A weeks ago I wrote about the Shouting Korea campaign, but didn't get around to posting these photos:
The bottom one might make a great new header...
Speaking of the campaign, when you watch the TV ads, they make much clearer who's behind the campaign.
Look carefully, and you might just see the Hyundai logo. The first Shouting Korea ad, a teaser video, can be found here:
One hopes that Motley Crue was compensated by Hyundai, considering how similar the 'drum-drum SHOUT!' part sounds like Shout at the Devil. I have to admit though, I'd rather listen to 80s hair metal than Kim Yuna and Big Bang:
It just gets worse, though. Last time I showed this poster, which describe how to do the 'shouting dance:'
Hmmm... manufactured cutesy banal pop music organized by a conglomerate in the name of nationalism. I think if Bill Hicks had lived to see this he would have declared himself to be in hell.
Back to the shouting campaign and the place of foreigners in it:
After watching the Netherlands defeat Brazil Friday night, I noticed something about the Shouting Korea ad on TV, which I found here.
The proud taeguk warriors fighting spirit has been stopped, but...
...we should not stop shouting.
Soccer is a festival. (Enjoy the world cup at Hyundai Fan Park with the people of the world)
Let's go to Hyundai Fan Park!
Hmmm, with that mention of taeguk 'warriors' and 'fighting spirit,' perhaps that quote about 75% of Koreans believing that “the survival of the fittest is a major principle of contemporary world” was way off. Hold on a minute though - who did I see the Koreans cheering with?
I know I've seen the girl in the bottom right corner before...
There she is at bottom left. Odd though, I thought the idea was to drown these people out, not cheer with them. What I didn't realize, which a friend pointed out, was that these 'let's cheer with the people of the world (whom we formerly cast as our, y'know, enemies)' ads only appeared after Korea was knocked out of the world cup. Cute. Now that you're no longer a threat, let's cheer together (unless you were cheering for us, and then we already liked you:)
At any rate, now that the taeguk warriors have been sent home (happily with no officiating scandals or bomb threats to embassies) Korean fans can shout along with the people of the world at Hyundai Fan Park. For more information about about Hyundai Fan Parks, let's look at their site:
Hyundai will be offering soccer fans around the world the opportunity to enjoy the World Cup in a fun and safe environment by providing venues and large screens in 32 cities from 19 countries across the 31 days of the event. Giant screens will relay all the action from South Africa, while group cheering boosts the festive mood.
Well, actually, that's from their British site. If you follow the link from there (or dig around FIFA's site), you'll find this page, which lists all of Hyundai's fan parks, including Seoul's, in Olympic Park. Now, clearly, if this is genuine, this call to cheer with the world's people, and not just a slogan to keep people coming out to Hyundai's turf for "distributing plastic balloons, pompoms and other items... as well as their leaflets and advertising goods" (the source of much of the garbage left over after matches), then I imagine Hyundai has done a lot to advertise the location of this fan park to foreigners in Seoul. Right?
[Sound of crickets]
I found no newspaper articles (well, one brief mention of the park's existence) and only one semi-official looking tourism blog in English which mentioned the fan park - and that was so foreigners could cheer at a Korean game.
Golly, it's wonderful that Hyundai creates spaces for foreigners to cheer at games in 18 other countries, but it seems pretty clear that in Korea there is only one team to cheer for, and that Hyundai's shouting campaign was a hell of a lot more honest when the role of foreigners was to be drowned out by the patriotic danil minjok or to join Koreans in celebrating their nation[al team].
Mind you, I may have misunderstood all of this. Perhaps the idea was, after the Korean team's ouster, for Koreans to cheer for foreign teams with the people of the world in a purely symbolic sense, in that those teams' fans would also be at other Hyundai Fan Parks worldwide watching the games at the same time. In that case, I can see why there would be no need to involve foreigners actually living in Korea in any of it.
[Update] I was thinking about how in my last post about Kim Yuna that the people watching had clearly never seen her James Bond program before, and realized that the women in Dunkin' Donuts didn't realize that Kim had clearly won - Asada would have had to give birth to baby Jesus on the ice to beat her - so I guess that explains their gloating over Asada flubbing the landing on one of her jumps. Explains it, but doesn't excuse it, it my eyes.
Kim Yuna's reaction after skating a clean program.
Kim Yuna not just won, she shattered her own previous records for long program and combined total, scoring 228.56 points (18 points more than her previous record). An outstanding performance on her part for both of her programs. You had to feel for Mao Asada, who must have known it would be impossible to top Kim's score (she came right after Kim). I watched them skating at the local Dunkin' Donuts, where half dozen customers (all young women) cheered in delight when Asada flubbed a landing. Nice, especially when it was clear Kim had already won. Asada still did well, at 205.50 she got the best combined score of her career, but it was just not good enough to beat Kim. At any rate it was nice to see Joannie Rochette overcome the personal tragedy of the past week to get bronze, and odd that the final top three were the same as the top three in the short program.
