Scribblings of the Metropolitician

The Metropolitician in Variety

As an eternal grad student following a pipe dream or two in Korea, it's not too often I get something to write home to Mom about. But when you get a chance to publish in Variety, you gotta kind of do a funny touchdown dance and wanna high-five people over beers.

Oh, yeah, baby! Here it is!

Thanks for indulging that, as well as reading the story. It was a great opportunity that Darcy passed my way, and I was happy to say that I worked the the photography of the facility into the story myself when I returned the editor pictures along with my draft. They were unsolicited, but the editor decided to buy two of them, one of which was used in the online version story linked above there. I think it was a good one, but here's a little photo essay I put together from the unused shots:

Akom Productions did the original Transformers movie.

Less than 10 seconds of notes and frames from a Simpsons episode!

Hard at work.



Archives room.

Editing away.

Scritch, scritch, scritch on Homer.

They did that first Spiderman cartoon, too.

My Sundae Afternoon

I got Coldstone Creamed on a "sundae." When you break a low-sugar diet, you might as smash it into bits and stomp on them, grinding them bits into fine, chalky dust. That's about what my Apple Pie sunday did to my efforts to keep my blood sugar down, along with my risk of type-II diabetes. Oh, well – I'm pretty good most of the week. But I slapped myself silly with sugar, cinnamon, and sweet, evil syrups.

And I don't even have a sweet tooth. It was my friend's fault. Not mine. Hehe.

Coldstone Creamery's been in Korea for a bit, but I thought I'd spread the love with pictures, anyway. The one I hit was right outside the Ehwa Women's University front gate.

Happy Monday morning, everyone.

On Respect for Photographic Subjects

This comes from a real question posed by David, related to photos and recordings' relation to laws and ethics. I'm glad to see a real conversation come from my indulgence of the urge to get in the mud. The original comment:

Hi...

Question: In which of these cases is it ok to record another's voice, without them knowing?
-in a conversation with them?
-when they're conversing with someone else?
-when they're giving a lecture in a school?
-when they're giving a public performance?

I ask because I think this has some relevance to this debate on street photography/personal rights.

--------------

Again, keeping it real...

It depends on the content and the purpose for recording it. As with anything, there are no absolutes. Even in the law, such things are often tricky, and the judgements and rationales difficult to navigate. That's why the law requires people to interpret it according to circumstances.

But for the creator of such content, the guidelines of content and purpose, whether it be photography or my podcasting.

So, if an undergraduate recorded their biochemistry lecture, who cares? It's not sensitive material. If they recorded it on a site that resold the content and charged for access, then suddenly, it becomes sensitive, because the professor's purpose for giving the lecture was not to have it sold, without their permission, for commercial purposes.

Same with photography – you can't take a picture of someone eating ice cream and sell it to Baskin-Robbins; if the people in the picture sue, unless they have signed contracts and model releases, BR's goose is cooked.

Taking a recording without someone's permission is technically illegal (I believe), but who cares if I record the people at the next table's conversation and keep it in my personal archives? If I use it on a radio show and somehow the people in the recording find out, I can get in real trouble.

That's why Linda Tripp's recordings were so morally screwed up and legally problematic – it's sensitive material (i.e. "I blew the President") and how the material was gathered (being recorded without permission) is at issue.

If you are a photojournalist (or anyone else, but most everyday people don't walk around taking pictures of sensitive things), if you take pictures, you have to know that you might be subpoenaed for the materials, even if you don't want to hand them over. Or if you're working in a poor country run by a repressive regime, it doesn't matter what your intent is if you can't secure your own person; that's something to think about.

And people complain about street photography here (apparently), but I think the issues aren't much different from audio (or video) recordings: it's about the content and the intended use. And I think that my podcast #16 ("December in Myeongdong") is actually quite similar to my street photography in that it's random snippets of real Seoul (one in pictures, one in snippets of conversation and sound as I walk down the street), with no coherent theme or story.

And I think the liklihood of someone getting hurt from the pictures about the same as the audio – sure, I might be recording the passersby saying ("...and yeah, when Mary Ann Kim slept with John Doe Lee after the Samsung office party in Dogok-dong..."), but it's probably not going to happen.

