Roh Moo-hyun

Posted on 25 May 2009 by admin

Obituary commissioned by The Guardian. Completed 24 May 2009. Edited version published on
25 May 2009 at http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/may/24/roh-moo-hyun-obituary

Combative South Korean president who challenged the old elite

Aidan Foster-Carter

Roh Moo-hyun, who ended his life on Saturday aged 62, was a South Korean president who broke the mould – though in the end the mould broke him. Born in poverty, his tenure in the Blue House (2003-08) antagonized the Seoul elite and Washington while disappointing his fans. Dismay grew as a corruption scandal enveloped him, finally driving him to jump from a clifftop near his home early in the morning after leaving a suicide note on his computer.

Roh never lost his roots in Korea’s rural southeast. The youngest child of a poor farmer, his nickname was ‘stone bean’: small but tough. His first-grade teacher said he had many talents – above all in presenting his opinions. Unable to afford college, he worked on building sites while studying at night for South Korea’s formidable bar examination. Passing this in 1975 – a remarkable feat for a non-graduate – he was briefly a judge before practising as a lawyer. In 1971 he had married his childhood sweetheart Kwon Yang-sook, from the same area and background; her father was once jailed as pro-communist. They have a son and a daughter.

At first more upwardly mobile than political – with a comfortable tax practice, he joined the local yacht club – in 1980 Roh defended students tortured on trumped-up charges by Seoul’s then military dictators. By his own account, the sight of torn-out toenails radicalized him. Now specializing in human rights cases, he was briefly jailed in 1987: the year democracy was restored. Elected to the national assembly for the port city of Pusan, he gained national fame for sharply grilling generals and tycoons, in sessions broadcast live on television. Such irreverence struck a fresh note in a country still in fear of the military and in awe of elites.

A spell in the wilderness followed. When his mentor Kim Young-sam allied with generals to win the presidency in 1993, a disgusted Roh threw in his lot with YS’s rival, the long-time dissident Kim Dae-jung. Regional antagonism between the southeast and DJ’s southwest made the latter a losing ticket in Pusan, but Roh doggedly ran and lost three times. His down to earth image as a principled if quixotic loser inspired his supporters to form Nosamo (We Love Roh), South Korea’s first ever political fan club, which blossomed as the Internet grew.

Kim Dae-jung won the presidency in 1997, and Roh served briefly as fisheries minister. Yet he was still a political outsider when the ruling party decided to choose its next candidate – South Korean presidents serve a single five-year term – via the country’s first ever primaries. To elite consternation, a bandwagon began to roll, delivering Roh the nomination. Insiders tried to deselect him; at one point he trailed third in the polls. But on the day in December 2002 he narrowly defeated a stiff conservative former judge. Koreans wanted a change.

In office Roh proved divisive. The establishment hated him, and he them. Shunning and at one point suing the conservative print dailies, Roh favoured left-leaning online news sites like Ohmynews. He promoted the radical 386 generation: in their 30s, at college in the 1980s and born in the 1960s. Populist and anti-American, the 386ers sounded a new assertive note. Roh himself, who unusually had never visited the US before (though he wrote a book about Abraham Lincoln), riposted by saying he did not see why he should go just to kowtow.

But the left were soon disappointed. Roh sent troops to Iraq, and in 2007 signed a free trade accord (still unratified) with the US, in the teeth of fierce street protests: a Korean speciality. If Iraq was a sop to Bush so that Roh could continue a ‘sunshine’ policy of engaging North Korea, the FTA seemed a real change of heart, rejecting the old ‘fortress Korea’ mentality.

Policies apart, Roh’s style grated. His mouth tended to run away with him. This spontaneity, refreshing at first, was often combative, could be crude and lacked gravitas. He admitted that on official trips – including the first ever Korean state visit to the UK, in 2004 – he packed ramyon (instant noodles); all that foreign nosh was uncongenial. Having no English small-talk was a problem too: by the time you beckoned the interpreter, the moment had passed.

At home Roh was forever upsetting applecarts, not least his own. Within weeks of becoming president, he wondered aloud if he was up to the job and suggested a referendum on his rule. In March 2004 he got one – as the first South Korean president ever to be impeached, which a simple apology could have prevented. A popular backlash in his favour then gave his party a majority in elections in April. In May the Constitutional Court threw out his impeachment. Roh, and Korea, bounced back from an unnerving roller-coaster largely of his own making.

Thus it continued. In 2007 as his term drew to a close, after years of antagonizing the Right on issues ranging from collaboration with past dictatorships to restricting elite schools, Roh startled friend and foe alike by proposing an alliance with the conservative opposition. The latter rejected this. Their candidate Lee Myung-bak, a formaer Hyundai CEO and mayor of Seoul, won a landslide in December 2007’s presidential election – over a centre-left which by then was desperate to distance itself from Roh, seen as a bungling, mercurial liability.

Still, at least he was clean. Scorning Seoul, Roh retired to a new house in his native village, where he grew organic rice, drank with the locals and blogged. In recent months this idyll darkened. A bribery scandal involving a Pusan shoemaker (a local supplier to Nike), Park Yeon-cha, was said to implicate Roh’s family. On April 7 Roh admitted his wife took money from Park to settle a debt. On April 30 he was driven to Seoul for a grilling that lasted till the small hours. Amid rumours from a suspiciously leaky prosecutor’s office – political bias is alleged – that Roh solicited $6 million from Park, he feared indictment, humiliation and jail. His death has halted this, sparing his family; but the full truth may now never be known.

