Joseon Korea: Baring it All

Photo source:  http://zenkatsuo.livejournal.com/203368.html
I'm sure Korean nationalists will deny it until the cows come home, but fact is fact.  In Joseon Korea, women who had borne male children often displayed their breasts openly as symbols of pride. The practice continued into the early 1950s. Look, there's nothing to be ashamed of, and we are not critiquing Korean customs.  In what other cultures did/do women freely uncover their bounty bosoms?  Mainly the tribes of Africa.

Music Break Featuring "Ajumma" Kang Ji Min

In a country that has perfected bubble-gum pop, South Korea has pretty much ignored folk music ("the real music") and folk musicians.

The Korean ajumma above is Kang Ji Min, and she sings both Korean and American pop classics.  Her voice in this rendition of "Without You" is almost perfect.  It is pure and powerful but not showy, unlike the Mariah Carey's version.

Just an ajumma with her guitar, laptop, and amazing voice...

Origin of Japan and the Japanese Language Explained...Best Article on this Topic Ever...

Japanese Roots

Just who are the Japanese?
Where did they come from, and when?

by Jared Diamond

Just who are the Japanese? Where did they come from and when? The answers are difficult to come by, though not impossible ― the real problem is that the Japanese themselves may not want to know. Unearthing the origins of the Japanese is a much harder task than you might guess. Among world powers today, the Japanese are the most distinctive in their culture and environment. The origins of their language are one of the most disputed questions of linguistics. These questions are central to the self-image of the Japanese and to how they are viewed by other peoples. Japan's rising dominance and touchy relations with its neighbors make it more important than ever to strip away myths and find answers.
The search for answers is difficult because the evidence is so conflicting. On the one hand, the Japanese people are biologically undistinctive, being very similar in appearance and genes to other East Asians, especially to Koreans. As the Japanese like to stress, they are culturally and biologically rather homogeneous, with the exception of a distinctive people called the Ainu on Japan's northernmost island of Hokkaido. Taken together, these facts seem to suggest that the Japanese reached Japan only recently from the Asian mainland, too recently to have evolved differences from their mainland cousins, and displaced the Ainu, who represent the original inhabitants. But if that were true, you might expect the Japanese language to show close affinities to some mainland language, just as English is obviously closely related to other Germanic languages (because Anglo-Saxons from the continent conquered England as recently as the sixth century A.D.). How can we resolve this contradiction between Japan's presumably ancient language and the evidence for recent origins?
During the Ice Ages, land bridges connected Japan's main islands to one another and to the mainland, allowing mammals ― including humans ― to arrive on foot. Archeologists have proposed four conflicting theories. Most popular in Japan is the view that the Japanese gradually evolved from ancient Ice Age people who occupied Japan long before 20,000 B.C. Also widespread in Japan is a theory that the Japanese descended from horse-riding Asian nomads who passed through Korea to conquer Japan in the fourth century, but who were themselves ― emphatically ― not Koreans. A theory favored by many Western archeologists and Koreans, and unpopular in some circles in Japan, is that the Japanese are descendants of immigrants from Korea who arrived with rice-paddy agriculture around 400 B.C. Finally, the fourth theory holds that the peoples named in the other three theories could have mixed to form the modern Japanese.
When similar questions of origins arise about other peoples, they can be discussed dispassionately. That is not so for the Japanese. Until 1946, Japanese schools taught a myth of history based on the earliest recorded Japanese chronicles, which were written in the eighth century. They describe how the sun goddess Amaterasu, born from the left eye of the creator god Izanagi, sent her grandson Ninigi to Earth on the Japanese island of Kyushu to wed an earthly deity. Ninigi's great-grandson Jimmu, aided by a dazzling sacred bird that rendered his enemies helpless, became the first emperor of Japan in 660 B.C. To fill the gap between 660 B.C. and the earliest historically documented Japanese monarchs, the chronicles invented 13 other equally fictitious emperors. Before the end of World War II, when Emperor Hirohito finally announced that he was not of divine descent, Japanese archeologists and historians had to make their interpretations conform to this chronicle account. Unlike American archeologists, who acknowledge that ancient sites in the United States were left by peoples (Native Americans) unrelated to most modern Americans, Japanese archeologists believe all archeological deposits in Japan, no matter how old, were left by ancestors of the modern Japanese. Hence archeology in Japan is supported by astronomical budgets, employs up to 50,000 field-workers each year, and draws public attention to a degree inconceivable anywhere else in the world.
Why do they care so much? Unlike most other non-European countries, Japan preserved its independence and culture while emerging from isolation to create an industrialized society in the late nineteenth century. It was a remarkable achievement. Now the Japanese people are understandably concerned about maintaining their traditions in the face of massive Western cultural influences. They want to believe that their distinctive language and culture required uniquely complex developmental processes. To acknowledge a relationship of the Japanese language to any other language seems to constitute a surrender of cultural identity.
What makes it especially difficult to discuss Japanese archeology dispassionately is that Japanese interpretations of the past affect present behavior. Who among East Asian peoples brought culture to whom? Who has historical claims to whose land? These are not just academic questions. For instance, there is much archeological evidence that people and material objects passed between Japan and Korea in the period A.D. 300 to 700. Japanese interpret this to mean that Japan conquered Korea and brought Korean slaves and artisans to Japan; Koreans believe instead that Korea conquered Japan and that the founders of the Japanese imperial family were Korean.
Thus, when Japan sent troops to Korea and annexed it in 1910, Japanese military leaders celebrated the annexation as “the restoration of the legitimate arrangement of antiquity.” For the next 35 years, Japanese occupation forces tried to eradicate Korean culture and to replace the Korean language with Japanese in schools. The effort was a consequence of a centuries-old attitude of disdain. “Nose tombs” in Japan still contain 20,000 noses severed from Koreans and brought home as trophies of a sixteenth-century Japanese invasion. Not surprisingly, many Koreans loathe the Japanese, and their loathing is returned with contempt.
What really was “the legitimate arrangement of antiquity”? Today, Japan and Korea are both economic powerhouses, facing each other across the Korea Strait and viewing each other through colored lenses of false myths and past atrocities. It bodes ill for the future of East Asia if these two great peoples cannot find common ground. To do so, they will need a correct understanding of who the Japanese people really are.
Japan's unique culture began with its unique geography and environment. It is, for comparison, far more isolated than Britain, which lies only 22 miles from the French coast. Japan lies 110 miles from the closest point of the Asian mainland (South Korea), 190 miles from mainland Russia, and 480 miles from mainland China. Climate, too, sets Japan apart. Its rainfall, up to 120 inches a year, makes it the wettest temperate country in the world. Unlike the winter rains prevailing over much of Europe, Japan's rains are concentrated in the summer growing season, giving it the highest plant productivity of any nation in the temperate zones. While 80 percent of Japan's land consists of mountains unsuitable for agriculture and only 14 percent is farmland, an average square mile of that farmland is so fertile that it supports eight times as many people as does an average square mile of British farmland. Japan's high rainfall also ensures a quickly regenerated forest after logging. Despite thousands of years of dense human occupation, Japan still offers visitors a first impression of greenness because 70 percent of its land is still covered by forest.
Japanese forest composition varies with latitude and altitude: evergreen leafy forest in the south at low altitude, deciduous leafy forest in central Japan, and coniferous forest in the north and high up. For prehistoric humans, the deciduous leafy forest was the most productive, providing abundant edible nuts such as walnuts, chestnuts, horse chestnuts, acorns, and beechnuts. Japanese waters are also outstandingly productive. The lakes, rivers, and surrounding seas teem with salmon, trout, tuna, sardines, mackerel, herring, and cod. Today, Japan is the largest consumer of fish in the world. Japanese waters are also rich in clams, oysters, and other shellfish, crabs, shrimp, crayfish, and edible seaweeds. That high productivity was a key to Japan's prehistory.
From southwest to northeast, the four main Japanese islands are Kyushu, Shikoku, Honshu, and Hokkaido. Until the late nineteenth century, Hokkaido and northern Honshu were inhabited mainly by the Ainu, who lived as hunter-gatherers with limited agriculture, while the people we know today as Japanese occupied the rest of the main islands.
In appearance, of course, the Japanese are very similar to other East Asians. As for the Ainu, however, their distinctive appearance has prompted more to be written about their origins and relationships than about any other single people on Earth. Partly because Ainu men have luxuriant beards and the most profuse body hair of any people, they are often classified as Caucasoids (so-called white people) who somehow migrated east through Eurasia to Japan. In their overall genetic makeup, though, the Ainu are related to other East Asians, including the Japanese and Koreans. The distinctive appearance and hunter-gatherer lifestyle of the Ainu, and the undistinctive appearance and the intensive agricultural lifestyle of the Japanese, are frequently taken to suggest the straightforward interpretation that the Ainu are descended from Japan's original hunter-gatherer inhabitants and the Japanese are more recent invaders from the Asian mainland.
But this view is difficult to reconcile with the distinctiveness of the Japanese language. Everyone agrees that Japanese does not bear a close relation to any other language in the world. Most scholars consider it to be an isolated member of Asia's Altaic language family, which consists of Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungusic languages. Korean is also often considered to be an isolated member of this family, and within the family Japanese and Korean may be more closely related to each other than to other Altaic languages. However, the similarities between Japanese and Korean are confined to general grammatical features and about 15 percent of their basic vocabularies, rather than the detailed shared features of grammar and vocabulary that link, say, French to Spanish; they are more different from each other than Russian is from English.
