On the Korean Peninsula

Unlike certain foreign dignitaries, at least the new South Korean president can show a modicum of sincerity and decorum:

President Yoon Suk-yeol on Friday expressed condolences over the death of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who was fatally shot by a gunman during a campaign event.

“I express condolences and consolation to the bereaved family and the Japanese people over the death of the longest-serving prime minister in Japan‘s constitutional history who was a respected politician,” Yoon said in a message to Abe’s wife Akie Abe.

Abe was pronounced dead in the afternoon, hours after he was shot while making a campaign speech on a street in Nara, western Japan.

Yoon condemned the shooting as an “unpardonable act of crime” and expressed deep sorrow and shock, according to the presidential office.

Further proof that one cannot talk to China about human rights and the craven industrialists in South Korea should remember that.

 

 

Highlighting human rights abuses no one wants to remember:

Eiji Han Shimizu's animated feature "True North" focuses on the human rights abuses in North Korea. Shimizu (52), who is Korean Japanese, alighted on the subject more than a decade ago.

"I was looking for examples of human rights violations around the world, because I was interested in the rights of people and the pursuit of happiness," he said in an interview with the Chosun Ilbo to coincide with the film's release here last week. "But North Korea's political prison camps will be remembered as the worst examples of human rights violations in the 21st century" and deserve to be studied by themselves.

He interviewed some 40 North Korean defectors through Human Rights Watch in 2010 while he was a documentary and cartoon producer. "The reality I discovered was far more brutal than I had imagined," he said. "I was always in a dilemma about whether to tone down the examples of rape, torture and forced labor in my films."

Why are the characters in the film speaking English? "I first thought about having them speak Korean or Japanese, but I felt my top priority was to spread the news around the world instead of focusing on Korea and Japan, which are to some extent familiar with the situation," he explained.

"True North," is set during the famine of the mid-1990s known as the "arduous march" and focuses on a Japanese family who are duped into moving to the North, which advertises itself as a workers' paradise, only to end up in a political prison camp.