Author: Peter

I have made an updated List of All Posts, including short descriptions and some other commentary interspersed.

The list is at Yuletyde.wordpress.com

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There are a few projects I wanted to get done on these pages but have never gotten around to. These include:

• The series on my first day in Korea in 2009 (posts 46 to 52). I planned twelve parts but completed only seven. The “story”, as I saw it, was somewhat worth recording in its own right. It certainly worth telling, I felt, when viewed from the perspective of several years later and knowing so much more. Specific memories fade, but knowledge accumulates.
• Regrettably, post-290 is the only one about Japan following my time there. Many other posts relate to Japan, but only secondarily.
• Despite intending to, I wrote nothing about my day in Manila in August 2014, or the many news places I visited in 2015, including Australia, Fiji, and Hawaii in August 2015.
• My Baekdu-Daegan Mountain Trail (crosscountry trail across Korea) posts in September and October 2013. I am not sure how satisfied I am with how these came out. A great trip, and I’d like to finish the second half.
• I am more interested in Europe than Asia, but since I started this only in 2013, when I was in Korea, there is a lot about Korea. Some, like post-268, and post-248 reflect my interest in Germany, the European country I know most about, having lived there and  speaking the language at an intermediate level.
• I’ve done many other things worth writing about in 2015 but most have gone unremarked upon on these pages. You can see a real slowdown starting in June 2015. Generally, post slowdowns occur in summer, when I am traveling, and when something new comes up that focuses all my attention.
• The Internet is unstable. I wonder if anyone remembers “Geocities“? It was an early website hosting platform, now totally gone, but in 1999 it reportedly was the third-most-visited website. I even made a webpage on it around year 2000 about The Simpsons. It is completely gone. Geocities webpages are all gone. The same is true today, in different ways. Content disappears all the time. Notably Youtube videos. Several that I posted about disappeared, for whatever reason. A notable case is post-197, about the group that spearheaded the Ukraine revolution in February 2014. The video has disappeared, but my transcription survives, for whatever this may be worth.

To look at it, the plain-looking building above would appear, to the reasonable person’s eye, to be a house, probably an old one. The reasonable person would be exactly half right (if counting by the letter).

It is actually a lighthouse. Believe it or not… Jones Point Lighthouse in Alexandria, Virginia. It is the southernmost point of the original District of Columbia.

I was there on December 11th, 2015, on my way to Mount Vernon by bicycle. The weather reached 70 F (21 C) and I had just finished an exam the previous day.

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Washington, D.C. was originally a perfect square, ten miles on each side, and any square will have corner points. This lighthouse was D.C.’s southern corner point. (The stone marker actually says “Historic Boundary,” because the Virginia side was returned in the 1800s.)

The red marker on the below map is anchored where the photo was taken. You can zoom in on this map all the way down. The anchor-point is exactly where I was standing, facing south.

The original cornerstone, placed in 1791, demarcating the boundary of the new federal district, also stands at Jones Point, and I sought it out. It was difficult to find.

Below: Along the Potomac River. To my right is the lighthouse. The lighthouse’s small shed is visible here (The same shed is visible in the above photo, behind the bicycle).

Below: The front of the lighthouse. I am standing almost in the Potomac River.

Above, directly under the door of the lighthouse, a curious opening exists. Easy to miss; very easy to miss; it values its peace and quiet. On closer inspection, this opening turns out to contain the cornerstone. Up close:

“The oldest existing physical monument associated with the federal city of Washington, D.C.”

Completely unremarkable!  No inscriptions are visible. Nothing obviously distinguishes it from a rock never touched by human hands.

“The inscription on the south cornerstone, worn by weather and water, is now illegible.” A small example of the power of Time to erase the works of man.

Two hundred and twenty-four years. That doesn’t seem so long. What would 2,000 years do? 20,000 years?

Say a great civilization existed long ago. Call it “Atlantis.” Say Atlantis’ monuments and buildings fell into disuse after a civilizational collapse or a mega disaster event. Is it possible that all of Atlantis’ monuments and buildings could’ve been wiped away with nary a trace left for us to find today, that all its structures became indistinguishable from natural features over time? Which leaves us with Atlantis the Legend, rather than Atlantis the Fact.

Maybe the case of the weathering of the Washington, D.C. cornerstone seems trivial. Think of it this way: Each  concept or emotion is as a reservoir, and different experiences “tap in” to different extents. I may have but splashed a few drops. Shelley’s traveler, meanwhile, upon his discovery of the ruins of the statue of Ozymandias, took a headfirst dive into the very same reservoir (but it was the same reservoir):

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“Used, but hardly used, like new” was how the seller described the phone that would become “my phone.” The seller was someone in Korea who was upgrading to an S4, or something. I don’t recall the exact sum I gave him, cash, but it was something like $150. The original price of a Galaxy S3, upon release, was something like $750 (if bought outright)! That was only a year and a half earlier, at that point. I thought I got a great deal, and it does still work…

Owning the phone outright, rather than paying a theoretically reduced price on installments mixed in with phone service, allowed me to use a much-cheaper prepaid service. For my purposes, this meant about $15 a month for 3G Internet and for phone calls. I believe text messages cost two cents, but I generally used a messaging application.