Since languages change over time, the more similar two languages are, the more recently they must have diverged. By counting common words and features, linguists can estimate how long ago languages diverged, and such estimates suggest that Japanese and Korean parted company at least 4,000 years ago. As for the Ainu language, its origins are thoroughly in doubt; it may not have any special relationship to Japanese. After genes and language, a third type of evidence about Japanese origins comes from ancient portraits. The earliest preserved likenesses of Japan's inhabitants are statues called haniwa, erected outside tombs around 1,500 years ago. Those statues unmistakably depict East Asians. They do not resemble the heavily bearded Ainu. If the Japanese did replace the Ainu in Japan south of Hokkaido, that replacement must have occurred before A.D. 500.
Our earliest written information about Japan comes from Chinese chronicles, because China developed literacy long before Korea or Japan. In early Chinese accounts of various peoples referred to as “Eastern Barbarians", Japan is described under the name Wa, whose inhabitants were said to be divided into more than a hundred quarreling states. Only a few Korean or Japanese inscriptions before A.D. 700 have been preserved, but extensive chronicles were written in 712 and 720 in Japan and later in Korea. Those reveal massive transmission of culture to Japan from Korea itself, and from China via Korea. The chronicles are also full of accounts of Koreans in Japan and of Japanese in Korea ｡X interpreted by Japanese or Korean historians, respectively, as evidence of Japanese conquest of Korea or the reverse.
The ancestors of the Japanese, then, seem to have reached Japan before they had writing. Their biology suggests a recent arrival, but their language suggests arrival long ago. To resolve this paradox, we must now turn to archeology. The seas that surround much of Japan and coastal East Asia are shallow enough to have been dry land during the ice ages, when much of the ocean water was locked up in glaciers and sea level lay at about 500 feet below its present measurement. Land bridges connected Japan's main islands to one another, to the Russian mainland, and to South Korea. The mammals walking out to Japan included not only the ancestors of modern Japan's bears and monkeys but also ancient humans, long before boats had been invented. Stone tools indicate human arrival as early as half a million years ago.
Around 13,000 years ago, as glaciers melted rapidly all over the world, conditions in Japan changed spectacularly for the better, as far as humans were concerned. Temperature, rainfall, and humidity all increased, raising plant productivity to present high levels. Deciduous leafy forests full of nut trees, which had been confined to southern Japan during the ice ages, expanded northward at the expense of coniferous forest, thereby replacing a forest type that had been rather sterile for humans with a much more productive one. The rise in sea level severed the land bridges, converted Japan from a piece of the Asian continent to a big archipelago, turned what had been a plain into rich shallow seas, and created thousands of miles of productive new coastline with innumerable islands, bays, tidal flats, and estuaries, all teeming with seafood.
That end of the Ice Age was accompanied by the first of the two most decisive changes in Japanese history: the invention of pottery. In the usual experience of archeologists, inventions flow from mainlands to islands, and small peripheral societies aren't supposed to contribute revolutionary advances to the rest of the world. It therefore astonished archeologists to discover that the world's oldest known pottery was made in Japan 12,700 years ago. For the first time in human experience, people had watertight containers readily available in any desired shape. With their new ability to boil or steam food, they gained access to abundant resources that had previously been difficult to use: leafy vegetables, which would burn or dry out if cooked on an open fire; shellfish, which could now be opened easily; and toxic foods like acorns, which could now have their toxins boiled out. Soft-boiled foods could be fed to small children, permitting earlier weaning and more closely spaced babies. Toothless old people, the repositories of information in a preliterate society, could now be fed and live longer. All those momentous consequences of pottery triggered a population explosion, causing Japan's population to climb from an estimated few thousand to a quarter of a million.
The prejudice that islanders are supposed to learn from superior continentals wasn't the sole reason that record-breaking Japanese pottery caused such a shock. In addition, those first Japanese potters were clearly hunter-gatherers, which also violated established views. Usually only sedentary societies own pottery: what nomad wants to carry heavy, fragile pots, as well as weapons and the baby, whenever time comes to shift camp? Most sedentary societies elsewhere in the world arose only with the adoption of agriculture. But the Japanese environment is so productive that people could settle down and make pottery while still living by hunting and gathering. Pottery helped those Japanese hunter-gatherers exploit their environment's rich food resources more than 10,000 years before intensive agriculture reached Japan.
Much ancient Japanese pottery was decorated by rolling or pressing a cord on soft clay. Because the Japanese word for cord marking is jomon, the term Jomon is applied to the pottery itself, to the ancient Japanese people who made it, and to that whole period in Japanese prehistory beginning with the invention of pottery and ending only 10,000 years later. The earliest Jomon pottery, of 12,700 years ago, comes from Kyushu, the southernmost Japanese island. Thereafter, pottery spread north, reaching the vicinity of modern Tokyo around 9,500 years ago and the northernmost island of Hokkaido by 7,000 years ago. Pottery's northward spread followed that of deciduous forest rich in nuts, suggesting that the climate-related food explosion was what permitted sedentary living.
How did Jomon people make their living? We have abundant evidence from the garbage they left behind at hundreds of thousands of excavated archeological sites all over Japan. They apparently enjoyed a well-balanced diet, one that modern nutritionists would applaud.
One major food category was nuts, especially chestnuts and walnuts, plus horse chestnuts and acorns leached or boiled free of their bitter poisons. Nuts could be harvested in autumn in prodigious quantities, then stored for the winter in underground pits up to six feet deep and six feet wide. Other plant foods included berries, fruits, seeds, leaves, shoots, bulbs, and roots. In all, archeologists sifting through Jomon garbage have identified 64 species of edible plants.
Then as now, Japan's inhabitants were among the world's leading consumers of seafood. They harpooned tuna in the open ocean, killed seals on the beaches, and exploited seasonal runs of salmon in the rivers. They drove dolphins into shallow water and clubbed or speared them, just as Japanese hunters do today. They netted diverse fish, captured them in weirs, and caught them on fishhooks carved from deer antlers. They gathered shellfish, crabs, and seaweed in the intertidal zone or dove for them. (Jomon skeletons show a high incidence of abnormal bone growth in the ears, often observed in divers today.) Among land animals hunted, wild boar and deer were the most common prey. They were caught in pit traps, shot with bows and arrows, and run down with dogs.
The most debated question about Jomon subsistence concerns the possible contribution of agriculture. Many Jomon sites contain remains of edible plants that are native to Japan as wild species but also grown as crops today, including the adzuki bean and green gram bean. The remains from Jomon times do not clearly show features distinguishing the crops from their wild ancestors, so we do not know whether these plants were gathered in the wild or grown intentionally. Sites also have debris of edible or useful plant species not native to Japan, such as hemp, which must have been introduced from the Asian mainland. Around 1000 B.C., toward the end of the Jomon period, a few grains of rice, barley, and millet, the staple cereals of East Asia, began to appear. All these tantalizing clues make it likely that Jomon people were starting to practice some slash-and-burn agriculture, but evidently in a casual way that made only a minor contribution to their diet.
Archeologists studying Jomon hunter-gatherers have found not only hard-to-carry pottery (including pieces up to three feet tall) but also heavy stone tools, remains of substantial houses that show signs of repair, big village sites of 50 or more dwellings, and cemeteries -- all further evidence that the Jomon people were sedentary rather than nomadic. Their stay-at-home lifestyle was made possible by the diversity of resource-rich habitats available within a short distance of one central site: inland forests, rivers, seashores, bays, and open oceans. Jomon people lived at some of the highest population densities ever estimated for hunter-gatherers, especially in central and northern Japan, with their nut-rich forests, salmon runs, and productive seas. The estimate of the total population of Jomon Japan at its peak is 250,000 -- trivial, of course, compared with today, but impressive for hunter-gatherers.
With all this stress on what Jomon people did have, we need to be clear as well about what they didn't have. Their lives were very different from those of contemporary societies only a few hundred miles away in mainland China and Korea. Jomon people had no intensive agriculture. Apart from dogs (and perhaps pigs), they had no domestic animals. They had no metal tools, no writing, no weaving, and little social stratification into chiefs and commoners. Regional variation in pottery styles suggests little progress toward political centralization and unification.
Despite its distinctiveness even in East Asia at that time, Jomon Japan was not completely isolated. Pottery, obsidian, and fishhooks testify to some Jomon trade with Korea, Russia, and Okinawa -- as does the arrival of Asian mainland crops. Compared with later eras, though, that limited trade with the outside world had little influence on Jomon society. Jomon Japan was a miniature conservative universe that changed surprisingly little over 10,000 years
To place Jomon Japan in a contemporary perspective, let us remind ourselves of what human societies were like on the Asian mainland in 400 B.C., just as the Jomon lifestyle was about to come to an end. China consisted of kingdoms with rich elites and poor commoners; the people lived in walled towns, and the country was on the verge of political unification and would soon become the world's largest empire. Beginning around 6500 B.C., China had developed intensive agriculture based on millet in the north and rice in the south; it had domestic pigs, chickens, and water buffalo. The Chinese had had writing for at least 900 years, metal tools for at least 1,500 years, and had just invented the world's first cast iron. Those developments were also spreading to Korea, which itself had had agriculture for several thousand years (including rice since at least 2100 B.C.) and metal since 1000 B.C.

