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16 Dec 09

Taipei Times - archives

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Environmental officials defended Taiwan’s record yesterday after the nation was ranked behind Japan and South Korea in an influential climate change performance report that evaluates emissions trends, levels and climate policy.
“The conclusions reached in the report draws on Taiwan’s information from the IEA [International Energy Agengy], which is from 2007,” Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) Minister Stephen Shen (沈世宏) told a press briefing last night. “[2007] was the worst year for us in terms of carbon emissions increases … that was accurately reflected in the report.”
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- Information from the EPA shows that the nation’s total carbon emissions decreased 4.4 percent over the last year from 267 million tonnes to 257 million tonnes. Meanwhile per capita emissions have fallen to 11.17 tonnes from 11.73 tonnes.
- Officials also lamented that government policy only accounted for a small percentage in the report’s ranking. The report weighed “Emissions trends” as 50 percent, “Emissions Levels” as 30 percent and “Climate Policy” 20 percent in reaching its conclusions.
  
  The report — which looked at 57 countries that accounted for more than 90 percent of total global carbon emissions, last year ranked Taiwan 32nd in the overall category and third in its regional category.
  
  This year, however, the ranking dropped 15 places, landing Taiwan at a dismal 47th, meanwhile its regional ranking was in the bottom three.
  
  Germanwatch said Taiwan had the greatest decline in rankings in this year’s report, adding that this was mostly due to its lack of initiatives to curb emissions increases in the energy sector in comparison with other countries.
- “Its problems are primarily a lack of solutions for curbing emissions in the electricity sector as well as a lack of planning for renewable energy,” he said.
- Taiwan accounts for about 1 percent of total carbon emissions despite being home to only 0.3 percent of the world’s population.

09 Dec 09

Healthcare Economist · Taiwan’s National Health Insurance System

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Taiwan’s adoption of a national health insurance (NHI) system in 1995
Health spending as a share of GDP was 4.79% in 1993 (prior to NHI) and 6.1% in 2007 (after NHI).
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- Administrative costs are 1.5% of total NHI spending.
- Taiwanese patients pay very low premiums and copayments. Over 98% of Taiwanese pay their premiums on time.
- The government sets a uniform national fee schedule. “Doctors and hospitals must achieve very high productivity to survive.”
- There is complete freedom of choice of providers. Competition between providers is based on quality, not cost.
- “Taiwan only has private supplemental indemnity health insurance; it covers specific diseases such as cancer or disasters like injuries from traffic accidents. It is a cash benefit, and the money is used to help pay for copayments, hire special nurses and buy nutritional foods—not for genuine inpatient medical services which are covered by the NHI.”
- Expenditures have outpaced revenues by 2% since 1998. To make up the difference, copayments and coninsurance rates have increased and the government instituted a tobacco tax. There has been only one premium increase (4.25% to 4.55% of wages in 2002).
- The government pays 100% of premiums for the poorest 1% of households. The near-poor (the next 2%) can receive interest free loans to pay for NHI.
- Physician payment: Currently, there is a fee-for-service system under a system of global budgets. Bundled payment (i.e., DRG-style payments) is available only for 53 surgical procedures.
- Patients use an IC Card (Smart Card) to access care. All providers submit claims electronically. Currently, however, there is no integrated form of electronic medical records, although most hospitals/providers have their own systems.
- Screening rates for breast cancer, oral cancer, and colon cancer are low.
- State-specific 5-year cancer survival rates are similar to those in OECD countries.
- Taiwan has 4.5 nurses/1000 population compared to 9.6 nurses/1000 in wealthy OECD countries.
- Like Japan and South Korea, Taiwanese patients have many physician visits of short duration. The average Taiwanese has 12.4 visits/year, although many of these visits can last less than 5 minutes.
- Taiwan lags behind the U.S. in: the pace of adoption of technology (new drugs reach the market 2 years faster in the U.S. than in Taiwan),
- the quality of the medical education (a top tier Taiwanese medical school is of the same quality as an average American medical school), and R&D.

27 Oct 09

Korea Aerospace Reveals Combat UAV Studies | AVIATION WEEK

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02 Oct 09

Matthew Yglesias » Where the Money Goes

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21 Aug 09

Seoulites Work Second-Most Hours | The Marmot's Hole

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25 Jun 09

Korean-American Police Officer Sidesteps Tradition : NPR

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16 May 09

French Sleep Most, Koreans Sleep Least | The Marmot's Hole

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26 Mar 09

Multiracial Koreans Live Very Difficult Lives: Report | The Marmot's Hole

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35% of Resident Foreigners Had Unpleasant Travel Experience in Korea | The Marmot's Hole

