Recommended read: L.A. Times: A confrontation exposes racial attitudes in South Korea

(reblogged from maddieloveskpop):

A recent incident highlights the mixed modern attitudes towards both “foreigners” and “other races” in South Korea (and sheds a little light on some attitudes on this side of the Pacific as well).

On Korean-language Internet sites, many called for swift punishment. Though there are few guns in South Korea and the incident lacked the bloodshed that might have played out in other places, for many it was still unsettling.

“Why are these people acting in such way in a foreign country?” asked one. Others reserved judgment. “I’ve seen many cases where Koreans act rudely to foreigners, staring at them as if they were some amusement,” one commented. “Let’s look at ourselves and think of the foreigner, a black man living in Korean society. He probably has to endure a lot of stress.”

And another link from the same column that I found interesting, though it’s about China: Jonathan Kos-Read is ‘the token white guy’ in Chinese cinema, i.e. he experiences the flip side of what, say, Randall Duk Kim does here:

Today, it’s not so much that foreigners are regarded as bad — on the contrary, many are heartily welcomed and at least outwardly respected as harbingers of economic success. But they are decidedly other. As workers and students from around the world take advantage of relatively lenient visa policies — more than half a million lived here in 2007 — there is an acute sense of who is foreign, and who is not.

However, Kos-Read’s attitude is, for me, questionable. He’s othering as much as he is (taking advantage of being) the other:

“It struck me how cool it would be to be that guy who speaks fluent Chinese, to be that cool guy. That was still rare enough then as to be almost nonexistent,” he said. “I thought, ‘Hey, I could go to China and be awesome — to be the guy who goes to the weird foreign country and integrates himself into the culture and gets it.’”

Interesting article. Just on a mere side note, it sounds like a weird parallel to incidents that happen here in the West. I’ve personally heard countless tales of immigrants conversing in their mother tongues being publicly confronted by white Americans in America or white Canadians in Canada and told to “speak English.” Though in many eyes it’s only appropriate to “do what the Romans do,” it nevertheless remains a heated issue.

Recommended read: "In South Korea, plastic surgery comes out of the closet." (The New York Times)

Celebrities have helped to drive the trend, as they scramble to keep ahead of digital technology that mercilessly exposes not only their physical imperfections, but any attempts to remedy them, said Rando Kim, a professor of consumer science at Seoul National University.

“Wide-screen and high-definition TV put pressure on them to look good in close-ups,” Mr. Kim said. “And with the Internet, where people like to post ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures, they can no longer hide it. So they go public, often talking proudly about it on TV.”

That, in turn, has encouraged greater openness among ordinary South Koreans.

But in recent decades, cosmetic surgery has become a weapon in Koreans’ efforts to impress others, “like buying an expensive handbag,” said Whang Sang-min, a psychologist at Yonsei University.

Doctors say their main patients are young women entering the marriage and job markets. “As it gets harder to find jobs, they’ve come to believe they must look good to survive,” said Choi Set-byol, a sociologist at Ewha Woman’s University.

Talked about this issue countless times before, I know. However, this article is one that was recently released. Just sharing for those who are interested. 

Think about what this relatively new “openness” can do to how people set standards and criterion in the realms of friendships, employment, relationships, marriage… or just to how people perceive each other.

Recommended read: "Ministry of Health and Welfare: 'Unwed Mothers are Ignorant Whores'" (by The Grand Narrative)

“Usually low levels of education, with an unstable job. Lives by herself or in a boarding house, has open and impulsive sexual values. A person whose socioeconomic situation is low, and who lives apart from her parents,” is how a website health guide operated by the past Ministry of Health and Welfare defined unwed mothers.

…according to the survey “Koreans’ attitudes toward and perception of unwed mothers and fathers,” carried out in 2009 by the Korean Unwed Mothers Support Network and the Korean Women’s Development Institute, unwed mothers were found to be the group that experienced the most prejudice, after homosexuals.

Also, of the 2,000 people who participated in the survey, over 60% answered that unwed mothers “are people who lack judgment and a

sense of responsibility.”

Things are changing (ie. organizations are starting to mobilize against this derogatory perception of the “미혼모” (mi-hon-mon/”unwed mother”)), but to think that as recent as 2009 there were pre-1900s attitudes floating about… 

Recommended read: Cracking down hagwons & reforming Korean education (by Time Magazine)

In South Korea, it has come to this. To reduce the country’s addiction to private, after-hours tutoring academies (called hagwons), the authorities have begun enforcing a curfew — even paying citizens bounties to turn in violators.

