Jun Ji-hye, a reporter at the finance desk of The Korea Times, focuses primarily on economic policy and government agencies, mainly covering the Ministry of Finance and Economy, the Ministry of Budget and Planning, the National Tax Service and the Korea Customs Service. She previously covered financial authorities, including the Financial Services Commission and the Financial Supervisory Service, and earlier worked on the political, city and business desks, reporting on a wide range of issues.
Military songs likely to lose masculinity
By Jun Ji-hye
The Armed Forces are considering expunging potentially gender-discriminatory expressions from military songs.
Among the references that may be affected are “men,” “sons” and other male-oriented words, the Ministry of National Defense said.
“All branches of the armed forces agreed in a recent working-level meeting on the need to consider the fact that the number of female personnel is growing fast and has now reached 10,000,” spokesman Kim Min-seok said at a briefing.
Kim said representatives from the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps were at the Jan. 21 meeting. They agreed that the existing military songs had been written under what had formally been a male-dominated culture, he added.
The move is seen as an attempt to reflect mounting public opinion against male-centered war songs.
A number of such songs have titles and lyrics that include references to “men,” as evidenced by “Real Men,” one of the most famous military songs. A school song of the Korea Naval Academy also has the lyrics, “Sons of the Republic of Korea stir up youthful blood.”
But the authorities reportedly had differences over whether to remove such words from the existing songs, with some opposing changes to old songs that are widely known.
“The military has conducted surveys on its own, which showed that few female soldiers have antipathy to the existing songs,” Kim said. “Therefore, authorities decided to leave existing songs as they are, but exclude problematic words from those created from now on.”
A ministry official, asking not to be named, noted that the authorities also discussed the need to remove words like “nationality” from war songs as well as from teaching materials, given that an increasing number of children from multiracial families have joined the military.
Some officials argued the reference needs to be changed to “country,” he added.
The officer said, however, that there were other opinions that the number of those from multiracial families has yet to carry a great deal of weight in the military, compared to that of the female soldiers.
“They said the expression nationality does not necessarily refer to pure Koreans only,” he said.
Spokesman Kim denied that the authorities had discussed the idea of removing that word from teaching materials.
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