If Google complies, it would mark the first time that the company has required visitors to its sites to enter such information, and it could set a precedent for how Google reacts in other countries when its services clash with local laws.

Gusts of Popular Feeling provides a detailed and  insigtful look at the evolution of the real name system and how it gained traction after someone’s dog took a crap on the subway.

“I was wakened by the sound of something falling with a thud outside. I went out to see what was going on and found my son dead,” said the mother.

The attorney, identified only as “B,” had filed a complaint with police, claiming that he was insulted by comments the deceased made on B’s posts on the game site, Lineage, in 2007.

Sad, and all over a f—ing video game!

Winter in Korea

As Seoul’s first snow this winter is already turning black, I find myself pondering the quirks of a language I have resolved — again — to learn.

I’m essentially at a very rudimentary level of Korean, which allows for basic communication with a lot of umms and ahhs and jerky hand gestures thrown in for emphasis. But it also allows for some wiggle room out of a particular trait of the Korean language that is part and parcel of the country’s social hierarchy.

A colleague of mine, an American, is at a more advanced level and he often communicates with our Korean co-workers using Korean as opposed to English. Which means that when he addresses those senior to him he has to use honorifics — even with people he may not like or repsect — that nevertheless connote respect and bolster the difference in status. It is not a conversation between equals.

My own broken Korean, on the other hand, allows me to transgress the language’s built in rules of inequality by pleading ignorance. In simply trying to communicate, I may inadvertantly fail to acknowledge a person’s seniority over me. Which, truth be told, suits me fine.

A couple of cases in point.

There’s a few folks I work with who would often comment out of the sides of their mouth that I used ordinary speech, as opposed to honorifics, when speaking to them in Korean. Only later, when they learned that I was actually as old or older than they were, did those comments cease. Still, it used to annoy the hell out of me.

Another instance. There’s a grouchy old man that lives up the block from me. The first time I met him, I was sitting by a nearby stream that runs outside his house with my wife and kid. He stared for about ten or fifteen minutes, then launched into a gruff-sounding personal biography about how he’d been born on that block and all the honors he’d gotten for his extreme nativism.

Now, there are two ways to say “once upon a time” or “back then” in Korean. One translates as “at that time” while the other sounds more like “long ago.” The difference in usage still seems a little subtle to me though, and so I used the latter one. He didn’t like that. His face twisted into this angry scowl as he waved his finger in my face telling me I was still a young punk and how dare I say “long ago” in reference to my own life. Needless to say, it caught me by surprise.

Still, he calmed down and eventually even handed my son an apple from his yard. It was a lesson in the language that I won’t soon forget. Which, tangentially, leads me to the other thoughts that have been bouncing around in my head these past few days.

The first has to do with the seemingly incoherent events that transpire in a country where one is neither a native or native speaker. In a recent conversation with a friend who’se just returned to Korea after an extended abscence, he was curious to know what had happened with the beef protests that had rocked the country last summer and seriously perplexed him. I told him U.S. beef was selling like hotcakes.

More recently is the case of Minerva, the on-line freakonomist who was arrested for spreading $2 billion dollar lies on the Internet. Now, a lot of foreign press coverage I’ve read spins the issue as a simple crackdown on Internet freedom (guilty as charged). But behind all the headlines is basically a big question mark about the hows and whys of this issue. When you don’t understand something, it’s always easier to dismiss it as either stupid or malicious. While it could be both, there’s usually more to it.

A Korean friend who is logical to a fault explained to me that Minerva had become a sort of rallying point for all those who hate the current government. Like U.S. beef, it was less about the issue itself and more about the conduit it provided for netizen’s almost unconscious disgust with the Lee administration. The Internet too has become this sort of platform for political mobilization, though certainly folks are going to be more cautious about their on-line comments.

The other thought has to do with North Korea. I read somewhere that Seoul has just published a dictionary of literary terms used in either one or both of the two Koreas. The 60 year political and cultural divide has led to a growing divergence in the two countries’ languages, as for example their definition of the term modernism: it’s either a progressive cultural and artistic movement or a petit-bourgeois capitalist conspiracy. I’ll leave it to you to figure out which one is which. They also use completely different words for computer and a host of other terms that often require translation.

Now you might think that this proves the two countries are wholly irreconcilable, but actually they’re more alike than one might think. Take for example the news that North Korean leader Kim Jong-il has tapped his third son to be next in line for the communist throne. Nevermind the younger Kim seems to be in as bad health as his pop. South Korea too is lining up to introduce a few new leaders itself. Though not blood related, the political ties are a little incestuous. Except with Samsung, where dynastic succession seems to be the order of the day.