South Korea’s hagwon crackdown is one part of a larger quest to tame the country’s culture of educational masochism. At the national and local levels, politicians are changing school testing and university admissions policies to reduce student stress and reward softer qualities like creativity. “One-size-fits-all, government-led uniform curriculums and an education system that is locked only onto the college-entrance examination are not acceptable,” President Lee Myung-bak vowed at his inauguration in 2008.

This is such a surprise, though I’m not sure if it’s a nice one. I like how the country’s finally stepping up and doing something about its messed up education system, but “hagwon crackdowns”? I know this is just a part of the entire system of reforms they’re implementing, and I do agree that shutting down hagwons is part of the remedy, but I can’t help but feel something is off here.

Why are hagwon owners getting criminalized now? After all, they’re only responding to the natural supply-and-demand forces of the bigger economy. What needs to be focused on is what’s currently taking place — this shift of values. Police are snooping around sending kids home from midnight private schools, but does society really understand what exactly is going on? People do things in reaction to their immediate reality — that is, merely on the basis of their personal lives. They see authorities shutting down their businesses, they’re not gonna think, “oh, they’re doing this for the better” — no. They’re going to get mad, ask why the government is taking away their jobs (remember, South Korea’s not faring so well in the employment sector), and they’re going to either re-open business or succumb to darker means of sustaining a livelihood. It’s just going to be this endless cycle of delinquency. What the government needs to do is ensure that their people a) understand that new values are emerging and will be enforced, b) assure (and enforce the assurance) that their kids will receive the education they need, and c) convince (and prove) that putting the kids through extra hours of studying will really not do anyone any good. How can this be achieved? Government-funded seminars, public awareness campaigns, strict enforcement on universities to drop the current admissions process and integrate the unacademia-based approach into their regulations, and, well, in my eyes, abolish the entrance-exam system, although that may be going out on a limb. But seriously, that may exactly be one of the biggest igniters of competition among students… and by that, I actually mean among parents.

Parenting is probably the most important area of concern — it’s the values Korean parents are instilling into their children. But in order to target that and attain significant results, you’re probably gonna have to dig deep into the East-Asian mind and not only sort through the many tenets of Confucianism and Hobbesianism, but attempt to uproot some of them as well. Unfortunately, that’s easier said than done.

Recommended read: "Getting an Abortion in Korea" (by The Grand Narrative)

This was so heartbreaking to read. Regrettably, like in many other places around the world, South Korea still has a long way to go in terms of women’s rights. 

The following week I re-visited the clinic but this time a different doctor checked the fetus. And what she said made me upset. Basically, she told me that I shouldn’t have such a loose lifestyle, that I should care more about contraception, why I had waited so long before coming to visit, and so on and so forth. But I had no choice, since if I go to a different clinic I have to pay for the ultrasound again.

This part was especially disturbing. I perceived it as a micro-example of ‘shaming the woman’: it’s her own fault she got pregnant, her sexually active lifestyle is an irresponsible one, and just a bunch of other bs ‘moral’-injections this young university student doesn’t deserve to hear.

I remember watching an episode of MiSuDa a while back in which there was a discussion about female reproductive health in South Korea. (I couldn’t find the video online, unfortunately.) While the foreigners were saying how regular visits to the gynecologist was not only normal but also important, the Korean female celebrities on the show confessed that they are incredibly intimidated from seeing the doctor even for a routine checkup because in many people’s  eyes, it suggests possible pregnancy (and the gossip gets especially ‘scandalous’ when it is known that the celebrity is not married). If this is the case for the nation’s biggest stars when it comes to something like pregnancy, I can only imagine what regular girls and women must endure when the issue at hand is abortion. According to Roboseyo, women get reprimanded by their local pharmacists even if they’re only buying birth control pills! (By the way, check out the rest of his post for a good overview of his thoughts of what should be done in terms of making reproductive health services more available to women in South Korea.)

