turns

June 15 (Asia Today) — Salt-damaged farmland once unsuitable for either agriculture or aquaculture has become a source of pension income for residents of islands in southwestern South Korea.

Shinan County in South Jeolla Province operates what it calls a “Sunlight Pension,” sharing part of the profits from solar power projects with local residents. The program is regarded as a social economy model that connects large-scale renewable energy infrastructure with household income and local spending.

The county began distributing the pension on Anjwa and Jara islands in 2021 under a renewable energy profit-sharing program. It has since expanded the program to Jido, Saokdo, Imjado and Bigeumdo.

Under the program, part of the profits generated by solar power projects is distributed to residents through local cooperatives.

South Korea’s Ministry of the Interior and Safety regards the Shinan program as a social economy model that converts local resources into resident income while keeping spending within the community. The program brings residents, local government and private businesses together to ensure that some profits from power generation remain in the region.

The model is also consistent with the national government’s initiative to create “Sunlight Income Villages,” where communities receive income from renewable energy projects.

Shinan County enacted an ordinance in 2018 establishing a system to share profits from renewable energy development with residents. Residents do not directly pay the cost of building the power plants. Instead, resident cooperatives participate in the projects and receive dividends from the resulting revenue.

The dividends are paid through local gift certificates, encouraging recipients to spend the money within Shinan County.

“Existing residents are guaranteed dividend benefits, while benefits for new residents vary according to age to encourage younger people to move here,” a county official said. “New residents age 40 or younger are eligible immediately, without a waiting period.”

The program has produced measurable results.

Renewable energy development dividends generated cumulative revenue of 24.71 billion won, or about $16.1 million, between April 2021 and April 2025. Of that amount, 22.32 billion won, or about $14.6 million, was distributed through the Sunlight Pension.

An additional 2.39 billion won, or about $1.6 million, was distributed as a Sunlight Child Allowance for residents younger than 18.

Of Shinan County’s 16,483 residents, 13,284 are members of participating cooperatives, representing a participation rate of 81%.

The Anjwa Solar City power plant serves as the foundation of Shinan’s Sunlight Pension model.

The facility has a combined generating capacity of 288 megawatts, consisting of a 96-megawatt first phase and a 192-megawatt second phase. The first phase began commercial operations in November 2020, followed by the second phase in January 2023.

Plant officials said the project cost about 560 billion won, or approximately $366 million. It generates annual revenue of between 80 billion won and 85 billion won, or roughly $52.3 million to $55.6 million.

The history of the site is also significant.

The land was originally used for farming but became unsuitable for both agriculture and aquaculture because of salt damage and years of use as fish farms. A 2019 revision to South Korea’s Farmland Act allowed salt-damaged farmland to be used temporarily for other purposes, clearing the way for the solar project.

The land is scheduled to be restored to farmland after the solar facilities cease operations.

Anjwa Solar City is considered a leading example of South Korea’s resident-participation renewable energy profit-sharing system. Large solar projects can generate local opposition when residents receive few tangible benefits, making the profit-sharing structure a central element in securing community acceptance.

The Shinan model, however, may be difficult to reproduce in every region. Large renewable energy projects require several conditions, including government approval, resident consent and access to transmission infrastructure.

Project profitability and local acceptance must also be considered to maintain a stable dividend system.

“The Sunlight Pension was designed to ensure that development profits remain with residents and circulate within the community,” the county official said. “We plan to expand the profit-sharing program beyond solar power to offshore wind and other renewable energy projects.”

— Reported by Asia Today; translated by UPI

© Asia Today. Unauthorized reproduction or redistribution prohibited.

Original Korean report: https://www.asiatoday.co.kr/kn/view.php?key=20260615010005065

David Baerwald holds up his most precious possession so that it’s visible on our video conference: a very old violin in a very old, battered case.

Baerwald, an award-winning musician, film composer and songwriter who called Los Angeles home for nearly four decades, doesn’t play the violin. During his years with the Tuesday Music Club (immortalized in the Sheryl Crow album “Tuesday Night Music Club”), he played guitar. But the violin belonged to his grandfather Ernst Baerwald — and it plays an important role in his recently published debut novel, “The Fire Agent.”

