Blind law plunges Korea into chaos

BY THE time Lee Hye-gyeong received a diagnosis of glaucoma in 2005, she had already lost much of her vision.

For the past year and a half, however, commuting has remained part of her daily routine. She takes the subway to a government-run school. There, Lee, 42, trains for the one job that for most of the past century has been reserved exclusively for the legally blind: masseur.

But she fears her prospects in this new profession could be threatened. Sighted people who are practising, but unlicensed, masseurs have asked the Constitutional Court of South Korea to declare unconstitutional a law that allows only the legally blind to become professional masseurs. They contend that the law violates their right to employment. A ruling could come as soon as this week.

Passions are intense on both sides of the debate over whether to preserve the restriction. Three people have died in protests over who is permitted to practise the trade.

Lee is concerned that the law might change and, with it, her chances for employment. "Massage is the only job we blind can do. In the name of free competition, they are trying to take away our right to survive."

Around 7,100 legally blind people work in South Korea's massage parlours. But they can hardly meet the demand, and so tens of thousands of so-called sports massage centres, skincare salons, barber shops and public bath houses employ sighted, but illegal, massage workers. Estimates of their number range from 150,000 to 700,000.

National sports teams hire masseurs with healthy vision. During the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, the government offered free massage training to the unemployed, regardless of the state of their eyesight.

"Every bride gets a full-body massage before her wedding, nearly always from unlicensed masseurs," said Park Yoon-soo, president of the Massager Association of Korea. "This shows how absurd the law is."

Members of Park's association, which represents 120,000 unlicensed masseurs, are working openly and in defiance of the law. They usually receive the fines ranging from $450 to $4,500, although the law calls for up to three years in prison.

"We are not trying to steal jobs from the blind," said Park. "We just want to share the market. We want to live as normal citizens, not as criminals."

The South Korean Constitution guarantees people the freedom to choose jobs, but it also requires the state to protect disabled people.

But in 2006, a reconstituted court issued a ruling that favoured the sighted, saying that restricting people's choice of jobs by government directive – the prohibition was not then a formal law – was "excessively" discriminatory.

That set off weeks of protests by the blind. Some blind masseurs leaped from buildings and jumped on to subway tracks. Two blind people died.

The police fished blind activists from the Han River in Seoul after they jumped from a bridge to highlight their cause. The protests continued until the National Assembly passed legislation enshrining the massage monopoly into law.

Then the sighted staged their own protests, and one activist killed himself by jumping from the same Han River bridge.

Earlier this month, blind protesters again jumped from the bridge, this time to protest a government proposal to license skin-care specialists to also give massages. The protesters demanded that the skin-care specialists be permitted only to massage heads and hands, leaving the rest of the body to the blind.

Dong Seong-geun, a blind masseur, staged a lone protest in front of the Constitutional Court recently. "I have a wife and two children to support," he said. "If I lose this job, I will have to beg on the streets. How can taking away one job from people who only have one compare with taking one job away from sighted people who have a hundred jobs to choose from?"

Immodest history to a touching tradition

The origins of blind masseurs owe nothing to modesty but to the promiscuity of the Edo period (1603–1807) in Japan. Rampant sexuality was the norm rather than the exception and few households were untouched by gonorrhoea.

Soon blind children were entering society in record numbers, and as they neared adulthood, people began pressuring the government to provide this sightless subset of society with a way to support themselves. The government decided to teach them massage, and in a few years' time, the image of a blind masseuse wandering the city streets in search of customers – stick in one hand, horn held to his mouth with the other – became a common sight.

The custom was imported to Korea when it was colonised by the Japanese in the early 20th century and it has persisted ever since. Call on the services of a professional, registered masseur in the country and he will be blind or visually impaired.

Similar privileges are also extended to other people with different disabilities. Buy a hot cake from a South Korean street vendor and the chances are that he or she is deaf.