Meet the community of survivors and activists behind South Korea’s first national war memorial for civilians.
I was summoned to Korea by an uncle who died 19 years before I was born. Through a series of chance encounters and unexpected opportunities, I was led by his ghost from my home in New York City to the central lowland city of Daejeon. From there, I traveled 20 minutes southeast to the remote valley where I am nearly certain he was killed, according to family members, news articles, and historical accounts.
Arriving on a bitterly cold winter day in 2024, I saw hundreds of white ribbons fluttering handwritten messages into the wind; they marked the barren clearing as a site of active mourning. A painting tied to the bare limb of a maple tree depicted a defiant young woman wearing a white minbok, standing beside a river of blood. Black letters tumbled down the right edge of the canvas: Who is it? In the heart of the nation, black-bullet gunners.
A tour bus to transport the grief keepers to the Golryeonggol massacre site.
Once called Golryeonjae for the dragon-shaped ridge along its northern edge, this valley held a hideous secret for decades. At the beginning of the Korean War, U.S.-backed South Korean troops and local police executed between 4,900 to 7,000 civilians here in a 10-day frenzy of anti-communist violence. The victims included thousands of political prisoners who’d been held at Daejeon Prison.
In recent years, the 1.5-kilometer stretch of pit graves has come to be known in Korea as “the longest grave in the world.” But family members of the victims and local organizers call it Golryeonggol (骨靈), the valley where the spirits of the bones dwell.
They would know. In 2020, they dug through the earth with their own hands to retrieve bones, teeth, shoes, buttons, and U.S.-made bullet casings. It was the third exhumation—and the first organized by civilians, who’d become frustrated by the slow progress of South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Exhumed remains at Sejong Memorial House.
Digging was their visceral initiation into the highest order of han (한): the embodied anguish and rage accumulated in the collective soul of my people, who have survived colonialism, a proxy war that killed an estimated 3.8 million Korean civilians in three years, and the cleaving of our homeland in rapid succession. It’s no wonder family members of the victims and local activists tend to this land as if it were a living being. They are its grief keepers.
Over the years, they’ve developed an elaborate communal practice of han puri—an externalized expression of han to release it from the body. By publicly healing a historical wound, they’ve also nurtured a fragile sense of possibility. After 26 years of organizing and six mass exhumations (the most recent in 2024), the Golryeonggol grief keepers are on the cusp of achieving their shared dream. In November, the South Korean government will prepare the mass grave site for the construction of Daejeon Peace Park, the country’s first and only national memorial to civilian victims of the war.
~
I made that first trip to Golryeonggol, accompanied by an interpreter and a friend, six months after my uncle first made himself known to me. I brought a suitcase full of fresh fruit, three gift boxes of dried persimmons, two bottles of makkgeolli, and a platter of fried fish. I’d come to perform a jesa, the ritual offering of food and drink Koreans do to care for the spirits of their ancestors.
Chun Mi Kyung (Chun Imo), President of the Daejeon Massacre Bereaved Families Association.
An offering of makkgeolli.
We were greeted outside a small building by an elegant matriarch named Chun Mi Kyung, whose father was killed in the massacre. Though her official title is President of the Daejeon Massacre Bereaved Families Association, I’ve come to think of her as the head grief keeper of Golryeonggol. Within minutes of our arrival, she and two other members of the association had washed the fruit, stacked the food on platters, and arranged carved wooden vessels on the floor.
When she noted the uncertainty in my face, Chun Imo (a respectful and affectionate word for maternal aunt, which she invited me to call her) gestured for me to kneel on the floor. She wrapped my hands around one of the vessels, filled it with makkgeolli, and moved my hands in three counterclockwise circles around the incense. Like an orchestra conductor, she guided me through two full prostrations before she, the other elders, and my companions paid their respects. After we concluded, the aunties cut up the fruit and passed the plates around as we shared our stories.
“Your uncle and all the people who were killed here, they are all my fathers,” Chun Imo said. “We take care of all of them just like we do our own dads.”
A jesa table at Sejong Memorial House, a forensic mortuary where the association performs regular ceremonies. The remains of 1,441 Golryeonggol victims are held here, as well as the remains of thousands of war crime victims from around the country.
