SEOUL, South Korea - One look at young fashion designer Ha Sang Beg and you know what he's about: Color, comfort and couture. But you have to talk to him before you understand what makes him different from his predecessors: His address.

Designer Ha Sang Beg hopes his designs will go global.

"I choose Korea as my headquarter," says Ha, his second language of English draped with a British lilt from his years studying in the UK. "I'm Korean and I feel comfortable in Korea. There is lot of merit in Korea."

He's not alone. Flip through the latest fashion magazines and you'll find a new breed of designers, who are attempting to make a global mark from Seoul.

"That's exciting to see," says Vogue Korea's Kwangho Shin. Shin says young talent used to leave Seoul and work from established fashion cities like London or New York. But this generation feels differently about their home country and the possibility of success from home.

"It concerns me as to how long it will last," says Shin. "Our challenge is digging up new talent and supporting their skills."

Seoul has focused on developing its automotive and high tech sector, and more recently, green technology. But fashion has been the forte of neighbors Tokyo and Hong Kong, who have more successfully built the business ties with the global fashion world. Shin says if Korea wants to keep up and coming talent like Beg at home, it needs to offer more.

Korea's government, trying to do that, named the fashion industry as one of the six new-growth power industries for the country, calling its goal the globalization of Seoul fashion. In this week's Seoul Fashion Week, the government worked with the industry to create not just a show, but a business event with the goal of becoming "World Fashion City, Seoul."

Ha hopes his government succeeds in building enough of an infrastructure to keep him busy at home. He predicts he's about to hit his global stride and hopes to take his country's image with him. "I'm still warming up, rather than going for it," he says. "My stage is warming up, just before running."

DALLAS, Texas - You don't go out golfing with the guys without a fair amount of trash talk about each other's bad shots. Even the golfer who just pulled off the impossible doesn't get a fair pass today.

"Ouch," says one of Y.E. Yang's buddies, holding up his fingers an inch apart, as Yang missed a putt on the 12th. Yang flashes him a sideways grin, as if to say he'll get him back on the 13th. Yang is playing with his buddies before our interview, squeezing in time with friends before the media interviews today. We drove up in surprise to see Yang playing, and to our greater surprise, he welcomed us to follow him around.

"Make my friends nervous," he joked to me.

You'd never know by watching these guys joke that YE Yang has just pulled off a historic, and life changing, win last week.

Ranked 110th in the world, Yang faced off with Tiger Woods in the final round of the PGA Championship. The number one-ranked Woods had never lost when entering the final round as the leader, until Yang beat him in one of the sport's greatest upsets, pulling off a feat no other golfer in the world has ever done.

"It will bring peace to the Koreas," joked one of his buddies. Maybe not, but that win catapulted the 37 year old to stratospheric heights of hero-worship in South Korea and across Asia. Yang's victory at the PGA made him the world's first player from Asia to win a major championship, putting a more global face on a sport dominated by Europeans and Americans. Since that win, the relatively unknown golf player has been thrust onto the global stage, chased by international media (we literally chased him onto the golf course today). He even got a personal call from South Korea's president.

Not bad for a kid from a farming family of 8, who couldn't afford to step on a golf course growing up. Yang didn't have the silver spoon background that many golfers have. He taught himself to play at age 19, old by golf standards, hitting balls after-hours at the driving range where he worked. He learned how to grip a club and swing, he tells me, from instructional videos by Jack Nicklaus. Yang never dreamed he'd ever face off with the great Tiger Woods, whom he'd watched on TV for years.

"I woke up that morning and didn't expect to win," Yang said, talking about the final round of the PGA Championship. "So I had this calm in my heart."

That calm helped Yang not crack in the final round, as thousands of spectators watched on the green and millions around the world. But what was notable on that day was how Yang appeared playful, even waving to the live TV camera, as he walked on the fairway of the 15th hole.

"We all saw him smiling throughout the back nine, having fun." said Brian Mogg, Yang's swing coach. "That's the kind of guy he is at all times and it was cool to watch his personality come out, under the heat of playing with Tiger. He's been in some ways, maybe fortunate not to have the spoiled upbringing that many golfers have had and he's been able to have the perspective of, it's a game."

