AJU PRESS ASIA FIRST NEWS AGENCY

Journalist

Park Sae-jin
Park Sae-jin박세진
Assistant EditorForeign embassies in Seoul & Geopolitics, Diplomacy, Policy
Experienced journalist and editor at AJU PRESS specializing in multilingual news. I cover international diplomacy, geolpolitics, and policy, consistently delivering highly accurate, compelling reporting for a worldwide audience. "Reporting the facts. Shaping the narrative. Every second counts."
Latest by Park Sae-jin
  • South Korea moves to protect 3 century-old temple toilets
    South Korea moves to protect 3 century-old temple toilets SEOUL, August 04 (AJP) - Three wooden outhouses still in daily use at South Korean Buddhist temples are in line to become national heritage, a decision that pushes state protection past the golden halls and stone pagodas of temple life and into the buildings where monks actually lived. The Korea Heritage Service (KHS) issued advance notice Tuesday of the designation of three temple latrines as national folklore cultural heritage. They are the Cheukgan at Seonamsa in Suncheon, South Jeolla Province, the Haeuso at Bodeoksa in Yeongwol, Gangwon State, and the Haeuso at Gugiram, a hermitage within the Haeinsa complex in Hapcheon, South Gyeongsang Province. All three were built more than a century ago. They stand on their original sites in close to their original form, and they are still used by the monks who live there. Haeuso means the place where you set down your worries, and the name is more recent than the buildings. KHS credits the coinage to the monk Gyeongbong at Geungnagam, a hermitage at Tongdosa, in the years after the Korean War, and says it spread from there until it became the standard word for a temple toilet. Before that, temples used Cheukgan, the ordinary word for a latrine, or Dwitgan, or the scriptural Cheongcheuk. The building had status regardless of what it was called. In the Seon tradition, a monastery was organized around seven core structures. The latrine, known as Dongsa or the east hall, was one of them, alongside the Buddha hall, the lecture hall, the gate, the monks' quarters, the kitchen and the bath. Monastic codes set out how it was to be entered and used. For two of the three, the notice points to a promotion rather than a first recognition. Seonamsa's toilet has been listed as a South Jeolla provincial cultural heritage resource since June 2001, and Bodeoksa's has carried a Gangwon listing since January 2003. No equivalent provincial listing exists for the Gugiram building, which would enter the register directly at the national level. Moving up from a provincial list to the national one tightens the permit requirements for any repair or alteration and opens access to central government funding. Each building can be dated precisely, because Korean carpenters wrote the construction date in ink on the underside of the ridge beam when they raised the frame. Bodeoksa's toilet was built in 1882, and Gugiram's in 1910. Seonamsa's is harder to pin down. A 1704 temple record refers to a Cheongcheuk on the site, and a photograph from the Japanese colonial period shows the building in place, while an ink inscription records a repair in 1928. KHS dates it to sometime before the 1920s. Two of the three sit inside UNESCO World Heritage sites. Seonamsa was inscribed in 2018 as part of the Sansa group of mountain monasteries. Haeinsa holds the Tripitaka Koreana, the 13th century set of more than 80,000 carved woodblocks, in a depository that is itself World Heritage. Bodeoksa carries a different kind of weight. Founded in 668 by the monk Uisang, it was renamed and made the guardian temple of Jangneung, the tomb of King Danjong, the boy king deposed by his uncle and put to death in exile in Yeongwol in 1457. The buildings share a design logic. All three are cut into hillsides so that the front reads as a single story while the back drops away into a two-story pavilion, which lets waste fall clear and lets air move through the space underneath. There are no doors. Partitions rise to chest height, and slatted wooden windows sit at eye level, giving light, ventilation and a view of the mountainside at the same time. Bodeoksa's is the largest of the three, with 12 stalls in two rows of six, separated into sections for men and women, an arrangement that could handle a dozen people at once. Seonamsa's is the best known, familiar to Korean readers partly through a widely anthologized Jeong Ho-seung poem that instructs the grieving to travel there and weep. Outside the temple walls, the toilet occupied a different place in Korean life, and a more practical one. In a farming country with no sewers and no chemical fertilizer, human waste was an input. Households kept the Dwitgan at a distance from the living quarters, let the contents age for months, then carried them to the fields in an A-frame pack or in a squat earthenware jar called a Ttongjanggun. In cities, night soil collectors made the same journey on a larger scale, hauling buckets on carrying frames out to farmland at the edge of town. On Jeju Island, the latrine was built over a pigsty, and the pigs did the composting. Korean folk tales include the story of a miser who refused to relieve himself anywhere but at home, because the loss would have been real. Folk belief also placed a deity in the latrine, a bad-tempered one who had to be warned before anyone entered. Chemical fertilizer ended that economy. Ammonium sulfate and urea reached Korean farms in volume in the 1960s, and the value of night soil collapsed. Flush toilets and septic tanks spread through the 1970s and 1980s, first in apartment blocks and then almost everywhere else. Traditional latrines survived longest in rural villages and at temples, and they have been disappearing from both as buildings are modernized for hygiene, for visitor comfort and for the simple reason that a doorless structure with no plumbing is difficult to maintain. KHS describes the three buildings named Tuesday as heritage at risk of vanishing, and cites their continued use as part of what makes them valuable. At all three, the old cycle still runs. Waste is layered with rice hulls and fallen leaves, left to break down, and returned to temple fields as compost. The leaves also serve a more immediate purpose, which is to control the smell. KHS will take public comment for 30 days before the National Heritage Committee reviews the case and issues a final decision on designation. 2026-08-04 11:05:45