All through human history, centralized states with metal weapons and armies supported by dense agricultural populations have swept away sparser populations of huntergatherers. How did Stone Age Japan survive so long?

With all these developments going on for thousands of years just across the Korea Strait from Japan, it might seem astonishing that in 400 B.C. Japan was still occupied by people who had some trade with Korea but remained preliterate stone-tool-using hunter-gatherers. Throughout human history, centralized states with metal weapons and armies supported by dense agricultural populations have consistently swept away sparser populations of hunter-gatherers. How did Jomon Japan survive so long?
To understand the answer to this paradox, we have to remember that until 400 B.C., the Korea Strait separated not rich farmers from poor hunter-gatherers, but poor farmers from rich hunter-gatherers. China itself and Jomon Japan were probably not in direct contact. Instead Japan's trade contacts, such as they were, involved Korea. But rice had been domesticated in warm southern China and spread only slowly northward to much cooler Korea, because it took a long time to develop cold-resistant strains of rice. Early rice agriculture in Korea used dry-field methods rather than irrigated paddies and was not particularly productive. Hence early Korean agriculture could not compete with Jomon hunting and gathering. Jomon people themselves would have seen no advantage in adopting Korean agriculture, insofar as they were aware of its existence, and poor Korean farmers had no advantages that would let them force their way into Japan. As we shall see, the advantages finally reversed suddenly and dramatically.
More than 10,000 years after the invention of pottery and the subsequent Jomon population explosion, a second decisive event in Japanese history triggered a second population explosion. Around 400 B.C., a new lifestyle arrived from South Korea. This second transition poses in acute form our question about who the Japanese are. Does the transition mark the replacement of Jomon people with immigrants from Korea, ancestral to the modern Japanese? Or did Japan's original Jomon inhabitants continue to occupy Japan while learning valuable new tricks?
The new mode of living appeared first on the north coast of Japan's southwesternmost island, Kyushu, just across the Korea Strait from South Korea. There we find Japan's first metal tools, of iron, and Japan's first undisputed full-scale agriculture. That agriculture came in the form of irrigated rice fields, complete with canals, dams, banks, paddies, and rice residues revealed by archeological excavations. Archeologists term the new way of living Yayoi, after a district of Tokyo where in 1884 its characteristic pottery was first recognized. Unlike Jomon pottery, Yayoi pottery was very similar to contemporary South Korean pottery in shape. Many other elements of the new Yayoi culture were unmistakably Korean and previously foreign to Japan, including bronze objects, weaving, glass beads, and styles of tools and houses.
While rice was the most important crop, Yayoi farmers introduced 27 new to Japan, as well as unquestionably domesticated pigs. They may have practiced double cropping, with paddies irrigated for rice production in the summer, then drained for dry-land cultivation of millet, barley, and wheat in the winter. Inevitably, this highly productive system of intensive agriculture triggered an immediate population explosion in Kyushu, where archeologists have identified far more Yayoi sites than Jomon sites, even though the Jomon period lasted 14 times longer.
In virtually no time, Yayoi farming jumped from Kyushu to the adjacent main islands of Shikoku and Honshu, reaching the Tokyo area within 200 years, and the cold northern tip of Honshu (1,000 miles from the first Yayoi settlements on Kyushu) in another century. After briefly occupying northern Honshu, Yayoi farmers abandoned that area, presumably because rice farming could not compete with the Jomon hunter-gatherer life. For the next 2,000 years, northern Honshu remained a frontier zone, beyond which the northernmost Japanese island of Hokkaido and its Ainu hunter-gatherers were not even considered part of the Japanese state until their annexation in the nineteenth century.
It took several centuries for Yayoi Japan to show the first signs of social stratification, as reflected especially in cemeteries. After about 100 B.C., separate parts of cemeteries were set aside for the graves of what was evidently an emerging elite class, marked by luxury goods imported from China, such as beautiful jade objects and bronze mirrors. As the Yayoi population explosion continued, and as all the best swamps or irrigable plains suitable for wet rice agriculture began to fill up, the archeological evidence suggests that war became more and more frequent: that evidence includes mass production of arrowheads, defensive moats surrounding villages, and buried skeletons pierced by projectile points. These hallmarks of war in Yayoi Japan corroborate the earliest accounts of Japan in Chinese chronicles, which describe the land of Wa and its hundred little political units fighting one another.
In the period from A.D. 300 to 700, both archeological excavations and frustratingly ambiguous accounts in later chronicles let us glimpse dimly the emergence of a politically unified Japan. Before A.D. 300, elite tombs were small and exhibited a regional diversity of styles. Beginning around A.D. 300, increasingly enormous earth-mound tombs called kofun, in the shape of keyholes, were constructed throughout the former Yayoi area from Kyushu to North Honshu. Kofun are up to 1,500 feet long and more than 100 feet high, making them possibly the largest earth-mound tombs in the world. The prodigious amount of labor required to build them and the uniformity of their style across Japan imply powerful rulers who commanded a huge, politically unified labor force. Those kofun that have been excavated contain lavish burial goods, but excavation of the largest ones is still forbidden because they are believed to contain the ancestors of the Japanese imperial line. The visible evidence of political centralization that the kofun provide reinforces the accounts of kofun-era Japanese emperors written down much later in Japanese and Korean chronicles. Massive Korean influences on Japan during the kofun era -- whether through the Korean conquest of Japan (the Korean view) or the Japanese conquest of Korea (the Japanese view) -- were responsible for transmitting Buddhism, writing, horseback riding, and new ceramic and metallurgical techniques to Japan from the Asian mainland.
Finally, with the completion of Japan's first chronicle in A.D. 712, Japan emerged into the full light of history. As of 712, the people inhabiting Japan were at last unquestionably Japanese, and their language (termed Old Japanese) was unquestionably ancestral to modern Japanese. Emperor Akihito, who reigns today, is the eighty-second direct descendant of the emperor under whom that first chronicle of A.D. 712 was written. He is traditionally considered the 125th direct descendant of the legendary first emperor, Jimmu, the great-great-great-grandson of the sun goddess Amaterasu.
Japanese culture underwent far more radical change in the 700 years of the Yayoi era than in the ten millennia of Jomon times. The contrast between Jomon stability (or conservatism) and radical Yayoi change is the most striking feature of Japanese history. Obviously, something momentous happened at 400 B.C. What was it? Were the ancestors of the modern Japanese the Jomon people, the Yayoi people, or a combination? Japan's population increased by an astonishing factor of 70 during Yayoi times: What caused that change? A passionate debate has raged around three alternative hypotheses.
One theory is that Jomon hunter-gatherers themselves gradually evolved into the modern Japanese. Because they had already been living a settled existence in villages for thousands of years, they may have been preadapted to accepting agriculture. At the Yayoi transition, perhaps nothing more happened than that Jomon society received cold-resistant rice seeds and information about paddy irrigation from Korea, enabling it to produce more food and increase its numbers. This theory appeals to many modern Japanese because it minimizes the unwelcome contribution of Korean genes to the Japanese gene pool while portraying the Japanese people as uniquely Japanese for at least the past 12,000 years.
A second theory, unappealing to those Japanese who prefer the first theory, argues instead that the Yayoi transition represents a massive influx of immigrants from Korea, carrying Korean farming practices, culture, and genes. Kyushu would have seemed a paradise to Korean rice farmers, because it is warmer and swampier than Korea and hence a better place to grow rice. According to one estimate, Yayoi Japan received several million immigrants from Korea, utterly overwhelming the genetic contribution of Jomon people (thought to have numbered around 75,000 just before the Yayoi transition). If so, modern Japanese are descendants of Korean immigrants who developed a modified culture of their own over the last 2,000 years.
The last theory accepts the evidence for immigration from Korea but denies that it was massive. Instead, highly productive agriculture may have enabled a modest number of immigrant rice farmers to reproduce much faster than Jomon hunter-gatherers and eventually to outnumber them. Like the second theory, this theory considers modern Japanese to be slightly modified Koreans but dispenses with the need for large-scale immigration.
By comparison with similar transitions elsewhere in the world, the second or third theory seems to me more plausible than the first theory. Over the last 12,000 years, agriculture arose at not more than nine places on Earth, including China and the Fertile Crescent. Twelve thousand years ago, everybody alive was a hunter-gatherer; now almost all of us are farmers or fed by farmers. Farming spread from those few sites of origin mainly because farmers outbred hunters, developed more potent technology, and then killed the hunters or drove them off lands suitable for agriculture. In modern times European farmers thereby replaced native Californian hunters, aboriginal Australians, and the San people of South Africa. Farmers who used stone tools similarly replaced hunters prehistorically throughout Europe, Southeast Asia, and Indonesia. Korean farmers of 400 B.C. would have enjoyed a much larger advantage over Jomon hunters because the Koreans already possessed iron tools and a highly developed form of intensive agriculture.
Which of the three theories is correct for Japan? The only direct way to answer this question is to compare Jomon and Yayoi skeletons and genes with those of modern Japanese and Ainu. Measurements have now been made of many skeletons. In addition, within the last three years molecular geneticists have begun to extract DNA from ancient human skeletons and compare the genes of Japan's ancient and modern populations. Jomon and Yayoi skeletons, researchers find, are on the average readily distinguishable. Jomon people tended to be shorter, with relatively longer forearms and lower legs, more wide-set eyes, shorter and wider faces, and much more pronounced facial topography, with strikingly raised browridges, noses, and nose bridges. Yayoi people averaged an inch or two taller, with close-set eyes, high and narrow faces, and flat browridges and noses. Some skeletons of the Yayoi period were still Jomon-like in appearance, but that is to be expected by almost any theory of the Jomon-Yayoi transition. By the time of the kofun period, all Japanese skeletons except those of the Ainu form a homogeneous group, resembling modern Japanese and Koreans.
In all these respects, Jomon skulls differ from those of modern Japanese and are most similar to those of modern Ainu, while Yayoi skulls most resemble those of modern Japanese. Similarly, geneticists attempting to calculate the relative contributions of Korean-like Yayoi genes and Ainu-like Jomon genes to the modern Japanese gene pool have concluded that the Yayoi contribution was generally dominant. Thus, immigrants from Korea really did make a big contribution to the modern Japanese, though we cannot yet say whether that was because of massive immigration or else modest immigration amplified by a high rate of population increase. Genetic studies of the past three years have also at last resolved the controversy about the origins of the Ainu: they are the descendants of Japan's ancient Jomon inhabitants, mixed with Korean genes of Yayoi colonists and of the modern Japanese.
Given the overwhelming advantage that rice agriculture gave Korean farmers, one has to wonder why the farmers achieved victory over Jomon hunters so suddenly, after making little headway in Japan for thousands of years. What finally tipped the balance and triggered the Yayoi transition was probably a combination of four developments: the farmers began raising rice in irrigated fields instead of in less productive dry fields; they developed rice strains that would grow well in a cool climate; their population expanded in Korea, putting pressure on Koreans to emigrate; and they invented iron tools that allowed them to mass-produce the wooden shovels, hoes, and other tools needed for rice-paddy agriculture. That iron and intensive farming reached Japan simultaneously is unlikely to have been a coincidence.
We have seen that the combined evidence of archeology, physical anthropology, and genetics supports the transparent interpretation for how the distinctive-looking Ainu and the undistinctive-looking Japanese came to share Japan: the Ainu are descended from Japan's original inhabitants and the Japanese are descended from more recent arrivals. But that view leaves the problem of language unexplained. If the Japanese really are recent arrivals from Korea, you might expect the Japanese and Korean languages to be very similar. More generally, if the Japanese people arose recently from some mixture, on the island of Kyushu, of original Ainu-like Jomon inhabitants with Yayoi invaders from Korea, the Japanese language might show close affinities to both the Korean and Ainu languages. Instead, Japanese and Ainu have no demonstrable relationship, and the relationship between Japanese and Korean is distant. How could this be so if the mixing occurred a mere 2,400 years ago? I suggest the following resolution of this paradox: the languages of Kyushu's Jomon residents and Yayoi invaders were quite different from the modern Ainu and Korean languages, respectively.
The Ainu language was spoken in recent times by the Ainu on the northern island of Hokkaido, so Hokkaido's Jomon inhabitants probably also spoke an Ainu-like language. The Jomon inhabitants of Kyushu, however, surely did not. From the southern tip of Kyushu to the northern tip of Hokkaido, the Japanese archipelago is nearly 1,500 miles long. In Jomon times it supported great regional diversity of subsistence techniques and of pottery styles and was never unified politically. During the 10,000 years of Jomon occupation, Jomon people would have evolved correspondingly great linguistic diversity. In fact, many Japanese place-names on Hokkaido and northern Honshu include the Ainu words for river, nai or betsu, and for cape, shiri, but such Ainu-like names do not occur farther south in Japan. This suggests not only that Yayoi and Japanese pioneers adopted many Jomon place-names, just as white Americans did Native American names (think of Massachusetts and Mississippi), but also that Ainu was the Jomon language only of northernmost Japan.
That is, the modern Ainu language of Hokkaido is not a model for the ancient Jomon language of Kyushu. By the same token, modern Korean may be a poor model for the ancient Yayoi language of Korean immigrants in 400 B.C. In the centuries before Korea became unified politically in A.D. 676, it consisted of three kingdoms. Modern Korean is derived from the language of the kingdom of Silla, the kingdom that emerged triumphant and unified Korea, but Silla was not the kingdom that had close contact with Japan in the preceding centuries. Early Korean chronicles tell us that the different kingdoms had different languages. While the languages of the kingdoms defeated by Silla are poorly known, the few preserved words of one of those kingdoms, Koguryo, are much more similar to the corresponding Old Japanese words than are the corresponding modern Korean words. Korean languages may have been even more diverse in 400 B.C., before political unification had reached the stage of three kingdoms. The Korean language that reached Japan in 400 B.C., and that evolved into modern Japanese, I suspect, was quite different from the Silla language that evolved into modern Korean. Hence we should not be surprised that modern Japanese and Korean people resemble each other far more in their appearance and genes than in their languages.
History gives the Japanese and the Koreans ample grounds for mutual distrust and contempt, so any conclusion confirming their close relationship is likely to be unpopular among both peoples. Like Arabs and Jews, Koreans and Japanese are joined by blood yet locked in traditional enmity. But enmity is mutually destructive, in East Asia as in the Middle East. As reluctant as Japanese and Koreans are to admit it, they are like twin brothers who shared their formative years. The political future of East Asia depends in large part on their success in rediscovering those ancient bonds between them.

