The Marmot’s Hole has a reposting of a statistical comparison of NK and SK’s relative military strengths. Short answer: SK could probably handle them on their own, but the damage could be bad if they don’t respond to NK aggression quickly and competently. Even still, any conflict would be over in a matter of days. Most of SK’s ships, tanks, and planes, are capable of destroying their NK counterparts before NK even knows they’re there.

And the NY Times has a piece on why China remains North Korea’s ally, even through all its embarrassments and immaturities; basically, China has a difficult decision of whether it wants a nuclear NK or a collapsing NK, and “nuclear” works out better for China. Too bad for anti-proliferation! It was a nice idea.

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Ask a Korean, a blog that you should be reading if you live in this crazy country, answers the question of whether or not SK is a safe place to be, what with the North rattling sabres all the dang time. Short answer: yes. A lot of his reasoning concurs with my post from a few weeks ago - they don’t have the resources for an invasion, there’s no way they could beat SK (especially when combined with the US); they basically couldn’t do anything except get off a brief, damaging bombardment before SK and US guns flattened them. But he brings up very interesting point - North Korea couldn’t handle the South even if they willingly bowed down before the august reign of Kim Jong Il. Unfortunately, the article cited is entirely in Korean, so I’m going to have to guess.

I remember reading that many South Koreans (especially younger ones) no longer want reunification. (Actually saying so is politically not very acceptable, like saying that marijuana should be legalized in America, even if a majority thinks so.) The reason: economic devastation. The South has pulled itself up by its bootstraps to get where it is today, and I believe they are aware of the fragility of their wealth. A country with almost no resources and very little arable land has little on which to fall should there be a global decrease in demand for cars, flat screen TVs, and supertankers. The financial crises of 1998 and 2002 show how responsive the economy is to the lightest blows; one blow it could not absorb would be an influx of ten million relatively unskilled laborers. How could they feed these people? House them? Find employment for generations of people essentially ruined by Kim Jong Il’s regime, left unfit for any sort of employment in a robust capitalist environment? Never mind the psychological trauma; the economic trauma of absorbing all these refugees would be unsustainable to the Korean economy.
Then there would be the process of disarmament, which would take years. The North has over a million soldiers who would need new jobs.
Imagine the land rush. Land in South Korea is extremely expensive. It’s one of the most overcrowded countries in the world. The North, in comparison, is undeveloped, a wilderness. Developers rushing to snatch up the resources and farmland would be chaotic beyond imagining, opening up opportunities for corruption and abuse that would make Roh’s alleged bribes look like peanuts in comparison.

Now, put the military knee-high boot on the other foot, and imagine the North, which has a fifth of the South’s population and a tenth of its technical sophistication, trying to rule fifty million North Koreans. Keep in mind, too, that South Koreans can barely rule South Korea. (I won’t try to count the riots, protests, and fistfights at the National Assembly that have happened in my two and a half years here.) It would be the kind of fiasco that we might find laughable, if sixty million lives weren’t caught in it. The conquered people would have to educate their conquerors on how to use, say, the Internet, or modern global banking, or how to make supertankers and fly F-15s. Then, too, they would have 650,000 South Korean troops to decommission, along with SK battleships and tanks far beyond their comprehension. An example only slightly exaggerated might be Mongol warriors trying to run New York City.

And the political reeducation would be a farce for the ages. Communism has only gained power when acting against an entrenched, corrupt regime (usually monarchal, though in NK’s case, occupational). There has never been a case of people throwing off capitalism to embrace Communism; SK is nothing if not the triumph of capitalism. It would be a hard sell to get these people to trade their state-of-the-art handphones for Dear Leader pins. The NK forces would be confronted with the undeniable victory of the free market, the skyscrapers, the incredible wealth available to every SK citizen (even the poorest is wealthy compared to a Nork), and discontent would give way to the collapse of Communism. Perversely, NK can only keep its soldiers Communist as long as it keeps them in the country. Give them a glimpse of PC bangs and Hite beer and choco pies, and capitalism will bloom. That’s how we beat the Soviets! Their steel-clad ideology was powerless against the temptation of McDonald’s.
Kim Jong Il understands this; he’s not entirely insane yet; that’s why we’re safe, for now.

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Hell, yes, I want to eat deer antler!

