Category: Korea-General Topics

Here is my first ever attempt at fortune telling.  It will be interesting to see how my predictions turn out at the end of the year.  If I hit on half of them I will be pretty impressed.  Anyway here are my bold and on a few of them not so bold predictions for 2007:

South Korea

– President Roh Moo-hyun will not resign. (Damn)

– Lee Myung-bak will win the South Korean presidency. (Yeah!)

– President Roh will continue to squash the spy scandal investigation.

– Ban Ki-moon will have little impact on the UN. (UN has little impact with or without Ban)

– Zaytun unit will be redeployed from Iraq. (Pretty much assured.)

– Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe does not visit war shrine. (I think 50-50 chance)

– There will be no Japanese invasion of Dokdo. (You wouldn’t know it talking to some Koreans.)

North Korea

– Six party talks will make about as much progress next year as it did this year (not exactly a bold prediction).

– North Korea will do something before the South Korean election in order to sway the vote towards whoever is running on the Sunshine Policy platform.  (Could be a inter-Korean summit or a armed confrontation depending on the current political situation.)

– North Korea will not conduct another nuclear test (It won’t make as much headlines as the first test did; best to save what little nuclear material they have.)

– North Korea will conduct another missile test (Last test seen as failure, a successful ICBM test across Pacific would make huge headlines.)

– Kim Jong-il will not name a successor (Kim Jong-il won’t name successor until he is really ill.)

– Kim Jong-il won’t get a hair cut anytime soon (Goes without saying.)

Korea-US Issues

– Some kind of anti-US incident will happen that will be manipulated for political purposes (It’s an election year, something absurd will happen).

– USFK will handle it much better than they did in 2002 (Lot’s of lessons learned from previous anti-US hatefests).

– The Camp Humphreys location will officially be delayed by the Pentagon.

– US announces further reductions of forces on the peninsula (Will be influenced by operational control and Camp Humphreys issues).

– Operational control will be handed to the ROK Army at 2009 (No matter if they are ready or not).

– There will be no FTA (another not so bold prediction).

– US beef will continued to be blocked from the South Korean market.

– South Korea will not get a visa waiver (Too much visa fraud).

Like I said, some bold and some not so bold, but I am confident that it will be an interesting year on the peninsula due to the impending presidential election and the North Korea and USFK issues that are still unresolved.  Anyone else have any predictions they want to make? 

Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon has announced plans to further green Seoul:

A plaza will be established in the middle of Sejongno Street in downtown Seoul by 2008. It will be named Gwanghwamun Plaza.

The Cultural Heritage Administration administrator, Yoo Hong-joon, and Seoul mayor Oh Se-hoon announced the final decision at Seoul City Hall on Wednesday (Dec. 27).

The city has collected public opinion on three ideas: setting up the plaza in the middle of Sejongno Street, on both sides of the street or on one side of the street.

More than 44 percent of people preferred a square in the middle, a city official said. The authorities also confirmed the name Gwanghwamun Plaza.

“The central position has a weak point in not greatly increasing sidewalks for pedestrians. But it allows an open view from the plaza to Gwanghwamun, Gyeongbok Palace and Mt. Bukak behind the palace,” the official said.

The plaza will make the street look similar to how it did during the Joseon Kingdom, the official said. Major government offices were located along with the street on both sides during the time.

The plaza will be 27 meters wide, and the number of car lanes there will be cut from the current 16 to 10.

According to the plans, the statue of Admiral Yi Sun-sin will remain in place, but the final decision of whether to relocate it will be made after further discussion. The statue of King Sejong that is currently in Deoksu Palace will be moved to the plaza.

I have always found it amazing how ignorant many Koreans are about their own history and the results of this test seem to only confirm this:

More than half the candidates who sat the first Korean history proficiency test by the National Institute of Korean History on Nov. 25 failed. The NIKH said Wednesday that 48.37 percent of 15,395 applicants passed the test. By level, 45.71 percent of applicants passed the high-school history education equivalent level, 31.73 percent passed the middle school test, and 85.04 percent and 72.94 percent the two elementary-grade papers. In other words, while most candidates at elementary level passed, candidates at middle school level proved particularly poor.

