"The year was 1943," as they say; the Glenn Miller Orchestra was at the top of the music charts.

If you were in the right place at the right time, in summer 1943, you could have caught glimpse of my grandfather in the uniform of the U.S. Army Air Corps. His term of service began in June 1943. I think he was conscripted. He would have been passed over in the first waves in 1942 due to having a dependent wife and son and his occupation (farmer). He spent most of the period from later 1943 to the end of the war (May 1945) in England, fixing airplanes, or so is my understanding. When the war was over, he returned to farming in Iowa, as he and his family had been doing for several generations (except for a brief stint in Colorado).

My Iowa cousin, J., looks a lot like our grandfather in these pictures.

J. would, himself, serve in the U.S. Army some six decades after our grandfather (the 2000s). I haven't seen much of J. recently but I remember him telling me, after his discharge from active service some years ago, that he hadn't really liked being in the army. I have heard similar things from a lot of people. Sometimes they also add something like "well, but, you know, it was a great experience to have gone through all the same."

I saw my grandfather often when I was ages 0-13 or so, but don't now recall him saying anything about his military service.

A farm scene. The baby is my uncle.

My grandfather died in 2007. I don't recall how I came to find these photographs. I think I came across them in 2014, probably in the possession of my father.

Who took these pictures? It may have been my grandmother. He seems to have been on leave visiting her, anyway.

Some letters my grandfather wrote to my grandmother at this time survive. He would have written them while stationed at some airbase in England as a U.S. Army Air Corps mechanic. They remained at the house in Iowa until they died. Seventy years after their writing, I had the chance to read one of these letters. It was nothing special, in fact; just saying 'Hi,' really. He talked about on-base friends he had and that the big pastime was going to the movies on off-time. He wrote the name of a movie he'd recently seen. He was never near any active fighting that I know of.

(On the custom of writing letters by hand, on paper, and mailing them. It makes me think what it takes to ensure something you write survives into the distant future. A lot of it may really be luck, hence our use of the phrase "[this document] survives," as everyday life constitutes a constant storm of destruction of small things like small letters;  most of what we do ends up discarded or otherwise lost, sooner or later. Losing what we've written may actually be more of a risk under higher technology: The great majority of my own digital correspondences, since about the late 1990s when I was first online as a child, are now gone without a trace. Early email accounts, passwords forgotten or deactivated with little or nothing saved; instant messenger programs, long lost; school email accounts, inaccessible to students upon graduation; and so on. I can only hope that the contents of this humble blog are not lost too easily.)

I am studying the German language again after a long hiatus. The last time I formally studied in a classroom setting was 2008. It surprises me how much I can still do in that language.

In my class are two good-humored Greeks I think their mid 20s. One spent a few years in the U.S. as a boy.

This week and next, the teacher's topic for us is the final year or so of the German Democratic Republic (fall 1989 to fall 1990). Their system, in retrospect, was showing serious signs of strain by August and September 1989; the anti-communist silent protests centered on the Lutheran churches had been ongoing for years Leipzig and Dresden but began to mushroom in October 1989.

The marchers' two principal chants were "Wir sind Das Volk" ['We are the People,' an odd slogan in some ways; some today, long after the days of communist rhetoric, may not realize that their slogan deliberately mocked communist rhetoric about "the People"] and "Gorbi! Gorbi!" Gorbi" [Gorbachev, seen as a savior]); the Berlin Wall was opened by the authorities on November 9th, 1989; the GDR formally continued to exist for another eleven months and held an election which featured a young Angela Merkel as a candidate for the first time; she attached herself quickly to the ruling CDU machine, =inherited this very machine later on, and has been Chancellor 2005 to present at the head of this machine -- likely now through 2021, after the latest German election).

What was the "key point" in the dissolution of the German Democratic Republic? The state security services choosing not to suppress October demonstrations was clearly vital. October may already be too late a date, though.

