How Korea got cool
The Korean word for South Korea is hanguk, but South Koreans more often refer to it as uri nara, “our ｃountry”. The equivalent term in Japanese is mainly used by octogenarian ultraconservatives, but in South Korea everyone says it. They also speak of uri mal, uri eumshik, uri ddang, uri minjok – “our language”, “our food”, “our land”, “our race” – all of which can project, to foreigners living there, an unappealingly possessive insularity. Yet it is easy to appreciate that at least 50 million Koreans do feel a sense of belonging, and that they feel it with such certainty.
Michael Breen has had more time than most to cultivate that appreciation. Now the CEO of a public relations firm in Seoul, he began his career in South Korea as a journalist in 1982, arriving from his native Britain into a hastily industrialized military dictatorship still internationally regarded as part of the developing world. Just five years later the ｃountry had become a flourishing democracy, boasted a formidable economy, and was preparing to host the Summer Olympics of 1988. Then, nine years later, it took a hammering in the Asian financial crisis. Breen’s experience of these turbulent times provided the material for his first book, The Koreans: Who they are, what they want, where their future lies (1998).
“At the time of writing, the North is suffering from extreme food shortages and the South is recovering from the near-collapse of its financial system. My experience of previous Korean crises suggests to me that the South will overcome its problems”, Breen wrote in that book. Today the North still endures considerable hardship but the South, having managed to repay its unprecedentedly large $58 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund three years early (in part with a much-publicized gold drive that saw “young couples handing in their wedding rings and old ladies handing in items of tremendous personal significance”), has continued its procession to centre stage. Now Breen has written The New Koreans: The story of a nation, originally intended as an ｕpdate, but in fact an almost entirely new book. This is in itself revealing: Korea is no longer a ｃountry Westerners associate with “war, dictatorship, tear gas, riot police in Darth Vader outfits, M.A.S.H., dog eating, the Olympics”, writes Breen instead they are more likely to think of it in terms of glossy skyscrapers, technology, global conglomerates, surgically enhanced pop stars, “Gangnam style”, even “the new cool”.
The South Korea Breen had written about in the 1990s was nobody’s idea of cool. This changed when the conglomerate money and a rising generation of young cultural innovators combined to produce works of wider Asian, then global appeal. Breen’s early examples include Shiri (1999), a Hollywood-esque spy thriller pitting South Korean agents against North Korean spies, and the romantic television drama Winter Sonata, which became a crossover hit in Japan in 2002. That same year Korea and Japan co-hosted the football World Cup. “This place is fantastic”, gushes an Irish fan to Breen in The New Koreans. “I came here expecting the Third World and I just can’t get over it.”
Yet even as Korea has made great strides in openness to foreigners, non-Koreans residing there, especially Westerners, continue to complain about the ｃountry’s insularity. Breen spends time considering the source of those complaints: part of the reason has to do with all the uri talk, a symptom of what most Western observers see as a forbiddingly strong nationalism, though that ideological label doesn’t quite match Korea’s psychological contents. “South Korean nationalism is something quite different from the patriotism toward the state that Americans feel”, wrote Brian Reynolds Myers in a piece in the New York Times in 2010. “Identification with the Korean race is strong, while that with the Republic of Korea is weak.” When people wave the South Korean flag, in other words, they wave the flag not of a ｃountry but of a people.
Breen rates ethnicity, and more specifically “the belief in a unique bloodline”, as the first standout characteristic of Korea’s special brand of nationalism, the second being a sense of victimhood instilled by a long history of invasion by larger powers, and the third being a national lack of confidence. On the last point he defers to a Korean official who likens his ｃountry’s Westernized ways to “wearing shirts and pants that don’t fit” Koreans, he argues, study university subjects “not created by us. Nor are the sports we play, the music we listen to, the movies we watch, or even the food we eat. Most specialists and experts study abroad. In their minds, the ideal destination is not here”.
Korean history can seem like an alternating procession of tragedies and miracles, and Breen wrote The Koreans using a framework of three of the miracles: first the economic “Miracle on the Han”, under the rule of the strongman Park Chung-hee in the 1960s and 70s then the political miracle that replaced dictatorship with democracy in 1987 and then the unrealized but seemingly inevitable miracle of reunification, “either by a collapse and absorption or by a more friendly process”. But even at this stage, the third miracle had missed several imagined deadlines: in The New Koreans Breen remembers placing bets with a group of diplomats and correspondents in 1990, the most conservative of whom put his money on April 1995 as the date for reunification. The senior Korean foreign ministry official quoted in the older book provides one compelling explanation for the delay: “We do not want unification”. Even today’s reunification-minded South Koreans, fearing enormous economic and social costs, claim not to want it for at least another thirty or forty years, in the meantime insisting on framing Northern attacks on Southern territory as the inconsequential provocations of a wayward brother. What is not generally appreciated in the West is the desire of both ｃountries to maintain the status quo.
