nanoomi

On subways and in store windows these days is this poster:

The first part reads: “Speak through a warm smile, ‘Welcome, come well.’ Why, you may ask? 2010-2012 is Visit Korea Year. Speak with a warm smile to foreigners who discover Korea. You are a smiling national representative of Korea.”

I wonder if this campaign to remind people to be polite to foreigners (somehow I doubt the invitation to “come freely” extends to white males) is a national one or if it’s just based in Seoul.

Of course, that poster is just one of ten to fifteen times I saw Kim Yuna’s face today. It’s nice to see her hawking watermelons for Homeplus – in a “Be the Reds” shirt no less:

Yes, it’s that time of (every four) year(s) again. It’s already appearing on beer bottles:

The two people above look really look like the kind of people you’d like to be sitting next to as you cheer for Argentina. The Korea Herald also looks at two soccer-related films coming out soon, both of which seem to suggest that people from other countries in Asia would like to jump on the Korea soccer bandwagon. Unfortunately, one of those films is a JSA-style movie featuring North and South Koreans getting together on friendly terms, and probably couldn’t come out at a worse time.

On the topic of alcohol bottles, this is interesting:

“The theory that Jinro is a Japanese enterprise is a baseless, vicious rumor. Since 1924 Jinro has been a pure minjok (ethnic/national) enterprise and for 86 years one national company, Jinro, has always shared all sorts of emotions together with people.”

There are other companies that I think people would also like to think are pure minjok enterprises, something I was reminded of when I saw this article about Lotte today, which mentioned that

Shin established Lotte in 1948 as a maker of chewing gum and has taken a firm root both in Korea and Japan, expanding its business horizons to beverages, retail, fast food chains and amusement parks.

For some odd reason, the article fails to mention that Lotte was started in 1948 in Japan by a Korean who was raised in there, and didn’t make its way to Korea until 1967.

From Gusts of Popular Feeling.

I found some new anti-native speaking English teacher cartoons, this time in a Segye Ilbo article from August of last year that I missed at the time.

Note that the Korean word for “fraud” in the title below, “엉터리,” also appeared back in 1984 in the first JoongAng Ilbo article to tie together such ideas as “any foreigner can get a teaching job,” ”unqualified,” ”irresponsible,” ”overpaid,” ”playboy,” ”Koreans are too kind to foreigners,” learning from foreigners hurts “national pride,” etc. into full-bodied, richly flavored hit-piece, perhaps the first of its kind. The name of that article was “In private foreign language classes, there are a lot of ‘fraud teachers,’” and it’s translated here. I’ve been told that “엉터리” might be better translated as “quack,” but that word is usually only associated with doctors, and wouldn’t work well with teachers. At any rate, I’m sure no similarity in the titles of these articles, published 26 years apart, will be seen.
________

In one year tens of millions of won are spent inviting… fraud native speaking teachers.

To familiarize elementary, middle and high schools students throughout the country with English and cut down on private education fees, a native speaking teacher system has been put in place, but many problems, such as weaknesses in the selection process, have been exposed. A staggering 7,000 or more native speaking teachers have been put into elementary, middle and high schools this year, but a good many native speaking teachers make good money moving to a hagwon and taking unapproved absences. Many [Korean] English teachers pointed out that, “We should really reconsider the value of the tens of millions of won spent in one year on native teachers” and “It is too much to expect these people to carry out their jobs in Korea when they don’t even have any experience teaching children.”

Great demand for private lesson site “snooping” = According to education officials and data, a considerable number of native speaking teachers snoop around to find other sources of income like hagwons, and devote more attention to this “rice offered to Buddha.” This is because, compared to schools, it’s easier to make a lot of money at hagwons. According to a high school teacher in northern Seoul, “Native speaking teachers can work at small hagwons without any particular documents when they want,” and said, “Once they get a taste for money, they have no interest in their classes, and finally they don’t renew their contracts and move into a hagwon.”

Thus cases of native speaking teachers in Korea with at least one year of experience teaching in a school are rare. In 2008, of 5,805 native speaking teachers placed at schools across the country, 1,309 (23%) had at least one year of teaching experience and only 787 teachers had two to five years experience, while 3,709 native speaking teachers (64%) had less than one year’s experience. Most native speaking teachers are only “novices.” Read the full story

A worthwhile article by Robert Neff appeared in the Korea Times the other day about Ernest Bethell, who published English and Korean-language newspapers which openly challenged and criticized the Japanese rule of Korea 100 years ago. While I thought I’d read a fair amount about Bethell in the past, Neff (as always) digs up information I hadn’t come across before.

