Category: Korea-General Topics

This is incredible:

South Korean students who have trouble with school bullies can soon call on the government to provide them with bodyguards.

South Korea plans to start a trial service next month to cut down on school violence. As a part of that, it will provide personal protection for those bullied students who seek it as they travel to and from school, an official said on Tuesday.

"We are going to try to protect the student who is being bullied and find out who is doing the bullying," said Park Jung-hee, an education ministry official.

Park said the bodyguards — which local media said were likely to come from the police, private security firms and volunteers — will not sit with students during class.

The funding and services are being provided by companies wanting to help cut school violence, Park said.

Sound like the exporting of parenting to the bodyguards. 

Is anyone surprised this issue hasn’t been corrected yet?:

Korean sailors’ sexual exploitation of teenage girls in Kiribati, a small island country in the Pacific Ocean, is continuing despite major international reports about the sex trade a few years ago, the National Youth Commission said yesterday.

Three girls even gave birth to babies of Korean sailors because the men refused to use condoms, it said.

The commission interviewed 24 women who had sex with Korean sailors during an investigation in Kiribati last December. One-third of them were under 19, the legal age of consent in Korea, and one girl was 14 years old.

As most of such girls live in extreme poverty, they fall into commercial sex for money, it said.

In Kiribati, young sex workers associated with foreign fishing vessels are called “te korekorea,” referring to the Korean sailors to whom the girls provide most of their services.

The commission estimated about 40 to 50 women were involved with Korean sailors last year and the age that they entered the business was getting younger.

You have to be one jacked up person to want to have sex with a 14 year old. 

What is interesting is that Kiribati’s main island is the island of Tarawa.  Tarawa during World War II was the site of the US military’s second offensive against the Imperial Japanese military.  After the Battle of Guadalcanal the US Marines launched an attack to secure the island of Tarawa.  Over 1,000 Marines died securing the island.  Over 4,700 Japanese and Koreans died defending the island.  Even more interesting is that only 17 Japanese and 129 Koreans survived the battle. 

The barbarians are taking over.  According to the Korea Times there is now 536,000 foreigners living in Korea that account for 1.1% of the population. 

When I read something like this, I have to wonder if this guy used to be a hagwon owner.

This stat just go to show that children are learning at a young age in Korea that abortion is just another form of birth control

More than one out of four female high school students who have had sexual relations have also had an abortion, the Korea Federation for HIV/AIDS Prevention said Thursday.

According to the agency’s recent survey of 2,898 middle school and high school students in Seoul, 26.9 percent of female high school students engaging in sex have had an abortion.

About 27 percent of middle school students and 47.9 percent of high school students responded that having sexual relations before marriage was not a problem.

While 1.1 percent of middle school students said they have had a sexual relationship, 7.5 percent of high school students said so. The average age for their first sexual relationship was 13.3 for middle school students and 15.2 for high school students. Among high school students who have experience of sex, 67 percent said that they have had at least two sexual partners.

.  According to South Korean law abortion is supposed to be illegal in most instances:

The Criminal Code criminalizes the act of procuring an abortion and administering an abortion. A woman who procures an abortion may be punished with up to a 2 million won fine and one year in jail.

A doctor, or the like, who performs an abortion may be punished with up to two years in jail if no injury occurs to the mother, up to three years in jail if an injury occurs to the mother, and up to five years in jail if the mother dies. Additionally, a doctor may lose his or her qualification to practice medicine for up to seven years.

In 1973, however, the Maternal and Child Health and the Mother and Fatherless Child Health Acts established exemptions from this prohibition.

According to the law, a physician may perform an abortion if the pregnant woman or her spouse suffers from an eugenic or hereditary mental or physical disease specified by Presidential Decree, if the woman or her spouse suffers from a communicable disease specified by Presidential Decree, if the pregnancy results from rape or incest or if continuation of the pregnancy is likely to jeopardize the mother’s health.

However, the law is enforced as strongly as traffic laws in Korea:

Today, a pregnant woman who wishes to abort her fetus usually visits her local obstetrician/gynecologist and the doctor usually performs the abortion or the doctor refers the patient to a clinic that will perform the abortion.

According to a information obtained in a phone call to a local clinic, abortions cost between 350,000 won and 600,00 won in normal cases. Additionally, most clinics will only perform abortions up to 28 weeks from conception, since at the 28-week mark the abortion may jeopardize the health of the mother.

