Once Americans return to crowded offices, schools, buses and trains, so too will their sneezes and sniffles.
Having been introduced to the idea of wearing masks to protect themselves and others, some Americans are now considering a behavior scarcely seen in the United States but long a fixture in other cultures: routinely wearing a mask when displaying symptoms of a common cold or the flu, even in a future in which Covid-19 isn’t a primary concern.
“I will still feel a responsibility to protect others from my illness when I have a cold or bronchitis or something along those lines,” said Gwydion Suilebhan, a writer and arts administrator in Washington who said he also plans to continue wearing masks in situations like flying on airplanes. “It’s a responsible part of being a human in a civil society to care for the people around you.”
Such routine use of masks has been common for decades in other countries, primarily in East Asia, as protection against allergies or pollution, or as a common courtesy to protect nearby people.
Meet the Press.”
Other leading American health officials, however, have not encouraged the behavior. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — which at the beginning of the pandemic advised against wearing masks, and only changed its guidance a couple of months later — does not advise people with flu symptoms to wear masks, and says they “may not effectively limit transmission in the community.”
That’s partly because there’s no tidy scientific consensus on the effect of masks on influenza virus transmission, according to experts who have studied it.
Nancy Leung, an epidemiologist at the University of Hong Kong, said that the science exploring possible links between masking and the emission or transmission of influenza viruses was nuanced — and that the nuances were often lost on the general public.
randomized controlled trials — the gold standard in scientific research — that masking reduced transmission of influenza viruses in a community.
There was some evidence from observational studies that masks reduced community transmission of influenza viruses, she added, but that research had a caveat: Observational studies cannot isolate masking from other possible factors, such as hand hygiene or social distancing.
“You can’t really decipher whether that observed reduction in transmission is due to face masks alone or not,” Dr. Leung said.
For similar reasons, the fact that the flu all but vanished in the United States during the coronavirus pandemic — and that many Americans anecdotally reported that they caught fewer colds than usual in 2020 — is not evidence alone that masks were responsible.
In East Asia, the historical use of masks is based on more than just medical research, and the steps that led each country to adopt them vary widely.
Please sneeze into your elbow, not your hand.)
Others pointed to institutional differences, including a history of anti-masking laws in the United States that were implemented during periods of social unrest in order to discourage violence.
New York State, for example, passed an anti-masking law in 1845 to prevent tenants from demanding land reform, according to research by Sharrona Pearl, a professor of medical ethics at Drexel University in Philadelphia. And from the 1920s to 1950s, several states passed similar laws in response to violence by the Ku Klux Klan.
Several East Asian scholars said in interviews that the region’s mask-wearing customs varied widely because people in each country had responded over the years to different epidemiological or environmental threats.
Jaehwan Hyun, a professor of history of Pusan National University in South Korea, said that ignoring the nuances could be dangerous.
seasonal dust storms that sweep into the country from Mongolia and northern China.
“Generally speaking, Koreans until recently believed that mask wearing was a sort of ‘Japanese practice,’ not ours,” he said.
In Hong Kong, where 299 people died during the SARS epidemic of 2002-3, the experience of universal masking against that coronavirus helped create a “cultural familiarity” with a practice that was also common during episodes of severe air pollution, Mr. De Kai said.
“It was a big reminder to people that masks are important not only to protect yourself from the pollution but also to avoid infecting those around you,” he said.
In Taiwan, SARS and recent air pollution were the two main factors that prompted people there to develop the habit of mask wearing, said Yeh Ming-Jui, a professor of public health at National Taiwan University in Taipei.
Professor Yeh said he believed mask wearing was not more widespread in the West because people there had no immediate memories of a severe pandemic — at least until now.
“The experience and health practices of past generations have been gradually forgotten,” he said.
Amy Chang Chien contributed reporting from Taipei.
Park Na-rae, a comedian, grabbed a male doll, placed its plastic arm between its legs and made a suggestive remark.
By the standards of Western comedy, the stunt on her YouTube show in March would have hardly seemed offensive. But the skit became a scandal in her home country, South Korea. Legions of aggrieved young men accused her of sexual harassment. The police are investigating.
The scandal has made headlines for weeks and has threatened to inflict lasting damage on Ms. Park’s career, two years after she became the first female comedian from South Korea to host a Netflix special.
Her supporters say the outcry illustrates a double standard in a culture where men often brag about sexual conquests and where sexual harassment is endemic, but where women who dare to mention sex in public can be penalized.
suggested that women use sex to get jobs. Since he was punished for inappropriate comments, they argued, Ms. Park should be called to account, as well.
Lee Wonjae, a professor at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology who studies online, said that most of Ms. Park’s critics were not trolls from misogynistic, far-right websites, but ordinary men from mainstream society.
