Shooting Rampage by Korean in Oakland

Oakland Shooting Rampage Forces Korean-Americans to Search for Answers Within The Community

From New America Media:

  

SAN FRANCISCO — The shooting that killed seven at a private Christian university in Oakland would never have happened in Korea, where owning a firearm is outlawed. That at least is the assessment of community members who point to America’s own thriving gun culture as a causal factor in this and other incidents.

“Gun possession is a major factor in the deadly shootings,” said Nam Paik, pastor of the Northern California Deaf Church based in Fremont, Calif. “Sometimes frustration and anger can boil over into direct and violent action through the use of firearms.”

The shooting, the Bay Area’s worst mass murder in nearly two decades, occurred Monday morning at Oikos University, in a business park between Interstate 880 and Oakland International Airport. Another three were injured in the slaughter, according to police.

The shooter has been identified as 43-year-old naturalized Korean American One (Won) Goh, a former nursing student at the school. A report in the SF Chronicle notes that Goh may have been involved in a dispute with campus officials. He was apprehended an hour-and-a-half later in Alameda, after having fled in a victim’s car.

“Life as an immigrant in this country can be very isolating and lonely,” explained Paik. “Also, the violence in American culture… with high rates of gun possession and an entertainment industry that glorifies violence can definitely influence people.”

One of the victims, Hyun-joo Shim, 21, was enrolled in the school’s nursing program, according to Joo-young Hwang, a reporter with the Korean-language Korea Daily. Hwang says the victim’s father had been waiting just off campus for his daughter to come out. “I have a bad feeling,” he told Hwang, after failing to reach Shim by phone.

“I regret it happened in the Korean community,” said Jae-sun Kim with the Korean Consulate in San Francisco.

Kyung Chan Kim, a pastor at the Richmond Korean Baptist Church and head of the Northern California Korean Christian Association, expressed condolences to the families of the victims, but was quick to distance the community from the violence.

“I’m very sorry to the victims of the shooting, and I’m very sorry that it happened in a Korean Christian school,” said Kim. “However, this kind of incident can happen regardless of place. I don’t think it’s just a problem within the Korean community.”

Such statements are exactly what Jonathan H. Lee, chair of the Department of Primary Care and Community Medicine at the San Mateo Medical Center, warns against. Lee, who is Korean American, says members must take stock of to what extent this tragedy reflects something within their own community.

“There is a racial overlay to this,” said Lee, noting that both the shooter and the university were part of the Korean-American community. “Koreans are implicated… [but] the reaction of the Korean community is probably going to be to find an explanation that doesn’t require them to go inward.”

Part of that may have to do with religion, he adds. “Many of the patients I see, who are more fundamentalist, tend not to acknowledge science.”

There is already a well-documented cultural reticence to acknowledging mental illness among Koreans, a tendency that is particularly pronounced among the more devout. “Some of them have a hard time accepting that their blood sugar count might be low,” said Lee, who notes that for some religiously inclined Koreans, admitting to such afflictions as mental disease can be tantamount to a weakness of faith.

“I met the assailant a couple of times, but don’t know him well,” said Dong Kim, publisher of the Korean-language weekly Hyundai News U.S.A. and a long time Oakland resident. “I heard he used to work at a Korean supermarket in Daly City, and that other staff there feared him.”

That description echoes similar statements following the shooting rampage at Virginia Tech in 2007, which killed 32 and wounded 25. The attacker, Seung-hui Cho, was a Korean American enrolled at the university. Like Goh, he used a .45 caliber handgun in the attacks. Cho had previously been diagnosed with a severe anxiety disorder. Korean media at the time were quick to note that he was raised in the United States.

In February of this year, a Korean man in Atlanta entered a sauna and opened fire, killing four before turning the gun on himself. All four victims were related to the shooter in that case. Officials say a domestic dispute led to the killings.

“It’s not just an individual problem,” said Dong, who like Lee feels this latest incident highlights potentially deeper problems within the community. Pointing to increasingly common reports out of South Korea about the often violent bullying that occurs there, sometimes driving victims to suicide, Dong says such bullying “doesn’t only happen in schools.”

Korean Plastic Surgery Culture

In South Korea, Plastic Surgery Comes Out of the Closet

Jean Chung for the International Herald Tribune

Dr. Park Sang-hoon, head of a top-ranked clinic in southern Seoul, consulted with Chang Hae-jin after her double-jaw surgery, a procedure that involves cutting and rearranging the upper and lower jaws.

Chang Hyang-sook, a makeup artist, paid the 2.3 million won, or about $2,000, to make her eyes look larger and rounder.

“Promise you’ll do a great job on my eyes,” Ms. Chang said to Dr. Seo. “Never mind the pain. I can take it.”