  • KAISTs AI builds workable schedules without optimization software
    KAIST's AI builds workable schedules without optimization software SEOUL, August 03 (AJP) - Researchers in South Korea have taught an artificial intelligence system to draw up delivery routes, factory schedules and hospital rosters that a company can actually run, without handing the job to the specialist commercial software the industry now relies on to make the numbers work. In testing, the system produced a legal plan in 100 percent of the problems it was handed, across five benchmark sets used throughout the field. No comparable method that learns end-to-end has managed that on its own. Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) announced the result on Monday. Kim Min-soo, a professor in the school of computing, led the team that built the system, which is called RL-SPH. The problem it goes after has a formal name in mathematics, integer linear programming, and a very ordinary shape in daily life. A courier company wants the shortest route. It also needs every parcel delivered, no van loaded past its capacity, and no driver kept behind the wheel longer than the law allows. A hospital wants a duty roster that covers every shift, respects rest requirements, and does not put the same nurse in two wards at once. A chip plant wants to hit its delivery dates without asking more of its equipment and its staff than they can give. Each of those conditions is a constraint. Break one and the plan is worthless, however efficient it looks on paper. A route that shaves 40 minutes off the day is no use if the van cannot physically hold the parcels. This is where AI has kept stumbling. Recent systems learned to guess at a cheap answer, and often guessed well on cost. They also produced plans that quietly violated a load limit or a working-hours rule. Companies dealt with that by passing the output to a solver, specialist optimization software that grinds through the arithmetic and repairs what the AI broke. The two best known, Gurobi and SCIP, do the heavy lifting in logistics and manufacturing worldwide. The AI never finished the job by itself. RL-SPH works more like a person redoing a timetable. Instead of predicting a finished answer in one shot, it starts with a plan that breaks the rules and edits it, one variable at a time. Change the number of vans. Change a shift length. See what broke and what got fixed, and learn from the result. The method behind it is reinforcement learning, in which a system improves through repeated trial and error rather than by studying worked examples. The design choice that matters is the order of priorities. The team told the system to find a legal plan first and a cheap one second. In a factory, that means locking in a schedule that meets every deadline and capacity limit, then squeezing cost and time out of it while keeping it legal. The researchers also proved mathematically that a system trained this way reaches a workable plan within a finite number of edits, rather than wandering indefinitely. Two other pieces make it faster. One is a model called ILP-GT, designed to catch relationships between variables sitting far apart in a problem, something earlier network designs handled poorly. The other is a search rule that targets the variables turning up most often in broken constraints instead of working through everything in turn. Across the five benchmarks, RL-SPH found a workable plan every time, including on harder cases involving variables that can take a wide range of values rather than a simple yes or no. Measured against existing methods that also hit a perfect record, it narrowed the distance to the theoretical best answer by 28.6 times on average and reached its first workable plan 2.5 times faster. Against the newest AI approaches, known as PAS, DDIM and DiffILO, it was the only one to hit 100 percent on all three benchmarks used in the comparison. Training took about 30 minutes, 14.7 times faster than established techniques and roughly 34 times faster than recent methods that learn without being shown correct answers. The team also ran it against MIPLIB, a public library of optimization problems that serves as a common yardstick for industry and academia. RL-SPH held up on problems as much as 67 times larger than anything in its training, and on problem types it had never encountered. "In the real world, a plan you can actually carry out matters more than the best possible answer," Kim said. He expects the method to become a foundation for AI-driven decisions in logistics, manufacturing, semiconductor production and workforce planning. Lee Tae-hoon, a doctoral student at KAIST, is the paper's first author, with Kim as corresponding author. The work was presented at the International Conference on Machine Learning, held from July 6 to 11 at COEX in Seoul. (Reference Information) Journal/Source: International Conference on Machine Learning Title: RL-SPH: Learning to Achieve Feasible Solutions for Integer Linear Programs Link/DOI: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2411.19517 2026-08-03 09:41:38
  • North Korea says peninsula conflict matter of time