Professor Lee said that many young men in South Korea — which has one of the highest gender pay gaps in the developed world — feel threatened by certain gender trends and President Moon Jae-in’s attempts to push for gender equality. These men see women as growing competitors for jobs and gaining more bargaining power in the marriage market.
“Why are you going to support women more? Look at me: I’m doing my military service. What are you doing for me?” he said of how young men see their lot in life. “That is the message.” (Men in South Korea age 18 to 28 are required to serve in the military for about two years.)
Sexism is deeply entrenched in South Korea. There is an epidemic of men using hidden cameras to spy on women in public restrooms and changing rooms. Misogynistic posts are a defining feature of Reddit-like forums. “It’s everyday life, this kind of gender conflict, misogyny, backlash and hatred,” Dr. Mo said.
Park Won-soon, was one of many male politicians to be accused of sexual harassment. (He died by suicide last year.) And the Seoul authorities apologized this year after issuing guidelines that advised pregnant women to cook, clean and work on their appearances to ensure that their husbands still found them attractive.
sentenced to prison in 2019 for raping women who were too drunk to consent to sex.
Yet, other male celebrities and public figures have made sexist remarks without facing the kind of scrutiny faced by Ms. Park. She already had a reputation for pushing the boundaries of what female South Korean comedians can say or do. She began her 2019 Netflix special, “Glamour Warning,” by talking about her “first time doing it without a man.”
Ms. Park resigned from her YouTube show a few days after the scandal broke. The Seoul police later said that they were investigating the harassment claims to determine whether she had broken any laws. The police did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
OpenNet, a South Korean nongovernmental organization that advocates for internet privacy, said this month that her doll stunt did not constitute sexual harassment under policies set by the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family. The group said that she had merely tried to express female sexual identity.
Ms. Park’s talent agency, JDB Entertainment, said that she was not available for an interview.
In a handwritten note to her 1.8 million Instagram followers in March, Ms. Park said that it was her duty as a performer and public figure to “take responsibility” for her own acting and props. “I am nothing but sorry to the many people who trusted and supported me,” she wrote.
Last month, she visited her grandparents for one of her other television shows, “I Live Alone,” and expressed remorse for how her stunt with the doll had caused harm to her castmates.
“Humans are imperfect,” her grandfather, who was not named in the broadcast, said as Ms. Park burst into tears. “Don’t listen to hate.”
Novavax, one of the first players in the race to vaccinate the world against Covid, delivered disheartening news on Monday, saying that its highly protective vaccine would not be authorized in the United States or Britain until at least July, and that it would not reach peak production until the end of the year.
The delays, announced during an earnings call with investors, are the latest setback for the little-known Maryland company, which was granted up to $1.6 billion from the U.S. federal government last year and whose product has shown robust results in clinical trials. Despite these wins, the company has struggled to demonstrate that it can deliver on its promise to supply the world with 2 billion doses this year. Novavax has never brought a vaccine to market in its 34-year history.
On the call, the company’s president and chief executive, Stanley C. Erck, said that the regulatory and manufacturing hurdles causing the delay have now been resolved. “Nearly all of the major challenges have been overcome, and we can clearly see the light at the end of the tunnel,” he said.
Investors did not appear to agree: By Tuesday morning, the company’s stock had fallen to $133.86, down nearly 17 percent, although it rebounded somewhat later in the day.
finalized a deal with Gavi, a public-private global vaccine partnership, to supply 1.1 billion doses of its shot to low- and middle-income countries. Novavax has struck other deals with countries like South Korea, Japan and Australia, and has set up agreements with eight production plants around the world.
In January, the company estimated that it would hit its full production capacity of 150 million doses a month by the middle of this year, a prediction it later revised after facing a shortage of supplies like filters and the giant single-use bags that are used in vaccine manufacturing. On Monday, the company delayed its estimate again, saying it expected to reach production of 100 million doses a month by the end of the third quarter, and to make 150 million a month by the fourth quarter.
One of its major manufacturing partners, the Serum Institute in India, has faced its own production and geopolitical challenges. A fire at the facility earlier this year reduced its capacity, and in April, Serum’s chief executive, Adar Poonawalla, called out the United States for restricting access to raw vaccine ingredients. And though Novavax’s deal with Serum is intended to supply the rest of the world through its arrangement with Gavi, the Indian government has banned exports of vaccines from the country as it struggles with a deadly second wave of Covid-19.
which is tracking global vaccine deals. “I think particularly for countries in South and Southeast Asia, as well as countries in Africa, it is hard to overstate the impact that this is having.”
