Books, blog and other blather

Category: South Korea (Page 3 of 13)

Seoul From on High

Yesterday Seoul had perhaps the clearest skies I’ve seen since returning to Korea. From my office in the west of Seoul, I could see Mount Gwanak in the south and apartment complexes from all over the city. There were some great clouds, too.

My office is pretty high up, but the windows are tinted, so you cannot really take decent photos from inside. But then I realized that the building has a helicopter pad on the roof. So I headed up and tried taking some photos from there.

First I went up in the middle of the afternoon. Here’s a pic looking west. You can see Banghwa Bridge far off on the left, and Ilsan to the distance, slightly to the right:

Later, I went up around sundown, when the magic hour was turning the city orange:

And here’s the view to the east. You can see the new high-rises at Hapjeong, then Yeouido behind them, and in the distance Mount Gwanak:

The same view, but a bit further back with the helicopter pad in view:

Then I tried out the panorama setting on my Galaxy S3 camera. There’s a few wonky stitches, but overall I thought it looked pretty good:

Argh. This blog format doesn’t allow me to throw in extra-wide images. Need to find a good place to show off these panoramas…

Legatum Institute: Korea

A year ago, the very nice people at the Legatum Institute invited me to join their summer program, a week long retreat in Italy. It was pretty amazing, talking about the world and the rise and fall of nations, and grandiose things like that with people like Vali Nasr, John Hale, Robert Kagan, Anne Applebaum, Robert Shafer, and Lucie Spickova (and many, many more).

But the real focus of the Legatum Institute isn’t randomly holding events in Italy. The institute is more about sponsoring research and hosting programs for advancing freedom and prosperity around the world. Probably their signature project is the annual Prosperity Index, which tries to quantify the idea of prosperity and rank all the countries around the world.

Which is why I am so happy to announce that I have just made a small contribution to Legatum’s Prosperity project — a country report on South Korea, called “Ready for Prime Time.” My report focuses on Korean culture and soft power and how its successes has helped reshape Korea, making it a more confident and prosperous nation.

It’s pretty cool to be able to add my name to the Legatum’s list of contributors. Past reports have been written by people like James Robinson (who co-wrote Why Nations Fail with Daron Acemoglu) — his essay on Colombia, “The Orangutan in a Tuxedo,” was excellent.

I should add a thanks to everyone at Legatum, for inviting me to the first event and for asking me to write this new report. And to Peter Passell, my editor, who always makes my writing 137 percent better. And an extra thanks goes to Jeff Gedmin, the president of the institute, for being behind it all.

Morning Links

  • Moon So-young takes a great look at new Museum of Modern & Contemporary Art in Seoul, with architect Mihn Hyun-jun (Korea JoongAng Daily)
  • Beer popsicles! Beer ice cream. And plenty of craft beers. (Korea JoongAng Daily)
  • A look at one of the Han River rescue teams responsible for a 22km stretch of the river that contains 15 bridges. The team responds to 774 suicide attempts and drownings last year — saving 258 people and stopping another 185. Still, that’s a lot of suicides. (Hankyoreh)
  • Enjoying the hot weather? I hope so because the Korea Meteorological Administration says it is going to stick around until Chuseok — that’s Sept. 19 this year. Which I suppose means we’ll have snow by Oct. 1. (Chosun Ilbo)
  • This is the first Gwangbokjeol (Independence Day) I’ve ever spent in Korea so close to the Japanese Embassy. As of 9am, there were plenty of police everywhere, with all the side alleys and roads around the embassy closed off. Could be exciting.
And in movie news:
  • The summer may be mostly over (especially for Hollywood), but the competition at the Korean box office is ramping up, as two big films were released yesterday for Gwangbokjeol. Kim Sung-soo’s first movie in a decade, The Flu, is the new No. 1, with 306,000 admissions yesterday. Hide and Seek was second with 294,000 admissions. (All stats from KOBIS)
  • Bong Joon Ho’s Snowpiercer fell to third with 200,000. It’s now at 7.1 million admissions and 51 billion won ($45.6 million).
  • The top four films in Korea yesterday were all Korean. Then the next six were all animated films (Japanese and Western). No live-action Hollywood movies in top 10.
  • So far this year, Korean films have had 56.3% of box office. 40.3% for Hollywood. Nearly 1% for Japan.
  • Lee Young-ae goes from JSA to the DMZ (Chosun Ilbo).

