Category: Uncategorized

Seven North Korean defectors were sent back to North Korea by the Chinese government:

It was reported on October 10 that China repatriated all seven North Korean defectors who had entered an international Korean school in Yentai, China and demanded to be sent to South Korea.

The South Korean government strongly protested the move and asked them not to let it happen again. As the issue appears to be related to the China’s North Korean defector policy in the future, chances are that it could lead to a diplomatic conflict between South Korea and China.

Unification Minister Chung Dong-young even said he was shocked by this. Some how I don’t think he or the ruling government really care about any of the defectors. However, they did lodge a complaint with the Chinese government and recently China allowed eight separate defectors to go to South Korea. This makes me wonder if China did this more out of international condemnation than pressure from the Korean government. You be the judge.

Obviously Kim Dae Joong doesn’t like President Roh to much after reading this article. Here is the best excerpt from the article:

A country where one Prof. Kang Jeong -koo of Dongguk University — man who has hailed the “spirit of Mangyongdae” (where Kim Il-sung lies embalmed) — threatens to sue the Republic of Korea at the UN if he is prosecuted for his remarks; a government that doesn’t pay attention to the return of South Koreans abducted to the North and prisoners of war still languishing there, even while attempting to return North Korean spies who served long prison terms here home to the North; a government that does not utter a word of complaint when a long-term prisoner is publicly praised as a “patriotic fighter”; a country whose Human Rights Commission says restrictions on students’ hairstyles breach their human rights but averts its eyes from the starvation and suffering of our brethren in North Korea; a country whose unification minister slanders a majority of the people as Cold War relics; a country where huge numbers of people flock to the North to watch the “Arirang” mass calisthenics, which North Koreans have been forced to rehearse at the end of a club — that is the sort of state the president has got us into, and the 70 percent whose views differ from the president’s have no reason to respect him. That is why he is being ridiculed and reviled.

So does anyone think he missed anything?

The Anton Ohno bashers who were giddy the last few days after he was twice disqualified in two prior races are sure to be furious with rage after Ohno comes back to win the overall speed skating competition buy winning two gold medals over his South Korean competitors on their home ice:

In the men’s 1,000-meter final, Ohno, last year’s overall world no.1 sprinter, clocked 87.452 seconds to outrun China’s Li Jiajun (87.646) and Ahn (87.833) for the gold medal.

With a last-day rally, Ohno, who was disqualified in the 500-meter and 1,500-meter events, took the first spot in the men’s overall classification ahead of Ahn. Both had 68 points but Ohno had the advantage of winning the long-distance event.

I wonder what twisted CIA conspiracy theory will surface to explain Ohno’s win this time? Maybe the race organizers will let him finally talk to the media now that he won.

Lotte is now offering to take over the North Korean tourism project after the North Koreans falling out with Hyundai over the dismissal of Vice Chairman Kim Yoon-kyu who embezzled millions of dollars to North Korea.

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Ever wonder who those people are that fill Korea’s Internet Cafes? Well here is an interesting article explaining who these gamers are:

Many of South Korea’s 17 million gamers — some 35 percent of the population, principally males in their teens and twenties — are obsessive. At the 1,000 won-per-hour ($1) Internet cafes popular among young South Koreans, they’ll sit eyes glued to monitors for hours on end. Sometimes play will extend for days.

Gamers camped out at Internet cafes typically live on instant cup noodles and cigarettes, barely sleeping and seldom washing.

My first tour in Korea Camp Casey did not have on post Internet access in the barracks so I always had to go to the off post Internet Cafes and I was always amazed by the fact that I would go to the Internet cafe in the afternoon and then come back some time the next morning and the same Korean youths wearing the same clothes sitting at the same computer would still be sitting there playing the same game. Hopefully the guys I saw didn’t end up like this:

This year’s gaming death wasn’t the first such case of someone dying at a computer terminal in this game-crazed nation: In 2002, a man died in Kwangju after 86 hours of marathon gaming.

One of Kim’s patients, a high school student, would leave his house and not come back for weeks, practically living in Internet cafes playing games, Kim said.

However, some of these game addicts are making big money off of their addiction or hobby depending on how you want to characterize it:

Computer games can also be a path to big rewards. Three cable channels are devoted to broadcasting game matches and a total of 4.5 billion won ($4.4 million) is given out as prize money in competitions each year.

Hong Jin-ho, a 24-year-old professional gamer, earns more than 133 million won ($130,000) a year, living and training with his fellow game team members in an apartment in central Seoul.

I play strategy games like Civilization III and Rise of Nations every once in a while and they can be addicting, but 50 hour game marathons? I can go maybe 4 hours before my eyes get worn out. It makes me wonder if the amount of these Internet cafe addicts is directly related to youth unemployment in Korea? I guess if you have nothing better to dom the Internet cafes are an inexpensive entertainment option to fill your day up with, or in the case of some these gamers, fill your weeks up with.