Watching Yang play with his friends on this Dallas, Texas golf course, you can see that love of the game is obvious. Yang later tells me that he hopes to never face off with Tiger again, because he's not sure he'd win again. You get the sense that while wins at the PGA level are important, this game with friends is just as important - and at the heart of why Yang managed to accomplish what no other golfer in the world could.

SEOUL, South Korea– You have to give the late South Korean President Kim Dae-jung credit. Even in death, he seems to be trying to get South and North Korea to become friends.

Honor guard soldiers carry the coffin of Kim Dae-jung for burial during his state funeral on August 23 in Seoul.

For the first time since the current conservative President Lee Myung-Bak took office, the North Koreans sent a high-level delegation to mourn the late Kim.

Before the trip, the North would only contact the late President’s aides. But while in Seoul, the delegation reportedly asked to meet with South Koreans and ultimately the president.

For Seoul’s part, there was a definite chilly reaction to the North’s announcement that it would send a delegation to Seoul.

And the South Korean news agency Yonhap says when the Northern visitors wanted to meet the president there were some in the government that thought it was inappropriate.

But in the end, the delegation got their meeting, and the South Korean spokesman says they conveyed a message from the North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il.

The details of that message were not made public. But when asked at the airport how their stay in the South went, the head of the North Korean delegation was quoted as saying, “We are heading back in the positive mood.”

The South Korean spokesman said President Lee conveyed a message of his own to the delegation: that South Korea’s position is still firm and that he hopes for sincere dialogue in the future.

Now, will this be the catalyst for improved relations between the two Koreas? It’s hard to predict. But one thing for sure, if they do, someone up there will be cheering on the sidelines.

SEOUL, South Korea – Over the weekend, North Korea fired seven missiles into the sea between Korea and Japan.

Shortly afterwards, South Korean media published stories about just how much this display of missiles cost the impoverished North Korean regime.

The price tag for each missile fired on July 4 was said to be between $3 to 5 million - all seven, a total of about $25 million.

North Korea has launched 18 short to long-range missiles so far this year. This total comes to some $330 million, according to Joongang Ilbo, which quoted a military source. Analysts say that is enough to keep North Koreans fed for an entire year.

So did North Korea gain more than a big bang for its buck?

Some analysts believe the launches were conducted on the U.S. Independence Day to show the North’s displeasure at the Obama administration. Washington has been pushing for tough enforcement of the U.N. Security Council sanction imposed after North Korea conducted a nuclear test in May. But if the North wanted to get a rise out of the United States, it failed. Washington had little to say on the matter.

North Korea did manage to spook South Korea. Some of the missiles were thought to be scuds with an extended range that would cover all of South Korea.

And South Korean media quoted military officials as saying the latest launch showed North Korea had been able to significantly improve the accuracy of the scuds.

This does not bode well as relations between South and North Korea have deteriorated to its worst level in recent years. South Korean projects in the North which were supposed to foster friendship between the two Koreas have either been suspended or have hit major stumbling blocks.

The North openly denounces the South Korean president as a war-monger.

After the missile launches, Chung Mong-Jun, a prominent National Assemblyman called upon the government to address the South Korean people to explain the level of threat North Korea posed to the South.

But what if North Korea’s fireworks display really didn’t have much to do with the outside world?

Kim Tae-Woo, a long-time North Korea watcher with the Korea Institute for Defense Analysis, laughs in agreement when asked if the outside world thinks it means more to North Korea than it actually does.

Kim sees the missile launches as simply a process in North Korea wanting to be what it always said it wanted to be: an independent and strong nuclear power.  “North Korea needs to test its missiles to see if their technological advances are real.”

“And it doesn’t hurt to let its potential buyers know as well,” he says.

While it is difficult to know exactly how many missiles North Korea exports, it is known that missile sales are a major source of foreign currency and their main customers are countries like Iran and Libya.

And then there is the internal political reasoning. “North Korea often uses such military actions to concentrate internal forces, to enhance domestic stability,” says Kim.

