What is the image of North Korea in the mainstream western media? It seems that it is too easy to generalize. North Korea according to this image is a country of goose stepping female soldiers, violent anti-American propaganda posters and of course, starving farmers. There is no doubt that both anti-American posters (often of ridiculous bellicosity) and goose-stepping female soldiers (often of impressive beauty) are both present in the North. However in the last few years, one would have to look hard to find any significant number of starving farmers or for that matter, starving city dwellers. North Koreans don’t eat well, and by the internationally accepted standards they are malnourished. But few, if any of them have starved to death in the last five or so years.
What comes next is where it gets very interesting. Successor designate Kim Jong-un is now in the unenviable position of having to preside over his father’s funeral and then attempt to consolidate his grip on power. What follows is seemingly likely to take one of three paths.
Kim Jong-un, with or without the help of his aunt Kim Kyong-hee and her husband Chang Song-taek may succeed in consolidating his power. This might not happen straight away. He may not simply leap into the shoes of his father and start going on tours of the country, giving disciplinary speeches to the high-level cadres that turn up in the newspaper and be the centre of a fanatical personality cult all of his own. The above mentioned has already begun in the North—he was reported to have gone on tours with his father several times, and has his own (still nascent) personality cult. He may take his time, behind the scenes consolidating his power, whilst in public mourning his father’s passing, much like Kim Jong-il did in the three years after the death of his father.
I took my first real teaching job in Prague at the Gymnasium Jana Nerudy, and at any chance I got, I used to read and drink at The Golden Tiger with Jiri Pavel. He was an original signer of the Czech civil rights initiative Charter 77 and revealed of himself, “I was a minor poet in a major time.” I didn’t have to mention anything much about my admiration of Havel for Jiri often revealed,
“Yes I drank bear with him 20’s of times.” And after we had a few Pilsners together he confided,
“We all wanted to be Havel but not just anybody could be for everybody like him.”
He had his own part of a table at “The Tiger” and when I met him on late weekday afternoons he always asked, “So have you met Havel yet?” Never a question of the obvious like do you want a beer but always had I met Havel yet. It was our inside joke. And inside jokes are a natural contour in the Czech personality. Jiri was mildly fascinated at all the Americans who were turning up in Prague in the 90’s, but really he knew the score, “Czech beer, Czech architecture, Czech women: now everyone can enjoy.”
With the election of Park Won-soon, the liberal independent candidate, in the October 26 mayoral election, the debate over free lunches, free college tuition and other welfare policies has dominated policy-making discussions around Seoul and the country.
Over recent years the growing trend in Korea’s ESL education has pointed toward a preference for Korean English teachers in both private and public schools. The administrators of schools prefer to have teachers who can work within the system, removing any sort of language and cultural barrier and, as new reports and polls are now showing, parents and kids prefer a Korean teacher over an expat (see here for a detailed list of sources).
Now, the Seoul government has taken heed and says it will show all expat English teachers in Seoul’s public high schools the door beginning in September of 2012.
I shot these images in Busan, Korea, on October 8th. Some filmmakers and people related to movies took buses to see the female worker Kim Jin-suk, who had been occupying a crane on the grounds of her factory, Hanjin, for more than 8 months (since January 6). She has since come down.
This event is a complex story to tell and I guess only Koreans will get what it is about without further information. In addition to the link above, see here for 3WM’s coverage of the issue.
By Stella Jang Every time there is an important election, campaigns are held all over the country in order to encourage youths to vote. This kind of apathy towards politics is considered a serious problem since the very group of people from which some will have to be political leaders and the others will have to determine the country’s future by either supporting the leaders or criticizing them is alienating itself from reality. This way, only a few people who are deeply concerned about politics will take up the role, and the world of politics will become polarized by these extremists.
However, in order to get young people to vote and be interested in politics, politicians themselves must prove that the world of politics is not a place of incessant senseless battles. One of my friends pointed out that politicians must stop waging a war between the conservative and the progressive, but seek actual solutions to problems in reality such as the unemployment crisis or financial difficulties.
The Korean-American Free Trade Agreement (FTA) was first mooted and drafted under the presidency of former President Roh Moo-hyun. There are many things said about Roh: he was corrupt, he was a human rights lawyer with great oratory skills, a crusader against exploitation, an idiot (바보) in the good sense of the word—i.e., a noble idiot. One thing that was emblematic of his premiership and what came before it—and what is more broadly a part of the left in South Korea—is an economic and to a certain extent politically critical posture towards the United States. To be honest this is fairly justifiable in some regards. The United States has in the past made it its own business to intervene in a country’s political system in order to install interests (often rather unpleasant to the locals) friendly to Washington.
