There and Back Again: Video Tours

My favorite videos on Youtube these days are the walking tours, in which someone carries a camera through a cityscape or landscape.  They range in length from half an hour to two hours and more.  I usually watch them on my TV through the Youtube app, which gives them extra vividness; I've caught myself thinking about buying a larger TV, but I don't have a good place to put one and 42 inches is really big enough.  They usually have no narration or musical soundtrack, so it's easy to get lost in the experience, but as often as not I just start one up and let it run as I do other things.

I first stumbled on some from Japan, starting with this one taken at night during a thunderstorm in Tokyo. The rainy soundtrack can be restful all by itself.  Youtube algorithms directed me to others.  Snowy landscapes or cityscapes are also pleasant, especially since you don't have to cope with the snow yourself.  (Here's one I found later, of snowfall in Manhattan.)  I also enjoyed these videos of Halloween in Japan.

When the quarantine started, I began sharing some of them on Facebook.  It occurred to me that these videos might alleviate feelings of confinement -- they do for me -- and when people began posting suggestions for home-schooling activities, I began looking for walking tours of other countries, in Europe or South America or the United States.  I passed along this tour of the inside of the Statue of Liberty.

Finally I found some walking tours of places in Korea.  This one, of Seoul by night, is taken from the air and is breathtaking.  I was interested in areas familiar to me, and Seoul Walker provides plenty.  Some of these videos were shot before the epidemic, but Seoul Walker has kept busy, and there are several from the past month or two.  I used to spend a lot of time in COEX Mall before it was renovated several years ago, and I don't much like the new version but it's nice to see what it looks like now.  Itaewon is not my favorite district of Seoul, but I recognized the streets and even the stores.  Here's a Saturday afternoon in Gangnam, of "Gangnam Style" fame.  Here's a student district that I visited, I believe, on my last visit to Korea in 2018.  There are a couple of videos featuring Insadong, an artsy / touristy district not far from City Hall.  I know it well partly because friends took me there on my first few visits, but it's also a good place to buy gifts for friends and family when I return to the US.  It's also adjacent to Jongro (pronounced Jongno), where I spent much of my free time on my last several visits to Korea.  Finally, here's a tour along the ocean in Yeosu, a seaside city in South Cheolla province where I visited a friend on my most recent trip in 2018.  We walked along this very route.

I find this video rather chillling: it's a residential district of private houses, probably owned by moderately (though not extremely) rich people, with no stores or street vendors; it has the same kind of emptiness as upscale housing developments in the US.  I've never been there nor am I likely to go even if I am able to return to Korea.  On the other hand, here is Nami Island, a popular tourist attraction; I have a vague memory of going there or to an island like it in 2003 or so, but in any case it reminds me of parks I've walked around since then.  And here's a video of a train ride to Seoul from Gyeongju, a southeastern city that was formerly the capital of one of the ancient Korean kingdoms.  I've been there twice, and took this ride myself a couple of years ago.

It might seem odd that I prefer the videos set in cities, where the camera passes among crowds.  For me that's a (paradoxical?) pleasure of being in a city: to be surrounded by a river of people, while still being anonymous.  (As anonymous as an old white man can be in an Asian city.)  Or look at this one, of Provence Village, a tourist attraction northwest of Seoul: I don't feel left out and isolated among these people, I feel included, contained, safe.  Once in a great while someone will single me out to talk on the street or in a subway station, which is fine.  As I've written before, subways - at least in Korea - are social places, where a lot of interaction happens between people, offering their seats to others or just striking up conversation.  At the end of the day I'm glad to go back to the friends I'm staying with for dinner and more talk, or watching TV together.  But the city is one of the great human achievements, and I always feel satisfaction being in one, especially when it's as well-run as Korean cities tend to be.  Not perfectly run, of course, no human construction will be perfect, but well-run.

I have mixed feelings about these Korean videos.  On one hand, they bring back good memories; on the other, they remind me of places I may never be able to see again.  I'm nearly 70, and who knows when it will be possible to travel to Korea again as a tourist? But for now, I'm grateful to be able to see these places again.

The Squirrel Took My Ice Cream

I have a lot of respect for Daniel Larison of The American Conservative, whose writing is useful not only as a reminder that not all conservatives are feral hydrophobes but for its own sake as a counter to the misinformation spread by mainstream media.  But sometimes I disagree with him, though even in this case his main thesis is basically correct - it just doesn't go far enough.

In a piece that went up on Monday, "Remembering the Invasion of Panama", Larison declares:

The invasion of Panama was the first regime change war of the last thirty years. No one realized it at the time, but it marked the start of an era of hyperactive militarism that has not ended yet. It is the first U.S. war that I can remember, and it is sobering to consider that the U.S. has been engaged in hostilities somewhere in the world almost every year since then.... It was the first in a series of wars against small, outmatched countries that posed no threat to the United States.

Um... no.  Those first two sentences are strange.  It is true, I suppose, that Panama was the first regime change war of the last thirty years; but it was also the latest in a long series of such wars that the US waged from at least the end of the Indian wars.  A better point to place the beginning would be the 1898 War with Spain, which was a war of regime change that set off a wave of hyperactive militarism that has not ended yet.  I suppose that that wave includes the Indian wars and the Mexican war and the American Civil War too, but the point is that the US has been engaged in hostilities somewhere in the world for most of its history.  (Daniel Immerwahr's How to Hide an Empire [Farrar Straus Giroux, 2019] fills in the gaps very well.)  But also, think of Reagan's invasion of Grenada, eight years before Bush's invasion of Panama. 

There was a brief interlude between the US withdrawal from Vietnam and the attack on Grenada, thanks to what is known as the "Vietnam Syndrome," when American troops were supposedly not on the ground except as "advisors," but even then the US was underwriting and supporting escapades like the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, starting the year we left Vietnam.  As Madeleine "YASSS SLAY QUEEN" Albright complained to Colin Powell, "What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about if we can't use it?"

But notice the closing sentences of the paragraph I quoted.  In fact, the invasion of Panama was the latest of a series of wars against small outmatched countries that posed no threat to the United States.  It's why Panama was picked, as Grenada was, because it would let Our Boys get the taste of foreigners' blood at minimal risk to themselves.  Korea and Vietnam were also small outmatched countries that posed no threat to us; as with Noriega in Panama, the threat had to be manufactured.  The difference was that the Korean and Vietnamese wars turned out not to be the cakewalks our rulers expected them to be, which is why they now refer to them as "tragic blunders" and the like.

Larison reminds his readers of how terrible the US invasion was for Panamanians, and that's valuable and I'm glad he did it.  I'm quibbling about the way he frames it, as some sort of watershed; I don't think it was.

Note: The title of this post comes from here.

The Times They Are a-Changing (And The More They Change, the More They Stay the Same)

Following on yesterday's post, quoting the same American-Korean blogger's post:

When I landed at Incheon International I breathed a sigh of relief at the familiarity around me. I left a place that I’ve always thought of as home, a place where traditions crumble and reform in a continual act of self-creation. I’m not sure now whether it’s home or not, but I wonder whether in the end that’s what it means to be a San Franciscan. Allowing the walls of certainty to come crashing down so that you can then rebuild them, piece by piece.

Again, there's probably some rhetorical exaggeration going on here, and I probably notice more change in Korea because I don't live here but simply visit every year or so.  But Korea is changing rapidly: technology, certainly, but also the economy and the politics.  This would have been visible to the blogger even in 2009, but I think it's accelerated since then.  The downfall of President Park Geun-hye under massive popular pressure, but also US pressure even before the accession of Donald Trump, has forced changes in Korean life that are going to continue making traditions crumble.  As a result, many older Koreans are responding just as many older Americans are, and in similar ways.

