Topic: Korea

More good BBC coverage of the talks between Donald Rumsfeld and his South Korean counterpart, Yoon Kwang-ung, and on the changes in the relationship between the two countries: Seoul presses US on army control, US agrees to slow S Korea pull-out. Meanwhile, South Korea will need to straighten out its own military: South Koreans baulk at boot camp.

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Topic: Korea

Two important articles on the BBC website this evening regarding changes to the American presence in South Korea (1, 2)

When it comes to the US troop presence in their homeland, South Koreans aren't sure what they want. On the one hand, their government has responded with shock and dismay to the American announcement that we'll be withdrawing a third or more of our troops over the next year, and pulling the rest back from the DMZ, where they have guarded the invasion corridors between the North and Seoul since the 1950s.

But a few years ago, when we were in Korea, there were massive anti-American demonstrations in the wake of the accidental killing of two Korean girls by a heavy military vehicle, with strong demands that the US troops at least clear out of Seoul. And President Roh Moo-hyun has called for a change in the longstanding arrangement by which an American general would be commander in the event of an actual conflict.

The US doesn't want to give up control — no surprise there — but we are more than happy to let the Koreans step up and pay for more of their own defense, and we aren't too sad about stepping back from the border either. Personally, I think the South Koreans should take this as a major opportunity. I think the Americans are right to point out that while it made sense for America to spend billions defending South Korea when the latter was a poor, struggling country, it is now time for the world's 13th-largest economy to pay much more of its own way. (As for South Korea's position on its own success, there's plenty of ambiguity there as well: the government clings to its developing-country status, despite the increasing preposterousness of the notion, in an attempt to maintain some degree of solidarity and influence with the countries of the Non-Aligned Movement and other developing states.)

The South Koreans should accept this burden, which will greatly increase their international stature and their standing with the American government. If they're footing the bigger bill, it will be easier for the South Korean leadership to demand control over military action on the Peninsula.

And it will help Korea to emerge at last from more than a century of dependency, something that has enormous symbolic importance for the Korean people. Indeed, if North Korea has any legitimacy at all in the minds of South Koreans, it is because it is seen as more fully independent, though of course it relies on China. If South Korea becomes not only the richer, more democratic of the two states, but also the more independent, that will undermine the last shred of credibility to which the North clings.

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Topic: Korea

Slate today has an article on how Korea has become the world capital of cloning research. (And no, I don't mean the North Korean variety.)

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Topic: Korea

The closing years of the Joseon Dynasty, Korea's last, are pretty grim: having maintained its isolation for so long, Korea is totally unprepared for its encounter with an aggressively expanding West, and the country is rapidly infiltrated by a variety of foreign powers before finally falling under the harsh dominion of Japan.

One of the early contacts from outside was a French expedition that sailed to Korea and tried to deliver a letter to the Taewongun, the prince regent and ruler, who refused to receive it. Troops were sent to repel the French, which they did, but not without heavy losses. In the aftermath, the Taewongun determined to strengthen his military. The process is fascinatingly described by Pak Chehyeong, whose essay is included in Sources of Korean Tradition, Vol. 2. Here is a rather lengthy excerpt:

The law of the land had proscribed the occult arts and supernatural means of building up strength. These restrictions were now set aside, and anyone with special skills and talents was encouraged to come forward and render service for enriching the country and strengthening its defense ....

Persons ... were recruited or promoted because of their extraordinary strength, as were ... others who possessed mechanical skills. Every day, people came to Unhyeon Palace offering novel and strange plans. One claimed that cotton cloth could stop bullets, and tests were conducted. The bullet penetrated two layers of cotton cloth stuffed with cotton, but twelve layers stopped the bullet. Finally, vests made of thirteen layers of stuffed cotton cloth were produced together with helmets made of ivy stems. When riflement wearing these new devices underwent training in midsummer, they were overcome by heat and suffered nose bleeds. There was also a suggestion that a boat made of crane feathers would be so light that a direct hit by a cannonball would mearely push the vessel backward without destroying it. Accordingly, hunters were sent out to capture cranes whose wings were then glued to a boat. The boat, named a "flying boat," was found useless, however, because the glue melted suddenly when it was launched in the water.