Regulatory hurdles have also set Novavax back. On Monday, company executives said that a now-resolved issue with an “assay” — a test that was needed to confirm that their product can be consistently manufactured at commercial scale across multiple production plants — was delaying regulatory approvals around the world, and that countries like Britain and the United States would not grant authorization until at least July. Company officials once said they hoped to gain authorization for their vaccine in April.
persuaded Novavax to set up a trial there last year in part by promising speed in clinical development and regulatory approval. But time is running out: About two-thirds of British adults have received a first dose of a coronavirus vaccine, most made by AstraZeneca, and every adult is expected to be offered one by the end of July.
The vaccine’s role in Britain depends in part on how quickly Novavax can start distributing its shot. A British factory making the vaccines has said that it would be ready by the summer. The country has recently turned away from the AstraZeneca shot in younger people because of the risk of very rare blood clots, leaving room for Novavax to be an alternative for people under 40.
The country is also studying the effects of administering a second dose of the Novavax vaccine in people who have already received a first dose from either Pfizer or AstraZeneca.
the company was on the verge of closing after a major trial failure for another vaccine, and it was forced to sell off its manufacturing facility to raise money.
Last year, the Trump administration placed a major bet on the tiny company as part of its Operation Warp Speed project, signing a $1.6 billion contract for delivery of 110 million doses by early this year. In April, the total amount of the deal was increased to $1.75 billion, according to Novavax’s financial filings. The company’s large trial in the United States and Mexico has still not been completed, although executives said on Monday that they expected results from that study “in a few weeks.”
Novavax officials said they now did not expect to deliver those doses until the end of this year or early 2022. A spokeswoman for Novavax said there was no penalty for later delivery in its contract with the U.S. government.
Novavax’s spotty track record does not offer confidence that it can rise to the challenge of producing billions of doses, said Les Funtleyder, a health care portfolio manager at E Squared Capital Management who invests in domestic and emerging markets. “It seems they were really unprepared for a challenge of this magnitude,” he said.
Recent news of internal turnover — such as the departure last month of Novavax’s chief financial officer, five months after taking the role, for personal reasons — does not help, Mr. Funtleyder said. “It’s a bad look,” he said.
children older than 12, in an effort to catch up to Moderna and Pfizer, which have already tested their products in that age group.
The vaccine can also be stored at normal refrigeration temperatures, without the freezing temperatures required by Pfizer and Moderna’s vaccines.
“By the end of 2021 there will still be a great need for safe and effective vaccines that can travel well,” said Ms. Taylor, of Duke University. “Novavax looks like it can fit that description.”
Dr. Saad B. Omer, the director of the Yale Institute for Global Health, noted that when concerns were raised over the Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca vaccines because of links to blood clots, countries with multiple vaccines available were able to switch to other options.
“It’s good to hedge our bets,” he said. “If we want to avoid, for example, body blow after body blow to low-income countries in many parts of the world that has an impact on everyone, we need to vaccinate a huge chunk of the world.”
Benjamin Mueller and Noah Weiland contributed reporting.
Births are falling. The population is aging. The work force of the world’s second-largest economy is shrinking.
China’s latest once-a-decade census, which was conducted last year, showed the slowest population growth since the 1960s, confirming that the country is in the midst of an urgent demographic crisis.
The results may push the government to loosen its family planning restrictions, which have shaped the most intimate aspects of Chinese society — marriage, childbirth and child-rearing — for decades. But the stark need for change has also underscored how reluctant the authorities have been to fully let go of control.
according to World Bank data. Last year, just 12 million babies were born in China, the lowest official number since 1961, as the country was emerging from a devastating famine.
Experts cautioned that the pandemic may have been a major factor, but births have now declined for four consecutive years.
The numbers make clear that China’s aging crisis will not be resolved anytime soon. As older Chinese people occupy a greater share of the population, while the younger work force who would support them declines, China’s pension funds and underdeveloped facilities for older adults are sure to feel strain. Adults above 60 now make up 18.7 percent of the population, compared with 13.3 percent in 2010.
Liang Jianzhang, a demography expert at Peking University, said he expected that the government would lift its remaining limits on fertility soon. Five years ago it ended its one-child policy and allowed families to have two children, but families who have more can still be penalized or denied benefits.
forcing women to have fewer babies as part of an effort to control the Muslim ethnic minorities there.
China’s gender gap is shrinking, but discrimination remains.
Stuart Gietel-Basten, a professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology who studies demography. But that ratio is still higher than normal, suggesting a lingering preference for boys, he added.
The advancement of women faces more official obstacles, too. In an effort to address the fertility crisis, officials in recent years have sought to push women back into traditional gender roles. Feminist activists have been detained or censored online.
39 percent of adults aged 25 to 64 in countries that are members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development had some form of tertiary education.) But it is a tremendous accomplishment for a country that in 1997 had fewer than 3.5 million undergraduate and graduate students.