Same with the pictures – yes, a person might be momemtarily surprised to find that – out of 10 million people living in Seoul, their picture of them carrying flowers was in a photo book or some photographer's site, but in the end, it's not content that's going to affect them materially in any way.

I think a lot of this paranoia comes from an overreaction to the early days of the Korean internet, mostly. Yeah, we needed a few horrible examples from which to learn, but in the age of "UCC" and people literally taking off their clothes and dancing in pink pajamas for a shot at the big time, while the nation "ho-hums" and moves on to the next distraction of the week, there's not going to be much that will gather the interest of the nation. Even the couple near-naked dancing on the car in the 2006 World Cup (a Korean girl with a white guy – oh, the horror!) was kind of like, "Well, umm...they're kinda lame. She's stupid, but oh, well...") She wasn't leaving school and changing her home address because of it.

Anyway, it's about the content and the purpose of it being recorded. I've gotten email asking "What if I recorded you in a compromising position and put it on the Internet?! Huh, huh?!" Well, you'd be a) recording me in a compromising position on PURPOSE, so the content itself is questionable, and b) you'd be doing it to hurt me. Pretty much the opposite of what I do.

If I were to publish a picture of say, a drunk salaryman vomiting, my goal wouldn't be to destroy his life to prove a point, nor does his individual identity matter to me. In fact, I'd probably choose a shot in which he was blurry, to protect his anonymity, but the fact that it was a salaryman in a suit vomiting would be clear.

A good and similar example is above, where I chose one of the artistically worst out of several shots, since the faces were clearly visible in others, but I chose to publish the one in which the least faces were shown (a friend is shown there, but it's small, blurry, and you're likely not going to lose your job or wife over having been there to help an unidentified drunk friend), especially the one of the person in question. And I lucked out because you got some depth to the picture with the alley, which also helped contextualize it. But there were other shots that showed more – I still erred on the side of politeness and caution, since I think about the possible harm that might come to subjects, although I think that highly unlikely.

So I conveyed the point – such scenes are as much a part of night life in Korea as any kids playing in the park wearing hanboks on Chusok, stuff that I am completely unconcerned with – without compromising a subject. And frankly, such scenes are so common, and/or something that is such a part of anyone's individual experience, that having been drunk like this is still not going to get anyone fired. Frankly, such an eventuality ("public drunkenness", which is an actual crime in the US, but not in Korea) would likely be much more problematic in America than in Korea.

And what anyone thinks about what this says about "Korea" – I don't work for the Korean National Tourism Organization, nor some imagined Society to Give Korea a Bad Name in the International Community (SGKBNIC); I'm just a street photographer and I shoot what I see, the rhythms of everyday life. And if you actually walk around any Korean city on any given night of the week, you will see drunk men in suits staggering about, women consoling their suddenly sad (and very drunk) friend, and vomit on the sidewalk in the morning anywhere in Chongno is probably about as common as doggy doo on the sidewalk back in the US.

Is it "good?" Is it "bad?" Well, if you're the kind of person who thinks that shooting a man carrying flowers is "anti-Korean" – well, you're already pretty paranoid, and a lost cause for me, anyway.

It's like my favorite prostitution picture, in which it having been shot on 1600-speed, extremely grainy color film prevents any real detail from being shown, combined with the fact that the subject's face is too small to make out any distinct features, what with the obvious wig/hair salon special she's wearing, or the standard outfitting of false eyelashes and a pancake of makeup. I dare even her best friend to try and recognize her in person, let alone through the wide-angle lens of a photographer driving his car with one hand, nervously pointing his camera through a tinted-glass window.

You can make out enough detail to see her expression, but not actively identify her; she could be anyone. Even if the woman in question recognized herself, she'd have a tough time even proving it was here, beyond a shadow of a doubt, in a court of law to even sue me in the first place. That's why this is the perfect picture.

For all those who disagree, and think my intentions somehow evil, let me just say that if I could show you the one picture I can never show in my defense, this particular argument would be over. Done. It's a high-resolution digital shot of a woman in a similar position, but it's razor-clear, and chock full of detail and character.

