Category Archives: Korea

The New York Times reports on the low-key trial and sentencing of a U.S. Army deserter, flying beneath all the flak of the U.S. elections.

CAMP ZAMA, Japan, Nov. 3 – Charles Robert Jenkins, the Army sergeant who left his soldiers and walked into North Korea in 1965 to avoid combat duty in Vietnam, received a light sentence Wednesday after pleading guilty in a court-martial here to desertion and aiding the enemy.

After hearing bleak testimony about his harsh life in North Korea, an Army judge seemed to accept a defense lawyer’s argument that Sergeant Jenkins, 64, had “already suffered 40 years of confinement.” The judge, Col. Denise Vowell, then demoted him to private, stripped him of four decades of back pay and benefits, and gave him a dishonorable discharge and a 30-day jail sentence.

The prosecutor, Capt. Seth Cohen, had called for a tougher sentence, evoking, in a veiled way, the need for military discipline while American soldiers are fighting in Iraq. Referring to noncommissioned officers like Sergeant Jenkins, he said, “We can’t have soldiers going into the field fearing that their N.C.O.’s will abandon them, especially given the state of the world today.”

But the trial and sentencing seemed to reflect American political needs to mollify Japanese public opinion, which has been moved by the drama of the American defector from North Carolina and his Japanese wife, Hitomi Soga Jenkins, whom he met in North Korea a few years after North Korean agents had kidnapped her from a Japanese island in 1978.

Apparently to minimize American media attention, the one-day military trial took place as votes were being counted in the American presidential election.

I think this whole affair has been handled with an admirable mixture of punctiliousness and compassion.

Deprived of books, Sergeant Jenkins said he had so treasured a banned copy of the historical novel “Shogun” that he read it 20 times.

I’d say that’s punishment enough (with its hotel bar-influenced mediaeval Japanese). But perhaps he could be further sentenced to his wife’s hometown on Sado Island, off Niigata. “It is one of Japan’s largest minor islands and served as an exile place for important figures since mediaeval times.”

NKZone‘s Andrei Lankov’s latest article, Eating Away the Truth, in his “Another Korea” series for the Korea Times is about North Korea’s long-running famine.

Few people would doubt that the famine of 1996-2000 was the worst disaster in the history of post-war Korea. However, nobody knows for sure how many people lost their lives.

Stalinist states have never been famous for openness, and important statistical data in North Korea has been classified from the early 1960s. Officialdom always insisted that the North is a “socialist paradise” where nothing could possibly go wrong.

In the mid-1990s, the North Korean officialdom grudgingly changed the pattern. It gradually dawned on Pyongyang that complaints are necessary to attract donors….

In 2001, Goodkind and West, two researchers from the International Center of the U.S. Census Bureau published what is, perhaps, the most reliable estimate available. They used both data released by the North Korean government and materials obtained from the refugees. Their initial estimates range from 200,000 to 3,000,000. To narrow the range, they also used the indirect evidence, including some Chinese materials from the era of Mao-made famines, and the WFP studies of the North’s nutritional situation. This indirect data allowed them to conclude that the Great Famine took between 600,000 and 1,000,000 lives.

The 600,000 or 900,000 do not sound as dramatic as the oft-cited “two million.” But for a country with a population of some 23 million this is a huge number. Some 3-4 percent of the entire population perished in the disaster. For the U.S., it would be equivalent to wiping out some 10 million people–a far greater proportion than America lost in any war during the twentieth century. And the disaster was entirely man-made; the result of deliberate political decisions.

However, the outside world did not care much. The North Korean famine did not become the major news issue, and outside East Asia only a handful of people really took notice. This seemingly strange indifference reflected the silent but dramatic change in the perception of North Korea that took place in the 1990s. No major player in international politics wanted to attract too much public attention to the mistakes and crimes of the Pyongyang rulers. While people were dying, powers great and small were busy playing their political chess games.

Jodi of Asiapages has a couple of posts on gender role expectations in Korea (and Japan) and sexual practices in Pitcairn that are, in turn, discouraging and disturbing. First, Korea (and Japan):

Yesterday and last night, I was scolded to the point of tears for being too confident, too honest and not submissive enough. I was told that as a woman, I had to be quiet. If asked my opinion I should always say what the boss wants to hear, not what I honestly think….

The colleague spared me no mercy and went through every single culturally insensitive thing I have done during my first month on the job:

I was too honest when asked my opinion.

I was too confident when talking to my seniors.

I didn’t follow protocol….

It does amaze me that we are in the one department in the entire building that works with foreigners. This means we have constant interaction with investors from other countries, especially Americans. And yet, some Koreans cannot accept an American working among them. Sometimes I think I am at a disadvantage because I am Korean American and people only see the Korean part of me and therefore, are shocked at my true Americaness. I am convinced that if I were Caucasian, the expectations would be different. (But that is up for debate of course.)

Next, a quote from a witness at Pitcairn’s trial of the century.

“We all thought sex was like food on the table.”

— Mrs. Olive Christian, 48, wife of Pitcairn’s mayor, describing her introduction to sex as a young girl as part of her defense against the sexual abuse accusations brought against half the male population of Pitcairn Island …

These statements were made by Pitcairn women to the media in defense of the accusations brought against the island’s men. They are arguing that sex at a young age was a very casual, acceptable, normal part of life on the island and that claims of rape were really just part of the island’s unique culture.