Hi,

Thanks for this. I agree that some of the current South Korean political discourse regarding Japan is inappropriate and counterproductive. However, as I will explain, I think your reading of this US military document – which was in fact cited in the book that I mentioned on Twitter – is highly selective and wrong. I believe that the document does more to undermine your broader argument than to strengthen it. I'm sorry that I don't have time to write a fuller response, but I hope that the below will make clear where I stand on this subject and on many of the points that you raise.

Last year I met Kim Bok-dong, who says that she was among those made to provide sex to Japanese soldiers against their will. You can read the full account of the interview here. In brief, she claims to have been told that she was needed for the war effort; that this would involve working in a clothing factory abroad, for good money, and that her family could suffer negative consequences if she refused. Aged 14, she was clearly not qualified to consent to sex work even had she been invited to do this; as it happens, she says that she was never given any indication that she would be engaged in sex, of which she says she was ignorant in any case. She says she was forced to engage in sex with Japanese soldiers in locations including Taiwan, Hong Kong, Guangdong, Malaysia, Sumatra, Java, Singapore, and Bangkok.

To my knowledge Ms Kim never went to northeast India but I find her account, and others, consistent with the Ledo Stockade report.

The Ledo Stockade report, as you note, says that 'A "comfort girl" is nothing more than a prostitute or "professional camp follower" attached to the Japanese Army for the benefit of the soldiers.' It also says that she is "uneducated, childish and selfish...not pretty...egotistical...'knows the wiles of a woman'...claims to dislike her 'profession' and would rather not talk about either it or her family". These remarks sound more than a little chauvinistic to the modern ear, but that is not the substance of my argument.

In this context, I think it is reasonable to interpret "nothing more than a prostitute" as a dismissive remark indicating that the comfort woman is "simply a woman who is given money for sex", without passing conclusive judgment on whether she entered this life knowingly and willingly. Let us remember that the writer was tasked only with collecting intelligence of military value. Of course, we can never know what the author really meant by this remark - but you surely do not believe that it is really a slam-dunk vindication of your position.

I object much more strongly to what I consider your deliberately misleading account of what the Ledo Stockade report says about the recruitment process. "It details that the girls were recruited with large cash payments, and signed contracts," you say. That seems to be broadly correct, and may well have been the case for Ms Kim.

But didn't you notice the reference to "false representations"? Ms Kim says that she was told to expect work in a clothing factory; for the Ledo Stockade women,"the nature of this 'service' was not specified but it was assumed to be work connected with visiting the wounded in hospitals, rolling bandages, and generally making the soldiers happy".

This explicitly refutes your implication that the women knew they were signing up to become prostitutes.

Your reference to "gang rape units dragging off innocent Korean girls by their hair" is presumably a rhetorical flourish, since it accords with no account of "comfort women" recruitment that I have ever heard. The assertion of people such as Ms Kim, and scholars of this subject such as Yuki Tanaka, is that government officials and private sector "brokers" were engaged by the Japanese authorities to recruit women for sex work, in a great many cases without revealing to them that this was what they would be doing.

Here is a passage from Tanaka's Japan's Comfort Women, which I consider entirely consistent with the Ledo Stockade report:

The most common expedient used in Korea was deceit — false promises of employment in Japan or in other Japanese occupied territories. Typically, a daughter of a poor peasant family would be approached by a labor broker and promised employment as a factory worker, assistant nurse , laundry worker, kitchen helper, or the like. While staying at an inn and waiting to be transported out of Korea, she would be relatively well treated. She would get good food and not need to work , but her physical freedom would be restricted. She would not find out the real nature of the work until she was taken into a comfort station and raped by members of the Japanese armed forces. This system provided many women from rural Korea. Jong Jingsong conducted research on 175 Korean women who came forward in 1993 as former comfort women. Of these, 105 out of 170 women whose birth places were identified had been “recruited” from rural areas in Kyongsang and Cholla Provinces. In other words, sub-contractors had targeted young daughters of poor peasant families, knowing that it was relatively easy to trick them.

Once at the comfort station, the report states, the women amused themselves with picnics, dinners, sports events and shopping trips. This assertion I consider irrelevant to the question under discussion, since picnics and shopping trips cannot have redeemed the sexual violence against young women – or indeed, in many cases, children – who, if the scores of first-hand testimonies are accurate, were being raped on a daily basis.