Still, experts have noted that the surging numbers of college graduates may bring a new problem: a dearth of well-paid jobs to employ them. China’s economy is still largely reliant on blue-collar labor. Ning Jizhe, the head of China’s National Bureau of Statistics, acknowledged the gap at a news conference about the census on Tuesday.
“Employment pressure on college students is increasing,” he said. “The pace of industrial transformation and upgrading needs to speed up.”
Unless the new crop of educated young people can find stable jobs, Professor Gietel-Basten said, the fertility rate may drop even further. “If you’ve got a situation where you have graduate unemployment and it’s difficult to access these good jobs,” he said, “why would you have more babies?”
Wealthier centers are continuing to grow, while poorer areas lag.
Wang Feng, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine. As the northeast continues to empty out, those disparities may become even more pronounced, he added.
At the H Mart on Broadway at 110th Street in Manhattan, the lights are bright on the singo pears, round as apples and kept snug in white mesh, so their skin won’t bruise. Here are radishes in hot pink and winter white, gnarled ginseng grown in Wisconsin, broad perilla leaves with notched edges, and almost every kind of Asian green: yu choy, bok choy, ong choy, hon choy, aa choy, wawa choy, gai lan, sook got.
The theme is abundance — chiles from fat little thumbs to witchy fingers, bulk bins of fish balls, live lobsters brooding in blue tanks, a library of tofu. Cuckoo rice cookers gleam from the shelves like a showroom of Aston Martins. Customers fill baskets with wands of lemongrass, dried silvery anchovies, shrimp chips and Wagyu beef sliced into delicate petals.
For decades in America, this kind of shopping was a pilgrimage. Asian-Americans couldn’t just pop into the local Kroger or Piggly Wiggly for a bottle of fish sauce. To make the foods of their heritage, they often had to seek out the lone Asian grocery in town, which was salvation — even if cramped and dingy, with scuffed linoleum underfoot and bags of rice slumped in a corner.
1.5 percent of the American population was of Asian descent.
beaten to death in Detroit by two white autoworkers who were reportedly angered by the success of the Japanese car industry. Asian-Americans, a disparate group of many origins that had historically not been recognized as a political force, came together to condemn the killing and speak in a collective voice.
Today, as they again confront hate-fueled violence, Asian-Americans are the nation’s fastest-growing racial or ethnic group, numbering more than 22 million, nearly 7 percent of the total population. And there are 102 H Marts across the land, with vast refrigerated cases devoted to kimchi and banchan, the side dishes essential to any Korean meal. In 2020, the company reported $1.5 billion in sales. Later this year, it’s set to open its largest outpost yet, in a space in Orlando, Fla., that is nearly the size of four football fields.
And H Mart has competition: Other grocery chains that specialize in ingredients from Asia include Patel Brothers (Patel Bros, to fans), founded in Chicago; and, headquartered in California, Mitsuwa Marketplace and 99 Ranch Market — or Ranch 99, as Chinese speakers sometimes call it. They’re part of a so-called ethnic or international supermarket sector estimated to be worth $46.1 billion, a small but growing percentage of the more than $653 billion American grocery industry.
Japanese Breakfast, in her new memoir, “Crying in H Mart,” published last month. The book begins with her standing in front of the banchan refrigerators, mourning the death of her Korean-born mother. “We’re all searching for a piece of home, or a piece of ourselves.”
As the 20th-century philosopher Lin Yutang wrote, “What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a child?”
For an immigrant, cooking can be a way to anchor yourself in a world suddenly askew. There is no end to the lengths some might go to taste once more that birthday spoonful of Korean miyeok guk, a soup dense with seaweed, slippery on the tongue, or the faintly bitter undertow of beef bile in Laotian laap diip (raw beef salad).
When Vilailuck Teigen — the co-author, with Garrett Snyder, of “The Pepper Thai Cookbook,” out in April — was a young mother in western Utah in the 1980s, she ordered 50-pound bags of rice by mail and drove 150 miles to Salt Lake City to buy chiles. She had no mortar and pestle, so she crushed spices with the bottom of a fish-sauce bottle.
Snackboxe Bistro in Atlanta, was a child in a small town in east-central Alabama, where her family settled after fleeing Laos as refugees. They fermented their own fish sauce, and her father made a weekly trek to Atlanta to pick up lemongrass and galangal at the international farmers’ market.
The essayist Jay Caspian Kang has described Americans of Asian descent as “the loneliest Americans.” Even after the government eased restrictions on immigration from Asia in 1965, being an Asian-American outside major cities often meant living in isolation — the only Asian family in town, the only Asian child at school. A grocery store could be a lifeline.
