Last week I headed up to the 9th floor of my office building to take care of some routine duties. The floor is filled with young interns, dressed in the tattered jeans and flannel shirts that are the trend during Korea’s wintry weather. Turning a corner I bumped into one of them, a young man [...]
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Walking to work this morning I passed an elderly Catholic nun who I often see strolling along the street outside my home. Bracing against the cold and thinking about how hard it’s going to be to kick my coffee habit at the onset of winter my mind turned to the ubiquity of religion in South [...]
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1900 — Hanseong Electric, the country’s first electric energy producer, which was established two years earlier, installs street lights for the first time in Jongno, the central district of Seoul, where the royal palaces of the Joseon Dynasty were located. 1919 — The Provisional Government of Korea, established in Shanghai earlier to restore their homeland’s [...]
Filed under: Korean Society, history | Tagged: history, protests, Seoul, technology | 1 Comment »
1975 — Eight South Korean men convicted of trying to overthrow the government are executed just 20 hours after a court sentenced them to death. They were among a group of 23 arrested on rebellion charges as part of a government crackdown on dissident movements. An article by Bruce Cummings in the Hankyoreh from 2007 [...]
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Some intersting media related historical tid-bits. 1896 — Korea’s first Korean-language newspaper, the Dongnip Shinmun, publishes its first edition in Seoul. The four-page newspaper, funded by the government and produced by Seo Jae-pil, an official educated in Japan and the United States, was aimed at reaching the general public by publishing in the vernacular as [...]
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Driving south down the expressway towards Busan I ponder the rows and rows of apartment blocks that litter Korea’s skyline. Many of them look like government housing projects back home, and they’re everywhere, like sentries on duty. What are they protecting? The power of South Korea’s ruling political and business elite, which have so thoroughly [...]
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Tragic story of China’s last eunuch. Only two memories brought tears to Sun Yaoting’s eyes in old age — the day his father cut off his genitals, and the day his family threw away the pickled remains that should have made him a whole man again at death… His desperate father performed the castration on [...]
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We moved to Gahoedong about a month ago, after spending a year in a remote corner of southeast Seoul in an enormous house we were renting from a friend. Surrounded by mountains and with an expansive yard, the place was truly palatial, but I felt cut-off somehow. I’d come home from work, close the door, [...]
Filed under: Asia, Daily life, Korean Society, Opinion, Seoul, history | Tagged: family, hanok, history, Korea, Seoul, spirituality | 1 Comment »
Having slept through the inauguration I printed out a copy of Obama’s speech to read on the train home. Behind it I stapled a couple of commentaries, one by William Safire and the other by Bob Herbert, neither of which did much to shake the thought that the words before me seemed empty. There’s a [...]
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An article in the IHT by Norimitsu Onishi about the buraku of Japan and their slow rise out of the traditional depths of Japan’s ancient social hierarchy, a rise — and article — that took inspiration from Obama’s election in the U.S. What caught my attention was a short graf in the middle that referred to [...]
Filed under: Asia, Identity, Korean Society, buddhism, history | Tagged: history, Identity, Japan, Korea, media, Obama, Politics, religion | Leave a Comment »
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