Seasons in the Kingdom

Seasons in the Kingdom

Saturday, November 1, 2014

November 1 - Global Stats for this week & month

Pageviews by Countries this week

Graph of most popular countries among blog viewers
EntryPageviews
United States
63
France
57
Poland
11
Ukraine
10
South Korea
5
Canada
3
Germany
3
Japan
2
Australia
1
Indonesia
1

Pageviews by Countries this month

Graph of most popular countries among blog viewers
EntryPageviews
United States
314
France
71
Ukraine
51
Poland
19
South Korea
17
Germany
11
Canada
9
Indonesia
5
Australia
4
Belgium
3

Tuesday, October 28, 2014

AP exclusive....

 October 23
LAKE CHON, North Korea — The Kaema Plateau, the “Roof of Korea,” is a stunning, forest-covered highland nestled in such treacherous mountains that it was never taken by the Allies during the Korean War. It’s now a truck stop.
As we squatted beside our lunches of kimchi and cold rice, in the distance, almost hidden in the thick mist, a woman sold refreshments in a tarp-covered stall. A half-dozen older people put down their loads and sat on a weed-covered embankment nearby; they had arrived on foot, even though the nearest town was hours away. One member of the group, a leathery man, rolled a cigarette and drew the smoke in deeply.
It’s quite possible none of them had ever seen an American before. But our presence went unacknowledged. No glances were exchanged. No words were spoken.
see the pictures and read more here...

Saturday, September 20, 2014

Last month's activity...global reach for nandupress

Pageviews by Countries

Graph of most popular countries among blog viewers
EntryPageviews
France
455
United States
350
Romania
21
South Korea
18
Germany
15
Ukraine
14
Thailand
6
Canada
5
India
4
Japan
4

Thursday, September 4, 2014

Comfort women: A final solution. Article from Asia Times

SPEAKING FREELY - click on ...
Comfort women: A final solution
By Yu Bin 

Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have their say. Please click here if you are interested in contributing. 

The author's preferred title for this article, its length precluding its use on our front page, is "A Modest Proposal - For the Final Solution of the Comfort Women/Sex Slave Issue". The phrase "final solution" is deliberately used here to reveal both the horror of the issue and satiric nature of the essay, similar to Jonathan Swift's treatise centuries ago. This article was previously posted under the headline: "Healing the 'comfort women' rift". 



Friday, August 29, 2014

« The Meltdown

For an in-depth article on the foibles of the Obama administrations foreign policy, I recommend this article in Commentary Magazine.



« The Meltdown Commentary Magazine

Friday, August 8, 2014

Richard Bridges ROK Photos, circa 1957

Ascom City Map & B.Duplantis

When I first began the search for information, over ten years ago, I made contact with Belford Duplantis. He had a map issued for GIs that were stationed at Ascom City so they, we, could find our way around to the other camps that made up the base in its entirety. The buildings that are in bold at about mid-page were built by the Japanese. They were in use by our forces when Ascom was at its zenith, and they were used when I was stationed there, 1973-75, at the small camp with no name at the top left, indicated only by Stockade. Below, I have included a photo of Belford, and a panorama of Ascom City as scene from the hills behind the stockade. Those hills separated Ascom City as we knew it from Inchon. They were the same hills over which the Marines came when assaulting Seoul in September of 1950.

Original Map of Ascom City, circa 1962.

L to R: Belford Duplantis, Titano, from Guam, and Luther Spivy, from Georgia.
,
Ascom City with the stockade in the center. This area is now covered with two story residential housing common in small Korean suburbs. The Church has been rebuilt. The village to the right in the photos remains surprisingly intact, considering that the rice paddies and the distance lands toward the horizon are now filled with 10-15 story apartment blocks.

Friday, July 25, 2014

ONE FREE KOREA - Update on our Foreign Policy - or Idiots playing with sharp objects...

