Bookending 5 years of blogging with posts on Dokdo

Huh. Five years. Who'da thunk it? We'll see what the next five years holds. And the first post was about the island that shall not be named and territorial claims to it appearing in the Buddha's Birthday parade. Fun times. As Nathan at Korea Beat wrote awhile ago,

I remember back in 2005 suddenly having my afternoon lessons cancelled so that students could be "educated" about Dokdo, which really meant listening to some speeches and then memorizing a Dokdo song.

As he notes, that was in middle school, but learning the Dokdo song was something that took place in elementary schools as well. I remember hearing it preceded by, "미국 똥! 외국 똥! 캐나다 똥!" Yup, good times. Ah, let's forget about it and look at these cute stickers!

(They spelled Korea wrong)

My friend Andrew found these in a stationery store at the time and gave me one. As Korea Beat notes here (and also in an article here), the curriculum has been altered to allow for more Dokdo education.

Under the new curriculum middle school students will study four areas of history rather than three, and two of the areas will include depictions of Dokdo.

I wonder, this administration being what it is, if this will mean dropping that whole useless 'democracy movement' chapter. This was interesting as well:

When data on the agreement regarding the illegal seizure of Dokdo by Japan is investigated, the problems are clear... the need to properly remember history can be clearly seen when one investigates the invasions of Southeast Asian lands, historical troubles, and other longstanding problems."

I imagine by "invasions of Southeast Asian lands" they aren't referring to Korean participation in Vietnam.

At any rate, Dokdo education is going strong, it seems, judging by this display I saw in the center of an elementary school in eastern Seoul:

Dokdo Love Learning Area

There are maps, more maps, video, models - everything you need to indoctrinate young children. One thing is for sure though - whoever is making those models of the islands must be making a killing. I saw these ones in Gimpo Airport subway station last week:


My two cents: I think Dokdo serves the same purpose in South Korea as Anti-Americanism does in North Korea - it serves to whip elements of the public up into a pavlovian-response nationalist/xenophobic lather at the drop of a hat and distract people from more important issues (or help unpopular politicians raise their approval ratings, much as Roh Moo-hyeon and his 'diplomatic war' of 2005 did). Hence the need to teach this to children at a young age. Korea could solve the 'problem' by pressing their claim, but why would the government want to get rid of such a useful mobilization tool? Similarly, B.R. Myers argues that better relations with the US would deprive the DPRK of its justification for poverty and for the military-first policy that is said to be responsible for it.

The 49th anniversary of 5.16

Today is the 49th anniversary of Park Chung-hee's coup. It was known as the 5.16 Revolution at the time, and more details about this time period can be found in this post. Below are photos of the coup and its aftermath, and if they are not otherwise noted, they are from Seoul Through Pictures 4: Seoul, to Rise Again (1961-1970).

Park and soldiers in front of City Hall

Soldiers in front of Deoksugung (City Hall is in the background).

Soldiers in front of City Hall.

Soldiers keep crowds off street near the then National Assembly.

Soldiers and tanks downtown. (Any idea what that building is?)

Citizens forced to wait at Seoul Station.

One of the tasks that needed to be completed after the coup was 'purifying' and reconstructing the nation. This building - one of two - was completed soon after.


Perhaps it looks familiar?


Yes indeed. Considering its background, one wonders why it was chosen by the US government for its embassy. But I digress. After the coup, many campaigns were carried out to mobilize people to 'rebuild' the nation, luxurious items were burned, and smugglers were sentenced to death. Here's a parade of 'reformed' gangpae:


Below are the ultimate sinners against the nation - dance enthusiasts - who were given 3 months to 1 year in prison:

Curfew violators in Myeong-dong held temporarily

Again, this post has a lot more information about those times.

The Housemaid opens today

Im Sang-soo's remake of the Housemaid is released today. The trailer can be seen here, background information about the production can be found here. I wrote about the original 1960 film here (it's great!), though it seems the Donga Ilbo didn't quite get it in 1960, while the Joongang Ilbo has a bone to pick with the remake. I think it'll be worth checking out, especially if we get to see lots of Seo Woo (who appeared in Tamra the Island).

