Seoul

As I said the other day I’m currently staying in Seoul for a few days. I’ve been to Seoul once before, about a year and a half ago, but that was at a time when I knew almost nothing about Korea and hadn’t even yet gotten fully adjusted to life in Japan. Since then I’ve pretty well used to Japan, and even a little tired of it for the time being, and the language, spent several weeks traveling in China, and even learned a tiny amount of the Korean language, all of which makes this visit a very different experience.

Despite having shipped 4 boxes of various sizes, I was still slightly over my legal baggage allowance. While flights bound for the Americas allow you to check two pieces of luggage weighing up to 30 kilos each, flights bound to Korea only allow a single piece of checked baggage weighing 20 kilos or less. Of course when transferring flights you’re allowed the allowance of your final destination, but staying for 5 days in Korea I was supposed to follow the stricter rules of that country. I called the airline to double-check their luggage policy and was told that every kilo over 20 costs 700 yen each, which is about the same price as shipping by boat. I figured it was worth the risk, and packed about 27 kilos. They didn’t even say a word about it at checkin. Until I entered the plane I was also nervous about my carryon luggage. I had my laptop backpack, stuffed fill with electronics and cables, as well as a soft duffle-bag half filled with books, as well as an small over-the-shoulder I had picked up in Hong Kong, and was carrying my jacket. I was under the impression that luggage checks were tight, but I went through the lightest security check I can remember, nobody even glanced once at the size, shape or amount of my luggage, and I collapsed into my seat like a rock.

I arrived tuesday afternoon feeling utterly dead, having spent the entire previous night getting ready to leave and only slept in spurts of a few minutes every time I rode in a vehicle. The taxi shuttle to the Kansai airport in Osaka, the plane flight to Korea, the bus ride from the airport to Seoul- these all took just about an hour and a half each. I took a bus from Incheon airport to the Plaza Hotel in downtown Seoul. Of course on my budget I was not to be staying in such a place. I was actually there to meet Son Jongmin, who was to show me to the place I actually would be staying-the student dormitory at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies (韓国外国語大学）. Why would I be staying at the dormitory of a strange university for only five days when I’d never even met a single person there? Well, my mom’s cousin Marian Palley, who is a professor at Delaware University, is close friends with other professors at several universities throughout Seoul, including both the president of this one, as well as Professor Kim Inchul, who was one of her students when he was studying for his PHD at the University of Delaware about twenty years ago. When I emailed Marian to tell her that I was going to stop by Seoul on my way home she insisted that I contact her friends at Hankuk University, and Kim Inchul arranged for me to stay for free at their foreign students dorm and to have his graduate assistant help me get there.

I’m pretty tired so I’m going to head off to sleep and finish this tomorrow.

Taiwanese restauranteur watches ‘Temple of Doom’ too many times

Originally spotted this morning in the print edition of The Japan Times. A good complement to my previous post about exotic Chinese food.

Monkey Rescued From Being Put on Menu


By Associated Press

July 16, 2004, 8:06 PM EDT

TAIPEI,
Taiwan — A monkey was recuperating at a wildlife park in Taiwan after being rescued from a restaurant that planned to sell slices of the animal’s brain while he was alive in a cage, a local government official said Friday.

A tourist in the central mountainous area of Nantou bought the monkey, Formosan macaque, after he saw that customers at a restaurant were about to eat its brains, said Huang Kuo-chen, a forestry official in Taoyuan county, where the tourist lives.

The man phoned Huang’s department to ask whether the monkey could be legally raised at home, the forestry official said.

“Raising monkeys at home is banned because they are protected animals,” Huang said.

The man, who didn’t give his name, handed over the animal to the authorities after rescuing it in May, Huang said. An inspection of the monkey showed exposed bone and small holes in its skull, he said.

In a front-page story, the Apple Daily showed photos of the monkey with a patch of hair shaved on its head where the restaurant reportedly planned to cut open his skull and slice off pieces of brain.

Many Taiwanese enjoy eating exotic animals because they believe the creatures provide special health benefits.

CTI cable news quoted doctors who warned that animal brains could contain dangerous viruses and were not fit for consumption.

The monkey is now being held at a wildlife park before experts evaluate whether it can be released in the wild, Huang said.

Here is a description of one monkey brain feast, which according to the source web site happened in 1948 or so.

