'You Die!' The Pervasiveness of anti-Japanese imagery

At the hagwon I used to work at, among the story books on the shelves in the kindergarten play room were two sets of books telling the stories of famous people. One set had stories about famous western people (like Einstein) and the other had stories about famous Koreans. Among the Koreans were people from the distant past like King Sejong, and Yi Sun-shin, as well as people from the 20th century like Kim Ku, Ahn Jung-geun, Yu Gwan-sun, and Yun Bong-gil. In the latter books, we find pictures depicting the following events:

The murder of Queen Min by Japanese assassins:


The torture of Yu Gwan-sun by Japanese police:


The suppression of the Samil protests by Japanese police:




In response to the murder and torture of (mostly female) Koreans at the hands of the Japanese, the stories present the following images of justified revenge. Among the acts of what was then perceived as assassination and terrorism that are depicted include the assassination of D.W. Stevens in 1908:



The assassination of Ito Hirobumi in 1909:



Yun Bong-gil's bomb attack which killed or wounded five Japanese officers or dignitaries in 1932.


All of these images are reminiscent of comic books, and would do well with some 'BLAM!'s or 'BOOM!'s added, as well as speech balloons saying 'DIE!' and 'ARRGH!' These aren't sophisticated in the least, but then, when aimed at children under ten (they're available for children under seven at the hagwon), they don't need to be. Showing these images to children who are too young to critically evaluate them does nothing but inculcate hatred for Japan.

Mind you, this is just one of many ways children are exposed to such images. Seodaemun Prison Museum presents these images to visiting children:



An April 2005 Ohmynews article describes a photo exhibition at Woninjae Station in Incheon which displayed photos of the colonial period such as this:


One wonders how the children viewing these photos felt:


Of course, this took place during the '2005 Korea Japan Friendship Year' that wasn't. This article by James Card gives a good overview of the 'diplomatic war' that took place that year after Shimane prefecture government declared 'Takeshima Day' on February 22 on the 100th anniversary of the islets' incorporation into that prefecture. As Card describes it,

In South Korean classrooms, all levels were taught in special classes about South Korea's sovereign rights over Dokdo with lesson plans supplied by the Korea Federation of Teachers' Associations.

Among the things even first-graders learned was the catchy 'Dokdo is our land' song.

Two months after the exhibit at Incheon's Woninjae Station, another station on the Incheon line, Gyulhyeon Station, displayed photos about Dokdo drawn by students at nearby Gyeyang Middle School (which can be seen here and here):

'Dokdo is whose land?' 'Ko...rea's...land'

I'm reminded of the student who, when asked 'when' he would like to go if he had a time machine, answered 'Hiroshima in 1945, so I can see Japan get bombed.'

On Thursday the Korea Herald (via Brian) reported that a 37-year-old man was caught trying to break into the Japanese Embassy Wednesday night with plans to set it on fire and take embassy staff hostage. He also planned to hold a press conference about Dokdo and Japanese textbooks. With the announcement that "Investigators were looking into his medical records to determine whether there is any history of psychiatric treatment," it's clearly being suggested that he may be mentally unstable.

This raises a question, however: If someone has spent their entire life surrounded by images of Japanese atrocities and has thus vicariously relived a narrowly defined version of Korea's colonial experience and has also been told repeatedly that Japan has done nothing to apologize for these outrages, instead whitewashing or justifying them, and in fact is attempting to steal cherished Korean territory once again, would burning down the Japanese embassy not be a justifiable response, especially considering the example provided by gun-and-bomb-wielding Korean nationalist heroes?

The dystopian world of Boys Over Flowers

[Update: I finally tracked down Gord Sellar's post looking at a later episode.]


From January to March this year, the show that all the young people were talking about was '꽃보다 남자' ('Boys Over Flowers') (which can be watched here). It was based on the Japanese manga 'Hana Yori Dango', which had been made into an anime and live action TV series in Japan (and a live action TV series in Taiwan as well). When I went through an anime phase years ago, someone had suggested Hana Yori Dango, which I ended up watching a few episodes of before realizing shojo manga-style anime was not for me. The live-action Japanese series (which can be watched here) begins with the main character already in class at a high school for the rich. The Korean version, on the other hand, does not, and how the main character, a dry cleaner's daughter named Jan-di, ends up going to the most elite school in Korea is actually pretty interesting. I only managed to get partway through the second episode before giving up on the series, though from what I've read, the rest of the series does not live up to the series' introduction. In that introduction, we see the history of an alternate reality Korea in which seemingly all of Korea's economic power is centralized in a single corporation and the rich have even more privilege in the realm of education. We're shown how one person challenges this, how the common folk react in support of her, and how the powers that be co-opt her and end the rebellion - all in about ten minutes. (The quotes below come from subtitles provided by WITH K-drama subbing squad.)

The opening of Boys Over Flowers makes reference to events from the previous year, in addition to perennial concerns in Korea. It begins with a Korean news anchor telling us that

The Korean Corporation Shinhwa Group has been selected to be the largest corporate sponsor in the 2011 London Olympics.