For Ms. Chang, 25, a makeup artist, the 2.3 million won, or about $2,000, eye job is just the finishing touch in a program several months long to remake her face. In the previous two months, Ms. Chang had not only had her teeth rearranged, but her jaw bones cut and repositioned, for 22 million won.

“You must endure pain to be beautiful,” she said, adding that an eye job is so routine these days “it’s not even considered surgery.”

Cosmetic surgery has long been widespread in South Korea. But until recently, it was something to keep quiet about. No longer.

And as society has become more open about the practice, surgeries have become increasingly extreme. Double-jaw surgery — which was originally developed to repair facial deformities, and involves cutting and rearranging the upper and lower jaws — has become a favorite procedure for South Korean women who are no longer satisfied with mere nose jobs or with paring down cheekbones to achieve a smoother facial line.

Celebrities have helped to drive the trend, as they scramble to keep ahead of digital technology that mercilessly exposes not only their physical imperfections, but any attempts to remedy them, said Rando Kim, a professor of consumer science at Seoul National University.

“Wide-screen and high-definition TV put pressure on them to look good in close-ups,” Mr. Kim said. “And with the Internet, where people like to post ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures, they can no longer hide it. So they go public, often talking proudly about it on TV.”

That, in turn, has encouraged greater openness among ordinary South Koreans.

“It used to be all hush-hush when mothers brought their daughters in for a face-lift before taking them to match-makers,” said Dr. Park Sang-hoon, head of ID Hospital. “Now young women go plastic surgery shopping around here.”

Dr. Park’s is a top-ranked clinic in Seoul’s “beauty belt,” a swarm of hundreds of plastic surgery clinics clustered around a string of subway stations in the upscale districts of southern Seoul.

“Where did you get it?” asks one of the ads for clinics that cover the walls at the entrances of the Apgujeong subway station, the center of the beauty belt. “What about your nose? And your chin?”

Parents may promise their daughter an eye job if she passes her college entrance exam. In Apgujeong, it is not hard to find young women shopping in department stores immediately after their surgeries, wearing masks or sunglasses.

“Korean women want a revolution with their face,” said Dr. Park, a leading practitioner of double-jaw surgery.

“What we do in double-jaw surgery is to reassemble the face,” said Dr. Park, whose clinic has performed 3,000 such procedures in the past six years. “Normal people become, sort of, super-normal, and pretty people prettier.”

In traditional Korea, tampering with the body bestowed by one’s parents was a violation of Confucian precepts that also discouraged cremation and, later, organ and blood donations.

But in recent decades, cosmetic surgery has become a weapon in Koreans’ efforts to impress others, “like buying an expensive handbag,” said Whang Sang-min, a psychologist at Yonsei University.

Cosmetic surgery is not covered by national health insurance, making it difficult to determine the exact size of the industry. A survey last year by the Seoul city government found that 31.5 percent of residents 15 or older were willing to undergo surgery to improve their looks. In 2007 the percentage was 21.5.

In a 2009 survey by the market research firm Trend Monitor, one of every five women in Seoul between the ages of 19 and 49 said they had undergone plastic surgery.

The number of doctors trained as plastic surgeons has almost doubled in the past decade to 1,500. But 4,000 clinics provide cosmetic surgery, most of them in Seoul’s beauty belt, because the law allows other doctors to switch to this lucrative field. As competition heats up, some clinics host “Cinderella events,” where patients are given free surgery and appear in their ads.

Doctors say their main patients are young women entering the marriage and job markets. “As it gets harder to find jobs, they’ve come to believe they must look good to survive,” said Choi Set-byol, a sociologist at Ewha Woman’s University.

When the government imposed a 10 percent tax on five popular types of cosmetic surgery in July, civic groups as well as surgeons protested that this discriminated against women and the poor.

One consequence of the boom is that young women look increasingly alike, doctors say. “They come in with photos of starlets whose face they want to copy,” Dr. Park said.

“Koreans agree on what constitutes a pretty face,” he said. “The consensus, now, is a smaller, more sharply defined youthful face — a more or less Westernized look. That makes 90 percent of Koreans potential patients because they’re not born with that kind of face.”

Not everyone is happy with this development.

The film director Im Kwon-taek says it has become all but impossible to find an actress who still has a traditional Korean face. “They all have that surgery to have their eyelids scrolled up,” he said. “What kind of eye is that?”

He said that one day he was watching a provincial beauty competition on television and almost jumped up when he saw a young woman with a relatively round face with natural eyes.

He cast her in a movie set in old Korea.

