Your South Korea Fix

Is President Noh Mu Hyon finally wising up? This article provides a glimmer of hope.

And more evidence that, maybe, people here in the South are indeed taking the Northern threat seriously?

The Sunshine Policy was flawed from the beginning. Kissing North Korea's butt gains the South (and the US) absolutely nothing. The Northern government is run by a bunch of paranoid, ungrateful bastards with their heads so far up their asses that their eyeballs're visible through their nostrils.

Paying NK as a peace overture? Sick, sick, sick. Ex-President Kim, what were you thinking?

Here-- a long spiel about Korea in general. This is copied from an email I sent to a church member the other day. Apologies, as before, for length.

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My father passed along your email address and mentioned that you were interested in hearing the news from over here, so I thought I'd take some time to write about the goings-on, both personal and national. A warning: I've never been all that politically astute, so I won't be providing trenchant, insightful political commentary; just a Joe Foreigner's view of how things are in the Land of the Morning Calm.

Since I have no computer, I have become a frequenter of "PC-bahng," which is the Korean version of an Internet cafe. Imagine a room full of library-style study carrels, each carrel containing a PC setup. You log in and pay about 80 cents an hour for use-- extremely cheap, compared to the ridiculous rates I saw in Europe and the Tokyo airport.

Koreans don't generally use PC-bahng for email. Instead, they spend their time playing networked computer games (usually the "strategy" games, where each player is an armchair general with an overhead view of the battlefield), often for hours on end. The PC-bahng ("bahng" is one of several Korean words for "room") is a truly huge cultural phenomenon here, and it is changing the face of society.

So perhaps we should start the commentary there, with PC-bahng. The Internet has its good points and its bad points, and Koreans have become increasingly worried about the PC-bahng phenomenon for several major reasons.

1. The question of physical fitness. Sad but true: South Korean society is becoming progressively fatter (despite required military service for men), and PC-bahng aren't helping this trend. Computer usage means being sedentary, and many PC-bahng, like Net cafes across the world, provide an unending supply of junk food for the patrons-- sodas, chips, candy, and instant ramen, to name a few of the more common items here in Seoul. No "reactionary" PC-bahng have sprung into existence yet: there are no hi-tech "PC gyms" or "PC fruit juice bars."

2. Another problem is social cohesion. Korean society, rooted as it is in Confucianism, makes the social, interpersonal reality the primary one, not the individual. Unfortunately, using a computer for hours on end is not the same as getting quality time with friends and family, and it's highly individualized. Even when people participate in networked games as a team, the ratio remains "one person per carrel." This is proving worrisome, and many Korean cultural pundits perceive a steady erosion of traditional social cohesion, and the rise of Western-style alienation, disaffection, and anomie, as PC-bahng become the favorite means of escape from family, work, etc.

3. A related danger is, as you might imagine, the so-called "invasion of Western values." The South Korean government does not monitor Net usage as tightly as, say, the Communist Chinese do; I am free to surf almost anywhere I want while online, with no fear of political repercussion. Unfortunately, for Koreans, this means that a whole host of potentially "unsavory" sites are available for the viewing: Western anarchist websites, worldwide pornography, politically subversive European sites, etc. A quick click on my terminal's browser "history" shows that there's a lot of roaming going on: people who logged on to this computer before me have been wandering the Net and seeing things their parents might not want them to see. Since PC-bahng users tend to be about 10-45 years in age (a huge demographic), the PC-bahng phenomenon has taken root very quickly, on multiple levels of society.

PC-bahng are located about every 10 feet in the city, or so it seems. You're never far from one, and the price-for-usage varies very little (maximum 2000 won per hour, or about $1.70). The same is true in the other big cities, like Pusan and Taegu.

This trend is impossible to ignore. It's the face of the new, young, hi-tech Korea. No one here is impressed any longer by American technological achievements: in Korea, which is already an enormous technological power, advanced electronic items enter the market far faster than they do in America. Cell phone usage is a case in point. Everyone in Korea, from the five-year-old kid next door to the 90-year-old grandmother, has a cell phone and knows how to use it. The fact that many Americans still refuse to buy cell phones is viewed here as a positively Luddite (or maybe troglodyte?) worldview, of a piece with the irrational American refusal to give in and "go metric."

The technologization and commercialization have wrought other changes here: I can see a marked difference between now and 1994 in terms of credit card usage. The Korea of 1994 was still primarily a cash-based economy: I was paid in cash, whether by my language institute or by the people taking private classes. Credit cards were almost unheard-of. Nowadays, however, credit card advertisements are splashed prominently on the interior walls of every subway car, and it's hard to imagine shopping at a Korean department store or buying a Korean car without a credit hard somewhere handy.