Update:
That's what the Google results for "Kim Yuna" are at the moment, and the top right picture of Kim and Asada links to my blog (here), resulting in some 6,800 hits Wednesday, and 4000 hits in the last hour. Fun.
Update: According to Chosun.com, Japanese netizens are accusing Koreans of 'buying off judges' in regards to Kim Yuna's victory. Oh, and there's a cool photo here.
[Regarding the title of this post,] That's what it said at the top of the tv screen after her performance, as all the other skaters took their turns. I was in Nolboo eating lunch today when Kim and Mao, performed, but was sitting at an angle which made it hard to see the TV screen, and missed Mao's performance (I didn't realize her score or how phenomenal she'd been, though in retrospect it explained why the whole restaurant was silent during Kim's performance). At any rate, she set a new world record, something she's been doing with regularity, and just a moment ago (as it's warm today and a lot of restaurants' doors are open) I could hear the music from her program waft up from a nearby restaurant. One wonders how many replays will be broadcast over the next few hours. I do wonder if I'm detecting some gloating in some of the articles I've seen, and all I can say that it's not over yet.
Kim's performance can be seen here, and Asada's can be seen here.
While the 1-2 battle was pure athletic drama, the sport's two stars over the past four years finally meeting on Olympic ice to duel it out, the emotional story belonged to Canadian Joannie Rochette, whose 55-year-old mother died of a heart attack here last weekend.
I couldn't figure out why she was crying after a third place finish (so far) until I read that and remembered that a (Korean) friend had told me about her mother dying (some Canadian nationalist I turned out to be).
By the way, does anyone find Kim's expression in this ad to be, uh, ecstatic?
Perhaps there's a reason the left hand side was cut off where it was. Just do it, indeed.
Kim Yuna set a new record at Skate America yesterday for her short program:
I just watched her long program a couple hours ago, in which she fell once and flubbed two other jumps, and though she came in second in the long program she still managed to come out on top and win the competition, making this seven consecutive grand prix titles, according to this article. I suppose it's a good thing she won, what with all the pressure on her. When she came in third after falling in her long program at the 2007 World Championships, every photo I saw on portals was of her on her ass on the ice - talk about fair weather support from the media.
Like shooting fish in a barrel, I know, but the Korea Times has an article with the headline "Figure Star Kim Yu-na Sparks Marketing Craze." Y'know, if you're going to drop a word from 'figure skater' in a headline, you might want to drop the 'figure.' Either that or change the accompanying photo to something like this (one of the top 'hot photos' at Donga.com at the moment):
I heard the sound of an announcer discussing figure skating today as my dad flipped through channels and decided to google 'Kim Yuna' to check if she was competing and the first response was this, saying that she'd won the Trophee Eric Bompard (but little more - I had to check her record to confirm that she'd just set a new one). As it turned out, due to the delay in broadcasting, she was on next, and I caught her performance. As my mom put it, 'She makes it look effortless.'
Odd how that google page for Kim Yuna has several representative photos of her, and one of them is on my blog. Every victory for her brings a bunch of visitors my way...
It took me less than three minutes to realize that Kim Yu-Na of South Korea should simply be presented the 2010 Olympic women's figure skating gold medal right now.
And that was just after the short program, and not the record setting long program, which left her 36 points ahead of the second place winner (Mao Asada).
I noticed Mark Russell also quoted from that blog in a post about Pyeongchang's 3rd attempt to bring the Winter Olympics to Korea in 2018, and if that doesn't work, in 2022, and if not then, in 2026 - Pyeongchang is the little train that could. This latest attempt comes after bidding to host the 2010 and 2014 Winter Olympics - the failure of the latter which brought on contagious crying enforced by the presence/surveillance of the media and this beauty of an opening sentence by Jack Kim writing for Reuters).
In 1992 Jason Priestly hosted Saturday Night Live around the time of the Winter Olympics and did a figure skating skit. Then Beverly Hills 90210 star Priestly had been a figure skater when he was younger and - as every Canadian newspaper or magazine article dealing with him was required to mention - growing up in Canada. Canadians find Korean media reports on successful Korean Americans familiar, or at least they should. Gord Sellar puts it more succinctly when, describing how "Korea... shares with Canada a long history of being peripheral", he writes that "Just as with Canada, Korea’s tendency to over-celebrate its profile on the global scale can make Koreans (like Canadians) look like fools." At any rate, Priestly's skit involved him skating while Phil Hartman and Dana Carvey (as Toller Cranston) provided commentary, and every time Priestly tried a jump, he fell. It's a great piece of physical comedy, helped by Hartman and Carvey intoning 'Ohhhhhhhh' every time he falls, and made funnier when it just cuts to them talking and interrupting every sentence every time he falls: "The competition here has - ohhhhhh - been wonderful this year.' 'Yes, they - ohhhhhhhh - You know, he really should just - ohhhhhhh - he really should just stop.' If Pyeongchang doesn't win the 2018 Winter Olympics, they might just want to take that advice.