Today the German teacher spent some time on the so-called Genscher Rede [Speech] of September 30, 1989 at the West German Embassy in Prague. That is 28 years ago today. At that time, hundreds and then thousands of East Germans had camped out on the West German embassy grounds in Prague hoping for permission to emigrate to the West. The fact that the Czech-Communist security services allowed them to simply jump the embassy fences is another sign in retrospect that the end was near. 

We watched the speech. Genscher's "speech" was just a few seconds long and delivered in a mood reminiscent of a team winning the World Cup.

Genscher gave the speech on the embassy balcony overlooking thousands -- some youths (above left) seem to have climbed onto the window sills or balcony to hear it.

This is how a Wiki writer describes Genscher's speech:

"He announced that he had reached an agreement with the Communist Czechoslovak government that the refugees could leave: "We have come to you to tell you that today, your departure ..." (German: "Wir sind zu Ihnen gekommen, um Ihnen mitzuteilen, dass heute Ihre Ausreise ..."). After these words, the speech was drowned in cheers."

Hans-Dietrich Genscher (1927-2016) was actually himself an 'East German,' having been born, raised, and lived there until 1952, when he emigrated to West Germany at age 25; in other words, he was an example of the East German state's problem of losing good people to the much-more-attractive U.S.-backed West German machine. They lost millions this way in the early years. Then, on Sept. 30, 1989, Genscher brought in thousands more. This was a blow the East German state could not handle.

Genscher rose to West German Foreign Minister and Vice-Chancellor (1982-1992) under Helmut Kohl and was previously West German Interior Minister (1969-1974) under SPD Chancellor Willy Brandt). He rose in politics within the Free Democratic Party (FDP), a freemarket-liberal party. In the old days when West Germany's CDU was still widely considered primarily a "Catholic Party" by Germans, the FDP was a safe place for Protestants on the right. (Almost all pre-communist 'East Germans' were, at least nominally.) Genscher was a high government minister under both left- and right-wing governments.

The Genscher speech viewed from almost thirty years later:

There was an federal (Bundestag) election in Germany last weekend. I think two things can be said about the Genscher Speech legacy given the results of the election.

(1) The ruling apparatus and its system may not have been as unpopular as this kind of imagery suggests. The "necoCommunist" party called Linke (which is descended directly from the East German ruling party) got 18% of the eastern vote, and generally does even better than that at the regional level (generally 20-25%). See, e.g., Post-246: Here Comes Bodo Ramelow.

(2) Refugee Imagery and its Political Discontents. I know that today's Germans have two political/historical memories of Germans-as-refugees: This case is one, this imagery of thousands crowding the embassy grounds in Prague and elsewhere in 1989; the other is earlier but even more important, I think, as it is a kind of 'foundation myth' of the Federal Republic [West German state] itself: Following WWII, tens of millions across Europe were homeless and many were expelled or could not return for some reason, i.e. refugees. This included something like 12 million  Germans from points east of the GDR's eastern border. These expellees formed a large part of the Federal Republic's population.

These two memories may have been what impelled Chancellor Merkel to suddenly and without consultation announce an open-border policy for refugees in late August 2015, which soon saw 1.5 million Islamic refugees enter Germany. German birth rates are low and the refugees were mainly young and male: One estimate has it that this 2015-2016 refugee wave alone constitutes 10% of the military-age population of Germany; in one fell swoop. This decision seems to have caused a significant exodus of support from Merkel's party, to the FDP and to a brand-new party to the right of the CDU. For the first time, the Bundestag has a party that threatens the CDU from the right. Their platform is dominated by: "Stop Merkel's Refugee Policy."

The new party, the AfD, which was co-led by a man (Alexander Gauland) who left the CDU after forty years over the refugee crisis, did very well in the eastern states, even coming in as the largest party in some districts and a strong second in most of the rest. (The ruling CDU got 27.5% of the vote in the east to the AfD's 22%.)