    North Korea says peninsula conflict matter of time SEOUL, July 31 (AJP) - North Korea declared Friday that armed conflict on the Korean Peninsula is no longer a question of whether but of when, denouncing a personnel buildup at the US military command in Japan as proof that Washington is preparing for war in the region. The statement came days after Lt. Gen. Stephen Jost, commander of US Forces Japan, disclosed in an interview with Japan's Asahi Shimbun published Saturday that his headquarters had added 215 personnel over the past year. The increase is part of a multiphase restructuring, launched in 2025 and scheduled to conclude in spring 2028, that is turning the command from an alliance management body into what US officials describe as a warfighting headquarters. Pyongyang's official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said in a commentary that the buildup shows the command "is transforming into a 'war command' in both name and substance." The state-operated news agency said the reorganization's "sinister intention lies in using Japan's 'Self-Defense Forces' as shock troops and a core combat force for an all-out war in the Asia-Pacific region in a contingency." The commentary argued that North Korea itself would be the command's first objective. "Given that US Forces Japan is the core reinforcement the United States would send to South Korea first in a contingency on the Korean Peninsula, it is an undeniable fact that the primary target of this 'war command' is none other than our republic," it said. KCNA then delivered its starkest line. "As the enemies themselves have admitted, a physical clash on the Korean Peninsula today has clearly been defined not as a question of possibility, of whether it will happen or not, but as a question of time, of when it will happen," the commentary said. The wording echoed Jost's own remarks in the same Asahi Shimbun interview, in which he said the region must prepare "on the premise of not whether a crisis will occur, but when." The commentary also aimed recent allied military activity. It cited the Combined Joint Sustainment Training exercise conducted by the South Korea-US Combined Forces Command from July 13 to 16, using the epithet "South Korean puppet military gangsters" to describe the South's armed forces. It further pointed to an agreement by the top military officers of South Korea, the United States and Japan to continue the trilateral Freedom Edge exercises and deepen three-way security cooperation. North Korea cast those moves as justification for expanding its nuclear arsenal. "The desperate military adventurist acts of the United States are once again leading us to the irreversible conclusion that we must devote ourselves further to the ceaseless development and evolution of our self-defensive nuclear war deterrent," KCNA said. 2026-07-31 11:02:59
  •  KAIST develops technologies to cut AI sensory hallucinations
     KAIST develops technologies to cut AI sensory hallucinations SEOUL, July 31 (AJP) - South Korean researchers have developed two technologies that stop artificial intelligence from claiming to hear sounds that were never recorded or see objects that do not exist, a step toward AI systems reliable enough for self-driving cars, rescue robots, and hospitals. The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) said Friday that a team led by Professor Ro Yong-man from the institute's School of Electrical Engineering developed techniques to address two persistent weaknesses in multimodal AI, systems that process text, images, and sound together. One teaches AI to correctly read specialized sensors, such as thermal cameras and X-rays. The other prevents the system from confusing what it sees with what it hears. Neither requires retraining the AI from scratch, which the institute said makes both fast and cheap to deploy in industry. The problem the team set out to solve is known as hallucination, the tendency of AI models to generate confident but false output. In multimodal systems the errors take a particular form. Shown silent security footage of a passing car, existing models often report hearing an engine, simply because a car is visible on screen. The first technology, which the team calls Diverse Negative Attributes (DNA), addresses how AI misreads sensors that measure signals other than visible light. A person looking at a thermal image knows the bright areas are hot. Conventional AI, trained mostly on ordinary photographs, tends to interpret the brightness as light. The team developed a training method that repeatedly feeds the model examples it gets wrong, teaching it the physical meaning behind thermal, depth, and X-ray imagery. The result is a system that recognizes objects more accurately in darkness and smoke, using only a small amount of additional data. The second technology, Modality-Adaptive Decoding (MAD), tackles the crossed wires between sight and sound. Before answering a question, the AI first asks itself whether the answer should come from the video or the audio, then concentrates on the relevant channel while suppressing interference from the other. Because the method works at the moment the AI generates its answer, it can be added to existing models like a software plug-in, with no retraining at all. KAIST said the technologies could serve autonomous vehicles that must spot pedestrians at night or in fog, rescue robots searching for survivors in smoke-filled buildings, drones carrying thermal cameras, airport security systems that analyze X-ray scans, and medical AI that reads CT, MRI, and X-ray images together. "For multimodal AI to be used in real environments, it is important that it accurately understands the characteristics of various sensors and does not confuse different sensory inputs," Ro said. "This research lays the groundwork for multimodal AI that can be trusted