“Discard me”, Roh wrote in his blog. For all his flaws, future history will judge him less harshly than that. His very weakness helped democracy. No emperor, he delegated and did not abuse power markedly. The economy grew at a fair clip, even if he had no clear vision for it – except a failed bid to move the capital from Seoul so as to promote regional equality.

His finest hour came in October 2007. Solemnly walking across the Demilitarized Zone, he drove on Pyongyang for a summit with Kim Jong-il whose results belied low expectations, launching wide-ranging business deals with the North. For a few months the two Koreas met daily and cooperated concretely. Roh’s successor Lee junked all this, just as in 2003 George W Bush brusquely ditched Bill Clinton’s outreach to North Korea. Si monumentum requiris, circumspice. Perhaps sunshine was appeasement, but does anyone have a better idea?

An odd mix of Candide-like innocence and often misplaced guile, Roh Moo-hyun could be a fool – and a hypocrite if he was not after all squeaky-clean. Yet he was a breath of fresh air, and his street-smart instincts did not lack vision. His end is a tragedy, for him and for Korea.

Roh Moo-hyun, politician; born August 6 1946, died May 23 2009.

Obituary: Roh Moo-hyun

Posted on 24 May 2009 by admin

By Christian Oliver in Seoul
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/571c01b4-4859-11de-8870-00144feabdc0.html
Published: May 24 2009 17:07 | Last updated: May 24 2009 17:07

Roh Moo-hyun, who committed suicide on Saturday, was devastated by an enquiry into his probity and had written on his blog of his shame at losing his reputation as South Korea’s only clean president. He was 62.

Prosecutors had been investigating payments of nearly $6m from a shoemaking tycoon to members of the family of Mr Roh, a leftist who left office last year. Even though prosecutors had not charged Mr Roh with corruption or tax evasion, by the time he threw himself from a mountainside, he was distraught about the damage to his reputation.

“I have lost the right to say anything about democracy, progress and justice. I fell into an abyss which I cannot escape,” he wrote earlier this month.

Within South Korea, Mr Roh’s supporters are portraying the case as a politically motivated assault by right-wingers. Although the sums involved are large, they are small by the standards of previous Korean presidents and the money is less clearly linked to direct political influence than in earlier scandals.

Mr Roh is popular mainly among Korea’s young people, who are sick of the traditional political caste. After his presidency, his home village became a pilgrimage site for day-trippers.

Of Mr Roh’s four predecessors, two were jailed for graft and the sons of two others were imprisoned on similar counts. Mr Roh was widely viewed as a highly principled man in a corrupt system. Many Koreans are viewing his suicide as an attempt to free his family from a painful investigation. If that was his motive, it worked.

Mr Roh was born to a poor farming family in Gimhae, south-east Korea in 1946. In a country where political success has normally been the preserve of graduates from Seoul’s top three universities, Mr Roh was an unusual autodidact who had spent nine years getting himself through the national bar exam.

He forged his reputation defending unionists and democracy activists during the turbulent democracy struggle of 1980s when the country was riven by bloody protests. In 1987, he spent three weeks in prison for supporting an illegal strike.

He entered parliament a year later and, ironically enough, gained stardom in a parliamentary hearing on the corruption of a former president, Chun Doo-hwan.

He became the protégé of Kim Dae-jung, president from 1998 to 2003, serving as his fisheries’ minister.

Although not expected to win the 2002 presidential election, he rode to victory on a wave of anti-Americanism, partly fired by the death of two Korean schoolgirls killed in an accident with a US military vehicle. He had campaigned on a platform of fighting corruption and reforming the mighty conglomerates that dominate the economy.

On becoming president, Mr Roh became well-known on the international stage for continuing Mr Kim’s “Sunshine Policy” of engagement with North Korea. Most famously he visited Pyongyang for a summit in 2007 and signed a raft of co-operation deals.

Mr Roh’s strategy was marred by the test of a North Korean nuclear weapon in 2006. However his diplomacy appeared to be paying dividends by the end of 2007 when international inspectors agreed North Korea was disabling its atomic facilities.

At heart a proud Korean nationalist, he was criticised for being too curt in some of his dealings with the US and Japan, the old imperial overlord.

On the domestic front, his presidency was marked by feuding, owing to his lack of a deep political support base. He was impeached in 2004 after publicly supporting his own party, contravening the constitutional neutrality of the president. He was reinstated after two months.

His government forged a trade deal with Washington, that has run into trouble under his successor, Lee Myung-bak.

He retired to the village of Bongha to work in an organisation dedicated to traditional farming methods. But the bribery scandal shattered his pursuit of rural tranquillity.

“Because of the state I am in, I cannot do anything. I cannot even write or read a book,” he wrote in his suicide note.

In the note, he also hankered after a return to nature.

“Do not be sad. Are not life and death all part of nature? … Please cremate me and leave a small tombstone near my home. I have thought about this for a long time.”

Additional reporting by Kang Buseong

Thousands in Korea mourn Roh’s death

Posted on 24 May 2009 by admin

By Song Jung-a and Christian Oliver in Seoul
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f848bf9c-485d-11de-8870-00144feabdc0.html
Published: May 24 2009 13:46 | Last updated: May 24 2009 17:15

Tens of thousands of mourners gathered across South Korea to pay their final respects to Roh Moo-hyun, a former president who committed suicide at the weekend as he faced a growing corruption scandal.

Shortly after dawn on Saturday, Mr Roh, 62, went hiking on a mountain behind his home in Bongha, a village in the south-east of the peninsula. Police said he jumped from a cliff-face near the summit and suffered severe head injuries. He left a brief suicide note to his family.

