My 2009 Korea Herald articles

While looking through old posts for this series, I realized that my Korea Herald articles from 2009 are no longer online. I decided to post them all here. I've included the original urls, even though they're now dead links. Matt Lamers was then working at the Herald and welcomed these articles (as he did the cover story for this issue - which he cowrote with Ben Wagner and me - when he worked for Groove Magazine). 

Data says it all: E-2s are law abiding

Korea Herald, October 6, 2009

On Sept. 24, Yonhap News reported that National Assembly Representative Lee Gun-hyeon had released crime statistics pertaining to native-speaking English teachers and stated that crime by foreign English teachers was at "serious" levels. I find it curious that he thinks this way, because according to the statistics he released, the foreign English teacher crime rate is actually quite low. 

These statistics say that 114 crimes were committed by foreign English teachers in 2007, and 99 were committed in 2008. According to the Korea Immigration Service, in 2007 there were 17,721 teachers on E-2 visas working in Korea, and in 2008 there were 19,771 teachers. Therefore, in 2007, 114 out of 17,721 teachers were convicted - a crime rate of 0.64 percent. In 2008, 99 out of 19,771 teachers were convicted - a crime rate of 0.50 percent.

According to a July 9, 2008 Chosun Ilbo article, the Korean Institute of Criminology reported that in 2007 the overall crime rate among all foreigners in Korea was 1.4 percent compared with the 3.5 percent rate among Korean citizens. 

In other words, according to Lee Gun-hyeon`s own figures, the foreign English teacher crime rate (0.64 percent) was more than five times less than the crime rate among Koreans (3.5 percent) in 2007 and half the rate of other foreigners living in Korea. 

And yet, for some reason Lee calls this low crime rate "serious" and in need of more measures - beyond the criminal record checks, degree checks, and health checks for illegal drugs and HIV that those who receive E-2 visas must already undergo.

Unfortunately, Lee is not the only member of the National Assembly to make exaggerated statements regarding foreign English teachers. In early June, Representative Choi Young-hee submitted three bills to the National Assembly obliging foreign English teachers to present criminal record and health check documents before they can be hired at public or private schools or academies. 

When she announced these bills, she said that 38,822 foreigners were issued E-2 visas and entered the country in 2008, but 22,202 were not accounted for. That the Korean Immigration Service had lost track of 22,202 foreign English teachers was troubling information, to be sure, but what was even more troubling was that she used the wrong set of immigration statistics to determine this figure. 

The source she used was a document listing those entering and leaving Korea by visa type, which presents a much higher figure than the statistics which list the number of foreigners residing in the country. The correct statistics for 2008 show that at year`s end, there were 19,771 foreigners in Korea on E-2 visas. 

It likely doesn`t need to be pointed out that mistakenly announcing that 22,202 foreign English teachers are missing is likely to cause undue worry and suspicion in Korean society of this group of foreigners, but when the Korean Immigration Service pointed out this mistake to Choi`s office, no correction was ever issued.

Additionally, the purpose statements of the three bills Choi submitted to the National Assembly stated that "the crime rate among native English teachers is rising." Representative Kim`s own crime figures, however, show that 114 teachers were arrested for crimes in 2007, 99 were arrested in 2008, and 61 were arrested in the first eight months of 2009. 

If the trend for 2009 continues for the rest of the year, not only would we see a drop in the crime rate over three years, we would also see a drop in the absolute number of teachers being arrested - hardly indicative of the "rising crime rate" Choi uses as the rationale for introducing these new bills.

Lee said that "recent crimes by foreign English teachers are causing the anxiety of students and parents to grow." It might be suggested that it is instead ill-informed, unfounded, and alarming statements made by public figures like Lee and Choi which are contributing to this rise in "anxiety" students and parents are said to feel towards foreign English teachers.

The opinions expressed by the author are his own and do not necessarily represent those of The Korea Herald. More of his writings can be found at populargusts.blogspot.com - Ed. 

By Matt VanVolkenburg                                           (Here is the related blog post.)

Putting statistics on foreign crime into some context

Korea Herald, November 3, 2009

Public outrage in the wake of a high-profile case of child abuse has led members of the National Assembly to turn a spotlight on possible threats to children and end the lax judicial treatment of sex offenders. While this is to be applauded, the manner in which this has been carried out has at times been careless.

On Oct. 19, National Assembly Representative Woo Yoon-keun said that the number of sexual crimes by foreign nationals had tripled over the past eight years, rising from 83 in 2001 to 242 in 2008. While this information is troubling, it would seem less so if the Rep. Woo had bothered to put any of this information in context. Considering the foreign population at the end of 2008 was 1.15 million, those 242 crimes result in a sex crime rate of 20.8 per 100,000. When compared to statistics from the Supreme Prosecutors Office which show the sex crime rate of Korean citizens in Korea to be 108 per 100,000, we see that the foreign sex-crime rate is five times less.

But this is not an entirely accurate portrayal of these statistics. If it can be agreed that children and the elderly tend not to commit crimes, then it`s worth looking at the demographics of the Korean and foreign populations in Korea. 

According to the CIA, children under 15 and elderly people over 64 make up 27.6 percent of the population of Korea. According to Korean Immigration Service figures, children under 16 and elderly over 60 make up 8.2 percent of the foreign population. If these low crime demographics are removed when making calculations, the foreign sex crime rate is 22.7 per 100,000 foreigners, and 151.7 per 100,000 Koreans - meaning in this case that the foreign sex-crime rate is 6.6 times lower. 

While some news media reports in the past have been responsible in pointing out that the rising crime rate among foreigners in Korea is still much lower than that of Korean citizens, Rep. Woo has not put his worrying figures into context. Unfortunately, Rep. Woo is not the sole political voice guilty of this. On Oct. 22, it was reported that the Ministry of Justice had announced it would "revise immigration rules to ban foreigners found guilty of raping Korean children from re-entering Korea permanently," and that this was "the latest in a series of government measures to keep sexual predators away from society."

It`s unfortunate that this discussion of how to protect Korean society from sex crimes, when discussing foreigners, has focused only on past and possible sex crimes committed by foreigners against Koreans and omitted sex crimes that Koreans commit against foreigners. 

A 2006 study, conducted on the behalf of the National Assembly Committee on Gender Equality, looked at the sexual activities of Korean men visiting Thailand and the Philippines and found that Korean men were known for habitually doing drugs and seeking out underage girls to have sex with. 

The National Youth Commission found in 2005 that Korean fishermen were largely responsible for the existence of a teen prostitution industry in the South Pacific nation of Kiribati. A 2003 survey conducted by the National Human Rights Commission found that 12.5 percent of female foreigners working in Korea said they had been sexually harassed by Korean superiors or colleagues. One wonders why more consideration isn`t being given to such sex crimes against foreigners and the need to prevent and punish them.

While every effort should be taken to protect Korean children from sex crime and punish its perpetrators, it is troubling that the only available role for foreigners in the current debate is as potential criminals. Reading such alarming statements about foreigners being made in the National Assembly, one wonders of Korea`s elected representatives truly want, as Justice Minister Lee Kwi-nam recently put it, "to realize a genuinely mature cosmopolitan nation," or if they see foreigners as a threat in much the same manner as the country north of the 38th parallel. 

