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new blog

2007-08-28T18:00:00.000+01:00

Here, for the time being.

2005-01-15T01:14:00.000Z

The indefatigable Dr Lankov (pdf file) has a fascinating and shocking article in Asia Times about food distribution in North Korea. Defectors are his main source of information.

They reckon time by "before" or "after" the collapse of the Public Distribution System (PDS). That was when short rations became progressively shorter, when ration cards and artificially low prices were meaningless because the supplies had failed.

Thousands of people died. Estimates vary - the more conservative put it at just over 500,000 but some say more than 2 million. Even the BBC mentions vague reports by "aid agencies" suggesting that up to two million people died.

It is sobering to read the report of the World Food Programme (pdf file).

In 2004, 6.5 million people in the DPR Korea - mainly women and children - will continue to need food assistance. At present they are targeting about 6.5 million beneficiaries: children, nursing mothers, and the elderly.

Other humanitarian organisations are at work there, including the Red Cross, which claims a staggering 330,000 volunteers and 371,730 Red Cross Youth at the community level, and over a million members in the DPRK.

And another thing

2005-01-05T19:31:00.000Z

And another thing.

Much has been made over RoK's Unification Minister's statement about block groups of defectors. I don't know a thing about this of course. But I am suspicious of groups that take money for transporting defectors. No government would want to have much truck with them. Some of the aiding groups seem to have a questionable religious agenda. And it may not be simply a matter of appeasing DPRK anyway as commentators seem to think. They are shocked at the human rights issue - these are Korean citizens (the RoK constitution extends its remit to North Korea). But hang on a minute. Isn't it the same old story of fear of "swamping"? That ugly selfishness that makes ordinary people fear for their jobs and wages, when desperate incomers are prepared to work for low wages, in appalling conditions? The same sort of fear and resentment that afflicts Brits vis a vis East Europeans, West Germans vis a vis Osties, Americans vis a vis Mexicans? Deeply unpleasant, but the sort of gut reaction from many voters that all but the bravest politicians find hard to resist.

Spin

2005-01-05T19:24:00.000Z

I'm no lover of the North Korean régime. Until someone can show me evidence to the contrary, I shall continue to suspect it is anything but Democratic or a People's Republic - though sometimes, out of ironic courtesy, I refer to it as DPRK. As far as I can tell, its leadership treats ordinary people with contempt: lies to them, cheats them of knowledge, political power, and even food. It cheats its young men of their youth by requiring 10 years' National Service. It has kidnapped foreign nationals for use by the state as educators. It imprisons people for crimes of dissent, uses their slave labour, and if some defectors are to be believed, even experiments on them in the manner of a latter-day Mengele.

However, that doesn't mean I'm a dyed-in-the wool neocon. I'm fairly ignorant of what's going on, trying to inform myself a little, and be critical of the sources of information. The west does itself no favours when it descends to the level of news distortion.

AOL, for instance, today is running a story with the headline "N Korea Prepares for War with US":

North Korea has ordered its people to be ready for a protracted war against the United States, issuing guidelines on evacuating to underground bunkers with weapons, food and portraits of leader Kim Jong Il.

The 33 page Detailed Wartime Guidelines published in South Korea's Kyunghyang newspaper and verified by Seoul, was issued last April, at a time when the communist regime was claiming that it was Washington's next target following the Iraq war.

The manual -- the first such North Korean document made public in the outside world -- was signed by Kim Jong Il in his capacity as chairman of the Central Military Committee of the ruling Workers' Party. That ended speculation over whether Kim has assumed the top military post following the 1994 death of his father, President Kim Il Sung.

Analysts said the guidelines reflected Pyongyang's fear over a possible US military strike amid stalled talks on its nuclear weapons programmes, as well as its campaign to whip up a sense of crisis among its 22 million population, reportedly growing discontent amid economic hardship.

"The United States has cooked up suspicion over our nuclear programs and is escalating an offensive of international pressure to strangle and destroy our republic," the booklet said. "If this tactic doesn't work, it plots to use this nuclear problem as an excuse for armed invasion.

"Kyunghyang did not clarify where it acquired the document classified as "top secret".

Seoul's National Intelligence Service said in a one-sentence statement: "We believe the document reflects North Korea's wartime preparations.

"The manual urged the military to build restaurants, wells, toilets and air purifiers in underground bunkers where government offices and military units will move in if war breaks out.

When North Koreans evacuate to underground facilities, they should make sure that they take the portraits, plaster busts and bronze statues of Kim and his parents so that they can "protect" them in a special room.

The Kim family has ruled North Korea for more than a half century, creating a powerful personality cult. Portraits of Kim and his father hang side-by-side on the walls of every house.

In fact, it's the same story that Korea Times was carrying earlier in the day, the same story that is repeated endlessly and thoughtlessly in news services around the world. The headline suggests that N Korea is rattling its sabres, and that this is something new. The detail is entirely different. It's not news (except that somehow the top secret document was "recently obtained by a local daily, the Kyunghyang Shinmun", as Korea Herald points out. And there is hardly anything surprising in a country preparing for siege when it's already been declared as part of the "axis of evil", seeing what's happened in Iraq.

The Chosun Ilbo casts a suspicious eye on the reasons for the document's appearance now. There has been a flurry of stories suggesting that Kim Jong Il's hold is weakening, and that vast numbers of senior military have been defecting, and so on. And of course they've been denied.

I don't know what to believe about those stories. I have no confidence that Washington isn't behind the scenes, stirring up stories from almost nothing. Given the twitchiness of news services, as soon as something appears it's spread globally, often without much analysis. It seems, sometimes, that the mere proliferation of these stories is enough to lend them credibility.

I don't suppose I'm alone in finding the requirement that citizens "should make sure that they take the portraits, plaster busts and bronze statues of Kim and his parents so that they can "protect" them in a special room" both laughable and deeply offensive.

Dwindling dot

2004-12-24T01:29:00.000Z

Megumi Yokota was a 13 year old schoolgirl who disappeared from a beach near her home in Japan in 1977. When President Koizumi visited Pyongyang 2 years ago, Kim Jong Il apologised for abductions of Japanese nationals, of whom she was one. After years of teaching Japanese language and culture in North Korea, Megumi allegedly committed suicide. Eight of the dozen or so abductees are allegedly dead. (One of the survivors married the defector Charles Jenkins.) If the story of abduction is incredible, so too is the aftermath.

Disgusted by the return of cremated remains which it claims (according to DNA tests) cannot be hers, Japan has already halted food aid. It seems only a matter of time before other sanctions. What would they achieve, though?

Trade sanctions hit the poorest. The élite are the last to suffer. Kim Jong Il's record gives little cause for hope that he would take steps to protect the powerless from starvation if it will cost him loss of face.

What outcome would satisfy the Japanese? Over 70% are in favour of sanctions. The motive seems to be punitive - understandable, but unlikely to get the world much further forward.

Not everyone is in favour of sanctions. Masao Okonogi, who teaches Korean Studies at Keio University, argues on asahi.com that sanctions should be used as a last resort. Even then, it's not clear from the article what they are supposed to achieve. Everyone wants DPRK to return to the nuclear negotiating table. This doesn't seem to have much to do with Megumi, but it's right there in his article.

And the western press is talking up the instability of the régime. There seems to be no way, yet, of knowing the truth.

I don't begin to understand this. It seems rather like bashing an old-fashioned TV set in the hope that it will make it work.

Fieldwork

2004-12-18T22:59:00.000Z

Antti Leppänen is a Finnish anthropologist studying neighbourhood shopkeepers and entrepreneurs in Korea. He has just been blogging about Grandfather Kwôn, a widowed laundryman whose frank account of his life brings home how differently people can live. He has had many jobs in his time, and many women. His was an arranged marriage. It is hard to imagine their relationship:

She was so sunbakhada (simple, honest, unspoiled etc.) that she could even have a room prepared in their home if he got to know a nice girl. It actually happened once. At that time a woman couldn’t pack her things and leave (pottari ssaji ank’o), a woman couldn’t make even a sound.