Also, I’m not so sure about the availability of family-planning services in South Korea, but based on the following stats, it seems that the lack or inefficiency of such services is having quite a detrimental effect:

… the reasons why married women, who make up 58 percent of the women who have undergone abortion procedures, chose to have abortions are because they do not want children (70 percent) and financial difficulties (17.5 percent). In the case of unmarried women, 93.7 percent said they underwent an abortion procedure because they were not married. They are saying that having children is difficult because of child-rearing and economic burdens in the case of married women, and because of social prejudice and financial difficulties in the case of unmarried women.

(source: originally The Hankyoreh, via The Grand Narrative)

I say “detrimental” because why is it that more than half of the married women who chose to go through abortions have it because they didn’t want kids? Though abortion is a choice to rid yourself of an unwanted pregnancy, this huge percentage suggests that the forms of birth control available are shitty because they don’t seem to be working, or women are not even aware of its availability; therefore making abortion the only choice, and that in itself is wrong.  

And as for that whopping 93.7% of unmarried women who got abortions, holy shit! Who says it’s absolutely necessary for you to be married in order to rear a child? (A society that stigmatizes unmarried women (and pregnant women in the workplace)  does!) Regardless, again, what happened to birth control? (Oh wait, nevermind.)

You know what else sucks? Apparently South Korea has one of the lowest birth rate in the world, and the Lee Myung-Bak administration actually believes one of the causes of this are abortions, which is why it decided to reinforce its anti-abortion laws in 2009. A closer analysis of the problem will reveal deeper and more fruitful reasons than this (then again, we’re talking about the same guy who condemns homosexuality as abnormal, so yeah): 

• A problem of unemployment and financial instability. The unemployment rate has rose from 3.6% to 4% this year. True, the economy’s been stabilizing since its darker days in the late 1990s, but BBC states that there are still concerns about its rising inflation. If Korean families are not confident about their financial situation, then they won’t have kids, simple as that. (And women have no choice but to turn to abortion if birth control have been forced out of the question.)
• Sexual discrimination. In the workplace, domestic violence at home… Based on the excerpt above, we seem to be talking about a society where a woman cannot feel secure and stable without having a man by her side. 
• Placing the MOGEF in charge of family affairs. Because seriously, this is the same damn agency that has continually contradicted itself from the windows to the walls during the recent song ban fiasco. 

But first and foremost, what is needed is a change of mindset. People need to be educated and enlightened about reproductive health and the importance of its awareness. The stigma surrounding gynecology and birth control methods need to be removed, and people need to understand that part of the core of female empowerment is the right of a woman to have full control over her own body. To quote Change.org (via The Grand Narrative, thank you very much ^^), 

Abortion shouldn’t be the only, desperate choice of women whose voices are silenced by their society, and it shouldn’t be used as a form of population control by the government. It should be one option for women who have the power, education, and awareness to make informed decisions. Unfortunately, it seems South Korea still sees abortion as one more issue for men to deal with, one more choice they make when and how they feel like it.

Only a woman can make decisions about what to do with her own body, not society. 

[Edit: Read Depressing Facts’ reblog of this post, who elaborated with insightful reasons behind Korea’s strict regulations]

Recommended read: "South Korea: Pop Music Censorship Meets with Strong Opposition" (by Global Voices)

(Sorry I’ve been posting nothing but links to articles these days. I’m currently working on a new post, but it may still be a while. I’m really preoccupied with packing and goodbyes as I’m about to fly back to Canadaland for school T_T)

A quick rundown of the banning spree the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family seems to be having fun with nowadays (extracted from the article):

• More than 2,600 songs have been banned in the past two years after being flagged for ‘hazardous media content’…
• This month, 24 songs have been banned as a result of their references to alcohol - 160 for this year alone…
• The Korean public have also blamed the Ministry’s unclear standards and inconsistency in censoring music. While the aforementioned songs were categorized as “hazardous” due to references to drinking, Nam-jin’s “Empty Glass” and Lim Chang-jung’s “A Glass of Soju”, whose major themes are alcohol, escaped the regulation [ko]. 

Agencies have already taken matters into their own hands. In fact, SM Entertainment has already won their lawsuit against the Ministry for issuing a ban on “Another Day,” by SM The Ballad group, while Cube Entertainment plans to follow suit for the condemnation against BEAST’s newest album. 

And it’s about time, too. I understand the intent here, but banning songs and restricting creative rights and freedom of expression is honestly not the best way to battle society’s ills. 

(found via The Grand Narrative)