President Moon showing his political skills was able to have his cake and eat it to when it came to back tracking from his campaign pledge to stop construction of nuclear reactors in Korea:
The construction site of the Shin Kori 5 and 6 units in Ulsan, 414 kilometers south of Seoul, is shown in this picture taken on Oct. 20, 2017. (Yonhap)
President Moon Jae-in vowed to enhance the safety of nuclear reactors Sunday, accepting the recent recommendation by a public debate commission to resume the construction of two new nuclear reactors that he earlier promised to scrap.
“The government will quickly resume the construction of the Shin Kori-5 and Shin Kori-6 nuclear reactors in accordance with the outcome of the debate,” the president said in a statement released by the presidential office Cheong Wa Dae.
The remarks came two days after the state commission, following its three-month deliberation process, recommended the two unfinished nuclear reactors be completed and put in operation.
The public debate began in July after the president agreed to first find out what the general public wished to do with the two new nuclear reactors whose construction already began in 2016.
Moon urged his supporters, as well as those who are in favor of building a nuclear energy-free nation, to accept the outcome of the public review that involved 471 citizens and experts representing both sides.
“I believe democracy becomes perfect when people have the right to discuss, and when they accept the outcome of such discussions. I also ask those who supported my election pledge to halt the construction to respect and accept the public debate commission’s recommendation,” the chief executive said.
The president said the government will instead work to ensure the safety of nuclear power plants, noting the Shin Kori reactors in Uljin will put the total number of reactors in the southeastern part of the country to 15, with millions of people to be within a 30-kilometer radius of these facilities. [Yonhap]
You can read more at the link, but my concern about nuclear reactors in South Korea is how resilient are they to missile attack from North Korea? I really hope that was considered when these plants were built. I also wonder what the impact is to the power grid if these plants have to be shut down in response to a possible crisis with North Korea? How many people will be without power? Are there enough back generators for hospitals and other key facilities if this was to happen? Hopefully someone in the ROK government has thought these issues through.
It looks like there will soon be a lot of job openings in the government sector of South Korea:
The government has pledged to create 810,000 jobs in the public sector as a means to help young people struggling in the tight job market.
The Presidential Committee on Job Creation unveiled the plan as part of a five-year road map Wednesday.
President Moon Jae-in, who presided over the meeting, said the nation’s top 30 business groups will increase hiring by 5.6 percent this year.
On top of creating more jobs on the public sector, Moon called for private companies to join the campaign to hire more employees.“Hyundai Motor converted 7,000 subcontractors into regular workers.KT, Hanwha, POSCO and Doosan Group will also join the campaign to create more jobs,” he said.
Moon said the government will support innovative companies that actively hire more young people.
Under the plan, the government will create 340,000 jobs in the social services sector.It will start by adding 170,000 jobs in child care and nursing this year, for which there is a high demand.
An additional 170,000 positions will be created in the culture, sports and environment sectors.
The government will add 100,000 more police officers, 74,000 position in firefighting, social welfare and livestock disease control, and 174,000 in local-level civil servants. [Korea Times]
You can read the rest at the link, but the ROK government has no funding plan for this hiring spree which means it will likely just be deficit spending.
This guy should have known better than to make these type of comments in South Korea:
Sunchon National University
Sunchon National University has dismissed one of its professors for making derogatory comments about Korean women who were forced into sexual slavery for the Japanese military during World War II.
Six out of seven members of the university’s disciplinary committee in the city of Sunchon, South Jeolla Province, chose the severest level of punishment for the professor, whose name is withheld, on Wednesday.He was charged with failing to fulfill his duty faithfully and failing to preserve his vocational dignity.
University President Park Jin-sung apologized for “those hurt by the blasphemous comments made by our school professor, especially the women who had gone through the ordeal in Japan.”
He said the school suspended the professor after the incident was reported in April and formed a task force to investigate the matter.
The professor, 56, from the university’s teachers’ college, made the comments during a lecture.He said many of the women, also known as “comfort women,” “probably knew that they were going to sexually serve the Japanese soldiers and thus voluntarily left for Japan.” He also said all the women were “crazy about Japan and would not have gone there if it weren’t for their (sexual) passion.” [Korea Times]
You can read the rest at the link, but he is not the first academic fired for making comments against the comfort women dogma. Professor Park Yu-ha at Sejong University was arrested for defamation for writing a book that takes a balanced look at the comfort women issue. She was fortunately found innocent.
The Korean public likes to think that all the comfort women were girls sleeping in bed and kidnapped by evil Japanese soldiers while the Japanese rightists like to think they were all willing prostitutes. Both historical narratives are untrue if one really looks at the history.
What Professor Park wrote about is the same historical narrative that American Sarah Soh wrote about in her book “The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan“. In the book Soh provides documented evidence that most of the Korean women put into the comfort women system were sold by Korean brokers. The actual kidnapping of Korean women by Japanese soldiers would be a very rare occurrence when the broker system made so many of these women readily available. This does not absolve the Imperial Japanese from responsibility since they ran the comfort woman system that provided the demand for the Korean brokers to meet. To make even worse is that many of these girls were teenagers when sold into prostitution. I see no way that a young teenager should be considered a willing prostitute. Especially when many girls were sold by their families into prostitution for money due to the extreme poverty. This was actually a practice that was going on well into the US military era in South Korea.
It is pretty clear that the comfort women issue is not black and white, but has more nuance to it then each side is willing to admit. Ultimately the Imperial Japanese government was responsible for the actions of the Korean brokers that supplied the majority of the Korean girls. The Imperial Japanese had to have known how young the girls were and the unethical and deceptive actions the Korean brokers were taking to make them available to the Japanese military. There is no need to rewrite the history of what happened to the comfort women when the truth is bad enough.
Hikers take in a view from Mangyeongdae Pavilion on a trail of Mount Seorak in eastern Gangwon Province on Oct. 1, 2017. The national park service has started to restrict the number of visitors on the trail to a maximum 2,000 on weekdays and to 5,000 on weekends and holidays for those who have made reservations. It will stay open to Nov. 14. [Yonhap]
Statues symbolizing comfort women are being moved from a bus to their temporary location in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul on Oct. 2, 2017, prior to their transportation to regional towns to signify their homecoming for the Chuseok holiday. Donga, a bus company, has been operating five buses since mid-August that carry the statues symbolizing Korean women who were sexually enslaved by Japanese soldiers during World War II. The statues will be taken to different towns, including Suwon, Daejeon and Jeonju, on the occasion of World Comfort Women’s Day. (Yonhap)
Statues symbolizing comfort women are temporarily set up in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul on Oct. 2, 2017, prior to their transportation to regional towns to signify their homecoming for the Chuseok holiday. Donga, a bus company, has been operating five buses since mid-August that carry the statues symbolizing Korean women who were sexually enslaved by Japanese soldiers during World War II. The statues will be taken to different towns, including Suwon, Daejeon and Jeonju, on the occasion of World Comfort Women’s Day. (Yonhap)
