Hallyu's 'rupture' onto the world stage!

Psy and the CICI President

Korea Herald

Joel Lee, reporting for the Korea Herald on how "Ambassadors discuss globalizing Korean culture" (January 18, 2016), quotes the president of the Corea Image Communications Institute (CICI), who gave the CICI's opening speech at its annual award ceremony, where she reportedly attributed the success of the Korean Wave to:

thousands of years of condensed artistry that has ruptured onto the modern world stage.

As you can see from the bouquet of flowers in the photo above, the most 'ruptured' artistry was due almost entirely to the "great and powerful" Psy, whose "Gangnam Style" took the world by stormy surprise at how readily it 'ruptured' nearly 6000 years of Korean history through over two billion pinprick hits on YouTube!

Korean fans await the next e-'rupture' . . .

Culture of Discourse: Student Silence

Image from Suggested Keywords

The JoongAng Daily recently announced that "Korean classrooms in Korea lack discussion" (September 14, 2015), offering an example:

Oh Soo-young, who attended the University of California, Berkeley, in 2013 as an exchange student, was posed a question by the professor in the first class she attended.

The teacher - who had memorized all the students' names - then continued to ask questions during the lecture. Whenever the students disagreed with one another, the presentation would shift into a debate.

"At first, I hesitated because I was worried about giving the wrong answer," the 24-year-old said. "But I got used to the debates after a while."

After finishing a semester abroad, her classes back in Korea were a marked turnaround from those in the United States. The professors simply read their written lectures, from beginning to end, off an overhead projector screen. And seldom did they pose questions to the class. When they did, they were mostly rhetorical.

I've been talking about this problem for years now - though, for the record, many Koreans have, too, so I'm not alone. I've incorporated discussion into all my classes over my years in Korea, but getting Korean students to talk is like pulling teeth! I should acknowledge, though, that Koreans are getting better as they slowly stop worrying about "giving the wrong answer."

But they were still worrying about that nearly ten years ago, when I taught a bit at Yonsei's Underwood International College. I had several non-Korean students who were happy to discuss, but one bright Korean student would hardly speak. I couldn't seem to encourage him, and he remained silent most of the time. About a year ago, I had dinner with a couple of the non-Korean students, and I asked them why the Korean student wouldn't speak. One of the two - an American - replied, "Because he couldn't predict what you would say next."

I hadn't thought of that, but I think the American man was spot on.

Also for reading the atmosphere of a too quiet classroom in Korea . . .

Have some nunchi?

Illustration by Rose Wong

NYT

In "Looking Another Culture in the Eye" (NYT, September 13, 2014), Erin Meyer tells of a recent educational experience she had in Tokyo:

While traveling in Tokyo recently with a Japanese colleague, I gave a short talk to a group of 20 managers. At the end, I asked whether there were any questions or comments. No hands went up, so I went to sit down. My colleague whispered to me: "I think there actually were some comments, Erin. Do you mind if I try?" He asked the group again: "Any comments or questions?"

Still, no one raised a hand, but this time he looked very carefully at each person in the silent audience. Gesturing to one of them, he said, "Do you have something to add?" To my amazement, she responded, "Yes, thank you," and asked me a very interesting question. My colleague repeated this several times, looking directly at the audience members and asking for more questions or comments.

After the session, I asked my colleague: "How did you know that those people had questions?" He hesitated, not sure how to explain it, and then said, "It has to do with how bright their eyes are."

He continued: "In Japan, we don't make as much direct eye contact as you do in the West. So when you asked if there were any comments, most people were not looking directly at you. But a few people in the group were looking right at you, and their eyes were bright. That indicates that they would be happy to have you call on them."

Ms. Meyer goes on to note that an absence of this ability to spot what people want has a name:

In Japan, there is an expression popular with young people: "kuuki yomenai." Often shortened to "K.Y.," it refers to someone who is unable to read the atmosphere.

This inability is the opposite of what the Koreans call nunchi (눈치, pronounced "noonchi"), an ability to read the atmosphere of a situation. But Koreans also have an expression for the inability to read atmosphere: nunchi eoptta (눈치 없다), meaning "nunchi is lacking."

The next time I inquire whether my Korean students have any questions, I'll remember to look for the shining eyes . . .

Fast Food, Slow People

Fasting  Slowly
Photo by Chang W. Lee
The New York Times

A couple of days ago, one of my colleagues -- another Southerner, Brian -- gave me a head's up on this article by Sarah Maslin Nir and Jiha Ham, "Fighting a McDonald's in Queens for the Right to Sit. And Sit. And Sit" (The New York Times, January 14, 2014)

Mr. Lee said . . . he and his friends -- a revolving group who shuffle into the McDonald's [in Flushing, Queens, NYC] on the corner of Parsons and Northern Boulevards on walkers, or with canes, in wheelchairs or with infirm steps, as early as 5 a.m. and often linger until well after dark -- had, as they seem to do every day, long overstayed their welcome.

These are old Korean men, doing what they also do in Korea, or as old men back in my Ozark hometown do, and likely as old men everywhere in the world do, except that these Korean men must be the world champions at hanging out for hours and hours to chew the fat and while away their little time left on earth because these old Koreans are in fast-paced New York City sitting at a fast food joint that allows just twenty short minutes for customers to occupy a table. MacDonald's has tried calling the police:

"They ordered us out," Mr. Lee said from his seat in the same McDonald's booth a week after the incident, beneath a sign that said customers have 20 minutes to finish their food. (He had already been there two hours.) "So I left," he said.

"Then I walked around the block and came right back again."

For the past several months, a number of elderly Korean patrons and this McDonald's they frequent have been battling over the benches inside. The restaurant says the people who colonize the seats on a daily basis are quashing business, taking up tables for hours while splitting a small packet of French fries ($1.39); the group say they are customers and entitled to take their time. A lot of time.

"Do you think you can drink a large coffee within 20 minutes?" David Choi, 77, said. "No, it's impossible."

Wrong! It's entirely possible. And not only possible! It's inevitable! Unless you're using the natural laws of evaporation to drink that coffee through your nose! And these old guys do seem to have made a science of it! More importantly, I see in these old Korean men the same sort of disrespect for the police in NYC as I see they have here in Seoul.

Workers at the restaurant say they are exasperated.

"It's a McDonald's," said Martha Anderson, the general manager, "not a senior center." She said she called the police after the group refused to budge and other customers asked for refunds because there was nowhere to sit . . . . The police in the 109th Precinct, which serves the area, say that calls to resolve disputes at businesses are routine, though the disruptions are more often caused by unruly teenagers than by septuagenarians.

So . . . why are they there? Inquiring minds want to know:

Outside the McDonald's on Saturday, Sang Yong Park, 76, and his friend, Il Ho Park, 76, tried to explain what drew them there. They come every single day to gossip, chat about politics back home and in their adopted land, hauling themselves up from the banquettes with their canes to step outside for short cigarillo breaks. And they could not say why they keep coming back -- after a short walk around the block to blow off steam -- every time the officers remove them.

Of course, they don't know. It's a habit, not a reflective choice. And they're stubborn old Korean men who KNOW they're right no matter what the law says. They can't be ordered away by a forty-year-old police officer half their age! What does that young whippersnapper know?

Welcome to New York City! Welcome to Seoul, Korea!

