Category: Korea-General Topics

It will be interesting to see if President Park’s solar initiatives goes anywhere:

Hanwha Group, the world’s largest solar cell maker, said it plans to open the nation’s first zero-carbon town run solely on solar power on Jukdo Island, a small island on the nation’s west coast, in cooperation with small and medium-sized enterprises in the solar industry. 

This will be a signature project for the South Chungcheong Creative Economy Innovation Center, which Hanwha Group jointly opened with the central government in Cheonan, South Chungcheong, on Friday. 

The South Chungcheong center is the nation’s 11th creative economy center out of a total of 17 planned under President Park Geun-hye’s creative economy initiative, the administration’s attempt to revitalize Korea’s economy through innovation. 

More than 150 people including President Park, Hanwha Group Chairman Kim Seung-youn and South Chungcheong Gov. Ahn Hee-jung attended the center’s opening. 

“In the 20th century, Korea used to rely on imports for 100 percent of its energy needs,” said Park in a congratulatory speech. “The era of fossil fuels coming to the end is a challenge but also can be an opportunity for the Korean economy. 
“If we move proactively in new energy-related technologies and commercialize them as soon as possible, the Korean solar-energy model will lead the world’s renewable energy market,” Park added.  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read more at the link. 

If parents can use technology like this to monitor their kids imagine what companies or the government could monitor?

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — “Smart Relief” is a mobile app for parental control of Android smartphones. South Korea’s government funded the app, which alerts parents to possible bullying based on its monitoring of phrases and words used in smartphone messages and in online searches. The developer says it can also give parents insight into the worries or preoccupations of their children.

Such apps are criticized in South Korea as an invasion of privacy but their use is burgeoning, particularly after the country’s telecoms regulator ordered monitoring applications be installed on the smartphones of Koreans aged 18 and below. Smart Relief is not one of the 15 apps authorized for use in that program but shares similar features with them.

—

The app monitors about 800 words and phrases in messages including:

Threat, kill, shut up, violence, destroy, handicap, crazy, prostitute, garbage, thief, porn, suicide, pregnancy, inn, obscene, sex, sexual crime, sexual relationship, prostitution, motel, beer, rape, adultery, run away from home, outcast.  [Associated Press]

You can read more at the link. 

Ever heard of Uljin? Neither have we – http://t.co/Ml6XWtMtnk pic.twitter.com/tz7IKvLYp2

— Hiexpat Korea (@HiExpat) May 12, 2015

Despite people doing damage and theft like this we are not supposed to call them thugs?  What else should this behavior be called?:

Richard Sung Kang’s American dream shattered along with his liquor store’s window during the Baltimore riots earlier this week.

The 49-year-old Korean immigrant saw his liquor store and bar, the Oxford Tavern, wrecked by a group of violent rioters following the funeral of Freddie Gray, who died of a spinal injury he apparently received while in police custody. Despite Sung closing the front door, the looters smashed the window and plundered the establishment. Even the store’s ATM was torn out, leaving a gaping hole in the exterior wall of the building.

“This is America. I wanted to follow my dream and wanted to make something for myself,” Kang told the Associated Press. He added that it was only his first year of owning the business and was unsure of reopening the store, as it could mean taking on more debt and paying higher insurance premiums.

“The most important thing is, I have to move on,” Kang said as his locksmiths worked on his doors. “But is it better to rebuild and start again or give up and find some other place? I don’t know.”  [KoreAm Journal]

You can read the rest at the link, but according to the article 200 small businesses were unable to open after the riots with 40 Korean-American owned businesses among them. If many of these businesses do not re-open than that will just further cause economic problems in area already economically depressed in the first place.

It looks like if you ever wanted to stay in a Seoul luxury hotel now is the time:

Luxury hotels here are struggling as profits dwindle amid a marked decline in high-rolling Japanese customers.

Lotte Hotel, the biggest hotel chain in Korea, saw operating profit fall by half last year to W24.3 billion (US$1=W1,071). Hotel Shilla, a favorite choice of visiting foreign dignitaries and heads of state, posted an operating loss of W20.6 billion last year.

The W Seoul Walker Hill Hotel on the eastern edge of Seoul, a popular destination for foreign tourists, earned a paltry W12 million in net profit last year. Shinsegae, which operates luxury hotels in downtown Seoul and the southern port city of Busan, saw operating profit fall to W4.1 billion last year, less than half of what it earned in 2013.

From 2009 to 2012, the number of Japanese visitors rose from 3 million to 3.52 million, but it fell to a 10-year low of 2.28 million last year as Seoul-Tokyo relations chilled and a weak yen made Korea more expensive.

Instead, the number of Chinese tourists soared from 710,000 in 2005 to 6.13 million last year, but they prefer to more affordable accommodation, such as business hotels or guest houses.

