting up a special dog market for the creation of “well-being” dog meat made from freshly killed dogs that were killed in a more humane way. It would be slightly less tasty but a bit easier on the conscience.

Perhaps the most interesting thing my instructor had to tell us was about the increased demand for the meat in earlier days. When she was a child, in the 1970s, dog meat dishes were not all made from the special breed that is apparently mostly used today. In those somewhat more chaotic days, all sorts of dog meat was apparently marketable. This meant that people could and did occasionally sell their household pets or their litters.

One common feature of living in Japan and Korea is the fact that small vehicles with loudspeakers, recorded tapes, or sometime just a yelling driver will pass by one’s house or apartment advertising items they have for sale (such as vegetables or heating oil) or things they wish to collect and buy (such as old household appliances).

According to my teacher, as late as the 1970s a dog meat collector would occasionally come through her neighborhood yelling, “개 팔아요” Despite a literal translation which might suggest that dogs were being sold, it was in fact a call for people in the neighborhood to sell their own dogs. In more familiar terms, the dog butcher passing through was essentially calling out, “Bring out your dogs!” My instructor told us that she can never forget seeing another child in her neighborhood weeping as she was forced to carry her puppy out for sale.

UPDATE: The market I mentioned is not in Seoul, but in Seongnam, Gyeonggi province and is on a five days cycle: the 4th, 9th, 14th, 19th, etc.

Fighting the Korean Internet Again

Does anyone have an ID/Password at the Korean newspaper Hankyoreh (or the means to create one easily for me?) who might be willing to share their access with me? If so, I would be most grateful if I might use it to access their web page (you can email me via the contact link above).

I don’t know when this happened but I can’t view archived articles anymore without logging in (I assume it is behind a simple registration like NYT instead of paid access). However, as always, I have to fight the twin problems of the Korean internet: 1) I’m not Korean. 2) I don’t use Windows and Internet Explorer.

Being a foreigner and using a Macintosh is pretty much suicidal for internet use in Korea. I had to wait 1 full week for Naver.com to inspect my Norwegian passport photo (which they required me to upload) and make sure that it matches my registration info. I was thrilled that I could register at all as many places require me to have a Korean citizenship/residence number, but having to wait this long is ridiculous.

Now, yet again, I have to go through this horrible process with Hankyoreh, though I had hoped it wouldn’t take a full week for my registration to come through. Today ended in complete failure and frustration though. When I tried to register through the special “foreigner” registration page at Hankyoreh, and after choosing “Other European Country” (since Norway wasn’t important enough to get listed) I gave them my Norwegian passport picture for upload and was all ready to go. Then the 2nd problem arose: Horrible programming. For some reason, no matter what I put in my birth year, either my real date of birth or any other number from 1-2006, it tells me that I haven’t entered my birth year. This is classic Javascript validation gone bad.

I really hate it when lazy programmers do Javascript validation or other web scripting and then only test it on Windows with Internet Explorer…

In this case, they slapped some crap together, as they often do, and wow – it worked in Internet Explorer on Windows – so that means it will work for everyone, right? I will happily spread the word that Korea is a place where the internet and technology is making great strides…as soon as web programmers and designers can master absolutely basic programming skills and create standards-compliant web sites. Like so many other websites I have struggled with around the world, this lack of quality on large scale commercial sites is really unacceptable. It might as well be 1995 all over again.

In this particular case, the Javascript Console in Firefox shows more than 30 errors for the registration page…I’m lucky the year of birth was the only thing that didn’t work…