01 Dec 06 Magazines Across East Asia
Earlier this year, in Bangkok I found street side magazine vendors selling photos of this young person.
This person is the Bhutanese crown prince Jigme Khesar Namgyal Wangchuck. He attended the Thai King’s 60th Anniversary celebrations along with royalty from several other country.
His youth and charm made him the idol of girls all over Thailand.
Several magazine tried to cash in on his popularity running articles on the prince with details of his life.
One nice thing though is that Thai’s now know a lot more about Bhutan. Incidentally, Thailand is the one of few places where the Bhutanese national carrier Druk air flies to.
Now we look at this magazine for Thailand’s neighbour Myanmar. This one is called the Yangoon Times.
And here you find an article on Korean actors. Korean TV dramas and movies are very popular in Myanmar. The state controlled broadcasting service runs some Korean dramas and apparently streets go empty whenever these dramas are playing on TV.
Talking about Korea, some enterprising Korean residents in Singapore have started this magazine called Korean World for Koreans in Singapore.
Something on the lines of several Japanese magazines you fine in South East Asia or the expat magazines in China. This magazine has ads from language schools specializing in English teaching, travel agencies, Korean restaurants etc. But what surprised me the most was the last page. This page was in English and has this article supporting Korean territorial claim on Dokdo islets. Dokdo is know as Takeshima in Japan and Japn also claims these islets.
Technorati Tags: japan, myanmar, bhutan, thailand
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It’s funny when I heard about the craze for the Bhutanese prince from my Thai friends. His recent visit to the Royal Ratchapreuk Expo in Chiang Mai brought back the latest stir.
It’s my first time here. Your first blog is so interesting. I love it. Keep it up.
I’m glad someone else found the Dokdo Island issue was being supported — but I am supposing that this is a Korean-published magazine isn’t it?
Dokdo was not really an issue for many years, until Japanese decided recently out of the blue to make a theory that it was first listed on Japanese maps as their own, and that Koreans had not even shown it on their own maps. Seeing as how this island is only a few miles off the coastline of Korea, the claim is rather far-fetched, and simply poured salt into an old wound. We here in Koreatown in America could only shake our heads. (And a few were much more annoyed than that.).
After the posturing between the two countries had abated, we noticed that some of the visa restrictions were lifted off South Korean visitors travelling to Japan. We were hoping that was at least a minimal apology for the whole fiasco, but who knows.
At any rate, it’s glad to see the issue brought out.