Category Archives: Korea

by | 15 December 2008 · 9:17 pm

Ridgway’s Repair Job in Korea, 1950

From: The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War, by David Halberstam (Hyperion, 2007), pp. 499-501:

More than most senior American commanders of his era, Matt Ridgway had a passion for intelligence. The American Army had always taken its intelligence functions somewhat casually; the men assigned to intelligence duty tended to have been passed over in their careers, not quite good enough for the prized command positions. Often the lower ranks in the Army’s intelligence shop were very good, but their superiors were not respected by their peers. Perhaps it was the nature of the modern American Army—it had so much force and materiel that when it finally joined battle, intelligence tended to be treated as a secondary matter, on the assumption that any enemy could simply be outmuscled and ground down.

There were a number of reasons for Ridgway’s obsession with intelligence. Some of it was his own superior intellectual abilities; he was simply smarter than most great commanders. Some of it was his innate conservatism, his belief that the better your intelligence, the fewer of your own men’s lives you were likely to sacrifice. A great deal of it was his training in the airborne, where you made dangerous drops behind enemy lines with limited firepower and were almost always outnumbered and vulnerable to larger enemy forces…. George Allen—who as a young CIA field officer in Vietnam briefed Ridgway daily for several weeks as the French war in Indochina was coming to its climax in 1954, later said he had never dealt with a man so acute and demanding, not even Walter Bedell Smith, who had been Dwight Eisenhower’s tough guy in Europe and later took over the CIA. Ridgway’s sense of the larger picture was so accurate, Allen believed, because of his determination to get the smallest details right. It was Ridgway’s subsequent report on what entering the war in Indochina would mean—five hundred thousand to one million men, forty engineering battalions, and significant increases in the draft—that helped keep America out of the war for a time….

The CIA, blocked from the Korean theater by MacArthur and Willoughby, was soon welcomed back. Starting at Eighth Army headquarters and running through the command, there was going to be a healthy new respect for the enemy. The Chinese had identifiable characteristics on the battlefield. They also had good, tough soldiers. Some units were clearly better than others, some division commanders better than others, and it was vital to know which these were and where they were. Now Ridgway intended to study them. There would be no more windy talk about the mind of the Oriental. The questions would be: How many miles can they move on a given night? How fixed are their orders once a battle begins? How much ammo and food do they carry into each battle—that is, how long can they sustain a given battle? Ridgway was going to separate battlefield realities from theoretical discussions about the nature of Communism. The essential question was: How exactly can we tilt the battlefield to our advantage?

Ridgway now intended to play at least as big a role in the selection of the battlefield as his Chinese opposites. For a time, he started his day by getting in a small plane and, with Lynch at the controls, flying as low as they could, looking for the enemy. With that many Chinese coming at his army, there had to be signs of them, evidence that they existed, but he saw almost nothing. That he found nothing did not, as had happened in November after Unsan, create a lack of respect for them—rather it brought greater respect for the way they could move around seemingly invisible. Gradually Ridgway began to put together a portrait of who the Chinese were and how they fought—and so, how he intended to fight them. The Chinese were good, no doubt about that. But they were not supermen, just ordinary human beings from a very poor country with limited resources. Not only did the Chinese operate from a large technological disadvantage, they had significant logistical and communications weaknesses. The bugles and flutes announcing their attacks could be terrifying in the middle of the night, but the truth was that, with only musical instruments, they could not react quickly to sudden changes on the battlefield. If they had a breakthrough, they often lacked the capacity to exploit it immediately. That was a severe limitation; it meant that a great deal of blood might be shed without their getting adequate benefits. In addition, certain logistical limitations were built into any attack they made—the ammunition and food they could carry was finite indeed. The American Army could resupply in a way inconceivable to the Chinese and so could sustain a given battle far longer.

Ridgway spent his first few weeks in country pressing everyone for information about the Chinese fighting machine. By the middle of January, he felt he knew much of what he needed to know. This war, he decided, was no longer going to be primarily about gaining terrain as an end in itself, but about selecting the most advantageous positions available, making a stand, and bleeding enemy forces, inflicting maximum casualties on them. The key operative word would be “pyrrhic.” What he now sought was an ongoing confrontation in which every battle resulted in staggering losses for the Chinese. At a certain point, even a country with a demographic pool like China’s had to feel the pain from the loss of good troops. He wanted to speed up that moment, to let his adversaries know that there were no more easy victories out there for the picking, no second shot at a big surprise attack. If the war was to be a grinder then the great question was: which side would do the more effective job of grinding up the other?

