The Grand Narrative

Over at Japundit, Peter Payne briefly discusses the phenomenon of kekkon taishoku in Japan, or leaving work to get married (I assume it’s exclusively used for women). My wife tells me there’s no equivalent exotic-sounding phrase in Korean (the real reason why Japanese culture is more popular than Korean) but the examples he gives of intelligent, sophisticated and (previously) career-orientated women quite happily…no, yearning to give it all up upon marriage will be familiar to anyone who’s taught Korean adults also. In my own experience, a good 10% or so of the women in their 30s that I’ve taught were already fluent, but happily confessed that they came to class more for social reasons and as a hobby than for learning English per se.

(Photo by comatosed)

Spending most of my undergraduate days either writing essays on the fallacy of the notion of “Asian Values,” or trying to pick up women at Amnesty International by joining their protests about them, then I completely disagree with Peter’s culturally-relativist sentiments that it’s inapproprite to judge this from his own US world-view. I do think that being a housewife is a waste of an intelligent woman’s abilities, particularly after 10+ years of career in a field that they enjoy, but notice that I didn’t say “raising children,” because yes, despite what I just said, my own wife is also a housewife and mother.

Why the contradiction? Well, we’ve decided that with the expense and widespread concerns over standards of childcare in Korea that this is best for our daughter (and our next child), but from what we’ve learned about childcare availability in Australia or New Zealand, then she would definitely work again if we lived there (which is…ahem…all I can really say about that online). Despite the boredom of being at home all day, she loves raising Alice of course (although it certainly helps that I’m doing much of it until I go to work at 1pm every day), and I’m reminded of a decade-old column I read in the New Zealand Herald about childless, soon-to-be (then) prime minister Helen Clark’s visions for childcare, which according to the columnist were based on an assumption that more women wanted to work but inadequate childcare facilities were the only reason preventing them from doing so, which the columnist, who was a mother, argued wasn’t quite the case. Somewhere in my possession I also have an Economist magazine article from 2000 or so that argued that the concept of going off to work and handing your children to complete strangers for the day was a recent anthropological oddity and hardly natural, and that thus, however cliched it sounds, “reconciling women’s roles as mothers and workers is one of the prime concerns of our age.”

I will try to find both articles if anyone wants to know more. In the meantime, I recommend you read this and then this article on the related subject of evolutionary psychology from Time magazine, both of which had a great influence on me at the time, and which briefly discuss the “naturalness” of modern-day childcare arrangements in passing (on pages 2 and 4 respectively). And if you haven’t seen it, then Mona Lisa Smile is a great movie dealing with all the themes above. It’s set in 1953, and if accurate, shows an environment clearly ripe for Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch in 1970. I haven’t read it, but I’ve heard that it discusses “Housewives Syndrome,” a term used by family doctors in the 1950s and 1960s to describe the physchological and physiological problems many women were developing because all they were expected to do with their university educations was cook, look after children, and clean the house for the remainder of their lives.

But despite all that, regular readers will not be surprised to find that I still think that the expansion and increased availability of childcare is by no means the only, but still the best route for the advancement of women in Korean society at the moment. To take a leaf from the 18th Century “Mother of Feminism” Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women, where she counters arguments that women are inherently mentally inferior to men by pointing out that such comparisons couldn’t be made until women received the same education as men, I’ll accept that women instinctively want to stay home and only be mothers only once they have all options available to them. Until then, gynocentric feminists can just STFU.

But all this is not going to happen without the political will in Korea. So far on the blog, I’ve repeatedly mentioned that it is because of this lack that legislation is not enforced, but in hindsight discussions of where it is supposed to come from have been suspiciously absent. Maybe it’s because it obviously must come from Korean women themselves, whom I am not imposing my own worldview on when I say that intelligent and ambitious women happily giving their careers up upon marriage is wrong, self-defeating and basically, just, well…pisses me off.

That may sound too strong, even for a geek like me, but placed in the context of my Korean female friend that complains that Korean men refuse to wear condoms, to which I reply that I’m pretty certain that most Western guys pretended to be happy to suit up only once they were given the option of doing that or not getting laid…do Korean women really need to be told to demand the same? Then there’s the Korean female friends with great bodies who just whine that they’re fat all the time: they’ll dutifully nod at my pointing out how healthy andattractive they are, but will still starve themselves at their next meal. Naturally I just loved having my opinions so completely ignored, one reason why I’m not friends with anyone like that anymore.

(On a side note, unless the recipient is clearly anorexic, then literally telling a woman that she looks healthy in Korean “넌 건강에 좋아보여요” or “You-health-goodlook,” actually means “You look fat”. What is wrong with this place??!)

