This is a start at least to these two countries learning to play nice with each other:
Some Civic group members oppose military info-sharing among Seoul, Washington and Tokyo on Friday. (Yonhap)
South Korea, the U.S. and Japan will sign a trilateral information-sharing arrangement on Monday to better handle the evolving nuclear and missile threats from North Korea, Seoul’s Defense Ministry said Friday.
The arrangement is expected to strengthen the three-way security cooperation that has been lackluster due to historical and territorial feuds between Seoul and Tokyo, and Seoul’s push for a deepened strategic partnership with Beijing.
South Korea’s Vice Defense Minister Baek Seung-joo, U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work and Japan’s Vice Defense Minister Masanori Nishi will sign the arrangement separately in their respective countries on Monday.
Under the deal, South Korea and Japan will not directly share their military information, but they will share it via the U.S. upon their consent, Seoul officials explained. Such an indirect method has been devised apparently in consideration of the public sentiment in the South against any military collaboration with its onetime colonizer.
“If South Korea offers information to the U.S., the U.S. would provide it to Japan upon South Korea’s consent. On the other hand, if Japan offers information to the U.S., the U.S. would give it to the South upon Japan’s consent,” a senior official at the Defense Ministry told reporters, declining to be named.
“The sharing will be limited to information about North Korea’s nuclear and missile threats. The country that has produced a particular piece of information will determine to what extent it will share its information.” [Korea Herald]
You can read more at the link, but an example of how this would work is if the Japanese received intelligence of an imminent nuclear test they would give that intelligence to the US to give to South Korea instead of directly. The whole setup seems juvenile, but President Park remembers what happened to President Lee Myung-bak when he tried to pass this deal a few years ago and it caused a public outcry and he had to cancel the deal. It was so bad he had to fly to Dokdo to prove he was not a Japanese traitor. Park is being smarter about this intelligence sharing deal with this indirect approach and noticed when she is having the deal signed; right in the middle of the holidays when few people are paying attention.
The highly controversial movie “The Interview” was released yesterday despite threats from North Korean sponsored hackers and that means more reviews of the movie are in. Like some of the initial screening reviews I read these reviews are not good either:
The Hollywood Reporter’sTodd McCarthy calls it “an intensely sophomoric and rampantly uneven comic takedown of an easy but worrisomely unpredictable target, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. In the relatively sparse annals of irreverent major studio comedies that pissed off foreign nations, for big laughs this one doesn’t rate anywhere near Borat or Team America: World Police. … As political satire goes, The Interview has the comic batting average of a mediocre-to-average Saturday Night Live sketch, with a few potent laughs erupting from an overall mash of sex, drugs and TV broadcasting jokes that feel rooted in a sense of humor primarily characterized by a frat-boy/altered state/prolonged adolescence mind-set.”
Additionally, “if you set up as provocative a premise as do the makers of The Interview, you ultimately have to deal with all its implications; let’s just say that what concludes the film is rote action, simplistic wish-fulfillment stuff that feels cheap and naive and more concerned with looking coolly kick-ass than with any real-world consequences. Even if one part of the film is sincere in wanting to highlight North Korea’s negatives (famine, ideological orthodoxy, cult of personality, militarism, nuclear brinkmanship, et al.), the larger part is devoted to very Western-style sexual grossness, deterministic outrageousness, self-satisfied obliviousness and contended immaturity.” Alongside Franco and Rogen, “Park brings great energy and enthusiasm to his tricky job of portraying the world’s least known big-deal ruler — there are even scenes of him getting the famous Kim haircut and selecting a suit from a closet full of identical ones.” [The Hollywood Reporter]
You can read more reviews at the link, but this movie appears to be pretty horrible. I think I will pass on watching it even if it is supposed to be my patriotic duty now to do so. Has any ROK Heads seen this film and can verify how bad it is?
It looks like the North Korean defector Yeonmi Park who has made international headlines about her defection from the country has been exaggerating some of the tales she has been telling:
You’d have to have been inhuman not to be moved. But – and you’re going to hear a lot of “buts” – was the story she told of her life in North Korea accurate? The more speeches and interviews I read, watch and hear Park give, the more I become aware of serious inconsistencies in her story that suggest it wasn’t. Whether this matters is up to the reader to decide, but my concern is if someone with such a high profile twists their story to fit the narrative we have come to expect from North Korean defectors, our perspective of the country could become dangerously skewed. We need to have a full and truthful picture of life in North Korea if we are to help those living under its abysmally cruel regime and those who try to flee.
“Celebrity Defector”
I met Yeonmi Park a few months ago when I spent two weeks filming a story about her and her family for Australia’s SBS Dateline. We called the story, “Celebrity Defector.”