More to the point is the question of whether the women had the option of not engaging in sex, or of returning home. You refer to the following passage:

"The girls were allowed the prerogative of refusing a customer. This was often done if the person were too drunk." 

Again, I cannot see this as conclusive evidence that the women were engaging in sex voluntarily. The remark that "this was often done if the person were too drunk" suggests that the women might well have been entitled to exercise this "prerogative" only if the soldier in question was behaving in an unusually bad way. I don't have the confidence to infer from this that the "comfort women" had sex with countless men because they wanted to and had a meaningful choice to do otherwise. Do you?

It is clear from the Ledo Stockade report that these women were dependent on their "house master". Their food was "prepared by and purchased from" him, even though many of these men "made life very difficult for the girls by charging them high prices for food and other articles". Even those who defy the evidence to claim that the women entered this situation voluntarily must accept that they were at best indentured labourers, as shown by the following: 

"The "house master" received fifty to sixty per cent of the girls' gross earnings depending on how much of a debt each girl had incurred when she signed her contract... In the latter part of 1943 the Army issued orders that certain girls who had paid their debt could return home. Some of the girls were thus allowed to return to Korea."

So the women could not go home until they had paid off their debt. The report does not explicitly say whether they were forced to pay off the debt by their "work" at the comfort station, although it is unclear how else they could have survived. The following helped me to understand why many women stayed despite the agonies that they described:

After about a year in Shanghai, I ran away from the comfort station on a snowy winter’s day. I ran as far as the rickshaw terminal. It was late at night. But there was nowhere for me to go. I couldn’t communicate with anyone, because I didn’t know Chinese. I crouched in the corner of the terminal and tried to sleep, waking frequently. I was frightened. In the morning, I still didn’t have anywhere to go, so I returned to the comfort station. I crept back to the kitchen. I cooked breakfast, as usual, and sat down to have my own meal. But the proprietor knew. He came in and beat me all over, saying that he would teach me a lesson once and for all. (Ha Sunnyo, quoted in True Story of the Korean Comfort Women, ed. Keith Howard)

I do not pretend to be a serious scholar of this subject, having researched it – among many other subjects – as part of my job covering Korea since July 2012. But the evidence I have seen and heard to date suggests to me that a terrible wrong was committed against thousands of women at the behest of the Japanese military authorities, who must take ultimate responsibility for this.

Kim Bok-dong has never claimed to have been dragged off by her hair. I do not believe that these women – at least certainly not the majority of them – were "systematically abducted" by the Japanese government. Rather, I believe the evidence – including this document – shows that a great many of them were lied to, and had no means of suspecting that they would find themselves spending years in prostitution on a basis of debt bondage. 

This is what the Ledo Stockade report says. Do you doubt it?

Kind regards,

Simon

PS: I also wondered why the US did not make efforts to publicise these crimes. Below is Tanaka's take on it, citing the Ledo Stockade report. Again, I really do recommend that you read his book, since you clearly have a keen interest in this subject, and it is the most thorough analysis that I have come across. You can find it here.

--
Why did a Psychological Warfare Team interrogate these comfort women? US Psychological Warfare Teams were formed for the purpose of gathering as much information as possible concerning the psychological conditions of Japanese soldiers in the battlefield. A particular function was to conduct thorough interrogations of Japanese POWs, to find out how they perceived the ongoing war and under what conditions they would decide to surrender. Such information was forwarded to the Foreign Morale Analysis Division in the Office of War Information, to be analyzed by such prominent psychologists and anthropologists as Ruth Benedict, Clyde Kluckhohn, and John Embree. These specialist opinions were taken into account in producing various propaganda leaflets designed to persuade Japanese soldiers and civilians to surrender rather than fight to the death. Tens of thousands of these leaflets were printed and scattered from the air throughout the Pacific region, in particular during the fiercest battle of World War II in the Okinawa Islands. 

It is presumed, therefore , that the interrogation of comfort women was not regarded as an important task for the US Psychological Warfare Teams. Such interrogation could provide only secondary information on the psychology of members of Japanese military forces. A few years ago I interviewed Grant Hirabayashi, one of the former nisei interpreters attached to the Psychological Warfare Team mentioned above that interrogated the 20 Korean women captured in Burma. He explained that only a brief interrogation was conducted, simply because these women had unexpectedly fallen into the hands of US forces. According to Hirabayashi , only a summary memorandum was recorded in this case, in contrast to normal POW interrogation procedures in which every question and answer was precisely recorded. 5 In other words, information obtained from these women was not highly valued by the Americans. 

