이명박

South Korea held its presidential election last week, and I've followed the campaign reasonably closely. The conservative frontrunner, 이명박, won the election in a landslide (his name is Romanized as Lee Myung-bak, which isn't bad as far as translations go, except that Koreans don't pronounce the "L" in "Lee;" this is obvious if you can read Korean, since there's no "L" character in the Hangul representation of "Lee"). I'm not thrilled with the result.

Quite apart from his politics, there's the small matter of corruption charges levied against him. He was cleared of these charges before the election; however, damning videotape evidence surfaced shortly before Koreans headed to the polls. The videotape isn't sufficient evidence to convict him of anything, but Lee was forced to employ some Clintonesque rhetoric to avoid indictment. Basically, in the Korean language, you rarely need to use personal pronouns. So instead of saying "I own and operate BBK," you might say "Own and operate BBK." The pronoun would be assumed based on context. Essentially, Lee Myung-bak's defense rests on this ambiguity.

I understand why Koreans chose to elect the man they did, and they didn't have great choices, despite having a dozen candidates to choose from, but it's disappointing to see a Confucian country like Korea ignore ethics in favor of economic growth.