Category: Uncategorized

This is one of these only in Korea stories, from the LA Times:

The law giving only the legally blind the right to become registered masseurs was introduced under Japanese occupation in 1913 and reaffirmed by South Korea 50 years later, a way for the state to give the visually impaired a chance to earn a living in a culture prone to ostracizing the disabled.

But that aim has now collided with South Korea’s constitutional guarantees against discrimination. Masseurs who are not blind and want to offer sports therapy or give facial and foot massages have long complained that the law is biased.

And they have decided to fight.

“Why is our business illegal in Korea when in all other countries around the world it’s perfectly legal?” asks Lee Dong-yup, president of the Korea Meridians Assn., which lobbies for about 300,000 masseurs who are not legally licensed — although many are working anyway, openly and without being harassed by police or inspectors.

Basically what is going on here is that the non-blind masseurs want to legally practice because customers would rather prefer to get a massage from hot and young Korean girl among other benefits and not a 63 year old blind ajumma.

The latest poll numbers on President Roh’s job approval are in and they are not pretty:

Polling Data

Do you approve or disapprove of Roh Moo-hyun’sas president?

I wonder who has higher approval ratings in Korea, Kim Jong-il or President Roh?

UPDATE: One Free Korea has more on the Oh My News’ “professional reporting”.

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Are the glory days of President Roh’s favorite media outlet Oh My News over just like he is? Let’s hope so:

Few doubt that OhmyNews, which galvanized younger voters, contributed to the election of President Roh Moo Hyun, who was portrayed by Korea’s mainstream newspapers as a dangerous leftist with little chance of victory. OhmyNews readers, prompted by citizen journalists’ reports that Roh was trailing in the vote, sent out a blitz of text messages urging friends to vote for Roh, and he prevailed by a narrow margin.”Ordinary citizens found a medium to serve their interest and express themselves,” says OhmyNews Chief Executive Officer Oh Yeon Ho.

OhmyNews has since become one of Korea’s most influential media outlets. However, the site continues to look for a profitable business model and is expected to lose money in 2006. This comes after a several years of very modest profits. OhmyNews, set up in 2000, now has about 90 full-time staffers—65 of them journalists—and some 44,000 citizen contributors. Together, they produce around 150 articles a day. This year, it expects revenues of about $6 million, 60% of which come from online ads and the rest from the sale of the company’s news product to Internet portals, and from miscellaneous services.

Let me get this right, they have a staff of 155 people and are only able to release 150 articles a day? That is less than one article on average per person that works there. Plus many of the articles they do produce are crap as I have long demonstrated (here are a couple of my favorite examples from my archives 1 & 2). Is there any wonder why they are losing money to blogs?:

Critics say OhmyNews will have a hard time trying to repeat the sensation it sparked in Korea. It competes for the attention of Net users in increasingly crowded markets, many of which might not really crave its maverick style of journalism. Apart from social-networking sites and portals that are increasingly developing into important news distributors, the explosion of blogging worldwide will probably make a dedicated citizen-news site less attractive in the future.

Even in Korea, fierce competition for online advertisements is expected to push OhmyNews into the red this year, according to company executives. “In any industry, no business model is sustainable unless you constantly seek innovation to adapt to new changes,”says OhmyNews Communications Director Jean Min. He adds that his company will soon come up with a revamped version that befits the Web 2.0 era. One option under consideration is giving readers certain editorial rights, Min says, without offering further details.

OhmyNews execs say the biggest difference between blogs and their service is the role of professional journalists. Blogs don’t have the credibility of OhmyNews, where professionals screen, edit, and fact-check stories from ordinary folks to filter out inaccuracies and potentially libelous claims, the company argues. Whether that kind of quality control will differentiate OhmyNews from competing sources of news and commentary remains to be seen. For the moment, though, the company remains long on idealism but short on a workable business strategy.