Regardless of how universally applicable the points in my rant are, a fellow blogger has pointed out to me that there is no greater indictment of a society than its members’ refusal to continue it, and I’m concerned that once my daughter starts school here then she too will indirectly learn there that it’s possible for a women to have a career, or to have children, but unreasonable to expect to have both. Needless to say, most Korean and Japanese women are choosing the former, and the results speak for themselves:

(Photo by ichico)

New Adults Fewer Than Ever

The number of people who reached the legal age of adulthood was only 1.35 million last year, which is the lowest number on record and 40,000 less than the previous year, the Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry said Monday.

The announcement came on the national holiday Coming-of-Age Day, held annually on the second Monday of January, as most new adults participate in Coming-of-Age ceremonies, women traditionally in expensive “furisode” kimonos and men in suits or dark kimonos with hakama.

Of the new adults, 690,000 are men and 660,000 are women, according to a Kyodo News report. Percentage wise, the new adults constitute 1.06 percent of the total population, which is down 0.03 points since the previous year.

The legal age of adulthood is 20 in Japan.

The previous record low, 1.36 million new adults, was recorded in 1987.

Thanks to Edward Chmura, again at Japundit, for bringing that article to my attention. Finally, here is some still woefully inadequate, but rare encouraging news from the Korean Times on the Lee Myung-bak’s Administration’s measures for dealing with the low birthrate in Korea:

Home Buying to Become Easier for Newlyweds

Newlyweds may see themselves a step closer to becoming homeowners by the year’s end, as President-elect Lee Myung-bak and his transition team is actively reviewing the ins and outs of his proposed housing policy for just-married couples. The policy is to take effect in the second half of 2008.

The Ministry of Construction and Transportation said Monday that the modified housing system is set to allow married couples of less than three years, who successfully pay monthly installments of 50,000 to 100,000 won into a housing savings fund, to get long-term home financing with low interest rates. However, couples must take the benefit within a year of having their first child.

The plan, which was one of Lee’s flagship campaign pledges, has been welcomed by young couples as buying a home in Korea is widely known as a cost-burdening and time consuming, but a must-do task for married couples.

A recent Kookmin Bank survey said that the average period it took for a couple to buy their own house after marriage was around 9.4 years, up two years since 2005, as local home prices have consistently been on the rise. Therefore, the initiative of the president-in-waiting is seen as a springboard for financially weak, just-starting couples.

The ministry said that the incoming government has plans to inject 4.1 trillion won to supply homes for the low-income newlyweds. It forecasts that the fresh policy will feed about 120,000 homes, each less than 80 square meters, into the market.

It added that the transition team is considering expanding the system to those who are eligible, but are already paying into a housing savings fund, to enjoy the same benefits.

Earlier, the president-elect said the reformed policy was ultimately drawn to encourage young couples from having more kids, as many are known to refrain from giving birth to a second child due to financial instability, including not owning a house.

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(Photo by jasonkrw)

To recap, back on Tuesday, I discussed an editorial from the Chosun Ilbo about the Lee Myung-bak Adminisration’s plans to merge the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family (MOGEF) with the Ministry of Health and Welfare. I refer to that post a lot here, so rather than constantly linking to it I’m going to assume that you’ve read it.

Was it as good for you as it was for me? Now, I know I have a worldwide reputation as a Korean social issues guru, but sorry, I confess that even I wasn’t familiar with the exact histories or purviews of either ministry, so I originally saw no reason to question this statement from the Chosun Ilbo:

…many netizens are calling for the abolition of [MOGEF]. Now even president-elect Lee Myung-bak’s Transition Committee is considering disbanding the ministry, according to its government reorganization plan. A wide difference of opinions clearly exists between those who face the reality of sexual discrimination and those who view reality from their own standpoint. This is the key point of the debate over whether to maintain or abolish the ministry. It is high time that we had a thorough discussion of the issue. It has been exactly 20 years since the ministry was established in 1988 by the president who was elected the previous year (1987). Its founding was actually the fruition of the democratization movement. (italics added)

But then I read the article I give below on this proposed government reorganization from the Korea Times, which said that MOGEF was only three years old, so I finished that last post with by promising to get a third opinion. I honestly wasn’t looking forward to spending my first weekend in Korea poring over dense official ministry texts with my electronic dictionary (the things I’m prepared to do for you guys), but I needn’t have worried: a simple search on Yahoo brought numerous English hits, most notably the ministry’s own English webpage. Naturally as a ministry it does put quite the spin on all of its activities, but it has such a wealth of material and downloadable publications on it that I could easily spend the next month studying it all, and I’m very glad to have found it. It was a bit much to take in all at once though, so instead this speech by Minister Dr. Jang Hajin in New York in July last year provided a more easily digestible introduction.