Interrogation Report No. 49 [THIS IS THE LEDO STOCKADE REPORT - SIMON] prepared by the Psychological Warfare Team in the India– Burma theater clearly refers to the violation of these Korean women’s human rights by the Japanese forces. It claims that most of these women were deceived into becoming prostitutes for the Japanese forces. However, it seems that the American interrogators did not regard it as a serious war crime against humanity, and had no intention of prosecuting the Japanese officers of the 114th Infantry Regiment for sexual exploitation of these women. 
....

Why was awareness of the comfort women issue as a serious war crime clearly lacking in the mind of the leaders of the Allied forces? One reason probably lies in the fact that the majority of the women victims of this enforced military prostitution were Asians and were therefore neither white women nor civilians of the Allied nations. As we have seen in the previous chapter, the Dutch forces, who prosecuted Japanese officers for the crime of forcing Dutch girls and women into prostitution, did not even bother to investigate most cases in which Indonesian women were victimized. Some historians have pointed to the “absence of Asia” in the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal. 13 Probably the comfort women issue was also ignored for the same reason. It took almost half a century for the enslavement of the comfort women to be considered one of the most serious and unprecedented war crimes in history.

Got back to Seoul this week after a nice sojourn in London. On Friday I went down to the offices of the Global Green Growth Institute, originally set up as a South Korean initiative under the presidency of Lee Myung-bak in 2010, before converting to an international institution two years later.

The other international green institution hosted by this country is the Green Climate Fund, launched to great fanfare in Songdo last month. All this is presumably part of South Korea's efforts to boost its international standing, and Park Geun-hye seems to be continuing her predecessor's lip service to "green growth" to some extent - although she has apparently dropped use of the phrase itself, as part of her efforts to differentiate herself from the ancien regime.

When I covered the GCF launch I spoke to senior figures including Christiana Figueres, the UN’s top climate change official, and Hela Cheikhrouhou, head of the GCF – and came away with an ominous feeling that the world’s “developed countries” (still defined, by the way, according to a system drawn up in Rio 22 years ago!) are unlikely to follow through on their promises to contribute $100bn to developing countries’ efforts to fight climate change. 

Housed in an airy, light pine tiered office, GGGI doesn’t contribute funding to the (20 or so to date) developing countries that it assists – just advice on green projects. That can be a positive, the GGGI officials I met told me, since there is no ulterior motive for seeking their help. Yet even so, they still need money to do their work – and they are already at the limits of what they can do with their $50m annual budget. 

The GGGI executives told me that developing countries were increasingly accepting the idea that economic growth and environmental responsibility need not conflict – for one thing, green energy helps shed the potentially dangerous reliance on fossil fuel imports. But the more I speak to people in this field, the more I fear that everything being done on this front will serve only to slightly mitigate a looming ecological disaster. After all, as Figueres conceded to me, the top target (which most experts seem to view as hopelessly optimistic), the absolute best case scenario, is to limit the temperature increase as of the end of this century to 2 degrees Celsius – something that would have all sorts of dire environmental consequences.

On Saturday I went to the “Animism” exhibition at the Ilmin Museum of Art on Gwanghwamun. It was a stimulating display, full of contradictions. I liked the contrast between one colonial-era discourse talking about primitive religious practices as things that should be stamped out as soon as possible, and another describing them as unique finds that should be recorded while this was still possible – but both taking for granted the idea that these things will be eliminated sooner or later. There was a thought-provoking treatment of shamanic practices in the Korean context – they were co-opted by the Japanese occupiers as a means of exerting control, but condemned as backward by the Park Chung-hee regime.

There was a lot of interesting stuff, too, about the real and representations of the real; the interplay and overlap between them. Notably BP’s beautiful but absurdly nonrepresentative flower logo, and Greenpeace’s attempt to make it more faithful through vandalism (see pic).

And a really cool quotation from Picasso, where he talks about both his art and masks produced by (presumably African) sculptors as enjoying a fundamentally violent quality: “They were against everything against unknown, threatening spirits… I too am against everything. I too think that everything is unknown, is the enemy! … If we give form to the spirits we become independent of them.”