As for Kim Yuna, is it just me, or is the photo below more Chosun Ilbo than AP?
After causing controversy with earlier comments regarding Korea University's influence on Kim Yu-na's World Championships performance, the KU president strikes again:
Eyebrows were raised after Lee Ki-su, university president, said on Wednesday that the institution "delivered" the 18-year-old, repeating a statement from late March that drew widespread criticism at the time. Reacting, KU students and graduates spoke of their embarrassment at the latest claim.
Lee said that KU pumped the spirit of the school into Kim so that she could win the World Figure Skating Championship 2009.
"We can say KU delivered Kim,'' Lee told a forum at a meeting arranged by Kwanhun Club, a senior journalists' group in Seoul. "You can tell Kim made totally different performances from the ones she performed during her high school era. It is a result of the injection of the KU spirit into her. I called and told her a leader in the 21st century should retain an ethnic, pioneering spirit and a conviction for victory."
On a related note, I saw one of my students with this comic book today:
Hopefully she's being compensated for this likeness(?). Roboseyo has more on Kim Yu-na here.
I was trying to figure out why, as of Monday, I've been getting over 1000 hits a day, and discovered the answer - Google photo searches for "Kim Yu-na World Championships" turn up, at the very top, two photos from my 2007 post titled (unsurprisingly) "Kim Yu-na at the World Championships" (which may or may not be in the top 20 for a google search by the time you read this). Strange that that post should be my most popular ever, two years later, but that's the internet for you.
It was in November 2005 that I read a Korea Times article (which I can't find now) about Kim Yu-na that had one of the two following pictures in it.
"Aw, isn't she adorable?" I thought, and when she won the Junior World Championships a few months later, I recognized her immediately (hard to miss her, seeing as she was on the front pages of many newspapers). The Joongang Ilbo published an article in January 2005 looking at the financial costs her family had to bear; things have certainly changed since then, as she's now one of the biggest stars in Korea. In the last three years she has changed from a "Figure Pixie (or 'elf') " to "Figure Queen" (or, in 2007, 'Wonder girl'). It was nice to see her finally crowned this weekend after her amazing record-breaking performances.
There have been a number of good articles in the western press, especially this one about how Brian Orser's experience being part of the 'Battle of the Brians' at the 1988 Olympics has put him in a unique position to help Kim, seeing as a similar rivalry between Kim Yu-na and Mao Asada will continue into the 2010 Olympics. Parts of an AP article were quoted by the Korea Times, who didn't bother to attribute it or put quotation marks around it, and, to add to their victory dance, mentioned that Mao Asada "had clearly been crying." Classy. The Times has also given us articles like "World Press Lauds Yu-na’s Brilliance" (attributions included!) and "Kim Yu-na Also Internet Sensation." While the Chosun Ilbo has written about how Kim Yu-na will help Korea's global brand, it's also written about her relationship with her mother, and the Donga Ilbo has written about the people who have helped her get to this point.
Before I wrote about Kim Yu-na at the World Championships in 2007, I'd written about her briefly here, and also wrote about her here and here in 2007, here and here in 2008, and here this year. Perhaps it's time to start a "Kim Yu-na" category.
[Update - via Brian in Jeollanam-do, we have this fine example of Kim Yu-na-inspired self-congratulatory 'our-minjok-share-the-same-pure-bloodline' nationalist drivel. "The miracles of economic development and democratization are embodied in the movements of Kim Yu-na," indeed.]
After winning the Four Continents championships on the weekend, the media is gushing about Kim Yu-na, and so is Roboseyo - go read his post about her. She's come a long way from these days (do go read that four-year-old article):
Yu-na can credit her success to her parents, who have spared no expense for her career. Her monthly training costs average more than 2 million won, which includes renting the Gwacheon ice rink and hiring instructors. When she takes part in an international competition, it’s at the family’s expense. But it is overseas training that truly costs a fortune. To create her program, Yu-na and her mother have gone abroad and paid huge sums to hire professionals such as choreographers.
Nowadays, as the Korea Times reports, Kim doesn't have to worry so much, seeing as
a rough tally of Kim's already sealed endorsements, sponsorships and cash prizes show that her total income this year will probably hover between eight to 10 billion won, more than double the amount she raked in last year.
