Some Reviews of Books on Korea, Part 1: Korean Agriculture, the Japanese Wave, and a Sycophant

I wish I had seen a sunset like this while I was in Seoul, but I did get to see one behind the 63 Building on the right while I was on a leisurely boat ride on the Han River on Sunday evening. And later I got to see the same view as the picture twice from the subway, on Line 1 heading over the river North towards Seoul Station. Millions of commuters see the same thing everyday, but for a country bumpkin living in a city of only(?) 3.5 million people, and who hadn’t been to Seoul in 2 years, I was suitably impressed.

For those of you that I met in Seoul, thanks again for the lunches, coffee and drinks, and it was great meeting you all, but after taking the subways all over Seoul most evenings while I was there I didn’t feel much like exploring the city the next day! But on Wednesday afternoon I braved the cold to buy some books, and first went to Whatthebook? in Itaewon, naively surprised while en route that even at 2pm in the middle of winter upon seeing me Juicy Girls would open their “bar” doors and encourage me to come inside…I guess I haven’t lost my touch. After beating them off with a stick, the store was easy enough to find a little further up the hill, but nothing like I’d imagined: I’d ordered online from them many times, but the physical store itself was mostly second-hand books. That’s not a bad thing at all, but already having too much stuff to carry back home to Busan meant I was planning to buy just a few, probably new books, not about the 30 or so second-hand ones I could easily have walked out of there with if I lived in Seoul. Here’s the 3 second-hand ones that I did buy from there in the end, in no particular order:

1. Agricultural Cooperatives in Korea (1998), by the National Agricultural Cooperative Federation.

Hey, I said I went to Seoul and just bought books, that should have told you how much of a geek I am. Seriously though, even I don’t consider it bedtime reading, but like I’ll talk more about in Part 3 (I’ll link to that once I write it), there are big gaps in English language sources on many aspects of Korean social sciences, and it’s good to have something to study the Korean agricultural economy with when I’ll need it. And considering how important it figures in Korea’s FTAs, that might be sooner than I think. Before this, all I had was Chapter 7 of Korea, the Land and People: The Organizing Committee of the 29th International Geographical Congress (2000), not enough for that topic but which is still a great (and the only) introduction to Korean Geography in English. To any scholars in the future who have found this post by googling the title of the book, which may well happen considering it’ll be the only relevant hit they’ll get once I post this(!), let me be even more helpful by pointing you in the direction of the pdf file Improving the Agricultural Finance System: The Changing Role of Agricultural Cooperatives in Korea (2004), which shouldn’t be too out of date yet.

2. Recentering Globalization: Popular culture and Japanese transnationalism (2002) by Koichi Iwabuchi

Given the Korean Wave only really got started after this book was published, then it too is maybe a little out of date. But actually I thought that that that was a blessing in disguise, because it looked like a pretty good introdution to the economics of the Japanese Wave, and I plan to read it and then see to what extent the same things it mentioned applied to the Korean Wave, the index showing that knowledge of the latter didn’t influence his (or her?) take on the former. Despite their complete absence in my blog so far, I’m actually very into the economics of Japanese popular culture (and Korean too, if there was anything on it), and have gone so far as to have on my bookshelves, in chronological order, Postmodernism and Japan (1989), edited by Masao Miyoshi and H.D. Harootunian, The Worlds of Japanese Popular Culture: Gender, Shifting Boundaries and Global Cultures (1998) edited by P. D. Martinez, and finally Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan (also 1998) edited by Stephen Vlastos. Sure, I may not have actually opened any of them until I just put them down next to my laptop as I type this, but I think I’ve got good excuses for the first one (despite the blog’s title, I hate postmodernism of any stripe, and agree wholeheartedly with Noam Chomsky’s take on it), and given how recently I blogged about invented traditions then Vlastos’s book may finally see the light of day relatively soon.

It’s kind of ironic then, that I thought like that on Wednesday, only to read an article in the English Chosun Ilbo today about how the Korean Wave was just a flash in the pan, much of it copied from Japan (see the examples the article claims in the picture, which include 200 Pound Beauty) and why the Japanese Wave just keeps on coming. But neither is any great surprise, and was apparent to virtually everyone a few years ago except seemingly the entire Korean media, the government, and by extension all too many Koreans. Despite the Chosun Ilbo’s apparent about face, and the useful related links available if you click on the article, it too was guilty of grossly exaggerating the Korean Wave’s success as recently as September, which you can see for yourselves with titles like “Korean Computer Animators Rising to Challenge Hollywood” and “D-War Director Returns Home Triumphant.” The public clearly has yet to get the message too, considering netizen’s reactions to a televison debate about D-War and one of the few Koreans daring to criticise the monstrosity.

(Update: Just found this rather prescient post of Michael Hurt’s entitled Why the Korean Wave Will Ebb, originally written in 2005. If you’re interested in the above, I recommend you check it out)

3. What’s So Good about Korea, Maarten? (2005) by Maarten Meijer

I usually avoid books like this like the plague, because after you’ve read one random expat’s book on Korea then you’ve read them all (although The Koreans (1999) by Michael Breen is pretty good), and Meijer seemed to have no qualifications to write the book other than having lived in Korea for 5 years and many other countries previously. Hell, he can’t even speak Korean…if he can make money writing a book about Korea, then I sure as hell should too. But then I’d been thinking a lot recently about something I read in Scott Burgeson’s hilarious Korea Bug (2005) a while back, when he interviewed Ken Kaliher, who’d lived here for 25 years…

