Category Archives: Korea

Day after day we racked our brains, but still couldn’t find an adequate transmission method [to communicate remotely between prison compounds in Korea]. Little Hou was truly a smart fellow and engrossed in the code work most of the time. When he was eating or taking a break, he would mention to us one possibility and another, but none of them would work. Then one morning he hit on a brilliant idea, namely to simplify the Morse code as much as possible, to the degree of letting one dot or one dash stand for a numeral. This would not only speed up the transmission, but also reduce confusion. Based on this conception, he and Mushu created the Walking Telegraphic Method: the sender of the message would stand behind the window of the war criminal’s cell [= the isolated cell in which Commissar Pei, the leader of the Chinese POWs, was held]. If he walked to the left side, it meant a dot; if he walked to the right, it denoted a dash; if he hunkered down below the window, that indicated the beginning of a new group of numerals. One dot meant 1, one dot plus one dash–2, two dots plus one dash–3, two dots–4, three dots–5, three dashes–6, two dashes plus one dot–7, one dash plus one dot–8, two dashes–9, and one dash–0. As a rule, every four numerals represented a word [probably = Chinese character]. After the receiver jotted down the numerals, he passed it on to the code man, who could decipher them with the aid of the codebook Little Hou was making. In reverse order to our cell, the war criminal’s room had a window facing Compound 6, so they could send and receive messages from within the room. This method would definitely resolve the problem of transmission. How excited we were! We wanted to shout for joy, but we didn’t dare. We only lifted Little Hou on our shoulders and walked a few rounds in the cell. Then he returned to working on the code.

When the lead in the pencil was worn down, Mushu would bite the tip sharp. As the main worker, Little Hou didn’t get enough sleep, his eyes bloodshot. We worried about him, but couldn’t do much to help. Without a dictionary, we couldn’t remember all the essential words, but we managed to come up with over eight hundred common characters. This wasn’t bad. The code shouldn’t be too elaborate; otherwise it would be difficult to master. So we aimed at fewer than one thousand characters. Whenever an often-used word came to mind, we would tell Little Hou. The penciled pages looked complicated and incomprehensible to me, but Little Hou could trace what he had done to avoid repetition.

Finally a booklet–loose sheets of toilet paper bound by a shoelace–was completed, which listed all the codes and gave instructions about the Walking Telegraphic Method. We put a title on the cover: The Pei Code.

War Trash, by Ha Jin (Vintage, 2004), pp. 224-225

The son of the last crown prince of the Chosôn Dynasty has died. The Korea Times reports:

Yi Ku [李玖, 이구, I Gu], the only surviving son of Choson Kingdom’s last crown prince Yongchin, died of a heart attack at a hotel in Tokyo on Saturday. He was 73….

Yi led a single life in Japan after having divorced his American wife, Julia Mullock, in 1982. Having left no offspring, Lee’s passing signifies the end of the main lineage of the Choson’s royal descent.

Yi was born in Japan in 1931 to Prince Yongchin and Masako Nashimoto, a member of Japan’s imperial family. Yongchin was the younger brother of Choson’s last monarch Sunjong and the seventh son of King Kojong. The marriage was part of Japan’s imperial ambition to merge Korea.

Yi was the second son in the marriage, but he became the sole surviving member of the royal family’s main lineage after his elder brother Chin died at the eighth month….

Yi could not come back to Korea for a while after then as President Syngman Rhee was weary of the influence of royal family members. It was 1963 when he returned to Seoul with his wife and parents and began to reside in Naksonjae residence, a small housing quarter located within Changdokkung Palace.

Wikipedia has already turned his biography into an obituary.

Gu attended the Gakushin Peers’ School (学習院 gakushuin), Tokyo, Japan. He later attended Centre College, Danville, Kentucky and studied architecture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology both in the US. He was employed as an architect with I.M. Pei & Assocs, Manhattan, New York on 1960 to 1964. Made stateless by Japan in 1947, Gu acquired U.S. citizenship in 1959, and Korean citizenship in 1964. He married Julia Mullock (b. 1928) on 25 October 1959 in New York, and and they adopted a daughter, Eugenia.

After the fall of Syngman Rhee, he returned to Korea in 1963 with the help of the new president Park Chung-hee, moving into the new building in Nakseon Hall, Changdeok Palace with his mother and wife. He lectured on architecture at Seoul National University and Yonsei University and also ran a business. When that went bankrupt in 1979, he went to Japan to earn money. In 1982 his wife divorced him; his mother died in 1989. He started living with a Japanese astrologer, Mrs Arita.

