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In a move so representative of the general silliness of many decisions of the Korean government that it seems like it ought to be parody, they have announced that they will be outlawing pojong mahcha (street food vendors) during the World Cup next year. People are up in arms, as there is a long tradition in Korea of sitting on the benches beside these carts, in summer to take the air, and in winter huddled inside the plastic sheeting that serves as windbreaks, and snarfing down some dok boeki or soondae or other yummy treats. But what people’re even more up in arms about, and justifiably so, is that street vendors will still be allowed to sell hamburgers. To the big fat hamburger-addicted Waeguk who will show up in droves and demand “Burgers! Give us burgers, you bastards!”, presumably.
Clueless old men in the government, scratching their scurfy scalps, going (in Korean, of course) “Huh-yup, dat’s what dem foreigner’s’ll like. They’ll feel all ta home if we only allow street vendors to sell hayam-burgers!”
This is the same sort of inexplicable dissociation from reality that has resulted in “Visit Korea Year 2001” seeing less visitors than actually showed up in “Regular Old Year 2000”. This despite all-singing, all-dancing commercials starring the erudite-but-terrifying prez, and which inexplicably only seemed to actually air within Korea, which when you stop to think about it, kind of defeated the purpose.
Update : Apparently, the legislation will also allow for the sale of ‘sandwiches’, which will presumably please the French tourists as well and their insatiable appetite for croques monsieur. Thanks fishstickchronicles for making me dig deeper into the madness…
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A Korean friend recently explained to me why there are so freakin’ many crosses glowing in the night skyline of any Korean city, not even outnumbered by the Giant Glowing Bowling Pins of Pusan (recently reRomanized ‘Busan’, but I’m Old Skool HanGul). There are a lot of Christian churches in Korea, and a lot of Christians. The problem seems to be, though, that Korean folks have a marked tendency to be fractious about…well, pretty much everything. Why do you think the Korean War is still officially unfinished? Anyway, most churches apparently tend to have internal dissension about details of dogma, and fracture into sub-churches frequently and parthenogenetically. One of the concommitant beliefs in this constant splitting and recombining of congregations is a conviction that regardless of the actual size of your churchlet, if you have a bigger, brighter, or more clearly visible cross, you somehow win the dogmatic argument. You are presto-chango more Holy.
Thus, crosses galore.
As always, this story may be apocryphal, but I have heard it a few times from various Korean people.

Kimchi as Light Emitting Vegetable Diode. Not only is Kimchi God’s! Own! Health! Food! (or so I’m constantly told), it is in fact a Side Dish Semiconductor. How cool is that?
(Pretty goddamn cool, is the answer, of course. Why else would I have asked?) via memepool

This thread on Metafilter is about boshintang, and links back thanks to y2karl to my post a month or so ago about it. This Herald Tribune article is a relatively reasonable take on the subject. An amusing quote : “…many Koreans are answering [with] a defiant phooey.” I cringe to think about some of the verbiage that is going to be flung around as this “Koreans=Dog Eating Barbarians” meme starts to propagate. Again.
sh-t, I used the word ‘meme’. Ten minutes in the penalty box.
Dec 15 update : The Anti Dog Meat Movement headquarters. “Japanese eat whale meat and Korean eat dog meat. Two countries are co-hosts of 2002 FIFA World Cup. They said that this worldcup will become a ‘green Worldcup’. Is this the truth? What is our next step?” My suggestion for your next step, kids : shut the f–k up. Warning : some nasty imagery ahead, if you follow that link.

Spotted an advert in the subway car on the way home this afternoon, for a Thighmaster™ knockoff. Spandex-clad lovelies working their thighs like butter-churns, big smiles.
Brand name : Honeymoon.
I laughed. People thought I was nuts.
This happens with worrying regularity.

Camp Catatonia links to me (thanks!), with some commentary, upon which I’d like to comment. Got it? Good.
There are some parallels between the experiences of foreigners in Japan and Korea, but there are also some very distinct differences. I would have to agree that, at least in their public faces, the Japanese tend to be ‘not openly outgoing and not particularly passionate people’, as characterized, but I would argue that that’s not the case for Koreans. As much as I hate to generalize about such a large group of people, I’m going to do it anyway. In my experience, the Koreans are a fiercely passionate people, warm-hearted to the point of sentimentality, quick to anger and quick to forgive, and in many cases completely lacking in that ‘inscrutability’ that westerners tend to ascribe to all Asian folks. As I’ve mentioned before, some call them ‘the Irish of Asia’, fully aware of both the positive and negative connotations that that phrase can elicit. To carry the analogy a little further, the Japanese would be the English of Asia – reserved, effete, cultured to the point of snobbery, at least in the face they present to outsiders. The Japanese tend to look down their noses at the Koreans, as the Japanese tend to do with most people who aren’t Japanese (again allowing for the fact that I’m making gross generalizations here). Korea has a massive inferiority complex, and a fairly large dose of ‘little man syndrome’ as well. They are desperate to prove to themselves, and the world, that they’re as good, no better, dammit!, than anyone else around. This manifests itself in risible statements, like “Korea has four distinct seasons, unlike anywhere else in the world,” which is one that newbie foreigners always run into soon after arrival and always scratch their head over, trying to dowse out a deeper meaning from what would seem to be nonsense.
I could go on, and I will, but not right now.
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The contradictions of Korea never cease to amaze me. Although the per capita income is hovering around US$6800, the Korea Times reports this morning that 13 Seoul subway stations have been fitted out with wireless internet access for PDA’s and laptops. In the next couple of months this will be extended not only to all stations on lines 5, 6, 7 and 8, but antennas will be installed in tunnels, making continuous broadband access available on trains.
At home, I have a 4-6 Mb uncapped DSL connection, for which I pay about US$30 a month. In the 3 months or so I’ve had it, there hasn’t been a single outage. Meanwhile, tiny roadside plots of dirt along the highway that runs past my apartment beehive are being subsistence-farmed by the old people who live nearby. Sometimes it’s as if you can walk a hundred metres, and pass through a hundred years of history.

