Columns

Second female PM

Timing is often an unruly thing. Many pundits have stressed the importance of timing in life. What I mean to say is, it is high time that Korea usher in another woman into a higher government office. The nation produced its first female president, Park Geun-hye, who served from 2013 until her disgraceful removal from office in 2017, and its first female prime minister, Han Myeong-sook, who served in the Roh Moo-hyun administration from 2006-07. Han Seong-sook, the current minister of SMEs and startups, has been tapped to become the next prime minister by President Lee Jae Myung. If she passes muster at the parliamentary hearings — which she did once before assuming the small and medium-sized enterprises ministership by promising, among other things, to sell off some of her real estate — she will become the second woman to become prime minister in Korean history. As Korea shifts gears to go headlong into the era of artificial intelligence (AI), Han's earlier career at IT company Naver is key. Her business background is different from the two women, Park and Han Myeong-sook who were

When nobody wants a piano anymore

I was in the fourth grade when my parents bought me a piano. I had been taking lessons for two years and wanted one desperately. When it arrived in the room I shared with my brother, I felt as if I had the whole world. Part of the excitement came from the sense of privilege. Few children in my class had a piano at home, and I suddenly became one of them. The instrument my parents bought was not new. It was a secondhand upright piano. Yet that hardly mattered to me. What mattered was that I finally had a piano to practice on — and, to be honest, to show off to friends who visited me at home. That sense of pride stayed with me for years. In fact, the piano remained in my childhood room longer than I did. When I left home for college, it stayed. When I graduated from graduate school and started working, it was still there. In 2008, when I was 28, the piano moved to my aunt's apartment in Seoul, where it served her two children, then ages 7 and 10, who were learning to play. Years later, she passed it on to an acquaintance. Three years ago, another piano entered my life. An acquaintance of

Staunch president, docile diplomats

For decades, Korea’s foreign policy establishment has prided itself on caution, restraint and alliance management. Its diplomats often described these traits as sophisticated — the habits of a mature middle power navigating a dangerous neighborhood. Yet the recent handling of the Israeli seizure of aid vessels carrying two Korean activists exposed the dark underbelly of that carefully cultivated image: a culture of bureaucratic self-preservation that too often mistakes timidity for prudence. The situation revealed not only a disagreement over diplomatic tactics, but the widening gap between a Korean public that increasingly demands a confident, sovereign foreign policy and the entrenched elite in those circles who are conditioned to avoid discomfort at almost any cost. In particular, the episode highlighted the contrast between political pressure for transparent and assertive action and the instinctive caution of Korea’s traditional diplomatic establishment. Figures such as National Security Adviser Wi Sung-lac and Second Vice Foreign Minister Kim Jina symbolize this mindset, whi