When the writer Jenny Han, 40, was growing up in Richmond, Va., in the ’90s, her family shopped at the hole-in-the-wall Oriental Market, run by a woman at their church. It was the one place where they could load up on toasted sesame oil and rent VHS tapes of Korean dramas, waiting to pounce when someone returned a missing episode.
A few states away, the future YouTube cooking star Emily Kim — better known as Maangchi — was newly arrived in Columbia, Mo., with a stash of meju, bricks of dried soybean paste, hidden at the bottom of her bag. She was worried that in her new American home she wouldn’t be able to find such essentials.
Then she stumbled on a tiny shop, also called Oriental Market. One day the Korean woman at the counter invited her to stay for a bowl of soup her husband had just made.
“She was my friend,” Maangchi recalled.
Kim’s Convenience” might say, a sneak attack. Once Brian Kwon entered the office, he never left. “My father called it his ‘golden plan,’ after the fact,” he said ruefully. He is now a co-president, alongside his mother and his sister, Stacey, 33. (His father is the chief executive.)
For many non-Asian customers, H Mart is itself a sneak attack. On their first visit, they’re not actually looking for Asian ingredients; customer data shows that they’re drawn instead to the variety and freshness of more familiar produce, seafood and meat. Only later do they start examining bags of Jolly Pong, a sweet puffed-wheat snack, and red-foil-capped bottles of Yakult — a fermented milk drink that sold out after it appeared in Ms. Han’s best-selling novel-turned-movie “To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before.”
To be welcoming to non-Koreans, H Mart puts up signs in English. At the same time, the younger Mr. Kwon said, “We don’t want to be the gentrified store.” So while some non-Asians recoil from the tanks of lobsters, the Kwons are committed to offering live seafood.
Sunday Family Hospitality Group, in San Francisco, remembers the H Mart of his youth in New Jersey as “just the Korean store” — a sanctuary for his parents, recent immigrants still not at ease in English. Everyone spoke Korean, and all that banchan was a relief: His mother would pack them in her cart for dinner, then pretend she’d made them herself.
Later, as a teenager, he started seeing his Chinese- and Filipino-American friends there, too, and then his non-Asian friends. Spurred by postings on social media, young patrons would line up to buy the latest snack sensation — “the snack aisle is notorious,” Mr. Hong said — like Haitai honey butter chips and Xiao Mei boba ice cream bars. (The current craze: Orion chocolate-churro-flavored snacks that look like baby turtles.)
In “Mister Jiu’s in Chinatown,” a new cookbook by the chef Brandon Jew and Tienlon Ho, Mr. Jew, 41, recalls Sunday mornings in San Francisco with his ying ying (paternal grandmother in Cantonese), taking three bus transfers to traverse the city, on a mission for fresh chicken — sometimes slaughtered on the spot — and ingredients like pea shoots and lotus leaves.
He still prefers “that Old World kind of shopping,” he said, from independent vendors, each with his own specialties and occasional grouchiness and eccentricities. But he knows that the proliferation of supermarkets like H Mart and 99 Ranch makes it easier for newcomers to Asian food to recreate his recipes.
“Access to those ingredients leads to a deeper understanding of the cuisine,” he said. “And that in turn can become a deeper understanding of a community and a culture.”
Chai Pani in Asheville, N.C., and Atlanta, feels that something is lost when you buy paneer and grass-fed ghee at a Whole Foods Market. You miss the cultural immersion, he says, “getting a dunk and having horizons broadened.”
“An Indian grocery is not just a convenience — it’s a temple,” he said. “You’re feeding the soul. Come in and pick up on the energy.”
In the TV special “Luda Can’t Cook,” which premiered in February, Mr. Irani takes the rapper Ludacris to Cherians, an Indian supermarket in Atlanta. Once Mr. Irani had to scrounge for spices like cumin and turmeric at health food stores; now, surrounded by burlap sacks stuffed with cardamom pods and dried green mango, he tells Ludacris, “This is my house.”
Min Jin Lee, 52, remembers how important H Mart was to people working in Manhattan’s Koreatown in the ’80s, when it was still called Han Ah Reum and “tiny, with almost no place to negotiate yourself through the aisles,” she said. (It has since moved across West 32nd Street to a larger space.) Her parents ran a jewelry wholesale business around the corner, and relied on the store for a cheap but substantial dosirak (lunch box) that came with cups of soup and rice.
She sees the modern incarnation of the store as a boon for second- and third-generation Korean Americans, including thousands of Korean-born adoptees raised by white American parents, who “want to find some sort of connection to the food of their families,” she said. “There aren’t gatekeepers to say who’s in or who’s out.”
BTS — anti-Asian sentiment is growing. With visibility comes risk.
For Ms. Lee, this makes H Mart a comfort. “I like going there because I feel good there,” she said. “In the context of hatred against my community, to see part of my culture being valued — it’s exceptional.”