(Photo from here)

Death of an English teacher in Pohang

According to a May 6 article in the Gyeongbuk Ilbo,

A foreign teacher in his 60s who showed signs of a brain hemorrhage died in hospital. At 11pm on April 24 in Duho-dong, Buk-gu, Pohang, Mr. A (66, American) suddenly collapsed on the street in front of a bar during a birthday party with friends and was moved to a hospital where he died during treatment on the 4th. Pohang Bukbu police said that Mr. A died from a brain hemorrhage due to ill health and that the exact cause of death was under investigation.

Recent articles about foreign English teacher arrests

In mid-April, five articles appeared about drug arrests in Daegu (such as this one), where four native teachers and a Korean bar employee were booked without detention for smoking pot. The teachers were from the U.S., England, and Australia. The teachers smoked in a bar in Dongsung-ro in Daegu’s Jung-gu on several occasions. The police were then also inquiring into the whereabouts of another foreign teacher and the son of a high-ranking US army officer.

The article ended with the typical assurance that the investigation would be expanded, and it turns out there is now an update to this story, as the Maeil Gyeongje reveals in a report titled "Prosecutors: Smuggling Drugs in Rectum, a Pile of Foreigners Arrested."

A pile of foreign English teachers and children of US military officers have been caught smoking and selling marijuana and hash in Daegu, including 26 year old teacher Mr. B. Four were arrested, and 10 were booked without detention. The teachers got the hash in Hong Kong and hid it up their asses in a ‘bizarre (엽기적인)’ method of smuggling. As always, the police believe more foreigners are involved and will expand the investigation.

The Maeil Gyeongje obviously believed this was a really, really, really, really important story, seeing as they published it online four times over two days.

In an article that makes no mentions of rectums, Yonhap says that according to police, Mr. B made 17 trips to Hong Kong last year and smuggled 3.4 kilos of hash back to sell to people like Mr. P (20), son of an American military officer. The arrested include American, Australian and Scottish English hagwon teachers, 3 junior college teachers, 2 salarymen, and English Village teachers. As is par for the course, exactly how many of those are foreigners is not entirely clear, and no mention of the Korean Bar employee arrested in April is made. This was also reprinted in the Gyeongbuk Ilbo, and the Maeil Shinmun also did a story on it. So we have four articles about this story, or seven if we include the reprinted Maeil Gyeongje articles.

The Maeil Gyeongje has clearly been busy, breaking another story involving English teachers and drugs, and finding the need to publish it five times (out of a total 15 articles). Here's a translation of the Kookmin Ilbo's article about it.

Yet Another Native Speaking Teacher [Arrested for] Smoking and Selling Drugs

Seoul Police drug investigators booked without detention three foreigners including New Zealand English Hagwon Teacher Mr. M (32) for smuggling psychoactive substances and making and selling synthetic marijuana.

They sold and made synthetic marijuana using 700g of powder containing 'JWH-018', a psychotropic substance, which was brought into the country three times since last August. Last July JWH-018 was designated a psychotropic drug.

Until recently Mr. M had worked since last July at K University's English Hagwon in Seoul, while the other person he was booked along with, Canadians Mr. C (32) worked as an English teacher in a kindergarten.

They met at a club in Itaewon and using an international courier, or purchased the psychotropic substance directly from Shanghai and brought it back into the country in a soap container. They made synthetic marijuana by mixing the JWH-018 powder with tobacco and smoked it at their house. They also sold it to three drug dealers including Mr. Park (27). Mr. Park then sold it to ten Koreans at clubs in Itaewon.

A police officer said "There have been cases of people being arrested for selling the new drugs 'skunk' and 'Spice,' which contains JWH-018, but this is the first time someone has been arrested for making synthetic marijuana from this ingredient."

When I read of teachers 'making synthetic marijuana,' I pictured devious chemists at work - not some guys mixing JWH-018 powder with tobacco. According to the Yonhap video here, the evidence includes the powder, tobacco, the finished, mixed product ('Skunk'), magazines, and this high-tech cigarette rolling machine.