For North Korea, which seems to be in the process of transferring leadership from Kim Jong-Il to his 26-year-old son Kim Jong-Un, this is a crucial time. After a stroke last year, the North Korean leader’s health is in question.

The 26-year-old heir apparent is a relative newcomer to the North Korean power structure and a young man shrouded in mystery to the outside world. The only picture publicly known of Kim Jong-Un was taken when he was a student in Switzerland ten years ago.

And to realize a smooth transition of power from father to son, analysts point out that the leadership needs the backing of all factions of its society, especially the military.

So if testing out and showing off its missile prowess keeps the military happy, it is more than worth the hefty price tag the North Korean leadership paid, says analysts.

“For the North Korean leadership, nothing is more important than regime survival,” says Kim.

SEOUL, South Korea – Judging from the media, South Koreans are not only happy about their team qualifying for the finals of the 2010 World Cup –- but they are also ecstatic about the North making it in, too.

“South and North Korean Brothers Make It Into the Finals,” said one South Korean newspaper headline read by locals on the subway.

The Joongang Daily has a front page picture of the star players from each of the teams with this headline: “The Two Men Go Together to the World Cup.”

“Will the two teams score goals of reconciliation?” the newspaper wrote in a headline for another story on the matches.

Another national daily, which said a joint cheering squad should be formed, wrote: “South and North Korea to Go Together to the Finals for the First Time in 44 Years.”

In fact next year's tournament in South Africa will be the first time both Koreas have played at the same World Cup. South Korea made their tournament debut in 1954 and have qualified for every World Cup since 1986, reaching the semifinals on home soil in 2002. North Korea's sole appearance in the World Cup was in 1966 in England where they reached the quarterfinals.

The teams’ achievements also topped the main news programs of South Korean TV stations.

While this may seem strange to the outside world, it is not if you consider the fact that in South Korea there are two mutually exclusive North Koreas.

One is the belligerent North Korea, which is seemingly bent on becoming a nuclear state and is led by secretive leader Kim Jong-Il.

The other is the North Korea that was severed by the South through a war that many people here feel was not of Koreans making. It is the idea of North Korea as the lost and impoverished brother that has gone astray.

North Korea is still the home for the brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters of tens of thousands of South Koreans.

Family members that these South Koreans never get to see, never get to hear from, except for a few isolated “family reunions.”

So while the rest of the world may see a rogue state, South Korea sees a country filled with "brothers" that need to be embraced.

Brothers that were "helped" when South Korea's star player Park Ji-Sung fired in the equalizing goal against Iran.

If the South Koreans had lost, North Korea's chances of making it to the World Cup would have gone up in smoke.

So while in almost no other place and instance, can South and North Koreans go hand in hand, it seems at the World Cup finals in South Africa, they will be able to play, brother alongside brother.

And that is worth celebrating.

SEOUL, South Korea – The man who answered my call sounded extremely dazed. "I didn't believe it when they first told me," said 40-year-old Bae Seok-bum. "I thought they were pulling my leg." But when Bae logged onto the Internet, he found his face plastered on South Korean Web sites as the third son and the heir apparent to North Korean leader Kim Jong Il.

Bae Seok-bum says this picture is of him, not North Korea's heir apparent.

"I have no idea how this got on TV Asahi," he said. "I took this photo last summer when we went on a trip. And I posted it on my Internet cafe so that others could see what I was doing," he said.

This is not the first time Bae, who is South Korean, got noticed for his resemblance to Kim Jong Il. "I heard that many, many times," he sheepishly admitted. But this is the first time things have gotten so out of hand.

"I'm getting so many phone calls that I can't do anything else." Even when I was talking to Bae, his cell phone kept beeping, letting him know there were many calls waiting.

Such a case of mistaken identity is not surprising when you have a regime that is so shrouded in mystery. The only photo the outside world has seen of North Korea's heir apparent, who is now 26, is a school photo taken when he was thought to be 11 at most. So when TV Asahi said it had pictures of Kim Jong Un as an adult, everyone took notice.

