The Grand Narrative

(Source)

Don’t worry, I’m not going to rail against the Wondergirls again. But whatever you make of what I’ve said about their clothes and dancing in previous advertisements of theirs, once you hear about their less than stellar academic achievements you can’t help but laugh at them being used as ambassadors for Korean education.

Man, what will they be used for next? The Wondergirls phenomenon has got to stop!

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Well, you already knew that Alice was a girl, but then if she doesn’t get you smiling this Sunday morning, then nothing will.

But here’s an ultrasound of her 16 week-old sibling, which the doctor has just told us he’s 90% sure is a girl. Click on the picture for a much bigger image.

At the moment we’re thinking of calling her “Elizabeth Jeong Turnbull”, after my sister’s middle name. What do people think? As I explain here, her first name has to be English ( “Jeong” is my wife’s family name), and I’m a big fan of long, elegant and/or dignified Christian names that can’t be shortened easily. Of course, Elizabeth can easily be shortened to “Liz”, but I’m gambling that she’ll still prefer Elizabeth herself.

Still, my wife and I are still very open to other suggestions. Having said that, anyone that comes up with “Hannah” will be severely punished for their lack of originality…!

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I’m probably over-analysing it when I say that, to me, this recent ad of Kim Tae-Hee’s (김태희) is another example of a distinctive “2000s” style, but then that would hardly be a first for me:

(Found via Mongdori)

I’ve been humming it for days now. Here’s a recent song that it immediately reminded me of:

I like both despite myself. Bob Dylan or Tracy Chapman probably wouldn’t approve, and 10 years ago an ex-Sandinista guerilla lecturer of mine didn’t think much of Barbie Girl either, but then us Generation Xers will take what shared icons and sources of identity we can thank you very much.

So too, will Generation Y Koreans.  No matter what I say about the Wondergirls, I’ll be the first to admit that the popularity of “Tell Me” is primarily because it’s just so difficult to shake the (not all that bad) rhythm out your head. Hell, our 15 year-old students will probably still be singing and dancing to it at 노래방s in 2038:

As will I be of the aptly-named “Can’t Get You Out of my Head” by Kylie Minogue, which followed me on computers all around Malaysia on my 2 week trip there in 2002. The song is haunting enough in its own right, but has special meaning to me as a personal symbol of globalisation:

Admit it, you’re humming along to at least one of those videos by now…

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(Number 5 of 7 Pictures of the Wondergirls on this Chinese porn site, found a whole three minutes after typing “Wondergirls” into Yahoo Image Search. Sorry to those of you who have regrets about the picture suddenly appearing on the screen in front of all of your students and colleagues, but, as you shall see, that you have those regrets at all neatly demonstrates one of the points I’ll be making!)

This post is a direct response to the second comment left by Chris in my last post on the Wondergirls. While I still think that he has deeply mistaken views about the Wondergirls and the issues they raise, I also think that a great number of people probably share them, and so it is worth me devoting a post to specifically addressing some (though not all) of his points, rather than losing my arguments at the end of a long line of comments that few people would bother scrolling through again.

Before I do, I must apologise in advance to Chris if highlighting what he said word for word here feels like a personal attack on him. But I don’t know how to avoid that.

Look More Closely

Fortunately for the sake of warming up readers up, we can start with something simple:

James, I don’t know how to convince you of Daegu high school girls’ clothing habits, but when out downtown on a weekend you can’t walk 10 feet without seeing a young woman who is obviously under 18, wearing high heels and/or a short skirt. Even when we took our high school students to the Busan Aquarium for a field trip, my very own students dressed much the same as some of the WG. You’re just going to have to trust me on this one.

This may sounds facetious, but I’m afraid that I really don’t think I can be convinced without photographic evidence.

I’ve put both videos up again below to stop people have to scroll between posts: in the first video certainly, the quasi-uniforms that a couple of the girls are wearing would be a strange sight in real-life. but are still within the boundaries of appropriateness and good taste. I never actually said that they weren’t. I don’t think many school students are wearing shorts as high as those orange ones between 0:14 and 0:17 though, but I’m willing to concede that there may be some, although I’ve never seen any myself.

But none of those observations apply at all to the second ad:

To paraphrase Bulgasari, bizarrely, if the ad to encourage voting was indeed re-fashioned to sell teenage sex instead, then the ad wouldn’t need to be changed much visually. To mention its features in order of least suggestive to the most, there are: none of the shirts being tucked in; two of the girls wearing suggestions of waistcoats, one of which is more akin to a crop-top considering it starts just underneath her breasts; and that one looks to be wearing a skirt but is in fact wearing an extremely high and tight pair of shorts with the pattern of the skirt. And don’t get me started on the dancing, or what any of all this has to do with voting.

Certainly, two girls are wearing clothes not dissimilar to normal school uniforms, and I think that when combined with the quasi-uniform patterns and designs of the other girl’s clothes, certainly would give the impression of normality with just a casual, single viewing. But repeated viewings and pausing reveals that 3 of the uniforms are anything but, and not at all like what you’d see at any Korean school, whether in Daegu or anywhere else.

Cultural Relativism?

Second point is perception. You and many others find the WG clothing and dance overly suggestive, while myself and many others do not. Who’s to say who’s correct? You say one of the girls strokes her breasts, I see her run the hands up the side of her body in an uninterestingly blase manner….

I won’t insult Chris’s intelligence by saying that he doesn’t know what cultural relativism is, but let me refer readers to When One Culture’s Custom Is Another’s Taboo by Barbara Crossette (New York Times, March 6 1999), to my mind a classic on the different but related and relevant subject of how “do democratic, pluralistic societies like the United States, based on religious and cultural tolerance, respond to customs and rituals that may be repellent to the majority?”. It’s also very short, well worth spending the 5 minutes it would take to read in its entirety. But for now, let’s consider just this: 

But going more than half way to tolerate what look like disturbing cultural practices unsettles some historians, aid experts, economists and others with experience in developing societies. Such relativism, they say, undermines the very notion of progress. What’s more, it raises the question of how far acceptance can go before there is no core American culture, no shared values left.

Many years of living in a variety of cultures, said Urban Jonsson, a Swede who directs the U.N. children’s fund, UNICEF, in sub-Saharan Africa, has led him to conclude that there is “a global moral minimum,” which he has heard articulated by Asian Buddhists and African thinkers as well as by Western human rights advocates.