Resolution of Conflict in Korea, East Asia and Beyond

2011 Civilization and Peace

The papers presented last October at the "2011 Global Forum Civilization and Peace" were recently published, officially in April, but my copy arrived only yesterday, courtesy of The Academy of Korean Studies. The back covers tells us that the forum:

. . . was attended by a number of audiences and scholars including the keynote speaker Professor Jürgen Kocka, the vice president of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Under the main theme "Resolution of Conflict in Korea, East Asia and Beyond: Humanistic Approach", we tried to look into many aspects of conflicts in the modern global world and gathered to find alternatives for the harmonious resolution. This is the collection of papers that were presented at "2011 Global Forum Civilization and Peace". I hope to share the forum's rewarding experience of intellectual exploration with the public through this publication

The "I" is unnamed, but I reckon it's Professor Chung Chung-kil, president of The Academy of Korean Studies because it reads like a summary of his "Preface." Among the papers referred to is also my own, "Points Toward a Culture of Discussion," to be found on pages 89-114. Readers may recall my posts on this paper last autumn, such as this report, in which I offered my presentation's conclusion:

Let us remind ourselves that this year's Global Forum on Civilization and Peace focuses on the "Resolution of Conflict in Korea, East Asia and Beyond," specifying "A Humanistic Approach," and our session is concerned with "Difference and Discrimination." I began, humanistically enough, with a conflict between a high-status university professor in the West who advocated critical discourse without reference to hierarchical status but who felt justified in physically attacking a 'lowly' graduate student who had insulted him. We then looked at hierarchy within Confucian Civilization in East Asia and noted some of the problems that result from Confucianism's suppression of open discussion, the implication being that Confucianism needs to find some means of accommodating critical discourse. We considered Huntington's thesis concerning the clash of civilizations, but reflected upon his appeal for intercivilizational understanding as well and noted the possibility of cultural commonalities and even commonalities grounded in our meta-civilizational human nature, especially our mortality. We saw how this common mortality can offer a basis for a culture of critical discourse in which reasons and evidence are privileged over hierarchical status even in strongly hierarchical societies. We drew attention to a necessity for the freedom to insult since even substantive points grounded in reason and evidence can be taken as insults, regardless of intention. All of these things point to the truth that a harmonious society cannot be imposed at the outset but can only be understood as an aim to be attained at the end of a discursive process, if such harmony is ever even to be attained at all. Finally, if this paper has raised issues controversial enough to stimulate critical discussion, then I will have succeeded in my goal.

There's usually a Korean version of the articles published simultaneously, but not this year. I'm not sure why. Anyway, for those interested, the book can be ordered from the site linked to above, and I'll link again here. Ironically, even though the forum was for both foreigners and Koreans, the page linked to bears the heading "Books for Foreigner," but one needs to read Korean to order a copy of the book.

I therefore suspect that my call for a culture of discussion in Korea (and elsewhere) will go unread . . .

Donation of the Gods?

Proof!

From a Copy of a 19th-Century Book

The Korea Herald, borrowing a Yonhap News report, informs us that a Korean "Scholar says [the] Korean alphabet [is] more than 3,000 years old" (July 3, 2012)!

Lee Chan-gu, who studies a Chinese classic book on divination, claimed in his new book titled "Money" that he found two Korean letters, including "don" meaning money in Korean, on stone inscriptions of a knife-shaped ancient Chinese metal money.

Miraculous Scholar Lee finding: two Korean letters that manage to spell the three-letter word "don" (돈)!

Known as a "pointed tip knife," the money circulated in China in the middle or latter years of the Spring and Autumn Period (B.C. 770-476).

Not quite 3,000 years ago, but close enough to 3,000 to be considered more than 3,000.

Lee said he found one of the stone inscriptions in a 19th century book of a Chinese scholar of ancient Chinese currencies and the other in two other ancient Chinese books.

Nineteenth century?! Wow! Old! And two other ancient books! Maybe even from the creaky old eighteenth century!

The knife-shaped money appears to have been made by pre-ancestors of the Korean tribe said to be living in the Liaoxi area, northeastern China, about 3,600 years ago, Lee said.

Made by "pre-ancestors"! That's really going far back! Almost 4,000 years! Which is almost 5,000! Let's call it 5,000 years of historical time! We're now talking demigod forefather Dangun time! Hangeul as gift of the gods, a divine donation that quickly became common currency and first alphabet on the whole planet! Or so it appears to the properly trained Scholar Lee mind:

[Lee] said he wanted to prove that Hangeul was made through the restoration of ancient Korean letters and deny claims that Hangeul imitated Mongolian or other countries' characters

Indubitable evidence of Scholar Lee methodology, an unbiased approach aimed at denying Hangeul's debt to any other alphabet, else it would not be a gift.

Hi, I'm a Boy, by Eideticboth

Hi, I'm a Boy!

By Eideticboth

(Image from Amazon)

A student of mine from two summers ago contacted me last winter break about proofreading a translation from Korean to English that she was doing of a story by her older sister. This sort of request usually proves to be a disappointment -- the writing generally being low in quality -- but when she showed me what she'd translated so far, I realized that her sister's story had real literary quality, and that my ex-student's translation had captured that quality. They just needed some help, so I agreed to an arrangement by which I'd edit the text for idiomatic English.

We finished shortly before the close of the spring semester a little over a month ago, and I asked what they planned to do with the translation. My former student explained that she and her sister intended to publish an electronic version available for download on Kindle and other devices. Two days ago, she contacted me to inform me that the story is now ready for downloading from Amazon under the title Hi, I'm a Boy!, by Eideticboth (their combined pseudonym):

'Hi, I'm a boy!' has published at last!

You can try a sample of it both in Amazon.com site or any Kindle device you might have such as an iPhone or Android phone.

Its sample provides up to 'Grandma; life on the third floor.'

I take this to mean that every thing up to and including the episode "Grandma: Life of the Third Floor" is available for sampling, so I'll provide an excerpt of these first three episodes. The story is told from the perspective of a 'Korean' boy about fifteen named "Daniel" who has a significantly older 'stepbrother' called "Highboy," probably because he's so tall, and the two of them live with Daniel's mother and grandmother in a motel that the mother manages and owns:

Our Neighborhood

Our neighborhood had some buildings near the train station with red lights like the kind used in butcher shops, except these lights shone on women who wore pretty dresses instead of on displayed meat.

The neighborhood was behind a train station. In the middle of the intersection was a nightclub called "Major League" that had a seventies air about it. To the left were whorehouses, and to the right were indistinguishable buildings lining a street where only the neon signs differentiated the various bars and strip clubs located inside.

And finally, at the end of the street, there was the motel "East Sea," my home, sweet home.

There was a main street at the rear of my house. Every morning, I would look down at the street from a window on the third floor and watch people from the apartment complex on the other side of the street swarm around the bus stop to board buses.

Most of them probably had no idea that such a neighborhood existed only half a mile down from the bus stop. The apartments were just part of a neighborhood facing ours across a single big street, but those people acted as if they were living in another country. Even though the people living in the apartment complex and the rest of the residential area used the same language as us, they pretended not to understand our speech and even acted as if we were invisible.

They finally decided that they could no longer put up with the danger and the loss in property values from living alongside us. The residents of the apartment complex and the rest of the residential area hired an attorney to represent them and filed a damages suit against the national government for doing nothing to rid the area of its red light district.

They staged protests for their rights in the square at the train station. I happened to be passing by when they were appealing to citizens to back their campaign. They also asked me to sign. I was just a nine-year-old boy, but they did not care. I readily signed. They even went around to obtain signatures, accompanied by representatives.