It's nice to see that the effort and money she and her parents put into her training has paid off so well, and it's worth noting that she has donated millions of won to charity over the past few years, as noted here and here. A Chosun Ilbo article asks:
Why do businesses like Kim? A staffer with Cheil Worldwide said, "When things are difficult, people want to hear hopeful news. For example, Pak Se-ri drew attention in the financial crisis in 1997 and national football coach Guus Hiddink became popular during the credit card crisis in 2002. As gloomy news about the recession pour out, consumers are becoming frenzied about Kim as a symbol of hope."
They aren't the only ones. Yesterday former GNP leader Park Geun-hye posted a picture of herself as a child on skates on her Cyworld homepage (yes, that's her pictured above, not Kim Yu-na) and wrote about the hope and courage that Kim's victory has brought, like a new spring, to the nation. Even politicians/daughters of former dictators aren't immune from Kim Yu-na's power. I found another photo of her at Dongdaemun Ice Rink in the 1960s, along with her sister and her mother:
And just in case you thought having a skating rink next to city hall was a new idea, it's not:
The rink is actually on the pond inside Deoksugung. For a decade or so in the '60s there was no high wall around that palace. Here's another view from 1958:
It was also possible to go skating on the Han River near the Han River Bridge:
Last but not least is the ice-rink at Changgyeongung palace:
He shoots! He SCORES!!
Needless to say, the way palaces are treated has changed quite a bit (though of course Changgyeonggung had been turned into a zoo and park by the Japanese). The last four photos are from Seoul Through Pictures Volume 3; I'm not sure about the sources of the other two.
You know, I was starting to get annoyed at the media coverage of figure skater Kim Yu-na's 'failure' on the weekend, what with the Korea Times and Herald cribbing from Yonhap, leading to a 'three-peat' of the headline (and article) "Kim Yu-na Fails to Win Third Straight Grand Prix Title," the Chosun Ilbo writing, "Her failure to win the Grand Prix Final three years in a row is only the beginning of a new journey ahead of her," and the Joongang Ilbo writing of her "mistake-filled free skate" (before explaining that "Kim managed only a single rotation on her triple lutz, normally her strong jump, for the second straight day and then fell on her triple salchow in the latter part of her program," indicating that she'd made all of two mistakes). But, just when you're starting to think that the media are acting more prickish than usual toward an "underperforming" athlete (ie. one that does not win gold), you read of Japanese netizens leading a cyber attack on VANK. The reason?
According to VANK, Korean netizens started the fight by crashing a Japanese site after Japanese figure skater Asada Mao beat Korean figure skater Kim Yun-a in the Grand Prix final in Goyang, Korea on Saturday.
You can always count on this breed of netizen to make the media look good, though to be sure, the media will never be as entertaining as these keyboard warriors trying to crash a Japanese portal into the Pacific. They would never actually want to sink the Japanese Islands, of course, because if they did, the sea that shall remain unnamed would simply become the Pacific Ocean, and good luck trying to change that name, VANK. It's funny how my suggestion to change the sea that shall remain unnamed to the "West Sea" (seeing as its west of Japan) is always met with utter incomprehension.
Anyways, to be fair, the aforementioned Joongang Ilbo article is actually lengthy and the best article of the bunch, relaying this quote: “It’s wonderful to have a rival like Yu-na,” Asada said. “We motivate each other and I’d like to keep having this motivation of each other.” This reminds me of the photo they took together almost two years ago titled, "we are rivals and friends".
Too bad these netizens - on both sides - can't get more into this spirit. But then, that's sports nationalism for you. As for other articles that are not so critical, a Yonhap article titled "Everybody's in love with Kim Yu-na, and so is the market" tells us that "Kim, an 18-year-old figure skater who took silver at the Grand Prix Final before an adoring home crowd this weekend signed a two-year sponsorship deal Monday with South Korea's top automaker, Hyundai Motors." It seems Hyundai isn't too concerned about her "failure," though the Korea Herald notes possible reasons for that:
The company said that it decided to sponsor Kim as her image is compatible with the brand image the carmaker is promoting for itself.
The figure skater has become one of the most popular celebrities for commercial advertisements. According to reports, a milk brand advertised by Kim has seen sales jump six times while the sales of a bakery chain's new product bearing her name is increasing at a rate 3.5 times faster than similar new products.
Perhaps she'll be able to help stem the tide for Hyundai during this economic downturn. To be sure, this isn't the largest product she's ever advertised for:
As for the Korean netizens on the attack after she won the silver, perhaps it was just the preliminary for this competition.