“There is a nonethnocentric global morality,” he said, and scholars would be better occupied looking for it rather than denying it. “I am upset by the anthropological interest in mystifying what we have already demystified. All cultures have their bad and good things.”

Murder was a legitimate form of expression in Europe centuries ago when honor was involved, Jonsson points out. Those days may be gone in most places, but in Afghanistan, a wronged family may demand the death penalty and carry it out themselves with official blessing. Does that restore it to respectability in the 21st century?

(bold added)

(Number 2 of the aforementioned series)

I hope that reference doesn’t make Chris rehash accusations of Orientalism against me, because the point I gained from that was that there are standards and limits that can not be crossed by the glib defence that him and I, and by extension Koreans and Westerners too, have merely different, but equally valid perceptions of what is and isn’t sexually suggestive. Somewhere out there, there are divisions between innocent and sexually suggestive that the vast majority of humans would agree upon, even though there will always be some individuals and groups of people that don’t for various reasons, and I think Gord explains very well why in this particular instance Koreans themselves do not see the Wondergirls as sex symbols.

But while they have limited exposure outside of Korea, the rest of the world does see them that way. Pictures or videos of the Wondergirls are certainly still some distance from child pornography, but then the first picture above especially and the place where I found them in particular give at least one demonstration of what’s being done with them and what non-Koreans consider them as, and that should at least give pause to the people who still protest that they’re nothing more than, say, innocent fashion shoots. And remove the Korean element from them, and the first thing most people familiar with the topic would say is that both photos above look like they’re from a Japanese schoolgirl photobook.

I’ll grant that despite my saying that there are limits to what 15 year-olds should be able to do and wear on national TV, it’s still a grey area and there are indeed issues of freedom of expression to consider too. But in Japan, the refusal of legislators to draw more specific lines between supposedly artistic pictures of underage girls in school uniforms and swimsuits and child pornography, for instance, led to nearly two decades of “art” photographers constantly pushing the boundaries, ultimately ending up last year with U-15s and even preteens in variously:

• their lingerie
• g-strings
• shoestring bikinis or whatever they’re called, with only the smallest of triangles covering their nipples
• doggy-style poses
• swimsuits stretched tightly over their labia while they’re on a gyrating chair simulating the “cowgirl” sexual position, their genitals sometimes only 10cm away from the camera.

All still technically legal because the law only prohibited nudity. It was only with those latter, most recent cases that legislators finally and belatedly stepped in and started making prosecutions (as I discuss here). I’m not saying that this will inevitably happen in Korea, Japan has a long pornographic tradition that Korea lacks for one, but not drawing lines between innocent and sexually suggestive dancing and photos at earlier points in Japan did ultimately lead from swimsuits to in-your-face child pornography there. So while sexually suggestive photos and videos of 15 year-old girls on TV will not lead to child pornography in themselves, unchallenged they certainly are a significant potential step in the same direction. And that is why the Wondergirls matter.

This is also connected to what Chris says later:

So far all I’ve seen regarding this issue from blogs like the Metropolitician and now the Grand Narrative are emphatic but nebulous statements that there is most definitely some correlation between the rise in popularity of wonjo gyojae and the increased sexualization of young women in Korea, OR that the WG are inappropriate because they might lead to REALLY bad things like that 6-year old girl who was really wearing next to nothing for no reason at all and dancing wayyyy more suggestively than the WG do in that youtube video. This is like when George W. said that gay marriage should not be allowed because, well if you let two men or two women get married, what’s to stop people from marrying their dogs or washing machines?

Chris does mention other factors behind the rise of wonjo gyojae/원조교제 than Korean teenagers’ increased sexualization as represented to me by the Wondergirls phenomenon, and these are all just as valid, but the absence of hard evidence for a correlation between, say, a future increase in teenage prostitution and the emergence of Wondergirls phenomenon, doesn’t mean that they can’t at least be a factor either. Even if they end up being 100% responsible, I’m not sure that hard evidence of a correlation that would satisfy Chris would even be possible, and am open to suggestions. But Chris seems to be saying that the absence of hard evidence means that media images of teenagers aren’t a factor in teenage prosituion at all, and that’s clearly not true. It would though, be difficult to accept if you didn’t view the above ads as sexual at all. Here is some extra evidence, although I sense that for some people there will never be enough:

Forced Sexualization, Cause and Effect

Actually, the second part of that original comment is the most revealing:

You say one of the girls strokes her breasts [in the first video], I see her run the hands up the side of her body in an uninterestingly blase manner….

Sure, she’s not working in a strip club, but her hands definitely go over her breasts, albeit very quickly. And I can’t imagine that there is a single woman in the world who wouldn’t make the same, really very unnatural gesture without knowing exactly what she’s doing. In that girl’s case, that she’s doing so in “an uninterestingly blase manner” is spot on, and suggests two possibilities:

1. That she knows what she’s doing and why a woman would do it, but her youth and sexual inexperience means that while she knows the basic mechanics of the gesture, she doesn’t really know how to pull it off in a more sexually appealing manner (ie, smiling, looking in the viewer’s eye, maybe licking her lips).

2. That she doesn’t know what she’s doing, and is only doing it because she’s being specifically told to do so by the producer of the video, and it’s thus to her it’s just another, uninteresting part of the video to be gotten over with. And judging by the other moves that the producer got her to which weren’t in the video, then I’d say that this explanation is much the more likely. See 3:02-3:32 of this video which shows the making of the commercial too:

My ass that that’s “just dancing”. Well, her ass rubbing against the big letter G at 3:26 to be precise. Why did the producer want her to do that? Maybe, just maybe, to use her ass to titillate male viewers, thereby helping to sell the product? Heaven forbid!

On a final note, and going back to the notion of hard evidence for links between the Wondergirls and other issues, I recall that there are a pair of orange books about Korean feminism sitting in most English sections of Korean bookstores which I’ve been meaning to buy ever since I started writing so much about Korean women’s body images several months ago (I don’t know the names sorry). I didn’t buy them earlier because they were full of mostly postmodernist waffle, but I desperately want one of them now because I recall that one essay in it discusses how Shim Mina/심민아’s (a.k.a “Miss World Cup 2002″) unconventional means of gaining public attention meant that, years later, it become perfectly acceptable for women to wear such revealing clothes in public, starting with similar national sporting events and increasingly outside of them too.