After a tug of war with the government, their campaign, supported by the hundreds of signatures collected, succeeded after months of indecision when the government finally granted their request. Construction began on an overpass across the street. The overpass continued with an opaque roof and extended to the train station, cutting across the sky over our neighborhood like a viaduct. Their dream came true. That was a so-called overpass over the intersection.

They no longer had to pass through our neighborhood to reach the train station. They were satisfied with the overpass, which allowed them to safely cross our neighborhood, and they gradually forgot us. As a matter of fact, the kids there did not even seem aware of our very existence.

All the people who came to enjoy our neighborhood were outsiders. It was located near a military base. As evening approached, soldiers would begin flocking to the intersection. Most of them were foreigners with colorful eyes and white or black skin. Some foreigners even looked as if they had just crossed the sea to come to our neighborhood. But nobody who lived in apartments of the main street came or visited our part of town.

My Family

Everybody called me "Danny" except my family. They called me "Daniel." I liked that better.

There were four in my family. Grandma, Mother, Highboy, and me. My grandpa died in 1984, the year I was born. Mother said he was so happy to hear the news of my birth. And he just flew to heaven.

Grandma always told me, "Your mother used to be the best pianist in the country's best university. She could also speak English very well and could have gotten a music scholarship to study abroad. And every man who loved her had a prominent job."

I wondered what kind of jobs those might be. Highboy told me it referred to someone working as cook, undertaker, or ticket-taker. Grandma repeated her story to us over and over for several years. It was only later I realized that it meant a doctor, lawyer, or prosecutor, not a cook, undertaker or ticket-taker.

At the end of the story, Grandma would heave a deep sigh. And she'd then fall silent and roll over to face the wall.

She never answered me when I asked what my father was like. Instead of answering, she'd just say that my father and I had ruined my mother's life. She only said that when Mother was out, or Mother would get very angry every time.

Grandma: Life on the Third Floor

Highboy and Grandma shared a room on the third floor with its own bathroom. That room had been my mother's when my grandfather was alive. It was too big for one person.

On one side of the room, there was a double bed where Grandma always lay, an air conditioner at the head of the bed. On the opposite wall from the bed were a television and a very big wooden wardrobe inlaid with mother-of-pearl. In the far left corner from the door stood a black upright piano. That was my mother's.

Grandma spoke the Kyungsang-do dialect characteristic of southeastern Korea, and she was afflicted with rheumatoid arthritis. Without a cane, she could not walk.

There was a sort of repertoire to Grandma's reiterative whining. One tune that she played was in blaming our motel and the town for everything. She believed all our misfortunes began with moving in.

First, her only daughter, who had an extremely promising future, was taken by a stranger. Next, she lost her husband. After that was an unexpected grandchild. Finally, she was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis and lived nearly crippled among all these unforeseen circumstances.

In the middle of meals, she often put her chopsticks down and lamented. "I am the one who ruined my daughter's life. What if I hadn't come to this town? Oh, no, what if I hadn't started running this motel, oh, no, no, no, what if my husband was still alive!" And then added, "Why don't we sell this motel right now? You could open a piano studio."

Mother never answered and just continued eating.

Grandma started each day by praying toward the wooden cross on the wall, then wiped her face with the clean washcloth that Mother had prepared by the side of her bed the night before. It was dunked in warm water and wrung out. She then turned on the TV. Lunch at noon. Dinner at seven.

Throughout the day, she was always lying or sitting on the bed, listening to the radio or reading the Bible. When night came, she fell asleep. She repeated her monotonous and uneventful routine day after day.

A half-cut PET bottle was at all times on a small table beside her bed. If she needed to use the toilet, she turned toward the wall and peed in the PET bottle. It was my job to clean those. Sometimes Highboy peed there, too, so I used to make extra bottles.

I could remember when I was little that Grandma would walk around town with her back hunched. For some time, though, Grandma had not been able to come down from the third floor anymore.

Thus ends the first three, unnumbered 'chapters', with several more to come, reaching about fifty pages in all. The style continues in this fashion, low-key, personal, somewhat nostalgic, and it depicts hardscrabble Korean life for a mixed-race 'family' from the early to mid-1990s, when most Koreans had still never seen a foreigner in person because the tsunami of globalization had not yet overwhelmed the country.

I remember that time, for I first arrived in Korea in 1995 and was the object of much attention for the mere fact of being a foreigner. I like the story, which is episodic but adds up to a coherent novella . . . or a long short story.

The cover might give the impression that this is a children's book, but rest assured, the writing is adult level, not really suitable for children.

Recommended reading for those interested in a charming story of a Korea that might already seem a long time ago, though it's also much like yesterday . . .

Bae Young-dae: "Korea needs a 'culture of discussion'"

JoongAng Daily Logo

(Image from JoongAng Daily)

I've been saying this for years, so I'm gratified to see that Koreans themselves are starting to echo my words. Bae Young-dae, for instance. In a JoongAng article published yesterday, "Korea needs a 'culture of discussion'" (April 1, 2010), Bae first uses heavy irony to note that:

Koreans apparently are good at "special skills," such as talking to themselves, fistfighting and ignoring established processes.

He then explains this through a hypothesis about cultural lag:

Korea [has] proudly achieved economic growth and democratization in a very short amount of time, but the culture of discussion [has] never quite made it.

That is the dark shadow of our modernization miracle.

Conflicts have accumulated in various sectors of our society. We face conflicts between classes, ideologies, regions, generations, genders and cultures.

Political conflicts such as the Sejong City issue actually fuel the inability of Koreans to talk things out. According to a June 2009 survey by the Samsung Economic Research Institute, Korean society's conflict index was ranked fourth among the 27 members of the OECD, following Turkey, Poland and Slovakia.

There is always agreement and disagreement, optimism and pessimism, about any issue.

In Korea, however, conflicts worsen between the extremes of conservative and liberal, left and right. Justifications based on the black-and-white dichotomy often prevail.

Intellectuals are largely responsible for the culture of "bullying and browbeating" and we have no model on which to base a behavioral change.

I agree with some of this. Korea does lack a culture of discussion, and the reliance on "bullying and browbeating" is noticeable. But Bae's analysis of the reason for this fails to hit the mark, in my opinion. The aggressive dogmatism of intellectuals is just another 'symptom' of the problem, which is too deep-rooted to blame on intellectuals alone. The cause, I think, lies in Korea's hierarchical, Confucian social structure and is reinforced by the Korean language's system of 'courtesy,' which forces interlocutors to make distinctions of status and thereby judge some individuals as more worthy of being listened to, but other individuals as unworthy of respected opinions. And the problem is far-reaching. For open, honest discussion to take place, two individuals speaking in Korean would have to be of precisely the same status . . . and how often does that happen?

Perhaps I overstate the case somewhat, but I do so to make a point, and I'll soon make a better case when a translation of my article on the need for a culture of discussion is published in a Korean journal, for I can then post the original English version.

But "soon" is a relative term . . .

