When I was growing up in South Korea in the '70s and early '80s, the country was too poor to buy original records. Everything was bootlegged.

I want to make Seoul the front line of the new South Korea. Seoul is sleeping, and I want to wake it up.

It's not uncommon in South Korea for a building to not have a women's bathroom.

I will try and make peace between North and South Korea.

From the early 1960s to the mid-1980s - the era of military dictatorship when South Korea was rebuilding itself from a postwar economic basket case to a humming, modern nation - military schools were the track of choice for ambitious young men.

We shouldn't be playing second fiddle to South Korea or anyone else,