Recently I visited Tokyo, where out of curiosity I visited the famously controversial Yasukuni Shrine (right). It's beautifully built, but of course its fame derives from the fact that it honours convicted war criminals. The visit there in April of top officials including finance minister Taro Aso drew cries of protest from China and South Korea, which suffered atrocities under Japanese occupation.

Japanese officials have been causing outrage with words as well as actions. Tokyo mayor Toru Hashimoto in May made unbelievably callous remarks about the tens of thousands of women who were forced into sex slavery by Japanese authorities during World War II. “To maintain discipline in the military, it must have been necessary at that time. For soldiers who risked their lives in circumstances where bullets are flying around like rain and wind, if you want them to get some rest, a comfort women system was necessary. That's clear to anyone," Hashimoto said, disgracefully. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, for his part, has been repeatedly questioning the view that Japan was an aggressive power during the war.

I think the problem can be traced in part to the US occupation of Japan between 1945 and 1952. The Americans were keen to ensure stability, and nervous about the potential spread of communism in Japan. So they decided that the emperor must remain - and moreover, must be absolved of guilt for crimes committed during the war. According to the historian John Dower, one of Hirohito's generals accidentally revealed during his war crimes trial that the emperor had been complicit in a particular act of aggression. The prosecution visited him that evening and advised him to recant; he willingly complied.


There is a striking contrast with Germany, where Hitler killed himself and the Nazi regime was totally dismantled (although many former Nazis remained in the West German civil service) - indeed the country itself ceased to exist as an integrated whole for nearly half a century. While Germans can totally reject the regime that took them to war as an isolated, odious period of their history, it is harder for the Japanese to dismiss the imperial state - because Japan is still, nominally, an imperial state, with Hirohito's son on the throne and widely revered.

So this is the background to the absurd remarks of people like Hashimoto, but it can never excuse them. And it certainly cannot excuse the deliberate distortions of history undertaken at the official level. One former South Korean minister told me that he viewed Hashimoto as "a badly educated young man". I knew what he meant when I went to the museum at Yasukuni, and saw this account (right) of the infamous "Rape of Nanking", in which Japanese soldiers committed one of the most obscene massacres of the 20th century, killing up to 300,000 people - mostly civilians.

As long as Japan's authorities continue to propagate such a shamefully misleading official account of its history, it will struggle to achieve good relations with its neighbours.

North Korea’s demand that the US recognise it as a nuclear state is not as silly as it sounds. For all Washington’s insistence that it will never accept a nuclear-armed North Korea, it is absolutely unclear what it will do to prevent it.

Amid an erratically evolving mix of foreign sanctions and economic assistance packages, Pyongyang has made slow, crablike but - seen over the long term - pretty steady progress towards nuclear arms capability. The US may hold out the prospect of talks and promise that the latest sanctions are biting, but there’s no evidence that any of this will seriously impede the North Korean regime’s goal of getting a working nuclear weapon in the medium-term future. John Kerry is reduced to pleading for China to apply pressure.

Yesterday I spoke to a prominent South Korean academic who raised the question of why there has been no talk of a military strike to stop North Korea getting the bomb, as there has been with Iran. The probable furious response from China, and the equally probable huge loss of life and economic devastation in South Korea, are two good reasons.

But the academic argued that the costs could be even greater if North Korea gets the bomb. Its achievement would totally alter the power dynamic in the region, and Japan and South Korea would probably feel obliged to respond by obtaining their own nuclear weapons, he added.

The prospect of a nuclear-armed North Korea is so unnerving that it is easier not to think about it. And Pyongyang has helped everyone to do this recently by issuing sensational statements, tailored for the foreign media, to make us think of this as an acute crisis. And we in the media duly lapped it up - just look at all the hype about the threat of imminent war on the Korean peninsula.

I think that short-term threat is pretty minimal because North Korea has no incentive to start a war at this point, when it lacks a fully developed nuclear capability and its conventional forces are so comprehensively outgunned. That’s exactly why it has every reason to seek a nuclear weapon - Kim Jong Un’s regime could finally shed its (apparently genuine) fear of US invasion, because it could hold its neighbours to ransom.

