Starting Points: South Korea

Showing posts with label South Korea. Show all posts

May 29, 2010

South Korea Expands Aid for Internet Addiction

Park Jin-Hee for the International Herald Tribune

Teenagers at online game parlor in Gwangmyeong, Seoul.

By CHOE SANG-HUN

SUWON, South Korea — Neither had a job. They were shy and had never dated anyone until they met through an online chat site in 2008. They married, but they knew so little about childbearing that the 25-year-old woman did not know when her baby was due until her water broke.

But in the fantasy world of Internet gaming, they were masters of all they encountered, swashbuckling adventurers exploring mythical lands and slaying monsters. Every evening, the couple, Kim Yun-jeong and her husband, Kim Jae-beom, 41, left their one-room apartment for an all-night Internet cafe where they role-played, often until dawn. Each one raised a virtual daughter, who followed them everywhere, and was fed, dressed and cuddled — all with a few clicks of the mouse.

On the morning of Sept. 24 last year, they returned home after a 12-hour game session to find their actual daughter, a 3-month-old named Sa-rang — love in Korean — dead, shriveled with malnutrition.

In South Korea, one of the world’s most wired societies, addiction to online games has long been treated as a teenage affliction. But the Kims’ case has drawn attention to the growing problem here of Internet game addiction among adults.

Sa-rang, born prematurely and sickly, was fed milk two or three times a day — before and after her parents’ overnight gaming and sometimes when her father woke up during the day, prosecutors said. The baby died “eyes open and her ribs showing,” said the couple’s lawyer, Kim Dong-young.

After six months on the run, they were arrested in March and charged with negligent homicide. On Friday they were sentenced to two years in prison, but the judge suspended Ms. Kim’s sentence because she was seven months pregnant and he said she needed some “mental stability.”

“I am sorry for being such a bad mother to my baby,” Ms. Kim said, sobbing, during the couple’s trial.

Thanks partly to government counseling programs, the estimated number of teenagers with symptoms of Internet addiction has steadily declined, to 938,000 in 2009, from more than a million in 2007, the Ministry of Public Administration and Safety said in April.

But the number of addicts in their 20s and 30s has been increasing, to 975,000 last year. Many of these adult addicts grew up with online games and now resort to them when they are unemployed or feeling alienated from society, said Dr. Ha Jee-hyun, a psychiatrist at Konkuk University Hospital.

This development and a recent string of cases like that of the Kims have prompted the government to announce plans to open rehabilitation centers for adult addicts and expand counseling for students and the unemployed, groups considered the most vulnerable to compulsive gaming.

“Unlike teenagers, these grown-ups don’t have parents who can drag them to counselors,” Dr. Ha said. He treats an average of four adults a month for an addiction to online games, he said. Two years ago, it was one a month.

More than 90 percent of South Korean homes are fitted with high-speed Internet connections. Nearly every street corner has a computer parlor with computers available for a fee. In these dim, 24-hour-a-day establishments, “the line blurs between reality and the virtual world,” said Jung Young-chul, a psychiatrist at Yonsei University.

Especially popular among adult players are large multiplayer online role-playing games.

In these games, players form alliances and wage battles that can last for days, with players operating in shifts to keep the action. The more time a player spends online, the more powerful the game character — and the player’s online status — becomes.

Cyberbattles can spill into the real world. There have been several reports of players tracking down and attacking others for killing the online characters they had identified with for years.

If the games are addictive, they are also highly commercial. “Items” — cyberweapons, outfits and special abilities acquired through gaming that strengthen their owners’ combat prowess — are traded for real money online. Such trades were valued at more than $1.2 billion last year.

Park Ki-hoon and his wife, Choi Jin-hee, both 37, run a swimsuit shop by day and play online games at night. During the winter off-season, Mr. Park said, he has played up to 18 hours a day and won up to $2,400 a month, enough to cover the rent on the couple’s shop.

If Mr. Park knows how to juggle his offline and online lives, many do not.

In February, a 22-year-old man was arrested and accused of killing his mother for nagging him about his obsessive playing. In the same month, a 32-year-old man dropped dead of exhaustion in a computer parlor after playing through the five-day Lunar New Year holiday. “Some jobless men come here in hope of a financial breakthrough,” said Hong Seong-in, the owner of a computer parlor.

South Korea promotes online games, with exports growing by 50 percent, according to the government, to $1.5 billion last year — by far South Korea’s single largest cultural export item. Its games are hugely popular in China and other Asian countries.

Although the country has become one of the first to address Internet addiction, little help is available for adults.

Computer parlor owners and game buffs assert that compulsive playing has actually been decreasing as the prices of items fall.

Enterprising players in South Korea and China have been running “item factories,” where hundreds of computers are programmed to play the games without human users for the sole purpose of generating items for cash.

“Online games are a culture,” Mr. Park said. “To me, people who hike or fish are as crazy as they think I am.”

Apr 2, 2010

Overtures to China may signal opening of North Korea's economy

Image by IsaacMao via Flickr

By Blaine Harden
Friday, April 2, 2010; A10

SEOUL -- Squeezed by food shortages and financial sanctions, North Korean leader Kim Jong Il appears to be reaching out to China and Chinese investors in a way that could mark an extraordinary opening in the insular nation's shuttered economy.

Kim might soon travel to China, according to the office of South Korea's president and U.S. officials. They cited preparations that appear to be underway in the Chinese border city of Dandong and in Beijing. The Chinese Foreign Ministry said Thursday it does not have information on whether Kim will visit China.

Such a trip could help restart six-party talks, hosted by China, aimed at persuading North Korea to denuclearize in return for economic and political benefits.

Kim is also attempting to accelerate Chinese investment and has ordered the creation of a State Development Bank. Officials from the new bank told a South Korean professor last week that they intend to allow the construction of foreign-owned factories in major North Korean cities. This would allow Chinese firms, many of which are running short of low-cost factory workers, access to North Korea's pool of low-wage laborers.

If the investments move forward, they would represent a major policy reversal by the government. For six decades, North Korea has sealed almost all its citizens off from the "poisons" of capitalism.

Outreach to China comes at a time of sharply increased pressure on Kim's leadership.

Image by yeowatzup via Flickr

Inside North Korea, food shortages have worsened because of botched currency reform, which disrupted the private markets that feed most of the country's 22.5 million people. Kim's medical ills also include kidney failure, and he undergoes dialysis every two weeks, according to the head of a state-run think tank in Seoul.

And outside, U.N. sanctions are reportedly limiting the North's ability to profit from weapons sales. State trafficking in counterfeit cigarettes and illicit drugs appears to be dwindling. In addition, large-scale food aid from South Korea has been stopped until Pyongyang agrees to junk its nuclear weapons.