The first thing Ridgway realized was that it was a disaster to retreat once the Chinese hit. The key to their offensive philosophy was to stab at a unit, create panic, and then, from advantageous positions already set up in its rear, maul it when it retreated. All armies are vulnerable in retreat, but an American unit, because of all its hardware, condemned to the narrow, bending Korean roads, was exceptionally so. What the Chinese had done at Kunuri, Ridgway learned, matched their MO when they fought the Nationalists in their civil war. But no one, it appeared, had been paying much attention. The disaster at Kunuri, he believed, had not been writ so large because the Chinese were such magnificent soldiers or even had such an overwhelming advantage in manpower. Even as far north and as vulnerable as they were, if the American units had been well buttoned down at night, if each unit had had interlocking fields of firepower with reliable flanking units (and had not counted on the ROKs to protect them), the outcome of the battle might have been different. Even at Kunuri, the military had had the capacity to resupply the troops by air until the Chinese were exhausted. Ridgway’s long training as an airborne man was critical to the strategy he sought now. He meant to create strong islands of his own, sustain unit integrity with great fields of fire, and then let the enemy attack. It was, he believed, why Colonel John Michaelis, with his Twenty-seventh Regiment Wolfhounds, had been so much more successful than other regimental commanders in the early part of the war. Michaelis was an airborne guy, and he did not mind if his men were cut off as long as unit integrity was preserved. He knew he could always be resupplied by air.

What Ridgway wanted to do was start the Eighth Army moving north again—for reasons of morale as much as anything.

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Filed under China, Korea, military, U.N., U.S., war

by | 6 December 2008 · 11:44 am

Mao’s War in Korea, 1950

From The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War, by David Halberstam (Hyperion, 2007), pp. 337-339:

In late September, after the In Min Gun started a panicky retreat north, the Chinese began to edge ever closer to intervention. What they would do next—entering the war, taking terrible casualties, but stalemating the Americans and the United Nations in the process—they did for their own reasons, not out of any great love for the North Koreans. Their respect for the Koreans and Kim at that moment was in fact quite marginal. They felt the Koreans had gotten their country too easily: the Chinese, after all, had won their great victory by fighting a numerically and technologically superior foe for decades. In addition, Mao and the others were still irritated by the arrogance and brashness of Kim Il Sung.

The Chinese leaders had been appalled by Kim’s lack of response to their warnings about a possible amphibious landing at Inchon. Any Chinese commander who had disregarded such powerful, hard intelligence would have been relieved of command. In early August, as Chinese Army forces began to build up north of the Yalu, the Chinese sent one of their senior corps commanders, Deng Hua, to visit with his Korean military counterparts. Deng crossed the Yalu, got to the border town of Andong, and discovered that that was as far as he could go. The Koreans were not going to let him anywhere near the battle zone.

The Chinese decided to send their troops to Korea because Mao believed it was good for the new China and necessary for the future of the revolution, both domestically and internationally. He also feared what a failure to intervene would mean—that his China, for all its rhetoric, was not that different from the old China, a powerless giant when facing what was in their eyes the armies of Western oppressors. Therefore, almost from the moment it became clear that Kim’s offensive was doomed, Mao had begun the planning that would end with the use of Chinese troops in Korea. In early July, a time when Kim’s armies were still gaining singular successes on the battlefield, Mao had nonetheless ordered the creation of what became the Northeast Border Defense Army, the NEBDA, to be positioned along the Korean border. It was to include more than three armies from the Fourth Field Army, which had some of China’s best troops. Eventually the force numbered thirty-six divisions, or roughly (with support units) some seven hundred thousand troops. Seven artillery divisions and some antiaircraft units were eventually attached.

Mao had felt that there was a certain inevitability in China being pulled into the war, and he wanted to be as realistic as possible in gauging the price China would pay. On August 31, Zhou Enlai chaired a meeting on force levels where the senior people spoke not only of what they would need, but what it might cost in terms of potential casualties in the first year of a war with the Americans. The answer, they decided, was around 60,000 deaths and 140,000 wounded.