My Galaxy S3 phone’s “birthdate” (manufacture date), printed inside the battery compartment, is March 14th, 2013. This is around the birthdate of this very website.

Here’s the kind of thing I like to find. Hidden or forgotten knowledge, waiting to be found. Libraries are great for this. (Though, in fact, I found what is below in a quiet, dusty little corner of the Internet.)

The Saturday Review magazine’s January 28th, 1928 issue has the following advertisement (p.559):

A lot of this advertisement puzzled me.

(1) Who is Aubrey Beardsley?
(2) What is a “pierrot”? What is a “harlequin”?
(3) What is meant, exactly, by “clown”? Is this actually a biography of a circus clown?
(4) What is meant by “Oscar Wilde’s downfall”? Again, was a circus clown actually involved in it? This seems unlikely.
(5) Who has ever heard of the names “Aubrey” (for a boy) or “Haldane”? How might you pronounce “Haldane”?
(6) Was $6.00 expensive for a book in 1928?

This word “pierrot”.  I recognized it to be — this is true — a Korean word. I had struggled remembering the Korean word 피에로. The Korean-English dictionary said the word translates in English as “pierrot; clown.” I’d never heard of an English word “pierrot.” It seems French. How did Korean get a French loanword for “clown”? Does the word really exist in English? If so, why had I never heard it before? Seeing it in English for the first time, in a periodical published six decades before my birth was a pleasant surprise…

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The Ngram of “pierrot” and “pierrots” (Ngram is a tool to graph word frequency in published material over time):

It gained popularity in English texts in the 1900-1920 period and stayed in high use from WWI to the 1930s.

Use of “pierrot” had declined quite a lot by the time I started reading in the 1990s. It was up to five times more common in published texts in the 1920s-1930s than it was by the 1990s-2000s. In fact, by year 2000 the red line (“pierrots”) sits back where it was before the word started its rise in the 1900-1905 period. I interpret this to mean that we have “completely lost the word” and so it has returned to just being “a foreign word,” not a “loan word” any more. (It was deloaned?) (I am vindicated in this thought by the fact that the automatic spellchecker included in the Firefox browser on which I am writing warns me that “pierrot” is a misspelled word.)

Thinking about the rise and fall of the word “pierrot”: The amount of language change that must have occurred in history that has simply vanished without a trace must be enormous. Maybe much, much greater than that which survived, than that which forms part of the languages as they exist today. There is probably no way to track down the great majority of vanished words or perhaps other aspects of language because most of history was pre-literate. Given a non-literate culture, especially, “pierrot” is a case of a word that would simply vanish.

How did Korean get this word? Best guess: It must’ve come through Japan in the ’20s when it was a hip word in English.

Who was Aubrey Beardsley? He was an English cartoonist (1872-1897). Some of his drawings were quite shocking. His art is the kind that would’ve been considered decadent or pornographic at the time and subject to bans, but today might appear in museums.

Who was the biographer, Haldane MacFall? He was another English artist and writer (1860-1928; he died the very year this book was advertised at age 68). His full name was Chambers Haldane Cooke Macfall. The link over his name is to a little biography of the man someone has done. The Aubrey Beardsley book is mentioned in the rundown of his published works: “[MacFall also wrote]…a spirited defence of his friend Aubrey Beardsley (1928.)”

The Aubrey Beardsley book was sold for $6.00 in 1928. This equals $83.45 in 2015 dollars. That’s a whole lot of money for a book.

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Interviewer: It seems many Korean Buddhists actually welcomed, in a sense, Japanese involvement [in Korean affairs in the late 1800s] because Japanese authorities forced Korean authorities to open up the cities, again, to the Buddhists.

Professor Sem Vermeersch (Seoul National University): Yes, that’s right. […] [From the 1600s-1800s in Korea,] Buddhism was tolerated. No one would confiscate their property. This didn’t happen anymore [after the suppressions of the 1400s-1500s]. Buddhism was left to its own devices but they were allowed to exist. Temples were taxed. They had to pay heavy taxes but they could at least maintain themselves. In the late 19th century, very slowly foreigners began to seep into the country. Of course, the Japanese were the most prominent of these. We all know the story of how Catholicism came to Korea, how Western missionaries started coming in the 1890s, but actually as soon as the treaty between Korea and Japan was inked in 1876, the year after already the Japanese opened a Buddhist temple in Busan. I think it was 1877. So very quickly, the Japanese were here to spread their own forms of Buddhism. Initially, they cooperated very well with the Korean Buddhist monks. There’s a very famous example of a Japanese Buddhist monk who “lobbied” the Korean government to overturn the ban on Buddhist monks entering the cities. That was, I think, in 1895. King Kojong allowed monks to open temples in Seoul and to go into the cities as monks. Before that, if they wanted to enter the city they had to dress up, disguise themselves, as something different. So in 1895, Buddhist monks were allowed to enter the cities, and that allowed them to spread “Dharma” again among the people. So initially they looked up, very much, to these Japanese monks.

Interviewer: They ended a four hundred year ban, so —

Professor Sem Vermseersch: Exactly.

Interviewer: That’s quite something.