Personally, I think mine to be technically much better and more honest than the one below that was published in the SF Chronicle (with no concern being given to Korean law, in terms of the subject, whose face is clearly shown – the only reason I republish it here is because it's been linked to and passed around the 'net to no end, with even progressive American NGO's linking to it, who never don't consider this a problem because hey, it's not my society, right? – at least I can make a good point with it, since the cat's out of the bag); you'll never know, because you'll never see that picture. I'll never publish it.

Just for the record, my picture shows what is more typical in these areas after anti-prostitution law – girls sitting around between customers, typically knitting (a fad these days), chatting, or taking a smoke; my shot was of a woman singing along to a pop tune on the radio, and was full of rich details, such as a "protect youth from violence" poster from a government campaign, beauty supplies, clothes in the back, stuffed animals, etc. And that was gained by getting my ass out of the car, walking by and breathing the same air as my subjects, risking getting caught by the thugs in the area, and not pulling the sneaky move of shooting out of a car window, catching them as they noticed the camera and then driving away.

What I don't like about the picture is that the apparent look of disdain and sneer on the face of the women in the picture comes from realizing that they're being photographed more than from the apparent plight in which the Chronicle obviously has a vested interest in proving these women are in.

And before you good feminists get all up in arms because you think I am saying that these women aren't in some plight, I'll just say that no matter what I think about the institution, when I'm photographing, I take the mission of capturing what I find dead serious. When I was nervously walking through Yongsan when I got the pictures I was describing earlier, I wasn't looking for a particular booth, or a kind of girl, or look; I was just walking, snapping, walking, snapping, with my remote plunger in my pocket going off at every stall (if I actually had the camera to my eye, or even my hand on the shutter, I would have been surely stopped by the watchers in the area, who are there to protect the girls, their business, and their interests – and that doesn't include media people taking pictures); when I came back to my monitor at home is when I found gold.

And there's gold there, in the sense of a couple pictures that shed much more life, even in single shots, and give the women in the windows much more complexity than the pictures that appeared in the Chronicle. And I wonder why, if the Chronicle respected their subject enough to blur the picture and omit the face of one of their main informants, they were OK with plastering the faces of these Korean prostitutes in Korea all over the Internet?

In American terms anyway, what they did was legal. The girls were in a public place. And realistically, they're not going to be sued internationally according to Korean laws for shooting a hooker. Photographically, though, I thought the Chronicle's moves pretty disrespectful of the subjects in Korea, highlighted by how extra-sensitive they were being to the main subjects – who also had vested interests in proving they were being trafficked and getting on the fast track to a green card.

Say what you want about me poking the sacred cow of the trafficking issue in the ass, but that's something that bothered me about the whole "exposé for the sake of these poor women" that was worked by the Chronicle. Why is it that they seem to show more care to the women in the US than to the women they came to photograph in Korea? Aren't the future prospect of the passionately-described "Youmi" of the feature as important as the unnamed Korean hookers whose faces are shown without a moment's hesitation across the Internet?

That's why I get so steamed about people calling me or my photography or this site "anti-Korean" or that I disrespect my subjects; if you knew the pictures I have held back on (and continue to), even when foreign photographers are showing up to cover and shoot topical issues about which I've got better material and access on hand down – and could simply push the "publish" button on my blog to easily prove it...I don't.

And that's out of respect for my subjects, respect for Korean law, and for wanting to continue to function here as a photographer in Korea. As a no-name photographer, it was tempting to pull out all my best stuff and jump on the bandwagon – how easy would that have been? To make a mega-post about prostitution and populate it with those money pictures I'd never shown before? Let me tell you – fucking easy.

I'm not trying to make myself out to be some saint – I'm just trying to tell the haters: if only you knew the choices I make when editing, you'd know that if this photographer/blogger/podcaster actually "hated" Korea – wow.

But I make virtual promises with my subjects to basically not fuck them, nor step over ethical lines. Hence, no matter how much I rant and rage about the education system here, I keep my camera off when it comes to the kids I teach. Even when I come to hate certain of the institutions who quite literally fucked me. Because one thing (my having been screwed) has nothing to do with the other (my kids and the implied assumption that, as a teacher, my kids' privacy comes first, my being a photographer is secondary).