Antti's blog is worth reading regularly for the light he sheds on ordinary lives.
(I wonder what an anthropologist would make of the entrepreneurs in the village where I live: the cobbler, the baker, the butcher who opens at 7am every day but Sunday, the Indian, Chinese and Turkish restaurateurs, the Pakistani newsagent, the successful car dealer whose father was a wartime Czech refugee?)

Defectors speak

2004-12-14T11:19:00.000Z

There's an interesting post at NKZone today, in which a teacher working with North Korean defectors reports on his students' perceptions of the possibility of change in the DPRK.

The questions posed seem based on many unspoken assumptions - most seriously, a suggestion that everyone wants reform, and that armed uprising might be a good way of achieving it.

It seems a missed opportunity to ask more open questions about their perception of the political structure of DPRK and reform. For example, what is their attitude to inward investment? And how autonomous can regions be in practice?

I'd like to know more about what it's actually like living there - where do people live, what work do they do, what do they eat, are they able to form frank friendships or is everyone always suspicious? Are ordinary people cynical about the government, do they want reform? Do people readily spot the discrepancy between what's reported and what they know? What about Ryongchon -what if anything did they hear about that, and where from? How much do they know about the rest of their country? Does anyone really love Kim Jong Il? Does anyone believe that stuff about the star and the two rainbows?

And above all, why did they defect? These are all questions to which we may think we already know the answers, but it would be good to hear from people who really know.

I trust that these students (whose English isn't good enough to read NKZone) knew that the information they gave would be used in this way.

Weapons of Mass Distraction

2004-12-13T23:33:00.000Z

A cogent article by Selig Harrison on the Council on Foreign Relations website argues that the US exaggerates the threat from Pyongyang with regard to nuclear weapons capability whilst overlooking the more tangible threat from re-processed plutonium which it can sell on to other powers. It suits DPRK to be cagey about their capability. But it is very dangerous for the US to proceed on a worst-case scenario basis. He accuses the US administration of misrepresenting the intelligence and ignoring the one real threat.

One Fat Man

2004-12-02T09:36:00.000Z

Two recent articles in The Christian Science Monitor merit reading. It's not a magazine I'd normally pick up, but Google alerts drew my attention.

Much has been written recently about the removal of Kim jong Il's posters, and the dropping of the Dear Leader honorific in some newscasts. This seems a pretty good summary of the state of knowledge about the back-pedalling on the personality cult, and possible unrest.

And today, Steve Knipp gives a vivid account of his tourist trip to the Diamond Mountains in North Korea. He describes how their bus is checked by lean and hungry young North Korean soldiers (every NK male is by law required to spend 10 years in the army), and how a South Korean woman was reportedly detained for several days for asking why Kim Jong Il was the only fat man in the country. He concludes:

While in the country, I desperately tried to talk to some actual North Koreans. But all outsiders travel in a virtual bubble, as a way to just about eliminate contact between North Koreans and outsiders. Except for the hotel's doormen, all the staff we encountered were recruited from ethnic Korean communities in China - and they are rotated back to China every three months.

Still, I must wonder what those rail-thin young soldiers boarding the buses each day think, as they come face to face with hundreds of South Koreans, whose round smiling faces and vivid, fashionable clothing convey prosperity. Maybe they will start to ask themselves: Why is there only one fat man in this land, yet so many from the South?

For other accounts of trips to North Korea:
Tan Wee Cheng's 8 day visit, many photographs and telling details, and not a little sarcasm.
The BBC's Caroline Gluck visits the DMZ briefly -some good links in the sidebar
Ron Gluckman casts a jaundiced eye on the "schoolyard antics" of both sides of the DMZ show, like who has the bigger flagpole.

All in all, it was like wrestling night at the forum. Only not nearly as much fun. For all the boasting about the superiority of the American Way, sad to say, the North Koreans throw a better border party.

A Palin fan visits the DMZ and garners some unguarded responses on the message board.

The Paranoid State, an article, not online elsewhere, gacked from The Observer.

Religious Freedom in North Korea

2004-09-28T10:50:00.000+01:00

A Forum 18 News article reports that a Russian Orthodox church is being built in Pyongyang:

Pyongyang, North Korea's capital, has two Protestant and one Catholic church, which are suspected of being "show churches" for display to foreigners, so it remains unclear whether any North Koreans will be able to or will dare to regularly attend an Orthodox church under construction. The building is funded by the North Korean state, and Forum 18 News Service has learnt that it is "65 per cent finished". By the early 1900's, about 10,000 Koreans had converted to Orthodoxy due to Russian missionaries in the now divided Korean peninsula. Dmitry Petrovsky, of the Moscow Patriarchate's Department for External Church Relations, expressed the hope to Forum 18 that links with this past missionary activity remain, as is the case with Orthodox churches in South Korea. Four North Koreans are studying at the Moscow Theological Seminary, and Petrovsky remarked to Forum 18 that they are displaying "zeal and a genuine interest in Orthodoxy".

This is a country where an estimated one in 50 is a government informer, and parents are said to be too afraid to pass on their faith to their children.

Forum 18 derives its name from Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (freedom of worship).

An earlier Forum 18 overview of religious freedom in the Hermit Kingdom concluded that any increase in religious activity probably resulted from returning defectors sharing a faith newly acquired abroad, and that this poses a threat to the regime:

the regime's concern that South Korean Christian groups in China pose a security threat to North Korea is not entirely illegitimate. For many years, South Korean organisations and individuals who wish to conduct humanitarian activities in North Korea or along the Chinese border with the DPRK must receive the approval of the South Korean Ministry of Unification. South Korean government approval of their activities was also conditioned upon their willingness to gather "intelligence" on its behalf.

One certain thing in all this murk is that the main religion in North Korea is worship of Kim Il Sung, the Eternal Leader.

Moon and earth

2004-09-27T13:23:00.000+01:00

Fashion conscious readers may pity me for having a gizmo up there top right that is so last year.

In the far east, moon phases are still important. The moon governs the calendar.

In Korea, there is a holiday for the full moon of the 8th month: it is Chuseok, when everyone rushes home to be back with their family and honour their ancestors. People tend graves, and make offerings. Then there's food and games. It's the major holiday of the Korean calendar.

If you're confused by the reference to August in that article, so am I. The Korean Year started later, but it's more complicated than that. Here's a simple explanation of the Korean calendar. I love the names of the solar terms:
Ipchun (Spring Begins)
Usu (Rain Water)
Kyongchip (Startled Hibernators)
Chunbun (Vernal Equinox)
Chongmyong (Clear and Bright)
Kogu (Grain Rain)
Ipha (Summer Begins)
Soman (Filling Out)
Mangjong (Grain in the Ear)
Haji (Midsummer)
Soso (Lesser Heat)
Taeso (Great Heat)
Ipchu (Fall Begins)
Choso (Heat Ceases)
Paengno (White Dew)
Chubun (Autumnal Equinox)
Hallo (Cold Dew)
Sanggang (Frost Descends)
Iptong (Winter Begins)
Sosol (Lesser Snow)
Taesol (Great Snow)
Tongji (Midwinter)
Sohan (Lesser Cold)
Taehan (Great Cold)
Each lasts a fortnight. The dates of these vary from year to year.