“Blogs don’t have the creditbility of Oh My News?” You have got to be kidding? I trust information coming from blogs like the Marmot’s Hole more than I do from Oh My News and I’m willing to bet many people agree with me. Than the claims they are professional journalists who fact check their articles is totally laughable with the number of errors and sensationalism that I and others in the K-blogosphere have shown.

With their financial problems now becoming public, it is now very clear why President Roh is giving Oh My News public funding to support them. Wouldn’t this be like President Bush giving tax payer dollars to the Weekly Standard? It is however quite clear that if Oh My News doesn’t change their ways they are going to be going the way of President Roh; limited time left and increasingly irrelevant.

HT: Asiapundit

Will the lunacy over Dokdo ever end in Korea? From the Korea Times:

Toyota has recalled about 4,000 cars this year, including 1,863 Lexus RX330s in August for faulty driver’s seats. Toyota is replacing BMW as the top-selling imported brand, having sold 5,183 vehicles in the January-October period. BMW, which had occupied the No. 1 for six consecutive years since 1999, fell to second with the sale of 4,931 in the same period.

Toyota also recalled IS250 and GS430, two popular Lexus models, for seat belt and airbag defects.

Additionally, auto experts said there is a possibility of getting an electric shock if the Lexus RX400h, the first hybrid car on the Korean market, is involved in a car accident.

But a Toyota official argued that no case has been reported in the U.S., citing a sensor system in the SUV.

According to the afternoon newspaper Munhwa, the Japanese carmaker is raising the ire of netizens for dropping the Dokdo Islets, the islets to the east of Korea that Japan also lays its claim to, from its navigation system. The allegation comes on top of complaints that it is selling its cars at inflated prices.

Who the hell cares if Dokdo is on an in car navigation system or not? Does Korea have plans to make a superhighway over 200 kilometers of ocean to get to Dokdo? My Garmin GPS doesn’t have Dokdo on it either, does that mean that Garmin is some how involved in this great Japanese conspiracy to take over Dokdo?

HT: Japundit

The fact that South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun told President Bush that his country will not be joining the US effort to inspect North Korean ships is getting a lot of play on the US news channels as if this is some kind of surprise when anyone with any passing interest in Korean affairs could have told you that South Korea would not inspect South Korean ships. The excuses from South Korea are so typical:

Roh said he would not join completely in the U.S.-led Proliferation Security Initiative, a voluntary program of about 80 countries that calls for stopping ships suspected of trafficking in weapons of mass destruction. Roh, however, said Seoul supports the principles and goals of the system.

Hadley said there were special circumstances for South Korea remaining out of the program.

“But short of that, they have made clear to us … that they fully support” the U.N. Security Council sanctions and “that they will cooperate to ensure that equipment related to weapons of mass destruction does not get into North Korea and does not get out of North Korea,” Hadley said.

If I only had a dollar for everytime the “special situation” or in this case “special circumstances” line was used to explain away South Korean policies I would be a very rich man. At least Bush and new Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe are getting off on a good foot:

Bush felt that he and Abe “saw eye-to-eye” on North Korea, Hadley said. He also tried to play down differences with South Korea.

In other words nothing new on the North Korean issue came from this APEC meeting even though everyone will pretend something was accomplished.

There is some interesting debate going on over at the Marmot’s Hole over a Korean Government’s Truth Commission^TM report absolving 83 World War II war criminals of Korean ethnicity that served with the Imperial Japanese military. The Marmot’s Hole has since posted a follow up report concerning well noted Korean scholar and author Michael Breen’s response to this report:

If the Truth Commission wants to get its moral bearings straight and live up to its name, it should examine the broader assumptions with which it is approaching its mission to resolve the pain of the past. In doing so, it should recognize that the idea that Koreans were all unhappy citizens of imperialism bar a few collaborators is a myth. Koreans were Japanese citizens, and it did not occur to many to support the allies against their own country. Ask anyone who lived in that period, and they will tell you that the political correctness of the post-colonial generation is distorted.

