The Times They Are a-Changin'

A little over 2 decades ago I came to, very slowly, in an increasingly familiar fuzzy stupor. I was in a darkened hotel room in Seoul with a woman who promised she could “Get you out of the sack with more of a kick than even the strongest mug of coffee”. The night before had finished at 3am when the soju had mercifully run out. It was now the unholy hour of 06:15 and the woman in question was 'The Caffeine Queen' broadcasting over the American Forces Network, Eagle FM. It was her mission to chase some 37,000 US troops out of their cots every morning and drive them punctually via the showers into the mess. To prove how adept she was at this, she sequenced 'You Oughta Know' by the rapidly charting Alanis Morissette followed relentlessly by Rainbow, Aerosmith and Meat Loaf - clearly she was leaving no man behind. As for me, stumbling into the hotel bathroom provided no refuge; the radio was piped in there too ! As I sidled gingerly under the cool water The Caffeine Queen asked her listeners coyly if they knew the difference between a hotel room and a white BMW ? She confessed that actually she didn't know, but evidently neither did Hugh Grant until two of LA's finest stopped to explain it to him, personally, at length, in painstaking detail. 

Having just pocketed a 'mere $100k' from an endearing signature performance in Four Weddings and a Funeral, Grant was on track to command a more respectable $6m for his next movie before being busted for a 'lewd act' in a car with Divine Marie Brown. LA police were alerted by the rear brake lights of Grant's parked car which lit up repeatedly and with a certain rhythm. In the media frenzy which followed, Grant's fee for FWAAF positively wilted under The Sun's scorching offer of a 'mere $150k' to Ms Brown to tell all. Indeed one film producer pondered seriously if Grant had possibly jeopardised his whole career; observing wryly that "Sean Penn could get away with this. But not Hugh Grant". 

http://www.nytimes.com/1995/06/29/arts/what-s-the-hollywood-topic-hugh-grant-s-future-mainly.html

Him: "I've always had a crush on cheerleaders. Catholic cheerleaders—my double favorite,"

 Given Grant's close-but-not-exclusive relationship with the peerless Ms Hurley, the story immediately gained a life of its own. It showed that even without the internet, even in parts of the world without radio, places which still relied on carrier pigeons, smoke signals or tea leaves, news like this was never going to remain secret.

Hurley: "Really ?  I mean.... R-E-A-L-L-Y ?"

For those of us who were not trying to bail out a film career by elevating the miserable apology into a new British art form, the real world was really picking up the pace and nowhere more so than South Korea.  

Since the 1990's Seoul is regularly referred to as The Miracle on the Han River in reference to the speed and size of it's growth and prosperity since the 1970's. Currently it is home to an astonishing 50% of the country’s population of 50 million, making it the world’s fifth largest megacity, behind Tokyo, Jakarta, Delhi and Manila in that order. 

http://demographia.com/db-worldua.pdf

Identical views of Seoul in 1929 and 2009 -
documenting phenomenal development, most notably from the 1970's onwards

In 1979 the most expensive office building was the Daewoo Building in central Seoul, directly opposite Seoul Railway Station. The building is 118m tall and for almost 20 years the chairman of the mighty Daewoo chaebol ruled his empire from the top floor, making the building a monument to the new-found economic success of Daewoo and South Korea in general.  Sadly Daewoo imploded in the 1997-1998 financial crisis, after which the building languished until 2006 when it was ill-advisedly bought by Morgan Stanley as part of its global real-estate portfolio.  Only 4 years later the building became infamous as the centrepiece of the largest ever loss in real-estate private equity funds as Morgan Stanley booked an exceptional write down of 60% on the protfolio.

  
http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/biz/2010/04/123_64829.html

In time-honoured tradition the famous folly was rapidly renamed 'Seoul Square' and today it houses the regional headquarters of various global conglomerates including Siemens and Mercedes Benz, as well as the German and Chinese embassies.

Happy Days: a light mural on the facade of Seoul Square.
The new face of the old seat of the Daewoo Empire.

By 1985 the title of Seoul's tallest structure passed to 'The 63 Building'. Standing 250m high it was double the height of the Daewoo Building and was the tallest building outside of North America at the time.  Built on the south bank of the river, it signaled that the centre of finance and wealth was moving out from Seoul's old city centre and across the river.

Seoul's 63 Building; at 250m, still the world's tallest gold clad building since 1985

This is not to say that the Miracle on the Han River has gone without some painful hitches.  Early one morning in Oct 1994 one deck of the Seongsu Bridge fell into the river without warning. The bridge was only 15 years old. Amazingly there were only 32 fatalities, although many  of these were schoolchildren.

http://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/22/world/32-reported-dead-as-bridge-collapses-in-seoul.html?scp=1&sq=++seoul&st=nyt

The builder of the bridge, the Dong Ah Construction Industrial Company, appears to have cut corners on welding to finish the bridge quickly, the Korean Society of Civil Engineers said

However this incident was totally eclipsed less than a year later when the Sampoong Dept store collapsed in June 1995 with 500 deaths and almost 1,000 injured.