The Chinese decisions in the weeks following Inchon were essentially those of one man, Mao Zedong. He was the classic example of the revolutionary as true believer. Starting out with so little, he had been unusually successful during those long years of the civil war—and most of his judgments, however bloody and difficult, had turned out right. He was sure he understood the ordinary Chinese—the peasants—better than anyone else. He believed in China’s right to be a great nation again; that the source of its strength was his revolution; and that the revolution had succeeded because it had evoked the purity of the Chinese peasantry and so turned historic political suffering into military strength. His men had been better soldiers than their well-armed Nationalist opponents because of their beliefs. As the principal architect of the new China, in his mind he now charged himself with keeping the revolution true to itself. That kind of belief in a single strand of history and in yourself as its principal figure—in effect serving as history’s man—is powerful stuff; it has both its strengths and its weaknesses.

What Mao knew—about China’s peasants and their suffering, and the cruelty of the old order—he knew brilliantly; what he didn’t know, he didn’t know at all and often was unable to learn. That kind of success has the capacity to produce a terrible kind of megalomania. Epic revolutions probably demand someone with a supreme, invincible sense of self, a belief in the price that other men have to pay for the good of their vision; it was what allowed men like Mao and Stalin to rationalize great suffering for the good of the cause. But in such men there were no boundaries, no restraints, and what began as an all- consuming vision became almost inevitably a great nightmare as well; in time, monstrous crimes would be inflicted not on China’s foreign enemies, or even its domestic dissidents, but on its own loyal citizens, including many of the men who had served Mao so loyally in those years of civil war and then in Korea. But to understand Mao’s action at this critical juncture it is important to think of him always not just as the architect of a revolution but as its guardian as well, someone who believed that his enemies—of whom there were many, domestic and foreign—were always out to destroy his revolution and that he had to move against them before they moved against him.

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Filed under China, Korea, U.N., U.S., war

by | 7 November 2008 · 5:33 pm

Cho “Gandhi” Man Sik vs. Kim “Stalin” Il Sung, 1945-?

From: The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War, by David Halberstam (Hyperion, 2007), pp. 78-79:

KIM MIGHT BE their man, but he was quite an unfinished politician, and he cut a disappointing figure to those Koreans who hungered for someone with more obvious credentials to lead them, and did not want any foreign power, no matter how welcome initially for replacing the Japanese, to bestow a leader on them. The Russians apparently chose to unveil Kim Il Sung first at a small dinner party held at a Pyongyang restaurant in early October 1945. Kim was, one Russian general told the assemblage, a great Korean patriot who had fought valiantly against the Japanese. Among others attending was the far better known Cho Man Sik, a nonviolent nationalist, known as the Gandhi of Korea. Aware of just how vulnerable he was, Cho was moving as deftly as he could in a political situation that, once again, the Koreans themselves did not control. He appeared at the dinner as a show of accommodation to the Russians. Part of his job was to welcome Kim. Though he was a figure with a far larger constituency, Cho arrived—in Russian eyes—with too much baggage from the past and was not ideologically trustworthy to the newest occupiers of Korea. Bourgeois nationalist was the category the Russians put him into, and it was not an enviable pigeonhole. A bourgeois nationalist was someone who did not understand that all the important decisions were going to be made in Moscow. Perhaps if he had played it right and been genuinely subservient, Cho might have had some brief value to them as a figurehead at the top, carefully isolated from the real levers of power. But as an independent politician, Cho had no chance. General Terenti Shtykov, Stalin’s man on location, the Tsar of Korea as he was then known in Pyongyang, thought Cho too anti-Soviet and anti-Stalin, and reported as much to Moscow.

