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Thursday, December 26, 2019

Rock and folk songs in the Korean top 10, 1974-1975

One of the features of the 1960s and 1970s weekly magazines I’ve been going through is the weekly top 10 music chart, and I realized a while ago that I had full set of charts from 1969-76 (mostly from the Weekly Hankook). Here's an example of one from Sunday Seoul magazine, dated February 9, 1975 (with Shin Joong-hyun's song 미인 topping the chart):



I decided to chart the rise and fall of rock and folk music during that time as well as make playlists of these songs in the top 10 from 1974-75, at the height of ‘70s youth culture in Korea. Here they are, broken up into 6-month increments.

Early 1974 rock, pop, and folk songs in the Korean Top 10:



Late 1974 rock, pop, and folk songs in the Korean Top 10:



Early 1975 rock, pop, and folk songs in the Korean Top 10:



Late 1975 rock, pop, and folk songs in the Korean Top 10:
(Note the move into synth-pop; Korea was rather ahead of the curve in that regard.)




Monday, December 23, 2019

Christmas in the 1960s-70s and a review of David Fields' 'Foreign Friends'

As a sequel to last year's Korea Times article about Christmas in Korea in the early 1960s, I wrote a follow-up last week about Christmas in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

As well, a few weeks ago I wrote a review of David Fields' excellent book Foreign Friends: Syngman Rhee, American Exceptionalism, and the Division of Korea. It's a very readable book; Fields impressed me with his ability to balance depth and concision in his writing. I didn’t have much time, in 800 words, to do justice to his examination of the concept of the “American mission” that Rhee made use of rhetorically other than in a single sentence which was subsequently cut for space. Here’s how the review as I wrote it begins; the first sentence of the third paragraph was excised, (while the last sentence of that paragraph was altered somewhat).
As the title of David P. Fields’ book “Foreign Friends: Syngman Rhee, American Exceptionalism, and the Division of Korea” suggests, it offers a new interpretation of one of the most controversial topics in the study of modern Korean history: the division of Korea in 1945.

In addition to serving as a biography of Syngman Rhee before 1945 and narrating a history of the Korean independence movement in the US, the book also highlights the way in which Rhee invoked the idea of the American mission before American audiences in order to gain their support.

In the late 1800s this belief that Providence set before Americans a special mission to the world compelled hundreds young Americans to sail abroad with the belief that it was their responsibility to spread Christianity, modern medicine, and democratic ideals. Rhee himself was a beneficiary of missionary work. He was saved from blindness as a child by Western medicine and educated at the missionary-run Pai Chai Mission School. There he was converted to political liberalism which led him to participate in a campaign to reform the monarchy as a leader of the Independence Club. As a result of this agitation he was arrested, and after months of torture he converted to Christianity.
As noted above, the rest can be found here. As well, an excellent lecture summarizing the book can be watched here.

Thursday, December 19, 2019

Drama at Phu Quoc Island

A Vietnamese refugee's memories of Korea
Part 1: Yang Bumo [Foster Parents]
Part 2: In Search of Freedom
Part 3: Drama at Phu Quoc Island
Part 4: Storm Near Taiwan
Part 5: Arrival in Busan

Part 3: Drama at Phu Quoc Island

[As an update: I'm not yet sure if my Korea Times article had anything to do with it, but a member of General Lee's family has contacted William's family and should be able to provide the information they seek in trying to track down the family in Busan who helped them - something I'm delighted to hear.]

April 27, 1975
I had never been sailing before in my life, but the blue Ocean was so beautiful and I really enjoyed the wonderful, fresh air. I looked around the deck and saw that Marines were helping everybody set up their own space. I found a little corner and with a little help from a Marine we managed to have an Army poncho put up to block the harsh sun that was streaming down on us. A pretty little Vietnamese lady with 2 kids and her Korean husband were on our left and a family of three, including an old Vietnamese couple, was on our right. Everything seemed to be cozy, and after a few conversations with the lady next to us it seemed like everyone on the ship knew where they were going before they got on except us! The ship was going to Korea as I expected. While it was still cruising at a comfortable speed, the Marines cooked ramyeon for everybody on the deck, and while I was having a bowl of it, at that moment I thought, “Life could not be any better than this.”

April 28, 1975
I got up very early in the morning and walked around the deck of the ship and began observing everything that was happening. I soon realized everyone on the ship had a very close relationship with a Korean. They either worked for a Korean or had a family member who was Korean. Most of them were Vietnamese women who were married to a Korean, and they were so surprised to hear that we did not have any connection to Korea but were on the ship. After that, I found out the reason for the chaos at the Korean Embassy gate was because the guards were checking passports and documents to prove that people were the wives or children of Koreans, or that they had some other connection with Korea. That was how they decided if people could gain entry to the Embassy grounds to wait for the bus to take them to Tan Cang and then to Korea. There were so many people there, I realized, “Good Lord, we were so lucky.” Those four patches given to me by Mr. Cho at the Embassy were like treasures. If someone wanted to take them from me they would have had to do so over my dead body.

By that time I think the ship was cruising at a comfortable speed because everything seemed to be so steady. The ship would never know how good a young guy on her back felt, sailing into an uncertain future, but content knowing for certain his destination was Korea, land of freedom.

April 29 – April 30, 1975
Drama at Phu Quoc Island

After a few days sailing on the ocean in perfect weather, on the early morning of April 30 our ship stopped, and so did the other. Everyone on the ship was wondering what had happened. I don’t think anybody knew where we were. Most people, including common people like my family and all the Vietnamese women with Korean husbands, were preparing for what to do, how to act, and so on once we arrived in Korea, but Korea was not that close. It had only been four days, and people said it would take a whole month to go to Korea by ship. “It’s not this close!” I thought to myself. “Where the hell are we?” I ran around asking but all the information I got was that we were at Phu Quoc Island - we were still in Vietnamese territory. I soon learned that the captain of the ship was preparing a small boat for the passengers on board without any relationship to Koreans or proper authority to be on board. After checking their passports and Korean documents, anybody without proper documents to prove they had the right to stay was to be taken to Phu Quoc Island to be returned to Vietnam on the orders of the government in Saigon.

“Holy shit - this is it,” I thought to myself. We were going to be sent back to Phu Quoc Island. There was nothing we had to prove that we had anything to do with Korea besides those four patches with some Korean words on them, and I was sure that in that situation the damned things would not help. My Sister had tears in her eyes and did not speak for some time because I ordered her to keep a low profile. She said, “I'm so scared, let them put us back on Phu Quoc and from there we can go to our father at Rach Gia.” My father was then still working as Chief of the National Bank in Rach Gia and she thought Rach Gia was not too far from Phu Quoc. I yelled at her, “Just shut up and let me think!”
It was then that two Korean men came to us and surprised me by speaking to us in Vietnamese. They said in a strong accent that they wanted to talk to us in the corner of the ship. I left my sister and brothers and walked with one man to a corner of the ship, and he said because they were Korean they could help us stay aboard if we had money or gold to give him. With a look of shock on my face I told him we did not have any money at all, and that all I had in my pocket was 16,000 Dong from my first pay packet, which was useless money at that point. He laughed and said, “What about on your sister’s suitcase? She must have some money or gold. Just give some to us and we will help the four of you stay on board.” He repeated that it was easy for him to help us stay aboard since he was Korean.

Even today I still wonder how the hell he knew that we didn't have any Korean relatives on board and that we didn’t have anything to do with Korea. I think he must have been a hustler who, after four days of studying all of the passengers on the ship, had figured out who was who on the deck and who had the right to stay and who didn’t. Knowing our situation, he must have thought he could make a ton of money before talking to us because he thought my sister’s suitcase was full of gold and dollars like the others he had approached before.