Toward a Culture of Discussion: Introduction

Kishore Mahbubani

(Image from Homepage)

As some might have expected, I've been working on an article that deals with the significance of a culture of discussion for society, particularly in the context of Korea since I live and teach here. I spent the weekend composing a first draft based on my posts, and since I'm pressed for time this morning (because the semester begins tomorrow), I'll just paste my paper's introduction below:

In June 1997 at the 7th International Conference on Thinking, held in Singapore, the Singaporean philosopher and diplomat Kishore Mahbubani asked a singularly discomfiting question: "Can Asians think as well as others?" A year later in the National Interest, he followed up on this question by publishing an essay with the even more provocative, potentially insulting title, "Can Asians Think?" This essay became part of a book by the identical title that same year, but it did not have the effect that Mahbubani intended, for as he writes three years later in the second edition, "My main disappointment with this essay is that it has not yet triggered a discussion among Asians on how and why their societies and civilizations fell several centuries behind European civilizations" (Mahbubani, Can Asians Think? Singapore: Marshall Cavendish, 2004, 19).

Mahbubani might not have triggered the discussion that he desired, but the topic of critical thinking among Asians was being broached by some Asian thinkers. For instance, the Thai philosopher Soraj Hongladarom presented a paper in 1998 on "Asian Philosophy and Critical Thinking: Divergence or Convergence?" and noted several characteristics of Asian cultures that "prevent the full realization of critical thinking skills," among these, "the beliefs that teachers are superior and always right" and "that social harmony is to be preferred rather than asking probing questions." In short, discursive hierarchy and social harmony trump genuine discussion and critical thinking. Far from being dismissive about these things, Hongladarom holds that Asian societies perhaps once had valid reasons for deciding that "social harmony should take precedence over critical argumentation and open debates." In today's competitive, globalized world, however, he argues that Asian societies need real discussion and critical thinking.

Perhaps these interconnected issues deserve some discussion, and this discourse will necessarily be discursive, winding around through such interrelated concepts as culture of discussion, critical thinking, free expression, and various other correlatives of discursive reasoning.

As noted, that's the intro. I've written the rest, too, but am not fully satisfied with it and will spend today reworking what I've composed . . . along with finding some time to prepare for the semester's onset.

Culture of Discussion: Soraj Hongladarom on Critical Thinking

Soraj Hongladarom

(Image from Homepage)

There's probably more to say about Peter Facione's article, "Critical Thinking: What It Is and Why It Counts" (2010), but this series needs to be brought to a close, and I'll do so by citing an article by a Thai philosopher, Soraj Hongladarom, on the difficulty that one encounters in attempting to inculcate critical thinking among 'Asian' students.

In a 1998 paper, "Asian Philosophy and Critical Thinking: Divergence or Convergence?" (Third APPEND Seminar on Philosophy Education for the Next Millennium, May 6-8, 1998, Chulalongkorn University), Professor Hongladarom specifies what he believes accounts for the difficulty:

[T]he beliefs that teachers are superior and always right, that knowledge is not to be made here and now, but exists eternally, so to speak, to be handed down by teachers, that social harmony is to be preferred rather than asking probing questions . . .

Professor Hongladarom doesn't mention Korea, but what he says about Chinese Confucianism applies to some extent here in Korea:

In China, the rapid transformation from feudalism to state bureaucratism, coupled with the pervasiveness of the Confucian ethos, while hugely successful in preserving China's cultural identity amidst the great variety of people and localities, nonetheless made it the case that material innovations and proto-scientific and logical theories would be given scant attention. Writings on such matters are relegated to the 'Miscellaneous' category by the mandarin scholars who put the highest priority to moralistic, ethical, or historical writings.

Professor Hongladarom deals with critical thinking mainly within the context of science and logic, and wants to explain why 'Asians' didn't continue to develop these fields, whereas I am interested in a culture of discussion more generally, but his point is similar. I would argue that when Korea adopted China's Neo-Confucianism with the founding of the Joseon Dynasty, it accepted the overarching importance of social harmony as a primary aim of a good society. In a sense, this was a decision, the kind of decision about which Professor Hongladarom has some thoughts:

If . . . [a] culture, for example, once decided that social harmony should take precedence over critical argumentation and open debates, then critical thinking practices would be forever alien to it if the members of the culture always agree that decisions in the past are not to be amended no matter what.

That sort of cultural 'fundamentalism' -- as he goes on to argue -- would be absurd:

But that is surely a very unreasonable position to take. Cultures, like humans, often make decisions which later are amended or revoked, with new decisions made, when things are not the same any longer. Decisions to prioritize one set of values over another are not etched in stone, but even so the stone can be broken down or else taken to a museum or a pedestal where it loses its real meaning.

Koreans, like the Chinese -- and also like the Thais about whom Professor Hongladarom in mainly concerned -- generally recognize the importance of adopting critical thinking if the challenge posed by globalization is to be met, but this recognition doesn't make the adoption easy:

[T]o argue that critical thinking is actually a good thing to have is difficult, because it may run counter to the deeply entrenched belief that critical thinking is just a label for the confrontational and disputatious mode of life which the culture finds unpalatable.

Thus, one continues to hear Chinese and Korean political leaders extoll the aim of a "harmonious society," and this seems to resonate among Chinese and Koreans. I tend to be cynical about politicians, however, so whenever I hear these politicians extoll the virtues of a "harmonious society," I think that what they're really saying is "Shut up and do what we say."

But maybe I'm just being overly critical.

José Ortega y Gasset: "Europa es el único continente que tiene un contenido."

José Ortega y Gasset

(Image from Wikipedia)

In his book Eccentric Culture, a fascinating analysis of European cultural identity, the French philosopher Rémi Brague relates an anecdote about Ortega y Gasset. The latter had recently returned from America and was asked the reason for his return. He answered with a pun of ambiguity:

"Europa es el único continente que tiene un contenido."

The Spanish word "continente" means both "continent" and "container," permitting either of two translations for Ortega's reply: "Europe is the only continent that has a content" and "Europe is the only container that has a content." He meant both, and one sees what he meant. Europe has a cultural unity that other continents lack.

Perhaps Europe's cultural unity is less impressive as a unique fact when one reflects that this continent is the artifact of an arbitrary line drawn to separate what is considered 'Europe' from what is considered 'Asia.' Looked down upon from above, Europe seems merely an Asian peninsula.

But the imaginary line exists in everyone's mind. To its west, Europe. To its east, Asia. West of the line, we find a civilization that integrated Athens and Jerusalem. East of the line, however, we find many civilizations. To be identified as "Asian" is therefore only a geographical distinction and implies nothing about one's cultural identity. Whereas a German might casually remark, "I am a European," and thereby make a recognizable statement of cultural identity, a Korean would not formulate a corresponding remark in stating, "I am an Asian."

For a Korean to offer a parallel statement of cultural identity, the formulation would have to be, "I am a Korean."

But what does that mean -- what is a Korean?

I've been 'officially' asked this question concerning Korean identity and now have to reflect upon it. Perhaps my recent encounter with Hwang Sok-yong's novel The Guest will provide some grist for this cultural mill, and I'll certainly be grinding away, but others with more knowledge than I are invited to comment here.

Foreigners and Foreignness in Korean Eyes

Essential Foreigner

But a 'Multicultural' Friend?

(Image from The Free Dictionary)

Brian Deutsch, over at his blog Brian in Jeollanam-do, asks an interesting question about the Korean word for "foreigner": 외국인 (wei-guk-in).

Can wei-guk-in ever refer to a Korean?