ONE FREE KOREA


Posted: 22 Jul 2014 05:46 AM PDT
With the world erupting in the greatest cascade of escalating conflicts since 1975 and President Obama’s approval rating on foreign policy at negative 21.2% — 11% lower than his overall (dis)approval rating — John Kerry eked out some time over the weekend to tempt fate with a dubious boast:
I just came back from China, where we are engaged with the Chinese in dealing with North Korea. And you will notice, since the visit last year, North Korea has been quieter. We haven’t done what we want to do yet with respect to the de-nuclearization. But we are working on that and moving forward. [John Kerry, Meet the Press, July 20, 2014]
If you’re in Seoul or certain parts of Washington, that clapping sound isn’t applause; it’s the smack of palms against foreheads. Kerry’s observation rubs a lamp that wiser men do not touch for fear of the genies they would rather not summon. One may as well compliment a politician’s moderate views during primary season, or announce one’s arrival in the cellblock by telling the gang leader that he seems a decent enough fellow. As if on cue, yesterday, North Korea threatened South Korea and the United States with “practical retaliatory actions of justice.”
As South Koreans are keenly aware, North Korea has not been quiet. Under the direct supervision of His Porcine Majesty, it has been testing SCUDs in violation of multiple U.N. Security Council resolutions, along with massive barrages of artillery rockets. The U.S. and U.N. responses to this have been negligible.
At best, Kerry’s comment suggests poor coordination with one of our most important allies that still hasn’t been attacked this year. At worst, it suggests dangerously wishful and complacent thinking. It clearly means that Kerry neither knows nor cares much about North Korea. Such revelations causeunease among our allies, which is why the State Department had to “clarify” Kerry’s remarks yesterday:
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry is clearly concerned about North Korea’s provocative actions and did not mean to downplay the seriousness of the issue when he said Pyongyang is “quieter” than before, a government official said Monday.
“The secretary and we all have been very clear in condemning North Korea’s aggressive actions when they occur. We’ve talked recently about the ballistic missiles and how those were in violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions,” State Department deputy spokeswoman Marie Harf said at a regular press briefing.
“So I think the secretary has been very clear about our concern with North Korea’s activity,” she said in response to a question whether Kerry’s statement is a correct assessment of the situation. “He wasn’t trying to convey something different than we’ve conveyed in the past.” [Yonhap]
Concern, however, is no substitute for a coherence in matters of policy. Under Kerry’s tenure, the Obama Administration has shown a lack of seriousness about enforcing existing U.N. Security Council sanctions, even after North Korea was caught in flagrante delicto. It has imposed targeted financial sanctions on Zimbabwe, Russia, and Belarus – and grudgingly enforced tough financial sanctions against Iran – while its tepid trade sanctions against North Korea are stuck in the 1970s. Treasury has sanctioned and blocked the assets of the top leaders of these nations, but none of the top leaders of North Korea.
Our government has designated Burma and Iran to be primary money laundering concerns, a potentially devastating measure that is the financial industry’s equivalent of a sex offender registration, isolating them from a community where reputation means everything. It has made no such designation with respect to North Korea, the world’s most prolific state sponsor of money laundering, counterfeiting, drug dealing, and illegal proliferation.
Most unforgivably, it has offered no policy response whatsoever to a U.N. Commission of Inquiry’s finding that Kim Jong Un’s regime is committing crimes against humanity. Kerry is as deaf to the cries of the North Korean people as he is to roar of Kim Jong Un’s rockets. That is why North Korea continues to defy the Commission of Inquiry and all those who support its recommendations.
It’s as if this administration has no North Korea policy at all.
Meanwhile, as gravity of the threat from North Korea builds, President Park is so convinced that a North Korean provocation is imminent that she has directed her military commanders to return fire immediately if fired on by North Korea. This puts us one ill-advised temptation away from the miscalculation that could start Korean War II.
But perhaps, Koreans wonder, this isn’t what Kerry meant:
[C]ritics said [Kerry’s] assessment is far from reality. 
While characterizing the North as “quieter,” Kerry might have referred to the fact that the provocative nation has not carried out a nuclear test or a long-range rocket launch — the two main types of provocations Pyongyang has used to rattle the world.
Even without such major provocations, however, the North has continued to rattle its saber in recent months, firing a number of rockets, missiles and artillery rounds off its coast with some launches in violation of multiple U.N. Security Council resolutions.
Last week, the council issued a statement condemning the North’s ballistic missile launches.  [Yonhap]
To claim success for Kim Jong Un’s failure to nuke off is to confuse coincidence with causation. There is no evidence that Kerry’s diplomacy has resulted in serious movement toward disarming North Korea. There is more evidence that the Obama Administration itself is moving away from denuclearization as an objective.
One could just as well claim that the House’s introduction last April of tough financial sanctions targeted at Kim Jong Un’s financial jugularmay be deterring him from a nuclear test. Or, it could simply be that North Korea’s nuclear tests will conform to their previous interval of three to four years. A test of something louder would at least get the attention of everyone else in Washington who would otherwise forget that North Korea exists. One can hope that this time, Congress might just respond with more credible policy options than John Kerry has to offer.