And despite what the Chosun Ilbo says, I can’t find any mention of a gender-related Ministry of any form being set up in 1988. What I do know is that Korea did ratify the Convention of the the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women in 1984, but little else seems to have happened until the establishment of the 41-member Presidential Commission on Women’s Affairs in 1998, which went on to become the Ministry of Gender Equality in 2001, further expanded into MOGEF in 2005 like the Korea Times says. Knowing this, and with all the other mistakes in the Chosun Ilbo’s editorial that I mentioned in the earlier post…is it too much to suspect that the background for the article was simply made up? After all, MOGEF has been targeted in the past because of fake news stories about it produced by its opponents, so the use of such tactics by a supporter may also be nothing new (and shocking only to newbies).

Regardless, what’s most disturbing is that it’s only by chance that I noticed the mistake at all, which makes me worry that everything else I’ve read and blogged about in the English-language press in Korea, the main source of materials for most Korean bloggers, has been equally sloppy and/or misleading. I’m again reminded of Baltimoron’s endeavors to include at least two opposing links in each post, “preferably opposing each other,” and I resolve to do the same from now on.

With that in mind, here is the Korea Times’ take on the same issue:

President-elect Lee Myung-bak’s transition team is formulating a plan for the major realignment of government organizations. A dispute has been simmering over the properness of the possible merging of the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family into the Ministry of Health and Welfare. The team has maintained the ministry should be subject to restructuring as part of efforts to slim down the government with many of the ministry’s operations overlapping with those of the Welfare Ministry. The ministry has been cited as the first target whenever it comes to government reorganization. In this context, the next government is likely to refer the ministry’s affairs - about women, nurturing and family - to the Health and Welfare Ministry.

Why is MOGEF always cited as the first target in any government reorganization? By whom? Since when? Surely not the socially progressive but flawed Roh Muh-hyun Administration, which expanded it only two and half years ago…so is the article referring to “conservative” Lee Myung-bak instead?

(Photo swiped from reader’s blog shelooksjustlikethatdeadgirl. Hope that was okay)

Women’s groups have been protesting the move - seven of them led by the Korean Women’s Association United issued a statement saying: “Only three years have passed since the ministry was born. It is deplorable to see attempts to abolish a nascent ministry before it takes firm root.” They called on President-elect Lee to abide by his pledge to strengthen the role of the ministry in order to further protect the human rights of women and promote gender equality. As a matter of fact, Lee said during presidential campaign that he would keep the ministry afloat as it has its own unique role. The women organizations urged the need to expand its role with the ministry converging services now separated among various ministries (italics added).

I give up. What I am aware of though, is that regardless of what I’ve said about the source, simple corporate interests would have meant that the Chousn Ilbo is probably correct when it points out that the Ministry of Health and Welfare would have resented losing some of its purview to MOGEF, and some (again unnamed) feminist groups certainly had reason to complain that lumping childcare with women’s affairs ultimately reinforced stereotypes (as Baltimoron pointed out in the comments).

Moreover, it may sound like mere semantics, but in Korean it is known as the Ministry of Women and Family/여성가족부 (thanks to Andy at gopkorea for pointing that out), and this has been latched onto by some male netizens who call for its abolition, even producing parody Ministry of Men and Family websites in retaliation. That reaction was a bit extreme (as arguably was the government forcing the owners of those websites to shut them down), but then this is the same ministry that is best known overseas for offering cash prizes to men for not having sex with prostitutes (see gopkorea again here and here). That sounds silly but harmless, but with a 2007 budget of 1.3 Billion US dollars, up from a mere 27.8 million US dollars in 2001, then it is not unreasonable to ask if the money is going on similarly useless and naive endeavours.

(Photo by theturninggate)

The ministry said it has made a great contribution to promoting women’s rights through the abolition of the “outdated” family registration system called “hojuje,” and the introduction of a special law for prevention of the sex trade. It has been pushing new projects with the goal of helping working women.

But the ministry is facing renewed scrutiny due to the criticism that there are no similar ministries in any other countries. Additionally, some experts claim that nurturing and the protection of women can be classified as a welfare policy. They say the current government system is flawed and inefficient as similar welfare policies are dispersed among several ministries.