Not every successful artist turns to a new medium at age 65 or moves to the opposite coast (Baerwald now lives in Kingston, N.Y.). Then again, not every artist has a family history quite like Baerwald’s, one that includes Germany and Japan, two world wars, a 1920s throuple and Beethoven’s Ninth.

The violin in Baerwald’s hands was the one his German-Jewish grandfather played as a Japanese prisoner of war in the Bandō camp at Tokushima during World War I. “It’s a very serviceable violin,” Baerwald notes. “A friend of mine played it for some years in the Long Beach Symphony. When my grandfather was older and wealthy, he bought a better violin, which was lost in a fire. But this is the one that matters.”

It matters because Ernst Baerwald was a founding member of a German POW orchestra that chose Beethoven’s great symphony as their premiere work — a performance so moving that it began a Japanese tradition marking the December holidays that persist to this day. Baerwald’s grandfather not only kept his violin throughout the war in which he fought; when he defected from the Third Reich in 1941, he placed it in an oiled bag and brought it with him via an oceanic escape.

Ernst Baerwald’s odyssey from a cushy childhood in Frankfurt to his final days in a beautiful Berkeley mansion, with a long sojourn in Tokyo along the way, reads like, well, a novel. Sent to an elite boys’ prep school in Germany, then on to a seriously disciplined Milanese dojo where he was trained by a Japanese sensei, Ernst was a prisoner in Japan for four years during World War I.

Those details might have been easy to find, but it wasn’t until David Baerwald went to clear out his parents’ house in Brentwood that he discovered papers showing that his grandfather had not only been the head of the Tokyo office of I.G. Farben, but that he had given a major speech to the nascent Office of Strategic Services (precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency) in 1943 that laid out the plan for the firebombing of Japan.

He also urged them not to allow partnerships between large corporations and the military, the way the German scientific community and government did with I.G. Farben and Krupp Armaments and Steel. “Any business that makes peace with Fascism will become Fascist,” he said. “And once Fascism captures economic control, then a Fascist coup will inevitably follow to seize political power. Germany, Italy, Rumania, Japan, Spain the story is the same. We cannot allow it to become the story of America.”

When Baerwald read that, “I was really alarmed, in the moment,” he says, realizing how closely tied his grandfather had been to the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “But it gave me a plan.” He wanted to show how deeply his grandfather had become integrated into Japanese culture.

“One of my characters tells Ernst that he has ‘yuyo,’ which might best be described as grace,” says Baerwald. “Its Japanese meaning is closer to the state of a river rock that has been washed over and tumbled thousands of times, so that it’s both distinct, and a meaningful part of its environment.” To some extent, the author understands “yuyo” personally, having lived in Japan and been educated at its International School until age 12, when his family moved back to California, “although I wouldn’t claim it for myself,” he says.

That move, in the early 1970s, may have led to his career in music. “When we got back to the States, I was extremely troubled. Call me a fish out of water, I guess. I went through a period of voluntary mutism — I think they call it selective communication. I didn’t talk to anyone, especially not to my family. My hearing would sort of come and go at will, too.” His mother understood he seemed to like his sister’s acoustic guitar, so she suggested he take some lessons. “At the time, it wasn’t at all a career path, it was a way of reassembling my brain so that I could cope with the reality I was experiencing, finding a way to communicate again.”

Part of what he was experiencing, which he knows a great deal more about now, was feeling “the secrets that were the engine propelling my family.” After Ernst’s long career of service and deception, David Baerwald’s father, Kurt, entered the U.S. Army during WWII and later became a professor of Japanese studies at both in Japan and at UCLA. The effects on their family of five still reverberate. Baerwald’s mother eventually became a clinical psychologist who specializes in trauma. “I had to separate myself completely from my family in order to survive,” he says.

However, what stalled the writing of this first novel were the two decades he initially left out, which included Ernst, Lina and their lover Chizuko being a ménage à trois in a 1923 Tokyo dealing with the aftermath of an earthquake and wildfires.