This is an example of supposedly “nebulous links” being more concrete than they first appear, and in this case may well have even provided part of the background to what the Wondergirls do being considered acceptable by Koreans. So I’ll try to find and buy the book soon.

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Update 4: More innocent, cute, and completely asexual dancing by a 15 year-old can be seen from 3:02-3:32 in the making of the commercial here.

Update 3: God, that’s the very last time I start my own thread on Dave’s ESL Cafe. With two notable exceptions, one of whom I know has an excellent blog and actually thinks about things before writing, everybody else has either said that the girls are just dancing, that I don’t know what “dancing’ means, that I’m blinded by my “Western perspective”, that I’m jerking off to the videos, that two of the Wondergirls aren’t fifteen, and finally that I write very badly…the last from someone who didn’t know what “acknowledged”  means, or even read my posts completely.

Serves me right I suppose.

Update 2: I’ve just found this post of Matt’s which addresses the “Wondergirls Issue” more directly.

Update 1: In the end, I did rehash old debates, albeit over at Dave’s ESL Cafe rather than here.

(Available on youtube here)

Well, a provocative title, but how else to describe the video? Two members of the Wondergirls group featured in it are still only fifteen.

The popularity of the Wondergirls and their increasingly sexual images and dance routines created quite a stir on expat message boards and blogs earlier in the year, both despite and in response to Koreans seemingly being unable to visualise them as sex symbols at all.

There’s already been more than enough virtual ink spilled on them, so rather than rehashing old debates I recommend this post of Michael Hurt’s for a good summary of them, and Matt provides useful background information on teenage sexuality in Korea here and here. But I will add that on this occasion this inability of Korean seems almost myopic: I don’t think I’d ever seen such “dance moves” on a prime-time commercial from an adult here, but for the Wondergirls the fact that they’re teenagers seems to mean that the normal rules don’t apply, no matter how blatantly they’re being abused.

Last month, they were also used in an ad as part of a campaign to encourage people to vote in the National Assembly elections, held last Wednesday. You could argue that technically their skirts could have been made even shorter, but here the National Election Commission seems to have known where to the draw the boundaries for the sake of good taste, appropriateness to the subject, and their right not to have their bodies used to titillate audiences:

(Hat-tip to Mongdori for the video)

Or not.

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I’ve just found two videos to accompany the story I translated in the last post. The first is a rather strange montage of (blurred) images of the students, complete with a surreal choice of soundtrack. It’s technically safe for work, but sometimes the blurring and the pixellation is a little sloppy, and so I’d avoid watching it at work myself. But do watch it, because it gives you a much better impression of how unusual the student’s behaviour was than the news report in the second video does.

I saw for myself that the news report did give the students’ side of things, but my wife says that overall the tone was pretty critical. Having seen the pictures in the first video now, I can’t say I’m surprised.

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Given how much child abuse has become such a topical issue in the Korean blogosphere recently (see here and here for starters), naturally I assumed the worst when I saw the pictures and article below. Fortunately, the truth is completely benign, but…jumping ahead, let’s just say that I have mixed feelings about it.

중고생들 왜이러나? 졸업식 뒤 막장 ‘알몸 뒤풀이’ 2008-02-19

What on Earth are Middle School Students Doing? Naked Graduation Antics

[중앙일보 김진희] 최근 인터넷에 중고생의 ‘알몸 졸업식 뒤풀이’ 사진이 잇따라 올라와 충격을 주고 있다.

[Joong-Ang Ilbo Kim Jin-Hee] Recent Pictures of Middle School Student’s ‘Naked Graduation Antics’ Create Quite a Stir on the Internet

지난 15일 서울 중랑천변에서 남자 중학생 10여명이 졸업 기념으로 벌거벗고 물놀이를 하다가 경찰에 조사를 받은 데 이어 개인 블로그나 주요 커뮤니티에는 전국 곳곳에서 행해진 알몸 뒤풀이 목격담이 이어지고 있다.

On the 15th of February at Jungrang riverside in Seoul, about 10 middle-school boys were observed stripping themselves to celebrate graduating middle-school, prompting a nation-wide police investigation of personal blogs and internet communities with similar accounts of middle-school children stripping.

네티즌 ID’탄젠트’는 “최근 노원역 모 백화점 앞에서 졸업빵 후 교복이 찢겨진 여학생을 실제로 봤다”며 “팬티만 입고 가슴은 손으로 가리고 뛰어가더라”고 전했다. 그는 “밀가루 뿌리고 계란 던지는 일은 봤어도 옷을 찢는 것은 처음 봐 무척 깜짝 놀랐다”고 말했다.

One netizen with the ID ‘Tangent’ was very surprised at seeing some virtually naked female students running in front of a department store in the No-won station area. He or she said that ”their uniforms were ripped and torn, and they were only wearing panties while covering their breasts with their hands,” and added that “Of course, I’ve seen graduating students throwing flour and eggs at each other before, but never anything like this.”

인터넷에 올라오고 있는 사진에는 여학생들이 주로 속옷만 걸친 채 밀가루를 흠뻑 뒤집어 쓰고 있고 남학생들은 속옷까지 벗어 던진 모습이 담겨있다. 네티즌들은 “시대가 변해도 너무 변했다” “도를 넘어섰다”고 비난하고 있다.

Also on the internet are pictures of female students only wearing underwear and covered in flour, and some of boys completely removing their underwear and throwing it away. Netizens are saying that “times have definitely changed,” but criticised the students, saying that behaviour like that is “over the limit.”

문제는 일부 학생들의 일탈 행위가 자칫 유행처럼 번질 수 있고, 졸업식 후에 행해지기 때문에 학생들을 단속하기도 쉽지 않다는데 있다.

Although only a minority of students do things like this, this behaviour has the potential to become a new trend. Unfortunately it is difficult to prevent, as students do it after official graduation ceremonies, when they are unsupervised.

서울 교육청 관계자는 “알몸 뒤풀이는 요즘 들어 많이 나오고 있는 일탈 행위인데 학교 안에서 하지 못하니까 밖에서 하는 것 같다”며 “앞으로 졸업식에서 장학금 지원이나 참고서·교복 물려주기 등 건전한 방식으로 뒤풀이를 하도록 학생들을 지도해야 할 것”이라고 말했다.