The question arises because we non-Koreans expats here in Korea receive the impression that wei-guk-in refers only to non-Koreans. Brian cites a passage from an article by David Kosofsky, "Exploring Korean Culture Through Korean English," which appeared in Korea Journal nearly 20 years ago (Volume 30, Number 11, November-December, 1990, pages 69-83). Brian directs our attention to page 75 for Kosofsky's experience with the Korean concept of "foreigner" (transliteration and translation added):

[I]n a Korean restaurant in San Francisco, . . . I was eating dinner with a young Korean man doing graduate studies at Berkeley. Pointing to a group of non-Asian diners at a nearby table, he remarked, "A lot of foreigners come to this restaurant." It was all I could do to continue chewing my 냉면 (naeng-myun, i.e., "cold noodles") without blurting out, "You're absolutely right, Mr. Kim, and you're one of them!" Apparently there is a dissonance between the English word, foreigner, and the Korean conceptual model.

Kosofsky then adds:

In English, the word refers to an abstract relationship, not an intrinstic attribute. Nobody is inherently a foreigner; anyone can become on simply by crossing a national border. Foreignness is a question of context, not essence.

The implication here is that Koreans consider foreignness an essential quality of non-Koreans. This sounded plausible, but I wondered if it were true, so I asked the first two native speakers of Korean that I could find and posted the results in a comment at Brian's blog:

I asked my wife and daughter about this, and they insist, as native speakers of Korean, that 외국인 (wei-guk-in) can refer to Koreans, too.

Some Koreans might have intellectual difficulties with this concept of Koreans as 외국인 (wei-guk-in), but I admit to calling various Europeans 'foreigners' while I was in Europe -- usually, but not always, as a joke.

I think that this is more an issue of provincialism than of semantics, for if my wife and daughter are correct, then 외국인 (wei-guk-in) can refer to a Korean outside of Korea.

Perhaps we need to ask more Koreans about this.

I therefore left Brian's blog and emailed a couple of Korean friends. First, I asked Dr. Suh Ji-moon, noted translator and a professor of English at Korea University about this, and she replied (parenthetical details added):

As for your query, I myself would never refer to an overseas Korean as a 'foreigner' (외국인, wei-guk-in), except as a figure of speech, so to say -- for example, 'why, he's almost a foreigner' (i.e., "almost a wei-guk-in"). But of course . . . young people may have a different concept of the word.

I therefore also asked a somewhat younger professor at Korea University, Dr. Moon Hi-Kyung, also of the English Department, and she wrote (transliterations and other parenthetical remarks added):

About your query -- an intriguing point. I would say that 외국인 (wei-guk-in) is a term which is used ambigously and could have two different meanings: it is used mostly to indicate a racial difference, so even if you (i.e., meaning not ethnic Koreans) are Korean nationality, you would still be a 외국인 (wei-guk-in). But of course in a stricter sense and when one is talking about nationality, then we talk about 외국인 (wei-guk-in, i.e., outside-country-person) and 내국인 (nae-guk-in, i.e., inside-country-person). But the former (i.e., racial) category is more usual in everyday conversation, I think.

Meanwhile, back over at Brian's blog, the discussion had continued. The learned Gomushin Girl wrote (referring to me in her comment as "HJH"):

Etymologically, it breaks down thusly:

外/외/wei/outside (same as in 외출: outing and 외도: go astray/wrong course)

國/국/guk/country

人/인/in/person

The question is whether the 國 component should be seen as possessive, as "my country" in reference to the speaker. In that case, then yes, calling all non-Koreans "foreigner" would be the correct way to use this word. However, I'm inclined to agree with HJH in that this use is unthinking and provincial, and not intrinsic. There are Koreans who are linguistically cautious and avoid using the word indiscriminately, and then there are Koreans for whom it works for any non-Korean, anywhere, anytime.

I note in passing the connection between being "foreign" and "going astray" -- but this is a point peculiar to the original Chinese term (and observe the irony that 외국인 (wei-guk-in) is a foreign term, borrowed from the Chinese language). Gomushin Girl's main point is that the term 외국인 (wei-guk-in) does not intrinsically refer to a non-Korean.

The equally learned Sonagi, however, differs a bit on this point (transliterations and translations added):

Your wife and daughter are correct that the dictionary definition allows for this usage, but I have only ever heard or read Koreans using the words 외국인 (wei-guk-in) and 외국사람 (wei-guk sa-ram, i.e., "foreign person") to refer to non-Koreans. Even ethnic Korean residents and citizens of foreign countries are usually distinguished as 한인 (han-in, i.e., Korean person), 한국계 (han-guk-gye, i.e., "ethnic Korean"), 교포 (gyo-po, i.e., "overseas Korean"), and 동포 (dong-po, i.e., "overseas Korean").

Unlike English speakers, Koreans will refer to a non-Korean as a "foreigner" even when the nationality is known. While retelling experiences abroad, Koreans have called Australians, Canadians, and Americans "foreigners." The Koreans knew these people were locals. An English speaker would refer to a German, a Japanese, or a Mexican as such and never use the word "foreigner" to refer to specific person of a specific nationality. Koreans will, too, but they will also call specific persons of a specific known nationality "foreigners."

The general Korean worldview can be thought of as a Venn diagram. In one circle are ethnic Koreans with Korean citizenship. In the other, are non-ethnic Koreans with foreign citizenship. In the middle are ethnic Koreans with foreign citizenship and Korean citizens with partial or non-Korean ancestry. Because your wife and children are part of a multicultural family, their worldview is probably not representative or typical of Koreans.

Sonagi may be correct about my wife and daughter, but I have also asked my class of about 25 students at Ewha Womans University, and these young native speakers agreed that 외국인 (wei-guk-in) can refer to Koreans as well as to non-Koreans, so the younger generation might hold more flexible views. (Or they might have been telling me what they thought that I wanted to hear.)

Language use reflects how people think, I suppose, and while many (perhaps most) Koreans may still speak as if "foreignness" were an essential quality of non-Koreans, the term 외국인 (wei-guk-in) can be used more flexibly (as the Chinese linguistic roots demonstrate) and is perhaps coming to be used to refer to Koreans in some contexts . . . but more investigation is needed on this intriguing point.

I lack the Korean linguistic skills for this sort of research endeavor, but I think that a good, concrete question to ask individual Koreans would be the following (composed with the help of my daughter, Sa-Rah):

Could you, as a Korean visiting a non-Korean country, say, "이 나라에서 나는 외국인이다" (e nara-esuh na-nun wei-guk-in e-da, i.e., "I am a foreigner in this country")?

With appreciation to my daughter Sa-Rah for the Korean sentence, apology to Korean experts for my poor transliteration, and appeal to everyone interested for their additional insights on this vexed cultural-linguistic issue.

Nominee for "Best Blog about Korean Culture in General, 2008"

Gypsy Scholar

Surprise Nominee

I have received an unexpected note in yesterday's blog-entry comments from fellow blogger Roboseyo alerting me to a potential danger:

Hi there. Your blog was nominated for an award for the best Korea blogs of 2008, at The Hub Of Sparkle. Go check it out if you like.

Naturally, I thanked him for the warning:

Thanks, Roboseyo, for the alert. It certainly is alarming to hear that my blog has been nominated for "Best Blog about Korean Culture in General, 2008" . . . along with seven others. Fortunately, the other seven are all more deserving, and one of them will win, so I won't need to make any speeches or anything like that.

Readers, please go to The Hub Of Sparkle and vote for some blog other than Gypsy Scholar.

I thought that I'd better repeat this appeal in a special blog entry since a mere comment to yesterday's blog entry might be insufficient to gain the attention of my readers to this possible danger.

The other seven blogs, far more deserving than my own, actually deal extensively with Korean culture. Check them out:

Ask A Korean!