The dinner in early October was hardly a success. The other Korean politicians present were underwhelmed by Kim’s youth and lack of grace. The more crucial introduction—the public one—came in mid-October, at a mass rally in the Northern capital, and the day proved something of a disappointment to a large crowd eager for the introduction of an important Korean nationalist. The people had apparently expected to see and hear a venerable leader, who had served their cause for many years, and who would reflect their own passion for a country now officially free from foreign domination. But it was a Russian show. Kim spoke flatly, in a monotone, in words written by the Russians, and what the crowd heard was a young, rather inarticulate politician with a “plain, duck-like voice.” One witness thought his suit too small and his haircut too much like that of “a Chinese waiter.” But what really bothered many in the crowd was his adulation of Stalin and the Soviet Union. All praise went to the mighty and wondrous Red Army. Here they were, hoping for distinctly Korean words of freedom, and his words were reflecting a new kind of political obedience, Korean words bent to Russian needs, too much of “the monotonous repetitions which had [already] worn the people out.” There are two very different photos, each of which tells its own truth about that occasion. In the first, Kim, looking young and anxious, is flanked by at least three senior Soviet generals; in the second, doctored version, produced later as Kim was re-creating his own mythic story, one of greater personal independence, he is on the same podium, the angle is slightly different, and the three Russian generals have magically disappeared. Cho Man Sik’s days were already numbered. By early 1946 he had disagreed with the Russians on a number of things important to a Korean nationalist, and had thus become in their eyes even more of a reactionary. General Shtykov had sought and gotten Stalin’s permission to purge him. Soon after, he was put under what was ever so gently called protective custody, in a hotel in Pyongyang. No one was allowed to see him. In fact, no one ever saw him again.

India’s Gandhi would certainly have had a rather different career trajectory if he had been up against Stalin.

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Filed under Korea, nationalism, USSR, war

by | 27 October 2008 · 8:58 pm

Near Unsan, Korea, October 1950

From: The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War, by David Halberstam (Hyperion, 2007), p. 13:

For experienced officers making the trek as the temperature dropped alarmingly, and the terrain became more mountainous and forbidding, there was an eerie quality to the advance. Years later, General Paik Sun Yup, commander of the South Korean First Division (and considered by the Americans the best of the Korean commanders), remembered his own uneasiness as they moved forward without resistance. There was a sense of almost total isolation, as if they were too alone. At first, Paik, a veteran officer who had once fought with the Japanese Army, could not pinpoint what bothered him. Then it struck him: the absolute absence of people, the overwhelming silence that surrounded his troops. In the past, there had always been lots of refugees streaming south. Now the road was empty, as if something important were taking place, just beyond his view and his knowledge. Besides, it was getting colder all the time. Every day the temperature seemed to drop another few degrees.

Certain key intelligence officers were nervous as well. They kept getting small bits of information, from a variety of sources, that made them believe that the Chinese had already entered North Korean territory by late October—and in strength. Colonel Percy Thompson, G-2 (or intelligence officer) for First Corps, under which the [U.S. First] Cav operated, and considered one of the ablest intelligence officers in Korea, was very pessimistic. He was quite sure of the Chinese presence, and he tried to warn his superiors. Unfortunately he found himself fighting a sense of euphoria that had permeated some of the upper ranks of the Cav and originated in Tokyo. Thompson had directly warned Colonel Hal Edson, commander of the Eighth Regiment of the First Cavalry Division, that he believed there was a formidable Chinese presence in the area, but Edson and others treated his warnings, he later noted, “with disbelief and indifference.” In the days that followed, his daughter Barbara Thompson Eisenhower (married to Dwight Eisenhower’s son John) remembered a dramatic change in the tone of her father’s letters from Korea. It was as if he were writing to say farewell. “He was absolutely sure they were going to be overrun, and he was going to be killed.” she later remembered.

Thompson had good reason to be uneasy. His early intelligence reads were quite accurate: the Chinese were already in country, waiting patiently in the mountains of Northern Korea for the ROKs and perhaps other UN units to extend their already strained logistical lines ever farther north. They had not intended to hit an American unit that early in the campaign. They wanted the Americans to be even farther north when they struck; and they knew the difficulty of the march north made their own job easier.

I distinctly remember seeing the First Cavalry shoulder insignia during my second grade year in elementary school at Camp Botanical Garden army base in Kyoto, Japan, in 1956-57, the last year before the base closed, the site reverted to its prior function, and the foreign missionaries had to start their own school.

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Filed under Korea, U.S., war

by | 18 September 2008 · 6:55 am

South Korean “Foreigners of Convenience”

A few days ago, The Marmot’s Hole posted a translated summary of a Korean newspaper article about one way that South Korean parents are getting their children into local international schools, which are a conduit to higher education abroad. They purchase foreign residency permits from embassies of Ecuador or Mali in order to qualify their Korea-resident kids as “overseas Koreans” qualified to attend international schools.