According to a spokesperson for the Seoul Education Office, “These nude post-graduation antics are becoming very popular recently, and because they can’t be done at school then they must all be occurring in public,” and so “it is much healthier if we encourage students to give their books and uniforms to their juniors rather than ripping them up, perhaps by offering scholarships to those who set good examples.”

김진희 기자 (Kim Jin-Hee)

(Photo by Sunderban)

For readers not based in Korea, bear in mind that Korean students usually graduate middle school at 16, and so probably just the age difference alone means that graduating middle school is much more important to most Koreans and worthy of celebrating than, say, graduating from my own middle school in New Zealand was to me when I was 12. Hence the antics more usually associated with graduating high school students in Western countries, and my wife says that she got up to similar things at that age, albeit with clothes on, when she graduated herself over ten years ago.

My gut instinct is that this is merely good, clean, harmless fun - God knows Korean teenagers get precious little enough opportunities for that - and that it is pretty tame compared to what many of their Western counterparts get up to. Hell, any complaints from teachers and parents should focus on the risks of pneumonia more than anything else.

On the other hand, I can’t shake off a nagging suspicion that it’s more than just coincidence that these sorts of games start appearing so soon after 16 year-old girls in the bare minimum of clothes have started appearing on Korean TV. Not that I’ve been looking, but I’ve been here 8 years, and it’s the first time I’ve heard of any Korean teenagers doing things like that, let alone ones that young. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that seeing the Wondergirls in mini-skirts and suggestive poses has instantly persuaded formerly innocent and pure Korean girls (and boys) to imitate them. But I do think that although Korean social and sexual mores are quickly changing, and that Korean teenagers would have eventually starting doing things like this regardless (see this post at Gusts of Popular Feeling, for instance, to learn more about the increasing sexualization of Korean teenagers since the mid-1990s), nevertheless the appearance of Korean girl groups surely had some part to play in teenagers doing this in 2008 rather than say, 2010 or 2015? We shouldn’t forget how important they are as role models.

Again, for an excellent summation of all of these issues, see Michael Hurt’s recent post.

(Update 1: There’s a thread about this at Daveseslcafe here, and through that I found an English-language article about it here)

(Update 2: For some videos, see the next post)

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Well, in so far as it’s an inane, essentially meaningless song and/or dance step, but which the whole country feels compelled to copy. Sorry if recent posts such as this, this, and this led you to expect a post about 15-year old-girls instead.

I’ve put the video up because, next time you complain about hearing “Tell Me” for the fiftieth time, then by all means rant away, but it’s healthy to remember that Korea doesn’t exactly have a monopoly on mindless fads. Like Janet over at Stranger in a Strange Land says of the video, “after a few weeks of being in Paris, I’ve seen people do this [Tecknotonik] dance in the clubs, on the streets, and on the subway. It’s pretty hilarious.” But then she learned that this dance was in fact a trademark, pushing everything from branded clothes to energy drinks. To embellish her words a little, that meant that what appeared mere harmless fun before, now left her feeling a little jaded and cynical. Similarly, while I never jumped into the whole Wondergirls furore in the blogosphere here, and won’t now either, I did follow it, and it was always good to keep this profit motive in the back of my mind. In particular, it helped me to remember why increasingly sexual images of them in the media couldn’t be dismissed as mere overanalysis, as a lot of commentators did.

Lest the Wondergirls leave me sounding jaded and cynical myself, there’s always that video in the last post to help me. And as for France, here’s still some genuinely fun, cool and creative work from there that I’ve been looking for an opportunity to share for a while:

Admit it, you liked it…especially the noises. 

It’s jumping ahead a little, but as I’ll explain in my next two posts, I’ll be looking for and highlighting similar things from Korea on the blog from now on. Watch this space.

(Update: By coincidence, just a few minutes after I finished this post I noticed that Michael Hurt had just written another post on the Wondergirls at his blog. I did say that I wouldn’t discuss them on the blog, if only because I couldn’t do the subject justice after all the time and (virtual) ink that other bloggers have already spent on them, but I couldn’t help but notice one point of his related to the above discussion: that most Koreans refuse to acknowledge that the Wondergirls are sex symbols at all. Again, this not only encourages people to dismiss qualms that their skirts are too short, or that their dancing is too suggestive, but it also deflects attention away from the various companies and individuals profiting from them doing so, instead implying some perversion in mind of the commentator for looking at schoolgirls in such a sexual way. 

He goes on to say that that “parallels the notion in idea that in Korea, people are all good, clean Confucians who don’t do dirty things (but just save it for the love motels and leave that “skeleton bone” there – hehe, yes, I meant for a double entendre to be read there!), while Americans apparently hump everybody, according to everybody not American,” and that was a healthy reminder to myself that if I did have to choose one of Korean society’s biggest flaws, it would be precisely this obstinate refusal to admit unpleasant realities.

Michael is often one of those accused of overanalysis, but in my mind this latest post of his on the issue is a very succinct and timely summary of the issues raised by the Wondergirls’ popularity. Even if you’re tired of them, I recommend checking it out)

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(Photo by Yume_Love) 

Blog Plans 

Like Aaron’s post over at East Windup Chronicle has reminded me, I’ve always had a strange mix of subjects on the blog, but I really do seem to have been all over the place recently, with posts like Lee Hyori’s taste in men at one extreme and others like my “Search for the Korean Fantastique” series and Lee Myeong-bak’s plans to disband the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family at another. The former post is light and fun, and - let’s face it - certainly does no harm with getting hits, but the latter posts aren’t some sort of compensation for it. No, really. Actually, it’s more the other way round: these days, I put a lot of time and effort into my long posts, and in the process of writing them I usually learn a great deal about the subject and sometimes even myself too, so much so that, to be honest, I’m really not all that concerned about their popularity. But after sometimes up to a week of writing and research spent on a single post, it’s sure good to unwind with Lee Hyori in a bikini. I’m “rested” now though, and despite this post’s sex-related subject, it marks a return to more serious posts for the next few weeks (hence I didn’t use this photo to accompany it instead). I could also mention that I’m applying for some editing jobs, and with this blog taking pride of place on my resume then that picture of Lee Hyori really needed to be shunted down the page a little, but I’d better not.

