the Seoul metro: "more civilized" or "a fucking war zone"?

I heard the opinions of two different colleagues yesterday. One colleague, a French speaker, said he encountered a Frenchman while they were both on the Seoul metro. The Frenchman remarked to my colleague that Seoul's subway was nothing like Le Paris Métro: "Ici, ils sont plus civilisés," he supposedly told my coworker. Here, they're more civilized.

While walking home with another colleague, however, I heard a very different assessment of the Seoul metro, and of Korea in general. This colleague had lived and taught in America, Thailand, and Japan, and he often found himself pining for Japan–a place he deemed cleaner than Korea, and peopled with citizens who understood rules of politeness and the value of living in a civil society. Japan's subways, according to him, are orderly and sedate. Seoul's metro, by contrast, is "a fucking war zone."

My own experience lies somewhere between these two impressions. For the most part, I can't say that I've experienced much trouble on the Seoul subway system, which I used quite often back when I lived in Seoul. I saw plenty of drunk people on the subways at night; I also saw my share of crazies. But those folks were notable mainly because they were in the minority: for the most part, my subway rides were hassle-free. Come to think of it, my experiences on the Paris Métro weren't that bad, either. I recall one drunk guy telling a woman in a leather miniskirt to "spread 'em, dirty whore! Go on—spread 'em!" ("Écarte, sale pute! Vas-y, écarte!"), but she and her boyfriend just laughed the drunkard off. One of my most traumatic Seoul subway experiences involved standing ten feet away from a furiously drunk guy who started taekwondo-kicking one of the subway car's windows; he eventually spidered the glass, then left the car in a hurry when the train stopped. No one did a thing.

But one such incident does not a war zone make, and I don't know enough about other subway systems around the world to be able to make an intelligent comparison.


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