Opinion - The Korea Times

What US doesn’t get about Dokdo

By Jason Lim Scott Snyder is a senior fellow for Korea Studies and Director of the Program on U.S.-Korea Policy at the prestigious Council on Foreign Affairs (CFR) and founder and former director of Center for U.S.-Korea Policy at the Asia Foundation. In his latest CFR blog post titled, “South Korea’s Small Think with Japan,” Snyder writes that Lee made a strategic mistake by going to Dokdo and, “suggesting that Japan as the bigger country should act in accord with its national power to address historical issues. I believe that Lee is thinking small, investing disproportionate emphasis on a single, limited issue at the expense of South Korea’s broader regional and global interests.” He goes on to argue, “Lee’s visit may hold great emotional importance for those who are still focused on past historical injustices between South Korea and Japan, but it distracts from the central reality that ultimately must propel relations between the two countries.” And that central reality is that Japan and Korea have more in common than not and that a strong relationship serves both count

Aug 24, 2012By Jason Lim

Jason Lim

Who made your brain do it?

By Jason Lim ``Did Your Brain Make You Do It?” That was the title of a New York Times op-ed column on July 27 written by John Monterosso, associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Southern California, and Barry Schwartz, professor of psychology at Swarthmore College. Their main point was that, from a biological perspective, it is always true that our ``brains made us do it” because each of our behavior is always associated with a brain state. This leads to a slippery slope in which no criminal could be held accountable for his or her crimes since the behavior wasn’t under that person’s control; it was their brains that made them do it. Which begs the question: who made your brain do it? Or more specifically, who made your brain do what it made you do? I apologize if I am starting to sound like, ``Who’s on first?” So, let’s explore this further. Monterosso and Schwartz go on to present an even scarier scenario. As they write, ``As science advances, there will be more and more ‘causal’ alternatives to intentional explanations, and we wi

Aug 10, 2012By Jason Lim

Jason Lim

Real name of comfort women

By Jason Lim July 30, 2012 will mark the 5th anniversary of the passage of H.R. 121, a non-binding resolution passed by the House of Representatives in the U.S. Congress that urges the Japanese government to acknowledge and apologize to former ``comfort women” for the crimes that were committed against them. During WWII, over 200,000 young Asian and Dutch women were tricked, abducted, and coerced into sexual slavery, raped by up to 50 Japanese Imperial soldiers a day, without rest and in squalid barracks that the Japanese Imperial army called ``comfort stations.” In addition to the rapes, these women were regularly beaten, tortured, and killed. As such, comfort women represent the largest case of human trafficking and sexual slavery in modern history. The comfort women issue is not new. Ever since the first Korean comfort women publicly came out with her story in 1991, a social movement to hold the Japanese government accountable was born. The public debate about comfort women soon moved to the U.S. In the late 1990’s, non–binding House resolutions (the one that pa

Jul 27, 2012By Jason Lim

Jason Lim

Bitter aftertaste of democracy

By Jason Lim In TIME Magazine’s July 2nd article, ``Why South Korea Is in an Uproar over Intelligence Sharing with Japan,” Bill Powell begins the story with an insightful observation: ``On its face, the idea seems rational enough: two allies and regional neighbors, both prosperous democracies with key foreign policy interests in common, resolve to share military intelligence, something that they perhaps should have been doing for some time now. But when the countries involved are South Korea and Japan, rationality can be a scarce commodity. The tortured history between the two countries almost guarantees that.” I would presume to make only two edits in the whole paragraph: swap out ``almost” with ``absolutely” in the last sentence and point out that the scarcity of rationality is not unique to Japan-Korea relationship ― it’s actually the human condition. The central narrative of the Great Recession is that highly capable individuals driven by rational self-interest have made such bad decisions that they almost brought down the world’s financial infrastructure and visited ru

Jul 13, 2012By Jason Lim

Jason Lim

6.25 or 7.27

By Jason Lim Korea has a peculiar tradition of naming events by the historical date on which they occurred. That’s why the student uprising against President Syngman Rhee’s regime is called 4.19 because it began on April 19, 1960, and Chun Doo-hwan’s brutal crackdown on Gwangju’s demonstrators is remembered as 5.18 because it happened on May 18, 1980. In line with this naming convention, the Korean War, which began on June 25, 1950, is popularly called 6.25. So, this past Monday marked the 62nd anniversary of the start of 6.25. Needless to say, the date is a seminal moment in modern Korean history because not only did it kill over 3 million people in three years but it also cemented the division of the Korean people into two distinct countries constantly at each other’s throats. This division is probably one of the most atrocious offenses against human sensibility that the world has known and affects – in a fundamental way – how Koreans live today. Yet, the anniversary of this momentous event seems to have been largely forgotten. This was brought home for