Suddenly many other anchors appear in other countries reporting the same news.


Portraying all the broadcasters of the world talking about Korea’s economic accomplishment in the same sentence as Olympics may betray a wish for recognition. Or a feeling of superiority: 'Korea's number one! Korea's number one!' While I'm sure this plays extremely well to the domestic audience, I'm not so sure about its reception in the other countries in Asia its producers hope to export it to. I'm sure it's just a coincidence, but it's interesting to remember the effect the omnipresent NBC had on the 1988 Olympics in Seoul. Or maybe it's just a way, for Korea to fictionally influence the Olympics after Pyeongchang failed to get the winter Olympics... twice. At any rate, before the Olympics have even begun, Korea is already on top. The Korean newscast continues:

And therefore in the global-wide recession... South Korea's economic growth started, it has maintained the status of the best company, and kept growing and growing and then reached the level of a multinational renowned corporation, its name is Shinhwa. Electronics, oil, automobiles, distribution, and telecommunications. If you are a citizen of South Korea, you know the two letters of Shinhwa before you know the president's name, and have created a kingdom and therefore is Korea's largest conglomerate.

A series of scenes make clear that Shinhwa (신화 in Korean means 'myth' - actively suggesting, perhaps, that it's not real, like Thomas More's Utopia, a place that is 'no place'?) is a super jaebol, or conglomerate, appropriating images of other companies such as Hyundai...


...Shinsegae...


...Emart (Shinsegae again, actually)...


...and SK.


As if these conglomerates didn't have enough control of the economy and life in general in Korea already, the series proposes a Korea in which one conglomerate has taken over them all, realizing a world in which, as Jon Stewart once put it, 'we're all going to be fired by the same person.' But then it becomes clearer what the point of this alternative reality where centralization and monopoly have come to their logical end is:

On a day where they had managed to increase their imports by one trillion Won, and were sent to the Blue House, the founder of this company instead of receiving a medal said, "Sir, please allow me to build a school where my grandchildren could attend."

And who is this president?


The ‘president’ shown in the photo is Park Chung-hee, who “even went to make special laws to accommodate the school,” making him responsible for what occured next:

And then, there it was, Shinhwa School. The first school in the history of Korea to be backed by the president, who believed that economic advancement was more important than education, and even went to make special laws to accommodate the school. And now there is a saying, if you do not have Shinhwa School on your resume, don't even bother applying. It is a School made for the 1%, attended by the 1%, and fit for the 1% and therefore has maintained the reputation of the best elite school. Most common people, even if they apply when they are born, they cannot get in to the Shinhwa Kindergarten, but when accepted, then you have the way paved nonstop for Elementary, Middle and High school, and even University. It is subject of jealousy and awe for the rest of the nation's students, and parents who suffer from the hard admissions to universities.

Not unlike More's Utopia again, which used Amerigo Vespucci's accounts of the new world to create a fictional if concrete representation of Plato's Republic, we see the show's writers creating Shinhwa school - pictured above as a sprawling complex which includes Shinhwa Kindergarten, Elementary, Middle and High Schools, and University, as a metaphor for what is known in Korean discourse on education as 'Gangnam' and 'SKY' (the top three universities, Seoul National, Korea, and Yonsei). In Gangnam, the top kindergartens, hagwons, schools and even Seoul National University can be found, and a residential game of musical chairs is played by parents wanting to move to the area to get their children into these institutions.


One imagines many (most?) Koreans would see this aspect of the Boys Over Flowers universe as dystopian, however, as its amalgam of the SKY universities and the schools and hagwons of Gangnam is even more elite and self perpetuating, starting with kindergarten (as in the image of kids painting above) and working up to university, highlighting the unfairness of the entire Gangnam-oriented hagwon and school system which rewards wealth and seemingly makes it possible for students to have the way “paved nonstop” to university (except that the denizens of the real 'Gangnam' have to take exams). The advantages of the elite in the Shinhwa schools especially provoke envy, and the ability to escape the college entry exam, like the past and present ability of people of means to dodge the draft, is particularly galling. The fact that it's run by the all-encompassing Shinhwa Corporation means, of course, that the school supplies those that will fill many -if not all - of the management jobs in the company. As it says, " [I]f you do not have Shinhwa School on your resume, don't even bother applying." But then it gets worse:

However, in this Shinhwa High School, a school for the chosen, something unimaginable was happening.”

What's interesting is that in this show aimed at teens, we see such violence, as bullies - in fact the entire school - terrorizes one student, beating him until he's bloody. He fights back, until he reaches the roof, and decides to kill himself.


Until, that is, our plucky heroine, Jan-di, who is delivering his uniform from the dry cleaning business her family runs, finds him and has a chat with him.

-Why [do you want to kill yourself]? You go to such a great school.

-No, this isn't a school, it's hell.

-Excuse me? Real hell is outside of this building. Have you heard of admissions hell?

-Have you heard of F4?

-F... F...what? F4? What is that?

-The moment you get a red card from them, you become a prey for the entire school.

