A semi-related article and some questions

First off, check Ariana Eunjung Cha's article in today's Wall Street Journal about Chinese 'success' books teaching people how to get rich 'the Jewish way'. In an interesting parallel to the Monnara series, those Chinese books were written to capitalize on a boom in the 'success book' market in China. Monnara's last three volumes about the U.S. were written to take advantage of the currently surging Korean fad of educational comic books. The books basically spring from the same source of misinformation, for example, the article says

Some works incorrectly refer to J.P. Morgan (an influential Episcopalian leader) and John D. Rockefeller (a devout Baptist) as Jewish businessmen.

All that is coming up in my next batch of translation, which I will hopefully get up tomorrow morning. I've translated up to page 43 but it's not easy to find time to sit and type it up. The funny thing is they just take opposite tacts. To the Chinese books, Jewish success is inspiring, and to Mr. Rhie, it's a wicked conspiracy. Interesting, I wonder if it has anything to do with national identity.


Also, I received an email from a friend of mine who has never been to Korea, and he had some questions I thought it would be helpful to answer here, so here goes.

Q: What is a social studies comic book?
A: It's a comic book that both kids and parents think is educational, and that kids read in order to gain knowledge about the world. Education is important to Koreans, so it's considered much better to read a book that is marginally educational than one that is 100% entertainment. Rest assured that this is big business, typical Korean kids have walls covered with these books, they buy entire series at a time. They tend to market themselves as more fun and less educational than Monnara does, it's on the educational end of the education-fun spectrum.

Q: Is anitisemitism common in Korea?
A: Perhaps the best answer I can come up with is that it's not uncommon to hear antisemitic and anti-Israel statements in Korea. Does that mean there is a lot of antisemitism in Korea? I don't know, there aren't a lot of Semites in Korea, nor is there much history between Korea and Jews.
To me, when I hear a Korean espouse an antisemitic view, it reminds me of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, when some people said "Those intractable Pashtun warriors will never be defeated. Their country has not been successfully invaded in thousands of years." and I wanted to ask them whether they learned about Afghanistan off the back of the Risk board game box or whether Colmes said it to Hannity the night before. In other words, anything resembling antisemitism in Korea is both hearsay and designed to fit a Korean view of the world, rather than being born of experience or arrived at through empirically obtained evidence.

Q: Is this propaganda or satirical?
A: Anyone who has lived in Korea likely laughed at this question as I did. Not satirical.

Q: If it is propaganda, what is it's purpose?
A: To make Korean children dislike/fear/suspect Jews.

Any more questions? Any better answers than mine? I'll bet there's plenty of both.