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09 Mar 09

Rick Smolan tells the story of a girl | Video on TED.com

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01 Mar 09

Japanese Roots | Human Evolution | DISCOVER Magazine

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especially to Koreans
the Ainu
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- But if that were true, you might expect the Japanese language to show close affinities to some mainland language, just as English is obviously closely related to other Germanic languages (because Anglo-Saxons from the continent conquered England as recently as the sixth century a.d.). How can we resolve this contradiction between Japan’s presumably ancient language and the evidence for recent origins?
- When similar questions of origins arise about other peoples, they can be discussed dispassionately. That is not so for the Japanese. Until 1946, Japanese schools taught a myth of history based on the earliest recorded Japanese chronicles, which were written in the eighth century. They describe how the sun goddess Amaterasu, born from the left eye of the creator god Izanagi, sent her grandson Ninigi to Earth on the Japanese island of Kyushu to wed an earthly deity. Ninigi’s great-grandson Jimmu, aided by a dazzling sacred bird that rendered his enemies helpless, became the first emperor of Japan in 660 b.c. To fill the gap between 660 b.c. and the earliest historically documented Japanese monarchs, the chronicles invented 13 other equally fictitious emperors. Before the end of World War II, when Emperor Hirohito finally announced that he was not of divine descent, Japanese archeologists and historians had to make their interpretations conform to this chronicle account.
- Unlike most other non-European countries, Japan preserved its independence and culture while emerging from isolation to create an industrialized society in the late nineteenth century. It was a remarkable achievement. Now the Japanese people are understandably concerned about maintaining their traditions in the face of massive Western cultural influences. They want to believe that their distinctive language and culture required uniquely complex developmental processes. To acknowledge a relationship of the Japanese language to any other language seems to constitute a surrender of cultural identity.
- For instance, there is much archeological evidence that people and material objects passed between Japan and Korea in the period a.d. 300 to 700. Japanese interpret this to mean that Japan conquered Korea and brought Korean slaves and artisans to Japan; Koreans believe instead that Korea conquered Japan and that the founders of the Japanese imperial family were Korean.
- Nose tombs in Japan still contain 20,000 noses severed from Koreans and brought home as trophies of a sixteenth-century Japanese invasion. Not surprisingly, many Koreans loathe the Japanese, and their loathing is returned with contempt.
- Unlike the winter rains prevailing over much of Europe, Japan’s rains are concentrated in the summer growing season, giving it the highest plant productivity of any nation in the temperate zones. While 80 percent of Japan’s land consists of mountains unsuitable for agriculture and only 14 percent is farmland, an average square mile of that farmland is so fertile that it supports eight times as many people as does an average square mile of British farmland. Japan’s high rainfall also ensures a quickly regenerated forest after logging. Despite thousands of years of dense human occupation, Japan still offers visitors a first impression of greenness because 70 percent of its land is still covered by forest.
- But this view is difficult to reconcile with the distinctiveness of the Japanese language. Everyone agrees that Japanese does not bear a close relation to any other language in the world. Most scholars consider it to be an isolated member of Asia’s Altaic language family, which consists of Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungusic languages. Korean is also often considered to be an isolated member of this family, and within the family Japanese and Korean may be more closely related to each other than to other Altaic languages. However, the similarities between Japanese and Korean are confined to general grammatical features and about 15 percent of their basic vocabularies, rather than the detailed shared features of grammar and vocabulary that link, say, French to Spanish; they are more different from each other than Russian is from English.
  