Even me. I was just twittering away that the resemblance between father and son was uncanny when I first heard of the possible hoax. And so, the outside world is back to trying to find out whatever they can about the mysterious Kim Jong Un. I have even heard of some using imaging technology to try to figure out what he would look like today.

Well, if you ask me, I would think those images could look a lot like Bae Seok-bum. Who, by the way, has finally turned off his cell phone.

SEOUL, South Korea — I did not know at the time that my interview with the late President Roh Moo-Hyun for Talk Asia in December of 2007 would be the one of the last ones he ever did with a foreign correspondent.

If I had, I would have wanted to know more about why this man, who was the most powerful in the country, was so sad.

That is the feeling I was left with as we ended the sit-down discussion, probed his computer system together, and walked around in his private office.

One of the last things he said to me was that he was really looking forward to stepping down as president.

“I think I will be able to watch the news with a more peaceful state of mind. I will be able to move when I want to move. That’s freedom. To be able to achieve such freedom fills my heart with anticipation,” he said.

I could see his face visibly brighten as he talked, and that to me indicated just how much angst this man experienced during his presidency.

For, despite good intentions, his presidency was one that was marred by controversy and deepening division between liberal and conservative factions.

The establishment never really acknowledged that this man who started out in a poor farming family, and never even went to college, had the right to lead the country.

It was Roh’s supporters on the streets that elected him president … the relatively young, of middle- or low-income status, and Internet-savvy.

They called themselves NoSaMo, the Korean acronym for “Group of people who love Roh Moo-Hyun.”

Their color was yellow, for the people’s movement.

They were the ones who took to the streets when the establishment tried to impeach their champion, and they are the ones who are the driving force behind the huge nationwide wave of mourning.

And they are also the ones that are most angry at the current government of President Lee Myung-Bak, who they believe initiated an unfair investigation into the late president that ultimately led to his death.

It was their presence that I felt in the late president’s private office as he proudly showed off a wall hanging of miniature piggy banks.

Thousands sent in coin-filled piggy banks to support Roh during his presidential campaign.

There were also memos of love and support, and even a gold medal someone sent him to use as campaign funds.

He said he put these things on his wall to remind him just who made him president and who he was working for.

It was this wall that was a huge burden as well, especially when Roh was going through the impeachment process.

“I couldn’t help thinking, they made me president, and now I am going to get myself impeached,” he said.

After he stepped down, he indeed seemed to enjoy life as a “normal” citizen.

He retired to his home town in southern Seoul and was shown doing “normal” things, riding a bicycle with his granddaughter in the back, walking to the corner store, always with a big fat smile on this face.

But the peaceful farm life did not last long. Prosecutors started an investigation into alleged corruption by the former president and his family, and he was summoned to the prosecution’s office to answer questions about his alleged illegal actions.

The smile was gone, replaced by the slightly sad grin I so vividly remember.

So as I cover the late president one last time, I am reminded of the words he left behind on a computer screen just before leaping to his death.

“Don’t be sad.  Don’t blame anyone.  Life and death are both a part of life.”

President Roh, may you finally be at peace and free.

SEOUL, South Korea — Since I arrived in Seoul early Tuesday morning, I have been struck by a scene that I walk by every day: a long line of people waiting to pay their respects to the late former President Roh Moo-hyun, who committed suicide last weekend by jumping off a cliff near his home.

This makeshift altar is one of several set up in Seoul and across the country to mourn Roh.

The long line of mourners is full of professionals, dressed in business suits. I have seen them at lunchtime, all afternoon and even late at night. Police buses line a roundabout nearby. The mourners stand behind a cord of yellow and black ribbons.

Yellow is the color associated with Roh's presidency. The line of mourners ends at a makeshift shrine under a yellow tent. That is where people bow several times before a portrait of Roh.

On the side of the tent, video screens show Roh meeting dignitaries during his 2003-2008 presidency. I have seen residents writing messages of condolences and taping them along the cement wall of the nearby subway stop.

While the rest of the world is watching what North Korea does next after its nuclear test on Monday, surprisingly, South Koreans are taking that news in stride. They are accustomed to and cautious about North Korea's unpredictable moves. To most South Koreans, they are less moved by the North Korea news and more connected to mourning their late president. That is the big story for them.