The monkey’s head was supported by its neck in a
bracket, two pieces of wood with a semicircular hole on each side such that when you put them
together, they form a complete circle around the animal’s neck, allowing the head to be exposed
above the plank. The hair around the head is shaven with a shaving razor. A small chisel and a
hammer is used to quickly chisel a circle around the crown, and the top part of the skull is
removed. A teaspoon is used to scoop up the brain, which is immediately eaten. This has to be
done before the monkey dies.

North Korea offers free email on the Web-new competition for Gmail?

I’ve known for some time that North Korea aka DPRK(Democractic People’s Republic of Korea) had a basic yet wildly entertaining newswire online at WWW.KCCP.net, but after visiting the site again today after a long absence I was pleased to see that they now have much more to offer. According to an undated but presumably recent press release, “The Korea Computer Centre (KCC), the nation’s software hub and local network centre, launched home page Naenara from June Juche 93 (2004).” Juche, incidentally is the name of North Korea’s official state philosophy of self-reliance, propagated by the now-dead but still legally head-of state Kim Il Song and now continued by his gluttonous son Kim Jong Il. Similarly to the way that the year in official dates in Japan is based on the reign of the current emperor (2004 is Heisei year 16, meaning the 16th year of the current emperor), Juche is used as the year label in the DPRK, which Juche year 1 being the year of Kim Il Song’s birth. Back to the main topic; North Korea’s new web presence.
According to their FAQ:

What is WWW.KCCKP.NET?

WWW.KCCKP.NET is the biggest Internet site in DPRK that operates as a base of information communication.
It provides useful information concerning whole field of politics, economy and culture of DPRK. North-south relationship has opened up a new stage of development after the historical declaration of Jun.15 Joint Statement attracting the world attention to the Korea’s reunification. Multilateral international relationship including Korea-Russian, Korea-America and Korea-Japan relationship is the focus of the world people’s attention. The reality requires that the world people have a quicker and correct understanding of Korea in order to strengthen the solidarity.

What kind of information is available?
The visitors to our site can gather deep and wide information about Korea. First of all it is possible to know the clear and consistent point of view of DPRK on the current international problems. And it will be helpful for you to know the real situation of Korea.
Membership and information service

Do I need to gain membership?
Of course you may not have a membership. You can browse many information without membership. But it is recommended that you gain a membership in order to enjoy advantage in using our website.

What additional information service is available?
You’ll have your own mail account and make a full use of convenient “Naenara” web mail service. Users can be provided with news and information in concern through “Naenara” e-mail.

How is the user information protected?
The security of user information is fully guaranteed. “Naenara” website regards it as its prime mission to protect privacy. Naenara website has built various security environment and is upgrading it continuously. It uses SSL. The 24-hour monitoring system is on alert to protect the site from hacking and viruses.

tive, but didn’t answer the one question I wanted to know: with a new free email service run according to Kim Jong Il’s interpretation of Stalin’s hard-line communist doctrine, do the capitalist imperialists of Hotmail, Yahoo or Gmail have any chance of surviving? Obviously I had to try their email service and make my own assessment. The registration is fairly typical for a web site. I asked my girlfriend to look at the registration and compare the Korean and English versions. She said all of the questions are the same, but the Korean version is extraordinarily polite, actually using the Korean version of the Japanese word ‘sensei’ (which everyone should remember from Karate Kid.) They ask for your real name, a user ID and password with optional hint question, sex, birthday, citizenship and language. They also have optional fields for current email address, telephone numbers, occupation and ‘What do you think of our site?’ Now, it’s common for sites that have a password hint question to give you a list of predefined questions to choose from. Kcckp.net is no exception. The choices are: ‘The name of your best friend is…’ ‘The scenary I love most is…’ (type in original) ‘My favorite movie star is…’ “How would Korea change after reunification?’ ‘What will you do when Korea is reunified?’ ‘My favorite movie is…’ By allowing people to choose questions either based on the dream of a unified Korea or Kim Jong Il’s Hollywood film obsession, I think all users will be able to find one that will stick in their head well.

Under the language pulldown menu they have choices for English, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Spanish, French and Arabic which probably does a good job of covering over 95% of the people on this planet who have a computer, but the country field is a bit strange. First of all, the list of nations in the pulldown menu is in an order that I would have to describe as completely random if Korea were not the first entry, and will therefore have to describe as almost random, there are a couple of surprises in the list. Now, there is nothing strange about them listing only a single ‘Korea’ instead of ‘Republic of Korea’ and ‘Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,’ but I was completely astonished to see that Taiwan is a possible country of citizenship! How can little North Korea’s official government site contain such a slap in the face of the closest thing they have to a sympathetic ally? Luckily, even as a ‘US Imperialist,’ to quote from the news section of the site, I was allowed to register with no greater hassle than finding my countries name in a non-alphabetized list.

I was now the proud owner of the email address mutantfrog@kcckp.net! I opened my gmail account and fired off a quick message to my new kcckp.net account so I could see how their interface stacks up, but I ran into a bit of a brick wall when I discovered that the menu-bar item for ‘e-Mail’ does not in fact actually link to anything. After checking around a bit, I realized that the site was full of links which do nothing but open a Javascript application pop-up window with the message ‘Please Wait!’ Sadly, it doesn’t look like I’ll be able to use my North Korean communist email account today. I sent them an email, and although I have lost some confidence in their ability to compete with gmail, I can at least take comfort in the message on the contact information page, ‘You’ll be answered within 24 hours. Kind service will be waiting for you.

First year middle school student sent to Juvenile Correction for illicit access to online game

Here’s an English translation I made of an article I spotted on the news wire of the Japanese daily paper Asahi. The article is extremely vague about the technical details of the case, only saying that he managed to gather the passwords by ‘correctly matching alphabetic and other characters.’ I assume the extreme vagueness is the result of a reporter with no technical knowledge and no desire to have any who basically just re-typed the police blotter to fill his daily file quota. I find it a little surprising that a 13 year old boy was actually arrested for this crime, even under Japan’s unforgiving legal system. Have there been any similar cases of people actually being arrested and charged with criminal activity for hijacking a game account in the US or other countries?

An announcement from the Saitama Prefectural Juvenile Guidance Center states that a Yokohama city first year middle school student(13) was taken into corrective custody by Saitama Prefectural police on July 12th for illegally using someone else’s ID to access the online internet game “Ragnarok.”

According to the same office, on December 16th of last year, when the boy was still a 6th year elementary school student, he used the ID and password of a male company worker(27) from Fujimi city in Saitama prefecture to connect illegally to Ragnarok Online from his home computer up to 16 times.

The boy is said to have collected about 140 people’s IDs and password by correctly matching alphabetic and other characters. Since August of last year he had repeatedly used these IDs and password to illegally access Ragnarok Online over 400 times.

“Ragnarok” is a game in which players engage in adventures on the net, where they collect weapons and other equipment to increase their own power. It was created in Korea, and according to the management company has over 500,000 players in Japan.

Kyoto’s MK Taxi tries to transform Japan: a Korean entrepreneur seeks progress in a xenophobic nation

Following up on my earlier two posts on Korean business and Japan I thought that perhaps I should make sure not to make it sound like the Korean-Japanese community is composed of criminals. Here’s an article I recently came across about a Korean-Japanese owned company based out of Kyoto (where I live.) I’ll post a couple of excerpts and you can click on the title for the full article.

Battling this public perception was one of the key tenets of Aoki Sadao’s plan when he started Japan’s most progressive taxi company, MK Taxi, in Kansai’s cultural capital, Kyoto. Initially starting out as Minami Taxis, the company merged with local rival Katsura Taxis in 1961, thereby forming MK Taxi, or just “MK” as the company is popularly known.

From the beginning, Sadao, a Japanese citizen of Korean descent also known as Yoo Bong Shik, placed great emphasis on presenting a polite, smart face to the public to encourage the belief that MK was a cut above the average Japanese taxi firm.

“I wanted to make drivers feel proud of their job, to have greater self-respect and self-confidence,” he says. In order to help realize this goal, Sadao started paying MK drivers a higher-than-average wage. Special employee apartments were designed and constructed, and drivers were encouraged to continue their education in night classes or at foreign-language schools.

-*-*-*

One particularly sour moment occurred in the summer of 2000, when owner Sadao held meetings with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s vice-premier, Kwak Porn Gi. Ethnic Korean Sadao was keen to take advantage of the then-warming relations between the DPRK and Japan with a view to exporting 1,000 taxis in order to establish a tourism-oriented taxi business in North Korea.

This meeting met with furious distaste among the far-right nationalists with their ear-splittingly noisy trucks. One June weekend, as I entered the MK Bowl to watch a five-a-side soccer tournament, trucks were circling the complex, speakers cranked to 11, as a voice agitatedly bellowed out, “MK Taxi! Nippon kara dete-ike!” (MK Taxi! Get the hell out of Japan!)

MK Taxi is only one of several taxi companies whose vehicles can be seen continually roaming the streets looking for fares. They are particularly noteworthy for their very convenient door-to-door Kansai International Airport shuttle service, which costs only about $35. They can afford this through economy of scale; instead of using personal taxis they send a minivan to take about a half-dozen passengers in a single trip, stopping at each address in turn, the route planned out by a GPS based navigation system. Their English language web page (which includes information on the shuttle service) is located at this address.

Iranian woman ‘gives birth to frog’

An Iranian newspaper has reported the controversial story of a woman who claims to have given birth to a frog.

The Iranian daily Etemaad says the creature is believed to have grown from larva to an adult frog inside her body.

While it is unclear how this could have happened, the paper carries quotes from medical experts who say there are human characteristics to the animal.

It has been speculated that the woman, who has not been named, unknowingly picked up the larva while she was swimming in a dirty pool.

The woman, from the south-eastern city of Iranshahr, is a mother of two children.

The “so-called frog”, as the newspaper puts it, has yet to undergo precise genetic and anatomic tests.

But it quotes clinical biology expert Dr Aminifard as saying: “The similarities are in appearance, the shape of the fingers and the size and shape of the tongue.”

Medical history recounts stories of people who believed they had frogs – or even lizards or snakes – living and growing in their bodies.

One of the most famous was the 17th Century case of Catharina Geisslerin, known as “the toad-vomiting woman” of Germany.

When she died in 1662 doctors are said to have performed an autopsy, but found no evidence animals had ever lived inside her body.

Japanese boy writes apology in blood

I’ve seen quite a few people pointing to this Reuters story, but I was a bit disappointed at the lack of detail so I found another story from a different source to compare. I’ve posted the original story, and the translation (from Asahi newspaper) below it.

Japanese boy writes apology in blood
TOKYO, Japan (Reuters) — A Japanese teenager was forced by his teacher to write an apology in blood after dozing in the classroom, the school’s principal said on Monday.

The teacher later went to high school principal Hiroaki Dan and confessed what he had done, Dan told Reuters.

The teacher had apologized to the 17-year-old boy and his parents, Dan said, confirming a local media report of the incident, which happened last Thursday.

He said the boy was taken to the staff room of the school in Fukuoka City, southern Japan, after being caught asleep during a lesson. The 40-year-old male teacher handed the boy a box-cutter and paper and told him to write an apology in blood.

The teacher left the student, who then cut his finger and began to write an apology using his own blood.

Other teachers in the staff room did not notice what was happening, Dan said.

“To ask a student to write in their own blood is something I just can’t imagine,” he said.

He said the boy was back in school, and neither he nor his parents had asked to switch teachers. The teacher involved is expected to resume classes in a few days, Dan said.

The incident comes on the heels of an attack in which an 11-year-old girl killed a classmate by slashing her throat with a box cutter, also in southern Japan.

Sleeping student at a highschool in Fukuoka made to cut his finger and write ‘reflection letter’ in blood
It was discovered on the 18th that at Fukushou public highschool in Fukuoka City, Minami district (Principal: Hiroaki Dan, 971 students), a student caught sleeping in class was handed a cutter-knife[note: probably something like an x-acto knife] by a male teacher in his 40’s and told to write a ‘reflection letter’ with blood from his finger. Later in the day, the principal, head teacher and the student’s homeroom teacher[literally ‘responsible teacher,’ which is as the name implies a position with more responsibility to the students than a homeroom teacher in the US], along with the class teacher, went to see the student’s guardian and apologized for the event.

According to people from the same school, at about 3pm on the 17th, this teacher called to the teacher’s office a male student who had been trying to sleep during his class. The teacher warned him ‘If you’re going to sleep, then go to the nurse’s office,’ but as the student’s expression showed no remorse, he handed him a B4 sized sheet of paper and a cutter knife and told him to ‘write with blood, not pencil,’ urging him to use the knife to cut his finger, and then write a reflection letter with that blood.

After that, the teacher went to another office to do some other job, and when he returned a few minutes later the student had cut his right index finger with the knife and written a reflection statement in blood. Apparently the teacher then tried to change his story, saying that the student was supposed to write in pencil after all. The school’s explanation is that ‘He truly did not think that the student was going to write in blood.’

Principal Dan gave the following statement to Asahi Newspaper: ‘I think that he was trying to get across the feelings that he has as a teacher, giving his earnet guidance, but it was inappropriate. Even despite the recent incident in Sasebo in which a knife was used [referring to the incident just a couple of weeks ago in which an 11 year old girl murdered a classmate for no apparent reason] for a teacher his guidance was most inadequate.’

When a relatively minor incident like this gets picked up by an international wire service it’s very rare for a second article from another source to be translated as well, so I thought it would be interesting to give people the opportunity to make a comparison. I’ll check again later and see if there have been any more recent articles with more information.

Yonghe Gong


March 8 2004
Yonghe Gong is a large Tibetan Buddhist temple complex in Beijing. It was originally the palace of a high ranking Beijing noble by the name of Yin Zhen, but was given to a group of Mongol and Tibetan monks in 1744 following its owners ascession to the Imperial throne and became Emperor Yong Zheng in 1723.


One of the temple buildings…


And a closeup of the sign being obscured by the lion’s head in the previous picture. The sign is the name of the temple in four language, which I believe are (from right to left): Modern Mongolian, Chinese, Tibetan and Classical Mongolian- although I’d say about 50% odds that I have the modern and classical Mongolian backwards since I don’t know anything about that language. I know I should be able to read the Chinese characters, but I can’t seem to recall what the first one means, but the second and third are ‘good-fortune’ and ‘hall.’

Japanese Money in North Korea

I’d like to thank the English edition of the Korea Times for reporting on this newest boast of superiority by the North.

North Korea Boosts Cider Production


According to the June 5 edition of Rodong Sinmun, the Workers Party’s newspaper, Kyongnyun Patriotic Cider Factory in Pyongyang is pushing for a rise in production, as well as modernizing its facilities.

The factory is named after Japanese-Korean businessman Park Kyung-ryun, who donated $150 million worth of cider manufacturing machines to set up a factory in the North Korean capital on the 70th birthday of the late North Korean leader Kim Il-sung in 1982. The facility currently produces 5,000 bottles of cider per hour.

Leaving aside sarcasm over the ludicrousness of a ‘Patriotic cider factory,’ it’s actually interesting to see the North Korean media bragging about an investment from overseas North Korean citizens residing in Japan. For those who don’t know, there somewhere in the neighborhood of a million people of Korean descent born and bred in Japan, but for the most part hold citizenship in either North or South Korea, and not Japan. Cash sent from North Korean-Japanese to their often unknown relatives back ‘home’ has actually been one of the things keeping people in the DPRK alive for years now. It is well known in Japan that one of the largest sources of this money is North Korean-Japanese owned pachinko parlors. Some readers may be unlucky enough to have experienced Pachinko, but for the rest- Pachinko is a mind-numbing Japanese passtime best described as a cross between a slot and pinball machine, and the most popular form of gambling in the country. Gambling is illegal in Japan, but Pachinko parlors get around it by giving you ‘prizes’ instead of cash when you trade in your winnings. You take the prize around the corner to an exchange counter (probably with no registered relationship to the parlor itself) where you then sell these prizes for cash, thus evading the letter but certainly not the spirit of the law. In any even, Pachinko’s ubiquity is proof that the government and police have no interest at all in controlling it. The following chart gives an idea of the high level of popularity that pachinko has in Japan.


(Image from here.)

Here is a good collection of links to articles discussing the connection between pachinko in Japan and North Korea.

A recent article in The Japan Times writes that:

[A new] ship bill stipulates that the government can ban, for a certain period of time, port calls by ships from a designated country or those that have stopped at that country.
[…]
The bill is designed to give the government another diplomatic card in its dealings with Pyongyang, allowing Japan to halt the flow of people, goods and hard currency between the two countries.
[…]
It follows on the heels of legislation that revised the Foreign Exchange and Foreign Trade Law, enabling the government to slap unilateral sanctions on the North by halting cash remittances to the reclusive state.

The ‘cash remittances’ mentioned in the article are gifts, donations and investments made by Japan resident North Korean citizens, and the Japanese government is finally making some attempt to control this cash flow after many years of turning a blind eye.