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I’m not the sort of guy who likes to make broad generalizations about any culture without first saying how I don’t like to do it - so now that’s out of the way, here we go!
What’s up with Korean workmanship? It’s baffling. These people make very fine supertankers and mp3 players and economy cars, but in construction, quality is all over the place. Often one encounters maddening and bizarre cases where a minimum concession is made to necessity, and a maximum to laziness and getting the job done in as quick a way as possible, never mind how it looks (or functions).

In our first Korean apartment, back in Daegu, they installed the air conditioner exhaust hose, from which condensation drips, by breaking the window. They just smashed out a corner of the pane, snaked the hose through, and taped up the rest in a half-assed way. Mosquitoes leaked in through the gap, and cold air leaked out. In our last place, here in Mokpo, the bathtub was sealed improperly, and it leaked every time we showered. The balcony doors didn’t seal - no problem with the doors, though, it was the very foundation of the building that was crooked. At my insistence, the handyman drilled the sliding screen doors into place, blocking out mosquitoes, but preventing us from ever opening the screen. Our hot water heater constantly conked out; after many complaints, the maintenance guys finally condescended to come and give the filaments a good scraping with a pair of needlenose pliars, fixing the problem for at least a week and a half.

Now, certainly Korea has a valid excuse for this sort of thing. The aforementioned trauma of the 20th century aside, they’ve only been industrialized for fifty or sixty years, or about two generations. In 1950, most of them lived in shacks, huts, or wooden houses, where such, shall we say, temporary repairs might have been acceptable. But this “good enough” spirit just doesn’t cut it an age when everyone lives in fifteen-story apartment buildings.

When we moved into our current place, we noted some problems with our gas range and kitchen cabinets. The cabinet was too close to the range, so the side of it was blackened and peeling. It was also too close to the wall, so it pinched the hose for the gas range against the wall, holding the hose at such an angle that the hose sometimes dipped perilously close to the open flame. I believe life should be lived at the edge, and this existential hazard gave me a little thrill every time I fried eggs, but Randi is of a steadier temperament, and did not appreciate living under the looming spectre of devastating explosions. For some reason.

A few weeks of complaining got an apartment guy to come see it, who told us that he could do nothing with the hose, as it was the gas company’s business; a gas man came, and told us he could do nothing because of the cabinet blocking it; the cabinet belongs to the apartment. Today we had a visit from the people empowered to move the cabinet. It only needed to go a few inches away from the wall to allow access to the hose.

The ajumma (middle-aged woman who wears a visor) pondered the problem, in pondering pose, hands on hips. Then, when my back was turned, she grabbed a peanut butter-smeared knife from the sink and hacked away the glue holding the cabinet to the sill behind the range. I offered a saw so she might not ruin the kitchen knife, but she merrily declined. Then she had me empty the contents of the cabinet, covering the dining table and ruining that room of the house unusable for the nonce. The repairman arrived, power drill in hand, and the real work began.

At first, the ajumma walked around the house, looking for another suitable place to site the cabinet; I stopped her when she suggested we put it on the balcony, on the other end of the house, where my exercise bike is. (Where would the bike go? Behind the refrigerator?) I didn’t relish the idea of walking through the dining room and living room, and opening the patio doors (which stick) every time I want a spoonful of mustard (which is often). In the pantry, then, where the oven is, and put the oven in the bathroom. No, thank you. Please just move it a few inches out from the wall to unpinch the hose, and an inch or two to the left to remove it from the heat of the stove. Simple.

So they did! Problem solved. Thank you for your help.

And then they disassembled the cabinet, removing the two top cabinets from the bottom one, giving us two cabinets - one three feet tall, with no top surface, the contents exposed from above - and then another section about five feet tall that would go where the oven is. The oven would go on top of that one. And what about that expensive and totally functional oven shelf? Who cares? Why was this arrangement better than leaving the cabinet in one piece? They mused for a while, hands on hips, then realized that now we had access to the gas shut-off knob, which we didn’t before. Much better.

So much better.

When the repairman got out his tape measure to prepare a new top for the first cabinet section - after first seeing if our now-displaced wooden floor grate from the pantry would fit (it didn’t) - I knew I had to speak up. I explained in my pidgin Korean that we didn’t use the knob before and didn’t need it - what we did need was our cabinet in one piece. “Can you please reassemble it in this new location, a few inches from the old? That would solve every problem at once, easily.” “Oh, sure, we can do that. On Monday, at 6:00. See you then!”
“Wait! Why can’t you do it now?”
The ajumma had a good laugh, and I asked again. Finally, she gestured at the repairman, and said, in Korean, sotto voce, “He’s stupid!”
Ahhhhhhhhhhhh. Of course. All becomes clear now.