The weekend before last I glanced at naver.com and saw on the front page a shot of skater Kim Yu-na, reminding me she was then competing in the U.S. The blog "Axels, Loops, and Spins" commented on the 'Pep squad' that materialized for Kim's performance:
Between the end of the Pairs competition and the start of the Ladies short I went and grabbed some dinner. Upon returning to the Arena, I found a sea of Korean flags! I must tell you I've never been to an event where Yu-Na Kim competed. I asked a couple who was sitting near me who also travel to lots of skating competitions and they said "Oh yeah, she has a traveling entourage of superfans! Where she goes, they go!" Once we got inside the Arena, the walls were instantly decorated with Yu-Na signs and messages. It's like the Arena underwent an instant transformation. At the same time, all those people outside with the flags took seats bunched together in one corner of the arena...suddenly Yu-Na had a pep squad!
"Ice Princess Kim Yu-na Fighting!"
[...] I think the Gold is wrapped up already. Yu-Na Kim was mesmerizing. She had a little flub up on her double axel but nobody cared because the rest was just so good! When the marks went up she was close to 12 points ahead of Miki Ando! The Korean pep squad went berserk! Yu-Na just sat there in the kiss and cry and shyly waved at the camera...geez! As soon as she left, the superfans quickly dispersed. I asked the couple behind who had some experience with the superfans and they noted they were now on their way to the hotel to stalk Yu-Na there!
A video of her short program is here. After she won with her long program and received the gold medal, the English language media in Korea made a fewreferences to her, and the same blogger wrote (despite the "stalking") that "The Yu-Na Kim superfans are amazing!". Gathering in one section to cheer a Korean athlete is by no means a new, post World Cup phenomenom. Here's a photo of Koreans in Las Vegas cheering boxer Kim Deuk-gu in 1982 (at the match which cost him his life).
You can be certain that the fans who come to cheer these athletes have a better attitude toward athletics in general than the editors who almost uniformly ran pictures of Kim Yu-na's fall in the 2007 world championships ("Hmmm, do we run a photo of the 99% of her routine which was successful, or the 1% that was not?"). Whether in online newspapers or the front page of naver, it was the fall which everyone saw first, along with the text announcing her bronze medal, which, if we haven't forgotten the Olympics two months ago, is seemingly worth almost next to nothing, though things are probably better than during the 1988 Olympics, when this description of Korean medal winners appeared in the New York Times:
Champions have been feted and paraded before the nation, their lives chronicled and rigorous training methods reviewed. But the second- and third-place finishers have either apologized for not having taken first or have seen their performances characterized as failures.
These days, the narratives of struggle and success can take on a different tenor if the winner is female. When Lim Su-jeong (above, with her moptop influenced by the Suh In-young cut which has infected the nation for far too long) won a gold medal in taekwondo in Beijing, we certainly got the story of the sacrifices she made when she was training, but there were also numerous inane headlines accompanying her photos, talking about her 'pure smile' or her 'cute sticking-her-tongue-out pose.' While commenting on her purity isn't such a stretch, the tongue pose headline is a bit odd. One of the reasons this form of coverage was decidedly uncommon in 1988 would be because there weren't many women sticking their tongues out in a 'cute' fashion for the cameras in the first place, a reaction no doubt influenced by cutesy sticker photo machines (Japan strikes again!) but perhaps even more so by eoljjang websites, which are discussed in a 2004 article here and more recently here (while the selka (self-camera) aspect of eoljjang is discussed here. Of course, these sites don't just have still photos, but also feature animated gifs which both encapsulate the nature of some of these poses by showing them all at once, and unwittingly illustrate the hyperspeed at which this society can move.
I can't decide whether it's hypnotic or disturbing...
Popseoul reported a week ago that a new trailer from the film 'Hellcats' (or 'I like it hot') showed Wonder Girl member An So-hee and co-star Kim Bum kissing (as well as the other characters in bed with their respective lovers).
I do find it amusing that they covered up the kiss with a heart. We mustn't let anyone get the wrong idea about So-hee, right?
It seems like a rather confused advertising campaign. Perhaps the appeal of the latter photo is that the male viewer is left to think, "Hey, that could be me being held by a 15 year-old." Unfortunately, that fantasy was ripped to shreds the moment the aforementioned male viewer saw the new trailer - "Hey! That's not me!" Wonder Girls fans responded to the image of So-hee kissing a male other than themselves with rage and their comments on Kim Bum's Cyworld page forced him to close it down. Fans left comments on the film's homepage as well. The victim's comment made it seem as if he wasn't too preturbed: "So-hee's fans are really scary…kekeke. I’m definitely going to get shot by a runaway soldier."
The question remains - were these teenaged boys who undertook this form of 'cyber terror', or were they guys in their 20s... or 30s?
The victim seemed to be taking it all in stride, suggesting that perhaps it isn't just nasty comments left on a person's homepage that lead to suicide.
