I went to Wal-Mart one time in Korea and never went back, so this isn’t a surprise to me:

Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, said yesterday it was pulling out of the Korean market after eight years of doing business here.
Korea was Wal-Mart’s second foray into Asian markets; it began here with four outlets and later expanded to 16. The U.S. retail giant opened its first Asian outlets in China in 1996, two years before coming here.
At a press conference yesterday, Wal-Mart and Shinsegae executives announced the sale of Wal-Mart’s Korean assets to the nation’s largest retailer. Shinsegae, which runs the E-Mart discount chain, paid 825 billion won ($877 million) for Wal-Mart’s assets here.
Joe Hatfield, the president of Wal-Mart Asia, told the press conference that his company’s decision was based on an analysis that the company could not move up to second or third position in the retail market here in the next four or five years.
Beth Keck, the company’s spokeswoman, said, “We want to be able to grow in a market, and we saw it would be quite slow at this point in time.”
Wal-Mart is the second foreign mass retailer to fold its tent in Korea in the last month. In late April, Carrefour of France sold its stores here to Eland, another local retailer.
Wal-Mart has been struggling in Korea, losing 9.9 billion won last year on revenues of 728.8 billion won. It ranks last in sales among the five mass retailers in the market.

Read the rest of the article about why Wal-Mart failed in Korea.  I tend to agree with a lot of what the Joong Ang had to say but the biggest thing that I think was their down fall was location.  Just for the record Home Plus is my favorite shopping center in Korea.

Tags: wal-mart, korea, e-mart

So far so good for the six North Korean defectors granted asylum in the US:

For their entire lives, six North Koreans had heard that Americans were hostile to people from their country.
But the six, who were granted refugee status in the United States earlier this month, said they were surprised to feel safe and relieved because they have been treated warmly.
The four women and two men attended a welcome dinner hosted by the Bethel Korean Church in Los Angeles on Saturday.
During the dinner, the six were tearful. “I never thought time was so precious,” said a 32-year-old former North Korean soldier, who is now calling himself Sin Joseph. “But, now, I don’t want to waste any second, any minute.” He said he has two goals – to learn English and to earn a license as an auto mechanic.

You would think that if people from North Korea of all places could enter the US legally and agree to learn English that our neighbors to South could do so as well.

Here is something else that isn’t to much of a surprise either:

The situation is not quite as rosy in South Korea, where 10 stadiums were built. 

Attendance for South Korea’s K-League has gone down in recent years. 

“The attendance rate at our matches seems to be dropping these days,” said an official of K-League team Chonbuk, who declined to give his name. “Korean people only get excited about the national team. Many people like baseball or the English Premier League but aren’t really interested in the K-League.” 

Jeju World Cup Stadium, which cost US$133.6 million (euro104.64 million) to build on the south side of South Korea’s honeymoon island, wasn’t getting much use until K-League side Jeju United moved in this year. 

Whether the arrival of one of the weakest teams in the league will help the stadium turn a profit remains to be seen.

Is there even enough people on Cheju to fill up the stadium?

Can anyone guess what the top six US military installations around the world are?  Hint none of them are in South Korea or Japan.

Hat Tip: Live from FDNF

I have been playing around with Google Trends and it is an interesting tool to see who from what countries are searching for certain terms. After playing around with this for a while I thought what a great tool to use to once and for all see if anyone else in the world gives a crap about the Dokdo Islands controversy. Judging from the results you will see that no one else outside of Korea gives a crap about Dokdo either.

4. Australia

6. United Kingdom

OhmyNews makes it sound like the former brutal dictator of North Korea, Kim Il-sung wasn’t such a bad guy after all:

The roots of the current crisis go back to the founding of North Korea in 1945, when Korea was divided along the 38th parallel after World War II. Given its current reputation, the Kim dynasty was one of the milder communist dictatorships, whereas Stalin and Mao both applied collectivist theory to the countryside in short, brutal bursts, leaving desolation in their wake. Kim Il Sung took a more gradual approach.

I guess according to OhmyNews it is better in dictator terms to let the people suffer slowly before perishing. Here is more on the greatness of Kim Il Sung:

Moreover, Kim Il Sung, by contrast, did not slaughter class enemies en masse. Rich landlords were allowed to flee to South Korea in 1946-50, those who stayed beginning new lives as peasants. The right to sell land was abolished, but the right to inherit it was not. Like Stalin and Mao, Kim collectivized rice, paddy, and maize fields, but in proper, manageable units. The peasants were also allowed to trade vegetables and whatever else they were able to grow for themselves in their backyard vegetable plots.