The opinions express here are the author`s only and do not necessarily represent those of The Korea Herald. For more of Matt VanVolkenburg`s writings, go to http://populargusts.blogspot.com - Ed.

By Matt VanVolkenburg                                           (Here is the related blog post.)

Systematically stigmatizing foreign English teachers

Korea Herald, November 20, 2009

In January 2005, Korean netizens discovered "dirty dancing" style photos taken at a "sexy costume party" at the foreign English teacher site English Spectrum which led to a scandal as the photos were spread by netizens and reported in the mainstream media. These netizens started an online "Naver Cafe" called "Anti-English Spectrum" to combat what they described as "the degradation of Korean women by English Spectrum," though, according to one of the women who appeared in the widely distributed party photos, "Some online articles and the Anti-English Spectrum cafe said we were prostitutes, western princesses and brothel keepers," suggesting that there were other motives.

Anti-English Spectrum, described on their website as "The Citizen`s Movement to Expel Illegal Teachers of Foreign Languages," attempted to disguise their true nature in 2007 by changing their website banner showing Korean nationalist heroes and the caption "Our homeland is protected by the blood of our ancestors" to one showing a child at a blackboard with the title "The Citizen`s Group for Upright English Education." 

Their day to day activities, which consist of race-based profiling and stalking of foreigners, have not changed, however. Anti-English Spectrum`s website is full of updates about foreign teachers that they are "pursuing" based on tips alleging illegal activity. A post on Oct. 14 about the "stakeout" of a female foreign teacher said, "Drugs have not turned up, only a used condom was found," suggesting they search through teachers` garbage. 

In a recent interview, the cafe`s manager even suggested that, instead of calling the police, people who want to report foreign teacher crime should "go through our cafe members (so) we can advise you and alert police." This behavior, however, has not been condemned, but was officially rewarded by the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency in 2007. 

Cafe members claim to have contributed to numerous newspaper articles and news broadcasts. To be sure, interviews with the cafe`s manager -- who invariably portrays foreign teachers negatively -- have appeared in articles in most of Korea`s major newspapers.

In the summer of 2006, an innocuous news report about rates of voluntary HIV testing among foreigners which mentioned English teachers led the cafe to begin a campaign to stigmatize foreign English teachers as being an AIDS threat. On Anti-English Spectrum`s site, they posted that "foreigners infected with AIDS have been indiscriminately spreading the AIDS virus" and -- perhaps revealing their true concern -- that "Koreans who have had sexual contact with a foreigner will almost all contract AIDS." 

They then worked with a tabloid newspaper and produced a story about the threat of AIDS-infected foreign English teachers which called for strengthening E-2 visa regulations, which was then used as evidence there was a problem when cafe members sent petitions to the Ministry of Justice. An e-mail sent during a bad breakup was pitched by Anti-English Spectrum as the basis of a story carried by a major newspaper in May 2007 titled "White English Teacher Threatens Korean Woman with AIDS," which in its Sports edition carried the subtitle "Beware the `Ugly White Teacher.`" 

That a major newspaper would publish this was shocking, but not as shocking as the fact that the manager of Anti-English Spectrum was invited to an immigration policy meeting hosted by the Ministry of Justice on Oct. 23, 2007. It was this meeting that decided upon strengthened E-2 visa regulations, including HIV tests, something that Anti-English Spectrum -- who had contributed to all of the past negative news articles equating foreign English teachers with AIDS -- had requested in petitions for the past year. 

That this campaign was designed not to protect children or unsuspecting Korean women, but to stigmatize foreign English teachers is suggested by the fact that when an HIV positive Korean man who had unprotected sex with numerous women for years was arrested in March, it didn`t merit a single word on Anti-English Spectrum`s website. 

The opinions expressed by the author are his own and do not necessarily represent those of The Korea Herald. More of his writings can be found at populargusts.blogspot.com - Ed. 

By Matt VanVolkenburg                                           (Here is the related blog post.)

(Note that the last article was published on the same page as "Blurring line between hate, free speech" by Adam Walsh, which was an in-depth look at Anti-English Spectrum; it initially was to include an interview with Lee Eun-ung, AES's leader, but Lee refused permission to print it, and AES successfully demanded the images taken from AES's site be removed from the online article. It was reposted at the Korea Herald's site in March 2010; this is how the two articles looked on the printed page.)

When critics of American foreign policy write Koreans out of their own history

(And other grumbling about factual errors, limited perspectives, and received wisdom)

I've come across a few books and articles about the negative influence of the US on Korea over the past few years that I started to write about but never got around to finishing; now that my book project is finished, I finally have.

My attention was turned a few weeks ago to an article at Salon by Marie Myung-Ok Lee titled "The 'Squid Game' critique is also a love letter to a unified Korea," and which has the subtitle "What the west doesn't understand about Netflix's hit show is that much of it is a critique of the US influence." The central argument is that "if there is a villain, it's seated in the root wound of the Korean people: the partitioning of the peninsula by the U.S." Perhaps "the root wound of the Korean people" appears to be "the partitioning of the peninsula by the U.S." from a progressive vantage point in the US, but the view from South Korea (in textbooks, media, and popular culture) would suggest that root is popularly perceived to be the colonization of Korea by Japan.

The article makes interesting points about the fratricidal conflict between brothers and Sae-byeok's pure Korean name, and makes the assertion that the banjiha (half-basement) rooms in buildings built in the 1970s were only meant to be bunkers (something I rather doubt, since Seoul's population increased steadily by 8 million between 1960 and 1990 – an average of 730 per day (!) – and there was a dire need for housing throughout that time). Those few interesting points, however, are unfortunately marred by either a shallow or biased understanding of the history involved, of a sort that I've seen on many occasions.

From the viewpoint of a non-American, it's fascinating to see how, whether on the left or right, some Americans demand that their country be placed at the center of so many historical narratives; the irony when it comes from those on the left is that, in the name of decrying the loss of Korean political agency at the hands of US imperialism, they create narratives which themselves deny Koreans any historical agency. I find it hard to imagine an assertion more offensive to North Koreans than the statement that their country "was originally created by the U.S. itself"– as if Koreans north of the line (and the Soviets) had no role to play in the formation of the North Korean state. (I would also imagine that making such a statement during a visit to North Korea would either indefinitely extend or abruptly end your stay.)

Minimizing the involvement of the USSR in such 'America first' arguments about the division of Korea and the Korean war is par for the course, but even here I was surprised by the statement that the location of the line that divided the peninsula was influenced by a desire to "appease the Soviets, who were threatening to invade, anyway." The plan since the Yalta Conference in early 1945 had been for the USSR to invade Manchuria and Korea in August 1945, and Soviet troops were on the verge of invading northern Korea at the time Rusk and Bonesteel were drawing lines on maps on the night of August 9, 1945. As well, at the Potsdam Conference two weeks earlier, the Soviets had asked the US if they could coordinate an attack on Korea from the south. The US declined, but they divided the sea around and air above Korea into zones of US and USSR operations. (See here.)

