Seoul – South Korea’s presidential Blue House has been something of a family home for Park Geun-Hye, but the luxury residence has now become a place of solitary confinement for the impeached, isolated leader.

Park has twice called the Blue House home: first as the daughter of late military strongman Park Chung-Hee and then as president herself – a cumulative period of 20 years.

Currently president in nothing but name and with no official duties to perform, Park faces a months-long empty schedule within the walls of the complex as she waits for the final act of her impeachment drama to play out.

The only regular encroachment from outside is the deafening chanting of hundreds of thousands of protestors who have taken to the streets of Seoul every Saturday for the past two months to demand Park either resign or be removed.

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2016-11-06 10:08:13

Photo Gallery

Tens of thousands of South Koreans stage protest in Seoul calling for President Park Geun Hye to resign

Source:

AFP

Reuters

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Ensnared by a corruption scandal involving an old friend, Park was impeached by parliament just over a week ago – a move that stripped away all her substantial presidential powers and transferred them to her prime minister.

She is allowed to retain her title and stay at the Blue House while the Constitutional Court considers whether to validate the impeachment – a process that could take up to six months.

But her movements are restricted to the residential part of the 250,000-square-metre (62-acre) compound. Her offices, some 200 metres from her living quarters, are off limits.

A planned trilateral summit with the leaders of China and Japan that was supposed to be held this month in Tokyo has been indefinitely postponed.

Aides say Park spends her time resting and preparing her impeachment defence for the court, but otherwise there are scant details about her activities.

“She must feel like the whole world has turned its back on her,” said Lee Jun-Han, a politics professor at Incheon University.

“I don’t think she has the luxury of travelling outside the Blue House, or even resting in peace at home,” Lee said.

Park’s father Park Chung-Hee ruled the country with an iron fist from 1961-79 and his eldest child enjoyed a pampered life, although in her memoirs she described her early days at the Blue House as “prison-like”.

She never married and has no children, and critics say her sheltered upbringing left Park aloof and out of touch.

In a televised apology she gave in early November as the corruption scandal snowballed, Park spoke of her “lonely life” as president and how it had led her to place too much trust in her long-time confidante, Choi Soon-Sil.

Park’s impeachment focused on charges that she colluded with Choi in forcing a number of South Korean conglomerates to donate tens of millions of dollars to two dubious non-profit foundations that Choi controlled and allegedly plundered.

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2016-10-29 18:47:34

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The ‘female Rasputin’ at centre of S Korean President Park Geun-Hye political scandal

Source:

AFP

Reuters

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Park acknowledged letting her guard down with Choi, who had helped her through “difficult times” as a single female president who had lost both her parents to assassins and was estranged from her siblings.

In testimony to an ongoing parliamentary investigation into the Choi scandal, Park’s aides cemented the image of her as a solitary figure who liked eating alone.

One former chief of staff who served Park for two years said he had often gone an entire week without meeting her at all – an experience echoed by other senior policy advisors.

“Park was almost always in her residence, whether on Sundays or a weekday, unless there were public events like a cabinet meeting or a meeting with advisors,” a former presidential chef said in a recent interview.

Park’s staffers now report to the prime minister – and acting president – Hwang Kyo-Ahn, who is expected to give the annual year-end national presidential address.

For the Blue House press corps, Park’s blank days have left them with similarly blank notebooks.

“The number of reporters in the pressroom has shrunk a lot – maybe only a third are showing up,” said the correspondent of one national newspaper who spoke on condition of anonymity.

“There are no more regular briefings by the spokesman. He only comes to the pressroom when there’s a particular issue regarding the president,” the correspondent said.

JAKARTA – An Indonesian air force transport plane has crashed into a mountain, killing all 13 people board, during a training exercise in the remote region of Papua, a search and rescue agency official said on Sunday.

The Hercules C130 plane had taken off from the city of Timika before crashing near its destination of Wamena at around 6.15 a.m. local time (2315 GMT), said Ivan Ahmad Riski Titus, operational director of Indonesia’s Search and Rescue Agency.

The crash site on Lisuwa mountain had been found and the bodies of the victims were being brought back to Wamena, he said.

Air transport is commonly used in remote and mountainous Papua, Indonesia’s easternmost province, where land travel is often impossible.

Indonesia has a patchy air safety record and President Joko Widodo promised a review of the country’s ageing air force fleet last year after a military transport plane crashed, killing more than 100 people.