"Through this State Development Bank, North Korea is trying to lure foreign investment in agriculture, ports, railroads and also light industry," said Lim Eul-chul, a research professor at the Seoul-based Institute for Far Eastern Studies. He spent four days in Pyongyang last week, talking to officials from the bank and to Chinese businessmen.

They told Lim that the bank is offering itself to foreign investors as a one-stop investment shop. With its board including senior members of the military and the ruling party, the bank will be able to conduct transactions with foreign commercial banks and invest in major projects, North Korean state-controlled media have said.

"The North is now planning to open foreign-owned factories not just in closed-off special economic zones, but in major cities like Nampo and Wonsan," Lim said. Until now, the government has confined nearly all foreign business operations to sealed-off economic zones, such as Kaesong near the South Korean border. "The military is closely cooperating with the State Development Bank to try to increase foreign investment."

Although the repressive power of the army and security forces remains strong, the North's command-style economy is a ruin. There were unconfirmed reports of starvation deaths in some areas this winter.

Image via Wikipedia

Kim, 68, and showing the effects of a 2008 stroke, is in the early stages of handing power over to his untested 27-year-old son, Kim Jong Eun. But the legitimacy of the succession -- and of the state itself -- is being weakened by the growth of the markets and increased public access to foreign media.

Refugee surveys show that many North Koreans blame Kim's government for food shortages, corruption and incompetence.

"Kim Jong Il doesn't have many cards to play, so there is more and more pressure on him to return to the six-party talks," said Koh Yu-whan, a professor of North Korean studies at Dongguk University in Seoul. "He is also aiming to get investment from ethnic Korean businesses in China."

In South Korea and China, there is widespread skepticism about North Korea's willingness to create modern banking systems and enforce laws that allow foreign companies to operate under standardized accounting rules.

Companies that have invested in North Korean mineral ventures have complained for years of corruption and outright theft by the government.

Special correspondent June Lee contributed to this report.

Apr 1, 2010

Why Internet connections are fastest in South Korea - CNN.com

Image by preetamrai via Flickr

Why Internet connections are fastest in South Korea - CNN.com

Mar 1, 2010

With pressures high, South Korean women put off marriage and childbirth

By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, March 1, 2010; A10

SEOUL -- In a full-page newspaper advertisement headlined "I Am a Bad Woman," Hwang Myoung-eun explained the trauma of being a working mom in South Korea.

"I may be a good employee, but to my family I am a failure," wrote Hwang, a marketing executive and mother of a 6-year-old son. "In their eyes, I am a bad daughter-in-law, bad wife and bad mother."

The highly unusual ad gave voice to the resentment and repressed anger that are common to working women across South Korea.

In a country where people work more and sleep less than anywhere else in the developed world, women are often elbowed away from rewards in their professional lives. If they have a job, they make 38 percent less money than men, the largest gender gap in the developed world. If they become pregnant, they are pressured at work not to take legally guaranteed maternity leave.

Thanks to gender equality in education, the professional skills and career aspirations of women in South Korea have soared over the past two decades. But those gains are colliding with a corporate culture that often marginalizes mothers at the workplace -- or ejects them altogether.

Women who do combine work and family find themselves squeezed between too little time and too much guilt: for neglecting the education of children in a nation obsessed with education, for shirking family obligations as dictated by assertive mothers-in-law, and for failing to attend to the care and feeding of overworked and resentful husbands.

As Hwang complained in two mournful newspaper advertisements she bought last fall in Seoul newspapers: "We work harder than anyone to manage housekeeping and earn wages, so why are we branded as selfish, irresponsible women?"

When the ads were published in September, Hwang's name did not appear in them. But she has since acknowledged buying them and has gone on television to draw attention to the pressures endured by working women.

Most South Korean corporations do little to accommodate working mothers -- or working fathers, experts say. South Korean law allows a full year of subsidized parental leave, but intense peer pressure at work means that working mothers usually take little time off, according to government surveys. Only about 35,000 parents in this country of 49 million people took advantage of child-care leave subsidies last year.

"The longer leave they take, the less the likelihood of getting their old job back, even though that is illegal," said Yoo Gye-sook, an associate professor of family studies at Kyung Hee University in Seoul. "Flextime is frowned on by human-resources managers. They feel that company discipline might erode."

To lower stress as they climb corporate ladders, women in South Korea are postponing marriage and motherhood. The number of unmarried women in their 20s and 30s is surging. For three years running, South Korea has had the world's lowest birthrate, according to the U.N. World Health Organization.

The no-husband, no-baby trend has become a demographic epidemic in East Asia. Among the 10 countries or territories with the world's lowest fertility rates, six are in the Asia-Pacific region, according to a 2008 CIA ranking. From Japan to Singapore, the percentage of women who remain single into their mid-30s is rising at historically unprecedented rates. In South Korea, the percentage of unmarried women ages 30 to 34 nearly doubled in the past five years, rising to 19 percent from 10.5 percent.

"Women in their late 20s are just not willing to make the sacrifice of having children, juggling family responsibilities and working," Yoo said.

Collapsing birthrates are alarming East Asian governments, which in coming years will face a demographic crunch as the proportion of pensioners rises and the number of working-age adults declines. South Korea, which has projected a population decline beginning in 2018, is scrambling to encourage childbirth with incentives including low-interest home loans for families with three or more children.

But for South Korean women, choosing to have children usually means falling off the career track. There is a 30 percent employment gap here between men and women, the fourth-largest gap in the world, after Turkey, Mexico and Greece. Even if women choose to stay on the job, they have no guarantees of career advancement.

U.N. statistics show that gender empowerment, as measured by women holding management and professional jobs, is falling.

"This means that despite Korean women having good health and excellent education, they still have a much greater chance of becoming a politician or even a middle manager or computer programmer in countries like Kyrgyzstan, the Dominican Republic, Botswana or Nicaragua," said James Turnbull, whose blog, "The Grand Narrative," tracks sex discrimination and the role of women in South Korea.

Hwang, the working mom who says she spent about $8,600 last fall buying newspaper ads to vent her frustrations, works 10 to 12 hours a day as a chief strategic officer in charge of product promotions for a Seoul marketing company. She said her salary is about double what her husband makes -- a rare and delicate equation in a South Korean family.

"When you make more than the husband, you have to be careful not to hurt his pride," said Hwang, 38, who makes about $86,000 a year. "I make a point of getting a suggestion from him, when I buy my own clothes or a new aquarium for my son's fish."

Even more problematic, Hwang said, is her husband's mother.

In the "I Am a Bad Woman" advertisement that she placed in the newspaper, Hwang gives this account of telephoning her mother-in-law to ask for help with child care:

"Her sharp scolding returns from the other side of the phone: 'Have you forgotten today is the day of your father-in-law's memorial service? Your other family members are already here. I understand you are talented and all, but do you ever fulfill your family obligations?' "

Hwang said her husband is more sympathetic and "does more at home than other husbands in South Korea." She said she understands that it is not easy for him to have a working wife.