Frog in a Well

Gord Sellar

The Grand Narrative

Gusts of Popular Feeling

Seoul Podcast

The Western Confucian

Given the high quality and Korean focus of these seven blogs, I'm fairly certain that there's no great danger of my blog winning this particular competition. Now, if the category were "Best Blog about Culture in General, 2008" (rather than "Korean Culture in General"), I might be more worried, for I have written a great deal on such general, high-cultural topics as moonshine, water slides, and Uncle Cran's adventures in the Ozarks.

Nevertheless, some danger does exist, so let me again urge my readers to visit The Hub Of Sparkle and vote for some blog other than Gypsy Scholar.

I suggest Gord Sellar.

Expat Living: The Spitting Image of 'Globalization'...

Glob-alization

It really does look like a 'glob'

(Image from Wikipedia)

Once again, my "Language Column" has shown up in The Korea Herald -- yesterday, to my surprise. I simply wasn't expecting it . . . but there it was.

I'm not displeased, obviously, for I'm pasting and posting it here, which leave me time for other, pressing pursuits, e.g., correcting Sun-Ae's literary translations from Korean into English, grading thesis statements, reading on Islamism, that sort of thing...

Anyway, here it is, my column on 'glob-alization':

"Facing up to globular reality," The Korea Herald, April 29, 2008

Everyone these days talks about "globalization," but how many of us have truly reflected very deeply upon its meaning even though we expatriates living here in Korea face globalization every time we step outside?

Some of us may rail against this globular reality that we encounter on Korean streets, some of us may even defend it, but all of us recognize its presence and that we can do little but adjust.

Expatriates from lands that have already experienced globalization should not look down on Korea for only now beginning to deal with this globular issue. Indeed, we need only look to our fairly recent pasts to discover that Korea is the spitting image of Western nations.

In America, for instance, Salinas, California still has a law to prohibit spitting on a sidewalk, and South Haven, Michigan even saw fit to legislate against spitting "on any sidewalk or on the floor or seat of any public carrier, or on any floor, wall, seat or equipment of any place of public assemblage," just in case anyone should consider giving in to an urge to spit.

As these examples suggest, spitting was very common even among Westerners not so long ago and only began to decline through pressure exerted by the medical profession, city ordinances, and disapproving peers. Some backwoods regions continued the habit of spitting well into the twentieth century.

As late as my adolescence in the Arkansas Ozarks, for instance, I recall seeing plenty of spittoons -- though usually intended for people who chewed tobacco. And folks did spit. Especially in barber shops, one could find some excellent spitters -- men who had sufficient skill for a sure shot from ten feet away.

Spitting contests of that kind, incidentally, might explain something that had previously puzzled me. One of my uncles tells the anecdote of his induction into the military during WWII. He and others from the Ozarks were sent to Little Rock before heading on to boot camp, but these new draftees first had to get medical exams to test their fitness. They were told to strip down to their birthday suits and stand near the back wall of the room. A sergeant came in with a bottle, held it up for all to see, and began to explain what the men had to do:

"Men!" he barked, "I want you to piss in this bottle."

To which, in utter seriousness, one of the men from my hometown responded:

"From back here?"

Now, maybe this hometown hillbilly was skilled at hitting spittoons, or perhaps he had even been in a few pissing contests, but he was absolutely sincere in his question -- my uncle swears to it!

Anyway, as for spittoons themselves, I'm sure that some spitters used them for oral fluids other than tobacco-enhanced saliva, but most Americans remain unaware that the habit of public spitting has only fully disappeared in the last generation or two. If we just knew a little more about our own relatively recent "nasty" habits, we might be more understanding of the spitting that we see among Koreans.

Finally, for those readers who wish to know about the more technical aspects of globalization, note that the word "glob" derives from the Latin globus, meaning "globular mass."

Jeffery is a professor at Kyung Hee University and can be reached through his blog, Gypsy Scholar, at gypsyscholarship.blogspot.com - Ed.

You can read this at the Korea Herald's website, of course, but you have to go looking through the "Expat Living" posts to find it.

Gypsy Scholar's "Pearls of Wisdom"

Yeouido Island, Seoul

Korea Beckons...

(Image from Wikipedia)

Early this morning, I received an email from an American-based (North American-based, anyway) physicist who had happened across my blog and decided to contact me for advice because he has been offered a position in a South Korean university. Like me, he is married to a Korean woman and has two children who speak both Korean and English.

Although he asked me for "pearls of wisdom" based on my experience, all that I can offer is the following, which might nevertheless prove interesting to others reading this blog:

From my blog, you may have noted that I don't really speak Korean. If you happen to, or if you quickly pick up languages, you will fit in better.

Having a wife who is Korean helps enormously, of course, and I am utterly dependent upon mine. If your wife is from Korea, then she will understand lots of things that appear odd to Americans, such as "key money." When renting a house in Korea, one does not usually pay a monthly rent. Rather, one gives "key money" in lieu of rent. This is a one-time deposit that one gets back when one's rental contract is over. One doesn't actually pay any rent, though one 'pays' an opportunity cost -- as the economists like to express it -- for that money, which can be as much as 20 thousand to 100 thousand dollars, or more, could have been used for investment or for obtaining interest in a savings account. In fact, the person receiving the "key money" is using that money in either of those two ways. Of course, if your housing is provided, the issue of "key money" is moot.

If your wife is a Korean citizen, you might consider applying for a spousal visa, for that gives you more flexibility in accepting a new job if that should turn out to be necessary or advantageous. A work visa leaves you with less flexibility, for if you accept a new job, then you have to leave the country and reapply to enter. Usually, that requires merely a one-day trip to Japan, but such a trip is still time, money, and inconvenience.

You need to realize that a contract is not really binding in Korea. Korean employers can alter contracts pretty much at will, and many foreigners working in Korea find this terribly frustrating. Don't be surprised if the contract also does not entirely jibe with reality.

Related to this is the 'disorganization' that confronts foreigners. Planning ahead is difficult, for conditions can suddenly change -- and at the last minute. For instance, you will need to inquire ahead in order to find out the holidays and special school days because Koreans will assume that you already know, but those special school days might not even be decided upon until a week in advance, and you might find out with only two days notice that classes will not be held . . . or that the midterm exams have been shifted one week back or ahead.

I'm in the humanities, so my needs differ from yours. The library system is insufficient for my purposes, so I rely upon the internet for doing my research. Fortunately, universities usually provide online access to a lot of journals, and I'm guessing that this would also be true for physics.

In your case, as a physicist, you would need to know what sort of laboratory equipment a department has and whether or not that equipment is available to you. Also, you would need to know if any of your colleagues would be willing to work with you on research and if you would have student assistants to help you to run experiments.

Koreans tend to be polite to Westerners but don't readily grow close, for both cultural and language reasons. Korea lacks a culture of discussion, given the hierarchical nature of its very Confucian society, and this affects personal relations as well as professional and teacher-student relations. If your wife grew up in Korea, you might have noticed that she doesn't discuss matters like an American (or other Westerner) does. My wife and I often used to misunderstand each other in discussions. For instance, if I tried to discuss a problem with her, she tended to interpret my words as complaints rather than as attempts to analyze and solve. You can perhaps imagine how not having a culture of discussion might inhibit academic life -- and this inhibition is compounded by the language barrier, of course.