I observed some of a pro-Trump demonstration in downtown Seoul on Saturday.  It was much smaller than the vast candlelight vigils that helped bring down President Park, and almost all (around 99 percent, I'd guess) of the participants were over 50.  They waved Korean flags with American ones, begged Trump to visit Park Geun-hye (unlikely, since she's imprisoned and awaiting trial), and to restore her to office.  Part of this was nostalgia for her dictator father Park Chung-hee, which accounts for her popularity among elderly Koreans.  (But elderly Koreans also helped bring her down.)

South Korea has been changing, technologically and culturally, ever since the Japanese occupation -- actually since the introduction of Christianity in the 1800s -- and the change has accelerated over the past couple of decades.  The civil war of 1950-1953 shouldn't be overlooked either: it uprooted people on both sides of the 38th parallel, and led to occupation by US troops, who required R&R support: bars, prostitution.  (This morning I saw a complaint in comments on another blog, about how unwelcome uniformed soldiers are in European public accomodations.  I don't want to stereotype, but there's a reason for this: soldiers are trained in violence, they're young and rambunctious, and they feel entitled to let off steam when they're off-base.  US soldiers in Korea, as elsewhere, have a long unsavory record of violence against local civilians, often exacerbated by white racism against black soldiers and the Korean women who served them.  Many in the military also despise the people they supposedly serve.)  Park Chung-hee's forced-march industrialization in the 1960s and 1970s drew many younger people from the countryside to the cities to work in the factories and offices (a normal process in capitalism) -- and now they're old people.  It's something else Seoul and San Francisco have in common: many Seoulites were not born here, but moved here for school, work, or escape from the countryside.  Traditions have been 'crumbling' in Korea under the hammer blows of 'modernity' in the same way they have elsewhere.

But I have to remember that the old people who were at the pro-Park/Trump demonstration are not really traditionalists: they're the generation that benefited, however ambiguously, from modernization.  They got electricity, trains, buses, television (even remote old rural houses have satellite dishes perched on them), refrigerators, washing machines, sanitation, a higher standard of living generally -- until the late 1980s, anyway, when growth began to slow and the Korean conglomerates, or chaebol, decided that the Korean dream was no longer viable, for most Koreans anyway.  They remind me of my parents and their post-Depression and post-WWII experience of change, except that they are my age, not my parents'.  Then the US and its instruments forced financialization on the Korean and other Asian economies, and the Korean Miracle staggered.  Even if it didn't quite fail, it still hasn't recovered.

Some changes have been positive: the shortening of the work week, more opportunities for women, and the like.  Young women, like their counterparts around the world, are less willing to marry than their mothers and grandmothers were, partly for economic reasons but also for "cultural" ones: they're not interested in being subordinate anymore, to husbands or to mothers-in-law.  In this respect they're like many Trump voters, right down to their soft spot for fascism and war.

I know the Korea Dispatch blogger must have been aware of much of this, if I judge by his recommended readings.  And things have changed further since he wrote that last post in 2009.  "Allowing the walls of certainty to come crashing down" is not just what it means to be a San Franciscan, it's also what it means to be a Korean.

Looking, Really Looking; Seeing, Really Seeing

I should have been paying more attention to the sites in my Korean news blogroll.  Some have disappeared, a couple are now Korean-language only, some are still there but stopped posting some time ago.

But I was interested by some of what I found when I looked them over last week.  This American blogger, though he stopped updating Korea Dispatch in 2009, has a good attitude.  I disagree with him on numerous points, of course, but he's less ethnocentric than some American writers in Korea that I've seen.  His suggested reading list is good.  He's married to a Korean woman.  I liked most of what he said in his final post, about the culture shock of returning to his home city of San Francisco after several years away, but this bugged me slightly:

And the faces. All kinds, all ethnicities. So unlike the never-ending sameness of Korea, that maddening, comforting sense of living in a village/nation where everyone is a variation of the same theme. SF felt fragmented, everyone a stranger who neither shared the same tongue, ate the same food… only occupying the same space. In Korea I am a minority; in SF, everyone is.

I realize that he's exaggerating slightly to make a point, and I know what he means, though when I first visited San Francisco in 1997 I was surprised how multiethnic it wasn't.  Yes, there was more variety of human appearance than in the small northern-Indiana towns I'd grown up in, but no more than I was used to after a quarter century in Bloomington, Indiana.  The university draws students from all over the world, and though its relative lack of racial diversity is still a sore point, I was surprised that San Francisco didn't feel so different to me.

But I disagree about the "never-ending sameness" of Koreans.  From my first visit in 2001, I was struck by how much variation there was in Koreans' appearance.  I'd already noticed it to some extent among the Koreans I'd met in Bloomington, but once I was in the actual place I could see how different Koreans looked from each other, and this was before younger Koreans really got into dyeing their hair in lighter colors.  (Older Koreans, by contrast, had been dyeing their hair black all along.  Every time I pass a Korean barber shop, I see half-a-dozen older men getting a dye job.  And not only older men: when I got my hair cut last week, a guy about 30 was getting his black hair refreshed.)  What I'm talking about is bone structure, face shape, eye shape (again, even leaving aside the depressingly popular eye-widening surgery so many Koreans get), lip/mouth shape, hair texture, even color.  (Also height and weight.)  Some of my Korean friends, when I've mentioned this, put it down to genetic influence from American soldiers, but I doubt it could have been as extensive as what I see.

But I've also noticed that there's a lot of sameness among Caucasians -- guys with goatees, for example, tend to look alike.  When I'm in all- or mostly-white small towns, I have the same feeling that the blogger had about Korea: never-ending sameness.  People's appearance can be categorized, though I don't have names for the categories, just the awareness that this person looks similar to others I've known or seen.  (That becomes more common as I get older: everyone looks like someone else.)  Some of the similarities cross "race" as well; I think of the laughing old Chinese man in Ang Lee's The Wedding Banquet who's a dead ringer for Texas billionaire H. Ross Perot.

Maybe it's just that I look.  Many foreigners I see appear to be drawn into themselves, as if not to draw attention to themselves, maybe afraid that someone will ask to practice their English on them.  (Most of the white people I see are European, though; when I overhear them talking to each other, they aren't speaking English anyway.)  I'm glad to be here, I'm interested in the country and the people, and I interact when I can.  I know I'm not unique in this -- I see foreigners speaking good Korean on TV, and I know some who do in everyday life as well -- but I rarely see it on the street, in the stores, on the subway.  As Thomas Mann had one of his characters say, interest is greater than love.

Korean Grandpa in Training

How do you like my ride?  Sweet, eh?

I'm in South Korea, in the same area of Seoul where I stayed last year.  I have the bike above on loan from the friends I'm staying with; they have a couple of spares, and I may switch to another one, but for now this one works for me.

Yeah, I know, it's a "women's" bike.  But it's also the bike my host's father rides when he's in town; the basket in front makes it good for running errands.  And I've noticed quite a few old Korean men riding "women's" bikes, so I fit right into the scenery.  That's not to say that Koreans aren't uptight about gender -- it's a very sexist, male-supremacist culture -- but I suspect that for people around my age, who grew up when Korea was still a very poor country, fussing about what a bicycle has between its legs is a luxury they couldn't afford, and don't worry much about now.  (P.S. My Korean friends agreed with my speculation.)  I get a fair amount of attention as I ride around Godeok, and I'm not sure whether it's because my bike is a lady or because I'm a foreigner riding a battered old Korean bicycle.  So I smile back, and nod, and have a great time.