In August, the Education Ministry issued a booklet warning high school students of “plastic surgery syndrome,” citing Michael Jackson and a local woman whose addiction to plastic surgery left her with a grotesquely swollen face. Last November, a woman hanged herself after her double-jaw surgery went wrong. “Every waking minute is hell,” she wrote in her diary of the pain.

Recently, a local television station secretly filmed a hospital official trying to sell a double-jaw procedure to a woman. “You want to get married?” he asked. “Then you have to do this, you have to take the risk.”

Chang Hae-jin, 21, an art student who was self-conscious about her slightly protruding teeth and chin decided to take that risk with Dr. Park. For weeks after the operation, she could not speak with her heavily bandaged swollen face. But it was worth it, she said.

“It opened a new world for me,” she said. “In the train today, a man sitting next to me talked to me. He said I looked younger than I am.

“My life has become much brighter.”

A version of this article appeared in print on November 4, 2011, in The International Herald Tribune with the headline: In South Korea, Plastic Surgery Comes Out of the Closet.

Korean prostitute in Texas

Texas County Declares War on Korean Brothels

In this TV image grab, police arrest sex workers in Harris County in Houston, Texas in early May. /Courtesy of ABC 13.

Harris County in Houston, Texas has declared war on Korean brothels, seeking to stamp out prostitution and other illegal activity. The county on Wednesday submitted a petition to a local court seeking to close down three massage parlors and one night club run by Koreans.

According to the Houston Chronicle, Harris County wrote in the petition that the proprietors “use young women, mostly from Korea, to perform services.”  County officials are seeking a court order to shut them down for one year.

It is rare for a U.S. county to single out a particular establishment for closure, but there had been constant complaints from local residents. “According to a news release from Harris County Attorney Vince Ryan’s office, hundreds of calls for service have been made to law enforcement agencies since 2009 resulting in 57 investigations,” the paper said. A police raid on the massage parlors resulted in the arrests of seven sex workers, six of them Korean.

City officials in Los Angeles, Atlanta and New Jersey, which have large Korean populations, are also having a hard time trying to deal with Korean brothels. The situation is the same in Australia, Japan and other countries.

Late last year, the Washington Post said there were more than 80 Asian women in the northern Virginia region engaged in prostitution, most of them Korean. It said they come to the U.S. in search of a new life, but most of them cannot escape the shackles of prostitution.

englishnews@chosun.com / Jun. 15, 2012 11:16 KST

10% of Korean Prostitutes Work Overseas

ChosunMedia The CHOSUNILBO

10% of Korean Prostitutes Work Overseas

Around 10 percent of Korean prostitutes work in brothels in the U.S., Japan, Australia and other countries, police estimate. They are also increasingly going to Dubai, according to a report by Busan police for the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family.

According to the Busan Metropolitan Police, most prostitutes working in brothels overseas leave Korea on two-month travel visas and earn W20-30 million (US$1=W1,158) a month.

“Half of the sex workers do it to pay off debts and half voluntarily. We estimate around 20,000 work in brothels in Japan and some 10,000 in Australia, but many of the ones who go to the U.S. enter the country illegally through Mexico, so it’s not easy to keep tabs,” said Nam Jae-woo, head of the international crimes investigation at the Busan Metropolitan Police.

englishnews@chosun.com / Jun. 19, 2012 07:52 KST

11 Korean working holidayers caught for prostitution in Australia

YONHAPNEWS AGENCY – 11 Korean working holidayers caught for prostitution in Australia –

SEOUL, Nov. 17 (Yonhap) — Eleven South Korean nationals were reported to have been engaged in work as prostitutes in Australia since 2006 while under the working-holiday visa program, a government report said Thursday.
The report by South Korea’s foreign ministry came after Seoul and Canberra agreed this week to bolster cooperation on investigating the alleged trafficking of some Korean women in Australia and coerced prostitution by abusing the visa program.

1 In 6 Prostitutes In Australia Are Korean

ROK Drop – KOREA FROM NORTH TO SOUTH – 

By GI Korea on May 6th, 2012 at 5:34 pm

1 In 6 Prostitutes In Australia Are Reportedly Korean

» by GI Korea in: Prostitution

Via a reader tip from the Open Thread comes this news that there is supposedly a lot of Korean prostitutes Down Under:

The Australian state with the largest Korean population in the country is currently investigating prostitution involving Korean women, according to a member of the state’s parliament.

Victor Michael Dominello, a member of the New South Wales Legislative Assembly, said that the investigation started at the request of the Korean multicultural committee he set up.

More than 1,000 Korean women are estimated to be involved in prostitution in Australia, a number that increased sharply in recent years, according to data from an Australian civic group. Some data say that about one-sixth of all women providing sex for money in Australia are Korean.

