5 posts tagged “south korea”

On 26 March South Korea's Ministry of Information and Communication announced a new crackdown on Internet content (to read the announcement, in Korean, click here, to read a related news story from the JoongAng Daily click here). The focus of the announcement was on pornographic user-generated content posted on popular Korean portal sites - this after a porn clip made it onto Yahoo Korea for a few hours last week.

Clips deemed inappropriate will be ordered off the portals, visitors to banned sites will likely be greeted by messages like the one shown below.

The reason given for the new and strengthened measures was to protect Korean youth from the seedier sides of the Internet. While not in favor of censorship, I can't really fault the Ministry for its goal here.

What I can and do fault the Ministry for, however, is it's restrictions on access to websites it deems pro-North Korean - also announced as part of the crackdown. Recently, while returning to a site I had accessed frequently from Seoul a few years ago while doing research for my MA thesis, I was met with the screen below:

(for more info, and the picture, please head to my website, 1stopKorea.com)
 

Shinzo Abe, Prime Minister of Japan:
“

Japan's prime minister, Shinzo Abe, denied on Thursday that the country's' military forced women into sexual slavery during World War II, casting doubt on a past government apology. "The fact is, there is no evidence to prove there was coercion," Abe told a reporters."

"

Nariaki Nakayama, chairman of a group of ruling party lawmakers that deny a Japanese government role in the forced sexual slavery:
“

Some say it is useful to compare the brothels to college cafeterias run by private companies, who recruit their own staff, procure foodstuffs, and set prices," Nakayama said. "Where there's demand, businesses crop up ... but to say women were forced by the Japanese military into service is off the mark," he said. "This issue must be reconsidered, based on truth ... for the sake of Japanese honor."

"

 Quotes from the International Herald Tribune Website, 1 March 2007

This has got to stop. Japanese government denials of forcing women into military sexual slavery have the same basis in ‘fact’, plus similar levels of dysfunctional morality, as Holocaust denials.

Facts are facts - IT HAPPENED. Japanese government records say so. The former victims, thousands of women from countries around the world, say so. Even former Japanese military members say so. Only politicians could be idiotic, ignorant, and racist enough to deny this.

The U.S. House of Representatives had hearings last month on this issue of Japanese WWII sexual slavery. Now they need to pass the resolution before them calling on the Japanese government to accept responsibility and apologize. No more should Japanese politicians be allowed to hide behind lies and childish historical obfuscation.

For more information, in English, please visit:

• Sharing House - http://www.nanum.org/
• Japan Policy Research Institute, Japan's Responsibility Toward Comfort Women Survivors - http://www.jpri.org/publications/workingpapers/wp77.html
• The Comfort Women Project - http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~soh/comfortwomen.html

or try reading:

• True Stories of the Korean Comfort Women
• The Comfort Women: Japan's Brutal Regime of Enforced Prostitution in the Second World War
  

I’ve been hearing and reading these for years, so finally decided to put up a few of my own.

You know you’ve been in a long time (too long?), when:

• you see scissors and toilet paper on a restaurant table and … well, you don’t really think much of it
• you’re driving your motorcycle down the sidewalk and get irritated when people don’t get out of your way
• you have ever owned, or at least know the meaning of, the expression, “bee-bee”
• you hate going all the way out to Incheon Airport because you remember how easy, quick and cheap it was to get to Kimpo (and you remember when “Gimpo” was actually called Kimpo, Busan was Pusan, and Gangnam was Kangnam …)
• you think of dial-up modems as something that went out with leisure suits and 8-tracks
• you’re no longer surprised when your health club’s sound system spends most of its time playing slow love ballads
• you used to visit hidden ‘after-hours bars’ that secretly stayed open past the curfew
• you have seen 1-won coins in use
• even when meeting and shaking hands with non-Koreans you reflexively touch your elbow
• you go home and your friends look at you weird because you keep pouring everyone’s drinks
• you now cut up apples and remove the peel before eating them
• you go to SE Asia and think the Buddhist monks look weird in orange instead of grey

I came across an article in the International Herald Tribune a couple of days ago that does an excellent job summing up South Korean views on the importance of the NK nuclear test and what the hot topics are here on the peninsula a year ahead of next year's presidential elections - economy first, nuke stuff later.

"SEOUL: Bruised by South Korea's cutthroat politics, bewildered by voters' rapidly changing concerns and battered mercilessly in the polls, President Roh Moo Hyun is limping toward the last year of his term.

But it is not Roh's engagement of North Korea, or even its recent nuclear test, that has saddled him with a current approval rating of 11 percent.

...

Indeed, even as the North Korean crisis keeps widening the gap between Seoul and Washington, it is nothing like a hot-button issue here among voters. North Korea's nuclear test last month has, if anything, reconfirmed the national consensus that South Korea has no choice but to keep its policy of engaging North Korea."

More at IHT 'Roh Loses Support' Article

Ever since the North’s nuclear test last month, and in the run-up to the holidays, people at home have been asking about what the mood is like here on the peninsula. Is it more dangerous now? What do the South Koreans think?

Is it more dangerous now?

Nope, not if you’re living in Seoul, or anywhere else close to the North’s border. Whether I’m sitting here and get killed by an artillery shell, or a nuke, the result is the same – I’m dead. So, for anyone living in the area, in range of North Korean artillery for decades, the North’s development of a nuke changes little.

What was the reaction among South Koreans?

I first heard of the explosion the afternoon it happened, during a break between classes. When I returned to class I asked my students, 1^st to 4^th year female students at the university in Seoul where I teach, if they had heard the news. Most had not and, when I explained what had happened, I was met with cheers and applause. Some of the students were literally ecstatic that the North had developed a nuclear weapon, “Because their power is our power.” Friends and co-workers reported similar reactions.

While these feelings are most common among the young and the left-wing, they are in no way a small minority. A sizeable segment of the South Korean population is honestly happy the North has tested an atomic bomb. The idea the North would ever do anything to hurt them is deemed crazy and war-like, the events of 1950-53 notwithstanding. In my class I told my students to go talk to their grandparents before getting too excited, then got back to the lesson.

In the end, the reaction to the nuclear test here in ranged from joy and happiness at one end, through a vast lack of concern across the middle, to a few demonstrations and some anger from the old and the right-wing. In the space of a few weeks, if not a few days, it seems everything here on the peninsula returned to normal. People that like the North still do – the SK government has kept up the Kaesong and Kuemgang projects. People that dislike the North still do, only with maybe a little more energy than before.

If there is such a thing as yawning at a nuclear test, that’s what’s happened.