To his bad luck, we had nothing to offer, and by the look from my face he realized that we were as poor as rats, and he slowly withdrew to the other side of the ship. I didn’t see his face again until we reached Busan, when I saw him during our first week at the refugee. I said hello and then never saw him again. I think because he was Korean he was able to get out of the camp and go to wherever his home was.

The process of checking papers started at the front of the ship, and we were near the middle. I saw the small boat taking passenger to Phu Quoc Island, which could be seen in the distance. I began to panic and yelled at my sister and brothers, in the sternest way I had ever spoken to my siblings, “You all come here! Let's go to the back of the ship! Duyen, you’re a woman – as soon as we get close to the back run up to the captain’s office and tell him everything! Show him the patches Mr. Cho gave us and beg him to stay on board – do whatever you have to do to stay and do not worry about us! We will disappear on the ship – we’ll separate and try to find a place to hide until whatever happens, happens. From now on, you’re all on your own!”

My poor little sister with tears in her eyes walked to the back of the ship. We followed her until she just about got to the stairs up to the captain’s office. Then the Marine stopped us from going any further but let her go through because she wanted to see the captain. By the time she was on the second step my brothers had follow my orders and gone into hiding somewhere. Trying to find a place to hide on the ship, I went down two or three floors below the deck of the ship and then I disappeared too, hiding behind of a stack of drums.

Many hours later, or so I guessed, I couldn’t take it anymore. I got out from behind the drums, walked back up to the deck to see what was going on, and realized that the ship had taken off and Phu Quoc Island was nowhere to be seen. “Oh, no!” I worried. “Where is my sister?! What happened to my brothers, Bao and Phu?!”

Panicking, I ran toward the bow of the ship with the worst possibilities in my mind, worrying that I had lost my sister. I hoped my brothers were still on board somewhere because I had told them and shown them where to hide. On the way up to the bow of the ship, as I scanned the deck from left to right with my eyes, came the happiest second of my life when I saw my sister waving at me. She ran back to me with tears in her eyes and said, "The captain allowed me to stay on the ship with you and our brothers, but when I went out I couldn’t see any of you at all! I was so scared that that you had been sent to Phu Quoc and that I had lost you all! Thank God you are here!"

“Let’s go and find the Bao and Phu,” I said. As I had hoped, my two younger brothers were hiding in a spot under the stairs that I had shown them previously, behind a stack of big drums. They just came out and waved at us. We went and settled back in our old spot in one corner of the deck. The old couple and their son and the little Vietnamese woman with her husband were all still there. I don't think they had any idea the hell we had just been through. The mighty LST warship had turned from Phu Quoc Island and left Vietnamese waters with great speed, and was now sailing to Korea, carrying us to the freedom we were searching for. I found out it would be three weeks before we reached Korea, but I certainly wasn’t bothered by the fact that it would be a long trip.


Tuesday, November 26, 2019

In Search Of Freedom

A Vietnamese refugee's memories of Korea
Part 1: Yang Bumo [Foster Parents]
Part 2: In Search of Freedom
Part 3: Drama at Phu Quoc Island
Part 4: Storm Near Taiwan
Part 5: Arrival in Busan

Part 2: In Search Of Freedom

April 26, 1975.

That day is still vivid in my head even now, when my hair has gone so grey that if I were to pluck it there would be no more hair left on this small little head of mine. I was born fourth of eight children in a middle-class household in Vietnam in 1954. My Father was a National Bank manager and my Mother was a dutiful housewife all her life. In our war-torn country bombing and fighting were an everyday occurrence we had grown used to, and I knew that I would go into the army to fight the Communists when I reached the age of 17 to do the honour of protecting the country from the invading enemy. My oldest brother served with the Biet Dong Quan commandos and survived being shot countless times, while my second brother was in a bomb discharge unit and almost lost all of his fingers while on duty, but survived. I was a little luckier and did not lose anything other than having to use a crutch to the end of my days. I was wounded in the leg with heavy shot when serving in the Army’s 23rd Division stationed in the Kontum and Pleiku highland region. After staying for a while in Nhatrang Hospital waiting for release papers, a Military Medical Report classified me as Class 2 and useless for duty and I was discharged from the Army.

 William training at Quang Trung, the Army Academy, in 1972.

 William’s father at work as Chief of the National Bank in Rach Gia.

Farewell to William's older sister, Thuy, who was going to study in France. 
Taken at Tan Son Nhat Airport early 1975.

Six months after my discharge, despite there being so many candidates, I proudly passed the exam to enter Saigon National Post Office College with the promise that I would be posted to work for the Government when I graduated. Whether I got a good position or a bad one, and whether I was posted far from or close to home depended on how successful I was during the grueling one-year training course which bombarded us with tests and mental assessments, so I was living in Saigon trying to finish the course.

That was my life before April 26, 1975.

At 11 am that day our class was dismissed early from school and I was so happy with my first monthly pay packet from the college of 18,000 VN Dong, which was equal to the pay of a low level Army Private at the time. “Man, this is going to be so cool when I get home and take friends out to a coffee shop to celebrate. Who else in this country is going to a school guaranteeing a job in the future and getting paid while studying? Only me, ha ha ha ha,” was how I felt at the time. By the time I got home after the struggle of riding through the chaotic traffic on my old pushbike, I was asking myself where such crowds of people were going, not realizing what was going to happen to my country in the next four days.

A letter from my eldest sister from Australia, sent a month earlier, had arrived with a very short note in Vietnamese saying “Take this paper and the photographs I included in the letter and hurry to the Korean Embassy to see Mr. Cho. He will help you and tell you what to do, and just do as he says.” My sister’s husband was a Korean citizen, and I later found out he and Mr. Cho, who was an important official at the Korean Embassy, knew each other well. The notes were asking for his help to get us onto an LST which was to embark at Tan Cang Port in Saigon.

Luckily, my two younger brothers, Bao and Phu, and my sister, Duyen, had been waiting for me at home so we could celebrate my first ever work pay from college, so we all headed to the Korean Embassy. At that time we did not know that we would be leaving our home forever, so we just took some basic clothing with us.

We had no form of transportation to take us to Nguyen Du, where the Embassy was, which was about three kilometers away from our home. It was such a chaotic time, but finally I managed to put all of us onto two xe om, or motorcycle taxis, with my sister and I on one and my brothers on another, and we reached the Korea Embassy after driving through the worst traffic I had ever experienced.
Upon arriving I thought, “Bloody hell, there must be a million people in front of the Korean Embassy!” The crowds of people were waiting to enter while Marines were checking passports and entry papers. There was no way I could get through with the four of us and it looked like you had to have some kind of paper to get through – something more official than the letter I was holding in my hand.

Looking around and feeling hopeless, I decided to get inside the embassy by climbing the embassy’s wall. I would show the letter to Mr. Cho while my brothers and sister slowly tried to get close to the gate, and then we would hope for the best.

Even though my left leg was still injured, with the skill of an ex-infantry soldier I managed to climb over the wall and run to the administration office. A few Korean Embassy officials stopped me, but when I showed them the photograph of Mr. Cho, they directed me to the office to see the man in the photo. I handed him the letter from my sister, and after reading it he quickly looked at me and said something in English but, even though I could read and write English quite well and I was a fan of modern pop songs by the Beatles, Paul Anka, and John Denver, there was no way I could understand him. I think the chaos from the gate may have made him impatient with me, but perhaps the content of the letter was so meaningful that he pointed at me and said, “YOU, HOW MANY?” Well, that I understood and answered “four” by putting four fingers up. He reached out onto the table and gave me four cloth patches with Korean writing and stamps on them. He then called another Korean man, said something in Korean, and that man took me to the gate. That's where I found my sister and brothers holding the steel bars, desperately waiting for me but not sure whether I was coming back or not. With help from the Korean man sent by Mr. Cho we were taken to the Embassy lawn where there were lots of buses waiting to go somewhere. I thought, “When in Rome, do as the Romans do,” so we did exactly what others were doing and got in line to get on a bus. Because there were no documents or anything allowing us on the bus other than those four patches with some Korean words on them, when we got on the bus we chose the back seats so that if something went wrong it would be hard to throw us off. On the bus there were lots of Vietnamese ladies married to Korean husbands, so we felt a little more comfortable when we heard Vietnamese being spoken all the way to Tan Cang.