"The husbands here expect a warm home and a pat on the shoulder, but sometimes my husband may not get that," she said.

Hwang's husband declined to comment.

Special correspondent June Lee contributed to this report.

Dec 11, 2009

Google Tailors Korean Home Page to Local Tastes

Image via CrunchBase

News and links to popular topics and blogs are added; effort seeks to gain market share by appealing more to locals

By EVAN RAMSTAD

SEOUL—Google Inc. this week changed the simple look of its home page in South Korea, adding blocks of links under the main search box about topics and news that are popular with Korean Internet users.

The move marks the first time that Google has significantly altered the iconic appearance of its home page to adapt to local market conditions, said Ted Cho, engineering site director for Google's Korea unit, although the company has made cosmetic tweaks to accommodate different languages. "I think the whole company is watching," Mr. Cho said.

The move represents Google's attempt to revamp its image in South Korea and there are no signs the company is contemplating similar changes to its U.S. homepage, which it keeps deliberately sparse.

Google declined to comment about whether it plans to roll out the new design elsewhere

While Google is the leading search engine and Web service provider in the U.S. and much of the world, the company in South Korea significantly trails two domestic Web portals in usage.

The two Korean companies— NHN Corp. and Daum Communications Inc.—present users with home pages that look more like those of media outlets than a search engine. They include the latest news, photos, videos and updated lists of highly trafficked blogs and popular online chat sites.

Mr. Cho said that he has often heard from South Koreans that they don't know what to do with a search engine that just provides a blank page and search box. "They visit these portals to find information about what's going on and what everyone is talking about," he said. "Then they start a search."

In November, NHN's Naver site led the market with 66% of search queries, according to KoreanClick, an Internet-industry research firm in South Korea. Daum was next with 21%, followed by SK Telecom Inc.'s Nate portal at 6%, Yahoo Inc.'s Korea site at 3% and Google at 2%.

The success of Naver and Daum is rooted in the homogeneity and density of South Korea, which is the size of a midsize U.S. state such as Indiana but with roughly the same number of people as California and Texas, the two most populous U.S. states, combined. South Koreans tend to be interested in the same things, and it shows in Internet search requests.

Both Naver and Daum keep users captive for a longer period than Google or Yahoo by creating vast databases of popular content and linking to them first. For instance, a search for information about lung cancer on Naver or Daum will first yield results from articles the sites have acquired or commissioned from Korean doctors or hospitals.

By contrast, a Google search yields results from the broader Web ranked by Google's search algorithm. Mr. Cho said that wouldn't change in South Korea.

Google found that, on any given day in South Korea, the top 10,000 search items account for 40% to 50% of all requests, more than twice the rate of any other country and far more than in countries with diverse populations.

—Jaeyeon Woo contributed to this article.

Nov 2, 2009

A Glass Darkly - Desperate for Food

Image via Wikipedia

In the early 1990s famine took hold in North Korea. The inefficient collective farms had never been able to feed the population and changing conditions caused China and Russia to cut back on the aid they had been supplying the regime. North Korea is a tightly controlled society and though no official figures are available (the regime ordered hospitals and physicians not to record starvation as a cause of death), it is estimated that up to a tenth of the population perished. That would amount to somewhere between 600,000 and 2.5 million people.

It has been said that people raised in Communist countries cannot fend for themselves, because they expect the government to take care of them. This was not true of many of the victims of the North Korean famine. When the public-distribution system was cut off, people tapped their deepest wells of creativity to feed themselves. They devised traps out of buckets and string to catch small animals in fields, and draped nets over their balconies to snare sparrows. They educated themselves in the nutritive properties of plants.

Women exchanged recipe tips: When making cornmeal, don’t throw out the husks, cob, leaves, and stem of the corn—throw everything into the grinder. Even if it isn’t nutritious, it is filling. Boil noodles for at least an hour to make them appear bigger. Add a few leaves of grass to soup to make it look as if it contained vegetables. Women would strip the sweet inner bark of pine trees to grind into a fine powder that could be used in place of flour.

North Koreans picked kernels of undigested corn out of the excrement of farm animals. Shipyard workers developed a technique by which they scraped the bottoms of the cargo holds where food had been stored, then spread the foul-smelling gunk on the roof to dry so that they could collect from it tiny grains of uncooked rice and other edibles.

The gathering and production of food was the focus of all enterprise. You woke up early to find your breakfast, and as soon as it was finished you thought about what to find for dinner. You slept during lunchtime because you were exhausted.

For more information read “The Good Cook: A battle against famine in North Korea” by Barbara Demick in The New Yorker (November 2, 2009) pp. 58-64.

You can find a audio-slide overview of Demick’s article here.

The Chosun Ilbo - Korea Lags Behind in Closing Gender Gap

Image via Wikipedia

Many countries are making great strides toward gender equality, but women still lag behind men in political and economic empowerment. This was revealed in Global Gender Gap Index 2009 released on Tuesday by the World Economic Forum of Switzerland.

The index was based on a survey of 134 nations in four categories -- economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, political empowerment, and health and survival. "The Index's scores can be interpreted as the percentage of the gap that has been closed between women and men," the report said.

Nordic countries had the smallest equality gaps. On a scale of 100, Iceland topped the list with 82.8 points, followed by Finland (82.5 points), Norway (82.3) and Sweden (81.4). Women there find it easy to work outside their home and find a balance between home and work as they benefit from traditionally generous welfare, the report said.

At the bottom, Qatar ranked 125th, followed by other Islamic countries such as Egypt, Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Yemen came last with 46.1 points.

Korea ranked 115th, very close to the bottom. The country slid since its already low ranking of 92nd in 2006 when this survey was started, dropping to 97th in 2007 and 108th in 2008.

Korea received 61.6 points in 2006, but improved in 2007 with 64.1. Its points dropped to 61.5 in 2008 and received 61.5 again this year. But it was pushed behind by other countries which improved faster. Korea performed relatively better in the health and survival category (80th) than the economic and political categories (113th and 104th). The country came first in terms of life expectancy but ranked as low as 116th in sex ratio at birth. It ranked 114th in legislators, senior officials and managers and 124th in women in ministerial positions.

Out of 115 countries that were first rated in 2006, more than two-thirds improved their performance over the last four years, the report said. But women still had a low rate of participation in parliament, government and corporate boards.

Countries have closed almost 93 percent of the gap in education but only 60 percent of the gap in economic activity and 17 percent in politics, the report added.