While I knew that he had been sent to Korea from Japan to cover the Russo Japanese War (like these journalists) and had been let go because Japanese control of information in Korea made their international press releases more informative than reports from most journalists in the field, I hadn’t known this:

Bethell insisted that he was dismissed for another reason. “My instructions from the Chronicle were that the policy of the paper was pro-Japanese and I was told that my correspondence would have to fit in with that policy.”

Read the full story

Yi Kwang-su (Photo from here.)

Last week Andre Lankov wrote an interesting piece in the Korea Times about the life of Yi Kwang-su, which got me interested in him, not because of his novels or literary criticism, but more because I’d been reading Gi-wook Shin’s Ethnic Nationalism in Korea, which discusses his influence on Korean nationalism. The way the Korean nation is perceived today has been influenced especially by two people: Shin Chae-ho and Yi Kwang-su.

As described in Andre Schmid’s book Korea Between Empires 1895-1919 (and also in Henry Em’s essay “Minjok as a Modern and Democratic Construct: Shin Ch’ae-ho’s Historiography” in Colonial Modernity in Korea), Shin Chae-ho’s most influential work was the essay “Toksa Sillon,” or “A New Reading of History,” which was first published in 1908. In it Shin was the first to take the relatively new concept of “minjok” (see Henry Em’s essay) and combine it with Dangun, the mythological precursor of the Korean people via the Jokpo, or family genealogical record. Ignoring court-based histories and the previous attention paid to Kija (the Chinese sage who founded an early Korean kingdom and provided a link to China when it was the center of the east Asian world), Shin made the minjok, the ethnic nation, the subject of his history, which allowed him to connect Korea to the greatness of Goguryeo (and a time when “Korea” included a great deal of Manchuria) and Dangun. Shin’s essay was incredibly influential, and though it should be noted that though his use of genealogical concepts made a “bloodline” implicit, Schmid makes no mention of Shin explicitly utilizing that idea. To be sure, Shin saw the nation in an organic manner, with his worldview influenced by Social Darwinism. It was Yi Kwang-su, however, who would contribute (or at least popularize) other ideas to fine-tune Shin’s concept into one that endures up to the present.

As Lankov notes, “Yi was born in 1892, in what is now North Korea. He was 10 years old when his parents died, but the village community took care of him as he had already become viewed by his fellow villagers as a local prodigy.”

Beong-cheon Yu’s book Han Yong-un & Yi Kwang-su: Two Pioneers of Modern Korean Literature says that Yi was taken in by the Dongak movement, while Lankov describes it as the Cheondogyo sect. At any rate, “It was sect leaders who provided Yi with a scholarship to study in Japan where he went in 1905. In Tokyo, he acquired a native fluency in Japanese. Indeed, Japanese, not Korean, was the language he used in his first fiction writings.” Yi also learned English there, and in the 1930s was described as being able to speak “beautiful English.”

There he became acquainted with Western writers, and especially respected Tolstoy. According to Yu, in 1910 he returned to Korea, to his hometown of Osan (in northern Korea), and became a teacher (and also got married). He later had a falling out with the religious officials who took over the school, and wandered around northeast Asia for several years, visiting Shanghai, Vladivostok, Manchuria and Chiba in Siberia. His planned trip to San Francisco was made impossible by World War I, and he moved back to Japan and enrolled in Waseda University. There he wrote many essays, especially about literature, and became famous when his book Mujeong (“Heartlessness”) was serialized in 1917 in the Maeil Sinbo (formerly Ernest Bethell’s Daehan Maeil Sinbo, which was secretly bought by the Japanese and published from 1910-1944, and the only vernacular Korean newspaper published by the Japanese authorities from 1910 to 1920, and 1940 to 1944). Mujeong is considered the first modern Korean novel, and made Yi a celebrity (and hated by some critics) overnight. (It’s reviewed here.) He also caused a scandal when the woman about to become Korea’s first doctor, Heo Yeong-suk, nursed him back to health after his first bout with tuberculosis and he divorced his wife to elope with Heo to Peking. [Yu, 88-91]