It's a good thing these criminal geniuses are off the street. Seriously though, how do you get caught selling something that looks exactly like a cigarette?

According to a Yonhap article titled "Foreign Teachers Making, Selling 'Synthetic Marijuana'":

Police have booked without detention sixteen people including two English teachers for making, distributing and smoking synthetic marijuana. In Korea active foreigners are becoming the primary suppliers of drugs.

The charts and statistics the article supplies to illustrate this assertion are... non-existent. Note also the focus on the two English teachers. For some reason Yonhap and the Kookmin Ilbo felt little need to mention the French DJ who was also arrested (as the Chosun Ilbo did). On the other hand, Koreans aren't forcing themselves to learn French DJing techniques ('Don't forget the DJ Cam listening test tomorrow, kids!') and allowing the presence or lack of such skills to mark socio-economic status and highlighting the crimes of all the French DJ instructors brought into the country in order to draw attention from the failings of Korea DJing system.

Another Yonhap article with the same name has sub-headlines which read "16 booked in first case of psychoactive substance smuggling, production and smoking" and "6 workers deported for selling philipon." As the article notes,

6 illegal Filipino workers were caught and deported for selling phillipon brought from the Philippines and local marijuana, and four Koreans, including 46 year old Mr. Kim were arrested, and four more, including 33 year old Mr. Lee, were booked without detention for having bought and smoked drugs sold by the Filipinos in places like clubs.

In addition to this Yonhap story, Herald Gyeongje and Financial News also mentioned the Filipino workers. While they found time to publish articles about the arrests of the foreign teachers in this case, the other Yonhap article, the Kookmin Ilbo, YTN, the Chosun Ilbo, NoCut News, the Segye Ilbo, the Munhwa Ilbo, and the Maeil Gyeongje (with its article published 5 times) obviously did not find the story of the arrest and deportation of Filipino workers worth reporting on.

I'm still compiling information comparing media reports on drug arrests of foreigners and Koreans in April, but will get it posted eventually.

[Update]

Regarding the comments made by the Wonder Girls' former English tutor in the US, JYP Entertainment head Jung Wook said, "I don’t understand why the entire country has to hear about what this guy has to say." Well, he is an foreign English teacher. I do feel his pain however, and can just as easily say, "I don’t understand why the entire country has to hear about some foreign teacher caught with a joint."

Singles going steady

This Korea Herald article the other day had some interesting statistics:

The reservation rate for a single ticket is steadily increasing at CGV. It was 20.3 percent in the second quarter of 2008 but rose to 24 percent last year.[...]

The situation is similar for musicals and plays. According to Interpark, an online ticket seller, single tickets for various performances stood at about 96,000 in 2006 but increased to 141,000 in 2007 and 214,000 in 2008.
...
According to Statistics Korea, one-fifth of the households in Korea are one-person households.
...
Home meal replacement products such as instant lasagna or galbitang, or beef rib soup, are [popular, as] the sales of such products increased 60 percent this year, according to E-mart.

The statistic on the number of single tickets being reserved at CGV movie theatres was something I found interesting, especially considering the number of times I've been told that people in Korea never go to movies alone. Things are obviously changing, especially if "one-fifth of the households in Korea are one-person households." One wonders how many of these people are in the ranks of the elderly.

Korea Beat also translated an article about students' attitudes towards marriage:

A study of 1,039 middle and high school students nationwide conducted by the Korean Association of Retired Persons (한국은퇴자협회) found that three out of four male students said "I absolutely want to get married" (76.4%) but just half as many (55.6%) of female students said they plan to marry. 69.5% of male students said "if I get married I absolutely want to have children" but just 59.7% of female students agreed. The male students gave economic reasons as the primary reason not to get married, while female students mentioned the burdens of childrearing and housekeeping.

Clearly, changes are afoot. While it could be said that the self-centeredness that has grown out of (North) American individualism is not the best thing that could be exported here, on the other hand, with the adoption of apartment blocks as the place of choice to live for the middle class in Korea, the community found in the golmok neighbourhoods of the past has already been under assault (figuratively and literally) for decades. The construction of so many officetels over the past ten years has clearly had an effect on the makeup of households noted above.