Professor Sem Vermseersch: So they were very grateful, actually. Not only that, but they also saw that Japanese Buddhist monks, apparently, had a lot of influence, lots of financial means, that they apparently had a very strong position in their own country, so Korean Buddhist monks basically wanted to follow the Japanese model, and learn about other cultures through these Japanese Buddhist monks. There is the famous case of the leader of Korean Buddhism at the beginning of the colonial period, 1909 or 1910. He made a secret pact with the Japanese that Japanese and Korean Buddhism would merge. […] Up to that point, there was a lot of goodwill amongst Korean Buddhists towards the Japanese, but when it became known that he had made this secret pact…There was a huge uproar.

[From Korea and the World podcast, recorded December 2014] [22:25-26:10]

Late July 2015: Upon recognizing the Singapore flag in Seoul in a place it had never been before (just south of Gwanghwamun Plaza), I discovered that a temporary Singapore exhibition had been set up.

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Temporary but presentable. Equipped with A/C inside:

“Pen your wishes for Singapore on her 50th birthday” is a phrasing no American could’ve come up with. Well done.

Most of the exhibition consisted of photos and accompanying explanations. Here are some:

The crying man is Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, who died this year after one of the most successful political lives of his time. (See post #292: “On Lee Kuan Yew, Founder of Singapore“).

There was also a television with three different videos about Singapore playing in rotation. The video I saw was of was some kind of professional Korean photographer who did a photoshoot over a weekend in Singapore and also had a filmcrew following him around, filming him taking pictures.

Donald Kirk is a veteran U.S. journalist who has reported on Asia for nearly fifty years.

I attended a talk and luncheon by him in Washington, D.C. on December 7th, 2015. It was hosted by a university’s Korea Studies program. The crowd was fewer than twenty people, most of whom were Asian foreigners. I couldn’t tell their countries of origin and didn’t have a chance to talk to them. Most were graduate students. (Everyone had sandwiches and cookies but of all the attendees I was the only one to take a can of regular coca cola. Several had diet coke. What to make of that?).

If I recall correctly, Kirk said that he first entered Korea in 1972, previously having reported from Vietnam and elsewhere. He ended up, over his career, reporting on Korea a lot (though by no means exclusively), and is still going strong on that topic in the 2010s. I had previously run across the name Donald Kirk in the Korea Times, one of the English-language newspapers. It still runs his column. I occasionally bought the Korea Times and have written about this newspaper elsewhere on this site.

I must say that I was greatly impressed with Donald Kirk. He struck me as a quality investigative journalist of the classic variety. He was also energetic and vigorous. He looked younger in person than in the photo above (attached to his Korea Times columns). Seeing him in person, had someone told me he was in his 50s, I’d have certainly believed it. (He is in his 70s.)

Kirk’s talk was about Jeju (of Korea) and Okinawa (of Japan) and their many parallels. The new parallel is of military base controversies on both.

I took notes during the talk. Here are some of his remarks I found most interesting:

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• Donald Kirk’s book is called Okinawa and Jeju: Bases of Discontent. (This title is a pun, as will become clear below, I think.)
• Kirk spent six weeks in Okinawa and Jeju, on a grant from some group in the USA, doing research for the book.
• Okinawa and Jeju are both the southernmost points of their countries, different in culture and language from their mainlands, different identities. Both islands have always resented control by the mother country. Kirk didn’t say this explicitly, but I think meant it. (Few Koreans, I think, would ever entertain the idea that Jeju “resents” Korea, and certainly few would say it. Donald Kirk, being an American, has the freedom to do so.)
• Okinawa was only taken by Japan in the late 1800s. Previously, it had been an independent kingdom.
• Jeju was conquered much earlier, but always maintained its own identity and strong local dialect.
• After independence in 1948, a revolt on Jeju against the Korean government was put down with 30,000 killed.
• The Jeju of today is completely changed, now an enormous tourist spot with 90% of tourists now Chinese (Kirk’s estimate) and previous “national feeling” may be swamped to an extent by that. The young raised in Jeju can speak with standard Korean accents now, of course.
• (I asked about the Jeju Revolt during the Q-and-A: “What would you say were the causes?” I wanted to get at whether it was “really” a communist revolt, as was claimed at the time, or what? It’s hard to trust answers you get on this from Koreans, because it is politically sensitive. Kirk didn’t have a specific answer. He mentioned political, labor problems. He graciously asked the Koreans in the room for their opinions. No one spoke up.)
• (Someone else asked why there is no secession movement on Jeju. The questioner, an Asian of nationality unknown to me, said that Okinawa did have one. Kirk answered that in his view the Okinawa secession movement “didn’t amount to much” when held up to the light of day.)
• Kirk pointed out that Jeju is the only Korean province given special “self-governing status” (제주특별자치도).
• The left-wing governments of Kim Dae-Jung and Roh Mu-Hyun, governing 1998-2008, did things to appease Jeju like officially apologizing for the Jeju massacre of ’48.
• Both Jeju and Okinawa now have military base controversies which likely will be around for a while. Okinawa has long had a large U.S. presence, and South Korea is currently building a naval base on Jeju, to open next year.
• Why is South Korea “militarizing” Jeju? Firstly, Kirk discussed the Ieodo Rocks (이어도), which are claimed by both China and Korea. Occupied by South Korea. China has not pressed this claim, unlike its many other claims to islands and rocks quite far from its borders. China has aggravated nearly all its maritime neighbors with its bold territorial claims, except South Korea.
• Kirk said that South Korea is trying hard to maintain good relations with China. To this end, Korea won’t support any SE Asian states in territorial disputes with China.
• Despite this deference-to-China policy, South Korea has quietly built up the Ieodo Rocks in a manner similar to what it has done with the much-more-publicized (especially in Korea itself) Dokdo Rocks in the sea between Korea and Japan, occupied since 1952 by South Korea but also claimed by Japan.
• South Korea has built facilities, including a helipad, on Ieodo (picture below). These rocks are completely submerged but rise near enough the surface to allow such facilities.

