Tag Archives: Gender

Continuous GRSJ in modern Korea

It is quite depressing to know that there are a lot of issues going on in Korea regarding to GRSJ issues. To sum up my blog posts, I will introduce or get in slight touch with concurrent GRSJ issues happening in South Korea right now.

Gender:

  • Salary: there is difference in income of male and female in South Korea. Male receive slightly higher income than female. From OECD, it showed that Korea has biggest difference among all the countries with 36.60 % in difference.
    • For this some males complain that females have a lot of breaks for periods, pregnancy and such but the gap is to great for all the breaks. Moreover, not all the companies are having these kind of breaks but only good ones so it is harder to receive complain from male.
  • Roles in family: referring to Andrea’s blog post regarding masculinity. The program mentioned shows difference of male and female roles in household very clearly. Not all the fathers were able to cook for the children. It is because Korean families still believe that female should do housework at the same time as her own work.
    • It is inclining to change since male start to help out with household but it is very seldom and sometimes it doesn’t work out as it was planned at first.
  • Date payment: for this one, a lot of female believes male earn more so they should pay. It tends to change but still a lot of people are thinking male should pay the fees along with buy them gifts.

Race:

  • There are still ongoing race inequality happening in Korea. Younger generation accepted and communicate with them as they are one of them but older generations are not.
    • One of the example was recent photos that I saw. Korean old grandpa was swearing and trying to use physical violence toward Turkish who were selling ice cream in front of the building. He was swearing and saying how there are no jobs for younger ones but he is taking one of spots that Korean guys could have taken.
    • There is another example where Muslim guy works in local market of Korea and Korean people keep asking him why is ISIS doing such horrible thing. Asking him to stop them as if he was part of it just because he is Muslim.

Sexuality:

  • This one is quite hopeful. Recently, there were a lot of videos regarding to seem like gay couples walking down the street and seeing the reaction of citizens. One of the worst response was from Russia. From Korea, WiKiTree (website) did the similar experiment in Seoul’s street.
    • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqH9AaFcvUo
    • This is the video showing the reactions of the citizens. They were mostly starting or glancing once in a while but there was no saying or violence used upon them. It was quite interesting since I thought Korea was quite conservative but we are getting better.

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This is the illustration that I wanted to share before I wrap up. It is from SantaDesign.com and showing how current Korea is changing. From Korean flag, if you take away few things, it become Japanese flag. It shows how current government is not doing right job in ruling and things become like what Japanese government want us to be. On the bottom, it shows in Korean saying “plans of them”. It is quite fascinating and directly touches on how things are going!

There are just so many things to discuss but these are some of the things that I wanted to mention before I wrap up the whole blog post. Thank you for all who’s been reading the blog post. Hope you all enjoyed.

If you have any comments then just leave one~

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

“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

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.