Is Korea it's own worst enemy?

In 1988, then prime minister of Canada, Brian Mulroney, made an official apology to Japanese-Canadians who were sent off to internment centres and camps during WWII. According to this article, written by one heck of a good hockey player, Paul Kariya, it was because they were uprooted from their lives, their assets were seized and not returned, and they were branded enemy aliens by Canada. Canada was at war with Italy, Germany and Japan, yet no Italian-Canadians or German-Canadians received the same treatment. It was clear discrimination against the Japanese. Between the 22,000 uprooted Japanese-Canadians the estimated losses were 443 million dollars. Survivors in '88 received an apology and 21,000 bucks. To my knowledge, Japanese-Canadians have made no further organized pleas for apology or compensation.

In this article, there is mention of something that happened to Ukrainian-Canadians who were interned like the Japanese, only during WWI. Its main focus is the Chinese head tax, which totally shafted Chinese immigrants, who were instrumental in the building of the Trans Canada Railway. Between 1885 and 1923 in Canada, people who governed the country or wrote for newspapers were mostly proper English loyalist snobs. They would have no personal truck with the dirty, stinking, inferior Chinese. However, the Chinese did twice the work of a white guy for half the money so they were tolerated. The Chinese were treated horribly! They were blamed for everything from disease to financial hard times. Though never interned, their suffering was probably worse than the Japanese or Ukrainians in Canada. For it, surviving head tax payers and spouses received an apology from our worst prime minister ever and 20,000 bucks each.

 

 

Here's a Canadian newspaper cartoon from the time. The caption says, "And he went for that heathen Chinese."

I am certain there are Chinese or Japanese Canadians who feel these not much more than ceremonial apologies and token payments were not sufficient, but most have chosen to put it in the past and move on. Neither of the past issues interferes with modern business or international relations between the countries. In fact in both articles, and in many personal examples, Chinese and Japanese Canadians say that the apologies made them very happy.

In a matter of let's say 100 years things have changed a lot in Canada. Why, a person would be lynched, drawn and quartered or worse for publishing a cartoon like the one above. In Vancouver and Toronto, where most Chinese-Canadians settled, you can see signs in Chinese, bank machines have Chinese, many places of business have service in Chinese. A Chinese person could live an entire life without speaking a word of English or French.

As for Japanese Canadians, they too mostly settled in Vancouver and Toronto, but not in Japanese towns. Most Japanese Canadians are Canadian born, unlike the Chinese-Canadians. They have adapted to the Canadian culture, speak Canadian languages and fit in seamlessly. Asking them where there from is not different than asking me where I'm from. I'd either answer with what part of Canada I'm from or my ancestral heritage. So would they.

As a Monty Python troop member might say, "And now for something completely different." The relationship between Japan and Korea. It's a brutal one complete with attempted genocide, and cultural elimination, rape, murder, pillaging, and all with one being the aggressor and the other the victim. It's hard to empathize, but not hard to sympathize with the Korean hatred of the Japanese. For anyone. Including the Korean descendants of those victimized by Japan. But Koreans believe differently.

What the average Korean believes might shock the average non-Korean. I can't tell you how many intelligent people I've had conversations with in Korea that I thought were tongue-in-cheek but turned out to be completely serious. Conversations about the origins of their "race" from the union of a god and a bear turned into a woman that resulted in Dan Geun, the first Korean. Conversations about how one of Dan Geun's descendants, a Korean princess, mated with a large, hairy aboriginal of the Japan area, which gave rise to the Japanese "race." About what foods to eat and NOT to eat before exams; about how babies and mothers need to be kept warm, and not eat or drink anything cold for a long time after childbirth; about how fans can kill you; about how Koreans are great at science because they use chopsticks; about how countless foods give you "stamina"; about their language is extraordinarily "scientific"; about how you can tell the sex of a baby by the shape of the baby bump; about how Koreans learn differently and think differently than other people; about how there are no gay people in Korea; about how only Koreans share a special kind of love they call "Jung"; about how an interviewer can judge the character of an interviewee by his face; about fortune tellers, name choices, the list goes on and on. In my 20 year relationship with Korea and the dozen years or so that I lived there, I argued some of these points and found no solid evidence backing the ideas. I found it was best to just write them off as interesting quirks of the people so as not to impinge upon their rights to their own personal beliefs. Who knows, maybe some of their crazy ideas might even be true. Maybe kimchi cures cancer. Maybe dreaming of pigs means you'll win the lottery. I haven't done the research. The research I HAVE done lead to the finding that more than a little opposition to a cherished Korean belief can quickly and permanently lose you a Korean friend.