South Koreans were stunned by the sudden death of Mr Roh, famed abroad for his attempts to build a rapprochement with communist North Korea. “This is hard to believe,” said Lee Myung-bak, the president. “It’s very sad and lamentable.”

Mr Roh, who left office in February 2008, had complained he was suffering from intense stress because of a scandal involving alleged corruption during his presidency. Prosecutors summoned him last month for an investigation into allegations that his family received $6m from a businessman while he was in office. His family has also been grilled.

Mr Roh’s supporters claimed the investigation was politically motivated to undermine the opposition and that the prosecutors’ probe into his family drove him to take his own life. The government on Sunday said the case against Mr Roh was closed but analysts speculate his suicide still threatens to catalyse the country’s political tensions.

Thousands of people queued up to burn incense and bow before a make-shift altar erected to Mr Roh in downtown Seoul. As Mr Roh was fond of smoking, many mourners left a cigarette rather than an incense stick. State radio reported 10,000 mourners had visited Bongha by Sunday morning.

“I am lost for words. His death is a great loss for the country,” said Kim Jae-suk, a 52-year-old housewife waiting for her turn in the tearful crowd gathered at the altar.

Mr Roh’s death came as prosecutors were due to decide whether to charge him. Mr Roh admitted his wife had taken money from a businessman to pay family debts. He had issued a public apology, but the scandal dealt a blow to his image as a clean politician in a rotten system.

Mr Roh, a former human rights lawyer, was elected in 2002 on a promise to reform powerful conglomerates, fight corruption, improve relations with Pyongyang and make Seoul more independent from the US, its long-standing military ally.

However, his five-year term proved turbulent, marked by political infighting and scandals. Mr Roh was impeached by lawmakers in early 2004 over a breach of election rules but was two months later reinstated after the Constitutional Court overturned the move.

His death may rekindle tensions between predominantly young liberals and older conservatives in South Korea, where President Lee, a conservative former businessman, came to power last year after a decade of liberal rule.

“A controversy is flaring up over whether the prosecutors were responsible for his death. If the government fails to handle this well, then the probe could be seen as a political revenge against Mr Roh. In that case, it will be a huge political burden for Mr Lee,” said Ham Sung-deuk, a politics professor at Korea University.

Obituary: Roh Moo-hyun (BBC)

Posted on 23 May 2009 by admin

Former South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun, who has died after falling into a ravine, was a controversial figure whose administration ended last year dogged by scandal and infighting.

At the time of his death, which police are treating as a possible suicide, 62-year-old Mr Roh was under investigation for receiving millions of dollars in bribes from a businessman while in office.

With his relative youth, lowly beginnings and promises to root out endemic political corruption, he seemed when he took power in 2003 to be the new start the country needed.

But his term in office was a rollercoaster ride. His Uri party was hit by scandal and in-fighting, and there was fierce public opposition to several of his policies.

He was even suspended early in 2004, after parliament voted to impeach him over a breach of election rules, but the Constitutional Court later overturned the move and he was reinstated.

Campaigning lawyer

A human rights lawyer by trade, President Roh first made headlines soon after he entered politics in 1988, when he grilled top officials from the previous administration during a special parliamentary hearing on graft.

He had been one of the leaders of the “June Struggle” in 1987, against the dictatorship of Chun Doo-hwan. He served a three-week jail sentence that year for abetting striking workers.

Born to poor peasant parents in the south-eastern region of Kimhae, Mr Roh initially studied law as a means of escaping poverty.

But in 1981 his work brought him in contact with a case of human rights abuse which he says changed his aspirations forever.

Mr Roh was asked to defend one of two dozen students arrested for possessing banned literature, for which they were detained and tortured for almost two months.

“When I saw their horrified eyes and their missing toenails, my comfortable life as a lawyer came to an end,” Mr Roh is quoted as saying.

Following nationwide protests which pushed Mr Chun out of office, Mr Roh entered politics by winning election to the National Assembly as a member of a pro-democracy party led by the activist Kim Young-sam, who later became president.

Mr Roh was helped to leadership by a public disillusioned with scandal and South Korea’s close relationship with the US.

Ironically, it was scandal and political infighting that also blighted Mr Roh’s time in office.

Mass defections

Within a year of taking office, Mr Roh and his supporters formed the Uri Party ( which means Our Party).

But in March 2004, parliament voted to impeach Mr Roh for breaching a minor election law, and he was forced into two months of political limbo.

The impeachment came about because the conservative opposition – which at the time dominated South Korea’s parliament – said the president had contravened the country’s voting rules by openly supporting the Uri party in the run-up to assembly elections.

The move humiliated Mr Roh, worried markets and drove thousands of people onto the streets in protest.

In May the Constitutional Court overturned the verdict, saying Mr Roh had violated the law, but not gravely enough to warrant his removal from office.

The Uri Party made a strong showing in assembly elections that April, and the president emerged in a much stronger position to push his reformist agenda in parliament.

But a series of unpopular decisions, including sending Korean troops to Iraq, a failed attempt to move the capital from Seoul and the continuation of a policy of engagement with North Korea saw Mr Roh’s popularity ratings plummet again.

His government was also accused of incompetency over its handling of the economy and in foreign affairs.

Last month, Mr Roh was questioned over allegations that he had taken millions of dollars in bribes from a wealthy businessman. He later apologised for the scandal.

In a statement posted on his website, he admitted his wife received a substantial sum of money from the businessman, but suggested it was not a bribe but a payment to help her settle a debt.