Nov 1, 2009

South Korea Struggles With Attitudes Toward Race - NYTimes.com

Image by maHidoodi via Flickr

By CHOE SANG-HUN

SEOUL — On the evening of July 10, Bonogit Hussain, a 29-year-old Indian man, and Hahn Ji-seon, a female Korean friend, were riding a bus near Seoul when a man in the back began hurling racial and sexist slurs at them.

The situation would be a familiar one to many Korean women who have dated or even — as in Ms. Hahn’s case — simply traveled in the company of a foreign man.

What was different this time, however, was that, once it was reported in the South Korean media, prosecutors sprang into action, charging the man they have identified only as a 31-year-old Mr. Park with contempt, the first time such charges had been applied to an alleged racist offense. Spurred by the case, which is pending in court, rival political parties in Parliament have begun drafting legislation that for the first time would provide a detailed definition of discrimination by race and ethnicity and impose criminal penalties.

For Mr. Hussain, subtle discrimination has been part of daily life for the two and half years he has lived here as a student and then research professor at Sungkonghoe University in Seoul. He says that, even in crowded subways, people tend not sit next to him. In June, he said, he fell asleep on a bus and when it reached the terminal, the driver woke him up by poking him in the thigh with his foot, an extremely offensive gesture in South Korea.

“Things got worse for me this time, because I was with a Korean woman,” Mr. Hussain said in an interview. “Whenever I’ve walked with Ms. Hahn or other Korean women, most of the time I felt hostilities, especially from middle-aged men.”

South Korea, a country where until recently people were taught to take pride in their nation’s “ethnic homogeneity” and where the words “skin color” and “peach” are synonymous, is struggling to embrace a new reality. In just the past seven years, the number of foreign residents has doubled, to 1.2 million, even as the country’s population of 48.7 million is expected to drop sharply in coming decades because of its low birth rate.

Many of the foreigners come here to toil at sea or on farms or in factories, providing cheap labor in jobs shunned by South Koreans. Southeast Asian women marry rural farmers who cannot find South Korean brides. People from English-speaking countries find jobs teaching English in a society obsessed with learning the language from native speakers.

For most South Koreans, globalization has largely meant increasing exports or going abroad to study. But now that it is also bringing an influx of foreigners into a society where 42 percent of respondents in a 2008 survey said they had never once spoken with a foreigner, South Koreans are learning to adjust — often uncomfortably.

In a report issued Oct. 21, Amnesty International criticized discrimination in South Korea against migrant workers, who mostly are from poor Asian countries, citing sexual abuse, racial slurs, inadequate safety training and the mandatory disclosure of H.I.V. status, a requirement not imposed on South Koreans in the same jobs. Citing local news media and rights advocates, it said that following last year’s financial downturn, “incidents of xenophobia are on the rise.”

Ms. Hahn said, “Even a friend of mine confided to me that when he sees a Korean woman walking with a foreign man, he feels as if his own mother betrayed him.”

In South Korea, a country repeatedly invaded and subjugated by its bigger neighbors, people’s racial outlooks have been colored by “pure-blood” nationalism as well as traditional patriarchal mores, said Seol Dong-hoon, a sociologist at Chonbuk National University.

Centuries ago, when Korean women who had been taken to China as war prizes and forced into sexual slavery managed to return home, their communities ostracized them as tainted. In the last century, Korean “comfort women,” who worked as sex slaves for the Japanese Imperial Army, faced a similar stigma. Later, women who sold sex to American G.I.’s in the years following the 1950-53 Korean War were despised even more. Their children were shunned as “twigi,” a term once reserved for animal hybrids, said Bae Gee-cheol, 53, whose mother was expelled from her family after she gave birth to him following her rape by an American soldier.

Even today, the North Korean authorities often force abortion on women who return home pregnant after going to China to find food, according to defectors and human rights groups.

“When I travel with my husband, we avoid buses and subways,” said Jung Hye-sil, 42, who married a Pakistani man in 1994. “They glance at me as if I have done something incredible. There is a tendency here to control women and who they can date or marry, in the name of the nation.”

For many Koreans, the first encounter with non-Asians came during the Korean War, when American troops fought on the South Korean side. That experience has complicated South Koreans’ racial perceptions, Mr. Seol said. Today, the mix of envy and loathing of the West, especially of white Americans, is apparent in daily life.

The government and media obsess over each new report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, to see how the country ranks against other developed economies. A hugely popular television program is “Chit Chat of Beautiful Ladies” — a show where young, attractive, mostly Caucasian women who are fluent in Korean discuss South Korea. Yet, when South Koreans refer to Americans in private conversations, they nearly always attach the same suffix as when they talk about the Japanese and Chinese, their historical masters: “nom,” which means “bastards.” Tammy Chu, 34, a Korean-born film director who was adopted by Americans and grew up in New York State, said she had been “scolded and yelled at” in Seoul subways for speaking in English and thus “not being Korean enough.” Then, she said, her applications for a job as an English teacher were rejected on the grounds that she was “not white enough.”

Ms. Hahn said that after the incident in the bus last July, her family was “turned upside down.” Her father and other relatives grilled her as to whether she was dating Mr. Hussain. But when a cousin recently married a German, “all my relatives envied her, as if her marriage was a boon to our family,” she said.

The Foreign Ministry supports an anti-discrimination law, said Kim Se-won, a ministry official. In 2007, the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination recommended that South Korea adopt such a law, deploring the widespread use of terms like “pure blood” and “mixed blood.” It urged public education to overcome the notion that South Korea was “ethnically homogenous,” which, it said, “no longer corresponds to the actual situation.”

But a recent forum to discuss proposed legislation against racial discrimination turned into a shouting match when several critics who had networked through the Internet showed up. They charged that such a law would only encourage even more migrant workers to come to South Korea, pushing native workers out of jobs and creating crime-infested slums. They also said it was too difficult to define what was racially or culturally offensive.

“Our ethnic homogeneity is a blessing,” said one of the critics, Lee Sung-bok, a bricklayer who said his job was threatened by migrant workers. “If they keep flooding in, who can guarantee our country won’t be torn apart by ethnic war as in Sri Lanka?”

Oct 23, 2009

The Chosun Ilbo - Two Koreas 'in Secret Singapore Meeting'

There were secret contacts between the two Koreas in Singapore during Oct. 15-20, possibly to discuss an inter-Korean summit, South Korean officials have admitted. Speaking on condition of anonymity, officials said Kim Yang-gon, the director of North Korea's United Front Department, secretly visited China and contacted a South Korean official. The official has not been identified but is believed to be unconnected to the Unification Ministry.

Korea Broadcasting System (KBS) on Thursday said a South Korean official secretly met with Kim in Singapore and discussed the summit question. Quoting an intelligence official, KBS said Kim arrived in Beijing on Oct. 15 but went to Singapore with Won Tong-yon, a ranking member of the Asia-Pacific Peace Committee, and contacted a high ranking South Korean official there. The contact was initiated by the North Korean side, it added.