Anyway – what I have described above is just one example of how content and intent, as well as affective commitment to the place you're at, where you call home right now, affects the artistic and ethical choices you make.

And for those who think this results in being "anti-Korean" or "unethical" or whatnot – I just have to say that you are definitely either overly paranoid and nationalist, or you have no direct experience with having produced and published anything yourself. And if you combine the two, without asking the intelligent kind of questions that David did, which allowed me to formulate a clear answer – that you have to think about content and intent, along with a respect for the subjects while balancing the desire to express something in general, and that there are no black-and-white – then it's difficult to say anything particularly useful.

"Showers and Flowers"

Spring is really upon us, as people have been seen carrying flowers more these days, perhaps to spruce up the cubicle, freshen up the home decor, or just give to a loved one on a date.

I just loved the contrasts posed by the subject's tough guy swagger, cigarette in the teeth, and a bouquet of flowers carefully cradled in his hands. One could only wonder whether he was coming or going with them.

In the picture below, I simply like the reads and pinks against the other random colors in the background, as well as the slight motion blur I got as I tracked the woman walking across my field of view.

All of it made me feel like spring.

"First Spring Shower"

A young man helps shield a companion against a sudden and chilly March evening shower, on a rare occasion when many Seoulites were caught off guard and without umbrellas.

OK, that's the picture and caption.

But as a photographer, one is often caught in a maddeningly tough set of choices before deciding what to "print." In the age of Photoshop and the Internet, this choice is lessened, since one can always put up the alternates, publish the b-roll, and add value to the product with "special features."

Second guessing oneself, in the digital age, is actually "value-added content." Or something like that. And I'm going to continue with the trend. I chose the above shot as my "official" choice, but since this is a blog, I'm going to give ya'll some "special features" and a "director's commentary." I won't torture you with too many "scenes from the cutting room floor," but one alternative is required to do the trick of giving you more to chew on.

The above picture is clearly the better choice photographically. I took about 20 pictures of this couple, and was standing really right on them, as this was taken with a 20mm lens (effective lens length with the EOS 350's digital enlargement effect is about 32mm) and the help of a friend who gave me an excuse and a reason to be standing all up on this pair at a bus stop.

To my direct right stood my friend, while I shot with my left hand, using the vertical shutter button, while I was "nonchalantly" cradling the camera in my arm. Takes some practice to master, and having a digital to get cover shots keeps from breaking your budget, but a good trick. You also have to have practiced quite a bit to see how much others generally pick up the sound of the shutter. On a street like that, though, passing busses and motorbikes offer good sonic cover.

The problem with the photo above is that it leaves the photographer open to Korean "right to one's image" laws. Now, taking their picture isn't illegal, contrary to popular opinion these days. [Read my post "Korean Photo Paranoia, 초상권, and Legal Inexactitude"] for all you never wanted to know about Korean photo law.] Nor is publishing their picture, technically, illegal. However, if the publishing of their picture results in demonstrable, concrete harm, I can be in trouble in civil court, as they can be awarded damages that stem directly from my picture, which I'd have to pay out of pocket.

What damages? Oh, like if that woman, in perhaps not being his girlfriend nor being described as such, happens to piss off his girlfriend, who then breaks off their engagement and causes him to sink into a well of depression, which in turn causes him to lose his job and begin living a life of misery.

In Korean law, that can be my fault. In American and most other democratic countries (with the major and notable exception of France, which has killed its own tradition of street photography by making it actually illegal to publish any picture without expressed, written permission), people standing in a public place have no explicit rights over how the image is used, unless, of course, you use their image commercially or misrepresent what is happening in the picture, or you portray them in an excessively "bad light" or what have you. But if your street shot just happens to catch two people together who shouldn't be (according to his wife), then that's his problem, not mine.

As it should be, since the photographer shouldn't be liable for someone else's immoral or illegal (in Korea, adultery is illegal and can carry criminal charges) acts. And realistically, no one is going to be harmed because you took their bad side in the morning, or caught them without makeup (oh, the horror!) No one's going to lose their job because they were caught not looking their best, which in Korea, would involve hours in makeup, a photo studio, and heavy photoshopping. Or simply overexposing to the point of obscuring basic facial features, as they do in the little couple-oriented "Star Shots" photo studios that were all the rage from the late 1990's.

