Category Archives: Korea

Anne Applebaum’s latest column in today’s Washington Post makes a point worth repeating:

Try, if you can, to picture the scene. A vast crowd in Red Square: Lenin’s tomb and Stalin’s memorial in the background. Soldiers march in goose step behind rolling tanks, and the air echoes with martial music, occasionally drowned out by the whine of fighter jets. On the reviewing stand, statesmen are gathered: Kim Jong Il, the dictator of North Korea, Alexander Lukashenko, the dictator of Belarus, Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, the former dictator of Poland — and President George W. Bush….

[I]f we are to avoid turning the anniversary of the end of World War II into a celebration of the triumph of Stalinism, more should be done. To begin with, Congress should vote on a resolution proposed this month by Rep. John M. Shimkus (R-Ill.), which calls on Russia to condemn the Nazi-Soviet pact as well as the illegal annexation of the Baltic states. “The truth is a powerful weapon for healing, forgiving and reconciliation,” the resolution states, in a burst of unusual congressional eloquence, “but its absence breeds distrust, fear and hostility.”

Bush, too, should show that he understands what really happened in 1945. Every recent U.S. president has visited Auschwitz, and many have visited concentration camps in Germany, too. Perhaps it’s time for American presidents to start a new tradition and pay their respects to the victims of Stalin. This is made difficult by the dearth of monuments in Moscow, but it isn’t impossible. The president could, for example, lay a wreath at the stone that was brought from the Solovetsky Islands, the Soviet Union’s first political prison camp, and placed just across from the Lubyanka itself. Or he could visit one of the mass-execution sites outside of town.

Of course these would be nothing more than purely symbolic gestures. But a war anniversary is a purely symbolic event. Each commemoration helps all of us remember what happened and why it happened, and each commemoration helps us draw relevant lessons for the future. To falsify the record — to commemorate the triumph of totalitarianism rather than its defeat — sends the wrong message to new and would-be democracies in Europe, the former Soviet Union and the rest of the world.

Work was the central function of most Soviet camps. It was the main occupation of prisoners, and the main preoccupation of the administration. Daily life was organized around work, and the prisoners’ well-being depended upon how successfully they worked. Nevertheless, it is difficult to generalize about what camp work was like: the image of the prisoner in the snowstorm, digging gold or coal with a pickax, is only a stereotype. There were many such prisoners–millions, as the figures for the camps of Kolyma and Vorkuta make clear–but there were also, we now know, camps in central Moscow where prisoners designed airplanes, camps in central Russia where prisoners built and ran nuclear power plants, fishing camps on the Pacific coast, collective farm camps in southern Uzbekistan. The archives of the Gulag in Moscow are chock-full of photographs of prisoners with their camels.

Without a doubt, the range of economic activity within the Gulag was as wide as the range of economic activity within the USSR itself. A glance through the Guide to the System of Corrective-Labor Camps in the USSR, the most comprehensive listing of camps to date, reveals the existence of camps organized around gold mines, coal mines, nickel mines; highway and railway construction; arms factories, chemical factories, metal-processing plants, electricity plants; the building of airports, apartment blocks, sewage systems; the digging of peat, the cutting of trees, and the canning of fish. The Gulag administrators themselves preserved a photo album solely dedicated to the goods that inmates produced. Among other things, there are pictures of mines, missiles, and other army equipment; car parts, door locks, buttons; logs floating down rivers; wooden furniture, including chairs, cabinets, telephone boxes, and barrels; shoes, baskets, and textiles (with samples attached); rugs, leather, fur hats, sheepskin coats; glass cups, lamps, and jars; soap and candles; even toys–wooden tanks, tiny windmills, and mechanical rabbits playing drums.

Work varied within individual camps as well as between them. True, many prisoners in forestry camps did nothing but fell trees. Prisoners with sentences of three years or less worked in “corrective-labor colonies,” light-regime camps which were usually organized around a single factory or occupation. Larger Gulag camps, by contrast, might contain a number of industries: mines, a brick factory, and a power plant, as well as housing or road construction sites. In such camps, prisoners unloaded the daily goods trains, drove trucks, picked vegetables, worked in kitchens, hospitals, and children’s nurseries. Unofficially, prisoners also worked as servants, nannies, and tailors for the camp commanders, guards, and their wives.