The South Korean official told Kim that a summit would require a fundamental change in the North Korean nuclear issue, and that no economic assistance could be promised for the summit, the broadcaster claimed. He also insisted that North Korean leader Kim Jong-il will have to visit Seoul this time as two previous summits took place in North Korea. The negotiations ended inconclusively as the North Koreans objected to the idea of Kim Jong-il traveling to the South for security reasons, it added.

A source in Beijing confirmed that the meeting took place. One key figure in the ruling Grand National Party said, "North Korea has long requested a meeting with a person who can speak on behalf of President Lee Myung-bak, and it is true that such a meeting was recently on the verge of happening, but since news of the meeting was made public, meetings of senior officials from both Koreas will be difficult to hold for some time."

Oct 8, 2009

In South Korea, an Effort to Defend Unwed Mothers - NYTimes.com

Image by joguldi via Flickr

By CHOE SANG-HUN

SEOUL, South Korea — Four years ago, when she found that she was pregnant by her former boyfriend, Choi Hyong-sook considered abortion. But after she saw the little blip of her baby’s heartbeat on ultrasound images, she could not go through with it.

As her pregnancy advanced, she confided in her elder brother. His reaction would sound familiar to unwed mothers in South Korea. She said he tried to drag her to an abortion clinic. Later, she said, he pressed her to give the child up for adoption.

“My brother said: ‘How can you be so selfish? You can’t do this to our parents,’ ” said Ms. Choi, 37, a hairdresser in Seoul. “But when the adoption agency took my baby away, I felt as if I had thrown him into the trash. It felt as if the earth had stopped turning. I persuaded them to let me reclaim my baby after five days.”

Now, Ms. Choi and other women in her situation are trying to set up the country’s first unwed mothers association to defend their right to raise their own children. It is a small but unusual first step in a society that ostracizes unmarried mothers to such an extent that Koreans often describe things as outrageous by comparing them to “an unmarried woman seeking an excuse to give birth.”

The fledgling group of women — only 40 are involved so far — is striking at one of the great ironies of South Korea. The government and commentators fret over the country’s birthrate, one of the world’s lowest, and deplore South Korea’s international reputation as a baby exporter for foreign adoptions.

Yet each year, social pressure drives thousands of unmarried women to choose between abortion, which is illegal but rampant, and adoption, which is considered socially shameful but is encouraged by the government. The few women who decide to raise a child alone risk a life of poverty and disgrace.

Nearly 90 percent of the 1,250 South Korean children adopted abroad last year, most of them by American couples, were born to unmarried women, according to the Ministry for Health, Welfare and Family Affairs.

In their campaign, Ms. Choi and the other women have attracted unusual allies. Korean-born adoptees and their foreign families have been returning here in recent years to speak out for the women, who face the same difficulties in today’s South Korea as the adoptees’ birth mothers did decades ago.

One such supporter, Richard Boas, an ophthalmologist from Connecticut who adopted a Korean girl in 1988, said he was helping other Americans adopt foreign children when he visited a social service agency in South Korea in 2006 and began rethinking his “rescue and savior mentality.” There, he encountered a roomful of pregnant women, all unmarried and around 20 years old.

“I looked around and asked myself why these mothers were all giving up their kids,” Dr. Boas said.

He started the Korean Unwed Mothers Support Network, which lobbies for better welfare services from the state.

“What we see in South Korea today is discrimination against natural mothers and favoring of adoption at the government level,” said Jane Jeong Trenka, 37, a Korean-born adoptee who grew up in Minnesota and now leads Truth and Reconciliation for the Adoption Community of Korea, one of two groups organized by Korean adoptees who have returned to their homeland to advocate for the rights of adoptees and unwed mothers. “Culture is not an excuse to abuse human rights.”

In 2007, 7,774 babies were born out of wedlock in South Korea, 1.6 percent of all births. (In the United States, nearly 40 percent of babies born in 2007 had unmarried mothers, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.) Nearly 96 percent of unwed pregnant women in South Korea choose abortion, according to the Ministry for Health, Welfare and Family Affairs.

Of unmarried women who give birth, about 70 percent are believed to give up their babies for adoption, according to a government-financed survey. In the United States, the figure is 1 percent, the Health and Human Services Department reports.

For years, the South Korean government has worked to reduce overseas adoptions, which peaked at 8,837 in 1985. To increase adoptions at home, it provides subsidies and extra health care benefits for families that adopt, and it designated May 11 as Adoption Day.

It also spends billions of dollars a year to try to reverse the declining birthrate, subsidizing fertility treatments for married couples, for example.

“But we don’t see a campaign for unmarried mothers to raise our own children,” said Lee Mee-kyong, a 33-year-old unwed mother. “Once you become an unwed mom, you’re branded as immoral and a failure. People treat you as if you had committed a crime. You fall to the bottom rung of society.”

The government pays a monthly allowance of $85 per child to those who adopt children. It offers half that for single mothers of dependent children.

The government is trying to increase payments to help unwed mothers and to add more facilities to provide care for unmarried pregnant women, said Baek Su-hyun, an official at the Health Ministry. But the social stigma discourages women from coming forward.

Chang Ji-young, 27, who gave birth to a boy last month, said: “My former boyfriend’s sister screamed at me over the phone demanding that I get an abortion. His mother and sister said it was up to them to decide what to do with my baby because it was their family’s seed.”

Families whose unmarried daughters become pregnant sometimes move to conceal the pregnancy. Unwed mothers often lie about their marital status for fear they will be evicted by landlords and their children ostracized at school. Only about a quarter of South Koreans are willing to have a close relationship with an unwed mother as a coworker or neighbor, according to a recent survey by the government-financed Korean Women’s Development Institute.

“I was turned down eight times in job applications,” Ms. Lee said. “Each time a company learned that I was an unwed mom, it accused me of dishonesty.”

Ms. Choi, the hairdresser, said her family changed its phone number to avoid contact with her. When her father was hospitalized and she went to see him with her baby, she said, her sister blocked them from entering his room. When she wrote to him, she said, her father burned the letters. Last year, about three years after the birth, he finally accepted Ms. Choi back into his home.

“That day, I saw him in the bathroom, crying over one of my letters,” she said. “I realized how hard it must have been for him as well.”

Aug 27, 2009

Energized Voters Seem Poised to End LDP's Half-Century Rule in Japan - washingtonpost.com

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, August 27, 2009

TOKYO -- Japanese voters are on the brink of doing something they have not been willing to do in more than half a century: throw the bums out.

The opposition Democratic Party is surging toward what polls predict will be a landslide victory Sunday. It would end 54 years of near-continuous rule by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which led Japan to stupendous postwar wealth but in recent years has become stagnant, sclerotic and poisonously unpopular.