Another thing to note is that Koreans are educated -- or perhaps 'trained' is the word -- to think "in the box," and getting them to think more flexibly is not an easy task. I have noticed a major difference between Korean students who grew up abroad as the children of businessmen or diplomats, for example, and those who grew up in Korea, the former being much more flexible in their thinking.

Some Koreans are anti-American and tend to assume that any Westerner encountered in Korea is an American. In 2002, for instance, when an American tank driver accidentally drove over two high school girls, many Koreans treated the accident as a deliberate homicide, and anti-American sentiment reached an all-time high. Canadians and Europeans reported being attacked as Americans by Koreans who refused to believe their protests that they were not American. Now, I don't want to exaggerate this, for even in 2002, I myself encountered no such problems. But I did give a talk about 9/11 that same year, and a lot of Koreans who came to listen didn't like the fact that I did not interpret the 9/11 attacks simply as a reaction to American foreign policy. In fact, I did acknowledge America's foreign policy as one of the motives behind the terrorist attacks, but I didn't think it the primary motive. Many of the Koreans present didn't like hearing that, but my topic of my talk probably attracted a lot of Koreans who were politically on the left.

You will probably also notice that Koreans are strongly nationalistic, even those on the left. The political left in the West tends to be international in its rhetoric, but the Korean left is a nationalistic left. This is less surprising when one comes to see that their nationalism is simply a shared feature of being Korean rather than some peculiar feature of being on the left.

I guess that I've focused on the various difficulties in being a foreigner in Korea, but the positives nevertheless outweigh the negatives for me. Korea has provided me with a job as a professor in a good university. I can manage my research without too much difficulty. My students are mostly nice even if they don't work hard enough. Korean food is good, at least to my tastes, and Korea itself is a modern nation that imports fine wines and offers international cuisine. I enjoy living in the great city of Seoul, which provides me with the highest standard of living that I have yet experienced.

Your mileage may vary.

Perhaps this blog 'paste' has not been especially interesting for my regular readers, but I did spend a couple of hours this morning composing it...

Expats and Korean Culture!

Dokdo Rocks!

Expats, Get in the Rhythm!

(Image from Seoul Metropolitan Government)

A little over one week ago, I got together with Gord Sellar and Charles La Shure for a meal and conversation, as I noted on my blog, though without going into details, for that evening was just one part of a rather long day, but I do recall the three of us discussing the way that many in the expat community react to life in Korea.

Those readers interested in hearing more about this specific point might want to visit an online site that fellow-blogger Big Hominid has called to our attention, Expat Interviews, which has posted an interview with Charles in which he expresses views that encapsulate some of what he, Gord, and I discussed that evening. I particularly concur with the substance of his answer to the question about whether he had any tips for readers about living in South Korea:

This answer is probably not going to win me too many friends in the expat community here, but I have very little patience for foreigners who come to Korea and spend all their time complaining without bothering to learn about the culture. I'm not saying that all foreigners who complain do this, but a lot do. I'm also not saying that we don't have a right to complain when we are treated unfairly. But understanding comes first. Without understanding, you won't even know exactly what it is you are complaining about. Without understanding, you will get little understanding in return from those whose opinions you seek to sway. So my tip would be this: I don't care how long you plan on staying in Korea -- you could be here on a one-year teaching contract or you could be here for a few decades -- you owe it to yourself to at least try to understand the culture. If you're going to insulate yourself from the culture, don't complain when things don't go your way. ("American Expat Charles in South Korea")

Charles also had some words on the process that one undergoes if one does engage with the local culture:

When people first encounter a new culture, they usually go through a "honeymoon phase" where everything is so new and wonderful, and they are enchanted by their host culture. As they become more accustomed to the culture, though, the cracks begin to show, and this leads to a swing toward the opposite end of the spectrum -- an intense dislike of the host culture. Some people never get past this stage, and they become bitter. Others learn to adjust and find their place in the host culture. ("American Expat Charles in South Korea")

As I've already noted, Gord, Charles, and I talked about these two, related issues in our dinner conversation. I recall telling Gord and Charles that a lot of the expats who waste time complaining about life in Korea seem never to have lived abroad before and don't realize that they would be having much the same negative reactions to the local culture no matter where they might be living their expat lives. I lived in Germany for six frigging years, and I remember going through a 72-month stage in which I complained about the stupid Germans doing stupid things in their stupid German way. If I had been living in Korea instead, I'd have been complaining about the stupid Koreans doing stupid things in their stupid Korean way, but because I'd already gone through that sort of thing in Germany, I circumvented this stage here in Korea, so I almost never complain about the stupid Koreans doing stupid things in their stupid Korean way.

Instead, I try to learn as much about Korea and Korean culture as I possibly and sincerely can, and I'm fortunate to have authoritative sources for doing so. Some readers will recall my MemoRive post of a few days ago. Well, in addition to providing me with the means for dealing with my 'big data', the good Korean people at MemoRive offer this important and fascinating tidbit concerning Korean culture on a piece of cardboard included in the packaging:

Dokdo consists of two tiny rocky islets surrounded by 33 smaller rocks. The Dokdo islets are located about 215 kilometers off the eastern border of Korea and 90 kilometers east of South Korea's Ullung Island. The islets are an administative part of Ullung Island, North Kyongsang province, under the control of the Department of Ocean and Fisheries. Dokdo is also 157 kilometers northwest of Japan's Oki Islands. Its exact position is 37° 14' 45" N and 131° 52' 30" E. Of the two Islets that make up Dokdo, Suhdo (the West islet) is a steep-sided rock about 100 meters high, while Dongdo (the East islet) is 174 meters high. The approximate total surface area of Dokdo is 0.186 square kilometers (56 acres).

Obviously, Koreans are a people of high culture, the sort of people who offer fascinating and informative encyclopedia entries about culture even on pieces of cardboard that Americans would reserve for such lower, purely utilitarian functions as explaining how to use one's purchase correctly, which the packaging neglects to do (even in Korean, as my wife has noted).

I also like how this informational tidbit capitalizes "West" and "East" -- as though the two tiny islets somehow stand for something greater than themselves. West meets East, or something. Sort of like my Western self being in this Eastern place.

The cardboard piece even includes a helpful map showing the location of the Dokdo islets in the middle of the East Sea -- otherwise known as 'Sea-That-Must-Not-Be-Named', but being that body of water lying just west of Japan, it could also perhaps be safely called the West Sea.

My cardboard further informs me:

The Korean flag flies at Dokdo. The Chinese characters declare Dokdo to be Korean land.

Chinese characters! Now that's culture! There's even a photo with proof of this, the national flag flapping in a stiff breeze high above a huge sign with enormous Chinese ideographs that I can't read but that doubtless declare, convincingly and with impressive authority, that Dokdo is Korean land.

I wish that I knew Chinese so that I could feel the full impact of Korean culture on this crucial point. But even without my knowing Chinese, Korean culture has made a forceful impact impressive enough for me to quickly and explicitly acknowledge Korea's claim to Dokdo, and I've found that openly accepting this bit of Korean culture helps enormously with my fitting in here.

I can therefore agree with Charles La Shure that expats would fit in a whole lot better here on the peninsula if they took the time to learn at least a bit about Korean culture -- the significance of Dokdo, for example. Charles deserves our collective expat thanks for his reminder about the importance of culture.

I also ought to thank Charles for mentioning my blog as one of the few that he reads regularly:

I do have some friends who live here in Korea, . . . and I read their blogs on a regular basis . . . [because] they do offer insight on life here . . . . The Gypsy Scholar is a university professor and a medievalist with a quirky sense of humor.

