Minister: Mindset change required

Nearly a year after her 16-year-old daughter was among 304 people killed when an overloaded ferry capsized, Park Eun-mi says not much has changed when it comes to safety in South Korea.

"Even after what we've been through, I wonder why society doesn't change, and how people so quickly forget," said Park, surrounded in her apartment by photographs of her daughter, who is among nine victims of the Sewol ferry disaster whose body has yet to be recovered.

Public safety was mostly an afterthought in South Korea's decades of rampant economic growth, defined by an attitude of pali, pali or "hurry, hurry".