Prisoners with long sentences often held down a wide variety of jobs, changing work frequently as their luck rose and fell. In her nearly two-decade camp career, Evgeniya Ginzburg worked cutting trees, digging ditches, cleaning the camp guest house, washing dishes, tending chickens, doing laundry for camp commanders’ wives, and caring for prisoners’ children. Finally, she became a nurse. During the eleven years he spent in camps, another political prisoner, Leonid Sitko, worked as a welder, as a stonemason in a quarry, as a construction worker on a building brigade, as a porter in a railway depot, as a miner in a coal mine, and as a carpenter in a furniture factory, making tables and bookshelves.

SOURCE: Gulag: A History, by Anne Applebaum (Anchor Books, 2003), pp. 217-218

NKZone‘s Andrei Lankov picks up the story of the Siberian Gulag after the death of Stalin.

For the last few decades a visitor to Eastern Siberia can sometimes come across unusual logging camps: fenced off with barbed wire, they spo[r]t the telltale portraits of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. These are North Korean camps: from the late 1960s, the North Korean loggers have been working in Russia’s Far East.

In the 1960s, the timber shortage was felt both in North Korea and the USSR, but the reasons for this shortage were different. The Russians had plenty of forest, but lacked labour. When gulags were emptied after Stalin’s death, few people were willing to go to fell trees in remote corners of Siberia at their own will. The North Koreans had an abundance of cheap labour but almost no good timber. Thus, the idea of cooperation came naturally. In March 1967, when the relations between the two countries began to recover after a serious chill, a logging agreement was signed.

According to the agreement, the North Korean loggers were allowed to work at designated areas of the Russian Far East. They were housed in special labour camps, run by the North Korean administration. The produced timber was divided between the two sides: the Russians get 60 percent [property rights!] and Koreans 40 percent [labour!] of the total.

At their peak in the mid-1980s, the Far East joint logging projects employed over 20,000 North Korean workers. This means that some 0.5 percent of all North Korean able-bodied men laboured there.

This recalls one of the hoariest of Soviet-era jokes: “Under capitalism, man exploits man, while under socialism, it’s the other way round.”

South Korea-based blogger Oranckay has a long, rambling post on the history of the Chinese minority in South Korea.

South Korea had around 120,000 Chinese in the early seventies, now there are 22,000. There are many reasons as to why they’ve left though one of them is that most are from families that originate on mainland, whereas because of history (being in SK at the height of anti-Communism) they are all Taiwanese citizens, with the exception of the relatively few who managed too obtain Korean citizenship. Problem with Taiwanese citizenship is that you couldn’t go to the mainland all those years and if you obtain Korean citizenship you have to give up your previous citizenship and still would not be able to go to the mainland all those years (things have changed). So, a good option was emigrating to the US; you can obtain US citizenship without renouncing Taiwanese citizenship while still being able to travel to the family hometown on the mainland on your US passport.

(In major Californian cities [like Honolulu!] it is not difficult to find a Chinese restaurant with gimchi and jajangmyeon (Chinese food particular to Korea, like fortune cookies were developed by Chinese in California) or video stores with Chinese movies that have Korean subtitles, run by Chinese who have gone to the States and still do business with Koreans. Just last week in Seoul I met a Chinese man who introduced himself as being an American from Walnut Creek, California, “back” here to acquire more videos and see his old friends. We conversed in Korean, though probably because he already saw me speaking it with someone and I’ve no reason to doubt his English as an “American.” He said he’d been in the US 20+ years. His Korean was perfect and I wouldn’t have known about him had he not told me.)…

Perhaps because he was a protégé of the Japanese, the dictator Park Chung Hee was very harsh with the Chinese as well. Chinese who served in the ROK army during the war as interrogators of PRC POWs were denied their benefits. Park limited the Chinese to mostly running restaurants, and then – get this – enacted price limits on how much you could charge for jajangmyeon! For a long time they were not allowed to own their own land and businesses, and many lost everything when Korean friends who acted as proxy property owners turned around and claimed assets as their own….