Having the bicycle increases my mobility wonderfully.  I routinely turn down side streets that I wouldn't ordinarily have time or energy to explore, and I've found some interesting places as a result: a little bike shop for repairs and such, a second-hand store that will be useful when I get a place of my own, a restaurant I mean to try for lunch.  I'm also saving money on transit fares, though I haven't gone very far yet.  I'm thinking of riding up to Jamsil, a few miles away but closer by road than by subway oddly enough.  Just riding around Godeok has occupied my energies for the past several days, and I'm not finished yet.

This is where I want to live for a while.  I can't yet -- I'll return to the US in mid-November -- but I'm more certain than ever that this place feels like home to me.  Not for the entire rest of my life, perhaps, but for a man in his mid-sixties, who knows how long that will be?  But for a while.

One Foot in Front of the Other

I'll begin by quoting again this passage from Shin Kyung-Sook's novel I'll Be Right There, which I wrote about here.

I made the right decision to learn about the city by walking around it.  Walking made me think more and focus on the world around me.  Moving forward, putting one foot in front of the other, reminded me of reading a book.  I came across wooded paths and narrow market alleyways where people who were strangers to me shared conversations, asked one another for help, and called out to one another.  I took in both people and scenery.

This uncannily describes my peregrinations around Seoul for the past three and a half weeks.  I've spent a lot of time on buses and subway trains, of course, which are also full of people.  But more than during past visits I've walked around.  The autumn weather has been more comfortable for walking than the stifling, humid summer weather of my past visits, and I'm not worried about getting lost, as I used to be.  Which doesn't mean I can't get lost -- even born Seoulites do -- but I know that if I walk for a few blocks in almost any direction I'll come to a subway station, and from there I can get back to some place I know.

One of the benefits of my exploration has been interactions with people, despite my nearly non-existent Korean.  (I feel guilty, ashamed, and frustrated for not having worked on learning more.  I've resolved to do something about that.)  The easiest of these interactions is giving up one's seat to other people on the subway.  There are, as in other cities around the world, seats reserved in each car for the elderly, the infirm, and pregnant women, but they fill up, and people freely offer their seats elsewhere in the cars.  Even when I was a few years younger than I am, people offered me their seats, and though I sometimes resisted, if I was tired enough I would accept.  Soon I got into the spirit of it, and I had enough basic vocabulary to play the game.  "Sir [or Ma'am], sit!  Yes, sit!*  No no, I'm fine!  I'm only going to the next station!"  If someone older than I got on, I'd be on my feet (just as the others would), offering a space to them.

Now, for about the past week, this hadn't been happening.  There weren't any opportunities to play the game on the trains I was on while I was on them; no other seniors offered me a seat or needed one while I was there, there were enough seats for those of us who were riding.  But today it was different.  I was reading in my seat when an older heterosexual couple got on, and there was only one seat so I gave mine; I had to insist, but after one refusal the seat was accepted.  At the next stop a seat opened up opposite to where I'd been, so I sat -- but at the next stop I gave that seat to a young mother carrying her toddler son, and another seat opened up for a halmoni (grandmother) next to her.  We all beamed and nodded and thanked each other happily.  As we moved to the end of the line where I was bound, more seats opened up and the game was over for this ride; the young mother spoke to me, and her son was looking at me.  I said hello to him, and she said hello for him -- he was too young to speak, and probably wouldn't have spoken even if he were a year or two older, children are shy sometimes.  But then she was giving him some dry cereal to nibble on, and he held it out to me.  I thanked him but didn't accept it, not being sure I should.  He gave it to his mother instead.  And then it was my stop.

I've long wanted to live in Korea, and this trip has confirmed and strengthened that wish.  I think I could live comfortably here, and I think I'm going to take more serious steps toward doing so.  Of course, I must learn to have conversations in Korean.  If I could do that now, there would have been conversations on the train today, not just thank yous and head bows.  And those conversations must be in Korean, so that I'm the one who has to work harder to express himself.  (This is how I feel about conversations in Spanish with my Mexican friends.  They get to correct my Spanish, and they do.)  Still, those are better than nothing.  Today made me think of Andrew Ti's fury at Americans who'd use the few words of Chinese they know, because (he assumed) they hope to be told "THANK YOU FOR BEING ONE OF US."  Of course the same gesture can mean wildly different things depending on the person who uses it, but his interpretation made no sense to me two years ago and it still doesn't.  We are already "one of us."  The task and obligation is to make the connections that follow from that: to learn more of the other's language and culture, and interact on that basis.

Something more about that.  Today as I was crossing the street to the subway station in the district where I've been staying, a middle-aged man who was riding his bicycle in the opposite direction called out happily to me in English, "Hello, sir!"  I replied happily, "Hello, sir!"  "Nice to meet you!" he called as he rode past, and I replied in kind.  I'd have spoken in Korean to him if there'd been time, but he was gone.  I'd like to ask Andrew Ti about that.  Did this man use his few words of English in hopes I'd tell him "THANK YOU FOR BEING ONE OF US"?  I doubt it. Should I despise him for a racist shitbag who had no reason for tossing out his pitiful store of English at me?  (I just looked at Ti's tumblr for the first time in over a year.  It's gone way downhill, and Ti's become a rote Obamabot.  Kinda sad.)

This doesn't mean I think I can "be Korean." If I move here, gain fluency in Korean, even become a Korean citizen and adopt a Korean name (as a few Westerners have done), I'll still be an old white man from the United States.  Korea is still too 'racially' homogeneous to have many Caucasian Koreans, but I suspect that will change in the next generation or two, and then there will be black and South Asian and white Koreans, just as there are black and white and South Asian and East Asian Americans.  Belonging is complex, but I feel like an outsider in the US too, so being an outsider in another country won't be that different; belonging is something you make happen, in concert with the people you encounter and live among.

*Although manners and politeness as well as deference to the old are important in Korean culture, they aren't always expressed in the language as they would be in American English.  So one doesn't say "please" when inviting a senior to sit.  I've noticed that Korean (and Japanese) movies often put American-style politeness into the subtitles.  A child's answer to his parent may be translated as "Yes, father," when the original language has only "Yes" or a grunt, which can be transliterated as "Eung."  Manners are, remember, a social construction.

No Shibal, Sherlock

I've been seeing teasers for this hit Korean musical on the subway monitors since I got here three weeks ago, and have wondered idly if I should try to see it.  One thing that makes it interesting is that the play, which spawned a sequel, is not a translation of a Western play but an original Korean work.  But then something occurred to me: there are no Caucasian actors in it.  Holmes and all the other, supposedly English characters are being played by Koreans.

This does not in fact bother me.  But it brought back memories of controversies in American theater and movies over the casting of Caucasian actors to play Asian characters.  I have mixed feelings about these controversies.  In the case of Miss Saigon, there were objections to the way Asian characters were depicted, but in that case wouldn't it be better to have them played by whites rather than have Asian actors sully their principles by playing racist depictions of Their People?  These complaints just confused the issue.  There were ample absurdities from the show's defenders, of course, such as the claim that there just weren't enough good Asian (or Asian-American or Asian-British) actors to play the parts.  (Something like that was a rationalization for the use of boy actors to play female characters in Shakespeare's day.)  I think that excuse is not likely to fly anymore (though some still try, like the producers of the TV movie Earthsea), as more and more actors of Asian descent have found work in American media.

But there's something more going in these objections, I think: a deep-rooted literalism that demands that the theater and movies, far from being the Kingdom of Fantasy we hear so much about, must be realistic.  This may carry more weight in film, where the camera gets right up in the actor's face, and the kind of "facial prostheses" used in Miss Saigon won't convince.  Though we still get a Caucasian actress playing a probably "Asian" character in The Hunger Games by darkening her hair and hoping for the best.  And there's also the question in a world full of multiracial people (who tend to make racists of all colors uncomfortable) of who's white and who's not.  There were people who complained that the hero of The Matrix was played by a white actor while characters of color were delegated to supporting roles, and who had to be reminded that Keanu Reeves has Native Hawaiian, Chinese, English, Irish, and Portuguese ancestry.