Park Wang-ja, 53

Today’s Korea Times reports that the shooting death of a South Korean tourist in NK on July 12th has revealed a breakdown in communications between the leaders of the two Koreas. The report noted a direct line between the two leaders set up during the Kim Dae Jung administration in 2000 as part of it’s Sunshine Policy is “no longer in use.”

This explains, in part, why there was such a delayed response by South Korean authorities to the killing. It also reflects the widening gulf between the two sides, a consequence of President Lee Myung Bak’s tougher stance. Reportedly the North is now demanding an apology from the South for the killing.

A quick look at English and Korean blog sites reveals a split between those who favor a tougher stance by the South, and those who lean towards a more conciliatory approach.

One comment on the popular English language blog The Marmot’s Hole questions whether the North would have been more forthcoming with an apology during the liberal Roh administration. “North Korea demands an apology from South, and refuses to cooperate with an investigation. Somehow, I doubt they would have done the same last year when Roh Moo Hyun was in power,” adding in parting a colorful description of Roh’s weak position vis-a-vis Kim Jung Il. 

Another comment on the site ROK Drop puts it bluntly, “there’s a pretty good chance the North Korean bullet that killed the 53-yr old South Korean tourist was paid for by the Sunshine Policy.”

Other’s point to the recent protests in South Korea over the importation of US beef, saying the North is exploiting President Lee’s weakened position here. “The North Koreans probably feel South Korean President Lee Myung-bak is politically weak right now due to the Cows Gone Wild madness, and can get away with their demands with no repercussions.”

Many are also wondering why the response from South Koreans themselves has been so muted, in stark contrast to the anti-US beef protests that nearly shut down the state. Linking it to media coverage, some have criticized the press here for toning down the language in their reporting, referring to the case as an “accident” rather than “murder.”

Korean netizens have been more sympathetic in their take on the shooting. One writes, “Why was the woman walking around the beach at four o’clock in the morning, when all the other tourists were sleeping.” He adds, “I’ve been to the resort and there is clearly a fence marking the restricted zone. The woman was being careless.”

The same blog notes that South Korean women lack any military knowledge because they do not serve in the military as South Korean men do. Many Korean netizens, it reads, are in fact calling on educating women here in basic military training. 

Other posts on Korean sites have gone as far as to blame the US and President Lee for orchestrating the killing, perhaps as a means to divert attention away from the mad-cow scares. A Korea Times report noted a flood of postings from netizens immediately after the killing was announced highly critical of the woman and the South Korean government. 

What comes of all this is a picture of a country divided by forces vying for control over popular sentiment, a battle being waged over the internet where fact and fiction are blended into a volatile mix aimed at influencing policy at all levels. 

“Clearly,” reads one post, “the shooting of the tourist at Mt. Geumgang shows we are still a country at war.”

Well, the above simply echoes what colonialists were saying prior to violating Korea’s sovereignty. Only in this case I think it just comes from built up resentment from living here for a while (understandable, but simplistic). I mean, in that case the US is a rip-off of European thought and society. The Enlightenment is just an imitation of medieval Islamic philosophy. Societies borrow, they influence, and they clash.

It sort of begs the question, though: is it that Korea has fundamentally not changed in its character? Or, rather, that non-Koreans continue to fail to understand what is essentially a very different and equally complex society? I think one thing is true: there is a tendency to measure Korea to certain standards that ultimately Korea will not live up to, simply because it is a different country, with a radically different history that has produced an outlook that is offensive, challenging, dynamic, and on the whole no better or worse than any other. 

On the other hand, it’s hard not to dismiss these comments. especially when you look around and see them proved day in and day out. Bulguksa, the temple in Gyungju, was restored by the Japanese, who said Koreans simply let their historical legacy fall to waste. I look around and see this type of neglect very often here in Korea.

Also, I remember once reading a comment about how, during the Tonghak rebellion, Koreans were seen by Westerners as simply walking by starving or rotting corpses, oblivious to the suffering around them. This too I see in Korea today. Whether it’s bus-drivers who could give a shit about the fact that you’ve got a child and a stroller while trying to balance on the bus. Or drivers who’d as soon run you down on the road as stop for you. And the homeless woman I pass daily who seems so alone in a sea of youngsters more concerned about their Converse than the fact that someone’s grandma is rotting in front of them. 

I see this, and yet I know the same is true for the US, Europe, or any other modern society. Hell, I walk by devouring my morning toast without as much as a glance these days.