As for the assertion that "the Korean people play[ed] no part in the decision" to divide the peninsula, this is correct, but the division decision was influenced by Syngman Rhee, as David P. Fields' book Foreign Friends: Syngman Rhee, American Exceptionalism, and the Division of Korea, makes clear (I summarized it here, but it's well worth listening to his lecture here). Rhee, of course, never wanted division, but successfully mobilized prominent American politicians who pushed for the US government to take action to stop Korea from being handed over to the Soviets. Dean Rusk himself noted that Korea was divided for "symbolic purposes," not strategic ones. The decision was also a State Department one, not a military one.

As for "the giddy days following Japan's" defeat which "lasted however many months before both U.S. and Russian military forced their way onto the peninsula," it should be noted that only the Soviets "forced their way" into Korea (against the Japanese), and that they were present before the fighting stopped on August 15. The Americans arrived 3-4 weeks after liberation, and the claim that they "forced their way" are belied by all of those photos of crowds cheering their arrival.

The mind also boggles at the description of Sae-byeok as being like "an urchin wandering the streets not unlike the scores of orphans crying in the gutters of Seoul after their families were killed in American bombings during the Korean war." I'm at a loss to understand how that association was made, though the fact that the orphans' families are assumed to have died due to US bombing and not due to political executions by the North (or South) Koreans or artillery fire from the Chinese - three belligerents mysteriously absent from this only mention of the events of the war - likely speaks for itself.

Regarding "Again, not thinking of Koreans, U.S. military left behind not peace but a shaky, hastily created ceasefire agreement," I'm not sure how two years of negotiations can be described as 'hasty.' It was in fact the fault of Stalin that the war was prolonged by two years because he wanted to keep the US bogged down in Asia while he rearmed eastern Europe, and used the issue of anti-communist KPA POWs (ie. those forced into the KPA) who did not want to return to North Korea as the means to extend the negotiations. 

As for the claim that the American-brokered ceasefire left "the South Korean president so frustrated that he wasn't even invited to the signing for fear he wouldn't sign the document," this is astonishingly incorrect. There was no fear Rhee wouldn't sign the armistice because it was well known to the US that he did not want to end the war without achieving unification, and that if it had to end, he wanted a mutual defense treaty signed before the armistice. (See here for more.) When he got neither, he ordered the release of the anti-communist POWs from POW camps on June 18, 1953, the day North Korea, China, and the UN planned to sign the armistice, disrupting the ceremony. Once again, this rendering of Rhee as a mere victim of unilateral US actions removes all agency from Syngman Rhee, and also ignores the fact that the North Koreans were also marginalized in the armistice negotiations by their Soviet and Chinese allies.

Ultimately, I think that any benefit derived from viewing Squid Game in the light of this analysis is offset by the one-sided, distorted view of history it depends on. (For more interesting takes on Squid Game, I would recommend this or this.)

That said, it is far more informed than Patriots, Traitors and Empires: The Story of Korea’s Struggle for Freedom by Stephen Gowans. According to this book review,

Stephen Gowans is not a writer to mince words or to defer to mainstream distortions. He makes no concessions to the standard self-serving Western narrative, and this is one of the reasons his work is so consistently refreshing. Gowans is also noted for his careful research and masterly knack for deploying information in support of logical analysis.

For an example of his 'careful research,' feel free to read this page of end notes:

So, 26 of 32 citations on that page refer to a single source. Needless to say, if I want to read Bruce Cumings, I'll read one of his books rather than an inferior knock-off. The book is summarized by its author as follows:

Korea has long struggled for freedom, from Japanese control in the first half of the twentieth century, and subsequently from US domination from 1945 to today. This is the story of the patriots who have fought for independence and of the empire-builders and traitors who have opposed them. [Pg. 15]

He also describes the Korean war as one fought by "an army of traitors vs. an army of patriots," as he describes the ROK and DPRK, respectively. On the bright side, I did appreciate being told right at the book's beginning that were would be no nuance or objectivity in the pages ahead. Thus, I did not read the entire book, but I did wonder what the pages about the Gwangju Uprising looked like (pgs 150-151). (The citations (rendered as '[65]') match the page of end notes posted above.)

Park’s presidency was quickly followed by a December 12, 1979 military coup d’état, carried out by General Chun Doo Hwan, commander of the ROK army’s Ninth Division. Chun, at the time, was under the command of US General John A. Wickham, Jr., head of the US-ROK Combined Forces Command.[63] A veteran of military intelligence, Chun, in power, expanded the intelligence function as a force of internal repression. The paramilitary riot police force was expanded, until it numbered around 150,000 by the mid-1980s.[64] Wickham approved a role for the ROK military in politics. The army would vet political candidates. At the same time, it would supervise all political activity, preventing challenges to the state.[65]

To clarify: Chun was never commander of the ninth division. At the time of Park Chung-hee's assassination he was the head of Defense Security Command, which - to correct the second sentence - was not under Combined Forces Command Operational Control (CFC OPCON). And, far from "approv[ing] a role for the ROK military in politics," after Chun's 12.12 coup, Wickham spent months all but lecturing his ROK counterparts on the need for the ROK military to focus on its job and stay out of politics. 

In the spring of 1980, students took to the streets of Gwangju to protest Chun’s dictatorship. Wickham approved the deployment of two ROK special forces brigades to quell the disturbance and enforce martial law. On May 18, elite paratroopers landed in the city and began to indiscriminately murder demonstrators, including women and children.[66] Outraged, the citizens of Gwangju fought back. Hundreds of thousands of local people drove the soldiers out of the city. It’s estimated that as many as 1,500 people died in the fighting. In the aftermath, a citizens’ council was established. Resembling the Paris Commune, the revolutionary people’s government that ruled Paris in the spring of 1871, the council governed Gwangju for the next five days.[67]

When student protests initially took place in Gwangju (and Seoul and elsewhere) in the spring of 1980, Chun was not yet in power; the author seems to not understand the chronology at all. The ROK's special forces were never under CFC OPCON, and Wickham wasn't even in the country on May 18. The paratroopers were most certainly utterly brutal on May 18, but describing them as "indiscriminately murder[ing] demonstrators, including women and children" on that day is hyperbole. And the 'citizens' council' was initially more conservative and gradually replaced by a competing student-led council, which itself had factions, among which the 'fight to the end' faction eventually prevailed. (The fact that he brings up a comparison to the Paris Commune but does not cite George Katsiaficas is another problem, as is the near absence of Tim Shorrock from the end notes.)