Mr Roh leaves his wife and childhood sweetheart Kwon Yang-sook, a son and a daughter.

He said he enjoyed mountain climbing and bowling. He spent his two months of impeachment reading and hiking around the hills behind his official residence.

Seoul food aims for top table

Posted on 15 May 2009 by admin

By Christian Oliver
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b56f1ae0-417d-11de-bdb7-00144feabdc0.html
Published: May 15 2009 19:28 | Last updated: May 15 2009 19:28

Across the world, every octopus should be quaking in his rock-pool; Korean chefs are going global.

By 2017, we will not just be dialling out for pizza Margherita and chicken korma, we will be hankering after tongue twisters such as samgyeopsal and doenjang-jjigae – sizzling pork-belly and spicy bean-paste stew. Those of a hardier constitution may even have tried dog soup and wriggling tentacles.

As part of an ambitious national branding scheme intended to awaken the world to the joys of an undiscovered hermit kingdom, South Korea’s government says it is planning to make its cuisine one of the world’s top five over the next eight years.

It is a very Korean goal. Koreans love league tables and outstripping performance targets. It is why they do so well. But the desire to produce one of the world’s top five cuisines also illustrates Korea’s peculiar tendency of seeking to quantify the unquantifiable.

The culture ministry does have a more quantifiable target of increasing Korean restaurants worldwide about sevenfold. The fluid strategy involves a sort of Korean Michelin star scheme, Korean cooking classes at Cordon Bleu schools and tweaking recipes to suit international palates.

Even if that works, is Korea then in the world’s top five? Who will measure such a subjective notion? If one starts counting restaurants, should you include the thousands of restaurants that serve dishes from all over the world, including the odd Korean dish?

Then there is the prickly issue of food from a region, not a country. Korea might claim victory over Morocco, Tunisia or Algeria on restaurant count but, in the real food wars, has fermented cabbage really defeated tajine and couscous?

None of this matters. It is an output target and not to be questioned. Much of this Korean love of pecking orders hails back to the educational system. Fear of nepotism means Koreans prefer that exams be reduced to “right” and “wrong” questions, partly explaining why the humanities are so weak. You may flunk exams but at least the mark did not depend on the whim of an arbitrary or corrupt examiner. Ranking people or things has become overly acceptable because it was seen as fair at school.

Korean officials now maintain the illusion that league tables can nail subjective issues. Their graphs can reflect their own opinions about certain themes, rather than objective data collection. The culture of statistics is pervasive and the otherwise truculent domestic press whimpers before them. An international survey ranking Korea only 50th in mothers’ welfare received wide but bizarrely uncritical coverage.

Korea’s culture ministry concedes there is no real ranking system for foods but wants random people surveyed in 2017 to say Korean food is in their top five. As with many things presented as statistics in Korea, it is ultimately a question of raw emotion.

Dedicated to a poetic Korea

Posted on 6 May 2009 by admin

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/features/2009/0506/1224245988613.html
6 May 2009

Koreans have been described as ‘the Irish of Asia’, and after translating 2,000 of their poems, Fr Kevin O’Rourke is in a position to judge, writes DAVID McNEILL

IN HIS COURTING days, Kevin O’Rourke once walked the 17-mile journey from Cavan town to Clones, in nearby Co Monaghan, in pursuit of a girl. Adventures like that, in the countryside that inspired W Percy French, Patrick Kavanagh, Patrick McCabe and other writers may unwittingly have prepared him for his unusual path: becoming the world’s greatest translator of Korean poetry.

O’Rourke (70) gave up girls, Ireland and much else besides to achieve his task. “I set out to put out the entire Korean poetry tradition in English,” he says from his home in the Korean capital, Seoul. Nearly 45 years later, the job is almost done. Now a semi-retired Columban priest, O’Rourke is part of a tiny but renowned Irish group of Asian scholars, including Dublin-raised Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) and Co Mayo-born Eileen Kato, who died last year.

Fr O’Rourke’s journey from Cavan to professor of English literature in Kyung Hee University, Seoul, began after he was ordained in 1964. He plunged into his adopted culture, becoming the first foreigner to be awarded a doctorate in Korean literature at a local college in 1982. Early missionary work in a region that was recovering from the Korean war of 1950-53 was a delight, he recalls. “Every day was a new adventure, getting to these remote places in the countryside. Modernisation took a lot of fun out of it, to be honest.”

Like many translators, he was struck by similarities between his new language and the one he left behind. Ten years ago, he began working on the poems of the vagabond satirist, Kim Sak-kat (1807-1863), a deposed aristocrat who took to the road, recalling the wandering Gaelic poets of 16th-century Ireland.

“He earned his food, lodging and booze off his pen,” says Fr O’Rourke. “So when he went to your house and asked you for a bed and something to eat, he’d be very nice to you. But if you refused, he’d let you have both barrels and hang the result on your front gate, like the poets who went to the big houses in Ireland.”

The Koreans, with their history of colonialism, have been described as “the Irish of Asia” – not entirely complimentarily, he points out. “It means we’re rowdy, drink too much, a bit dirty in our habits, cry at the drop of a hat, and so on. But we do get along with them.”

Bringing Kim to the English-speaking world is part of an enormous labour of love that has made Fr O’Rourke a local celebrity. Over the years, he has translated about 2,000 poems, as well as stories and other literature, a task requiring a working knowledge of thousands of Chinese characters. Much of it has been published, but he is still grappling with his idea for an anthology of the collected poems, divided into two volumes, classical and post-1910.