A couple mental conventions that are supposedly shared by all Korean blooded beings are called Hwa Pyung and Han. These are states of rage and melancholia respectively which are believed to be the result of Korea's history of unavenged mistreatment, most of it at the hands of the Japanese. These, like many other strange Korean beliefs, should not be challenged too vehemently by any foreigners because we just can't hope to  understand.

 

These two guys? Sure, they understand because they have Korean blood. Just look at all that rage and melancholia! But foreigners must try to understand that we can never understand the Koreans' "unique situation."

Almost every male foreigner has either tried to stop, or witnessed another guy trying to stop a Korean dude from assaulting his girlfriend. I have. It was the female, not the male who told me to mind my own business and let her boyfriend continue beating shit out of her. Basically, "Try to understand our unique situation."

I've asked some female students who had bruises on their necks or arms from fighting with boyfriends why they don't just dump the guys. The reply was usually, "Because they're passionate." I went out with one Korean girl who was constantly baiting me and obviously trying to get me to hit her. If I had, maybe we'd still be together. I think possibly this is all written off as this Hwa Pyung or Jung or Han or whatever. But only if you're Korean.

North Koreans still believe their leader to be a sexless god. Kim Jong Il got 5 holes-in-one the first time he ever golfed. The emperor of Japan was considered a god until I think 1989 when Hirohito died. The Chinese too. They called their emperors "Sons of Heaven" and still believe the Dalai Lama to be a reincarnation of a god-like being. And Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon martial artists flying through the trees is not yet so much the stuff of fantasy as it might appear to us in the west.

What I'm saying is that over here in Asia, there are some traditional beliefs that are hard for foreigners to subscribe to. Some are hard not to laugh at or even make fun of. "Fan death" makes an uproariously funny Halloween costume. But if I've said this once, I've said it a thousand times, like soooo many other things, Koreans carry things to the extreme. I'll give two examples.

During a trip to South Korea for a soccer friendly between the North and South national teams, the passengers on the North Korean team bus saw a banner on the side of the road for the event. It had the image of their then leader, Kim Jong Il on it. And it was raining. The bus was immediately stopped and several people got out of the bus in order to shield his holy countenance from the elements.

The second incident took place in the south. There are two statues of girls that are monuments to comfort women in Korea. As this article explains, one is outside the Japanese embassy in Korea's largest city, Seoul, and the other is outside the Japanese consulate in Korea's second largest city, Busan. Notice the stocking cap and scarf placed with love onto the statue to keep her warm in the harsh, Korean winter.

This is a dangerous time here in Asia. Trump recently said that if China won't deal with North Korea, the U.S. will. Martin Luther King Jr. said that the U.S. is the greatest purveyor of violence on the earth. He said this during Viet Nam, which was one giant war crime. Civilian killings went unpunished, rape was rampant, napalm was designed to stick better to skin and even burn under water, as so many well done Viet Nam movies can give us a sense of, it was pure hell.

Similar to Vietnam, the U.S. bombing of North Korea during the Korean war was described in the identical words: "Kill anything that moves." As this article attests, the bombing, and napalming, they used napalm in N. Korea too, was merciless and endless. A key line is,  "After running low on urban targets, U.S. bombers destroyed hydroelectric and irrigation dams in the later stages of the war, flooding farmland and destroying crops." This is war crime. You can't DO this! You are killing innocent people, and in a Noam Chomsky video on YouTube I recently watched, he says American solders were glorying in it talking about the awesome sight of all that water washing over the farmland killing all those people and crops.