Another even more literal form of this literalism was the reaction to a Coke commercial made for the Superbowl, in which the song "America the Beautiful" was sung by people in a variety of languages. Although this song has no official status -- it's not the national anthem or anything, though apparently many believe it is -- many people felt that it was somehow defiled by being sung in languages other than English.  (That it was defiled by being used in a Coke commercial during a commercial sports event seems not have entered their tiny heads.)  One could point also to racist hysteria over the national anthem's being sung, again at a sports event but in English, by a young native-born American citizen of Mexican descent.  It's hard to detach the gut-level racism in such reactions from considerations of power and "representation" in media, but I believe that gut-level response is almost always a factor.

On stage, though, it's a different matter.  You can mix up the "races" quite nicely, and you can have divas of sub-Saharan descent playing ancient Egyptian (which is to say, supra-Saharan) royalty.  You can have men playing women and women playing men, straights playing gays and vice versa, for all sorts of reasons.  If a play is racist, it would better to argue that no one should act in it than to demand that parity requires that only an Asian actor should play a racist caricature of a "half-caste."

Me, I'm delighted to see Koreans engaged in the kind of cultural appropriation that gave us Sherlock and Sherlock 2, with Korean actors playing Victorian Brits.  But those who object to whites playing Asian characters should take notice, and come up with some reasons why this doesn't bother them.

Service Advisory

I'm back in Korea after a four-year absence, and I spent the first week just running around, readusting, getting settled in.  (I'll be here till mid-November.)  I'm still trying to find out how to score free wifi, which is supposed to be available all over Seoul, but is hard to combine with a place that has an outlet for my laptop.  Even if I had a smartphone, which is probably what most Seoulites do with wireless, I wouldn't want to try to write a blog post on it.  So I'm back in the Internet cafes, the PC rooms.

I have a bunch of ideas, but for right now I'm just checking in.  I'll try to do some writing later today.

What Is the Sound of One American Flip-flopping?

Of course I've been watching the situation on the Korean peninsula, though not all that carefully.  I'm worried about my friends there, but it's hard to take most of the US coverage seriously.  It's the usual mixture of hysteria and posturing, but I know I should take it more seriously because the US is a threat to peace in Korea, as well as in Asia -- well, in the world -- generally.

When people I know have posted stuff on Facebook about this, I've mostly made fun of it.  On the one hand, the corporate media have been telling us (and my friends dutifully swallow it), North Korea is a clown show as well as a failed state.  Kim Jong Un is a fat nut, a joke, and so on.  But North Korea is also an imminent threat -- to the United States.  Most American journalists, and most Americans, don't care about South Korea.  They're worried that the North Korean army will flood across the Korean/US border, and conquer us without firing a shot.  Kim has threatened to fire missiles at us!  With nuclear warheads!  Never mind that as part of the clown-show coverage, most Americans probably are well aware that North Korea doesn't have missiles that can get very far off the launching pad, never mind fly the thousands of miles to get to us.  They could reach South Korea, but most Americans are vague about where that is, don't know much about it ("Gangnam Style" is about the limit) or world geography in general (as we're often told), and don't much care what happens to people in other countries.  I've seen the same pattern often over the years: US propaganda about Vietnam took much the same form, and more recently the US propaganda about Iraq.

I said as much in comments under a posting by a former Bloomington acquaintance who's been teaching English in South Korea for several years now.  (On occasion he's expressed contempt for his Korean students, which doesn't endear him to me.)  He replied peevishly that as a resident of Seoul, he had reason to be worried about the North.  But, I pointed out, he hadn't posted about the threat to Seoul, he'd posted about North Korea as an immanent threat to the United States -- and never mind that he'd been posting lots of clown-show material about Kim Jong Un.  (Making fun of Kim's weight, for example, which my acquaintance is in no position to cast the first stone about.)  He justified that as dark humor, given the circumstances, which I suppose was fair enough.

But his embrace of US and right-wing South Korean propaganda is not fair enough.  This acquaintance has never, to my knowledge, taken any notice of the ways the US has tried to destabilize the Korean peninsula.  I said most of this, and was intrigued by some of his friends' responses to me.  One assumed that I didn't know anything about Korea, had never been there, and didn't care what happened to Koreans.  I set him straight on that, mentioning my numerous friends there and my desire to live there someday.  In fairness, he doesn't know me personally, and couldn't have known of it; but he showed what happens when you assume.  He also took issue with my pointing out the flipping between treating North Korea as a laughable failed state on one hand, and a powerful, menacing threat on the other: he claimed that I'd made this up out of my "miserable imagination", though my English-teaching acquaintance's postings were a perfect example of this pattern.  It reminded me of the time a gay American soldier stationed in Korea demanded angrily where I'd heard the "propaganda" that South Korea was ruled by a military dictatorship for over twenty years; from Korean history, I told him, and from Korean friends.

Hell, on my last visit to Korea I had a conversation on this very subject with a Korean, a middle-aged salaryman who approached me in the COEX mall in Seoul.  This was right after a South Korean ship, the Cheonan, was sunk with some loss of life under circumstances that remain murky: the South Korean and American governments claimed the cause was a North Korean mine, but that has been questioned by sensible people.

After asking me the usual biographical questions -- where was I from, what brought me to Korea, what did I do back home in America -- he asked what I thought about the sinking of the Cheonan. Didn't I think that America would help Korea, as Mrs. Clinton had promised? I made a face, and told him I wouldn't rely too much on American promises. What, he asked, is she a liar? She is, I told him, and so is Obama: think of what they have said about Iran and numerous other countries. Besides, didn't he remember that in the Korean Civil War, the US had promised to help the South if the North attacked -- yet when that attack happened, there was no help until the South was almost entirely conquered?

He conceded that unhappily, but then he brightened and declared that there was nothing to worry about, because the North is very weak. There is no danger that they could do much damage to the South. I thought about that for a moment, then asked him why, if the North is so harmless, President Lee and the Americans are saying that the North is a deadly threat? That took him aback too. We chatted for a few moments more, and then we shook hands and he went on his way.

No, I wasn't making this up out of my miserable imagination.  I encountered similar confusion among other South Koreans, especially those who came from political and/or military families.  And within a day after my exchange on Facebook I found some useful links confirming my reading of American corporate media coverage of North Korea.   I've mentioned before the naval base the US has been building, against intense local resistance, on Jeju Island.  Its primary purpose is to "contain" China, but it will be even closer to North Korea.

FAIR, as usual, had a couple of excellent articles, demolishing the US stance of innocence.   This one describes joint US/ROK military "exercises," an ongoing form of entertainment ever since the Korean Civil War ended by truce in 1953.

So there are "exercises" right next door, conducted by the world's most powerful military, which possesses thousands of nuclear weapons; and then there's menacing saber-rattling.

While North Korea's apparent threats are obviously troubling, one doesn't have to be paranoid to take offense at those military drills. As Christine Hong and Hyun Lee wrote (Foreign Policy in Focus, 2/15/13):

The drama unfolding on the other side of the 38th parallel attests to an underreported escalation of military force on the part of the United States and South Korea. In fact, on the very day that Kim visited Mu Island, 80,000 U.S. and South Korean troops were gearing up for the annual Ulchi Freedom Guardian. For the first time in its history, this war exercise included a simulation of a pre-emptive attack by South Korean artillery units in an all-out war scenario against North Korea. Ostensibly a defensive exercise in preparation for an attack by the north, the joint U.S./South Korea war games have taken on a decidedly offensive characteristic since Kim Jong Il's death. What’s more, a South Korean military official discussing the exercise raised red flags by mentioning the possibility of responding to potential North Korean provocation with asymmetric retaliation, a direct violation of UN rules of engagement in warfare.