It almost never happens, Korean photographers tell me, and the only place you're really going to get into trouble is if you use their image commercially without their permission, which is, to be blunt, just plain messed up. If I used the picture above to sell my brand of umbrellas – "Don't get caught without a Michael Hurt™ fashion umbrella!" – then they should sue my pants off.

If I use the shot for artistic or news purposes (and the latter is even more protected), then it would be harder to sue. There are other concerns, though, if you are a newspaper reporter, since "John Doe Kim and Bobby Sue Lee work hard to fend off the rain" is much better than talking in generalities and not getting the names of the people in the picture. However, for a real news story, if there were a fire in a seedy motel and two people were seen together who shouldn't have been at 2 PM on a work day, well – tough luck. Chalk it up to an act of God, not the fault of an unethical photographer; after all – who's the one really being unethical here?

Anyway, these are some legal issues to think about in Korea. As for aesthetic ones, in the picture above, there is the fact that both of their faces are shown and their expressions indicate they are waiting for something, most likely a bus, as anyone who has lived in a city anywhere in the world could safely assume.

Compare the above picture with the other candidate, which I've included below. There, their faces are actually not visible, which lets me off the hook in terms of the Korean law in the unlikely event of a lawsuit, but it doesn't convey that additional piece of information about what it is they might be doing. In the picture below, there is this implied sense of intimacy, especially since it's implied that the woman below is smiling, with her expression being lit up and silhouetted by the overexposed street sign (I always shoot in center-weighted metering mode for situations just like this, since the exposure reading is set by what's in the center of the frame, as opposed to averaging the total amount of light in the frame, which is the default in most cameras. If this were a standard point-and-shoot on full automatic, the street sign would probably come out relatively readable and the couple in the foreground unusably dark).

Most of the other pictures were actually devoid of other visual cues indicating why either of them might be holding a bag over their heads. The street is wet, but the fact that it was raining doesn't just jump out at you. So what helped make these two picture the final candidates was the presence of other picture elements that contextualized what the couple was doing. In the picture above, it's obvious as day, since the ajumma passing by has an umbrella; what's more, and what makes the picture even stronger, is that she is seemingly looking over in their direction. So she adds spatial depth, performs an explanatory function, and gives an element of human interaction.

In the picture below, the other man standing off to the left offers some of this, but not as obviously (no umbrella!) and not as strongly (he's smaller and not as obvious).

I know it sounds like a lot of analysis and fretting, but writing it out (or even reading it) requires a lot more effort than the couple of minutes it takes to look at several pictures, compare them, bring them down to a final few (or two), and then deciding between them in the way I've described above.

It may sound like work, but for me, it's fun. And that's why I love being a photographer. And if you think it silly to carry one's camera with you, unsheathed and ready to fire at any time, even in the rain – then let this picture be another testament to that. You wouldn't be looking at these pictures if I wasn't obsessive-compulsive with my camera in my hand.

Gotta love it.

"Laugh Concert"

I'm trying to get to blogging-as-usual, and I thought the best way to do that was through a picture – a happy picture (or two).

A television crew from a show apparently called "Laugh Concert" visits the fashionable Myeongdong shopping district, where eager passersby, feigning reluctance, are "forced" to perform for the camera, in this case, laughing forcefully and hysterically on cue.

"Teachable Moments"

Meanwhile, on the Korean side of the big water...

As a professional educator, I think about "teachable moments."

Like on September 11, 2001, I refused to cancel my class on nationalism, war and historical representations of WWII (as the material was eerily appropriate) and showed several clips from The Siege (in which Arab-Americans were put into internment camps in reaction to a string of terrorist attacks and "Freedom Is History"), chickens coming home to roost, the erosion of civil liberties, and what it means to resort to the degraded moral level of one's enemy.