• If China ever presses the Ieodo Rocks claim, the South Korean Navy would be in a better position to enforce its claim with the Jeju base. The rocks are 150 km southeast of Jeju.
• The second reason for the Jeju naval base, Kirk says: North Korea. A strong naval base on Jeju could better intercept North Korean vessels. This is the official position and is valid.
• Kirk says that former president Kim Dae-Jung opened the shipping lanes around Jeju to North Korean commercial ships. This surprised me. This ended with the end of the Sunshine Policy. Kim Dae-Jung was a longtime South Korean left-wing political dissident, elected president in 1997, and was interviewed several times by Kirk during his long career, which included a period of exile in the USA (mostly spent in Northern Virginia, according to Kirk).
• Some Koreans are protesting the Jeju naval base. They say it will hurt the environment.
• Kirk says he interviewed one of the main protest leaders at the Jeju naval base protests, a certain Korean Catholic priest. I cannot recall what specific remarks he made about this priest. He said his name was Moon.
• Kirk doesn’t buy the notion that the protest is environmental in nature. He gave the example of the plan to completely destroy a particular island in Busan Harbor so as to allow more maneuvering space for ships. No protests at all for that doomed island.
• The real force behind the protests on Jeju, Kirk says, may be anti-American Left (this is my term, not his). The protesters, if you talk to them, allege that the base “will become a U.S. base”. The base is a U.S. plot, they say. Kirk says there is no basis for this claim, no indication the U.S. has anything to do with it.
• Opposition on Okinawa to the military bases does relate to the U.S., as one of the largest overseas U.S. bases in the world is on Okinawa, but Kirk says that it is not so simple on Okinawa as “Get the foreigners out.” Okinawans do not yearn, at all, he says, for a handover to the Japanese military (and there may again soon be one to speak of). They probably prefer the U.S. to Japan. The Okinawa protesters just want to be left alone with no bases at all. (This does seem to suggest that Okinawa “national feeling” is strong, even if Kirk says rumors of a secession movement have been greatly exaggerated.)
• I asked a question about what Kirk’s view was on prospective U.S. military withdrawal from Korea and/or Japan, whether it was possible or likely anytime soon. He replied that Jimmy Carter had had a plan to withdraw U.S. forces totally from Korea in the late 1970s, but “he was talked out of it” after taking office. Kirk then said that today Donald Trump, who has said the same thing (Korea can pay for its own defense; foreign commitments a waste of money; bring U.S. troops home), if elected, would also be talked out of it. I wanted to follow up but didn’t have the chance. Who “talked Carter out of it”? Why? Who would talk Trump out of it? Why?

Note: I implanted one fact above that didn’t come from the talk I attended, but from an interview with Donald Kirk I listened to separately. It is that Kim Dae-Jung lived mostly in Northern Virginia during his political exile in the USA, 1980-1985. Kirk has mixed feelings about Kim Dae-Jung, and many negative things to say, while conceding his political skill. Kirk’s perspective on the much-praised, Nobel-anointed Kim Dae-Jung was nice to hear: This interview was reposted to Youtube here. (Korea and the World podcast, October 2015).

This appeared in a Korean language textbook (with my English translation):

A puzzling question with no apparent correct answer. 

The textbook insists that there is a correct answer. The back of the book even explains “why” it is allegedly the correct answer, precluding the possibility of a misprint/typo. 

Can you guess the answer?

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According to the textbook, the correct answer is (1).

“This person is a Korean.”

He is? In what way? Born in another country. Can’t speak Korean. We can understand him to be Korean only by merit of blood ancestry. 

Consider, too, that this is a basic question, ascertaining whether you understand the simple grammar forms and vocabulary used.  The question writer, then, believes that blood obviously trumps something as flimsy as citizenship, place or birth, or even cultural affiliation and language ability!

The explanation at the back of the book flatly has it this way: “(1) is correct because the person’s parents are Korean.”

That answer is not at all intuitive to Americans. Not on a formal test question like this. No way. When taking a test, we have to think in terms of the test, which is to say in terms of the test makers, and this is a good example of that.

Interestingly, Koreans raised in Korean culture who have never lived in the West will generally apply this logic consistently, by which I mean that in the U.S. context they’ll tend to regard Whites as “Americans” and others as (at least semi-)”foreigners”, or something about like that, including Korean-Americans. (This is not to say they universally like Korean-Americans, a complicated issue in itself.) I have seen this attitude again and again from”lesser-Westernized” Koreans of all ages, including (or especially) while such people were speaking in Korean.

