Category: Uncategorized

I was surprised to learn that it is impossible, in South Korea, to “fail a grade”.

I mean, if a Korean does very poorly in (say) 1st-grade of high school (=10th grade in the USA), failing all tests, and shows not even a basic understanding of the material taught, he will still go up to 2nd grade of high school with the others of the same age. There is also no “summer school”, as we have the in the USA, to make up failed classes.

What is the incentive to learn, if you will just advance to the next grade no matter what?”, I asked.

Two answers were forthcoming: “Making parents happy” and “getting into a good university”.

I found these answers uncompelling, and it reminds me a lot of what I wrote in post-73.

“She is most frugal in matters of business, but in her private life she reveals a streak of ___________.”
             (A) antipathy
             (B) misanthropy
             (C) virtuosity
             (D) equanimity
             (E) prodigality

This question appeared recently in the English-education insert that typically accompanies the Korea Herald newspaper. It is from a semi-daily section called “John’s GRE Prep”.

I’ve done dozens of “John’s” GRE practice questions, and I’ve gotten every one of them right, until this one.

I rejected choices (A) and (B) immediately, but none of the other three seemed like knockouts. I was doing this on the subway, so I may have been unable to properly concentrate. But the real reason I think I got it wrong was that I was led astray by Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John (no relation to the John of John’s GRE Prep), whichever one of them recounted the Prodigal Son parable.

My knowledge of the famous Prodigal Son parable has led me to believe, from a young age, that “prodigal” means “rebellious”. “Rebellious” is not really a good candidate to be an opposite of “frugal”, I thought, so I gave that one a low-mental-ranking. I wavered. No choices seemed right. My final choice was (D). That was wrong. The correct answer is (E).

“Prodigality”, it turns out, has the following definitions (according to this): 1. Extravagant wastefulness. 2. Profuse generosity. 3. Extreme abundance; lavishness. / Not “rebelliousness” at all. Since age 9 or so, I’ve inferred that the word was tied-in with the theology of that particular parable, which is more about the rebelliousness of the son, turning away from the father, and not about the son’s “lavish wastefulness”.

The price I pay for a haircut has risen: From 6,000 Won ($5.30 at current exchange) to 7,000 Won ($6.20).

For the past year and a half, I’ve gotten my hair cut by a woman who runs a small barbershop in eastern Bupyeong**. After today’s haircut, she handed me back three 1,000-Won notes after I handed her a 10,000-note. She’d smiled and said something I didn’t understand, but indicated that she was aware she was giving me 3,000, which means the new price is 7,000. This is the first time I’ve paid that price. / Alright. It’s still half what I paid in the USA.

In all my visits to this woman, she has never once tried even one word of English. Our limited communication is in Korean. I appreciate that, even though it means very limited communication. / There are some foreigners of my acquaintance here who have located an “English-speaking barber” in central-Bucheon, to whom they shell out 20-25,000 (about $20) for a man’s haircut. I consider that a waste of money, but “to each his own”.

** — “Bupeyong” (부평) is an older neighborhood between Incheon and Seoul. I live to the east of Bupyeong, in a newer development called Jung-Dong, Bucheon. I have always felt a bit more comfortable in humbler Bupyeong than in self-consciously wealthier Bucheon. Bupyeong is also where I used to play soccer. See post-6. Actually, the barbershop is just above the anchor-point of post-6’s map. I found it once on the way to play soccer, and I’ve stuck with it.

In late 2009, my then-boss in Ilsan bought a new Volkswagen SUV. I was surprised that she bought a foreign car. At the time, I interpreted it as luxury purchase. Due to tariffs on foreign cars, a Korean buying a foreign car was engaging in overt conspicuous-consumption, I thought.

It seems that my boss was on the cusp of a trend, back in 2009. According to the Korea Herald, foreign carmakers’ “market share” in South Korea (which I assume to mean the percent of cars on the road) has increased as follows:

Share of Foreign Cars on the Road in South Korea
        4.7% : Mid-2009
        6.7% : Mid-2010 [+2.0% market-share]
        7.4% : Mid-2011 [+0.7%]
        10% : Mid-2012 [+2.6%]
        11.7%: April 2013 [On track to be +2.0% for Mid-2013 over Mid-2012]

Soon, one-in-eight cars on the roads of South Korea will be of foreign origin. My former-boss was one of those responsible, as her purchase helped push the foreign-car-share past the 5%-threshold back in 2009.

South Korea’s long-tightly-protected car market may finally be opening up, perhaps partly due to the Free Trade Agreements. Then again, these foreign cars seem to me to be all “high-end”. (Americans don’t think of VW as a “luxury brand”, but in Korea it rather is. So is Ford; the few I see are “high-end”.) There is a street in Gangnam that is lined with glamorous stores selling glamorous foreign cars, displayed in their windows [as is usual here]. If this is the “image”/”market” for foreign-cars, then growth will slow and stop.

The USA, by comparison, has a 60% foreign-car share. (60% of cars on U.S. roads are not made by U.S. companies).