During the 2020 civilian exhumation, Chun Imo and other members of the association discovered that many of the remains had been waterlogged and broken by construction.
“I slept alone in this house with the bones for days,” she said, sweeping her hands above the altar table to show where they had spread the fragments to dry. “But I was not afraid. At night I walk the grounds here with only the light from the moon. I take care of the spirits, and they watch over me.”
Prostrating before the spirits of the ancestors.
Later, as we said our goodbyes, Chun Imo grasped both my hands in hers and told me to come back for the community memorial ceremony, held annually at the end of June.
“I will see you here next year,” she said.
~
I traveled again to Daejeon this past June for the memorial, arriving at the clearing to find hundreds of people sitting under a massive white tent. Most were elders whose shrunken bodies told the story of wartime starvation. Paper lanterns dangling from surrounding trees cast a warm glow on faces ravaged by sun, time, and grief. Beneath the lanterns, a row of wooden easels held framed black-and-white portraits of the dead.
Son Bok Seong, whose husband's older brother was killed at Golryeonggol.
The opening ritual was a sangyeo procession, a Korean funeral bier. Four men carried a palanquin with a symbolic corpse of paper-cut chrysanthemums. A fifth man led them in a call-and-response song with a melancholy, strident melody. Late into the night, we sat with our restless ancestors through music, poetry, and shamanic rituals, plus a drum dance to accompany wandering spirits to the afterlife.
The next morning, we reconvened for Buddhist death rites, a Catholic sermon, and the formal jesa ceremony. I found my uncle in the center of the banner inscribed with the names of victims. Below it, a massive table sagged under dozens of platters piled high with traditional altar food.
A feast of plenty to remind the dead we know how they suffered.
~
It wasn’t safe to speak on the Daejeon Massacre publicly until the mid-2000s, let alone grieve its victims openly. In the absence of a formal peace agreement, the South Korean government waged an ideological war within its borders. It continues to this day under the banner of national security. Surveillance, disappearances, torture, and blacklists of anyone associated with leftists were once common enough that a generation of South Koreans blotted “red” relatives from their family histories.
A mourner covers his face.
The 1950 Daejeon Massacre was the largest in a vicious spree of civilian executions during that first summer of the war. It was carried out by President Syngman Rhee's military police, formally under U.S. wartime command beginning July 14. They targeted known leftists and people suspected of being sympathizers simply for being poor; the government had registered hundreds of thousands of them in a “political rehabilitation program” called the Bodo League in 1949. All told, the South Korean military police killed between 100,000 and 300,000 of its own civilians.
For decades, relatives of the victims, including my own, grieved in secrecy to avoid the scrutiny of successive right-wing dictatorships installed by the United States after the 1953 armistice. I understand why after meeting Chun Imo: Long after her father was executed, her eldest uncle was abducted by police and her brother poisoned by right-wing assailants. After years of being blacklisted, her youngest uncle died by suicide, her grandfather eventually lost his mind from repeated shocks, and Chun Imo herself moved to another town where no one knew her family.
Chun Mi Kyung (Chun Imo), President of the Daejeon Massacre Bereaved Families Association.
The long silence finally broke in 1992, when a left-leaning magazine called Mal (말, translated literally as Word) published the first exposé about the massacre. A novelist writing under the pseudonym Noh Gah-won interviewed a former police officer who had participated in the killing. He described how soldiers and policemen shot row after row of people until the valley was “a sea of blood.” Among the scenes he described, corroborated in subsequent years by eyewitness accounts, one detail roiled the magma of my han: U.S. soldiers had watched from the ridges surrounding the massacre site. One of them, Major Leonard J. Abbott, got close enough to take 18 grisly photos of the massacre in progress (declassified by the U.S. in 1999). They include a few shots of victims who look like teenagers, staring into the camera—immortalized on the threshold of death in the archive of a U.S. proxy conflict my high school teachers called “the Forgotten War.”
The Mal exposé might have also been forgotten if not for Sim Kyu Sang, an activist from the Daejeon region who was serving a two-and-a-half-year sentence at Andong Prison. Sim, who’d been incarcerated for participating in a building takeover during the 1990 Seoul student protests, grabbed the magazine from a pile of periodicals delivered to the prison when he saw the headline. Following his release a year later, he went to a senior center in the area and asked people who were old enough to remember. They refused to speak, other than to tell him they’d been warned by local police officers to report anyone who asked questions about the massacre.