The widespread Western image of the North Korean state as a black comedy is probably part of the reason why we don’t take its nuclear programme seriously enough. But the country has been putting huge amounts of resources into it, and that is yielding results.

Over two years ago, the top nuclear scientist Sig Hecker said he was “stunned” by the scale and sophistication of a uranium enrichment facility that he visited in North Korea. I’m told that Hecker recently drew a parallel between North Korea’s energetic pursuit of nuclear weapons, and the determined assault on the manufacturing industry by South Korean companies such as Samsung and Hyundai, which were also once ridiculed in the West. This is a chronic problem, and one that shows no sign of abating.

John Kerry, US secretary of state, has sought to calm tensions on the Korean Peninsula in the past few days by stressing that the US is open to talks with Pyongyang. But does this risk giving North Korea an incentive to stoke fears of war again in the future?

I discussed this question on Monday with Jonathan Pollack, director of the John L Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution, and author of No Exit - one of the most authoritative recent studies the Korean security question. In that 2011 book, Pollack describes the aftermath of Pyongyang’s first nuclear device test in October 2006:

"Within weeks of the nuclear test, the US and North Korea initiated bilateral talks in Beijing, followed by deeper discussions in Berlin in January 2007. Pyongyang had finally secured the bilateral channel it had sought unsuccessfully during President G.W. Bush's first term. To Pyongyang, the US willingness to undertake direct negotiations vindicated its decision to test."

Does Washington now risk continuing the same pattern? The last bilateral deal between the countries came on February 29 last year, when the US agreed to provide food aid in exchange for a North Korean moratorium on missile and nuclear device tests. That agreement collapsed over a (failed) North Korean satellite launch less than two months later, and Washington has since shown little desire to push for a resumption of talks.

If Kerry - an established proponent of “engagement” - does so now, after a rocket launch, a nuclear test and weeks of intimidating rhetoric, that could look like rewarding bad behaviour, Pollack worries. Washington would proceed very cautiously after its experience last year, Pollack says, but he adds: "I was quite stunned that this is [Kerry's] first trip to Korea, despite having travelled across Asia for decades. What I would find a bit worrisome about that is that if he feels very new to this issue, there's always the possibility that we would replicate past efforts that President Obama has said we will not repeat."

Pollack argues that a major reason for North Korea's high-profile warnings of imminent war - which have abated in the past few days - was the desire to burnish supreme leader Kim Jong Un's image at home. If the US-South Korea joint exercises finish at the end of this month without conflict having arisen, the young leader will be able to say he has "stood firm" in the face of imperialist aggression, Pollack notes. "This is a crisis that has basically been manufactured by North Korea for their own primarily domestic purposes... there is no observable evidence of any kind of a [military] mobilisation in the North."

Pollack says he has noted a hankering in Washington for the days of Kim's father. "There seems to be this wistful nostalgia for Kim Jong Il - the sense that he understood the way out of these situations," he says, noting concerns that the new leader's inexperience raises the risk of rash actions. But policymakers appear calm, he adds.

With the limited repertoire the North Koreans do have to influence sentiment in the US, the threat to start a war generates a lot of conversation among the chattering class, but my own strong impression is that it has not agitated those in the US government who are responsible [for this area] . Policymakers have sen this movie before. It's true this is a more extreme version, but what's required in the circumstances is to stay calm. The assumption is that maybe this is what North Korea does to validate its young ruler."

A hackneyed saying has it that Marx was wrong on everything he said about communism, but right on everything he said about capitalism. Having finally got round to reading Das Kapital, I'm reminded that Marx would find plenty in today's industrialising nations to back up his claim that capitalist enterprises inherently tend to drain the maximum possible amount of labour from their workers. 

Specifically, I was struck by the comparison between Marx's description of factories in nineteenth-century England, and a recent China Labor Watch report on illegal practices at Chinese factories producing goods and components for Samsung Electronics.

Now, it would be absurd to suggest that the problems highlighted by CLW are of the same order of magnitude as those recorded by Marx in Victorian England, where children as young as six worked for astonishingly long periods without sleep. Imperfect and imperfectly observed as Chinese labour laws are, they are more stringent than those in Marx's England, and conditions in modern Chinese factories are broadly better as a result.

But reading the CLW report alongside pertinent elements of Das Kapital is interesting because it illustrates in detail one of the book's central arguments. Capitalist profit, writes Marx, is only possible to the extent that the value added by the worker exceeds the market value of his labour, which corresponds to his wages. 