…which compared to my meager 9 months at the time made me wonder if I had any business selling him literature that purported to “explain” various aspects of Korean culture. But he was very nice and didn’t cop an attitude at all, which he was certainly entitled to do. Actually, a lot of expats I’ve met in Korea and Japan who’ve reached that 4-5 year mark can be fairly standoffish towards relative newcomers, but I’ve found most “Old Hands” to be quite chilled out about such temporal jockeying and one-upmanship. After you’ve clocked in 15 or 20 years, you’ve pretty much seen it all and done it all. You ain’t got nothin’ left to prove. (p. 257)

I’d be one of those expats with an attitude, but I’ve been slowly admitting to myself that I don’t know everything about Korea, and I was recently very humbled by my score in my latest Korean/TOPIK test, which is why I’ve slowly started linking to and reading newbie blogs like Stranger in Suwon to get a much-needed fresh perspective on the place, although with that particular one I chose unwisely because she has just left Korea (and she never linked to me anyway, damnit so I’ve removed it from the blogroll). So I figured what the hell, it was only 6,000 won, usually 12,000 it said on the back cover (although I later found new ones, without pages falling out, for 9000 won at Kyobo) and I might learn something.

From the 72 pages I’ve read so far, I did indeed learn some tidbits: pp.35-36, for instance, showed me that there are so many Kims, Lees and Parks in Korea because those were the names of some royal clans in the Silla period, and people wanted to disguise their occupational backgrounds by adopting those royal names. There are one or two others, but unfortunately I’m not sure that I can read anymore for, in short, this is the most sycophantic, outdated, incoherent crap I’ve ever read about Korea, and this is coming from a geek who has bought virtually every book he can find on Korea for the last 7 years.

The book started off well enough. I actually saw it’s Korean edition in bookstores two years ago well before I ever saw an English one, and when Meijer claims that he’ll be “painfully direct” and “straightforward,” and while “there will be no Korea bashing in this book” that this does not mean that the nation lacks problems or that it’s people have no flaws” (p. 12), you sense that he is directly talking to Korean readers. But I was already regretting the waste of money, the cost of a whole Black Russian, by the time I got to page 15, where he begins to argue that criticisms of Korea are the result of a biased, ethnocentric world-view. After admitting that Scandinavian nations score “extremely high in empowerment of women,” for instance, he claims that “what exactly constitutes ‘female power’ is an issue of debate,” and defends Korean women’s extremely low empowerment by the fact that:

In many cases, the deck is firmly stacked against the inherent conservatism of Korean society and culture. Frequently, one can find western commentators complaining of the “authoritarian,” “hierarchical,” “unreasonable,” or “chauvinistic” character of the Korean male, for example. The underlying idea is that men nowadays should be democrats: egalitarian, rational gents who are in favor of absolute gender equality. Such assumptions, however, are popular notions of how society ought to be ordered based on a fundamentally western worldview.

No, they’re not, and like I said in my introduction to this recent post, that “Asian Values” argument is at least a decade out of date. Later, on pages 33-35, Meijer again shows how out of touch he is by mentioning Koreans’ preference for sons leading to abortions of female fetuses and skewing the birth rate, but which I’ve demonstrated here is something that was indeed a big issue 10 years ago, but has since has been resolved and is not at all a concern to Koreans. Not surprisingly then, the English book hasn’t exactly gotten stellar reviews, and if you click here and then on “next message” you can read Scott Burgeson’s (the Korea Bug guy above) criticism of the factual errors in it and Meijer’s response. I’m also happy to say that, despite the somewhat biased Dutch Business Club Korea’s claims, given that “as far as [they] were told it is the first book about Korea by a Dutchman published locally,” Koreans don’t like it either!

(Update 2: I’ve just found a review of a new book called Korean Consumer Report by Scott Burgeson, which I remember also seeing the Korean version of in Korean bookstores this year, and which I fully expect in my sock this Christmas (you have been warned). The review briefly mentions Burgeson’s opinions of Meijer, and it sounds like he criticises him a great deal in that book too)

I’m not claiming at all that producing Korean versions of books automatically makes authors sycophantic, and Tariq Hussain’s Diamond Dilemma (2006), which I plan to finish and review after I get back from my vacation, seems to achieve a good balance. But it must surely be a temptation for the sake of sales, and although I can’t find the link for now sorry, in his blog Michael Hurt has mentioned how it is tedious and bizarre for non-natives but natural for Koreans to say “Our Country this,” “The Great Korean Republic” that, and “Our People,” whereas we’d just say “Korea” and “Koreans” in English, and this would surely have a subtle influence on English editions of what were originally Korean works too.

As for me, I think I’ll throw mine away to make sure it doesn’t get into an impressionable newbie’s hands! In the meantime, I did buy 3 more books that day which I intended to talk about in this post, but you’ll be happy to know that I’m going to try to stick to a limit of 1500 words per post from now on, and while this post’s 2000 words means that I’m not off to a good start, it’s much better than the 5248 one I did recently. I have some thrilling blog tidying-up to do as well, but I’ll still try to do Part 2 tomorrow, and it’ll probably be much shorter because all 3 books are very good and so I have less to rant about. After that I’ll try to do Parts 2 and 3 of Flatting, Premarital Sex and Cohabitation in Korea next week as promised, but I also have to write my next 6 posts for ZR5 Asian News before I go on vacation, so sorry, but that means that there won’t be time for many pictures of attractive Korean women for a while. If you can’t wait though, you could do much worse than checking out my second post there on Han Eun-jeong/한은정.

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