The opposition party's leader, Yukio Hatoyama, 62, an elegantly attired, Stanford-educated engineer, seems to derive much of his popularity from the simple act of being a sentient replacement for Prime Minister Taro Aso, whose tone-deaf leadership over the past year has made him an object of derision, even in his own party.

In the election's final week, Hatoyama is drawing big crowds for his signature stump speech, which savages "the long-term reign of one party gone rotten."

Although voters seem energized by the opportunity to flush the LDP down the drain of history, they are much less certain about what will replace it.

"I am not sure of what the Democratic Party is saying or what it will do, but there has to be a change in power," said Hideo Enomoto, 58, who sells industrial machines and who listened this week as Hatoyama spoke outside a commuter train station during the evening rush hour.

Senior LDP leaders acknowledged this week that the Democratic Party is on the verge of a historic win that may provide it with a commanding two-thirds majority in the lower house of parliament and the ability to decide policy all by itself. The Democratic Party already controls the less powerful upper house.

The prospect of tossing the LDP out of power has created the highest level of voter interest in a general election to date, according to a survey by the Yomiuri newspaper. In the poll, 89 percent of respondents indicated interest in the vote.

As its marquee incentive for dumping the LDP, the Democratic Party is promising that it will pay parents as much as $276 a month to raise a child until he or she graduates from junior high.

Japan has the world's lowest percentage of children and highest percentage of elderly. It's a slow-motion demographic disaster that the LDP has long ignored and that the Democratic Party hopes to turn into electoral gold.

"If that money is going to come, then it is well worth voting for the Democratic Party," said Aya Koike, a 20-year-old who came with her two infant children to listen to Hatoyama's speech. She works nights in a Tokyo restaurant but could quit if the government began paying her $552 a month to look after her kids.

Many young women in Japan are reluctant to have children because of the lack of affordable day care. Promising to "take the anxiety out of child rearing," the Democratic Party has said that it will eliminate waiting lists for cheap public day care and remove tuition fees for high school.

Hatoyama's party is also promising to do away with highway tolls, cut business taxes and increase the minimum pension -- all without raising the consumption tax in the near future. The party also says that it will somehow find a way not to increase the staggering government debt, which is the highest among industrialized nations, at 180 percent of gross domestic product.

"It is doubtful that they can really deliver on all this," said Richard Jerram, chief economist at Macquarie Capital Securities in Tokyo. "Once they win, maybe they will water down their promises. If they don't, it is going to be problematic."

The Japanese economy, although it returned to growth in the second quarter of this year, has been the hardest hit of all industrialized countries by the global recession.

Even before the downturn, Japan was growing at a snail's pace compared with its neighbors in Asia. In the coming year, Japan is all but certain to lose to China its longtime ranking as the world's second-largest economy.

Yet there are few specifics in the Democratic Party's manifesto about increasing growth, enhancing productivity or privatizing inefficient government services.

Most voters, according to polls, doubt that the party can raise the money needed to pay for its promised programs, which add up to about $178 billion in new spending. The party says it will find the funds by ending wasteful spending, tapping "buried treasure" in obscure bureaucratic accounts and abolishing some tax deductions.

What voters do believe will happen after the election -- and what the Democratic Party seems capable of delivering -- is a substantial change in the way the government is run.

For decades, an elite bureaucracy has quietly controlled much of government policy, often aligning it with the interests of the country's largest corporations.

"The bureaucrats, confident that they were safe, created heaven for themselves," Hatoyama said in his speech.

His party is promising to blow up this system, replacing it with a "politician-led government in which the ruling party holds full responsibility." It plans to place more than 100 members of parliament in charge of the various bureaucracies and require them to take marching orders from the prime minister's office.

In addition, the party says it will ban corporate political donations, restrict the ability of retired bureaucrats to find lucrative jobs in industries they regulated and ban hereditary seats in parliament. About a third of LDP members in the lower house have inherited their electoral districts from relatives.

During the more than five decades of LDP rule, the main pillar of its foreign policy has been a close and cooperative relationship with the United States, which guarantees Japan's safety and keeps about 50,000 military personnel here.

The somewhat left-leaning Democratic Party has been less enamored of this special relationship. Its leaders want to give foreign policy a more Asian tilt, eventually creating an East Asian community with China, South Korea and other countries. The party has also said that it would examine ending the Japanese navy's role in refueling U.S. and allied warships in the Indian Ocean, as well as revising rules for the presence of American forces in Japan.

As the party's victory has become a near certainty, its leaders have played down significant policy differences with the United States.

"Continuity is key," said Tetsuro Fukuyama, who helped write the party's manifesto.

The U.S.-Japan relationship will be the "centerpiece" of foreign policy, he said, remaining "as important as it ever was."

Special correspondent Akiko Yamamoto contributed to this report.

Aug 18, 2009

Seoul Amplifies Its Network

By Stephen Kim and Bill Powell

In the sprawling, densely populated capital city of South Korea, Lee Hye-young and her husband Kim Soon-kyo are nothing if not typical citizens. Which is to say, even the most mundane, everyday aspects of their lives are carried out at technology's leading edge.

Consider their respective commutes to work early one recent morning. Lee clambers onto a city bus, headed to her office job in the southern part of the city. She pays using her radio-frequency-identification (RFID) card--it has a computer chip in it--part of a transit program conceived and implemented by the city government. The card is smart enough to calculate the distance she travels on any form of public transit, which determines the fare. She can then use the same card to pay for the taxi she hails to finish her journey to work. Sometimes her husband, the deputy marketing manager at a small chemical company, drives her to work. But not today. A few months ago, he applied online to join a program offered by the city that promises insurance discounts, reduced-cost parking and a tax break if he leaves his car home one business day a week. The city sent him an RFID tag, which he attaches to the windshield so the city can monitor compliance. It took him just minutes to fill out the application on his home computer, and now, he says, he saves the equivalent of $50 a month. From the city's standpoint, the estimated 10,000 fewer cars on the road each day means less congestion and less air pollution in one of the busiest cities in East Asia.

For a decade, Seoul has had the justifiable reputation of being one of the most wired cities in the world. After the Asian financial crisis devastated the South Korean economy in 1997, the Seoul city government, the national government and the private sector all made a concerted effort to move the country's economy from one reliant on heavy industry to one that included information technology--a shift that by most measures has been a resounding success. Today, according to data compiled by Strategy Analytics, a U.S.-based technology market-research firm, an astonishing 95% of households in South Korea have a broadband connection. (Tiny Singapore is second, at 88%, and the U.S. comes in at No. 20, with just 60% hooked to broadband.) The entire city of Seoul, whose metro-area population is more than 20 million, is already one giant hot spot, with wireless access available from virtually anywhere within city limits for a small fee.