Photographs I Have Taken
2013: 6,847
2014: 5,570
2015: 5,613
2016 through August 16th: 3,727
= 21,757 photos taken in 44.5 months, or about 490 per month.

Some hundreds of these appear on this very website. They direct a lot of the traffic that comes from strangers to what is now called Yule-Tide.com.

This seems like a lot of pictures. I don't remember at all what the great majority were. How could I? Why did I take them?

I do know exactly why I took about a thousand of those taken in year 2014 (nearly 20% of that year's total). They were very explicitly taken to "preserve the past." I photographed many of the papers, writings, and other miscellany of my grandfather in Connecticut who died eighteen years ago. He was born a hundred years ago this year.

His files were then still intact. Without going into details, in 2014 I had a fear that everything might be thrown away at any moment. When I visited Connecticut on one of my trips there in 2014, I figured I could prevent the total loss of it all by photographing, no matter what comes later. Then, I reasoned, I could transcribe some of his writings and upload them to a website that I could create for that purpose. This has not yet been done.

There were many good writings, all of which were bound to be lost. I had the power in my hands, literally, to preserve them. His writings were things like letters-to-the-editor, essays, short stories, newsletters for the clubs he was in, and of course his full-length comedic novel from the ant's perspective (two animation movies quite similar to his novel were produced in the late 1990s; he had his manuscript done already by the mid 1970s; among his files there was much correspondence with literary agents trying to get that novel published). There were also speeches he gave, personal histories and reminiscences, and travel writings, such as from his trip to East Germany in 1979.

He was also a photographer and a longtime member of a local camera club. My attempts to take digital photos with my phone camera of his old black-and-white photos, some from the 1930s, were not totally satisfactory. There were some photographs around even older, mostly family pictures. Of those he took, one interesting set shows him with buddies in the 1938-1940 period with the Connecticut National Guard. The guardsmen, himself included, are photographed horsing around, often with shirts off, and grinning. This was a military outfit, even if in peacetime, so this surprised me. My grandfather had lied about his eyesight (it was below standard for the army) and when they figured it out, they kicked him out. That was before the war began...

Then there was the slide projector. My cousin B.W. helped get it working, after some difficulty. It was a 1970s model. It was my first time using one of those. There were boxes full of slides and  was able to photograph some very nicely. He was a comedic writer and a comedic photographer. He made entire visual stories out his slides. The one pre-loaded in the projector was made with the help of a local family, a boy and his mother. I could recreate the slideshow on these pages. It hasn't been seen by very many people in recent decades. I think it was made in the 1970s as well.

The only failure of this historical preservationist endeavor was in my cousin B.W. and I wasting an hour or two trying to get the film projector to work. We did finally get it to work, whirring along and projecting those "moving pictures" our grandfather had filmed decades before we were born. The reel we'd spooled in was of some kind of trip they;d taken, perhaps in the 1950s. The case was marked 'Florida.' We'd seen a minute of it, a scene filmed in the airplane, a scene of palm trees swaying, a scene of people walking on the tarmac after getting off the plane -- then -- poof! -- the light bulb burned out. It was not easily replaceable at all and they'd stopped making them long ago.

The burning out of that lightbulb, when I look back on it, is a clear metaphor for the whole endeavor, for trying to hold onto the past, or maybe to "find" the past, but being unable to do so.

Is remembering the past now much easier than before? It's true that enormous amounts are now being recorded -- Three years of my occasional writings on these pages, for one thing. Then there is the Facebook behemoth. For all that sort of thing, though, there really is no perfect repository of "what has actually occurred." For instance, despite the thousands of words on these pages, written by me, rather little of my "life," really, has shown up here, just what I choose to write about. I prefer writing, when time allows, about other subjects than my day-to-day life, though aspects of my own life sometimes play supporting roles.