Thursday, July 17, 2014

Seasons in the Kingdom reference: ROKDROP

Posted: 11 Jul 2014 07:20 AM PDT
I was wondering when this would eventually come to light:
Cho Myung-ja ran away from home as a teenager to escape a father who beat her, finding her way to the red light district in a South Korean town that hosts a large U.S. Army garrison.
After she escaped home in the early 1960s, her pimp sold her to one of the brothels allowed by the government to serve American soldiers.
“It was a hard life and we got sick,” Cho, 76, said in an interview in her cluttered room in a shack outside Camp Humphreys, a busy U.S. military garrison in the town of Pyeongtaek, south of Seoul.
On June 25, sixty-four years after the Korean War broke out, Cho joined 122 surviving comfort women, as they were called, in a lawsuit against their government to reclaim, they say, human dignity and proper compensation.
The suit comes as an embarrassing distraction for the South Korean government, which has pushed Japan to properly atone for what it says were World War Two atrocities including forcing women, many of them Korean, to serve as sex slaves for its soldiers.  [Reuters]
It is pretty well known that many Korean girls were sold often times by their parents into the Korean club system many decades ago to service not only US GIs, but Korean as well.  To learn more about this time period I recommend reading the book Seasons in the Kingdom about the GI experience in 1960′s Korea.  Likewise when it comes to human trafficking many of the women from the Philippines when they first came over to Korea I think in 1998 to work in the clubs were kept locked up in buildings that had barb wire on the roofs to prevent them from escaping.  I wonder if some of these Filipinas can launch a lawsuit as well for having their human rights violated?
The complaints against the Japanese for something that happened over 60 years ago seems a bit two faced when the Korean government has done nothing to address the victims of the comfort women system in South Korea that the government help to implement.

Friday, June 13, 2014

Skosh, the orphan: Korea 1962


Skosh, 1962.
 The name like many probably came from Skoshi, 
Japanese term meaning (roughly Speaking, soon or in a hurry.
Sokcho, Korea, 1962
Our Detachment commander was waiting in Sokcho (Korea), for one of our Korean employees on the East Coast of Korea when a tiny little boy about five years old came to his Jeep and begged for money. The lieutenant asked where his parents were and he began crying. It was raining cats and dogs and the L-T put the little fellow on his lap and turned up the heat in the Jeep. We later took him in as our mascot (this was 1962) and sent him to school, clothed him and fed him This picture is about 18 months after we "adopted" him.

A good friend of mine told me that when he went back to Sokcho in 1975, Skosh was gone and no one knew about him or heard of him. Ten years between tours in Korea was almost an eternity because the tour was only one year. My buddy said he heard that a master sergeant adopted him and took him to the US. 

Skosh was very spoiled and once told me to get out of his latrine while he brushed his teeth. Normally, we'd leave him alone while he readied for school but that morning I had an emergency electrical problem in the latrine I had to deal with and the little shit kicked me and yelled again to get out of his latrine! 

My friend recently told me that he was even worse as time went on. No one knew how to deal with an unruly child except his school teachers. By the time I left, I simply avoided him and often ignored him when he'd tell me to go get him a coke. The bartender knew he had a tab that we'd pay if he wanted anything. 

Story as told by Richard Bridges. 2014





Saturday, May 31, 2014

7th Div, Camp Hovey, 1956 - Troop C, 10th Cav. PHOTOS

Greetings,

1956, 7th Inf. Div. Camp Hovey, Spec 5.
Happy to announce and exhibit of photos taken by Richard Bridges, a multi-tour veteran of the ROK. This first batch is a few I have edited this week, but many more coming as the weeks go along as I edit and post them for you to view. I have seen many of the images of men at work and also men at play. Great images and is a worthy addition to this small collection for veterans view and remembrance. Bridges was in a tank unit with the 10th Cav, 1956.

Also, coming are images from my unit taken by Phil Simms, a friend and now contributor to this site. After some delay in getting all these images updated and edited, I am back the computer again.

Just click on the guy here and it will take you to the gallery for viewing.


Saturday, February 15, 2014

ROK men interested in DPRK women?

