(495) Mixed Marriages Peoples intermarry. Whenever two groups, howsoever hostile or different, come into contact, sexual liaisons are bound to occur, and intermarriage usually becomes common as well.
(494) A Bridge Too Far? In wartime Seoul, one of the most prominent sights was that of the Han River bridges: half-destroyed, with arches protruding from the shallow waters of the river.
(493) English-Language Daily The Korean English-language press was born in the 1890s. Foreigners were allowed to settle in Seoul only from the early 1880s, and in a few years time Korea had a small but growing expat community, largely consisting of missionaries, businessmen an..
(492) Beginning the Dance It is human to dance at least, I am not aware of a single culture which does not know dance. The recent two centuries have seen a Western dancing culture which originated largely in Italy, France, and other parts of southern Europe spread across..
(491) Political Consensus To an outside observer, Korean politics of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s might appear a great spectacle: dynamic, full of intrigue and suspense, reminiscent of a good action movie. Indeed, revolutions erupted, generals drove their tanks to the presidenti..
(490) Shuttle Merchants Back in the mid-1990s every visitor to a large Korean wholesale market would notice the powerful presence of the ``Russians" (actually, these were people from many of the successor states to the Soviet Union).
(489) Fame and Fortune Confucian history was moralistic, essentially a morality tale about great sages who fought repulsive villains, and the vestiges of this approach are still alive in Korea. The sages and heroes of modern history are people who fought the Japanese, li..
(488) Country of Taekwondo In recent years, one of the favorite topics of the Korean media has been that of hallyu, the craze for all things Korean, which in the recent decade or so has engulfed many countries of East Asia.
(487) Room 201 ``He stays in the royal suite at the Chosun Hotel.'' For decades, this remark could be found in newspaper reports about the rich and famous who visited the Korean capital. One had to be very famous or very rich to warrant the privilege of staying i..
(486) Newspaper Boom Newspapers are important as every politician or businessman knows only too well. And they continue to be important even when they have to compete against electronic media and the Internet. But a few decades ago, their importance was even greater.
(485) Poet Kim So-wol In 1934 the 32 year-old Kim So-wol committed suicide. He obviously saw himself as a failure. An unsuccessful entrepreneur, a student who never graduated, a failed journalist. He was also widely admired as Korea's best poet, but this was not enough ..
(484) A Small Incident The large history of empires, migrations, and economic trends consists of countless small histories, histories of common people. The great tragedies of nations and civilizations consist of smaller tragedies which frequently disappear over the histo..
(483) Chinatown in Incheon Visitors to the city of Incheon are well aware that in recent years the municipal authorities have been pro-active in promoting a new sight of interest: ``Incheon Chinatown.'' Frankly, the description of this area as ``Chinatown'' is more a marketi..
(482) Western Food We do not know whether the few Westerners who found themselves in Korea in the 1600s ever cooked Western cuisine and then shared their food with Koreans. In all probability, something like it might have happened, but the Koreans were presumably not..
(481) Dictating Sex By the late 1970s the Korean movie industry was panicking. Korean cinema was dying, and this crisis had come out of the blue. As recently as 1969, things had looked very good. In 1969, the Korean movie industry produced 229 full length features. Ho..
(480) Elevating Prospect When in 1945 Korea regained its independence, there were merely 40 buildings in the entire country which were equipped with elevators and few of these elevators really functioned after the years of war and chronic shortages of everything. The fi..
(479) Well-Served A 1932 survey indicated that among Koreans with an education above high school level, merely 7.7% did without servants in their households. In the late 1960s, the majority of Korean middle-class families still kept a live-in servant. And then thing..