With this, the audience is introduced to the plot line of Hana Yori Dango, but the violence is much harsher than in the Japanese version, which lacked the brutal beating and blood. Not that such violence is absent from Japanese schools, of course; films there like All About Lily Chou Chou or Blue Spring have dealt with the brutal violence of students, but Hana Yori Dango did not. In this Korean version, we get brutal bullying and the recording of the anticipated suicide scene on students' phones. Phones have been used by students in the past both to record beatings by teachers and bullying by students, to encourage it, or used them as a tool with which to humiliate or coerce their victims. It's likely one of these phone cameras that captures Jan-di saving the boy as he tries to jump, which then makes the news.

"Brave Seomin High School girl, Who is She?

Aristocratic Elite School Shinhwa High School's Murder?"

The incident goes beyond internet, however, as we see in the next scene on a subway:


"Today's News : [What is] Aristocratic Elite School, Shinhwa High School's Real Identity?
Shinhwa High group bullying savior is a seomin wonder girl."


In fact, there are various ways in which this news is spread:


"Shinhwa High's group bullying savior is a seomin wonder girl.
What is going on in the best educational high school, Shinhwa High? The brave seomin high school girl, who is she?"


The boy on the left below seems to lack access to such media, but no fear - to his left is a man reading the newspaper...


"Who saved the student being severely bullied by his school at Shinhwa High is not rich nor comes from a family with a title" [Or so the subtitles read, if not this screenshot].


...and to his right is a woman reading a magazine:


"Brave seomin high school girl, Who is She?
The truth about aristrocratic, elite Shinhwa High School."

First, the class term seomin should be explained. As Antti Leppänen describes it,

seomin are those who besides being less well-off, having difficulties acquiring decent housing, living from hand to mouth, are also politically unmotivated and unconscious and do not act out of common political interests but individual or familial economic interests.

Seomin are different from minjung, which refers to politically conscious masses. This term is used to position Jan-di and her family, who run a dry cleaning shop, against the filthy rich students who attend Shinhwa High School. In declaring her a seomin hero, however, the media (portrayed here as monolithic and not ideologically divided - utopian indeed!) seem to be appealing to readers to identify with her in a class conscious way while decrying the abuses of the upper class attending the elite school.

While the scene on the subway may seem to be a showcase of Korea's technology and the extent of cell-phone penetration made to show off to foreign audiences, or could be interpreted as the pervasiveness of what Guy Debord termed 'the spectacle' in Korean life, it also works in connection with the following scenes.


In a cleverly done scene, we see the development of the online conversation about this incident, which has focused attention on the rich students of Shinhwa schools and how unfair the system is. Online discussion moves beyond the media's criticism of the abuses of the upper class attending Shinhwa and decries their privilege. Each internet user above is zoomed-in on as they contribute their opinions:

"There is only so far a special privilege can go, Shinhwa Group confess!"

"As mother with a child, this is something that is unforgivable. Starting from tomorrow, let's not go to Shinhwa Mart."

Those who have to take the university entrance exam, such as the girl above, are especially angered by the Shinhwa students' privilege, with the girl above describing them as "The children of god who are exempt from entrance exams."

One result of all this online attention is media interest. It is soon found out that Jan-di works part-time at 'Bom Juk' (instead of Bon Juk) and reporters try to interview her there.


This results in more exposure.


The other result of all the online grumbling about Shinhwa?


A candlelight protest, of course!

'Help us, wonder girl!'

(Not that wonder girl)

I'm sure the use of the term 'wonder girl' has been noticeable, showing that the influence of the Wonder Girls has spread from the days of spreading the 'Tell Me' dance across the nation, to the application of the term 'wonder girl' to people like Kim Yu-na (In her transition period from 'figure yojeong' to 'figure queen'), to Boys Over Flowers. Actually, I suppose it's not surprising, this use of 'wonder girl', considering that in the Tell Me video, Sohee, as 'Wonder Girl', rescues babies, fights a babari man, and finally defeats a bunch of bullies:


As for the Candlelight protest, we hear the opinions and slogans of people attending the rally.

-"Shinhwa Group, Abolish special education!"

-"I am here where people are protesting against the Shinhwa Group and the special educational system. Let's hear some opinions from the citizens. Hello, why are you out here today for the candle protest?"

-"My friend was also heavily bullied and he dropped out of school, we can say that because of the unbearable stress of the entrance exams, but they have no hardship whatsoever don't you think so?"

A guy in army uniform speaks out:

I mean, is that school a school for the gifted? It's not even a foreign language school or a science high school, like it states, it's a school for the rich. And isn't Korea a republic?

It should be obvious that this -


- is meant to conjure this...


... the first candlelight protest at Cheonggye Plaza in May 2008, which set off months of mad cow protests, which ended less than six months before Boys Over Flowers first aired. The memory of these protests - which may have been taking place as the series was being written - surely influenced the following speech:

- Right now, the PR team is working busily with the press to-

- Do you know why the public is scary? Because they are dumb. If they start getting crazy for a cause then it's impossible to stop them. It cannot be dealt with through reasoning and sense.

