Category Archives: South Korea

Harvard professor sparks outrage with claims about Japan’s ‘comfort women’

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Academics reject J Mark Ramseyer’s claim women were not forced into sexual slavery during second world war

A Harvard University professor has sparked outrage among fellow academics and campaigners after claiming that women forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military had chosen to work in wartime brothels.

J Mark Ramseyer, a professor of Japanese legal studies at Harvard Law School, challenged the accepted narrative that as many as 200,000 “comfort women” – mostly Koreans, but also Chinese, south-east Asians and a small number of Japanese and Europeans – were coerced or tricked into working in military brothels between 1932 and Japan’s defeat in 1945.

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North Korean defector spends six hours walking around heavily guarded border unnoticed

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Embarrassment for South Korea’s military after guards fail to heed alarms despite man being picked up by five sets of CCTV cameras

South Korea’s military is facing criticism over security lapses along the country’s heavily armed border with North Korea after a man was able to cross into the South despite being spotted multiple times by surveillance cameras.

The man, wearing a wetsuit and flippers, reportedly swam to South Korea in the early hours of 16 February, but evaded capture for more than six hours, according to the Yonhap news agency.

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South Korea gripped by trial of 16-month-old Jeong-in’s alleged killer

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Calls for tougher child protection laws intensify as toddler’s adoptive mother faces court in Seoul

The video clip shows a healthy, happy child smiling from ear to ear, her milk teeth gnawing at a pink fluffy toy. Within months all of South Korea would know her name: Jeong-in.

It has taken the death of a 16-month-old, allegedly at the hands of her adoptive mother, to jolt South Korea’s government into what campaigners say is long-overdue action to protect the most vulnerable children, amid a dramatic rise in reported abuse cases over the past decade.

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‘Luxuries I can’t afford’: why fewer women in South Korea are having children

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As the population declines, traditional gender roles and careers are leading many to forgo childbirth

The outcry created this month by Seoul city government’s advice for expectant mothers – including tips on how to cater to their husband’s every need while heavily pregnant – has reignited the debate over why so many South Korean women are choosing not to have children.

The guidelines, issued by the city’s pregnancy and childbirth information centre, were taken down in response to online fury, but not before they had provided a telling insight into attitudes towards gender roles in South Korea, one of the world’s most advanced economies.

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South Korean AI chatbot pulled from Facebook after hate speech towards minorities

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Lee Luda, built to emulate a 20-year-old Korean university student, engaged in homophobic slurs on social media

A popular South Korean chatbot has been suspended after complaints that it used hate speech towards sexual minorities in conversations with its users.

Lee Luda, the artificial intelligence [AI] persona of a 20-year-old female university student, was removed from Facebook messenger this week, after attracting more than 750,000 users in the 20 days since it was launched.

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‘Don’t look dishevelled’: anger over Seoul city’s advice to pregnant women

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Government guidelines give tips on how to avoid putting on weight and how to prepare food for men who are ‘unaccustomed to cooking’

The Seoul city government has sparked anger for offering advice to pregnant women that includes ensuring their husbands have clean clothes and enough to eat while they are in hospital giving birth.

The guidelines, posted on a government-run website, included tips for expectant South Korean mothers at different stages of their pregnancy.

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Hyundai’s value surges by $9bn amid reports of Apple electric car deal

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South Korean firm backtracks on statement confirming ‘early discussion’ with US company

Hyundai’s value surged by $9bn (£6.6bn) on Friday after reports that it could join with Apple in developing a driverless electric vehicle – despite confusion as it backtracked on a statement acknowledging “early discussion” with the iPhone manufacturer.

Investors sent the South Korean carmaker’s share price on the Seoul exchange up almost 20%, as local media reported a possible tie-up on electric cars and batteries with Apple, which has been developing its own vehicle technology.

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Iran bans importation of Covid vaccines from the US and UK

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Despite virus spread, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei forbids what he calls ‘untrustworthy’ jabs

Vaccines produced by the US and UK will be banned from entering Iran, its supreme leader has said, even though his country has suffered the worst virus outbreak in the Middle East.

“Imports of US and British vaccines into the country are forbidden ... They’re completely untrustworthy,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in a live televised speech. “It’s not unlikely they would want to contaminate other nations.

