The Animated History of Korea

 

KOREAN STREET FOOD - Gwangjang Market Street Food Tour in Seoul South Korea

 

Walk from Jonggak Bosingak to Myeongdong Shopping St. and Myeongdong Cathedral

 Today, we walked to Myeongdong Shopping Street, the center of shopping, and Myeongdong Cathedral, the first main hall of Korea, from Bosingak, where Korean New Year’s events are held every year.

Itaewon Summer Friday Nightlife | Walking Around Seoul Korea

 

Lively Hongdae Evening | Walking Tour Seoul Korea 4K UHD

 

Gangnam Station Afternoon Walk | Walking Tour Seoul Korea

 Yes, it's Gangnam style. 

We Asked Korea’s Top Virus Expert Why COVID-19 Is Getting Worse | STAY CURIOUS #32

 

With the COVID-19 death toll hitting 300,000 in the US alone and many parts of the world still under lockdown, we went back to interview Professor Kim for the latest update on COVID-19.

Japan’s Proposal for a Tunnel to Korea

 

Japan is considering constructing a $170 billion tunnel to South Korea, connecting itself to all of mainland Asia and beyond. A tunnel from Japan to Korea is very feasible and would have massive economic and political incentives.

How well do the Korean celebs understand English?

Bookstores in Seoul 📚 Favorites and New Finds!

We Gave An Extreme Home Makeover To A Korean Grandma Making $2 A Day

Madame Yoo is an 82-year-old elderly woman in Korea and has raised 5 children. She has been living alone for 5 years. Madame Yoo now survives off of a $200/month government pension and $2/day earned by tirelessly picking up cardboard boxes from morning to night.

It’s winter now in Seoul, South Korea, and we visited her for the third time to see how she’s been managing to keep warm. What we didn’t tell her is that we came with a surprise that would change her life forever.

A lack of women in Asia

Today, Asia is "missing” around 170 million women: 70 million in India, 50 million in China, 20 million in Vietnam, 10 million in Korea. The result of population control policies imposed by the West. The fight for women as tradable commodities takes on a new dimension. With the growing surplus of men, crime rates are rising and threatening the internal stability of these nations.

Samurai Warrior - National Geographic Best Documentary 2015

Following the Battle of Hakusukinoe against Tang China and Silla in 663 AD that led to a Japanese retreat from Korean affairs, Japan underwent widespread reform. One of the most important was that of the Taika Reform, issued by Prince Naka no Ōe (Emperor Tenji) in 646 AD. This edict allowed the Japanese aristocracy to adopt the Tang dynasty political structure, bureaucracy, culture, religion, and philosophy. As part of the Taihō Code, of 702 AD, and the later Yōrō Code, the population was required to report regularly for census, a precursor for national conscription. With an understanding of how the population was distributed, Emperor Mommu introduced a law whereby 1 in 3–4 adult males was drafted into the national military. These soldiers were required to supply their own weapons, and in return were exempted from duties and taxes. This was one of the first attempts by the Imperial government to form an organized army modeled after the Chinese system. It was called "Gundan-Sei" (軍団制) by later historians and is believed to have been short-lived

Young, Rich, Entitled, Spoiled:

A 10 year old Korean girl channeling her inner Trump, fired her chauffeur after verbally abusing him

.    A granddaughter of the president of South Korea's biggest newspaper, Chosun Ilbo, is under fire after an audio file revealed the 10-year-old abusing and threatening her chauffeur, 57.

The girl is the daughter of Chosun president Bang Sang-hoon's second son, Jung-oh, president of cable network TV Chosun. MBC TV disclosed the file, believed to be recorded by the driver, who was sacked soon after the girl's tirade, on Wednesday. 
The verbal attack was said to have been recorded in Bang's family car ― while the chauffeur was driving her to school, private cram schools and home. No one else was in the car. 

Korean President Park Geun-hye Has Announced She'll Turn Power Over To The National Assembly

South Korean President Park Geun-hye has issued a statement that her powers will be delegated to the National Assembly and has once again apologized for the ongoing scandal involving  the influence of a close friend who reportedly held sway over policy decisions which is illegal as she isn't an elected member of government.   President Park has faced massive demonstrations over the last five weeks and well as impeachment threats from the General Assembly which is controlled by the opposition.  Among the allegations were that this person had access to national security information and reportedly written speeches.

The embattled South Korean president has said that she will allow the country's parliament to decide how long she stays in office and plan for a successor amid calls for her impeachment.

"I will leave to parliament everything about my future including shortening of my term," she said.

Al Jazeera's Harry Fawcett, reporting from Seoul, said that while Park had stopped short of resigning, her remarks effectively paved the way for her to be replaced.

"She has said would delegate the opinion of how long her term would last – a potential shortening of her term – to the national assembly. Then she would delegate her political authority to an incoming candidate," Fawcett said.