And they left. Our cabinet is in two pieces, our oven is unusable, on top of the cabinet, and our foodstuffs are all over the kitchen. Until Monday. Then everything will be fixed.

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With the first copycat suicide after the late president’s, now seems as good a time as ever to discuss Korea’s suicide problem.
In case you’re too lazy to click that link, the facts are these: a 23 year-old college student hung herself, saying that she was following former President Roh’s example. Roh, of course, jumped off a cliff last week after a corruption probe dragged his name through the dirt, incarcerated his family members, and aggravated his already poor health. We’ll come back to that.

Korea’s suicide problem isn’t merely bad; it’s approaching chronic. Korea’s got the highest rate among the OECD, and the third highest in the developed world (sometimes Finland edges it down to the fourth, depending on the year), behind Russia and Japan. Suicide is the fourth-highest cause of death in this country. I have friends here who once found a dead body while hiking, and in the past month, at least two students in this province killed themselves over difficulties at school. Last year, after popular actress Choi Jin-Sil killed herself, a rash of celebrity suicides followed; five or six more killed themselves in the following month, one singer by burning himself in his car. This rippled throughout the country, too, and rates rose for the rest of the year; the hotline Lifeline Korea reported a much higher volume of calls.
Then, earlier this year, actress Jang Ja-yeon killed herself after suffering sexual abuse at the hands of her TV producers. She named names in her suicide note, and legal action followed.
And, finally, last week the former president killed himself.

What creates this culture where suicide is acceptable?
It is acceptable. There are online forums where people discuss how and why they want to commit suicide; 59% of Korean teens consider suicide, and 11% have attempted it. The government rewarded Roh’s suicide by calling off the investigation, giving their tacit approval to his death by showing that suicide does get your family or reputation out of trouble. Roh put his own stamp of approval on suicide as a problem-solver, as does every other star or politician who kills himself.

History!
Korea, you know, has a rigid Confucianist background. All society was ordered according to obligations to country and family. It’s much less rigid today, but still evident. At any sort of staff meeting, it’s always the women making coffee for the men; old men are routinely let off the hook for horrible crimes because of this deep-seated respect for elders. So it’s no surprise that matters of familial duty and honor trump personal well-being. It’s the same pressure that leads to Japan’s more popular tradition of seppuku; “You have disgraced your family! There is only one way to restore honor!”
But compounding this is the subtler notion of “kibun”, something like the Korean counterpart of self-esteem. It can also be translated as “face” - dignity and pride (but not vanity), both inward and outward. One must maintain one’s own kibun and avoid damaging that of others - the problem is that it is easy to damage others’ kibun. Interactions of which Westerners would think nothing can be damaging to a Korean’s kibun - things like small impolitenesses (not bowing properly or frequently enough, or to the wrong people), social snubs (”I don’t want to eat lunch with you, I just want to be alone for a little while”), or winning an argument. Blatant offenses are even more damaging. When kibun is damaged, it can take some time to regenerate. So when, say, Jang Ja-Yeon was forced to have sex with her bosses, she may not have been able to conceive that her kibun could recover from such a blow. When Roh was investigated, he lost face (almost completely). In America, we encourage a sense of self-worth derived from our own opinion of ourselves - “Who cares what someone else thinks about you?” In Confucianist Korea, that idea is much, much weaker. Choi Jin-sil killed herself after intense Internet hate sparked by her former lover’s suicide. I’m not saying that Koreans have a poor sense of self-esteem, only that they are more susceptible to letting their self-esteem be influenced by external rather than internal forces.
Furthermore, the Confucist ethic requires harmony in all things. Koreans don’t want to be different. They’re proud of their 99% ethnic Korean population; they drive white and black cars, with a very occasional red one. There are only a few brands of milk, juice, beer. They all drink soju, even though no one can actually like the stuff. They like to do things together. This sounds glib; what I mean, though, is that they respond easily to peer pressure. If someone else does something, it’s okay.

Deeper into history!
It’s no secret that Korea had a twentieth century that experts might liberally describe as “fucked.” They suffered through forty years of the worst brutality inthe Japanese occupation, then a traumatic civil war, then forty years of military dictatorship marked by oppression, sometimes bloody, and a rocketship-ride to industrialization the whole time. Fifty years ago, this country was rice paddies and the occasional railroad. Now it is Seoul, with its 23 million people and fourteen subway lines, and state-of-the-art handphones, flatscreen TVs on every surface, and wealth never dreamt of. Giddy with this modern state, the country has never really worked through the severe trauma of the past century. One can see how this tumultuous past could be disaffecting.
And then there’s the pressure cooker of the Korean education system, which is a topic for another post. Suffice to say it is often literally murderous. Suicide rates peak around the time of high school exams. Exams here determine the course of one’s life; teenagers are not built to handle that kind of pressure. Reform is desperately needed on this front.