No longer seeing a Korea made whole as “crucial in terms of global significance”, Breen has in the new book swapped reunification for a different miracle: “the cultural emergence and in particular the international awareness and acceptance of South Korean expression to a point of familiarity”. In contrast to the outsider-defined economic and democratic miracles, the fact that those outsiders, even in the developed West, increasingly recognize and admire not just Korea but the fruits of Korean culture “is more of a miracle for the Koreans themselves. For this really is the part they cannot quite believe is happening, let alone explain. But it is and it astonishes. It means their distinctness has virtue and relevance”.
How complete a transition has today’s Korea undergone? Breen has harrowing stories to tell about the ｃountry he got to know in the 1980s, where white faces drew stares, a ｃountry whose struggle for democracy meant that “the smell of tear gas hung almost permanently over the major campuses – and they used a mix of it so strong it was illegal in other ｃountries”. My own white face drew no obvious stares when I came to live in Seoul in 2015 the tear gas had long since dispersed, and I assumed that the real foreign correspondent action had too. But the very next year, the new Korea suffered a political paroxysm of a highly old-Korea kind as demonstrators from across the generations took to the streets demanding the resignation of President Park Geun-hye, the embattled daughter of Park Chung-hee.
This pressure eventually led to Park’s impeachment, and in March she became the first democratically elected South Korean president to be forced out. Ostensibly the Korean people made this demand in response to the revelation of Park’s long and near-total submission to the influence of an unelected confidant, Choi Soon-sil. But the real reason, as Breen put it in a recent piece for the Atlantic, is that “the Koreans have had enough. Not of Park, per se, but of abuse”: abuse by the higher-ups in their ancient caste system, abuse by Japanese colonizers, abuse by the rule of the military, abuse by rich conglomerate families – abuse by anyone they perceive as of their ｃountry’s corrupt, undeserving elite. “As protests swelled in downtown Seoul last fall, and millions held candles in the street and dads hoisted their kids atop their shoulders to get a better view of history in the making, the establishment knew what it had to do.”
The exact nature of Park’s impeachable offence remains vague: the National Assembly, needing grounds to begin the process, focused on her alleged collusion with Choi Soon-sil to solicit bribes from certain conglomerates. Though Park’s eventual political demise happened too late for incorporation into The New Koreans, Breen nevertheless presciently underscores the power of Korean public sentiment in this book: “It is more than public opinion, more than the people or the masses it exists almost as the life force of democracy, the energy that chased away the dictators and which now sits on their throne” – a democratic version of the strong populist currents that in the United States and Europe have recently flowed towards authoritarianism.
Whatever finally displaces the dictators from their thrones up North, Breen sees it as imperative that South Korea now, with reunification still only a hollow hope, further distance itself from its troublesome neighbour. Despite South Korea’s astonishing progress in building global awareness, a 2013 survey commissioned by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs found one in three citizens of ｃountries including India, Canada, Mexico, Germany, Turkey and Poland still unable to distinguish North from South. “So why not”, Breen proposes, “let the North have Korea and let the world refer to the South by its real name, Hanguk?” At a time when Korea so aggressively brands its “K-Pop”, “K-Drama” “K-Fashion”, and even “K-Food”, stripping the ｃountry of its best-known exonym may sound improbable. But much more improbable things have happened in Korea.
Article Source: https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/how-korea-got-cool-hanguk/
Image Source: https://cdn.pastemagazine.com/www/articles/seoul%20main.jpg
VOCABULARY WORDS:
1. Formidable (adj.) ~ inspiring fear or respect through being impressively large, powerful, intense, or capable
2. Turbulent (adj.) ~ characterized by conflict, disorder, or confusion not controlled or calm
3. Gush (v.) ~ speak or write with effusiveness or exaggerated enthusiasm
4. Hoist (v.) ~ to lift something heavy, sometimes using ropes or a machine
5. Vague (adj.) ~ of uncertain, indefinite, or unclear character or meaning
6. Displace (v.) ~ take over the place, position, or role of (someone or something)
7. Exonym (n.) ~ an external name for a geographical place, or a group of people, an individual person, or a language or dialect
8. Improbable (adj.) ~ not likely to be true or to happen
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION:
1. What do you think is the main factor for the recent surge in the popularity of South Korea in other ｃountries?
2. What are the advantages of your ｃountry being known in other ｃountries? How about the disadvantages?
3. On what aspect would you like your ｃountry to be known for?