“Korean poetry doesn’t sell, for some reason,” he says. “East Asian literature is occupied by Japanese and Chinese.”

He is also trying to finish a book that is a miscellany of his story, his own poems and lessons on “how to survive in an alien culture like Korea for 45 years”.

Every year, he makes the journey from the Missionary Society of St Columban in Seongbuk, northern Seoul, to Cavan, for the visitation of the local graves, and Rosslare, where he stays in his brother’s holiday home. The dictionaries stay on his desk in Seoul. “It’s difficult in Rosslare. The golf club is five minutes up the road and the sea is close by.”

Gulag horrors and showstoppers

Posted on 17 April 2009 by admin

By Christian Oliver
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/7b613b4c-2ae6-11de-8415-00144feabdc0.html
Published: April 17 2009 03:00 | Last updated: April 17 2009 03:00

On entering North Korea’s brutal gulags, inmates have to sign a declaration that they will never tell anyone what goes on there.

Jung Sung-san is one of the few men ever to get the chance to break that vow of silence and broadcast the hidden horrors of the reclusive communist dictatorship. He has chosen to do so through the surprising medium of stage musicals, delivering his message through toe-tapping tunes and exuberant dancing troupes.

Jung escaped to Seoul in 1994 and his first musical, Yoduk Story , opened in 2006. The power ballads were interspersed with unnervingly graphic depictions of rape, floggings and shootings inside an infamous penal camp. The lead characters all came to a sticky end.

“I wanted to shock South Koreans by letting them know that this is the truth,” he says at the rehearsals for this year’s extravaganza, Great Show , as the glamorous cast bursts into another feisty song-and-dance routine in front of the mirrors of the rehearsal room.

Great Show makes for jollier family viewing during an economic downturn that has pole-axed South Korea. Jung has branched out into romance and comedy to give a more human picture of ordinary North Koreans, who are often casually dismissed as brainwashed automata.

“South Koreans are totally indifferent towards North Korea and I want to change this sentiment,” says Jung. He craves a reunification of the peninsula but feels he might get more sympathy for his work abroad than in Seoul; he is in exploratory talks about taking the show to London.

This year’s musical tells the tale of a young man on national service arrested for watching a contraband video of a South Korean pop singer, with whom he falls in love. He avoids the death penalty by accepting a mission to abduct her for the delectation of Kim Jong-il, North Korea’s leader.

The plot is not as crazy as it sounds. Kim, a film buff and former official propagandist, did indeed kidnap one of South Korea’s top directors and his wife, a film star, in 1978. Jung says the plot was more directly inspired by a story he had heard of party officials who were jailed for getting hold of a South Korean pornographic movie. The South Korean videos and DVDs that are smuggled over the Chinese border into the North have had a profound effect on the country’s political mindset, forcing the North Korean government to redraft its catalogue of propaganda about its rich democratic neighbour. Pyongyang can no longer tell its people that the South is as poor as the North – it must now resort to accusing it of being a morally bankrupt Babylon.

Great Show ‘s plot also overlaps with Jung’s own story, as he was arrested for listening to a South Korean shortwave broadcast – officially, North Koreans can only buy radios set to the one approved state frequency. For more than two months, he was in a penal camp dubbed “Station of the Wolves” because all that could be heard was the howling of inmates. He escaped across the Chinese border after a van carrying him to another camp crashed on a road made slippery by heavy rains. “There were two men who were killed helping me escape,” he says, “and I am dedicating this show to them.”

On arriving in Seoul, he went back to furthering his knowledge of cinema, which he had studied in Pyongyang. There he had been trained in the Soviet tradition, making a graduation film on coal miners trapped in a collapsed shaft who keep their spirits up by singing patriotic songs in honour of the country’s leaders.

Although North Korean black-market favourites now include Desperate Housewives and Mr Bean , Jung had seen no films from outside the socialist sphere before fleeing except for a few of Sean Connery’s outings as James Bond.

“Arriving in Seoul was a huge culture shock. It was like the difference between heaven and earth. Instead of just revolutionary songs, I could listen to pop, jazz and dance,” Jung says. However, his big problem was – and still is – money. Directing musicals initially appealed because they cost only a tenth of the price of a film to produce. Even so, the money needed was enormous for a refugee. When raising finance for Yoduk Story , he used one of his kidneys as collateral on a loan.

The musical was first performed during the presidency of Roh Moo-hyun, who was trying to pursue a “sunshine policy” of rapprochement with the North. This conciliatory stance from the government made it very difficult to find backers for a musical that was so critical of the North’s human rights record.

Nevertheless, the show had a successful run in South Korea, staging 100 performances in Seoul before going on tour to the US. There the Korean-language musical failed to fill the theatres, in spite of considerable media and political support.

But Jung resented the way Yoduk Story became a political football in Seoul. Members of the conservative Grand National Party, opposed to Roh’s détente with Pyongyang, made sure the media knew they were attending performances of the musical. Jung makes it clear that his shows receive no financial backing from any political group and that he depends exclusively on ticket sales.

In spite of his ordeals in the North, Jung expresses simmering frustration with the South – paradoxically, he fears that the unification he yearns for will destroy a certain innocence in his homeland: “There will be a flow of low-quality, capitalist culture pouring in.”

In one of the scenes in Great Show , the North Korean national serviceman arrives in the heart of Seoul on his kidnapping mission. He is dazed by the racing tides of preoccupied people, clutching their Starbucks coffees, texting and barking into their mobile phones. He cannot get anyone’s attention and loses his temper among the tetchy, hurried pedestrians.