LONDON — India’s foreign minister, visiting London for a gathering of ministers from the world’s top industrial powers, said on Wednesday that he was self-isolating after coming into contact with people who tested positive for the coronavirus.
Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, the foreign minister, said on Twitter that he had been made aware of a possible exposure to positive coronavirus cases. “As a measure of abundant caution,” he said, he had decided to take part in the events virtually.
The event, held before a summit of leaders from the coterie of nations known as the Group of 7, has been heralded as the first major in-person diplomatic gathering since the pandemic began. Other members of India’s delegation were also isolating.
It comes as India is experiencing a devastating surge in coronavirus cases, and the news that the country’s delegation was self-isolating offered a telling reminder that while some nations with robust vaccination campaigns are moving to fully reopen, others remain in the throes of the pandemic.
according to the BBC. “As I understand it, what has happened is the individuals concerned are all isolating now.”
The Indian delegation had yet to attend central events being held at Lancaster House in London, but did participate in other meetings, including with Priti Patel, Britain’s home secretary.
received a vaccine dose. On the top of the agenda were discussions about cooperation between the two nations on coronavirus relief efforts. A surge in coronavirus cases has devastated India in recent weeks, with record numbers of daily new infections reported this week, and a lagging vaccine rollout worsening the problem.
Mr. Blinken also met with Dr. Jaishankar on Monday evening. The two delegations sat socially distanced and masked across from each other, according to reporters traveling with the secretary of state, and later gave brief remarks to the news media.
Dr. Jaishankar was also scheduled to attend a G7 dinner on Tuesday night with Mr. Blinken and other foreign ministers. It is unclear whether he attended.
Travel from India into Britain was recently restricted amid the surge in cases, with travel allowed only for British citizens and residents coming from India. Those who are allowed in must enter a mandatory hotel quarantine upon arrival. However, government guidelines offer exemptions to some of the measures for representatives of foreign countries who are traveling to the country on official business.
SEOUL — On a bright August morning in 1960, after two days of sailing from Japan, hundreds of passengers rushed on deck as someone shouted, “I see the fatherland!”
The ship pulled into Chongjin, a port city in North Korea, where a crowd of people waved paper flowers and sang welcome songs. But Lee Tae-kyung felt something dreadfully amiss in the “paradise” he had been promised.
“The people gathered were expressionless,” Mr. Lee recalled. “I was only a child of 8, but I knew we were in the wrong place.”
Mr. Lee’s and his family were among 93,000 people who migrated from Japan to North Korea from 1959 to 1984 under a repatriation program sponsored by both governments and their Red Cross societies. When they arrived, they saw destitute villages and people living in poverty, but were forced to stay. Some ended up in prison camps.
renewed interest in North Korean human rights violations, and when leaders in Japan and South Korea remain particularly sensitive about opening old wounds between the two countries.
“It was my mother who urged my father to take our family to the North,” Mr. Lee said. “And it was her endless source of regret until she died at age 74.”
The Lees were among two million Koreans who moved to Japan during Japanese colonial rule from 1910 to 1945. Some went there looking for work, others were taken for forced labor in Japan’s World War II effort. Lacking citizenship and financial opportunities, most returned to Korea after the Japanese surrender.
Citizens’ Alliance for North Korean Human Rights.
Japan approved of the migration despite the fact that most Koreans in the country were from the South, which was mired in political unrest. While Japanese authorities said ethnic Koreans chose to relocate to North Korea, human rights groups have accused the country of aiding and abetting the deception by ignoring the circumstances the migrants would face in the communist country.
Japanese women married to Korean men and thousands of biracial children. Among them was a young woman named Ko Yong-hee, who would later become a dancer and give birth to Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea, and grandson of its founder.
When Mr. Lee’s family boarded the ship in 1960, his parents thought Korea would soon be reunited. Mr. Lee’s mother gave him and his four siblings cash and told them to enjoy their last days in Japan. Mr. Lee bought a mini pinball-game machine. His younger sister brought home a baby doll that closed its eyes when it lay on the bed.
“It was the last freedom we would taste,” he said.
He realized his family had been duped, he said, when he saw the people at Chongjin, who “all looked poor and ashen.” In the rural North Korean county where his family was ordered to resettle, they were shocked to see people go without shoes or umbrellas in the rain.
In 1960 alone, 49,000 people migrated from Japan to North Korea, but the number sharply declined as word spread of the true conditions in the country. Despite the watchful eye of censors, families devised ways to warn their relatives. One man wrote a message on the back of a postage stamp:
“We are not able to leave the village,” he wrote in the tiny space, urging his brother in Japan not to come.
Mr. Lee’s aunt sent her mother a letter telling her to consider immigrating to North Korea when her nephew was old enough to marry. The message was clear: The nephew was only 3.