in daily life and industrial settings by reducing sensory bias and hallucination without large-scale retraining." Doctoral student Chung Sang-yun served as first author on both studies, with Yoo Young-jun joining as co-first author on the DNA research. The MAD study was presented in June at the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), the top international venue in the field, and the DNA study was published in the journal IEEE Transactions on Image Processing. (Reference Information) Journal/Source: IEEE Transactions on Image Processing and IEEE / CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Title: Enhanced Vision-Language Models for Diverse Sensor Understanding: Cost-Efficient Optimization and Benchmarking MAD: Modality-Adaptive Decoding for Mitigating Cross-Modal Hallucinations in Multimodal Large Language Models Link/DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2412.20750 / 10.48550/arXiv.2601.21181 2026-07-31 09:51:43
  • Seoul says Chinas stance on denuclearization unchanged
    Seoul says China's stance on denuclearization unchanged SEOUL, July 30 (AJP) - South Korea's foreign ministry said Thursday that China's position on the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula has not changed, setting the tone for a planned visit to Seoul by Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, the first by a top Chinese diplomat since President Lee Jae Myung took office. Wang is expected to travel to Seoul on August 19 and 20 for talks with Foreign Minister Cho Hyun, according to diplomatic sources cited in Korean media reports, with a courtesy call on Lee also under arrangement. The trip carries an uncomfortable question. Wang visited Pyongyang in April, and Chinese President Xi Jinping followed in June, and on both occasions Beijing avoided any public mention of denuclearization, deepening concern in Seoul that China now values rebuilding ties with North Korea over resolving its nuclear program. Asked at a regular briefing whether the government sees a need for Beijing to publicly reaffirm the principle during the visit, and whether a joint document reflecting it is under discussion, foreign ministry spokesperson Park Il pointed to commitments already on the record. "Peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula are a common interest of the two countries," Park said, an understanding he said was confirmed through the leaders' reciprocal state visits, most recently Lee's state visit to Beijing in January. China has expressed its intent to play a constructive role toward that end, he added, and has said it would maintain the continuity and stability of its policy toward the peninsula. "The denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula is the consistent goal of the international community, confirmed through multiple Security Council resolutions, and our government will uphold that goal without wavering," Park said. "China, too, has seen no change in its position on the Korean Peninsula issue, and the US-China summit in May also confirmed that North Korea's denuclearization is a common goal." He did not address whether a joint statement or outcome document is being coordinated, saying only that the government would keep strengthening communication, including through the visit now in consultations, to draw out a constructive role from China. The summit reference has a paper trail. After US President Donald Trump met Xi in Beijing on May 14 and 15, the White House released a fact sheet stating the two presidents "confirmed their shared goal to denuclearize North Korea." Beijing never echoed the language. Asked days later to confirm the American account, Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said only that China's position and policy on the Korean Peninsula maintain continuity. Seoul has leaned on both statements since. The ministry delivered essentially the same answer in June, days after Xi returned from Pyongyang, making Thursday's response the latest recitation of a fixed line rather than a reaction to the visit reports. That is the ambiguity Wang would carry into Seoul. The South Korean government is expected to press for a more active Chinese role on the North Korean nuclear issue, while Beijing is likely to use the visit to present its position on Taiwan and its trade friction with Washington, and to restore balance to a peninsula diplomacy that has tilted heavily toward Pyongyang this year. Whether Wang states the word denuclearization in public while in Seoul will be watched as the clearest signal of where China actually stands. The last time the question was put to the test, the answer was silence. Xi spent two days in Pyongyang in June, his first visit to North Korea since 2019, and left without once mentioning denuclearization. 2026-07-30 16:22:14
  • Why Kazakhstan puts more women to work than Korea or US
    Why Kazakhstan puts more women to work than Korea or US SEOUL, July 30 (AJP) - Kazakhstan's female workforce grew again in the first quarter of 2026, extending the reach of one of the world's higher rates of working women, a distinction the Central Asian country owes less to recent policy than to a century of history. The number of employed women reached 4.527 million in the first three months of the year, up 42,600 or 0.9 percent from a year earlier, according to Kazakhstan's National Statistics Bureau under the Agency for Strategic Planning and Reforms. Of them, 79.6 percent worked as employees while 20.4 percent, or 925,100 women, were self-employed. The scale of female participation sets Kazakhstan apart from far wealthier economies. World Bank data put the country's female labor force participation rate at about 66 percent in 2024, well above the world average of 51 percent, and ahead of both South Korea at 56 percent and the United States, where