East Asia News & Politics Thread: China, South Korea, Japan...

A total of four Korean entertainers have abruptly retired from the industry this week, in a widening scandal linking the glossy world of K-pop with a series of seedy sex crimes. The biggest players — Seungri, of the influential all-male group Big Bang, and the 29-year-old singer-songwriter Jung Joon-young — have both apologized to the public for their involvement in twin, interlocking cases of exploitation of women.

To catch you up: Investigators booked Seungri on Monday on suspicion of supplying prostitutes for businessmen at one of Seoul's upscale night clubs, setting off a media feeding frenzy that ensnared the second star, Jung, and potentially more famous men to come.

Seungri is denying charges of brokering prostitution. But in statements to the press, Seoul Metropolitan Police say an investigation into his Kakaotalk messages (Kakao is South Korea's dominant messaging platform) found evidence of "pimping" — they claim he was not only offering different types of women to investors, but he was part of a separate group chat with the other star, Jung.

That's where the details get more sordid. Police say the near-dozen participants in the Jung chatroom were sharing hidden camera footage of sex with drugged and unconscious women. Korean broadcaster SBS showed the leaked text exchanges, which include Jung responding to a video of one unconscious woman by texting in Korean, "You raped her, LOL."

Korean wire Yonhap reports Jung is under investigation for secretly recorded and shared videos of his own sexual encounters with at least 10 women he filmed between 2015 and 2016.

Jung, who rose to fame on a Korean equivalent of American Idol, is cooperating with police and released the following statement:

"I admit to all my crimes. I filmed women without their consent and shared it in a social media chatroom, and while I did so I didn't feel a great sense of guilt... More than anything, I kneel and apologize to the women who appear in the videos who have learned of this hideous truth as the incident has come to light."

The other men who have apologized and suddenly retired from the industry after being implicated in the chat rooms are Choi Jong-hoon, singer from FT Island, and Yong Junhyung, singer from Highlight, who admitted that he was in the chat and saw the videos and did not speak up.

K-pop is such major cultural export and economic boon for the Asian nation of 55 million that this scandal — or scandals, depending on how you're counting — has attracted global attention. (One of the genre's most successful groups, BTS, had the No. 2 and No. 3 best-selling albums worldwide last year.)

Within South Korea, the business' darker underbelly is well-known. Its three top entertainment companies — SM Entertainment, YG Entertainment and JYP Entertainment — are notorious for running their artists through a militaristic system of rigorous dance and singing training, restrictions on their private lives and cosmetic surgery regimens that begin when they're teens. When women artists have come forward with allegations of sexual harassment or abuse in the industry, they are rarely investigated. K-pop is so interwoven with Korea's soft power identity that Seungri said on Instagram, "I've been branded as a 'national traitor.' "

His agency, YG Entertainment, dropped him on Wednesday, apologized for failing to "manage the musician more thoroughly" and has watched its stock shares tumble.

Celebrity involvement in these sex crimes threaten to taint the carefully-crafted image of the K-pop industry, sure, but for South Korea, it shines an international light on an already-festering societal problem: hidden camera porn, known in South Korea as "spycam," or molka, and its role in promulgating a misogynistic culture. Since last year, outrage about law enforcement's uneven response to spycam has swelled into the streets, leading 22,000 women to protest last June, marking the largest women's protest in South Korean history.

South Korea is a modern country that boasts of its advanced consumer electronics and fast internet speeds, but on the measure of equality for women, it ranks at the bottom among developed countries. As we've reported, school curriculum even teaches that victims are to blame for sexual assault.

Combined, these factors feed a widespread spycam porn epidemic that's gone on for years. Tiny hidden cameras that look like lighters secretly film women in dressing rooms, bathrooms, public places like subway stations and during private moments — while they're having sex. The footage of sex acts is considered a "natural porn" that's commonly distributed and profited off of on online platforms, without the victims' knowledge.

Officially, police estimate more than 6,000 cases of people filmed on spy cams without their consent, each year, between 2013 and 2017. The victims are overwhelmingly women. But most of the time, people aren't aware their images are being traded: A 2018 study by the Korean Women Lawyers Association found 89 percent of spycam crimes were perpetrated by strangers.

"There have been plenty of celebrity scandals before, including pretty serious charges like domestic abuse, but those usually ended being isolated incidents that faded from the public consciousness fairly quickly," says Jenna Gibson, a Korea columnist for The Diplomat and a longtime K-pop watcher. "This time, because Korea has been directly grappling with issues like MeToo, spy cams, and women's rights in general, there's no way they will let these crimes go so easily. The things these men have allegedly done hit right at the heart of the biggest societal divisions in Korea right now."

The justice system is also being put to the test, as the Korean public raises questions about police complicity in the prostitution brokered at nightclubs. "We will conduct a strong internal investigation, and ... we will take stern measures regardless of their rank," South Korea's National Police Agency Chief Min Gap-ryong told lawmakers on Thursday, according to CNN, in response to questions about police looking the other way.