Teenage hooker discovered to be a boy after arrest in Daehangno

The Korea Times had an interesting article today:

A teenage "girl'' arrested in central Seoul in March for offering to sell sex to adult men on the Internet has been found to be a boy, nearly a month after he was taken into police custody.

Before the 16-year old, only identified by his surname Choi, was found out through fingerprint identification, he was held in a lockup cell with five women at a Seoul detention center in Uiwang city, Gyeonggi Province, for 23 days. After finding out his real gender, police immediately moved him to a cell for men and had to revise the case report.

According to police, Tuesday, Choi was arrested along with four others in late March on charges of selling sex to adult men. He was dressed as a girl and used a female name when questioned by police. Because of Choi's feminine physical features and attire, investigators were completely fooled. Police said Choi solicited adult men on online chatting sites. When they met in a motel room, Choi stole the men's wallets and ran away while the men were taking a shower.

Interesting that it took so long to identify him, and perhaps a testament to the thoroughness of police searches. The article adds that

For minors aged under 17, fingerprint identification is the only official tool to distinguish genders. Koreans receive a resident identification card when they become 18 years old.

That should be "17 and under" above (in Korean it says '18세 미만'), though it's not surprising that such mistakes are made when the Korean reads something like '17세 이하'. I was curious what the fingerprints would be compared to, but a co-worker told me that babies are fingerprinted when born and the prints submitted to the dong samuso to be used in case children go missing.

As for dressing as a girl to steal money from men looking for sex with minors (wonjo gyoje), this isn't the first time, as the first news item under December 4 here reveals:

On December 2nd [2002], Busanjin police office issued a warrant for the arrest of a 17 year old boy identified by only his family name, Park. Park, who has naturally long hair, put on some lipstick, pretended to be a high school girl and used a video chatting site to lure men into arranging sexual liaisons for money. The men would send money to Park's bank account, but he would never show up for the arranged meetings. Police were able to track down Park and arrested him after more than 1.2 million won had already been transferred to his account.

The 2006 film Dasepo Girls (which I looked at in depth here) portrays something similar, in which a teenage boy makes himself up like a girl and video chats with a person he believes is a girl - but turns out to be his father in the next room.

The Korea Times provides a few more details about Choi's arrest:

He was taken into custody after a sting operation by Hyehwa Police Station in late March, and then transferred to the Seoul detention center in early April.

It might be worth noting that the first Korean film to deal with wonjo gyoje (which I also examined at length in that post about Dasepo Girls) took place in the same district, as can be deduced from its title: Teenage Hooker Becomes Killing Machine in Daehakro (대학로에서 매춘하다가 토막살해 당한 여고생 아직 대학로에 있다), which was released in late 2000. The translation of the Korean title is even more amusing than the English title: "The High School Student Who Got Chopped Up While Selling Herself in Daehangno is Still in Daehangno." I don't imagine this film was released in any more than a handful of theatres, and as far as I know, it isn't available in Korea on DVD (though it was released on video in Japan). A review can be found here, and some photos can be found here, which is where the photo at the top of this post came from.

Cheonggyecheon in Films

Yesterday I mentioned Robert Neff's post at the Marmot's Hole quoting from (and showing a photo from) a 1958 article about the future covering-up of Cheonggyecheon. At the time I remembered some films from the past featuring the stream, including Homeless Angels (1941), which I wrote about here. In that post, I showed this photo and wrote:

Perhaps the stream above is Cheonggyecheon, but it's worth remembering that there were dozens of streams in Seoul that were covered up in the twentieth century by both Japanese and Korean governments.