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This article was taken from the library of The Japan Exchange and Teaching Alumni Association (Region #9 Oklahoma/Texas) and posted by Henny Savenje to the Moogoonghwa mailing on July 14, 2000. The original article appeared in Discover Magazine Vol. 19 No. 6 (June 1998).

迎 恩 門 (Yeongeunmun)...Gate for Welcoming (Chinese) Imperial Benevolence

Photo Credit:  Wikipedia.com

Korean political history and culture are inextricably linked to China's .  The picture above of 迎 恩 門 (Yingenmen or Yeongeunmun in Korean) was where Chinese imperial envoys were welcomed by Korean kings.  Korean kings also knelt and bowed toward the direction of Beijing as the envoys left the gate.  Thus, the name of the gate, Gate (門 ) for Welcoming (迎) Imperial Benevolence (恩).

In fact, Koreans were so crazy about all things Chinese that they named a lot of their important cities and rivers for China and the Chinese.  For example, the Joseon capital (what is now Seoul) was Hanseong or 漢城 (Hancheng, or City of the Han Chinese).  Similarly the Han River that runs through Seoul is 漢江 (Hanjiang, or the River of the Han Chinese).  Interestingly, the modern name for Korea (in use since 1897) 韓國 (Hanguo in Chinese or Hankook in Korean) is based on the ancient Chinese state by the same name during China's Warring States period.

Because of modern-day nationalism, Koreans don't emphasize the Chinese origin of their place names. That's really too bad because history should not be rewritten to suit modern taste.  Let's give back to history its own voice...

Krazy Korean Parent

From the Korea Herald


Police apprehended a student Thursday for allegedly murdering his mother, having been unable to deal with her increasing academic expectations, and leaving her body to rot for months in their apartment.

According to the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency, the high school senior, 18, stabbed his mother, 51, in the throat with a kitchen knife in March and left her body to decompose in a room for eight months.

“I was afraid of the severe punishment I was going to receive when my mother found out that I forged my grades to say I was 62nd in the nation during the next day’s Parent Teacher Night,” confessed the student.

The names of the student and his family members were undisclosed to the media.

Authorities said the student confessed that his mother constantly pressured him to be “first in the nation,” and to “go to Seoul National University’s School of Law.

Police say that the mother resorted to violence and other means of torture including withholding food or sleep, when his grades failed to meet her expectations.

Authorities found that the student had been forging his report cards since middle school and his actual pretest scores put the teen academically within the nation’s top 4,000 students. Police also found that his self-graded scores of the College Scholastic Ability Test earlier in the month put him in similar outstanding ranking.

Police found that the young man had sealed the room door with glue as the odor from the decomposing body began to grow.

The student was caught after his estranged father, who recently returned after walking out on the family five years ago, called the police after detecting the putrid odor.

By Robert Lee (robert@heraldm.com)

Los Ancianos Malos: King Yeongjo of Chosun (Chaoxian) Korea

Locked his son, the crown prince, in a rice box to die of thirst and starvation...