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Seoul court orders Japan to pay damages over wartime sexual slavery

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Japan denounces ruling as ‘unacceptable’ as row over sexual enslavement of women in the second world war enters new chapter

Japan has denounced as “utterly unacceptable” a South Korean court ruling ordering it to pay damages to women who were sexually enslaved by the Japanese military before and during the second world war.

The Seoul central district court on Friday said Japan was liable to compensate 12 women who were forced to work as so-called “comfort women”, in a ruling that is expected to inflict further damage on the countries’ already fraught ties.

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South Korean forces arrive in waters near strait of Hormuz amid Iran tensions

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Destroyer moves into region one day after Revolutionary Guards seize a South Korean tanker

South Korean forces have arrived in waters near the strait of Hormuz as pressure builds on Iran to free a South Korean tanker it seized along with its crew on Monday.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said they had taken control of the South Korean vessel, the Hankuk Chemi, and its 20 crew because it was “polluting the Persian Gulf with chemicals”. The tanker is being held at Iran’s Bandar Abbas port city.

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Coronavirus live news: millions more wake up to tier 4 in England

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Follow all the latest on the coronavirus pandemic across the world

The new variant of the coronavirus circulating in Britain has been detected in Sweden after a traveller from Britain fell ill on arrival and tested positive for it, the Swedish health agency said on Saturday.

A health agency official, Sara Byfors, told a news conference that the traveller, who was not identified, had kept isolated after arrival to Sweden and that no further positive cases had so far been detected.

Jordan has arrested a journalist over an article alleging that the coronavirus vaccine had arrived in the kingdom and that officials had received the jab, a judicial source said on Saturday.

“The state security court prosecutor ordered the arrest Thursday of journalist Jamal Haddad, editor of news website Al-Wakaai, for writing that government officials had been vaccinated against the coronavirus,” the source said.

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Coronavirus global report: Christmas curtailed as UK arrivals face tougher measures

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Pope addresses fewer than 200 people in St Peter’s; China and US take action against UK amid concerns about new variant; South Korea reports daily case record

The coronavirus pandemic cast a pall over Christmas celebrations worldwide, with the pope holding a reduced St Peter’s mass, and further restrictions imposed on arrivals from the UK and South Africa amid concerns about potentially more transmissible variants of the virus.

China said it would halt UK flight arrivals indefinitely, deciding to follow the example of dozens of countries that introduced bans this week following the emergence of a new mutation in the virus. There are currently eight weekly flights between mainland China and Britain, including two by British Airways.

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Kim Ki-duk: punk-Buddhist shock, violence – and hypnotic beauty too

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The South Korean director, who has died of Covid, was at the forefront of a new wave of uncompromising cinema

Of all the film-makers of what might loosely be called the new Asian wave of the 21st century, perhaps the most challenging and mysterious – and probably the most garlanded on the European festival circuit – was South Korean director Kim Ki-duk. He made movies which were shocking, scabrous and violent - yet also often hauntingly sad and plangently beautiful and sometimes just plain weird. But they were strangely hypnotic. In 2011, I was on the Cannes Un Certain Regard jury which gave the top prize to his opaque docufictional piece Arirang, and though I struggle a bit now to recapture the mood of certainty that led us to that decision, there is no doubt about that Kim’s work had a commanding effect.

In fact, Kim himself might be a more prominent figure himself were it not that he was involved in the #MeToo controversy – three actors accused him of sexual assault which resulted in a fine for the director and inconclusive recrimination in the civil courts.

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Controversial South Korean director Kim Ki-duk dies of Covid aged 59

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The director, who faced accusations of sexual misconduct, died while being treated in Latvia

Controversial South Korean film-maker Kim Ki-duk has died aged 59 in a Latvian hospital, where he was being treated for Covid-19. The news was initially reported by Vitaly Mansky, director of Latvia’s Artdocfest film festival, though and later confirmed by Kim’s family in the Korean media. Kim was understood to be developing a film project set in the Baltic region when he became ill.