Article Choice

After my last choice of subject, I really wanted something more serious to practice Korean with today, and so I started by checking out the “Society” section of the Korean MSN news rather than the “Soft Porn and Smut” “Entertainment” section like I normally do. Unfortunately(?), just like everyone’s eyes are instantly drawn to anything with the word “sex” in it, mine are also drawn to “성” (pronounced “song”), which is the Chinese character “性” meaning “sex” or “nature,” and so I quickly plumped for the link which had “성매매” in the title, which strangely isn’t in any of my dictionaries but I know literally means “sex-buying-selling,” or prostitution. Seeing as I have the Bible of Korean Study in front of me as I type this, let me warm my brain up and offer something to readers beginning to study Korean by mentioning some sex-related words with “성”  in them:

• 성규육 - sex education
• 성기 - sexual organ
• 성욕 - sexual desire
• 성교 - sexual intercourse
• 남성 - man
• 여성 - woman
• 동성 - same sex
• 이성 - opposite sex
• 성병- …

(Photo by isto-ica)

And so on. I should note that the “성” in “성인,” or “adult” is a different Chinese character - (成) - which also has the “성” sound in Korean but means ” to complete,” and so you have “complete person” = “adult.” Also, many of the words above are only medical and/or legal terms really, Koreans usually saying “섹스하다,” or literally “sex do” instead of “성교하다” or “sex exchange” for instance, but you get the idea. If I’ve piqued your interest in this vocab-learning method, then then try to figure out what “성병” means for starters (hint: what’s a “병원”?) and then check the second half of this post out for more. Now for the more difficult stuff:

교육부, 중고생에 “성매매한적 있냐” 설문 물의

Controversy Arises as Education Department asks Middle and High School Students: “Have you engaged in prostitution?”

교육인적자원부가 학생 정신건강 관리를 위한 설문조사를 시.교육청에 하달하면서 학생들의 수치심을 자극하는 부적절한 설문을 문항에 포함시켜 물의를 빚고 있다.

A planned survey of middle and high school students by the HR Department of the Ministry of Education has aroused shame and controversy with it’s inappropriate questions.

11일 교육부에 따르면 ‘청소년 정신건강 및 문제행동 선별 행동지’에는 원조교제, 성폭력 경험 여부를 묻는 질문이 포함됐다.

Yesterday, the Department said that city and regional education offices will give a survey entitled “Teenage Mental Health and Behavioral Problems” to students which will ask, amongst other things, if they have experienced sexual violence and/or engaged in prostitution.

교육부는 이같은 내용의 설문지가 포함된 ‘2008학생정신건강관리방안’을 하달하고 이 지침을 기본으로 시ㆍ도교육청 여건에 맞게 구체적인 계획을 수립ㆍ추진하라고 지시했다.

These survey questions will be included as part of the Ministry’s 2008 ‘Student Mental Health Care Plan,’ and aimed to obtain concrete data about each city and region’s individual circumstances.  

학년, 반, 번호, 실명이 기재되는 이 설문지는 (지난 한달간)’여자(남자)친구와 성행위를 하고 있다’, ‘원조교제나 성매매를 한 적이 있다’, ‘성폭력을 당하거나 한적 있나’ 등을 물었다.

Completion of the survey will be mandanatory for students, and they will have to include their year, class, student number, and real name. The questions will ask if students have, in the last month: engaged in a sexual act with a boyfriend or girlfriend; had a “compensated date”; and if they have engaged in prostitution.

(”원조교제” is the Korean term for “compensated dating,” which refers to teenage girls having sex with an older men for money. If you’re interested, I wrote two posts about it last year here and here, and more recently I discussed some news about this phenomenon in Japan here. As for today’s translation, I have no idea why the survey makes a distinction between it and “성매매,” which like I said just refers to “prostitution”?)

(Photo by Suzÿ_Quzÿ)

교육부는 이들 문항을 ‘위험문항’으로 분류하고 원점수 총점이 기준점수 이하라도 위험문항에 대한 긍정반응(2점이상)을 보였다면 심층면접이나 정밀점진이 필요한 학생으로 포함키시라고 지시했다. 설문결과 정밀검진이 필요한 학생의 정신전강정보는 반드시 가정에 통보해 정신보건센터, 병.의원을 통한 치료를 받도록 했다. 선별검사결과를 통보할 때는 반드시 담임교사가 직접 방문하거나 유선으로 통보하도록 했다.

If students answer “yes” to 2 or more of these and similar questions, then teachers will be obliged to notify the student’s parents, and then contact a medical health center, with the aim of ensuring that students that need an examination will receive one. When notifying parents, teachers will be under strict instructions to do so face to face or by phone if necessary.

교육부는 오는 3월까지 학생정신건강 실태조사 실시학교를 선정하고 5~6월 학생.학부모.학교관계자에 대한 교육을 진행한 뒤, 전국 245개 학교를 대상으로 선별검사를 실시할 예정이다.

245 schools to be surveyed will be selected by March, and then the survey will be carried out in May or June.

이에 대해 교사 A씨는 “이 설문의 실효성이 있을지 의문”이라며 “성관계, 원조교제 여부를 묻는데 누가 사실대로 응답하겠느냐”고 지적했다. 국가청소년위원회 청소년성보호팀 천상기 팀장도 “실명으로 이같이 물으면 본인의 인권에 문제가 있다고 보여진다”며 “보통 소속이나 반 같은 것은 공개하지 않고 설문을 하지 않느냐”고 말했다.

Of the planned survey, one anonymous teacher complained: “If students have to give their real names, who on Earth is going to answer that they have engaged in prostitution?” Cheon Sang-gi, the head of the National Teenager Committee’s Teenage Sexual Health Protection Team (James: hell, you come up with a better translation!), agreed, saying that “having to reveal their names is a violation of students’ fundamental human rights,” and that “if their answers are going to be revealed to teachers and parents, then the questions simply should not be asked.” 

한편 지난달에는 국책연구기관인 한국직업능력개발원(원장 이원덕)이 전국 전문계고 학생 등 수천 명을 대상으로 ‘성폭행(가담)과 부모 이혼 여부’ 등을 물어 물의를 빚은 바 있다.

Meanwhile, this planned survey comes on top of a similar one recently conducted by the Korean Industrial Development Center (Head: Lee Won-dog), which asked several thousand students nationwide if they had participated in sexual acts and if their parents were divorced.