That is a pretty obvious reference to the mad cow protests - or at least the right wing view of them. The person these lines are given to is the CEO of Shinhwa (or the director of the school, I forget), a woman who looks more than a little similar to Park Geun-hye, the daughter of Park Chung-hee, the former president who allowed Shinhwa school to be created.


She decides, after seeing a magazine interview with Jan-di, that "The one who started the fire should be responsible for extinguishing it," figuring that the media and netizens will cool down if she allows Jan-di to enroll in Shinhwa school. Her family is thrilled, and sing and dance around the house, deliriously happy that their daughter will attend an elite school, and though she refuses, they browbeat her into going.


As with many Korean dramas, I really find the acting to be grating, mainly because of the way it is stylized, which is not at all to my taste. In one scene, I believe on the roof before Jan-di saves the student from jumping, she replies in confusion - and with a really dumb look on her face - to a question, "W-w-w-w-w-w-w-w-w-what?" Arrgh. But I digress. And to digress further, her mom is played by Im Ye-jin, who was a teen movie star in the 1970s (and acted in 25 movies in 5 years, which must have been tiring, perhaps explaining her 20-year hiatus), starring in such dramas as 'I Really, Really Like You' (1977, below).


From there, Jan-di starts school, watches the sickening way F4 (a quartet of the school's richest and most powerful boys) act like gangsters but are treated like super(junior)stars, and is either ignored or picked on until she gets a red card from F4, after which the entire school gangs up on her, and when she resists further, a member of F4 sends his minions to gang-rape her, something I don't think was in the Japanese version, and may be a specifically Korean addition. [It seems it is in Hana Yori Dango]. Thus ends the first episode:


It's okay, though, since they fall in love and are together at the end of the series, or so I've read.

The show's concept of Shinhwa Corporation and the Shinhwa Schools acting as symbols of both Korea's Jaebol and the failings of the education system, as well as its depiction of the way in which people organized in order to criticize perceived abuses made for an interesting first ten minutes, but it's too bad this fictional world couldn't have been explored in depth in order to comment further on Korean society. That such a promising beginning turned into such shallow schmaltz shouldn't be surprising, however, considering the source material, so the question remains: Is the inclusion of this very Korean alternate reality at the beginning a disappointment because it inevitably ended so quickly, or is it worthy of admiration for being broadcast at all, especially at the beginning of such innocuous fluff aimed at the youth market?



Fun fact:
Jack London wrote what is considered the first modern dystopian novel, The Iron Heel, in 1908, four years after he visited Korea. Coincidence? Probably. His short story "A Nose For The King", written in 1904, does however depict the arbitrary power of officials in Korea, albeit in a humorous manner.

Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?

I had just finished the last post and the title popped into my head, based on this poem by Francois Villon (arguably France's best medieval poet, who seemed equally happy making allusions to classical figures as writing about his exploits in bars and brothels, and also someone who escaped the gallows for murder and theft). Translated, the line 'Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?' means 'But where are the snows of bygone years' (quoted in such different places as Tennessee William's Glass Menagerie and Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds). The point? After writing the title and posting the post, I looked outside.


I'm sure what's fallen in the last hour will be more than Seoul will get all year, unfortunately. Because hey, if it's gonna be cold, you might as well have snow. As it turns out though, Seoul's lack of snow isn't anything new. As Percival Lowell wrote of his visit to Seoul in 1884:

Owing to the latitude of Soul, thirty-seven and a half degrees north, the sun's power there, even in midwinter, is so great that the snow at the sea-level never lies deep upon the ground. After a heavy snow-storm, the evening before, it is surprising to those accustomed to more northern latitudes to notice how quickly it vanishes in places exposed to the sun. If it were not for repeated additions, there would be very little even in the depth of winter; and as the season advances and the days lengthen, you may trudge homeward some night through a heavy fall of snow, to find on the next afternoon no trace of it left. You have therefore, almost simultaneously, the coming of snow, like a snow-storm in New York, with a disappearance of it worthy of Virginia ; and yet it may be far colder on the day it vanishes than on the day it appeared.

I guess the lack of snow explains why people my age remember using spent yontan to roll into snowballs to make a snowman when they were young...

Mais où sont les 골목 d'antan?

Back in December I posted photos of Gindeung Maeul, an older neighbourhood near my house that was mostly abandoned, where I had enjoyed riding my bike through the maze of paths and streets. One of the ways I figured out where some of the paths connected was watching kids play one day. As I took photos in one spot, I'd see the kids run down a street in front of me, only to reappear behind me a minute or two later. It was kind of like injecting radioactive dye into the streets to see where they flowed.


I also posted photos of the neighbourhood's progressive destruction, and now that Google Earth has a new map, we can see what it looks after the demolition of most of the planned redevelopment area:


Before:


After:


What's interesting is that if you look at the satellite photo above and a panorama I took below, they look rather similar:

The same pathways through the soil, the same two excavators. Also, a building in the center, near the top (in the distance) is still standing. The photo above was taken on October 19, while the photo below was taken November 23 (with the distant building gone).