Re-reading this prior to posting, it strikes me how neutral I'm trying to be. Chuseok is about harvest and ancestors. It is all so alien. I don't know where any of my grandparents is buried. One grandfather lies somewhere in Australia, another somewhere in the West Midlands. I know where my grandmothers died, but not where they are buried. I could find out, though my parents might think it odd. As children, we were kept away from funerals, and cemeteries were seen as gloomy, sentimental places. It may have had something to do with our peripatetic life. Graves were another thing to let go of, along with homes and friends we had to leave. The grandmother I never knew is most vivid to me in the stories my father and aunt told me. Vivid and deeply unreliable - a story-teller herself, who if believed would link me back to real people and places that may not belong at all.

I can see some virtues in solid ground. I would pull the weeds from her grave, if I knew where it was, and I would feel sentimental, superstitious even, for doing so. As for my own - I will be cremated and scattered.

La la la

2004-09-27T13:18:00.000+01:00

I'd heard reports of ambitious Korean parents arranging for their children's tongues to be snipped to enable them to pronounce English, but doubted that it could be a widespread practice. Perhaps it isn't. Here's a first hand account by the impeccably fluent Woojay, who suffered this mutilation in 4th grade. It's not the only mutilation his doting parents visited upon him.
Not for the faint-hearted or prudish.

Beyond satire

2004-09-24T15:37:00.000+01:00

I was intrigued to discover, via the advert on my Gmail sidebar, the official page of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, available in 17 languages (including Esperanto).

I suspected it might be a spoof, like Kim Jong-il’s blog, also advertised in my Gmail sidebar. (Yes, we all know the Dear Leader is an internet addict.)

But no. It’s real. Or, at least, it’s alternatively real. Here's a song I bet you don't hear much in Seoul.

In easily navigable little chunks of information, it depicts a land of completely liberated people, wearing elegant clothes and accessories, eating delicious exotic food, and playing tug o’war or singing folk songs after a hard day’s work with explosives:

The peasant’s music folk games like the ‘kangangsuale’ were also very favourites in Korea. This kind of dancing games where usually made during the rest times in the harvesting or when returning home after work. Also during collective work like bridge construction or excavation.

It might only be accident that casts that passage in the past tense. They obviously didn’t ask Charles Jenkins to run an eye over the English. I’ve endeavoured to copy accurately in transcribing sections here. More web-savvy readers than me will have something to say about the reasons for the jpg page construction.

The site aims to give an overview of North Korean culture, history, geography and politics. For example we are told about traditional dwellings, by comparison with which

The new and modern buildings of today have an average surface of 150 square meters fully equipped with furniture, heaters, fridge, colour TV, etc. and they’re provided totally free from the government to each family in the country, so in North Korea there’s not just a single person poor or homeless.

Certainly I've heard that the DPRK houses up to 200,000 political dissidents in gulags, but I doubt somehow that they have colour television.

And in a country where an estimated 2 million people have starved to death since the mid-nineties, the section under Drinks is from another world:

The liquors are extracted from the cereals like the ‘Kamjongro’ (high alcoholic grade, it has red colour and it’s sweet and slightly hot, distilled from honey) or the ‘jukrioko’ (made from giant bamboo and ginger).

In the soft drinks you can find the ‘Sujongkua’ (made from cinnamon, ginger and pears, peach or other fruits) Since long time ago this one is a traditional New Year drink. ‘Juache’ is another drink made from ‘Schizandra water’ where sugared fruits are mixed with pine nuts and ice cubes, perfect for summer time.

With the high development of the nutritional industry, today a great variety of the traditional food can be produced in big amounts.

Don’t get me started on the sections on history and politics.

Today The DPRK is a genuine worker’s state where all the people are completely liberated from the exploitation and oppression. The workers, peasants, soldiers and intellectuals are the real owners of the power and defend their interests.

For just 12 Euros inclusive of handling and shipping, I could buy a Kimjongilia badge!

Do read the whole thing if you've the stomach for it. There are more nauseating distortions. It's interesting, though, to see things from another perspective. Like The Wall, for instance.

The Wall

Only a few people in the world know that Korea is divided by a big concrete wall in the Parallel 38 that was built by the United States of America when the Korean War finished. This wall is hundreds of times bigger than the one that existed in Germany

and allegedly divides not only the nation but cuts across rivers, mountains, and paths of migrating animals.

Never heard of it? Digging around online produced a host of references, split predictably into two camps. The official South Korean line is that the wall is imaginary. The US say it’s only a series of tank barriers, but I’m not sure how long your defences against tanks can be before they are a wall. The "combined length of 44.6 km" acknowledged by Yonhap News (the ROK news agency) is quite a barrier, even if it doesn't run the full 240 km from coast to coast. The North Koreans claim that the wall is camouflaged from the South and therefore invisible.

Ever have the feeling that you don't know what to believe?

By the way, I'd be interested to know if the DPRK site is easily accessible from South Korea.

More western propaganda about North Korea here:
BBC North Korea: On the Face of it (18 September 2004)
BBC Country Profile: North Korea
Guardian Special Report
NKZone (academic blogzone)

comments

2004-09-22T13:28:00.000+01:00

Haloscan has visited on me the ultimate indignity of denying me access to my own comments box. Something to do with my security settings, but I think it's madness to disable my firewall, as suggested, for even a second.

So I have restored blogger comments. Not that I'm expecting any comments anyway.

Blogging on

2004-09-22T13:18:00.000+01:00

A nice plug for OhmyNews in this morning's Guardian in an article on blogging as a corrective to established media.

I googled "rathergate" just now and it turned in 13,300 results.

I am not and never will be a news blogger, but I'm all for challenging accepted sources of information.

Having been on hiatus for a while (several posts lying there in draft form may never see the light of day) I hope to be blogging again shortly.

2004-08-29T16:10:00.000+01:00

If I'd read Jae's entry for today first, disaster might have been averted. Jae is a Korean who has studied in the US and has returned home. Breathlessly, she narrates the mundane detail of daily life.

Today's entry on shopping in a big store seems to bear out all those allegations I've been reading about Korean manners:

UGH...those ajummas need to learn manners... I was stuck between their carts so many times and they don't care... I was jammed and all that... What about ajussis or even guys around my age? They don't care if I were a little girl, an ajumma, a young woman, or an old lady around your grandma's age... They just push their carts toward you and they cut in lines... It was just a big, big, big mess and chaos there!!! Okay, pushing, jamming, cutting in lines...I can accept that. Why do ajummas pick up YOUR stuff from YOUR cart and touch them...and hold them...and make comments about what YOU're going to buy? I mean, they're so rude...and I was at the cashier and these 2-3 ajummas wouldn't care if I was almost done putting my stuff at the cashier or not... In fact, I was so busy trying to put all the stuff we got (and thanks mom for getting SOOOOOOO much stuff...that I had a hard time pushing the cart around) and these ajummas wouldn't put them back in our cart. I mean, we're about to pay for them and it's OUR stuff!!! Of course, they don't even ask you if they could take a look at those things that they're holding at the moment. By the time we got out of the store trying to get to the parking lot, my face turned completely red, my mouth grumbling, shaking my head. Of course, mom knew I was annoyed as hell... When we got into her car, she was asking me..."Are you angry?" I was like, "No, just annoyed, because I can't stand those rude ajummas and ajussis... I don't think I want to live here just because I don't want to grocery shop at such places...with such rude people!!!" She was just laughing and saying..."It's because you're not used to shopping here...I didn't even think it was that crowded at all this morning."

Haloscan

2004-08-29T08:49:00.000+01:00

It seemed a good idea at the time. Haloscan commenting has been added to this blog, with the unexpected result that all previous comments have been lost. If anyone knows how to retrieve them, please share it. I apologise to everyone who's taken the trouble to comment in the past.

I realise now I shouldn't have taken the lazy option of an automatic installation. It's possible to run haloscan side by side with blogger, as Antti Leppänen does on his excellent blog Hunjangûi karûch'im. Now why hadn't I bothered to ask myself why he did that?

hiatus

2004-08-19T11:21:00.000+01:00

I won't be posting for a week or so, as I'm off to France (part of Abroad).