“I really miss North Korea and I want to go back there one day. In South Korea you always have to be street-wise, a fox. You lose your purity – but whenever I meet defectors from the North, they still have that innocence to them.” Additional reporting by Song Jung-a . Performances of ‘Great Show’ continue until May 3 at the Goyang Aramnuri Theatre in Seoul, tel +82 2 1577 7766, www.artgy.or.kr

Korean actress’s suicide letter sparks sex-for-favours anger

Posted on 31 March 2009 by admin

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/6851b7d2-1d8c-11de-9eb3-00144feabdc0.html

South Koreans who watched Jang Ja-yeon playing an alluring villain twice a week in the nation’s favourite soap opera assumed the 26-year-old star had it all.

But since she hanged herself from banisters this month, the country has had to look hard at the seedy underbelly of an entertainment industry whose films and soap operas have won legions of fans across Asia.

A week before her suicide, she wrote a seven-page letter chronicling the sexual favours needed to achieve stardom in dramas of the Hallyu, or Korean Wave.

Police have opened an inquiry into 12 people, including producers, agents and studio executives. The fair trade commission is promising a rigorous examination of slave contracts in the entertainment business.

The case has become the focus of a national scandal and women’s groups view it as a broader test of accountability for a country where, they argue, an unchecked cabal of middle-aged men calls the shots, sealing deals in bordellos and hostess bars.

Lee Eun-sang, deputy director of Korea’s sexual violence relief centre, hoped the police inquiry would prove a landmark case in cracking down on abuse.

“The practice of powerful figures using their status for getting sex in return for favours is rampant in Korean society at large,” she said. “Miss Jang’s case can be the starting place for setting up a real institutional framework. In the past, the rumours never got as far as a proper investigation.”

The story Jang tells in her letter and the details the police have released smack of a soap opera. Orphaned since her school days when her parents were killed in a car crash, she says she was at the mercy of studio bosses who pimped her off and used her to serve drinks on a golf trip to Thailand.

In a trial by the public, the men she named have already been identified on websites, sparking an outpouring of vitriol.

But the case is far from clear-cut. Kim Sung-hoon, the artist’s agent, was cast initially as the villain of the piece and efforts are under way to secure his extradition from Japan, but he protests his innocence.

In late February, Jang visited Yoo Jang-ho, her former manager, in whose office she wrote the accusatory letter. Mr Yoo then gave copies of this letter to Jang’s family and leading media. The state-run Korean Broadcasting System, which shows Jang’s soap opera Boys over Flowers , aired extracts from the letter.

Mr Kim told Korean media the letter was an attempt by Mr Yoo, his rival, to bring him down. Although the police first assumed that Jang killed herself because of public humiliation, the star’s family contests that she felt hounded after Mr Yoo leaked the document.

Park Mun-yeong, a former KBS producer, said the suicide was also a tragic side-effect of a lack of genuine competition in Korean media that was stifling the arts.

“The current system of three [non-cable] broadcasters was established when the economy was a 10th of its current size. Therefore, a TV appearance has become synonymous with success and people are eager to perform at all costs,” he wrote in the Joong-Ang daily. “Actors and actresses who do not make frequent appearances are treated as losers. To avoid this, they often have to go too far.”

Korea’s government is trying to pass a media reform bill to increase competition but the measure is being resisted by leftwing politicians and unions.

Additional reporting by Kang Buseong

Unsuk Chin: Hear my $200,000 concerto

Posted on 16 February 2009 by admin

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/unsuk-chin-hear-my-200000-concerto-570182.html
Monday, 16 February 2004

At 42, the composer Unsuk Chin has won one of the world’s most prestigious music awards. But, as she tells Martin Anderson, the path from South Korea to lyrical modernism wasn’t smooth

The annual Grawemeyer award is one of the most prestigious in classical music. It is given to a contemporary composer for a specific work, bringing a colossal $200,000 in prize money and an equivalent amount of kudos. The first winner, in 1985, was Witold Lutoslawski, for his Third Symphony; subsequent winners have included some of the biggest names in new music, Ligeti, Penderecki, Takemitsu and Boulez among them.

The 2004 winner is the Korean composer Unsuk Chin – the third woman to take the Grawemeyer. Like the rest of us, composers come in all shapes and sizes, but Chin isn’t quite what you’d expect a modern composer to look like: she’s petite, delicate, almost weightlessly graceful, with the kind of sultry, heavy-lidded eyes that you see on James Bond’s sexier villains. The award is for her Violin Concerto, which receives its first UK performance at the Barbican on Friday, when the soloist, Viviane Hagner, will join the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the conductor Martyn Brabbins.

Chin first made her mark with a piece called Acrostic-Wordplay, for soprano and ensemble, written in 1991. Three years later, she was signed up by the publisher Boosey & Hawkes, whose efficient machinery has since made sure of widespread international performances for her meticulously crafted works, among them a Fantaisie mécanique for chamber ensemble (1994); Miroirs des temps (1999), which was a BBC commission for the Hilliard Ensemble and Royal Philharmonic Orchestra; and a piano concerto in 1997. A Double Concerto for the unusual combination of piano, percussion and ensemble appeared last year.

Born in Seoul in 1961, Chin is only the second Korean composer to make the running in contemporary classical music, her sole predecessor being Isang Yun (1917-95). When she was in London recently, I asked her how this had come about. “When I was 11 or 12, I decided to become a composer; before that I wanted to be a pianist.” But under what impulse? It’s hardly a conventional teenage career plan, even in the West. “My father was a minister in the Presbyterian Church, and my mother – a Christian, too – was a teacher. They couldn’t afford to pay for piano lessons. At that time in Korea, in the Sixties and the beginning of the Seventies, we were very poor. My music teacher at school was a composer, and one day she advised me to become one, too; she said it was much better to be a composer than a pianist.”

