Published by the Gwangju International Center since 2001
By Philippe Coulon In August 2022, during a visit to the Gwangju International Center for a chess tournament, I stumbled upon a group that would change my life. However, my … Read More
By William Urbanski Since time immemorial, the Kia Tigers have completely dominated the professional sports scene in Gwangju, and for good reason. For baseball aficionados and casual fans alike, the … Read More
By Qurratu Having a solid six years’ experience living in a dormitory, food taste does not matter because I am grateful enough that a plate of rice is guaranteed three … Read More
By Park Nahm-sheik I have been a lifelong teacher of English helping people learn to use the English language. I started with private tutorials for any and every comer. This … Read More
The title of this article is a maxim, which many of history’s great role models lived by. Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus, and Captain Cook, for example, did just that.
Marco Polo (circa 1254–1324) spent nearly two decades traveling and exploring in a wide swathe of the Orient. Over much of this period, he lived in the Yuan court under the tutelage of Emperor Kublai Khan (1216–1294). He was afforded many privileges as the Khan’s favorite courtier, one of which was working as his imperial envoy to the neighboring kingdoms. Done with his long Oriental sojourn, he returned home to Venice and published a memoir of his encounter with the cultural diversity of the East. This tome served to help open Europe’s eyes to the cultural riches of the vast Asian continent.
Marco Polo was followed by another Italian explorer just as great: Christopher Columbus (1446–1508). Under the auspices of Ferdinand II and Isabella I of Spain, Columbus embarked on a transoceanic voyage to open a sea route to the East Indies or East Asia. The region was a mythic land of plenty in the popular Western imagination of the day. Columbus ended up by discovering a huge land mass on the far end of the Atlantic. This continent is known today as Latin America and comprises Central and South America. Serendipitous and wide of the mark as it was, this find proved to be more than enough of a payoff for Columbus and his sponsors.
Those in the world of Korean education have likely encountered the national rule about not having military training in the air during special examination periods. The practice reflects a community spirit to national education, true, but it reflects other facts, too. Air force bases are a “thing” in South Korea, and few people enjoy being around military aircraft.
The siting of air force personnel and equipment as well as the staging of drills seemingly form the classic “NIMBY” (not in my backyard) problem. As a society, we need garbage dumps, crematoriums, prisons, and military bases, but no one wants to have such blights too close to them. Everyone wants the benefits of such facilities but simultaneously without the negatives.
Is it something in the Gwangju air? Or, more accurately, is it the city’s historical record that is so inviting toward the political sphere? In a literal sense, last May, thirty international youths residing in Korea from different civic society spectrums were invited to join the second edition of the Youth Gwangju Democratic Forum (Y-GDF). To learn from and with one another and share their existing knowledge and experiences, but most importantly, to lose the conditioned distaste or even fear of politics many of us were conditioned to develop in our home countries. We were invited to train ourselves to become active citizens.
By the time this article is released, some of Fukushima’s radioactive wastewater may have already been released into the Pacific Ocean. It is quite depressing to learn that something so seriously wrong as this can be done so shamelessly. The Japanese government insists that the radioactive level of the to-be-released wastewater is not so harmful when diluted 100 times with water, and now they are ready for a test release. Can it really be safe? Should we not cry over spilled radioactive wastewater?