I've been silting up with unposted comments, trying to get my facts straight before I post. Mindful of the reproach that people read blogs as much for stories as for facts, here's some reading to be going on with.

Cathartidae describes going into KFC and not finding a seat. I keep coming across this sort of story, and have no way of knowing whether it tells us more about Korea or about the teller. Are these rudenesses there because one's looking for them, or are they endemic? Andi's story about the loan of the umbrella (scroll down to "Mourning for me?" on 17 Aug, because I can't link directly) is a refreshing counter to this sort of thing.

Oranckay considers the sins of the fathers. (By the way, the novelist he mentions there, Yi Mun-yol, has an excellent book The Poet available in English translation. It explores, among other things, the nature of poetic responsibility. The Poet grows up under the cloud of his grandfather's defection.)

Through a fresh pair of eyes

2004-08-18T13:11:00.000+01:00

Andi's unabashedly upbeat post "Mourning for me?" on 17 August compares two rainy days: the day she started composing the post, and her third day in Korea, a year ago now, when she went empty-handed looking for a temple in a park. A lot has happened in between, punctuated by the two epiphanies she describes so vividly. And she wonders about the nature of seeing.

When does a place become familiar? Can we mark the transition between the wondered unknown and the commonly overlooked? Today, with the question of mourning in my heart and a rainy summer day, I felt as if I were just arriving again, able to see some of the things I had stopped seeing. The color of the sky when it is cloudy. The smell of the dojang this evening, the feel of the vinyl-like floor. The chill of the air-conditioned office when my clothes are wet. The city's ugly concrete, its neon, its awnings, the daily rise and fall of the market, the squirming modernity under the heel of a country-side way that internet, handphones, cars, and the IMF can't destroy, though they can change it. To see all of this for even a moment--to see it as I saw it when I first came, really absorbing it, really seeing it rather than allowing my eye to skim while my head is full of wool--is to find the point between the familiar and the unfamiliar. Both of those require some idea of what should be seen, some comparison between a place not here and here.

I'm sorry I can't link to it directly. Something about my firewall setting means that very occasionally I can't access javascript, and Andi's is one of the blogs that happens to. So I can't access comments or trackbacks on her blog. Were I not such a technological ignoramus, I'd have sorted it out by now.

And on the subject of comments, someone told me they had a problem posting theirs here. I'm very sorry about that. It's great to have comments. You don't have to be a blogger subscriber to leave your comments - just select the "post anonymously" option lurking way under the brash blogger log-in stuff. Although it will summarily entitle you "Anonymous" you don't actually have to be anonymous if you don't want to: you can always leave your name, email and homepage details in the body of the comments if you like. The comments box accepts html.

Whose history is it anyway?

2004-08-13T18:35:00.000+01:00

Background

The Korean peninsula lies between the rock of Japan and the hard place of China. Communist North Korea may or may not have the bomb. DPRK is pathologically secretive. Attempting to flee the country is a crime. Seasoned Korea-watchers suggest that the rule of Kim Jung-il will eventually collapse. There are unsubstantiated reports of civil unrest. There has been a famine in DPRK since 1995. Substantial aid has been given by UN World Food Program, RoK, and others seeking to establish diplomatic ties. Similarly, aid was forthcoming after the Ryongchon train disaster earlier this year.

If the régime collapses, there will be a rush to fill the vacuum. There may be political as well as humanitarian reasons for food aid, which staves off political crisis and its uncontrollable consequences.

South Korea’s constitution is committed to reunification (Arts 3 and 4). Since Kim Dae-Jung’s much-criticised overtures to the North (for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2000), hopes have grown of a rapprochement, despite its cost. Even critics support eventual re-unification. In theory, anyway.

Koguryo

This requires a longer essay than I can manage in the time available.

The complex of Koguryo tombs was declared a World Heritage Site in July. In fact - officially two sites, as the complex lies in both China and North Korea.

Given the history of invasion, conquest, oppression and colonisation, Koreans are sensitive about their past. They are proud of their origins. So when China first of all deletes some ancient history from the Korean section of its Foreign Ministry website, and then deletes all of Korean history prior to 1948, Koreans are outraged, and worried. Chinese express bafflement at the criticism.

In an interesting twist, China's former Prime Minister Zhou Enlai is reported as saying

We cannot distort history. It’s absurd to say that the land west of the Tumen River and the Yalu River has been Chinese territory or that Korea has been China’s tributary from early times.

Thanks to the Marmot, whose most recent coverage of the story is here and here. The comments accompanying those posts are telling, even (or perhaps especially) when they are at their least courteous.

Capital gains

2004-08-12T10:33:00.000+01:00

Oh, and in case anyone was thinking of speculating in property around Yongi-Kongju, the government already thought of that a month ago, declaring the area an overheated speculation zone. Property transactions will be restricted through strict government monitoring, and capital gains taxes levied on the actual sales price.
Korea Times, 12 July 2004

Seoul

2004-08-12T07:44:00.000+01:00

"Seoul" means "capital" in Korean. With a population of more than 10 million, it’s one of the largest cities in the world. Despite opposition, the Korean government has
confirmed plans to relocate the seat of government to Yongi-Kongju 100 miles to the south.

The government cites the heavy concentration of population as the main reason for the move:

Forty-six percent of Korea's population is concentrated in the Seoul Metropolitan Area. Compared with the population of other countries - Japan, 32%; Great Britain, 12%; France, 19% - Korea's population concentration is by far the severest and indicates the urgency of addressing the issue of population concentration in the Seoul Metropolitan Area. This heavy concentration has been a great barrier to achieving balanced regional development and national reconciliation by widening the gap between the Seoul Metropolitan Area and other regions. In addition, the Seoul Metropolitan Area is faced with many socio-economic problems, such as high housing costs and land prices, traffic congestion, environmental pollution.

Update: More information on the move in today's Guardian, which also has some good links to other sites about Korea. I still can't find a proper map, though. There's a very general one at the foot of this government page.

Abroad

2004-08-11T19:17:00.000+01:00

Reading Incestuous Amplification’s farewell post (hat tip to Big Ho) after his six and a half years in Korea led me to thinking about how I have sidled up to Korean culture in the last few months and presumed to comment on it. I came via some translated poems, and stayed to watch obliquely through the endoscope of a muddled internet ban.

It must seem outrageous. I’m not Korean, haven’t been to Korea, don’t even speak Korean. Good grief, I haven’t even met any Koreans. I should apologise for the presumption and desist forthwith.

Hang on, though. Is it so pointless, so unforgivable? Most people share these disqualifications. Wherever we live, most of the world’s population live abroad. Almost everyone has views on abroad; people pontificate; people vote, even without much hard fact to base it on. So how can we become more informed about a foreign country? (I’m taking it as given that we should.)

In my case, it’s not just Korea but most countries round the world about which I’m ashamed to say I’m profoundly ignorant. Even as a traveller, it’s possible to learn very little. Media reports, history and travel books, personal anecdotes, and the stuff of imagination in art, film, music, literature – who knows what shapes our understanding? Politics and religion (are the two ever far apart?) lurk beneath the surface of a lot of what passes for information. Can any source be unbiased? Every message signifies about the messenger. And the same message sounds different, depending on who’s listening.

The internet is a particularly seductive medium. Having happened across one blog by an expat American in Korea, just as my interest had been whetted by literature, I was captivated to read more. Well, of course you know – blogs have links, and you follow links to links (which is how I found Andi’s blog in the first place) and before you know where you are you’re deep in shit or shinja. Both are illuminating in their different ways.