That level of connectedness, either via high-speed cable or through the ether, has not only transformed South Korea's economy; it has changed forever the way this massive city is governed, how individuals receive services and interact with city hall and how prospective contractors solicit business with the city.

Start with clean government. All city contracts are now put out to bid online, and all bids are posted. That transparency, Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon tells Time, has reduced corruption in the city significantly in the past 10 years. "Since all information is disclosed real time over the Internet, influence-peddling over the bargaining of government permits becomes impossible," he says. "The online system tracks the flow of approval routes and leaves behind evidence in real time. If a manager holds on to an application for too long, he becomes a suspect. So administration becomes faster and uncorrupt." And while every big-city mayor may boast that his government is less corrupt than the last guy's--and corporate corruption has been an acknowledged problem in South Korea--Seoul has been named the world's most "advanced and efficient e-government" for several years by a U.N.-sponsored e-government-evaluation agency.

The city services accessible via Internet technology are already vast and growing rapidly. When Lee was returning home from work one day, she needed to pick up a copy of her social-security certificate. She did so at a subway station near her office, using a fingerprint-recognition kiosk: she placed her thumb on the machine, it read her print, and out popped a copy of the document. If she had so desired, she could have also printed real estate and vehicle registrations. It goes without saying that Lee pays her city taxes and utility bills online--or with her mobile phone's browser--and recently she dialed 120 to find out why the electric company had overcharged her. She was calling the Dasan Call Center, a 24/7 government agency that fields all questions regarding city services. A service rep did a quick check, confirmed the error and made sure her bill for the next month would reflect the correction.

Seoul has even greater e-ambitions. It has begun to implement a project called Ubiquitous Seoul--or U-city--which will extend the city's technological reach. Seoul's nearly 4-mile-long (6 km) Cheonggye Stream walkway, which runs through the high-rises of downtown Seoul, is the site of a U-city pilot project. Via their phones and laptops or on touchscreens located in parks and public plazas, citizens can check air-quality or traffic conditions or even reserve a soccer field in a public park. The city also sends out customized text messages. The city's chief information officer, Song Jung-hee, says those with respiratory problems can get ozone and air-pollution alerts, and commuters can get information about which route is the most congested at any given time. The city calls these real-time, location-based services.

Earlier this year, the city rolled out U--safety zones for children, a program using security cameras, a geographic-information-system platform and parents' cell-phone numbers. Participating families equip their kids with a U-tag--an electronic signature applied to a coat or backpack that allows a child to be tracked at all times. If the child leaves a designated ubiquitous-sensor zone near a school or playground, an alarm is automatically triggered alerting parents and the police. The child is then located via his or her mobile phone. The city plans to increase such zones rapidly. To some Americans, the Big Brother--ish qualities of the U-city push can be a tad unnerving. But Seoul officials point out that the U-safety-zone project is entirely voluntary, and the technologically sophisticated citizens seem to have few objections.

Seoul over the past decade has become a hotbed of early adopters, and global powerhouses from Microsoft to Cisco Systems to Nokia use it as a laboratory. The level of connectivity provided by the city's electronic infrastructure means "ubiquitous life" has become an inescapable catchphrase in Seoul. "Almost all new apartment complexes now advertise home networks and ubiquitous-life features," says Lim Jin-hwan, vice president for solution sales at Samsung Electronics. In a nutshell, that means every electronic device in the home can be controlled from a central keypad or a cell phone. Biorecognition lock systems open apartment doors, and soon, Lim says, facial-recognition systems will be introduced.

As megacities continue to grow and become more complex, it's likely that many will have to get wired just to stay manageable. Seoul took the considerable risk of being out front, but it has demonstrated the potential payback when the city government, and not just the citizens, is one of the early adopters.

Aug 17, 2009

North Korea to Reopen Its Border to the South

By MARK McDONALD

HONG KONG — North Korea said Monday that it would open its highly militarized border with South Korea to allow periodic family reunions and group visits by tourists from the South.

The conciliatory move, coming just after the high-profile releases of two American journalists and a South Korean worker detained by the North, seemed likely to ease the growing anxiety on the Korean peninsula.

Tensions had escalated since spring, beginning with the imprisonment of the Americans, the North’s second nuclear test in May, a series of missile tests and North Korea’s refusal to re-engage in six-nation talks over its nuclear weapons.

But the North, in the announcement Monday by its official news agency, also warned the United States and South Korea about their joint military exercises, which the North said were “obviously maneuvers for a war of aggression.” It said an “annihilating” retaliation could be one consequence. Still, that kind of bellicose language is almost standard from the North and was eclipsed by its outreach about the border and tourism.

Analysts have said North Korea is eager to re-establish contacts with Washington and Seoul in hopes of undermining the United Nations’ sanctions over its nuclear program.

The North said it would allow reunions of Korean families separated by the 1950-53 Korean War, with visits taking place at Mount Kumgang, or Diamond Mountain, during the three-day Harvest Moon Festival, when Koreans traditionally visit their hometowns. This year the festival begins Oct. 3.

Regular visits to Mount Kumgang on North Korea’s eastern coast will start “as soon as possible,” the official North Korean news agency reported, as well as visits to the ancient border town of Kaesong.

Programs allowing tour groups — predominantly South Koreans — to visit the North were expanded in October 2007 but were stopped last year when a South Korean tourist at Kumgang who apparently entered a restricted zone was fatally shot by a North Korean guard.

The announcement on Monday followed a meeting Sunday between the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, and the chairwoman of the Hyundai Group, the South Korean conglomerate, which is the biggest investor in the North.

The chairwoman, Hyun Jung-eun, had successfully negotiated the release of a Hyundai worker whom the North held for several months on charges of denouncing the government and encouraging defections.

Aug 7, 2009

It's Jjia jjia, But Written in Hangeul

A tribe in Indonesia has begun using Hangeul, the Korean alphabet, as their writing system to express their spoken aboriginal language, which is on the verge of extinction. It is the first time the alphabet has been officially adopted outside the Korean Peninsula.

The 60,000 person tribe in the city of Baubau, located in Buton of Souteast Sulawesi, has been working to transcribe its native language "Jjia jjia" into Hangeul.

The Baubau city counsel decided to adopt Hangeul as the official alphabet in July 2008. Work soon began and the textbooks were completed on July 16 this year. By July 21, elementary and high school students began learning their spoken language through the Hangeul writing system.

Textbooks were completed with the help of the Hunminjeongeum Society of Korea that is leading the Hangeul globalization project.

The next step includes setting up a Korean center and using Hangeul on their signposts across the city, as well as training Korean language teachers.

Hangeul has been lauded around the world by linguists for its logic-based structure. The language is a combination of 52 phonetic symbols.

