October 2015

12 hours… 65 years

GRSJ230, , , , View all 2 comments

If you are looking through recent news regarding to Korea, you will find something interesting yet rather depressing regarding to North Korea and South Korea.

To summarize, after long time, politicians had two different perspectives toward ruling the land of Korean Peninsula. One was communism and other is Democracy. Due to their different perspectives toward how to rule the peninsula, they decided to divide the peninsula into two half in order to rule as they believe what is good. This happened in 1945.

In 1950, North Korea’s government wanted to take over the whole peninsula so on June 25th, at 4am, invaded suddenly. This caused the whole peninsula to be in panic. All the males were taken to military to be trained to fight in war. According to the families that were separated, they mentioned how they will be separated only for 10 days but it ended up being 65 years.

Some people were separated due to male members being away for military and ending up not meeting them every again. Some people were separated while they were trying to evacuate as far as possible. Most of them were separated due to great amount of crowd trying to go toward south or north.

After the war paused and had treaty signed to have temporary peace, North Korea’s and South Korea’s government came together to let the separated families to meet together after a long time. There were times when this event paused due to continuous troubles and conflicts that happened between the countries. But in 2015, they actually made up to let dispersed families to meet after 65 years.

https://www.facebook.com/businessinsider/posts/10153155009284071 (from Facebook page, Business Insider)

This is the video where it has the English subtitles and what I found interesting was the comment that was left under the video. They mostly commented on how it is cruel to separate the family and letting them meet for only 12 hours instead of helping them to live together.

From here, I was able to see how it was relevant to one of GRSJ 230 classes that we had talking about law oppression toward minorities. It was not “minorities” but the main reason that they can’t live together was one of the laws of North and South Korea. Causing the war itself it painful to the race but suppressing them so they can’t meet showed deeper feelings for people who can’t see each other even though they breathe same air, stand on same peninsula.

From Tuesday to Thursday, some fortunate people were able to meet their separated family. However, there were another issues that government couldn’t afford to let all the people to meet their separated family, that they had to draw certain people out.

Looking at this ongoing sadness and conflict, I hope peace to come fast.

“It goes ill with the house where the hen sings and rooster is silent.”

GRSJ230, , , , View all 3 comments

“It goes ill with the house where the hen sings and rooster is silent.” (암탉이 울면 집안이 망한다) is one of famous proverbs that Koreans are aware of.

Why am I mentioning this in GRSJ blog? Guess what! This is the proverb that indicates significant gender inequality in past Korea.Let’s analyze that proverb to specify why this indicates “gender inequality”.

Hen represents female or female members in the family. Rooster, then obviously  represents male or male members in the family. The rooster itself is the one that makes noise in the morning to wake the people. Moreover, rooster is the leader that leads the hens. So it is symbol that shows when the female being noisy (a.k.a getting involved in politics or even family matter) was considered bad omen. Mainly because the role of women is being the “lady of the house”. Doing houseworks, chit and chat with neighbouring ladies of the house (in same status) and behave well and assist one’s husband well so they don’t lose their face in the society. So if they get involved in the “roles of male” then it was sign that the house would result in destruction.

Incident that is most closely related to this proverb happened to last empress of Korea, Queen MyeongSeong.

This is my own artwork that I produced from IB Art. This is based of the assassination of Queen Myeongseong.

This is my own artwork that I produced from IB Art. This is based of the assassination of Queen Myeongseong.

http://mariachung.wix.com/artisp201415#!final-artwork/c1m72 

The queen was assassinated by Japanese government, specifically soldiers who were ordered to murder the queen. She is one of the females that advocated different political issues of Korea to help the country to stay as the country itself. This involves the historical background regarding to invasion of Japan in 20th century. The queen was trying her best to rule out Japanese government from taking over Korea. Considering the queen being obstacle to their future aim, Japanese government set up Empress Assassination plan.

October 8th, Japanese soldiers invaded the castle and started killing massive amount of people who got in their way. When they finally reached to the bedroom of queen’s, they did most outrageous actions to the queen and assassinated her. This is called Eulmi Incident.  Currently, Japanese government is denying the fact that assassinated the queen (even with the eye witnesses) and trying to refuse to apologize.

Back to the point, Empress MyeongSeong was considered as one of the victims of “hen” that caused destruction to the household of hers, the kingdom of Korea. The cause was her passionate advocation in the politics. That’s what people think it is. I personally believe, that she was murdered due to the narrow perspective of ancestors toward women in general. If they have considered the opinions of the women and listened to them at least small bit, the history could have changed.

What do you think of it? Any opinions regarding to the proverb that I worked with since high school?