Koreans raised in Korea but with direct exposure to Western society, perhaps having lived in a Western country, can sing a different song and be more “politically correct” (as we’d say), but all the same will typically keep their own racial feeling close to the chest. A foreigner who worked in Korea with whom I once talked related a conversation he’d had with his boss, characteristic of the type I mean. I recall the details roughly, but I recall precisely the “punchline” (which will be the very last words of this post):

The boss was a Korean woman who had lived for years in the USA and even then spoke of moving to Canada. She’d come back to Korea and had gotten into the English education business when it was booming. Her son or daughter was in Canada at that very time, studying in university or something. This boss was complaining about foreigners in Korea — how they should go home and stop causing problems, how Korea needed to be reserved for Koreans…something about like that. “But you lived in the USA for many years, and isn’t your daughter in Canada now?” “So?” “So…I mean, you were a foreigner, too.” “It’s different.” “How is it different?” “Well — Korea is only for Koreans. The USA is for everybody.”

Who likes an angry, recalcitrant ideologue? Nobody. That’s who. 

Ideology can blind good judgement, for one thing. This is the case with a list of “best to worst presidents” put out by a prominent libertarian, Dr. Ivan Eland. The worst four presidents according to him:

The very worst: James Polk
The 2nd worst: William McKinley
The 3rd worst: Harry Truman
The 4th worst: Woodrow Wilson

The author is a “Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at The Independent Institute.” He is prominent enough to be often invited on U.S. television news debate shows. 

I disagree with his analysis and I have to wonder if he is even arguing in good faith from these bizarre choices.

His methodology severely penalizes involvement in war of any sort, as we see in his full explanation:

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On Polk: He annexed Texas and won the entire American Southwest out to California. Far from being the very worst president, I think he’s one of the best of the “low name recognition” presidents. Would Dr. Eland prefer the USA to have never risen to continental power status? Perhaps the entirety of European settlement of North America was a bad idea from the beginning? With people like Ivan Eland at the helm, history would never move. Or, more likely, it would still move, but it would be moved by a more assertive people with a sense of its own destiny, and the Elands of the world would be swept aside, quickly forgotten.

On Wilson: If only all the belligerents had avoided the pointless nightmare of the 1914-1918 war entirely… But they didn’t. I have heard many serious people argue that a German victory would’ve been the preferable outcome of the 1914-1918 war, and this seems to be directly implied in the article, saying Wilson should’ve stayed out. A victorious Imperial Germany would not have tolerated a Marxist Russia, would’ve crushed the Bolsheviks while they were still able to be crushed, and likewise would’ve suppressed Marxist uprisings everywhere. No need for radical fascist movements of the 1920s and 1930s to resist radical Marxism. No Danzig problem, no Marxist states in Europe, no World War II, not anything like we knew it. (On the other hand, the old aristocratic regimes of Europe and the Ottoman Empire did need to be swept away, and were by that war.)

On Truman. The USA suddenly found itself a world superpower in the 1940s, mostly unwillingly and unwittingly. There were a lot of rather brilliant men in the U.S. government at the time, the late 1940s. No “general war” against Communism ever occurred. International institutions were set up that last to this day. Was Truman wrong to intervene in Korea? Maybe. I have to reluctantly say that I think so. Once the commitment came, the USA couldn’t get out of it. Propping up South Korea was very expensive over the years, and I am not sure it has ever served a real U.S. interest.

The best presidents according to the same author: (1) Tyler, (2) Harding, (3) Hoover. 

This is just foolishness. These guys were not the three best. Come on.

The malcontents were out in force on June 12th, 2015 at Gwanghwamun Plaza [광화문광장] in Seoul. This was the height of the MERS Panic of 2015. The MERS virus cleared the customers out of the department stores, but alas was not strong enough to clear out Gwanghwamun’s protesters. A few of the protesters wore surgical masks. I didn’t.

Gwanghwamun was once the core of downtown Seoul. That was a long time back, when Seoul had a single, identifiable downtown — until around the mid-20th century. Today, Gwanghwamun is home to plenty of office space, a few government agencies, and has been molded into a tourist center. You’ll find museums, monuments, and the main former royal palace (Gwanghwamun is the name of south gate of the main palace). The U.S. embassy is there. The huge Kyobo bookstore is there.

The most interesting thing about Gwanghwamun, to me, though, is that by today it is a central place for South Korean malcontents to gather and hold their signs, shout their slogans, and annoy passersby. My impression is that the malcontentry has increased in the 2010s over what I recall in my first times there in 2009. The “malcontents” are of all sorts, most often in the guise of Christian religious extremists and far-left political protesters.

I got some good pictures of two particular protesters that day and can “profile” them a little:

(1) “U.S. Military, Get Out!”

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A snapshot of the South Korea Far Left. Here we have an anti-American, implicitly-pro-North-Korean protester (being explicitly pro-NK is illegal), holding vigil in front of Gwanghwamun’s gleaming golden King Sejong The Great statue. 


