A model shows off two new inverter dehumidifiers, manufactured by LG Electronics Inc., during a publicity event in Seoul on May 3, 2015, in this photo released by LG on May 4. The two products have the largest capacity of 17 liters among dehumidifiers available in South Korea. (Yonhap)
Maybe they are spies or are just making a false confession under duress, but the fact that the North Koreans are publicizing this shows that they want to use them as bargaining chips in future negotiations:
Two South Koreans detained in North Korea told CNN on Sunday that they spied for South Korea.
South Korea has flatly rejected the accusations and urged Pyongyang to release them.
The interviews came after North Korea announced on Saturday that it arrested a South Korean student studying in the U.S. on charges of illegal entry into the country, the fourth South Korean citizen detained in the North.
South Korean missionary Kim Jung-wook has been held there since October 2013.
Sunday’s interviews as well as the new detention could be an attempt by Pyongyang to pressure South Korea to shift its policy toward the communist nation. The North could also use the detainees as a negotiating chip should inter-Korean talks reopen.
When announcing last month the arrest of the two CNN interviewees — Kim Kuk-gi and Choe Chun-gil — North Korea accused them of working as spies for South Korea’s main intelligence agency National Intelligence Service (NIS), branding them “heinous terrorists.”
In Sunday’s interviews, both Kim, 61, and Choe, 56, admitted to the charges against them and said they would accept any punishment the North Korean government decided. North Korean minders were present during the interviews, CNN said. [Yonhap]
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.
The 2nd Infantry Division is moving forward with its combined division concept with the ROK Army:
2nd Infantry Division civil affairs officer Lt. Col. Gil Kwon, left, and his deputy, Lt. Col. Michael Cole have shared an office at Camp Red Cloud, South Korea since Kwon and 30 other South Korean officers joined the division in January.
It’s a little cramped these days in the office that South Korean Lt. Col. Gil Kwon shares with his deputy, U.S. Army Lt. Col. Michael Cole.
But they are learning more about each other every day as the two countries’ militaries try to bridge cultural gaps and prepare for a major reorganization that will shift south most U.S. forces from bases north of Seoul to an expanded megabase at Camp Humphreys.
What’s left will be a combined U.S.-South Korean unit prepared to defend the peninsula if war were to break out with North Korea.
The transformation involves adding South Korean troops and units, including 31 staff officers and an entire infantry brigade; replacing the Camp Hovey-based 1st “Iron” Brigade Combat Team with U.S.-based rotational brigades on nine-month deployments, and moving the bulk of the division to Camp Humphreys.
South Korean and U.S. officers started sharing offices inside 2nd Infantry Division headquarters on Camp Red Cloud in January as part of the transformation. In January, the division received a complement of 31 Korean officers with ranks ranging from major up to a brigadier general who is now deputy 2nd ID commander, said Maj. Gen. Thomas Vandal, who turned over command of the division to Maj. Gen. Theodore Martin last week. Vandal spent the past two years preparing for the changeover.
The South Korean officers speak English and have experience at U.S. and British military schools. Each is paired with a U.S. counterpart with one serving as the other’s deputy, he said. [Stars & Stripes]
You can read the rest at the link, but 1st Brigade on Camp Hovey will deactivate this summer and be replaced by rotational units coming to Korea from the US for 9 months at a time. The rotational units will train with the 16th ROK Brigade.
People dressed head-to-toe as Darth Vader and storm troopers, characters of the film “Star Wars,” pose for a photo during a publicity event, held by Japanese retailer Uniqlo, in Seoul on May 4, 2015. The “Star Wars Day” event originated from the English expression from the movie, “May the Force be with you,” which sounds like “May the Fourth.” (Yonhap)
Here is an article in the Christian Science Monitor that discusses how South Korean President Park Geun-hye could leave a legacy if she was able to work out a reconciliation with Japan over its World War II past:
Yet the South itself is sharply riven on partisan lines, between right and left. Disagreements are profound on how to interpret most of the past, including the autocratic rule of Park’s father, who served as an officer in the Japanese Army. Not until 2012, for example, could political agreement be gained to open the National Museum of Korean Contemporary History, which sits prominently at the Gwanghwamun Square rotary next to the American embassy. But inside, one subject does garner agreement: Korea’s unhappy occupation by Japan, a time when Koreans were forbidden to learn or speak their language.
“In 1905 Imperial Japan forced the Korean government to sign a treaty depriving it of sovereignty,” reads an opening script. Partway through is a photo display of the so-called “comfort women,” stating: “Women and girls were even victimized as forced laborers at the various places or as the military sexual slaves at the Japanese military camps.”
In fact, comfort women are just the tip of the iceberg for Korea’s outcry. It is Abe’s entire revision of the basic meaning of World War II that bothers Japan’s neighbors, many of whom see the prime minister as also trying to restore the honor of his own family. Abe’s maternal grandfather was Nobusuke Kishi, a minister in Japan’s wartime cabinet who was arrested on war crimes charges and then released.
Indeed, many ideas that purport to restore Japan’s honor and dignity hearken to Meiji era propaganda, which helped form the basis for Japan’s colonial expansion and the war. For example: that Japan in the 1930s was only taking territory to keep it from Americans and other European colonials. That Japan was acting as friend to the nations it invaded. That Japan’s cause was just, and the atom bomb attacks made Japan the war’s victim.
