(Part 2)

Then after getting married I had the experience of a sojourn in Korea, a war-torn country split artificially into the Communist North and the supposedly Democratic South. Korea in 1958 was as depressing as its coal-blackened buildings and the suicidal look on the faces of the people. The tyranny and corruption of the Syngman Rhee government was a byword and when a student revolution swept his government away overnight, he and his foreign wife fled to Honolulu but his adopted son and heir following Korean custom lay the blame on his father by family suicide within the President’s Palace. An attempt at democracy followed but the military became impatient with the slowness of democratic process and a military coup d’ etat brought back dictatorship. I believe the dictatorship of President Park Sung Hee ended only with his assassination after a lengthy Marcos-like term. When I revisited Korea in 1978, 20 years after my sojourn there, I saw tremendous progress, unusual change from an individualistic, pushy way of life to one of order and organization; from corruption as way of life to a disciplined society. A Korean professor of history gives the credit to a real Christianization of Korea that had transformed itself into an argo-industrialized country. Instead of their importing finished products, Koreans have successfully competed with Japanese and Taiwanese and made a bid for standards acceptable in Western Countries. I saw samples of Korean products all over the US: something the Filipinos must learn—making the product equal the sample.

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