the Bureau of Labor Statistics measured the rate at 57.5 percent in early 2025. The explanation begins in the Soviet era. For seven decades, state policy pushed women into employment, education, and professional training across Soviet Central Asia, backed by universal childcare and a social expectation that women worked. When Kazakhstan became independent in 1991, the norm survived the state that built it. Researchers point to that inheritance as the main reason post-Soviet countries cluster far above nations of comparable income on female employment. Education has sustained the pattern. Women make up the majority of university students in Kazakhstan, and the state has kept investing in female education since independence, including scholarships that sent thousands of women to universities abroad. Economic necessity did its own quiet work. The turbulence of the post-Soviet transition made single-income households unaffordable for most families, and two earners have remained the default ever since. Government policy came later. Kazakhstan adopted its Concept of Family and Gender Policy in 2016 and, after joining two UN Generation Equality coalitions in 2021, abolished a Soviet-era list of professions legally closed to women, opening jobs in mining, transport, and heavy industry. The first-quarter data suggests women are moving into those newly opened sectors. The fastest annual growth in female employment came in real estate, up 25.7 percent, followed by administrative and support services at 21.9 percent, transportation and warehousing at 16.2 percent, and industry at 7.6 percent. Some 388,100 women now work in industry. Most working women, however, remain concentrated where they long have been. Education is the largest employer of women with 902,200 workers, or 19.9 percent of the total, followed by wholesale and retail trade with 877,600 and healthcare and social work with 426,300. Together, the three sectors account for nearly half of all employed women in the country. That concentration feeds the number that complicates Kazakhstan's success story. Women earned an average of 344,496 tenge, about $686, in the first quarter of 2025, against 468,914 tenge, about $934, for men, a gap of roughly 26.5 percent, according to the statistics bureau. The gap had narrowed from 32.2 percent in 2013 to 21.7 percent in 2021, then widened again to 25.7 percent by 2023. By international standards, the disparity is wide. The OECD, which compares median earnings of full-time workers, put its members' average gap at 11.3 percent, with the United States around 16 percent and Japan at 21.3 percent. South Korea recorded the widest gap in the group at 29.3 percent in 2023, a position it has held for decades, leaving Kazakhstan narrower than Korea but roughly double the OECD norm. The Asian Development Bank concluded in its country gender assessment that while Kazakhstan's participation rate compares well internationally, the gaps between men and women in both participation and wages are not narrowing. Women also carry more unpaid domestic work than men on top of their jobs, the bank found. The government has answered with targets. Its updated Concept of Family and Gender Policy through 2030 commits to raising the share of women at decision-making levels in state bodies, the judiciary, and the corporate sector to 30 percent by 2030, alongside measures on the wage gap and women's asset ownership. A national action plan for 2024 to 2027 folds gender equality into budgeting and labor law, and the UN Development Programme launched a campaign in Kazakhstan in 2023 pressing companies toward pay transparency. 2026-07-30 16:14:52
  • S. Koreas football chiefs apologize over World Cup failure
    S. Korea's football chiefs apologize over World Cup failure SEOUL, July 30 (AJP) - The two men most blamed for South Korea's worst World Cup showing in a generation bowed their heads before lawmakers on Wednesday, as parliament opened a public reckoning over how the national team crashed out and who let it happen. South Korea exited the 2026 World Cup at the group stage despite fielding European-based stars including Son Heung-min and Lee Kang-in, a result made harder to accept by the tournament's expansion to 48 teams and a draw widely seen as favorable. The failure set off a wave of public anger that has gone beyond the team's performance to the governance of Korean football itself. That anger reached the National Assembly on Wednesday, where the Culture, Sports and Tourism Committee summoned former Korea Football Association president Chung Mong-gyu and former national team coach Hong Myung-bo as witnesses. "I did my utmost for the development of Korean football during my tenure, but I am sorry for the series of controversies and the disappointing result at the North American World Cup," Chung said in his opening statement. "I feel the weight of my responsibility as president, and I apologize for falling short of the expectations of the public and football fans." Hong followed with his own apology. "I want to first say to the public that I am sorry for failing to live up to your expectations at the World Cup," the 2002 World Cup hero said, adding: "I take seriously the responsibility for not repaying the support given to the team. Today I will speak plainly about what I know and the responsibility I must bear, without avoiding it." Hong also addressed his players. "I want to convey my regret and gratitude to the players who ran to the end in difficult circumstances," he said. "I take it seriously that I could not repay their effort with a result." For Hong, the hearing revisited a wound that predates the tournament. His appointment in July 2024 drew immediate controversy because he was the only one of three final candidates who went through no formal interview or presentation. The