Latest posts by Oiwan Lam from June, 2007
Japan: Cellphone recycling bins
Edo from Pink Tentacle blogs about cell phone companies’ plan to equip convenience stores with cellphone recycling bins, making it easier for people to recycle their unwanted handsets.
South Korea: Inequality, Empolyment Outlook
Jamie from Two Koreas blogs about the increase in income gap in South Korea and two stories about Chaebol's labour management, including companies strategies for intervening in a union election and Samsung's labour training for mass game.
South Korea: the Mismatch between an Imagined North Korea and the Real Role of the USFK
An article posted at SavePTfarmer on the imagined North Korea threat for creating a state-of-the-art “strategic hub” south of Seoul in accordance with the United States’ plan for the realignment and strategic flexibility of the USFK.
Japan: Pearl Harbor Never Happened
Soon after the denial of the existence of forced prostitution (comfort woman), 100 lawmakers in Japan denied the history of a surprise attack by Japanese soliders on the U.S. Pacific Fleet in 1941 and demanded that photographs portraying the Japanese military in a negative light be removed from U.S. war...
Korea: Rubber Shoes Redesigned
Verena from Pingmag showed a number of design works from the Korean rubber shoes redesign project commissioned by last year’s Seoul Design Festival.
China: Beijing Billboard
Imagethief notices that Beijing city always managed to paint the city billboards for major city event, such as Sino-africa summit. Recently the city government put down many billboards due to “poor construction”: The conspiracy minded among us (Mrs. Imagethief) believe that entire scheme is a ruse to claim Beijing's most...
China: Online discussion on slave labour
Bingfeng observes some interesting features in the online discussion of slave labour despite the government censorship instruction.
China: Charity Campaign
Zhaomu blogs about a recent charity campaign in Wei-hai in Shandong province. Within 10 days, the city government managed to get RMB20 millions , and companies and corporates have agreed to donate 1 billion. The campaign is a most effective one. However, there are reports disclosing that ordinary workers are...
Japan: War Responsibility Project
Tessa Morris-Suzuki wrote in Ohmynews the background of Yomiuri's project in publishing a book on war responsibility: it is a re-examination of the problem of war responsibility initiated by a newspaper generally considered to be “right-of-centre”, and therefore expected to support a more nationalistic approach to the past. The project...
Hong Kong: Light Pollution
Chu zai from inmediahk.net criticized the light show in the Victoria Harbour for creating light pollution as the excessive lighting would create more carbon dioxide (zh).
China: Environmental politics
Chong from interlocals.net translated an article by Zhu Jiangang on “three parties in environomental politics”: the three parties are central government, civic groups and citizens, special interest consortium in the local levels.
China: Security guard culture
Security guards (Bao-an) in China is omnipresent. Granite Studio noticed the presence of Bao-an is very distinctive feature in China, but they have different set of rules for locals and for foreigners.
China: Harmonizing 18 child rape cases
Chris O'Brien from Beijing Newspeak criticised Chinese media for downplaying the crime of 18 child rape cases in Gansu by a primary school teacher: Xinhua did not release this story in Chinese. The report about the death sentence was buried, as usual, on page four or five of the local...
Hong Kong: Defending plagiarism
A blogger's commentary on a comic had been plagiarized by a popular local magazine. An apology would have ended the issue. However, the editor's attempt to defend plagiarism has resulted in more outraging responses from the blogsphere. ESWN has translated the conversation between the blogger and the editor. The original...
China: More on Slave workers
ESWN translated various local reports on Shanxi slave workers issue. They give more background on the morality of contemporary Chinese society.
South Korea: How Does Seoul Rank Globally?
R. Elgin from Marmot's Hole points to the fact that Seoul's quality of life ranks below 50 best cities globally.
Japan: Lawmakers’ Ad on Comfort Women
A group of Japanese lawmakers took out an ad in the Washing Post to present “the facts” about the comfort women that “no historical document has ever been found by historians or research organisations that positively demonstrates that women were forced against their will into prostitution by the Japanese army”....
Japan: Art of campaigning
Japan Observer has a post commenting on the culture of political campaign in Japan: elections serve neither as a vehicle for holding officials accountable nor as a transmission belt for public concerns. Neither politicians nor voters seem to take their responsibilities seriously, meaning that election campaigns, for all the ritual,...
Japan: Fingerprinting visitors
Debito reports that Japan immigration will adopt a new policy in November 2007 for fingerprinting and photographing all foreigner visitors to Japan: Except that as well as being kinda weird and laughably amusing, it’s deadly serious about targeting foreigners as potential terrorists.
China: June 4 Ads in Chengdu Evening News
ESWN translated an article by a veteran worker at Chengdu Evening News explaining how the thirteen word advertisement (in memory of June 4) made its presence in the newspapers: From the process how the whole affair unfolded, this was a planned “prank.” This “prank” reflected the public opinion of the...
China: BeijingF__kingOlympia
Joel Martinsen from DANWEI reports on a punk song, BeijingF__kingOlympia, by a Jiangxi underground band, aka Punk God widely circulated in China. Department of Culture of Shanxi Province has issued a notice to stop the illegal transmission of the song.
