The Korea Times

Rumors of impurity

Courtesy of WHBy David A. TizzardIt feels somewhat peculiar to write about women in Korea because I'm neither a woman nor Korean. I also don't think that there is a singular female experience in Korea. Women's personal experiences differ greatly across time, class, and many other factors. Nevertheless, nationwide statistics paint an all too familiar and distressing story. They show Korean women incredibly far behind their OECD counterparts in terms of boardroom participation, political representation, wage gap, parental leave, and a host of other factors. Dry statistics also fail to account for the more psychological and existential fears many women feel in society. There has been a great deal of progress in the past century here in Korea. Such progress is not to say that the current situation is desirable nor is it to make an excuse for what is seen as acceptable today, of course. However, it is just to make that point that Korea is not Canada, the United Kingdom or Germany. History matters, as does culture. Those who ignore it fail to understand problems in their true context.At th

Dec 12, 2021By David A. Tizzard

Opinion

Resistance to violence in Korea

Courtesy of PascalBy David A. TizzardJinu sees himself as a humble musician who focuses on providing solidarity to those suffering from oppression, violence and health problems. This week he spoke to me about his experiences and why, as an individual, he has decided to try and take a stand while no-one else will do so. He describes having seen firsthand young hired thugs (called “yeong-yeok” in Korean) and police carry out acts of violence against the workers of Noryangjin fish market in central Seoul; workers who are often elderly women. The workers are decent people, citizens of the city who enjoy trot music, television dramas, and living the lives they have. Yet water cannons and excavators are used to forcibly move those who don't agree with government plans to relocate them to new premises.The new fish market into which the vendors are expected to move is described by some as a collusion between government and large financial enterprises. No longer a public market supported by officials and taxpayers' money to provide quality goods at reasonable prices, the responsib

Dec 4, 2021By David A. Tizzard

Opinion

Twitter or television?

Courtesy of MattysFlicksBy David A. TizzardStephen Fry suggested this week that “social media is a lavatory wall.” Essential, capable of providing anonymity and security when we need it most, yet basically surrounded by a load of old crap and home to glory holes and spycams. It's a place where ideas are scrawled by anyone and everyone, often without consideration of the consequences. A soapbox. A place to vent: to be outrageous. You can declare your love for Suzie, rage war against Junho, or just put a silly picture of a cat for no reason. Social media, and Twitter in particular, talks of hot-button topics. There has to be news, outrage, something happening every morning. Hashtags fly. If there weren't, we would probably have to learn about Twitter users' lives instead. Imagine the horror! If you want to see Twitter at its worse, have a look on a day when something of reasonable importance happens: Everyone shares the same information just to make sure you don't miss it ― for the 500th time. Each user feeling that they are in some way creating reality, shaping a narrative

Nov 27, 2021By David A. Tizzard

Opinion

Neon Bunny: A new Korean cosmos

Courtesy of HillaryBy David A. TizzardMusic needs space. Claude Debussy, Miles Davis, and many others knew this. It's not always what you play; it's the gaps, the intervals, the meditations and the silence between the noise that really resonate. Nothing is louder than silence. Unfortunately, that silence is often hard to find in modern life. A constant barrage of shorts, jingles, and government alerts beep, tweet and ring from our pockets. We sleep with podcasts on. Netflix automatically plays the next episode of the drama we're not really interested in but everyone else is watching. And music has to hit us within the first 10 seconds, otherwise we skip and scroll down. Influential songwriter and producer Tat Tong, a man whose discography has gone 80x platinum, echoed this sentiment in a recent video upload to LinkedIn. Explaining how he listens to demos, Tat says, “I listen to it the way a listener with a very ADHD attention span would. I start the track. Does it grab me instantly? Is there something cool about it? If there's something that throws me off, I skip it.”This

Nov 22, 2021By David A. Tizzard

Opinion

The metaverse as capitalist nonsense

Courtesy of Elif AyiterBy David A. TizzardI don't want to live in the metaverse. Multimillion dollar companies' insistence on intoxicating us with sentimentality, hooking us on disposable simulated emotions, ubiquitous visibility and the hyper-clarity of a digital world are the themes of innumerable sci-fi novels and films and they never have a happy ending. Despite the over-egged emphasis on individuality, choice and existentialism supported by oblique references to Jung, Nietzsche and Freud by corporate entities that use philosophical ideas as concepts to sell products, rather than having any genuine understanding of the work, the metaverse is someone else's creation. Someone else's sandbox. Not yours. Not mine. Not ours. Your participation in such a place profits others first and foremost, and I mean it literally profits other people in financial terms. After all, this venture would not have gotten past the boardroom if it wasn't destined to make other people incredibly rich and you and your life (virtual or otherwise) the source of all that money. The metaverse is not an egalitar