To survive, the migrants often relied on cash and packages sent by relatives still in Japan. In school, Mr. Lee said, children called him “ban-jjokbari,” an insulting term for Koreans from Japan. Everyone lived under constant fear of being called disloyal and banished to prison camps.
refugees, spending two and a half years in prison in Myanmar when he and his smuggler were detained for human trafficking. After arriving in Seoul in 2009, Mr. Lee helped smuggle his wife and daughter out of North Korea. But he still has relatives, including a son, stuck in the country, he said.
His wife died in 2013, and now Mr. Lee lives alone in a small rented apartment in Seoul. “But I have freedom,” he said. “I would have sacrificed everything else for it.”
Mr. Lee has formed an association with 50 ethnic Koreans from Japan who migrated to North Korea and escaped to the South. Every December, the group meets to mark the anniversary of the beginning of the mass migration in 1959. His memoir is nearly complete. His generation is the last to have firsthand experience of what happened to those 93,000 migrants, he said.
“It’s sad that our stories will be buried when we die,” Mr. Lee said.
LONDON — The Group of 7 was created to help coordinate economic policy among the world’s top industrial powers. In the four decades since, it has acted to combat energy shortages, global poverty and financial crises.
But as Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken meets with fellow Group of 7 foreign ministers in London this week, a key item on the agenda will be what Mr. Blinken called, in remarks to the press on Monday, “defending democratic values and open societies.”
Implicitly, that defense is against China and, to a lesser extent, Russia. While the economic and public tasks of recovering from the coronavirus remain paramount, Mr. Blinken is also employing the Group of 7 — composed of the United States, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan — to coordinate with allies in an emerging global competition between democracy and the authoritarian visions of Moscow and Beijing.
One twist in the meeting this week is the presence of nations that are not formal Group of 7 members: India, South Korea, Australia and South Africa. Also in attendance is Brunei, the current chair of the Association of South East Asian Nations.
Ash Jain, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.
Mr. Jain noted the way the group is now emphasizing common values over shared economic interests. “The G-7 is being rebranded as a group of like-minded democracies, as opposed to a group of ‘highly industrialized nations.’ They’re changing the emphasis,” he said.
Many of the countries represented at the meeting do big business with China and Russia, complicating efforts to align them against those nations. China’s pattern of economic coercion was one specific topic of conversation on Tuesday, participants said.
was expelled in 2014 from what was then the Group of 8 after its annexation of Crimea from Ukraine.
Nor is it likely a coincidence that the expanded guest list matches, with the additions of South Africa and Brunei, a group of 10 countries and the European Union, collectively short-handed as the “D-10” by proponents of organizing them in a new world body. Those proponents include Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain, the host of this week’s gathering and architect of its guest list.
Mr. Johnson has also invited India, Australia and South Korea to send their heads of state to this summer’s Group of 7 summit in Cornwall, citing his “ambition to work with a group of like-minded democracies to advance shared interests and tackle common challenges.”
President Biden has similarly suggested that the world is grouping into competing camps, divided by the openness of their political systems. In his address to Congress last week, Mr. Biden said that “America’s adversaries, the autocrats of the world, are betting” that the nation’s battered democracy cannot be restored.
also committed to holding a “Summit for Democracy” during his first year in office, and officials say planning for such an event is underway. Asked in a Tuesday interview with The Financial Times which countries might be invited to such a summit, Mr. Blinken did not answer directly.
And Wednesday’s agenda for the gathering includes a session on open societies, including issues of media freedom and disinformation. Other sessions over the two days include Syria, Russia and its neighbors Ukraine and Belarus, Myanmar, and Afghanistan.
interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes” broadcast the night before, Mr. Blinken made clear how the United States views China’s rise.
Jeremy Shapiro, a former State Department official in the Obama administration who is now research director at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said that informally expanding the Group of 7 is far easier than constructing a new body.
“It is always a pain, from a governmental perspective, to invent a new forum, because you need to have an endless discussion about who’s in and who’s out, and how it works, and its relationship to the U.N.,” Mr. Shapiro said.
He added that the Group of 7, whose mission had grown nebulous in recent years, may have acquired a new sense of purpose as it tries to organize a post-Trump democratic world in the face of Chinese and Russian threats.
“You would be hard-pressed to look back the past five years or more since they kicked out Russia to name a single thing the G-7 has done of interest,” Mr. Shapiro said. “It didn’t have much to do.”
The European Union will recommend that its member states open borders to travelers who have been fully vaccinated, it said on Monday, clearing the way for the countries to welcome more visitors.
Member states are set later this week to debate the proposal, which was issued by the European Commission, the bloc’s executive arm. Visitors who have received a vaccine approved by the European Union’s drug agency would be allowed to travel freely, and individual countries could still impose tougher requirements on visitors, the proposal said.
