This reminds me of people complaining about aircraft noise after they build a home near an airport:
South Korean officials say they will replace portions of a 16.4-mile stretch of barbed wire along the northeast coast with electronic surveillance equipment after residents complained the fence is ugly.
The barbed wire was meant to protect the coast against sea infiltration by countries such as North Korea, a Ministry of National Defense spokesman said Tuesday on customary condition of anonymity.
The fence will be removed in 41 areas in Gangwon province, which borders North Korea, in the first half of 2015, according to the ministry. North Korean subs were discovered along that stretch of coastline in the 1990s near the cities of Sokcho and Donghae.
The MND spokesman said officials are not concerned about reduced security because the unmanned surveillance equipment has already been tested. He would not comment on whether removing the fence would affect South Korean troop levels along the eastern coast. [Stars & Stripes]
This document has been making the rounds in the Korean media, but really it doesn’t state anything we don’t already know:
Japanese police sexually abused female Korean protesters during the occupation of Korea from 1910 to 1945, an old report by an American missionary group shows.
The report details incidents where Japanese police stripped, tortured and even raped Korean women who took part in the March 1 independence demonstrations in 1919.
The Korean Methodist Church in New York on Saturday revealed the 27-page report compiled by the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America detailing the abuses by Japanese police based on accounts from American missionaries in Korea at the time.
Titled “The Korean Situation,” it explains the historical background that led to the protests, as well as Japan’s brutal crackdown on protesters and changes in Tokyo’s colonial policies after the demonstrations.
The Korean Methodist Church in New York was established in 1921 and served as the U.S. support base for Korea’s independence movement. It discovered the report in its archive while going through old documents to prepare for a book to mark its 100-year history.
The report contains statistics on the brutal crackdown. It shows that 631 Koreans died from March 1 to July 20, 1919 as well as nine Japanese, mostly police. Some 28,934 Koreans were arrested — 5,156 jailed and 9,078 released after being whipped.
“Among the tortures and brutalities dwelt on by writers and especially emphasized by the American press were those dealing with young women and school girls who were stripped and examined, tortured and maltreated,” it says. “No charge is made of rape under these conditions.” [Chosun Ilbo]
The article opens about the Japanese police raping Korean women, but according to the quote from the document it said no charge is made of rape so I don’t know what is true. However, the fact that Japanese police were generally pretty brutal against protesters is nothing new. I recommend everyone read this article about the March 1st Movement that provides a more balanced account of what happened.
That is what the writer’s at the Marmot’s Hole tried to determine by signing up for an account and testing to see if the Ashley Madison website is legitimate or not:
Now, according to the claims of Christoph Kraemer, director of international relations for Ashley Madison, “. . . Membership is growing quickest in India, South Korea and Japan.” (cite)
When I read about this, I checked and, yes, the site is accessible now from Korea and does offer support in Korean, however, since there are quite a few complaints of this service being fraudulent. Several people I know thought that this site was a typical dating scam setup, where there are fake accounts setup just to drawn in the unsuspecting, so we thought it would be a good idea to test this and to ascertain if previous complaints had any merit and the following is what we found. [Marmot’s Hole]
You can read the rest at the link, but basically they found the site to be misleading with bots posing as women to get people to sign up for accounts. They never did interact with any real women. I think their advice of learning some Korean and just being a pleasant person is much better way to meet people in Korea than depending on a website like Ashley Madison.
The Justice Ministry tightened visa standards in April last year for foreign women who marry Korean men and started requiring them to pass Korean language tests to obtain visas to come here. The aim was to stem the chronic marital strife resulting from communication problems that has led to many of migrant wives seeking refuge in shelters.
But a lack of educational institutions abroad teaching the language is making it tough for women from abroad to join their Korean husbands here.
According to the Korean Embassy in Vietnam, the number of visas granted to Vietnamese brides fell from 5,708 in 2013 to 2,967 in 2014.
Justice Ministry data also show that the overall number of foreign brides who entered Korea fell from 98,965 to 98,364 over the same period.
In January and February, the number fell nine percent on-year to 17,522.
Now some critics say the rules are unfair to bona-fide married women who already have marriage licenses. One man in the southern port city of Busan killed the owner of a matchmaking company after his new wife was unable to enter Korea because she kept failing her language test.
Lee Soo-han at the South Gyeongsang Province chapter of Women Migrants Human Rights Center said, “The aim of the revised regulations is reasonable, but the problem is that the rules are too strict since brides who fail the test have to wait six months to take the next exam.” [Chosun Ilbo]
You can read the rest at the link, but could you imagine the claims of racism that would be made if such a language test was required in the US?