The transition team has yet to make a final decision over the possible closure of the ministry. It needs to take into consideration that the nation’s women still wield less authority though their rights have been greatly improved over recent years. There exists discrimination against women in the workplace and many of them still suffer difficulties in raising children and housekeeping. Regardless of the realignment, the value of gender equality and family should be respected above all.

Lest I give the wrong impression, despite pointing out MOGEF’s flaws above I’m still undecided on it’s effectiveness since 2005, whether or not it should be merged back to the Ministry of Health and Welfare, and whether or not is correct to have family-related policies to exclusively fall under the rubric of a ministry devoted to women’s affairs. At this stage though, I think I’m unlikely to change my mind on MOGEF needing more than 2.5 years to fulfill its goals, and, given the centrality of childcare issues to Korean women’s abysmally low GEM measure, then I have no problems with the MOGEF’s new “family” purview, at least for the next couple of decades or so. Finally, I now have in my possession hundreds of pages of PDF files outlining MOGEF’s achievements, and despite the spin I mentioned, some of the achievements are real, and I plan to study them in more detail because they impact on my areas of interest so intimately. Given my plans for the blog till March/April, I’m tempted to say that a proper examination by me will have to wait until sometime after that, opportune timing because by then Lee Myung-bak’s final reorganization plans will be clear, but this issue is interesting and will provide a nice balance to January’s topic of “developmental states”, so I’m quite happy to keep blogging about it.

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For a geek, it’s been very frustrating being surrounded by quality second-hand bookshops this holiday, as I’ve had to balance the 50 or so purchases I’ve wanted to make against the 20kg weight limit on my check-in baggage, my backpack already straining with shoes that actually fit me, shirts I don’t look completely gay in, roller-blades, English copies of Men’s Health (And now Women’s Health too), and rather all too many gifts for my daughter from her grandparents. But, thinking of my promises to my readers, I just had to buy the first book below by Maureen Baker when I saw it, a comparative study of Australian, Canadian and New Zealand families, and the mere 12,000 won I paid for it more than made up for the fact that I realised my other, more recent sociology book purchase was also by her, and so was probably unnecessary. Here’s a review for anyone interested, and I’ll be looking at it in great depth myself in February. 

(Families, Labour and Love: Family Diversity in a Changing World, by Maureen Baker, 2001)

As for the second book, it was a gift from my father, who for birthdays and Christmases usually gives me books on subjects that I’m semi-interested in, but which come low on my book-buying priorities; it’s an appreciated, but often hit and miss affair. On top of that, in my recent travels amongst the sociology sections of bookshops in downtown Auckland I’ve come across a great deal of complete rambling crap on Australian and NZ demographics, many such as Advance Australia Where? being of such a standard and depth that I would have been embarrassed to hand in to lecturers even as a freshman. Being quite the  purveyor of complete rambling crap myself, I saw no need to pay to read someone else’s when I could read my own for free, so I groaned a little when I opened this gift by yet another supposed expert:

(The Big Picture: Life, work and relationships in the 21st century, by Bernard Salt, 2006)

I soon grew to like it though. And it turns out Bernard Salt is quite an expert (see his homepage here), or at least people pay to listen to him - which makes him a demi-god as far as I’m concerned - and what’s more he writes in an hilarious style that I hope to emulate myself, but is still some way off. Let me give you a taste, first on 20-somethings’ blasé attitudes to premarital sex. After explaining why 50-somethings are happy to let their grown children to stay at home because it helps them get over being biologically “nurturing” to “completely obsolete”, (not completely true - New Scientist magazine says that parents have a big impact on the fertility of their children if they’re around to help raise grandkids - but still funny) he observes: 

When baby boomers formed pre-marital sexual relationships in the mid-1970s they did the respectable thing: they hid the extent of these relationships from their parents. That’s why the drive-in was invented. Not like the youth of today: they have no respect for the double standards preferred by parents. A stay-at-home generation Y male is just as likely to say to his parents: ‘Oh, mum and dad I thought Tracey might “stay over” tonight.’ There is, apparently, a subtle emphasis on the term ’stay over’ which precludes anyone from seeking to define precisely what ’staying over’ entails. Does this hotel get any better: free meals, free laundry…and now sex? Why would these kids ever leave?

I am curious as to how exactly this situation is manoeuvred by generation Y. On the first occasion that Tracey ’stays over’, how is this arrangement executed? Are mum, dad, son and ‘Trace’ all happily sitting on the couch watching Sale of the Century when son nonchantly yawns and says something like ‘Gosh I am so tired. I think we might head off to bed now.’ And do mum and dad then turn around and say ‘Oh, okay, nighty night. See you in the morning.’