From http://koreajoongangdaily.joinsmsn.com/news/article/article.aspx?aid=1966865

A prince is suffocated at the Rice Box Gate

We will never know the rights and wrongs of the matter. But we know one thing for certain: Something terrible happened at the Rice Box Gate.
The killer ― perhaps the murderer ― was a king. Yeongjo, one of Korea’s greatest kings, was decisive, famous for a rigid righteousness. He also had one of Korea’s longest reigns, 52 years. According to his detractors, however, the decisiveness that marked his youth and maturity turned to arbitrary, stubborn senility as Yeongjo advanced in age.
The victim is known to history as Sado-Seja, Yeongjo’s favorite son and the designated crown prince. Yeongjo ― perhaps wise enough to see his approaching senility, perhaps merely following a tradition of abdication in old age common among Korean kings ― had retired to the Mulberry Palace in the west of Seoul and turned over the daily administration of government to Sado-Seja, who lived in Changgyeong Palace near the East Gate.
Those who have read King Lear can guess what came next: The court was split by factionalism. Inevitably, two groups coalesced around the two centers of power: one urging the king to retake his throne, one urging the prince to consolidate his heritage, each in advance of their factional interests.
The King’s group, out of power, whispered in Yeongjo’s ear that his son was overtaxing the people. Indeed, his tax collectors were little more than brigands. Worse, he had developed insatiable sexual appetites. His agents combed the kingdom for the prettiest women, married or not, and brought them to the palace for his pleasure. Now, it was said that he even had plans to kill the old king, his father, outright, and seize the throne.
The king ordered his son brought before him for punishment. And here is where Yeongjo’s Confucian Korea and Shakespeare’s England are different. Sado-Seja submitted to this order. This in itself suggests he was the injured party, the dutiful son. Had he been a schemer expecting what came next, or been planning to seize power, he would surely have refused. Once in his father’s power, he was formally stripped of office, sealed up in a rice chest and left before Seonim Gate in the hot July sun, without food and water. This, they say, was the suggestion of the prince’s own sister.
How could a sister be so heartless? The princess claimed in her memoirs that her plan was only to shock Sado-Seja, who had grown paranoid, back to his senses.
It took the prince nine days to die. After 21 days, they opened the chest. His body showed no decomposition, and was strangely cold.
This was taken by many as proof from heaven of his innocence. The old king supposedly repented what he had done, but too late. The nation suffered through an erratic last few years of his reign. When Yeongjo died, his grandson, feeling the capital’s ground polluted with the injustice, refused to enter the royal palace, and planned to move the government to Suwon.
Through the same haunted gate, the depraved ruler Yongsan-gun passed in 1506. Korea’s Caligula, said to torture virgins after sleeping with them, said to have driven his sister to suicide with his incestuous passions, passed through on his way to exile and imprisonment on Gyodong Island.
The unlucky gate is now sealed. But you can visit it by taking the No. 4 subway line to Hyehwa Station and walking west through the grounds of Seoul National University Hospital to the east wall of Changgyeong Palace. It is the gate just south of the main entrance to the palace.
Admission to Chongmyo will entitle you to stroll north, across a bridge, and into the Changgyeong Palace grounds. Seonim Gate will then be directly to the east, your right.

Ungrateful Kimchis

Ingratitude, thy Name is South Korea

By Dennis Prager

South Korea has joined with only two other countries in the world in dropping the name of the forthcoming film “Captain America” and using the subtitle, “The First Avenger.” The other two countries are Russia and Ukraine. According to the New York Times report, “Although that country (South Korea) is one of Hollywood’s top-performing territories, resentment about the continued presence of the United States military runs deep.”

For years now, I have intended to write a column about the most glaring case of international ingratitude of which I am aware. The “Captain America” story has finally pushed me over the edge.

For decades, there have been anti-U.S. demonstrations in South Korea. And each time I wonder the same thing: Do these people have any idea what the living hell known as North Korea is like? Do these people understand that the United States is the reason they are so free and prosperous, completely unlike their fellow North Koreans who had the horrible luck not to be liberated by America? Do these people know how many Americans died to enable them to be free?

Whenever I confront someone who claims that America’s wars abroad were fought for economic gain or to extend its alleged imperialist empire, I ask the person about the Korean War: What imperialist or economic reasons were there to fight in that country?

The answer I most often receive is, “Frankly I don’t know too much about the Korean War.” And it’s a good thing for the critics of America’s wars that they don’t know much about the Korean War. If they did, they would either experience cognitive dissonance or have to severely modify their position on America’s wars.


Just five years after a war-weary America celebrated the end of World War II, Americans were asked to fight the successor-evil to Nazism, communism, in Korea, a country most Americans could not identify on a map or did not know anything about. In an earlier version of what happened in Vietnam, the Soviet Union and China backed a communist attempt to take over the southern half of the Korean peninsula — the northern half had been communist since the end of World War II — and install a Stalinist tyranny over the non-communist southern half.

Over 36,000 Americans died in America’s successful attempt to keep South Korea from becoming communist. And another 92,000 were wounded.

So, forgive me for the contempt I feel for South Koreans who demonstrate against the United States and for the two-thirds of South Koreans who, according to a 2002 Gallup-Korea poll, view the United States unfavorably. Whenever I see those anti-American demonstrators or read such polls, all I can think about are the tens of thousands of Americans who died so that South Koreans would not live in the communist hell their fellow Koreans live in.

Younger South Koreans want American troops to leave their country? Do these young people not know that on planet Earth no other country suffers the mass enslavement, mass incarceration, mass death or the deadening of the mind and soul that North Koreans endure because of the psychopaths who run that country?

And if they do know all this about North Korea, how do they explain why South Korea is so different?

Here is a suggestion: The South Korean government should conduct a national plebiscite on whether America should withdraw its troops from that country. Before the South Korean people vote, the United States should make it clear that if it withdraws its troops and North Korea later invades the South, we will send no troops to die again for South Korea — but we will vote to condemn North Korea’s aggression at the United Nations.

If a majority of the South Korean people wants us to leave, we should.

The beauty of such a plebiscite is that if a majority of the South Korean people wants American troops out, we have no moral obligation to stay there. And if a majority wants us to stay, the South Korean left and other ingrates in that country should shut up.

I have been to South Korea, and I live in a community with many Koreans. I have always admired their industriousness, work ethic and strong families. But South Korea is surely the most ungrateful country in the world. Which is all the more remarkable since it is also the luckiest.

Dennis Prager hosts a nationally syndicated radio talk show and is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He is the author of four books, most recently “Happiness Is a Serious Problem” (HarperCollins). His website is www.dennisprager.com.

Down with Kimchi Revisionism!!!

In an article on Korean-Chinese (Chaoxianren or Chaoxian minzu) in Korea, the so-called Chosun Ilbo newspaper of South Korea jingoistically proclaims that northeastern China during the 18th century was a part of Korea.  LMAO! And more LMAO!

Firstly, refer to the map of Qing China below.  Secondly, use some common sensical logic.  The ancestral homeland of the Qing was Manchuria, which has always comprised the northeastern (dongbei) territories of China. (Manchus lived in Manchuria, for the benighted writers of the Choson Ilbo.)

At its apex, the Qing empire stretched from Outer Mongolia to Vietnam.  An empire this large (and before 1842, quite powerful) surely could have afforded to protect and defend its own ancestral homeland from tiny Chosun (Chaoxian) Korea.  In fact, Chosun (Chaoxian) Korea was a vassal/tributary state to Qing China.  The Chosun (Chaoxian) king had to pay his respect to the Qing emperor every year or so by sending tributes to the Forbidden City.

Here is the offending paragraph from the Chosun Ilbo (July 6, 2011 online version): 

Korean Chinese can trace their roots back to the late 18th century, at around the end of the Chosun Dynasty. At this time, Koreans began migrating in search of food to northeastern China, which was then considered a part of Korean territory.

 
Map of Qing China (Source:  Wikipedia)

Yet Another K-POP Suicide

　Chae Dong-ha, 30, former member of the Korean pop trio SG Wannabe, was found dead in his home Friday morning, his agency said.



　Chae had hanged himself in his house in Eunpyeong-gu. Chae’s manager said Chae could not be reached the night before, and he was found dead the following morning when the manager arrived at his house. Police believe Chae committed suicide on the night of May 26.



　Chae’s agency said he had been suffering from depression since the death of his former manager’s, who committed suicide in 2009 in a motel in Tongyeong, South Gyeongsang province.



　Chae had expressed his affection for his former manager in an album he released that same year. On the album Chae wrote, “He was everything to me -- my consoler, my friend, my brother. When I met him, I had the whole world in me.”



　Chae debuted in 2002 with his first solo album but failed to gain popularity. In 2004, he formed a ballad trio, SG Wannabe, with Kim Yong-jun and Kim Jin-ho. The group became popular in South Korea and Japan. In 2008, however, Chae left SG Wannabe and moved to a different agency. In 2009 he released his second solo album.



　Chae had been planning a concert next month in celebration of his birthday on June 23.



　Just four days before Chae’s death, an MBC sports announcer committed suicide. Celebrities including actor and singer Park Yong-ha, actress Choi Jin-sil and actress Jeong Da-bin have committed suicide in recent years.



　By Yun Suh-young (syun@heraldm.com)

Source:  Korea Herald

NO TO "KIMCHI" IMPERIALISM

Cambodia Bans Marriage to Korean Men

The Cambodian government has decided to temporarily forbid marriages between Cambodian women and Korean men to curb the mail-order bride business. Phnom Penh says Korean men often fail to observe the month-long consideration period for which they are required to stay in Cambodia to undergo an interview and a review of documents.

A Korean government source on Friday said the Cambodian government informed the Korean Embassy in Phnom Penh of the ban in an official letter on March 5.

The measure was taken after a woman was arrested for lining up no fewer than 25 Cambodian girls as potential brides for a Korean man to choose from, according to the source.