At any rate, it seems the Google Satellite Map for the area new Gimpo Airport dates from late October last year. Here's another photo from January 17 of the area, with no change.

I took the photo below on May 26. I had no idea if the people living in the house in the center above were still there, but it was easy to see that the people living in the building below had left, and they were one of the last families to leave. I remember sitting on the now overturned platform in front of the 'Supeo' or corner store below and talking to some of the few remaining families back in June of last year, prior to the start of demolition. As they shared watermelon with me and chatted, you could still get a sense of the community (dwindling as it was) that had once existed there, similar in some ways to the alleyways depicted in Kim Ki-chan's photos (such as in the excellent book 그 골목이 품고있는 것들 (The things the alley embraces).

'Happy Corner Store'

There aren't many alleys now, though.

"Gendered Multiculturalism" and visa statistics

An article about Scott Burgeson's new book appeared in the Korea Times today, and mentions that

On Nov. 5, he is giving a lecture titled "Notes on Multiculturalism in Korea" at Kium, an annex of Kyobo bookstore inside [Shin] Nonhyeon subway station, Gangnam.

As he described it to me,

"[T]he point of the lecture is to deconstruct the myth of "multiculturalism" in Korea, address the Korean media's continued stereotyping and demonizing of Western expat males here, especially ESL teachers, and offer an alternative formulation of multiculturalism here based not on ethnicity, since Korea will remain overwhelmingly homogenous ethnically speaking for the next several decades (reaching only 10% in 2050), but rather based on alternative values transcending race and ethnicity, which will ideally help Koreans better tolerate differences and diversity among themselves."

Here is the opening:

These days we often hear in the South Korean media and from the South Korean government that Korea has entered a "New Age of Multiculturalism." The reasons for what I will call the Korean establishment's promotion of this idealized notion are complex, and for now I can only offer two primary causes or motivation here: First of all, the old national ideals of "Danil Minjok" and "Han Bando" (i.e., Reunification with the North) have come under widespread questioning in the past few years, and are no longer seen as realistic or desirable by many Koreans, and so a "Multicultural Korea" offers a positive alternative identity as the nation seeks to "rebrand" itself in today's globalized world. More to the point, this is simply a "good" international marketing strategy, as South Korea aims to attract more "multinational companies" and "international investment" here.

A second reason is driven by what we might call "gendered multiculturalism," specifically in response to the many "foreign brides," mostly from China and Southeast Asia, who have been coming to Korea since the late 1990s to marry Korean men, often older men in the countryside. These bicultural families, which presently number over 100,000, have in turn been raising a new generation of bicultural children, prompting the South Korean government to introduce a number of laws and policies in the past few years in support of such "multicultural families." Of course, from the 1950s and well into the 1990s, tens of thousands of "bicultural children" were born of Korean mothers and U.S. military service members, and quite a few more as the result of marriages between South Korean women and male native ESL teachers from Western countries, who have been coming to Korea in large numbers since the 1990s. However, the South Korean government traditionally felt no need to support such "multicultural families" at the official level, and the reason is fairly obvious: Gendered multiculturalism has only recently been embraced by the Korean establishment because it serves the interests of Korean men, which is to say the patriarchal structure here. This becomes even more apparent when we consider that the number of male migrant workers here from Southeast Asia and China is roughly four times that of "foreign brides" from these same countries, and yet the South Korean government continues to make it difficult for male migrant workers from developing countries to obtain permanent residency or citizenship here, and often they are deported in large numbers. Clearly, "multiculturalism" has a rather narrow meaning as far as official Korea is concerned, which is why I call it "gendered multiculturalism" in the service of Korean patriarchy.

It sounds like an interesting lecture, and as he points out at his site, it's at 7pm.

Scott asked me to confirm some immigration statistics, so I thought I'd post the fruits of those findings here (the numbers are rounded, not exact).

The Korea Immigration Service's statistics for 2008 can be downloaded by clicking here. You may end up with a file called '2008'; if so, you have to rename it '2008.zip'. In the zip file are many excel files. “2장_Ⅱ_체류외국인현황” has the end-of-2008 statistics for all foreigners in Korea by country and visa type. Helpful in determining the different visa types is this List of South Korean visas.

For migrant workers, we can find them under three visa types:

D-3 (industrial trainee (which I thought had been discontinued?))
Male 26,000
Female 8,800

E-9 Employment Permit (migrant workers)
M 192,400
F 24,000
(They are all Asian, but only 7000 are Korean Chinese)

H-2 (Korean Chinese working visit visa)
M 161,000
F 137,000

If you include H-2 Korean Chinese workers there are 549,000 migrant workers.
M 379,400 69%
F 169,800 31%

Without the H-2 Korean Chinese migrant workers, the total runs
M 218,400 87%
F 32,800 13%

So including the Korean Chinese in the total migrant worker figure, we see that there are are twice as many males as females.