Morning Links

Since I am apparently dumping a bunch of fun links over on my Twitter feed, I thought I would repeat them here for the (wise) folks who don’t bother with Twitter:

  • 2 million North Koreans have mobile phones these days (Chosun Ilbo). It’s kind of amazing how quickly that is growing:
In 2008, North Korea set up Koryolink with Orascom. The number of subscribers stood at only 1,600 in the first year but rose to 100,000 in 2009, 500,000 in May 2011 and a million a year later.
  • Foreign currency (mostly US dollars and yuan) surges in North Korean economy. Now 10% of NK’s economy (Chosun Ilbo)
  • This story about singer-turned-actress Nam Gyu-ri story was hard to get right. She called herself a 변태, which usually is translated as “pervert.” But that language struck some people in the newsroom as too strong and loaded, so we finally decided to go with “weirdo” (Korea JoongAng Daily)
  • A reminder Aug. 14 is the start of the Jecheon Film & Music Festival. A lot of my friends in the entertainment business think Jecheon’s combination of music and movies make it the best fest in Korea (JIMFF website)
  • I think this is turning into a really interesting year for K-pop. The quality of the music just keeps rising. At the moment, one of my favorite songs is Junsu’s “Incredible” (just a really fun tune):

Sometimes the Cheonggyecheon Really Is a River

This is my favorite time of year in Korea — I love it when the hot, summer rains pelt down — so after dinner this evening I took a little walk through the drenched streets of downtown Seoul. And, well, this is what I found:

Pretty cool, huh? The Cheonggyecheon was pretty swollen. Usually, the stream looks more like this:

This was the start of the Cheonggyecheon this evening, when the rains were really coming down:

As opposed to this:

Anyhow, one of my favorite parts of Seoul is just walking around, seeing what I might find on a random street on a random day. Like yesterday, I was walking near the Seoul History Museum, when I suddenly realized that I had never checked out Gyeonghuigung Palace before, and I really should. So I did:

Heunghwamun Gate was originally further east, then moved by the Japanese during the colonial era, and finally moved here in the 1980s.

Gyeonghuigung was apparently destroyed by the Japanese during the colonial era, so this is almost all a reconstruction … But it was quite a nice reconstruction.

The main entrance to the palace is under construction until August, so that was a bit of a bummer.

Unlike the other palaces in Seoul, this one was dead quiet. No tourists anywhere and just a few folks walking around.

Here’s a view of the palace from a hill behind it:

After checking out the palace, I stubbornly refused to retrace my steps and leave the same way I came in, so I started looking around for a back gate. But apparently there wasn’t one. Undeterred, I kept looking, eventually heading up into the forest hill behind the palace. There I found an old wall, with little steel doors in the side. It wasn’t locked, so I walked through and found myself on a little roadway.

I kept walking up until I got to the top of the hill, and what did I find? The old Seoul Weather Observatory, in operation since 1933, I do believe.

Around the observatory, there’s some rebuilt  sections of the old Seoul wall (looking very unhistoric, by the way) and quite a nice path snaking its way around the hill. It led to this park:

Which had a whole bunch of cats sleeping on the stones and in the undergrowth:

By now I was up pretty high, in an interesting taldongne area.

There’s even a walking tour and map through the alleys:

And a few forlorn hanok:

Eventually the road took me back down to Sajik Park. Here is a view of Inwangsan from the park:

Oh, right, I started this post talking about the Cheonggyecheon being swollen by the rain. So here are a couple more pics:

A More Complete (But Still Very Incomplete) List of Differences Between Korea and Spain

