Barbara Yaffe (“Snubbing Expo 2012 shows Ottawa's skewed international spending priorities”, The Vancouver Sun, August 26) and similar views expressed elsewhere in the Globe and Mail make a good point, but South Korea’s Expo 2012 is not just about trade. We can learn from the Koreans. During many scientific missions there in the last decade, our hosts proudly toured their international guests through a variety of cultural and industrial gems in the country’s crown. These were not only in the big cities of Seoul and Pusan, but in towns all the way to the tip of the peninsula. On one offshore island we saw, for example, an international photography show, an international cello competition, and the two biggest shipyard in the world. Every village mayor and regional governor had something to show off that was well worth seeing; and the receptions following these events were a lesson in civic and national pride. Somehow, the Koreans manage to lead the world in arts and technology while maintaining their cultural roots: in every valley is a beautiful Buddhist temple, beside every byway a shrine, on every mountaintop a monastery. Besides being amazed and awed by the country’s arts and technology, I learned this: In the Korean national psyche is the feeling that there is nothing they cannot achieve. If they can imagine it, they believe they can do it. This is a country that, for centuries under the alternate heels of Japan’s military and China’s political hegemony, has finally thrown off the yoke of oppression and become one of the most vigorous and productive democracies in the world. Canada should recognize that, for the cost of participating in the expo, we would gain far more than an increase in trade
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