But all of them* – the Americans, the Canadians, the Australians, the Finn – have a foreigner’s perspective. Some, like Robert Koehler and Jeff Harrison have been in Korea for years. Some are married to Koreans. Others come for a short time, working in the hagwons. Some are with USFK. They bring different prejudices – Republican, Democrat, liberal, Catholic, Presbyterian, Buddhist, atheist. Some have learned Korean, some are more sympathetic than others. Whatever. They see Korea perhaps as I might, through western eyes.

Western, egalitarian, anti-authoritarian – I have plenty of prejudices too. Ignorance is a pretty serious one. The worst will be those I have no inkling of. (Ahh, those unknown unknowns.)

And no qualifications in media studies or anthroplogy.

So what am I saying? An apologia rather than an apology. I claim no expertise, just an interest in finding out more, and trying to understand. Will try to write about it as long as the pain of confessing ignorance doesn’t get too tedious.

And if I get it wrong, which I'm bound to, please use the comment box. No point in parading my representative global ignorance if it goes unchallenged.

*(except for the two Koreans I’ve come across blogging in English, and one Korean inveterate commenter-on-blogs who doesn’t have his own)

Cultural gestures

2004-08-10T22:46:00.000+01:00

The internet blocking is melting away. Last I heard by email a couple of days ago, TypePad is accessible some places but not all, and LiveJournal still isn't accessible even by proxy. Blogspot and others are back to normal. This despite the fact that the offending material is still out there and as easy to get hold of as ever. Perhaps it's just that the critical moment has passed. Public passions have turned to other things - the outrage over China's rewriting of Korean history, perhaps.

Meanwhile, a very interesting article by Andrew Ward in the weekend's Financial Times about the Korean pop star BoA, whose popularity in Japan is perhaps playing a part in healing the rift between the two nations.

Nowhere is the success of Korean culture more surprising than in Japan. The two countries are separated at the narrowest point by just 200km of ocean but relations remain tormented by centuries of conflict and rivalry. Most recently, Japan invaded Korea in 1910 and brutally occupied the peninsula until its defeat in the second world war. Dissenters were tortured in prison camps and thousands of women were forced into sex slavery for Japanese soldiers. In perhaps the most bizarre act of oppression, stakes were driven into the summits of sacred Korean mountains to destroy the country's spirit. Nearly 60 years later, many Koreans maintain a bitter hatred for their former colonial master.

During the occupation, Japan did all it could to suppress Korean culture. Koreans were forbidden to speak or write their own language and were even required to take Japanese names. The damage has been incalculable. It is only since the beginning of this year that it has been legal to sell Japanese music, films, computer games and comics in Korea. A bit of internet censorship that inconveniences a few expat bloggers seems mere bureaucratic routine by comparison. Especially when compared with other parts of the world, China and Iran, for example.

Apologies and outrage

2004-08-02T15:22:00.000+01:00

Kevin at Big Hominid reports today (5 August) that

I'm able to access Typepad/Blogs.com blogs from this local PC-bahng. As before, please take this news with a grain of salt: accessibility probably isn't universal. But keep your hopes up.

Also through Kevin, who additionally reports he can access MuNu without proxy, I learn of this apology (28 July) by BRD at Anticipatory Retaliation and a whole blog domain I never knew existed:

Apologies
As you may know, all of Munuvania is currently being censored by the South Korean government (check out Big Hominid for the latest on government censorship - he also got tagged in a Newsweek article). It just dawned on me that the ban on the mu.nu domain is probably a direct result of my posting the video of the South Korean hostage being beheaded.

As someone who's a brand new arrival in mu.nu, I feel like quite the ass for getting my new homeland banned in an entire country.

So, all and sundry affected by this turn of events, please accept my abject apologies for this turn of events.

Which is gracious of him, but surely not necessary, unless there is a touch of sarcasm there I didn't quite catch. In a comment on that post, the Big Ho opines:

I suspected that your posting had something to do with the MuNu ban, but unlike the SK govt, I thought you did the right thing. No sweat. I can see you through proxies

Um. Pragmatism over principle is quite understandable in the circs, and from my distant armchair I can hardly criticise them for that. Should BRD feel the need to apologise? When there are things like this happening?
(Via Marmot, whose take on it is more measured than mine. He points out that the beheading parody was heavily criticised, and apologised for, whereas I'm amazed that anyone could have thought it appropriate at all, especially so soon.)

Censorship and Civil Society

2004-07-30T15:24:00.000+01:00

Gord Sellar has an excellent letter about censorship in the Korea Times today. Responding to a teacher calling for more internet restrictions last week, he writes:

When people begin speaking about the need to "filter out" what they deem "harmful" information or "junk," one wonders what else is being filtered out, and what kind of harm they are seeking to "protect" citizens from. Are the citizens all mere children? Are they unable to think about the information they access, or make responsible decisions?

Quite. Do read the whole letter.

Access to blogspot

2004-07-27T21:21:00.000+01:00

The blog ban seems to be quietly lifting, but only patchily. As far as I know, there's been no public announcement. Jae reports (27 July)

I don't really know what exactly happened, but I now can access blogspot sites on my computer. I guess I'm lucky...to have Hanaro Telecom as my ISP. Heard they're loosening up a bit...and I think that's probably why I can access blogspot, but NOT typepad and livejournal. Bummer! But I still consider myself as lucky...because a lot of people who have different ISPs still can't access blogspot, typepad and livejournal... Is MIC really going to block these domains for good? I wonder... No further notice whatsoever...and we have no idea when this block thing's going to end... Jerks. It's pretty odd though...as I wonder...if Hanaro is allowed to loosen up a bit, then why not other ISPs do the same? Is Hanaro even allowed to do that? I can't stop being bitter thinking...why would Hanaro unblock only blogspot? Do people here even know what people do with blogspot, typepad, or livejournal? Whatever. You just have to let go sometimes because there're idiots out there.

Kevin reports (27 July) that blogspot is accessible from home but not from work. Blinger has already (24 July) reported access to blogspot, but not TypePad. He obviously thinks it's over, as he's taken down his banner.

Shawn reports (26 July)

There was some rumors circulating today about the block being lifted. James said he could view my website from work, but I thought he was yanking my chain since I was still unable to see it. I just checked again and it's true - Korea Life Blog is back! A warm welcome back to my readers in Korea. Now you can view my website directly and post comments again.

The government must have felt the heat coming off the recent articles in the paper and the coverage in the international magazine Newsweek that just came out. I'm glad I didn't go through with starting a new site as I was planning to.

I really ought to adjust the subtitle to this blog, to something like "partially accessible in Korea." If I continue with it at all.

why blog

2004-07-26T18:21:00.000+01:00

Originally, it seemed a good idea to keep track of what I’ve been reading about the Korean internet ban. I’d planned to jot down a few thoughts eventually about how freedom of speech squares with duties to the community of which one is part – the shady line-drawing that Article 29 allows.

The discovery that people – anyone – might stumble on the careless process, shook me. This is a serious topic, and I can't do it justice. And I have no locus standi.

The ban caught my attention because it struck just as I was looking at some Korean blogs, having already become interested in Korea. (I’d been reading some translations of Korean poetry.) News of Kim Sun-il's capture came through. Then he was beheaded. A video was released, circulating in Korea within hours. I was following Joel’s blog, and Andi’s – when the ban hit.

These were a couple of people whose writing I’d found interesting enough to keep reading. When they were gagged (that’s what it seemed like) I was outraged. I wanted to find out more, and keep a note of it all. I wanted to help – but it was clear there was nothing much I could do except sign petitions and write letters.

Even that was problematic. Often I’d meet the comment that Korea is a sovereign country, so it can do what it likes. Back off, cultural imperialist! I have some sympathy with that view. If Korea wants to gag itself, perhaps we shouldn’t interfere. I don’t live there. I wouldn’t take kindly to a bunch of Koreans telling us Brits to clean up our internet, or for that matter, petitioning BT Internet to allow child porn through their filter after all.