Difference Who’s Better
Movie theaters Korea – cheaper, bigger, nicer
Shopping Korea – most things open Sunday, convenience stores open 24 hours/day
Customer service Korea – much much faster and more helpful
Korean food Korea (duh)
Spanish food Spain (also duh)
Wine Spain – cheaper, nicer
Beer tie – both terrible
Weather Spain – sunnier, less hot, less humid
Traffic Spain – also bad, just Seoul has much more of it
Subways Korea – can use phone, cleaner, fewer pickpockets
Buses Spain – smoother
Fast food blerg. Hoping not to have an opinion for some time
Television tie – both terrible
Beaches Spain (duh)
English ability Who cares? Study the local language more, you uncouth foreigner
But what about tourists and people without the time to learn the local language? Fine … Tie, I guess.
Geopolitical danger Tie – Barcelona is apparently a big al-Qaeda hub. South Korea has the North. But neither worry me much.
Geopolitical danger Tie – Barcelona is apparently a big al-Qaeda hub. South Korea has the North. But neither worry me much.
Access to North Korean websites Spain – all things NK remain blocked in South Korea, even North Korean news’s handy new Facebook page. It was nice being able to read anything I wanted about the North without going through the hassle of elaborate workarounds (and someone I was able to read it all without turning communist)

There’s plenty more to talk/whine about, I’m sure, but that’s a list of what has occurred to me after being back four days.

Feast, Famine, and Korean Music

Econ 101: in a perfectly competitive environment, profits go to zero.

Case in point: Korean music.

After years of people saying Korea could not support summer music festivals, the country now has five major music festivals in a three-week span:

  • Ansan Valley Rock – July 26-28 – Ansan, Gyeonggi Province – 260,000 won (The Cure, Skrillex, NIN)
  • Pentaport – Aug. 2-4 – Songdo,  Incheon – 165,000 won (Fall Out Boy, Suede, Testament)
  • Jisan World Rock – Aug. 2-4 – Jisan – 250,000 (Weezer, Jamiroquai, Nas)
  • Supersonic – Aug 14-15 – Olympic Park, Seoul – 176,000 won (Pet Shop Boys)
  • City Break, Jamsil, Seoul, Aug. 17-18 – W250,000 (Muse, Metallica)

And those are in addition to these July festivals:

  • Asia Metal Festival – July 1-2 – Seoul – 73,000 won/day
  • Rainbow Island – July 7-9 – Nami Island, Gangwon Province – 99,000 won
  • Ultra Korea – July 14-15 – Olympic Stadium, Seoul – 160,000 won (DJs and EDM, but also Japan’s Perfume)

It’s the sort of pattern one sees over and over again in Korea, where everyone tells you something can’t be done, until someone does it, then everyone does the same thing, too, and floods the market, be it microbrew beer, mixed martial arts, or whathaveyou.

But I guess too much music is a problem you want to have. It’s great to see how far the scene has come since the first aborted attempt that was Triport in 1999.

Beauty Myths and Korean Beauty Myth Myths

Zara Stone over in the the Atlantic takes a look at Korea’s plastic surgery “obsession” (HT: Marmot’s Hole), in an article that is at once fascinating and infuriating. Fascinating because Stone has done a fair amount of serious reportage, digging up some really interesting history and details. Infuriating because it is so full of moralism, stereotypes, and poorly thought-out ideas.

Some points on Stone’s article, in no particular order:

1) “Plastic surgery” is presented like a blanket term, with little distinguishing between eyelid surgery and more invasive techniques (although Stone notes that Koreans often make such a distinction). No mention is made of, say, orthodontics, which in America is incredibly common, far beyond any medical need. Are braces and retainers examples of “body objectification”? How about Lasik surgeries? Tanning beds?

It’s also worth noting that Korea’s obesity rates are so much lower than America’s. So, while too many women in Korea have an unhealthy fascination with thinness, the problems with weight are a much smaller part of Korea’s body image problems.

The point being, if you broaden your definitions of body image beyond “plastic surgery,” suddenly Korea looks a lot less of an outlier.

(All that said, the V-line jaw surgery is pretty terrible stuff … although Stone gives us no sense of how common or uncommon the procedure is.)

2) The K-pop link. Like a lot of writers on this subject, Stone looks at K-pop’s beauty standards (although, thankfully, she notes that this is an issue that pre-dates K-pop). And like others, she blames K-pop for much of Korean women’s beauty myth problems (and the article focuses 99% on women). Which is pretty daft, in my opinion. There are huge amounts of plastic surgery in Hollywood and Western pop music, but people usually are more cautious about linking them to mainstream plastic surgery culture/trends. What makes K-pop so much more influential and problematic than Western pop culture? If there is a difference, Stone doesn’t describe it.