  Since languages change over time, the more similar two languages are, the more recently they must have diverged. By counting common words and features, linguists can estimate how long ago languages diverged, and such estimates suggest that Japanese and Korean parted company at least 4,000 years ago. As for the Ainu language, its origins are thoroughly in doubt; it may not have any special relationship to Japanese.
- ancient portraits
- haniwa
- Those statues unmistakably depict East Asians
- China developed literacy long before Korea or Japan. In early Chinese accounts of various peoples referred to as Eastern Barbarians, Japan is described under the name Wa, whose inhabitants were said to be divided into more than a hundred quarreling states. Only a few Korean or Japanese inscriptions before a.d. 700 have been preserved, but extensive chronicles were written in 712 and 720 in Japan and later in Korea. Those reveal massive transmission of culture to Japan from Korea itself, and from China via Korea. The chronicles are also full of accounts of Koreans in Japan and of Japanese in Korea—interpreted by Japanese or Korean historians, respectively, as evidence of Japanese conquest of Korea or the reverse.
- In the usual experience of archeologists, inventions flow from mainlands to islands, and small peripheral societies aren’t supposed to contribute revolutionary advances to the rest of the world. It therefore astonished archeologists to discover that the world’s oldest known pottery was made in Japan 12,700 years ago. For the first time in human experience, people had watertight containers readily available in any desired shape. With their new ability to boil or steam food, they gained access to abundant resources that had previously been difficult to use: leafy vegetables, which would burn or dry out if cooked on an open fire; shellfish, which could now be opened easily; and toxic foods like acorns, which could now have their toxins boiled out. Soft-boiled foods could be fed to small children, permitting earlier weaning and more closely spaced babies. Toothless old people, the repositories of information in a preliterate society, could now be fed and live longer. All those momentous consequences of pottery triggered a population explosion, causing Japan’s population to climb from an estimated few thousand to a quarter of a million.
- The prejudice that islanders are supposed to learn from superior continentals wasn’t the sole reason that record-breaking Japanese pottery caused such a shock. In addition, those first Japanese potters were clearly hunter-gatherers, which also violated established views. Usually only sedentary societies own pottery: what nomad wants to carry heavy, fragile pots, as well as weapons and the baby, whenever time comes to shift camp? Most sedentary societies elsewhere in the world arose only with the adoption of agriculture. But the Japanese environment is so productive that people could settle down and make pottery while still living by hunting and gathering. Pottery helped those Japanese hunter-gatherers exploit their environment’s rich food resources more than 10,000 years before intensive agriculture reached Japan.
- To place Jomon Japan in a contemporary perspective, let us remind ourselves of what human societies were like on the Asian mainland in 400 b.c., just as the Jomon lifestyle was about to come to an end. China consisted of kingdoms with rich elites and poor commoners; the people lived in walled towns, and the country was on the verge of political unification and would soon become the world’s largest empire. Beginning around 6500 b.c., China had developed intensive agriculture based on millet in the north and rice in the south; it had domestic pigs, chickens, and water buffalo. The Chinese had had writing for at least 900 years, metal tools for at least 1,500 years, and had just invented the world’s first cast iron. Those developments were also spreading to Korea, which itself had had agriculture for several thousand years (including rice since at least 2100 b.c.) and metal since 1000 b.c.
- But rice had been domesticated in warm southern China and spread only slowly northward to much cooler Korea, because it took a long time to develop cold-resistant strains of rice. Early rice agriculture in Korea used dry-field methods rather than irrigated paddies and was not particularly productive. Hence early Korean agriculture could not compete with Jomon hunting and gathering. Jomon people themselves would have seen no advantage in adopting Korean agriculture, insofar as they were aware of its existence, and poor Korean farmers had no advantages that would let them force their way into Japan.
- The new mode of living appeared first on the north coast of Japan’s southwesternmost island, Kyushu, just across the Korea Strait from South Korea. There we find Japan’s first metal tools, of iron, and Japan’s first undisputed full-scale agriculture. That agriculture came in the form of irrigated rice fields, complete with canals, dams, banks, paddies, and rice residues revealed by archeological excavations. Archeologists term the new way of living Yayoi, after a district of Tokyo where in 1884 its characteristic pottery was first recognized. Unlike Jomon pottery, Yayoi pottery was very similar to contemporary South Korean pottery in shape. Many other elements of the new Yayoi culture were unmistakably Korean and previously foreign to Japan, including bronze objects, weaving, glass beads, and styles of tools and houses.
- While rice was the most important crop, Yayoi farmers introduced 27 new to Japan
- After about 100 b.c., separate parts of cemeteries were set aside for the graves of what was evidently an emerging elite class, marked by luxury goods imported from China, such as beautiful jade objects and bronze mirrors. As the Yayoi population explosion continued, and as all the best swamps or irrigable plains suitable for wet rice agriculture began to fill up, the archeological evidence suggests that war became more and more frequent: that evidence includes mass production of arrowheads, defensive moats surrounding villages, and buried skeletons pierced by projectile points. These hallmarks of war in Yayoi Japan corroborate the earliest accounts of Japan in Chinese chronicles, which describe the land of Wa and its hundred little political units fighting one another.
- Beginning around a.d. 300, increasingly enormous earth-mound tombs called kofun, in the shape of keyholes, were constructed throughout the former Yayoi area from Kyushu to North Honshu. Kofun are up to 1,500 feet long and more than 100 feet high, making them possibly the largest earth-mound tombs in the world. The prodigious amount of labor required to build them and the uniformity of their style across Japan imply powerful rulers who commanded a huge, politically unified labor force. Those kofun that have been excavated contain lavish burial goods, but excavation of the largest ones is still forbidden because they are believed to contain the ancestors of the Japanese imperial line. The visible evidence of political centralization that the kofun provide reinforces the accounts of kofun-era Japanese emperors written down much later in Japanese and Korean chronicles. Massive Korean influences on Japan during the kofun era—whether through the Korean conquest of Japan (the Korean view) or the Japanese conquest of Korea (the Japanese view)—were responsible for transmitting Buddhism, writing, horseback riding, and new ceramic and metallurgical techniques to Japan from the Asian mainland.
- A second theory, unappealing to those Japanese who prefer the first theory, argues instead that the Yayoi transition represents a massive influx of immigrants from Korea, carrying Korean farming practices, culture, and genes. Kyushu would have seemed a paradise to Korean rice farmers, because it is warmer and swampier than Korea and hence a better place to grow rice. According to one estimate, Yayoi Japan received several million immigrants from Korea, utterly overwhelming the genetic contribution of Jomon people (thought to have numbered around 75,000 just before the Yayoi transition). If so, modern Japanese are descendants of Korean immigrants who developed a modified culture of their own over the last 2,000 years.
- Measurements have now been made of many skeletons. In addition, within the last three years molecular geneticists have begun to extract dna from ancient human skeletons and compare the genes of Japan’s ancient and modern populations. Jomon and Yayoi skeletons, researchers find, are on the average readily distinguishable. Jomon people tended to be shorter, with relatively longer forearms and lower legs, more wide-set eyes, shorter and wider faces, and much more pronounced facial topography, with strikingly raised browridges, noses, and nose bridges. Yayoi people averaged an inch or two taller, with close-set eyes, high and narrow faces, and flat browridges and noses. Some skeletons of the Yayoi period were still Jomon-like in appearance, but that is to be expected by almost any theory of the Jomon-Yayoi transition. By the time of the kofun period, all Japanese skeletons except those of the Ainu form a homogeneous group, resembling modern Japanese and Koreans.
- In all these respects, Jomon skulls differ from those of modern Japanese and are most similar to those of modern Ainu, while Yayoi skulls most resemble those of modern Japanese. Similarly, geneticists attempting to calculate the relative contributions of Korean-like Yayoi genes and Ainu-like Jomon genes to the modern Japanese gene pool have concluded that the Yayoi contribution was generally dominant. Thus, immigrants from Korea really did make a big contribution to the modern Japanese, though we cannot yet say whether that was because of massive immigration or else modest immigration amplified by a high rate of population increase. Genetic studies of the past three years have also at last resolved the controversy about the origins of the Ainu: they are the descendants of Japan’s ancient Jomon inhabitants, mixed with Korean genes of Yayoi colonists and of the modern Japanese.
- Instead, Japanese and Ainu have no demonstrable relationship, and the relationship between Japanese and Korean is distant.
- That is, the modern Ainu language of Hokkaido is not a model for the ancient Jomon language of Kyushu. By the same token, modern Korean may be a poor model for the ancient Yayoi language of Korean immigrants in 400 b.c. In the centuries before Korea became unified politically in a.d. 676, it consisted of three kingdoms. Modern Korean is derived from the language of the kingdom of Silla, the kingdom that emerged triumphant and unified Korea, but Silla was not the kingdom that had close contact with Japan in the preceding centuries
- Like Arabs and Jews, Koreans and Japanese are joined by blood yet locked in traditional enmity. But enmity is mutually destructive, in East Asia as in the Middle East. As reluctant as Japanese and Koreans are to admit it, they are like twin brothers who shared their formative years. The political future of East Asia depends in large part on their success in rediscovering those ancient bonds between them.