And, finally, there’s the poor treatment given to those with mental illnesses, including victims of depression and substance abuse. It’s still considered a subject of shame to suffer from depression here, and the number and training of psychiatrists is below standard for a nation with this human development index. Jang Ja-Yeon expressed frustration with her inadequate psychiatric care. Most don’t receive it. I know that at my school, and most schools, mentally handicapped children are mixed with the general population. There aren’t enough teachers to tend to them, and they don’t receive much additional training. This is indicative of Korea not coming to grasp with the problem of people with different mental abilities.

The Korean government could address the problem by … addressing the problem. They’ve been quiet about it, saying little to nothing to discourage people from killing themselves. This is a burgeoning problem, and it will worsen - the last PRESIDENT just killed himself, for crying out loud! The government needs to tackle this problem immediately; they need to set up hotlines; they need to encourage depressed people to seek counseling, and they need to improve the quality and availability of that counseling. (Unfortunately, the Lee Myung-Bak administration is not known for its compassion or civic sensitivity - they are the embodiment of what one candidate means when he calls another “out of touch”.) Most of all, they need to overhaul the ineffective and deleterious public education system, or they’ll be cutting teenagers down from trees and shower curtain rods for some time to come.

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Two American journalists are being held in North Korea, and will receive a sentence soon. I don’t have any illusions that they are receiving anything like a fair trial, and the North has made too big a deal out of this to let them go. They’ll likely destroy their lives by sending them to one of their horrific slave camps and claim a great victory against the imperialist US.

It’s a difficult situation, and the US government has remained silent. That’s understandable; the women did enter the country illegally (though they certainly weren’t “spying” or “conspiring to commit harmful acts”). Does that mean our government’s hands are tied? Apparently. The US has “expressed concern” and is working with Chinese officials to secure their release - but the journalists are still going to trial. It’s probable, too, that the US is more concerned with NK’s nuclear ambitions and warmongering, and feels demanding the journalists’ release would compromise those goals. The devil of it is that NK could send them to prison for the rest of their lives 100% “legally”.

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He’s conducting MORE missile tests from BOTH coasts soon.

And it looks like he’s named a successor. That’s something one does when one feels the icy hand of death on one’s neck, n’est-ce pas?

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(I’m blogging about a wider variety of topics here. Why? Because I have thoughts, important thoughts that pulse like futuristic land mines in my cerebral topsoil, and I want the legs of your perception blown off by them.)

(For those of you who read my blog but don’t me personally - movie stars, exiled chamberlains, stockbrokers, circus acrobats, hiphop producers, caravan guides, mutant subhumans, defrocked monks - you should know that I live and work in Mokpo, South Korea. So I will write about South Korea more often than, say, a resident of Suriname would.)
(Suriname has an interesting history.)

I read the news and a variety of Korean blogs every morning while I eat my breakfast, just after my daily regimen of three thousand sit-ups, and I’ve noticed that North Korea’s been making an awful lot of noise lately. First they tested a nuke - okay, no big deal, they’ve done that before.

They followed this up by declaring that the truce ending the Korean War is “off” and that they would no longer be able to “guarantee the safety” of SK and US ships in or around their waters. (I love that phrasing. It implies they’re hard at work rescuing shipwrecked American sailors, or fighting off sharks or pirates. Their actual track record is not so fun.)

Then the ruthless murder of local fish populations via short and mid-range missiles, Kim Jong-Il accusing the US of preparing an invasion, and we have quite the exciting week. But I’m not worried, and it’s for reasons beside my personal radiation-born invulnerability.

The North Korean military leaders live on an elaborate fiction; their power depends on them never actually exercising it. Yes, they have the fourth biggest army in the world (behind China, US, and India), and definitely the largest per capita; almost one in ten Norks bear arms. Yes, their soldiers are fanatically eager to drown us capitalist pig-dogs in their blood, smother us with their corpses, etc. If you’ve seen their military parades, then you probably get the same chill as from a Nazi rally. These guys are seriously scary.