Nonetheless, North Korea under Kim Il Sung was a repressive state, but its people never experienced a peacetime famine. According to CIA estimates, until the early 1980s, North Korean rice fields were actually more productive than those in the capitalist South, which was owing mainly to big subsidies, massive irrigation projects, and a generous use of chemical fertilizers.

How productive would the agricultural system in North Korea had been if it wasn’t for the “big subsidies” from their communist allies. Kim Il-sung was not some enlightened leader who created an effective agricultural system; he was a thug who was a master at manipulating people which he was able to successfully do by playing both China and Russia against each other in order to gain aid from both. The fallacy of the North Korean agricultural system was evident when China and Russia cut aid to North Korea and famine ensued shortly there after.

According to OhmyNews, Kim’s son, Kim Jong-il must also be a “mild” dictator for his response to the mass famines in the mid-90’s:

The government’s immediate response to the mayhem, when set against the norms of unreconstructed communist oligarchies, was pretty good. While Mao never admitted that China was facing mass starvation, North Korean leaders, by contrast, confessed their inability to feed their subjects in 1995.

Could it be that Kim Jong-il asked for international aid because he had no other choice because the regime was on verge of collapse and not because of some deep seeded feeling to help his own people?

This article only gets better:

The problem is not that the North Korean administration does not understand where it has gone wrong. The chief obstacle to reform is that Kim Jong-Il cannot admit this publicly without losing the last pretext for not teaming up with the capitalist South. Having seen South Korean judges hand down long-term jail sentences to two of their own former presidents for corruption and political murder, he probably dreads the thought of what they would do to him.

So does the author believe that if Kim Jong-il is issued amnesty than unification should become a reality? Has it ever occurred to the author that Kim Jong-il doesn’t want unification? He wants to keep his power and amnesty wouldn’t let him keep that.

Here is my favorite part. This was actually predictable because when in doubt, blame the Japanese:

Observers say that the North Korean regime should stop being suspicious of Japan and South Korea, as they are nearby and are best placed to help. Millions of tons of rice are sitting in Japanese warehouses, but with the Japanese press full of stories about North Korean obstructionism against those who would try to feed its hungry masses, the Japanese government is unsure of what to do.

First Dokdo, then history textbooks, and now they are letting the North Koreans starve. Those bad Japanese. I also guess it hasn’t occurred to the author that Japan is not eager to offer any aid until all their abducted citizens by North Korea are accounted for. Just because South Korea could care less about their abducted citizens doesn’t mean that Japan shouldn’t.

The woman standing trial over starting the March Yongsan fire has admitted in court to starting the fire.  Get this, she started the fire over a credit card dispute that denied her visa to return to her family in the United States:

A South Korean woman admitted in Seoul court Thursday that she set a March fire on a U.S. military base to publicize her fight to rejoin her family in America, according to court testimony.

Kweon Jung-ja, 57, has spent years trying to garner help to return to her U.S. husband and Korean-born sons in the States, but her one-person protests near U.S. facilities fell on deaf ears, her lawyer said. She decided to change from her self-proclaimed peaceful protests to a more violent one after a U.S. military police member in March called her crazy and a liar, her lawyer said after the court proceeding.

During her 30-minute court appearance, Kweon at times cursed and shouted her answers to the Seoul Western District Court judge, accusing authorities of kidnapping her and railing at both U.S. and South Korean governments for not helping her renew her U.S. visa. She also accused court officials of terrorism as she admitted to arson and to trespassing on government property.

After reading the whole article I can’t help but wonder why did the husband not move back to Korea with the rest of the woman’s family?

From Yonhap:

South Korea’s opposition leader Park Geun-hye was attacked by a 50-year-old drunk man and was taken to hospital, party officials said Saturday.

Rep. Park, chairwoman of the main opposition Grand National Party (GNP), was canvassing for Oh Se-hoon, GNP candidate for Seoul mayor, in Sinchon in Seoul when the man, identified only by his surname Ji, allegedly slashed the right side of her face with a utility knife.

