So the SF Gate (San Francisco, not science fiction) ran a four part-series on Korean-related sex-trafficking in America. (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4) and Marmot reports that some Korean-Americans are angry that, well, this doesn’t make Korea look good in the American media:

Instead of educating Chronicle readers about the cultural background of South Korea, the world’s 10th largest economy, the “Diary” series dwells at length, and with questionable purpose, on the titillating details of one individual’s forced sex acts and non-typical family history. The Chronicle series includes many cultural inaccuracies and paints a distorted picture of Busan, South Korea’s second-largest city. Busan is an international coastal resort known for its open-air seafood — not sex — markets, and as host of the annual International Film Festival, the largest such event in Asia.

All of this is silliness: the article was focused on the sex slave business, and how it involves a lot of Korean trafficking, and Korean women, and how this is impacting on San Francisco. Nobody in San Francisco cares about the open-air seafood markets and film festivals in Busan. And heaven forbid that the experiences of someone with a non-typical family background be examined. Heaven forbid. I wonder what a “typical” family background entails, given that the average family debt here is… and the percentage of the economy taken up by the sex trade is… oh, well, read the articles yourself. And this response to the criticism, too. Oh, and the pictures here, too.