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/27/seoul-sampoong-department-store-disaster-history-cities-50-buildings

The Sampoong Dept store collapse in June 1995:
The most fatalities in a building collapse until New York  9/11 2001

Today the citizens of Seoul are waiting for the grand opening of the city's next great landmark; the Lotte World Tower.  Its 123 floors and 555m height make it the tallest building in the OECD - for the moment.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/15/realestate/commercial/in-seoul-lotte-world-tower-rises-leery-koreans-watch.html?_r=0

The Lotte World Tower was topped out in Dec 2015:
a reminder of the distinguished legacy of the founder of the Lotte chaebol.
Note the relentless spread of normal high rise over the hills and far away.

The founder of the Lotte chaebol is Mr Shin Kyuk-ho, already in his 90's.  So important is the completion of this project and so subtle is the influence of Lotte that a military runway was realigned so that construction of the tower could go ahead.

Curiously not everyone is convinced of the distinguished legacy of the Lotte founder.  The chaebol now finds itself at the centre of an unprecedented investigation of its business affairs and has responded by hiring five of the country's top law firms to defend it.

http://m.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20160617000708&ntn=0

http://m.koreatimes.co.kr/phone/news/view.jsp?req_newsidx=184170


No doubt there's more to this story to follow later ;)
    

"The Price of Everything and the Value of Nothing"

In Lady Windemere's Fan (1892) Oscar Wilde's Lord Darlington famously defined a cynic as a man "who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing".  Pedantically it may have been more accurate to define this cynic as the man "who knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing". The intended criticism being that it can often be shallow or shortsighted to assess a thing based on its cost rather than the value of having it.  However a century later our global economies are still, self-evidently based on the (perhaps, super-cynical) ability to look for every possible opportunity to maximise the difference between the cost and the value of an item; obtaining it at the lowest possible cost, maximising its value and selling it for the highest possible price.  For most of what we buy the price of a thing is so finely tuned to its perceived value that the cost is rarely even considered.

Physical assets such as property, cars and jewelry as well as less tangible commodities such as health, education and career development are priced in terms of their value perceived by the consumer rather than the cost of actually providing them. Property is valued by demand, not by the cost of construction.  Cars are valued by speed and luxury, even though traffic jams make the former redundant and perhaps only the latter really relevant.  Gems are valued by their rarity which is itself manipulated by hoarding vast stockpiles to artificially restrict supply.  Similarly the prices of private health, education and career development reflect perceived value rather than cost.  Such is the world we have created.

In many ways Korea is a soft target, perhaps even a willing victim, of the global advertising and marketing strategies used to hype the perceived value of international products.  It is nothing short of bewildering that Korean cars such as Kia are regularly voted 'International Car of the Year' but Korean consumers are desperate to pay eye-watering premiums for foreign cars which are usually not as good as the cheaper domestic products.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_of_the_Year

Laurence Fishburne as Morpheus from The Matrix, promotes Kia's K9 at the 2014 NFL Superbowl
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diPICUxtRdo

Meanwhile South Koreans defiantly prefer to spend their hard-earned cash on imports .........

The Mini Cooper is a firm favourite in Seoul - even without any promotion by Trinity or Neo

Another glowing example is smartphones.  In January 2015 it was reported that Apple secured 33% of the market in the last quarter of 2014.  This was apparently the first time that any foreign smartphone gained more than 20% of the Korean market.

http://9to5mac.com/2015/01/21/apple-grabs-33-smartphone-marketshare-in-south-korea-a-historic-record-for-foreign-manufacturers-in-samsungs-home-turf/

Naturally there was much furious debate in the press, fairly or unfairly praising the IPhone and criticising Samsung's rival, however all of this rather missed the point. The explanation was a little simpler and it was entirely based on the price. The IPhone sells at a significant price premium to the Samsung which basically states to anyone who is paying attention that the owner has money to throw away. Quite simply for every unattached guy out there, there is no other choice but an IPhone - until he is lucky enough to find 'The One'.

Technically Samsung recovered some lost ground with its next model but cynical observers believe that the key to Apple's market share is simply its price premium, which male customers simply won't pay for a domestic product unless the phone comes complete with the all-important Dream Girl.

Perceived Value: in Korea the IPhone gets you the Dream Girl
Good luck with that then !

Last but not least, since 2015 the competition between domestic and international products expanded to include the normally uncontroversial (= positively snoozeworthy) furniture market.  Rumours of the opening of Sweden's first IKEA store were stoked by months of hushed murmur among Ladies who Lunch (LwL), fuelled with intense speculation in spas frequented by the rich and pampered and fanned by frenzied email exchanges between people who actually have to work for a living.