Therefore, every additional minute worked by the labourer, without an increase in his wage, goes straight into the factory owner's bottom line. And even if the worker is paid for the overtime, the extra hours worked still enable the company to extract extra profit from the labourer without having to incur the costs of hiring extra staff.

So companies, according to Marx, have an obvious incentive to pursue “the unnatural extension of the working day, that capital necessarily strives after in its unmeasured passion for self-expansion”. Samsung’s massive breaches of Chinese working-time law - which it admitted in November, saying it expected this situation to continue until as late as the end of 2014 - back up this theory.

Samsung did not dispute CLW’s allegations of overtime violations, although it said all the other allegations were “not in line with our knowledge”. Of eight factories in Samsung’s supply chain investigated by CLW (six owned by Samsung), all but one maintained overtime “for at least half the year that reaches or exceeds 100 hours per month, sometimes with only one day of rest during the entire month”. One company owned by Samsung had workers putting in 186 hours of overtime a month - more than five times the legal limit of 36 hours.

Other parts of the report had initially struck me as less shocking, by comparison - for example, the requirement at some of the factories for workers to turn up 20 minutes early for a meeting, without being paid for their time. But if the company considers these meetings to aid the productivity of the plant, as presumably it does, then that represents an extortion of free labour power. It all seems rather chilling in light of Marx’s warnings about “‘small thefts’ of capital from the labourer’s meal and recreation time”, and of the following passage:

“‘If you allow me,’ said a highly respectable master to me, ‘to work [the factory] only ten minutes in the day over-time, you put one thousand a year in my pocket.’”

Incredibly, when Samsung admitted its illegal practices, it used its statement to cock a snook at Apple, which has had its own PR crisis over conditions at the factories of its supplier, Foxconn. “Unlike companies that rely predominantly on the outsourcing of manufacturing, Samsung can maintain its own high standards throughout its in-house manufacturing network to offer world-class working conditions,” Samsung bragged.

“World-class working conditions” is a phrase open to interpretation, but my definition wouldn’t include being made to work standing for an overtime shift of 12 hours; or having to maintain a pace of installing two screws every nine seconds for hours at a time; or being worked so hard that I don’t even have a chance to grab a glass of water; or having to pay an admin fee of half a month’s wages for the privilege of taking my job; or being docked wages if I fall ill; or facing physical or verbal abuse from guards and managers - all violations for which CLW claimed to have found extensive evidence at one or more Chinese factory owned by Samsung (as stated above, the company has said that “except the overtime issue, violations covered in the report are not in line with our knowledge”).

The fact is that conditions at Samsung’s factories are good enough for young Chinese people in need of work to keep turning up; good enough for the government not to feel the need to intervene; good enough that media reports on the violations won’t prompt a mass boycott of Samsung’s goods - but absolutely no better than that, and no better than they have to be for the plants to keep making something approaching their maximum possible contribution to the company’s annual profits.

But of course, much the same could be said of thousands of other factories, dating back to the dawn of the industrial revolution. While the twentieth century has made plain the limits of Marxist doctrine as a political model, it strikes me that the man was on to something in passages like this:

“The capitalist is [careful] that his workmen are not idle for a single moment. He has bought the use of the labour-power for a definite period, and he insists upon his rights. He has no intention of being robbed.”

Judging by its statement in November, it seems logical to conclude Samsung will continue to break Chinese labour law for up to two years because the government has given it no pressing reason to act faster. That is a function of the fundamental dynamics between capital, labour and regulation which have remained the same throughout the globe, since Marx’s time and earlier. In that sense alone, the phrase “world-class” seems rather apt.

Writing this on the way back from a fleeting visit to the bustling port of Busan, South Korea’s second city. This morning I headed up to Bŏmŏ-sa, an ancient Buddhist temple complex in the mountains overlooking the city.

It was a beautiful setting, especially in the snow, but I was more interested in the ceremonies going on in a couple of the buildings. Each had a monk, shaven-headed and in grey robes, singing ceaselessly while a dozen or so worshippers knelt on cushions to the side.

Something about it reminded me of Catholic masses in Latin America – the dim lighting, the sombre atmosphere, the gloomy (though beautiful) tone to the singing. But more reminiscent of England was the dearth of young people in the congregation.