And there you have it. On the one hand, it is ludicrous that so much time and money will be going into what will be a completely useless survey, but at least some teachers and individuals have the sense to notice this and the gumption to point it out. Meanwhile, please focus on the gist of the translation and not specific terms I’ve chosen, as the ”National Teenager Committee’s Teenage Sexual Health Protection Team” for instance, rolls off the tounge very well in Korean, but that monstrosity will hopefully never been seen again in English. And the connotations in one language, lacking in another? Please don’t bring that up either, otherwise the only translations I’ll do will be of the “See Spot Run” variety!

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

(Photo by Teafor2)

I haven’t blogged about teenage prostitution in Korea in a while, and didn’t plan to today, but post titles like “Japanese Schoolgirl Sex Sellers Use Codes for Carnality“ do get one’s attention (as did my truncated version, yes?). Seriously though, when I read that it reminded me of this post of mine where I discussed Korean dating sites, many of which it turns out are basically fronts for teenage prostitution, and the article I translated there said that clients and sellers were using increasingly elaborate codes and signals on the sites’ chatrooms to avoid the attention of the police and organisations like the Korea Internet Safety Commission. I don’t know what these Korean codes are sorry, but that article goes into quite some detail on the ones used in Japan.

Once I get my current series of posts out of the way, I might do some research of my own and see if anything new has been happening to stamp out teenage prostitution here since I wrote my post in August. Probably nothing, but I wonder if it fell under the purview of the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, and if so if efforts to combat it have completely stalled since Lee Myung-bak announced that it would be downsized and merged with the Ministry of Health and Welfare?

In the meantime, just in case this post didn’t remind you of how different Korea and Japan really are, this photo I just found on Flickr certainly will. As the photographer pointed out, it was being sold in the toy section of his local supermarket. And as an added bonus for those Japanese learners amongst you, if you click on the link below then you’ll come to a bigger photo with translations of everything.

(Photo by locket479)

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Although I mostly concentrate on economic and demographic issues in this blog, I’m still very interested in censorship and rights to free speech in this part of the world, and back in my first month of blogging wrote posts with titles like “Korean Booty and Democratization” that still get most of my hits I’m still quite proud of. In that post, I briefly mentioned some of the differences in pornography laws between Japan and Korea, and earlier this week this article on a crackdown against child pornography in Japan renewed my interest in the subject. After reading it, I realised that I’ve been guilty of lumping Japan and Korea together in my posts in recent months, and the article was a healthy reminder that the two societies are really very different.

(Photo by karanj)

To be more precise, in the case of specifically pornography laws it is the attitudes towards sexuality, and women and children’s rights that the laws represent that are different, and like me, I’d wager that most first-time travellers to Japan actually first learn of these without ever having spoken to a Japanese person: instead, they are all on full display on the train from Narita airport. With that in mind, rather than jumping straight into the post topic, let me introduce it by reenacting that train trip as it were:

(Photo by MakoDC)

The first thing to notice is the sheer volume of advertisements on Japanese subway systems, to my eye making them a colorful improvement on their drab, grey and plainer Korean counterparts. Not only that, but the ensuing lack of space forces Japanese advertisers to find ever more innovative and interesting ways to get commuters’ attention, which I’ve never seen in Korea:

(Photo by chrissam42)

(Photo by colodio)

(Photo by ethanbee)

These differences in advertising and arts culture will be the subject of my next post, inspired by a post on this great new Japanese arts blog I’ve just found on the top 10 ad-tricks in Tokyo’s train stations. Meanwhile, the next thing to notice is ads like these amongst them:

(Photo by Cedric Sam)

You’re not going to see equivalent ads in Korean or even American subways anytime soon, but regular readers will not be surprised to learn that I have no problems with soft-core pornographic DVDs being advertised where minors can see, provided the models aren’t nude and in provocative poses. I can understand why some people would have issues with them, but then I and every other straight guy in the world would be lying if he said he wasn’t also aroused by women’s lingerie advertisements sometimes (that’s half the idea of them after all), and it is hypocritical to allow those but prohibit technically virtually identical ads for pornography. I can also understand the embarrassment of parents on the subway having to explain to their 8-year old’s innocent queries as to why men (or hell, women too) would choose to buy things like that, but then virtually every parenting book in the world argues that the sooner you teach them about sex, the more responsible and mature they’ll be about it in the future. Besides which, it’s not like the absence of ads for pornography in Korean subways means that Korean children and teenagers aren’t as equally exposed to it by the media as their Japanese counterparts are, nor that Korea doesn’t have one of the biggest prostitution industries in the world.

But something I was shocked by, and which even I still have issues with, is behavior like this:

(Photo by jeremiah)

Yep, that’s your average salaryman nonchalantly looking at porn on the subway, seemingly unconcerned with the reactions of those next to him or even having his photo taken. And why should he be? That is perfectly normal and acceptable behaviour in Japan, and I saw it for myself after, hell, a good hour and half or so of my first ever commute around Tokyo. I dare say that he might restrain himself if a ten year-old was sitting next to him, but to my mind it’s bad enough for a man to do so when surrounded by grown men, let alone women or children.

Now, I’ll be the first to man the barricades to defend my right to make, sell, posses, view and discuss, say…Black-on-Asian midget lesbian fisting porn (first thing that came to mind), but at best it would be damned inconsiderate and rude to subject my fellow commuters to this peccadillo of mine. After all, it’s not like they can exercise their democratic right to change the channel or choose not to buy the photobook, and even simply moving away may not always be an option (this is the Tokyo subway remember). Sure, in practice probably 99% of the guys brazen enough do this on the subway would be looking at relatively tame porn and/or hentai comics, and if they weren’t craning their necks to get a good look themselves, probably 99% of the male commuters next to them would have absolutely no problems with it either. But the first time I saw it, it was a guy in his 50s with a pointedly-looking-the-other-way 20-something female university student on his left, and a resigned-looking 80 year-old woman on his right. And, for all their flaws, a Korean man of any age would have given a crap about them, and would have restrained himself from pulling out even his copy of Maxim, let alone anything else.

But it gets much much worse:

(Photo by muffinonline)

On the surface, that’s just another ad for an innocuous soft-porn magazine (or is it a TV show?), but this one has an “U15″ section. Yes, models under 15. No, not nude, although it wasn’t until as late as 1999 that the Law on Punishing Acts related to Child Prostitution and Child Pornography and on Protecting Children made the production and sale of “artistic” photobooks of nude children illegal. But presumably as there are still so many in circulation, with those of child model Rika Nishimura notoriously being produced right up until the law went into effect, then Japan remains one of the only countries in the world where the posession of child pornography is still legal, the other being that last bastion of civil-rights…Russia.