In other words, there are some real world events that might bother North Korea's leadership–no matter what one might think about the level of North Korean paranoia. On much of the U.S. television coverage, the threats are virtually all coming from one side, without any explanation, and the United States is merely on the scene to bring down the level of tension. 

[P.S.  FAIR also did a segment on North Korea for their weekly broadcast Counterspin, which aired on Friday.  You can listen or download the podcast here.  Their guest was Tim Shorrock, whose excellent article on the background of the conflict went up at Salon on the same day.]

Imagine, as someone else suggested, that China was conducting military exercises in Mexico.  Remember, for that matter, how graciously the US welcomed Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962, which were very plausibly there as a deterrent against US aggression against Cuba.  (This was right after the US had tried unsuccessfully to overturn the new Cuban regime by an invasion.)  As another source quoted by FAIR put it, both North and South Korean leaders are fulminating about what they say they'll do in retaliation if they're attacked.  The North, then, doesn't seem to be threatening to make the first move, though in the current overwrought situation, something could happen anyway.

Another FAIR post today reports how CNN brought in a retired American general to sketch out, at some length, what could happen if hostilities break out between the Koreas.

Well, this is all starting to sound pretty alarming. Until they get to the end of the discussion:

FOREMAN: But you don't think this will happen?
MARKS: Not at all.

Oh. Sorry to waste everybody's time, then.

This is CNN, mind you, not Fox.  Which is why you really have to bypass the corporate media almost entirely to get sane coverage of Korea.  Or of anything, really, but Korea's my subject today.

According to Democracy Now! yesterday, the Obama administration is "reconsidering" its bellicose stance toward North Korea.  A good idea, for the sake of all Koreans.

How the Mighty Have Fallen

According to an editorial in the Hankyoreh, when South Korean President Lee Myoung-bak visited the US last month, he "relied heavily on a U.S. speechwriting firm for the text of his major speeches and statements ... The Korean Embassy in the United States reportedly paid $46,500 (around 51 million won) to the Washington-based company West Wing Writers, primarily for draft writing and revisions on three texts: speeches to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a joint speech to Congress, and a statement at the White House."

The editorial goes on to scold Lee for not expressing his "own diplomatic philosophy and values" in his American speeches, because "the president should represent the country’s interests on major issues in bilateral relations with the country in question." Given Lee's record, one could argue that he represents American interests in Korea and so his choice of speechwriters was fully appropriate: "Recently, the Korean Embassy in the United States paid a U.S. company to lobby for a quick passage of the South Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (KORUS FTA) in Congress." But what made me giggle was the idea of South Korea outsourcing its presidential speechwriting to the US, shipping Korean jobs to American political maquiladoras. Of course Lee probably didn't save money on the deal, but it's the principle of the thing.

The Other 99 Percent

From today's Hankyoreh:
Independent opposition candidate Park Won-soon won the Seoul mayoral election on October 26 handily, and he's already on the job -- he even took the subway to the office.

This was an off-year election, with the big one coming up next year, and there's good reason to expect that the ruling Grand National Party will take a beating then. President Lee Myung-bak has been running a thoroughly corrupt plutocratic administration, and his GNP has repeatedly been defeated at the polls, so it will be interesting to see how things turn out in 2012. I should see if I can arrange my travel plans so as to be in Korea for one or the other election.

I get the impression that some Koreans, at least, are getting their hopes up too high. Park's support was strongest among what Koreans call the 2030 Generation, today's 20 and 30-year-olds. (The GNP also lost support among voters in their 40s, however.) But I remember all too well how the 2030s' older siblings (the 386 Generation) celebrated the election of Noh Mu-hyeon to the Korean Presidency in 2003. Noh, a very courageous human rights lawyer, had no real political experience, and he was up against international pressure to continue the neoliberal assault on the Korean economy, which he didn't really know how to fight. He quickly disappointed his supporters without appeasing the Korean Right, which continued to hound him even after he left office. I worry that Park Won-soon will disappoint many of his supporters too.

The Hankyoreh is optimistic but skeptical too:

Park pledged that he would run a participatory model of government, installing a city management council under him to this end. It is true that some are worried that the involvement of different forces could leave the city’s administration in chaos. We hope that the new major will show the political skill to create a new model for cooperative governance. Attention is also sure to focus on Park’s actions in discussions on opposition party integration and solidarity in the wake of the by-election. This, too, requires a thoughtful response. Park must be prepared to cooperate equally with the Democratic Party (DP) and with progressive parties like the Democratic Labor Party (DLP).

He also needs to work to build his abilities as a leader. In television debates during the election campaign, he became flustered by questions from the rival candidate that were not especially tough. This may have been because he had little experience with criticisms or attacks over the course of his civic organization activities. The mayor of Seoul occupies a high public office. It is difficult to hear people speaking honestly when you are surrounded by government employees. We hope that Park Won-soon does not lose the readiness to listen he showed during the election, and that he creates opportunities for himself to hear some strong criticism.

This is the ongoing problem with elections as a source of change: the GNP has given Korean ample reason to vote against them, but that doesn't mean that the opposition will come up with effective replacements. The GNP, like the ruling parties in the US, has big money behind them, and the GNP gets along well with international business and political interests. George W. Bush liked Lee Myung-bak much better than his predecessor Kim Dae-jung, and I've seen no indication that Obama likes Lee any less. Mayor Park should prepare himself for the usual storm of abuse and misinformation that any opposition figure, no matter how mild, can expect.

More and Better Opposition Candidates!

From the Hankyoreh:

Merchants of a traditional market in Busan’s Saha District carry out a campaign to urge voting, Oct. 24, two days before the by-elections. They hold signboards reading, “You casting a vote is beautiful!!” “Make sure you urge others to vote!!” and “State your opinion through voting.”

An editorial from the Hankyoreh:

According to an analysis of social indicators released this past April by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), South Korea ranked dead last among the 34 member nations in its voter turnout for parliamentary elections. The 46% rate recorded for the 2008 general elections was roughly half the rates observed in the top three countries: 95% in Australia, 92% in Luxembourg, and 91% in Belgium. It was also far lower than the 70% average for member nations as a whole. Germany recorded a rate of 78%, Japan 67%, the United Kingdom 61%, and the United States 48%.

There is a tendency among South Koreans to view interest in politics as a sign of backwardness and to make it the target of cynical derision...

That's depressing; I thought Koreans had a better turnout than the US.

From another editorial, "KORUS FTA in conflict with the Constitution":

... The KORUS FTA implementation law passed by Congress contains only some of the provisions of the agreement. It contains only four amendments to U.S. law. Even these are trivial, procedural rule amendments necessary for trade, related to matters like tariffs and proof of country of origin; there is nothing that disturbs laws or systems, as in South Korea. Article 102 of the implementation law, moreover, clearly states that U.S. law takes priority in cases where it clashes with the KORUS FTA. This makes it explicit that U.S. policy will not be violated based on the agreement.

The government explains such imbalances in the treaty by saying that the U.S. legal system is different. This attitude is one that respects only the U.S.’s legislative sovereignty. The National Assembly must now eliminate unequal article in the KORUS FTA, just as Congress has done in the U.S.

This reminded me of something that has been bothering me, at first only obscurely, about a lot of what I've been reading by Americans about Free Trade Agreements. It's almost always about the effects of these agreements on Americans: "our jobs" being "shipped to other countries," that sort of thing. Even this sensible piece, which also mentions Colombia's awful human rights record:

The Korea FTA is the most economically significant since NAFTA, is projected to increase our trade deficit in key “jobs of the future” sectors such as computers, high speed trains and solar and result in the loss of an additional 159,000 U.S. jobs.