[A follow-up to post-67: Syria’s Complicated Conflict]

I don’t claim to understand Syria or its war, but I trust experts who say it is complicated more than I trust third-rate pundits in the USA who repeat silly claims that it is a “popular rebellion against a dictator that is being repressed”. That kind of analysis is easy and lazy, and ultimately boring.

If Syria is a multifaceted ethnic-religious-political-cultural civil war with significant foreign intervention, what are some analogies to other wars in our history which Western people would know more about? Two strike me:

(1) The Spanish Civil War (1930s). Orwell’s book, Homage to Catalonia, described a frantic and angry civil war within the “Republican” (anti-Franco) side itself. He identified three main paragroupings (and his favored side was crushed by the Stalinists, as he recounts it). This is similar to the wide range of ideologies among Syria’s co-called “Rebels” (and the government). In Spain, there was not necessarily an ethnic-religious angle akin to Syria’s today (though the case can be made, it was once pointed out to me, for a real implicit ethnic-religious angle to the Spanish war).

(2) Europe’s Thirty Years War (1618-1648), a war for Catholic or Protestant domination of Central Europe. This had a definite ethnic-religious angle, as Syria does, and many interventions. The 30 Years War ended in a kind of draw. The German-speaking population of Europe was reduced by one-third; neither Catholic nor Protestant dominated. However, Protestants won more rights, the empire was weakened, and Germany was splintered into 300 statelets.

I’ve often thought about this (boringly-named) “Thirty Years War”. Its Protestant hero, King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, seemed to have a street or a platz named after him in every Protestant city I visited in Germany in 2007.

One result I see of this war was the end of a Catholic-dominated Europe. Before 1648, Protestants were always a kind of rebellious minority, in fact or in imagination. The war won them normality, a large majority of German-speakers in Europe, and a major “civilizational morale boost” (or so I imagine). The split with the medieval and feudal past was complete, allowing the Protestants of Europe to seize their own destiny. Up to three centuries of spectacular output followed. The early USA, e.g. is an obvious product of secular-Protestants.

Being of half-Scandinavian background and (nearly) half-German-Lutheran background, I almost can’t help but sympathize with the Protestant side in that war. And, in my biased view, an abject defeat of the Protestant side (e.g., by a total failure of the Swedish campaigns under King Gustavus) would have been a defeat for Europe itself, a partial step back into the medieval order.

The paragraph directly above, if its (i.e., my) prejudices and ‘national’ feeling were transposed onto Arabs, and altered in form to fit their Islamic heritage rather than my own, may explain why there will be no easy end to the Syrian war (with the possible exception of a deux ex machina in the form of thousands of NATO bombs, as in Libya).

After reading an essay entitled “Syria’s Sectarian Stalemate” by an American Middle-East expert, Bernard Haykel, I’m reminded again what the the Syrian war really is: Complicated. Most people, or so is my impression, wave-away the war as a “popular rebellion against a autocratic government”. If you read the linked-to essay, it is really not that at all.

There are a lot of sides in Syria, a lot of of “ideologies” involved, several (defacto) ethnicities involved. There are varied religious, cultural, ethnic, and political angles at play. There are volunteers from all over the world coming in to fight for their favored sides. Foreign states sponsor and cheerlead for their favored sides.

I have a foreign coworker who was “studying abroad” in Syria in 2011, before the worst of the fighting began. He is white, but studied (and speaks some) Arabic. I’d think he’d have insights into the conflict, but he is one of those (i.e., the great majority) who waves the Syrian War away as “rebellion against a dictator”, which is a narrative that I don’t find compelling, from all I’ve read.

Maybe it’s hard to understand a locale’s “politics” (broadly) just from within that locale.

Back in April of 2012, there was an election for all seats in the South Korean national legislature (국회).

The results of the past few elections, abbreviated and simplified, are as follows:

Seats in the South Korean National Assembly Won, By Election
……………[Left-Wing] .. [Right-Wing] .. [Socialist] .. [Other]
2000: ……….115…………………..152…………………..0……………….6
2004: ……….161…………………..125………………….10……………….3
2008: ………..84…………………..185…………………..5……………..25
2012: ………..127…………………..157………………….13……………….3

The “right-wing” coalition thus won the following shares of seats:
            2000: 56% of seats
             2004: 42% of seats
             2008: 62% of seats
              2012: 52% of seats

There was a back-and-forth “seesawing” in the 2000s. Then 2012 put the power-balance back where it was in 2000.

The days after the election, I reproduced the above table on the board in my classes at the hagwon in Bucheon at which I worked (including the Korean names of the political parties), without further comment. I asked students to write about these results, or prepare spoken responses about them, depending on what kind of class it was.

One rather high-ability 8th-grade girl (born in January 1999, so age 13 as of April 2012), wrote what I thought was a remarkably mature essay on April 12th. That was less than 24 hours after the result was in: Emotions were still raw.