Choi In-kyu, the director, went on to direct several other (less 'pro-Japanese') films before being kidnapped off to North Korea during the Korean War, including 'Hurrah for Freedom' (1946), the first DVD put out by the Korean Film Archive. It includes a scene in which the main character, an independence fighter, has rescued his friend from a Japanese police officer (I guess we're assuming he wasn't Korean) by stabbing the officer, and flees over (and then under) a bridge crossing Cheonggyecheon. I'm quite certain this is the same bridge (Gwanggyo) seen in the post at the Marmot's Hole, which is now the second bridge to be seen along the restored stream when walking from its source. Thanks to panorama software and a screenshots of a pan across the bridge, we can see almost the full length of the bridge.


Here's a shot of what it looked like underneath:


What really prompted me to post these was a comment by Sperwer at the Marmot's Hole mentioning the fact that Obaltan, (The Aimless Bullet), a 1961 film by Yu Hyeon-mok considered a classic today, features a scene in which one of the main characters flees the police after a robbery by running through Cheonggyecheon - under the then ongoing construction which was covering the stream:



(Due to it being a panorama made from screenshots taken from a pan, both people seen above are the same person)



Very cool. I watched the film when the dvd came out back in 2002, but did not know anything about Cheonggyecheon at the time (it was later that year that it became mentioned more often in the English language press), so it was fascinating to watch it again, knowing where this scene took place.

Some interesting history reading for today:

Over at the Marmot's Hole, Robert Neff posts a fascinating article from 1958 which looks at the upcoming covering of Cheonggyecheon and laments the loss of the past. In the Korea Times, Michael Breen writes about the 'forgotten' second republic which existed in between the overthrow of Syngman Rhee in April 1960 and Park Chung-hee's 5.16 coup in 1961.

A Herd of Jostling Hippopatamuses

While the cars on Korea's roads today are not as long or ostentatious as American cars of the 1950s and 1960s that James Wade describes, one imagines he could never have conceived of the way in which 'herds' of cars jostle on Seoul's streets today...





Wade has a number of pieces on the behavior of foreigners (read: Americans) in Korea in the 1950s and 1960s which might have led to less-than-charitable feelings towards them by Koreans, as well as tensions that existed among members of the foreign community, which I'll post in the future.

Children's Day march

Prior to Children's Day, my school had a 'practice' sports day. There were three grades on the field at once, so things were pretty busy. I remember having the entire school out when we had sports day in elementary school, but living in a small town, the school grounds were likely six or seven (or ten?) times bigger than most schools in Seoul, and we also didn't have 300 kids in a single grade. In fact, I think my school had between 400 and 500 students. Our sports day (called 'tabloid day,' for some reason), involved the grade 7 students running the different activity stations and the grade six students leading a team with students from grade 1-6 in it - something unimaginable in the Korean context, I suppose. When I was in grade 7, relaxing and running a station, the grade six students who were supposed to be leading their teams from station to station got mixed up and the teachers, demonstrating great patience, simply decided to cancel sports day after an hour. Sports day here is a little more organized:


As seen above, the younger students pushed giant balls, had small group games of tug-of-war, and running races in groups of six. The older students did a running race around the schoolyard that included hurdles and tumbling, as well as a relay race. One other activity I didn't understand at first, unable to figure out why the kids were all lined up until I finally noticed the very long rope they were holding.



What was interesting was just how elaborate all of the marching to get them into place was:


Of course, it shouldn't be so surprising that Korean schools still show the influence of militaristic education stretching back to the colonial period, as described here (see also, on a lighter note, here). Also related to schooling back in the day were the 'lunch box checks' of the 1970s which were put in place to limit the use of rice in meals (a policy which led to makgeolli consumption dropping and 'fake' (non-rice-based) soju attaining a popularity it still has today). Of course, lunch box checks were necessary back then since lunches weren't served by schools. A friend of mine who grew up in Hwagok-dong (the location of the first development in Seoul's west end in 1965) in the 70s and 80s remembers kids who came to school and just went outside at lunch and drank water because they had no lunch to eat. He also talked about seeing fried chicken restaurants but never being able to eat there, how, if you went to a meat restaurant the night before, you'd wear the same shirt the next day so as to show off its meat smell to everyone, and how bananas were super-expensive and kids who brought them to school were envied.