The Korean Embassy suspended receipt of applications for consular international marriage certificates on March 8, and will also temporarily suspend a settlement support program for immigrant spouses from Cambodia on April 1.

"International marriages should occur after free dating and the couples should decide on their own which country to live in after marriage. But Koreans, who account for 60 percent of international marriages in Cambodia, mostly meet Cambodian women through matchmakers," a government official said.

The arrest of the woman prompted the Cambodian government to enforce the ban amid deteriorating sentiment about Koreans among locals, he added.

Source: Chosun Ilbo (English edition).

60 Years after the Start of the Korean War

Like I Say, Animals Should be on a Plate or in a Pot :-)

From Ask a Korean (http://askakorean.blogspot.com/2009/08/dog-its-whats-for-dinner.html)


Q: Why do Koreans eat dogs?
A: People eat what’s around them. Protein, especially obtained from a large animal, was traditionally scarce in Korea. Eating a cow was nearly out of the question – each household, if it were lucky, would have a single head of cattle to pull the plow. Pigs competed for the same food that humans ate. Dogs did not. Traditionally, dogs are eaten during the three high heat days of summer, called bok or sam-bok ("three bok").

Q: How prevalent is it?
A: Dog meat is not very prevalent in modern Korea – it is not what people eat every day. You have to visit a restaurant that specializes in dog meat-based dish to get it. There are apparently around 530 such restaurants in Seoul, which is not many for a 12 million people city. Roughly 1 million dogs are slaughtered for food each year. By weight, it is the fifth-most consumed meat in Korea, following chicken, pork, beef and duck.

Q: Is dog meat considered a gourmet delicacy?
A: No. It is traditionally a peasant food, and was never considered high-end. Reflecting this status, you would have to get out to the poorer outskirts of Seoul to encounter a good dog meat dish.

Q: What do Koreans think about dog-eating generally?
A: According to a survey conducted in 2000, 83 percent of Koreans (91.9 percent of males and 67.9 percent of females) have eaten dog meat. 86.3 percent of Koreans favored eating dog meat (92.3 percent of males and 72.1 percent of females).

Q: What do Koreans who own pet dogs think about dog-eating?
A: Some pet dog owners in Korea have become extremely vocal against dog-eating, citing all the reasons that are familiar to non-Koreans who find dog-eating unpalatable. Most pet dog owners are more moderate: in most cases, they wouldn’t eat a dog, but do not care about other people who do. Still others distinguish dogs raised as pets and dogs raised as food, and have no qualms about eating a dog. The Korean’s friend who lives in Korea owns a Yorkshire Terrier as a pet but is nonetheless a huge fan of dog meat. She frequently goes to the dog meat restaurant with her Terrier, and says she feels no inner conflict.

Apparently, looking at this mug does not dim the Korean's friend's appetite for dogs.

However, the distinction between edible dogs and pet dogs is not necessarily ironclad for sellers of dog meat. Recently there was a report that abandoned pet dogs were being trafficked to dog meat dealers instead of an animal shelter, where they are supposed to go. The movie Ddong Gae (English title: Mutt Boy) shows the main character fighting the bullies who ate his dog, which the main character picked up as a stray.

Q: I heard dog meat is illegal in Korea. Is that true?
A: It is more correct to say that dog meat is in legal grey area. Livestock Processing Act of Korea sets forth various standards for how livestock may be raised, slaughtered, processed, sold, inspected, etc. Oddly, dogs do not fall under the definition of “livestock”. This is an odd omission because the definition of “livestock” includes horses, which Koreans almost never eat. (The Korean's guess would be that whichever aid to the legislator who drafted the law copied a non-Korean law without thinking too much about it.) This does not mean that dog meat is illegal; it just means that Livestock Processing Act does not regulate the processing of dog meat. Instead, it is regulated by Food Hygiene Act, which simply defines “food” as “all foodstuff, except taken as medicine.”

But dog meat-abolitionists of Korea often argue that this indicates the Korean law’s recognition that dogs are not for eating. On the other hand, however, the National Tax Board of Korea issued an opinion that dog meat restaurants may receive the same tax treatment for their purchase of dog meat as, say, the tax treatment that a barbecue restaurant receives for its purchase of beef. So it’s fair to say that this issue is muddled.

Several years ago, there was some attempt on the part of Seoul city government to regulate dog meat processing in order to ensure it is processed in a hygienic manner. However, the vocal minority vigorously opposed the “legalization” of dog meat, and the idea was dropped.

Q: How are the dogs raised and slaughtered?
A: Because Livestock Processing Act does not cover dog meat, dog-ranchers (so to speak) and dog meat sellers essentially go for the raising/slaughtering method that generates maximum profit. This generally leads to unsightly living conditions for edible dogs, similar to those of pigs or chickens in industrialized farming in the U.S., only in a smaller scale. Dogs are raised in a small cage and sold alive until they get to meat market. Then they are generally electrocuted before being processed and shipped to restaurants.

Freshly slaughtered dogs in a market in Korea that specializes dog meat wholesale.

Q: Is it true that the dogs are tortured before they are killed?
A: Again, because Livestock Processing Act does not cover dog meat, there is no restriction about how to kill a dog for meat. At the meat market, the need to slaughter the dogs quickly usually means dogs are electrocuted, similar to cattle. However, especially in rural areas where people slaughter dogs to cook and eat on their own, the common method is to hang the dog and beat it to death, in an attempt to tenderize the meat. (This, however, may be counterproductive; while beating the meat does tenderize it, an animal that dies in a stressed state generally produces tougher and less tasty meat.) A figurative expression in Korean for a severe beating is “like beating a dog on bok day.”

Q: Enough with the cultural stuff, let’s get to the food – How is dog meat cooked? Is it like a Chinese restaurant, where you can get the same dish in different meat? (e.g. beef fried rice/chicken fried rice/shrimp fried rice/dog fried rice?)
A: The answer to the second question is no. Dog meat is generally cooked in two different ways – in a spicy soup or steamed and braised. (The same soup is sometimes made with goat meat.) In addition, dog meat broth made with herbs is considered medicinal, and is often prescribed by oriental medicine doctors in Korea. It is supposed to be an energy booster.

Dog meat, two styles

Q: What does dog meat taste like? Is it good?
A: It tastes closest to goat meat – like extremely lean beef, with a little bit of its own aroma (a little like lamb). Yes, it is very tasty.

Q: What does the Korean think about dog-eating in Korea?
A: Glad you asked, made-up-questioner!

The Korean’s Thoughts on Dog-Eating in Korea

The Korean has no problem with people who refuse to eat dog meat. Far be it from the Korean to quibble with other people’s preference in food. The Korean also has no problem with people who are repulsed by dog meat, or the process of turning dogs into dog meat. You are who you are, and if you are repulsed by a certain food for any reason, that’s completely fine. By all means, please go on eating what you like, and be happy.

But to everyone who is trying to stop anyone from eating dog meat, the Korean has only this to say: please, go fuck yourself. Seriously, please remove yourself from the Korean’s vicinity and give yourself a handjob. The Korean cannot disagree more with your position. Go eat what you want, be happy, and leave Koreans alone. Koreans will go on eating what they want, and be happy too.

Objection against Koreans’ eating meat usually comes in three flavors. The Korean will address each in turn.

1. Koreans should not be eating meat, period – and that includes dog meat.

Often, self-righteous vegetarians and vegans make the argument that no one should be eating meat, based on two arguments: (1) it is morally impermissible for humans to cause pain on sentient beings; (2) because meat is less efficient to produce than vegetables and grains, forgoing meat would significantly alleviate (if not eliminate) world hunger.

The Korean is receptive to the second argument – that argument alone was enough to turn the Korean into vegetarian for a year. But what makes the second argument very convincing turns the first argument unpersuasive, and even dangerous. What’s the difference between the first and the second argument? The second argument focuses on humans and their suffering. The first argument focuses on “sentient beings” – i.e. non-human animals; to which, the Korean has two objections.

First, let us soberly face our biological destiny. Humans are omnivores. We are biologically wired to be omnivores. There is no human society that does not eat meat, absent certain religious or personal creed that overrides the biological impulse. Our biological destiny is amoral. We do not think lions are immoral because they eat meat. That is what they do. Similarly, humans eat meat. That’s what we do. Even in places that have few animals to eat, humans turn to animal protein. For example, in traditional New Guinea society where there was no large animals (chicken counts as large) to eat, people ate mice, spiders and frogs.

One might think one would just turn vegetarian rather than going through the trouble of catching and eating these little critters.

As biological omnivores, there can be no moral judgment attached to the fact that humans eat meat. In order to eat meat, pain must be caused on animals. This is not only inevitable, but also universal in a world in which animals eat other animals to survive. Sentient beings cause pain – and indeed, death – to other sentient beings all the time, as far as eating and survival are concerned. It is unpersuasive to say that humans must be an exception.

Second, while the Korean has problems with the “sentient being” argument itself, he has even bigger problem with the kinds of behavior that the argument justifies. Stated simply, the “sentient being” argument leads people to value animals more than humans. This is utter insanity, and completely unacceptable.

