Eric Thames, a former major league player and now a first baseman of South Korea’s NC Dinos, smiles after winning the MVP award of the Korea Baseball Organization (KBO) on Nov. 24, 2015. Thames, 29, helped the Dinos to their second straight postseason and became the third foreign player to win the KBO’s top individual honor. (Yonhap)
The photo, released on Nov. 24, 2015 by a soon-to-open local museum, shows a replicated coal mine on exhibit that was worked by South Koreans mobilized for labor by Japan during the colonial years. The museum, hosted by the southeastern port city of Busan, is South Korea’s first that chronicles the forced laborers. It will open on Dec. 10 to coincide with the World Human Rights Day. (Yonhap)
This will be a significant development in ROK and Japanese relations if this intelligence sharing agreement does become operationalized:
The United States has been implementing a trilateral military intelligence sharing agreement with South Korea and Japan, the Pentagon said Tuesday.
The memorandum of understanding, which was signed in December last year, calls for voluntary sharing of military secrets on North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs.
The agreement was put into action earlier this year, but questions have arisen after Assistant Secretary of Defense David Shear said earlier this month that the U.S. hopes to “operationalize” the agreement.
“We are implementing the arrangement,” Cmdr. Bill Urban, a U.S. Defense Department spokesman, said in response to a question from Yonhap News Agency. The official declined to provide further details, including how many times information sharing has taken place. [Yonhap]
Via a reader tip comes this sad news that two Soldiers from the 2nd Combat Aviation Brigade were killed in a helicopter crash near Wonju:
Firefighters search through debris of a crashed U.S. helicopter on a road in the city of Wonju, South Korea, on Monday. YONHAP via AFP – Getty Images
A U.S. military helicopter crashed in South Korea during a routine training mission Monday, killing both American pilots on board, the U.S. Army and South Korean police said.
The AH-64 Apache helicopter crashed on a road in Wonju, about 80 miles east of Seoul, a Wonju police officer said.
Two bodies recovered from the helicopter were severely damaged and officials couldn’t immediately confirm their identities. There were no reports of casualties on the ground.
The U.S. Army in South Korea later confirmed the crash, saying the cause of the accident was under investigation. [Fox News]
You can read more at the link, but condolences to the families of the pilots after this tragic crash.
It has already been 5 years since North Korea’s deadly artillery shelling of Yeonpyeong Island which the Kim regime has never taken responsibility for:
South Korea’s Marine Corps held a live-fire drill in the Yellow Sea on Monday, as the country marked the fifth anniversary of North Korea’s shelling of Yeonpyeong Island.
The live-fire exercise, which mobilized K-9 self-propelled artillery launchers, was held despite warnings from North Korea on Sunday that it would react “mercilessly” if the South pushed ahead with the scheduled drill near the tense maritime border.
Monday marked the fifth anniversary of the Yeonpyeong Island shelling, which was North Korea’s first attack on South Korean soil since the 1950-53 Korean War. The bombardment of shells left two Marines and two civilians dead and further froze inter-Korean relations under the Lee Myung-bak government, which had accused the North of torpedoing the Cheonan warship in the Yellow Sea eight months earlier. The North denies responsibility for the sinking, which killed 46 sailors. [Joong Ang Ilbo]
I saw this posted over at the Marmot’s Hole about how a professor from Sejong University Park Yu-ha was charged without detention for writing her book “Comfort Women of the Empire”. What crime did she commit writing this book? The crime was defamation due to her attempting to accurately portray an unbiased history of the comfort women issue:
“she wrote the book in an attempt to re-portray them in light of the variety of testimonies provided by former comfort women. She said their words opened her eyes to the sheer diversity of the circumstances and experiences of Korean comfort women, and to the bigger picture of ‘an empire and its colony.’