Human rights activist Sim Kyu Sang, who now serves as the Daejeon bureau chief of Oh My News.
Sim Kyu Sang with Im Jae Geun, executive chair of the Daejeon Sannae Golryeonggol Countermeasure Committee and director of the Research Institute for Peace and Unification Education.
Sim wandered through the mountains for weeks until he identified the silhouetted mountain in one of the Mal magazine photographs. He walked into the valley and saw human bones and teeth scattered everywhere. The subsistence farmers who owned the land admitted they’d thrown out piles of human remains they’d found while plowing.
~
Hoping to halt the continued desecration of the victims, Sim attempted to publish a new story about the massacre for the next four years. No outlet would touch it until 2000, when both Mal and Oh My News published his citizen journalist report. Thereafter, he was inundated with phone calls from family members of the victims, who beseeched him to show them the site. In July 2000, he gathered the members of 16 families at Golryeonggol for the first time. They howled and wept for three hours.
In the years that followed, more people joined their kinship of grief, confronting together what no one person could bear to face alone. They became a living embodiment of jeong (정)—the Korean relational ethic of deep collective care, powerful enough to soothe our han. After incorporating as an NGO in 2007, the group evolved into a hub of local organizing for government accountability. Working in solidarity with similar associations across Korea, the Golryreonggol grief keepers have traveled to Seoul on numerous occasions to push forward the government’s tepid Truth and Reconciliation process. After a 2010 investigation, the commission concluded the state had acted illegally, holding itself and Syngman Rhee responsible for executing “incarcerated prisoners without due process solely on the grounds that they had a history of leftist activity or were suspected of sympathizing with the Korean People’s Army.”
Mourners gather to pay their respects at the Golryeonggol massacre site.
In 2016, South Korea’s government announced it would create a memorial peace park for civilian victims of the state from before, during, and after the war. It invited applications from local governments nationwide to host the project. Of the seven cities that submitted bids, Golryeonggol made a compelling case due to the scale of the massacre and the geographical range of the victims held at Daejeon Prison. Its team, led by Sim, was eventually selected by the national evaluation committee.
Like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission itself, progress on the memorial has depended on whether the national government leans right or left. In 2021, a large-scale excavation unearthed the remains of nearly 1,000 victims at Golryeonggol, lending new momentum to the project under the left-leaning administration of President Moon Jae-in. This came to a grinding halt under the far-right President Yoon Suk-yeol, who wanted to destroy the remains—a plan foiled by his impeachment.
Park Jun Su, whose father was executed at Golryeonggol.
Given their tumultuous journey, the grief keepers are understandably skeptical that they will live long enough to see the memorial. But Sim is confident construction will begin in December, now that the government has made a formal announcement and appropriated more than $48 million USD for it.
In the meantime, thousands of tormented spirits still need care. Knowing my uncle died violently and far from home, I feel deep gratitude for Chun Imo’s jeong with the souls of so many victims.
“Sometimes they cry out to me from hunger and sadness,” Chun Imo says.
When they do, she cooks an elaborate meal, sets the altar table with plates piled high, and invites the wandering spirits to eat.
A traditional ancestor table at Golryeonggol to mark Chuseok (Full Moon Harvest).
[post_title] => The Grief Keepers
[post_excerpt] => Meet the community of survivors and activists behind South Korea’s first national war memorial for civilians.
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As the genre continues to diversify, it's time for K-pop to reckon with its relationship to Blackness.
BTS’s long-awaited comeback was controversial from the start.
In March, following a year-and-a-half hiatus to fulfill their mandatory Korean military service, the seven-member boy group reunited with a short animated trailer teasing their new album Arirang. Inspired by a nationally beloved and UNESCO-recognized folk song of the same name, the album was positioned as somewhat of an homage to the group’s Korean roots. In the trailer, the group spotlights the “profound cultural significance” of the original song—believed to be over 600 years old—through a “modern reimagining” of the seven Korean students at Howard University who first recorded it in 1896.
But many fans noticed something strange: For a few seconds, BTS can be seen portraying the students while singing, on campus, to a mostly white audience.