Born in 1960, Kim made his name with a series of violent yet aesthetically challenging features, including The Isle (2000) and Bad Guy (2001) – the former of which was sanctioned by the British Board of Film Classification for animal cruelty. Subsequently he became a fixture on the international festival circuit with films such as Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter ... and Spring (2003) and 3-Iron (2004), and he would go on to win the Golden Lion at Venice with his 2012 film Pieta, which the Guardian described as “bristl[ing] with Kim’s trademark anger and agony”.

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Why a giant fictional penguin could be the cure for millennial burnout

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Pengsoo was created for children’s television, yet it became such a sensation with adults that it was named South Korea’s person of the year. Now it’s ready to take over the globe

Growing up in the South Pole, Pengsoo was to his penguin peers what Rudolph was to Santa’s reindeers: an outcast shunned for being different. Bullies latched on to Pengsoo’s towering frame – at nearly 7ft, Pengsoo is almost twice the height of the average emperor penguin – and its large, unblinking eyes.

“The other penguins didn’t play with me because I was too big,” 10-year-old Pengsoo told producers at a studio in the Korea Educational Broadcasting System (EBS) headquarters in Seoul in April 2019. Sitting in a gray room, empty save a too-small chair positioned beside a childish self-portrait, Pengsoo stared at the producers as it spoke. Pengsoo had swum to South Korea from the Antarctic “not too long ago”, it said, in the hopes of becoming the next big sensation on YouTube, which was “getting very popular” in its homeland. But the bullying there had been too much.

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‘Stealing our culture’: South Koreans upset after China claims kimchi as its own

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Agriculture ministry drawn in to row after state media prompts backlash with claims that China leads global kimchi industry

Social media users in China and South Korea are embroiled in another row, this time over the provenance of kimchi, the fermented cabbage dish that most people recognise as an essential part of the Korean diet.

Not, though, in China, where state media have sparked an online backlash after one of the country’s fermented dishes received certification from the International Organisation for Standardisation [ISO].

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North Korean hackers tried to disrupt vaccine in South, says spy agency

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South Korean intelligence foiled the attempt by secretive regime to infiltrate pharmaceutical companies working on treatments

South Korea’s intelligence agency has foiled attempts by North Korean hackers to disrupt attempts to develop a Covid-19 vaccine, according to officials.

Ha Tae-keung, a conservative member of the national assembly who was briefed by intelligence officials, said attempts by the North to target South Korean drugmakers had failed, but did not identify the companies involved.

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France to ease Covid rules as Asian countries consider stricter action

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WHO says Europe faces third wave early in 2021 if nations repeat their failures to prepare

France is preparing to ease its Covid-19 lockdown rules in the weeks leading up to Christmas with new daily caseloads falling and pressure building from retailers to allow the annual shopping season to go ahead.

But parts of east Asia that were thought to be controlling the disease have raised the possibility of new restrictions.

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Map of the soul: how BTS rewrote the western pop rulebook

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Contrary to their dismissive framing as manufactured robots, South Korea’s BTS use social media, documentary and storytelling to make themselves into profoundly human stars

BTS’s leader RM looks up from under a black baseball cap, then stares back down at his hands. “Doing the promotional interviews, [I kept saying], ‘Music truly transcends every barrier.’ But even while I was saying it I questioned myself if I indeed believe it.”

It’s late September, and the rapper is confiding in over one million fans live from his Seoul studio. His “complex set of feelings” about the explosive, record-breaking success of Dynamite – the first fully English-language single from the South Korean megastars – is not the celebration you’d expect from a band that just topped the US Billboard Hot 100, the first K-pop act to do so. But this kind of frank, unfiltered conversation is exactly what their global “Army” fanbase love: BTS’s candid social media presence has included their fans in every step of their artistic journey, and, as they release new album Be this week, has made them the biggest pop group on the planet.

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South Korea facing ‘crisis’, says PM, as Covid measures tightened

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Chanting and singing at concerts banned amid daily case rises and fears for the looming winter flu season

South Korea has strengthened social distancing measures amid a rise in new coronavirus cases, with the country’s prime minister warning that action was needed to avoid a crisis with the arrival of the winter flu season.

The country has won widespread praise for preventing a serious Covid-19 outbreak through a combination of mass testing, vigorous track and tracing and isolation, coupled with social distancing and mask wearing.

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