As the citizens of Gwangju were driving the US-commanded South Korean army out of the city, the US National Security Council was meeting at the White House to plan a response. US President Jimmy Carter, along with Zbigniew Brzezinski, his national security adviser, and Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke, decided to approve a military intervention.[68] Wickham ordered the ROK army’s Twentieth Division to deploy to Gwangju to crush the rebellion, a mission it successfully carried out a few days later. But Washington took no chances. To guarantee the success of the mission, the arrival of troops in Gwangju was delayed by three days to allow a US naval armada led by the aircraft carrier Midway to reach Korean waters, should reinforcements be required.69

Again, the ROK forces in Gwangju were not US-commanded, nor were they under CFC OPCON when the uprising began. The meeting at the White House was a Periodic Review Committee (PRC) meeting intended to discuss events in the ROK that was planned over a week in advance; it was not convened in response to events in Gwangju, nor was Jimmy Carter present, as is implied above. Chun's military group had always planned to end things with force (if negotiation didn't work), and though the PRC did condone the use of "the minimum use of force necessary" if negotiations failed, it also "advised them to use moderation" (see here; scroll down). In regard to the final sentence, the US urged the ROK to wait at least two days hoping that it would allow time to reach a negotiated settlement, not because they wanted to use American reinforcements aboard the aircraft carrier USS Coral Sea (not Midway) during the recapture of Gwangju; the aircraft carrier was sent to intimidate North Korea into not taking advantage of the situation. As for the idea that "Wickham ordered the ROK army’s Twentieth Division to deploy to Gwangju to crush the rebellion," that was hardly possible because the Twentieth Division had been removed from CFC OPCON on May 16. It is also worth noting that all troops used in the retaking of Gwangju on May 27 were already on the city's outskirts by May 21; the May 22 White House meeting had no effect on troop movements. All of what is written in the paragraph quoted above suggests the US was wholeheartedly supporting Chun, when at that meeting Brzezinski stated the need to make clear to Chun's military group "the dangers of imposing a military dictatorship on a population as sophisticated as South Korea."  

To put it as gently as the paragraphs quoted above deserve, this is utter garbage written by someone who has no real understanding or knowledge of what happened. It amazes me someone could be arrogant enough to write a book on a topic they know nothing about. And, once again, this is entirely focused on the US and depicts Koreans as being without agency and simply acted upon by outside forces. 

Of course, a glance at his primary (in this case, meaning 'main,' and certainly not 'first-hand') source, Bruce Cumings' Korea's Place in the Sun (1997), makes clear where some of the errors came from. A quick look at the Kwangju Uprising-related history in Cumings' book reveals a number of mistakes. For example, “In late April [1980], however, miners took over a small town near the east coast, and Chun Doo Hwan used this as a pretext to make himself head of the KCIA.” This is incorrect. The Sabuk incident took place between April 21 and 24, 1980. Chun was appointed acting head of the KCIA on April 14, a week earlier. 

Cumings also wrote that prior to this “General John Wickham, had given his blessing to the Korean military’s role in politics—which included 'being watchdogs on political activity that could be de-stabilizing, and in a way making judgements about the eligibility and reliability of political candidates.'" While I could be wrong, I have doubts that Wickham was giving his blessing to this behavior, considering the way in which James Young (in Eye on Korea) described Wickham’s efforts to steer Korean officers away from political matters; it seems more likely he was merely commenting on these tendencies among Korean military leaders. Let's move on to Cumings' description of the Kwangu Uprising:

On May 18 about 500 people took to Kwangju’s streets, demanding the repeal of martial law. Elite paratroopers, widely thought to have been on drugs, landed in the city and began the indiscriminate murder of students, women, children—anyone who got in their way. One woman student was pilloried near the town square, where a paratrooper attacked her breasts with his bayonet. Other students had their faces erased with flamethrowers. By May 21 hundreds of thousands of local people had driven the soldiers from the city, which citizen’s councils controlled for the next five days. These councils determined that 500 people had already died and that some 960 were missing. The citizens’ councils appealed to the U.S. embassy to intervene, but it was left to General Wickham to release the Twentieth Division of the ROK Army from its duties along the DMZ on May 22. A 1988 ROK National Assembly report alleged that the suppression forces waited for three days to enter Kwangju, until the U.S. aircraft carrier Midway and other American naval ships could arrive in Korean waters. 

As mentioned above, “indiscriminate murder” did not occur on May 18, and limiting his description of the violence to outlier incidents like attacking a woman’s breasts with a bayonet and the use of flamethrowers – when most injuries and deaths were inflicted through beatings and shootings – makes clear the author's desire to hew toward the most sensationalist narrative possible regarding the events of May 1980. As well, citing sources written soon after the uprising is a sure way to argue for a very-high body count. To elaborate further on the 20th Division, two of its brigades had been withdrawn from CFC OPCON at the time of Park Chung-hee’s assassination, while another brigade was withdrawn May 16 (when Wickham was out of the country). The 20th Division had not been on duty at the DMZ at all, but were in the Seoul area, and they moved to Kwangju on the night of May 20 and May 21, not May 22. It’s clear that Gower’s error in naming the US aircraft carrier derives from Cumings’ mistake.

Cumings went on to write that on the morning of May 27, “the soldiers came in shooting, killing scores more people who had refused to put down weapons they had seized from local armories. These units were disciplined, however, and quickly secured the city.” While elements of the 20th Division were used in retaking the city, the units that attacked central Kwangju, including the provincial capital, were in fact the same special forces units whose indiscriminate violence had helped spark the uprising in the first place. By the time Korea's Place in the Sun was republished in an updated version in 2005, at least ten books had been published in English about 5.18, but, because a choice was made to update the book rather than revise it, no new information is included, so the book's description of what happened in Kwangju is rather lacking. (I should note that I'm only analyzing these few paragraphs of Korea's Place in the Sun as part of critiquing Gowan's book, but it should be clear that mistakes or sensationalist writing by someone as prominent as Cumings can ripple out and affect writing and interpretation throughout academia and the media.)

Another article I was pointed to the other day was K.J. Noh's "South Korean Dictator Dies, Western Media Resurrects a Myth," an article that helpfully made it clear within the first few paragraphs what the reader is in for. We're quickly told that after Chun's death:

Many western media outlets have written censorious, chest-beating accounts of his despotic governance and the massacres he perpetrated - something they rarely bothered to do when he was actively perpetrating them in broad daylight before their eyes.

This is utterly incorrect. The US media covered 5.18 (there's an entire book of journalists' memories) and Chun’s human rights abuses extensively and critically. (Don Kirk, for example, wrote an article titled "The dissident Korean minister who never came home" about Rev. Im Ki-yoon, who was taken by police for interrogation in Busan in July 1980 and died two days later - and this article was published on the day Chun became president.)

We're also told that "only after death, decades later, do 'human rights violations' in South Korea burst out of radio silence and become newsworthy." See above. Again, human rights violations were not only commented on by the US media, but also by the Carter administration, which ultimately convinced Park to free political prisoners in exchange for Carter’s 1979 visit to Korea.

We're then told that "Chun’s predecessor and patron, the aging South Korean dictator Park Chung Hee, had ruled the country as an absolute totalitarian despot for 18 years," though I could have sworn there were elections in 1963, 1967, and 1971. Yes, they weren’t particularly fair elections, considering the resources the DRP and Park had marshaled for the campaigns, and Park should not have run in 1971, but Park was at times constrained in his actions by the opposition / public opinion – and therefore hardly an "absolute totalitarian despot" from 1963-1972.

I couldn't read of Park Chung-hee's "American puppet masters" without remembering when the US announced in 1970 it was going to pull 20,000 troops out of the ROK and Park was visited by US Vice-President Agnew ‘for an hour’ and Park harangued him for 4 (or 6 – accounts differ) hours, not letting him eat or go to the bathroom, as he tried to stop the troop withdrawal. Park and the US tolerated each other at best, and Park all-but-openly criticized American 'interference in Korean internal affairs' (such as criticizing the human rights situation or lack of press freedom). Though, to support the 'puppet' label, he only held elections in 1963 under US pressure to do so.