18 Feb 09

Korean Political Ads Are Rad • VideoSift: Online Video *Quality Control

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31 Dec 08

Kashya Hildebrand | Jung-Yeon Min

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26 Nov 08

BBC - North Korea - Crossing The Line - TV Shack

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순천만

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19 Nov 08

History textbook causes an uproar in South Korea - International Herald Tribune

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The facts no one disputes are that, at the end of World War II, the Soviet military swept into northern Korea and installed a friendly Communist government while a U.S. military administration assumed control in the south.
"It was not our national flag that was hoisted to replace the Japanese flag," reads the textbook published by Kumsung Publishing. "The flag that flew in its place was the American Stars and Stripes. Our liberation through the Allied forces' victory prevented us from building a new country according to our own wishes."
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- "undermine the legitimacy of the South Korean government."
- The books, they say, inspire a "masochistic" view of Korean history by demeaning the role of the Allied forces in Korea's liberation from Japan, casting the United States as an imperial power and dwelling on the faults of South Korean dictators while slighting their achievements, such as their contributions to the country's rapid economic growth.
- According to the Kumsung textbook, Park Chung Hee - who seized power in a coup in 1961 and tortured political dissidents while mobilizing the nation for export-driven economic growth - was "a president who placed himself above the nation's Constitution."
  
  The Defense Ministry wants this to be replaced with: "a president who contributed to the nation's modernization."

01 Oct 08

Hey, But At Least We’re Not as Shitty as Taiwan! | The Marmot's Hole

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09 Jul 08

US Allowed Korean Mass Executions - TIME

Between 3,000 and 7,000 South Koreans are believed to have been shot there by their own military and police, and dumped into mass graves, said Kim Dong-choon, the commission member overseeing the investigation of these government killings.

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