But Korea upholds free speech in its constitution - albeit with caveats. It prohibits censorship.

I don’t hold much with censorship, though I admit there are places such as schools, offices, public libraries, where there can be reasons to have a net nanny. But not for adults at home. Yet the Korean government regularly blocks websites "likely to offend public morals" or showing sympathy for North Korea. Internet savvy people can get round these blocks by using proxy servers. Unlike China, Korea doesn't seem to have started taking action against them. Perhaps that's indicative of something less than a whole-hearted approach to censorship.

Although it is an offence in Korea to watch the beheading video, both Andi and Katolik Shinja (5 July - I haven't mastered trackback) report that it's been widely circulating among EFL students.

The ban affected people who were completely innnocent. Even if one accepted the ICEC arguments why the video shouldn’t be seen and why websites linking to it should be banned, there can be no justification for cutting off sites that have nothing at all to do with it. All the Korean bloggers I’ve read were appalled by the beheading.

Last week, I saw Fahrenheit 9/11. That too uses some shocking footage. Some of it was shot by coalition forces, or embedded journalists. Some, like the brief images of the wrecked bodies of US soldiers dragged through the streets, must have come from elsewhere. Perhaps one should query the propriety of any side of the war using this sort of thing as a propaganda weapon? In assenting to view it, am I allowing it to be used as a weapon one way or another? I can’t remain neutral to images like that. Or is Fisk's “weapon” metaphor misleading? It seems to suggest that one should seek to disarm... as if the fault or horror lay in the images, not in what they depict (Susan Sontag, NYT 23 May 2004)

But censoring the video - even assuming it could be done effectively - doesn't make it go away. If anything, it ensures that it hides underground on sites that specialise in pornography and violence, and on the sites of the terrorists themselves. It prevents analysis and discussion. If it's uncensored, some sick people will get kicks from seeing it, and it will horrify others, but still no-one's likely to stumble across it unawares. If you click on a link saying "Kim Sun-il Beheading" you must have a fair idea what you'd be letting yourself in for.

Sometime soon, I want to come back to Article 29. But now that it seems that the ban is beginning to ease, albeit patchily, I'm off to read some Susan Sontag.

Fisk on Terror by Video

2004-07-26T14:25:00.000+01:00

Robert Fisk in today's Independent: Terror by video: How Iraq's kidnappers drew their inspiration from horrors of Chechnya highlights the unspeakable vileness of some of the people whose free speech and free access to information I would seek to defend. In this subscription-only article, Fisk claims that a video that went on sale in Fallujah more than six months ago, showing a Russian soldier being executed by Chechnyans, was intended as a training manual for Iraq's new executioners. He describes how the use of video has become increasingly sophisticated as a weapon of terror. All sides have joined the video war, he says, citing US videos of Saddam's trial and the "Allawi" tape, alleged to be made by the Iraqi authorities (which must both pale by comparison). The execution videos are rarely shown in full by al-Jazeera or al-Arabia.

But in an outrageous spin-off, websites - especially one that now appears to be in California - are now posting the full and gory contents. One American website has posted the beheading of the American Nicholas Berg and the South Korean hostage in full and bloody detail. "Kim Sun-il Beheading Video Short Version, Long Version" the web-site offers. The "short version" shows a man severing the hostage's neck. The long version includes his screaming appeal for mercy - which lasts for at least two minutes and is followed by his slaughter. On the same screen and at the same time, there are advertisements for "Porn" and "Horse Girls."

I am finding it increasingly difficult to say anything about all this. Though it's not news that the videos are available on porn sites, it's something I want to push to the back of my mind. But hang on - are those who are in favour of censoring it saying that Fisk shouldn't see it either?

There's an edit war on wikipedia relating to the rights and wrongs of linking to such a site, or indeed any site showing the Kim Sun-il video.

Could Technorati™

2004-07-26T09:10:00.000+01:00

... be a great campaigning tool?

As I'm new to blogging, I was staggered to find someone half way round the world referring to squarea. I had told absolutely no-one about it. Or so I thought. I'd imagined I could lurk here safely undiscovered forever, just experimenting with blogging tools and kindergarten html. I rather liked it that way. No intention of going public.

I put up links. Harmless fun. But some people I link to use Technorati™. It reports to them on who's been linking. And so they dropped by to see what goes on here.

So, I figure, would anyone. Give it a go. See if you can get anyone's attention.

I don't know how it works, but it does. One of the people I linked to mentioned this site; another hotlinked my name on a comment I'd left days earlier on his.

Is it bad manners to link to someone else without asking? They don't have to acknowledge it, but if they're using Technorati, they'll see you. Seems like a good way to get the message out there.

A bit like Googlebombing, but less antisocial. Anyway, I wouldn't want to link without good reason. The Technorati potential is a bonus.

Technorati is free. Is it too good to be true? I'm a natural cynic. If anyone knows of any linky-dink disadvantages, please tell me asap.

No News

2004-07-25T17:10:00.000+01:00

This isn’t a news site. I haven’t the energy or interest for constant updates, where blogwatching becomes the raison d’être of the blog. But one month on from the start of the ban, here’s a link to a recent article in the Korea Herald about the internet blocking. (Briefly, the Government sought to stop the dissemination of the video of Kim Sun-il's beheading. They blocked access to any internet sites showing it, or linking to it. Despite that, the video circulates freely via P2P, and is available on many unblocked sites, such as wikipedia.)

There is no progress, and a surprising lack of information:

the ministry says it has no idea how many sites are blocked and Internet viewers say millions of users are affected by the ban, due to a blanket procedure that shut off entire domains.
Despite these broad stroke efforts, the execution video still remains accessible to Internet surfers in Korea.

It seems likely – though why has no-one been able to find out? – that the ban is informal. The Ethics Committee of the MIC met at an emergency meeting last month and decided to ban the video. All they then had to do was put pressure on the ISPs to block the offending sites. I’ve heard tell of ranting telephone calls to ISPs. They apparently go in awe of the powers of the MIC, so will do what they’re asked, without the need for a formal order from the Minister. In these circumstances, it’s easy for the MIC to claim it’s not censorship but voluntary self-regulation. The effect is just the same.

On the MIC's FAQ page, there are unanswered questions by angry and baffled internet users. Particularly worthy of notice is one by C Smith, an EFL teacher, who lists a number of sites he cannot access, and says

I look to these sites for inspiration and ideas to improve my classes. This ban is affecting me professionally and personally as my family in Canada maintains a blog on the blogspot network, which I can no longer view.

Why aren’t the customers putting pressure on the ISPs? Because those people really aware that they’re affected are few and powerless. And because in any case, public opinion might not be on their side. Consider this article, in The Korea Times. A high school teacher argues for a filtering system to create

a healthy internet culture which will make our society more democratic and transparent by reducing the digital divide and filtering out junk information, so that Korea will truly become the most developed information-centered nation all over the world.

Anyone notice anything self-contradictory in that?

Le Chagrin et la Pitié

2004-07-23T15:50:00.000+01:00

I watched 4 executions on Wednesday. The men were blindfolded, tied to a row of stakes, and shot all at once by a firing squad. As they were hit, their bodies jerked and crumpled, sliding down the stake with their hands tied behind them, like curtains pushed along a pole. Puffs of smoke from the rifles drifted away. In the background were trees.

They were collaborators. It was 1945, in black and white footage shot by the perpetrators of the execution. The scene was shown in the documentary Le Chagrin et la Pitié by Marcel Ophuls – a film considered so scandalous at the time it was made in 1971 that ORTF, who’d commissioned it, refused to screen it.