"This is quite significant to see another race of people start using it. This will also greatly help our project that we believe will be a long-term one," Seoul National University linguistics professor and member of the Hunminjeongeum Society Lee Ho-young told The Korea Herald.

The textbook comprises writing, speaking and reading sections and also explains the tribe`s history, language and culture. It also has a Korean fairy tale. The entire book is written in Hangeul.

Due to a lack of writing system, the tribe has seen its language almost disappear.

"This will be all the more meaningful in an anthropological sense as well if Hangeul contributes to resurrect the dissipating language and culture," Kim Joo-won, head of the Hunminjeongeum Society said.

Hangeul was created in the mid-15th century when King Sejong the Great commissioned scholars to create a new language to differentiate Korea from China.

Organized into syllabic blocks, each consists of two or more 24 Hangeul letters that is comprised of 14 consonants and 10 vowels. These blocks take on the shape of how each is pronounced, and can be arranged both horizontally and vertically.

The Hunminjeongeum Society began its project to promulgate Hangeul abroad last year.

"In the long run, the spread of Hangeul will also help enhance Korea`s economy as it will activate exchanges with societies that use the language," Kim Joo-won said.

While past efforts to introduce Hangeul have been difficult, this time it was possible because of avid support by the local government, Seoul National University, said.

The association targets regions without their own alphabet where the local government would not oppose the efforts. It also takes into consideration whether the country has had close contact with Korea, such as those that send their nationals to work in Korea (like Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Mongolia and Vietnam).

(angiely@heraldm.com)

Jul 30, 2009

Opening Their Wallets, Emptying Their Savings

By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, July 30, 2009

SEOUL -- In pursuit of middle-class prosperity, South Koreans have looted their household savings like no other people on Earth.

They have collectively binged on private schools and fancy cars, language camps and new apartments, foreign travel and designer shoes.

Americans, the longtime avatars of consumerism gone mad, will save next year at double the rate of South Koreans, according to a report this month from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a group that supports sustainable economic growth in developed countries.

When it comes to buying high-priced, brand-name stuff as if there were no tomorrow, Sabina Vaughan concludes that Americans are relative wimps. "Koreans spend more, way more," said Vaughan, 35, who travels to Seoul every summer with her Korean-born mother and spies on her cousins as they shop. "It is a kind of competition for them. It doesn't matter what their income is."

Her conclusion is supported by a mountain of data and a chorus of concerned economists. The household savings rate in South Korea will have plummeted from a world-beating 25.2 percent in 1988 to a projected world low of 3.2 percent in 2010, according to the OECD. Government policies have encouraged borrowing, while Korea's aggressive culture has supercharged spending on signifiers of success, whether they be Ivy League degrees or Louis Vuitton handbags.

"It is not recognized as a virtue to save, not anymore," said Lee Sun-uk, an investment adviser for an office of Samsung Securities that is located in a wealthy neighborhood of Seoul. "To maintain a certain status, people are willing to spend, even if their incomes have declined."

In the past decade, average savings per household have plunged from about $3,300 to $525. On a percentage basis, it is the steepest savings decline in the developed world. Meanwhile, household debt as a percentage of individual disposable income has risen to 140 percent, higher than in the United States (136 percent), according to the Bank of Korea.

The consequences of South Korea's collapsed savings rate are beginning to register in the country's slowing rate of growth, economists said. For nearly 40 years, growth galloped along at between 6 and 8 percent, as banks were flush with household savings that fueled business investment and research. But growth slowed to about 4.5 percent after 2000, when the savings rate dipped below 10 percent.

"The low savings rate is sapping our capacity to grow, and it is going to get worse," said Park Deog-bae, a research fellow who specializes in household finance at the Hyundai Research Institute. "It will lead to credit delinquency. It will cause greater income disparity. It means less resources for our aging population."

As South Korea changed from a war-battered farming society to Asia's fourth-largest economy, its savings rate was almost certain to decline. Economists consider a fall in savings and a rise in consumer spending to be part of the normal development process, as government-backed social services increase, property values rise, and stock markets grow.

But the fall-off-a-cliff character of what has happened with household savings in South Korea strikes many experts as abnormal and worrisome. It is one of several trends suggesting that South Korea, as it wrestles with post-industrial affluence, is a society under extraordinary stress.

South Koreans work more, sleep less and kill themselves at a higher rate than citizens of any other developed country, according to the OECD. They rank first in time spent online and second to last in spending on recreation, and the per capita birthrate scrapes the bottom of world rankings. By 2050, South Korea will be the most aged society in the world, narrowly edging out Japan, according to the OECD.

At the same time, South Korea ranks first in per capita spending on private education, which includes home tutors, cram sessions and English-language courses at home and abroad.

An obsessive pursuit of educational achievement, it seems, is one of the driving forces behind the low savings rate. About 80 percent of all students from elementary age to high school attend after-school cram courses. About 6 percent of the country's gross domestic product is spent on education, more than double the percentage of spending in the United States, Japan or Britain.

"Education is a fixed expenditure for Korean parents, even when household income shrinks," said Oh Moon-suk, executive director at LG Economic Research Institute. "Parents often overspend. It even appears to be leading to a slowdown in the birthrate."

As she plans her family's monthly spending, Lim Ji-young says she makes sure that at least a third of the money is reserved for the education of her 5-year-old son, Roah.

Besides day-care fees, he requires money for books, alphabet tutoring and sports training.

"We want to give our son the opportunity not to be left behind in this society," said Lim, 34, an office administrator in Seoul. "We want to provide him with what other people are providing. To avoid condescension from other people, you want to have the best."

Competitive spending -- on tutors, apartments, imported whiskey and designer handbags -- is a significant factor in the decline of saving in South Korean, according to Park at Hyundai Research.

"Koreans are so much concerned about saving face," Park said. "This is encouraging overspending and it is sometimes irrational."

There are other reasons for the fall in savings that are eminently rational -- and sponsored by the government.

When the economy nearly collapsed a decade ago during the Asian financial crisis, the government made low-cost loans available for the purchase of apartments.

Borrowing exploded, as did housing values, while savings began to evaporate.

"Young households without proper discipline borrowed heavily from banks and on credit cards," said Lee Doo-won, a professor of economics at Yonsei University in Seoul. "They ended up with a huge amount of debt, and the debt trap is still there."

Stagnant incomes and job losses in the current recession have further reduced capacity for savings and have slowed debt repayment.

As important, the spending patterns of aging parents, many of whom have been tapped for loans by children in pursuit of real estate, mean that cash is steadily disappearing from savings accounts.

"Old people do not save," Lee said. "This is a long-term structural phenomenon. It will not change with the business cycle."

Special correspondent Stella Kim contributed to this report.