“Who are [these] white folks at a historically Black college built so Black Americans could actually go to college because white people would not allow them into their schools?” one fan commented on YouTube. Others followed suit.
Upon release, the 14-track album followed the standard K-pop formula: a mix of Korean and English songs with a bit of AAVE slang thrown in, and a slew of high-profile Western producers and writers, including Mike-Will-Made-It, Tezzo Touchdown, and Diplo. In short, Arirang was less an homage to an unofficial national anthem than it was a catchy hip-hop album—a nod to the group's cultural influences, but not necessarily their Korean ones. Only the leading track (“Body to Body”) sampled parts of the historic song.
This wasn’t unusual: Over time, as the genre has diversified, K-pop groups have made music with expanding influences, ranging from house to trap. In recent years, the genre has only further loosened, often following global trends rather than strictly adhering to what’s popular in Korea.
It’s an identity crisis that’s been plaguing the genre since the beginning of the decade. While the earliest iterations of K-pop groups (also known as first generation K-pop) occasionally produced songs in English, such tracks didn’t determine a group’s popularity, nor did they dominate the genre like they do now. As K-pop reaches a critical mass of popularity among international audiences, with groups not only sometimes singing exclusively in English, but also branding themselves as “global groups” with members from around the world, the lines have started to blur on what specifically makes K-pop, K-pop. It’s also why it’s become increasingly necessary for the genre as a whole to reckon with its relationship to Blackness, both historically and today.
The word K-pop itself was a bit of an accident. Dr. Stephanie Choi, Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Colorado Boulder, says that the label was “coined by outsiders, not by the K-pop industry itself.” Popularized in the 90s by Japanese and Chinese media, the term was used to refer to the global popularity of Korean dance pop, before Western media began using it throughout the decade. “Only by the early 2000s was the term introduced to Korean media,” says Dr. Choi.
It was around this time that Lee Soo-man, the architect of what's known as contemporary K-pop, created the idol trainee system that now defines the genre. Inspired by the assembly line approach of 60s Motown, Soo-man brought the same model to Korea, founding SM Entertainment in 1995, carefully crafting and turbocharging each trainee’s talents in dance, vocals, and visual identity through bootcamps notorious for their intensity.
This tradition has endured, eventually evolving into idol trainee reality TV-style competitions that have since produced some of the biggest K-pop groups in the world, including TWICE and Stray Kids. Like the rest of the genre, the success of these shows has now moved beyond Korea to the international stage, which is where The Debut: Dream Academy—the hit show behind the global girl group Katseye—was born.
In addition to commercial success, equally pivotal to defining K-pop is the loyalty of its fandoms, something that’s endured even as the genre has continued to diversify. All K-pop groups thrive on the intimate relationship fostered between idols and their fans, and through social media, this relationship has only intensified. But as the genre has globalized, this intensity has also proven to be a double-edged sword for idols of color. While there's, of course, virtue in national and ethnic representation, for idols, this has often manifested as overexposure to racism and bigotry—sometimes including from fans of color who project themselves onto what they believe an idol of their culture should look like.
It’s a part of why in late February, when Manon Bannerman, the only Black-identifying member of the global girl group Katseye, announced a temporary hiatus from group activities for unspecified reasons, the internet was abuzz with shock, confusion, outrage, and genuine concern on her behalf. Others, meanwhile, were suspicious.
“Definitely some anti-Blackness going on behind the scenes & you can’t tell me otherwise,” one fan commented on Reddit amidst all the speculation. “It’s very textbook.”
For an industry that has roots in Black entertainment, you’d think Black idols would be more common in K-pop. But while K-pop groups have always had members from other East Asian countries, having visibly non-Asian members is still rare. Alexandra Reid of girl group BP Rania was the first Black idol in K-pop history, debuting in 2015. After BP Rania disbanded and re-debuted as Blackswan in 2020, Senegalese-Belgian member Fatou joined her in the lineup. In 2025, Girlset (formerly known as VCHA) rebranded into a multinational four-person girl group, including a Venezuelan-Trinidadian member. But otherwise, Katseye remains the exception rather than the rule when it comes to racial diversity.