Most S.Korean Men Would Marry N.Korean Women

Seven out of 10 single men in South Korea are open to the idea of marrying a North Korean woman, but no South Korean woman would marry a North Korean man, according to a straw poll. 

The poll perhaps reflects the popular belief here that beautiful women come from North Korea and handsome men from the South.

Matchmaking company Bien-Aller polled 558 single South Koreans online, and 68.8 percent of men said they are "somewhat positive" about the idea of marrying a North Korean woman, while 84.2 percent of women were "somewhat negative" and 15.8 percent "very negative."

"Women in this country are so picky in choosing their husbands that men are considering North Korean women as an alternative," a spokesman for the company said. "But women place prime importance on educational background, income and manners and have very negative views of North Korean men, whom they associate with soldiers or starving people." 

Men are usually are more interested in looks and associate North Korean women with beauty, perhaps from looking at pictures of North Korean performers. In contrast, women here usually picture North Korean men as short, skinny and clad in ill-fitting uniforms.

Friday, January 31, 2014

North Korean Leaders Rewrite History At Their Own Will - Andrei Lankov from Radio Free Asia

nkorea-kju-ny-jan2014.gif
http://www.rfa.org/english/commentaries/purged-01062014151151.htmlNorth Korean leader Kim Jong Un delivers his New Year's Day address in Pyongyang, hailing the execution of his once-powerful uncle as a resolute act to remove "factionalist scum."
 AFP PHOTO/KCNA VIA KNS


The purge of Jang Song Thaek has brought about many changes in North Korea. One of these changes has been the disappearance of news articles from North Korea’s state media websites concerning Jang. North Koreans are in the dark about this, but KCNA and Rodong Shinmun post articles on their websites that can be seen by anyone abroad.

These articles include those that were published recently, but also ones that were uploaded years ago. It is from these articles that the North Korean authorities have deleted any references to Jang.
They have also removed pictures with Jang’s face, and have edited out scenes from videos where Jang appeared.
A similar thing happened to Lee Young Ho after he was purged last summer. Lee was the most powerful man in the North Korean military before being purged. Soon after he was removed from his position in July 2012, any mention of him was deleted from the North Korean media and history textbooks.
Lee had stood in the first line with Kim Jong Un during Kim Jong Il’s funeral, but now even this photo cannot be seen anymore in North Korea.
This history of purging is a unique characteristic of the country and has led the world to believe that history does not exist in a country like North Korea. North Korea’s leaders may remove or distort the country’s historical facts and truths at their own will.
Removed from view
That being said, there is no denying that Jang, Lee, and others like them—regardless of whether they were good or bad—played tremendously large roles in recent North Korean history.
Now, however, North Koreans are not even allowed to mention their names.
There are many forces in this world that aim to distort history. Political forces of every color and stripe tend to distort historical facts in order to suit their own interests or values. However, the act of distorting historical fact cannot mean refusing to acknowledge truths that are already well known by the people.
Moreover, all societies have political forces that are in competition with each other, so political forces that attempt historical distortion face criticism from other political forces. It is common for rightist scholars to attack leftist scholars, whether it be in Korea, Germany, or Russia.
In such countries it is impossible to completely distort historical fact. Even if, with the intent of removing certain facts from collective memory, historical facts are not reported, the other side emphasizes and spreads those facts regardless.
'Perfect control'
North Korea is in a completely different situation, however. North Korea has no conflicting political parties, and only a very small minority of the population has a complete hold on power. The leadership has perfect control over history.
North Korea’s supreme leader may remove all mention of Jang, Lee, and other purged party members, and can choose not to talk about important historical events. North Korean leaders are also free to concoct events that never really happened and spread them as historical fact.
I will give you one example here.
North Korea’s official propaganda machine argues that Kim Il Sung commanded the Chosun People’s Revolutionary Army (CPRA) in the 1930s. A look at records from the time, though, shows that there is no written evidence that this organization existed. Kim did fight against the Japanese but fought as an officer in the Chinese Communist Party’s armed forces.
But nationalism and the need to paint Kim as a heroic leader have led the North Koreans to ignore this fact and turn the existence of the CPRA into a historical fact.
This kind of shameless distortion of history is one reason why the outside world completely ignores the North Korean version of its own history.
Translated by Robert Lauler.
Andrei Lankov, a professor at Kookmin University in Seoul, is a Russian historian, North Korea expert, and regular RFA contributor.

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