Then there is the ephemerality of the Internet. Much of the Internet that I remember from the old days has vanished totally, including my own first-ever webpage, a tribute page to The Simpsons that I made about year 1999 when I was in middle school (while trying to learn HTML). The second website I tried making, about year 2001, has also long since vanished (no big loss). My early email accounts have, likewise, all vanished with no access, that I know of, to the archives. Various discussion forums I used to visit in the mid-2000s are now totally gone, with all posts lost.

It would seem that memories themselves are like this, too. Not all survive. Even to recall, in the evening, precisely what one did that very same morning can be difficult. How, then, can we hope to really remember one year ago, ten years ago, and so on. At some point, things fogs up, and at some point beyond that, things vanish. This can happen quickly. As soon as events happen, they start slipping away.

What, then, is "history"? It can't be "telling us what happened", because of the slide towards the loss of most information that starts as soon as something occurs. Much more can be said on this and the historian E.H. Carr said it well.

Is the attempt to "preserve the past," in general, to fight a hopeless rearguard action against a superior enemy force that will eventually win? Yet still we fight.

내가 최근에 알게된《낙화》라는 감동적인 시를 한번 영어로 번역해보겠다. 우선 이 시를 소개한 사람한테 고맙다고 하고 싶다. 감사해요, M씨.

이 시를 쓴 시인의 이름은 이형기(李炯基)다. 진주에서 1933년에 태어났고 1956년에 동국대학교를 졸업하고 2005에 돌아가셨다. 검색해봤더니 낙화라는 시가 1963년에 출판한 것 같다. (그런데 출판년보다는 언제 처음 쓴 것을 알고 싶다...) 이 시의 내용을 이해하기가 좀 어렵긴 어려운데 사실 모국어로도 그런거죠. 당연, 보통 길 아니고 시 때문이죠. 나 같은 번역하려고 하는 사람이 꼼꼼하게 최선을 다할 수 있지만, 이중적 의미를 갖는 원래 나온 단어와 표현들이 같은 뉘앙스로 번역할 수 없는게 분명하다. 아무튼, 어찔 수 는 것이다. 내가 최선을 다했다. 내가 번역한 것을 읽으실 분께도 고마워요.

I am translating a poem by a Korean poet named Lee Hong-Ki (1933-2005). The poem's name in Korean is "Nak-Hwa" (낙화, 落花, these characters meaning "fall" and "flower"). This is entirely my own translation with the help of various dictionaries.

It was during the now-forgotten MERS Virus Panic of Summer 2015 that I first heard of "THAAD" (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, a U.S.-made anti-ballistic missile system).

Public places in Seoul were largely empty at the time, with the great masses afraid of inhaling a gulp of MERS-tainted air and staying home. Schools and hagwons were closed by the thousands; cafes were deserted; tourist spots, likewise. The TV news at the time consisted of wall-to-wall MERS coverage, as more infected persons were discovered and some began to die. A war panic, without the war.

Anti-government protestors, though, kept vigil, as they always do, at the broad avenue in front of Gwanghwamun [광화문] in central Seoul. As so many of those normally out and about were hunkering down during the MERS Panic, these protestors were more visible than usual. I was there. I was not particularly afraid of MERS and used the opportunity to take full advantage of the emptiness of the streets. (The final MERS death toll was 36, almost all of them elderly; I don't think there was ever evidence of any sustained general airborne transmission.)

I recall vividly two things from Gwanghwamun on that MERS days: (1) The unusual daytime silence, and (2) The handful of predictably dour protestors, some masked to prevent MERS. One of the protestors' placards had the word THAAD on it. "What's THAAD?" The placard called for U.S. military expulsion from Korean soil. I guessed THAAD must be something the U.S. military was doing. (See post-318, "A Glance at the Gwanghwamun Protestors, ". I will repost the photo here:)

(Note #1: Some would call the group behind that burgundy placard above "친북성향" ["Rather Friendly Towards North Korea"], a kind of political slur in South Korea. These groups are worth watching because they are political spearhead groups, by which I mean that they are the first to speak up on issues that often get traction. Their influence is much greater than the vote totals that their explicit parties can secure.) (Note #2: THAAD will, as far as I can tell, be under ROK-Army control and not USFK control, so the sign is factually incorrect in that it insinuates the USFK is bringing in THAAD. [See Post-#318 for a translation of the slogans on the placard.])