Nowadays, lunch is provided at school, for a fee. Not everyone can afford it, and as Yonhap noted (almost two months ago), the issue of free lunches has become a political issue ahead of the upcoming elections.

Opposition candidates are promising to exempt all elementary and middle school students from lunch expenses, seeking to appeal to low-income voters in the nationwide elections, which are seen as a litmus test for the Lee Myung-bak administration ahead of the 2012 presidential election.

The main opposition Democratic Party (DP) and other minor parties insist the provision of free lunches conforms to the Constitution, which stipulates free compulsory education through middle school. The opposition parties also contend that the current selective program hurts the self esteem of students from low-income families placed on the free school lunch list.

Currently, 970,000 million elementary and middle school students from low-income households are under the state-sponsored free meal program, according to government statistics.

The ruling Grand National Party (GNP) and the government have dismissed the opposition's calls as a "populist" tactic, arguing that providing free meals even to children from well-off families with taxpayer money could undermine the country's fiscal soundness.

Finance Minister Yoon Jeung-hyun said recently that he cannot understand the calls for universal free lunch, suggesting the demands may have been motivated by "socialism."

I imagine the good finance minister will be shocked when he learns about the health insurance and pension system, or if he reads anything about Park Chung-hee's five year economic plans. Of course he realizes that it's just opportunism on the part of the DP (especially when you see them saying, "There would be no problem if the government scrapped its four-river project and other exhibitive projects"), but it's much easier to shoot back and call 'em all commies.

[The GNP] agreed Thursday to more than double the number of free-lunch students to 2 million by 2012, with the related annual budget estimated at 400 billion won. They also agreed to entirely computerize the social welfare information network so that the list of young schoolchildren put on the free lunch list would be kept secret.

How long until that information is hacked and appears on the internet?

Of course, it wouldn't be Children's Day without a report like this:

A survey of 5,437 students ranging from fourth grade to high school seniors showed that 53.9 percent were happy with their lives. This is below the 26 OECD members’ average of 84.8 percent and the top-ranked Netherlands, where 94.2 percent of students said they were happy.

Not that anyone is shocked by this, or by reports that fitness levels among students are falling.

I didn't give any of this much thought on the holiday itself, mind you, choosing to enjoy a barbecue on this stretch of the Han River instead...

A closer look at Ernest Bethell

A worthwhile article by Robert Neff appeared in the Korea Times the other day about Ernest Bethell, who published English and Korean-language newspapers which openly challenged and criticized the Japanese rule of Korea one hundred years ago. While I thought I'd read a fair amount about Bethell in the past, Neff (as always) digs up information I hadn't come across before.

While I knew that he had been sent to Korea from Japan to cover the Russo Japanese War (like these journalists) and had been let go because Japanese control of information in Korea made their international press releases more informative than reports from most journalists in the field, I hadn't known this:

Bethell insisted that he was dismissed for another reason. "My instructions from the Chronicle were that the policy of the paper was pro-Japanese and I was told that my correspondence would have to fit in with that policy.''

Bethell stayed on in Korea and went on to found the Korea Daily News and the Daehan Maeil Sinbo. I hadn't realized it was initially called the Korea Times, nor had I realized that Bethell had been sent to Korea with fellow Englishman Thomas Cowen, who started the paper with him and eventually betrayed him:

Unknown to Bethell, Cowen was pro-Japanese and informed the Japanese authorities that they were getting ready "to start a paper here (in Seoul) called the Korea Times, with a lot of support from the Korean Court, the policy to be Korea for the Koreans and the anti-Japanese.''

Shortly after the inauguration of the Korea Times and the Daehan Maeil Sinbo on July 18, 1904, Cowen quit and returned to Japan. It was at this point that Bethell changed its name to the Korea Daily News.

It's also noted that " Emperor Gojong helped finance Bethell through Antoinette Sontag, the proprietress of the Sontag Hotel -- the headquarters for the pro-Russian party in Seoul." I also found this interesting:

Bethell was also attacked by Japanese-owned Korean newspapers. One paper claimed that it was a "great folly'' for Koreans to trust the Korea Daily News and those who did were likened to "Chinese opium-smokers." It asked its readers if it was "wise for Korean people to give their confidence to men of another race'' and insisted that Koreans should "trust men of their own color.''

