Thomas journals

The Seoul government spends a lot on cultural and tourist events, to the great joy of locals and foreigners alike -- and to the businesses that sell to them. The Lantern Festival has grown into an art display: no longer small lanterns floating on a stream, but rather large hollow paper sculptures lit from within by electric lights, fixed to the streambed. Thousands of people flock to the ChangyeCheon stream  (a waterway analogous to the San Antonio Riverwalk in that it was renovated into a public walkway) to see the dozens of sculptures on a cold November night.

The Asian Games 2014 just wrapped up.   The local press was of course excited about it, with plenty of coverage of the contests as well as the human interest stories and the local angle.  Specifically, the Little Country That Could showing the world this great success story of modernization.   And the games went quite smoothly -- the website immediately listed stats on all the contests with all the player names and numbers, as they happened!   Unfortunately, the English-language web portal was evidently subcontracted to a travel agency that really did not worry about local English speakers seeking tickets -- various links looped to each other, or to brochures or Korean-language pages.  We could not figure out how to buy tickets online.  And there did not seem to be much local marketing -- few flyers or handbills or ads in the papers.   Our local 7-11 posted an ad reminding that 7-11 was the official sponsor of the Asian Games! The games were held...

KoreaTimes newspaper of April 5, 2014:  the front page features five items: a photo of the Avengers2 film shoot, with Captain America posed on the set; four stories with these headlines:   Japan adopts absurd claims in textbooks ; Obama plays favorites ; Ortiz’s selfie makes White House uneasy ; and ‘US knows japan at fault on row with Korea’ … all about America and Japan!  (Obama is said to be favoring Japan -- he even supposedly pressed the Virginia governor to veto the bill requiring Virginia textbooks to add the name “East Sea” to Sea of Japan!). And the Avengers2 filmshoot dominates public talk -- students and teachers alike discuss sightings of the film crew or actors, and the resulting traffic delays at the bridges in use. But it is considered worth the effort, to show the world that Korea is a hip, modern place, worth the effort for Captain America to defend against the villains (from the north, perhaps?).

As part of the Great Game -- originally describing the cold-war-like battle between Russia and Great Britain in the 1800s -- between China, Korea, and Japan, recent elections of more conservative and certainly more nationalistic leaders have led to a war of words.  We all worry that the words may escalate to more damaging exchanges.   As South Korea is now trading furiously with China on the economic front, the political connections continue as well.   While I was in China last month, the news media trumpeted the repatriation of the remains of Chinese soldiers killed in "the war against American Imperialism" (later editions termed it "the korean war"(all lower-case)).   China Daily's front page displayed a nice photo of military honor guard bearing caskets at an airport, and described the great care that South Korea had taken in disinterring the remains.   A few days earlier the same newspaper reported that a new holiday had been declared, to...

The war is not over.    Thus said the wife of the American vet who was detained by the NK police last month, and released only after extensive lobbying by the US.   As it turned out, the vet was part of a special-forces team that worked behind enemy lines in North Korea, seeking defectors.  When I visited the border area, one of the old-timer expats explained the situation as analogous to a Saudi man visiting NYC on a package tour, then asking around about some buddies who were in New York in late 2001.  To the North Koreans, the war is definitely still going on -- that is the only way to justify the extreme measures taken in all parts of that country.

Today's Korea Times newspaper published this photo as front-page news, with no accompanying article.  A westerner looks at the photo, wonders why it rates front-page status (above the fold, no less!).  The first thing I noticed was the high quality of the photo, and the bright colors.  Then I saw the red circles that the editors had photoshopped in to the photo, drawing our attention to something notable. To a Korean viewer, that something is unthinkable:  he is wearing SHOES IN THE HOUSE.  I asked several of my Korean students what they would think of someone who would wear shoes in the house.  They responded, repeatedly: "It would never happen."  No, really, what would you think of such a person?   "It would never happen." Then one student noted that on Korean dramas, the bad guy usually storms into the house with shoes on... just another marker of how bad he is.