The Japanese colonial period is often used to condemn the Japanese, however according to this test many of the Korean students don’t even accurately understand the Japanese colonial period:

Candidates were most embarrassed by questions about Japanese colonial rule. Experts say this is because some school history classes sometimes don’t cover the era, which is in the latter part of the standard textbooks, due to time restraints. Many applicants also gave wrong answers to questions about the ancient Koguryo and Barhae kingdoms, which China has been trying to co-opt as part of its history by way of the so-called Northeast Project. This suggests Korea has tackled attempts at historical distortion by Japan and China with more rhetoric than substance.

I guess I should give these students a break because maybe they didn’t understand which answers to give on this test because you have real history and than you have the revised history of the Korean government that revises unpleasant aspects of Korean history such as Korean war criminals during World War II.  Does the student answer the actual number or the revised number only accepted by the Korean government?  Actually I would be impressed if the students even knew Korea had war criminals during World War II to begin with.  Just think if they asked a question about who was responsible for the Gwangju Uprising how many different answer they would get.  The politicization of Korean history by politicians for their own short term political advantage is what is responsible for so many competing theories of Korean history.  Not to mention the North Korean fifth column interested in rewriting history in order to give a more sympathetic and positive view of North Korea while at the same time exploiting issues in order to drive a wedge between the US and the general Korean public which they have had much success at.  Unfortunately I don’t see this trend changing any time soon.

Some how I just don’t see this new law having any effect on the new Hooters franchise.

Brendon Carr over at the Marmot’s Hole has a very insightful posting about lawyers in Korea.  Highly recommend you go through and read the comments as well that shines a lot of light on what can seem like a very murky aspect of Korean society.

I have to wonder if this is in response to the fraudulent denial of US beef imports by the Korean government:

The U.S. has called Seoul’s attention to the increasing number of Korean children deported for attending U.S. public schools on visitors’ visas. A government official said the U.S. Embassy in Seoul in a consular meeting with Korea on Friday made it clear that it will clamp down. “A senior U.S. official expressed his concern about the disadvantages such illegal acts by Korean parents can bring to their children in the future,” he added. Another government official said dozens of such cases are reported in some U.S. cities.

Most U.S. public schools do not check foreign students’ visa when they enroll. But the Department of Homeland Security is serious about tracking down students who enter the country on a visitor’s visa and stay after it expires. The embassy said if children are found out, they will not only be deported but risk being blacklisted.

I have to wonder if this crackdown on minors using cell phones will be as successful as the prostitution crackdown?:

Phone bill angst is rife in South Korea, where data from mobile service operators show that four out of five people own a handset and at least six out of ten school-age children have one.

A Telecommunications Ministry official said on Friday that from January, children will need parental permission to go above a pre-set limit, which can be up to 30,000 won ($32.57) a month.

Parents will also receive detailed information about the types of services their children subscribe to.

At present, parents can set a limit on how long children can talk on their mobiles, but all the kids have to do is ask the mobile provider to increase the limit.

In February, a teenaged South Korean boy killed himself after tallying a phone bill of 3.7 million won ($4,017).

“The ministry hopes these regulations will prevent teenagers from making a lot of mistakes about how they use their mobile phones, which can lead to mounting bills,” the telecommunications ministry said in a press release.

How about parents just take the damn phone away from them if they are using it too much?

If the US gets it’s way Korea may become a NATO partner:

U.S. Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns said Tuesday that President George W Bush will propose at the upcoming NATO summit in Riga, Latvia, a program to bring Japan, South Korea and Australia closer to the military alliance.

The three countries “do not seek NATO membership, but we seek a partnership with them so that we can train more intensively from a military point of view,” he said. Japan, South Korea and Australia have all deployed troops in Iraq as members of the “coalition of the willing,” Burns stressed. Japan has been seeking closer ties with NATO, with Foreign Minister Taro Aso having expressed Tokyo’s willingness to strengthen coordination in his speech at a meeting of senior NATO officials in Brussels in May.