A man reads messages of condolence posted at the City Hall subway stop in Seoul.

The public is angry, shocked and saddened by Roh’s death. Angry because many believe his suicide was the outcome of an intensely political corruption investigation; shocked and saddened because Roh was a politician who had campaigned on rooting out corruption. Before his death, he had denied allegations against him.

This morning, I walked to the bureau and passed the line again. I smelled incense in the air. Incense is burned to pay respects to ancestors or when someone passes away. With the state funeral set for Friday, the lines of mourners will surely grow longer and larger.

SEOUL, South Korea — It's the end of a long news week, and a group of foreign correspondents share a well-deserved beer. The conversation naturally turns to the story of the day.

"Did you think Kim Jong-Il limped?" "Not that I could notice."

The reclusive North Korean leader's health has been the subject of much debate.

"Didn't he always waddle?"

"Now what about that left hand...Definitely something wrong there."

Then someone notices how absurd our conversation is becoming.

But it's a reflection of just how absurd the story we cover is. It's a story that is put together by the bits and pieces of information that seeps out of one of the most reclusive countries in the world.

Take the issue of the North Korean leader's health. Reports say he suffered a stroke last August. A French surgeon that treated him supposedly confirmed it.

The evidence to back up such suspicions is that Kim didn't appear in public for months, then only released still pictures in various well-controlled photo-ops.

So imagine the anticipation among North Korean watchers as day-of video of Kim appears.
The scrutiny begins.

JoongAng Ilbo, a prominent South Korean English daily, shows Kim holding up his Worker's Party card on Thursday, then compares it to a very similar shot taken a year ago, and then the same pose again 10 years ago.

According to JoongAng Ilbo, a number of things become apparent: In the photos of the past, there are a row of microphones in front of Kim; there are none in the recent photo. The paper says this is an indication that Kim did not make a speech to the assembly this year, a sign that he may not yet be able to speak clearly.

And while it may not be evident to the untrained eye, his expression was reportedly more rigid than usual. And it stayed that way throughout the assembly meeting, said the paper, evidently having had someone look at just his face throughout the event.

A neurosurgeon quoted in the article said these are possibly signs that there was facial paralysis due to the stroke. He added that Kim's left hand is noticeably less active then his right, a fact that was apparent as he clapped: His right hand did the clapping, his left hand barely moved.

One neurosurgeon said he noticed the fingers on this left hand did not move as Kim pushed papers around on his podium. Another was quoted as saying his right leg stayed on the ground slightly longer than his left leg, causing him to walk with a slight limp.

All signs, the doctors say, that he is still recovering from the aftermath of the stroke.

But the neurosurgeons all agreed that while the symptoms of a stroke were all there, Kim was still well enough to rule North Korea.

Even the journalists, untrained in medicine, agreed with that assessment; the conversation to be resumed when the next piece of news filters out of the North.

SEOUL, South Korea - Today is Arbor Day in South Korea.  The day people go to the mountains to plant trees, and visit the graves of their ancestors. This year, the weather was perfect; sunny and calm.

South Korean activists on Sunday launch a balloon carrying leaflets intended to land in North Korea.

But it was also perfect weather for North Korea to conduct what the rest of the world considered a not-so-peaceful act: Firing off a long-range rocket.

It was not like any tree-planting South Koreans could see from the mountains; the rocket dropped one engine into the sea east of the Korean Peninsula and then flew over northern Japan.

But South Korean President Lee Myung-Bak hurried back from planting trees to an underground emergency situation room to hold a National Security Council meeting.

And for the scores of South Koreans climbing up mountains, the fact that North Korea would again raise tensions on the peninsula was definitely something looming over their heads.

As timing would have it, one group was holding a Korean War photo exhibition in downtown Seoul. South and North Korea fought a devastating war from 1950 to 1953. The conflict has technically never ended since the two sides never signed a peace treaty.

The organizers said it was a fitting message to North Korea of what could happen again if the North kept ratcheting up tensions.