The reason for the outrage was nothing to do with the executions, or the description of the barbaric torture practised by the Gestapo on Mme Mury to extract a confession, but the way the film challenged precious myths about the German occupation of France. Instead of a nation united in resistance, we are shown a motley collection of individuals with their accommodations, self-justifications, denials, impaired memories, sufferings and occasions of heroism.

Not that I’m going to digress far from this blog’s monomania. Besides, there are plenty of reviews of the film online, and I’m not going to disagree with the general view that it’s brilliant, compelling and complex. There’s a meme that the documentary steps back from judgement, allowing people to speak in their own words; but this is a naive underestimation of what any director does in choosing his interviewees, and choosing where to shoot them, where in the narrative to place their footage, and what to leave on the cutting room floor. (What, for example, occasions the coincidence that the words “Je suis catholique” are only ever spoken as a defence of Pétainism, and only by some of the most odious people in the film?)

I was struck by Lord Avon (Anthony Eden), who came across as a thoughtful and compassionate man (and who incidentally spoke good French). He was not prepared to condemn the actions of those French who had worked with the Vichy régime, for who was to say what the British would have done if they’d found themselves in that position? It was a less common attitude then than now. Not that he was arguing for any sort of moral relativism, more for an understanding of the extraordinary exigencies and difficulties the French had to undergo.

It’s always chastening to be reminded of the need to know the whole picture before we judge. There are moral absolutes we cherish. When some evil threatens what we hold dear, we might sacrifice these, or what we perceive to be a fraction of them, as if they were divisible. Threatened by terror, we are prepared, we think, to sacrifice a bit of liberty, a bit of free speech, a bit of freedom from torture, a bit of equality before the law, a bit of freedom from discrimination, a bit of right to fair trial, a bit of freedom from arbitrary arrest, a bit of freedom from arbitrary interference with privacy, home, family or correspondence, a bit of freedom of free association, a bit of freedom of movement...

This is happening all round what we like to call the free world. It’s happening in defence of values we hold dear. Which are...

Oh, but aren’t we just signing those away? This was France's dilemma. The judgement of the French after the war was that collaboration was wrong, that in some cases it even deserved punishment by death.

So that's how I came to be watching executions, in a documentary widely considered to be a classic. There’s more than one irony there, somewhere.

An irreparable loss

2004-07-20T23:06:00.000+01:00

My encounter with Korea is entirely through translation, and I often wonder what I am really encountering.

In How the Other Half Lives, the translator Jung Ha-yun describes her childhood in the south:

Growing up in the 1970s in Seoul, I was taught that North Koreans were our archenemy, all of them red devils with horns. Everyone at school had to participate in anti-Communism slogan and poster contests, and girls jumped rope to a song that went, "Let's kill off those Commies. / It's about time." I imagine North Korean children were taught to see the South in the same way.
I hope I know better now, but the truth is, I really don't know how to regard North Korea and its people. Like most other South Koreans of my generation, I am stuck somewhere between that ridiculous, feverish hatred and familial sympathy, between the fear of North's nuclear threats and the burden that we need to confront this crisis in a sane, sensible way.
Reading and translating the three short stories for this feature was, for me, the most intimate encounter I have had with North Korea, an experience that I hoped would allow me to get better acquainted with this unknowable other half.

The pieces she has translated for Words Without Borders are
Han Ung-bin from Hopes for Good Fortune
Kim Hong-ik from He's Alive (“He” in this case being the Dear Leader)
Kim Byung-hun from Friends on the Road
Jung explains that these stories are about the nation and its leader, not about individuals.

But still, I got a glimpse into the everyday lives of factory workers, rural youth, party officials, a complaining husband, a demanding wife, a loving grandmother, a young couple in love. In other words, people like any other people from any other part of the world--no red-horned devils. And I also believe that I discovered some truths in these stories, about the lives North Koreans lead, their small hopes, their limitations. They worked jobs, got married, had children, wanted better housing, went on business trips, struck up conversations with the prettiest young woman on the train at the first given chance. The one distinction that marks their stories is that, for these characters, all conflicts are resolved by their faith in the Great Leader, just as European medieval literature relies on religious belief and Hollywood comedies preach the power of romantic love.
Most importantly, I feel I have met some of the people on the other side of this broken land, people I am forbidden to come in contact with as a South Korean, and saw them as flesh and blood, perhaps for the first time. No, their stories were not aesthetically satisfying, but this experience was not about taste for me. It was about re-encountering my long estranged family and coming face to face with how much they have changed, without judgment. And that, I think, is a start.

Thanks to Language hat - I hadn’t come across this wonderful e-zine before.

The essay quoted there, How to Read a Translation by Lawrence Venuti, is worth reading in its entirety. Translation is a fascinating and maddening subject.

Venuti describes translation as

an attempt to compensate for an irreparable loss by controlling an exorbitant gain.

and what translator could resist this accolade:

The translator is no stand-in or ventriloquist for the foreign author, but a resourceful imitator who rewrites the original to appeal to another audience in a different language and culture, often in a different period. This audience ultimately takes priority, insuring that the verbal clothing the translator cuts for the foreign work never fits exactly.

Again, he stresses the virtues of that unsung hero:

We should view the translator as a special kind of writer, possessing not an originality that competes against the foreign author’s, but rather an art of mimicry, aided by a stylistic repertoire that taps into the literary resources of the translating language. A translation communicates not so much the foreign text as the translator’s interpretation, and the translator must be sufficiently expert and innovative to interpret the linguistic and cultural differences that constitute that text. When a foreign classic is retranslated, furthermore, we expect the translator to do something new to justify yet another version. And in raising the bar we might also expect the translator to be capable of describing this newness.

This must be absolutely right. When I first came across an Italian translation of Heaney’s Beowulf, I did a double-take. But Heaney, in appropriating the Anglo-Saxon, had made a new thing of it, his own. And Massimo Bacigalupo honours that:

Heaney ha tradotto Beowulf appropriandosi – con mossa sacrilega simile a quella del ladro del tresoro incantato – del primo monumento della letteratura inglese. Il colonizzato che rapsice la collana fatata di colonizzatori.

Somewhere, I’ve still got a copy of Bacigalupo’s introduction (the book wasn't mine), interesting even if like me you have to struggle through it with a dictionary on the Poundian ABC of Reading principle.

Venuti enumerates four excellent rules of reading translations. No – go and read it.

His would-be radicalism is appealing:

A translation ought to be read differently from an original composition precisely because it is not an original, because not only a foreign work, but a foreign culture is involved. My aim has been to describe ways of reading translations which increase rather than diminish the pleasures that only reading can offer. These pleasures involve primarily the linguistic, literary, and cultural dimensions of translations. But they might also include the devilish thrill that comes from resistance, from challenging the institutionalized power of cultural brokers like publishers, from staging a personal protest against the grossly unequal patterns of cultural exchange in which readers are unwittingly implicated. Read translations, although with an eye out for the translator’s work, with the awareness that the most a translation can give you is an insightful and eloquent interpretation of a foreign text, at once limited and enabled by the need to address the receiving culture. Publishers will catch on sooner or later. After all, it’s in their interest.

As if.

Other Koreana on Words Without Borders: an interesting essay by Stephen Epstein: Encountering North Korean Fiction: The Origins of the Future and his Han Ung-bin translation Second Encounter

참견하지 마라

2004-07-19T22:04:00.000+01:00

참견하지 마라

I just wanted to see if that would copy over. It does.
Hell, I'm not involved. I'm just watching. And if watching changes things...

Blogjam today, blogjam tomorrow

2004-07-19T18:51:00.000+01:00

The internet blocking continues. There is an amazing lack of hard information, and a lot of speculation. I know Woojay wrote about its legal basis in but Kevin hasn't got around to translating it yet.

The block is operated by individual ISPs, and can be patchy. Rebecca Mackinnon clearly took a sound decision to move NKzone away from TypePad.