Although “The Fire Agent” is based on Ernst’s history, not all of the facts are congruent. The wrestling coach at the American school in Tokyo, Ernst’s glamorous courtesan Chizuko, and many of the characters are composites. Speaking of that courtesan, Baerwald says it’s true that his grandfather and grandmother cohabited with a Japanese woman for many years, even after Lina and Ernst had a child together. “I found so many letters between my grandfather and my grandmother and I think they truly loved each other, and I think they truly loved that woman, too.”

That didn’t make it easy for Baerwald to write about that love. “My German grandmother, on whom Lina is partly based, was terrifying,” he says. “It was easier to write about her sex life with my grandfather and their Japanese lover by creating composite characters.”

He didn’t want to leave out their sex life, though, or that of others.

“Every generation of young people thinks they invented sex, right? But nothing is new — and it never gets old. Here’s an example. One of my godfathers, Sam Jameson, was the L.A. Times bureau chief in Tokyo for decades. He was also the doyenne, if you will, of the cross-dressing community in that city. It was this rich world he was a part of that nobody knew anything about. I based the character I call Bünheimer on him.”

Some of the worlds Baerwald has uncovered through his family’s papers are rich and sensual; others, like the POW camp where Ernst was held and the speech he gave to the OSS analysts at the Presidio in the 1940s, are stark and terrible. While he renders all appropriately, he’s aware that his perspective remains that of a white Western man. How did he gain the courage to write about people of other races, cultures and genders? He says it comes from something he did when he was on a swim team in high school. “The psychological trick I would play on myself at each meet was to imagine the water I’d dive into was freezing cold,” he says. “And of course it wasn’t. Which was such a relief and kept me going.”

Like his grandfather’s beloved violin, Baerwald has taken a deep dive into previously unknown waters — and survived. As he works on his second novel, he’s better prepared for airing family secrets and the publishing world. Ever the musician, he likens his first round with it to a Shepard tone, the auditory illusion that can make listeners feel like two notes one octave apart are constantly ascending or descending in pitch (Baerwald has worked with famed composer Hans Zimmer, who used the tone in, for example, “The Dark Knight”).

“A Shepard tone can make you feel like you’re flying. Or sinking,” he says. “At this point in my life and art, I prefer to have my feet firmly on the ground.”

Beneath azure skies and fluffy white clouds, three giggling toddlers and their mothers arrive at a candy-colored water park in the town of CoComelon.

It’s the opening of “Fast Little Fishy Splash Water Park Adventure,” a three-minute episode of “CoComelon,” the popular children’s cartoon series that is perhaps as controversial as it is appealing to young children.

Moonbug Entertainment, the studio behind “CoComelon,” says the episode, which debuted on YouTube in May, is the result of a years-long collaboration with a UCLA think tank.

In an unconventional move for a privately held entertainment company, the studio released its child development guidelines on its website Tuesday. Moonbug’s head of communications Bao Nguyen said the company began to incorporate findings from the research into its creative process in late 2025.

“It’s a great example of what we’ve been trying to do,” said Rich Hickey, Moonbug’s chief creative officer, referring to the episode. “Inclusive storytelling and learning through play — they’re all evident within that episode.”

Nina and Cody, ecstatic about visiting their neighborhood splash pad, run through fountains and hop in kiddie pools, but protagonist JJ is a bit more skeptical.

With support from his friends and his mother, who offers him goggles and a pair of orange arm floaties, JJ decides to face his fears. He joins his friends under a tipping bucket, and — spoiler alert — realizes that he actually enjoys playing in water. (“I just love to swim, swim, swim,” he sings.)

The guidelines, called the “Moonbug Learning Principles Framework,” are informed by academic research and advise that Moonbug shows should help young viewers navigate “real life moments” and “model positive relationships among children and their friends and caregivers.”

Other priorities include creating shows that encourage kids to learn through play, as this helps them develop their imagination and creativity, and featuring characters from diverse backgrounds (“CoComelon’s” Nina is Mexican American, Cece is Korean American and Cody is Black) — and giving said characters depth — across all Moonbug shows.