A few weeks ago, the THAAD deal between the U.S. and ROK was finalized and the deployment process begun. There was some opposition from the left-wing Democratic Party [더불어민주당], who performed well in the recent elections, but the issue was never put to a vote in the National Assembly. It was simply a government initiative. Full operational readiness for THAAD, they say, will be at hand before the end of 2016.

My impression in mid-2015 was that THAAD had very low awareness in the Korean public mind, and Koreans I asked about it had never heard of it. By this summer (2016), a year later, it has become perhaps the top international political story in Korea, and a significant one for East Asia as a whole.

China has been publicly resentful of THAAD.

The Korean Democratic Party organized a visit to reassure China about THAAD, sending some of its top parliamentary figures. The visit may not have achieved much, according to a news report which I will translate here:

Final thoughts:

1.) The Democratic Party of Korea (더불어민주당) is, curiously, is still called the "opposition party" [야당] in the Korean press despite winning more seats than the government party (Saenuri Party 새누리당) in the April 2016 election. No party now has a majority.

2.) I recently re-read the first-ever account of Korea written by a Westerner, the journal of Hendrik Hamel [published 1658]. I can't help but be reminded by this Korean delegation of the regular tributary visits and payments that Chosun Korea made to China. Hamel talks about these some length in his book. (Hamel and the other shipwrecked Dutchmen were held against their will in the Kingdom of Chosun [i.e., Korea], and the Chosun king was very afraid of the Chinese learning about the Westerners. He locked them up when a Chinese delegation visited.)

3.) Whether you agree that a walk down the above path of historical analogy is valid or not, at least you'll agree that this THAAD issue is a metaphor for bigger things.

4.) A similar deployment just twenty-five years ago would never have generated a high-profile official state visit to China no matter how angry China was -- I say this with certainty because until August 1992 there were no official ROK-PRC relations at all and thus no official state visits.

5.) Say unification occurs. Unified Korea would share a long border with Manchuria, China. Some Koreans feel that they have historical claim to parts of Manchuria.

I have known some ethnic Koreans from China [조선족] who have come to Korea. One, born in the 1970s, is married to my friend M.P., now in Texas. Another, P.G.H., a male born in 1988, gave up on Korea in late 2015 and returned to China because the jobs he was getting were of the "handing out flyers" sort. His Korean was rather worse than mine. The reason he gave us, though, for giving up on Korea, was that all his friends were in China. Another ethnic-Korean-from-China, K.J.H., born 1991, majored in linguistics in China, briefly taught English there (though we have only ever spoken Korean and she says she knows English only 'academically') and got TOPIK-6 (the highest Korean level) after coming to South Korea last year. She says she can't understand most of the TV news, which makes me feel relieved. These ethnic-Koreans-from-China seem certainly culturally more Chinese, but they may seem something different to Chinese, I don't know.

Anyway, this pool of Koreans-in-China is several million strong.

I was once handed a leaflet in front of Tapgol Park in Jongro, Seoul [종로 탑골공원앞] by a thin and grinning ajeosshi in his fifties or so, the type you'll find somewhere on a mountain trail on a sunny Saturday drinking magkeolli alcohol. Why did he give me, an obvious racial foreigner, his four-page-long Korean-language leaflet? I'm glad he did, but he'd not have been able to know I could read it. The rambling treatise, as far as I could understand it, called for "reclamation" of "our land." This would mean parts of the Chinese provinces of Jilin and Liaoning on the below map, and maybe even some of southern Heilongjiang:

I have had the good fortune throughout life to meet many interesting and amazing people from all over the world, and this trend seems to be accelerating in the year 2016. I ought not to squander my good fortune or shirk the responsibilities that come along with it.