The prospect of coffee tables more than 30cm high which one doesn't sit around cross-legged on the floor was enough to set every expat heart fluttering. The possibility of beds that can be lifted to reveal enough storage space to store all of last year's clothes which are simply the wrong colour to be worn again this year lifted the spirits of every Korean national.  The mouth-watering flavours of IKEA meatballs smothered in gravy with french fries was like a call to an oasis after 40 years wandering through a parched desert.  It was the biblical epic which everyone had been waiting for.

http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2015/12/15/2015121501559.html

IKEA visitor numbers have already surpassed 10 million.
The store is credited with stimulating new business for national manufacturers.
Imitation being the sincerest form of flattery; the question is; will national rivals start to sell meat balls ?

Order yours now !

  

Sense and Sensitivity

From time to time it's fun to test yourself to see what you know (or could guess) about the world; so please consider the following statement and hazard a guess at the answers to the multiple choice questions.

Statement

Japan has an infamous colonial era, during which its military used brute force to subjugate large areas of China and many east Asian nations. Bad things happened to many people until Japan's unconditional surrender after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. 

The growth of the Japanese Empire

Questions

Q1: 'Comfort Women'
In 1992, which country erected a statue outside the Japanese embassy and started demonstrations every Wednesday afternoon until the present day, to demand that Japan redresses the rights and dignity of women forced by Japan into sexual service during WW2 ?

a) Vietnam
b) Philippines

c) Korea

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/12/29/world/asia/comfort-women-south-korea-japan.html?_r=0&referer=

http://koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/culture/2016/01/135_195450.html

Statue of a Comfort Woman overlooking the Japanese Embassy -
complete with demonstrations every Wednesday since 1992

Q2: Remembrance Day
70 years after Japan's ignoble WW2 defeat, if the Japanese prime minister visits Japanese war memorials in Japan to pay respects to the Japanese soldiers who voluntarily, but vainly, paid the ultimate price expected by their Emperor; then which country routinely condemns Japan's remembrance of Japanese countrymen as a celebration of Japan's militaristic colonialism ?

a) Indonesia

b) Taiwan

c) Cambodia

d) Thaliand

e) Malaysia

f) Singapore

g) Mongolia

h) Laos

i) Burma

j) Vietnam

k) Philippines

l) Korea

http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2015/04/22/2015042201018.html

http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2014/04/24/2014042401188.html

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/26/japan-shinzo-abe-tension-neighbours-shrine

Japanese PM Abe at the Yasukuni shrine in August 2013

Q3: Sea of Japan
In 1992, a United Nations conference was used to start a global campaign to rename the Sea of Japan as The East Sea.  Twenty years later in 2012;
i) this proposal was rejected by the United Nations which declared it had no authority to decide such matters

ii) the International Hydrographic Organisation decided not to change the long-standing, internationally recognised 'Sea Of Japan'

iii) the Senate of Virginia rejected a bill to legally require school text books to identify the sea with both names.  (Although confusingly in 2014 Virginia's House of Delegates finally relented and passed this into state law)

The country which has presumably solved all major international and domestic problems, allowing this issue to rise to the top of its To-Do list, thus justifying 20 years of unstinting international lobbying and making lots of new friends in the process would be ?

a) Russia

b) China

c) Korea

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_of_Japan_naming_dispute

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/pandering-to-northern-vas-koreans-is-going-to-extremes/2014/08/19/f9032eea-271e-11e4-8593-da634b334390_story.html

The Sea of Japan -vs- East Sea controversy: still passions run deep

Bonus point

Q4: Hiroshima apology
In the run-up to President Obama's visit to Hiroshima in late May 2016; which nation vehemently objected to any possibility that the US might apologise to Japan for dropping atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki but simultaneously suggested that if Obama was going to apologise to anyone, then their countrymen deserved it first and foremost ?
a) Korea

http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20160512000856

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/26/world/asia/korea-hiroshima-nagasaki-survivors.html?_r=0

“If there is anyone he must apologize to, isn’t it the innocent non-Japanese victims ?"

May 2016: Obama and Abe reflect at Hiroshima

Hiroshima aftermath
The best estimates suggest that the blast and firestorm caused by 'Little Boy' killed 70,000 people, with roughly an equal number dying slowly and wretchedly of their injuries in the month which followed. Only 30% of Hiroshima's population were soldiers, including the last surviving prince of Korea's Joseon Dynasty, Yi Wu, who was serving as Lieutenant Colonel in the Japanese army.

The bomb is still regarded as the least worst military option that was available at the time, even if the civilian losses, including an estimated 25,000 forced labourers from Korea, were admittedly huge. All non-military people were clearly in the wrong place at the wrong time on the day.  However it is perhaps a uniquely uncompromising view to suggest that any of these people were more victims than the others.