The essay goes on to describe the encounter with the American steamer the General Sherman, which the Koreans captured, executing its crew. Unfortunately, none of the Koreans could figure out how to operate the unusual craft, and even after making a direct replica, then taking apart the original and rebuilding it at great expense, they couldn't get the boat to go faster than "a dozen or so paces in one hour," probably because they were using charcoal rather than coal to fuel it.

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Topic: Korea

In reading Ki-baik Lee's A New History of Korea, I've come to the period of Japan's colonial occupation and annexation of Korea, a topic that exercises Koreans more than any other. Lee makes some effort to keep his anger in check, but as with every other Korean source I've seen on the subject, he can't help but portray the period in black-and-white terms: the Japanese are wholly nefarious in their intentions, the Koreans who hand over the country are "traitors," and the Korean guerrilla fighters are "righteous armies."

I suspect that there is truth to all these ideas. Unfortunately, the lack of nuance makes it hard to understand what really took place, and hard to trust the Korean sources. Two key questions that are never asked are how the Japanese justified their actions to themselves and the world, and what motivated their Korean collaborators.

Lee seems to believe that Japan's annexation and exploitation of Korea was part of an orchestrated long-term plan whose only goals were to enrich the Japanese at the expense of the Koreans and to provide a platform for war against Manchuria and Russia. If this is the case, then Japan exercised considerably more forethought than the colonial powers it was emulating, such as England, France and Russia, who tended to advance willy-nilly in defense of commercial or military interests as they arose, rather than as part of a grand strategy to conquer a vast territory.

Even more difficult for me to believe is that Japan, alone among the colonial powers, felt no need to justify its actions in terms of aiding the people it conquered. England, France, even Russia saw themselves as civilizing forces, bringing economic development and decent standards of behavior to the benighted peoples of the world. In some cases — notably the Belgian Congo — the mad scramble for overwhelmed any attendant civilizing mission, but the exploitation of Korea required sustained economic development. Actions that Lee characterizes as wholly aggressive, such as seizing all uncultivated land for distribution to Japanese colonist farmers, encouraging Japan's vastly more efficient fishing fleet (which in 1912 caught more fish than the Korean fleet with about half as many boats and just 14 percent as many fishermen) to expand into Korea, and greatly expanding Korea's mining industry, seem like actions that could have been characterized by the Japanese as intended to benefit the Korean people over the long term by bringing this backward, underdeveloped territory into the progressive Japanese fold.

That this was contrary to the wishes of the Koreans themselves, and indeed required harsh repression and an astonishing 140,000 arrests in 1918 alone, is certainly a point that must be emphasized. So is the opportunism of the Japanese who used the undemocratic colonial administration to extract vast profits for themselves, often by cheating and impoverishing Koreans. These tendencies are at the root of the problem of colonialism, and they can be seen today in the no-bid contracts handed out to American companies by the American-run Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. At the time, however, the weight of international opinion still favored the colonial enterprise as the best way to foster economic development, and the Japanese were right to recognize that if they didn't take administrative control in Korea, some other great power would. Nor can it be questioned that the dithering, helpless Korean monarchy had lost all legitimacy by the time of the Japanese takeover.

As for the Koreans, did those Koreans who signed away sovereignty stand to gain personally by doing so? Were they forced to put their signatures to the traitorous documents? If so, what methods of coercion were used? If not, what could have motivated them? Did some Koreans, recognizing their own government's weakness, actually welcome the Japanese, hoping that they would modernize Korea as they had modernized their own nation?

Korea has perhaps not come far enough from its difficult period of humiliation to be able to look at it squarely. Certainly it hadn't by 1967, when Ki-baik Lee published his book, in what was still the hopeful period of Park Chung-hee's long dictatorship. The Korean War was then still an open wound, while the economic "miracle" was yet to come. But even now, when Korea has much to be proud of, there is still a tendency to portray the Japanese colonization as an evil scheme plotted by terrible men bent on tormenting Korea for their own narrow gain. The reality is perhaps more frightening: Korea's humiliation, exploitation and suffering were carried out, at least in the early years, by well-meaning officials who believed in the decency and necessity of what they were doing.