Here is another interesting story from the former ROK Prime Minister Kim Jong-pil who served in the Korean government through some of its most interesting times in the country’s modern history. Here is another interesting story he tells of how a North Korean spy came to South Korea on a mission believed to be from Kim Il-sung to meet with him or Park Chung-hee:
A photo of Hwang Tae-song released by the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, now called the National Intelligence Service, on Sept. 27, 1963. “Spy Hwang Tae-song” is written below. All trials of Hwang were closed to the public. [JoongAng Photo]This is the latest in a series of articles on the life and times of Kim Jong-pil, a two-time prime minister, based on extensive interviews with the 89-year-old.It was just past 3 a.m. on Oct. 15, 1961, when I received a phone call from my mother-in-law. Picking up the phone, I had a sense of foreboding. Calls at that time of the morning are rarely good news.
“Something bad has happened,” my mother-in-law, Jo Gui-bun, murmured without elaborating.
I urged her to tell me what was going on.
“I don’t think you know about him. There’s a man named Hwang Tae-song, a friend of your father-in-law’s. He went up to North Korea before the war and now he is back here in the South. He asked me to arrange a meeting with you and Park Chung Hee.” To her, Park, then-Chairman for the Supreme Council for National Reconstruction, was a brother in-law.
I could sense the anxiety in her voice. It was understandable given the high sensitivity of the matter. She was calling from the Gumi Police Precinct using an emergency phone line. The head of the precinct let her use the phone knowing that her son-in-law was the head of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency.
I tried to calm her down.
I had never heard of Hwang Tae-song before. I had no idea how or why he made his way to her in the South and why he wanted to meet Park and me. There were many questions about him I had to find out right away using all of my resources as the top man at the intelligence agency. [Joong Ang Ilbo]
You can read the rest at the link, but I was curious to whatever happened to Hwang Tae-song and discovered this article from the venerable Andrei Lankov that explains how Kim Il-sung thought that since Park Chung-hee was an authoritarian that he may be more amiable than his predecessors with cooperating with North Korea. Hwang was sent to arrange a summit between Kim and Park followed by a gradual easing of tensions. Instead of meeting with Hwang, Park had him arrested, tried, and shot as a spy. Park wanted to erase any doubts about his own communist past and Hwang simply became the perfect example for him to show his US allies that he was all in against communism.
A bill to restrict people who are 24 years old or younger from appearing in ads for alcoholic beverages passed the National Assembly’s committee on health and welfare on Thursday.
If it gets approved in the plenary session of the National Assembly, singer IU, who was born in 1993, will have to stop ads she’s been doing for a soju brand.
The committee said the bill proposed by ruling Saenuri Party lawmaker Lee Elisa in July 2012 to ban young athletes and other celebrities from appearing in liquor ads was partially modified and passed.
The bill was proposed when figure skating star Kim Yu-na modeled for a brewery in 2012. Many argued that someone such as Kim who is idolized by young people can encourage teenagers to drink alcohol. [Chosun Ilbo]
There would be no politicians left in the US if spreading false information during a campaign ever became a crime like it is in Seoul:
The post of Seoul education superintendent, one of the most powerful educational positions in the country, might be vacated for the third time since direct elections were introduced for the post in 2008.
On Thursday night, the Seoul Central District Court sentenced Seoul Superintendent Cho Hee-yeon to pay a 5 million won ($4,640) fine for spreading false information about one of his rivals, Koh Seung-duk, during the election campaign last year. If the ruling is upheld in the Supreme Court, he will be kicked out of his job.
Cho claimed that Koh was a permanent resident of the United States, which wasn’t true.
“Superintendent Cho did not fully check the facts about Koh’s permanent residency in the United States when he held a press conference about it,” said the judge panel. “Given that Cho mentioned the issue again even after Koh released an explanation, Cho’s action was clearly the spreading of false information.”
Under local educational law, a candidate who intentionally disseminates false information about a rival can be fined 5 million to 30 million won or sent to prison for up to seven years. An education superintendent who is fined 1 million won or more or sentenced to any time in jail loses his job. [Joong Ang Ilbo]
You can read the rest at the link, but could you imagine the money that could be raised by this law in the US in just the US Presidential election cycle?
The number of cigarettes released in the domestic market dropped 44.2 percent following price increases in January, data showed Tuesday. [Korea Herald]