Japan's blackface problem: the country's bizarre, troubled relationship with race

Baye McNeil, a black American writer who has lived in Japan for a decade, told me he found the blackface appalling — but didn't think it was worth wasting too much time on in a country he loves, despite suffering from routine racism.
"These singers were some old guys doing niche music and weren't that terribly popular, so it wasn't like they were in my face all the time," McNeil told me.
But McNeil lost his patience last month when members of a popular mainstream Japanese group posed for the promotional photo that appears at the top of this page. In it, the members of girl band Momoiro Clover Z grin in full blackface alongside old crooners Rats & Star, who have been performing in paint since the 1980s. The two bands were set to appear together on Fuji TV, a major network.

But as McNeil knows all too well, this episode was only part of a much larger problem with race in Japan, a problem that cannot be quickly fixed with a petition. To Americans, and indeed most people, it’s pretty obvious that blackface is extremely racist. How could the Japanese, as well-educated as they often are, tolerate this practice? The answer goes way beyond mere ignorance of blackface's ugly history, to a powerful national belief in Japan's ethnic purity that leaves the country incapable of dealing with its race issues.

Racism in Japan isn't just for TV. it happens across the country.  A student from Pakistan who's family lived in Japan was attending junior high school in Chiba until he could no longer take the overt racism directed towards him, not only from the schools students, but the teachers and the schools principle as well.  The cities Board of Education had little idea on how to address the issue or resolve the problems and the abuse the student faced.  They choose to sweep the whole incident under the rug rather than dealing with the appalling racism this young man faced.   Students have been classified with derision by teachers simply because they believed them to be from another Asian country.   As the article mentions especially China and Korea.

Japan's race problem

Japan's problem with racism is well-established. A 2005 report by a UN special rapporteur described "profound" racism in the country, much of it aimed at people from former Japanese colonial holdings in China and Korea.
In 2013, extremist nationalists led a series of anti-Korean protests; they threatened to flatten Tokyo’s Koreatown and build a gas chamber in its place. Japan is one of the few democracies without hate-speech laws, so little was done to stop this. Anti-racists staged counter-demos, and an extremist group has since been forced to pay compensation, but the national government has done stunningly little to prohibit racist hate speech, particularly given Japan's recent history of fascism.
"The blackface thing is emblematic of a larger problem of Japanese politics and civil society in which diversity is not recognized, or cultivated, or respected," said Kyle Cleveland, associate professor of sociology at Temple University’s Tokyo campus, who lectures on race.

China's Still Pissed About a War Fought 120 Years Ago

China's Communist government and its people are still mad as hell about losing the Sino-Japanese war which led to Japan's imperial conquest of Korea.   I'm positive that everyone alive today no matter their age was kicking around back in 1894.

So to insure that passions are sufficiently inflamed the government decided to build a time machine and not just any time machine either

They built their time machine into a Delorean invented  by Doc. Emmett Brown with an assist from  Marty.  I'm sure its a little unformatable jamming all those people in there but, hey its all for a good cause.    

 Years in the making, the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-5 was fought for control of Korea, which at the time paid formal tribute to China's Qing emperors but was increasingly coveted by Tokyo, whose ambition was to emulate the empires of the Western powers.The shooting began with a naval clash off Korea's west coast in late July, a week before war was formally declared on August 1, 1894.

For China, the long ago war may as well have been yesterday. The anniversary has been frequent fodder for the country's state-controlled newspapers, magazines and television.In an editorial last week, the state-run China Daily newspaper said the defeat by China's "worst enemy in history" still forms "an open wound in (the) Chinese national psyche".

Abe's government wants history textbooks to better reflect its vision of history

The Education Ministry is planning to implement school textbook reform to better reflect the government’s stance on topics such as history and island disputes.
Education Minister Hakubun Shimomura said his ministry will revise the textbook screening process for elementary, junior high and high schools, TBS reported Saturday. “We are attempting to adopt the government’s viewpoint on textbook criteria, but this doesn’t mean that we will block various historical or political viewpoints,” he told a news conference.
According to the proposal, textbook certification revisions will start next fiscal year beginning with middle school textbooks. With subjects like history and territorial disputes, the reform seeks to encompass the government viewpoint. But where varying viewpoints exist on a particular subject, then each will be explained fully and objectively to provide an overall sense of balance to the textbook curriculum, Shimomura said.

Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LPD) has a long standing issue with Japan's actions before and during World War II.   A majority of its members are historical revisionists concerning the most egregious atrocities committed by the Japanese Imperial army.

Comfort women were women and girls forced into a prostitution corps created by the Empire of Japan during World War II. The name "comfort women" is a translation of a Japanese name ianfu (慰安婦).^[1][2] Ianfu is a euphemism for shōfu (娼婦) whose meaning is "prostitute(s)".^[3]

Estimates vary as to how many women were involved, with numbers ranging from as low as 20,000 from some Japanese scholars ^[4] to as high as 410,000 from some Chinese scholars,^[5] but the exact numbers are still being researched and debated. Many of the women were from Korea, China, and the Philippines,^[6] although women from Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan, Indonesia and other Japanese-occupied territories were used for military "comfort stations". Stations were located in Japan, China, the Philippines, Indonesia, then Malaya, Thailand, Burma, New Guinea, Hong Kong, Macau, and French Indochina.^[7]

According to testimony, young women from countries under Japanese Imperial control were abducted from their homes. In many cases, women were also lured with promises of work in factories or restaurants. Once recruited, the women were incarcerated in "comfort stations" in foreign lands.^[8]

A U.N. report on May 31 criticized Japanese politicians and local leaders for denying the facts about “comfort women” and urged Tokyo to take measures to prevent "re-traumatizing" the victims.