Nov 14, 2021By David A. Tizzard

Opinion

Cultural appropriation: Inside and out

Courtesy of USAG HumphreysBy David A. Tizzard2021-11-05(코리아타임스)Last week I sat down with Yu Jung-ahn (Daisy), a former member of the K-pop group Momoland, for a chat about life inside one of the world's most talked about industries. When our conversation was eventually released as a podcast, two things immediately became clear. First, the adoration fans around the world have for these idols is tangible and genuine. Second, these idols, despite the amazing choreography, curated existence, and incredible looks, are humans just like us. Despite our talk covering a wide range of subjects, from fancams (appreciated, useful, but sometimes weird), mental health (not enough focus on it), training (hard), and creativity (little), the K-pop media outlets that picked up on our chat seemed to focus on one aspect of it: cultural appropriation. And it was perhaps easy to see why. The topic generated a huge response and provoked really strong reactions. Fans were attacking each other online, each accusing the other's bias of having fallen foul of a costume, hairstyle, or video that used a cultural

Nov 6, 2021By David A. Tizzard

Opinion

Foreigners, Halloween and xenophobia

Courtesy of Neil CummingsBy David A. TizzardAbout 10 days ago, I began seeing local television news warning viewers that COVID-19 infection numbers would increase during Halloween, claiming that foreigners would be in Itaewon partying and not respecting the nation's social distancing guidelines. The narrative being constructed was unambiguous and early. It was also playing into ready-held stereotypes and beliefs. This situation meant that the narrative was easily disseminated and accepted without too much cognitive dissonance or thought. Moreover, this narrative was of course all being communicated in Korean and largely unobserved by the non-Korean speaking population of the country. Over the past few days, we have seen the population of residents of foreign nationality become more aware of these reports. There has been outcry at what is seen as unhospitable attitudes toward those of foreign nationality living and working here. Others point to the hypocrisy of relaxing guidelines during the traditional holiday of Chuseok, then tightening them for a western holiday, only to then comme

Oct 31, 2021By David A. Tizzard

Gov't warns of strict response to foreigners violating COVID-19 rules

Opinion

North Korea outlives America

Courtesy of Franzisko HauserBy David A. TizzardGovernments, nations, borders and cultures flow in and out of existence. They emerge and flourish amid waves of hope and triumph. They perish as bodies age and congregations decline. Some fade into irrelevance while others suffer unimaginable tragedies. Thus has it ever been: the stark inevitability of the human experience. The forever rise and fall of nations. It's commonplace to project a sense of the eternal onto countries and organizations as if to provide greater legitimacy. And the younger we are, the more we take the idea of the state for granted. Yet political entities millions once called home have fallen off the map, split up, changed names, been taken over or had their recognition denied. Bohemia, Czechoslovakia, Persia, Prussia, the Ottoman Empire, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union are all gone. Taiwan and Tibet face a daily struggle, while Palestine's reality is debated in chambers of diplomatic authority. Parallel to all this has been the creation of 34 new countries since 1990. The world map of 2121 will no doubt look differ

Oct 23, 2021By David A. Tizzard

Opinion

Music and the lost future

Courtesy of Pedro Ribeiro SimoesBy David A. TizzardNo one is really bored anymore. We always have a phone. We are connected at all times. A digital world of our choosing at our fingertips. Now even 90 seconds waiting in a line has most people reaching for their pocket rather than suffer the crippling anxiety of existing next to someone. No one is bored, but everything is boring. Content is content-less. A 10 second TikTok. An Insta story. YouTube short. Facebook moments. Disposable ideas. Enough to pass the time but never enough to actually stop and think about what you are doing and whether any of it actually means anything. A news article tells you that the latest K-pop video has another 50 million views as if it matters and isn't just paid promotion. It doesn't tell you the exponentially growing views are because a select group of people are streaming the video on 9 different devices 24 hours a day just to try and keep the thing relevant. If you want to think for a second about the energy use that these 'like' farms and view factories use, it makes the whole thing even more depres

Oct 16, 2021By David A. Tizzard

Opinion

What is morality in 21st-century Korea?

Courtesy of FarrukhBy David A. TizzardIn many ways, we are the first real people to exist without any answer to the question of what we're doing here or, more importantly, what we're meant to do. Secularization and the increasing absence of religious authority have left many modern citizens grappling with existential questions. Worryingly, this situation leads some to conclude that the only answer must be a return to 1950s-esque social cohesion, where any dissenting views are hammered back into shape and we all supposedly live for the greater good. There needs to be some form of stable society, yes. But society must also be dynamic enough to change and adapt to new and unexpected circumstances. Among all this, somewhere, is the question of morality. It's not as simple as just obeying the law. Someone could go slightly over the speed limit and we wouldn't automatically think of that person as being immoral, despite the illegal nature of their actions. At the same time, a person could have a series of extramarital affairs and, despite that now being legal (the adultery law in Korea was

Oct 3, 2021By David A. Tizzard

David A. Tizzard

Read more

Rumors of impurity

Resistance to violence in Korea

Twitter or television?

Neon Bunny: A new Korean cosmos

The metaverse as capitalist nonsense

Cultural appropriation: Inside and out

Foreigners, Halloween and xenophobia

North Korea outlives America

Music and the lost future

What is morality in 21st-century Korea?

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