And in South Korea on April 17, 2007, I instantly thought about the divide between nation and culture, scapegoating, and the dangers of categorical thinking from even before the moment that the shooter at Virginia Tech was announced as Korean; when he was, I knew that the vicious scapegoating of racial and national Others that is the modus operandi of much of the sensationalist and highly unprofessional Korean media would be harder to pull off, as talk in Korea turned to fears that Koreans would be "hunted" in the streets or "targets" of national retribution.

The US, while a country still fraught with racism and a complex about that subject, has come a long way since the race rioting (of whites lynching blacks) after the 1915 release of The Birth of a Nation, the railroading of Sacco and Vanzetti, the injustice committed on the Scottsboro Boys, the murder of Vincent Chin, and even September 11th.

And even on that day, when the terrorists turned out to be who everyone suspected they were, or most feared they were, depending on who you were – and even after hate crimes shot up 600% and innocent brown people were the targets of sporadic violence, the overwhelming public reaction I remember on that day was in official messages and in moments of silence and in candlelight vigils was one of keeping measured reaction and to refrain from scapegoating.

But the Virginia Tech case, while shocking, differs from 9/11 in two major ways, both in terms of scale and socio/ideological meaning. First, the grandiose and sheerly terrific effect of this attack on an entire nation undergirded the reactions to Arab-Americans and Muslims in the US. Second, no such pre-conceived notions, nor deeply felt and culturally embedded fear and loathing of Korean/Korean Americans exist, as they did and do for "swarthy" people from the Middle East. In the American cultural imagination, the "Arab terrorist" was guilty even before he was accused, as Oklahoma showed us in 1995.

So I knew that there would be no mass lynchings of Korean people, public vilification of them resulting in assaults or shootings, or even verbal/physical fisticuffs on a mass scale.

FEAR BY EXTRAPOLATION
But such direct retaliation and mass discrimination is what Koreans in Korea fear(ed), because I think it is a fair extrapolation of how foreign Others are treated as scapegoats and categorical symbols of many Koreans' opinions of other nations and races.

One might say that this is not the time to bring this up; I say there's no better time.

I have to point out one thing: if this had been a white foreigner who had done anything like this, I wouldn't have left my house, would have ordered in for a few days, and have canceled appointments. I am dead serious, and based on the noticeable increase in verbal and physical attacks on foreigners in the fall of 2002, I stopped taking the subways (for some reason, older Korean men would always seem to come out of the woodworks to start a fight) and started taking the bus (where for some reason, I never found any trouble).

And under no circumstances would I take the blue #1 line, which is the place where the majority of Korean-foreigner confrontations happen, and where it was nearly guaranteed, at that time, that you would be yelled at for being a foreigner.

And that was in reaction to an accident, albeit one that was the fault of the American military, which is no favorite of a younger, more prideful generation of Koreans who see the United States as enemy, not friend.

I have always said about the 1995 incident in which 3 black men raped a middle school girl in Okinawa (see my post "When Blood Mixes") – if that had happened in Korea, there would have been serious and personal retribution. I am not being paranoid – given the fact that I felt the need to be on my guard in 2002 for Americans who committed a traffic accident, I wasn't one to be the newspaper story.

And regardless, the public reaction – or lack thereof – to many proprietors who put up signs refusing to serve Americans or even "all foriegners" directly after incident, or the fact that "Fucking USA" became a soundtrack I heard several times a day while walking nearly anywhere in central Seoul, while "미국놈" ("American asshole", roughly translated) became just as common in street usage as the neutral term "American"– that was the benchmark that I believe Koreans assume Americans will have.

That was just a popular rendition, upped to YouTube. See the much more interesting original version that was played on Korean television, in classrooms, and made the rounds of the Internet.

Clearly, there is a pattern of extreme scapegoating, xenophobia, and even racism in this country; I think the assumption is that in America, the reaction would be the same.

So this fear comes not from any observed pattern of mass vilification of Koreans in the US (even though many Koreans still think, thanks to the Korean media, that blacks spontaneously attacked Koreans, and when asked, many people have never even heard of Rodney King), but rather from an extrapolation of this society's actual pattern of treating and defining "Others" in Korean society.

A DISCRIMINATING LOGIC
See, I've already done a "thought experiment" in which the shoe was on the other foot when it comes to overt discrimination, which is unapologetically practicable here.