As is well known, Bethell was able to print such critical articles about the Japanese because his British nationality prevented the Japanese (or Koreans, really) from prosecuting him due to Britain's extraterritoriality agreement with the Korean government. He was hounded in various ways until the Japanese pressed the British government to censure him, and after a first trial he handed over control of the paper to his assistant editor Arthur Marnham. A second trial saw him sent to a British prison in Shanghai for three weeks. He died soon after his return due to his heavy drinking (though the stress he had been put under no likely played a part in his early death - he was not yet 40). His papers would not long outlast him.

It was Bethell's wish for his newspapers to continue printing but shortly after his death, Marnham suspended production of the Korea Daily News; only the Daehan Maeil Sinbo was printed under the supervision of Yang Ki-taik, the Korean editor.

It was in the Daehan Maeil Sinbo that Shin Chae-ho published his influential essay, "A New Reading of History" in 1908 (discussed briefly here); Shin was in fact editor-in-chief and a regular contributor to the paper. As for Yang Ki-tak, he ended up becoming a target of the Japanese - twice - which led one British diplomat to stand up to the Japanese, but I'll save that story for another time. What I really found interesting was this:

Marnham, unwilling or unable to endure the threat of Japanese persecution and encouraged to do so by the British consul-general in Seoul, sold the newspaper to the Japanese government for about 7,000 yen.

The sale of the newspaper was kept relatively secret until after Japan's annexation of Korea when the paper's name was changed to the Maeil Sinbo on Aug. 30, 1910.

The paper that had once defied the Japanese government's steps to colonize Korea was now nothing more than a propaganda tool for the very government it had opposed.

This is quite interesting, as Yi Kwangsu's Mujeong (the first modern Korean novel) was serialized in the Maeil Sinbo in 1917, and it was in the Maeil Sinbo in the 1940s (after other Korean papers had been closed down) that he would write many of his pro-Japanese articles. Worth noting is that you can actually read most (all?) of the Maeil Sinbo here, at the Korean Internet News Database (KINDS). To see the full selection of papers available (in pdf form) look here. Among the papers you can find are the turn of the century papers Daehan Maeil Sinbo, Hwangseong Shinmun, Dongnip Shinmun, and the English-language version of the Dongnip Shinmun, The Independent. I think it's great that this material is now freely available online. Started as it was by Seo Jae-pil (Philip Jaisohn), the first naturalized Korean-American, I imagine he wrote the editorial which appeared in the first issue. Speaking of the outrages caused by the Righteous Armies which formed in the wake of the murder of Queen Min, at one point it reads,

We are told that some foreigners have been killed by these rebellious bands and that some of Our people have been killed by foreigners, all of which shocks and pains us. As We have opened up intercourse with the world, We consider that we are all brothers, whether foreign or native born. For brothers to hate and kill one another is an offense to Heaven and will bring its punishment. Our messengers tell us that the governors and magistrates have received Our orders to protect the people regardless of nativity.

Ye people, cast away all savage customs and become peaceful and obedient children. Cast aside the doubts and suspicions which you entertain against foreigners.

Compare this to what the Japanese said later about Bethell, asking if it was "wise for Korean people to give their confidence to men of another race,'' insisting that Koreans should "trust men of their own color," describing his foreign physical attributes as an "Englishman, with deep-set eyes and white nose, with white face and yellow hair'' and accusing him of "taking advantage of the ignorance of the Koreans.'' Luckily, after liberation, Koreans put a stop to such negative media portrayals of foreigners and harping on their different physical characteristics. Right?

Just for fun, it's worth pointing out that after the Japanese turned the anti-Japanese Daehan Maeil Sinbo into their mouthpiece as the Maeil Sinbo, it became the Seoul Shinmun after liberation, which now publishes things like this.

While it's nice that cut flowers are often left at Bethell's grave at the Seoul foreign cemetery, one wonders how someone in a similar position, looking critically at what goes on in Korea, would be treated today.