Category: Korea-General Topics

Here is the latest gay rights issue being promoted in South Korea:

Kim Gyu-jin and Kim Se-yeon held their wedding ceremony during the 2023 Seoul Queer Culture Festival earlier this month in central Seoul. Hundreds at the festival congratulated the wife-wife couple on their union — even though it is not legally recognized by South Korean law — as well as on the baby they are expecting.

The Kim couple revealed that their quest to have a child required a trip to a foreign country, Belgium, as accessing a sperm donor had not been possible for them in South Korea.

In addition to same-sex couples, single women also face significant obstacles here when it comes to accessing sperm donations, largely due to a combination of legal restrictions and customary practices within the medical community.

Korea Herald

You can read more at the link.

I wish the Chief of the IAEA would have asked these lawmakers when South Korea is going to stop dumping their own treated radioactive water into the ocean?:

Rafael Mariano Grossi (R), director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), attends a meeting with Woo Won-shik (L), the floor leader of the main opposition Democratic Party (DP), and Wi Seong-gon, a DP member who heads a special committee tasked with opposing Japan’s Fukushima water discharge plan, at the National Assembly on July 9, 2023. (Yonhap)

Senior officials of the main opposition Democratic Party (DP) on Sunday met with the chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to express concerns and regret over Japan’s plan to discharge water from the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant.

IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi met DP officials during his three-day visit to Seoul to explain the U.N. nuclear watchdog’s report that concluded Japan’s Fukushima water discharge plan would meet international standards.

DP floor leader Woo Won-shik expressed regret over the IAEA’s backing of Japan’s water release plan despite lingering public concerns over the potential long-term impact of treated wastewater on people and the environment. 

“(The IAEA’s) verification was biased in favor of Japan from the beginning, losing its neutrality and objectivity,” Woo, who has staged a hunger strike for the 14th day, said during the meeting at the National Assembly.

“It is very regrettable that (the IAEA) made a conclusion without properly investigating (the water release’s) impact on neighboring nations, making it ‘self-verification’ and ‘a Japan-tailored investigation,'” Woo added.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link, but this is all just political theater for the uninformed masses on this topic that do not realize that South Korea and other countries release more becquerels of tritium per year into the ocean than what the Fukushima plant is scheduled to release.

The ROK has concluded that the North Koreans were trying to conduct a legitimate space launch with their rocket that crashed in the ocean back in May:

The salvaged wreckage of a North Korean space rocket is displayed on the deck of the ROKS Gwangyang at the Navy’s Second Fleet in Pyeongtaek, 60 kilometers south of Seoul, on June 16, 2023. (Pool photo) (Yonhap)

South Korea has retrieved a North Korean spy satellite wreckage and concluded it has “no military utility,” Seoul’s military said Wednesday, ending a 36-day operation to salvage the sunken debris of a failed North Korean space rocket launch in late May.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said that the military raised multiple key parts of the rocket and the satellite through the operation that began May 31 and ended earlier in the day.

South Korean and U.S. experts have conducted a detailed analysis of the wreckage and found that the salvaged satellite debris has no military utility, the JCS said.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

According to the article Chinese nationals make up 56% of the suspicious property transactions currently being investigated. Americans make up 21%, Taiwanese 8%, and Canadians 6.6% of the additional suspicious real estate cases:

A view of apartment complexes seen in Jamsil in southern Seoul [YONHAP]

The Korean government detected over 400 suspicious land transactions made by foreigners between 2017 and 2022, with more than half of the cases linked with Chinese nationals.    
   
The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport reported 437 land acquisitions deemed illegal to related investigation agencies following its large-scale nationwide investigation conducted from February through to June. Out of a total of 14,938 foreign land transactions between 2017 and 2022, the investigation then focused on 920 suspicious cases, in which individuals involved were asked to provide supporting documents for further examination.  (…..)

The investigation identified various violations, with the most common being the manipulation of reported transaction amounts and contract dates, with 419 cases of misreported contracts. Additionally, 61 cases were suspected of tax evasion through expedient gifting, and 35 cases raised suspicions of illegally imported funds from overseas.  

Joong Ang Ilbo

You can read more at the link.

The four remaining families say they don’t want to take the compensation unless it comes straight from the Japanese government:

Lawyer Lim Jae-sung, right, who represents some of the forced labor victims who sued Japanese companies for compensations for their forced labor, speaks with the press just outside the Foreign Ministry building in Seoul on Monday to protest the ministry’s decision to make public deposits of third-party compensation money that four out of 15 plaintiffs refused to accept. [YONHAP]

The Foreign Ministry will deposit at local courts compensation money for victims of wartime Japanese forced labor and their relatives who have so far refused to accept the government’s compensation scheme.  
   
Some of the money will also go to parties who have been unable to receive compensation due to personal circumstances.  
   
As of Monday, 11 out of 15 plaintiffs who sued Japanese companies for compensation of their forced labor during the 1910-45 Japanese annexation of Korea have received third-party compensation, mostly from Korean corporate donations.

For the remaining four plaintiffs, two of whom are surviving victims and the rest relatives of victims who had already passed away, the Foreign Ministry announced it was depositing the compensation money so that they could choose to take it from a local court close to where they live “whenever they wish.”  
   
“This decision was reached so that any of the plaintiffs who change their mind and decide to take on the compensation can do so at their leisure,” said a high-ranking Foreign Ministry official in speaking with the press in Seoul on Monday. 

Joong Ang Ilbo

You can read more at the link.

It is about time this happened because telling the age of Koreans can be difficult:

South Korea will scrap its traditional method of counting age and adopt the international standard starting Wednesday, resulting in the reduction of a person’s age by one or two years on official documents, officials said.

Under the revisions to the Civil Act and the General Act on Public Administration, multiple age systems will be unified under the internationally recognized system in which age is based on birth date, according to the Ministry of Government Legislation.

In South Korea, three age systems are currently in use.

Under the most commonly used system of so-called “Korean age,” a person turns 1 on the day they are born and adds a year on the first day of the new year. For instance, a baby born on New Year’s Eve becomes 2 years old as soon as they pass midnight.

The second system is the internationally recognized system, whereby a person’s age is determined according to their birth date, while the third system adds a year to a person’s age on the first day of the new year.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

It looks like the Korean officials that studied the plan to release contaminated water from the Fukushima nuclear plant into the ocean as the best of bad options:

Japan’s decision to release contaminated water from its crippled Fukushima plant was finalized years ago as the most realistic alternative, and there is no point in talking about other ways to dispose of the water now, an official said Monday.

Amid concerns about health hazards, critics have suggested alternative ways, other than releasing the wastewater into the ocean, such as solidifying the water within concrete or storing the water in massive tanks.

“That part is something that was discussed for more than four years in the mid-2010s,” Park Ku-yeon, the first deputy chief of the Office for Government Policy Coordination, said of other methods during a daily briefing on the Fukushima release plan.

“At the time, there were extremely complex discussions within Japan, and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was in the final decision,” Park said. “The current method of releasing it into the ocean was finalized as the most realistic alternative when scientific precedents and safety were comprehensively taken into account.”

Suggesting the IAEA reverse the decision would contradict the principles of faith and trust, Park said.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.