This is a perfectly valid concern, but it often leads to outright foolishness, trying to imply that the US is a pitiful helpless giant brought to its knees by hungry orientals who suck our economic lifeblood for their own enrichment. It's possible to talk about the harmful effects of FTAs on the American economy without ignoring their harmful effects on the US "trade partners."

As many people have pointed out, when we hear talk about dealings between "countries," what is meant is the ruling elites, not the overwhelming majority of citizens. The richest, most powerful people in the US, as in Korea, Panama and Colombia, will benefit greatly from the FTAs, which "have only a limited relation to free trade." Again:

I don't understand how people can talk about "free trade" with a straight face. Apart from the transparent violations of free trade built into the World Trade Organization rules-monopolistic pricing guarantees that go far beyond anything in economic history, for example-what does it mean for political entities that rely crucially on the dynamic state sector for economic development (like the US) to enter into "free trade agreements"?

The same goes for "globalization," which as we usually encounter it is a doctrinal term that refers only to a limited range of interaction among countries, instead of "international integration, economic and otherwise":

So, at some level, workers and companies agree: everyone favours globalization, in the technical sense of the word, not the doctrinal sense that has been appropriated by advocates of the investor-rights style of integration that is built into the so-called "free trade agreements," with their complex mixture of liberalization, protectionism, and undermining of popular democratic control over policy.

I wrote before that the trouble with "shipping jobs overseas" is that the jobs being shipped aren't replaced with more jobs here. It's certainly a mistake to write as though our captains of industry and finance were exporting jobs for the benefit of them foreigners over there; of course they aren't -- they're doing it to benefit themselves.

It should be remembered just how global the "anti-globalization" movement is: contrary to the caricature of the movement in the corporate media, the protests against the World Trade Organization include not only American college students and union members but people from all over the world. including workers and farmers from Asia who've suffered from "free trade" being imported to their countries. This, I think, should be the background if not the focus of criticism of FTAs: not an exclusive concern for those who will be hurt here, but with the recognition that people all over the world will be hurt by them.

Who's a Pretty Boy Then?

I said the other day that the pretty boy is a traditional type in Korean art and entertainment, and indicated that his appeal extends beyond the young girls who are the target audience for boy groups and the like. I began to think that I should offer some support for that statement.

The most famous example of youthful male beauty as an ideal in Korean culture is the Hwarang, the flower boys of the Silla dynasty, in the first millennium CE. The origins of this group are murky, and they changed in their aims and image over time. But along with filial piety, loyalty, and sincerity, physical beauty and the cultivation of friendship were virtues associated with the group. Somewhere along the line military excellence was added, and it looks to me as if each era projected its own ideals on the Hwarang of the past. I haven't looked into this enough to have an informed opinion about the quality of the historical record, but physical beauty recurs as an enduring requirement for induction. For many people today, the combination of male beauty and friendship indicates homoeroticism. I suspect it often did, but we'll never know.

The Hwarang now have a martial art named after them, and a couple of years ago a stage musical. As the poster shows, the musical assimilated the Hwarang to contemporary Korean standards of male good looks, which brings us full circle.

Some of the most valuable material in English on what you might call "old Korea" comes from the late Richard Rutt, formerly an Episcopal bishop in Korea who, because of the small number of Episcopalians in Korea in those days, became almost a circuit preacher, ministering to scattered congregations all over the Republic in the 1950s and 1960s. He developed a great fondness for and knowledge about Korean culture, and in his 1964 book Korean Works and Days he described the rural communities he visited in his first decade there. Stephen O. Murray quoted some of Rutt's observations somewhere, which led me to read Korean Works and Days myself. It's ... intriguing stuff.

For example, describing the entertainment at country fairs, Rutt wrote:

The boys are a very interesting feature of the teams. They are sometimes called hwadong (flower boys) and are almost certainly historically connected with the famous Hwarang, the Order of Flower Boys of the Silla dynasty. They wear red skirts with sleeveless, split-skirted blue coats over them. Over the coat is a series of crossed and knotted sashes tired into turbans with heavy ruching over the forehead. I am told by the oldsters that this headdress is modern. In days gone by the boys wore long pigtails and looked like girls. Nowadays their skirts are the only suggestion of female impersonation left about them. There were three of them here, about thirteen to fifteen years old [62].

More generally:

Educated Koreans often claim that homosexuality is unknown here, in spite of the passionate intensity of many adolescent friendships. But the attitude on this subject too is ambivalent. One of the severest judgments made by the strict Confucian historians against the later kings of the Koryo dynasty was a condemnation of their indulgence in the "love of dragons and sunshine." (That is the literal translation of the phrase, indicating two male concepts, but it really refers to the name of a classic Chinese royal favourite.) And for centuries the gentleman's ideal has restricted sex to marriage and procreation. But there are signs that in rural society paederasty was tolerated if not actually approved.

Not long ago I was sitting in the tiring room of one of my smaller churches, chatting with the churchwarden while the supper was being prepared. There was a lull in the conversation, and then he chuckled and said, "You know, I never realized paederasty was a sin till I read the Epistle to the Romans." After hearing the rest of his chatter I was left wondering to myself just what memories lay behind his chuckle.

He said that when he was a boy, only forty years ago, there were often "pretty boys" in a village. They were especially the favourites of young widowers and sometimes of older and richer men. The boy would receive nice clothes and would be fairly conspicuous. But his position would involve no ostracism and would not impair his chances of marriage.

But among the itinerant players -- the dancers and acrobats and puppet-show people -- paederasty, male prostitution, and regular homosexual marriages [!], sometimes with transvestitism, were common and well known (just as formal tribadistic unions were common among the palace women in the capital.) Today, he said, things have changed. He suggested three reasons: the Japanese efforts to break the custom, the greater freedom of contact between men and women, and the fact that boys no longer wear their hair long like girls. But still the colloquial description of a good-looking boy is "pretty, like a girl" and implies no disparagement [112-13].

Since Korean Works and Days describes Rutt's experiences in Korea during the 1950s and early 1960s, the "forty years ago" to which his informant refers would be just before and after 1920. The Japanese occupied Korea from 1910 until 1945. My knowledge of Korean culture is much more limited than Rutt's, but from the Koreans of different generations whom I've known, I think it can still be said that it implies no disparagement in Korea to say that a good-looking boy is "pretty, like a girl." (This doesn't mean a general acceptance of male homosexuality, however, as indicated by Rutt's remark about educated Koreans' denial of homosexuality in Korea.)

I'm fascinated by Rutt's relaxed discussion of this topic, surprising from a very conservative Anglican priest who converted to Catholicism in 1994 because he disapproved of the Church of England's decision to ordain women as priests. (In 1969 he married a woman several years his senior, and I've been wondering what happened to his marriage when he was ordained a Catholic priest in 1995. His wife, who also converted to Catholicism, lived until 2007.) He also became an authority on knitting, and wrote a history of that lifestyle choice.

But despite his conservatism he wrote without homophobia or even any evident moral disapproval of homosexuality in rural Korea. (His preferred term, "paederasty," is accurate in the context, since boys were the objects of desire.) I'd be wary of generalizing too much from this anecdote, though, because there was a great deal of regional variation in Korean culture outside the cities; on the other hand, the wandering performers went all over the place, so it appears that good-looking dancing boys were popular everywhere.

At this remove we'll probably never be able to find out more, since the people who could have told us are dead, but when the movie The King and the Clown became a huge hit in 2006, it aroused some interest in male homosexuality in the Korean past. Even the New York Times covered it. And it seems to me that commercial pop culture's use of pretty boys still has a specifically Korean flavor to it.