There were two massive, scary-looking Korean LSTs (Landing Ship, Tank) warships docked at the pier. The Marines started to let people onto the ships, and as soon as I was aboard a ship I knew that a journey into the unknown was about to begin.

Though I was so tired from all the hassles of that day, I'm not sure if I got any sleep once we were settled on the deck of the LST. One thing I knew for sure was that the ship was moving, slowly, but it was moving, and my God, I knew we were saved. From the top deck of that massive, scary LST I saw my beloved Saigon passing way with every meter as the warship moved slowly away. It seemed like something was stuck in my throat and my eyes seemed to be a little blurry as I realized I was about to leave my country, the one which my older brothers and I had spilled blood for, and was instead becoming a runaway and not even sure where I was going. But the uncertainty of my future at that moment was really nothing compared to the knowledge of the punishment a former South Vietnamese soldier would suffer from the communists when they arrived in Saigon.

The fact that the warship was slowly heading toward Saigon Bridge comforted me so much because I knew that I would be free from any political conflict in the days to come. Whatever happened, I would be able to face it, and would have a “Que sera sera” attitude and a grin on my face from a thousand miles away.

In the past five or six hours so much had happened and I had been so full of adrenaline. I was exhausted, and I think I fell asleep by the time Saigon Bridge was out of sight.

Friday, November 22, 2019

A Vietnamese refugee's memories of Korea, part 1

A Vietnamese refugee's memories of Korea
Part 1: Yang Bumo [Foster Parents]
Part 2: In Search of Freedom
Part 3: Drama at Phu Quoc Island
Part 4: Storm Near Taiwan
Part 5: Arrival in Busan

Part 1: Yang Bumo [Foster Parents]

Over a year ago I wrote an article for the Korea Times about the arrival of Vietnamese refugees in Korea at the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. This was followed up by a lengthier article on the topic at SinoNK and two blog posts here and here

As a result of these articles and posts, I have been contacted by several former Vietnamese refugees who spent time in Korea. All have shared their stories and photos with me, but William Nguyen, now living in Australia, has spent quite a bit of time telling me his story because he plans to return to Korea in early January and he would like to find the Koreans who helped him, in particular Choi Ok-suk, a Red Cross worker at the Busan Refugee Camp who essentially acted as a foster parent to him and his two brothers and sister. He would also like to find the generous family of Marine General Lee Dong-yeong. I thought it might be helpful to draw attention to his story in the media in the hope that someone who knows these people who read the article might reach out to William. On Wednesday an article I wrote about William's story appeared in the Korea Times, and I'm hoping to interest a Korean-language news outlet in the story. (Should anyone know a journalist who might be interested, please let me know).

As the article relates, William and his siblings moved to Australia, where their older sister lived with her Korean husband, in September 1976. While in Korea he met his future wife, who was of Korean-Chinese heritage but had been raised in Vietnam, and they were married a month before he left. In early 1977 he returned to Korea to bring her to Australia. This was the last time he was in Korea.

I have edited a memoir by William explaining how he came to arrive in Korea aboard an ROK Navy LST on May 13, 1975. He has also sent me more than 20 photos, most related to the time he spent in Korea. He began the memoir at the end of the story, so to speak, remembering the kindness of Choi Ok-suk, the Red Cross worker and wife of a Busan police chief who, a month or so after their arrival in Busan, essentially sponsored William and his brothers Bao and Phu and sister Duyen. This meant she could take them out of the camp on trips or have them stay over at her house. Below is the first installment of his memoir. Others will follow soon.

---------------

William and Choi Ok-suk at his wedding in August 1976.


Yang Bumo [Foster Parents]

“Misong ah!” The call from my foster Korean mother was the sweetest sound on this earth. “Ne!” I answered with my lousy Korean that I had just started learning about a month ago. She looked at me from head to toe and then she said something, but all I could understand was the word Xichang (market).

Her daughter translated and explained that she was going to take us to the local market for some reason. “Wow - we get to go shopping in Korea?” It seemed like a dream come true for a guy behind the high wall of that Vietnamese refugee camp, a former girl’s high school, where you could only see the city of Busan through a peephole when you wandered around with all of those security officers almost everywhere you turned.

“Mama Sook” was one of the Korean ladies working for the Red Cross at the time we Vietnamese refugees came to Busan. She took us in like a sponsor, took us home to stay with her and told us to call her “Mama.” She treated us like our own mother, sometimes even better. What a lady, what a heart she had! It had to be made of gold the way she treated us, we who were strangers. It really does melt my heart every time I think of her. That great Korean lady left a solid mark in my humble life and taught me the meaning of humanitarianism.

What a view, what a life! The Korea market was just like something out of a movie to a poor soldier just who had recently come out from the jungle, a bustling and busy scene that I had never seen before in my life. We used to be proud of life in our country, a country I had fought and spilled blood for. We thought we were the Pearl of the Orient, but no. I may be a fool, but I had seen enough of my own country to know that nothing there compared to Korea, to such an advanced and bustling place. Even though I had only been there for a very short time, that was something that made me feel that it would not be so bad if we had to stay in Korea if no third country would accept us.

In the market, while we were still looking around at the scenery, overwhelmed by so many things happening around us, she went straight to an underwear shop, came out with a large bag, and told her daughter that we were going home. We were disappointed to leave so soon but still followed her home. When we got home, she opened the bag and there was lots of underwear for all of my family. She hurried us to try them on and get changed to go to a Chinese restaurant with her. She thought that, being Vietnamese, we might be sick of the Korean food in the camp.

I nearly broke down with tear in my eyes when I went to the room to try on the underwear, how did she know that we were not wearing underwear? How did that she know my size to perfection even though I did not know myself, nor did my real mother? It was the first time I ever wore that kind of tight, jockey underwear and to my surprise it fit me perfectly. What an impression that made, what a lady! I'm very close to the day when I will return to dust now, but I still vividly remember that feeling of appreciation every time I think of it.

Every night while we stayed with her, she made our bed on a Futon. The most impressive thing was that she always left out a tray of apples or pears next to a teapot. When I asked her what it was for, the answer in her sweet voice was that it was in case we were hungry at night. Maybe it was just Korean traditional hospitality, but to me, a poor Vietnamese refugee who used to sleep with a gun in my hands watching for the enemy and afraid of being attacked, or who had been tired of worrying about himself and his siblings on the cold steel floor of an LST ship while not knowing where we were going or what would happen after that, this was just as sweet as it came.


Visiting Choi Ok-suk in Busan in 1977. 
William's wife, Helene, Mrs. Choi's husband, Mrs. Choi, William. 

Choi Ok-suk's daughter with William's sister Duyen.


Monday, November 11, 2019

1988 Olympics: The view from the U.S. Embassy

The 1988 Seoul Olympics

Prologue 1: "Why can't Americans be Punished?"