Her essay, verbatim [Note that “New Frontier” is the current-name of the main “right-wing” party]:

The girl was disappointed [“disappearing”] that the two big “party machines”, about which many people are cynical, gobbled-up 95% of the seats that were up for election. Independent candidates ran, but, as in the USA, nearly all lost. The minor “far-left” party-bloc did pretty well, taking 13 seats, but only three elected were “independents”.

Whether the left-wing coalition had “won” (by gaining a net of 43 seats over ’08) or “lost” (by failing to win a majority of seats) was the main object of discussion in most of these 7th-9th graders’ essays. Many discussed how much they disliked the “right-wing” party, and the then-president, Lee Myung-bak. For instance, on the night of the election, before the results were in, a student wrote: “I predict the Democratic Unity Party will win. Because people saw Lee Myung Park’s barbarities.”  That last word will have been thanks to a cell-phone-dictionary.

I think this girl’s essay is more mature than all that. She is not a partisan. Perhaps hers is more mature than what most adults would come up with, in fact. If I can rephrase her last three lines: “More independent political voices is exactly what Korea needs. The two mega-parties‘ backstabbing power-politics really do nothing but weaken this society. They bicker with each other and waste time, accomplishing nothing except the demoralization of the public.”

This “spirit” (independent, anti-big-party) lost out big time in the later, Dec. 2012, presidential election, in which one product of a big party machine faced off against another. Park Geun-Hye, a big player in the “right-wing” machine, won. The other guy, who lost, was a product of the “left-wing” machine.

An independent voice was in the race for a while: A popular IT self-made millionaire and professor named Ahn Cheol-Soo (안철수). He polled well but dropped out, sure enough, after intense pressure from the left-wing machine.

The latest news is that Ahn is back. He won a seat to the legislature in a special election in 2013. He may well be elected president in December 2017. If so, then the above girl essayist — whose name I have now forgotten, who will be about to turn 19 years old in Dec. 2017, and who will probably be in college at the time — may be happy. Maybe she will even remember writing that essay way back in April 2012.

I give out U.S. coins as prizes every now and then to the Korean students.

It’s mostly pennies, nickels, and dimes. Once or twice, I offered a gold-dollar coin as a big, end-of-semester prize to a winner of one contest or other.

Often, the kids are dazzled by these coins.

I happened to pocket some nickels for that purpose one day this past week. I had the idea to give them out as prizes in the “T1” class which consists of 7th and 8th graders. Earlier that day, though, I’d bought something and gotten change, so I had some 100-Won pieces (equivalent to about 10 U.S. cents) in my pocket, too. I didn’t remember this. They all got mixed together.

A little “social experiment” came together in my mind when I realized I had coins from both countries. I offered well-performing students a choice between a nickel and a 100-won piece.

This can only count as anecdote, because the sample size was tiny, but…. I noticed that the lethargic, unambitious, quieter students — who tended to be lower-ability — opted for the 100-won coin, while the students who seem more optimistic about English, are more talkative in class, and who seem to be of higher-ability, chose the nickel.

I don’t think this should be a surprise. The motivation is the same:
— Type #1’s thinking:“I can buy things with 100-Won coin, but that nickel is of no use to me.”
— Type #2’s thinking: “Although I could use the 100-Won coin, the nickel is something new and fascinating; I’ve never possessed one, or even held one in my hand before. The nickel is much more appealing!” 

It’s clear which kind of student-temperament would tend to do better in language learning.

It’s also tempting to extrapolate this simple coin-choice “experiment” into an entire Weltanschauung, as above. Although that leap may be both reckless and hasty, it really makes sense to me. It also, I think, could point to why Koreans are (collectively) so famously-bad at learning English, despite their huge commitment to it for so long: The Type #1 attitude (above) prevails in this society. Most Koreans, I think, see English as not relevant to their lives beyond some piece-of-paper that says they got such-and-such a score, qualifying them for this-or-that.

This “#1” attitude even dominates most hagwons (language-learning institutes, at which I work), it seems to me. I was just thinking about the fact that my present-place-of-employment has a whole lot of signs hanging on the walls. They are all in Korean only. If this hagwon were committed to English, it would put them in both languages.

I mentioned “Jeong” (정), a “Korean emotion” in my digression-laden account of what happened on my first night in Korea. (It is a series of posts here which I’ve lamely titled “One Night in April of 2009”; “jeong” was mentioned in Part V. I hope to complete this “One Night” series in June.) I offered a definition of “jeong”, as I’ve come to understand it over my years in Korea. [Note: I prefer to write it in English as “juhng”, which I feel makes it easiest to pronounce as Koreans say it. How is a “layman” supposed to pronounce “j-e-o-n-g”?]

I refer anyone interested in the “What is Jeong” issue, to a continuation of that discussion.

The temperature in Seoul broke the 30 Celsius threshold (86 F) on May 23rd. Way back in post-34 (“Two Weeks of Spring”) I repeated a joke about Korea: “Spring here is great. Those are really two of the nicest weeks you’ll ever see”.