Case in point? The 23-month jail sentence of Michael Vick for running a dog-fighting ring. To be sure, animal cruelty – and specifically, what Vick did – is despicable. Animal abuse has to be illegal because we wish to discourage the abuser’s twisted desire for sadism. Regardless, the Korean was in utter shock when the news came out Vick received 23 months. Federal Sentencing Guideline (which is, as the name suggests, a guideline and not a hard rule) recommends level 10 for gambling rings that involve animal fighting, which translates to 0 to 6 months in prison for a person with no prior criminal history, like Vick. If you don’t think running a dog fighting ring (as opposed to, say, a cock fighting ring) had nothing to do with the between 4- and 23-times increase in Vick’s sentence, you are crazy.

Please take a look at the linked Federal Sentencing Guideline and see what crimes typically get 23 months in prison for a first time offender (which is level 15 and 16.) Involuntary manslaughter is at level 12. Aggravated assault is at level 14. Sexual abuse of a ward (i.e. a child in one's supervision, like a foster child) is level 14. Can you honestly say that dead dogs – no matter what the number and the manner of death – are more serious, or even equally serious, than a dead person, a person with severe injury, or a sexually molested child? If you answer yes, your priorities are severely misplaced.

Lest you think this is hypothetical, here is a real life example that parallels Michael Vick. Earlier this year, Donte Stallworth – another high-caliber NFL player like Vick – was driving under influence, hit 59-year-old Mario Reyes, and killed him. Here is a man who recklessly killed another man. How much jail time Stallworth receive? (You might to sit down for this one.) 30 days. If that does not make you indignant, the Korean does not know what to say to you. Reyes was a construction worker who worked all night and was trying to get home by catching a bus. Presumably, he had a family to feed. Did any of the dogs killed by Vick have a family to feed? If it stopped Reyes from dying, the Korean would gladly torture and kill any number of dogs with his own bare hands in the most horrendous manner imaginable. No word yet as to if a charitable society rushed to make sure Reyes’ family was taken care of in a high-profile photo-op, like the dogs rescued from Vick’s dog-fighting ring.

Seriously, the Korean couldn't even find the picture of Mario Reyes on line. But picture of Vick's former fighting dogs? They are everywhere.

But we do not even need to compare Reyes’ life and dogs’ lives. What about Vick’s life? Isn’t Michael Vick human? Isn’t his freedom important? Didn’t he deserve to be treated fairly, and receive the punishment that was proportional to his crime? Isn’t Vick’s constitutional right more important than lives of dogs? By any measure, Vick should not have received more than 6 months in prison. Instead, he got 23, and he was bankrupted in the process. And the pitchfork mob wants more blood out of Vick, staging petition drive to ban him from the NFL, depriving him of the only way in which he can earn a living.

Anyone with a functioning moral compass would say that human interest must come before animal interest. Yet when it comes to dogs, Americans just lose their minds – and the “sentient being” argument fuels this insanity. By imbuing morality into an amoral subject, the argument over-values animals’ pain and undervalues human interest. The result is that one high-profile NFL player kills a person and resumes his life after 30 days in jail with minimal publicity, while another high-profile NFL player kils dogs and gets his life nearly destroyed, with the media harping on and on and on. The “sentient being” argument encourages people value animals more than humans. That cannot stand.

(As an aside, it must also be noted that one rarely sees anyone other than white people in those PETA rallies, for a good reason – colored people of America have been fighting for the last few centuries trying to be treated like humans. Now that we are being treated like humans, we are not very much inclined to give the same status to dogs.)

Maybe the two girls in the back count as colored?

Furthermore, even the most orthodox “sentient being” proponents appear to get especially worked up over dog meat than, say, pesticides that kill millions of animals (insects) in order to grow the vegetables they eat. This leads to the next group.

2. Koreans may eat other meat, but not dog meat.

This is the most contemptible argument against eating dog meat – that while eating other meat is ok, eating dog meat is not. The argument is contemptible because it belies its proponents’ underlying conviction of cultural superiority, which is completely objectionable. It is pretty much a historical accident that Europeans/Americans developed a particular penchant for dogs. In a herding economy like old Europe, dogs were more useful as herding assistant than for their meat. But in an agricultural economy like old Asia, dogs had just about one use – meat. In that sense, dogs in East Asia were not much different from chickens. But no matter – to the opponents of dog meat, their historical accident is superior to any other people’s historical accident, regardless of how accidental their historical accident was.

In an attempt to forge an objective argument separate from the historical accident, opponents of dog meat basically make the case that dogs are more special over other animals, and therefore we cannot eat dogs. There are basically two sub-arguments as to why dogs are more special: (1) dogs are smart; (2) dogs are loyal, and therefore our friend. Let us discuss each in turn.

First, dogs are smart. Really? The Korean’s friend’s Maltese would not stop eating toilet paper and excrete white poop, although you can obviously tell it suffers from pain as the toilet paper passes through its digestive tracks. But regardless, why does intelligence determine what we eat? Pigs are known to be extremely intelligent – smarter than a three-year-old human child. Mother sows sing songs to piglets as they nurse, for crying out loud. Yet barbecue restaurants roasting dozens of whole pigs a day are innumerable everywhere in America. So that’s not a real argument – unless one is willing to argue that no human should eat (or kill) any animal, as above, partly because animals are intelligent.

And it's not as if pigs lose out on the cuteness factor either. Aww.

Second, dogs are loyal – “Man’s best friend”, as it were – and therefore special over other animals. But the value of dogs’ loyalty tends to be vastly overstated, because humans project their values and emotions onto creatures that cannot talk back. Humans are particularly good at projecting their own values and emotions with animals, distorting the truth of what happens in the social life of animals.

Here is an example: at Pier 39 in San Francisco, there is a sizeable colony of California sea lions, which serves as a tourist attraction. In front of Pier 39, there is a statue of three sea lions – a large one symbolizing the father figure, slightly smaller one for the mother figure, and a cute, tiny one for the baby. Cued by the statue, the visitors often try to figure out which sea lion would be mommy, daddy or the baby, often trying to find the smallest one and saying among themselves, “That must a baby!”

Sea lion statue at Pier 39, San Francisco

Truth is, no sea lion at Pier 39 is a baby. Moreover, no sea lion at Pier 39 is a nuclear family of father, mother and child as the statue suggests – the sea lion colony at Pier 39 is made entirely up of adult male sea lions. They are there because a regular colony of sea lions is made up of one male and up to thirty females and their babies. In other words, the sea lions at Pier 39 are the loser males – the males that would not get laid ever in their lives. But what kind of tourist attraction would celebrate a collection of dudes who lost out in the process of creating a harem of one alpha male and 30 women? Better to pretend that it’s a family, although the smallest sea lion may well be the oldest one among the bunch that just happened to have a small stature.

The same with dogs. The Korean will readily admit that dogs are generally loyal. But it is a mistake to ascribe the value of human loyalty to a dog’s loyalty. Dogs are not loyal because they choose to be loyal – dogs are loyal because that’s exactly what they are hard-wired to do. All domesticable animals – dogs, horses, cows – have the same trait: they are all pack animals, which follow the pack leader. Humans could domesticate those animals exactly because of that trait – human could assume the position of the pack leader, and the animals would follow them.

We do not think sea lions are immoral because they practice polygamy. That’s just what nature is making them do. For the same reason, dogs are not on a higher moral plane somehow because they are loyal – being loyal is just what nature is making them do. Can we admire it? Within reason, sure. Humans admire the lion’s strength and eagle’s swiftness, and often borrow their names for things for which we wish they embodied those qualities. (For example, national seals or sports teams.) By the same token, we can admire a dog’s loyalty. But that does not make dogs any better than any other animal.

3. Koreans should not eat dog meat because the process by which dogs are turned into meat is unnecessarily cruel

This argument has some merit in the Korean’s opinion. Even as an avid meat-eater, the Korean will readily accept this point – while there can be no moral judgment attached to the fact that humans eat meat, there can be moral judgment attached to how humans eat meat. This is just like the fact that humans are supposed to have sex, as it is their biological destiny to have sex. However, morality dictates that there are certain restrictions as to how sex may be conducted in human society.

Similarly, the Korean believes that humans need to treat the animal that sacrifices its life for our benefit with dignity and respect. That includes doing away with the most horrifying aspects of industrialized farming, which features heavily stressed out animals living in cages too small to move an inch, which in turn prompts massive use of antibiotics just to keep them from dying from stress.

This needs to stop.

(Aside: If the Korean were to choose the most notable difference in Korea and America with respect to the way in which its people approach their food, he would pick the level of respect towards food – Koreans are nearly reverential of their food, while Americans display almost no respect toward their food. It probably is not a coincidence that Korea is the thinnest country in the OECD, and America the fattest. But that’s a topic for another day.)

And yes, treating animals with dignity and respect means that the current way in which dogs raised for their meat in Korea must change. The tiny cages must go, and so must the unsanitary living condition for those dogs. The method of slaughtering the dogs must be regulated as well, so that the dogs may end their lives in a humane, dignified manner.

But – not so ironically – the greatest obstacle to regulating the processing of dog meat in Korea is not the dog meat restaurateurs or dog ranchers, but the opponents of dog-eating. As the Korean described in the “fact” section of this post, the lawmakers of Seoul city government attempted to regulate the dog meat processing procedure so that it would be more hygienic, and therefore humane. (Because after all, it is humane to have animals living in a clean condition.) But it was the opponents of dog-eating – who believe that currently dog meat is illegal in Korea – who rabidly attacked the proposal, fearing that it would “legalize” dog meat. The legislators saw no political gain to be made from pushing the proposal, and backed off.