Part 1:  The Seoul Olympics, 25 years later
Part 2:  The 1988 Olympics and Korean fears of AIDS
Part 3:  Americans and bad first impressions
Part 4:  Reptilian Style: The 'live-or-die general war' against Hollywood
Part 5:  An attack in a boxing ring
Part 6:  Media responses to the boxing ring incident
Part 7:  No more lion: US swimmers' 'prank' becomes 'diplomatic incident'
Part 8:  KAIST catches Big Ben
Part 9:  Hankyoreh interviews Korean witness to theft by swimmers
Part 10: Stop me if you've heard this one: Four GIs head to Itaewon in a taxi...
Part 11: Taxi-kicking US runner taken to Itaewon police box
Part 12: NBC uses the power of t-shirts to insult Korea... again
Part 13: Cultivating outrage toward America
Part 14: Politicians engage in damage control
Part 15: Heaven on Earth
Part 16: Hustler magazine tramples the purity of the Korean race 
Part 17: Stolen gold
Part 18: The view from the U.S. Embassy

Not too long ago a rather amazing, 1364-page pdf titled "The Korea Country Reader," a collection of oral history interviews of American diplomats who served in Korea from 1945 to 2002, was brought to my attention by Jacco Zwetsloot. The interviews were conducted and collected by the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, and readers for other countries can be searched for here.

I've been dipping into various eras, and it dawned on me that I should look at how the Embassy viewed the anti-Americanism that occurred during the 1988 Seoul Olympics. What I found were two interviews with different points of view, as well as reference to an contemporary news article worth reading that I had not come across before.

First up is an interview with Aloysius M. O’Neill, Political Officer, Seoul (1988-1992), from pages 1117-1118; the final two paragraphs are from pages 1121 and 1146, respectively.

******

O’Neill: The Olympic Games, aside from being a great triumph for Korea both in terms of organization and of the face that Korea put to the world was, as far as I was concerned, also a festival of anti-Americanism. That’s my most lasting memory of the Seoul Olympics. The Koreans were so on edge and so intent to ensure that everything went perfectly that anything involving Americans that didn’t go perfectly really set them off. This included the opening ceremony. The American team was waving to the crowds and cheering, and some of them were wearing Mickey Mouse ears and things like this as young, happy, naive Americans traveling abroad probably for the first time would normally do. This greatly offended the Korean news media who decided that this was not decorous enough and respectful enough of Korea for their sensibilities, and they began blasting the American team for that breach of decorum.

We had another incident… I don’t want to belabor this too much….

Q: No, I think it’s well to capture the flavor.

O’Neill: It was really flavorful! One of the first American gold medals was won by a men’s swimming relay team, and those young guys went that evening to the Hyatt Hotel and had a number of drinks, I’m sure, in the bar. They walked out of the bar with a plaster lion’s head that had been hanging on the wall. They just picked it up. It wasn’t something, as far as I know, that you could stick in your pocket, so it was pretty obvious that they were doing it. Rather than just approaching these tipsy or drunken young men who had just won a gold medal and said, “Give us our lion head back,” the Korean staff of the Hyatt went to the police about this “theft.” The police lost no time in going to their eager media contacts about this gigantic crime. From the media outcry, you would have thought that these swimmers had burned down the presidential mansion, the Blue House.

The outrage was unbelievable. I was, as I often was, in the embassy that Saturday afternoon. The incident was on a Friday night, and I was in the embassy all day Saturday, and the phones were almost literally ringing off the hook, with outraged Koreans calling. The poor embassy operators were just beside themselves trying to field the calls. I remember talking to one man who was just furious. “How could they do this??? How could they possibly steal something?” I said, “They were drunk.” He said, “What???” I said, “They were drunk. He said, “Oh.” And he hung up. It’s safe to say that Koreans understood the concept of doing outrageous things while drunk.

This whole thing, this hysteria, was fanned by the Korean news media. NBC Sports had the broadcast rights for the Olympics. They did a masterful job of broadcasting. Also as part of their programming they had prepared a number of really good…what would you call them?...spots or vignettes showcasing different things about Korea’s industrial might and the economic progress of the country, the palaces of Seoul, the history of Korea, things on the Korean War. Some of my relatives wrote me how much they learned about Korea from this fantastic coverage that NBC Sports was giving the country.

However, there was at least one spot about black marketing and prostitution particularly around the U.S. military bases, a not unknown phenomenon, shall we say. Again, the Koreans were not in the mood for any kind of accuracy or balance. What they wanted was laudatory treatment. If you gave 90% praise and 10% pointing out some warts, all they could think about was, “You were focusing on warts, and that’s rude.” Again, this set them off. There was a case where a Korean boxer had a match called against him. I believe the other boxer was an American, but the New Zealand referee called the match against the Korean. In response, that sportsman sat down in the ring and would not move. Every so often as NBC Sports was reporting on other events here and there, track and field and whatever else happened to be going on, they would occasionally go back and show this boxer still sitting there in the ring.

Q: I recall that!

O’Neill: Again, Koreans were outraged that the Americans news media were humiliating Korea by showing this jerk sitting on his backside in the ring. No mention of the poor sportsmanship of the Korean boxer who had legitimately had a call against him. In fact, either in this match or in another boxing match that went against a Korean, his ringside staff and the Korean security people assaulted the referee.

Throughout, you had cheers for Soviet athletes and boos for American athletes with few exceptions. When Flo-Jo won everybody cheered. I happened to have been there at the track and field semi-finals, where she starred. Otherwise, it was a very grim period for Americans in Korea and the grimness lasted after the games, too. It really ground down a lot of people in the embassy.
[...]
One of the reasons for the outburst of anti-Americanism in the Olympics and afterward was because Koreans who felt this way were freer to do so than they had been in the past. They were able to express their bottled up emotions at the way they saw America as being the friend of the dictators of Korea over the decades before this election. They tended to forget or did not know that we had been pushing behind the scenes all these decades to get the kind of electoral situation that they had now arrived at.
[...]
Most particularly as I detailed earlier in the interview in the context of the Seoul Olympics. I still unfondly remember that as a gigantic anti-American festival with sporting events thrown in. Ambassador Jim Lilley was there up through the end of December 1988, so he had the full blast of the Olympics. He used the expression, “We’re the biggest show in town,” meaning that of all the countries represented there, we were the biggest especially with the large military presence and its endless potential for crimes or accidents, which could become an immediate focus of the anti-American student movement and others as well.

******

A view more sympathetic to Korea can be found in an interview with Thomas P. H. Dunlop, Political Counselor, Seoul (1983-1987), and Country Director for Korea, Washington, DC (1987-1989). [Pages 927-28]

******

The Seoul Olympics were a great success for the South Koreans. There were lots of anecdotes about them, none of which particularly deserves recording. The South Koreans did a good job. I was not there for it. I thought that I might try to "boondoggle" my way out there, but the Embassy was under a tremendous amount of stress just handling the American Olympian contingent. I would say one thing. I got to know some of the people who represent our Olympic movement, and some of them are absolutely arrogant, egocentric, and very difficult people to deal with. I mean that they are concerned about petty things, like demanding suites with a "hot tub" and things like that. I'm not talking about the athletes. I'm talking about the administrators in the American Olympic Committee and all of their "hangers on." They can be real pains to deal with. The Embassy didn't need me hanging around, so I did not go.

Q: What about the problems of having the press all over the place? When the press got there, and the American press in particular, I imagine that they were always looking for a story to make the South Koreans look bad. They did that at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996. This is just what the press does.

Dunlop: NBC [National Broadcasting Company] had the coverage. The South Koreans didn't like the coverage. We had complaints from them. NBC, like any American network, put on a lot of "background" stuff about Korea. Of course, what they did was to oversimplify things. Although there are a lot of things in Korean history that are not particularly admirable, on the human rights side, for example, this was probably more than the South Korean authorities wanted to see dredged up from the past and, maybe, the not so distant past. However, there were no big problems.

