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Kim Ji-myung

The writer is the chairwoman of the Korea Heritage Education Institute (K*Heritage).

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Kim Ji-myung

24 questions of Samsung founder

By Kim Ji-myungThe sinking of the Sewol ferry has thrown all Koreans into an unprecedented sincere reflection about life and death, and love for family. Parents are now grateful for the simple fact that they can eat dinner together with their children. The tragedy has awakened many Korean parents to some very basic truths.Many fundamental questions are now boggling our minds. It reminds me of the 24 questions that were raised by the late founder and chairman of the Samsung Group, Lee Byung-chul, just before he died in 1987. Chairman Lee wanted to know answers to these questions but he did not raise them overnight."Chairman Lee was not a man of academic or pedantic style at all,” said his last secretary at a recent all-religion meeting. He had been one of Lee's closest aides during his final eight years.The chairman's queries started casually some 10 years before his death. The first question was straightforward and realistic: ``Why do our CEOs tell lies? Why do they promise higher growth in sales when they know they cannot meet the goal?”Thus more than 100 questions of Ch

May 9, 2014By Kim Ji-myung
Kim Ji-myung

Champion of the Rose of Sharon

By Kim Ji-myung Last week, I picked up a bundle of rose of Sharon cuttings downtown at the Ministry of Forestry and handed them out to citizens in a campaign to plant Korea’s national flower around Arbor Day. Rose of Sharon, or Mugunghwa in Korean, reminded me of a pioneering champion of a rose-of-Sharon planting campaign some 100 years ago. Namgung Eok (1863-1939) served as an able government official, a prominent journalist, a high school English teacher and an insightful leader for independence in his final days.He belonged to an academically blessed generation in Korean history as he and some of his contemporaries learned Chinese at a traditional school (seodang) as children, studied Korean and English at modern schools in their youth and learned Japanese after colonization. They had the keys to access the intellectual world in three languages. After retiring from official positions in Seoul, Namgung moved to his ancestors’ hometown of Hongcheon and focused on education. His understanding of the national situation was astonishingly foresighted.He h

Apr 11, 2014By Kim Ji-myung
Kim Ji-myung

Sad, romantic story of Dilkusha

By Kim Ji-myungA beautiful young British actress was travelling in Japan where she met a smart and gentle American entrepreneur from Korea. At the time she lived in India. When she visited an old 19th century park named Dilkusha Kothi in Lucknow in northeastern India, she resolved to give that name to her own house one day. The two young people fell in love and later married in India.George Albert Taylor, whom everyone called Bruce, and his wife Mary Linley came to Korea in 1917 where Bruce became a successful gold mine developer. His father, George Alexander Taylor, was one of the first American businessmen to land in Korea when it was forced to open its ports to access from the outside world.In late February, 1919, Mary was lying in a room at the Severance Hospital, waiting to give birth to their son, Bruce Tickell Taylor. The baby arrived just one day before the nation-wide March 1 Independence Movement in Korea. She did not know it then, but she played a pivotal role in that historic event.Preparing for the uprising on March 1, the independence activists had p

Mar 14, 2014By Kim Ji-myung
Kim Ji-myung

A born photographer

By Kim Ji-myung He can no longer talk.  He can eat and walk only with the help of his wife; only she can communicate with him through his sounds and gestures. For the past several years, he has slowly lost the speaking ability and kinetic functions. And yet his gaze was sharp and penetrating as ever when I recently visited him for the first time in several years.I am talking about H. Edward Kim ― probably the most successful and accomplished Korean photographer in our time.He is known by two descriptions: First an Asian photographer who made his way up to the position of Chief Photo Editor of National Geographic magazine, and the first western photo-journalist who was allowed to travel in North Korea in the 70s. He toured the secluded country for 28 days. The resulting series of news stories together with impressive and vivid photos published in National Geographic were shocking revelation to world readers.He was a sophisticated writer on top of being a magical photo-artist. His photos had an impact that lasted in people’s minds for the rest of the

Feb 14, 2014By Kim Ji-myung
Kim Ji-myung

Forward or foreword?

By Kim Ji-myungI was lucky to have my first contact with a native English speaker several decades ago, in my first year of middle school. A once-weekly English conversation class was organized by some insightful parents, outside the regular school schedule; the teacher was the wife of an American embassy employee. My classmates well remember the moment of our great surprise when we found she could not guess what “omu-ra-is” meant. We could not believe that it did not sound like an English word to a native ear, and the correct name “omelet over fried rice” was too alien to all of us. If you can order food in this country in Korean or in Korean-style English, and then get the food you want, there is no problem. This is because language is for communication and if your message gets across, the purpose is accomplished. However, when it comes to a book published in English, it’s a different story. Producing printed material in English means introducing it into the enormous world of English publications. It may be attractive in appearance, but if it is not

