Yeah, but note that I was talking about Jeju people in terms of migration to Japan. Jeolla people, I read, were more up in Seoul and then back to Jeolla when things didn’t work out. As for things being relatively okay now, hmmm. I think they’re better, but I also think a lot of people (especially around age 40 and up) still feel it’s okay to imply Jeolla people are all commies, especially in Gyeongsang province. A lot of doctors think it’s harder for a Jeolla doctor to get a residency in a decent hospital in Seoul than it is for doctors from other regions. One reason my fiancee went with a Catholic organization was their strong reputation for being non-biased in this way. But she did fine despite being from Jeolla, and was even offered an excellent residency.

Yeah, Gyeongsang and Jeolla are worlds apart, Foreigners I know who have lived for a long time in both places have found Gyeongsang to be much more wealthy and uptight — one guy even called it a police state, though I think he was exaggerating a lot — while Jeolla is comparatively much poorer, but with way better food, nicer people, and more relative chaos (freedom).

The historical decisions wasn’t so much to focus development in the Southeast as it was to ignore the Southwest as completely as possible. They just got a proper direct highway (the Honam Expressway) just prior to my coming here, 5 years ago… before that, the 2.5 hour drive from Jeonju to Seoul was 4+ hours long, I’m told. Jeolla people were so happy when Kim Dae Jung got in, though, partly just because it’d be a Southwesterner (one of their own) who could plunder and railroad economic development to Jeolla for a while.

Jeolla people also seem to perceive — rightly or wrongly or somewhere in between — that Gyeongsang people have it out for them. The rivalry thing… man, it blows my mind how far back that goes. Chinhan, Mahan, Pyonhan… if the rest of the world were that viciously regional on a consistently long timescale, how would we avoid all-out constant world war?

Zainichi Koreans… Interesting. There’s a Zainichi Korean gangster in the story I recently sold to Machine of Death. A side character, not the main one.

On Korean emigration to Japan, if you haven’t seen the (much-derided, but fascinating) film 청연, it’s worth a watch, and I mention this because you won’t hear that much from Koreans and the film may or may not have hit your radar, what with the occupation of your lovely little bundle of wonder. (The film flopped in Korea, which is usually a sign of a good and unusual film.) Really interesting depiction of one Korean emigrant to Japan during the colonial period, and Koreans’ reaction to her, and one in which Japanese aren’t all presented as monsters, yet in which monstrous racism also occurs. The contemporary reaction to the film — netizens ranting about a Korean historical woman who actually did relatively well for herself in Japan, how dare she — seemed to turn people off and help boost the popularity of the somewhat less-interesting 왕의남자. The modern depiction of, and reaction to, this Korean emigration to Japan, which anyone would argue is a smart move for the woman involved and actually gives her opportunities she wouldn’t have had in Korea, is really interesting. Doomed, here, right now, but interesting.

Sorry I mixed up your blog with someone else’s. I think maybe you linked somewhere where it happened to be mentioned on another page, or something.

http://www.unesco.or.kr/kor/publications/1_1.html

It’s interesting that you mention the discrimination Jeolla people faced in Seoul was so bad that some of them went to Japan instead. A few years ago, I did a paper on Korean “Zainichi” there http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zainichi , learning a lot about the construction of Japanese identity in the process, and while things are relatively okay now Koreans there faced a LOT of discrimination until the ’90s. Things would have to pretty bad in Seoul if they considered Japan a better option!

Living in Gyeongsang since I came to Korea, I of course know about the Gyeongsang-Jeolla rivalry, and I mention that they were 3 seperate kingdoms in this post, but I get the impression that a great deal of it comes from the decision to bypass Jeolla and focus Korea’s development on the Southeast. England, for example, had its multiple warring kingdoms too, but while of course regionalism remains its nothing like it is in Korea, despite its small size.

I didn’t mention the movie May 18 sorry, must be another blog, but while I’m glad it wasn’t at all anti-American, despite its great potential to be so, I get the impression from this post http://www.radicalcontrapositions.com/left_flank/2007/07/27/a-sanitized-political-drama/ that its more of a extended Korean drama than something Koreans can actually learn something from, especially Korean under 40-year olds who have been brought up learning the massacre was all America’s fault. So I won’t be bothering to watch it.

Ooops, sorry, that’s called “Splendid Holiday.” Am I confusing movies? Which one is May 18? Sorry, being stuck at home with my daughter for over a year now, I’ve lost track of them.

I have students in Bucheon, and at a relatively good university too, who still lament not getting into their first choice of Uni, which is, of course, a SKY uni. At the same time, I’ve heard that admission to SKY schools doesn’t guarantee functional study there. One woman who did her BA in Jeonbuk and her MA at Seoul Uni claimed she couldn’t get a student card for the first year, and when she inquired repeatedly, finally was told, “It’s not like you did your BA here, honey.” (The Korean equivalent, mind you.)

There’s probably a lot more to look at as far as alternative emigration patterns in the earlier parts of the century. Southward migration during Japanese colonial rule — what was that like? I imagine as times got tighter, people would have gravitated toward Seoul. I’ve also heard that surprising numbers of Jeju people emigrated to Japan because while they were subject to discrimination there, it held more opportunities for them than Seoul was willing to for Jeju people.