The Katseye girls hail from three continents and several different ethnicities and nationalities. Sophia, the group leader, is from the Philippines. Manon is Ghanaian and Swiss. Lara, Daniela, and Megan are all from the States, representing Indian, Cuban-Venezuelan, and Chinese-Singaporean heritages respectively. The only member born and raised in Korea is Yoonchae, who is also the youngest of the six. Their diversity has long been their strength—carefully engineered to capture the hearts of millions of fans, starting from their debut on 2023’s The Debut: Dream Academy, then in 2024, through their intimate Netflix docu-series Pop Star Academy. Following multiple successful commercials for Jollibee, Glossier, and The Gap (the latter of which went viral as a perceived response to Sydney Sweeney’s rather tactless American Eagle ad), the group became seen by fans as a paragon of what the future of K-pop could be.
“I found it interesting that there was a member with the same name as mine who also has Venezuelan ancestry,” says Daniela Bottini, a self-identified Eyekon, as the group’s fans are known. “It was refreshing to see that when they said global, they really meant it. They took the best parts of the K-pop training system, but also recognized that the rigid rules that govern it couldn’t work in a group mainly comprised of young Gen Z women raised in more liberal countries.”
Indeed, on paper, Katseye checks off every K-pop box: rooted in the trainee system, with a deeply interpersonal fandom, challenging choreography, and catchy songs perfect for a 30-second TikTok. Unfortunately, their success has also shed light on the uncomfortable ways global groups are still perceived—and treated—in K-pop compared with their all-Korean peers.
Unlike her Korean contemporaries, Bannerman has not been offered the same grace nor protection she might otherwise have found from fans, even before she announced her hiatus. Throughout her trainee days and well into her debut, she received online hate and death threats and was often called “lazy” and “ungrateful” for someone in her position. It’s an unfortunate reality that all idols, Korean or not, have to go through; but coupled with xenophobia and racism, often rampant against non-Korean idols within fandom spaces, the insults compound.
While anti-Blackness is a worldwide phenomenon, it feels especially glaring in an industry that has long been inspired by Black American culture. Historically, the genre has borrowed heavily from Black aesthetics and practices while divorcing them from the bitterness of Black history, thus turning them into something more “palatable” for a broader audience to enjoy. Across the genre, Black culture is simultaneously commodified while its originators go unrecognized—something increasingly harder to ignore when Black idols like Bannerman exist. Katseye and other global groups, then, present an interesting tension point within the genre, ultimately forcing K-pop’s global audience to reconcile its conflicting ideas of fetishized exotic orientalism—its own form of racism—with its disdain for Black people. It's also what makes BTS’s Arirang trailer snafu—intentional or not—so glaring.
As the genre continues to diversify and to innovate, we’ll likely see more attempts at recreating Katseye’s success, and songs that are not just in English, but in Spanish, French, and other languages, too. Maybe there will be a K-pop group that only produces house music and dance. Perhaps the next trend in K-pop will be country guitar riffs. Jeff Benjamin, a K-pop contributor at Billboard, made the prescient prediction that 2026 will be a defining year for how the genre shifts and how global audiences perceive K-pop overall.
“At this year's Grammy Awards, we saw Katseye as well as Rosé of Blackpink perform; additionally, KPop Demon Hunters won an award—but the bodies of work that these three acts were nominated for aren't traditional K-pop,” says Benjamin.
It’s likely we’ll see a shift happen sooner rather than later. As of June 2026, the Grammys have introduced a new award: Best Asian Pop Music Performance, a category recognizing pop music performances originating from or widely known in Asian markets. It isn’t limited to just K-pop, but J-pop, C-pop, and music from other countries across the Asian diaspora, too. Shortly after the category was announced, BTS said they would not submit Arirang for consideration in the 2027 awards.
“We hope our music can be heard and loved for what it is, rather than being divided by region or language,” reads a statement from all seven members of the group, explaining their decision. “We thank Army [the group's fandom] and everyone who has always stood by us.”
As barriers between cultures and languages break down on our screens, and the world as we know it inevitably changes, it’s clear that K-pop has the potential to be a bright spot in a new world order. It’s already crossed the boundaries of race, ethnicity, and language to become an international genre. Its music resonates and inspires millions of fans across the world. But if the genre wants to reach its full cultural potential, it will also have to reckon with its relationship not only to idols of color, but xenophobia towards idols outside of Korea, once and for all.