The protester kept his head down. You see him and his sign at the very bottom right of the first picture. The same man and his sign are fully visible in the second picture. (The U.S. flag waves in front of the U.S. embassy across the street.) Here we go: 

The sign’s contents with my translations:

탄저균 반입 THAAD 배치 미군은 이땅을 떠나라! 메르스 확산 6.15 부정 박근혜정권 퇴진하라! 
U.S. Military, Get Out of Our Land! We Don’t Want Your Anthrax and THAAD Missiles!
Park Geun-Hye Regime, You Can’t Control MERS! Resign Now!

자주통일과민주주의를위한 코리아연대
The Korean Solidarity Organization for Independent Unification and Democracy

The slogans come from two recent news stories, neither of which I was much aware of. First story: “Live Anthrax Accidentally Shipped to S Korea and US Labs“. The second story references the debate on whether a U.S.-made anti-missile defense system called THAAD should be deployed in South Korea or not.

I wrote above that the Gwanghwamun of the 2010s is a big tourist draw. This was a good Friday afternoon, but the place is remarkably empty. This was the several-week-window when MERS changed a lot. We see only a single pair of tourists and can count eight yellow-vested policemen. These police are all around, and in my impression much more visible than before. (The U.S. embassy is right across the street and the ambassador was slashed by a would-be assassin a few months ago.)

(2) “Stop the Seorak Mountain Cable Car!!”

Another protester at Gwanghwamun that day, a ways to the south.

This man’s sign says this (with my translation):

설악산 케이블카 반대!!
Stop the Seorak Mountain Cable Car!!

I had no idea, but it seems there is a plan to construct a cable car to the very highest summit of Seorak Mountain [설악산], in addition to a lesser cable car than already exists (which doesn’t go to the summit). Seorak is perhaps South Korea’s most famous mountain. I must say I agree with the protester. A lunkering cable car up to the summit would detract from it all. This is a common sort of development in Korea, and I expect it will likely go forward.

Here is another recent protest against the new Seorak Cable Car I find online:

At left, the small sign says:

망가지 버린 자연환을 우리아이들에게 물려줄 수 없습니다.
Ruined Nature Cannot be Passed Down to Our Children.

The Seoul protester was standing at the highest foot-traffic area of Gwanghwamun Plaza, right in front of the intersection (once the busiest automobile intersection in the country). Admiral Yi Sun-Shin overlooks this intersection:

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Alas, this is not a hard movie to analyze, I think. 

The message is that the nuclear arms race had a distinct kind of insanity to it, with no possible winners, and further that nuclear war scenarios can easily, and actually will inevitably, encourage insane thinking. The one general (George C. Scott) who pleads with the president to go all-in with a nuclear first strike when they realize they cannot recall the bomber with the damaged radio system, he does actually seem to be right with his argument. He argues that it’s better to go with a first strike to knock out most Soviet capacity, and lose 20 million Americans killed, than sit and wait and lose 150 million Americans killed. His reasoning, it seems to me, is both correct and insane at the same time.

It’s been a long time since 1964. 

I don’t think there’s been much fear of generalized nuclear annihilation in a long while. When my political and cultural awareness were coming into focus, around the mid-1990s, I recall a little of that, left over from the Cold War days, but it was by then rapidly fading. I don’t think people born in the 1990s ever saw any of it. 

In the world of the 2000s-2010s, at most there has been a low-level fear of a single, rogue mini nuclear attack by an Islamic-State-like group on a particular enemy city, but that would be a small tragedy in the grand scheme — nothing like the kind of mutual extinguishing of industrial civilization that a general ICBM nuclear exchange would’ve meant in the Cold War, as parodied in Strangelove. 

This fear belongs to another era. And yet, the nuclear missiles are still there. Thousands of them…

I liked the movie very much, especially the acting of George C. Scott and Peter Sellers. I learned, after looking up the movie online, that Peter Sellers played three parts. This may be the first time I’ve ever seen him. He was a British comedic actor. He is long dead now.

I saw this movie for the first time last week thanks to a website called BnW Movies (which shows copyright-expired movies mostly from the 1910s-1940s for free. Strangelove, from 1964, is the latest-produced movie on the site.)

I have some amount of Danish ancestry via my father. The important (by European tradition) “father’s father father’s…” (patrilineal) line for me comes from Denmark (see post-223), but that line entered the USA a long time ago now. I have never been to Denmark. I have met personally and had interaction with only two Danes in my life.

Let me write a few words about these two Danes.

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I look forward to meeting a third Dane someday. Maybe more. Unlikely a third or beyond will get a full write-up like this, though.

I am going to Taiwan. It will be my first time there.

A picture of the Taipei skyline (featuring “Taipei 101”, the world’s tallest building from 2004-2010):

I know a Taiwanese family in the USA who have graciously connected me with friends and family there, so I expect the trip will be good. I leave Friday afternoon May 29th, and will return to Korea the following Wednesday.

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Taiwan is somewhat famous for food. The following foods have been recommended to me by the Taiwanese student in my Korean class:

The study of a language is never an “island unto itself” but rather comes as part of a package involving an entire culture and worldview which has evolved with over centuries and milennia. The worldview must be, and inevitably is, learned in parallel with a language. It is possible to learn the culture without the language, but it is more profound when learning the language. Plus you can communicate with natives on their own terms.