Yi’s non-fiction writing focused on the purpose of literature in Korea and its relationship with the Korean nation, making it clear that nationalism influenced his way of seeing the world. Michael D. Shin’s essay “Interior Landscapes and Modern Literature,” from Colonial Modernity in Korea, discusses and quotes from some of his essays, especially “What is Literature?” (1916), Korea’s first example of modern literary criticism. In it he views munhak, or literature, in a different way than in the past because of jeong “which he uses to describe a wide range of emotions.” Shin notes Yi’s assertion that “in the past emotion had been ignored because “humanity did not have a clear conception of individuality (gaeseong).” Shin describes Yi writing that “although the human mind consists of three factors – knowledge (chi) emotion (jeong) and will (eui) – people in the past “regarded jeong as lowly and considered only knowledge and will important.” [...] “The thoughts and emotions of the Choson people were restricted by an intolerant moral code for around five hundred years after the founding of the Yi dynasty.” [p. 256]

See the rest of the post here.

From Gusts of Popular Feeling.

On March 25 Financial News published this article by Choi Gyeong-hwan:

[Bill to] insert a mandatory drug test for foreign teachers into the “Child Education Law” has been dormant for 10 months

During [the reaction to] the case of an American gang member working as a native-speaking teacher who was arrested for drug crimes, it became known that a bill which would require foreign teachers to take drug tests has been sitting dormant in the National Assembly for almost 10 months.

The Democratic Party Representative Choi Young-hee, member of the National Assembly Committee for Health, Welfare and Family, revealed on March 25, “Had the ‘Child Education Law Revised Bill,’ which I sponsored on June 9 last year, been passed, the employment of problematic native-speaker teachers could have been prevented.”

Rep. Choi’s bill to revise the child education law would require foreign teachers wanting to work at kindergartens, elementary or secondary schools, or hagwon to submit a Korean criminal record check, and within one month of arrival, health check results including drug tests, including those that would detect marijuana.

However, this bill has been moored in the National Assembly and has made no progress for almost 10 months. At present, drug crimes and sex crimes against children by native-speaking teachers in Korea are on the increase. In a situation where there are no rules for verification, cases of English teachers not charged by police finding a new job at a different school or hagwon [can occur].

Rep. Choi said, “Recently, demand for foreign teachers has been rapidly increasing due to things like English immersion policy, but verification and administrative measures to deal with them are nonexistent.

“These bills should be passed at an extraordinary session of the National Assembly in April in order to provide a more secure learning environment for children and teens.”

It’s worth noting that this bill was also mentioned at the end of this recent article:

Presently a revised bill proposing changes to the Kindergarten Education Law, Elementary and Secondary Education Law, and the Hagwon Education Law, which requires native English teachers wanting to work in Korea to provide criminal records, a medical examination including drug screening, and academic background certificates, has been submitted in the National Assembly, but the standing committee deliberations have not even been set up.

In order that we can believe in and entrust our children [to hagwon?] the National Assembly should promptly discuss this revision of related laws.

The revised bills referred to at the end of the article are, of course, Choi Young-hee’s bills, which were introduced in the National Assembly on June 9 of last year, and are translated here.

I like the neutral way in which the article is introduced: “[I]t became known that [this] bill … has been sitting dormant in the National Assembly for almost 10 months.” Not “The person sponsoring the bill has jumped on this recent case to draw attention to it.” The article mentions that:

At present, drug crimes and sex crimes against children by native-speaking teachers in Korea are on the increase. In a situation where there are no rules for verification, cases of English teachers not charged by police finding a new job at a different school or hagwon [can occur].

If you look at the bills themselves, you’ll see that the statements above are essentially taken from the bills’ purpose statements. What I don’t understand is how a criminal record check for crimes committed in Korea will turn up anything if the teachers “are not charged by police” in the first place. As for those statement that “drug crimes and sex crimes against children by native-speaking teachers in Korea are on the increase,” the bill itself says only that “the crime rate among native English teachers is getting higher”; nothing specific about drug or sex crimes is mentioned. It may be worth mentioning that Rep. Lee Gun-hyeon’s statistics regarding crimes by foreign teachers actually shows the crime rate to be dropping, but niggling things like “facts” have little place in this discussion.