F-2 (Marriage residency - total 123,000)
M 15,300 12.2%
F 108,000 87.8%

Most of these are Asian, but 5,000 are not.
M 3,000
F 2,000

F-5 (permanent resident - Total 19,000)
(An F-2 prior makes it easier to get this, but is no guarantee of marriage)
M 7,800
F 11,400

If we only look at the F-2 figures as an indicator of marriage migrants, we see there are seven times as many females as males, though among non-Asian marriage partners we see 50% more males. Interesting. Also interesting is the fact that it was only, I believe, in the last decade that foreign men married to Korean women could get an F-2 visa. Prior to that it was only for foreign wives of Korean men, something else pointing in the direction of '"gendered multiculturalism" in the service of Korean patriarchy.'

Those statistics are well worth downloading and looking through (quite a few of them have English translations, at least in part) if you want to kill an hour or two...

In the Korea Herald about foreigners and sex crimes

I wrote an article about the place of foreigners in the current debate over punishment of sex crimes against children prompted by the 'Na-yeong Incident' which was published in the Korea Herald today.

In researching this, the most interesting thing for me was digging up statistics breaking down foreign residents by age. It was always clear there weren't many foreign children or elderly here, but it's nice to have it quantified (they only make up 8.2 percent of the foreign population, compared to a similar demographic making up 27.6 percent of the Korean population). Not taking that difference into account makes Korean crime rate seem more favourable than it is. Needless to say, E-2 visa holders have no children and likely no elderly among their numbers, so this approach to the Korean crime rate should also be applied when making comparisons with E-2 visa holders.

Thanks to Matt Lamers for publishing the article despite its last-minute nature, and to Benjamin Wagner for suggesting the overseas crime connection.

Matt asked for my sources, and since they're all compiled, I'll post them here for the curious:

Korea Herald article on Rep. Woo Yoon-Keun's statements.
KIS document 2장_Ⅱ_체류외국인현황:








SPO stats from the Wagner report page 20
CIA Korean population stats
KIS Document 2장_Ⅲ_2.국적및연령별 등록외국인현황








Korea Times article on banning foreign pedophiles
Marmot's Hole post on 2006 National Assembly Committee on Gender Equality study
Joongang Ilbo article on National Youth Commission findings about Kiribati
Chosun Ilbo article mentioning 2003 National Human Rights Commission survey
Korea Times article by Justice Minister Lee Kwi-nam

SNUE president Song was misquoted by the Korea Times.

As I noted Friday, the Korea Times reported that Seoul National University of Education president Song Kwang-yong said the following about foreign English teachers:

Song also stressed that Korean teachers should replace native English-speaking teachers as soon as possible. "Currently, only 20.5 percent of native English speaking teachers (at schools) have teaching licenses (according to data from the Education Ministry, November 2008), so it is urgent for us to foster teachers who have excellent English proficiency," Song said.

"The native speakers are not qualified and are often involved in sexual harassment and drugs."

According to Benjamin Wagner, who contacted President Song's office this morning by phone and sent him questions by email:

President Song was good enough to make a personal call in reply to the email.

He was misquoted by the KT. President Song explained that while problems with foreign teachers as covered in the press were mentioned in passing, he did not say "The native speakers are not qualified and are often involved in sexual harassment and drugs."

President Song said the focus of the discussion was the need for more qualified teachers because his school is responsible for training them.

So the source of this quote defaming foreign English teachers in Korea would appear to be Kang Shin-who, so that is who complaints should be directed to - or the person who should be complained about. As Scott Burgeson noted in a comment, the Korea Times can be reached by phone here:

Political Desk : 02-724-2343
City Desk : 02-724-2346
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The Housemaid Remaid

I finally watched Kim Ki-young's 1960 film The Housemaid, which was released on DVD a few months ago. It's long been considered a classic (or at least since his work was 'rediscovered' at the 1998 Pusan International Film Festival) and more than lives up to its reputation. Basically, a middle class family moves into a new, two story house, and, due to the wife's pregnancy, hires a maid.



(The film is notable for having a young Ahn Sung-gi play the son.)


The maid, however, is a little odd...


... and she proceeds to wreak havoc on the household.




To say more would ruin the fun, but it's an amazing film which never stops surprising you. Imagine a mix of the Harold Pinter/Joseph Losey collaboration The Servant and Takeshi Miike's Audition. Go watch it. Now.

Or soon, at any rate, before the remake is released. I just saw this, which reveals that The Housemaid will be remade starring Jeon Do-yeon and directed by Im Sang-soo (best known for The President's Last Bang and Good Lawyer's Wife). While part of me wonders why such a great film - so recently re-released on DVD - is being remade, the other part is intrigued by such a director - actress pairing and is looking forward to it. One hopes they'll find a part for Ahn Sung-gi. It's to start filming in December for a May release.

Club bust and AES update

Yonhap reports that there was a drug bust on Thursday which uncovered 53 drugs users who had attended drug parties in clubs and at a Gapyeong resort.