One benefit of studying Korean more-or-less full time over the past year has been the clarifying and/or opening up of such a new perspective to me, beyond what I understood about Korea, and East Asia generally, before. (see, e.g., post #261 “But Which Twin is the Elder?”).

Here is a possible example of this. A Chinese native speaker in my Korean class sent me a set of paired images delineating differences between West and East and asked for comment. Simple pictures, simple headings, but not all have clear meanings. I think it’s well done and thought provoking. The important thing is that this was produced by East Asians in East Asia, probably Chinese. It was found on a Chinese website.

Blue is Westerners. Red is Easterners:
 

인간 관계, Connections Between People: I am not sure exactly how to interpret this. Asians have a wider network of acquaintances whom they can rely on for favors? Westerners have fewer people they can rely on?
나(자신), Myself: Westerners have higher self esteem (maybe excessive). Asians tend to be internally nervous and self-conscious.
문제 대처방식, Coping with Problems: Like one of those ink blot tests, many things are possible to see here, too. Asians avoid problems rather than dealing with them as they should? Or is it that Asians smartly go around problems while we foolhardedly and obliviously plow on into them?

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시간 관념, Concept of Time: I’m not sure what this means. Westerners live in the moment? East Asians are smarter about managing time? I am reminded of the famous experiment that offers kindergarten students the choice of one chocolate treat now or two at some specified time in the future. More Asians would choose to wait and get two rather than dive in and enjoy just one immediately.
식당에서, At the Restaurant: Asians are louder at restaurants. Or, Asians have more fun at restaurants?
여해, Trip: Even before the rise of the digital- and now the smartphone-camera, this was the stereotype about Asians.

의사 소통, Doctor’s Communication: I don’t know much about doctors in East Asia, having rarely been. My one impression was that doctors in Korea were quite rude, abrupt, and even arrogant, which was bizarre because U.S. doctors generally take pains to at least appear as approachable as possible.

줄서기, Waiting in Line: Japanese do not do this, but Chinese do, and Koreans are somewhere in the middle. It is interesting that whoever made this set of images equates “the West” with Ordentlichkeit and respect for rules in public like lining up neatly. This means “The West” is actually Northwest Europe and its overseas extensions (like the USA). Southern Europeans don’t form prim lines like this while waiting. (The “Italian queue”).

파티, Party: The Blue party looks much more fun.

서로에 대한 인식, Perception of Each Other: This is a strange one.

Anger: Western direct expression of emotions vs. Eastern “Saving Face”. Westerners would view a fellow Westerner who acts like the Red character (hiding actual emotions and pretending to feel the opposite way) with suspicion and even contempt.

Weekend: Yes. This really hits home. I have known many Westerners in Korea and Asia who don’t like going places among throngs of people all the time. Many complain and cannot handle it. We evolved in lower density environments. I am totally on the Blue side here. This was one of the hardest things to get used to for me in Korea.

Lifestyle: Right, but I do think Asians fundamentally misunderstand the Western side of this. From conversations with Koreans, it seems there is an idea that Western individualism means extreme selfishness, a complete disregard for the well-being of others. This might be a reasonable assumption. In reality, the results seem to be the reverse. Americans and other Westerners are very much open to strangers, help them when in need, and are kind and friendly to them for no reason. The irony is that Asians’ group thinking is that though they take care of the people in their group, they are a lot less open to outsiders.

Eating: I don’t understand. Does it mean Breakfast-Lunch-Dinner? Does it mean three “courses” within a meal? Does it just mean general eating habits (Westerners eat twice as much cold food as hot)?

Boss: Right. Maybe not quite right. The Blue character should be slightly bigger.

Late April 2009
Me (freshly arrived in Korea for the first time): “Can I drink the tap water?”
He (American, several years in Korea): [Calmly] “Never drink the tap water.”

That was that. I didn’t question it. Why would I? He was the expert; I was a complete outsider.

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He had this idea not from any data or scientific analysis. He had this idea because Koreans don’t drink their own tap water. The Korea Herald reports that only ten percent of South Koreans drink tap water (vs. 82% of Americans, it says). Chosun Ilbo in 2011 reported that 2.6% of Koreans drank straight tap water.

Many Westerners who end up in Korea don’t get the message. I’ve known a few who openly say they drink tap water. Never have I heard a Korean say this. I most recently met a tall young man from Georgia (born 1993), recently arrived in Korea, who triumphantly announced that he drinks the tap water. My first instinct at his proclamation was that he needs to get with the program and do as the local people do. Then again, maybe the local people are all wrong and he should do what’s right after all. (The Herald itself says that the people are wrong and the Korean tap water is fine.)

What does it say about Koreans that they drink their own tap water at such low rates compared to the rest of the rich world, the USA and other Western countries (e.g., Germany: 90% drink tap water according to the Internet consensus)? The easiest answer is that Korea was poor just a short time ago and so blah blah blah. This is a stock answer to a lot of “questions about Korea”. More interesting lines of speculation are possible. Here is one: The desire for elaborate filtration systems or bottled water comes from the same place as the custom to always take off shoes at the door at all times. I think you may see where I’m going with that. Another possible speculation: For all Korea’s wealth today and its impressive “soft power” in Asia, Koreans don’t necessarily trust their own institutions (water as a social microcosm).