It is kind of amazing that a country trying to improve a birthrate that is the lowest in the world is doing nothing to stop one of the many reasons for it being so low to begin with. 

This is a pretty cool NASA image of coulds swirling around Cheju Island:

This image from January 19, 2007, was acquired by the MODIS on the Terra satellite. Featured in the image are von Karman cloud vortices off Cheju Do Isand, which is off the southwest coast of South Korea.

The highest point of the island is interacting with wind-driven clouds, causing the clouds to flow around it in large, spinning eddies. Cheju-do Island is actually home to Mt. Halla, Korea’s tallest mountain, at 6400 feet. It is likely that the vortices are forming off this mountain!

If you look at the top of the image you can see the South Korean coast and then just below that you can see the barrier Hallasan Mountain is making for the clouds blowing through.

From the Stars and Stripes:

Thanks to an increase in counterfeiting of South Korean bank notes, get ready for South Korean paper money that looks different from what you may be used to.

The South Korean government announced recently it would begin issuing newly designed 10,000-won and 1,000-won notes Monday. It already had issued new 5,000-won notes Jan. 2.

But you’ll still be able to use the old money — worth about $10 and $1.

The government is taking the action to thwart what Bank of Korea officials said is a recent increase in counterfeiting, especially of 5,000-won notes.

Those fakes often were a sophisticated product not easily detectable to the unaided eye, bank officials said.

Any guesses who is behind the counterfeiting?  I guess when rigorous sanctions make counterfeiting US currency less appealing, you might as well counterfeit the currency of the nation you know will do nothing towards you about it.

Does anyone out there really think this is going to work:

South Korea is empowering couples to have more children by giving them discounts on electricity bills. 

Next week, the government will cut rates for families that have three or more children, the energy ministry said.

"People worry about paying higher electricity bills as their family gets bigger. So, to free them of those worries and have more babies, we are giving discounts," Jang Seok-gu, an energy ministry official, said.

A typical family of five would see their monthly electricity bill fall by about 40,000 won (22 pounds), according to an elaborate formula worked out by the ministry.

40,000 won is roughly $40 bucks a month families would be saving under this latest proposal.  If you multiply that by twelve that comes out to $480 bucks a year.  After reading this I decided to give my brother in law in Anyang a call.  He has one son in middle school and another one in grade school.  I asked him if the government’s latest great idea has inspired him to crank out another kid.  He told me that if the government really wanted to raise the birth rate they would do something about the outrageous education costs.  He said that between paying for school, hagwons, piano classes, taekwondo lessons, etc. for his kids, he is paying roughly about $1,800 month to ensure they get a quality education.  He cannot afford another kid even if he wanted one and saving $40 bucks a month isn’t going to convince him otherwise. 

So obviously this latest great idea isn’t going to do any good.  If the government really wants to improve the birth rate they need to take on the real problem and that is the education system.  Either the system needs to be reformed or the government needs to provide families who have three kids or more with economic assistance to pay for the education costs.  I guarantee the government will improve the birth rate significantly if they agree to pay in full the education costs for the third baby of any family.  This would cost a lot of money, but I’m willing to bet it would be money better spent than sending over one billion dollars to North Korea next year. 

Instead of spending money to better educate their own citizens and improve the sagging birthrate, the government would rather send over a billion dollars every year to North Korea to feed their soldiers, and bolster both their ballistic missiles and nuclear programs.  With a government like this, who would want to have kids.

Here is an interesting letter to the editor of the Korea Times:

I would love to make a comment to your newspaper about a very shocking experience that I had today. I got a phone call from a company that had viewed my mini resume, minus photo, on some Web site.

They had asked me to send my full resume with photo, no problem, I sent it. I then received an email from he director or whoever she was telling me THE COMPANY IS LOOKING FOR ONLY WHITE PEOPLE! What was even more degrading, is when this “person’’ had enough gall, to tell me that Korea is a racist country and always will be so I shouldn’t take it personal, and not to feel bad because, the blacks have it worse here.

She closed her statement by saying, “I don’t know why you came to Korea, but you should go back to America because Korea will not change, so you may continue to feel this kind of prejudice.’’

Hines who?

The Stars and Stripes has a good round up of 2006 for the US military in Korea.  Needless to say USFK transformation issues dominated the headlines of 2006.