The main reason I went to Busan was to see one of the presidential candidates in action ahead of this month’s election. Busan is a traditional conservative stronghold but Moon Jae-in, the liberal candidate who spent much of his early life there, is hoping to win it this year. Political analysts say the result in Busan could swing the election.

Moon got a rousing reception at his rally last night in the city centre. He’s a pretty fiery speaker – his voice was noticeably hoarse from weeks of campaigning – and the crowd was chanting his name by the end.

But he still faces a tough struggle to defeat Park Geun-hye, candidate of the ruling Saenuri party, and daughter of the late military dictator Park Chung-hee. She commands a lot of support in Busan, particularly from older people. I notice that Park’s opponents and supporters alike define her primarily in terms of her father. The former say that they can’t stand to vote for someone whose father victimised innocent people; the latter that she’s bound to pick up where he left off in stimulating the economy.

It’s perhaps concerning that Park’s ancestry, rather than her policies, is the main focus for many voters. But history is very present in South Korea, which got rid of its military regime only 25 years ago. On Thursday I got talking to a taxi driver in Seoul who told me that he had studied journalism and broadcasting. As I wondered what happened to his media ambitions, he told me that he had taken part in the Gwangju uprising of 1980, the bloodiest event of military rule, in which more than 200 people, mostly students, were killed in pitched battles against the army. Many of those who survived were tracked down and prosecuted – and clearly would have had fat chance of starting a career in a press tightly controlled by the state.

Most people in Gwangju – where I went a few weeks ago – still strongly oppose the conservative party that evolved from the military administration. And many have a good deal of sympathy for the North Korean regime, according to Brian Myers, a Busan-based American professor who I had lunch with yesterday. 

Myers – who has specialised on North Korea for several years – stands out from mainstream thought on the country because he says it should not be thought of as communist but as an extreme nationalist state like Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan, with a focus on racial pride rather than economic justice and progress.

Myers sees no way that Pyongyang can be induced to abandon its nuclear programme – even with the most generous financial incentives – because it's at the heart of the “military first” ideology that is so central to the regime’s legitimacy. “Economic growth wouldn’t bring Kim Jong-eun anything in terms of political capital,” he told me. “They could get huge growth for years and still not get near South Korea.”

This means that Moon’s plan to reintroduce the “Sunshine Policy”, involving generous aid donations in the hope of putting inter-Korean relations on a more peaceful footing, will only encourage Pyongyang by making the South look weak, according to Myers. Kim has no incentive to change tack because his position is “totally secure”, he adds. “Is there anyway to get [Kim’s ruling clique] to commit political suicide? I don’t think so.”

Personally I'd choose to live in Seoul over an island city state any time, but it seems foreign executives still need persuading. I met up this week with the local head of an international executive search firm, who told me that Korean companies still have to offer a wage premium over and above what's on offer in Hong Kong or Singapore, to convince foreign talent to move to Seoul.

In part that's because Korea remains a mysterious unknown quantity to most Westerners (perhaps Gangnam Style will help provide a reference point!). And there's not a huge, reassuring existing community of fellow high-flying middle-aged Westerners to plug into.

But perhaps there's also an element of nervousness about professional life for foreigners in South Korean offices, who are typically in a tiny minority. There are only five foreigners among the 600,000 employees of the national government, the Korea Herald reported on Monday. And I've spoken to some foreigners with experience at Korean companies who feel they were there as window dressing, never having their ideas listened to, but always wheeled out for cocktail parties and promotional videos.

Some might also fear a heavier workload than they're used to - a request for three or four weeks' holiday a year would draw an astonished response at most companies in South Korea, which ran on a six-day working week until 2003. I spoke last week to an adviser to one of the presidential candidates, who said that it would be career suicide for any politician to be pictured on a beach holiday, even for a couple of days.

Still, the executive headhunter I spoke to said highly qualified foreigners are becoming more open to the idea of moving over here, as South Korea's image improves. And they're being pursued increasingly enthusiastically, she added, by Korean companies convinced that "now they're successful outside Korea, they need more global talent".

Floating 2,000 pairs of socks over a heavily fortified border might sound like an eccentric form of humanitarian relief – but it could save lives, according to a North Korean defector I met yesterday at one of his regular balloon launches.