As of today, Katseye is a de facto four-member girl group with Bannerman’s hiatus ongoing, and Sophia's recent announcement she would be stepping back from the group until September. Prolonged hiatuses aren’t uncommon in K-pop groups, usually due to illness or injury or just the need for a mental health break. But whether Bannerman comes back to the group or not, one thing is for certain: the issue of anti-Blackness in K-pop remains, and it’s up to both the industry and its fans to dismantle it.
[post_title] => The Globalization of K-Pop
[post_excerpt] => As the genre continues to diversify, it's time for K-pop to reckon with its relationship to Blackness.
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We don't just need more women in office. We need a culture shift.
I once believed that the presence of a female leader signaled real progress—a sign that gender equality had taken root. As a girl growing up in China, I watched with admiration as women like President Tsai Ing-wen in Taiwan and President Park Geun-hye in South Korea rose to the highest offices in their respective countries. Their success seemed to promise a future in which women’s voices would be equally heard, equally respected—that perhaps women might finally be seen as equals.
But as I began to study gender and politics more deeply, particularly across East and Southeast Asia, that initial optimism gave way to unease. Representation alone, I realized, does not guarantee change. Even more alarmingly, the symbolic presence of women in power can obscure the systemic barriers that continue to shape—and often silence—most women’s participation in political life.
Globally, this problem has proven surmountable. In Scandinavia, gender quotas and institutional reforms have helped elevate women to between 40% and 50% of parliamentary seats, reflecting not only a shift in numbers but a broader cultural embrace of women as political leaders. Similar gender quotas in Mexico—which elected its first woman president, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, last year—have led to women making up 50% of seats in congress, after gender parity was enshrined in the country’s constitution in 2014.
In contrast, however, East and Southeast Asian democracies continue to lag behind—not only in representation, but in the structural support needed to close the gender gap. Japan, for example, despite being one of the world’s largest economies, has seen little progress in this area. Women occupy roughly 16% of seats in the national legislature—a statistic that reveals not just electoral imbalance, but deeper societal expectations about leadership, gender roles, and public legitimacy. As of April of this year, the percentage of women who hold parliamentary seats in India (13.8%), Cambodia (13.6%), Malaysia (13.5%), Sri Lanka (9.8%), and Bhutan (4.3%) remains even lower. And in China, there have been no women in the politburo since 2022, something the United Nations has flagged as a matter of great concern.
So, are women truly gaining power in Asia, or are they simply there to make politics look more gender equal?
Analyzing data from the Asian Barometer Survey suggests the reason women’s political participation remains low in Asia is as much a numbers problem as it is a cultural one. Founded in 1971, the ABS is a cross-national survey that aims to gather “public opinion data on issues such as political values, democracy, governance, human security, and economic reforms.” In a 2020 academic paper from the University of Edinburgh’s Dr. Sarah Liu, one surprising finding from the 2010–2012 survey was how the gender of the interviewer affected women’s answers. Faced with female researchers, women opened up about their political beliefs. With male interviewers, many of them hesitated. This suggests a much deeper problem with Asia’s gender divide, rooted in women feeling both uncomfortable with and unwelcome in politics.
Across many societies, not just in Asia, politics is still seen as a man’s domain, where women are expected to support, not lead. But in East and Southeast Asia, where traditional gender roles continue to shape public and private life, this attitude is amplified. Even in modern cities, women are constantly told that politics is not their space. For me, it wasn’t that anyone said I couldn’t be a leader when I was growing up—it was that no one ever expected me to be one. And when women are constantly told that something isn’t an option for them, it makes sense that, eventually, they might actually start to believe it.
When women do step forward to lead, they also face a very different kind of scrutiny to their male peers. Their private lives are often judged more harshly than their professional ones, and given as much attention, if not more. When Tsai Ing-wen became Taiwan’s first female president, critics focused on the fact that she was unmarried—as if being single made her unfit to lead. But when it comes to unmarried male leaders, no one ever even thinks to question it.