And that’s just the first four paragraphs. I think that there's an argument to be made that America's alliance with the ROK and the command structure enveloping USFK and ROK troops implicates the US to some degree in the actions of the ROK's rulers, but this kind of error-ridden screed is hardly the way to do it.

(Here’s an example of the US media commenting on the advent of the Yushin dictatorship in South Korea, from the Kansas City Star, October 26, 1972 (the eagle-eyed will note the ironic date).)

(The two gravestones read "Americans who died for 'freedom' in S. Korea" and "Representative Government in S. Korea.")

Another article of note criticizing the American military presence in Korea is Tim Shorrock's "Welcome to the Monkey House: Confronting the ugly legacy of military prostitution in South Korea," from 2019. This article is a far cry from the articles and book examined above in that the subjectivity of Koreans (i.e. seeing the events from Koreans' points of view) is extensively presented as it delves into the role of both the US and ROK governments in regimenting sex work around around US bases and details the atrocious treatment of sex workers with STIs. 

As well, unlike what is criticized above, this article is not plagued by historical errors; there is just one exception: it wrongly says of convicted murderer Kenneth Markle that he "became the first American turned over to South Korea for a criminal trial; in 1993, he was convicted and sentenced to life." This suggests that during the first 25 years of the SOFA agreement, the Korean government did not punish American soldiers who committed crimes in Korea, but this is simply not true; Billy Cox, who was indicted by Korean prosecutors for arson and assault on March 29, 1967, six weeks after SOFA came into effect, was the first GI to be prosecuted, and many, many more followed (more on that here).

I will, however, quibble with the inclusion in an article about militarized prostitution of the story of the traffic accident involving USFK vehicles and middle school girls in 2002. As well, I find it hard to laud the actions of the National Campaign for the Eradication of Crimes by U.S. Troops in Korea, whose greatest victory came after kindling outrage over the traffic accident in 2002, which they accomplished in part by placing large posters of the girls' mangled bodies, brains spilling out of their heads, in many subway stations. Since I saw these in person, the utter lack of respect for the girls, their families, or the passersby who saw the posters is something I remember quite well. The same can be said for their treatment of murdered sex worker Yun Geum-i in 1992 and the photo of her body – not for nothing did Kim-Yun Eun-mi write in the feminist magazine Ilda that "the effect aroused by Yun Geum-i's photo and internet porn with a rape motif have something in common. They both aim to arouse an intense impression of violence inflicted upon women's bodies." Former sex worker and activist Kim Yeon-ja didn't mince words about the campaign surrounding Yun Geum-i's murder: "There were dozens of girls who died before Yoon Geum-yi died. But no one ever tried to help us when we called for help," she said. "I felt that Yoon Geum-yi was just used as a tool for anti-American protests."

My main reason for bringing up this article, however, is that readers are promised a report on the legacy of military prostitution in Korea, but we learn nothing about sex work associated with the far-more-numerous ROK military. According to ROK government statistics, there were almost one million sex workers in the late 1970s, but only 40,000 GIs. Even if there were one sex worker per GI (there weren't), 40,000 is only 1/25 of a million, so most sex workers had nothing to do with the US gijichon system. I'd be curious to know how the treatment of the women who did not service GIs compared to those who did. How were brothel workers treated as compared to “gisaeng” who serviced the over 600,000 Japanese tourists per year in the late 1970s? How did this compare to sex workers around ROK military bases? Did the same onerous loan and fee systems that trapped them in place exist? Was it only sex workers around US bases who were confined if they tested positive for an STI? Was the system put in place around US bases more oppressive than for other forms of sex work, or was it not? How did the agency of these women differ according to various types of sex work? Did policies developed by both governments around US bases influence policies in other areas of the ROK? Did they reflect already-existing ROK policies? Were they a mixture of both? 

To be fair, the kind of wide-ranging research and comparative approach needed to answer the above questions would be difficult to summarize in a single article, and would more suit a book, so it's not surprising we don't see it here. At the same time, I strongly doubt that such questions are of much interest to the authors, whether Korean or American, of such articles focusing on US camp town prostitution (or the article and book mentioned above), since their main goal is to criticize American foreign policy and the actions of the US military abroad or to portray the victimization of Koreans at the hands of the US. 

In this post I mentioned an exception to this: Hyun Sook Kim's chapter (in Dangerous Women: Gender and Korean Nationalism) "Yanggongju as an allegory of the nation," in which she criticized the relegation of Korean women involved in militarized prostitution to the category of 'victim of American imperialism' and nothing more. The chapter begins with this story:

In February 1995, a former sex worker (Kim Yon-ja [who is mentioned above]) and two activists from Korea (a female, feminist writer and a male videomaker/photographer) led a three-week tour through major cities in the United States. The purpose of the tour was to Americans’ awareness about the problem of militarized prostitution foreigners in Korea and its impact on the lives of Korean women their children. 

She went on to describe how a forum she attended was held "at one of the major academic institutions where the audience was comprised of mainly feminist students and faculty."

The forum concluded with Kim Yon-ja's presentation of her experience of working and living in Kijich'on. Kim spoke in detail about the physical, psychological and economic hardship she endured in sexual labor for twenty-five years, from 1964 to 1989. She also discussed the importance of her religious faith as a source of self-empowerment which, she said, helped her to sustain hope and eventually to escape the life of a sex worker. Kim also mentioned that ever since becoming a preacher in 1989 she has used her missionary role to advocate the rights of working-class Korean women and their children living in military camptowns in Korea. 

On the whole, the forum was successful in conveying important information about the history of U.S. imperialism in Korea since 1945 and the destructive impact of U.S. militarism on the lives of Korean civilians. However, as a Korean-American academic-activist sitting in the audience, I observed that the activists and the audience had very different ways of approaching the question of militarized prostitution. For example, the audience invited Kim to elaborate on her daily coping strategies in sexual labor, her views about the circumstances that forced her into sexual labor, and her views on patriarchy and militarism. Several adherents of liberation and feminist theology begged Kim to expand upon her description of how religious faith had guided her survival in (and eventual escape from) sexual labor. However, the young Korean American woman interpreter, who was responsible for providing simultaneous translation of questions and answers from English to Korean and vice versa, screened and censored the questions directed to Kim. Insisting that the forum time be devoted to the delivery of the group line, which aimed to "educate" Americans about the impact of U.S. imperialism and militarization on Korean lives, the activists overlooked and neglected to translate questions addressed to Kim. Attempts from the audience to ask about Kim's personal experience in Kijich'on were repeatedly ignored. The activists judged Kim's talk as "testimonial" and "evangelical" because her focus on the personal and daily struggle in sexual labor left no room for discussing the larger and, in the activists' eyes, more significant dimension of imperialism and domination of Korea by United States. 

Kim Yon-ja's testimony was relegated to the margins of this forum because the writer and videomaker analyzed the problem of military prostitution simply in terms of U.S. militarism and imperialism, thus locating the blame on Americans for the exploitation of Korean women working in Kijich'on. Their emphasis on the United States' culpability left little room to discuss the intricate relations of economic, cultural, and ideological hierarchies that reinforce women's subordination, including militarized prostitution among Koreans, in which Korean women provide sexual service to Korean soldiers near Korean military installations, and the role that the Korean dictatorships and patriarchy have played in encouraging Korean women into prostitution. 