I suppose it all appears rather trivial in comparison with the grosser sorts of human rights abuses north of the border. (Though judging by what some of the more paranoid Americans say, one would think it's no longer permissible in Seoul to criticise N Korea. Conspiracy theories abound.)

As for the internet blogjam, apparently the MIC are shifting blame for the blanket ban onto the domains. The ICEC declared the Kim Sun-il video illegal. Therefore websites linking to it are also illegal. It's up to the ISPs to make sure they aren't letting any illegal websites through. Filtering tools are allegedly too blunt to select all the individual offenders. MIC presumably expect blogging hosts themselves to crack down on unsavoury material.

Meanwhile, among the bloggers there is great disquiet about the unconstitutionality, uneven-handedness and sheer ineffectiveness of the ban.

It's not clear that MIC have given specific orders to the ISPs in relation to the blogging domains, but the press reports that the public have been registering complaints about sites on Internet 119. (The open letter of request to US Bloggers quoted in OhmyNews was "signed by staff" of the ICEC, which strikes me as odd, though it could just be a translation glitch.)

I gather it's not usually necessary for the Minister to issue a formal order, as the ISPs usually jump when ICEC pronounce. This would enable MIC to hide behind the fiction that they haven't actually done anything, and so there is nothing for them to undo.

I don't speak Korean. I suspect the actual words used are important, and that they need to be separated out from the spin. Was there actually a decree?

Though in practical terms, none of this probably makes much difference. There seems to be public support for the ban and little sympathy for the collateral damage. It could go on indefinitely.

This sort of thing has happened before, though not quite on this scale. In 1997 Geocities was banned in its entirety, on account of a single page saying something complimentary about Kim Il-sung. I'm told that that ban has never been formally lifted, but that some ISPs now allow access.

Joel has handed in his petition. Last I saw, it had 154 signaures.

OhmyNews

2004-07-19T11:55:00.000+01:00

OhmyNews is an online journal from Korea, unusual in that most of its articles are sent in by "citizen reporters". This article by Todd Thacker about the Korean blogjam features Big Hominid in all his eloquence.
May people sit up and take notice.

Antti Leppanen reports (19 July):

This morning I got a reply from the secretary of rep. Kim Sook-jun (GDP). He says that rep. Kim has requested material concerning the site block from the ministry, and that he will work for the quick solution on the problem at hand.

He adds wryly,

Let's see, at least this adds to the awareness of the problem. Now how big is the leverage of members of parliament over the bureaucracy?

Last week (14 July), Rebecca Mackinnon of NKzone announced

NKzone will be dormant for the coming week as we work to migrate the hosting to a new server. This is necessary because the current Typepad server is blocked in China and South Korea.
The new URL (which will continue directing to this site until the new site is ready) is www.NKzone.org

Meanwhile, the "Headline Feed" and "NK Updates" located in the right-hand column will continue to update automatically with the latest news headlines and blog posts on North Korea.

Those of you in China and S.Korea who can only receive NKzone content via email updates or RSS aggregation are encouraged to visit the following link directly for NK news updates:
http://www.bloglines.com/public/NKzone

How shaming is that?

With luck they should be up and running at their new address any day now, though not yet at time of writing.

Banned in Korea

2004-07-18T11:50:00.000+01:00

Thanks to Ron Silliman, Diamond Geezer, and Golden Rule Jones for publicising the Korean petitions.
They all blog with blogspot, which is subject to the blanket ban on blogs - including TypePad and LiveJournal. All because someone on blogspot linked to a site showing the banned Kim Sun-il video.

Ron is a poet from Pennsylvania. He blogs about poetics, casting light into dark and impenetrable reaches of the avant-garde. He has a large and diverse blogroll, worth trawling through for the many riches, which include
Golden Rule Jones. Sam blogs wittily from Chicago about literature.
Diamond Geezer famously lives near Bow Road Station. Politics, quizzes, satire, ice lollies - all in his characteristically sharp prose.

e-Clean RoK

2004-07-17T17:43:00.000+01:00

These past few days, I've been interested in the Korean internet ban. They are blocking millions of websites in an attempt to prevent people viewing the video of Kim Sun-il's beheading at the hands of terrorists. The attempt is futile, because the video is still widely accessible via P2P, and damaging, because it affects the free flow of information to and from RoK. Read Dr Hodges, at the link above.

They don't have censorship in South Korea, of course, because it's banned in the constitution, which protects free speech. They just want an e-clean environment where people are encouraged to report illegal and unfair information transmissions to Internet119.

The e-Clean Korea Charter

(Issued 12 June 2003)

We all live in a society of knowledge and information.

With the enormously rapid development in the information and communications technologies, the entire world dwells on active exchanges of knowledge and information sources to unify the whole world in the cyberspace.

Being committed to global citizenship, we pledge to practice the following points so that we can bring a cyber world which pursues mankind?[sic] love and the ideals of human dignity and value.

One, We respect and care for each other to build a sound human relationship in cyberspace.

Two, We pledge to fully abide by the rules in compliance with ethical norms in cyberspace.

Three, We keep righteous words and expressions as the forefront runner to improve the quality of life in cyberspace.

Four, We do our best to help youngsters unfold their dreams safely in cyberspace.

(via Korea World, as above)

So that's all right then.

Meanwhile, the most wired nation on earth, the nation that prides itself on accelerating informatization, is cut off from blogland. Millions of sites are inaccessible to Koreans. Bloggers who are resident in Korea can't even read their own blogs without using a proxy.

There are two petitions, Joel Browning's here and Edward Smith's here.

There is a message board, but people don't seem to be using it much.

The Korean Embassy in the UK. Write to them.

Some online articles

JoongAng Daily: Virtual pundits in a foreign land

Korea Times: Internet Providers Urged to Block Hostage Video

Korea Times: Korea Blocks 40 Web Sites to Bar Spread of Victim’s Video

OhmyNews: Bloggers Affected By Iraq Video Ban

Some English language blogs from Korea

This isn't a comprehensive list, or an endorsement of anyone's views. These blogs have all said something interesting, whether personal or political, analytical or purely expository. I make no claims except that they all merit a visit at least once.

As I don't speak Korean, I haven't any idea what's going on outside the expat community. Not that reading the blogs gives a comprehensive view of the English-speaking community anyway.

About Joel: teaches English, takes photos, thinks. Started the People Against Censorship petition

Big Hominid:Joint moderator of the Fight MIC message board. Gets angry creatively, uses bad language creatively, draws. Not for the faint-hearted

Blinger: teaches English. Hosts the Fight MIC message board

Fatman Seoul: Foodie with a camera. Classic.

Flying Yangban:

Gumbi: Canadian who launched the Petition to Repeal Censorship

Hunjangûi karûch'im: Brilliant! Finnish anthropologist fluent in English and Korean. A voice of intelligence and sanity

Marmot: Marmot is a translator for Chosun Ilbo, and a big hitter. His blog gets big hits. Don't mess with the marmot

NKzone: Blogzone, just moving from their old TypePad address on account of being blocked in South Korea and China. Essential reading for NK

Oranckay: oranckay means "foreigner". Thoughtful, well-informed

Overboard: feisty Buddhist and feminist. Politically aware, sensitive writing.

Ruminations in Korea (Jeff) Thoughtful, well-informed, and provocative.
Woojay (blog of the Pythi master) Essential. I wish I could read Korean, though!

Korea voted for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 (as did everyone else in the UN except USSR and its satellites, and South Africa and Saudi Arabia).

So that's all right too, then.

But before we get too complacent, take a look at what Reporters sans Frontieres say about internet freedom in the UK and the USA.

Welcome

2004-07-17T16:51:00.000+01:00

This is a test post.

A link to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.