It was early May when “spring weather” began (by which I mean temperatures reliably in the comfortable “10 to Low-20s” Celsius range [50s-70s Fahrenheit]). Consequently, that “two weeks of spring” joke may not be off by much, after all. The ten-day forecast calls for temperatures in the high-20s [80s F] most every day.

A screenshot of the temperatures in Celsius this month so far:

Incidentally, my father once explained to me an easy way to figure out Celsius:

0 is Cold
10 is Cool
20 is Warm
30 is Hot

I am fascinated to see that the BBC’s “Country Ratings Poll” 2013 shows that, internationally, Israel and North Korea are viewed as about equally-negative influences on the world.

Israel
21% said Israel had a “positive influence” on the world
52% said Israel had a “negative influence” on the world
[25-to-10 : Ratio of Negatives-to-Positives]

North Korea
19% said NK had a “positive influence” on the world
54% said NK had a “negative influence” on the world
[28-to-10 : Ratio of Negatives-to-Positives]

The USA was viewed narrowly more positively than negatively. The BBC headlined that Germany was “the most popular country in the world”. In terms of positive-to-negative ratio (as above), though, Canada seems to be the real #1. Germany’s ratio is 39-to-10 positive; Canada’s ratio: 42-to-10 positive. / The USA’s ratio in 2013 is 13-to-10 positive, similar to South Korea’s 12-to-10 positive. Japan’s popularity in 2013 took a hit, probably due to the island disputes, and maybe the more-recent depreciation of their currency. In 2012, it seems that Japan had an impressive 28-to-10 positive ratio, down in 2013 to 19-to-10.

Perhaps the biggest news of the poll, though, is that people are getting annoyed about the EU project:

Until 2008 or so, people were singing the praises of the EU, and it seemed things really worked well there. I “lived” there for most of 2007, and I can attest that the mood was optimistic in most ways. I even had to read a book called “The European Dream”, which predicted the EU was headed for a golden age which everyone would have to follow. It’s unclear, now, whether the EU will survive (in present form) even to 2020.

I’ve been watching “The Simpsons” with Spanish audio a bit, lately. I don’t know why.

In one episode I watched in Spanish, Homer gets in a fight with the local garbage-men and then runs for sanitation commissioner. Homer develops the campaign slogan “Can’t Someone Else Do It?” and proposes that garbage-men pick up trash directly from waste baskets in people’s homes.

Now, “The Simpsons” is a smarter show than most people realize, and a lot of the lines are awkward to translate. The Spanish translators (who I presume to be Mexicans) quite often change lines for this reason.

Here is Homer’s campaign speech, in English (found here):

The line “That’s not America. That’s not even Mexico!” would be a case calling for a….tactful translation, or perhaps a subtle line change for the Mexican/Latin-American audience. Instead, this is what the translators went for:

Translation:  “That’s not the way my country is. That’s the way the neighbor to the south is!“

This a big change in meaning. The new line is much more (and directly) insulting to Mexico! What a strange choice.

[Venting about my job situation]

At my job (Sept. 2011 to Sept. 2013) [an English-language institute (“hagwon”) in Korea], there are three “first tier” managers, five “second-tier” managers specific to my campus, and several “third-tier” managers. There are only a few Korean teachers who are not managers. My former British coworker, E., pointed out the ridiculousness of there being far more Korean “managers” than regular workers (i.e., teachers). It seems like a situation right out of “Dilbert”.

Today, there are six foreign teachers, none of whom are “managers” in any way, shape, or form.

Formerly, we had M., who was sort of a foreign manager. He was “foreign head teacher”, though he was strictly limited to authority over the other foreign teachers. (It wouldn’t do for any foreigner to have any authority over any Korean, of course…) He left in late June 2012. For reasons I still don’t understand, one or several of the “second-tier” managers (three of whom are distant blood-relatives) saw to it that no foreigner took his place, so there has not been any foreigner with any official authority at all since then, leading to inefficiency, resentment, and a lot of bad feelings over questions of seniority. Now, typical people respect ‘commands’ from superiors, even if we may dislike them (“We’re doing it this way, guys…”, “Ok, boss…”), but if it’s just some equal, some coworker, strutting over and telling you what to do, there’s a feeling of “Who does she think she is?” This leads to fewer decisions being made, fewer collective efforts, less “strategic” thinking, less planning, and inefficiency over delegation of responsibilities. Few are willing to slide into the hated role of “guy who bosses around his equals”, so planning is just avoided.

Say one of us develops an idea for a change of course, an idea on how to tighten things up or freshen things up, or make things more more efficient, etc., etc. Any change of course will be more difficult than sliding along in the lazy status quo, so if authority is not attached to a “change of course” idea, people will likely resent it, and likely ignore the “advice”. A prolonged situation of a group working together in which no one is in authority may lead to rivalries and bitterness. Most likely, I suppose, it will lead to apathy, as mentioned above.