At any rate, the Wonder Girls virus continues to spread (and a test to check for the virus may be necessary for Korean students wishing to study in the US), as the Donga-Ilbo has taken to calling Kim Yu-na a “Wonder Girl” after her second victory at the Grand Prix finals, which has got to make her feel that all those years of training were worth it. Perhaps it's better than "Figure Pixie (or 'elf') ", the media's old name for her, though she seems to have graduated to "Figure Queen" these days, as she's called in a photo caption here (if you look at the comparison chart near the bottom, tell me, could they choose a worse looking photo of Mao Asada?).
[Update: For more recent criticism of the media, Feetman Seoul looks at the poor photos the local press took of Paris Hilton in a Hanbok, While Korea Beat looks at the shockingly inappopriate headline of a Sports Hankook Ilbo story about a 15 year-old girl who was forced into prostitution.]
Korean figure skating sensation Kim Yu-na (17, Gunpo Suri High School) is rewriting the history of her sport.
Yes, I did say the Donga Ilbo, and not the Rodong Shinmun. And thanks, Kim Seong-gyu, for letting us know she was Korean. That was really necessary.
In March, Kim received a short program record score of 71.95 in the Tokyo Figure Skating Championships, and now is the record holder in both short program and free skating scores.
Kim set a record score in the free skate competition with 133 points to take home the Russian Cup in the fifth 2007-2008 Grand Prix at the Khodynka Ice Palace in Moscow yesterday. She won the Cup with a total of 197.20 points, including the 63.50 she received in the short program the day before. 197.20 is Kim Yu-na’s best aggregate score ever.[...]
Although her world ranking is second, trailing behind rival Asada Mao of Japan, this record is as good as ‘proclaiming’ her the current world champion.
No, it's not. Next we'll be told that the fact that she performed flawlessly during all of her practices this month "is as good as ‘proclaiming’ her the current world champion". The same logic is to be found in people saying, "Well, in the 2006 World Cup, Korea tied France, and France beat Brazil, so therefor Korea beat Brazil." Sure it does. Sorry, but the way sports events work is by choosing one competition to be "the big one", the one that determines the world ranking of the participants. All the first place rankings in competitions this year don't mean anything when it comes time for the world championships. It's like the university entrance exam - your 98% average for the past three years of high school means nothing if you blow the exam. I realize that for a great many things, knowing someone and appealing to them can give you a leg up. I know that, quite often, asking for a favour from your cousin's friend's elementary school classmate will allow you to bend the rules in Korea. Korea is not the world, however. I would be surprised if Kim Yu-na didn't bring home a gold medal or world championship at some point, but while she's proven herself to be ready for the big leagues, the attention craving cheap nationalism and faulty logic that lies behind this article shows that the media in Korea, and a whole lot besides, is not.
At least the Joongang Ilbo remembered that there was more to the Cup of Russia than just the ladies competition.
South Korean figure staking sensation Kim Yu-na rallied to win the women's title Saturday at the Cup of China, as she stayed on course for a berth at the Grand Prix final in December in Turin, Italy.
Kim Yu-na demonstrates her staking skills
Between those blades of steel and her sensational 'staking' skills, I think Kim Yu-na should be up to the challenge if the forces of evil should ever seek to invade a skating rink.
Her short program is here, and the long program is here. The stake was edited out of the performance on Giles Brian Orser's orders.
More than two months ago in the Korea Times, an article mentioned the most searched for keyword for the week of June 3 - 10:
TV talent show StarKing topped the nation's No.1 search engine Naver's most searched keyword list as a participant on the show killed herself due to depression.
Actually, entering the participant's name into the search bar at naver.com gave you more than a dozen options, made up of word combinations others had previously searched for:
In it, people search for her school, her homepage, photos of her, her suicide, her weight loss, etc. Several articles in the English language media appeared at the time:
According to police, [a] 16-year-old girl, Lee Eun-ji, hung herself in her room at her home in Daejeon early Tuesday morning [June 5]. Her mother was the first to find her. Early last month [actually, April 28], the girl appeared on an SBS television show titled "StarKing,'' where ordinary citizens with extraordinary abilities or stories compete for an award.
Lee drew public attention to her loss of 40 kilograms, bringing her weight from 87 to 47 kilograms in three months. She said she did so in order to please her late grandmother who used to worry about her being overweight.
The Donga Ilbo tells us
Her mother said, “On the previous evening, I found my daughter feeding her nephew, skipping her meal to reduce her weight, and I reprimanded her for not eating. Then she entered and locked her room.”
The Korea Times continues:
There was a written will on her desk. It read, "I'm sad to have been scolded. Father and mother, I'm sorry for having worried you. I'm sorry for having given you pain.''
While this may be beginning to sound like the story from months ago about 'sudden', spur-of-the-moment suicides by children, the Times reveals more.
Although her mother said Lee had suffered from depression over the stress of weight control, many Internet users are blaming fans of boy band Super Junior for Lee's death.