Korea Football Association (KFA) instead sent its technical director to Hong's home late at night to persuade him to take the job, and a government audit later found procedural violations in the process. Bae Hyun-jin, a lawmaker of the People Power Party, pressed Hong on that history. "In 2024, Lee Lim-saeng, a director who had no authority to recommend a coach, met you at 11 pm as if holding an interview in a bakery, and you were appointed without any separate interview or presentation," she said at the hearing. "Did you not feel ashamed before your juniors and football officials that one could become national team coach through a bakery interview?" Hong held his ground. "When the offer came to me, I believed it had gone through a normal process," he said. "I understand the public may see it as opaque, but I never asked for any special treatment or benefit." The distrust followed Hong through his tenure. Fans booed his name at home matches and hung banners at Seoul World Cup Stadium reading "the dark age of Korean football," while chants demanding Chung's resignation rang out at kickoff. The group-stage exit also echoed Hong's first spell in charge, when South Korea went out winless at the 2014 World Cup in Brazil amid accusations that he favored players he knew personally. Chung's 13 years atop the KFA gave the hearing a wider target. His tenure covered the appointment and costly dismissal of Jurgen Klinsmann, the team's collapse at the 2023 Asian Cup, and repeated administrative controversies, and he stepped down after the World Cup as the government launched a reform drive. A K-Football Innovation Committee, co-chaired by former national team star Park Ji-sung, is now reviewing the sport's governance, including the KFA's election system. Chung told lawmakers he would step back from football entirely. "After resigning as president, I will focus on management as a businessman and contribute to society," he said. One question remained over his international posts. Chung holds positions including vice chairman of a FIFA commercial and marketing advisory body and a seat on the executive committee of the Asian Football Confederation, and Chung Yeon-wook, a lawmaker of the People Power Party, asked whether his staying on the international stage was an asset for Korean football diplomacy or an unfinished exit. "Having resigned as association president, I have no attachment to those positions," Chung Mong-gyu said. "Once a new president is elected and a new leadership is formed, I will follow their decision." 2026-07-30 12:54:20
  • What Grammys lost when BTS walked away
    What Grammys lost when BTS walked away For five years, BTS wanted a Grammy, and the wanting was never hidden. The group submitted its music every cycle. Its members flew to Las Vegas and delivered performances that outclassed the ceremony hosting them, went home with nothing, and returned the next year to try again. On the red carpet in 2022, RM told American cable TV entertainment news operation E! News that the previous two years had been exhausting and devastating, and that a Grammy would make it all pay off. He said this as the leader of the best-selling act on the planet, which tells you the trophy had stopped being a prize somewhere along the way and had become something closer to a verdict he was waiting to hear. I watched that ceremony live on a Monday morning in the newsroom, the way Korea always watches American award shows, at the wrong hour and with too much riding on it. About 15 of us stood around the television, editors and reporters still in face masks in those pandemic days. When the "Butter" performance ended, nobody said anything, and nobody needed to. Whatever a world-class act was, we had just watched one. Minutes later the award went to someone else, and the gap between what we had seen and what the voters had seen was the whole story, though it would take four more years for BTS to say so themselves. They said it on July 29. Each of the seven members posted the same brief statement announcing that the group would not submit its music to the Grammys this year, adding a hope that music might be heard and loved for what it is rather than sorted by region or language. Big Hit Music asked that the statement be taken as written, and taken as written it is remarkable, because it asks for nothing. A boycott makes demands. This made none, set no conditions, named no grievance, and offered the Recording Academy no way to win them back. You negotiate with an institution whose judgment you still need. The one whose judgment you have outgrown, you simply inform. The timeline explains what the statement declined to. In February, the Grammys had their most open night in memory: Bad Bunny won Album of the Year with a record sung entirely in Spanish, the first in the award's history, while a song from an animated film about Korean pop stars became the first K-pop recording ever to take home a Grammy, its writers giving their acceptance speech in English and Korean both. For one evening, the ceremony resembled its own advertising, a room where the language of a song was no obstacle to its honor. In March, BTS came back from military service with ARIRANG, which opened with the biggest American sales week any group had posted in more than a decade. And in June, with BTS holding the number one album and number one song in the Academy's home market, the Recording Academy unveiled a new category: Best Asian Pop Music Performance, reserved for songs making meaningful use of an Asian language. Read that rule against the group's own history and it curdles. The song that earned BTS its first Grammy nomination was "Dynamite," performed entirely in English. Under the new category's terms, "Dynamite" would not qualify. So the institution that recognized these seven men only when they sang in