Out with the old, in with the new

By Kim Ji-soo

Was 2015 a long or short year for you?

This question must hover on people’s minds with a day left in the year. Being human and craving a certain meaning for the year, it was a little disconcerting to find myself readily agreeing with more than 500 professors in the nation. Professors in Korea annually choose the best four Chinese characters as an idiom to describe the year. More than 500 out of 886 professors chose the four-letter Chinese phrase "honyongmudo"(昏庸無道) as the most representative idiom.

The phrase means that society is chaotic and without moral justice.

Chaotic may mean something different in fits and spurts, which seem to describe the turn of events that took place in Korea, some definitively void of morality or justice.

Earlier in the year, President Park Geun-hye and the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un talked up dialogue and unification, raising expectations and anticipation. We know how that issue is going to wrap up. We also heard of a small child being wacked by her teacher at a daycare in a city west of Seoul, prompting these centers to install cameras and provide better environments for both the children and the teachers.

Around May, the hitherto unknown Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) caught Korea by surprise, putting thousands in quarantine and eventually leading to the loss of 38 lives. The fragile Korean economy took a big dent as MERS effectively stopped the influx of foreign visitors and tight-shut the wallets of Korean consumers who preferred also not to go out and about well into fall. Korea has declared an official end to MERS, but the health minister who had to step down for his responsibility over the MERS affliction is highly rumored to make a return as chief of the National Pension Service.

Then the debates about labor reform, adopting state-authored history textbooks in middle and junior high schools, and political power realignment, seemed to dominate the general societal landscape much of summer and fall.

As economic figures rolled out in the last months, we find that the Korean economy had run its public debt to nearly 1,000 trillion won up from 957 trillion won in 2014, and household is debt pushing 1,200 trillion won this year, raising head-scratching questions about how the declining Korean economy can deal with this.

And this week, Korea reached a deal with Japan on the former sex slaves or the Korean “comfort women” issue. It was one of those issues in which President Park Geun-hye seemed unlikely to budge. But South Korea accepted the Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s expression of “apology and remorse from the bottom of his heart” and a Japanese fund of 1 billion yen for the compensation of the former sex slaves during World War II. Furthermore, the deal was “final and irreversible” on the condition that Japan fulfills its promises and that the two countries will refrain from conflict over the issue. The 46 surviving Korean comfort women have said that their voices were not included in the deal.

Admittedly, the sequence of the events that I have laid down here are conveniently along my memory lines. People may remember a different set of incidents and events for this year, and hopefully there are those with a whole new grouping of events or milestones peppering their memories.

The best part about defining in a group of 365 days and having the occasion to usher in a new set of 365 days is we hope for new days. For hope is justice in our era, or so it seems.