So how, without support, did she make her way forward in music, in composition in particular? “I learnt everything by myself. I listened to music every day, Western classical music; I played piano; I studied a lot of scores. It wasn’t normal to buy recordings or scores: they were all rarities and very expensive. I borrowed scores from other people, too, and copied them out – the Tchaikovsky Sixth Symphony, in its entirety.”

Which other composers was she listening to at this stage? “Brahms, Beethoven, Mozart…” Not Ligeti, Lutoslawski, and the other composers we might call “lyrical modernists”, among whom she is now counted? “No, at that time we didn’t know these people at all. Stravinsky we did know: I was 13 when I heard the Stravinsky Violin Concerto. I found it very beautiful but, for my ear, at that time, there was too much brass!”

Could the attraction to Western music be ascribed, at least in part, to the fact that her father was active in an Occidental spiritual tradition? “When I was a child, I used to accompany the hymns in the church. For me, it was like an exercise in harmony. They would say hymn number so-and-so, and I would have to play. I was only eight or nine years old, very young, and it was quite stressful, but it was also very good practice. Sometimes, when people got a bit excited and went higher, I would have to play a half-tone higher, transposing up, sometimes down… I did that for years. It was my first encounter with the Western tradition.”

Chin ascribes her first brush with musical modernism to Sukhi Kang, her principal teacher of composition and piano at Seoul National University. When she began studying with him in 1982, Kang “had just returned from Europe, bringing a lot of information with him. I learnt a lot from him, even aspects of craftsmanship, of how one sets notes. I heard Ligeti first, then Penderecki, Stockhausen, Boulez.”

Was her own music already advancing along similar lines? “No. In fact, I had written very little up to that point – only little things, sonatinas, variations, that were rather tied to tradition. But I was open to all possibilities. Stockhausen and Boulez were really difficult to understand, but I was very inquisitive none the less, and I was prepared to take this music into myself.”

When did she write the first work that pointed to her current style? “That was after my studies. I did compose a piece during my studies, in 1983, which was chosen for the World Music Days of the International Society for Contemporary Music in Canada, and that was my first international success. Nothing like that had happened in Korea before. And, at 22, I was still very young.

“After that, I composed a piece for my final exam at the university, and that was selected as a finalist for the Gaudeamus competition in Holland, and I was lucky enough to win first prize. All of that happened within the three years that I was studying with my teacher, incredibly quickly – too quickly!” Chin’s rise continued to be rapid. In 1985, a German government scholarship took her to Hamburg to study with Ligeti, no less. Three years later, she moved to Berlin, where she has lived independently ever since. “Life hasn’t been easy so far, since I’m a freelance composer, and I have a family – one son who is three years old – and I have to compose to provide all the necessities of life: rent, mineral water, cigarettes. When you think about it, it’s a bit crazy that you can, or must, live like that.

“My dream was always to do what I wanted, to live my own life, and so, even without this prize, I can’t complain about anything. Even when I don’t have much money, and don’t have a car, I do have a fulfilled life. I’ve lived in much worse conditions than this, and it didn’t do me any harm. I’ve never wanted to join an institution or take up a position somewhere that might have nothing to do with me. I just want to be myself and get on with my work.”

Chin’s Violin Concerto had its first performance in Berlin in January 2002 by the then 26-year-old Viviane Hagner, who has been drawing critical superlatives since her emergence on the international stage. The two women worked intensively together on the piece – Hagner, Chin says, “gave me a lot of advice on why something might be difficult, what isn’t possible, how something could be easier to play”. The result is a staggeringly difficult, though still violinistic, solo part that Hagner somehow takes in her stride.

Chin’s listeners, though, have an easier time of it. Her concerto is relatively traditional in form: not quite half an hour in length, with the soloist swirling above a carpet of instrumental colour – the use of the orchestra is reserved and refined. The Grawemeyer committee described the work as “a synthesis of glittering orchestration, rarefied sonorities, volatility of expression, musical puzzles and unexpected turns”. It is also, for all its modernist musical language, remarkably lyrical. The composer nods. “Yes, you could say that. The most important thing for me in my music is that there should be a big palette of expressive possibilities. If it’s only lyrical, or only aggressive, then, for me, it is flat and one-sided. So, within a piece I try to communicate diverse, differing states of feeling and modes of expression.”

So, Unsuk Chin’s work is thus relatively accessible, even to the listener who thinks that he or she ought to be afraid of modern music. “That’s my philosophy when I compose: I never write pieces for my composer-colleagues – I write pieces for many different types of listeners. There are the normal classical-music lovers. There are the professional new-music lovers. And there are the people who have never had anything to do with music. For me, a good piece of music is one in which people from all of these different groups maybe don’t understand everything but can at least get something out of it. It is very important to me that my music speaks to all of these people on a certain level.”

The UK premiere of Unsuk Chin’s Violin Concerto is on Friday at 7.30pm, Barbican, London EC2 (0845 120 7596) and broadcast live on BBC Radio 3

Dispatch from New Malden

Posted on 17 January 2009 by admin

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/5e3f800e-e050-11dd-9ee9-000077b07658.html
Matthew Engel

Huge flocks of ring-necked parakeets have made their home in Surrey over the past few years. These are exotic Asian birds which have either charmed the locals by adding colour and diversity to the landscape, or irritated the hell out of them, bringing forth complaints about their noise, diet and toilet habits. This is the traditional split of opinion on immigrants.

