SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — Authorities searched on Thursday for the mayor of South Korea’s capital, Seoul, who vanished amid sexual harassment allegations after giving his daughter a message that she described as sounding like a will, police said.
Police said they were looking for Mayor Park Won-soon in wooded hills stretching across northern Seoul where his cellphone signal was last detected. They said the phone was currently turned off.
Highly doubt it. The ex-President of South Korea, Roh Moo-hyun, killed himself while I was living there in 2009. And Korean pop-idols and celebs off themselves all the time. I believe South Korea has the highest suicide rate of any developed nation. If this were another country you could put on a tinfoil hat and believe it’s an Epstein-esque cover-up, but since it’s Korea this is totally unsurprising and par-for-the-course.
Societal pressure is so high in Korea. My Korean friend immigrated to the US in elementary school and really wanted to move back to Korea. Finally did in junior high, instantly regretted how difficult life is beyond the comfort of being in his own culture.
Yes. Societal pressure is bad in Taiwan (it’s bad everywhere in East Asia), but nothing compares to Korea. The biggest increase of suicides is the day of the national exam. Lots of disappointed students kill themselves. It’s not just the young though. A 60 year old professor at the uni I used to work at in Seoul flung himself off one of our buildings.
I had a cousin in Taiwan who was top of his class most of his life. He didn’t test into the college that he wanted, so my dad told me not to mention anything about college when I spoke to him.
Fortunately, things ended well for him. He went to the Midwest for a PhD, got an offer to go back to work for Academia Sinica, but ended up being an engineer for Altec.