The deeper trend, then, is away from the savings-oriented thinking of the past to the more American cash-flow model. Finding and keeping a steady job is important if one is to remain financially viable, especially in a huge city like Seoul.

Working against this trend, however, is increasing privatization and entrepreneurship. It's becoming harder to find steady, guaranteed work in the new economy. I'm glad, in a way: Korea's economic model, based on Japan's model of an economy ruled by huge conglomerates, is unwieldy and ultimately unwise. This explains Japan's post-1980s plunge over the edge. Koreans watched Japan go over the cliff, and they've been busy diversifying, trying to save themselves from the same fate. Smaller companies, new businesses, are sprouting all over, and not always inside Seoul. This, to me, is fantastic, and while the decrease in job security means more stress, it also means greater economic vitality in the long term. The old stereotype of the Japanese and Korean "salaryman" is yielding to something more polyvalent and flexible, that hasn't acquired a definite shape yet.

I think, however, your primary interest is in the North Korean question, so I have to apologize if I bored you with all of the above.

Around the time of the recently prosecuted Gulf War II, it became obvious that South Koreans are of two minds about America, and specifically about the continued presence of American troops on Korean soil.

The split in opinion is, as you can imagine, along age lines. The younger generation wants American troops out, wants Korea to be a greater voice in global economy and politics, and is more sympathetic to North Korean complaints about US belligerence. The older generation, perhaps more mindful of recent history (after all, the 1950s were NOT that long ago), is wary of North Korea's motives, sees value in the US troop presence, and does not deeply resent Korea's second-fiddle position in world affairs.

My Korean relatives and friends provide an interesting case study. My relatives were not against the US invasion of Iraq; they felt Iraq deserved what it got. My closest Korean buddy, however, can't speak about George Bush without using the work "fucking" in front of his name. My friend represents, in many respects, the opinion of the younger crowd. South Korean youth don't see North Korea as inherently evil. If anything, they see it as harassed by the US and other powers. Communism does not strike SK youth as somehow bad; to the contrary, as my friend says, "we see some merit in it"-- a thought still unthinkable among most of the older crowd.

South Korean youth also are pushing the "one people" notion, that North and South Koreans are united by thousands of years of history, language, and culture. "We share the same heritage," my friend claims.

My own opinion about all of the above is somewhere in the middle.

On the question of American troops, I actually agree with the youth that, maybe, it's time for us to go. South Korea has a strong economy, and despite recent wobbles, it's on fundamentally steady ground. The dynamism and creativity of modern South Koreans will ensure that nothing deeply serious can ever happen to the country, I think. The military numbers close to 1 million, and is constantly replenished by fresh blood since all able-bodied men are obliged to serve their country. There's no lack of troops, and there's no question of a serious economic hiccup.

If Koreans want anything from us, it's military technology-- not because they don't know how to build it, but because we produce it in such scarily huge volume that it's easier for them to buy it from us than to develop it themselves. So, materially, South Korea will do just fine. In terms of morale, it would be a HUGE boost to the South Korean psyche for our troops to leave the peninsula, especially since we occupy prime real estate in Seoul (a constant source of US-SK friction, and a blow to national pride).

I think Rumsfeld's idea of moving our troops southward on the peninsula is a good one. Maybe it's a precursor to leaving the peninsula entirely; I don't know. I think that Gulf War II proved we have the ability to project force into a combat area despite hindrances from other countries (I'm thinking of Turkey's recalcitrance just before Gulf War II), so it won't matter much where our troops start off; they'll end up in the combat zone quickly enough. Although a war on the Korean peninsula won't be won nearly as easily, the question of force projection remains about the same, I think. Also: in the initial push across the DMZ, it's been said that North Korea can fire over 500,000 artillery rounds PER HOUR into Seoul, as well as target points south of Seoul. If this is true, then nearly 40,000 US troops may end up losing their lives in the first 48 hours of combat. That, to me, is a senseless waste of life. Whatever Rumsfeld's faults, I think he's right to move our guys out of immediate harm's way.

However, I emphatically do not agree with Korean youth about North Korea's "victim" status, the harmlessness of Communism, or the issue of NK and SK representing "one people."

North Korea got itself into this situation, and it is they who are starving their own citizens while their maximum leader remains plump and paranoid. I don't for a second view North Korea as some poor, impoverished victim of circumstance, though I do sympathize with the plight of its citizens, who, especially if they live outside of Pyongyang, know nothing but fear and hunger.

As for Communism... don't get me started. The idea doesn't work on paper, and it's never worked in reality. The closest thing we have to "successful" Communism is the current Chinese experiment (which I'm watching closely), but the Chinese have compromised by trying to layer a Communist government atop a quasi-free-market economic model. The new president, Hu Jintao, appears ready to compromise even further and begin making small changes in the political arena-- a heretofore unheard-of move by a Chinese leader. All this shows that Communism is saddled with deficiencies.