I describe here what has happened in my workplace since last July. I have seen examples of the resentment I allude to above from all the foreigners here. I mean, when an “equal” waltzes in and “tells someone what to do” (with an air of authority, despite officially having none). Another case is when someone is having private meetings with a Korean boss with the rest of us excluded. I, myself, have been on both ends of this. I guess we all have.

In theory, our direct superior since July 1st of 2012 has been a Korean manager, a tall stringbean of a woman with a soft voice and a bit of a squirrely manner whose English is great but who is nevertheless very hard to approach; who is seriously passive-aggressive; who is often absent and cannot be found; who carries grudges about perceived slights against her; who refuses to listen to constructive advice. I could rattle off several more characteristics in that vein. I suspect, based on what she’s told me, that it was this woman who saw to it no one replaced M.

In general, most of our weekly interaction with her is during the Friday “foreign teacher meetings”, which happen about 75% of the time. In those meetings, she drones on and on, and often pretends not to know certain pieces of information to save face, which is frustrating.

The thing that really bugs me most about this set-up is this: The people who end up rising to the top in such “power-vacuums”, it seems to me, tend towards the sociopathic (to lean on the hyperbolic side), frankly. E.g., Stalin. When power within a group is uncertain, those who are most ruthless in playing one against another, those who are best at manipulating others, tend to end up on top. Not  necessarily the most talented, dedicated, or experienced, but the best manipulators. This has also happened at my present workplace (and it is all magnified because the Koreans with real power often can’t pick up on Western personality archetypes that might be considered toxic in the West). I am thinking, with this, of one particularly manipulative female foreign teacher.

I am reminded, for some reason, of the idea that “there’s a sucker at every poker table, and if you don’t know who the sucker is at your table, it’s you”.

I respect George Orwell because he was not an angry ideologue.

“To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to
feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilisation.”

Orwell wrote the above in April(?) 1945, just before the war’s end. He was touring Germany at the time, as best I can tell, as a correspondent. That ominous line was in an essay I came across called Future of a Ruined Germany .

Here was a committed Socialist (as Orwell described himself), a volunteer for a Marxist militia in the Spanish Civil War, remembered as a leading “anti-totalitarian” author, seemingly expressing deep regret at what had just happened to “Nazi Germany”. The war, in that essay, comes off almost like a catastrophe of nature, one that had just reduced city after city of this major world power to heap after heap of smoldering debris.

Elsewhere in the essay, Orwell wrote:

I happen to have spent time in Dresden, Germany. A friend has lived there for several years. He will move to Riga shortly. I visited him in December 2010.

In Dresden, the worst firebombing raid of the war in Europe occurred on my birthday (Feb. 13th). The city was overloaded with refugees, and many of them were killed in the firestorm. A young Kurt Vonnegut was a POW in Dresden at the time. He used the shock of the experience, twenty years later, to write the classic “Slaughterhouse Five”. (In visiting Dresden in December 2010, I located the spot where the Vonnegut “slaughterhouse” POW-prison must have been, though it is all different now except for the street name. It was snowing the night I walked the street, just as it was when Vonnegut arrived in December 1944, according to his book.)

About the Dresden firebombing, a German poet wrote the following shortly after it occurred:

“Wer das Weinen verlernt hat, der lernt es wieder beim Untergang Dresdens.”
[He who has forgotten how to weep can learn to do so again from the destruction of Dresden]

I was in Seoul for much of the day Friday, a holiday, the annual celebration of Buddha’s Birthday.

The above is in the evening, in the 8 PM hour, along central-Seoul’s Cheonggye Stream, near City Hall and Gwanghwamun Plaza. The lights have Buddhist religious significance, I suppose.

The crowds were immense, all along the path. When the picture was snapped, I was exiting the stream area after having finished plodding through the crowds for 30 minutes — entry points to the stream are highly limited.

As a follow-up to post-57, there are a couple of other pictures I took on the Buddha’s Birthday holiday that really tell a story when contrasted. First:

The above was at the Jo-Gye Temple compound in north-central Seoul (the old downtown). It is a major site in the Jo-Gye Order of Korean Buddhism. (Incidentally, I see that this denomination officially came together in spring 1962, a year into the Park Chung-Hee era. Did the latter impel the former? General Park declared himself Buddhist. Interestingly, though, according to his recent biography he went to a Protestant church as a boy; later in life gave money to that church.)

I stopped by on Friday, Buddha’s Birthday (석가탄신일). (I was also there in May 2010 with a German man, but that’s a different story…)

Jo-Gye Temple is sort of tucked away. I mean, it’s easy to travel within Seoul for a few days and miss it, if you’re not aware of it. This is not to say it’s small: The compound is quite large; it’s just not overly conspicuous. This befits Buddhism, I suppose. It manages to exude a rather tranquil atmosphere in central Seoul, which is an impressive feat.

Long ago, I didn’t believe the statistics that said South Korea was only “20-25% Buddhist”. Maybe that is the share of active Buddhists. Unfair counting, I thought. I imagined most Koreans were sympathetic to Buddhism as their “ancestral religion” (or something). I imagined most of the population to be nominal Buddhists, as it was“the old Korean religion” (in my mind) and therefore perhaps connected with Korean racialist-nationalism, an ever-present political current in Korea on “left” and “right”. My ideas about Buddhism’s place in Korea were all quite wrong.