The first new F-15K that the South Korean government purchased from Boeing has arrived in Korea:

South Korea has received its first batch of next generation fighter jets, a development that boosts its aerial defense over the Korean peninsula.

The US$5.5 billion deal saw the Eagle from America’s Boeing beating off competition from the Typhoon Euro-fighter, and the Rafale from France.

Some of you may remember the controversy that started when President Bush publicly advocated the purchase of the F-15 to then Korean President Kim Dae Jung. It was unwise for President Bush to do that because anything he says will get interpreted in the Korean media in some anti-American way which was the case with F-15 purchase. This gave the French government an opportunity to also jump in and play to anti-American sentiment in hopes of selling their inferior aircraft.

Ultimately the Korean government did the right thing and buy the best aircraft. Here is what one Korean pilot thinks of the new F-15K:

Boeing test pilots and South Korean fighter pilots took the first two F-15s through a number of performance tests on their way to Hawaii.

This K-model F-15 is compatible with other South Korea Air Force systems as well as U.S. assets in the region. The K-model version packs all the latest avionics capabilities available on the market.

Since the ROK Air Force now has F-15’s I wonder if the “citizen groups” will sue the ROK Air Force for noise pollution like they did the American F-15’s?

Nomad has more on his site.

Japan has once again proven it has got some really strange sex weirdos and here is another great example from Coming Anarchy:

A man faces charges for tracking a schoolgirl on the street while in his company car and pestering her to sell him her panties, prosecutors said. The 24-year-old man, whose name has not been released, has been reported to the Yokosuka Branch of the Yokohama District Public Prosecutors Office, where he faces a charge of breaking a Kanagawa Prefectural Government ordinance aimed at providing youth with a wholesome upbringing.

The man has the dubious honor of being the first person to be reported to prosecutors since the ordinance was expanded in July to outlaw even the encouragement of used underwear purchases.

If trying to buy school girls’ panties wasn’t weird enough, this guy thinks he did nothing wrong:

He admits to the allegations against him.

The Kanagawa ordinance has since July forbidden the sale of, or encouragement to sell, used underwear belonging to under 18s that contains traces of feces, urine, saliva or other bodily fluids.

So I guess it is okay to buy panties from children under 18 as long as they are clean?

According to the Chosun Ilbo, a lot of the prepositioned war stocks here in South Korea have fallen into a state of disrepair:

The majority of U.S. military hardware in South Korea fell into such a state of disrepair that it would have caused serious delays had any hostilities erupted, the Washington Post said Tuesday quoting classified internal audit reports.
The Post said the Pentagon and U.S. Congress continued to be misled by reports that readiness levels were high, even after an internal investigation in October last year found that 50-80 percent of heavy artillery and other weaponry were not “fully mission capable.”

The problem was aggravated during Washington’s large-scale shifting of arms and supplies from caches scattered around the world toward battle zones in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The important thing to remember is that this report covers the war stocks here in Korea. If the actual Army equipment being used here fell into this kind of disrepair then it would be time to really worry. The equipment in the war stocks just sit there down south and do not have people conducting regular maintenance on them, so it shouldn’t be to much of a surprise that they are not in great operational condition. Military equipment needs regular maintenance, the prepositioned stocks don’t get that thus leading to some of the problems cited.

In the 2005 Miss Asia Pageant, Korean entrant Hong In Young on the left of this picture finished second to Kitty Wang of China who is pictured in the center. Third place went to Anna Zhai of China who is on the right. Here is another picture of Hong:

I admit she is pretty hot, but I have seen better looking women in Korea, but then again she may have a lot of talent she displayed at the pageant. Isn’t talent supposed to be important at pageants? Anyway I know who is really hot, Ms. China, Kitty Wang:

Hat Tip: Japundit

A bar catering to westerners in Pyongyang is expected to close with the North Korean decision to end the World Food Program’s activities in North Korea:

It looks as if Pyongyang’s only bar for foreigners will have to close if, as North Korea demands, all foreign NGO staff leave by January next year. The U.K. Guardian reported Tuesday that the bar, which is run by aid workers, will probably not survive the exodus. Some 300 foreigners live in North Korea, 90 percent of them working for international organizations. The remaining 10 percent are people who come and go on business, a handful of Western journalists, and five English teachers.

Every Friday Pyongyang’s expat crowd gathers at the bar inside the UN World Food Program compound. Foreigners have taken to calling it the RAC ? an acronym for “Random Access Club,” itself a take on the WFP’s famous “no access, no food” slogan. It is also “the single place in North Korea where one can come and go as one pleases,” the paper said, “an oasis of modern globalized normality inside a land where time has not only stood still but gone backwards.”

Judging by the looks of the place I don’t think anyone is missing out on much.