In other words, while attempting to reduce the suffering of dogs raised for meat through regulation is a valid and worthy goal, boycotting dog meat is not the way to do that. Dog meat restaurateurs or dog ranchers are not a politically powerful group. They are, in general, very poor people with limited resources, and the poor condition of the dogs that they raise is a reflection of their human caretakers’ lot. They have no leverage at all if the Korean government – of any level – wanted to make the dog raising/slaughtering process more humane and sanitary (and presumably more expensive). Those who oppose eating dogs hold all the leverage. The best way to make the dogs’ lives less miserable, therefore, is to target those who blindly oppose any measure that attempts to regulate dog meat. They must be convinced that unregulated dog meat could be a human health hazard, and promotes the dogs’ suffering as well.

Conclusion

This post was rather long, so the Korean will distill it into three major takeaways:

(1) Koreans eat dog meat – not as much as beef, chicken or pork, but they do. Dog meat is tasty.
(2) If you don’t like it, fine – eat what you want, and be happy.
(3) If you want Koreans to stop eating dog meat – didn’t the Korean already tell you go away and fuck yourself?

-EDIT 9/1/09 8 p.m.-

As promised, the Korean will answer more questions from the comment section.

Q: What breed of dogs are most popular to be eaten?
A: Wikipedia entry claims that there is a specific Korean dog breed that is raised for meat, but that is not the most correct way to describe it. (Seriously, when it comes to Korean culture, don't trust Wikipedia.)

First, one must understand what kind of dogs live in Korea. Because Korea traditionally did not raise dogs as pets, few dogs were raised in a carefully selective manner enough to create any notable breed, with certain exceptions. At this point in time there is only one breed in Korea that is worth a name -- the famous Jindo dogs, bred for its intelligence and loyalty as hunting dogs. (But even with Jindos, there is a lot of problem figuring out exactly which dogs qualify as a purebred.) All other dogs in Korea are either imported dogs specifically for the purpose of being pets, or generic mutts that do not have any real breed.

So the most accurate way of describing the breed of dog eaten is: all dogs, except certain dogs protected by law as national treasure (i.e. Jindos) or pet dogs that are imported. Pets are usually owned by someone so they are generally not eaten, except in certain situations described above, i.e. some shady restaurants turning abandoned pet into dog meat. Jindos are national treasure, and it is illegal to take a purebred Jindo out of their native Jindo Island (for which their name is given), much less kill them for food. In practice, this means generic mutts in Korea are (by and large) the only dogs that are turned into food. But it is not as if those generic mutts belong to a particular breed.

Q: How popular is dog meat among younger Koreans?
A: Definitely less popular than among older Koreans. Younger Koreans are more likely to have dogs as pets, so they more often refrain from eating dogs. Reflecting this factor, dog meat abolitionists in Korea are overwhelmingly young women. But the Korean really hopes that dog meat does not fade into history. Seriously, it's tasty. Don't knock it until you try it.

Also, some corrections are in order:

- Commenter Jewook pointed out that in Animal Protection Act passed in 2008, which bans cruel methods of killing an animal (such as hanging) or killing an animal in a public place. Anecdotal evidence suggests that this law is not particularly well-enforced, but Jewook points out at least one news report where a man was arrested for killing a dog in a public place by hitting its head with a shovel before cooking it. So there is some restriction as to method of killing.

(The Korean's original point -- that formally regulating dogs as livestock would improve the dogs' welfare and therefore more humane -- still stands, because Animal Protection Act does not specifically regulate how dogs raised for their meat may be raised. It says in broad terms that "Owner of an animal must endeavor to provide suitable food and sufficient amount of water, exercise, rest and sleep" -- which may as well not be there, because it is not followed by how this clause may be enforced.)

- Robert Koehler, proprietor of the blog Marmot's Hole and a fan of dog meat, noted that dog meat dishes are not particularly cheap (between $10~$25 per person, depending on the dish,) and one does not need to go to the outskirts of Seoul to get it. That's a fair point -- it does not make dog meat a high-end food, but it is not random cheap food either. The Korean would note that, regardless, dog meat is more popular outside of Seoul, where there is less money and presumably less pet dogs to distort one's perspective.

Koehler also linked an interesting article on the current Korean president's favorite foods, which includes steamed and braised dog meat during summer.

-EDIT 9/3/2009 6:26 p.m.-

More questions are answered:

Q: What's the Korean name for the steamed and braised dog meat dish? Is it also served in boshintang restaurants?
A: It is called su-yuk, or gaegogi suyuk. Suyuk is actually generic term for steamed and braised meat, and gaegogi means "dog meat". Suyuk can also be made with pork, and the pork version is more popular. Boshintang is the name for the soup, and yes, boshintang and suyuk are almost always sold at the same place.

Q: In France/Europe we eat rabbit, and I heard in Korea they didn't eat rabbit because people think it is too cute of an animal. Is it so?
A: Nope, not at all. Rabbit meat is generally rare in Korea, but that's just because there aren't too many rabbits in Korea. The Korean had plenty of rabbit in his Europe trip, and is a massive fan.

-EDIT 9/20/2009 4:47 p.m.-

A reader sent an interesting New York Times article: archeological study says that dogs were first domesticated in southern China, for the purpose of eating them.

-EDIT 9/28/2009 3:27 p.m.-

More questions!

Q: What do they feed the dogs raised for food in Korea? Is it cost effective to raise them in a large-scale setting, given that dogs require at least some meat to feed?
A: The Korean does not know exactly what the dogs are fed. But the Korean knows that not enough dog meat is consumed in Korea to justify a factory-style ranching like chickens or pigs -- in other words, dog-ranching is not a large-scale thing. Usually a dog farm would not involve more than about 30 dogs, and mind you, these are very primitive operations. Therefore, presumably, not much effort or thoughts go into the dogs' diet. But given that these dog farms are nonetheless doing business, it must be cost effective somehow.

Got a question or a comment for the Korean? Email away at askakorean@hotmail.com.

75 COMMENTS:

Joshua said...

Good post. In my opinion, too, let people eat whatever they want to eat. It's only naturl. On a side note regarding the part about caring about humans more than animals, humans are animals (so says the Oxford English Dictionary, primary def). According to Taxonomy, the species of human are classified as animals in the kingdom of Animalia, and dogs are even in the same class (mammalia). So, it is kind of hard to care for humans more than animals, but rather care for humans more than other animals. On a personal note, I, too, find dog meat quite tasty, and am happy to continue my omnivorous ways.

8/31/2009 1:11 AM

The Expat said...

I've eaten it several times and have finally decided that I don't like it. I don't like a lot of meat though. I think it's the smell or the fact that the skin is still attached.

As The Korean and Joshua said, I don't see one thing wrong with eating it though. I do wish, however, that the methods were a little more regulated and that people would stop refering to food when they see me and my wife with our 똥개 on the streets. It gets a little old.

From the mouth of my
father-in-law upon seeing my dog for the first time: "Are you presenting this to me as a pet or food?" He was kidding of course and I thought it was damn funny, but that's the point: Big dogs have not reached pet-status yet and certainly not in the city. That's slowly changing and, in the past few years, I have started to notice a lot more Koreans walking big dogs.

Slightly unrelated and I can't remember where I read it (I'm sure it was in jest), but there was an article proposing that instead of euthanizing young and unwanted dogs at shelters, those animals should be slaughtered and their meat distributed to impoverished communities and countries. It wouldn't go over well with most people, but considering that millions of pounds of dog meat is being discarded every year in the US alone (over 4 million dogs), it might not seem so crazy.

8/31/2009 3:07 AM

Kilter said...

I don't think I saw this mentioned in your excellent post, but what species of dogs are most popular to be eaten? Is that a question that arises when this whole issue comes up? A fascinating post.

8/31/2009 7:25 AM

JW said...

One of the more shocking and despicable events that I've come across in my 20 years of living in America was when Leona Helmsley, after giving "consideration" to the less well off members of *human* society, decided they were not worth a dollar of her money, and left behind billions of her wealth to be used exclusively for the welfare of DOGS. Sad to say, I became a little less American after that fateful moment.

8/31/2009 9:13 AM

Jewook said...

“there is no restriction about how to kill a dog for meat.”

Actually you are incorrect on that. An Animal Protection Law (동물보호법) has been established since February of 2008. It makes it illegal to kill an animal (including dogs) in a cruel or inhumane manner. Probably not as well enforced yet but a few people have been prosecuted and fined for it. The punishment is mild compared to other countries but it means things are changing for the better. Though I enjoy dog meat very much I still think it is unacceptable to slaughter them inhumanely.

Animal Protection Law link:
http://likms.assembly.go.kr/law/jsp/Law.jsp?WORK_TYPE=LAW_BON&LAW_ID=A0374&PROM_NO=08852&PROM_DT=20080229&HanChk=Y

And a news article about a man who was prosecuted.
http://news.naver.com/main/read.nhn?mode=LSD&mid=sec&sid1=102&oid=003&aid=0002269375

8/31/2009 9:35 AM

Simon said...