Apparently Lineage, a MMORPG from a Korean company called NCSoft, has about 3 million players, with about 160,000 playing concurrently at any given time, making it the biggest online game in the world. I’ve never even heard of the damn thing, and they have something like 7% of the population of the country playing it! Makes Everquest, with a total of around 400,000 players, look like chicken feed (wonderchicken feed, even). (via Salon. Sorry.)

My piece on migrant workers in Korea is up on WorldNewYork. Three words : painfully. mangled. syntax. A few revisions might have been wise. Ah well.
Thanks to Grant for being patient.

An amusing page 3 picture in the Korea Times this morning, with a lineup of men at the Hankook Ilbo Building in Seoul, holding placards reading (romanized for your reading pleasure) : Tambae Soebi ChaChu. This translates, more or less, into “The Beginning of the Era of Smokers’ Rights”.
Apparently the members of the Korea Smokers’ Association were protesting for their right to smoke in a ceremony marking Tobacco Consumers Day.
I’m not making this up.

Feeling the need, this late, drunken evening, to counteract some of the anti-joy I’ve been propagating. Balance, dammit. Here are some beautiful pictures of Korea from 25 years ago, by Bill Hocker. I’m hoping he won’t object if I put a sample here.

Since the tone has gotten so damn high-falutin’ around here of late, what with talk of the WTO and such, I figured it must be time to drag it down into the gutter again. If you’re one of the 3 people left on the planet who hasn’t yet seen this Korean Flash game (warning – graphic depictions of poo falling from what would appear to be some sort of celestial lady’s bum. Think of the children, for the love of god!), here it is.
This isn’t just random wackiness, believe it or not. The ‘dong-jeem’ (which is what those yellow letters say when you catch one of the falling Kenny-From-South-Park’s that appear periodically) is a big schoolboy fave here.

Years ago when I was teaching some elementary school kids in Pusan (an experience best forgotten), one of the kids tried the old dong-jeem on my unsuspecting waeguk bottom. Needless to say, he was a little taken aback at my reaction. The scars healed up nicely, though.
(Joke. I don’t beat small children senseless, although I have been known to swallow them whole when they cross my bridge without permission.)
Critical Anal Intrusion Update : Boong-ga Boong-ga, the bum molesting game that made the ‘net rounds a while ago, is memetically rising again, thanks to the Register et al. Once again, reassuring to know I’m on the cutting edge of Wacky Korean sh-t. Have a fun! Enjoy!

As more people are hitting this place thanks to the link and kind words by everyone’s favorite enraged guy, I was thinking that perhaps I should clarify what is no doubt an overwhelming impression that I hate Korea. I don’t. Well, sometimes I do, goddamnit, but it’s more complicated than that.
Without getting into icky details of my long and convoluted personal history (which may titillate or bore, but are certainly none of your freakin’ business), let’s just say there have been a fairly significant number of female people who have uttered the fateful words : “Bosco, I love you, but I’m not in love with you.” After they wiped the vomit from their shoes, we would generally get along fairly well, in most cases.
What’s my point? Do I even have one? Fear not – I do, and it’s this: I think that it’s profitable to make the same sort of annoying distinction between ‘hate’ and ‘in hate’. What I mean is that there are times that I hate Korea, but there have been times when I hated pretty much anywhere I’ve lived. I do hate the chaos, the filth, the racism and casual cruelty, but there are scores of Korean people I just love to bits. So I would say that I do sometimes hate Korea, and some individual people here, but that I’m not ‘in hate’ with the place. The inversion of meaning also implies that it’s better to just hate than be in hate, for your s(e)oul, if nothing else.
Waeguk-in who come to live here use the other foreigners around them as ‘complaining posts’. Western-style bars are chockablock with waeguk-in sitting around and commiserating about the last school-director that ripped them off, or the last kid that mimed monkey motions at them. I had enough of that circle-jerking years ago, so was born Waeguk is Not a Soup. Ta-da!