“Park believes that Japan did not recruit comfort women in Korea, which was part of Japan from Tokyo’s perspective, in quite the same way that it did on the front lines and in occupied areas, such as in the Philippines. In those areas, records show that Japanese soldiers were directly involved in the forcible and violent taking away of comfort women. ‘Many of the Korean comfort women were apparently recruited while being cheated by agents of prostitution, some of whom were Koreans, or being sold by their parents,’ Park said. ‘While some have testified they were forcibly taken away by military personnel, I suppose that such cases, if there were any, were exceptional.’
But Park emphasized that Japan is not exempt from its responsibility for the comfort women, who were taken to ‘comfort stations’ against their will and experienced pain. That is because she sees the relationship of an empire and a colony in the backdrop of the Korean comfort women issue. [Asahi Shimbun]
You can read the rest at the link, but the Korean public likes to think that all the comfort women were girls sleeping in bed and kidnapped by evil Japanese soldiers while the Japanese rightists like to think they were all willing prostitutes. Both historical narratives are untrue if one really looks at the history.
What Professor Park writes about is the same historical narrative that Sarah Soh wrote about in her book “The Comfort Women“. In the book Soh provides documented evidence that most of the Korean women put into the comfort women system were sold by Korean brokers. The actual kidnapping of Korean women by Japanese soldiers would be a very rare occurrence when the broker system made so many of these women readily available. This does not absolve the Imperial Japanese from responsibility since they ran the comfort woman system that provided the demand for the Korean brokers to meet. To make even worse is that many of these girls were teenagers when sold into prostitution. I see no way that a young teenager should be considered a willing prostitute. Especially when many girls were sold by their families into prostitution for money due to the extreme poverty. This was actually a practice that was going on well into the US military era in South Korea.
It is pretty clear that the comfort women issue is not black and white, but has more nuance to it then each side is willing to admit. Ultimately the Imperial Japanese government was responsible for the actions of the Korean brokers that supplied the majority of the Korean girls. The Imperial Japanese had to have known how young the girls were and the unethical and deceptive actions the Korean brokers were taking to make them available to the Japanese military. There is no need to rewrite the history of what happened to the comfort women when the truth is bad enough.
An illegal immigrant from Indonesia, a suspected follower of a terrorist group linked to al-Qaida, leaves a Seoul court on Nov. 20, 2015 after deliberations on his arrest warrant. The 32-year-old was detained on Nov. 18 on suspicions that he supports al-Nusra Front. Police confiscated a model of an M16 rifle and books on Islam fundamentalism from his home. The suspect uploaded on his SNS accounts photos of himself waving the flag of the terrorist group and wearing a cap with the group’s logo. (Photo captured from Yonhap News TV) (Yonhap)
In my opinion Kim Young-sam never got the credit he deserved for his time as Korean President. First of all he was able to punish the past military dictators by charging with treason and putting them on trial before ultimately pardoning them which arguably maintained national unity. He also got stuck with the task of handling the Asian Financial Crisis and accepting the bail out loan from the International Monetary Fund. Both of these issues were widely unpopular, but history has shown that the way Kim Young-sam handled them was correct and hopefully with his passing people will better remember the great things he accomplished as President:
Kim Young-sam
The nation – political supporters and detractors alike – mourned the death of former President Kim Young-sam, an icon of Korea’s democracy movement, who passed away Sunday at age 87.
Kim died at 12:21 a.m. at Seoul National University Hospital after suffering from septicemia, or severe blood infection, and acute heart failure, hospital chief Oh Byung-Hee said in a press briefing.
He had been hospitalized since Thursday with a high fever.
Kim was previously hospitalized for 18 months from April 2013 to October 2014 for stroke and pneumonia.
A native of Geoje Island in South Gyeongsang, Kim served as the first elected civilian president of Korea from 1993 to 1998, following decades of military rule.
Former leaders of the country and current politicians flocked to the former president’s wake at SNU Hospital in Jongno District, central Seoul, on Sunday, to grieve his passing and recall his legacy of helping to build a more democratic nation.
Former Prime Minister Kim Jong-pil – who was at times a rival and at times an ally to President Kim- arrived at the wake in a wheelchair. “He will forever be remembered in the hearts of the people as a leader of convictions,” he said. [Joong Ang Ilbo]