I recently met a British journalist based in Korea, author of several history books, and that meeting has, in part, inspired me to make the forthcoming comments.

Now, in fact, I have actually never set foot on UK soil and have, actually, always felt closer kinship with the peoples of the northwestern European mainland despite shallow language differences with the latter and purported linguistic unity with the former. (I have come to realize two things in recent years [1] On American-British linguistic unity: I cannot speak on "native speaker terms" with people from the UK, as my days regularly playing soccer with British people in Incheon, Korea taught me. Very often I stood there unable to follow their conversations... and [2] I have come to appreciate, after some years away, that culture similarity among the kindred peoples of Europe -- despite what we may think or want to think -- is very high.)

I admire the British for their highly-cultivated verbal abilities. It is generally always entertaining to hear a British speaker, on any subject. Take a North American and an Englishman of equal intelligence and background. Despite this "base parity" and despite our shared cultural origins as products of that which we call Western Civilization, we all know that the Englishman will likely have a much better apparent way with words. Why is this? I am not exactly sure.

I have also had occasion to listen to an American pastor (in English) and a German pastor (in German), who share the exact same nominal religious tradition, but in whose presentation I found the American somewhat too unserious, readily sliding into a jokey mode, while the German pastor I found more properly dignified and ultimately, then, a warmer and more engaging.

Is it that Americans have a certain anti-intellectualism that has leveling effect on demonstrated rhetorical ability? Is there a cultural pressure in the present-day USA to not appear "too smart"? Has there always been? How then, does one explain the beautiful rhetoric of the Founding Fathers, of Lincoln?

As to whether present-day American civic life suppresses rhetorical ability (or the demonstration thereof), I can say this, recalling my school days: I am certain that it was true of myself in many contexts. I generally wanted to do well in classes, but I remember writing essays around high school that had deliberate mistakes in them, and even deliberatly poor reasoning at times, to avoid intellectual self-aggrandizement at the cost of my peers, many of whom were not even English native speakers.

Some might dismiss the foregoing paragraph's reminiscence as high school antics by an American boy unsure where he fit in the multiracial maze of a U.S. public school circa the early 2000s. It is also true, though, of adult American sons of privilege, notably George W. Bush, twice elected (once even with a majority of the vote). People mocked him for being such a poor speaker, for fumbling around with words, for saying words that just didn't exist, for being incoherent. Those of my age and older will remember this well. He presented himself as having a much lower IQ than he actually had/has.

There was also the famous case of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's "Unknown Unknowns" speech which has its own Wiki entry now. Rumsfeld was a Princeton graduate and a very sharp man, but he couldn't spin a proper neologism for what he wanted to say (reading it again now, I still am not sure) and he confused audiences far and wide. If Rumsfeld were a product of the British system, ceteris paribus (as a British writer might write; an American would almost always use "all else equal"), he would have come up with something better than "unknown unknowns"!

Before I break this off, let me say that my occasional reading of old newspapers and magazines suggests the "decline of American rhetoric" may be more recent. I am not sure when or how it happened...

Here is another version:

A Korean friend named L. made some interesting comments to me about the song. This is a Korean who majored in German and with whom I communicate in a mix of German, English, and Korean, as the mood fits. (L.'s Korean name, if written in English initials, is the temperamentally-unsuitable S.H.Y.).

These are L.'s comments on the song (in original German):

"In den 70er Jahren lebten Koreaner in der dunklen Zeit der Diktatur. Deswegen sang die viele Folksong über die Solidarität zwischen den Leuten oder die leuchtende Zukunft." ("In the 1970s, Koreans lived in the dark days of dictatorship. It is for this reason that they sang a lot of folk songs about unity of the people or the bright future.")

L. was born in 1987 and the above reflects the view of that generation, I think. Few Koreans of our generation would admit to liking the "dictatorship" (which ended around the early 1990s), I suppose.