“A majority of five-star hotels have seen a 30-percent decline in the number of Japanese guests. In some hotels the number fell 50 percent, while the increase in Chinese guests has been minimal,” one luxury hotel staffer said.  [Chosun Ilbo]

You can read the rest at the link, but in response to all the empty rooms the major luxury hotels are now offering some rooms at 50% off their normal prices just to get someone in the room to make up for the losses.

According to the statistics an increasing number of Koreans are divorcing or choosing to remain single:

One in four married men are likely to get divorced. The more the highly-educated people are, the less they will likely they are to divorce.

Among married men who left school before finishing their education the proportion is as high as 48 percent. Among men with a high-school diploma the chances drop to 30 percent, and among university graduates to 20 percent.

According to a report by Statistics Korea’s analysis of census and annual marriage data from 1990 to 2010, the chance of divorce among men rose from 10.4 percent in 1990 to 25.1 percent in 2010, up 2.5 times over the last 20 years.

Kim Soo-young at Statistics Korea said, “Although individual circumstances and social values have a big impact, divorce got more common due to the prolonged slump after the 1997 Asian financial crisis.”

The chances of divorce among married women also rose from 9.9 percent to 24.7 percent over the same period.

The number of remarriages has declined. In 1990, more than seven out of 10 couples who divorced chose to remarry, but that dropped to half by 2010.

The number of men and women who choose to stay single also rose. In 1990, only one in 11 men chose to stay single, but that rose to one in every five by 2010. The ratio for women rose from 5.1 percent to 15.1 percent over the same period.  [Chosun Ilbo]

You can read the rest a the link, but it is believed that more and more Koreans are seeing little benefits in marriage and want to remain single because of the convenience.

That is what this grandmother writing in the Korea Times believes:

It seems true that 50 percent of marriages end up in divorce. A Korean friend of mine in New York told me that her daughter, 45, is in a divorce suit after 25 years of marriage after having two children who are now in high school. The American husband told his wife that he wanted a divorce because she does not contribute at home while he has to work hard. He thinks it’s not fair.

In Korea too, men are beginning to think that having a wife is quite expensive. And raising children, the product and main purpose of a marriage, is even more expensive. Young men are scared of having a wife and it has pushed many youngsters into marrying later resulting in a low birth rate which Korean and Japanese governments are concerned will mean their countries lose national competitiveness.

Actually it’s not a wife’s responsibility but blame should go to the profit seeking enterprises that first supplied all those kitchen appliances: refrigerator, kimchi fermenting machine, microwave ovens, automatic rice cooker, dishwasher, and so on. Then again there’s the food producers who sell a pantry full of canned foods, instant foods, ramen and instant noodles. The simplified cooking appliances and the factory produced foods have pushed women out of their kitchen.

Now it takes less than 15 minutes to prepare a family dinner and men who were reluctant to lift a finger now can easily do kitchen chores. So too do children who make their lunch or a snack without the help of their mother. Women have lost their status as a housewife.

It wasn’t always like that. When I married 54 years ago, I was the most important member of the family holding full control over the kitchen and laundry affairs. I knew the whole family would starve or wear dirty clothes for a month if I got sick or went on strike. Men didn’t know even know how to fire the hearth, not to mention boil rice without burning it or prepare side dishes.  [Korea Times]

You can read the rest at the link, but I think the biggest reason for a low birth rate is the cost of education in Korea. It is absolutely ridiculous when the costs for hagwons are factored into raising kids.  As far as the divorce rate that has more to do with women not being locked into poor marriage survive anymore.  If their husbands are treating them poorly women now have the option leave and still be able to support themselves without the husband.  I don’t think living without modern appliances is going to do much to lower the divorce rate in Korea, but cooking a home cook meal and having dinner together as a family would definitely help.

https://twitter.com/SouthKoreaDaily/status/593862593443340288

https://twitter.com/SouthKoreaDaily/status/593496512610607106

It looks like the program is working as intended:

The Justice Ministry tightened visa standards in April last year for foreign women who marry Korean men and started requiring them to pass Korean language tests to obtain visas to come here. The aim was to stem the chronic marital strife resulting from communication problems that has led to many of migrant wives seeking refuge in shelters.

But a lack of educational institutions abroad teaching the language is making it tough for women from abroad to join their Korean husbands here.

According to the Korean Embassy in Vietnam, the number of visas granted to Vietnamese brides fell from 5,708 in 2013 to 2,967 in 2014.

Justice Ministry data also show that the overall number of foreign brides who entered Korea fell from 98,965 to 98,364 over the same period.

In January and February, the number fell nine percent on-year to 17,522.

Now some critics say the rules are unfair to bona-fide married women who already have marriage licenses. One man in the southern port city of Busan killed the owner of a matchmaking company after his new wife was unable to enter Korea because she kept failing her language test.

Lee Soo-han at the South Gyeongsang Province chapter of Women Migrants Human Rights Center said, “The aim of the revised regulations is reasonable, but the problem is that the rules are too strict since brides who fail the test have to wait six months to take the next exam.”  [Chosun Ilbo]

You can read the rest at the link, but could you imagine the claims of racism that would be made if such a language test was required in the US?