The Commission said that if certain member states were prepared to let in visitors who had tested negative, they should do the same for vaccinated ones. Unvaccinated travelers could still be permitted, but countries could require tests or quarantines.
Yet the return of tourism, which the European Commission’s president, Ursula von der Leyen, spoke about last Sunday, would be a much-needed boon for countries, particularly those in southern Europe whose economies rely heavily on tourism but have been crippled by shutdowns.
The announcement comes more than a year after the first bans on nonessential travel from most countries to the bloc came into effect.
A handful of countries with low virus caseloads, including Australia, New Zealand and South Korea, have been exempt from the ban. The Commission said on Monday that it would expand that list by allowing in visitors — regardless of vaccination status — from countries with virus rates higher than the current limit (though still lower than the European Union average).
If member states accept the proposal, they would also be able activate an “emergency brake” mechanism to suspend all travel from outside of the bloc, the Commission said, to avoid the spread of coronavirus variants.
Countries including Greece, Spain and France have already said they will open for visitors who can show proof of a vaccination or a negative test.
Under the new proposal, visitors would be able to enter the European Union if they received the last recommended dose of an authorized vaccine at least 14 days before arrival.
Travelers would have to prove their status under a vaccination certificate program issued by the national authorities of the country they wished to travel to, according to the Commission. But until that program was in place, governments could also accept certificates from countries outside the bloc, impose quarantines or require a proof of a negative test.
SEOUL — North Korea said on Sunday that President Biden had made “a big blunder” by calling its nuclear arsenal a threat last week, and it warned that the United States would face “a very grave situation” if it maintained what it called a “hostile policy” toward Pyongyang.
The statement, attributed to a senior official, was one of three that the North released on Sunday directed at the United States and its ally South Korea. They included warnings that the North might respond to the Biden administration’s recent statements about the country with unspecified “corresponding measures.”
Mr. Biden made a brief reference to North Korea in his speech before a joint session of Congress on Wednesday, saying that its nuclear program and Iran’s presented “serious threats to American security and the security of the world.” He said the United States and its allies would deal with them “through diplomacy as well as stern deterrence.”
“It is certain that the U.S. chief executive made a big blunder,” Kwon Jong-gun, a senior official at North Korea’s Foreign Ministry, said in a statement published by the North’s state news media. He said Mr. Biden’s remark “clearly reflects his intent to keep enforcing the hostile policy toward” North Korea.
ended in 2019 with no agreement on dismantling the North’s nuclear weapons facilities or easing American-led sanctions imposed on the North.
On March 25, North Korea launched two short-range ballistic missiles, its first such test in a year. Analysts have since warned that the North could carry out more tests or other provocations in an attempt to bolster its leverage in any talks with the Biden administration.
The administration, which has been conducting a North Korea policy review, recently indicated that it would pursue a strategy somewhere between Mr. Trump’s direct outreach to Mr. Kim, in which he strove for a single, sweeping deal, and the “strategic patience” approach of former President Barack Obama, which sought to compel the North to negotiate through sanctions and other forms of pressure. Both approaches failed, and North Korea has kept expanding its arsenal.
The White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, said on Friday that the administration “will not focus on achieving a grand bargain, nor will it rely on strategic patience.” She said it would seek “a calibrated, practical approach that is open to and will explore diplomacy” with North Korea and would try to “make practical progress that increases the security” of the United States and its allies.
a statement last week by Ned Price, the State Department spokesman, who called North Korea “one of the most repressive and totalitarian states in the world.” Mr. Price cited “shoot-to-kill orders at the North Korea-China border” that American officials say the North has imposed since the emergence of Covid-19.
Also on Sunday, Mr. Kim’s sister, Kim Yo-jong, denounced South Korea for failing to stop a group of activists from using balloons to send propaganda leaflets across the countries’ border into the North.
Such launches, a tactic often used by defectors from North Korea campaigning against the Kim regime, were banned by South Korea in March, on the grounds that they needlessly provoked Pyongyang and endangered South Koreans living near the border. The North cited the propaganda launches last year when it blew up an office building on its soil where officials from both Koreas had worked together.
Park Sang-hak, who leads a defectors’ group in Seoul, said on Friday that his organization had defied the launch ban earlier in the week, releasing 10 large balloons carrying a half million leaflets. He accused the South Korean government of “gagging” the defectors and denying North Koreans the right to know how their leaders were seen by the outside world.
Ms. Kim, who serves as her brother’s spokeswoman on inter-Korean issues, called the defectors “human wastes” in her statement Sunday, characterizing the launch as “a serious provocation” and warning that the North would “look into corresponding action.”