“Park had an approximately 10-centimeter cut to the face from ear to jawline. It seems like a utility knife was used, given the shape of the cut,” Kim Hyeon-jong, a doctor on duty at Yonsei University’s Severance Hospital, said.

She received 17 stitches in an operation and her life is not in danger, according to the doctor.

Two heavily intoxicated suspects were detained by GNP officials and citizens at the scene and taken to a nearby police station.

“It appears to be election terror,” Rep. Lee Ke-jin, spokesman of the GNP, said in a telephone call with Yonhap News Agency.

The government should take responsibility for the lack of security, another high profile GNP official said.

Rep. Chung Dong-young, chairman of the ruling Uri Party, said that the assault was an “unforgivable act” and that it should be dealt with sternly.

“It is very shocking. I am really worried about her health,” Chung said.

Park is the daughter of former Korean President Park Chung-hee.  She is one of the leaders in the conservative movement in Korea and a possible candidate to replace the current liberal President Roh Moo-hyun in national elections next year.

I find it interesting that the ruling party chairman Chung Dong-young thinks this stabbing should be handled “sternly” when he could care less about the police and soldiers in Pyeongtaek being beaten and stabbed by his supporters.

I say bring them on:

A spokesman with a coalition of activist groups earlier said it will send a group of protestors to the U.S. to thwart the negotiations. ¿We already finished the preliminary work for our rally there¿, the spokesman said. The coalition includes the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions and the Coalition of Farmers’ Associations. ¿We are in discussions with the Democratic Labor Party to decide whether lawmakers in the party will join the protests,¿ he said.

The original plan was to dispatch a twice the number, but the coalition reportedly ran into visa problems. Among the group¿s plans is a protest on the Potomac River in Washington D.C.

Washington D.C. police are preparing to deal strictly with any illegal protests in cooperation with the Korean Embassy in the U.S. and Interpol. U.S. police have set out stringent guidelines after seeing the violent demonstrations by Korean protestors against the World Trade Organization ministerial meeting in Hong Kong last year, according to officials in Seoul. Police there are analyzing video clips of the demonstrations and will treat protestors as terror suspects under the U.S.¿ sweeping anti-terror laws if they are found in possession of dangerous items, National Intelligence Service officials here said.

Can you imagine what these people would do to the US public’s perceptions of Korea if they protest and attack the police with the same venom that they have used before against the Korean police in places such as Inchon over the McArthur statue and in Pyeongtaek over the Camp Humphreys expansion. The Korean government is worried about that fact:

Friday¿s government plea was issued by five ministers including Finance Minister Han Duk-soo and Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon. Everyone has the right to speak their mind freely, but staging a rally in the U.S. does not help solve the problem, the statement said. Such protests by a handful of organizations could prove a stumbling block to a visa waiver for Koreans in the U.S. and thus inconvenience the entire people.

The statement warned Seoul will have very limited scope to intervene if protestors violate U.S. law.

That damn right, Seoul will not be able to intervene if these people break US law. That is why I say give them their visas and let them try to violently protest so the US courts can put these people in jail and fine them like they deserve. It would be nice if the Korean government came out as strongly against these same people violently rioting down at Camp Humphreys where they have been suspiciously silent, but the minute they talk about bringing their show on the road to the US the Korean government suddenly condemns them. Interesting.

2ID soldiers may excel at taxi cab related incidents, but the airmen in Osan have quite a record of stupid crimes themselves. The latest is a pair of government travel card fraud cases:

Two airmen were sentenced in separate trials here Wednesday for putting thousands of dollars in wrongful charges on their government credit cards, officials said.

Senior Airman Duane Jones of the 51st Aircraft Maintenance Squadron was sentenced to reduction to the lowest military pay grade, E-1, and a bad conduct discharge from the Air Force. Jones, 33, had been in the Air Force six years.

A four-member jury found Jones guilty of putting $8,400 in unauthorized charges on his government travel card between January and December 2005.

Staff Sgt. Michael D. Glover of the 51st Communications Squadron received a court reprimand after pleading guilty to putting $4,200 in unauthorized charges on his government travel card between May 2005 and this February.

These guys are not the first and most assuredly will not be the last to commit government travel card fraud. I don’t know how they expected to get away with the crimes when the command has visibility over travel card purchases. I’m actually surprised they got away with it as long as they did.

Careers and lives ruined over a few thousand dollars.