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Home  Contemporary Issues
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Contemporary Issues
The contemporary issues project promotes cross-cultural understanding through public lectures, panel discussions, symposia and workshops that present the rich diversity of Korea and U.S.-Korea relations in historical and contemporary contexts. These programs feature authors, scholars, artists, practitioners from the nonprofit sector, politicians, business leaders and others who are willing to share with the American public their unique expertise on Korea and U.S.-Korea relations.
The focus of this project area is an in-depth exploration of the social, cultural, economic, political, historical and security dimensions of the U.S.-Korea relationship. The objective is to foster a greater awareness, appreciation and understanding of the complexity of these underlying factors, which fuels the power of imagination that is the indispensable wellspring of the capacity for empathy. While divergences of perspectives between Americans and Koreans on many fundamental issues may be inevitable, it is equally inevitable that these divergences must be brought within the realm of imagination to be channeled toward productive engagement based on mutual respect.
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The Growth of the Northeast Asian Economy: Business Opportunities Inside and Outside of the Region The Korea Society was a co-presenter of the 2005 summer forum presented by the Federation of Korean Industries (FKI). This event has been organized by FKI every year since 1987 through its affiliate, the International Management Institute (IMI). More than 500 CEOs from Korea, China and Japan took part in networking events and discussions on a broad range of topics related to the environment and strategies for business in the Northeast Asian region. Over 45 prominent global executives and experts were invited to speak, including Okuda Hiroshi, chairman of Toyota; Carl W. Stern, chairman of The Boston Consulting Group; Phil Gramm, vice chairman of UBS Investment Bank; and Joseph M. Ha, vice president of NIKE Inc. July 27-30, 2005 |
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Heisoo Shin, vice-chairperson, Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights, the United Nations, described the continuing efforts to press Japan for an official apology and reparations for its sexual enslavement of women during World War II. Shin recounted how the government of Japan has consistently refused to acknowledge that the so-called comfort stations set up during the war by the Japanese army were government entities, despite reams of evidence to the contrary. Women from several Asian countries, Korea in particular, were abducted to provide sexual services in these facilities were they were known euphemistically as "comfort women." Although Japan has set up a fund for disbursing money to former comfort women, it has not done the one thing Shin says the survivors want most: accept responsibility. With every passing day, she added, the need for justice becomes more acute. All former comfort women are in their 70s and 80s, and many are in failing health. Of the 215 South Korean former comfort women who've come forward since 1991, 100 have already passed away. The struggle of Korean comfort women was presented vividly and without any filters, as Jang Jeom Dol, a former comfort woman, recalled her own experiences as one of the victims of World War II-era sexual enslavement by the Japanese army. Tenuously holding back her emotions, Jang recalled how she was taken from her family when she was just 14 years old and told she was going to work in a factory. When she ended up instead at a comfort station in Manchuria she first attempted suicide and then tried to escape, but was caught and beaten so severely that the left side of her face remains paralyzed today. After a year and a half she was transported to another station in Singapore. Several pregnancies ended in miscarriages during her time in the comfort stations. Then, in 1945, her captors were themselves taken prisoner after Japan's surrender, leaving her and her fellow comfort women destitute and marooned thousands of miles from home. Relying on the kindness of strangers, Jang eventually returned to her village in Korea, but found that her family had been scattered by the war. The trauma of her ordeal prevented Jang from ever marrying or leading a normal life. John H. Kim, a New York-based lawyer who serves as the coordinator for the New York Coalition on Comfort Women Issues, provided some additional legal context and also served as the moderator for the program.
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Breaking the Bamboo Ceiling: Career Strategies for Asians
An Asian American child grows up listening to Asian proverbs: "the loudest duck gets shot," and the "nail that sticks up gets hammered down." A Euro-American child grow up listening to Western maxims: "the squeaking wheel gets the grease," and "you have to learn to toot your own horn." Now when these kids graduate into the workplace, which one is going to be more comfortable speaking up at an important meeting? Addressing a Young Professionals Forum, Jane Hyun, executive coach and author of the recently released book Breaking the Bamboo Ceiling: Career Strategies for Asians, drew these contrasts to highlight the cultural underpinnings of the prejudice Asian Americans face in the corporate world. But she went on to argue that the bigger barrier for Asian Americans is the challenge of reconciling their deeply felt cultural values with the tasks required for career success. The key to that success lays in developing what Hyun calls "critical competencies" and "cultural fluency." That means, for example, understanding that modesty and deference are cultural convictions and then making an occasional effort to toot your own horn in spite of them. Adapting to the workplace while retaining one's cultural identity isn't necessarily easy, but it is possible. "I've always felt I have led a bicultural existence in which I have been breaking new ground," Hyun told the audience, "even in the workplace I don't feel I've lost my cultural values, but I feel instead that I've developed new skills."
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Hollywood images of exotic, silk-clad Asian women and glasses-clad, mathematically gifted Asian men color Westerners' perceptions of Asia. According to Sheridan Prasso, a longtime Asia correspondent and recent author of The Asian Mystique, these stereotypes do more than make people uncomfortable, they complicate everything from major business deals to U.S. foreign policy. The American entertainment industry didn't invent these caricatures-Marco Polo sent lurid reports back to Europe that claimed submissive Chinese women would swarm over European men-but it has spread the image of the delicate, feminine Asian male and "Dragon Lady" Asian female farther and wider than ever before. As a result, Americans have consistently patronized and underestimated Asians, sometimes with disastrous consequences. U.S. automakers GM and Ford believed their Asian competitors couldn't make a full-sized pickup truck, Prasso contended, because on some level they felt it required more masculinity than Asian men had. Now they're losing sales to the Nissan Titan and Toyota Tundra. Similarly, CIA and State Department reports of the era described Vietnam's communist leader, Ho Chi Minh, as weak and passive. Had his American assessors been able to see through their cultural filters, Vietnam might not have been as scarring an experience as it was. As Asian countries become more important players on the world scene, seeing past stereotypes will become all the more important. "There are a number of areas where diplomacy and compromise, and the recognition of real differences, would help so much," Passo said in closing. |
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