As the numbers grew, the prostitution issue emerged as a diplomatic concern between Korea and Australia.   [Joong Ang Ilbo]

For anyone that has been to Sydney the Korean prostitutes working around Kings Cross are pretty obvious.  The issue isn’t so much that so many Korean women are working as prostitutes but that many of them are beingtrafficked into Australia on holiday visas and supposedly coerced into prostitution.

• tbonetylr
  4:17 pm on May 6th, 20121“Victor Michael Dominello, a member of the New South Wales Legislative Assembly, said that the investigation started at the request of the Korean multicultural committee he set up.”I’d bet the S. Korean Multicultural Committee wants names from V.M. Dominello so the S. Korean Justice Ministry can catch(arrest) the S. Korean women when they return to S. Korea.“Trafficked into Australia”
  Let me guess…by S. Koreans?
• Koreans are the same as everybody else
  4:28 pm on May 6th, 20122Korean will talk all this nonsence about “we are Korean” but they will make a buck off of someone’s else’s daughter. Leaching off the back of the week and poor of your nation like scum you are
• tbonetylr
  4:59 pm on May 6th, 20123I clicked on the last link and this is what Yonhap wrote…
  ’11 Korean working holidayers caught for prostitution in Australia’
  SEOUL, Nov. 17 (Yonhap) — Eleven South Korean nationals were reported to have been engaged in work as prostitutes in Australia since 2006 while under the working-holiday visa program, a government report said Thursday.The report by South Korea’s foreign ministry came after Seoul and Canberra agreed this week to bolster cooperation on investigating the alleged trafficking of some Korean women in Australia and coerced prostitution by abusing the visa program.Funny how it’s only “alleged” when 1 in 6 prostitutes are S. Korean. 
• ohmesohornymeloveyoulongtime
  5:00 pm on May 6th, 20124That is just Australia….So riddle me this! Outside of how many United States Army Installations in the US is there a Korean Barber shop, ran by Korean Females that gives you a trim and then gives you some trim??? So we should just write that off as Human Trafficking??? I know for a fact that is a bunch of BS. When my wife and I got here in 2003 from Fort Sill we were looking for apartments. We were looking at one and the lady said that we would be able to rent it for at least two years because she was going to the US to work for that time. She asked me what Camp I had just come from and I told her Ft. Sill, OK. She got real excited and said that was where she was going to work. She then asked me if I knew of a place called Suzie’s in Lawton. I said yes everyone at Ft. Sill knows about Suzie’s because they were notorious for their back room. Later I found out in 2006, from one of my old friends that was still at Ft. Sill, it got put off-limits due to prostitution. Now did it sound like this lady was being trafficked….HELL NO she was going on her own because that is how she planned on making some quick money and had been doing a regular rotation to this place. So as you can see alot of (not all) this prostitution and human trafficking crap is a lot of BS. The person knows exactly what they are doing and getting themselves into and actually enjoys that line of work, because they keep coming back for more.
• Teadrinker
  5:14 pm on May 6th, 20125#3,“Alleged” is a word reporters use to distance themselves from a comment.
• Sonagi
  5:32 pm on May 6th, 20126Unlike sponsored employment visas, holiday/tourist visas are obtained by visitors themselves, so I wonder how Korean women who enter on tourist visas manage to become coerced into prostitution unless the coercion actually takes place in Korea. For example, a woman agrees to enter Australia on a holiday visa to work as a prostitute in order to pay off a debt.
• Teadrinker
  6:21 pm on May 6th, 20127#6,How much coercion are we talking about? Getting their legs broken if they don’t pay up or seeing their credit cards canceled?
• OleTanker
  7:16 pm on May 6th, 20128#4, I think you are reading a lot more into this than I see, maybe you are “PROFILING” Korean girls as whores.What chick (of any nationality) Showing apartments knowingly brags to Americans (no less) that they will be working as whores?I think you are the F*cking d*ckwad in the whole scenario. 
• Dave
  7:59 pm on May 6th, 20129Here’s an excerpt from Wikipedia, and yes there is a reference to back it:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_Australia“Korean Prostitutes in Australia Korean prostitutes number increased since South Korea outlawed the prostitutes. Many Korean prostitutes came abroad for the business they can no longer perform in their own country.[7]”

  I don’t believe that’s “human trafficking”. They’re going where the job and the money is.