“The problem for us is that Japan’s denial and revisionism is their actual position,” says Choi Jin-wook, president of the Korean Institute for National Unification. “For them it is truth. They have drifted into believing that they were victims of World War II. For Japan, nothing is remembered. For us, nothing is forgotten.”
Prof. Choi points to another factor: Mounting strains between Japan and China mean that Abe cannot be seen as showing any weakness in northeast Asia.
Today, most historians and a UN investigation argue that some 200,000 women in Asia were forced into sexual slavery during the war. Yet Abe has questioned this, despite previous Japanese official apologies and the payment of compensation starting in 1992. Last November, Abe enabled a commission to “consider concrete measures to restore Japan’s honor with regard to the comfort women.”
The new Japanese position has emerged gradually. But its main points are this: Korean women were not rounded up and forced to service Japanese soldiers, as most history texts outside Japan suggest. Rather, the women were volunteers, willing participants – not coerced by Japan but offered up under Korean management. [Christian Science Monitor]
In regards to the revisionism the Japanese use to justify the war, the Koreans are absolutely correct. All one has to do is go to the Yushukan Museum next to the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo. The Yasukuni Shrine gets all the attention because it honors all Japanese war dead to include those convicted of war crimes. Having been there, Yasukuni is nothing compared to the Yushukan Musuem where World War II is called the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere War. Those who put the museum together believe that the Imperial Japanese were liberating Asian nations that were being colonized by Europeans and Americans. Much of the history depicted at the museum is laughable.
As far as the colonial occupation of Korea I always recommend that people read Under the Black Umbrella: Voices from Colonial Korea, 1910-1945
which dispels much of the myths about the occupation, like the one repeated in the article about not being allowed to speak Korean. Koreans could speak their native language during the colonial period just not in schools or to hold government positions. People who have spent time in Korea know how much Koreans value education. The Imperial Japanese understood this too and this was how they hoped to assimilate the Koreans into their culture over time.
As far the comfort women issue I always recommend that people read The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan (Worlds of Desire: The Chicago Series on Sexuality, Gender, and Culture) which provides a lot of facts instead of emotional arguments on this issue. The facts show that very few Korean women were forcibly conscripted by the Japanese Army to be comfort women. The vast majority came from Korean brokers who either bought girls from poor families, tricked them, or sometimes kidnapped them to be comfort women. The fact that after World War II this same system was in place to provide women to be camptown prostitutes for the US military further validates this. The critics in Japan on the comfort women issue want people to believe they were just prostitutes that the Japanese military did not force into prostitution. With that said the Imperial Japanese would have known that these women were being bought, coerced, or kidnapped making them just as liable for the crime as the Korean brokers.
Considering how repugnant the historical revisionism is in Japan I do not see any way that President Park Geun-hye can reach out to Prime Minister Abe without him first making significant concessions. First of all he should advocate for removing the war criminals names from Yasukuni and come out against the historical revisionism in the Yushukan Musuem. He cannot force change because they are both private entities, but he can advocate for change which would be positive first step to reconciliation. If he doesn’t make a significant first step I don’t see how politically President Park can move forward on this issue.
Without high resolution imagery I don’t think this image is a smoking gun in regards to reported mass executions in North Korea. For all we know these could just be wooden targets they put up for training purposes:
A U.S. civic group has released satellite images of North Korea that appear to show a public execution.
Radio Free Asia reported Thursday that the Washington-based Committee for Human Rights in North Korea published an analysis of photos taken last October from above a military training area near Pyongyang.
Analysts identified six anti-aircraft machineguns lined up across from some blurry objects, with distinct shadows that appear to be people, also lined up side-by-side on a firing range.
Whatever or whoever was in the images was no longer there in another picture taken nine days later.
The committee says the most plausible explanation is that a public execution took place there. [Chosun Ilbo]
The protesters actually get themselves together a good size crowd of about a thousand people to protest for this huge sum of compensation money:
Men shave their heads in protest during a demonstration April 3, 2015, over a history of incidents near the Rodriguez Range live-fire complex in Pocheon, South Korea. The large range is frequently used by both U.S. and South Korean forces.
A citizens group living near the Rodriguez Range live-fire complex in South Korea is calling for 11 trillion won ($10.2 billion) as compensation for training-related incidents during the past six decades, organizers said Monday following a recent protest.
The call by the private Youngpyeong Seungjin Firing Range Task Force for payment from the national government to Pocheon, an area of about 160,000 residents living between Seoul and the Demilitarized Zone, came after the group demonstrated Friday against range accidents. The city of Pocheon has not endorsed the request.
Senior 8th Army officials drove to the village and compensated the homeowner that day, while South Korea soldiers fixed the damaged roof.
Citizens group officials said they counted more than 1,000 people attending a protest Friday, which had been planned prior to the errant round incident, though the figure could not be independently confirmed. Local police told Stars and Stripes they did not count the crowd but had been told to expect about 500 people. [Stars & Stripes]
You can read the rest at the link, but there is no way I envision that much money going to the city of Pocheon. Live fire training has to be conducted somewhere just like their has to be an airport constructed somewhere. What matters is if all the proper safety precautions are being taken to minimize accidents like what happened with the misfired Stryker training round.