Interesting is the ongoing stereotyping of westerners as sexual predators, perverts, and bail jumpers, when in fact these people are in the minority.

Even after the scandal that erupted when a teacher at the Paju English Village was accused of sexually harassing a student, when the media had a field day and the Korean Teachers' Union officially demanded a re-examination of allowing foreigners to teach English in Korean schools – even after it was revealed that the perpetrator was actually Korean, the KTU refused to retract its assertions.

Or the antics of SBS, which traveled to Hongdae after a crazy GI raped a senior citizen, at which point the entire area was characterized as a dangerous area where foreign men roamed wild, looking for fresh, female Korean meat to kill. Shortly after the area was again declared off-limits to American GI's (which it had been in the past, actually), SBS did a follow-up report the very next week that showed the equivalent of clean streets, fresh air, and chirping birds. The report was so utterly ridiculous, it made the reaction to the Central Park "rapists" or the Boston carjack race panic look nearly rational in comparison, although it could never have approached the scale. But at least they were vilifying a single group – how are "all foreigners" dangerous, roaming the streets one week (in an area where some occasional rude and drunk GI's make a bit of trouble in certain clubs, but generally aren't even on anyone's mind, much less foreigners in general), and squeaky clean the next?

Foreigners here always talk about the inevitable day when a foreigner will actually be accused of some actual, heinous crime against Koreans; given the treatment of foreigners who have generally not committed any serious crimes of that nature here – besides the "crime" of being seen in a picture with a Korean woman in a tasteless, nevertheless fully consensual situation (English "Spectrum-gate" and a more general post on Netizen "witchhunting" here) – no actual major crimes have been committed here. Well, the Korean police are always reporting any time some idiot foreigner gets caught mailing pot to himself or they bust a few people in Itaewon with drugs; that's bad enough.

What we fear is some foreigner – especially some Yank or Canuck English teacher –gets convicted of molesting children in their hagwon. Although that's horrible, we know what would happen. Without a heartbeat's hesitation, the essential cultural morality of "all foreigners" would be called into question without a second thought. Crackdowns of hagwons would happens, some more restrictive hiring laws would be passed (which can't be a bad thing, though), and people would surely be assaulted.

Given that this pattern of behavior and general xenophobia already exists and has already made itself apparent in South Korea – without any major crimes even having been committed in recent years – lawd know what would happen if some idiot Outlander, especially a white one, started knifing or killing anyone.

The recent case of the Chinese man caught in the act of hiding a body in Ansan, which is infamous amongst Koreans as the place where many "dangerous" foreigners live. In a population that barely even tries to hide its strong anti-Chinese sentiment, this wasn't good news for Chinese folks. So you hear talk of the Chinese being confirmed as being as "dirty" and as "sneaky" as most South Koreans have already decided them to "be." But he wouldn't fall into the same category as a "real" foreigner, the ones who teach English to South Korea's children and spend looooots of time alone with them.

Or the spate of widespread verbal and sometimes physical acts of violence committed upon foreigners in Seoul (none of which were reported in Korean newspapers, even the attempted murder of an Army officer stabbed nearly to death by 3 Korean assailants on his home away from duty, while even verbal altercations between taxi drivers and GI's made national headlines) after the 2002 death of two middle school girls accidentally run over by a US Army armored car (here and here for some US military blogs related to it, and here for my more media-related critique).

One thing that a few people I knew were talking about before the shooter's identity and nationality was officially revealed was the fact that it he had turned out to be Korean, how interesting that would play out for a Korean media and pliant population that is notorious at unfairly targeting entire communities.

And that has yet to play out; this is something that should be as interesting for observers of Korean media as the Hines Ward show was. And you know I'll keep on blogging about it.

UPDATE:

Apparently, many Koreans would agree with this article. From The Christian Science Monitor:

Several of the people interviewed added that had an American student living in South Korea killed 32 people, American expatriates would face serious reprisals. To describe such an eventuality, many interviewees used the word nallinada, which can be loosely translated to mean upheaval, disaster, or chaos.