I can see the appeal of Ahn Chul-soo as a potential presidential candidate. So far as I have gathered, he is a self-made man, someone who had an idea to invent something (anti-virus software), using cutting-edge technology—i.e. Information Technology —and then having become a billionaire (or is that millionaire?) decided to put what he had learnt into the most prestigious job in the country (professor at Seoul National University, the nation’s Harvard or Oxford).
He is therefore a shining light for the young and a good example the old would like to see their offspring following. A solid moral background, a lot of money (earned in a both exciting and non-criminal way), and forward looking—the money was made through the revolution of our times, micro-processors. This means the man is both very popular and unsullied. He is also very anti-right, which makes a nice change from most of the billionaires I have seen with supposed political ambitions (I suppose we can make an exception for Mr Buffet).
On October 20, Professor Yuji Hosaka of Sejong University’s Dokdo Research Institute launched an English language Web site to inform netizens that the Dokdo islets are Korean territory.
The project was jointly launched with singer Kim Jang-hoon, a staunch advocate of Korea’s claim to the islets who has held a concert on the main island of Suhdo.
The site, truthofdokdo.com, has Korean, Japanese and English versions and provides ancient documents and maps to prove Korea’s claim to the islets.
By Iwazaru Doctor, software mogul, professor and dean of the Graduate School of Convergence Science and Technology of Seoul National University, Ahn Cheol-soo, has stepped down from his post as president of the Advanced Institute of Convergence Science and Technology today due to scrutiny over his public support of then candidate and now mayor of Seoul, Park Won-soon.
The man who whipped the Korean populous into a frenzy when rumors emerged in early September that he would run for mayor, faced intense criticism from the ruling Grand National Party (GNP) over his support for Park. According to breaking news reports this afternoon, he was no longer able to maintain his post at Seoul National University given its status as a public university.
By Peter Ward Elections have been a passion of mine since I was eight and Tony Blair was coasting to a certain victory of unimaginable scale in the 1997 British General Election. It was a time of great fear in my house—my father and mother foresaw the Britain’s entry into the Euro and the rise of a European super state. This state would envelope our lives and proscribe everything, from our milk bottle sizes to our religion (we would be forcibly converted to Catholicism). As a young boy, I was terrified and transfixed.
By Iwazaru Below is part 2 of my interview with Prof. Hosaka during which he talks about his visits to the island, events surrounding Dokdo during and after the Korean War, the Korean populus’ emotional reactions to the dispute, how the Korean government should proceed and the reaction of Japanese citizens to Prof. Hosaka’s stance on the issue.
Bush may have talked tough about a “war on terror,” but he was only playing a game. How could it be otherwise for one who’d avoided Vietnam, barely bothered with his obligations as a pilot in the National Guard and had as his vice president for two terms that notorious draft-dodger, Richard Cheney, whose avoidance of military service during Vietnam did not stop the first President Bush from naming him defense secretary. These guys didn’t know what war was all about. They were too frightened to think of sacrificing political popularity by making people join the army whether they wanted to or not. They preferred to engage in torturing terrorists at Guantanamo . No downside there.
By Iwazaru “What do you think about Dokdo? Who does it belong to?” one Korean student asked Professor Yuji Hosaka during a Japanese Culture and Language course he was teaching in 1995. Little did he know that this one question would change the course of his life. How did he respond to the student’s question? “I couldn’t say because I didn’t know,” says Hosaka. Thus, what began as a simple bit of curiosity developed into a deep desire to objectively uncover the truth of whether Korea or Japan had the historical right to claim the 35 islets off the eastern coast of Korea. His fifteen years of research in Korea and Japan resulted in three books about the subject—“Dokdo, Our History,” “Dokdo of Korea” and “On Old Japanese Maps there is No Dokdo”—he attained the post of professor in the College of Liberal Arts and Graduate School of Policies Studies at Sejong University in Seoul and he is the head of the Dokdo Research Institute, also at Sejong.
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What is the image of North Korea in the mainstream western media? It seems that it is too easy to generalize. North Korea according to this image is a country of goose stepping female soldiers, violent anti-American propaganda posters and of course, starving farmers. There is no doubt that both anti-American posters (often of ridiculous bellicosity) and goose-stepping female soldiers (often of impressive beauty) are both present in the North. However in the last few years, one would have to look hard to find any significant number of starving farmers or for that matter, starving city dwellers. North Koreans don’t eat well, and by the internationally accepted standards they are malnourished. But few, if any of them have starved to death in the last five or so years.
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