I remember one example of cultural insensitivity. There was a Korean boxer who was thought likely to take one of the medals and, perhaps, win the gold medal. He was in one of the middle weight areas. He was really beaten and committed a foul in the process, which counts a lot in the Olympics. You get points, and the foul involves subtracting points from the total. He lost. He refused to leave the ring. After the celebration of his opponent's victory, he slumped down in the middle of the ring.

However, the cameramen didn't turn off the lights. The cameras were still on him. He presented a picture of utter dejection. People came up and tapped him on the shoulder, but he just sat there. The commentators began to laugh at him. He stayed there in the center of the ring for about an hour. They would keep cutting back to show him. They would say, "Oh, he's still there." I thought that this was just perfectly without any shred of taste. What was happening to that young man was that his whole life was in ruins. He had lived to be an Olympic boxer. He was a hero in his hometown. He had a salary. He had preferment. He had goodies which were otherwise probably unthinkable for his family. He had the responsibility for keeping all of that going. It was all gone. He knew that they would set the dogs on him in his home village. He would be pelted with stones when he got back there. I think that it was a particularly bad case of insensitivity.

I must say that an American sports columnist, Tony Kornheiser, wrote a good story about it. Some Korean told him what was going on, and Kornheiser wrote a nice piece on this incident. I wrote to Kornheiser and said that this was just a pebble on the beach, but it was nice to see that somebody had taken the trouble to report what was really going on, in a cultural sense.

******

Tony Kornheiser's article for the Washington Post, titled "It's Not The Koreans Who Do Not Understand," can be read here. Below are excerpts of it, which begin after Kornheiser's recap of various events like runner Johnny Gray "Kicking a taxi," the theft of the lion sculpture by the swimmers, NBC's attempt to make insulting T-shirts, and the incident in the boxing ring where the referee was attacked by Korean staff.

******

"Why did you have to show it so many times?" my Korean friend, Mr. Lee, asked me at dinner the other night.

"We'd do the same thing if it was an American," I told him. "That's the way journalism works, it reacts to the story. We do it at home all the time."

"But you are not in your home now," Mr. Lee said, "you are in ours."

Until last year's social revolution, the Korean press historically was in the side pocket of the government. Koreans have clamored for a free press, but don't really comprehend all that goes with it. Koreans saw the Olympics as a way to announce their accomplishments to the world, something like an advertising supplement. They didn't expect the American media to go looking at anything other than what the Koreans wanted to show; they think it's mean that we don't play the game their way, censoring our best instincts for the good of their public image. They've been our friends, and though they should know better after all these years, may think we have betrayed that friendship.
[...]
That gong sound we hear is the clash of cultures. We're unnerved and a bit frightened by the anti-Americanism, and justifiably upset at Koreans taking offense when no offense was intended. But it hasn't deterred some Americans from practicing what is construed as -- particularly by the contentious European press -- as Ugly Americanism. Many Americans treat the Olympics like their own private tour group. We shouldn't apologize for our enthusiasm, but we wave our flags and chant in the loudest, most self-absorbed way. This behavior is beyond patriotism. It's about rudeness and the automatic right of way that Americans consider their birthright as they travel the world in a clumsy exuberance that other cultures take for bullying. Every uniformed guard we treat with impatience, every custom we insult, every sideways glance we give, we feel we're entitled. We're No. 1. We've bought the damn Games, and we have our own aggressive way of doing things. We like to wear our diamond rings on everbody's nose.

It was bad enough in Los Angeles, which was at least our home. It's provocative here. We've been here more than two weeks and most of us have learned one phrase -- kamsa hamnida, which means thank you. One phrase in two weeks, and we get annoyed because every Korean cabdriver doesn't speak perfect English. Not only haven't we been sensitive to their culture, we haven't even acknowledged it.

And yet there have been so many small moments of grace between us and the Koreans, so many tender mercies. I have foundered hopelessly in the Seoul subway, intimidated by Korean language maps and signs, and Koreans have literally led me by the hand to where I should have been. I have been on the streets without a clue how to get home, and Koreans have stopped for me and driven miles out of their way to take me to the press village, and refused to take any money for it. I have been unfailingly treated with politeness and friendliness and genuine warmth by police, security guards and Korean Olympic personnel. They give me flags and pins and small gifts to take home so I'll remember Korea. The anti-Americanism seems more an expression of hurt than anger.

"Please understand," Mr. Lee said, "that we have always had great friendship with the Americans."

"You shouldn't take this boxing thing personally," I told him. "You should let it roll off your backs."
"This is what you do?" he asked.

"All the time."

"You are a big country, a great country, and things roll gracefully off your back," Mr. Lee said. "What rolls off your back is enough to drown a small country like Korea." There was a bottle of Korean soju on the table, and Mr. Lee poured two shot glasses. "I cannot ever make you understand how important Olympics are to us," he said, and in the moonlight his face seemed 5,000 years old. "We invite you to our house to show you what we have done."

I raised my glass. "To your house," I said.

******

Though there are a few cliches in there, Dunlop was right to highlight Kornheiser's article as an attempt to see things from both sides. Most pertinent was his observation that during the Olympics "The anti-Americanism seems more an expression of hurt than anger." What should be added is that it was the media that fanned the flames and turned that hurt into anger. As O'Neill noted, "it was a very grim period for Americans in Korea and the grimness lasted after the games, too." Many of the issues brought to the forefront by activists during (or just before) the Olympics such as the need to revise SOFA, the need to ban the direct importation of US films, and the need to test foreigners for HIV/AIDS, would, in the months to come, get a push from the burst of hurt turned to anger at the US during the Olympics.

Friday, November 08, 2019

Korean government ordered to pay compensation to foreign English teacher over HIV testing

It was reported the other day (here as well) that
A court ordered the state, Wednesday, to compensate a New Zealander for urging her to undergo mandatory human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) testing under a now-lifted government regulation while working here as an English teacher.
In 2009, after working at an elementary school in Ulsan for a year, a native-speaking English teacher from New Zealand was offered a new contract and began the process of re-signing for another year. Well into the process she was told she would have to take another HIV and drug test. While she had been willing to take an HIV test for immigration purposes when she first arrived in Korea, she refused to take another unnecessary HIV test for renewal, and was not re-signed. She subsequently left the country, but challenged what amounted to her dismissal over refusal to take an HIV test by taking her case to the Korean Commercial Arbitration Board (which ruled against her) and the National Human Rights Commission (which rejected her petition).

With the possibility of these "domestic remedies" exhausted, she petitioned the UN Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), which decided to hear the case in 2012 and ruled in her favor in 2015, saying that E-2 HIV testing was discriminatory and should be stopped. It also ruled that she should be given "adequate compensation for the moral and material damages caused by... violations of the Convention, including compensation for the lost wages during the one year she was prevented from working." For more on this process and decision, see this post.

The Korean government did not respond until the National Human Rights Commission belatedly took her side and recommended the government take the actions recommended by CERD in 2016. In July 2017 the Korean government finally officially ended the HIV testing regulations but did nothing to compensate the teacher. The teacher finally pursued a civil case against the Korean government, and it was this case that was decided in her favor by the Seoul Central District Court.

Having been given access to the decision, here are some of its highlights.

The court accepted the plaintiff’s claim for damages, including 24,000,000 won for the loss her expected wages salary, and 6,000,100 won for mental damage, and ruled that the defendant should pay this full amount (along with interest dating from June 20, 2018).

In its ruling, the court referred to the AIDS Prevention Act, as it was in force in 2009, according to which it was the government’s duty not to discriminate against HIV-positive patients, and employers were not to require HIV testing of employees. The Act also listed specific groups of non-Koreans who were required to submit HIV test results to the government before entering Korea, but the plaintiff was not part of such group.