• Dave
  8:32 pm on May 6th, 201210Oh, I forgot to mention, prostitution is legal and regulated in most areas of Australia.
• tbonetylr
  10:03 pm on May 6th, 201211# 10 Dave,
  That isn’t important because it’s illegal(technically) in S. Korea. That is…it’s illegal for women to buy or sell sex. It’s also illegal for S. Korean men to buy sex, but not sell sex. So, you have S. Korean men staying home to sell sex legally and S. Korean women going to Australia to sell sex legally. S. Korean men gotta earn a living somehow aye? S. Korean women…that’s another story.
• tbonetylr
  10:06 pm on May 6th, 201212And they’ll get punished when they return to S. Korea.
• ohmesohornymeloveyoulongtime
  12:42 am on May 7th, 201213Well #4 it looks like you might be too long in the tooth ol’ dog!!! You might want to get your reading glasses script updated!!! NO WHERE….I REPEAT….NO WHERE…In that statement did I say that the female showing us her apartment openly state to us that she was a prostitute!!!!! I DID SAY HOWEVER, that I had just PCSed from Fort Sill and I knew where Suzie’s was located and I knew the reputation having a lot of friends that frequented the place because of their practices of that barber shop!!!! Maybe I should have put a few more comma’s in there, but I did not know that some slack jay c*ck bitter was going to critique one of my first experience here in Korea. I can see that I must have hit a never when you so richly said that I was profiling Korean Women….well hate to ran on your soon to be in the rest home parade, but I did say “SHE” was on a regular whore rotation to the United States, NOT EVERY KOREAN FEMALE in this country. Anyway the comment was directed toward what the writer stated at the bottom of the article, “The issue isn’t so much that so many Korean women are working as prostitutes but that many of them are being trafficked into Australia on holiday visas and supposedly coerced into prostitution.” I was giving an experience that I had here in Korea when the female in question was knowingly and willingly going to a location to perform these services. I also believe, you flaming butt pirate, that since you’re married to a Korean that must have been the nerve that I hit…..well I did not call your wife a whore, sir!!!! I did call the female in question a Whore and any other woman who acts like her, NO MATTER THEIR NATIONALITY!!! Besides how many girls coming to this country or going to another country from Korea IN THAT LINE OF WORK don’t already know exactly what they are getting into since the world as a whole has been beating this Prostitution and Human Trafficking thing to death for the past decade since Fox News blew the roof off of what was going on here in KOREA at Camp Casey, no doubt??????? NOT Japan, NOT the Philippines, NOT Taiwan, NOT Vietnam, and NOT the Middle East…..JUST KOREA GOT JAMMED UP IN ALL OF THIS!!!! You started something you old fart…..I also love that the Korean Government says that they are fighting prostitution and Trafficking of Humans, but allows the glass houses to operate or turns a blind eye to all the Filipino women down in the clubs when they are doing their patrols right alongside our Military Police on Friday and Saturday Nights. You know what though, guy, maybe you should have been a Rocket Scientist (since you have the mental power of Albert Einstein…NOT!!!) instead of a “DAT” and if you don’t know that means, cause I know you’re a little behind on the times, it means a Dumb A$$ Tanker!!! Let me get a REDCON on that you pillow bitter!!!
• Ole Tanker
  6:26 pm on May 7th, 201214Wow! You put a lot of effort into that. More than it deserves.
  I was always taught to give someone the benefit of the doubt.
  Unless you met the girl in a whorehouase or she told you she was a whore, I wouldn’t assume she is one. 
• G.I. G.I. Joe
  10:41 pm on May 7th, 201215Why is Korea exporting prostitutes?That would be like the U.S., the largest consumer of oil in the world, exporting oil.Isn’t Korea the largest consumer of….
• Bill
  3:41 am on May 8th, 201216Prostitution was still illegal back in the 75-79 timeframe, yet there was never a shortage of girls to choose from. There were even the standard VD clinics and VD cards that the girls had to get checked off on twice a week. I was stationed at the JSA, and twice a week they (the Army) would bring a busload or two of ‘working girls’ up to our compound, Camp Kitty Hawk (now Camp Bonifas). Supposedly they were only allowed in the NCO Club, but there was usually some activity in the barracks or the bunkers on those nights, even though the Sgt of the Guard would try and catch some folks violating orders.Korea might as well take advantage of one it’s natural resources.
• Holly
  10:35 am on May 23rd, 201217There are a bunch of South Korean prostitutes smuggled into Japan too and it is a big problem in Japan. Also they are pretending to be Japanese  .
  This problem is not only Australia and Japan. There are many South Korean prostitutes are in U.S too. Two weeks ago, seven South Korean prostitutes were arrested in Texas. They also pretended to be Japanese and used Japanese name.You will understand how big prostitution does South Korea have as a national industory.
• Tom
  1:13 pm on May 23rd, 201218Come on, prostitution is a perfectly legal job in Australia. And one thousand Korean women in the legal industry in Australia isn’t that many, when you compare it to the 35,000 Australian prostitutes in the industry – most prostitutes in Australia are Australians. Don’t blame your prostitution problem on Koreans. And Holly is Japanese.
• Sonagi
  3:07 pm on May 23rd, 201219

  Two weeks ago, seven South Korean prostitutes were arrested in Texas. They also pretended to be Japanese and used Japanese name.