The Donga Ilbo continues:
Her school friends revealed, “She took a picture of herself with a member of “S”, a famous singing group, who was one of the program’s panel members, which was the major reason for her becoming a subject of personal attacks.” She posted the picture on her own website.
One classmate said, “After the picture was spread online, she was badly frightened after she received about a dozen threatening phone calls and text messages a day from fans of the group.” Another friend said, “She received those phone calls even at home.” In relation to this, some netizens criticized the fan club of “S” group for bombarding her with the hate messages that may have eventually driven her to end her own life.
Lee's mother said in a TV interview that the high school student suffered depression due to the negative press and threatening e-mails that she tried to defend herself against by answering all the messages posted online.
Oddly enough, 'StarKing' is pronounced 'stalking' in Korean. Now perhaps this is starting to sound like another case of online harrassment, which the media first commented on in the wake of the Dog Poop Girl incident in 2005, when they dubbed it 'cyber terror' (one legislative result of the media furor of two years ago became law on July 27 when the use of 'real names' became necessary to post comments on 35 popular websites). Back in January, the media blamed online harrassment by netizens for the suicide of singer Unee (an opinion the Metropolitician certainly disagreed with), and the Hankyoreh certainly saw this case from that angle:
Concerns about the impact of malicious internet comments took center stage again this week after a high-school girl killed herself apparently due to verbal attacks from net users.
Of course, when dealing with Superjunior fans, you have lots of ammunition to use in supporting the 'they're obnoxious in packs and should be avoided at all costs' theory, which goes well beyond the internet, as this article about fans gathering outside Superjunior's house relates:
The flock of fans annoying local residents is on the spot around the clock. Usually there are more than 20 girls waiting near the building and on weekends more than 100 join the queue. [When] the fans, middle and high school girls, were screaming and singing songs for more than 10 hours, and neighbors asked them to be quiet, they simply ignored the request.
“Would you keep loving them even if they didn’t return your love?” “Of course ― until the day I die!”
which should remind us that we're dealing with adolescent girls who lack perspective or experience and who may be willing to verbally (or otherwise) trample those who would stand in the way of them and their idols. The article ends with a 15 year old girl being asked her future plans:
“I want to become a singer, just like BoA. Even though I’m plump now, I’ll go on a diet and lose weight.”
Losing weight didn't work so well for Lee Eun-ji, unfortunately. The Korea Times mentions that a few fans had realized that hounding a girl in comments on her homepage, in emails, and on the phone for taking a photo with one of their idols was maybe a tad over the top:
A fan of the pop group also posted a written apology on a portal site. She said she and other fans recognized their comments could have led to Lee's suicide and apologized, adding they were regretful for having been jealous of the picture.
One comment on a naver blog read "Lee Eun-ji, I'm sorry, in heaven meet your grandmother and be happy." It's nice to see that some of the fans felt sorry for venting an incredible amount of hostility and negativity at a fellow fan who got the chance to pose in a picture with a member of their favourite 'music' group. Perhaps Lee Eun-ji would have forgiven them, if she wasn't, y'know, dead.
Anyone hoping that such fans would learn something about respecting other people's feelings and would refrain from selfishly trampling upon them in the future were likely disappointed when, presented with the accusation that figure skater Kim Yuna slighted a Superjunior member on July 31, they lined up to leave 2000 comments worth of seething negativity on her Cyworld homepage. As it turned out, this was a lie concocted by a Superjunior member on a radio broadcast to draw attention to himself, and considering the past behavior of his fans, he was either a complete moron not to expect the response it got, or a complete asshole for ignoring its possibility (actually, as a media figure who lied just to get attention, he's already most certainly an asshole; knowing that there was a strong possibility that his fans would respond the way they did allows him to descend to a special category of asshole, say, a Super-asshole). After he apologized for this, many fans defended him, saying, "At least he apologized." Yeah, that means so much, doesn't it, just like when his fans apologized over their harassment of Lee Eun-ji and then continued where they left off a few months later with a new target. On an unrelated note, half of Korea's pre-schoolers are on-line.
The last few links have been from Popseoul, who covered Lee Eun-ji's death in a way that was far less superficial than the simple excuses the media offered of online harrassment:
[W]hat angers me most is that Lee Eun Ji’s cyworld post back in May clearly demonstrated that she was suffering from depression, but Elves [fans] just continued to torture the poor girl.
Lee Eun Ji mentioned that she went up to her attic several times because she thought that it was better to end her life than to continue with her rigorous diet (she starved herself for three months, drinking only one or two cups of milk daily). She also cried her heart out saying it’s very difficult to deal with all the crap she’s currently going through. Before her weight loss, people treated her like a pig and after her weight-loss people are treating her like a liar (some were accusing her of losing weight via plastic surgery and/or diet pills). Any sensible person would’ve realized that this girl is suffering a lot and that she’s in fragile condition, but Elves ignored her plead and continued to attack her, which apparently pushed Lee Eun Ji over the edge.