The media frequently contributes to this double standard. I remember watching coverage of Shoko Kawata, a 33-year-old woman who became the youngest female city mayor in Japanese history after winning her election in Yawata, Kyoto Prefecture in 2023. I was furious that the story’s focus was not on what she’d said in her speech, but on what she was wearing. Other reports also emphasized her love of tea ceremony and traditional kimono attire—while barely mentioning her actual policy goals. Her agenda had been reduced to its aesthetics: her clothes were that day’s headline news, while her policies went overlooked.
Even within political institutions, this bias persists. In Japan, a young Tokyo assemblywoman was once heckled by her male colleagues while speaking about the need for better childcare policies. This incident occurred in 2014, when Ayaka Shiomura, a member of the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly, was addressing how the government might better support mothers in light of Japan’s drastically decreasing birth rate. During her speech, several male lawmakers interrupted her with sexist remarks such as “Go and get married!” and “Can you even have children?” One of them, Akihiro Suzuki, later admitted to the heckling and publicly apologized. But the incident sparked widespread outrage, and served as another stark reminder of the entrenched gender bias in even the most formal of political spaces.
Fueling all this is the deeper issue that women are still expected to prioritize the family above all. This problem isn’t singular to Asia, but nonetheless, it feels especially pervasive here: Even in the public sphere, women are still trapped in private expectations. When a woman chooses public service, some see it as a betrayal of her “real” duty. The media asks, “Can she have it all?”—a question they’d never ask of a man, and one that has never been asked of a father.
These attitudes don’t just make the job harder. They make women question whether the space was ever meant for them. And in many ways, it still isn’t—something that keeps women out of politics, and keeps everyone, regardless of gender, chained to the status quo.
Yet, despite persistent challenges, women politicians in Asia have continued to make remarkable strides. President Tsai and President Park both shattered historical barriers to ascend to the highest levels of national leadership in their respective countries, proving that women are more than capable of leading. They also both drove meaningful social and economic change during their terms—even in systems not designed for them.
As the first woman president of Taiwan, Tsai Ing-wen and her administration actively pushed for gender-equal policies, earning Taiwan the top spot in Asia—and one of the highest rankings globally—for gender equality. One particularly meaningful initiative was an amendment requiring companies with more than 100 employees to provide childcare facilities—helping to ease the burden on working mothers. Tsai also supported policies that loosened loan restrictions for women entrepreneurs and promoted female participation in the economy as a path to structural change.
Beyond legislation, she repeatedly called for dismantling gender stereotypes and encouraged women to participate in public life—raising both the visibility and legitimacy of women in leadership. Under her eight-year tenure, Taiwan’s economy grew steadily, with an average annual GDP growth rate of 3.15%, and even reached 6.6% in 2021—a rare achievement during global economic uncertainty.
Park Geun-hye’s presidency, meanwhile, offered a different but equally important approach to leadership. While her administration made more modest progress on gender-specific reforms, it recognized the challenges faced by working mothers and proposed expanding childcare services to support female employment. More broadly, Park’s role as a woman navigating a traditionally male-dominated political landscape was also deeply symbolic.
Under her leadership, South Korea expanded its global economic footprint by signing free trade agreements with 52 countries, including China and Vietnam—bolstering South Korea’s export markets and international competitiveness. These policy efforts, though not always framed through a gender lens, reflected a broader vision of national growth, with women as increasingly visible participants.
Tsai and Park’s contributions—each shaped by their own context—highlight the transformative power and potential of women’s leadership. For millions of women across Asia, seeing them in positions of power—on television, in parliament, in international headlines—continues to deliver an enduring message: women belong here. And their presence alone continues to inspire others to imagine what is possible when women are no longer the exception.
Change won’t come overnight. Cultural shifts take time. But every honest conversation, every woman who speaks up, every moment of resistance matters—so hopefully, one day, girls growing up in East or Southeast Asia will see women in power and think: “That could be me.” Not because it’s rare, but because it’s normal.
To achieve this, we don’t just need more women in office. We need political systems that respect their leadership, media that reports on their work—not their wardrobe—and societies that stop measuring women by outdated standards. We need women in Asia to not just be seen in politics, but truly heard.
[post_title] => When Will Women in Asia Be Seen as Leaders—Not Exceptions?
[post_excerpt] => We don't just need more women in office. We need a culture shift.
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[post_modified] => 2026-08-03 22:48:14
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