  I had never heard of this phenomenon, so I googled “prostitutes arrested Texas Korean” under “news” and “past month” and got no related results. Tried again after adding “Japanese” to the search terms and still couldn’t find a single news story about the case you allege to have happened. Thanks in advance for providing us with a link to a local Texas newspaper or TV station reporting on the arrests.

• Dreamboat Annie
  3:16 pm on May 23rd, 201220Tom, are these ho’s in your stable, too?http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2012/05/117_111532.htmlSeven Filipinos have been arrested on suspicion of smuggling the equivalent of 16 billion won (US$13.7 million) from South Korea, police said Wednesday.

  The suspects include a 58-year-old group leader detained under formal arrest and six others who were booked without detention for allegedly smuggling the remittances of Filipino workers in South Korea, according to the international crime investigation unit at the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency.

  The leader, identified only by his initial L and an illegal immigrant in South Korea since 1993, is accused of transferring the money out of the country by plane after changing the won into dollars and hiding it in packs of instant noodles.

  More than 25,000 people deposited sums of money into 59 bank accounts managed by the leader between January 2004 and this month, the police said.

  The leader is suspected of pocketing 150 million won by charging 5,000 won in commission fees for each remittance, and another 1.2 billion won from foreign-exchange profits.

  Police said they are searching for 35 other members of the group and plan to widen their investigation to crack down on other groups suspected of involvement in similar schemes.

  Illegal workers often choose such means to transfer money to their home countries as they do not wish to expose their identities in the process of setting up bank accounts and sending remittances, police said.

• yellow peril
  12:35 am on August 16th, 201221Korean prostitutes will claim that we were trafficked and the Australian government is liable though women came to enter on their will. They will ask for compensation when they get old as comfort women

Korean prostitution in Australia

Korea JoongAng Daily

Korean prostitution examined in Australia

The Australian state with the largest Korean population in the country is currently investigating prostitution involving Korean women, according to a member of the state’s parliament.

Victor Michael Dominello, a member of the New South Wales Legislative Assembly, said that the investigation started at the request of the Korean multicultural committee he set up.

More than 1,000 Korean women are estimated to be involved in prostitution in Australia, a number that increased sharply in recent years, according to data from an Australian civic group. Some data say that about one-sixth of all women providing sex for money in Australia are Korean.

As the numbers grew, the prostitution issue emerged as a diplomatic concern between Korea and Australia.

Governments of the two countries upgraded bilateral cooperation on the issue late last year, launching discussions on possible countermeasures that could be taken against illegal prostitution in Australia. Possible actions to be taken will be announced once the committee completes its investigation.

Educating women about resources available to them to pursue other livelihoods will be part of whatever the committee decides to do, Dominello told the Korea JoongAng Daily during a trip to Korea. The Korea Foundation arranged an April trip to the country for him as part of a personnel exchange between Korea and Australia.

“After the investigation is concluded, one of the things I will be looking at is education, providing women with more education about what is right,” he said. “If we educate more about their entitlements to be free of this type of activity, this might liberate certain people.”

He said Australia already has one of the best systems available to protect people in vulnerable situations and that the committee will improve existing resources with its investigations and countermeasures.

And though the committee is initially focusing on prostitution among Korean women, Dominello insisted that in the end, the issue knows no ethnic boundaries.

“Regardless of where they come from, we try to find out a little bit more about it,” Dominello said, referring to the sexual exploitation of women in general.

He also said that while some might expect the issue to paint negative stereotypes of Koreans in Australia, this is not actually the case.

“I think people migrating from Korea are some of the best migrants we receive in our country,” he said. “Koreans are rightly proud of their wonderful culture, of their education system, of the contribution they make to the Australian way of life.”

By Moon Gwang-lip [joe@joongang.co.kr]

Hyung-In Moon

Retraction Watch

South Korean plant compound researcher faked email addresses so he could review his own studies

Scientists frustrated by the so-called “third reviewer” — the one always asking for additional experiments before recommending acceptance — might be forgiven for having fantasies of being able to review their own papers.

But one Korean scientist, Hyung-In Moon, managed to do just that, through what must have seemed like clever subterfuge at the time. And he got away with it for a while — until he didn’t, as witnessed by this retraction notice for “Larvicidal activity of 4-hydroxycoumarin derivatives against Aedes aegypti,” published in Pharmaceutical Biology, an Informa Healthcare title:

The peer-review process for the above article was found to have been compromised and inappropriately influenced by the corresponding author, Professor HI Moon. As a result the findings and conclusions of these articles cannot be relied upon.