In fact, my impression from casual observation is that a 20-25% Buddhist population-share seems too high. It may be an accurate figure, but in most parts of the Seoul Megalopolis I am familiar with, Buddhism is almost invisible. Christianity is very visible, which surprises many.

Korea’s complicated religious history is hard to untangle (as is much of Korean history, generally), but the idea that Buddhism is “the old Korean religion” (to which ‘patriots’ adhere) is dubious. In fact, there is arguably much more “racialist-nationalism” from the Christian side in South Korea today.

Now that I know more, I would say the following is true (and this is all anecdotal from my own observations):
          (1) Most Koreans are indifferent to Buddhism;
          (2) A minority of Koreans are Buddhists or sympathetic to Buddhism;
          (3) A larger minority (a % I wouldn’t even hazard to guess of the Christians) is hostile to Buddhism, at some
               level, on (what appear to be) religious grounds (though I always suspect there is more to that story);

Point (3) leads me to the “contrasting images”. The above two photos depict the (“pro-“)Buddhist side. The contrast is with an antagonistically-anti-Buddhist side.

A certain kind of Christian was out in force in central-Seoul, taunting the Buddhists. It was something (perhaps) like a group of Muslims in New York City assembling outside a church to mock worshipers entering a church for Easter.

I saw them around Jo-Gye Temple. I presume they were also around other temples. Some had loudspeakers blaring (what I presume to be) anti-Buddhist messages. Others were engaged in other forms of anti-Buddhist activism.

These people are a minor nuisance in many public areas on regular Saturdays, but they were really conspicuous in Seoul on Buddha’s Birthday this year. A small team of them I walked past on the way to Jo-Gye Temple was engaged in a loud group-prayer, led by a man in a hat with mic hooked up to a speaker system. The photo is directly below. The prayer-leader was making impassioned pleas for the heathens to turn from the Devil to Jesus (I presume). His voice was full of emotion. These Christians were protected by police to prevent disturbances. Here they are:

In case there is any doubt as to whether these Christians were “targeting” the Buddhists, their banner clearly mentions to Korean word for Buddhism (불교). I cannot otherwise figure out what the banner is saying.

Another tactic of the anti-Buddhists was that still-regular-feature-of-Korean-public-life, the “guy in a van blaring messages from a loudspeaker”. Here is a shot of one parked at an intersection, blaring messages.

Finally, I saw the below later in the day. It is not specific to Buddhism. Anyone who spends enough time in central-Seoul sees somebody with this sign, sooner or later. I can’t figure out what he’s trying to say, other than the bottom left message of “Jesus will come soon! Repent!”

Caveat: It would be wrong for someone reading this to assume that Buddha’s Birthday in Seoul was marked by ‘sectarian’ antagonism, which it surely was not. Overall, it was just a regular holiday with people out enjoying a Friday off. Again, most Koreans are indifferent to Buddhism (or so is my impression). Most people of any time and place are indifferent to the “political” struggles going on around them, though. It is significant that a Christian-vs.-Buddhist dynamic is noticeable in South Korea, I think, though what the significance is, exactly, I can’t say for sure.

The essay assignment was to write about “your study plans for high school”.

A 9th-grade boy in E1 class (the same boy, incidentally, as was mentioned in post-21, who volunteered to go scold another class) wrote an essay which included the following:

            I want to go to the good high school. It’s because I want to success my life. So I should go to the
            good high school. If I want to go to the high school. I should get a good grade for every tests. So
            I should study very hard. And I should take part in english contempt contests and math contempt
            contests and other subjects contempt contests. Then I should get many certificate of awards.

I imagine a stage surrounded by a large, hooting audience and a panel of distinguished judges. One contestant at a time goes on stage, and is given a minute or two to display their contempt for English.

Possible judge banter: “Yeah, that one seems quite annoyed; he clearly dislikes English a fair bit — 60 points.” / “Goodness! That girl’s arm-waving and shouting shows the sincerity of her contempt. Don’t you think? — 85 points.” / “Oh my. Burning an effigy of Shakespeare on stage and using the pages of an unabridged Oxford dictionary as kindling, all while shouting damnations upon Geoffrey Chaucer — That kid really…hates English. 95 points!”

[ I cannot guess what the student actually wanted to say. I highly doubt it was “contempt”]

In post-53, I discussed the May 16th, 1961 coup d’etat, which resulted in the presidency-for-life of General Park Chung-Hee (박정희). I gave the two positions that I perceive Koreans hold about the coup and its aftereffects:

            Most negatively, the coup can be waved-away as a power grab by ambitious mid-level figures in the military.
            Most positively, [it was] a successful attempt to eliminate corruption/backwardness, resulting in prosperity.