Lee Ju-sung came from North Korea to Seoul, via China, Myanmar and Thailand, in 2006, and soon after started using enormous helium balloons to send pamphlets over the border telling North Koreans about the better lives they could find outside their impoverished country. His own escape was partly inspired by a leaflet that he found in the woods, sent by the same means.

But last year he decided to start sending socks instead. These are a precious commodity in North Korea – particularly in the winter, when inadequate footwear can mean the loss of toes or feet to frostbite. Mr Lee often saw victims of this hobbling around on crutches, he said. And the relatively high quality of South Korean socks means they command a high price on the North Korean black market, where they can be exchanged for enough corn to feed a person for a month.

He’s now won the support of NGOs including a group of other defectors and people with relatives in the North, who are helping to fund his campaign. They were among about 50 people who turned out to assist yesterday’s launch at the Demilitarised Zone that divides the peninsula.

Mr Lee says interventions like his are the only way to get assistance to struggling North Koreans in the countryside: the millions of dollars’ worth of aid provided over the years by South Korea, the US and others has been almost entirely diverted by the Kim regime to reward party loyalists and help ensure its own survival, he argues.

I was struck by the seriousness with which he went about getting the balloons  and packages together – and by the thought that much of the humanitarian work done by North Korean defectors is motivated by feelings of guilt for the ones left behind. Families of defectors are often sent to brutal prison camps, sometimes for three entire generations, as Blaine Harden’s book Escape from Camp 14 explains. It’s a powerful means of discouraging thoughts of escape.

On the bus back from the DMZ, someone asked Mr Lee if any of his family members had been punished for his defection in 2006. He said that yes, bad things had happened to his extended family, and also to his friends. He didn’t elaborate. I was chilled to think of the anguish and sleepless nights those consequences of his escape must have caused him, as with so many other defectors, but he gave no outward sign of it at all.

I'm all for encouraging creativity in schools, but a responsible teacher would probably draw the line at telling the class to produce violent, xenophobic art aimed at a neighbouring country. 

That seems to be what's happened at one Korean school, judging by this Japanese website that I stumbled upon. It shows photos of a huge display of childish depictions of violence and hatred towards Japan. One shows three Koreans beating up a weeping Japanese person; others have the Japanese flag being burned, or given funeral rites, or about to be hit by a nuclear missile.

The reason for the recent outbreak of anti-Japanese sentiment in South Korea seems absurd to many foreigners: the countries' competing claims to two tiny, rocky islets, uninhabited save for a fisherman, his wife and a small South Korean police detachment. But for Koreans the symbolism of the Dokdo islands (Takeshima to the Japanese) is enormous.

Japan formally incorporated the islands in 1905, five years before it annexed Korea: the beginning of a 35-year occupation that involved terrible human rights violations, including the sexual enslavement of thousands of Korean "comfort women". Japan lost control of Korea when it was defeated in World War II, but it never relinquished its claim to Dokdo.

For Koreans, this seems needlessly stubborn, adding insult to the injuries suffered under Japanese occupation. A senior government official told me last month that Koreans are infuriated by Japan's perceived refusal to show proper remorse for what happened in those years - the comparison with Germany is often made.

So South Korean president Lee Myung-bak's visit to the islands last month set off a huge row between the countries, threatening hoped-for economic and military cooperation deals between them. Both governments seem to be taking ostentatiously tough stances on the subject to shore up support from nationalists at home. The Japanese government is under extra pressure given the simultaneous flare-up of a tussle with China over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands.

The fight even overflowed into the Olympics - the South Korean footballer Park Jong-woo was denied a bronze medal after waving a placard inscribed with a Dokdo related slogan. (I noticed in Seoul's main square that people are collecting money to buy him a substitute one - see pic right.)

It's important for foreign observers to be sensitive to the problematic relationship between these two countries. Nonetheless, it is an enormous shame that relations seem to have taken such a turn for the worse at a time when the rise of China means it's in both nations' interest to forge closer ties. And they have far more in common - centuries of cultural osmosis have continued to the present day, with Japanese restaurants doing a booming trade in Seoul and Korean singers commanding huge followings in Tokyo.

Perhaps we should expect politicians on both sides to whip up nationalistic sentiments when it serves their purposes. But those children's drawings show the lasting, corrosive effects that can result.