All of this is forcing a reckoning in several layers of the public sphere, but most notably for the entertainment engine that is K-pop, which churns out stars and groups that earn the devotion of fans worldwide. The packaging of these artists is squeaky-clean, but can you still love a product that's cooked in an exploitative culture? And as it is often asked during this #metoo era: What do we do with the art of monstrous men? The K-pop fanbase is now the latest to be working these questions out.

South Korean local assembly members are planning to adorn some items at schools with a sticker saying they were "made by Japanese firms that committed war crimes".

A bipartisan group of assembly members in Gyeonggi Province, near Seoul, submitted a draft ordinance last Friday.

It would require putting the sticker on items worth more than 200,000 won, or about 177 dollars, which were made by some 300 firms with alleged links to Japan's past colonial rule.

The proposal covers about 4,700 elementary, junior high and high schools in the province.

Deliberations on the draft ordinance are scheduled for Friday of next week.

One of the assembly members told reporters they intend to educate the war criminals who did not apologize for exploiting Koreans.

But the proposal has brought a strong criticism from experts and locals. Some called the move "exclusive nationalism."

A recent probe into Japanese firms using the state-sponsored Technical Intern Training Program to deal with acute labor shortages has revealed 759 cases of suspected abuse, including unpaid wages, the Justice Ministry said Friday.

The findings confirm growing concerns about the link between the interns’ working conditions and their disappearances from work. Last year, the number of missing foreign trainees rose to 9,052, compared with 7,089 the previous year. As of December, 328,360 foreign people were registered as technical interns.

The results of the probe showed that 231 interns weren’t paid overtime wages and another 58 were being paid below the legal minimum. One intern was paid only ¥60,000 per month during a 7-month stint and received an hourly payment of ¥700 for an average of 60 hours of overtime per month.

The ministry also found that 171 interns died while in the program between 2012 and 2017, the officials said. There were some 150,000 foreign trainees in 2012 and about 270,000 in 2017.

The officials revealed that in 28 of the deaths, trainees died due to accidents that occurred on the job, including by drowning after falling off of fishing boats or suffering from heat exhaustion.

Another 59 interns died from sickness. Among them were two trainees who had logged overtime and whose cases were reported to the labor standards inspection office because their working hours were hovering around the life-threateningly high cap specified in Article 36 of the Labor Standards Law.

The fatal cases included 17 suicides, including one case in which a trainee was given only four days off over 3½ months.

The officials admitted they had not been aware of 43 of the cases, which had either gone unreported by the organizations supervising the trainees’ programs or had not been included in the ministry’s records.

“These cases of people vanishing and deaths have left us with a lot to reflect on,” a ministry official said.

The official admitted there had been flaws in responding to intern disappearances, such as failures to acquire evidence of alleged abuses and failures in the process of interviewing those who escaped and investigating their cases.

The Justice Ministry set up a team tasked with investigating what was behind the disappearance of technical interns after it came under fire in November for mistakes in processing records from a survey on interns who had fled.

The appointed officials looked into reports, including from the trainees themselves, claiming that interns had been forced to work under harsh conditions for little pay, to check whether abuses of trainees’ rights had triggered any disappearances. They also verified records to determine whether such violations were related to any reported deaths.

The team surveyed 5,218 trainees who had fled their workplaces between January 2017 and September 2018 but were later found, and 4,280 organizations that were accepting such trainees under the internship program, by conducting on-the-spot investigations or by telephone or email. The officials said, however, that 113 firms refused to cooperate and another 270 were unreachable.

During a regular news conference on Friday, Justice Minister Takashi Yamashita called the failure to detect the deaths “extremely unacceptable.”

“I want to take thorough measures to better grasp the backgrounds of the fatal cases through regular inspections,” he said.

The officials speculated that the enactment of a new law in November 2017, to improve supervision of companies employing foreigners under the trainee program, has helped curb further abuses of the program.

Under the law, Japanese employers are obliged to secure accreditation for their training programs. The government also created a watchdog for the program, to more effectively confirm whether companies are complying with the new rules and not exploiting the trainees.

In fact, the probe showed that in 2018, after the implementation of the law, 658 trainees were confirmed as having fled their workplaces. A year earlier, the number stood at 1,163.

The official said, however, that with the increase in technical interns in Japan “there may be more cases that have not yet come to light.”

The findings have prompted the ministry to improve measures aimed at detecting and preventing further violations, including a mandatory requirement for firms accepting foreign interns to transfer wages to the trainees’ bank accounts to enable immigration officers to track the history of such transactions.

The government will also require companies using the program to share the number of trainees’ residence cards to help detect whether a trainee is trying to change jobs without permission.

The government is also working to strengthen support for foreign nationals and improve multilingual services to make such support more accessible.

At 11 a.m., March 31, 2 PLAAF J-11 jets violated the long-held tacit agreement by crossing the median line of the #Taiwan Strait. It was an intentional, reckless & provocative action. We've informed regional partners & condemn #China for such behavior.

Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen has ordered a “forceful expulsion” of PLA warplanes next time they cross the “median line” separating the self-ruled island from the Chinese mainland.