The Japanese government should "refute attempts to deny the facts by the government authorities and public figures and to re-traumatize the victims through such repeated denials,” the report of the U.N. Committee against Torture said.

The report not only criticized Diet members and high-ranking local government officials, but it also expressed concern that public compensation or relief measures have not been provided to former comfort women and that those involved in setting up the comfort women system have not been prosecuted.

The report also called on the Japanese government to accurately describe the comfort women issue in history textbooks.

The Nanjing Massacre,
1937-38

Summary

The Nanjing Massacre, also known as "The Rape of Nanking," is a rare example of simultaneous gendercides against women and men. It is generally remembered for the invading forces' barbaric treatment of Chinese women. Many thousands of them were killed after gang rape, and tens of thousands of others brutally injured and traumatized. Meanwhile, approximately a quarter of a million defenseless Chinese men were rounded up as prisoners-of-war and murdered en masse, used for bayonet practice, or burned and buried alive.

The background

The Second World War began in Asia. Japan's military dictators had long viewed China as the main outlet for their imperial and expansionist ambitions (for an overview, see Saburo Ienaga, The Pacific War 1931-1945). Japanese forces invaded and occupied Manchuria in northeast China in 1931, setting up the puppet state of Manchukuo. After the manufactured "Marco Polo Bridge Incident" of July 1937, the Japanese launched a fullscale invasion of China, capturing Shanghai on 12 November and the imperial capital, Nanjing, on 13 December. Numerous atrocities were committed en route to Nanjing, but they could not compare with the epic carnage and destruction the Japanese unleashed on the defenseless city after Chinese forces abandoned it to the enemy.

(III) 1970 TO 1990

The denial of the Nanjing Massacre started around 1972, when the right-wing political force in Japan began to rise. The Japanese denial of the Nanjing Massacre and other brutalities in Asia can be divided into three broad categories:
(a) Complete Denial of the Massacre
By the end of 1971, the wave of confessions by Japanese soldiers and research by journalists exposing the brutal crimes in Asia encountered strong resistance from the right-wing conservatives. The articles by Katsuichi Honda, the "Journey to China", triggered a new phase of response in the Japanese treatment of the war crimes from the Japanese right-wingers. The denial movement began with two controversial yet influential articles: (1) an article by a self-claimed Jew named Shichihei Yamamoto, "Reply to Katsuichi Honda" published in Every Gentlemen, March 1972; (2) an article by Akira Suzuki, "The Phantom of The Nanjing Massacre", published in the April issue of the same Journal. This wave of open and public Japanese denial of their war crimes escalated over the years, as evidenced by Massaki Tanaka's book "Fabrication of Nanjing Massacre" (Nihon Kyobun Sha, 1984) in which not only was the Nanjing Massacre denied, but the Chinese Government was charged as responsible for the occurrence of the Sino-Japanese War.
(b) Disputes on the Number of People Killed in the Massacre
Besides total denial, another line of Japanese thoughts insisted that the Nanjing Massacre was exaggerated by the Chinese. This view is best elaborated in a book written by Hata Ikuhiko "Nanjing Incident" (Chuo Koron Shinsho, 1986) in which it was argued that the number of victims in the Massacre was between 38,000-42,000. It was also argued that the killing of surrendered or captured soldiers should NOT be considered as "Massacre". This book is now considered as the official history text on the issue by the Japan Ministry of Education.
(c) Distortion and Rewriting of History
In 1982, the Ministry of Education embarked on a campaign to distort the presentation of the history of World War II. In the process of the revision of history textbooks in Japan, Japanese "aggression" in China was substituted by "advancing in and out" of China during the Sino-Japanese War. The Nanjing Massacre was described as a minor incident which occurred because the Japanese soldiers were too frustrated by the strong resistance from the Chinese Army. Although the substitution of the word "aggression" by "advancing in and out" was finally stopped because of the strong protest by the surrounding Asian countries and various Japanese educational groups, the rewriting of the Nanjing Massacre remained. Moreover, the Ministry of Education has never admitted that the distortion of history is a mistake.

   

Rapper Psy takes Number 1 in the charts with 'Gangnam Style'

Rapper Psy became the first South Korean musician to make it to number one in the UK today with his single "Gangnam Style".

The pop track broke into the top 40 two weeks ago at number 37, four weeks after its release, and has been climbing steadily since ending up at number three in last week's chart.
The video that accompanies the single has amassed more than 253 million views in just two months and became the most "liked" video of all time on YouTube.
Psy, who is already an established star in South Korea having released six albums, taught Britney Spears his dance moves on US TV show Ellen earlier this month.