[The E-2 visa HIV testing requirement was initially instituted in 2007 via an Immigration policy memo which, when challenged, the government said was perfectly legal but was quietly changed to an enforcement ordinance on April 3, 2009, almost a year and a half after testing of teachers began. This testing regime was never codified by amending the AIDS Prevention Act (or the Hagwon Act).]

The court also ruled that while the objective of the HIV testing was justified to protect the health of children, the defendant did not prove such testing was necessary, since there was no factual evidence that foreign English teachers were a suspect group, nor was there a reason to believe there was a risk of the plaintiff being HIV positive, particularly since she had already tested negative less than a year earlier.

The defendant argued that the statute of limitations had passed, but the court ruled that June 12, 2015, the date of the CERD recommendation, was the date to begin from, since the plaintiff had been unable to determine the illegality of the government’s actions until then. It also pointed out that the plaintiff had made continuous efforts domestically and internationally to abolish the HIV testing policy and to receive compensation for her damages, and had been vigilant in seeking her rights. Therefore the defendant’s argument that the statute of limitations had passed was against the principle of good faith considering the defendant’s continued denial of compensation to the plaintiff.

Though the court did not determine whether the CERD recommendation had any binding power, it took the unprecedented step of accepting the CERD decision as the determining factor in calculating statute of limitations.

It’s hard to believe that it took ten years to get to this point, but it may not be over yet. The government has 2-3 weeks to appeal the decision.

As well, the HIV testing policy, officially ended two years ago, is still being carried out at some hospitals. This is the test I received five months ago:

'AIDS' test results are to be recorded near bottom right.

I printed out and gave an attendant a news report in Korean announcing the end of the tests, but who knows if they did anything about it. Needless to say, that a national hospital is still carrying out these tests suggests the government did little to publicize the end of E-2 HIV testing.


[This was not the only challenge to the HIV testing regime. A case brought before the constitutional court in 2011 (which did not hear the case) was ruled favorably on by the UN Human Rights Committee in 2018.]

Wednesday, November 06, 2019

Breaking into the US Ambassador's residence

A few weeks ago, 19 students broke into the compound where US Ambassador Harry Harris lives and displayed banners decrying President Trump's attempts to make Korea pay more for the US military presence and calling on Harris to leave Korea. Police requested arrest warrants for nine students; four were ultimately arrested. Another break in took place last year, but a more well-known and much earlier incident occurred on October 13, 1989, when six students broke into the US Ambassador's residence shortly after Donald Gregg took up his post as ambassador. As he told the story in his memoir Pot Shards, on that day
at about 6 a.m., Meg and I were awakened by a loud “bang!” outside our embassy residence. The residence guards immediately called us and shouted, “Students, students!”

My first thought was: ‘Oh shit, I hope they’re not armed.’

Six Korean college students had driven up from the southern port city of Pusan and had used their car as a sort of vaulting horse to get over the low wall surrounding the residence grounds. They threw some sort of large firecracker at the unarmed residence guards and were quickly able to break a window and enter our house.

I called the security officer and told him to get the Korean police on the scene. Almost immediately, I had a reassuring call from the Marine Security Guard at the Embassy, saying he and his men would “take care of things” if I needed help. I told them to stand by, as one of the first things I’d been taught at “Charm School” (ambassadorial training) was to never turn the Marines loose on unruly local civilians unless a truly mortal threat was involved.

Sounds from outside our bedroom indicated clearly to me that we were dealing not with a trained group of assassins but with young men surprised at how easily they had gotten into the house and unsure what to do next. They gently tried to open our stout bedroom door, then retreated down the hall when they found it locked. I could hear the smashing of lamps and crockery from the front of the house. We slipped out a back window and went to another embassy house on the compound.

The Korean police eventually arrived, and the students were hauled off to jail. Their main motive had been to protest U.S. pressure on the beef quota issue. I called the protocol office at Blue House and urged that the students not be treated too severely. I gather that they served up to two years in jail.

I immediately went into my embassy office, about a mile away, to discuss how to respond to the torrent of questions coming in from both local Korean, and international media. A hurried press conference was held at the Embassy, and both Meg and I appeared on television to thank the Korean police for their help and to say that we were aware of the sensitivity of the beef issue. Meg was gracious and stressed how glad we were to be in Seoul. We heard from many sources that her TV performance had truly moved the Korean people who saw it.

I have since met four of the six students who “visited” us that early October morning in 1989. Two are now rising young stars in the National Assembly; one of the others owns an Italian restaurant, and one works for a French trading company. During a December 2006 visit to Seoul, I was visited in my hotel by three of the former students, all of whom apologized. They were accompanied by the press in large numbers, and a good deal of publicity resulted, all of which I considered positive.
One of those politicians is Jeong Cheong-rae.

Thursday, October 10, 2019

Battles over curriculum and inclusion in Korea's schools, 1969-1970

In the past few weeks I've had two articles appear in the Korea Times. The first was "Fighting segregation in Seoul's schools in 1969," about efforts by SMOE and the Ministry of Education to integrate children of people who had overcome Hansen's Disease, or leprosy.

The second, "Korea's battle over the 'domineering use of Chinese characters' in 1970," was written with Hangeul Day in mind. The debate over whether or not to stop teaching Hanja as part of the Korean language curriculum went back to 1945, but I chose to focus on the debates that arose in years around when it was phased out in 1970. One thing I failed to note, which was helpfully pointed out to me by an American who has lived here for decades, was that Hangeul Day had been a public holiday from 1945 to 1991. Becoming a holiday in 2013 was not a new rise in status, but a return to its former status.



Sunday, September 22, 2019

Kim Yong-jang was not a military intelligence officer

Back in May I wrote a post about Kim Yong-jang, who had become something of a media darling after claiming he had been a intelligence officer in the US 501st Military Intelligence Brigade and revealing that Chun Doo-hwan flew to Gwangju Air Base on May 21, 1980, just before troops began opening fire on protesters. Some of his claims seemed fishy to me, but one in particular I knew not to be true - that the US had pulled its citizens out of Gwangju days before May 18 - I examined in depth here to prove the claim false.

After that I was contacted by journalist Kap Su Seol, whose name I immediately recognized - he was one of the translators of Lee Jae Eui's Kwangju Diary: Beyond Death, Beyond the Darkness Of The Age (1999). He was even more suspicious of Kim's story than I was, did a great deal of digging, and wrote articles for the Kyunghyang Sinmun documenting his findings (here, and here). The latter article is translated in part here (though the translation doesn't feature photos of the (English-language) documents he uncovered; best look at the original articles).

What he found was that Kim Yong-jang
never worked as an intelligence officer of the 501st Military Intelligence Brigade. Kim joined the 501st Intelligence Brigade as an interpreter in 1974 and retired as an interpreter in the mid-1990s. He was not in a position or had the authority to personally draw up official reports for the 524th Military Intelligence Battalion, the United States Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM) and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). The only evidence Kim submitted to the Prosecution Service as a witness was a commendation for twenty years of service.
What that commendation reveals, however (as any reader of English can see), is that Kim was a civilian language specialist. Seol conducted interviews with US military personnel and went on to document not only how Kim's story changed, but also how the media outlets getting the scoop tried to cover for Kim.

Needless to say, considering how what Kim was saying was what so many wanted to hear, some people were not happy with Seol's investigation and let him know it. He has finally been vindicated, however, by a post at Newspaper and Broadcasting, a blog by the Korea Press Foundation.