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Topic: Korea

From Overheard in the Office:

Professor #1: You know what I hate? There's never any TP in the men's room. You have to bring your own.

Professor #2: Yeah, I know. Unless you buy it at the vending machine.

Professor #1 unspools some paper from a roll on the coffee table.

Professor #1: I just hate using this roll. It's like telegraphing the whole world you've gotta take a dump.

San 69-1
Churye 2-dong, Sasang-gu
Busan City, South Korea

Hey, at least it's not that rubbery, anti-absorbant pink stuff they sell in Nepal, where you can sometimes still see chunks of wood pulp in it. *shudder*

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Topic: Korea

On Wednesday, six elephants escaped from an amusement park and went on the rampage in downtown Seoul (see BBC News and Digital Chosun). Now the JoongAng Daily reports that the elephants were probably suffering from the stress of too much work.

This is a complaint that most Koreans can relate to. South Koreans work among the longest hours of anyone anywhere. It was only in 2003 that the National Assembly approved legislation to roll back the six-day work week to five days. In 2001, bus drivers went on strike, complaining that they were forced to work 11-hour shifts six days a week. When Jenny and I were in Korea, school teachers were agitating to get their Saturday mornings off.

The elephant escapees, having just been moved to their new home (they had previously resided in Incheon), were putting on as many as seven performances a day, every day. (That's the JoongAng Daily's number; Digital Chosun says five.) Anyone who has taught English in Korea knows how exhausting it is to put on seven entertaining dumb-shows a day, and those who decided to make extra money by taking on private classes during their weekends tended to lose their minds. The couple we replaced at the ECC Anyang kindergarten were something like those elephants: overworked, stressed out and anxiously eyeing the exits. (They left the country two months after we arrived.) So I feel for those elephants, and I hope they have the good sense to renegotiate their contracts.

Bonus: The Korean word for elephant is kokkiri.

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Topic: Korea

When I was in Korea in 2001 and 2002, I was impressed by the high quality of the subway system, which made the contrast of the bus system all the more striking. The buses were grotty, poorly designed, weirdly numbered and driven by psychopaths, and worse yet, there were no bus maps. They simply didn't exist. (You can read my description of them here.)

Well, apparently all that has changed. My friend Graeme sent me a link to his Anyang Expats MSN group, where I was startled to see a post entitled Bus map: startled because as far as I had known, no such thing existed. Following the link, I discovered that there is in fact a fascinating online Seoul bus map (works only in Internet Explorer and requires an applet). When I tried it out, though, none of the bus route numbers matched the ones I remembered.

Then I stumbled across a post in a blog called The Beige Report explaining that Seoul has thoroughly upgraded its bus system. There are new blue buses, new route numbers, and, of course, a map.

Ah, progress! South Korea changes so fast that when I talk to someone who was there in 1997, it's like he's describing a different country. I suppose I, too, have an out-of-date picture of the place. And there's only one way to fix that. I suppose I will have to go back.

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Topic: Korea

Okay, this one is just nuts. South Korea and Japan are in a territorial dispute over a couple of uninhabited islands in either the Sea of Japan or the East Sea (that name, too, is disputed). The BBC reports that to protest Japanese claims, a couple of Koreans chopped off a finger each, one with garden shears and the other with a meat cleaver. Let us hope, for the protesters' sake, that there are not nine more territorial disputes.

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Topic: Korea

And how do you get the chickens to eat it?

These are the questions raised by an intriguing BBC story on claims that kimchi, fed to chickens, may be a cure for the bird flu that is currently wiping out chicken populations across Asia and creating serious worries of a global pandemic.

The results so far are inconclusive, and researchers have no idea why kimchi would be able to stop the deadly virus. It does make intuitive sense, though, that Korea's flaming-hot, reeking, fermented national dish may be toxic to some organisms. I just assumed the organisms were people.

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