The first three instances examined above present narratives that overlook or even ignore Korean agency, while the fourth feels too limited and begs for a wider net to be cast to better understand how militarized sex work for Americans fit into the larger context of the sex industry in Korea. All four, viewing Korea from an American (or in Gowan's case, Canadian) vantage point, tend toward presenting Koreans as mere victims of American imperialism, but as as Hyun Sook Kim put it, "we must recognize that military sex workers have not been completely colonized by patriarchy, militarism, imperialism or neo-colonialism; the women do assert agency and subjectivity as Korean women." 

In some ways, the above-examined articles and book are quite different from each other, but they share a tendency to focus more on the (neo)colonizing power than on Koreans, and may reflect a lack of awareness about the ways in which these narratives are influenced by, compliment, or are utilized by Korean nationalist narratives that highlight Korea's victimization at the hands of outsiders. In Gowan's case, the narrow focus of his narrative is due in some part to the nature of his main source, Bruce Cumings' Korea's Place in the Sun, which I first read shortly after arriving in Korea in 2001, and which exerted a strong influence on my thinking about Korea. But when I reread it four years ago for a class, I was struck by the near-constancy of his denunciations of American foreign policy. My attempt at an ironic and pithy review would be, "A well written book - I just wish it had been about Korea." 

As David Fields noted in his book Foreign Friends, for American policymakers, Korea was always about someplace else, with decisions affecting Korea made by American presidents in 1905, 1919, and 1943 deriving from an American focus on relations with Japan, China, or the USSR. Perhaps the same can be said about the above writers and those like them who view Korea through the narrow lens of US foreign policy. From 1945 until the present, and particularly with the ROK's incorporation into the US-constructed cold war system of alliances, the US has exerted a powerful influence over Korea, and decisions made by its diplomats and military leaders have at times had a catastrophic impact upon the lives of Koreans. Examining these decisions and actions in a critical manner can help to highlight the past in the hope that they won't be repeated again (perhaps a dim hope, considering the way memories of the evacuation of refugees from Indochina in 1975 only bubbled to the surface once the airlift from Afghanistan was underway). But criticizing this history in Korea by deploying incorrect 'facts,' pretending that the US was the only actor creating negative outcomes, ignoring the complex interplay between Korean, American, and other actors, or minimizing the role of Koreans in their own story does a disservice to both Americans and Koreans and obscures more than it reveals.

Postscript:

I couldn't help but smile reading a couple weeks ago that Democratic Party presidential candidate Lee Jae-myung said during a meeting with U.S. Senator Jon Ossoff, that "the reason Korea was annexed by Japan was because the United States approved it through the Taft-Katsura Agreement." As the Korea Times helpfully (if incorrectly) explained, "The Taft-Katsura agreement is a 1905 pact in which the U.S. condoned Japanese rule over Korea, while Japan acknowledged the U.S. governing over the Philippines." 

In Korean the term used to describe is 밀약, or secret treaty. The problem is that it wasn't secret (the New York Times mentioned it after it was reported on in Japan), and it wasn't an agreement; as this must-read article puts it, it was "an 'Agreed Memorandum,' which technically is merely an agreement by both sides that the description of what was spoken in the conversation is actually what was said," which later "shifted [in the minds of historians] to become an agreement, pact, or even (secret) treaty." Roosevelt certainly supported Japanese dominance in Korea, but this was just a conversation, and not any kind of agreement. If Lee were to say "and let's not forget that time Teddy Roosevelt sided with the Japanese as they moved to take over Korea," that would be correct.

Mind you, I don't think that US approval had much effect on the outcome of Japan's step-by-step takeover of the peninsula. A more important influence, I think, was the UK-Japanese Alliance, which allowed Japan to defeat Russia, and which the British renewed several years early (in summer 1905) and explicitly wrote into the agreement that it recognized Japan's paramount interest in Korea. But the UK doesn't have the kind of influence over the ROK that the US does today, so no one really cares.

Amid all this misunderstanding, it was nice to see this Ohmynews article refute the idea that it was a treaty. In fact, it goes even further to argue that it only became a so-called "agreement" after the Japanese government leaked to a newspaper details of the conversation in the aftermath of the Hibiya riots in September 1905, and that Korean historians uncritically accepted this distortion by the Japanese. As a result, it has appeared in textbooks for over 50 years, something which needs to change. So… should this happen (and 20-30 years from now the kids who learn from new textbooks take positions of prominence in the media and academia and create a new consensus on its meaning), hurrah for Lee Jae-myung, I guess. 

Korea's handling of COVID-19 and the Itaewon outbreak

South Korea's handling of its coronavirus outbreak has been praised for its efficiency and results, and I'm certainly glad to be living in a country with competent leadership that has dealt with it so well.

Still, its response has not been without faults. The government's ability to harvest personal data has allowed it to pursue an effective contact-tracing program, but has also been criticized for its breaches of privacy, making clear what some people have been up to in their free time.

Of course, tracking its citizens is nothing new for the Korean government; one has to wonder if Korea's authoritarian past has contributed to its ability to contain the virus (fellow former anti-communist dictatorship Taiwan has also done well in this regard). I couldn't help remembering the inscription on MacArthur's statue in Incheon, which read "until the last battle against the malignant infection of Communism has finally been won may we never forget it was also he who said, 'In war, there is no substitute for victory.'" To be sure, South Korea has a long history of fighting to contain ideological infection.

A friend also pointed out that one reason China's neighbours have done so well handling the virus is the very fact that they live next to China. Experience has taught them to be wary of a government that does not play by the rules (Canada is only just figuring this out; my friend Mike Spavor has been in prison, taken hostage by the Chinese government, for more than 500 days now). Despite this, while China isolated Hubei province from the rest of China but did not close airports there, allowing potential virus-carriers to leave the country and inadvertently spread it throughout the world, the Blue House chose not to close its borders to Chinese visitors (except from Hubei). If it thought the Chinese government was going to pat the it on the head for that, the PRC didn't; when the Daegu cluster caused case numbers to rise here, China quickly put in place entry restrictions on travelers from South Korea. The government here reacted with restraint as over a hundred countries placed entry bans on Koreans. Except when Japan did so - then it reacted with breathtaking childishness by banning entry to travelers from Japan. At least we can rest assured that this particular government will not let a pandemic prevent it from stirring up anti-Japanese feeling.

There have also been other problems rooted in the inability of the government and Korean society in general to get a good grasp on the fact that there are more than two million foreigners living in the country who often fall into blind spots, particularly in a society where citizenship was equivalent to ethnic identity (or at least one's father's ethnic identity).

One of the earliest examples that made my jaw drop was Korean Air's decision to "put all of its non-Korean pilots on three months of unpaid leave ... in a self-rescue effort amid worsening business conditions caused by the coronavirus outbreak." There was no mention that this might be seen as discriminatory. (I'm sure there are reasons, such as contractual ones, that the company could put forward to justify their decision, but ultimately they didn't have to because they weren't even asked.)