Knowing what kind of man Donald Trump is, knowing the hatred North Korea has for America, which is not quite as deranged as we are meant to believe it is, and knowing that the first thing North Korea or China will do in response to U.S. aggression is bomb the shit out of Seoul, it should be one of the most important things on the Korean political agenda to mend ties with Japan and present a more formidable defense against this. Japan has a more powerful military than most people think.

Yet I hear nothing about Korea pursuing issues of unity with Japan and am constantly finding divisive reminders of things like Dokdo and the comfort women. Nobody is expecting Korea to forget about the horrible atrocities committed by Japan against them. The two Canadian analogies that started this article can't compare in brutality. But the spirit of the two examples is something that would be healthy to foster in Korea and maybe through it begin forgiving individual things such as the comfort women issue, which they have received apologies and payment for no less than three times. The most recent settlement in 2015 netted each of the 46 remaining comfort women 187,000 American dollars each. That's WAY more than Canada pays for atrocities!

The argument goes that the apology was proven untrue because Japan didn't include the story of their occupation of Korea and war crimes against them in their history books to the extent that Koreans would like. The fact is, it is mentioned, including the comfort women. If Korea want the Japanese to have a full feature article with a pull-out poster or to write a Broadway play about it, I think they're asking too much. I didn't learn of the Chinese head tax in school and only briefly learned about the Japanese internment areas and camps.

At any rate, it doesn't help when you say you will get rid of the comfort woman statue in Seoul in exchange for the apology and payments, then not only go back on that promise, but you build ANOTHER one in front of the Japanese consulate in Busan. Worst of all is the terrible Korean melodramatic acting of Kim Eun Sung behaving like he's stunned at the Japanese "overreaction" to this intentional act of defiance and provocation. "How can a statue hurt Japan?" he muses.

More recently a film clip has been released that people are told is the first verifiable film clipping of Korean comfort women. But you look at it and the soldiers are Chinese, one girl is wearing a kimono, and the girls could be farm workers waiting for a ride home. I presented a simple question asking how we know they are comfort women. The soldiers are talking but my video had no sound. I asked if others had sound and if the soldiers are saying something incriminating. I was met with extreme hostility. People instantly jumping for the jugular. "Have you ever been repeatedly sexually assaulted?" "Do you loathe Korea so much that you rationalize the rape and murder of hundreds of thousands of women?" "You must be a Trump supporter." Then, after the video alone was enough to convince the previously convinced, this came out:

 

 

Now they have comparisons between the video and some photos. Okay, that's a little better, but still... I mean seriously, if you put a black and white, blurry photo of Jackie Chan next to some of these girls, you'd see as much resemblance. It shows how little evidence there must be for them to say that this further solidifies the evidence of Korean comfort women. The strongest evidence is in the minds of the old folks in Korea and in the many, many stories that are spread through Korea in every way possible to make sure this is not forgotten and the Hwa Pyung and Han do not diminish. Even though while the stories were told of Japanese burning textbooks and killing people, stealing land and possessions, forcing Koreans to be their slaves, to speak Japanese and to pledge allegiance to the Japanese Empire, oddly, the comfort women were not part of these stories until the early '90's. That's 50 years after the fact.

Whatever! Don't challenge this story, it's like walking through a mine field. Ask Park Yu Ha.

Korean representatives of the comfort women, (it's important to note, it's NOT the comfort women), have discounted apologies from Japan as not sincere while at the same time making promises to bury the hatchet that are not sincere. The newspaper, T.V. and internet stories, the protests, the ads, the building of statues in other countries, these things are actually increasing and so is the anger and the alienation of the Japanese people. A friend of mine took at bus in Los Angeles and saw a sticker on it that read, "Dokdo is Korean territory."

And for all I know, Korea may be in the right. I believe there WERE comfort women, I just believe there are reasons why they were kept secret for so long that aren't yet part of the official narrative, and may never be. As for Dokdo, I don't know or care.