Twelve people were arrested were arrested for smuggling ecstasy from China and other drug offences included Gangnam club owner Mr. Kim and Itaewon club DJ Mr. An, while 41 were booked without detention. The drugs involved included ecstasy, meth, and pot. The drug taking took place in clubs in Gangnam, Itaewon, Hondae, and Gapyeong resort. Most parties involved 2-300 people, but one in Gapyeong had 4-500 people attending. Most of the people involved were affluent types from Gangnam, employees of places of entertainment (like clubs) and foreign students. Police found out about a party in Itaewon in August and after three months of undercover work made the arrests. They expect the investigation to expand.

While this has nothing to with English teachers, at Anti-English Spectrum, the cafe's manager (엠투) offers several comments on the story, the first being:

Wooshi (Damn)... I hope that they don't overlap with the people that we are trying to track down... ㅠㅠ

The second comment reads:

Right now our group is really in a mess... trying to track down drug-using teachers. It makes me sigh that this good news will just make the suspects [that we are searching for] hide further underground...
But it is still good news.

In another post the AES leader reports he is very tired and very busy tracking foreigners. Yesterday he went to Yangju, Gyeonggi-do, to stakeout a foreign teacher and then to Yangcheon-gu, where another member followed the teacher they suspect of smoking and selling in a taxi to Mok-dong and to a club with lots of foreigners.

Yes indeed, these people really have no lives.

[Hat tip to Benjamin Wagner]

The source of the Kaneko-Park photo

The photo above was posted a few years ago at the Marmot's Hole when Robert wrote about the location of Japanese anarchist and nihilist Kaneko Fumiko's grave in Mungyeong. The photo of her with her husband (their marriage was registered in prison), Korean anarchist Park Yeol drew attention in the comments to that post to how affectionate the pose is (circa 1925), and this posting by Brother Anthony noted that it was taken while they were in Prison. I looked more closely at their case here. One thing I didn't know was that it was apparently Uiyeoldan - a group that would have been called a 'terrorist' group back then - that Park Yeol was hoping to get a bomb (or bomb making materials) from.

Kaneko Fumiko (from here)

I've been reading Treacherous women of imperial Japan: patriarchal fictions, patricidal fantasies by Hélène Bowen Raddeker, or at least what is available of it at Google Books ($195 is a bit steep for me). The book looks at the experiences of Japanese anarchists Kanno Suga - executed in 1911 in a case of 'judicial murder' - and Kaneko Fumiko and their collisions with state power, and reveals something quite interesting:


It's fascinating the freedom they were given while in prison and on trial for plotting to kill the emperor (though it's pointed out Kaneko may have had nothing to do with it, but accepted responsibility anyway). What's also interesting is that it was this judge who asked her to write an autobiography/confession, and who eventually passed it on to her lawyer (also an activist), and thus it's partly because of him we know so much about her. Her confession is available in English. Apparently Park wrote one as well, but it's not available in English, and I'm not even sure if it's available in Korean. Raddeker's book delves into a great deal of material beyond the confession, including her letters and court documents. Park and Fumiko were found guilty and sentenced to death, but this was commuted to life in prison by Imperial pardon. Kaneko responded by tearing up the pardon and saying:

You toy with people’s lives, killing or allowing to live as it suits you. What is this special pardon? Am I to be disposed of according to your whims?

In prison, authorities made sure to watch her so that she didn't commit suicide, because, essentially, the Emperor had ordered that she must live. Strangely enough, the work the women were to do in prison was weave hemp into rope. She refused at first, but one day asked to do the work.

She worked hard that day, and the next morning the guard on duty looked in on her at 6:30 to find her diligently twisting the rope; yet when she was checked some ten minutes later, she was found hanging limply from the same rope now attached to bars at the window. [...] [The doctor’s] report expressed amazement at the ‘determined, carefully premeditated, and calm manner of suicide.'

Reading one of the poems she wrote in prison, her course of action doesn't seem surprising:

One's limbs
may not be free
and yet—
if one has but the will to die,
death is freedom.

One wonders about the urge for martyrdom that drove patriotic assassins like Ahn Jung-geun or Yun Bong-gil to their actions - which they must have clearly known would result in their executions. What's interesting about Kaneko is that it appears she was only vaguely involved in the plan to import explosives but chose to implicate herself. Some have tried to suggest that she had a 'death wish' or that she wanted to be with her lover; she told him "I'll never let you die alone" but only he walked out of jail in 1945 (and 'went north' during the North Korean invasion in 1950, apparently dying in 1974). She was 23 when she committed suicide, and while my knee jerk reaction is to consider her suicide tragic, consider what she wrote to the judge:

So I say to you: ‘It’s a joke to admonish a person who doesn’t want to live to want to live. It’s a real joke to turn a person not content with life and tell him his life is very happy.’

For me life has no value. Value comes through a person’s having joy in life. Everything about humans is individual, but nothing is more coloured by individuality than the issue of life and death.

In the end, who am I to judge the final act of someone who had such a strong belief in the power she alone had over her life and death?

My multicultural society does not include foreign English teachers!

A reader linked to an article titled "SNUE Takes Lead in Quest for Multicultural Society."