The corresponding author and the publisher wish to retract these papers to preserve the integrity of material published in the journal. The publisher acknowledges that the integrity of the peer review process should have been subject to more rigorous verification to ensure the reviews provided were genuine and impartial. The publisher apologizes for any inconvenience rendered to the readers of the journal and wishes to assure the reader that measures have been taken to ensure that the peer review process is comprehensively checked to avoid a similar error occurring.

There are three more retractions in the International Journal of Food Sciences and Nutrition, with the same notice:

• “Hepatoprotective effects on alcoholic liver disease of fermented silkworms with Bacillus subtilis andAspergillus kawachii”
• “Anticancer activity of sesquiterpene lactone from plant food (Carpesium rosulatum) in human cancer cell lines”
• “Anti-complement activity of essential oils from red and black rice bran”

We wanted to know just how Moon had “compromised and inappropriately influenced” the peer-review process. What we learned, from Informa Healthcare managing editor Kimber Jest, was quite something:

He suggested preferred reviewers during the submission which were him or colleagues under bogus identities and accounts. In some cases the names of real people were provided (so if Googling them, you would see that they did exist) but he created email accounts for them which he or associates had access to and which were then used to provide peer review comments. In other cases he just made up names and email addresses. The review comments submitted by these reviewers were almost always favourable but still provided suggestions for paper improvement.

Moon had apparently read the same playbook as Guang-Zhi He, an author at Guiyang College of Traditional Chinese Medicine in China who made up email addresses for possible reviewers of a paper that was eventually retracted. Like He, it turns out Moon tried to be too clever. Real reviewers might have always been”almost always favourable but still provided suggestions for paper improvement.” But they wouldn’t have been so fast.  Jest continued:

This came to our attention when the Editor of Enzyme Inhibition and Medicinal Chemistry, Claudiu Supuran noticed that almost all of the peer review comments were coming back in less than 24 hours. He contacted Prof. Moon who admitted to pretending to be some of the peer reviewers that he had ‘recommended’ or to asking colleagues to provide the reviews. We then provided a list of all the papers that Prof. Moon authored and published in our journals and asked him which ones were affected and if he would retract any of them based on his manipulation of the peer review process.

There will be more retractions from Informa, from Enzyme Inhibition and Medicinal Chemistry andImmunopharmacology and Immunotoxicology. The case has been frustrating to deal with, Jest tells us:

We have tried numerous times to contact his institution but have received no response.  We attempted to contact all co-authors to let them know about the situation- very few replied, and most of those who did said they were not aware of Prof. Moon’s practices. Prof. Moon claimed throughout to have acted alone and that his co-authors were not involved in this activity. He was the submitting and corresponding author on all of the papers.

Informa, Jest said, will take steps to make sure this doesn’t happen again:

 We have audited the peer review process for all our journals and updated our Best Practice peer review guidelines for our Editors and Associate Editors. This includes reinforcing the idea that we must have at least 1 review performed by someone that was not listed as a preferred reviewer, checking thoroughly the expertise and institution of suggested reviewers, and being suspicious of minimalistic and positive reviews coming back extremely quickly. We have recommended that editors try and use institutional email addresses as far as possible to contact reviewers and generally we raised awareness among our editors of this novel type of misconduct. We have also placed this case before COPE and have been following their recommendations which included issuing the retraction notices for the papers that Prof. Moon admitted to influencing the peer review of and agreed to retract, and investigating further the other papers he has authored with us to see if there is cause to retract these papers as well- one suggestion was to send them out for peer review again and this is an ongoing part of the case.

Informa has also added this warning on some of their journals’ article submission pages:

Please note: it is inappropriate to list as preferred reviewers researchers from the same institute as any of the authors, collaborators and co-authors from the past five years, as well as anyone whose relationship with one of the authors may present a conflict of interest. The journal will not tolerate this practice and reserves the right to reject submissions on this basis.

For his part, Moon acknowledged suggesting his friends and colleagues as reviewers, telling Retraction Watch that the results “can be mistaken for fake reviews.” But he said it wasn’t only his mistake: The editors, Moon said, invited those reviews without confirming the identity of the reviewers.

Moon denied encouraging his friends to review the papers, but admitted that that “the lack of [a] genuine and impartial review process” meant that readers can’t rely on the findings and conclusions of the articles. As a result, he proposed a retraction and agreed to the notice.

Moon also — um, helpfully? — had some suggestions on how to make sure this didn’t happen again:

There is nothing wrong with soliciting reviewers from authors, as long as there are some checks. Of course, authors will ask for their friends, but Editors are supposed to check they are not from the same institution or coauthors on previous papers. I know so many journals ask for *potential* reviewers, which they then add to a database of reviewers for the field the submission was made in. They then send the paper for review to other people on that database.