What I care about, despite, or maybe somehow because of their crazy quirks, are the Korean people and I don't want to see them blown up. One of the people who attacked my challenging of the above video clip was a Korean girl who accused me of being one of many foreigners trying to tell Koreans how to feel about Korean issues. If you don't think about it, you may think she's made a good point. But if you understood how insular Koreans can be about ideas they hold dear, you'd know that it can't possibly be a Korean who encourages them to put Dokdo and the comfort women on the back burner for now and try to patch things up with Japan. That person would be lynched. But a foreigner has access to news, opinions and facts outside the Korean peninsula and they are not held to as high a standard of blind faith in Korean beliefs. The catch 22 of the whole deal is that the foreigner cannot be expected to understand the Korean plight so his/her advice will not be heeded.

 

So you see, it is their culture that will be the downfall of their culture. I don't literally think that. There is a disturbing trend to Koreans they call the brain drain. A lot of their smarter citizens are leaving the country and the most common reason stated is it's because of the way Korean people think. This article explains several more examples of the way Koreans think including a lot of the duties forced on everyone and the pressured they cause. I feel sorry for the creative Korean who wants to express him/herself or have different ideas. There is a saying in Korea that the nail that sticks up will be hammered down. It will take a little while for all the older more traditional opinion makers of Korea to die off before the younger Koreans can modernize the national thinking, but I think it will happen. If they aren't blown up first.

Meanwhile, yesterday a statement was made by Lindsey Graham, a U.S. senator from S. Carolina that conflict with North Korea is inevitable if the ICBM program continues. This is something that has always struck me as the height of arrogance in international politics. Who gets to have nuclear weapons? Who has them? We all know Russia and the U.S. have most of them. But there are seven other nations that have them. France, U.K., China, India, Pakistan, Israel and, you guessed it, North Korea. Why can some nations have nukes and some others can't? North Korea says their nuclear weapons are a deterrent. We've been conditioned to think the leadership of North Korea is too crazy to have nukes. But they haven't pressed the button yet. Who has? Only one country. And present leadership of that country is peerless in lunacy if you want my honest opinion.

Who fears a deterrent? Those who don't want to be deterred. See we don't want you to have nuclear weapons because we might want to nuke you at some point and we don't want you to be able to respond in kind. The fact is we don't want to fight unless we have an absolutely HUGE advantage. And this has always been my problem with the American ideal of bravery. Western movies, action movies, folk tales, even their history, guns. I don't like you. I get a gun and shoot you. I am a hero. This has never played well in my mind. This is not bravery, it's cowardice.

Having supreme firepower is not cowardice but the use of it could be. It all depends upon the values held by the person whose finger presses the button. Donald Trump has a habit of borrowing money for business ventures, reneging on those ventures and then suing the lenders. This is why he can't get money from most banks any more. But he's found one. Deutschebank. A bank that has strong ties to Russia. Russia is the kingdom of Putin. He is the 200 billion dollar man. It has been speculated that Trump is into Russia, (Putin or one of his army of thugs), for 4 billion and that this is why he refuses to reveal his tax information.

While we were busy over the weekend watching his new gameshow The Whitehouse Apprentice and The Mooch was fired, there was something very important going on. Bill Browder was giving testimony, damning testimony for Vladimir Putin, at the Senate Judiciary Committee Hearings. Read the whole thing and you will see the kind of gangster kingpin control Putin has over Russia. It's sickening! The very idea that he has total control over Russia and, with Trump deeply in his debt financially and possibly for helping him get elected, this means Putin has a lot of power.

Now you may think this makes it less likely for the U.S. vs. North Korea hostilities to amount to much. If so, you haven't been watching the world lately. Putin has been strengthening his ties to North Korea, but it could be the old wolf in sheep's clothing. China's long relationship with North Korea is cooling. The North Koreans need an ally. Putin steps in. This may make North Korea feel safe, but it is actually the opposite. In true international vulture capitalist style, Putin, with his influence over Trump, might encourage a U.S. strike on North Korea simply to weaken the country. Then Russia can step in and "save" the North Koreans from the U.S. getting the country and all its resources at its most vulnerable and cheapest.

Maybe I'm overthinking this, and maybe even an allied S. Korea/Japan would STILL not be enough to stop this from happening, but I think now, maybe more than ever, Korea would be wise to buddy up with the Japanese instead of pissing them off.

I sure hope I'm wrong about all this!