In the case of Ecuador, all you need do is visit for a week to qualify, while Mali’s embassy in Japan can issue permanent residency visas. Both options will usually cost you about 30 million won.

As a result, some people estimate that as many as 80% of the kids enrolled in international schools are South Koreans, while the official Ministry of Education figure is 13%, because dual citizens and those with official residency overseas are counted as foreigners.

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Filed under Ecuador, education, Korea, Mali

by | 17 August 2008 · 12:33 pm

Wordcatcher Tales: Gorin = Orimpikku

Japanese video reports about the Olympics often show the screen label 北京五輪 ‘Beijing Olympics’. I had assumed that the Japanese news media were simply following Chinese usage, with 五輪 gorin (‘5 rings/wheels’) being a clever and concise sound-symbol translation of the word Olympic, which is otherwise rendered more lengthily in Japanese katakana オリンピック. A Google search on 五輪 returns 18,600,000 possible results, while a search on オリンピック returns 27,000,000 results.

Well, it turns out that this usage of 五輪 for ‘Olympics’ is restricted to Japanese. The official Chinese homepage for the Beijing Olympics uses four characters strictly for their sound values, 奥林匹克 (ao-lin-pi-ke), a string that Google finds on 17,500,000 pages. Korean usage also relies on a phonetic transcription, 올림픽 (ol-lim-pik), with 23,300,000 Google results.

Beijing Olympics logoSo it looks as if the Japanese may have coined the term 五輪 for ‘Olympics’, probably on the occasion of its 1964 Olympics. That headword shows up in my father’s battered old New Pocket Japanese-English Dictionary (Kenkyusha), which was revised in 1964 after first appearing in 1958. (Does anyone have an earlier edition?) It’s a clever coinage, with several positive allusions, but first I’d like to note that the Beijing Olympics logo also incorporates a bit of clever usage of Chinese characters. The stylized image of a runner strongly evokes the character 京 jing (‘capital’) of Beijing (‘north capital’), and the logos for the various event types also evoke the old Chinese seal scripts widely used in decorative engraving from as early as the Han dynasty.

I emailed Matt of No-sword about this, and he suggested that one positive association of 五輪 is Miyamoto Musashi’s Book of Five Rings (五輪書), which involves competitive strategy and tactics and is sometimes translated as The Art of War. Indeed, many of the Chinese-language search results for 五輪 referred to that book. Other Chinese results referred to “5-wheel” (off-road 4WD) vehicles, the 5th round of 6-party talks, and the popular Japanese singer Itsuwa (‘5-rings’) Mayumi (also known as Wulun Zhengong in Chinese). Just about the only Chinese-language usage I could find of 五輪 for Olympics was by a Chinese blogger in Japan.

A more spiritual association of 五輪 occurs in 五輪塔 (gorintō), the 5-element pagoda. And 五輪 is also homophonous with 五倫 (Jp. gorin, Ch. wǔlún), the essential 5 relationships of Confucianism.

POSTSCRIPT: I’ve been watching far more of the Olympics than I had planned, and I must say that I am most impressed by the good sportsmanship of the athletes from both the host country and the largest guest country. It’s a big improvement over the behavior of both such parties during the 1988 Olympics in Seoul. (And congratulations to Constantina Tomescu-Dita! Her gutsy move paid off.)

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Filed under China, Japan, Korea, language

by | 17 July 2008 · 8:43 pm

Lankov on the Origins of Commercialized Prostitution in Korea

In my reduced blog-reading of late, I’ve been a little slow to note an interesting take, by Andrei Lankov in the Korea Times, on the origins of what is now a highly developed industry in Korea (and elsewhere, in both supply and demand): commercialized prostitution.

Traditionally, most East Asian countries have had few scruples with regard to extramarital sex as far as males were concerned, but before 1900, Japan was remarkable in the development of commercial prostitution on a grand scale.

In this regard it was different from Korea, where in old times only the rich and famous could afford to buy expensive sexual services from gisaeng girls, while the “low orders” usually had no access to commercial sex whatsoever.

The Korean nationalists love to stress this fact, explaining it as another indication of the alleged “spiritual purity” of Koreans. Well, less lofty explanations are more likely, but it is difficult to deny that the large-scale prostitution industry was created by the Japanese presence.