English has now prepared a room they may enter only if they sing in Korean, and whichever language they choose, the room is never the main one. I doubt anyone at the Academy designed this on purpose. It reads like reflex, the old institutional habit of responding to a periphery grown too large to ignore by building an annex rather than widening the center. The Recording Academy has met this habit in itself before. In 2020, it renamed Best World Music Album as Best Global Music Album, conceding that the old term carried what it delicately called connotations of colonialism. "World," it turned out, had always meant everyone else, and the category had functioned as a holding pen with a friendly name. The Academy admitted as much and collected praise for the admission. Five years later, the pen has been rebuilt with Asia written on the gate. The vocabulary improved in the renaming. The habit did not. Bong Joon-ho saw all of this coming, in his own field, in the fall of 2019. Asked by Vulture why no Korean film had ever been nominated for an Oscar, a question resting on the assumption that Korea owed Hollywood an explanation for its absence, Bong refused the premise entirely and observed that the Oscars are not an international film festival but a very local one. The line traveled the world as a burn. It was actually a measurement, taken without heat, of an institution that had confused its own size with the size of the world, and it stung precisely because it was accurate and nobody in that world had been positioned to say it aloud. Four months later the Academy gave Parasite its highest prize, which was called history, though it might as easily be called an institution scrambling to agree with him. BTS has taken Bong's measurement and reached the opposite door, and the difference lies not in the judgment but in what each institution offered. Hollywood, once measured, opened its front entrance, so Bong walked in. The Recording Academy, once measured, offered a side entrance with a language test, so BTS walked out. These look like opposite choices. They are the same choice, made by Korean artists who stopped letting an American ceremony decide how large they were. The strongest case for entering anyway sat in February's ceremony itself, where Bad Bunny collected the open field's greatest prize and a specialty award in the same evening, proving a category can be a floor rather than a ceiling. But he arrived at that ceremony with something left to win. BTS would arrive with nothing to win and one thing to lose. Five nominations in open competition, five losses: that zero has hardened into a monument, and what it indicts is not the music, on which the world ruled long ago, but the room. Let BTS claim the inaugural Asian award and the monument inverts. The story of the group the Grammys failed to honor becomes the story of the group that finally won, in the category built for it, and a decade of open-field defeats gets quietly refiled as evidence the annex was needed all along. So the Academy will lose nothing visible in February. Award shows are practiced at not noticing who is missing, and the broadcast will glitter as usual. What it lost on July 29 is the thing no broadcast can generate. An award has no value of its own; it is worth exactly what the wanting of it is worth, and the wanting must be freely given. For five years the biggest band on earth gave it freely, showing up, performing, losing, returning, lending the ceremony the one asset it cannot manufacture, the sight of someone enormous still hoping. That hope was always the Grammys' property more than BTS's weakness. It has now been withdrawn, without anger, without demands, in a statement short enough to fit on a phone screen, by seven men who knocked at a door for years and were at last, generously, offered a smaller one. Submissions for the 69th Grammy Awards close on August 28. The ceremony follows on February 7 at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles, where last February, for one night, the room briefly resembled the world. BTS will not be there to see whether it happens again. 2026-07-30 10:05:07
  • US ambassador Steel to land in Seoul after 18-month vacancy
    US ambassador Steel to land in Seoul after 18-month vacancy SEOUL, July 30 (AJP) - The new United States ambassador to South Korea lands in Seoul on Thursday afternoon, ending a vacancy of about 18 months at the top of the American mission and filling the post for the first time since President Donald Trump returned to office. Michelle Steel is expected to arrive at Incheon International Airport at about 3:20 p.m. She will deliver an arrival statement to reporters at 4 p.m. in the briefing room at the first-floor entrance to the VIP lounge in Terminal 2, according to the United States Embassy in Seoul. The job has had no confirmed occupant since Philip Goldberg left in January 2025. James Heller has run the embassy in the interim as chargé d'affaires, the senior diplomat who leads a mission when no ambassador is in place. Steel's confirmation closed a process that began in the spring. Trump sent the nomination to the Senate on April 13, and it was referred that day to the Foreign Relations Committee. The committee approved her 14 to 8 on June 4, and the full Senate confirmed her on June 17 by a vote of 55 to 39. Her statement to the committee, submitted at her May 20 hearing, set out how she reads the relationship. She described the alliance as the linchpin of peace, security and prosperity in Northeast Asia for more than seven decades, and called the combined defense posture, anchored by the 28,500 members of United States Forces Korea and reinforced by extended nuclear deterrence, the bedrock of the partnership. It "remains ironclad," she wrote. She named three security problems the two governments work on