( The artwork is my own and it is created for the sake of gender inequality and the social injustice that happened in Korea 20th century. I consider this as one of interesting yet painful part of the history. If you want more information regarding to art piece, there is link up there that leads to my personal art blog or just leave comments~)

Creation of Hangul

GRSJ230, , , , View all 3 comments

Invention of Hangul

Hello Guys~ Do you know what day is today? October 9th is the Hangul Day! Today is the day to commemorate the invention of Hangul and to give appreciation to King Sejong who spent his life to invent language from scratch.

Hangul is something that people all around the world consider as something significant, innovative and (well it is informal but) cool. It is because Hangul could literally pronounce the words or the sound. It is because of the vowels and consonants being flexible. With Hangul, you could pronounce or even write in Korean what we hear. It is also considered significant since it is registered in UNESCO.

HOWEVER, it is not appreciated as much as it should be! K-pop songs include English or English words and concurrent people create “internet language” to use instead of using beautiful words given for us to use. Before this gets too serious, I like to discuss invention of Hangul.

Oct 9th, the day where people commemorate the invention of Hangul and show appreciation to King Sejong

Oct 9th, the day where people commemorate the invention of Hangul and show appreciation to King Sejong.

Hangul, Hoon Min Jung Eum and Korean language… what do you think of them? Let me rephrase this. Do you know what Hangul is? or Hoon Min Jung Eum is?

I bet not many of you will recognize these two words. These two words are Korean languages: Hangul, 한글 and Hoon Min Jung Eum,훈민정음. If those two words are Korean languages what is the difference? The difference between these two are very simple. One is 1st edition and the another is  2nd edition.

Hangul is like 2nd edition book. Koreans use Hangul to communicate. It is formed with 21 vowels, 14 consonants, and 5 double constants. In order to form the word or letter, at least one vowel and consonants required. With these alphabets, various combinations of words could be made. Hoon Min Jung Eum is the 1st edition of Hangul. To put it simple,  Hangul is modified language of Hoon Min Jung Eum.

Going back to main idea, can you believe if there is GRSJ issues behind invention of Hangul/ Hoon Min Jung Eum?

To start with, the time we are going back to is Chosun Dynasty. . Chosun is the last dynasty which the king ruled the country. The time is set to 1418 to 1450 when SeJong the Great ruled the country.

At the time of Sejong the Great, there was status to divide the citizens in to different rank. The highest was the royal family: kings, queens. Then, it was nobles, commoners and slave or servants. Since Korea didn’t have its own language, so the country was borrowing the China’s language to communicate with others. Due to this, there were a lot of people who were illiterate just because of their status or gender.

Women and slaves were not considered as “human” so they were not educated at all. Some women and commoners were educated to certain level if they are fortunate enough but they couldn’t participate in any roles of the society in our case, “government”.(Some of fortunate cases were women in prostitution, child from decent family or commoners that had enough money to send them to school).  Due to this, it was hard to communicate with citizens to clarify the laws or basic knowledge.

In 1428, there was incident which the son killed his own father. Chosun, considering the respect to the elders most significant attitude, believed this was just one outrageous, uneducated act done as the child. SeJong the Great was in despair of how people were illiterate about some of important aspects of country. So he decided to create our own language that was easy to read and learn.

From here, to conclude SeJong the Great invented Hangul so it was easy for commoners, slaves and women to learn and use it in real life so that they were aware of what’s happening in the country, cause no disrespectful act through education.

In our point of view, we could say the invention of Hangul was resulted from gender inequality, social justice so everyone has equal rights and do not cause any ignorant crimes to be caused.

Hope you enjoyed~

*Some of the diagram to show how Korea’s websites and Google is celebrating the Hangul Day*

Hangul Day - Naver

Hangul Day - Daum

Hangul - Google

What do you think of it?

Personally, I think this is just fabulous. It is first time that I am realizing that King actually cared about “status difference” and “gender inequality” happening in the country and trying to let EVERYONE have education given. Not mentioned above but when he proposed of inventing the language, all the governors disagreed of this. Mainly because THEY DON’T WANT TO LET LOWER ONES (women or slaves/commoners) TO EVEN HAVE A CHANCE TO OVERTHROW THEM. They just care about how citizens start to get education and realize A LOT of bribing or extortion done to them then they don’t stand a chance.

But, since SeJong the Great invented Hangul, currently we are able to have some freedom and difference from other Asian countries. To stay independent.

Giving a hint about future blog post topic – Independent activists actually used Hangul to communicate with each other secretly in order to gain independence from Japan in later century. This is when people realized the importance of having their own languages and used the most.