Jan 17, 2014By Kim Ji-myung
Kim Ji-myung

Korea to fly above the radar

By Kim Ji-myung A new book on Korea is always welcome, especially when it is in English and even more so when it is written by a foreigner. I do agree that the latest tome “Korea, the Impossible Country,” by the Economist correspondent Daniel Tudor, serves Korea by opening her secrets to the world.The author notes that existing English-language literature about this nation has done little to dispel misplaced assumptions and gross misunderstandings about it. It is true that Korea is one of “Asia’s least-known countries” and foreigners’ ideas about Korea tend to be “heavily stereotypical” despite all the recent fuss by local media over the hallyu (Korean Wave) phenomena around the globe.In most parts of the world, ordinary people cannot tell South Korea from North Korea.A survey I conducted two years ago of some 100 scholars of Korean studies revealed that main images of Korea were limited to kimchi, Taekwondo, K-pop singers and TV dramas.As a member of the small community of writers about Korea in English, I feel somewhat respo

Aug 2, 2013By Kim Ji-myung
Kim Ji-myung

Friends for traveling together

By Kim Ji-myung“To know the true character of a person, you need to do three things together with him ― drink wine, take a public bath and play golf.” Koreans often apply this simple rule when a daughter brings a guy home and tells her parents that she wants to marry him.Well, this three-test process may reveal the true face of a person.  When you get drunk, when you are naked and when you are under the stress of playing golf with a would-be father-in-law, you might find it very difficult to showcase a nice personality that is not truly your own.I would add one more process for finding a hidden side of a person – traveling together. A comfortable travel-partner is not easy to find.As a Korean, I belong to a much-travelled group. During my stay in Germany for many years, my family toured around a lot on weekends and during vacations.My interest in “popular” history, such as how to best interpret and write about history for the general public, made my trips all the more interesting and rewarding.The best trip I remember was to have a friend, long-time

Jul 5, 2013By Kim Ji-myung
Kim Ji-myung

Do you know 'Yushukan'?

By Kim Ji-myung This column is supposed to mainly deal with cultural topics, traditional and modern heritage. However, the last one in May was an exception because it was about an episode in which former chancellor of Germany reprimanded Japan and advised it to be honest about history. This is the second part of that exception on the same subject, presented along with my hope that these two pieces based on my experience and observations are worth sharing.To the international community, the Yasukuni Shrine near Tokyo has become a symbol of Japan’s lack of repentance for the horrible actions of their military during World War II in Asia. By ignoring the protests of their victimized Asian neighbors and by demonstrating their respect to the enshrined "divinities,” including some of the masterminds of that horrible war, Japanese politicians who visit it reveal their perception of their past.The Koreans and Chinese have strongly protested against the Japanese political leadership whenever they paid homage to the Yasukuni Shrine where 14 Class A war criminals of World

Jun 7, 2013By Kim Ji-myung
Kim Ji-myung

Chancellor Schmidt scolds Japan

By Kim Ji-myungIn May, 1995, former President Roh Tae-woo attended the Inter-Action Council Meeting in Tokyo. His 5-year term ended in February, 1993, and he was ready to play a visible role, as the first former Korean president, in this international arena of retired political leaders ― former presidents and prime ministers. I tried to find documentation of the proceedings of that meeting, but to my disappointment they have never been published, not even the usual final communique of the plenary session. I suspect that this exceptional omission was intentional on the part of the host country, which is regrettable. It is ironic that former Prime Minister Fukuda Takeo of Japan had conceived of the Inter Action Council as a body that would "make contributions to threatening problems,” and later sat very uneasily in the culprit’s seat while co-founder former German chancellor Helmut Schmidt straightforwardly reprimanded him. In May 1995, I was sitting in the simultaneous interpreter’s booth, interpreting the plenary session into Korean for my only audience, ex-pre

May 10, 2013By Kim Ji-myung
Kim Ji-myung

The Koreans are coming, again

By Kim Ji-myung  “The Koreans Are Coming” was the headline on the cover of the June 6, 1977 issue of Newsweek magazine. Koreans were shown with big smiles while marching forward holding a radio, calculator, iron bar, shirt, fish, ship and tire ― our export items of that time.Thirty five years have passed since then. The so-called hallyu, or Korean Wave, has been the term describing the widespread love of Korean entertainment products such as popular music and TV dramas by people outside Korea. The government has been supporting the expansion of entertainment exports, as it did for the industrial products in 1970s and ’80s. Entertainment and game industries got the lion’s share of government support as a potential cash-cow of the national economy. The world may feel that the Koreans are coming again, this time with something soft ― culture.Pop singer Psy’s global success was an initial culmination of the hallyu that assured all Koreans of the potentiality of their creativity, although the singer himself confessed that it was a sheer ac

Apr 12, 2013By Kim Ji-myung
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