Rep. Choi said, “Recently, demand for foreign teachers has been rapidly increasing due to things like English immersion policy, but verification and administrative measures to deal with them are nonexistent.” [Emphasis added]

Odd. I do tend to remember the criminal record checks, notarized copies of said checks and diploma stamped by the embassy in my home country and sealed transcripts existing, and I know the health check occurred since I took photos of it:

There have been other suggestions as to how verification and administration of foreign teachers might be carried (see suggestion 4 here), but Rep. Choi’s bills have nothing new to offer. In the end, the bills are practically calling for the status quo with a marijuana test and Korean criminal test added (though no AIDS tests). Nothing earth-shatteringly different there. It might be worth remembering what Benjamin Wagner wrote about his inquiries with Rep. Choi’s office:

I pressed for stats for the statements “At the same time, however, the crime rate among native English teachers is getting higher,” and “Furthermore, there are native English speakers who have committed crimes in Korea and been expelled from Korea for those crimes, yet these native English speakers are being rehired as English teachers in Korea a few years after their expulsion from the country.”

Sadly, they don’t have them. The aide mentioned some police reports of crimes they had received in regard to first statement, but just of crimes, not of an increase. For the second quote I was told they’d seen a newspaper story (no, I’m not kidding). He didn’t remember the title or where they saw it.

While on the one hand, it’s nice to see someone actually going about making a group of foreigners submit to drug and AIDS tests in a transparent (and legal) way in the National Assembly (as opposed to simply passing around a policy memo), but it’s pretty ridiculous that the rationale behind submitting this bill has no facts whatsoever to back up the assertions being made. There’s nothing to prove the foreign teacher crime rate is rising, and for the statement that “native English speakers are being rehired as English teachers in Korea a few years after their expulsion from the country,” they have nothing to support this other than a vague “I read about it somewhere.” And let’s not forget how Rep. Choi announced that the Ministry of Justice had “lost” 22,202 foreign English teachers because she’d used the wrong statistics (and of course never offered a retraction when this was pointed out to her).

This statement is interesting:

“Had the ‘Child Education Law Revised Bill,’ which I sponsored on June 9 last year, been passed, the employment of problem native-speaker teachers could have been prevented.”

The problem is that these most recent cases have involved Korean-Americans on F-4 visas (yes, others were arrested, possibly E-2 visa-holders, but they were footnotes in articles about the Korean-Americans), but according to statements made by an aide of Rep. Choi’s to Benjamin Wagner months ago, these bills will affect only E-2 visa holders — despite the fact that the inclusive term “native English teachers” (원어민교사) and not specifically “E-2 visa holders,” is used in the bills. I wrote months ago that “those on other visas might wish the bill to be a little more specific in its language,” and I wonder if “native English teachers” will be interpreted in a more broad fashion to include those on other visas after these most recent incidents. I’m not sure what’s worse — re-interpreting the language in the bills to including F-4 visa-holders, or not including them and using crimes by F-4s to justify stricter laws against E-2 visa-holders. Both of those options are rather sneaky, if unsurprising.

Of course, we have to remember the reason this is being done:

“These bills should be passed at an extraordinary session of the National Assembly in April in order to provide a more secure learning environment for children and teens.”

We have to protect the children. Now, to be fair, Rep. Choi has criticized Korean teachers as well, and at the same time the three bills were introduced regarding foreign English teachers, she also introduced 5 bills aimed at Korean teachers. For example, in the wake of the Na-yeong incident, while some other National Assembly representatives were saying that out of foreigners in general, “native-speaking teachers are especially potential child molesters,” Rep. Choi was pointing the finger at Korean teachers who had committed sex crimes but who had mostly not been punished for it (in Korean here):

A total of 124 sexual crimes involving elementary and secondary school teachers were reported to the education authorities between 2006 and 2009. Among them, 47 involved prostitution, 43 were sexual harassment and five were rape cases.

However, only eight teachers (6 percent) were given prison sentences, while 31 were not indicted and 28 received suspended sentences.

Interesting that such figures are marshaled to provide a basis for criticizing Korean teachers in nothing more than a press release, but nothing specific is needed when submitting bills in the NationalAssembly calling for expanded monitoring and testing for foreign English teachers.

http://populargusts.blogspot.com/2010/04/will-choi-young-hees-bills-be-passed.html