Look to the Future, Don't Dwell on the Past

This morning, while I was getting ready to leave for Gumi, my host's TV set was on, tuned to the news. Although my Korean is rudimentary to the point of nonexistence, I could tell just by the sound that something was up, so I looked at the screen. It was President Lee Myung-bak, solemnly intoning something or other. For a while I was nervous that he might be announcing a declaration of war against the North, but my host's wife, who was watching and listening, didn't seem perturbed, so I figured it wasn't too big a deal, and left for the bus station.

Now I've had a chance to find out what was going on. As I prophesied here a couple of weeks ago, the ruling party did badly in the recent local elections -- spectacularly badly, in fact. So President Lee was making an apology to the nation and promising to be better in the future. He said he will accept the results of the election -- which is big of him, don't you think? He will reshuffle his cabinet. (Again.) He promised to give up the Sejong City boondoggle (which was originally a pet project of his disgraced but martyred predecessor Noh Mu-hyun) and let the legislature dispose of it. There were hints that he would abandon his big Four Rivers restoration project, which is opposed by many if not most Koreans. Do I believe him? Nope. Nor do many Koreans.

The Hankyoreh reports that Lee's tax cuts benefited only the top twenty percent of Korean households. (No wonder he got along so well with George W. Bush.) And it's an interesting coincidence that Lee and his administration trumpeted the sinking of the Korean ship Cheonan in the run-up to the elections: the accusations against North Korea were first publicized on the day the election campaign began. Oh, and the Korea Times, striking another blow for journalistic integrity, reports (in a story the required the efforts of two staff reporters) that sales of condoms increased dramatically on the night Korea defeated Greece at the World Cup.

Come Over and Help Us

I imagine there must be one or two people out there wondering why I haven't been posting about Korean politics this time around, especially with the growing tensions over the sinking of a South Korean ship, blamed by South Korea and the US on North Korea. I haven't been following events closely enough, to tell you the truth.

I have seen a lot of clips of Secretary of State Clinton grandstanding on Korean TV in the past few days, announcing that an independent inquiry had established North Korean guilt, which to me is as good as a confirmation of the North's innocence. Korean friends and some articles I've looked at in the Hankyoreh inform me that there is room for doubt. One friend told me today that it's normal around election time for the ruling party to stir up anxiety about North Korean aggression. Similar incidents have been happening ever since the Korean War ended in truce in 1953, but more people died (about 46) when the Cheonan sank, and it providentially occurred close to the elections, which made it useful for exploitation. On the other hand, the Lee administration's shutdown of economic activity with the North is hurting businesses in the South:

Businesses commissioned for inter-Korean processing and trade were up in arms Tuesday following President Lee Myung-bak’s announcement of plans to halt inter-Korean trade in response to the sinking of the Cheonan. The companies charged that the government’s measures “are killing South Korean businesses, not North Korea.” With the government’s focus lying solely on punishing North Korea, the abrupt announcement gave no time for small and mid-sized companies to prepare a retreat, and despite what is effectively a compulsory measure, almost no government compensation plan has been put in place. ...

For the most part, the companies commissioned to do processing plan their production six to seven months in advance, so a lot of the raw materials are already in North Korea," said an official who attended the Unification Ministry’s talk Tuesday. "If the goods that are currently being produced, or even those that are already finished, cannot go in, then it tarnishes the image not only of the businesses, but also of the company, since they are unable to deliver to the foreign contracting company, and of the state."

I suspect that measures like this may hurt the ruling party at the polls next week.

I've also learned from the Hankyoreh that President Lee Myung-bak and "a number of cabinet members" did not complete their compulsory military service. That surprised me, because not completing one's service is supposed to be a serious disability for men in South Korea. But evidently it hasn't stood in Lee's way. On the other hand, his record may partially explain his desire to appear tough toward Japan and North Korea; we have such men in US public life too, known as "war wimps" and "chicken hawks."

I was sitting on a bench in COEX Mall yesterday, writing in my notebook, when a Korean man about my age, dressed in suit and tie, noticed me and stopped to chat. "Is that English?" he asked about my writing. I admitted that it was.

After asking me the usual biographical questions -- where was I from, what brought me to Korea, what did I do back home in America -- he asked what I thought about the sinking of the Cheonan. Didn't I think that America would help Korea, as Mrs. Clinton had promised? I made a face, and told him I wouldn't rely too much on American promises. What, he asked, is she a liar? She is, I told him, and so is Obama: think of what they have said about Iran and numerous other countries. Besides, didn't he remember that in the Korean Civil War, the US had promised to help the South if the North attacked -- yet when that attack happened, there was no help until the South was almost entirely conquered?

He conceded that unhappily, but then he brightened and declared that there was nothing to worry about, because the North is very weak. There is no danger that they could do much damage to the South. I thought about that for a moment, then asked him why, if the North is so harmless, President Lee and the Americans are saying that the North is a deadly threat? That took him aback too. We chatted for a few moments more, and then we shook hands and he went on his way.

Myself, I don't believe that North Korea is as weak as this man claimed; that was just normal nationalistic boasting on his part. I believe that they could do a lot of damage in the South before they were stopped. It chills me to think of what war would do to the beautiful country I'm visiting, and to its people. Interestingly, it's China that is pressing for caution and patience now -- they don't want war on the Korean peninsula either, so close to their own borders. It's easy for the Americans to say "Let's you and him fight" -- the fight would take place far away from us.

P.S. From the Hankyoreh:

In a survey conducted Saturday by Research Plus at the behest of the Hankyoreh, 59.9 percent of those surveyed say they do not trust the military’s statements issued on the findings of its investigation into the sinking of the Cheonan. Only 34.9 percent say that they trust the military officials. Some 57.9 percent also said that the ruling government has not responded effectively to the stinking of the Cheonan, while only 34.3 percent said they think the government has carried out an effective response.

I'd call that a healthy attitude. We could do with more of it in the US.

The Rule 3 - The Naked Kitchen

I've been working on a review of Hong Ji-Yeong's 2009 release The Naked Kitchen, which seems not to have received much attention despite its quite bankable cast. (The Naked Kitchen is a misleading tease of a title; the Korean title is simply the English word Kitchen, transliterated into Korean. From here I'm just going to call it Kitchen.) Darcy didn't even list it in upcoming releases at Koreanfilm.org as far as I can tell, and he's usually quite thorough. One thing that struck me when I watched it was how well it conformed to the Alison Bechdel / Liz Wallace Rule for movies, which requires that they have at least 1) two women characters, who 2) talk to each other about 3) something other than a man.

Kitchen meets the requirement with ease, perhaps because writer-director Hong is a woman. Ahn Mo-rae (played by Shin Min-a, left in the photo above) lives happily with her financier husband Sang-in (played by Kim Tae-woo, right), and has her own shop which sells parasols decorated with her own painted designs. Her friend Kim Sun-woo is a photographer, still unmarried, and they talk to each other a great deal during the movie, not just about men (Sun-woo thinks Mo-rae married too young and needs more experience) but about their work. Early in the movie, for example, Sun-woo drafts Mo-rae to help her photograph a wedding, so they talk about the work they're doing and about Mo-rae's pay for the gig. Sun-woo is a familiar type, the slightly older, tough, brassy working female buddy, but she has a good-sized role in the story, and I find her very sympathetic. (I couldn't, however, find any photos online of the two women together.)