Just up the A3 in New Malden, the exact reverse phenomenon has taken place. Thousands of migrants have arrived, but so quietly that it took years for people to notice. They are Asian, but their plumage is drab and conformist. They make no noise and create no waves.

This bland and discreet commuter suburb has received the blandest and most discreet influx imaginable. Yet, as you walk down the high street now, the phenomenon is obvious. New Malden has turned into Koreatown.

It would be no surprise to see a Korean restaurant anywhere in London these days. But in New Malden there are at least 20, backed up by Korean travel agents, estate agents, beauty salons, supermarkets and herbal remedy shops. And in places, it’s impossible not to notice the distinct whiff of pickled cabbage. No one knows exactly how many Koreans live here, though it is thought there must be at least 15,000 in New Malden and nearby. The Land of the Morning Calm has merged with the Land of the Morning Rush.

Yet the locals only really cottoned on in 2002, when the South Korean soccer team reached the semi-finals of the World Cup. As the tournament went on, the community descended on The Fountain pub, which erected a big screen in the garden. Then a strange thing happened.

“Afterwards, you wouldn’t even have known there had been a major event,” said Derek Osborne, the local Lib Dem councillor and now leader of Kingston upon Thames council. “They even picked up every cigarette end in the garden, and the Koreans are heavy smokers.”

The resentment created when poor migrants take over traditional working-class areas is well documented right across western Europe. This is a bourgeois invasion. Korea and Britain could hardly be more remote and different from each other. Yet these two groups, the Home Counties British and the Korean newcomers, are astonishingly similar: self-contained, reticent, desperate to avoid offence and very bad at making connections, partly because they are both hopeless at foreign languages.

The newcomers started to accrete here from the 1980s because the South Korean embassy was in nearby Wimbledon, but New Malden was cheaper. Then the Korean conglomerates – LG, Samsung, Hyundai – emerged and set up London offices, where managers would be posted on three- to five-year contracts. Naturally, they wanted a ready-made expat community and welcoming landlords. “The Koreans are the most popular tenants in the area,” says Chris Lee of Jin’s Letting agency. “They look after the houses and the companies pay the rent.”

But the isolation in the early days was total. The first Korean restaurant-owner in New Malden put up a notice saying “No English”, meaning that no one there spoke any; he soon had a visit from the council dealing with a potential racial discrimination charge.

Integration was pitifully slow. Korean families work on traditional hierarchical lines: the men took the train to the office, leaving their wives to draw whatever support they could from their compatriots. And that’s still how it works. Local officials have only the vaguest idea what might be happening within the Korean community. “If there is something negative to report, we don’t tend to hear of it,” said Brigitte Pfender of Kingston council. “Any social services or child welfare issues are not necessarily known. To take council help would be considered shameful.”

But what evidence there is suggests the children are fine, although – by local standards – somewhat overworked. They need intensive language tuition when they come into the schools but often emerge as high-flyers. The teachers get annoyed solely because they put in the hard slog only to see the children take wing academically and then return to Korea before they can bump up the school’s SATs results and league table placing.

The British find the Korean work ethic terrifying. The children take extra classes every afternoon and go to Korean school on Saturday. And church on Sunday is also the norm.

Ken Myung, a shipping agent who has been in the area since 1997, and his wife Rachel are among the growing minority who have settled here and started to anglicise themselves (they’re still Kyung and Seoung to old friends). Their son Joshua/Yu Meen is only four, has just started at Malden Manor primary school and is already taking extra Korean and taekwondo lessons.

Malden Manor has 60 Koreans out of 430 pupils, but reports minimal problems and many playground friendships. It is clearly harder for older arrivals, who turn up at secondary school with no English. But that can lead to an intriguing sub-phenomenon, whereby the women – who often find it hard to settle initially – stay behind when their husbands go home to allow the kids to pass UK exams.

There may be another consideration.“One thing I can tell you about Korean women,” says Ken Myung, “is that after two or three years, they don’t want to go back. They get a lot of family pressure back in Korea.”

Behind the leaded windows and net curtains of New Malden’s mock-Tudor semis, the lives led by neighbouring families are always mysterious. That is doubly truer when those neighbours are Korean. The community’s politics are also fairly impenetrable. The Korean Residents’ Society, which once played the leading role in sorting out problems, appears moribund following a disputed election so vituperative that even local councillors now shrug their shoulders rather than try to understand the issues involved.

And as the Koreans embed themselves, there are the beginnings of an underclass working in the shops and restaurants – some of them North Korean refugees who have extra-strong reasons to keep their heads down and their noses clean.

Overall, New Malden feels like a success story, as is South Korea. But we should never forget the people’s pain – imagine life in Britain if there had been almost no communication for decades with anyone north of the Trent. And it is easy to forget the drawbacks of any exile, however comfortable.

To an Englishman, the supermarkets on the High Street look and smell like Korea. Not to a Korean. “It’s different,” says Ken Myung. “The taste is different. At home everything would be fresh. English vegetables don’t taste the same.”

And it is easy to forget the low-level irritation felt by the locals every time a long-established shop closes and gets replaced by yet another Korean business. That does seem to be as bad as it gets, though. As one woman put it to me, “If you’re going to have an ethnic group in your community, I recommend the Koreans.”

Random Korean Articles

A private collection of news clippings – not for public use

Category Archives: Sources