Category: Korea-General Topics

Quartz.com has a long, but interesting read about the growing gender war in South Korea.  Of course the Gangnam murder case is brought up of evidence of growing misogyny against women in South Korea without providing the context that the murder was by a schizophrenic homeless man who was in and out of mental hospitals.  Regardless I think most people would agree there is room for improvement in South Korea in regards to the treatment of women.  However, one group Megalia is accused of being a radical feminist group that is further dividing the sexes in South Korea with its various activities.  The group’s logo in fact makes light of how small male penises are in South Korea.

In response to the growing feminist movement in Korea Korean men are now complaining they are being discriminated against and one guy even jumped off a bridge to promote the idea:

Speaking up for men’s rights isn’t a fringe idea in Korea—it has become mainstream. “What’s striking about the current situation is the extent to which… men seem to be feeling very comfortable in saying that women’s demands for greater rights or greater protection are misguided,” says Koo Se-woong, a former university teacher and managing editor of liberal news site Korea Expose.

In one extreme display of men’s rights, in 2013, the heavily indebted founder of men’s activism group Man of Korea (link in Korean), Song Jae-gi, decided to jump off a bridge to raise money for his group. TV cameras were present as he readied to throw himself into the Han River. Among the goals of Man of Korea was the abolishment of the government’s agency the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, and compensation for Korean men who served in the military (all Korean men must serve two years in the army). His body was found a few days later.  [Quartz.com]

Anyway for those that have 15 minutes to spare I recommend reading the whole article.

Here is another drunk woman in trouble story:

A reportedly drunken woman was injured when she fell into a car parking lift in Busan at 1:50 a.m. Saturday.

The woman, surnamed Kim, was apparently in a hurry to use the bathroom.

She ran into the lift to relieve herself where she could not be seen, but she fell two meters through a 60 centimeter gap between the lift and a wall, according to police. She broke her pelvis.

Firefighters rescued her, and she was taken to hospital.

Police are investigating why the parking lift was open and unstaffed, allowing anyone to enter. [Korea Times]

If you have the think that there is a lot of elderly taxi cab drivers in South Korea you would be right:

The advanced age of taxi drivers in Seoul has recently become a hot issue after a number of them breathed their last behind the wheel.

According to the Korea Transportation Safety Authority, 19.5 percent of all taxi drivers in the nation were 65 or older at the end of last year, and in Seoul 51 percent are over 60.

According to a 2013 study by the KTSA, a whopping 73.1 percent of cab drivers over 65 who had driven taxis for more than 25 years were involved in car accidents in the previous three years, compared to only 7.5 percent who had driven taxis for less than five years.

That means elderly drivers are 10 times more likely to get into accidents than younger ones. [Chosun Ilbo]

You can read more at the link.

10 Questions You’ll Probably Be Asked as a Foreigner in Korea https://t.co/EtweO9A0U0 #10magazine #korealife #korea

— 10 Magazine (@10_Magazine) October 18, 2016

I doubt the young woman in question is the first politically connected person to receive favorable treatment in admissions to a Korean university.  So why are people making a big deal about it now?:

After recent allegation that a granddaughter of President Park Geun-hye’s close mentor was granted admissions to Ewha Womans University unfairly, professors will hold a rally Wednesday to demand the university president step down, taking up a cause students have been championing for some 80 days.“Ewha Womans University, which has been under fire for its plans to build a college of continuing education, is now mired in a political issue,” said an emergency planning committee of Ewha professors in an official statement. “University President Choi Kyung-hee and the board of directors are handling the issues at the school dictatorially and failing to communicate with the university staff and students. It is high time that professors take up the cause.”

Professors will hold a rally in front of the main hall of the university, which has been occupied by students since July 28. It is the first time since the university’s establishment in 1886 that professors of the university have called for the ouster of the president.

The allegations concern Choi Soon-sil, daughter of Choi Tae-min, who was President Park Geun-hye’s mentor.  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read more at the link, but the young woman in question won a gold medal in the Asian Games for an equestrian event and the university added winning a gold medal in equestrian as an additional selection criteria the year Choi applied to the university.  She also supposedly misses classes and turns in homework late and still gets good grades.  To me this is all hearsay and who knows if it is true.

