Opinion - The Korea Times

Seoul Craft Museum

Kim Ji-myungBy Kim Ji-myungJust on the northeastern corner of Anguk-dong Intersection on the site of Poongmoon Girls' High School, construction is underway. In a year, Seoul will add one more “must see” attraction on this intersection between the traditional Bukchon residential area and the commercial quarters of bustling Insa-dong.Like many schools in Seoul, Poongmoon was opened in 1937 during the Japanese colonial period on a former residence of the Korean royal family, namely the residence of King Sejong's eighth son, Prince Yeongeung.The site has been symbolic of the encounter between the past and present. Now, it looks to traditional crafts, which are the core elements in a culture transmitted down through generations, to create a new future. The school has moved to south of the Han River and the old site will soon become the Seoul Craft Museum.Designed to become a hub space in the city, the Seoul Craft Museum will change the area into a cultural park with an open space for citizens. Some sections will have walls removed so that visitors to and from Samcheong-dong ar

Jan 10, 2020By Kim Ji-myung

Kim Ji-myung

Grandpas in kitchen

By Kim Ji-myungHanging in the kitchen of my countryside home is a plate that reads: “Danger! Men Cooking.” The phrase serves as a handy test question for visitors. A six-year kid laughed reading it, while her father stood dumbfounded, not knowing what was happening.Most elderly male guests are simply puzzled. It is not a question of the English language but of culture. For most Korean men over 50 years, the words “men” and “cooking” are not associated. They are not related nor do they appear together. Kitchens and other spaces for housework are the domain of women. The connotation of cooking is that of serving the family by feeding them, which is far from the culinary art of creating happy and tasteful foods.There is a widely known, albeit joking, Korean saying: “If a man enters kitchen, his banana will become crooked!” or in some areas, “it will even drop to the ground!” If this saying were true, then these days there would be many men in their 20s and 30s who must have become eunuchs by now!But this is no longer a typical

Dec 13, 2019By Kim Ji-myung

Kim Ji-myung

Magic of translation

By Kim Ji-myung“Without it being written in English and spread on internet, even a truly attractive or valuable story of Korea would move the minds of only a handful of people on earth.”This has always been my personal belief. The success of Korean idol groups, dramas and films abroad owe much to excellent translations. But it is not only contemporary Korean popular culture that benefits from translations.“The records of all states, how strong or weak they were.Alas, why such differences amid the same humanity!While some peoples, seeing ahead, swagger over land and ocean,Why do we lag and linger, in the dark of the night?”Don't these lines sound like they are taken straight from an English verse? The “we” here are the Koreans, living in the turbulent period of the Korean Empire (1897-1910). The author deplores the frustrating situation of his fatherland. I am sure these rhymed lines, translated into English from an old document, will come into the hearts of modern Koreans, more than the original poem in the classical Chinese or the hangeul-translat

Nov 15, 2019By Kim Ji-myung

Kim Ji-myung

To be guilty or not

By Kim Ji-myungIs the recent Cho Kuk chaos drawing nearer to a close with his resignation from the justice minister's position? I'm afraid not. People, including the opposition party, are still very wary of this powerful man second only to the president. Although much of his and his family's criminal charges haven't been cleared up, he may remain a threat until his possible entry into the National Assembly or even as a presidential candidate in the next election.His farewell statement, expressing his love for his “victimized” family, failed to move the people because it was his obsession to sit in the justice minister's seat that was the cause of the exposure of all the diverse and complicated family related problems. Once your speech loses truthfulness, it is hard to turn it around.What is clear is that the Cho scandal clearly revealed the two vastly separate attitudes of Koreans. The pro-Cho groups, President Moon Jae-in and the ruling party on one side, and the rest on the other side stood in extreme antagonism. And so far there appears to be no hope of rapprochement.F

Oct 18, 2019By Kim Ji-myung

Kim Ji-myung

Archive to revive 1907 Korea

By Kim Ji-myung While I was finalizing my dissertation in November 2017, UNESCO decided to list on the Memory of the World Register the very documentary archives I had been researching ― the National Debt Redemption Movement Archives. Those thousands of historical records, handwritten letters and newspaper articles from 1907 to 1910 attest to the first nationwide voluntary fundraising movement by the Korean people.To briefly explain the backdrop of this civil movement, Korea had long been slowly usurped of her sovereign rights, mainly to Japan, since the 1870s by interfering Japanese advisers, while China, America and Russia were also competing to claim their portion of interest in this waning kingdom.The period of the Korean Empire from 1897 to 1910 hit Korean society with a paralyzing force on all dimensions. Forced to open the nation by treaties with other countries, through negotiations handled by foreign advisers and interpreters, the royal court and government officials alike were lost, suspicious and divided among themselves.On the other hand, foreign books, religions and alie