“We’re a digital-first company and we realized that there may be some … hesitation to sharing online content with children,” Hickey said. “This is really to keep building on the trust we think we’ve built.”

“CoComelon” is Moonbug’s flagship preschool show, and the series’ origins date back to 2006 when commercial director Jay Jeon shared a YouTube video of an alphabet cartoon set to music. The videos began to revolve around toddler JJ in 2017.

By 2020, “CoComelon” was the most-watched YouTube channel in the world, averaging 3.5 billion monthly views. That year, the show made its streaming debut on Netflix — where it broke ratings records — and was bought by London-based entertainment company Moonbug.

Moonbug was then acquired by Candle Media, a firm led by ex-Disney execs Kevin Mayer and Tom Staggs, for a reported $3 billion. Disney+ has since obtained the exclusive streaming rights to “CoCoMelon.”

“CoComelon‘s” image woes aren’t new. The series has developed a reputation for keeping children glued to the screen, as seen in videos that have gone viral on social media of babies bolting to the television upon hearing the marimba theme song.

In 2020, a Guardian columnist wrote that “CoComelon” was “like crack” for a preschool child. A New York Times report in 2022 gave the public more insight into Moonbug’s audience development process, which included testing “CoComelon” videos on young children to make its shows as attention-grabbing as possible.

The program has been a hot topic on parenting forums. The exchange typically goes something like this: Someone asks if “CoComelon” is “bad” and a gaggle of parents weigh in. “Very overstimulating,” said a user in one Reddit thread. “It moves too fast for kids’ brains to process, which can cause a speech delay,” wrote another.

Asked to respond to the criticism, Hickey said he believes Moonbug makes “age-appropriate content” and produces a range of videos to cater to different moments throughout a child’s day, from slow bedtime videos to faster-paced ones meant to encourage movement, Hickey said.

In 2023, Moonbug recruited the Center for Scholars and Storytellers, a think tank at UCLA that bridges entertainment media and psychology research, to “create the best possible product” for its audience, Hickey said.

The center was tasked with analyzing Moonbug’s content and crafting the learning principles to guide the studio’s future preschool programming, which also includes the “Blippi” and “Little Angel” franchises.

A scene from Moonbug Entertainment’s “Blippi’s Job Show.”

(Jessica Perez / Moonbug)

Moonbug also asked the center to determine if there was research showing that audiovisual content could be addicting for preschoolers, said Yalda T. Uhls, an assistant adjunct professor of psychology at UCLA and executive director of the Center for Scholars and Storytellers. Uhls said the center’s review of existing peer-reviewed research found that there was no such evidence.

And despite oft-repeated claims that long-form content is better for kids than short-form content, “there isn’t really actually any evidence for that,” Uhls said. “It’s very inconclusive.”

The center found that preschool children struggle to learn as much from content with frequent cuts, though consuming it doesn’t impact their attention span negatively, Uhls said.

As such, the principles the center crafted recommend Moonbug “minimize distractions and tangential songs or storylines” when characters are navigating real-life situations to make sure it does not interfere with preschool children’s ability to learn lessons.

The center interviewed members of Moonbug’s creative teams and formed an advisory council of academic experts in child development to evaluate a selection of Moonbug’s episodes, assess the quality of socio-emotional learning and find areas for improvement, Uhls said.

“The content certainly had a lot of places where it could improve, but it wasn’t horrible,” Uhls said. “There was some learning within the episodes. … It wasn’t all good, it wasn’t all bad.”

Uhls said she recalled several instances of episodes modeling unsafe behavior, but declined to share specifics.

The center plans to continue to work with Moonbug to integrate child development research much earlier in the studio’s creative process and aid with the integration of the learning principles into its content slate, Uhls said.

June 12 (Asia Today) — South Korea’s Trade Ministry is accelerating a project to convert master workers’ tacit manufacturing knowledge into artificial intelligence data as the country seeks to preserve industrial skills threatened by aging and labor shortages.

Tacit knowledge refers to experience and know-how that skilled workers often use without writing it down. In manufacturing, it can include judgment used in process optimization, quality control, welding, equipment checks and other work that depends on years of experience.

The Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy held the fourth M.AX conference Friday at the Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry in central Seoul. The conference focused on development and cooperation strategies for using master workers’ tacit knowledge in manufacturing AI transformation.

Officials and experts discussed how to build AI systems that can capture knowledge from industrial sites and how labor and management can cooperate in the process.

The ministry said skilled manufacturing experience is becoming a core asset in the AI era. Officials warned that if the know-how of retiring workers is lost, companies could face weaker process control, lower quality management and reduced manufacturing competitiveness.

The government is using 48 billion won, or about $31.2 million, from this year’s supplementary budget to support pilot projects for 30 manufacturing processes. The projects will build tacit knowledge datasets and develop AI models.

The ministry plans to prioritize processes with high safety risks or severe labor shortages. AI models developed through the project are also expected to be used to train new workers.

The conference included examples of AI already being applied in manufacturing. Sungwon, a stainless steel pipe maker, said it is using AI in welding work where skilled workers previously relied on visual judgment to support operators’ decision-making.

Participants said the project’s success will require data standardization, verification systems, proper compensation for workers who share their knowledge and sufficient communication with employees before implementation.

Some participants also proposed creating an advisory group of national quality masters so the project can better reflect expertise from actual manufacturing sites.

Kim Sung-yeol, head of the ministry’s industrial growth office, said the project is designed to protect South Korea’s manufacturing base.

“This project is about protecting manufacturing and manufacturing sites, which are among our core assets,” Kim said. “Because it is a project to preserve and transfer the tacit knowledge of master workers, we will do our best to help solve difficulties at manufacturing sites.”

— Reported by Asia Today; translated by UPI

© Asia Today. Unauthorized reproduction or redistribution prohibited.

Original Korean report: https://www.asiatoday.co.kr/kn/view.php?key=20260612010004392

A site of big changes, the Music Center has become farewell central. Alongside the Gustavo Dudamel hullabaloo at Walt Disney Concert Hall, James Conlon has begun his final appearances in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion as music director for two decades of Los Angeles Opera, with his own signature form of enchantment in Mozart’s “Magic Flute.”

The silent-movie panache of Barrie Kosky’s production, which opened Saturday night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and runs through June 21, is on its way to becoming a perennial. This is the third revival since L.A. Opera first staged it in 2013 — all four times with Conlon in the pit. The production operates like an operatic graphic novel and live animated film charmingly all in one. The scene is a giant movie screen broken up in sections and upon which is projected witty, fantastical background animation, while the characters are the live singers, dressed as though silent film stars.

The orchestra plays Mozart’s score as though it were, as orchestras did in the old days, accompanying a silent movie but to radically different effect. Fulgurous cinematic spectacle may immerse your attention, but the opera’s essence is transferred from the stage to the pit. The singers, meanwhile, function to an unusual degree as choreographed characters in a cartoon, leaving little opportunity for body language, allowing, instead, individual expression almost exclusively to their voices.

In Mozart’s opera, Tamino, a prince in a fairyland of mystic temples and mystifying gods, relies on his supernatural flute that turn sorrow into joy to get him out of jams. The genius of Kosky’s singularly musical production is that it magically makes the orchestra itself a compendious magic flute. It more than ever becomes an agent of delight.

That is where Conlon comes in. He has, while leading L.A. Opera for 20 seasons (half the company’s existence), served as an advocate for the core operatic repertory — notably Mozart, Verdi and Wagner — much of it little heard in our late-blooming former operatic desert. He has also been an international champion of his “recovered voices” project, salvaging the neglected operas of composers in the first half of the 20th century who were silenced by Nazi Germany.

“The Magic Flute,” one of the world’s two or three most popular operas, needs no such patronage. Written at the end of Mozart’s life as a popular entertainment, its a singspiel, or sung play. As a proto-Broadway musical operatic genre of spoken word and musical numbers, it appeals on all levels. The fairy-tale libretto is child-friendly. Mozart’s score is tune heaven.