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— Aidan Foster-Carter (@fcaidan) October 16, 2016

Person who recently visited the city tends to think so:

If one were to crown the most bizarre city in South Korea, many users on r/korea would undoubtedly pick Songdo. Officially known as the Songdo International Business District, this 40 billion USD project is promoted as a smart, green, low-carbon city a fifteen-minute drive and a short flight away from a third of the world’s population.

Little do people realize that the city is far from just about everything else. Songdo is part of Incheon, and to get to the former you have to go through the latter if you’re not coming from the airport. From Seoul I took the subway, which crawled past enormous apartment buildings for what felt like more than an hour. I found myself wondering what Douglas MacArthur — the nuke-loving American general who surprised the invading Korean People’s Army here seventy years ago — would say if he could see what this village of brick and tile had become.

It was all too much for me, or at least for my stomach. By the time my map app was telling me I was in Songdo I was about to collapse from starvation. I staggered out of the subway into the dark gray empty station and wandered South Korea’s usual labyrinthine hallways, stairwells, and escalators echoing with electronic voices until I emerged in the middle of… nowhere.  [Korea Expose]

You can read the rest at the link of what was a humorous read about what is likely Korea’s most empty city.

This is a really horrible tragedy which appears to have been caused by negligence by the driver:

A fire on a tour bus killed 10 people Thursday night on a highway in Ulsan. Seven others on the bus, which was carrying 22 people including a tour guide and the driver, were injured.

About 10:10 p.m., the bus scraped against a crash barrier several times while changing lanes. It then caught fire.

The passengers could not get out because the crash barrier was blocking the door. Some of them managed to break the window and escape, but 10 people could not escape from the smoke and fire, survivors and witnesses said.

Firefighters extinguished the fire at 11:01 p.m. Only the frame of the bus was left.
The tour guide told police that they couldn’t find the emergency hammer, so the driver used a fire extinguisher to break the windows.

The driver, surnamed Lee, 49, claimed that one of the tires went flat and made the bus lose balance. He added he did not doze off. But police suspect he was speeding, based on traffic camera footage and testimony from some of the passengers that the bus was travelling at high speed before suddenly changing lanes.

Police will request an arrest warrant for the driver for accidental homicide, saying Lee did not drive safely enough. “The driver claims the accident was caused by a flat tire, so we will send the bus to the National Forensic Service for inspection,” Choi Ik-soo, chief of the Ulju Police Station, told journalists at a briefing. [Korea Times]

You can read more at the link.

I think when determining if a minimum wage is too high or too low it depends on if the minimum wage is supposed to be something that people are supposed to make a living off of.  If the minimum wage is supposed to be livable wage then the increase is probably not enough considering the high cost of living in a place like Seoul:

Four subway rides, a newspaper and packet of cigarettes, or one Big Mac: That is what a minimum-wage worker can buy after an hour on the job, and have change of a couple of hundred won. The minimum hourly rate of 4,860 won, due to rise to 5,210 next year, amounts to 1.08 million won a month for a 40-hour work week. Differences in purchasing power make comparison between countries difficult, but the nation’s rate ranks on the low end of the scale among wealthy nations. In 2011, just eight of the 23 OECD countries aside from Korea had a lower hourly minimum. Many of those countries with higher rates, however, also have significantly higher GDPs per capita. Nonetheless, whether the current wage is reasonable depends very much on who you ask. Neither employers nor labor groups expressed satisfaction with the most recent increase for 2014, the former having called for an outright freeze, the latter a rise of more than 21 percent.

“It is very hard to pin down whether the minimum wage is high or low. It is somewhat relative,” Woo Seok-jin, an economics professor at Myongji University in Seoul, told The Korea Herald. “We have some minimum living standard costs, and the minimum wage should be determined based on that level.”

Whether the current rate meets such a standard is a matter of debate. Park Jeong-woo, a 20-year-old music student at Seoul National University of Arts, has worked numerous minimum wage jobs such as a convenience store clerk alongside his studies. Even though he avoids rent by living with his parents, he still finds the current rate to be out of synch with the rising cost of living.   [Korea Herald]

You can read more at the link.

So true: South Koreans revere King Sejong, monarch who invented Korean alphabet. But he gets scant mention in #NorthKorea. #history #divided https://t.co/v74FPfpI8a

— Jean H. Lee (@newsjean) October 10, 2016