It seems to me that the positive view of this coup predominates (based on my [limited] observations of Korean politics and affairs, on my informal polling of dozens of students I have had over the years, and on my observation of the elections of 2012). There are two caveats: #1: It is viewed less positively by younger Koreans, born after 1980 or so. #2: It is viewed much more negatively in Jeolla Province (but that’s a different, more complicated story). The anonymous but influential Korean-American blogger who runs “Ask a Korean”, calls General Park a “fascist” but even he credits him with the economic boom.

Why is there a predominantly positive view today of the May 16th Coup and Park’s military rule?
I can offer a few ideas based on what I have learned, with my own conjectures mixed in.

(a) From Stagnant Poverty to Economic Boom: Poverty hurts. South Korea in the ’50s showed no sign of being able to raise itself up, out of Third-World status. Park’s government aggressively/successfully pursued economic growth. This is the standard reason given for support for Park. I think it may, though, be the most superficial of all.

(b) National Prestige: South Korea is one of the few states that has faced a long-term major threat to its existence, i.e. a competing Korea. Today, it’s easy to wave away North Korea as a backward, despotic, alienated and “weird” place. North Korea was not always backward, though. It was superior to the South for many years. Into the 1970s, say the Korea experts, the North Korean economy was clearly stronger. When comparing the ROK and DPRK militaries, the latter was stronger, one-to-one, well into the 1980s, I’ve read. Thus, when the coup was being plotted in 1960, South Korea seems to have existed solely because of U.S. protection and largesse, understandably a humiliation. By the time Park Chung-Hee was killed in 1979, the idea of South-Korea as a “U.S. satellite” was mostly untrue, I think.

(c) The First Strong Leader of the ROK: The coup of May 16th marked, people tend to believe, the start of the first era of decisive leadership in the ROK’s history. From 1948 to 1960, South-Korea’s leader was an elderly man named Syngman Rhee (리승만, as it was written in Korean at the time, now 이승만). Rhee is considered a pretty bad leader by Koreans. My impression from reading about him is that he was part buffoon and part autocrat, a toxic combination. His mismanagement led to his overthrow and exile in 1960, followed by an era of instability.

(d) Plain–Old Nostalgia: All the above is well-and-good, but I think all three may be partially…”pretexts”. Something else may be more fundamental. Consider the exit-polling for last year’s election, in which Park Geun-Hye [박근혜] was elected president. She is the daughter of Park Chung-Hee. The outcome by age-group tells the story:

             The Vote in the 2012 South Korean Presidential Election by Age Group [Park Geun-Hye vs. Moon Jae-In]
            Voters Born Before 1955:  For Park by a 3-to-1 Margin (Three in this age group voted for her, to one against)
            Voters Born Before 1965:  For Park by a 2-to-1 Margin (Two in this age group for her, to one against)
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
               Voters Born After 1975:  Against Park by 2-to-1 Margin (Two in this age group voted against her, to one for)
               Voters Born After 1985:  Against Park by 2-to-1 Margin (Two in this age group voted against her, to one for)
               
The division is sharp. It seems hinged on the question: “Do you remember South Korea under Park Chung-Hee?” 
In general, if your answer is “Yes, I remember”, then you voted for Mrs. Park. The more years of your life spent under the Park “dictatorship”, the more likely you were to vote for Mrs. Park in 2012. If your answer is “No, I don’t remember this country under General Park”  (I was either not yet born, or was too young), then you voted against Mrs. Park. / Those who would have remembered the 1950s era itself (as a contrast to the post-coup era) supported Mrs. Park totally-overwhelmingly, more than three-to-one. It is even starker if we discount the voters from the Southwest, who bloc-vote against conservative candidates because of a regional rivalry. My rough calculation is that in Korea outside the three southwest jurisdictions, voters born before 1955 supported Park Geun-Hye by five-to-one.

It was a “nostalgia election”. There happen to be more older than younger voters, and thus was the election decided.

Why would nostalgia be such a powerful force in South Korea? I have some speculations on that, too. I will comment on that another time.

The following dialogue intrigued me:

This is from chapter 12 of the amazing 1970s book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (which is nothing like the name suggests). “Phaedrus” is a college professor teaching rhetoric. DeWeese is his friend.

What Phaedrus describes is a subtle/unconscious version of simply playing favorites.

I wondered how much I do it.

Say you are grading essays, or presentations, or debate speeches, etc. Which one is best? And what does the grade of “A” mean? “B”? “C”? If scoring is purely holistic (giving a grade based on what you ‘feel’), then the grades tend toward meaning “I like this student”/”I dislike this student”, to some extent or other. How to mitigate this is Rubrics.

One of my ongoing….disappointments with certain Western coworkers at my present workplace in Korea is that they have a passive hostility to the philosophy behind rubrics (or maybe it’s just plain old laziness). That attitude undermines the whole endeavor, I feel.

For example, a presentation contest. “I like Tina and Emily; they are so polite; they worked so hard on that powerpoint; I think they should win”.  That’s the basic attitude one tends towards without a rubric.