Sep 20, 2019By Kim Ji-myung

Kim Ji-myung

Korea's UNESCO man

By Kim Ji-myungOn July 26, 2001, my conference organizing company ConvEx Korea was selected as the planner-organizer for the “ICOM Seoul 2004” conference by the organizing committee of the event. I attended the bidding urged by my high school friend Dr. Lee, who was a director of a college museum in Seoul then. She is an expert in Roman glass from the Silla period.I knew little about ICOM, nor about the background of the triennial conference. Was it a blessing or a curse that my staff and I were made to take on the responsibility of setting up this complicated event?Founded in 1946, ICOM (the International Council of Museums) is a non-governmental organization with around 17,000 members in 140 countries. Until the 2004 Seoul Congress, not many Koreans knew about ICOM and its activities to promote and develop museums. ICOM also works to develop museum professionals at an international level, many of whom work at World Heritage sites with museums.In 2001, I was a novice CEO of a newly established professional conference organizer. I launched the company at the active encour

Aug 23, 2019By Kim Ji-myung

Kim Ji-myung

Translation professionalism

By Kim Ji-myungOn Sept. 1, 1979, the Graduate School of Simultaneous Interpretation had its first matriculation ceremony on the campus of Hankuk University of Foreign Studies (HUFS) in Seoul. As it was the first master's degree course in Asia to train professional conference interpreters in nine languages, fully financed by the government, it seemed quite an overshot at that time.It was amidst the Cold War period (1945-1991) when the two blocs of the East and the West were locked in confrontation. Korea, in particular, had relatively few contacts with the outside world diplomatically, scholarly and economically.Then HUFS president, the late Dr. Park Sul-eum, and school leaders must have had a vision for the upcoming detente in the world's politics. Avowing a goal of nurturing international conference interpreters and professional translators “who are equipped with international perspective and expertise,” courses covered English, French, German, Russian, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Malay and Indonesian.By succeeding in achieving an unparalleled reputation based on

Jul 26, 2019By Kim Ji-myung

Kim Ji-myung

Foods unite two Koreas

By Kim Ji-myungThe book “Traditional Foods of Korea” (Joseon Minjok Eumsik) introduces the authentic foods of North Korea. Published by the Foreign Language Publishing House of North Korea in 2018, this 118-page catalog in English printed in color is impressive by any standard.Three representative Korean dishes ― sinseollo, cold noodles (naengmyeon, or raengmyeon in North Korean dialect) and kimchi ― and rice wine are shown on the cover. Those three dishes may well showcase the most popular traditional haute cuisine for South Koreans, too. Despite some differences in recipes and ingredients between the South and the North, there are enormous commonalities between their cuisines. If we try to achieve inter-Korean unification very quickly, recipes and dishes may be the easiest area with which to begin.The publication's brief preface says, “Korea's national dishes are what the industrious and talented Korean people have created and developed with various home-grown ingredients to suit their physical constitution, taste and likings.”It then emphasizes that dishes

Jun 28, 2019By Kim Ji-myung

Kim Ji-myung

Missionary history in Daegu

By Kim Ji-myungOld photos of Korea in modern times fascinate me. The first photos taken by Westerners bring us back to the lost and never-seen land of the past. As for those black-and-white photos of the 1900s, the town of Daegu is mostly covered by a flat layer of thatched-roof houses. An exception here is the giant spired cathedral emerging high, like Gulliver among the miniature people. The earliest photo with the name Gyesan and the year 1907 printed on the front is colored in pale sepia and orange. Due to a sudden change of schedule during a recent meeting held in Daegu, I had an unexpected chance to visit and look around the cathedral. The Romanesque Catholic edifice was first constructed in 1886 directed by Father A. P Robert. An extension was added in 1911 when it became a bishop's church. The current shape of the enlarged structure was completed in 1918. A postcard of the photo was published saying “Coree ― La Cathedrale de Taikou, consacree en 1919.” Chinese brick workers who had participated in building cathedrals in Seoul and Pyongyang built the Gyesan Cathedr

Jun 2, 2019By Kim Ji-myung

Kim Ji-myung

15,000-year-old rice

By Kim Ji-myungIn a lecture on Korean history for foreign CEOs in 2011, I showed a photo of a few samples of the earliest cultivated rice grains which were discovered in 1998 at Soro-ri, a small village in central Korea. Common sense had it then, and still in 2019, that rice farming moved from China to Korea and Japan. At that time, I was unaware that “Archaeology: Theories, Methods and Practice,” a popular archaeology textbook by professor Colin Renfrew and writer Paul Bahn, had already revised the source of rice for mankind from China to Korea since its 2004 edition. The Soro-ri discovery was first reported by Lee Yung-jo, a professor at Chungbuk National University, and other Korean archaeologists. Radioactive dating of the 59 unearthed burnt grains of rice had pushed back the date for the earliest known cultivation of the plant to somewhere between 14,000 and 15,000 years ago. Lee claimed the discovery challenged the accepted view that the world's oldest rice was found at the Yellow and Yangtze rivers in China, dating between 10,500 and 11,000 years ago. The discovery

May 5, 2019By Kim Ji-myung

Kim Ji-myung

Read more

Seoul Craft Museum

Grandpas in kitchen

Magic of translation

To be guilty or not

Archive to revive 1907 Korea

Korea's UNESCO man

Translation professionalism

Foods unite two Koreas

Missionary history in Daegu

15,000-year-old rice

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