As you can imagine from the post title, given that there has been a recent crackdown then this new law may appear to have been ineffective, but things are much more complicated than that. Actually, the law has worked, but producers of photobooks have (literally) stretched their interpretation of it to limits that authorities now longer find acceptable. But in so doing, they are merely following a long tradition, and it would be remiss of me not to place the law in the context of pornography in Japan before discussing the crackdown further.

The Wikipedia article on this subject is interesting but rather lengthy, so I shall highlight only three things from it:

• First, despite the lack of cameras then, the Japanese pornography industry has a long and flourishing history from as far back as the Edo Period of 1603-1868, and it was only because governments of the Meiji Period of 1868-1912 feared prudish Western opinions that it became to be curtailed. Further restrictions were placed on it by increasingly militaristic governments in the early twentieth century, culminating in its complete prohibition in World War Two. It wouldn’t be until the 1950s and ’60s that things returned to the more liberal days of a century earlier.
• Second, it was during the Meiji Period(!) that the present prohibition against all representations of genitalia was enacted. Showing the pubic region and pubic hair was illegal until 1991 too (and still is in Korea), but is now perfectly acceptable. In practice, this means a lot of nudes from a distance, but as soon as the model is close enough for heinous things like labia, the anus, the penis, or testicles to be visible, then they must either be covered with a hand and/or pixellated or misted out.
• Thirdly, and most importantly, virtually anything is acceptable provided that at least a nod towards these restrictions is made. Yes, while it’s easy enough to find non-censored hardcore Japanese porn on the internet, and only a little harder to find the same in Japanese pornography shops provided you have a good relationship with the proprietor (or so my Japanese-speaking friend tells me), abiding by those restrictions does lead to some rather strange (and frustrating) results (needless to say, NSFW).

(Photo by ArkanGL)

And when I say virtually anything, I mean virtually anything. For me, hentai comics display the hypocrisy of Japanese laws at their finest, as drawings of things ranging from coprophilia to pedophilia and rape are permissible provided that black rectangles or pixels cover where genitalia would be. Yes indeed, drawings of men in trenchcoats approaching young girls, receiving oral sex for money are perfectly okay, provided the penis is a little blurry. Two points:

1. Despite the revulsion some of the subjects arouse in me, again, I’d (albeit more reluctantly this time) still man the barricades to defend people’s right to draw and look at drawings of anything they damn well like. But today’s post is not about hentai, although as you can imagine many Japanese people do have issues with the subjects permitted: if you’re interested you can read about recent censorship developments in this area here.
2. Yes, that some people are into this does make Japan a bit of a sick place. But overall, I consider Japanese attitudes towards sexuality much healthier than in many Western countries. Consider this sentiment from from page 118 of this edition of the 1992 Michael Crichton novel Rising Sun:

“Remember, Japan has never accepted Freud or Christianity. They’ve never been guilty of embarrassed about sex. No problem with homosexuality, no problem with kinky sex. Just matter-of-fact. Some people like it a certain way, so some people do it that way, what the hell. The Japanese can’t understand why we get so worked up about a straight-forward bodily function. They think we’re a little screwed up on the subject of sex. And they have a point.”

It’s a cliche to say so, but put all thoughts of the forgettable Sean Connery and Wesly Snipes movie out of your head, for the book is simply brilliant. It’s a little dated, being written largely before Japan’s “Lost Decade” when it looked like it was going to take over the world, but it is still an indispensable guide to Japanese and even Korean modes of thought. And considering what you’ve just read about Japan, is it an exaggeration to say Westerners are screwed up on the subject of sex? Well…no. Consider these examples for starters:

• In Australia, it is illegal to sell hardcore pornography in all states but that of the Australian Capital Territory (the small sliver of land around Canberra), and the Northern Territory, so depopulated that it is not technically a state and so is directly administered by the federal government from ACT. If you’re unfortunate not to live in either, then you have to have videos and magazines mailed to you from there. No wonder upgrading Australia’s broadband links was such a crucial election issue.
• In the US, selling dildos or vibrators in the states of Alabama, Georgia and Texas (amongst others), can, and has, resulted in a year of incarceration and/or a $10,000 fine. And don’t get me started on the teenagers who pledge that they’ll abstain from sex until marraige. Feeling that they don’t need sex education, when their hormones inconveniently work their magic on them too, they end up having higher rates of STDs and teenage pregnancy than non-abstainers.
• And in England, the age of consent is 16, but anal sex is illegal until 18. Far from being some vestige of prudish Victorian sensibilities, this was reaffirmed as recently as November 2000.  And as David Aaronovitch pointed out afterwards in his column entitled “In defence of the metropolitan elite” in The Independent newspaper, the reasoning behind this was beyond caricature. In my mind, this column was such a classic that it’s worth giving out the relevant section of it in full:

…On Monday the Conservative peer Baroness Young introduced an amendment to the Sexual Offences Bill; yesterday I spent a spellbinding couple of hours reading the Hansard transcript of the ensuing debate. As the Labour peer Lord Davies of Coity explained, Lady Young’s provisions accepted that “normal intercourse is legally permissible at 16 years of age for men and women, and it provides that anal intercourse in respect of both men and women will be legally permissible at 18 years of age”.

Unfortunately, he was not interrupted. Had he been, he might have had to explain exactly what made buggery OK at 18 but impermissible by statute at 17. Nevertheless, Lady Young’s position, described as a wrecking amendment, led to the fall of the Bill for the equalisation of the gay age of consent, by 205 votes to 144.

Diversion or not, Lady Young herself adhered to the point. “By keeping the age of buggery at 18,” she declared, “we protect young 16-year-olds from anal sex, the most dangerous of sexual practices.” At that point (and much to his credit, though not, alas, recorded by Hansard) The Independent’s own sketch-writer, Simon Carr, was heard from the press gallery to utter the words “Not in my experience, it isn’t.”

I would pay to attend a debate between Carr and Young on the relative merits and perils of different forms of sexual activity. As I would to purchase The Lady Young Guide to Proper Sex (or, what every young person ought to know), in which she considers the prospects of choking during oral sex or warns how petting inevitably leads on to the hard stuff. Each act could get a danger-rating from the baroness.