But they won’t attack. Kim Jong-Il and his inner circle have it too good. They have the run of their shitty little country, with its terrible weather and its appalling concentration camps and its persimmons and its total dearth of culture or human warmth; they have money, power, wine, women. I can’t remember on which blog I read this, but someone pointed out that the US and SK know the locations of their mansions and holiday resorts, and they know we know it, and the Norks know the accuracy of US-made cruise missiles. Serious aggression would meet with instant and devastating retaliation. The North would find itself in a war they could not win, with an increasingly pissed off populace; the only way the military could hope to retain its power would be to take KJI out of office via a coup (which would have even messier repercussions down the line, but in the meantime might be the best thing for the country).
My point is, once the North Korean military is put to use, it would spell the end of the regime. The wild card is whether the generals and KJI are smart enough, or sane enough, to understand this. That they haven’t attacked yet implies so.

(Why wouldn’t they win, especially when they almost stomped the South fifty years ago? Many, many reasons, but quickly:

1. Now we’re ready for them. Last time, they attacked by surprise, when most of SK’s soldiers were on vacation, and the US had little presence at all. Now the US has 28,000 soldiers here [and 60,000 more in Japan], and the South has 650,000. They are well trained and ready for action.
2. They don’t have the resources to sustain a campaign. They don’t have the fuel or ammunition or funds for any kind of prolonged action.
3. Their military - the soldiers have poor training, poor equipment, and very, very little experience. SK soldiers have fought in Iraq, Afghanistan, off the shores of Somalia, and trained extensively with US forces. And US forces, without any sort of patriotic exaggeration, are really, quite seriously, among the best in the world. We’re losing the Iraq war and lost Vietnam because those are asymmetric conflicts. Against NK, it would be a brutal and speedy conflict.
4. Their allies - Russia isn’t Communist any more, and China barely is. The Chinese turned the tide of the last war, but now their commercial relationships with SK and the US are worth much more to them than any idealistic ties to the North. Neither of these states is truly Communist, and they’ve got nothing in common beyond the nominal level. China was quite embarassed by the last nuke test.)

So why the noise? I think KJI’s dying. It’s almost certain that he suffered a stroke last fall, and recent pictures do not have him looking good. Compare his tubby old self to his now jowly, grey-haired corpus, and it’s plain to see that he is not in good health. The most recent batch of PR photos from the North show him at the dedication of a swimming pool; he’s barely propping himself up with the poolside ladder. It’s sad. So he concocts a misdirection, he rattles his sabres to get the attention away from his obviously failing health, he makes noise. His ships lob a few shells at some empty patches of ocean, his artillery splinters a few South Korean trees, and he can tell his people how he repelled the imperialists, and chase away the generals and heirs hovering vulturelike over his bedside, for another day.

I’m not 100% certain that KJI’s death will be the best thing for NK - as Saddam’s downfall showed us, a stable tyranny is desirable compared to anarchy - but it certainly would be a good thing.

What’s the danger? If KJI truly lost his mind and launched a full-scale attack, and the generals did not remove him from power, then all he could do would be to hammer the South with short-range conventional cruise missiles while stacking up North Korean bodies along the DMZ. Naval and air attacks would be repulsed with almost no damage to SK and US forces; their ships and planes are simply too outdated, and the crews untrained; they don’t have enough fuel to train their pilots. A ground assault would cause a good amount of destruction, with his million suicide troops, but the allies would hold them at the DMZ. They would certainly never make it as far as Seoul.
There would be instant diplomatic pressure from not only the UN et al, but also from their “allies” China and Russia. (The quotes indicate nominal allies - they don’t have any kind of mutual protection pact, because China and Russia aren’t batshit insane.) There would be fighter-bombers blowing holes in Pyeongyang 24/7, as well as cruise missiles from US and SK battleships pounding their military installations. It would be the end of the country as a sovereign entity. The best NK could hope for would be a lot of South Koreans dead from cruise missiles and along the DMZ.
Something like this might happen, regardless, if NK keeps rattling that sabre. Lee Myung-bak (South Korea’s George W. Bush) is pissed off right now. He’s never been known for his patience with the North, and he has something of a domestic crisis with former President Roh’s recent, awful suicide. A little shock and awe might direct public attention away from his own dire unpopularity, as well as make him feel better. Neo-cons aren’t known for their forebearance with dictators.

I don’t want a war, even a quick, victorious one. I just want some missiles to explode a few unpopulated mountains and bits of ocean so the government will get scared and close schools for a week, and I can stay home and play video games.

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