Professor. Medievalist. And a real quirk. All three of which qualify me as a man of insight...

Robert Kaplan on China's interest in North Korea

Goguryeo's Territory

(Image from Wikipedia)

Robert Kaplan has recently published an article, "When North Korea Falls," in The Atlantic Monthly (October 2006), and -- perhaps fitting for a writer on military issues -- he's been taking a lot of flak from the expatriate blogging community here in Korea. I agree that Kaplan has given a distorted picture of some things here in Korea. For instance (to borrow a quote from the Marmot's copy of the entire article):

As the saying goes among American soldiers, "There is no peacetime in the ROK." (ROK, pronounced "rock," is militaryspeak for the Republic of Korea.) One has merely to observe the Patriot missile batteries, the reinforced concrete hangars, and the blast barriers at the U.S. Air Force bases at Osan and Kunsan, south of Seoul -- which are as heavily fortified as any bases in Iraq -- to be aware of this.

One military man, Capt BBQ, took contentious issue with Kaplan on this point:

So this is the Kaplan guy I hear talked up so much? He's a good story teller at least. Spending 3 and 1/2 years in the USFK has perhaps given me an unfair standard to judge him by, but how can I take his analysis of a secretive regime seriously when he fails so miserably portraying the US military? I've never heard of more than half the crap he claims we say:

"which are as heavily fortified as any bases in Iraq"

My barracks were guarded by a combination of any two from a group of three narcoleptic old men, a grandma and a retard ... that is, Grown-man-on-bike-with-training-wheels retard.

Capt BBQ might be guilty of a little humorous exaggeration himself, but he's surely right. The U.S. bases here in Korea are not even remotely "as heavily fortified as any bases in Iraq."

But I'm not posting on Kaplan to critique, praise, or bury him, but to quote him on China's interest in North Korea, which he illustrates in the case of a Kim Family Regime (KFR) collapse:

Whereas Japan's strategic position would be dramatically weakened by a collapsed North Korean state, China would eventually benefit. A post-KFR Korean peninsula could be more or less under Seoul's control -- and China is now South Korea's biggest trading partner. Driving along the coast, all I saw at South Korean ports were Chinese ships.

Other factors also work in Beijing's favor. China harbors thousands of North Korean defectors that it would send back after a collapse, in order to build a favorable political base for China's gradual economic takeover of the Tumen River region -- the northeast Asian river valley where China, Russia, and North Korea intersect, with good port facilities on the Pacific. De facto control of a future Tumen Prosperity Sphere would bolster China's fiscal strength, helping it to do economic battle with the United States and Japan. If China's troops could carve out a buffer zone in the part of North Korea near Manchuria—where China is now developing massive infrastructure projects, such as roads and ports -- Beijing might then sanction the installation of an international coalition elsewhere in the North.

This is the sort of scenario that has concerned me since first learning of China's Northeast Project about three years ago when I was working with my Hanshin University colleagues Yoon Pyung-Joong (윤평중) and Kim Myongsob (김명섭) on a research project concerning Korean reunification.

You can read about this Northeast Project and the attendant controversy in an article by Yonson Ahn, "The Korea-China Textbook War -- What's It All About?" (3/6/2006), but if I may oversimplify China's position, the Northeast Project is a research program funded by the Chinese government that presents the ancient kingdom of Goguryeo as part of China. This is problematic for Koreans and for the prospect of future unification on the Korean peninsula because Koreans have long considered Goguryeo as part of Korean rather than Chinese history and because China's claim to Goguryeo raises territorial issues since Goguryeo extended halfway down the peninsula. If the claim is allowed to stand, China could appeal to history as a legitimate cover for intervention in a crumbling North Korean state.

Kaplan -- though without mentioning Goguryeo -- thinks that China is already planning for this:

Meanwhile, China's infrastructure investments are already laying the groundwork for a Tibet-like buffer state in much of North Korea, to be ruled indirectly through Beijing's Korean cronies once the KFR unravels. This buffer state will be less oppressive than the morbid, crushing tyranny it will replace. So from the point of view of the average South Korean, the Chinese look to be offering a better deal than the Americans, whose plan for a free and democratic unified peninsula would require South Korean taxpayers to pay much of the cost.

Kaplan may very well be right about China's plans, but he underestimates Korean nationalism (okay, I am critiquing). If Koreans are already angry about China's claim to Goguryeo, then they're very unlikely to be sanguine about Chinese control over the North.

Rather than being sanguine, the Koreans could get sanguinary.

Problems with the Korean Education System: Education Minister Kim Byong-joon

Kim Byong-joon

Minister of Education

(Image from July 27th issue of The Korea Times)

In last Thursday's Korea Times (July 27, 2006), "Minister Admits Bungle: Kim Apologizes for Publishing Thesis Twice," staff reporter Park Chung-a informed us that:

Kim Byong-joon, deputy prime minister and minister of education and human resources development, on Thursday apologized for having published identical research papers in academic journals .... He admitted that he published identical papers in two journals as if they were separate papers under a government-funded research project, when he was a professor at Kookmin University in Seoul in 2001. This double publication of a single paper was not intended to get state research funding twice, he said. "Printing the same paper twice is my fault although I believe my assistant made a mistake in helping me process the research paper,'" the minister nominee told reporters on Thursday.

I don't know Kim Byong-joon personally, nor am I familiar with his work, but I suppose that anybody can bungle and publish a paper twice ... though I, for one, have enough trouble publishing a paper a single time. That's probably why I don't get much academic notice -- learning experts say that educators should make a point of repeating themselves to ensure that their students get the point.

I think that we must be getting the point by now, for in Saturday's JoongAng Daily (July 29, 2006), "Kim accused of cheating at least three more times," Park Seung-hee and Ser Myo-ja reported that:

Besides the one he already admitted, Deputy Prime Minister for Education Kim Byong-joon resubmitted at least three other research papers as if they were new works, a JoongAng Ilbo investigation has found.

For instance:

While serving as a Kookmin University professor, Mr. Kim published a paper in August 1998 with the Korea Regional Political Science Association on the civic groups' influence on policymaking. One year later, he published the same paper with the university's social science research institute, carrying a slightly reworded title. The two papers' contents were identical. Mr. Kim used Chinese characters in the title for the first publication, and Korean in the latter.

Kim should receive an opportunity to defend himself -- and I won't make any accusations since I know only what I read in the funny papers -- but I do want to focus upon the attitude of one official:

With mounting pressure, the Blue House held a meeting yesterday, hosted by the Chief of Staff Lee Byung-wan, where it concluded the issue was not serious enough to fire [Kim] .... "Mr. Kim denied he had committed self-plagiarism and he also apologized for the discrepancy," a senior Blue House official said. "Since it has been a common practice among scholars in Korea in the past, I don't think the matter is serious enough to let him go."

According to this anonymous "senior Blue House official," self-plagiarism -- which Kim Byong-joon denies having committed -- has not been considered a serious academic offense in Korea and is therefore no reason to bar an individual from holding the office of Education Minister.

Regardless of Kim's innocence or guilt, the attitude that plagiarism -- even if 'only' self-plagiarism -- presents no serious breach of academic ethics is very problematic. The younger generation of Korean scholars would not agree, and I suspect that the Blue House will soon come around to this younger generation's point of view.

But the point may bear repeating before the Blue House gets the point.