The recent entry of China to the WTO presents some daunting challenges for Korea. Sandwiched as it is between Japan (the 2nd largest world economy) and China (the 5th largest), it has managed to build itself from a rural, war-ravaged backwater to the 12th biggest economic force in the world, which is no small achievement for such a small nation. With China’s entry to the WTO, though, the landscape has changed. At the moment, Korean goods, particularly electronics, are of much higher quality than Chinese goods, and the economy is in most ways further along the path of development. China’s rapid industrialization is striking fear into the hearts of Korean government and business leaders, though. China has much cheaper labour, very stable markets, almost no labour unrest (thanks to repression, but hey, all’s fair in the market economy, da?), and has now joined the Gang.
Unless Korea gets its act together, and understands that working smarter, not harder, is the only way to keep their competitive edge over China, dark days are ahead. A recent study found that the average productivity of Korean workers is around 36% that of American workers, and 50% of Japanese workers. How, then, has the country made such incredible economic gains in the past few decades? Fourteen and sixteen-hour work days, I guess. Work 16 hours at a 40% productivity rate, and it’s like working 8 hours at an 80% productivity rate….
It’s interesting that Korea now finds itself in a similar position, in some respects, to the one Japan was in 30 years ago…at the stage where it needs to break free of the industrial nightmare and move to the production of higher value-added products and services, while its neighbour to the east is rapidly industrializing. Hopefully Korea will manage it with the aplomb, relatively speaking, that Japan displayed.
It’s an interesting and possibly germane side note that Kim Dae Jung, who some refer to as the ‘Nelson Mandela of Korea‘, now in the fourth year of his presidency, asked Alvin Toffler at a conference shortly before the last Korean election, if, provided that his bid for the presidency was successful, Alvin and his wife would advise him on matters Future-Shocky. Alvin agreed, and one of the key findings of the report that he handed over to President Kim was that unless Korea moved to a more service-based economy, and one less agricultural and primary-industry-focused, the band would be playing Down The Toilet We Go.
(I know that’s not a real song. Sometimes I just dream things, OK?)

The Museum of Contemporary Art at Seoul Grand Park is a pleasant place, surrounded as it is by trees and mountains, afflicted with only mildly brutalist architecture. SK said, as we wandered around, ‘This would be a good place to work.’ I agreed. The whole park, though built on an agressively non-human scale,gives me some hope that Korea may eventually, in some far-flung futuristic century, be less of a nasty place than it is at the moment, that there is some spark remaining of appreciation for contemplative beauty and harmony.
When we got home, she hopped on the Net, and ‘lo and behold there was a job on offer there. Six days a week, 20,000 won per day. That’s US$15.71 a day. You can imagine our enthusiasm. She made more that per hour in Sydney. Score another one for Korean society.

A new record! On the sub-1-kilometre (that’s under a half mile for any Amuricans that happen by) walk from my apartment beehive to the subway station this foggy, smoky morning there were :

Korean young people are infantilized throughout most of their lives. My younger students, in their first and second years of university, behave like 14 year-olds might in Canada. It is endearing, certainly, but a little sad too. The Moment of Truth arrives, for the young men, when they go off to do compulsory military service : 26 months, or 28, or 30 depending on whether they are inducted into the Army, Navy or Air Force. Their lot is, according to friends of mine, random beating and dehumanizing abuse at the hands of their ‘seniors’ – for a new inductee, basically everyone. For young women, it arrives a few years later, when they are expected to marry, and bear a child as soon as is possible, preferably between the ages of 25 and 29, and devote the rest of their lives to their children. Woe to the young mother who is not able to bear at least one male child. Young women have a brief flare of opportunity to express themselves, post high-school, during university. Once they have born a male child, they are referred to in public as ‘Male-Child-Name”s Mother. Around their 30th birthday, if they have a career, they find that any opportunities that previously seemed to have existed are suddenly gone, and if they are just working a job for wages, they are generally made to feel that their welcome has worn out.
There’s a very tight schedule for men and women both, and deviating from it by more than a year or two is actively frowned upon.
This is changing, rapidly, and a number of Korean editorialists lately have noted that, not unlike the situation 33 years or so ago in the West, there is no longer any common ground for young people and the older generation to find. The rift is a different one, though, as all but the most radical of young Koreans still bow respectfully to their elders, and still of necessity use the built-into-the-language forms of address, that, true to Confucianism, show respect to elders. Older people, comfortable that these outward signs are enough, continue in their assumption that the norms that lend structure to their understanding of how society should work, not realizing how far the Korean youth of today have strayed from any real respect for the moral bankruptcy that traditional Confucian culture has degenerated into.
The War that is coming in Korea will not be between the North and the South. It’ll be between the young and the old.
But then again, I may just drunk and rambling. I have a tendency to do that.