The post highlights the need to engage in fact checking of whistle-blowers' stories as a "basic principle of journalism" and gives four examples of how this was and wasn't done. The first is of how in 2017 the Washington Post checked the background of a tipster seeking to give them a dramatic story about Republican U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore and discovered she was working with an organization out to embarrass the Post. The second is of how CBS failed to do this in 2004 in regard to a tip about George W. Bush's national guard service, resulting in the resignation of Dan Rather. The third is related to the Hutton inquiry which blamed the BBC for not fact checking a story. In the midst of the mess, the whistle blower committed suicide, and the end result was the resignation of BBC chairman Gavyn Davies and BBC director-general Greg Dyke, as well as journalist Andrew Gilligan.

The final example is related to Kim Yong-jang, and gives more background on how he came to speak out this year. Initially, the producers of the MBC show "PD Notebook" were working on a report about the Kwangju Uprising and were made aware of Kim Yong Jang and his testimony that Chun Doo-hwan went to Kwangju airbase just before the army opened fire on protesters on May 21. Despite their excitement at this scoop, however, they tried to verify his story and came up short. They checked the air force flight records but found no entry for Chun (though there was an entry for President Choi Gyu-ha's visit to Kwangju). Ultimately, the PD Notebook team verified that there was little evidence to support Kim's claims. After they decided not to interview him, Kim Yong-jang came to Korea, held a press conference at the National Assembly, and appeared on "JTBC News Room" and "Kim Eo-jun's News Factory." The article then pointed to Seol Kap Su's Kyunghyang Sinmun article as helping to confirm that Kim was not who he said he was. The article ended by stating that the lesson of these four cases was that the problem was not the whistle blower, but the media, and the media needed to carefully vet such sources.

It's nice to get some more background about how Kim came to Korea this year, and nice to see Seol vindicated. Kim's story was too good to be true, as it turns out, but luckily cracks in it began to appear almost immediately. We may have to accept that no proof directly linking Chun to the shooting order will ever surface. Better that than allowing tainted testimony to stand unquestioned.

Wednesday, August 07, 2019

The Trials of Korea's Atomic Bomb Survivors

Update, August 7:

The Korea Times published a worthwhile article on the Korean atomic bomb survivors here.

Original post:

Korean first and second generation atomic bomb victims in 
Hiroshima during President Obama's visit, May 2016.

We had been deprived of our land, property, and even our mother tongue. We were driven away from our homeland. Why was it that we had to suffer? What did we do? While suffering as colonial people, we had lived to the best we could do, conscientiously. But what we were given was a living hell – the atomic bomb brought on by the war of aggression. Both innocent Japanese people and Koreans died, scattered like scraps of garbage. 
- Atomic bomb survivor Sin Bok Su, in Twice Victims: Koreans at Hiroshima

My latest article for the Korea Times, titled, "Trials of Korean atomic bomb survivors," can be read here. While at the University of Washington I wrote a lengthy paper on this topic for Kenneth Pyle's seminar on the historiography of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and he encouraged me to do further research and publish it. I'll return to it one of these days.

It still amazes me that almost 20 years passed without any attention being paid to the survivors in South Korea. The earliest articles I could find date from 1964. The Korea Times article that appears with my article covered the topic with more sensitivity than most articles from that time - here it is in full:


Interestingly, I think the Kwak Ki-hun mentioned in the article may be the same 곽귀훈 whose lawsuit won the right in 2003 for overseas survivors to receive benefits from Japan. (He is mentioned and pictured here.)

For more recent articles, here is a 2010 Korea Herald article titled "Sufferings still linger for Korean A-bomb survivors." For more on the struggles of second-generation atomic bomb victims, this letter by Han Jeong-soon (on the right in the photo at top), honorary chair of the Association for the Second Generation of Korean Atomic Bomb Survivors, is well worth reading.

One of my arguments - influenced by Scott Burgeson's essay 'Stranger in Chongno' (particularly this page) - is that to bring up the atomic bomb victims is to bring up the atomic bombs that brought about Korea's liberation from Japan. I looked through more than a dozen middle school history textbooks, and two high school textbooks, and here are typical examples of how liberation was dealt with:


 All of the books were all structured with 'Korean history' at the beginning, then 'international history' at the end. This meant that the events of World War II were disconnected from the Korean history section. Not that matters, I suppose, since WWII got two pages of coverage: one for the war in Europe, one for the war in the Pacific:


(The textbooks also had a WWII atrocity page equating comfort women with the holocaust, the rape of Nanking, and the use of atomic bombs.)

Not mentioned in my article was the fate of North Korean survivors. What sources I could find suggest the vast majority of survivors returned to southern Korea and stayed there. Those that did end up in North Korea did so when Japan repatriated Koreans in Japan to North Korea beginning in 1959 (over 90,000 ultimately returned). Among them were likely over 1,000 survivors. In the 1990s Japan began considering how to address this issue (should DPRK citizens seek treatment in Japan) and in 2001 Japanese doctors visited North Korea and confirmed 938 survivors were still alive. The political fallout of North Korea admitting to kidnapping Japanese citizens, along with other incidents and the restarting of the DPRK's nuclear program made further contacts difficult. In 2008 North Korea announced that 382 survivors were still alive.

I've barely scratched the surface of this topic here, really. I'll return to this topic, but for now here's a section from my paper's conclusion:

"On May 20, 2013 Joongang Ilbo editorial writer Kim Jin published a column which, based on the idea that “God sometimes borrows human hands to punish human evil,” argued that “Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the revenge of Asians sacrificed for Japanese militarism,” particularly those killed by experiments of Unit 731, which referred to its test subjects as maruta, or “logs.” Castigating Japanese Prime Minister Abe for a lack of repentance, Kim wrote that “He is free to act as he wishes. But God also has freedom. It is God's freedom to judge that the marutas’ vengeful spirits have not yet been appeased, and that therefore the lightning that struck Japan was not enough.” Unsurprisingly, members of the Japanese government protested the column, while a press release by the Association of Second Generation Korean Atomic Bomb Patients “strongly condemned” the column and demanded Kim and the Joongang Ilbo apologize. At the end of his next column a week later, Kim wrote, “I regret if, contrary to my intentions, I hurt the feelings of Japanese atomic bomb victims or their bereaved family members." If it did not seem to occur to Kim to apologize to Korean survivors, one reason may be that no major Korean news outlet reported on the Second Generation Association’s press release.

The above episode highlights both the way in which the Japanese government has successfully claimed the atomic bombings as an example of uniquely Japanese victimization as well as the continuing marginalization of Korean atomic bomb survivors within South Korea. Though the South Korean Foreign Ministry ultimately responded positively to President Obama’s visit to Hiroshima, saying, “It is meaningful that he mentioned Korean victims on par with U.S. and Japanese victims in his historic speech,” it would seem that diplomatic parity was the government’s main goal. The fact that a toothless Special Act to Support Atomic Bomb Survivors, which had made no progress after eight years in the National Assembly, was passed only a week before President Obama’s speech suggests that the South Korean government may have wished to avoid being seen as hypocritical when asking for special mention of the atomic bomb survivors it had ignored for decades."

Also worth noting: After years of court cases aided by Japanese activists, South Korean survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki now receive better treatment from their former colonizer than they do from their own government.

Friday, July 26, 2019

First attempts to fly across the English Channel

It was with some interest that I came across this article about inventor Franky Zapata’s failed attempt to cross the English Channel on his flyboard (he only made it halfway across the 22-mile channel before he ran into trouble at his refueling point). This is because one of my favorite essays I wrote in undergrad at the University of Guelph was from a 4th year course on the public sphere (ie. Newspapers and magazines) in England in the 1780s. For my essay I wrote about the ballooning craze in England in 1785. Hot air balloons had been invented in France in 1783 but lack of government interest in England led to it becoming an entrepreneur’s paradise as balloonists competed for attention. The craze eventually petered out after deaths and the basic physical fact that balloons only go up and down, and aren’t all that exciting after you’ve seen it go up once. It was so popular during that time, however, that pickpockets were even able to snatch Edmund Burke’s wallet as “thousands look[ed] up in astonishment” (the title I gave my paper).