In the 1850s, Japan was “opened” to the world, but for decades afterward it remained a very poor place, so “export-oriented” prostitution became a major industry there.

The Japanese working girls, known as “karayuki-san” (“those going overseas”), plied their trade across Asia, from Sydney to Vladivostok, from Shanghai to Singapore, usually supervised by Japanese brothel owners.

A Japanese prostitute and brothel remained ubiquitous components of urban life in the Asia-Pacific for the decades between 1870 and 1920, and remittances from these girls, who duly sent their earnings back home, were said to be the third biggest foreign currency earner for Japan at the turn of the 20th century.

Of course, neighboring Korea became one of the areas where Japanese prostitution flourished. Contrary to the now common misperception, typical commercial sexual encounters in Korea before 1900 did not involve a poor Korean girl serving some lusty Japanese male.

If anything, the situation in which a Korean male purchased sex from a Japanese female was probably more common. Until the 1910s, the vast majority of prostitutes operating in the country were Japanese.

Koreans may want to blame Japan for commercializing prostitution in Korea, but Japan can hardly be blamed for the growth of prostitution everywhere else in East, Southeast, and South Asia, except insofar as it led the way in creating a model of economic growth that spread the wealth beyond a narrow elite.

via The Marmot

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Filed under China, economics, industry, Japan, Korea, Philippines, Southeast Asia

by | 20 April 2008 · 1:21 pm

Jenkins in Jakarta

The Reluctant Communist: My Desertion, Court-Martial, and Forty-Year Imprisonment in North Korea, by Charles Robert Jenkins with Jim Frederick (U. California Press, 2008), pp. 163-165:

Once we touched down in Jakarta, my wife was there on the tarmac along with throngs of media…. The bus ride into the city took two hours. I had never seen such a bad traffic jam in my life. In Pyongyang there was rarely any traffic at all, even in the center of the city, but here the streets were jammed with cars. I did not wait long before getting down to business with my wife. I had already been waiting so long, I didn’t see any reason to delay the discussion any further. The bus was full of the Japanese delegation, so I still had to be a little discreet. We sat side by side, not looking at each other while we talked. “Why didn’t you want to have this meeting in China?” I asked. “If we met in China,” she said, “I may have been sent back to North Korea.” So I asked, “You don’t want to go back to North Korea?” “No,” she said quietly but firmly. “But I thought you did,” I said. “The [Korean Workers Party] Organization told me that you have been trying and wanting to come back this whole time.” “Gae-so-ri,” she said. (That is dog talk.) “Well,” I thought, “that’s it, then. The decision has been made. We are not going back.”

They put us up in a hotel downtown that was the nicest place I think I have ever stayed. We were in a suite on the fourteenth floor. It was larger than any house I had ever lived in. Brinda and Mika were in a state of shock. The television just blew them away. Actually, it blew me away, too. All those channels. The size of it. The brightness of all the colors. Some of the stuff that was shown, and the fact that it was on twenty-four hours a day. I think that was their very first whiff that there might be a lot more to the outside world than the North Koreans had ever told them. It didn’t take them long to sense that the rest of the world was much more free than North Korea had been. At the same time, there was only so much freedom for us: There was a guard on our door (officers from the Niigata police force, to be specific) twenty-four hours a day. Right across the hall from us was the Japanese delegation, including Saiki and Nakayama.

The next morning, my wife and I continued the discussion we had been having on the bus. To test her resolve on the matter, I said to her, “If you are not going back, then there is no point to me being here. The girls and I will go to China for a little while and then return to North Korea to pick up our new house. I don’t see what the problem is for you to come to North Korea. The Organization says you can go and come as you please. You can take the ferry back and forth. You can visit anytime you want.” She responded, “You know one big reason why I am not going back? It is not just because of me. It is because of you. Because of your family in the United States. If you go back to North Korea, you will never see your mother and sisters again.” “But I am not going to see them anyway, since I am going to go to jail for life!” I yelled. “You are not going to go to jail!” she yelled back. “How can you say that? ” I asked. “You can’t say that for sure.” I had realized by then that she and Koizumi were doing everything they could to appeal to the Americans for understanding and leniency in my case, but I also knew that my wife was in no position to offer me assurances about how the U.S. Army was going to choose to punish me. Whenever it was I had to face my accusers, I knew at least on that count, I would be doing it alone.

