Published on April 21, 2019.
Continuing from the previous chapter, this essay discusses the deeply rooted discrimination against women in Korean society and the problem of so-called sexual entertaining, said to have long been normalized in workplaces and the entertainment industry, as a window into the deeper structure of Korea’s social pathology.
Using the World Economic Forum’s gender-gap rankings as a point of departure, it argues that Korea’s low international standing regarding women’s status reflects a serious internal problem, while also referring to what the author sees as anti-Japan propaganda by China and Korea and the role of Japan’s mass media in damaging Japan’s international standing.
The essay criticizes the contradiction of a society that invests heavily in education while excluding women from the labor market, and insists that Japan should more forcefully communicate its true value and reality to the world.

2019-04-21
As long as Korea’s “male-superior, female-inferior society” remains unchanged,
and “sexual entertaining” in workplaces and elsewhere continues to be treated as something normal,
it is said that even the most earnest investment in education will only come to nothing.

The following is a continuation of the previous chapter.
The emphases in the text and the comments marked with an asterisk below are mine.
Furthermore, the same agency threatened women who wished to sign exclusive contracts, telling them that in exchange for taking over their debts and paying the full cost of their cosmetic surgery, they should enter into sexual relations.
This is also an article showing that Korea is one of the world’s leading countries in cosmetic surgery.
All of the victims were in their twenties, and the number of women who suffered from sexual entertaining reached twenty-three.
According to the World Economic Forum (WEF), as of 2014, Korea ranked a low 117th out of 142 countries in the gender-equality index.
Japan, by the way, ranked 104th.
This survey regarding Japan is truly outrageous.
As I have mentioned many times, the truth is that Japan is number one.
In the same survey, Syria, which has become a base for the “Islamic State,” ranked 139th.
Everyone should feel that Japan’s position here is also extremely strange.
From these numbers, one should clearly understand how persistently China and Korea have waged anti-Japan propaganda around the world…
and how much the mass media, led by Asahi, which it would be no exaggeration to say has fully sided with them…
have lowered Japan’s international standing and credibility…
The time has long since come for us to resolve never again to allow such foolish conduct.
Japan, a country where, as a matter of divine providence, the turntable of civilization revolves…
Japan, which together with the United States must lead the world with the highest freedom and intelligence…
We must engrave in our minds the carelessness of a world that leaves Japan in such a position…
and politicians and bureaucrats in particular…
must fiercely broadcast Japan’s excellence to the world…
and scatter the “bottomless evil” and the “plausible lies” of China, a one-party Communist dictatorship, and Korea, a totalitarian state that is Nazism itself.
For if that is not done…
the world will sink into still deeper confusion and become an extremely dangerous place in which every kind of evil will run rampant.
Seen from overseas, the status of women in Korea is not greatly different from that in countries where terrorists run rampant.
Regarding this situation, Professor Kim Chang-hwan of the Department of Sociology at the University of Kansas warned in his own column:
“The reason Korea’s gender-equality index is low is because the status of women in the labor market is low.
The reason Korea’s high enthusiasm for education has thus far been able to contribute to economic development is that it successfully advanced investment in human capital.
But if women are excluded from the labor market, the capital invested up to now will have been wasted”
(Weekly Donga, dated March 9, 2015).
As long as Korea’s “male-superior, female-inferior society” remains unchanged, and “sexual entertaining” in workplaces and elsewhere continues to be treated as normal, even eager investment in education will only go to waste.
At least in principle, Korean society as a whole understands that “discrimination against women must be eliminated.”
The fact that Park Geun-hye, a woman, was the sitting president may also be evidence that Korea is changing.
However, it still seems likely to take much more time before discrimination against women is removed from the root.