Gusts of Popular Feeling has an informative posting for those that are not familiar with the 1995 subway beat down involving an American soldier who had the nerve to protect his Korean wife on the subway:

It all began when an American soldier put his hand on a Korean woman’s rump.

The version that has captured the local imagination is that a group of drunken American soldiers were rampaging through the subway, molesting Korean women, and that the soldiers then attacked good citizens who dared protest the errant hand.

The American understanding of events starts with a fact that the Koreans tend to leave out: The American soldier and the Korean woman whose behind he patted were in fact a married couple.

The Americans say the problems arose when some angry young Koreans on the subway accused the American of sexually harassing the Korean woman. When the Korean woman explained that she was the American’s wife, the Korean men allegedly spat at her and slapped her — leading the woman’s husband to punch the man who slapped her.

In any case, the result that evening in May was a huge brawl in the subway. It has reverberated through the country and underscored the delicacy of the mission of the 37,000 American military personnel in bases in South Korea.

The soldier in question, his wife, and his friends that were with them initially received jail time but after appeal their sentences were reduced to fines while the Korean who started the brawl got away totally free.  This was 1995 and you would think the Koreans and the Korean legal system in general would have evolved since then.  Guess what, things haven’t changed.  If anything it has only gotten worse with soldiers being attacked & kidnapped from a subway, beaten, and forced to make coerced statements on national television among a host of other highly dubious incidents that the Koreans involved were not punished for. In fact these attackers of GIs are often considered heroes!

Justice for GIs continues to be hard to find in Korea and it didn’t start in 1995 and it shows no signs of ending today. 

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