It was around that time I also realized that the power between my wife and me had changed. In North Korea, I was primarily responsible for protecting her and providing for her, and she would do what I thought was best for us almost without exception. She needed me. Now, however, the equation had changed. I would have to listen to her; she would be my guide. I now needed her more than she needed me. This change in our relationship has been one of the most noteworthy parts of our lives together since 2002, and, to be honest, sometimes one of the hardest for me to adjust to.

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Filed under Indonesia, Japan, Korea, military, U.S.

by | 20 April 2008 · 1:20 pm

Jenkins by Other Names

The Reluctant Communist: My Desertion, Court-Martial, and Forty-Year Imprisonment in North Korea, by Charles Robert Jenkins with Jim Frederick (U. California Press, 2008), p. 173:

[My defense attorney] introduced himself, and we made a little small talk. He asked me what he should call me. I told him something we used to say ages ago in the army: “You can call me anything you want, as long as you call me three times a day for chow and once a month to get paid.” So with that, he started calling me Charlie. I had never been called Charlie before in my life. Growing up, I was always Robert. When I was a teenager, I was Super. In the army, I was Jenkins. In North Korea, the three other Americans took to calling me C. R., while the Koreans sometimes called me Min Hyung-chan. (They gave me this name when I started acting—they needed something to put on the credits—but in person, I refused to answer to it.) So, although I have gone by many names in my life, Charlie was a new one. But now, thanks to Capt. Culp, a lot of people, especially everyone I now know in the U.S. Army stationed in Japan, refer to me as “Charlie.”

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Filed under Korea, language, military, U.S.

by | 2 March 2008 · 9:25 pm

Braille Family Resemblances and Mutations

Matt’s recent post on No-sword about Japanese Braille prompted me to look at other varieties, all of which derive in one way or another from the system first invented in France between 1821 and 1824 by Louis Braille (1809-1852), who was himself inspired by a more complex system of night-writing designed to allow military units to communicate in the dark without betraying their positions.

All varieties of Braille render the characters of their respective languages in a six-dot matrix (or did until until recently); all are read from left to right, even in Hebrew; all use word-spacing, even in Chinese and Japanese; and all tend to place diacritic characters before the characters they modify.

14   0_   0_   00
25   __   0_   __
36   __   __   __
EN:  a    b    c 

14   __ 0_   __ 0_   __ 00   _0 0_   _0 0_   _0 00
25   __ __   __ 0_   __ __   _0 __   _0 0_   _0 __
36   _0 __   _0 __   _0 __   00 __   00 __   00 __
EN:     A       B       C        1       2      3
   = cap-a   cap-b   cap-c   num-a   num-b   num-c

In English, the same formation of dots can represent either a letter or a number, depending on the preceding context. Each formation can also serve as a contraction, so that b = be, c = can, d = do, e = every, f = from, j = just, l = like, v = very, and so on.

The designers of Japanese Braille (点字) retained the letter = number equivalency, marking numbers with the same prefix, but introduced some genetic mutations to adapt to the kana syllabary. They redefined a b c d e as the vowels a i u e o, which is how everyone nowadays begins to recite the kana syllabary. The dots for these five letters are confined to positions 1-2-4 (a = 1, i = 1+2, u = 1+4, e = 1+2+4, o = 2+4), leaving positions 3-5-6 to render the consonant on each syllable, so that k = 6, s = 5+6, t = 3+5, n = 3, h = 3+6, m = 3+5+6, r = 5. The syllable n is written as m without any vowel in positions 1-2-4.

There are no capital letters in Japanese kana, but the same method is used to add the dakuten and handakuten marks to following consonants: a prefix with a dot in position 6 is used to transform h- into p-, while a prefix with a dot in position 5 is used as a to transform voiceless initials into their voiced equivalents.

