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Social / CSR in South Korea

  • Japan And South Korea Heal Historical Wounds

    CHINA, 2016/01/03 Six decades since the end of World War II and despite several changes in world politics and as well in the Northeast Asia, the issue of “comfort women” continued to haunt Japan’s relations with its neighbour, South Korea. The Korean people are unable to forget the atrocities committed by the Japanese military during the long colonial policy from 1910-1945 over all Korean peninsula. The issue is too emotive in South Korea. In particular, what hurts the Korean people most is that a lot of Korean women, a euphemistic expression for sex slaves called as “comfort women” or “ianfu” as the Japanese called them, were forced to work as prostitutes by Japan’s Imperial armed forces during World War II. Japan refused to pay individual compensation for the wrongs committed. This unresolved issue, an unfortunate wartime aberration, was finally buried to the dustbin of history, at the same time as the foreign ministers of both Japan and South Korea announced an agreement on 28 December 2015 during Japan’s Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida’s visit to Seoul.1 To further assuage the feeling and applying balm of sort, Japan’s Prime Minister Abe Shinzo telephoned President Park Geun-hye and offered Japan’s “faithful apology and remorse from the bottom of his heart” over the issue. With this, a new era seemed to have dawned in relations between the two nations. Though Japanese leaders had offered apology in the completed, the South Koreans always felt the lack of sincerity, as perceptions are hard to change. This time Abe offered apology to the former “comfort women” and committed his government to finance a 1 billion yen (US$ 8.3 million) aid fund for the aging survivors to be set up by South Korea. Kishida and his South Korean counterpart Yun Byung-se resolved that both the governments will confirm that “the comfort women issue will be settled in a final and irreversible manner” so long as Japan faithfully follows through on its promises.
  • Oxfam Study Finds Richest 1% Is Likely to Control Half of Global Wealth by 2016

    AFGHANISTAN, 2015/01/20 The richest 1 % are likely to control additional than half of the globe’s total wealth by next year, the charity Oxfam reported in a study released on Monday. The warning about deepening world inequality comes just as the world’s business elite prepare to meet this week at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The 80 wealthiest people in the world all own $1.9 trillion, the statement found, nearly the same all shared by the 3.5 billion people who occupy the bottom half of the world’s gain scale. (Last year, it took 85 billionaires to equal that figure.) And the richest 1 % of the people, who number in the millions, control nearly half of the world’s total wealth, a share that is as well increasing.
  • The South Korean election: a step forward for women

    SOUTH KOREA, 2012/12/15 Park Geun-hye of the conservative Saenuri Party is ahead in the polls in the final stages of campaigning. If elected, she will join the ranks of Asia’s other female heads of national who have benefitted from the political legacy of a patriarch — Benazir Bhutto, Corazon Aquino, Indira and Sonia Gandhi, Sheikh Hasina and Gloria Arroyo. Park Geun-hye’s father was the authoritarian architect of South Korea’s economic ‘miracle’, President Park Chung-hee.