Unfortunately, the Superjunior fans weren't the only ones attacking her. While according to the Donga Ilbo, "She was treated as a celebrity at school, among friends, and even on the Internet since then, and she often said to her friends that she wanted to become a singer later," the Korea Times paints another picture:
Another friend said not only the star's fans but also Lee's classmates posted hurtful comments on her blog, with one of the comments saying, "Are you happy to have lost that much weight and to be on TV? I bet you underwent liposuction.''
While it may often be true that doing well and standing out above the crowd at school doesn't go over so well, there are other factors to consider. This article started to cut through some of the 'harrassment' hype -
The girl is said to have almost refused to eat anything for the past three months, which contributed to the depression that made herself vulnerable to netizens' accusations.
- while the Donga Ilbo article is clearer:
[T]he police are now investigating the alleged relationship between the possible motives behind her killing herself: the hate messages, rumors, and possible side effects from the extreme diet she went on. [Emphasis added]
Let's make this clear - according to her, she lost 40 kg (going from 87 to 47 kgs) in three months. To put it another way, she lost 88 pounds in about 90 days - one pound a day. There are so many things that could be talked about regarding her perceived need to undergo such a diet - the rejection she felt being overweight, the pressure from whatever source (the media, classmates, teachers, 'her grandmother') to be thin, the severity of the diet, her mental state after losing so much weight - but it's much easier for the media to focus on cyber harrassment, so any consideration of why she felt compelled to follow such a severe diet is left unmentioned during discussions of the need for proper 'netiquette' or more surveillance.
Since the reason for her diet was never a topic for discussion, little discussion was made in the media of how similar the effect of her diet was to the change in Kim Ah-jung's appearance in the movie 200 Pound Beauty (which was released on Dec 14, 2006, four and a half months before her appearance on StarKing). I have no idea if the film influenced her; while some thought it encouraged plastic surgery, I thought it questioned some of the attitudes surrounding it.
It might not be entirely obvious, but StarKing seemed to see the similarities between the movie and the girl's weight loss. For those unfamiliar with the movie, here's the music video for a song from the movie.
Another song from the film is here, just in case you're not acquainted with it. The reason for being concerned with the songs is that you might find them familiar if you watch this clip of her appearance on StarKing (taken from a file I found on emule).
You'll notice that both songs are played during her appearance on the show. The first was likely played in the studio, as we see her dancing to it. The timing of the second song would make me think it was added later, as the singing of the song ('Maria') is the character's first triumph in the film, and plays while Lee Eun-ji describes her rejection by 7 boys when she was overweight, but her assertion that she's better than them now and that she'll be luckier next time. Visually, there are several moments on the show designed to associate Lee with 200 Pound Beauty. Having the life-sized cardboard cutout of her 'former' self allowed for the comparison I made above, while the inclusion of her old pants allowed for several more associations with the movie:
The photo above of singer Younha putting both legs in one pant-leg is right out of the film as well. One unasked question is why Lee felt the need to appear on tv in the first place; you have to wonder if the show itself was everything she expected it would be. What appeared on air was about two or so minutes of her speaking (not even half of the clip) with the rest of the time involving antics with the pants and self-aggrandizement by the host.
Did she want to do that little dance at the beginning of the clip, or was it encouraged/mandated by the producers? The show did everything it could to compare her experience to a movie (and blogs that commented on the show afterwards dutifully called her "a real-life 200 Pound Beauty") and, while there was no malicious humor directed at her, by making an issue of the size of her pants and showing that they could hide behind her cut-out, they were, I thought, making fun of who she "used to be", as if there could be no connection between the two (which seemed to miss the entire point of the film, wherein the main character misses the person she once was). Nowhere on the show is the wisdom of her radical diet questioned - perhaps the means justified the end.
A girl most likely influenced heavily by the images of women omnipresent in the media goes on an extreme diet in order to compete with those images and appears on a television program where her ordeal is only superficially referred to and is compared to a movie all for the sake of entertainment and ratings, after which a member of a media-created group poses for a photo with her which then provokes his jealous fans to use every medium at their disposal to harrass her. What got lost in this media collision was that this wasn't someone who used special effects in a popular movie to appear to lose weight - she actually did it, but her reasons for wanting this, and the way in which she did it were never questioned. Who knows why this person chose to commit suicide, but it seems many people involved in the last weeks of her life - from the StarKing producers who wanted to compare her to a movie to the Superjunior fans who were enraged by a photo on a website - found it hard to see beyond pixels and text, which are as insubstantial as the ashes her family was left with.
The proud taeguk warriors fighting spirit has been stopped, but...
...we should not stop shouting.
Soccer is a festival.
Let's go to Hyundai Fan Park! 