14   0_   0_   00
25   __   0_   __
36   00   00   00
JP:  ha   hi   hu

14   __ 0_   __ 0_   __ 00   __ 0_   __ 0_   __ 00
25   __ __   __ 0_   __ __   _0 __   _0 0_   _0 __
36   _0 00   _0 00   _0 00   __ 00   __ __   __ __
JP:    pa      pi      pu      ba      bi      bu
   =  '-ha    '-hi    '-hu   ''-ha   ''-hi   ''-hu

Braille takes up a lot of space, so its regular users rely a lot on contractions. (There’s also a kind of Braille shorthand.) The word Braille itself is usually written with just the letters B-r-l. These contractions can have different meanings even in closely related members of the Braille family, like French and English. For instance, the French circumflex vowels are rendered by adding an extra dot in position six (which I will show as ^) to the first five letters of the alphabet, so â = a+^ (1+6), ê = b+^ (1+2+6), î = c+^ (1+4+6), ô = d+^ (1+4+5+6), and û = e+^ (1+5+6). (The filled dot 6 also adds a circumflex to Esperanto versions of Braille.) In English, these same contractions respectively indicate ch/child, gh, sh, th/this, and wh/which.

English double letters are contracted and rendered within a single cell by a different method: shifting the position of the dots but retaining their shape. Thus, the dots for b/but occupy positions 1+2, while bb drops to positions 2+3; c/can sits at 1+4, while cc drops to 2+5; d/do sits at 1+4+5, while dd drops to 2+5+6; and g/go sits at 1+2+4+5, while gg drops to 2+3+5+6.

A similar principle plays a key role in Korean Braille, invented in 1894 by a Canadian missionary who introduced some radical (and brilliant) mutations to adapt it to the (equally brilliant) Korean alphabet. Korean vowels occupy their own cells, while some diphthongs take up two cells. The letterㅏ(a) occupies dots 1+2+6, whileㅑ(ya) occupies its mirror image, dots 3+4+5. Similarly,ㅓ(eo) at 2+3+4 is a mirror image ofㅕ(yeo) at 1+5+6; ㅗ (o) at 1+3+6 is a mirror image ofㅛ (yo) at 4+3+6; ㅜ (u) at 1+4+3 is a mirror image ofㅠ (yu) at 1+4+6; and ㅡ (eu) at 2+4+6 is a mirror image ofㅣ(i) at 1+3+5.

The possible syllable structures of Korean are too numerous to fit into a six-dot matrix, so Korean syllables are written sequentially, typically (C)V(C), just as in French or English. In order to avoid putting spaces around each syllable, so that readers can distinguish initial from final consonants, Korean braille has two versions of every consonant, one for initial position, the other for final. Each consonant has the same shape in each position, but the one in final position is either lower than its initial counterpart or a mirror image.

Thus,ㄴ(n) occupies dots 1+4 if initial, but drops to 2+5 if final; ㄷ(d) occupies dots 2+4 if initial, but drops to 3+5 if final; andㅁ(m) occupies dots 1+5 if initial, but drops to 2+6 if final. Meanwhile, mirror-image consonants don’t drop, they flip:ㄱ(g) flips from dot 4 in initial position to dot 1 in final position; whileㄹ(r) flips from dot 5 to dot 3; andㅂ(b) flips from dots 4+5 to dots 1+2. As a result, Korean 점자 ‘dot characters’ display the same kinds of symmetry and inversion that the Korean alphabet itself displays.

Chinese Braille comes in at least two flavors, Cantonese and Mandarin. Both represent Chinese characters in three cells, one for the onset, the second for the rime, and the third for the tone, just as in Zhuyin/Bopomofo. In practice, however, tone is frequently left unmarked, generating a good deal of ambiguity. Perhaps the new system designed in the 1970s, which represents all three components in just two cells, will eventually solve that problem.

UPDATE: Matt has added a new post about attempts to render Japanese kanji in Braille. The more complicated method is geared to the shape of the kanji and requires two extra dots in each cell. The other method uses three six-dot cells per kanji. The first cell broadly classifies the type of character to follow, the second gives one mora of the Sino-Japanese reading of the character, and the third gives one mora of the native Japanese reading of the character. The second method strikes me as akin to the structural division of many written kanji into one part that broadly classifies the semantic domain, and another that indicates the (Sino-Japanese) sound value. The combination of native and Sinitic reading is also how Koreans routinely distinguish similar-sounding Chinese characters. It’s as if English speakers routinely distinguished similar-sounding Latin roots by saying ‘foot-ped-‘ vs. ‘child-ped-‘. The typical Japanese strategy, by contrast, is to cite a well-known compound in which the kanji occurs, just as English-speakers might distinguish ‘ped- as in pedestrian’ from ‘ped- as in pediatrics’.

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