"Anti-Americanism would have become extreme," says Mr. Yook, citing the groundswell of anti-American activism during negotiations for the recently signed free trade agreement between the US and South Korea. The country also saw a protracted uproar after American soldiers hit and killed two young girls while driving a convoy in June 2002. The direct fallout from that accident lasted several months, says Yook, and hard feelings persist today.

One woman, who was interviewed in Seoul on Wednesday, said she is married to a Korean diplomat. Korea's foreign ministry, she said, held late-night meetings to discuss how to protect Korean-Americans from possible reprisals. She was certain that, had an American attacked Koreans, the reprisals would have been swift.

"People will throw rocks at them and tell them 'Yankees go home,' " said the woman, who asked to remain anonymous because her husband is a government official. "People will go even crazier here if exactly the same incident at Virginia Tech happened here but committed by an American."

You damn skippy. I'm glad that this has become, at least to some, a teachable moment. Perhaps some good can come out of this.

Podcast #30 - Through a Glass, Sparkling

Welcome to Korea's new international tourism brand!

"Korea, Sparkling!?" Huh? Hmm. Someone's got some explainin' to do, and we've got just the person to do it. Listen to guest Tanya Van Soest of PR firm Fleishman and Hillard do some fancy talking that sounds kinda...convincing, actually.

I attended the pretty spiffy event put on by the Korean National Tourism Organization and got to enjoy some of the spread (lobster tails – they must've really been wanting us to be happy), listen to some non-traditional traditional drumming, and there was even some audience participation.

My attention span and math skills were no match for the trivia game, but a friend from our table did get some recognition as she beat the hell out of the drums in perfect sync with the expert Korean drumming guy.

Does the ability the beat the big buk run in the blood, written in the genes? Sometimes, my dedication to non-essentialist logic bows a bit to such wishy-washy ideas. Well, not really. Hehe.

And despite whatever criticism the brand campaign and slogan may be receiving, the one thing I can say is the KNTO sure knows how to throw a good party. I left wined, dined, and entertained, and I must say that even at my most cynical, I can't deny the good show and effort that KNTO put on. I hope the brand does well, although I'm certainly not one of its biggest fans; but it was a pretty "sparkling" night.

And as for that brand, which many bloggers, including myself, had real fun publicly pooh-poohing – perhaps there is more to the question of context? I mean, add some Enya to the background and sit back with some ginger ale on ice...you just might get in the mood.

Oh, and in the podcast, I would apologize for the Enya, but I know that, deep deep down somewhere, you love Enya. Yes, you do. Come on – we both know the truth. Stop lying. SOMEONE bought her albums, and it wasn't...m...well, OK – I did buy one. And I liked it.

Enjoy the podcast! (To subscribe via iTunes, simply click here!)

Running Time: 14:16
File Size: 6.5 MB

"Options"

On the first truly warm night of spring, a couple seems to weigh their options as they leisurely stroll through a bright and busy intersection in Shinchon.

As the spring rolls around, I find myself shooting a lot of couples again. I did a lot of that when I first came to Korea, since there are so many conspicuously conjoined couples on the streets in certain areas, especially Shinchon, near Yonsei and Ewha Womens' Universities.

There are a lot of young people who flock to the area who are not actually from these schools, but yet often make the pilgrimage to this Mecca of generally middle-to-upper class youth in their early 20's, who congregate in what is what is an entertainment district that fits student budgets and sensibilities.

Unlike the Chongno area, which is much centers much more around a late-20's and early-30's working crowd, or the much more vast and staunchly working-class party area of Yeongdeungpo, Shinchon makes up for food and fun that cater to a less refined and monied set of sensibilities by being the marker for the new trends in consumptive habits: the new theme cafe, "in" cuisine of the season, or next development in street amusements that will hopefully yield a stuffed animal for an eager young lady.

It is also a repository of trends that have come and gone in most other places, but where there is enough foot traffic and couples looking for something new to do to keep them afloat: the board game cafe, jjimdak chicken restaurant, or coffee shop where you can get a foot massage or cruise the Internet in "couple chairs."

Why Korean All-Nighters Are Better Than in America

3 AM. The hunger won't end. Another bowl of cereal won't do.

$20. Twenty minutes. Pound o' pork and raw garlic.

Any questions?