Other than that, Kitchen is pretty conventional. Sang-in quits his job to pursue his lifelong dream of being the chef in his own restaurant, and brings from France a young cooking prodigy, Park Du-re (played by Joo Ji-hoon, center in the top photo), to coach him and help work out the menu. Du-re and Mo-rae start an affair (Sun-woo was right, Mo-rae needed more experience) and things get complicated. Kitchen flirts, ever so delicately, with male homoeroticism -- there seems to be a hint that Sang-in and Du-re also had an affair when they met in France, which Du-re would like to rekindle in Korea; but the flirtation seems more fashionable than sincere. The 2006 hit The King and the Clown proved young Korean women to be as susceptible as young women elsewhere to the fantasy of pretty young men smooching each other, but Kitchen doesn't pursue the theme beyond the aforementioned hint. Too bad -- it might have improved the box-office.

By the Sea, By the Sea, By the Beautiful Sea

I played tourist this weekend, and that combined with general discombobulation is why things have been quiet around here. They probably will continue so for a few days more, since I'm planning to travel outside Seoul again tomorrow. When I get back, I hope to be more productive.

Yesterday a friend took me with him to Jebu Island, just off the western coast of South Korea. (Not to be confused with Jeju [also spelled Cheju] Island, to the south.) He was meeting some friends he'd known since elementary school there. They're all in their mid-40s now. One of them has run a hotel on Jebu for about ten years, and the friends gather there three times a year. This impresses me, because I'm not in touch with anyone from my elementary school years.

I'd been to Jebu once before, about five years ago. It's an island you don't need a ferry ride to visit: instead there's a raised, winding road that takes you through the tidal flats that surround the island, a road that is covered when the tide is high. (Photo of the submerged road here.) You have to check the times when the road is above water. It's not the most picturesque scenery, with hundreds of yards of mud on either side. We passed other tourists as we neared the island itself, wearing boots as they dug in the mud for shellfish, squids, and whatever else they could find. Since it was a long holiday weekend, we found a line of cars ahead of us when we turned onto the approach to the island, and progress was slow.

It wasn't a big reunion, just eight or nine of my friend's classmates and their wives and children, but (or maybe because of that) it was fun: lots of food, lots of soju (Korean rice vodka), lots of conversation, lots of karaoke. (The soju commercial below has been inescapable while I've been here; featuring the pop singer Lee Hyori.) Several people spoke at least some English, and the others were patient and encouraging about my fumbling, inadequate Korean.



After breakfast this morning, under gray skies and occasional drizzle, a bunch of hotel guests rode out to the edge of the tidal flats to see what were in the hotelier's nets there. We put on borrowed / rented boots and disposable plastic raincoats and climbed onto the back of three vehicles like the one below:

Driven by the hotelier and two of his workers, they took us out to check the nets. We collected an octopus, some clams and crabs, and some small fish. (Or rather, the other folks did. I just wandered around a bit, distracted by a very hot fisherman I found it hard not to keep looking at, and who does not appear in these photos.*)


The fish were cleaned and eaten fresh and raw, with soju, where we were.

After which we rode back to the hotel, the tide slowly rising behind us, for a hot lunch.

One of my host's friends is a Harley-Davidson enthusiast, and as we were finishing our meal a bunch of people he knew rode up.


Very nice, friendly people. The first bikers I've encountered in Korea, some of them smoking the first cigars I've seen being smoked here. They all sat down to lunch too. Shortly afterward my host and I returned to Seoul.

*It may be worth mentioning, considering questions I've occasionally been asked and a complaint I've received, that despite the title of this blog, not everything or everyone it discusses is gay. The fact that I was drooling over this fisherman, for example, doesn't mean he drooled back. (Even if he were gay, he probably wouldn't.) This is a misapprehension of which I've often run afoul in the 30-odd years since I came out: straights and gays alike tend to assume that everyone I know must be gay (and that I'm having sex with all the gay ones), even though both groups should know better. The straights who know me, after all, have themselves as evidence that not everyone I know is gay, and the gays (who aren't sleeping with me) have straight friends themselves. Being openly gay has meant that I've blended the two populations together most of the time without much thought. Often it's the very people who gripe about queers ghettoizing ourselves who assume that the wall of separation is high and unbreachable. So, verb. sap.

Memorial Day

I was just walking out of Incheon Airport last night, following my hosts to their car, when one of them asked me if I'd heard the big news story. "Noh Mu-hyeon committed suicide today," he told me.

Things had unfolded in an amazingly short time. Early Saturday morning, the former president of South Korea had gone hiking near his home -- climbing up mountains is a popular pastime of the elderly here -- and then thrown himself off a cliff. He must have done it virtually in front of the bodyguard who was with him. At 9:30 a.m. he was pronounced dead at the hospital, and within a few hours the country was in mourning. It was reported that he'd left what amounted to a suicide note on his computer at home. In the early evening his coffin was brought back home and carried to the Town Hall by aides and family members. (Photo above from the Hankyoreh.)

Rather than quote the obituaries I've seen online, let me quote this article by the historian Bruce Cumings, which appeared in The Nation in 2003:

In December [2002] the South Korean people broke decisively with the existing political system, and the elites within it who date back to the Korean War, by electing Roh Moo Hyun. Roh is a lawyer who came up the hard way: Born into a dirt-poor family that could not afford college, he schooled himself in the law and passed Korea's notoriously difficult bar exam on his first try. In the 1980s, during the Reagan-supported dictatorship of Chun Doo Hwan, Roh defended many human rights and labor activists at the risk of his own career and life. Amazingly, for presumably anti-Communist South Korea, his wife comes from a family that was blacklisted for decades: Her father was a member of the South Korean Labor Party in the late 1940s, a Communist party outlawed by the US Military Government that ruled the South then; he was arrested for allegedly collaborating with the North during the Korean War, and died in jail. Roh's sharpest break with the past, though, is his constituency. His election was boosted mightily by a burgeoning movement among younger Koreans against the seemingly endless American military presence in the South, conducted in successive, truly massive and dignified candlelight processions along the grand boulevard in front of the US Embassy in Seoul. Routinely labeled "anti-American" by the media, these demonstrations were in fact anti-Bush--like so many others.

After he left office in 2007 charges of corruption were leveled against Noh, primarily involving large sums of money allegedly given to family members and to Noh himself. This prosecution was what evidently led to his suicide. It's hard to sort it out: I'm inclined to suspect a political element in the investigation, as are many Koreans, since the Korean Right like its American counterpart is big on getting back at political opponents. It doesn't diminish my suspicions to learn that the prosecution will be dropped in the wake of his death. I have the impression that despite the accusations of arrogance and self-righteousness that have been thrown at him, Noh quickly realized that he wasn't a very good president. His only real political experience was a brief term as Minister of Maritime Affairs and Fisheries under his predecessor Kim Dae-jung. According to a rather blatantly biased Wikipedia article on Noh, his biggest success in office was a "free trade agreement" with the US, a move that wasn't going to meet with much opposition from either the local Right or the US itself -- his main political antagonists -- and was almost calculated to offend his core constituency, since South Korea has had hard experience with "free trade" in the past dozen years.

Now it looks as though his death may galvanize opposition to Lee Myeong-bak's administration, despite the predictable calls for reconciliation. Lee has been trying to stifle dissent of any kind at least since last summer's candlelight vigils, which nearly brought down his government. It hasn't been as easy as he must have hoped -- the courts just threw out arrest warrant requests for some labor leaders he wanted put away, for example -- but while his opponents have the numbers, Lee has the guns. (And like our own President Obama, Lee wants to focus on the future, not on the dead past.)

Last night in Seoul, "mourners clashed with police who seized their makeshift tents and cordoned off the memorial altar with buses to prevent them from holding rallies," as the Korea Herald reported it. (Photo above is from the Hankyoreh.) Of course any assembly of people the government doesn't like is now illegal, but it's hard to suppress public mourning for a dead recent president. Lee, and Korea, may face a long, sad, painful summer.