(A friend from Busan who married a Canadian man and has never come back says she doesn’t know anyone from her Chinese high school in Busan who still lives in Korea. All the fellow Chinese she grew up with are gone, gone to immigrant countries like the US, Canada, and Australia as well as Chinese enclaves such as Hong Kong, Singapore, and of course Taiwan. Her 1st generation father wanted to go to the mainland so much he renounced his Taiwanese citizenship and defected to the PRC, even though her Korean mother renounced Korean citizenship and acquired Taiwanese citizenship when they married and has lived as an alien in her own land. Not uncommon in Busan it seems, that sense of just being here temporarily.)

I’ve seen relatively reasonable Koreans actually tell me that Park did a good thing by making Seoul virtually the only capital in the world without a full fledged Chinatown, “otherwise the Chinese would’ve taken over the Korean economy like they did in Southeast Asia” or something similar, believe it or not. Dictatorship has its advantages when someone else suffers, eh?…

So now Korea wants to bulldoze a whole neighborhood and build a Chinatown to attract investment and tourism, a “development project” largely initiated by Koreans? Maybe the idea looks impressive to Chinese investors from other countries but for those who’ve always been here it looks to me like something close to an insult and it comes way too late. Some Chinese might come and they might call it a “Chinatown” (‘차이나타운,’ [cha-i-na-ta-un] the loan word from English, like they do now for the one in Incheon) but that’s not what it will be in the traditional sense of the word in English as it will lack culture and history, and because Korea will only take “investors” and not the “immigrants” that would create a community in the area. But what kind of developer really wants that anyway?

via the Marmot

Butterflyblue has a fascinating post on Japanese surname trivia. Compared to China, and especially Korea, Japan has a huge number of surnames.

Compare these numbers: China only has about 500 surnames. Korea only has 249. Japan has about 120,000….

The possibility of the same kanji (Chinese character) having multiple readings makes it imperative when exchanging business cards in Japan to have a little dialogue about the pronunciations of the characters on the respective cards. For example, 熊谷 can be “Kumagaya,” “Kumagai,” “Kumatani,” or “Kumaya” (all meaning ‘Bearvalley’)! Here are some more examples Butterflyblue lists under Weird Names.

• 子子子　is pronounced “Nejiko” [Kinderkidson?]
• 林林 is pronounced “Rinbayashi” [Woodgrove?]. This is just crazy. You will notice they are the same character.
• 谷谷 is “Tanigaya” [Valleyvale?]. Again, they combined two readings for the same character.

Apparently, most Japanese didn’t have surnames until about 1875.

Some people at that time must have thought “soy sauce” [醤油 ‘shoyu’] and “tabacco” [煙草 ‘smoke grass’] made good names, I guess. Others went to the village chief or someone else they trusted and got themselves a name based usually on where they lived [in a rice field = Tanaka, in a forest = Morinaka, above the well = Inouye] or what they did for a living (“Watanabe” means “ferryman”; “Kodama” means “jeweller”).

I wasn’t aware that given names in olden times were often scatological.

Yes, in the Heian period and after, it was common to use “Kuso” in names, which means just what you think it means…. Names like “Kusoko” [Shitchild] and “Oguso” [Littleshit] were in vogue among the nobility [as well they should be!].

via Language Hat

Diversity-challenged South Korean opposition Grand National Party legislator Kim Choong-whan wants to legislate standard romanization for Korean names in English (and presumably other languages that use the latin alphabet). If he were serious, he would have first changed the spelling of his own name to Gim Chung-hwan (which google translates as Kim Insect Exchange).

What would Bak Jeong-hui think? This is an especially sensitive issue in Korea, whose citizens were forced to change their names under Japanese colonial rule.