Examining the feasibility of potential reviewers is an important part of being an editor, Moon said.

Then…authors and editors will be able to avoid the problems [that occur] from the selection of reviewers.

Moon — now in the department of Medicinal Biotechnology at the College of Nature Resources and Life Science of Dong-A University, in Busan, Korea — has experience retracting papers. We found seven from several years ago:

• “Erythrodiol-3-acetate, pentacyclic triterpenoid from Styrax japonica, expressions of matrix metalloproteinase-1,2 in cultured human skin fibroblasts,” in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology

This article has been retracted at the request of the first author with the agreement of the editor. Please see Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal (http://www.elsevier.com/locate/withdrawalpolicy).

Reason: The first author, Hyung-In Moon, has written to the journal editor indicating his responsibility for having committed major mistakes whilst conducting the experiments, and apologises to the co-authors and the readers for this retraction.

Readers may wish to know that three other papers in which Hyung-In Moon is a co-author, have also been retracted for the same reason:

The effect of tiarellic acid on the expressions of matrix metalloproteinase-1 and type 1 procollagen in ultraviolet irradiated cultured human skin fibroblasts. J. Ethnopharmacol., 98 (2005) 185–189.

The effect of flavonol glycoside on the expressions of matrix metalloproteinase-1 in ultraviolet irradiated cultured human skin fibroblasts. J. Ethnopharmacol., 101 (2005) 176–179.

The effect of sativan from Viola verecunda A. GRAY on the expressions of matrix metalloproteinase-1 cause by ultraviolet irradiated cultured primary human skin fibroblasts. J. Ethnopharmacol., 104 (2006), 12–17.

• “The effect of 2′,4′,7-trihydroxyisoflavone on ultraviolet-induced matrix metalloproteinases-1 expression in human skin fibroblasts,” from FEBS Letters:

This article has been retracted at the request of the authors and/or the Editor-in-Chief.

Reason: This article has been retracted at the request of the editors and authors due to unreliable data resulting from instrument error.

• “Effect of Meso-dihydroguaiaretic acid from Machilus thunbergii Sieb et Zucc on MMP-1 expression in heat shock-induced cultured primary human fibroblasts,” in Phytotherapy Research:

This paper by Hyungin Moon and Jae-Chul Jung (DOI: 10.1002/ptr.1941)has been retracted by agreement between the authors and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. The retraction was requested by Hyungin Moon due to errors being made in the performance of the experimental work.

• “Matrix metalloproteinase-1 expression inhibitory compound from the whole plants of Viola ibukiana Makino”, also in Phytotherapy Research, with the same retraction notice.

We asked Moon for more information on these retractions, but he hasn’t responded yet. According to Thomson Scientific, none of his papers has been cited more than 20 times.

Then there’s the erratum for “Synthesis of sulfonamides and evaluation of their histone deacetylase (HDAC) activity,” in Molecules:

At the request of the authors of this paper [1], we wish to announce the following corrections:

The list of authors and their institutional affiliations is revised to:

Seikwan Oh 1, Hyung–In Moon 2, Il–Hong Son 2, Jae–Chul Jung 1,* and Mitchell A. Avery 3

The correction then lists affiliations, and continues:

The Acknowledgements section is revised to:

This work has been supported by the KOSEF Brain Neurobiology Grant (2006), the Ewha Global Challenge grant (BK21) and Cooperative Agreement Number 1-U01 C1000211 from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (M.A.A.).

This Errata note will be linked henceforth to the original paper. The corresponding author and other coauthors wish to apologize to Dr Avery, the University of Mississippi and the C.D.C. for the omission of their contributions to this research, and to the readership of Molecules for any inconvenience caused.

References

1. Oh, S.; Moon, H.-I.; Son, I.-H.; Jung, J.-C. Synthesis of sulfonamides and evaluation of their histone deacetylase (HDAC) activity. Molecules 2007, 12, 1125-1135.

We asked Mitchell Avery, of Ole Miss, whose name was the one added to the paper, what happened. Corresponding author J.C. Jung, Avery said, was one of his postdocs for a number of years. At some point, Moon visited the lab, then he and Jung returned to their home country of Korea and published some of the work they’d performed in Avery’s lab — without telling Avery.

I was forced to involve the University here to deal with Jung to submit errata which then included myself as author, and the agency that funded the work here (the CDC).  Altogether a most unsavory situation.  While Hyung-In Moon was here, he was more a colleague of Jung’s than my postdoc, and I had no hand in training him.  The whole thing was very odd.