First of all, I can’t believe the lunatic left, backed by North Korean agents in South Korea will be to happy about this. Secondly China won’t be to happy either, especially if the US expects China to do anything about North Korea. Than again this just may be a bargaining chip to get China to do something about North Korea.

HT: Coming Anarchy

From Yonhap:

South Korean inmates overseas suffer from excessively heavy prison terms compared to convicts at home, due to cultural differences and language barriers, a lawmaker said Monday.

There were 1,400 South Korean nationals in foreign detention centers as of the end of August, with 6.3 percent, or 228 of them having received jail sentences of 10 years or more, Rep. Im Jong-in of the ruling Uri Party said, quoting data submitted by the Justice Ministry.

In the United States, more than half of the 197 South Korean inmates were serving prison terms of 10 years or longer.

The situation was the same in China where 54 out of 168 Korean prisoners were sentenced to imprisonment of 10 years or more.

Fifteen of them received life in prison or suspended death sentences for drug offenses or fraud, the lawmaker said in a press release.

The punishments are very harsh compared to those in South Korea where those convicted on such charges face maximum sentences of 10 years of imprisonment, he claimed.

“The Justice Ministry must devise measures to save South Korean inmates serving unnecessarily long prison terms in foreign countries after closely analyzing criminal cases involving them and their sentences,” the lawmaker said.

I find it interesting that the Korean media is complaining about overseas Koreans receiving unfair “heavy prison sentences”, while in Korea crimes against foreigners often go unpunished. Let me remind everyone of one of my all time favorite Korean justice system sentences:

The Seoul High Court yesterday overturned the conviction by a lower court of a 49-year old taxi driver who had been charged with the rape of a 19-year old U.S. female soldier.
The man had received a 10-month prison term in the original trial after being convicted of luring the newly-arrived servicewoman from Incheon International Airport to a hotel near there where the woman said he raped her. The woman reported the incident to U.S. military authorities, who asked for assistance from Korean prosecutors. The appeals court ruled that the woman had shown no evidence of having refused the man’s advances, and that he used “not enough violence to constitute rape.”

This guy rapes a US soldier and was freed on appeal when he only originally received a 10 month sentence for the assualt to begin with. Then this same media has the balls to criticize US prison sentences?

Those who live in Korea can attest to the amount of third country nationals from Islamic countries that work in difficult labor jobs in Korea. With the amount of Muslims workers in Korea combined with the number of US military installations in Korea, it really was only a matter of time before the radicals would try something and it is good to see that the South Korean authorities were ready:

Since 2002, the National Intelligence Service has investigated 107 suspects in connection with six cases involving Middle East terror organizations, the agency said in a report to a legislator made public yesterday.
The intelligence service, according to Representative Won Hye-young of the Uri Party, said South Korea has not escaped involvement with terror attempts by radical Islamist groups.
According to the report, the service learned in May 2005 that an Iranian organization linked to Hezbollah, named by the United States and a few other nations as a terrorist organization, had been involved in wire transfers of cash amounting to about 60 billion won ($63 million).
The transfers had been disguised as trade transactions; it was not clear from the report if the money had been raised in Korea or had been routed through this country in an attempt to disguise its origins. One Iranian was sentenced to a year in prison here for violations of Korea’s financial transfer laws.
In May 2004, the report added, the spy agency learned that people linked to Jemaah Islamiah, another Islamist group, were arriving in Korea to set up a base of operations here. Eight Moroccans were denied entry and turned over to Moroccan intelligence in October.
One Korean-American suspect was cited in the report; the agency said it and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation in March 2003 jointly tracked down a 30-year-old man affiliated with a Pakistani terror group.
He was deported to the United States, where he received an 11.5-year sentence after being convicted of being a member of a terror organization and having received paramilitary training.

HT: TKL