The book would be worth reading, for Lady Young is ingenious. She was not anti-gay at all, not her (that must have been a different Lady Young). And what she worried about was not boys, but young women being taken from behind. “Girls,” she pointed out, “are half the population, [and] are directly affected by [the Bill] when the minimum age for buggery goes down to 16. One must accept that the Bill is a gay rights measure which will have a profound effect on girls.”

So, Lady Young’s argument is that if heterosexual buggery at 16 (which few - I imagine - know is illegal) were legalised, then girls the length and breadth of the land would be far more liable to be buggered. As Baroness Seccombe put it: “This is a very important matter that could have disastrous effects on the lives of young girls aged between 16 and 18.”

I will not bore you with the revelation that there is no law against heterosexual sodomy in Scotland, nor with the lack of evidence that there is rampant buggery in the glens and that frustrated southern sodomites now head north to get their kicks. But I am left trying to explain to myself how an amendment of such stunning stupidity could gain a majority of the upper house of Parliament.

And he concludes by saying:

…strangely, I seek to impose few of my own lifestyle choices on others. I may want abortion to be available to my family, should they require it, but I don’t demand that everyone be forced to have an abortion. Just as I might think it was right to allow adults to decide how to manipulate the sexual organs of themselves and their partners, so I am happy for Lady Young to find her pleasure as she sees fit. It’s her buggering everyone else around I object to.

Sounds like Michael Crichton was right to me.

But while later than Western countries, Japan has “slowly been implementing legal measures against child pornography, [although] the ambiance, culture and religion of the country makes people less uncomfortable about such issues compared with Western societies,” said Koji Maruta, the author of “Enko-shojo To Loli-con Otoko” (”Girls Who Sell Sex and Men with Lolita Complex”). There is the 1999 law already mentioned, which defines child pornography as any image of a child under 18 years old “naked or partially naked, which is sexually stimulating,” and there is also the second article in the U.N.’s Optional Protocol on the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography, which Japan signed in 2002, which defines child pornography as “any representation, by whatever means, of real or simulated explicit sexual activities or any representation of the sexual parts of a child for primarily sexual purposes,” and requires signatories to have laws banning such material.

So what exactly is being cracked down on? Let me hand you over to this article of May last year from the Japan Times: 

Photos of preteen girls in thongs now big business

Asuka Izumi [in the photo] was modeling for a DVD in July 2005 when the director asked her to put on a string bikini. She was just 12 years old. 

She agreed to pose in the sexy bathing suit and now, nearly two years later, that DVD is credited with starting the popularity of “T-back junior idols.”

Izumi, now 14, went on to pose in thong bikinis in four photo books and several DVDs. She looks back on that first time in a revealing bikini and said she had no reason not to do it.

“It wasn’t a big deal. The director asked me to do it, and I did it because I wanted to,” Izumi, who is still in junior high school but has appeared before the camera as a child model since she was 1 1/2 years old, said during a recent interview with The Japan Times.

From pornographic animation to raunchy dolls, Japan leads the world in eccentric products and media that sometime push the boundaries of what people consider to be decent — or even legal.

This latest trend of preteen girls striking provocative poses in slinky bathing suits has some people questioning whether this is child pornography and if the parents are actually selling their children for sex.

The large number of shops with Junior Idol and U-15 (Under 15) signs in Tokyo’s Akihabara district, the country’s subculture capital, is just one indication of how quickly the new market has grown.

The controversial industry has been reluctant to reveal figures, but reports suggest that more than 3 million photo books were sold in the past year alone.

Junior idol DVDs and photo books are commonly sold right next to hard-core pornography, and two years since Izumi’s DVD, the models have grown even younger. Last month, 9-year-old Rei Asamizu appeared in “Melty Pudding,” a photo book that includes shots of the little girl lying on a bed wet in a thong bikini.

Although there is no full nudity, the scantily clad children are often pictured seductively blowing on the end of a flute or licking an ice cream cone.

Like in hentai, even string bikinis are at least a nod towards the restrictions against nudity, and so, as the article goes on to mention, (until recently) police had no legal authority to stop the sale of such material.

Despite some readers’ no-doubt impressions of me, I’m not exactly an avid follower of the u15 gravure model scene in Japan, and actually had no idea that girls Izumi’s age were now appearing in string bikinis, and in the blatantly pornographic poses that they were. Rather, I thought the recent crackdown was because of (previously) more notorious cases like those of Saaya Irie, all over the Japanese blogosphere in 2005, whose unusally well-developed breasts for her age made photobooks and DVDs of her in bikinis and maid outfits sell out very quickly, despite the fact that she was only…11 at the time. Those pictures were taken by photographer Garo Aida, and if you go to his homepage (not really SFW) you can get some idea of how ridiculous the situation has gotten in the 3 years since: if you thought pictures of 11 year-old girls in bikinis in 2005 were bad, now in 2008 they’re even younger, wearing clothes about as wide as my shoelaces, and in poses that leave little to the imagination.

Again seriously screwed up, but before you denigrate all Japanese men as pedophilic freaks, bear in mind that that paragon of Western civilisation and virtue, Google, has no problems with youtube having plently of videos of Saaya Irie available (although not Izumi yet). For more on her, and the issues her photos bring up, see here.

Meanwhile, I hope what I’ve written above shows how the situation in Japan is much more complicated than a post with a mere link to the following blogger’s post would suggest, and regardless of how ridiculous things became, the string bikinis do seem to have been the straw that broke the camel’s back (they’re about the same weight after all):

(Edit: the link below doesn’t seem to be working. But the original can still be read by going here and scrolling down to Jan 16)

Lolicon Lovers’ Luck Loses Out

Connoisseurs of lolicon beware! Weekly Playboy magazine reports Japanese authorities are finally starting to crack down on the highly lucrative teen and child exploitation gravure business.

Although Japan has started implementing similar child pornography laws as most of Western society, the lack of enforcement in recent years have seen an explosion of materials targeted directly to men who like them young. Photo compilations of popular idols ranging from their late teens to preteens to as low as eight years old fly off the shelves as they’re released to a teeming mass of fans hungry (horny?) for more photos of their favorite starlets. Reports suggest that over 3 million photo books sold from 2006 to 2007 alone (See Japan Times).

But this may soon be screeching to a halt. The police conducted a series of raids late last year on producers of a photo shoot DVD “starring” a schoolgirl that resulted in the maker of the DVD to be arrested for Child Pornograph