Though the article on Zapata’s attempt mentions the first powered flight over the English Channel, it leaves out the first unpowered flight. I wrote in the paper, “After three successful flights in France, Jean-Pierre Francois Blanchard ascended from Chelsea in October 1784, and became the first person to cross the English Channel by air on January 7, 1785, with an American, Dr. Jeffries, as a passenger.”

Not everyone who tried this was so lucky: “Pilatre de Rozier, the first man to ascend in a balloon [in France], sought to cross the English Channel from France to England, which was difficult due to the prevailing winds. He set out with M. Romaine on June 15, 1785, flying a machine that combined a Montgolfier [fire-powered] and a hydrogen balloon, and the inevitable explosion occurred over the rocks on the Channel shore, where they both fell to their deaths.” Luckily, Zapata’s failed attempt was far less fatal.

I should also mention that my professor for this course, Donna Andrew, who has published a number of books on this time period and helped instill in me an affinity for archival research (which at that time was all on microfilm), was as dedicated as they come; she’d take our stack of papers to the library, find the books in our bibliography, and check to see that we’d cited them correctly.

I got a B on my paper - she correctly criticized me, despite it being "well written," for being too dependent in its thesis on a secondary source. Years later I realized I should have focused on the public / private divide that balloons broke. You see, some balloonists got the capital to fund their balloon building and hydrogen-making through subscription - those with means would offer them a portion of the capital needed and in return were invited into a closed space to witness the balloon launch. The problem is that balloons rise out of those private spaces into public space, and people skipped work and climbed onto roofs to watch balloon launches. I realized teasing out the ways in which balloons broke the bonds of subscription-funded private space and entered into public space would have made for a much more interesting paper. A future project for a rainy day, perhaps.

Here's a lecture by her discussing the culture surrounding, and criticism of, dueling in 18th and 19th century England:

Wednesday, July 24, 2019

Nationalist outrage, 2019 edition: Flag ripping and boycotts target Japan

As Japan-Korea relations spiral downwards, a primer on the direction it may go can be found by looking at the 2002 candlelight protests aimed at the US. To be sure, similar scripts are appearing as nationalist reactions are being stoked, though there are differences. As Robert Kelly has noted, usually there are forces that would slow the momentum of anti-Japanese furor in Korea, but at the moment Korean conservatives are out of power and the US will likely not be bothered to intervene. Thus this is, as he put it, "a ‘useful’ social science natural experiment moment: we will learn just how far the South Korean left is willing to go on Japan, because the traditional brakes are not there this time."

Another difference is that in the past (particularly in the anti-American cases), it was opposition activists who stoked the flames of nationalism, but this time the government and ruling party have taken the lead in this capacity. For example, on Monday Democratic Party Chairman Lee Hae-chan said that "Following Abe’s election victory, Japan will intensify 'its attempts to invade the Korean economy,' (in Korean, "이제 우리나라에 대한 경제침략이 본격화될 것"). The same day Cho Kuk, senior presidential secretary for civil affairs, wrote in a Facebook post that "It is not proper to advocate Japan's assertion at a time when Korea's legitimacy and judicial power are under attack by Japan, which nullified South Korea's sovereignty in the past." Of course Japan complicating export processes is just like being colonized by Japan all over again! How helpful of him to offer such reasoned, thoughtful commentary.

Luckily, Cho noted that under the current government, "Anyone can criticize without fear of retaliation. In 2019, South Korea has a higher freedom of press index than the United States and Japan." This would be more reassuring, however, if Won Il-hee, a news anchor for South Korea's SBS CNBC, hadn't been called a 친일파 ('pro-Japanese) and fired for suggesting that South Korean leaders, policy makers, diplomats, and the media should remain level-headed and seek rational and diplomatic solutions. (See here; hat tip to John Lee.)

Level-headedness has, of course been eschewed for anti-Japanese boycotts which have affected the sales of Japanese goods (though it can at times be difficult to determine what, exactly, is a Japanese product). Protests calling for these boycotts and engaging in giant flag ripping have taken place, and have also equated Japan with the conservative Liberty Korea Party (as has KBS news). Students who held a protest in the Japanese consulate in Busan were detained by police after they "shouted slogans and held banners that read, 'We denounce Japan's re-invasion,' 'We condemn economic provocations,' and 'Abe must apologize.' I fail to see how referring to the 1965 agreement in the face of the ROK's Surpreme Court decision on forced laborers and complicating export procedures is "Japan's re-invasion," but I'm sure the phrase has great utility in whipping up negative emotions in graduates of the ROK public education system who hear it.

One rather inane voice may have inadvertently highlighted one of the Moon government's aims when he wrote, "Nothing spoke for me better than some North Korean media outlets in rebuking the Japanese government," and offered this example:
"The South Korean Supreme Court's ruling, which called for Japan to compensate the victims of forced labor during the Japanese occupation, was more than justified. Tokyo's export controls are shameless acts like the thief turning on the master with a club," said Meari (Echo), the North's government mouthpiece targeting the international audience. "Regarding the imperishable crimes Japan committed against the Korean people ― sex slavery, forced labor and genocide* ― Tokyo will not be able to repay fully even if it sells off the entire archipelago."
What better way to encourage a feeling of brotherhood with those north of the DMZ than by rallying against the eternal race enemy, America Japan? In another broadside directed at the conservatives, the reason to abrogate the 1965 Normalization Treaty upon which Japanese - ROK diplomatic relations are built, it is said, is because in 1965 "Korea was governed by a general-turned-dictator who had only economic growth and his continuous grip on power in mind." While the latter two assertions may be true, in 1965 Park was arguably in the least-dictatorial phase of his rule; open dictatorship would not arrive until 1972.

I'm sure there will be more frustrating days of this ahead.

*(I'm not sure how 'genocide' is to be reconciled with Korea's population doubling between 1910 and 1945, but whatever stokes people's anger is worthy of inclusion, right?

Update, July 28

An update, plus subway unions plan to post 20,000 anti-Japanese stickers in Seoul's subway cars. It's nice to see productive action being taken.

Wednesday, July 03, 2019

The 1965 methadone scandal

My latest Korea Times article, about the methadone scandal (메사돈 파동) of 1965, which involved medicines containing methadone that were sold at pharmacies to thousands of people due to corruption that reached high levels of government, can be read here.

Media blitz

Update, August 2:

I forgot to mention that I learned that SMOE sent watermelon to our school to thank it for allowing the media to film there. It would seem my school played a part in SMOE's propaganda campaign against the strike, which seems hypocritical considering our staff only went on strike for a single day, rather than 3 days like at many schools.

Original Post:

It's not every day you're on your way to work and find the entrance to the school being recorded by three different cameramen. My coworker was not sure why they were there; later I looked out the window and saw all these vehicles  parked in front of the school.




As can be seen, they were from just about every media company. Upon my second inquiry, my coworker surmised, correctly, that they were there at the school's invitation to cover the effect of the strike by cafeteria (and other irregular) workers. Searching about, I found two articles that had photos (at the top of the articles) taken in the school cafeteria (in fact, I recognize a student in this one).

From the Joongang Ilbo.

It makes me wonder what the protocol is when it comes to photographing these kinds of stories. Did they contact the school, or vice versa? I'm sure I'll find out eventually. At any rate, it made for a more interesting day than usual. The media presence, I mean, not the lunch we were provided. The bread was god-awful, and I heard some of the grade 6 students were joking about complaining to the media. Thankfully, I was told the workers at our school were only planning to strike for one day. Hopefully their union's demands are met satisfactorily, though it doesn't seem too promising.