The troublesome Queen of the Night dazzles with high notes that shoot out like daggers. The main lovers, Tamino and Pamina, are lyrical wonders. The comical bird-catcher, Papageno, is everyone’s darling. The domineering Sarastro, an all-powerful priest, bellows spiritual profundities. But if you start digging under the surface, deeper than the symbolic Freemasonry and all, you may never find bottom.

The opera begins with three ceremonial chords in the orchestra that signal a brief, sober introduction quickly undercut by an exhilarating fast-forwarding overture. Those three chords can be made to mean many things. Often, they come across as commands by an orchestra to sit up straight and pay attention. They may be dignified or downright quirky and playfully no big deal, just a here-we-go.

Conlon handles them as a sweet, perfectly tuned, almost amorous invitation to pleasure, implying this will be a genial, gracious, laid-back “Flute.” Among his accomplishments in L.A. has been to make the opera’s orchestra capable of producing just such velvety, flowing Mozart, as well as terse, tight theater.

Here, Conlon offers a lesson in the kind of leadership generally lacking in modern society, by simultaneously staying out of the way yet being at the essential center of things. Depth here is not announced, but the care of phrasing implies that there is more to everything Mozart is saying than first meets the ear, that, under it all, the “Magic Flute” is not fantasy but a spiritual lesson in morality.

Many in the cast, this revival, are young singers, not yet well known and new to the company. Sydney Mancasola and Miles Mykkanen, as Pamina and Tamino, are likable, lyric lovers. Kyle Miller catches Papageno’s vulnerable charm. Aigul Khismatullina, Queen of the Night, impresses with the silvery pricks of her high notes, while Kwangchul Youn’s Sarastro, unsteady in middle register, takes on weight at the bottom of his bass. Zhengyi Bai’s lustful Monostatos, disguised in the production as a hammy vampire, almost steals the show a time or two. The Three Ladies and Three Spirits provide vocal allure.

One of the evening’s most theatrical moments, though, came after the music stopped when what sounded like a gun interrupted curtain calls. But as if rescued by a magic flute, an instant of fear turned to joy, glittery gold graffiti filling the Chandler and celebrating Conlon.

Jared Grindlinger is not ready to say goodbye to his friends at Huntington Beach High. The likely first-round draft pick didn’t have to play for the Oilers in the Southern California Division I regional playoffs, let alone pitch. But he did both to help Huntington Beach knock off San Diego Open Division champion Patrick Henry 10-3 on Tuesday.

Grindlinger went four for four, including a home run, and finished with three RBIs. He also struck out five in three innings on the mound. Dane Cunningham had a three-run home run. Huntington Beach advances to play the winner of Wednesday’s game between Corona and Chula Vista Eastlake on Thursday.

Cathedral Catholic 4, St. John Bosco 2: The impressive two-year run of St. John Bosco’s baseball team has come to an end. The Braves had the bases loaded with one out in the bottom of the seventh but couldn’t push across any runs and were eliminated in a first-round Division I game. They won the Southern Section Division 1 title the last two seasons and the regional title last season.

La Mirada 7, Liberty 6: A three-run seventh inning helped the Matadores enjoy their bus ride home from Bakersfield. The big hit was a three-run home run by Justin Torres. La Mirada will face Cathedral Catholic on Thursday in the semifinals.

Arroyo Grande 4, Loyola 3: An RBI single in the eighth inning by Colton Gotchal pushed Arroyo Grande to victory over top-seeded Loyola in Division 2. Jack Murray had a home run and two RBIs for Loyola.

Newport Harbor 2, Madison 0: Gavin Guy threw the shutout with seven strikeouts.

South El Monte 3, Brentwood 2: South El Monte went on the road and pulled off the upset of Division 6 champion Brentwood. Anthony Mata had an RBI single and Gabriel Canchola limited the Eagles to four hits while striking out nine in six innings.

Westview 7, Carson 1: Leadoff hitter Eli Irvine had three hits for the winners.

North Torrance 2, Bell 0: Seth Narasaki and Joey Banuelos combined for the shutout.

Verdugo Hills 11, Rolling Hills Prep 2: Cutlor Fannon finished with three hits and three RBIs for the Dons.