Another problem that arose was that, as one article put it, "Local governments in South Korea are paying emergency financial assistance to those facing difficulties due to the COVID-19 outbreak. However, the measures do not apply to many tax-paying foreigners." As Udaya Rai, the president of the Migrants Trade Union, put it, "Immigrants and migrant workers pay all the taxes the government requires. We pay earned income tax, aggregate income tax and residence tax. We pay taxes and other duties and it's because of discrimination we cannot receive the same money as members of society."

The article went on to mention that "Ironically, South Korean nationals from overseas can receive the lifeline support when they return to the country while tax-paying foreigners cannot." A city official made clear that the problem is that "there's a lack of legal basis to help families composed of foreigners." Ansan solved the problem by providing 70,000 won in aid to foreign residents - 70% of what Koreans were getting.

If you want to be generous, it can be argued that such discrimination is rooted in thoughtlessness or the existence of legal blind spots, as opposed to the cynical political motive noted by Brian Myers, who, before the April 15 election, noticed a banner that had gone up in his neighbourhood urging all local residents to claim their coronavirus benefit. Upon checking, however, he learned that this did not apply to foreigners, even tax-paying long-term foreigners. It was only for people qualified to vote on April 15.

This was all before a 29 year-old Korean man went clubbing in Itaewon and infected over 140 people just as the nation's daily infection numbers had dipped into the single digits and the government was planning to reopen schools and public institutions like libraries. That there were some 1,500 people in the 5 clubs he went to made it clear that there was a potential for a large outbreak. But the fact the outbreak was located in Itaewon coloured the response in a variety of ways.

In a nutshell, Itaewon serves as a symbol of the unease many Koreans feel in regard to modernity and globalization. It sits next to Yongsan Garrison, originally home to the Imperial Japanese Army, followed by the US military, a location associated with Korea's experience of being colonized and then incorporated into the post-liberation cold war order. Itaewon is associated with foreigners, with prostitution, (or even worse, Korean women who voluntarily have sex with foreign men), with clubs and decadence, with homosexuality, and with AIDS, a place with a "dark nature." It served as a center of cultural (or physical) clashes during the 1988 Olympics, but it was also a place of cultural mixing; Korea's earliest b-boys learned to break dance from black GIs in Itaewon's clubs in the 1980s, for example. In fact, it was a song and video ostensibly about that era - Itaewon Freedom - that helped turn it into a trendy neighbourhood less than a decade ago. You might think - despite the negative effects of gentrification - that this would improve its image, but in fact this further contributed to the association it has with decadence; the trendy kids, the folks from Gangnam lining up to consume foreignness, the expensive restaurants and clubs, people speaking English - these all serve as an irritant to the people who can't afford such distractions, and considering growing economic inequality, there are many people who feel this way. Tied into this is something left over from the days of Korea's forced-march development: the association of excessive consumption with immorality.

If in the 1970s decadence and consumption posed a threat to national economic development (which was often seen in military terms by state planners), then today decadently clubbing and dining is seen as posing a threat to the nation while it battles the coronavirus. So, clearly, people spreading the virus by clubbing was never going to go over well. Doing it in Itaewon in particular, considering all the national baggage associated with it, was really not going to go over well. And doing it in gay clubs? Well... that's like adding napalm to the fire.

To be sure, this is not the first time Itaewon, gay bars, and a virus have been linked in the national imagination. While the first HIV+ Koreans were often sex workers in US base camp towns (like Itaewon), and thus were not a group of people anyone was much concerned about, when a Korean man who returned from Kenya died of AIDS in February 1987, it set off a panic. As I noted in this post about that panic, AIDS became the perfect metaphor for foreign moral, sexual, and cultural contamination. One result of the panic was felt in Itaewon, as a March 12, 1987 Korea Times article noted.

Itaewon Suffers from Slack Business Due to AIDS Scare

Entertainment facilities in Itaewon frequented by foreigners as well as Korean people are suffering from a decline in business, apparently affected by the AIDS-related death of a 62-year-old man recently.

According to sources yesterday, “gay” bars and facilities exclusively for foreign clientele are on the edge of closing down with business shrinking to almost half.

The phenomena is mainly attributable to the fact that Koreans believe that the fatal disease may be transmitted by foreigners and avoid spending their leisure time there.

The so-called AIDS-phobia not only affects the business of entertainment facilities such as hostess bars or discotheques in the area, but also of restaurants and clothes shops, it is reported.

In the case of ‘D’ club where some 100 people used to throng in a bustle, some 50 people on the average visit the place to dance and drinking. Garment shops and restaurants are suffering a 30 to 40 percent decrease in sales.

The health authorities have made transvestites submit to blood tests for AIDS, but no one has been found positive in the tests.

33 years later, attitudes don't seem to have changed much. Media reports quickly pointed out that some of the clubs the initial patient visited catered to LGBTQ customers, though the patient said he was not gay (fair enough; in the past I've been to some of those clubs with gay friends myself). The result of these articles was the unleashing of a torrent of homophobia in their comment sections. Even worse, during the contact tracing process people who were at the clubs risked being unintentionally outed. It was soon noted that the entry logs for clubs (as a way to enable tracing of customers should there be a COVID-19 outbreak) featured many entries that contained false information, but that is hardly surprising; being outed is a good way to lose your job. (The cluster in Incheon seems also to have arisen due to the stigma surrounding the Itaewon outbreak.) If the Daegu outbreak was due in part to the secretive nature of the leaders of a predatory cult, the secretive behavior of those club goers is due entirely to the discrimination they face in Korean society. This has been noted in foreign news reports, which is a good thing, since the media (and no doubt the government) monitor reports from overseas. This article does a good job of summarizing the wave of issues facing the LGBTQ community in Korea. One key point is the dawning realization that homophobia and stigma are hampering health authorities' ability to control the spread of the virus. As a result, the Seoul city government announced the advent of anonymous testing (as well as free tests with no risk of deportation for undocumented foreigners). If that doesn't work, however, telecom companies used base station data to give the Seoul city government contact information for 10,905 people who spent more than 30 minutes in the club area "between midnight and 5 a.m. from April 24 to May 5." In all, some 35,000 people related to the Itaewon outbreak have been tested.

Now that much of Yongsan Garrison has moved to Pyeongtaek, it's harder to associate Itaewon with GIs, but there is another group associated with the area that has also come under the microscope: foreign English teachers. A couple days ago I did a Google search for "native speaking teacher + Itaewon" and found over 80 articles published in the past day or two. MBC (yes, the network responsible for reports like this, or, god help us all, this) got into the spirit of things by broadcasting this gem of a report by reporter Gang Hwa-gil on May 11:

More than 90 native speaking English teachers went to Itaewon … There is a nationwide emergency in schools.

[Anchor]

The government has urged school teachers and workers who went to Itaewon clubs to voluntarily get tested.

In fact, it has been revealed that many native speaking English teachers were among the club visitors.

So far, none of these teachers have been confirmed to have the virus, but education authorities have taken steps to quarantine them at home for two weeks.

Reporter Gang Hwa-gil.

[Report]

Currently, the Gangwon-do Office of Education has found that 55 faculty members visited clubs or other places in Itaewon .

They are all native speaking assistant English teachers or English teaching student volunteers [Likely from the TaLK Program].