together: North Korea's unlawful weapons programs, its expanding cybercrime operations and its deepening military cooperation with Russia. She pointed to the trilateral partnership with Japan as part of the effort to defend a free and open Indo-Pacific. On the economic side, she cited the strategic trade and investment agreement reached in 2025, under which Seoul committed to invest $350 billion in American strategic industries and to reduce barriers to American exports, and said the joint fact sheet issued after Trump's state visit to Gyeongju set out an upgrade to security cooperation that included a South Korean pledge to expand defense spending. Her own account of how she reached Seoul runs through the war that created the alliance. Her parents fled North Korea during the Korean War and built a life in the South, where she was born. In her statement she noted that more than 36,000 Americans died defending that country. The family later moved to Japan, where she studied at Nippon Joshi Dai, Japan Women's University, and her father encouraged her to continue on to the United States. English, she told the committee, is her third language. Steel won a seat on the California State Board of Equalization, the only elected tax board in the country, where she represented more than nine million constituents, then served as supervisor and chairwoman of the Orange County Board of Supervisors. In the House of Representatives, she served two terms representing California's 48th and 45th districts, sat on the Ways and Means Committee, and worked on the Transportation and Infrastructure and Education and Labor committees, on issues ranging from tax policy to relations with China. She holds a bachelor's degree in business administration from Pepperdine University and an executive master of business administration from the University of Southern California, and the State Department describes her as fluent in Korean and Japanese. The department, in its certificate of competency submitted to the Senate in April, concluded that her record in elected office and her experience abroad make her well qualified for the post. 2026-07-30 09:39:30
  • Seoul office vacancy hits 5-year high on new downtown supply
    Seoul office vacancy hits 5-year high on new downtown supply SEOUL, July 29 (AJP) - Seoul's Grade A office vacancy rate rose to 5.8 percent in the second quarter, up 1.8 percentage points from the previous quarter and the highest level since the third quarter of 2021, according to a report released by Cushman & Wakefield Korea, the local arm of the global commercial real estate services firm. The increase was driven by new supply rather than falling demand. Two large towers, G1 Seoul in the Gongpyeong redevelopment zone and Rene Square near Euljiro 3-ga, were completed in the central business district at the same time, adding space that has yet to be absorbed. Average rents rose 1.3 percent from the previous quarter and 5.0 percent from a year earlier. Vacancy in the central business district jumped 3.3 percentage points to 9.0 percent, the steepest rise among Seoul's three major office districts. The report said initial vacancy at the new towers remained despite lease signings by large companies, while existing buildings in the area continued to fill. IQVIA signed a lease at Pine Avenue Tower A, and LG Household & Health Care and the Korea Public Finance Information Service expanded their space at Seoul City Tower. The quarter also saw companies moving between districts. MetLife Korea is relocating its headquarters from the Gangnam business district to G1 Seoul, taking 12,900 square meters, and Lotte Rental is preparing to move from Gangnam to NH NongHyup Tower downtown. Their departures pushed Gangnam's vacancy rate up 0.6 percentage point to 3.1 percent, still the lowest among the three districts. Gangnam also recorded the city's highest average asking rent at 42,444 won per square meter, against a citywide average of 39,883 won. Among new arrivals, Anthropic, the developer of the AI assistant Claude, selected the Centerfield building for its Korea office, a 3,700-square-meter lease. Hyundai Marine & Fire Insurance took 4,100 square meters in the same building, and Hyosung ITX and Wyatt also signed leases in the district. The Yeouido business district saw vacancy rise 0.5 percentage point to 3.7 percent as financial firms continued to relocate and expand. Woori Investment & Securities announced plans to expand within One Sentinel, and the Korea Trade Insurance Corporation is set to relocate to Three IFC. Net absorption across the city totaled 8,251 square meters for the quarter, with the central business district recording 40,143 square meters against negative figures in Gangnam and Yeouido. On the economic front, the report noted that consumer inflation reached 3.2 percent in June, prompting the Bank of Korea to raise its base rate by 25 basis points to 2.75 percent at the start of the third quarter. The 2026 growth forecast was revised up to 2.6 percent on strong semiconductor exports, though higher rates are expected to weigh on domestic demand. Choi Yong-jun, who heads occupier services at Cushman & Wakefield Korea, said the quarter was defined by "a divergence in which a temporary rise in vacancy driven by new prime office supply and a structural realignment across districts are unfolding at the same time." Eul Tower, a 44,900-square-meter project near Euljiro 3-ga, is scheduled for completion in the fourth quarter, and the report forecast that central business district vacancy would hold near current levels through year-end. "The consolidation of the Gangnam district as an essential entry point for global big tech and AI companies will be a key indicator determining the direction of Seoul's office leasing market going forward," Choi said. 2026-07-29 15:37:49