They will also tell you that from 1937-42, Koreans in the Japanese army were volunteers _ who included King Kojong’s son, an army general _ and that large-scale forced conscription only started in 1944. The Commission should know that those rounding up comfort women were Koreans and those torturing people in police stations were mostly Koreans. Koreans, in other words, were more “horrible’’ to Koreans in many cases than the Japanese were. The solution to this dilemma is to accept the notion of individual responsibility. I asked my father’s friend why he thought the Koreans camp guards were so nasty. “When the camp commander was angry about something, he’d berate his officers,’’ he explained. “The officers would take their frustration out on the Japanese privates, and they would take theirs out on the Korean privates. The Koreans would then take their anger out on the only people beneath them _ that was us.’’

So, Truth Commissioners, who’s the victim, my father’s friend or the camp guard?

Some pretty hard hitting comments from Michael Breen. The Korean government’s hypocrisy in regards to their complaints of the Japanese not recognizing properly their own war time history is quite clear after this Truth Commission’s report. I could go on and on about the Korean government’s attempts to rewrite history in order to protect Korean Pride^TM but both Marmot’s Hole postings and the comments do a good job of doing this. So make sure you check them out.

This is actually quite surpising considering the South Korean government’s past policies of being North Korean apologists:

Seoul has for the first time decided to support a UN resolution on North Korea’s human rights abuses when it comes up for the vote in the UN General Assembly. The government has been absent or abstained from votes on resolutions condemning the rights situation in the Stalinist country, three times in the UN Commission on Human Rights between 2003 and 2005 and once in the General Assembly. “We expect that the decision will contribute to promoting human rights as a universal value in North Korea,” the Foreign Ministry said in a statement Thursday but added, “We will maintain the principle of reconciliation and cooperation toward the North and make continuous efforts to bring about real improvements in the human rights situation there including food issues.”

Don’t read too much into this because this vote was only to save face for newly elected South Korean born UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. I don’t expect anything of any substance from the South Korean government to materialize that would actually promote human rights in North Korea. Like One Free Korea I remain very skeptical about these UN Human Rights resolutions when these international diplomats show more outrage about false accusations by terrorists of Korans being flushed down the toilet at Gitmo than about the slow, starvation, and murder of hundreds of thousands of North Koreans.

More over at the Marmot’s Hole as well.

As you can tell there has been light posting here due to being out of the loop for the past two weeks but regular blogging will resume once again. A lot has actually happened the past two weeks.

I’m glad I had no access to TV or the internet the past two weeks so I didn’t have to listen to the congressional election nonsense. Hopefully sanity will return to the US media now that the election is over and the Democrats won. The results may actually be a good thing if the Democrats don’t turn the next two years into nothing but revenge politics. Now that they are in control of Congress they now have to play a constructive role on issues such as Iraq instead of doing everything possible to criticize and undermine.

I for one seriously doubt the Democrats will force a withdrawal of troops from Iraq like many of them and their opponents claimed during the election run up. A US troop withdrawal followed by the evacuation of the Green Zone that brings back images of the fall of Saigon would be political suicide for the Democrats. Americans don’t want to lose the war in Iraq they just don’t like the status quo where it appears the US is losing. So look for a bunch of talk to happen about changing strategies but I really don’t expect any grand change in strategy besides what the US is already doing, which is training Iraqis and handing over areas of responsibility when ready. If the politicians really want to help they need to get the Iraqi government to allow the US military to go after Sadr and his thugs.

A great thing that happened just this past week was that Secretary Rumsfeld was removed. It was about time. Rumsfeld actually did some good things shaking up the Pentagon and as Robert mentioned his USFK policies were very sound, but he has out lived his usefulness because he has pretty much alienated himself from the military leadership at the Pentagon. I think President Bush actually kept him around this long just because he didn’t want to be seen as caving into Democratic demands, but he definitely needed to go and the election results gave the President the cover he needed to get rid of him.

Also as Nomad pointed out, this blog was mentioned in the Korea Times in a rather badly edited article but thanks none the less to the author for mentioning this exactive duty soldier who operates the GI in Korea site.

Then:

1955 marketplace

Now:

Modern day marketplace

Then:

Now: