sci-fi art, entry #2

It's 12:35 a.m. on a Friday night (or a Saturday morning, if you want to think about it that way). I've had a hard week and a glass of bourbon. I don't feel like posting anything particularly profound, and you know what that means—time for some more sci-fi art.

This one's called "Ancestors." I don't know what the title means, and I have no clue what the contents were meant to portray. And that's the beauty of it, really. Just stare at that half-ruined structure and the stunning panorama in the skies above it, and wonder.

some thoughts on Japan (before I go)

I don't know if anybody out there's been keeping up with international news lately, but if you have, you might recognize this fellow:

His name is Toru Hashimoto, and he's the mayor of Osaka, Japan. But let me back up further.

While keeping this blog I've alluded several times to the ongoing friction between Japan and both Koreas. Each has a long list of grievances with the other. The most prominent bone of contention is probably the Occupation. I've written it with a capital "O" because that's how Koreans refer to it. I've never heard 'em say "the Japanese occupation" or "World War Two." It's just "the Occupation." Neither North nor South Korea has forgotten the 35 years of oppression they endured at Japanese hands.

Compounding matters is the issue of "comfort women." (This must surely ring some bells, right?) It's widely known that the Japanese military kidnapped thousands of women and girls from their conquered territories in East Asia and pressed them into sexual slavery. Korea was no exception. Many elderly Korean women have come forth in recent years and told horror stories of the indignities they were subjected to.

But matters aren't as simple as that. There's still a great deal of debate going on about what exactly happened. Historians on both sides of the Sea of Japan have argued that the comfort women's recruitment was voluntary, and the 200,000 women involved came of their own free will. Others, of course, vehemently deny these allegations and insist that the Empire of Japan committed a brutal war crime, violating these women's human rights. To my knowledge, no reparations have been called for; a simple acknowledgement of guilt is all the Korean protesters are looking for.

Most everybody in Korea (except for those historians I mentioned) is united in the belief that Japan kidnapped their women. Most young folk in Japan don't dispute the matter. However, the nexus of Japan's right-wing party, which has long been defined by its hardline nationalism, insists that Korea is making much ado about nothing. Their arguments have run the gamut: at times they've alleged that the comfort women came voluntarily; at others, they hold that, yes, even though it was a terrible thing to take these women by force, it was necessary to keep up the morale of the soldiery.

This is where Mayor Hashimoto comes in. He created quite a buzz during a recent press conference when, instead of apologizing for some off-color remarks he made earlier, actually wound up making some more. He essentially said that, while what happened to the comfort women was a terrible and inexcusable thing, there's no evidence that the Japanese government was directly involved.

Many in Korea beg to differ.

This recent gaffe has got me curious. I've often longed for a chance to go to Japan and figure out what they think of Koreans. You know, hear their side of the story. I'm not saying that they're not to blame for what happened to the comfort women; I'm just curious to know what the average Japanese man on the street thinks about all this, now that I know what the Korean one does.

Well, now's my chance. Summer break's coming, and I'm spending the month of July at home. After that, though, I'm heading for Japan to meet Miss H and our mutual friend from Bucheon (whose codename I've forgotten). We'll spend two days in Tokyo, going to Disneyland, checking out the sights and sounds of Shibuya and Shinjuku, eating ramen and sushi and perhaps even fugu, and then we'll split. Miss H and our friend will head back to Korea to work (suckers), but I'm a free agent. I reckon I'll ride the shinkansen (bullet train) down the length of the country, see Kyoto and Osaka, visit Miyamoto Musashi's grave, go to Kumamoto and lurk outside my idol Eiichiro Oda's birthplace, stand beneath Rashomon, et cetera, et cetera. Then I'll take the train to Fukuoka and ride the high-speed ferry back to the Korean peninsula. Perhaps I'll chill with Adam in Busan for a few days and then take the KTX back to Seoul. Who knows? I have yet to plan it all out.

But I'm going to Japan, that's the main thing. And may many adventures, new experiences and lucrative travel articles come of it.

Stay tuned...

the punsters were right

...Korea's got a lot of Seoul.

Okay, that was awful. I know. I'm not the first one to make that pun, either. And that's just my point.

Maybe it's the fact that I'm living in Korea's capital city. For the previous two years I was in the hinterlands. I was way down on the islands in 2008-2009, about as far from Seoul culturally as I was geographically. And in 2012 I was in Bucheon, which, even if it is part of the greater metropolitan area (barely), hardly counts as part of the big city. It was relatively quiet, laid-back and dull compared to this hoppin' metropolis.

Seems like everywhere I go in this town, every corner I turn, every street I walk down, every new neighborhood I explore, every event I attend, a new and surprising part of the Korean way of life jumps up and punches me in the nose.

Take the Sejong University Festival, for instance.

Technically it lasted from Tuesday to Thursday, May 14-16. I didn't get much of a glimpse on Tuesday because I had class all day, and I don't have any classes on Wednesday, so I wasn't even on campus. Thursday was my last shot. So after I finished up at two o'clock, I strolled around and snapped some photos.

 

  

 

 

Not much to speak of, right? Students were setting up tents and awnings. A few enterprising souls were already peddling cocktails for four bucks a pop. Some of the English department professors were rehearsing for their big show at 4:00 p.m. Knots of students were meandering here and there. Other than that, the campus was serene.

My friend and coworker Sam and his wife JB (whom I mentioned in my last post) invited Miss H and I to come back to campus at 9:00 and view the proceedings then. I didn't figure there'd be an appreciable difference, but I agreed. My girlfriend and I duly arrived at the appointed hour—halfway through it, anyway—and took a look around.

BOY, was there an appreciable difference.

Those awnings and tents that I had seen being set up earlier were packed with people—students. Soju, beer and cocktails flowed freely. Barbecue lines were everywhere. Snacks of every description were being fried and served to groups and couples at plastic chairs and tables. A famous female K-pop group was performing at the live stage in the middle of the dirt pitch, and dance music thumped from every speaker and amp on campus. Students danced in the streets and under the incandescent lights. Shouts, screams, and roars of laughter echoed and bounded from every darkened window and building. I tried to snap a few pictures, but nothing could encompass the joyous chaos. I'll leave that to your imagination. Sam, JB, Miss H and I sat and nibbled on fries for time, shooting soju, sipping beer from Dixie cups and taking the occasional gulp of baekseju, a Korean wine somewhere between potpourri and cough syrup. Then we got up and wandered around, snacking on chicken kebabs and having conversation when the noise level abated enough for us to be audible. We didn't stay on campus long, but we stayed long enough.

I remember being struck most of all by a feeling of gratitude. After riding my students like a slave master for nearly three months solid, it was nice to see them kicking back before a long four-day weekend. (I bumped into two of them during our wanderings through campus, and they looked like they were having fun.) But most of all, I was awed by the difference in the atmosphere. By day, Sejong University was a somber, venerable educational institution. During these few nights of festival week, however, it had donned a lighthearted and jovial guise, absolutely riotous, star-spangled and comical, infectious in its enthusiasm. A question occurred to me as we weaved through the happy milling crowd.

"Sam," I said, "what exactly is the point of this festival?"

This wasn't his first rodeo.

"It's like spring break," he replied, "but they don't go anywhere."

Well, there you have it. This was the Korean equivalent of spring break. With classes still on and nowhere to go, they threw a party on their school's own grounds. No wonder they were so enraptured. The weather had just turned lovely, the leaves were green and the flowers in bloom, summer was right around the corner, midterms were over and all was right with the world. I was catching a glimpse into a rare sight: Korean students kicking back in grand fashion during a lull in the academic war they'd been waging since grade school.

I felt ever so privileged to have that glimpse.

a day at the races

I love it when I get to drop Marx Brothers references in my blog post titles, but this one is especially apt. I just came off the perfect weekend in Seoul, and it wasn't even a holiday. Yet.

Here's what happened on Saturday, . First, Miss H and I went on our first double-date. It was one of my best buds from Sejong University, whom I'll call Sam, and his girlfriend JB. We went to Seoul Racecourse Park and bet on the ponies:

I even included a video for you schmucks, 'cause I think that highly of you: this is the final stretch of the 7th heat:

I was slightly disappointed. This was my first horse race, but even though I'd known in advance that they only ever made one lap of the track, it still went by too quickly and ended too abruptly. On the other hand, the palpable excitement we felt when the racers rounded the final curve and went flat-out on the home stretch, with the Koreans yelling and stomping all around us, and their cheers and shouts gradually building to an inhuman roar, was something to experience.

Then we went to our favorite Uzbek restaurant in Seoul (yes, we have one): the Fortune Café. Left to right: lagman (lamb and noodle soup); shiz-biz (bits of mutton and onion over French fries); and manti (enormous meaty dumplings, boiled or steamed); and there were at least five varieties of Baltika beer to go with it. (No. 7 is my usual favorite.) A steady stream of Russian pop music videos on the TV set guaranteed that we were never at a loss for something to listen to when conversation waned.

 
The Fortune Café is in Dongdaemun, which is sort of the Russian district of Seoul. So we also stopped by one of the many tiny Russian markets in the vicinity. We walk into the first one and see this:

Holy cow, ain't nobody got a selection of vodka like that around here. I nabbed some Parliament-brand vodka and a bottle of Napoleon brandy (French stuff; I've heard it's excellent). Score!

Then we walked back outside into the dying evening light. And lo and behold, what did we see but a grand parade! It was the Lotus Day Parade, an early celebration of Buddha's Birthday, which would be coming the next weekend. Take a look! It was an amazing spectacle.

 

Each group of people represented a different Buddhist temple in the vicinity of Seoul, and each had different flags and lanterns of all shapes and hues. And it wasn't just Koreans, either: the Chinese and Tibetan diaspora were out in force as well, with the flags of their nations and their own brand of Buddhism on display.

After the temple-goers passed in review, we moseyed down the road in the direction of the Dongdaemun gate, viewing the floats and moving sculptures people had fabricated for the occasion. The elephant dipped its head...

...and the lotus flower opened and shut, giving birth to Siddhartha over and over again.

When we'd finished viewing the parade, we slid down an alley to a tent city filled with cheap merchandise and street food.

This is a mixture of noodles, onions, cabbage, spicy red sauce, and sundae (noodles wrapped in the lining of pig intestines, a Korean favorite). It was surprisingly good. We got ripped off, though; these two plates and the four cans of warm beer cost us 40,000 won, or roughly $36.

And then it was time for the evening's crowning glory: a gem of a place I had no idea existed anywhere in Seoul. It's called an LP bar:

This one was called the Sam Cooke, after the American soul singer. It's near Hyehwa Station, north of Dongdaemun, near Seoul University. These LP bars are the bee's knees. Sam Cooke was no exception. It was quite dark (as you can see from the photos) and the decor was eclectic: photos of the Beatles on the walls, cubist paintings behind the booths, an image of Che Guevara by the door. We walked in, sat down, and looked around. The shelves behind the bar were filled with vinyl records. There were two turntables on the counter just going like the clappers, and sound—a sound I'd not heard played in public for 15 months—was blasting out of the speakers.

Classic rock.

No joke! These LP bars sprang up back in the 1960s when Park Chung-hee outlawed listening to Western music. Enterprising bar owners sneaked onto American army bases and bought LPs off the G.I.s, secreting them in their establishments and playing them after dark for willing patrons. Now these LP bars are old and scuffed, just like the records they play, but they survive as novelties, places where oldsters can go to feel nostalgic and young 'uns can go to feel hip. And that's surely what we felt as we scribbled arcane requests on slips of paper, giving them to the barman up front. Our eyes widened and our souls soared as we heard the familiar tunes piping out of the speakers a few minutes later. It was downright psychadelic to sit there sipping beer in a dark wooden bar while the Doors' "The End" oozed serenely out of the speaker grilles. 

And that was just Saturday. On Sunday, our old friend Joanna, Miss H and I went to Myeong-dong to go shooting (in and out, no pictures), had some delectable Italian food and then went down to Gwacheon to hit up Seoul Zoo. Another full, lovely day in the third-largest city in the world!

I'll just leave you with this bear to keep you company until my next adventure-filled post.

Stay tuned...

peninsular news

What I'm about to tell you is two weeks old already, because the newspapers I'm using were a week old when I picked them up, and it's been a week since I picked them up. So there. Yeah.

But anyway, the news was so interesting and so genuinely Korean that I had to share it with you. Y'might get a better idea of what goes on over here on this peninsula after reading these stories:

From an issue of the Joong-Ang Ilbo, dated May 3rd:

The rebuilding of Sungnyemun (also known as Namdaemun, literally "South Great Gate") has just been completed. This is what it looks like now:

                                                                                                        from Wikipedia Commons

Why was it rebuilt? Well, because in 2008, this happened:

                                                                                           also from Wikipedia Commons

Some ass-hat set fire to the darn thing and burnt it to a crisp.