A very predictable thing has happened in Baltimore. It was so predictable, in fact, that even I predicted it, on these pages, some weeks ago. In reaction to the anti-police political climate (following the race riots and the charging of six officers with “murder”), police are stepping back. The number of arrests being made in Baltimore has gone way down (May 2015 has had fewer than half as many as normal), and murders have gone way up (May 2015 is Baltimore’s deadliest month since the 1990s). It’s reasonable to presume that one follows the other.

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A Baltimore policeman will feel that it’s better, in the present political climate, to just let things slide and not try too hard. Why chase down this suspect who, I expect, will violently resist? If he ends up injured or worse in the affair, the agitators will start chattering away about more Racist Police Terror. The media will get on board. Political lynch mob will form. Dark clouds. Could lose my job. Could even go to prison. Destroyed reputation: “Hey, aren’t you that racist police guy who beat up that unarmed kid?” No, let’s just drive on.

Who can blame him?

These are the fruits of the recent politically-motivated, irresponsible, racialized demonization of the USA’s police. I want no part of this movement (“Stop Racist Police Terror”), no matter how fashionable it may be.

” Mad Max: Fury Road” turned out to be great. I didn’t expect this. In truth, one of the best such movies I’ve seen.

Here is a question. If today’s elaborate, gentle, safe-seeming society and institutions — liberal democracy, let’s say — collapsed due to some enormous shock or irreversible crisis, what kind of political institutions and cultures would human survivors rally around; what kind of stable systems would rise up? In other words, what would post-apocalyptic cultures look like? Mad Max lives in one.

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Mad Max‘s world is dominated by rival warlord cultures which are reinforced by quasi-religious cults of personality around the leaders. These cults of personality are in turn based on exclusive access to certain resources, and groups without access to a resource are relegated to banditry or drifting along like Mad Max himself does. These militaristic cultures have vehicles and firearms and lead a mutually-hostile, bellum omnium contra omnes (war of all against all, Thomas Hobbes) existence. We can see nothing “liberal,” much less “democratic,” about anything in any of these societies (with one possible exception at the end). The main culture we see in the movie is militaristic and aggressive, and has a domestic policy based on kinds of repression that would shock even Hobbes.

Mad Max himself is a drifter, who, as the movie opens, is caught and enslaved by one of the warlord cultures. This culture’s power flows from the fact that in a world that seems totally parched and desert-like, it controls access to a particular underground major water source and can turn the spigot on or off at will. This power makes the regular people think of the masked supreme leader as a god, and the ruling political clique as divinely mandated. The culture has an entire army of young warrior fanatics whose highest desire is to die in combat for the god figure and enter “Valhalla”.

Mad Max comes to escape slavery and gets mixed up with a renegade smuggling operation in which a particular woman tries to smuggle out a half dozen young women, slave concubines of the masked water-controlling demigod. One is pregnant during the escape. The movie consists mostly of this journey, the things they go through along the way, and the dramatic chase led by personally by the masked supreme leader to recover his property (as he calls them).

The movie’s limited scope is appealing (it is not something like “How our heroes save the world”). There seem to be backstories to each character and culture we see; we catch glimpses of things enough to get a vague feel for an entire world. Overall, the world we see is allusive to historical cultures and what we can surmise about prehistoric cultures.

The movie takes place in the future, though. A return to barbarism. Speaking of which, I see echoes of ISIS in Mad Max. In other words, Mad Max is a powerful vision of reality (and only a few steps removed from ISIS in Iraq and Syria, if the stories are to be believed). It is a reality stripped of all pretenses. It is a world in which scarcity bites a lot harder than it does now (scarcity still very much exists in the present day, a fact we can easily forget). The world we see in Mad Max is enormously affected by scarcity of resources following the catastrophe (which is never discussed in the movie, is probably in the distant past in the movie’s universe and long out of the collective memory). I don’t think we are even shocked by the barbarity of the main culture we see, because life is so hard. In such a world, we accept that this is just the way it is. Brutal.

How hard would it be for a vast, well-organized Luddite conspiracy to cripple the Internet? 

As it exists today, “the Internet” seems like a kind of magic (e.g., people now talk about storage of data “in the Cloud”), but the Internet really is and remains just a network of physical boxes (servers) and physical wires.

Say a number of Luddite commando teams are raised. Armed with plain old-fashioned hammers, they are dispatched to smash up the world’s limited number of servers and dynamite major fiber-optic cable chokepoints. Couldn’t doing so “destroy” the Internet?

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How many physical computer hard-drives (servers) would the Luddite commandos have to smash? In other words, how big is the Internet, physically? A few weeks ago, at a book store, I browsed through a (paper) book published last year that answered this. It is by the writer of the popular xkcd.com web comics.

The answer: The physical Internet in the mid-2010s may still be smaller than a single oil tanker (maybe two, by now. The original answer was written in 2012). An oil tanker is a just few football fields in length, and a whole lot of the world’s servers are together at few central locations, or so is my understanding. This wouldn’t require so much smashing, after all.

After writing this, I did a search and found a thought exercise by someone a lot more informed than I on how destruction of the Internet could be achieved.