Back in South Korea where she now lives, Park is one of the stars of a television program featuring a cast of North Korean women. It’s called “Now On My Way To Meet You” and it daringly satirizes the Kim Dynasty. The women tell personal anecdotes about their lives in North Korea and their journey to the south. A number of the women were introduced to us as having been homeless and starving – the reason they fled.
Buried in the shows archives are some snapshots of Park’s childhood in North Korea that explain why she’s known on the show as the Paris Hilton of North Korea. They’re in sharp contrast to the story she’s now telling her international audience. [The Diplomat]
You can read the rest at the link, but it is a very convincing case that Park has exaggerated circumstances of her defection to possibly help raise awareness and funding for the North Korean human rights organizations she has been working with.
Here is Yeonmi Park’s response to this article:
I want to thank Mary Ann Jolley for caring so much about the terrible situation in North Korea that she would point out any inconsistencies in my quotes and how my story has been reported. Much of the time, there was miscommunication because of a language barrier. I have only learned English in the last year or so, and I’m trying hard to improve every day to be a better advocate for my people. I apologize for any misunderstandings. For example, I never said that I saw executions in Hyesan. My friends’ mother was executed in a small city in central North Korea where my mother still has relatives (which is why I don’t want to name it). And there are mountains you can even see on Google Earth – maybe you call them big hills in English – outside of Hyesan that we crossed to escape. There are many more examples like this.
But one very important thing to correct: I do not have a foundation. The website was a dummy site built by a friend, and it was not supposed to be live. There was no way it could accept money, and I haven’t taken any. I am so sorry for the confusion. The site has been taken down.
Also, I apologize that there have been times when my childhood memories were not perfect, like how long my father was sentenced to prison. Now I am checking with my mom and others to correct everything. I am also writing a book about my life in North Korea, my escape through China and and my work to promote human rights. It is where I will be able to tell my full story.
In the meantime, I thank you all for your patience and kindness to me.
I think most of the inconsistencies are pretty minor that could be explained by poor memory and English language skills other than the story of her mother being raped. If that is not true then that is a flat out lie. The organizations that promote defector testimony like this need to be very careful to not have defectors exaggerate or lie because this just plays into the hands of the Kim regime and its apologists. The truth about North Korea is bad enough, there is no need to lie about it.
There technically is an Internet that only a very small fraction of the population, including government employees or select university students, can access.
When they do, they likely only go to about the 10 to 15 “government-blessed” sites that computers in the country would be able to access, which would inevitably be monitored, said Martyn Williams, who runs a North Korean tech blog.
“They’re quite good at self-censoring,” Williams told ABC News. “They know what sites they should and shouldn’t go.”
New government-approved sites are added “every few months” but some examples that have been accessible outside of North Korea recently include a cooking website with different recipes for rice.
The Korea National Insurance Corporation has a rotating slideshow of pictures, including one that shows snow-covered artillery guns.
“Not many people have used it but it’s a lot of smoke propaganda,” Williams said.
The websites with servers that are based in North Korea and are visible outside its borders end in the .kp domain, though there is an entirely separate intranet system that residents are able to access through some library and university computers, Williams noted.
“That for most people is the closest they’ve come to a computer,” he said.
Williams estimated that the number of people who regularly use the Internet in North Korea was probably somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 people, and since Monday’s attack took place in the evening hours local time, the number of people who noticed would be far less. [ABC News]
Here is a ROK Drop Christmas present for all you male readers out there:
Rookie actress No Soo Ram was recently accused of intruding on the ‘Blue Dragon Film Awards‘ without an invitation.
According to the film award representatives, No Soo Ram was not on the official list of invited actresses, but because she arrived at the event dressed for the occasion, they weren’t able to turn her away. [AllKpop.com]
Via the Marmot’s Hole it appears that the Uber’s days are number in Korea once Daum-Kakao releases their app that is endorsed by t
South Korea’s leading free messenger service operator Daum Kakao said Wednesday it will launch a taxi service app by the first half of next year as it initiates a new platform of connecting online and offline businesses.
Daum Kakao signed a memorandum of understanding with the Seoul Taxi Association and Korea Smart Card Co. for the service that would link customers with the closest cab through a mobile app. The taxi association has some 255 Seoul-based cab operators as members, and Korea Smart Card is the country’s top transportation payment system provider.
“Daum Kakao has established important grounds for the operation of Kakao Taxi, and we plan to expand cooperation with other taxi operators throughout the country in the future,” the company said in its release. [Yonhap]
You can read more at the link, but the Seoul city government passed an ordinance offering rewards of up to a Million Won to people who report Uber taxis which will set the stage for the Daum-Kakao app to take over this market.