They visited clubs, restaurants, and bars in Itaewon between April 29 and May 6.

The Gangwon-do Office of Education required all of these teachers to self-quarantine and to be tested.

[Gangwon-do Office of Education official] "The quarantine authorities only require testing for those who have been to clubs, but we’re being proactive and saying that if you went to Itaewon at all, you should be tested ..."

The problem is that, with schools set to open next week, these native speaking teachers had already gone to school.

As a result, there are worries that the other teachers they came into regular contact with when they went to work could become infected.

Ultimately, these other teachers were ordered to work from home.

[Gangwon-do Office of Education spokesperson Gwon Dae-dong] "School staff who worked [with] native-speaking assistant teachers are telecommuting. They are all self-isolating.”

As well, elementary schools running day care [during social distancing] have made students return home.

Currently, there are 274 native English teachers and 55 English teaching student volunteers working in Gangwon-do schools.

The situation in Gwangju and Jeollanam-do is similar.

It was revealed that during the long weekend 7 native speaking teachers and instructors from Gwangju and 34 native speaking teachers from Jeollanam-do visited Itaewon and Hongdae.

As of yet none of the teachers being tested have turned out to be infected, but education authorities in Gwangju and Jeollanam-do plan to have all teachers who visited clubs self-isolate for two weeks and to conduct additional detailed investigations.

As well, with the Ministry of Education strongly advising that faculty members who visited entertainment facilities in Itaewon undergo testing at screening clinics, the problem of blocking the source of infection among faculty has emerged as the biggest variable ahead of school reopening.

Even though none of the teachers are reported to have tested positive for the virus, it's a nationwide emergency! This reminds me of an old SNL sketch where a weatherman points to the death counter for a hurricane, which reads zero, but he assures viewers that 'the numbers are going to start jumping up any time now!' The report also features par-for-the-course photos of blurry classrooms and, of course, numerous club scenes.

The report was followed by, when I first looked at it, 3937 comments, but now there are only 3752, suggesting some pruning of the more negative comments has occurred. Two that were right below the report when I read it read "Throw out all the native speakers involved" and "We have lots of English majors in Korea. We don't need to use native speaking teachers here. It's a waste of foreign currency. Let's give jobs to Koreans. This is the chance." The commenter is clearly unaware that no teacher working in Korea is paid in anything but Korean currency.

MBC's negative slant is highlighted by a similar Korea Times article which ends in this way: "A senior official at the South Jeolla provincial government said however, it wouldn't be reasonable to blame the foreign teachers just because they have visited the area."

To be fair, teachers in general are going to be focused on due to schools getting ready to reopen. Schools have already pushed back the reopening schedule by one week, but some think it should be pushed back further. According to this article, "a total of 880 teachers, including 514 Korean teachers and 366 native English teachers nationwide, visited Itaewon between late April and early May." Of those, 641 people were tested, with 524 being cleared and the rest awaiting results. "Of those who went to Itaewon, 41 people -- 7 Koreans and 34 foreign nationals -- have been to the bars and clubs identified as places of transmission" and all have tested negative but for one still awaiting results.

SMOE released the following data:

158 SMOE faculty visited Itaewon, but of those, only 6 Native speaking English teachers and 8 Korean faculty visited entertainment venues, and they all tested negative. The other 144 SMOE faculty (97 Koreans and 47 foreigners) merely visited the area; all tested negative except for 33 who are awaiting results.

Yonhap, however, was unable to read this chart and reported that "some 158 teachers and school officials are confirmed to have visited such entertainment facilities in the city's popular nightlife districts, including Itaewon, from April 29 to May 6." Nice way to undermine SMOE's transparency, Yonhap.

There have been reports on foreign teachers experiencing discrimination, listening to their coworkers talking about Itaewon and "원어민교사들" within earshot, and, in one case, demanding a teacher go get tested without even bothering to ask if she'd been to Itaewon, which is clearly discriminatory. Hagwon instructors are particularly at the mercy of their bosses, who are trying to protect their income. As one foreign instructor put it, "it's very clear to me they care more about the business rather than the foreign employees and maybe the kids as well." "Maybe"?

Beyond teachers, Itaewon merchants are also critical of the government's handling of the Itaewon outbreak:

Many local traders are angry with the government and Seoul city officials. "One man visited a bar in Gangnam before he tested positive and the government was reluctant to identify him, but now they are overly stressing the fact that the latest infections occurred in Itaewon."

Club owners claim they were abiding by social-distancing orders. Lee Dae-jin of a community association of traders in the district said, "Everyone knew young people would come once the clubs were allowed to open again, and the government let us do it. The infected people went back home, but the government continues to cast the spotlight on Itaewon."

As of Wednesday, only four out of about 120 confirmed cases linked to Itaewon clubs and bars actually live in the district.

As I noted earlier, the baggage associated with Itaewon was always going to colour how this outbreak is perceived.

Returning to foreign teachers, the many negative comments on that MBC report go to show that though the media has not engaged in much negative reporting reporting on foreign teachers in the past half-decade (see an overview here), the negative attitudes toward them have not gone away. This is not surprising, since they are not only related to more traditional xenophobic attitudes, but also to the deep frustration connected with learning English, and the economic fault lines mastery of English, or lack thereof, reveal. Though foreign teachers sit at the nexus of age-old xenophobic fears and reasonable concerns about school reopenings and children's safety, they are, compared to the LGBTQ community, in a far, far more privileged position. To paraphrase what one foreign teacher wrote, 'Maybe we can take some of the heat off the gay community.' The trend in testing of educators so far suggests that this media interest in foreign teachers may be but a passing trend, however.
[Update: I may be wrong about that, considering this article was published today.]

Hopefully the fact that discrimination against the LGBTQ community is so obviously hampering the authorities' attempts to control the spread of the virus will change some minds, at least in the government, about the necessity of trying to prevent such discrimination. I'll admit I'm not all that optimistic, but one can hope.

Update, May 17:

Minutes after publishing this post I was sent a link to a Yonhap News article which argued that even if foreign teachers didn't go to Itaewon, parents should still feel anxiety and be worried about them, and maybe they should all be tested for the disease regardless. I translated that article here. A friend of a friend also translated a number of the comments left on that article. Many were critical of teachers, but quite a few were also dismissive of the 'witch hunt' going on. Still, one argued that US soldiers needed to be tested too (reminiscent of the AIDS scare in the late 1980s), and another showed a certain disturbing mindset: "They are a bad influence. I think recklessly letting foreigners in has something to do with the rising number of gays in our country. I wish we could kick the illegals out and purify the country somewhat."

Anyone hoping for the Korean government to help in such matters should prepare to be disappointed. In a recent interview on German television, Korea's foreign minister said "We don't have a consensus on the rights of the sexual minorities and people with various gender identities." Well, what can you expect from an administration led by a former human rights attorney? Ahem. Still, I suppose she did say the government was trying not to aggravate prejudice against sexual minorities while dealing with COVID-19. And I did notice that one article said to have used discriminatory language against the LGBTQ community no longer contained any when I recently read it, suggesting that either the news outlet decided to edit it or it was told to do so.

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.

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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.
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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.
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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.

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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]

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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.

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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.

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"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.
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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.

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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.