Category: KOREA

Blackface, Korean Media, and the Context of the American Vaudeville Show

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Apparently, there has been an explosion online regarding an incident in which Korean performers donned  blackface for a performance over the Lunar New Year: Yeah. And this isn’t all that rare in Korean media. In fact, Matt over at Gusts of Popular Feeling hits the highlights with an excellent and carefully-researched history of Three Decades of Blackface in Korea, though it’s not an exhaustive history — he doesn’t get into every example. Just the big ones, and especially those in programs (as opposed to in advertisements). Like, for example, the all-Korean production of Roots here. Yeah, seriously. Go give it …

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Cantico del Seoul

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This entry is part 51 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

by Gord Sellar The thought of what Korea would be like If space opera had a wide circulation Troubles my sleep, The thought of what Korea, The thought of what Korea, The thought of what Korea would be like If space opera had a wide circulation Troubles my sleep. 빨리 나가라! Now lettest thou thy professor, Now lettest thou thy professor Drink in peace! The thought of what Korea, The thought of what Korea, The thought of what Korea would be like If space opera had a wide circulation… Oh well! It troubles my sleep. (With no apologies to Ezra …

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Fair Coverage: Rude Canadians in Korea

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A funny memory hit me today, in the light of the comments to my post yesterday. I mentioned how there are rude people everywhere, but I feel I must give fair coverage to some Canadians I’ve known who were living as expats in Korea. It’s a memory from my first year in Korea. Now, that first year, I experienced a lot of strange, bizarre crap. Not all of it was from Koreans; in fact, most of the weirdness was from expats teaching in Iksan. One of the more interesting was seeing how young men who left Canada for Korea suddenly, …

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What Happens When You Ask Assholes to Be Polite (In Yeokgok, At Least), And How to Get Better at Doing It

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I swore to myself that I wouldn’t write bitching rants about Korea anymore, since they do nobody any good. So… I’m not. You might think I am, below, but stick with me: it comes around. Miss Jiwaku and I had a pretty nice day out today… well, mostly. (We saw the only decent film playing in a 5km area of our home, which was Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and, well, I have to say: there’s no point in watching a good film — something without a techno music soundtrack, or a plotline even a monkey could follow — in a …

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Sun-drying Grains Equals Causing Harm, or, Stupid Things My Employer’s Administrative Officers Say

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Making beer involves extracting sugars from grain. This means you end up with a lot of grain that you have no use for, since everything tasty has been extracted, but which needs to be disposed of somehow. I’ve been happy that a friend in the building, after starting a worm farm, ended up finding my spent grain useful, since that means one less wasteful outcome for the stuff. I tend to leave the grain out for him, and he dries it in the sun. Drying stuff in the sun is so common in Korea that one expects to see it: …

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Talking Through Bigotry

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Miss Jiwaku and I have an acquaintance, a Korean fellow we know, though I won’t say how we know him. (Anonymity will allow me to speak more honestly.) He is a fine sort of fellow, in general, quite professional and creative, easy enough to work with and even at times funny; she and I have learned many things from him, and I hope likewise he has learned a thing or two from us as well. However, there’s one thing that makes it hard for me to get along with him, something it’s hard to put my finger on exactly because, …

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What Debate?

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Bryan Kay’s article, “South Korea’s Racism Debate,” amuses me mostly because I don’t think there’s really all that much of a debate going on at all. When Miss Jiwaku has tried, with some of her Korean friends and acquaintances, to talk about the issue, she’s had a pretty disappointing success rate: often, she runs into the usual justifications, evasions, or dismissals that any non-Korean can tell you about. She’s lost friends over it. What’s more heartbreaking is that some of those friends wouldn’t even empathize about the crap she’s had to put up with herself — the intersection of sexism and …

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Ruler of the Your Own World (네 멋대로 해라) — The Halfway Point

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During my first few years in Korea, I asked Koreans I knew what was the best South Korean-made TV show they’d ever seen. I would hear different answers from different people, but one consistent answer I got from people who cared about and consumed a lot of movies, films, and books, was the recommendation that I check out 네 멋대로 해라, a TV program that aired back in summer/fall 2002 (and which, in English, got titled Ruler of Your Own World.) Somehow, though, my other (very brief) experiences with Korean TV dramas kept me skeptical. I don’t care for the kind …

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It Says Something…

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Miss Jiwaku told me about a news report regarding a Canadian who had murdered his girlfriend three years ago (but had pretended she’d drowned accidentally, pursuing a tennis ball), fled the country, gotten religion, but finally returned to Korea to turn himself in. He claimed he’d murdered her because he was afraid she was going to kill him. Okay, so…? “Do you know him?” she asked, and mentioned that he’d been in Korea from 2001 until the time of the murder (in 2009), and had worked as an instructor at “a university in Jeolla Province.” I arrived in Jeolla Province …

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