Jun 29, 2012By Jason Lim

Jason Lim

Breasts, skulls and babies

By Jason Lim I came home from work recently and encountered my wife, ashen-faced and seemingly in shock. ``What’s wrong?” I asked urgently, thinking that something might have happened to our 7-month-old son. ``Nothing,” she replied and tried to look away before confessing, ``But I did hear a horrible story from my friend.” My wife has a friend in Singapore who had twins about a year ago. Since we are now raising a 7-month-old baby boy, my wife is keenly interested in anything that her friend has to say when it comes to raising children. Well, what she heard that day was that her friend in Singapore had left the twins alone while doing housework and found them a short time later happily gorging on their own… ah, can I say No. 2? I hope you understand what I mean. Aside from a disgusted, puckered mouth and a deeper appreciation of the fact that babies will put everything and anything they can pick up or get into their mouths, I also suddenly realized that babies do not automatically reject their own bodily waste. By that I mean that a baby does not instinctively associate

Jun 15, 2012By Jason Lim

Jason Lim

If Obama meets Kim Jong-un

By Jason Lim Just imagine that the unthinkable has happened. The U.S. and North Korea somehow worked through their Gordian Knot and settled on an agreement that their respective leaders will formalize with a summit. This would mean that President Obama will come face-to-face with Kim Jong-un to engage in an important conversation over the future of the Korean peninsula. Needless to say, it would be a historic event. So, what do you think would happen when this meeting finally takes place? When Obama meets Kim for the first time? Well, nothing, unless you have an interpreter present. Without an interpreter, the best they can do is shake hands and smile awkwardly at each other in their best imitation of a junior high school dance. This is obviously an outlandish scenario, but I wanted to make the point that an interpreter, who is often overlooked, is a critical piece to any dialogue that involves more than one language. This is more so when the language pair is English and Korean since their underlying culture, syntax, and embedded preconceptions can be very differe

Jun 1, 2012By Jason Lim

Jason Lim

Korea's 'invisible' gays

By Jason Lim Whether you agree with him or not, President Barack Obama’s recent pronouncement supporting gay marriage was certainly a courageous one. Critics may argue that it was cynical political calculation that drove him, but that doesn’t discount the fact that he took a solid stance on an issue that he didn’t need to. You don’t have to be a prophet to see that this issue will be a huge wedge in the upcoming presidential election in November. But it wasn’t the election that sprung to mind when I first read about this. It was summer camps. Summer camps in America are funny and enlightening in a way because you see your campmates only once a year. You gather together in June just as summer vacation starts and then you say goodbye two months later only to see one another the following June. This means that you only see yearly snapshots of your camp friends as they grow, which accentuates the different speeds and various ways that each one of us physically and emotionally mature into adulthood. For example, Rich, who was by far the biggest and strongest among us during our

May 18, 2012By Jason Lim

Jason Lim

No hoopla for Sharon

By Jason Lim Sharon’s my boss. Has been for the last five years. In fact, she’s the only boss I’ve known in my current job. And she’s retiring next week. Well, actually, she’s supposed to have retired already a few months ago with the New Year. But her bosses convinced her to stay on for a few more weeks to help with the reorganization effort that our work unit was going through. Help settle the team, so to speak. As these things are wont to go, those few weeks have turned into a few months. But now she’s finally going, and no one can say otherwise. Realizing the inevitability, we threw her a surprise retirement party. Of course, Sharon probably knew something was afoot anyway. In fact, the only surprising part of the surprise was that we were so inept in keeping it a surprise. But she was a good sport and played along. She even managed to look, if not exactly surprised, but at least bemused when she walked in the door where we held the party. Of course, Sharon did bear some blame for this party being an amateurish attempt at a pseudo-surprise; she had given us an admoniti

May 4, 2012By Jason Lim

Jason Lim

Jasmine Revolution, Korean style

By Jason Lim Korea has come of age, of sorts. Jasmine Lee, a naturalized Korean citizen originally from the Philippines, became the first foreign-born lawmaker. Granted, she didn’t run for a seat herself, but became a member of the National Assembly as a proportional representation candidate when the Saenuri Party won a majority in the recent parliamentary elections. This is actually big news. Not necessarily the fact that Jasmine Lee became a rising political star; she was already a minor celebrity in Korea with a complete package of looks, smarts and a compelling narrative. The real news is the fact that Jasmine Lee has ― as a result of her background as a transplanted Southeast Asian woman who came Korea after marrying a Korean husband ― become the face and voice of 210,000 similar women and their 150,000 children who live in Korea today and their struggles to join the mainstream society. This won’t be an easy task. The insular vein from the “Hermit Kingdom” of old still runs thick beneath modern Korea. After all, the country is probably one of the few that proudly trum

Apr 20, 2012By Jason Lim

Jason Lim

Read more

What US doesn’t get about Dokdo

Who made your brain do it?

Real name of comfort women

Bitter aftertaste of democracy

6.25 or 7.27

Breasts, skulls and babies

If Obama meets Kim Jong-un

Korea's 'invisible' gays

No hoopla for Sharon

Jasmine Revolution, Korean style

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