But Communism's "friendly" face, even in modern China, does nothing to disguise its ugly reality: repression, squelching of diversity, crushing of spirit. The youth here in South Korea, with their full bellies and idealism, have too quickly forgotten just how dangerous the Communist ideology is. While I hesitate to demonize Communism as "evil" (I don't like engaging in absolutist rhetoric, which smacks of fundamentalism), I recognize it as a threat and treat it as such.

The final issue, that of NK and SK comprising "one people," is one that bothers me deeply. On the one hand, I'd like to believe there's truth to this. Certainly all Koreans, North and South, do indeed share a long, long history that dwarfs American history by a factor of thirty. But as happened in China, Communism (or maybe it's Stalinism) entered North Korea, poisoned the society to the root, and did its damnedest to eradicate all that was good and noble in Korean culture. North Korea operates according to a ridiculous ideology called juchae, or self-reliance. In North Korea, you will never see Chinese characters in books, on TV, on newspapers, or anywhere else. This huge element of Korea's past has simply been erased, despite the cultural debt owed to Chinese culture. Other elements, Chinese and native, are gone as well. Religion? Gone. Confucian family values? Gone. What replaced these treasures in the North Korean heart is a cult of personality called, by some, "Kim-ism," i.e., the fanatical devotion to the ruling Kim family, who are treated as deities.

None of the above has any relationship to the South Korean heart, or to SK culture. To call NK and SK "one people" strikes me as wishful thinking at best. The sad reality is that the two cultures have become, over the short course of a half century, alien to each other. Proof: news stories are appearing, with greater frequency, about North Korean defectors who have had great difficulty adapting to life in South Korea. Linguistic differences are enormous: South Koreans use plenty of borrowed English terms in everyday speech these days. Dialect has diverged to the point where some NK speakers are almost incomprehensible to SK listeners.

Yet I still have hopes for reunification, so long as it's under a South Korean banner. South Korea's cultural model, wacky as it is, offers the best hope for the peninsula. In my darker moments, I just wish for the quick collapse of the Kim regime, social chaos in the North, perhaps a military skirmish or two, and a quick takeover by the South. But I doubt that's how it's going to happen.

What else? Hmmm...

Seoul traffic remains as congested as ever. People commuting from just outside the city routinely wake up at 4 or 5AM just to get to the office in time. English remains the most popular foreign language to learn, though American teachers have been falling out of favor over the past decade, as Koreans discover the wonders of New Zealand, Canadian, and Australian culture. Koreans no longer express a widespread wish to emigrate to America-- again, they prefer Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, where "the people are friendlier."

Seoul itself remains the Korean Mecca; people move here in droves. South Korea has about 45 million people; 12 million live in Seoul, so one out of four South Koreans is a Seoulite-- a staggering statistic. Seoul's borders continue to expand outward into Kyonggi Province. In a few years, I imagine Seoul and Inchon will have merged into a single city. This is inevitable, if for no other reason than that Seoul's international airport has relocated to Inchon.

On a personal note, I'm enjoying a spot of free time right now. I teach one private English class six hours a week, and am going to begin working with a tutor on my Korean and Hanja (Chinese characters) next week. I may also be doing occasional studio work-- voice recordings to be placed on audio CDs and sold to English learners. Scary thought, but so many foreigners end up doing SOME sort of studio work that it's a wonder I haven't gotten a studio job sooner. The real ticket, of course, is getting on TV, but to do that, it helps to speak impeccable Korean. While my Korean has improved by leaps and bounds over the past year, I'm nowhere near true fluency. In August, I begin my "real" job as a full-time English teacher at a nearby language institute, and in September I begin night courses in Korean at Ehwa University.

I'm also hitting the gym several times a week, and it's helping with weight and cardiovascular fitness. I recently had the pleasure of hosting Mom, my brother Sean, and some relatives from Texas; Sean's lost a lot of weight thanks to the Atkins Diet, so now I'm inspired to greater heights.

After I lose enough weight, I plan to begin a martial arts class or two; other personal projects include writing a children's book based on Korean folkloric figures (in progress), learning Chinese/Korean calligraphy, and continuing my dialogue and studies with Korean Zen Buddhist monks. All this means I'll be here another couple of years before trying to get into the UCLA doctoral program.

You might find it amusing that some of my Christian relatives are concerned about my "fraternizing" with Buddhists-- visiting temples, meditating, and all that suspicious stuff. I take my relatives' concern in stride; there's little we can do to change each others' attitudes, so I don't waste time worrying about it.

[end email]