I have been part of two presentation contests here: One in early 2012 and one early 2013. In the weeks before the 2012 contest, I was trying to figure out what made a good presentation. From my research, a rubric slowly came together. It was divided into scores for Body Language, Vocal, Visuals, Content, and Group-Cohesion. A series of Yes/No questions awards most points. For example, under the Body Language score were several subscores including ‘Smiling’. Good presenters ought not look depressed (and many do). The judge watches and asks, “Are the presenters smiling?” If “Always” then 2 points; if “Sometimes” then 1 point; if “Never” then 0. Unless the judge is lying or mistaken, this system eliminates most bias, which would otherwise run the show. I was proud of this rubric.

I was able to use the rubric successfully in many classes. It shows students exactly how to improve. Hand them their rubrics at the end, and it’s right there. It also gives classmates an easy way to review their peers. / Unfortunately,  in the actual contest this year, I was the only one who consistently used it; others generally fell back on “That one seems better”, which falls into the Phaedrian Grading Trap (above).

Tomorrow is May 16th. On May 16th, 1961, a clique of army officers, led by Generals Chang Do-Young and Park Chung-Hee ‘invaded’ Seoul and declared martial law.

A few weeks later, the coup was hailed as “the finest thing that has happened to Korea in a thousand years” by American General Van Fleet, known as the “Father of the R.O.K. Army”.

This single action largely defined South-Korean politics for the next thirty years or so. Its reverberations are still being felt into the 2010s. The daughter of General Park was elected president in 2012.

I will attempt here to give a brief outline of what I have learned about the coup during my time in Korea.

A description of the coup in an issue of Time Magazine from May 1961 began like this [via Gusts of Popular Feeling]:

Over the next days, Generals Chang, Park, and the others explained why they had seized control of the government:

            (1) To oppose Communism in all its forms          
            (2) To root out corruption
            (3) To solve the misery of the masses
            (4) To transfer power to new, conscientious politicians

The pursuit of (1) led to the arrest of thousands of Koreans suspected of “pro-Communist plotting”. This included many former government officials, including the former leader John Chang, on the pretext that he had given $770 to a left-wing “relief society”.

I suspect that this “opposition to Communism” as front-and-center was to win American support. General Van Fleet’s comment (the title of this post), and the subsequent acceptance of General Park by the Kennedy administration, suggests this was a success.

The larger goal, though, seems to have been the pursuit of point (2) above. This led to the arrest of many more, tens of thousands if not into the hundreds of thousands (40,000 in the first five months). People were arrested for anything deemed degenerate by the junta (e.g., prostitution, smuggling, scamming, gangsterism, running suspicious nightclubs, printing of ‘slanderous’ or leftist newspapers…and so on). Some of the worst offenders were executed.

The junta tried to ban conspicuous-consumption itself. Elaborate weddings and funerals: Outlawed. A waste of resources. Only simple ceremonies from now on. Wooden chopsticks: Banned. A waste of wood. And any government official who showed up five minutes late for work was fired on the spot. Hard austerity, it all was.

The promised “new, conscientious politicians” turned out to be heavily drawn from…the Army, presumably including many of the men in the group photo above. In certain ways, this was a good thing: They were a talented bunch. General Paik Sun-Yup [백선엽] wrote the following in the epilogue to his war-memoir:

One ROK-Army veteran with a lot of managerial knowledge (Chief of Staff in Spring ’61, in fact) was soon out, though:

General Chang (born 1923), the head of the junta in the early weeks, ended up arrested himself, in July of 1961, and was not heard from again. Few Koreans remember him today.

Ever since I learned this story a few years ago, I’ve wondered what became of the “peppery” Lieutenant General Chang Do-Young, the defacto ruler of South Korea for a few weeks in 1961. Did he return to the army? That would’ve been awkward. Did he live quietly on a farm for the rest of his days?

In fact, Chang spent time in Seodaemun Prison after his arrest, and released in 1962 or 1963.

After that, he actually went into a kind of exile in the USA. He had studied English in Japan during World War II, so he could speak English. He earned a doctorate from the University of Michigan in 1969, and became a professor at the University of Wisconsin until 1993, when he retired. He died in 2012. [From Korean Wikipedia]

It was General Park who ended up president, a position he retained until his death in 1979.

Things began to relax in 1962 and 1963; many prisoners were pardoned. Soon economic growth picked up.

Most Koreans who actually lived through that period (of military rule) seem to remember it fondly, it would seem. The coup and the subsequent strength of the Park Chung-Hee government brought an end to the instability and stagnation in which South-Korea was mired since its independence, many say. General Park is given credit for the wild economic growth of the 1960s-1970s. He was killed in 1979, but the essence of the regime he set up lasted well into the 1980s. Other generals, drawn from the broad-circle around Park, took his place after his assassination. The final general-turned-president handed over power to the first non-military president in February 1993.

Most negatively, the coup can be waved-away as s a power grab by ambitious mid-level figures in the military.

Most positively, it can be seen as a successful attempt to eliminate corruption/backwardness, resulting in prosperity.