With the growing number of interracial families in Korea, schools need more teachers who are well-trained in taking care of multicultural children, educationalists say. Changing the education environment for a multicultural society needs to start from elementary schools, they add.

Seoul National University of Education (SNUE), a higher education institute that specializes in fostering primary school teachers, has taken the lead in creating various programs to deal with the surge of mixed children into elementary schools.

Song Kwang-yong, president of the university, explained the school's "Triangle Partnership" program, which centers on setting up a successful multicultural education environment at primary schools.

"Interracial children are rapidly increasing and elementary schools are the first to be affected by this trend. Our university should be the first to change, and our school is the first to introduce multicultural education programs among Korean universities," Song said in an interview with The Korea Times at his office last Thursday.[...]

Under the programs, teachers receive orientation on how to take better care of children from interracial households, and bilingual teachers are being taught how to efficiently communicate with children from immigrants.[...]

According to the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology, the number of children from multicultural families in Korea has more than tripled over the past three years up to 18,778 last year from 6,121 in 2005.

Many of the children have difficulties adapting to schools while around 15 percent of them stop attending schools and instead opt to give up their studies. With this problematic situation, the ministry has allotted about 5.8 billion won ($4.6 million) to the project this year.

It's nice to see the president of what is considered to be Korea's best teacher's university planning for the future and preparing for the challenges that mixed race children will face. Mind you, it seems foreign children don't seem to get the consideration mixed-race Korean children do:

According to the Education, Science and Technology Ministry, 1,402 of 17,000 children of migrant workers attend school – 981 in elementary, 314 in middle, and 107 in high school. This means that most of the children are being left uneducated.

As the Korea Times continues,

Song also stressed that Korean teachers should replace native English-speaking teachers as soon as possible. "Currently, only 20.5 percent of native English speaking teachers (at schools) have teaching licenses (according to data from the Education Ministry, November 2008), so it is urgent for us to foster teachers who have excellent English proficiency," Song said.

"The native speakers are not qualified and are often involved in sexual harassment and drugs."

Before reacting to this, it's worth considering a few things. In September of last year, Song was also quoted in an article titled "The role of universities is important for regional development," saying that he was thankful for the help provided by native speaking teachers employed in Seoul schools but that Korea couldn’t rely only on native speaking teachers. He also said that it would be more efficient to invest in SNUE’s teacher training than in bringing in native speaking teachers. There's no mention of unqualified teachers and their sexual harassment and drug use.

Most importantly, it should be noted that the article was written by Kang Shin-who. I've written about him before, looking at how he repeatedly made incorrect assertions that managed to drive a wedge between E and F visa holders. I also mentioned these two cases:

It may be worth noting that Brian in Jeollanam-do has reported that statements attributed to Park Nahm-sheik in an article by Kang from April ["Some English speakers don't have much affection toward our children because they came here to earn money and they often cause problems''] were said to have been mistranslated or taken out of context, according to people close to Park. I wasn't surprised when I read Brian's post, as I had not had any luck finding his statements in Korean.

Another article by Kang from March this year has the supervisor of the Incheon education office, Koo Young-sun, on record saying that, "Many foreign teachers lack teaching methodology and some of them are not ethically qualified to treat children." A Yonhap article on the same topic (in Korean) has no mention of these controversial statements from the supervisor.

He also took a press release by ATEK about the election of their new president and turned it into a platform for Anti-English Spectrum. Another more creative look at his body of work is here.

I don't know if ATEK or anyone else feels like taking it up, but I think it would be worth checking with SNUE president Song's office to see if he actually said these things. If he did, he should be criticized for it, and if he didn't then Kang Shin-who should be made accountable for it.

Well, at least the Korea Times has a sense of humour

In the Times the other day, Justice Minister Lee Kwi-nam wrote a message describing how Korea was going to enforce a "consistent and intensified" crackdown on and deportation of as many illegal immigrants as possible and described a plan to fingerprint and photograph all foreigners coming into the country. The name of the article?

Minister Committed to Open Society for Foreigners

OK.

We're also told that

today Korea has become one of the most quintessential immigrant nations with a large immigrant population. The number of immigrants in Korea has exceeded 1.15 million, accounting for 2.3 percent of the entire population.

Actually, this number includes tourists and short term stayers (B and C visas), who aren't really immigrants. Last year the number of residents was calculated by immigration to be 854,007.

This was interesting:

On the other hand, since 2002, the number of people who have lost or renounced their nationality has increased to approximately 1.8 million, far surpassing the current 83,000 naturalized or newly reinstated Korean citizens. And this phenomenon in the net outflow of Korean citizens has been continuing.

And I see logic isn't seen as being necessary when devising immigration policy:

To ease anti-foreign workers sentiment, under the principles of the rule of law, the government strictly cracks down on the foreigners illegally overstaying their visa.

At the same time, the government encourages the illegal migrant workers to depart this country of their own volition by discharging them from fines and minimizing entry restrictions, which enables them to re-enter Korea.

We want you out! But come back any time.

He also mentions the ability to get re-entry visas and the like online, which sounds great. Has anyone tried that?