That we may be clear, Sungnyemun is National Treasure No. 1 in South Korea. There used to be a huge retaining wall 20 feet high which encircled the citadel of Seoul, back in the Joseon Era (1392-1897). The gates were all built between 1396 and 1398, and they marked the cardinal directions. The northeast, northwest, southeast and southwest gates were the "Four Small Gates," and the north, south, east and west gates were the "Four Great Gates." Only six of 'em still exist today; I've been to four of them.

Sungnyemun (which literally translates to "Exalted Ceremonies Gate") is the best-preserved and most iconic. It shows up most frequently in travelogues and brochures about SoKo. It was nothing short of a tragedy when it was destroyed, and it was a long, torturous labor of love to set it to rights again. But now it's back, and reopened, and everyone can behold it in all its glory. The city government took pains to reconstruct the gate using materials and methods which were correct for the period, and they went slow and steady instead of rushing things (which has bitten them in the butt with previous restoration projects, I hear). I advise everybody to stop by the gate on their way through Seoul. It's worth your while.

Okay, onto the second news story:

The Korean SATs have been canceled.

No joke. It turns out that the office of the Korean Supreme Prosecutor (ain't that a badass title?) raided six college prep schools (hagwons) in Gangnam in February on suspicion that they were selling SAT questions which they sourced from Southeast Asia. In response to this information, the College Board canceled the test on the peninsula. Period.

This is unprecedented. The test has never been out-and-out canceled here before. A lot of Korean college students are going to be heavily disadvantaged by this. Just like in the U.S., SAT scores are an integral part of the university application process. Without 'em, students have little to no chance of getting into any sort of credible institution. It remains to be seen what the overreaching effects of this development will be.

And in the national news section of the Joong-Ang Ilbo, there was this little gem of a headline:

Filial attitudes get less respectful, says survey.

Here's the nut graph, just so you can get an idea of the article's message:

"As Korea's Confucian values continue to give way to modern or Western ways, a decreasing number of young people think they should be solely responsible for elderly parents."

Interesting, huh? I don't want to sound puffed-up, but this is something that I've been noticing myself in my discussions with students and young Korean people. The steady seep of Western films, music and philosophy into Korean culture has wrought its subtle magic, for good or ill. According to this study (conducted jointly by Statistics Korea and the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, which is apparently a thing), only 35.6 percent of Koreans between the ages of 15-24 said they intend to fully support their parents when they get old.

Just to give you some perspective, that figure was 67.1 percent in 2002. 

Increasingly, it seems, young Koreans are expecting the government to take care of the elderly, leaving them free to pursue their own hopes and dreams free of the financial burden of dependent parents. This is quite a turnaround. They don't have a Parents' Day in this country for nothing, you know. Time was that Koreans would sacrifice everything for their parents and grandparents. Nothing was more important than caring for and obeying one's forbears. (Every single story I read in Professor Jeong's Folk Tales from Korea reflected this to a degree.) The unconditional care and support the elderly would receive from their children when they became too old to work was...a given. It was universal. It was the Confucian retirement plan. It was a reflection of Kongzi's emphasis on filial piety and respect for the elderly. These two ideas were ubiquitously practiced in the East for centuries, so much so that they were identified in the West as an integral part of the Oriental mindset.

But all that's changing now. The influx of Western ideas, particularly those which emphasize individualism, are well on their way to supplanting the old Confucian ways in Korea. (Potentially elsewhere, too: I'm curious to know if this same thing is happening in far-more-liberal Japan or far-more-conservative China.)

I know it'd be trite to say that Korea is a "nation of contrasts"; but hey, I'm a hack writer, so I can say it if I want to. That's precisely what this country is. They lovingly restore a 700-year-old gate, and yet their young 'uns don't want to take care of the old fogies anymore. They practically kill themselves working and studying, but some of them seem perfectly willing to cheat to get ahead. All I can say is that I'm glad I'm on the ground to formulate these opinions firsthand instead of trying to construct a picture from newspaper clippings and TV talk shows.

Postie out.