A Riot Averted in Busan: Update
(Update: No rain, but no protest outside my apartment either. Can anyone confirm if anything happened in Seomyeon or not? Meanwhile, probably the hugest protest on the issue ever is being staged in Seoul tonight)
(Hat tip to Brian, whose post on it turned up on Bloglines before the one at KoreaBeat above did)
I did some digging around, and it turns out that the protestors weren’t only university students, nor did they just stroll over from the two campuses 800m down the road. According to this Korean article, they actually started in Seomyeon outside Judie’s Taehwa Department Store, where a candlelight vigil has been held every night since May.
( Source )
I had been wondering why all of the protestors eventually got up and left en masse in the opposite direction to which they’d come from, although the article doesn’t say where they went next. Apparently there’s another huge protest planned for tomorrow too, although I don’t know how that will pan out with the rain predicted.
I’ll be working unfortunately, so I won’t be able to do any more grass-roots, more (literally) in-focus reporting of it sorry. Hope I don’t get stuck in it walking home though.
P.S. To those of you unfamiliar with the city, Seomyeon is downtown, and that march would have been roughly 12km long.
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I’m afraid Brian is right. It increasingly looks like this is going to turn out badly. I don’t like to make predictions, but at minimum American beef is never coming to Korea and the FTA is dead.
Strange, but everybody always talks about having a little money saved up and having an escape route in mind in case things with North Korea turn really bad. You know, the neighboring country that tested a nuclear weapon last year? But never imagined anything like this happening on such a nation-wide scale.
Err, I’m not quite sure what you’re getting at?
What I mean is a lot of people have, in the back of their mind, a plan should something happen with the North. We are aware of the risks of living in East Asia, affluent though it is, and we generally consider North Korea to be the biggest risk we face here But it looks like the catastrophe that could really do some damage is not North Korea but American beef, a comparatively trivial thing many would say. (It makes a lot more sense in my head than it does on paper, sorry).