In November 1996, he made what he hoped would be his permanent return to Korea but, showing signs of a nervous breakdown, he was unable to adjust to life in the motherland. Restlessly going back and forth between Japan and Korea, he eventually died of a heart attack at the age of seventy-four, at the Akasaka Prince Hotel, the former residence of his parents in Tokyo, Japan.

The Korea Times has a follow-up story on the fate of the last Korean royal family.

via The Marmot’s Hole

This one’s for Jodi.

Jim was born in South Korea and grew up in Muscatine, Iowa, in the 1970s. For as long as he could remember, the place had seemed too small for his ambitions. He hardly noticed the Mississippi flowing by the lovely old downtown or the fragrances of grains on summer nights or even the famous local produce, the Muscatine melon….

Jim’s father had schemed and charmed his way out of North Korea and become, proudly, Muscatine’s periodontist, with an office upstairs on Main Street. Jim’s mother had come from South Korea–a grandfather had served as a minister to the last Korean king–and she had studied at Union Theological Seminary with Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich and become a Confucian scholar, and ended up for many years a housewife in Muscatine. A small, elegant woman walking across the local golf course when her children were too young to play alone, diligently trying to make sense of American sports so she could understand her children’s milieu. At every opportunity she took Jim and his siblings to Des Moines and Chicago so they’d know the world was larger than it seemed from Muscatine. She taught her three children, by example, the arts of debate around the kitchen table, while her husband, who had early morning appointments, went to bed grumbling that he didn’t know what they had to talk about that was more important than a good night’s sleep. She’d tell them to live ”as if for eternity” and tutor them on current events, translating for Jim the images of famine and war that upset him on the TV news. Early on, Jim imagined himself becoming a doctor to treat such suffering, and excelling in science quickened his interest.

He was quarterback on the Muscatine High football team, a starting guard in basketball, the president of his class and its valedictorian. But the Kims were the only Asian family in town, except for the one that owned the Chinese restaurant. When they went to the malls of Iowa, adults stared and children followed them around, the bolder ones approaching, crying out, “Kiai!” and making as if to deliver karate chops. For Jim, embarrassment at his parents’ Koreanness was the loneliest feeling of all….

He went to the University of Iowa and felt liberated there until he was told that Ivy League schools were better. He transferred to Brown, where he discovered an organization called the Third World Center. He became its director. He broke up with his Irish Catholic girlfriend because he suddenly believed he shouldn’t date white women. He made his friends among black, Hispanic, and Asian students. He learned “the pimp walk.” On parents’ weekend he and his friends would dress up in black and stride around the campus, a phalanx of about thirty African American and Hispanic students, and one Korean, sometimes chanting, sometimes maintaining a threatening silence, and noting with pleasure the double takes and frightened looks on the faces of some of the parents.

Before Brown, Jim hadn’t known that the United States interned Japanese Americans during World War II. He read up on the subject, then lectured about it. He embraced the idea of Asian “racial solidarity.” He didn’t realize back then just how complex a matter this could be. He didn’t find out until much later that, for example, Koreans were supposed to hate the Japanese. From time to time, doubts cropped up. It seemed as if for other Asians at Brown, racial identity meant little more than eating with chopsticks and finding an Asian mate, and the paramount political issue seemed to be the “glass ceiling,” the fact that Asians weren’t yet rising to the very tops of institutions. But the idea of being a member of an oppressed minority was very alluring. Jim decided to learn his native language. “I wanted to learn Korean, be down with my people, be an authorized third world person, so I could say shit.” He got a fellowship to travel to Seoul and happened on an interesting story for his Ph.D. thesis in anthropology–it had to do with the Korean pharmaceutical industry. In Seoul he did his research and made a mighty effort to fit in, hanging out at bars with new Korean friends and performing karaoke–beforehand on each occasion, he’d go to the bathroom and study the words to songs like “My Way.”

He had left Iowa prepared, naturally enough, to think that ethnicity was the central problem of his life. By the time he came back from Korea to Harvard, to continue medical school and write his thesis, he had grown bored and a little disgusted with what was known in academic circles as the politics of racial identity. It seemed like an exercise in selfishness. “I discovered South Korea was doing just fine, and that what Koreans wanted was for me to write grant proposals so they could come to the States and get degrees. I had looked at student movements. They were all about Korean nationalism, just sort of troublemaking.” When he met [Paul] Farmer, he was ready to change directions. At one point during their talks in the old, one-room PIH [Partners in Health] office, Farmer told him, “If you come to Haiti, I’ll show you you’re blan, as white as any white man.” Jim thought of his black, Hispanic, and Asian friends at Brown, and how angry that remark would have made them.