TOKYO – Japan has begun slaughtering about 210,000 farm birds in northern Hokkaido to contain another outbreak of a highly contagious strain of avian flu, an official said Sunday.

It is the fifth mass cull this winter in Japan with hundreds of officials working to prevent the spread of the virulent H5 strain, which has been detected at several farms across the country.

Just weeks earlier, outbreaks led to a cull of 550,000 chickens in the central city of Niigata and 23,000 ducks in the Aomori prefecture south of Hokkaido.

Authorities have also banned the transport of poultry and poultry products in areas close to the affected farms, while sterilising main roads leading to them.

But progress has been slow this time with just 32,310 chickens at the farm in Shimzu town in northern Hokkaido culled by Saturday evening, local officials said in a statement.

“We continue to cull the chickens today but the work is difficult as the air temperature falls to some -20 degree Celsius (-4 Fahrenheit) at night” in addition to fallen snow that is another obstacle, an official told AFP.

Before the current outbreaks, Japan’s last confirmed case of avian flu at a farm was in January 2015.

TOKYO – Japanese workers put up with long hours and unpaid overtime under pressure from cost-saving companies, and figures from government, which wants more money in workers’ pockets to boost consumer spending, appear to underestimate the problem.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is trying to enact labour reforms as part of his “Abenomics” plan to end decades of stagnant growth and deflation.

His proposals include measures to cut working hours and limit overtime, raise wages for temporary workers and make things easier for employees with children.

By law, both management and rank-and-file employees should get paid for extra work, but companies have been discouraging overtime claims for so long that employees accept it as normal.

Government data shows that Japanese work an average of 14.2 hours of overtime a month, but 2,000 respondents in a recent survey by the Japanese Trade Union Confederation said they worked an average of 40.3 hours of overtime a month, and get paid for just 22.7.

“Workers often face pressure from their superiors, sometimes in subtle, unspoken ways, to claim less overtime hours than actually worked,” said Toshiaki Matsumoto, chief executive of HR Strategy, a human resources consultancy.

A deferential work culture means few speak up.

“Often I don’t bother claiming overtime because my projects would run over budget, and that would hurt my chances for promotion,” said one 38-year-old IT engineer who asked not to be named for fear of upsetting his boss.

He estimates that he works an average of 50 unpaid overtime hours a month, often leaving the office at 8 p.m., spending some time with his wife and 3-year-old son before bed, then getting up at 3 a.m. to tackle unfinished work.

A 26-year-old Tokyo man who works in sales at a steel trading company said his employer regularly pressured workers into reducing hours on their overtime forms.

In busy times he works from 7 a.m. to midnight, plus Saturdays.

“The amount of overtime has left me exhausted,” he said.

At times, the punishingly long hours can have tragic consequences.

The suicide of a 24-year-old ad agency worker who clocked up 105 hours of overtime in the month before she fell into depression was last month ruled “karoshi”, or death by overwork.

DEAF EARS

Abe’s pleas for businesses to put up wages to kickstart the economy have largely fallen on deaf ears.

But if the results for the union survey are extrapolated nationwide, just paying employees for the hours they work could push up consumer spending by 13.4 per cent, according to Reuters calculations based on monthly wage data and the propensity to consume.

“It’s a problem if you’re working long hours and not getting the compensation you’re entitled to,” said Norio Miyagawa, senior economist at Mizuho Securities, adding that working long hours also meant people didn’t have time to go out and spend.

In an era of weak global demand and uncertainty about economic prospects, Japanese companies have been hoarding cash rather than sharing it with the workforce.

Since Abe took office in late 2012, recurring profits have gone up 62.3 per cent, but staff compensation has grown a miserly 2.1 per cent.

Household spending has risen just 1.6 per cent during the same period.

“Companies are without a doubt robbing workers of their wages and free time,” said Toko Shirakawa, a visiting professor at Sagami Women’s University and a member of the government’s work culture panel.

But cultural and workplace expectations are difficult to change overnight, and civil servants say the government also needs to get its own house in order.

One 26-year-old at a government agency in downtown Tokyo said he was paid for about 70 per cent of the overtime hours he worked.

“I request pay for all the overtime hours I work, but we operate on a fixed budget, which means you don’t automatically receive the full amount,” said the man, who declined to be named. “I feel like I’m working for free.”