It’s also worth nothing that K-pop fans tend to be more interested in the male idols than the female, but once again the author glosses over male images in her analysis.

Oh, and then there are those K-pop talent shows on TV, which has produced acts like Busker Busker, Lee Hi, and Akdong Musicians — all pretty different faces and bodies than typical K-pop. If this was all about prefab appearances being pushed by the music companies, why does the Korean public vote for all sorts of different looks?

(Btw, I quite like this brief interview with Park Ji-min, winner of the “K-Pop Star” program, talking about why she likes working at JYP Entertainment).

3) Work and beauty. Stone talks a lot about how beauty is a part of work-related competition, trotting out the canard that the economic crisis of the late 1990s somehow pushed people toward more procedures. She also points out how Korea job applications include head shots — although I would point out that plenty other parts of the world tend to require photos, too, and Korea was requiring photos long before women were participating much in the workforce.

Do beautiful people have an unfair advantage when it comes to getting hired in Korea? Sure … just like everywhere. But is it significantly different in Korea? Not from the many, many offices I have been to in Korea over the years. Ninety-eight percent of the time, the university name and record matters far more than appearance (plus most of the high-prestige jobs in Korea require an application test, which double-fold eyelids don’t help you with at all).

* * *

Anyhow, I’m no fan of most cosmetic surgery, and like many people harbor an instinctive dislike for it. My wife has never had any work done and I’m quite happy with her (quite Korean) appearance. But making sweeping generalizations about a country based on my personal tastes (and a country that the author doesn’t particularly know)? That I’m much less confident about.

Certainly women in Korea, like women everywhere, are under way too much pressure to look certain ways. And the deep types of anti-women prejudice still lingering in Korea make it worse. As Sharon Heijin Lee (not “Hejiin”) says in the article:

There’s a real problem when you make generalizations about a whole country full of women, that they’re all culturally duped. There are certain economic situations happening in Korea and America that might impel different choices. We — Americans — might not see plastic surgery on the same level here that we see in Korea.

And:

When we think of it as just the desire to look white, we’re not really giving credit to the surgery industry that flourishes by reprinting people’s features.

Body image and the pressures women are under to look a certain way are important subjects worth exploring. But blaming Korea’s version of these subjects on K-pop and economics is dubious to the extreme. If only Stone had listened more to her own expert.

Adios and Annyeong

Hard to believe it, but my time in Spain has nearly come to an end. Somehow our quick jaunt turned into nearly four years. But it has been a (mostly) fun four years, so no regrets. Living so close to all those Spanish beaches was good fun. Making new friends was quite nice. Working on another language was interesting.

Best of all, it was great to return to writing, after stopping for a couple of years to try out documentaries. In addition to the journalism and think tank writing, I should have a couple of books coming out later this year — two very different projects that I hope to talk about very soon.

But living here has also made it clear to me that I’m more of an Asia person than a European. It should be fun returning to a part of the world that I’m more accustomed to. Not to mention returning to the foods I like. It’s only been four years, and I have visited Korea a couple of times, but I’m still curious about what has changed. Korea is always changing, and I think that last few years were no different.

Tides of Change

Google’s fun Earth Engine lets you look at maps of the world going back nearly 30 years, so you can see how an area has changed over time. Usually, the resolution isn’t good enough to turn up much of anything, but one area it works pretty well is with reclaimed land along coastlines. And between Songdo in Incheon and Saemangeum in Jeolla Province, Korea has a couple of big reclamation projects going on. So I checked them out on the Earth Engine to see how they looked.

Here is Songdo, the new “international business city” being built southwest of Seoul, close to the Incheon airport:

If you want to see some good pics on the ground of what Songdo looks like today, you should check out the photography of Robert Koehler (like this one):

Saemangeum is even bigger, with around 400 square kilometers eventually to be reclaimed from the sea (or so I read). I don’t know how much they’ve done so far, but it is fascinating to watch, along with the building of that huge sea wall:

 

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