Is it a stretch to impute a political message to this very simple song? Maybe, but this kind of thing is the bread-and-butter of certain academics, isn't it. There is also value in the comments for their own sake, i.e., how young Koreans see their own recent history.

I had the pleasure of learning the name Yun Dong-Ju (윤동주) last week. A movie is now out about him and I had the good fortune to see it (the less fortunate part was how little I understood). Yun Dong-Ju is, it seems, one of the most beloved Korean poets of the 20th century. He also has a romantic and "political" (one might say) cachet to the present-day Korean mind because of his early death in a Japanese prison in February 1945 at age 27.

I have decided to translate one of Yun Dong-Ju's poems called Self-Portrait, though I might prefer to translate the title also as Portrait of the Artist. It was written in 1939 and was included by the author in a collection he published with limited circulation in 1941. The collection was republished in 1948 following the author's death and the deceased Yun Dong-Ju became a kind of poet folk hero, it seems.

The below is my own translation. I increasingly find Korean poetry beautiful for its disciplined use of language and layers of implied meanings, but this also makes it a real challenge to translate smoothly.

Self Portrait has an air of mystery to it. Two characters. Thick symbolism. In reading it, many questions come up. This is a self-portrait, is it? Which character is the author? Both? I suppose that is up to us to decide...

Self-Portrait

Yun Dongju [1917-1945] / Poet
[Translated by Me, April 2016]

On my solitary way down from a rocky outcropping,
I seek out a secluded well for a little peek inside.

Inside the well: A bright moon, drifting clouds,
a spread-out sky. A blue breeze blows. It is autumn.

There is also this strapping young lad.
For reasons unclear to me, I feel that I hate this lad.
I turn away to leave and proceed on my way.
Presently, I begin to take pity on the lad.
I go back for another look.
There he is again, still there, just as before.
Again I feel that I hate this lad, and again I take my leave.
Walking away, I come to realize something. I yearn for the lad.

Inside the well: A bright moon, drifting clouds,
a spread-out sky. A blue breeze blows. It is autumn.
As from the recesses of fond memory, there is, also, this lad.

Yes, I can say that the Korea election result surprised me. I learned it, or at least the early projections, on the bus on the way back from Paju (Wednesday was a holiday). Most other observers were also surprised.

From my Korean contacts, I sense a new political optimism in the form of breaking the democratic tyranny of the two-party duopoly system.

I have been busy and have no time to do any further in-depth commentary, as I'd like to, and as I will get back to.

Final Score
300 seats allocated (majority: 151+)
122 seats: Saenuri Party [right-wing, so-called, governing] (새누리당)
123 seats: Democratic Party [left-wing, so-called; it and its predecessors have been in opposition for almost all of the history of the Republic of Korea since independence in 1948, both during the military rule period and during the past twenty-five years of quasi-democracy] (I have learned they want to be called "the Minjoo Party of Korea" in English). (더불어민주당).
38 seats: People's Party [centrist, so-called, but most seats are due to Jeolla region voters punishing their long standy party]. Party leader, Dr. Ahn Cheol-Soo, also easily won re-election.
6 seats: Justice Party [left-wing] (정의당)
11 seats: Independents. Many of these are expelled members of the Saenuri Party.

The big winner, alas, was Ahn Cheol-Soo. He's got to be a favorite for the presidency now.

Election is tomorrow, Wednesday, and is a holiday. Election day a holiday? What a good idea.

The last I've heard is that the left-wing opposition Democratic Party (더불어민주당) is looking like it may lose more seats than expected in its southwest heartland. If it can't sweep that region, as it usually does, that is a major problem for it. The newly-formed People's Party (안철수의 국민의당) may take many of their seats.

Given the split opposition, a big net gain by the governing, right-wing Saenuri Party (새누리당) still seems possible. Saenuri has apparently set "200 seats" as their election goal (of 300 total seats to fill), up from the current 150. The opposition to the Saenuri Party seems politically discouraged. Both parties have been marred by pathetic infighting.