He told Farmer that he felt liberated from “the self-hatred and evasion of ethnicity” he’d felt in Muscatine.

“It’s good to have to come to understandings of that, but you’ve got to put that behind you now,” said Farmer. “So what are you going to do? Be the first Asian to do some stupid thing like walk on the moon?”

They hadn’t talked long before Jim declared that he wanted to make Farmer’s preferential option for the poor his own life’s work.

SOURCE: Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World, by Tracy Kidder (Random House, 2004), pp. 166-169

I have to confess I’m fascinated by the story of the U.S. Army deserter Charles Robert Jenkins and his kidnapped Japanese wife Hitomi Soga, both of them far outliers by any standard. They’re in North Carolina now, and most accounts of their visit are rehashes of the same wire service stories from AP, Kyodo, Reuters, etc. But one story by Jim Nesbitt, a staff writer for a major North Carolina regional paper, the Raleigh News & Observer, stands out. Unable to get much more than the time of day from an extremely tight-lipped Jenkins, Nesbitt decides to report on the Japanese media coverage. (Yes, I know, reporters covering other reporters is all too common these days, but I think this one works pretty well because Nesbitt is discovering different cultural perceptions, not just reinforcing his own conventional wisdom.) Here’s a sampling.

WELDON — On the tree-lined avenue in front of the two-story brick home of Army deserter Charles Robert Jenkins’ sister, scores of Japanese camera crews and reporters practice an electronic form of brinkmanship.

Sharp-elbowed and competitive, they aim to capture every moment of Jenkins’ first visit to North Carolina since he spent four decades as a defector in North Korea.

But unlike their American counterparts, their focus is on Jenkins’ wife, Hitomi Soga, 46, who was abducted by North Korean agents in 1978 while shopping with her mother in their hometown on Japan’s isolated Sado Island and spirited away by speedboat to the Communist dictatorship.

Since her solo return to Japan in 2002, Soga has become a leading symbol of the abductee saga, her story wrapped in Japan’s enduring interest in the fate of as many as 60 Japanese citizens who were also abducted by North Korea from 1977 to 1983.

Her quest to be reunited with Jenkins, 65, who stayed in North Korea with their two daughters because he feared punishment for desertion, became the focus of negotiations led by Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, who made a personal appeal to North Korean officials for their release.

In the eyes of the Japanese, this is a love story and a tale of motherly devotion — with Soga at center stage….

Her story is made more poignant by the uncertainty surrounding her mother, Miyoshi Soga, who also disappeared the same day. The North Korean government has never admitted abducting Soga’s mother.

The Japanese see a psychic connection between Soga’s missing mother and her husband’s desire to see his own mom — a wish Soga has said she wanted fulfilled so she and her daughters could meet [her husband’s mother Pattie] Casper.

“It’s a double image,” [New York-based TV Asahi senior producer] Nakamura said. “The union of Jenkins and his mother reflects her [Soga’s] fantasy dream of being reunited with her mother.”

For the Japanese, Jenkins has been a sideshow, a supporting actor whose remarkable story has been seen through the lens of his wife’s saga. They’ve known from the start that he was a 25-year-old Army sergeant who deserted the squad he was leading during a patrol of the demilitarized zone separating the two Koreas in January 1965.

Until they hit North Carolina, though, and started talking to U.S. veterans and visiting his hometown in nearby Rich Square, about 25 miles southeast of here, they didn’t realize the anger some have for him.

“The people didn’t really know Mr. Jenkins was a deserter and how serious that was,” said Toshiyuki Matsuyama, a Washington-based reporter for the Fuji News Network. “Now, we’re focusing on the negative aspects of his visit.”…

In the three days Jenkins has been in Weldon, the sight of Japanese reporters interviewing locals at the Weldon Super Market or the Trustworthy Hardware Store on Main Street in Rich Square has become common.

But coverage that has been almost round-the-clock has given Japanese reporters, producers and camera crews little time to explore the local delights.

Tomohiko Murayama, who covers Sado Island for the Niigata Television Network, spent a year as a high school exchange student in Kentucky 20 years ago and wasn’t unhinged by being stuck in Weldon.

“This is the typical small town in the United States, isn’t it?” Murayama said.

Yes! If only the reporters from the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, and the wire services understood small-town America (and Japan) as well as Murayama seems to. Hats off to Nesbitt, too, for an original and informative take on the media circus.