Jeolla Province would also be an interesting, and probably different, case. I don’t know where I read it, but I’ve heard that a lot of people from Jeolla who go to Seoul never really got a fair break in the old days, when dialect was less smoothed out by mass media, and that a lot of people actually gravitated back to Jeolla. I get the sense it’s a little different now, but after seeing the film “May 18,” my (Jeonju native) fiancée and I discussed bigotry against both Jeolla people and also Kwangju people. It’s still around enough for her to be a tiny bit bitter at it, and to occasionally challenge people on nasty statements about folks from those areas.

[The mind-blowing bit of the conversation was about how Chun Du-hwan got out of his death-sentence, his current status, all of which I knew about vaguely, but couldn't remember and still know too little about, and also about the comic book Kangfull wrote about an imagined assassination attempt. (Which is news to me and exciting me enough to start wanting to study Korean and try to read it. Surely it would be more interesting than 순정만화, funny as that book is...)

For the record, since I think you mentioned it recently, the film I mean, I found Peppermint Candy more interesting than May 18 as an examination of where the evil done on May 18 emanated from. The soldiers in the new film were just bloodthirsty maniacs, while in Peppermint Candy, you see how they were badly trained, ill-prepared, willfully deceived kids sent to shoot some Communists, and how badly some of these guys' lives must have been screwed up -- as well as the horror of what happened to the civilians -- just so a corrupt c*cksucker like Chun could hold on to power.]

Ann, I’m a gentleman, and will stick to my word! You’re doing the TOPIK test right? If I don’t see you before then, I’ll meet you there and lets celebrate afterwards.

Gordseller, you must be an avid fan if you can recognise Slant from THAT picture! Indeed it is: I’ll talk more about it on your site after I type this up.

I read the rest of your comment as I was going to bed last night, and I must say it took the wind out of my sails a little…I thought I was making a profound and deep point, but then what country DOESN’T have concentric rings of power? Rings of power world views with rings of power around Seoul…a nice phrase, but a rather facile connection really.

But after tossing and turning a while (damn coffee!) I realised that I meant that, although I’m not sure if I actually wrote this (can’t bear to go over the post again yet sorry), since the Korean War the whole of South Korea has literally been on the move towards Seoul, of course for work and a better standard of life like in every country sure, but I’ve read sooo many books about parents sending their kids to live for their whole childhoods with relatives in Seoul in the 1960s and earlier, all for the sake of the better schools. I seriously think that Seoul’s present population of 22-23 million, out of 49 for Korea as a whole, would not be as big without Korea’s hierarchial views of education.

By coincidence, in some of my 재수 listening classes a question came up where the guy only saw his girlfriend on weekends (the question was about what train he was catching to meet her), and it reminded me of how common 주말부부 (literally “weekend married couples”)are here, families where the family all lives together in Seoul originally say, but the father is transferred to Busan. Instead of (ultimately) following him like most Western families would, the guy might work M-F there for 5-10 years or even more, going back up to Seoul on weekends (that’s why Koreans loooove the KTX so much). Many of my ex-students in companies do this themselves, and many of my present students’ fathers too: the rate may be as high as 5-10% of all families.

Of course Korean jobs for life for men before 1997 had a great role to play in this, employees not really having the option of quiting and finding other work rather than following the company’s orders and transferring. But I think if the schools weren’t so good in Seoul, then OF COURSE Korean families would follow their husbands and fathers - What other reasons are there to stay? Seoul has one of the worst climates in Korea, its polluted and expensive, and Koreans are human too and want to be with each other. Again, Koreans are used to it, but I don’t think Koreans realise what a huge impact this has on family life…personally, I don’t consider 주말부부s to have normal family relations at all.

I have a journal article on the subject, I’ll dig it out of the bedroom tomorrow when my daughter’s up. I know the same happens in Japan. I’m curious about Taiwan, although I expect it to be the same.

As for tangential… that’s a copy of Greg Bear’s Slant in your reading pile, isn’t it? Are you an SF-reader? :)

As for concentric rings of power emanating from a center, I have to say that while it’s MORE pronounced in East Asian cultures, or maybe just monarchic ones in general, peripherality is also a major defining factor in Western life, isn’t it? It’s surely a major deal in Canadian politics, where the country itself is peripheral of the big power to the south, and then being outside Toronto/Ottawa is further peripheralization, and being outside the cities in the prairie is the most peripheral of all — especially, say, on the aboriginal reservations. The interesting difference is that while in, say, Saskatchewan, you can flee the periphery by going to Montreal, Toronto, New York, Shanghai, hell, South Korea — and one may flee the periphery into another periphery, without any clear strategy for “rising” hierarchically, it’s different in South Korea. Ascending seems to be implicitly assumed important — all the hiersrchy-reinforcing adds to “culture” here, with students in classes knowing their exact rank and wishing to rise higher within the class as a unit, for example — and of course for tons of reasons, Korea itself is peripheral but in a way that’s less escapable. Being peripheral in Canada of Australia, one may choose Toronto, Vancouver, or Sydney or Melbourne, OR one may choose Beijing, or Busan, or Paris, or Montana, or wherever the hell… but being peripheral in Korea, where are you going to go? Mostly, just Seoul.

I like this blog!