Here is a frontpage headline story in the Metro newspaper, translated by me. (Thanks to K. from my Korean class for the newspaper.) It was not so hard to translate, but I am unsure what, if anything, is to be "read between the lines":

Original Korean:
[사진] 제20대 국회의원 선거를 하루 앞두고 연예인들도 대거 투표 독려에 나서고 있다. 지난 8일 사전 투표를 통해 선거권을 행사한 걸그룹 AOA 멤버설현. /연합뉴스 총선 D-1, 연예인 투표 독려"소중한 안 표 함께 해요" "여러분의 소중한 한 표 꼭 행사하가시길 바랍니다." 제20대 국회의원 선거가 하루 앞으로 다간온 가운데 연예인들도 대거 투표 독려에 나서 눈길을 끌고 있다. 일부 연예인들은 바쁜 스케줄 속에서 사전 투표로 먼저 소중한 한 표를 행사하며 시민들의 선거 참여를 권했다. 올해 총선 홍보대사로 활동 중인 걸그룹 AOA 맴버 실현은 지난 8일 오후 서울 강남구 청담동 주민센터에서 투표를 했다. 설현은 2014년 6월 제6회 전국동사지방선거 이후 두 번째로 투표에 참여했다. 설현은 이날 "투표할 때마다 설레기도 하고 긴장되기도 한다. 내가 뽑은 서람이 당선될까 기대도 된다"며 "설레는 마음으로 투표했다"고 말했다.

This was in Metro, a free newspaper distributed at subway stations in Seoul (claimed daily readership, 226,000). The article continues by mentioning other entertainers who voted early and/or made similar statements to encourage the apathetic to take part in the civic ritual.

Nothing Seolhyeon said can be read as an endorsement of one party or another. If she has been Gangnam-ized yet, though, she most likely voted for Saenuri. (Her voting precinct is one of the wealthiest in the entire country.)

Why are K-Pop stars, including 21-year-old Seolhyeon, being used as props to promote voting?

Self-Promotion Angle
"Seolhyeon is patriotic; she votes; she cares; she is a good citizen. She also donates money to orphans, holds the door for the elderly, covers her nose when she sneezes, and says her pleases and thank yous, we'll have you know!" (Sincerely, The Management).

Pro-Opposition Angle
Seolhyeon's fans are not likely to be Saenuri supporters. Saenuri has low support among those born in the 1980s and 1990s. If she gets thousands more fans to vote and they go many-to-one against Saenuri, that could swing some elections against Saenuri.

Pro-Government Angle
The government has put up "Make Sure You Vote" banners everywhere. Why would the government do this if higher turnout may mean more votes for the opposition?

Voter turnout for National Assembly elections was:
2012: 54%
2008: 46%
2004: 60%
2000: 57%
1996: 64%
1992: 72%
1988: 76%

There is a clear downward trend, here. There may be a fear that low and declining voter turnout could undermine the state's legitimacy itself. The "Make Sure You Vote" campaign could be a way to reassert the state's legitimacy.

My "Connection" to Seolhyeon
I admit that I'd never heard the name Seolhyeon (설현) before seeing this article. I have seen her, it seems, in advertisements but I didn't recognize it to be the same person as in the newspaper photograph above. Seolhyeon is the spokesmodel for the SK Telecom phone company, my classmate in my current Korean class, M.P., tells me.

I also see from Wikipedia that she was born in Bucheon, next to Seoul, and is a graduate of Gyeonggi Art High School (경기예술고등학교). In fact, I lived in Bucheon from 2011-203, and, in fact, I worked just two minutes' walk from that high school (in a dense urban part of Bucheon New City's Central District [부천신도시 중동]). Seolhyeon graduated in February 2014, which means she was a student at that school from March 2011 (in accordance with the Korean and Japanese school-year system). I began working in Bucheon in September 2011. I likely passed her on the street many times.