Profile Post: The News from Wabu-eup

When discussing two-sided issues such as the Korean unification, most people tend to be biased towards one side or another, myself included, mainly because the people interested in the issue have some kind of connection to either side or is affected by the outcome of the issue. So it is always fresh to find an objective third party talking about the issue nonchalantly as if it were straight out of a textbook, a pure academic matter.

Such was the case with one blogger, more specifically an English instructor living in South Korea, who posts about his daily sightings and discoveries in a highly observant manner. As a foreigner, he offers a third-person perspective to the unification issue in the Korean peninsula and other political problems he detects in his daily life in Korea. Although he is neither a historian nor a professional in this field, he researches topics he is interested in and appears to be somewhat informed of the situation and background, which aid in providing evidence for his observations throughout the post. The frequency of his postings varies; it sometimes appears as little as two to three times a month, but massively increases to twenty or even thirty in the active days. As a result, he received lots of feedback when his blog was constantly being updated, but he hasn’t seen many comments these days.

His blog, titled “The News from Wabu-eup,” contains various sightings and issues spotted during his stay in Korea. Some posts draw heavily from his background research, yet others are purely observational. I found two posts that I was particularly interested in: “Anti Kim Jong-Il Graffiti” (http://rbbadger.wordpress.com/2011/07/02/anti-kim-jong-il-graffiti/) and “Mao Zedong, the Savior of North Korea.” (http://rbbadger.wordpress.com/2011/09/16/mao-zedong-the-savior-of-north-korea/)The first article was posted on July 2, 2011 as a response to the news that a certain graffiti praising ex-president of South Korea, Park Jung-Hee, and scorning the current leader of North Korea, Kim Jong-Il. His tone throughout this post is very informative, and he doesn’t give away much of his reactions or feelings; instead, he simply tells us the gist of the news, with added background knowledge in the intro for those who don’t know about the current situation in North Korea. In the more recent post mentioned above, he summarizes the events of the Korean War, eventually drawing the conclusion that “The Chinese People’s Liberation Army entered the war… without them, one wonders whether or not North Korea would exist today.” He ends his thoughts with a quote from Andrew Salmon’s Korea Times article that gives Mao credit for saving North Korea. It is interesting how, although Salmon’s article is rather biased towards the left with many comments taking China and North Korea’s side and sneering at South Korea’s leftists, he manages to maintain his pacifist position by objectively listing detail by detail without an inch of prejudice detected. By carefully avoiding controversial words such as “winning” and “losing” and refusing to take sides by abstaining from the pronoun “we,” he successfully upholds his objective point of view.

As a whole, this blog provides historical insight to the current issues of the Korean peninsula. Although it does not directly address reunification, it is a valuable source for me and my studies in a way that it allows me to probe into the views of a third party not necessarily on either side of the debate. While his postings aren’t usually too rich in detail or scholarly, he glosses over relevant historical examples and tie them together in a clear, simple manner that is directly linked to his conclusions. My blog will definitely be drawing from more modern evidence and events instead of relying heavily on historical examples, and it will be somewhat more biased due to my background and prior knowledge.