And a little later:

Baby boomers have very different attitudes to sex than did their parents. They did not even ask their parents whether their girlfriend or boyfriend could ’stay over’ in the 1970s; boomers intuitively knew not to even pose the question. The parental response would have been first an apoplectic fit and then an admonishing lecture: ‘While you’re under my roof you will live by my rules’. And so it is for this reason that boomers left home early; it was a lust-driven imperative. (pp. 65-67)

And here’s a section on the short and fleeting period of “youth” that Baby Boomers had, something which Korean university students, with only a narrow window between sleep-deprived, rote-studying teen years and then long hours at work and then marriage and parenthood, would readily identify (see my posts on Korean Education for more information on that, especially this one and then this).

Today’s crop of 20-somethings resile from commitment to marriage and to the groundwork years required of a career, let alone to the concept of a mortgage (James - Its okay: I didn’t know what “resile” meant either). These people are easily bored; they up and off from whatever, or whomever, as they please. They travel, they trial relationships, they flirt with this, they flirt with that. They float into a share house, or into an apartment, and then they float back to mum and dad when things go pear-shaped.

Despite their radical image, 20-something baby boomers were conservative in such matters. They married and bought into housing and careers at an early age.

Prior to World War II, you were a child until the day you turned 14 and metamorphosed into an adult. The concept of teenager didn’t exist. Young women made their debut at 17, which meant that they could court. Generation Xers please note: to ‘court’ means to establish a non-sexual romantic relationship with a person of the opposite sex, and to hold that relationship over several months (years in some cases) with the (fervent) intent of joyous consummation on the ‘wedding night’.

Until the mid-1970s, some Australian women would wait until their 21st birthday to announce their engagement (tearfully during the speech for maximum impact). These female chameleons moved from teenager to debutante to fiancée within 4 years, and to wife and mother within anouther 2. (pp. 249-250, italics added)

Despite everything I’ve said about rapidly changing sexual mores in Korea, that still sound like a lot of Korean couples I know (although for that reason alone wouldn’t count as friends), so that struck a chord with me. Needless to say, I look forward to reading the rest properly once I’m back in Korea. In the meantime, do any Australian readers know any more about him?

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(”overworked mind needs rest” by sanguine seeker)

My plans for the blog still have a week to wait before I’m back with my books in Korea, but in the meantime the reception desk seems to have accidentally granted me 2 free days of internet usage, which I’m not going to draw their attention to anytime soon. I’ve been taking advantage by catching up with all my Economist magazines, otherwise physically waiting for me on my neighbour’s coffee table in Busan.

This article on death by overwork in Japan caught my eye, interesting because I need a post up otherwise I’ll start losing readers it shows the extremes of the long hours and overall company-first culture of Japanese workplaces, which will need to change drastically in order to encourage mothers to remain in the workforce (the alternative being - god forbid - immigrants). Naturally, with Korea being overshadowed by Western interest in Japan then I don’t expect a similar article about Korea in English anytime soon, but as Korean workplaces are so similar then the article is still relevant, and indeed even the Wikipedia article on Karōshi/ 過労死, the Japanese term for it, seems fit to mention that the phenomenon is called Gwarosa/과로사 in Korean. Does anyone know if there a Taiwanese equivalent?

(”Overworked and out of toner…” by G*Squared)

The article is short enough that I may as well as well give the entire thing. Afterwards, if you’re interested in reading more about the history of the phenomenon in Japan, then I highly recommend this short but comprehensive academic journal article from 1997 available here.

Jobs For Life

Dec 19th 2007

Japanese employees are working themselves to death

HARA-KIRI is a uniquely Japanese form of suicide. Its corporate equivalent is karoshi, “death by overwork”. Since this was legally recognised as a cause of death in the 1980s, the number of cases submitted to the government for the designation has soared; so has the number of court cases that result when the government refuses an application. In 1988 only about 4% of applications were successful. By 2005 that share had risen to 40%. If a death is judged karoshi, surviving family members may receive compensation of around $20,000 a year from the government and sometimes up to $1m from the company in damages. For deaths not designated karoshi the family gets next to nothing.

Now a recent court ruling has put companies under pressure to change their ways. On November 30th the Nagoya District Court accepted Hiroko Uchino’s claim that her husband, Kenichi, a third-generation Toyota employee, was a victim of karoshi when he died in 2002 at the age of 30. He collapsed at 4am at work, having put in more than 80 hours of overtime each month for six months before his death. “The moment when I am happiest is when I can sleep,” Mr Uchino told his wife the week of his death. He left two children, aged one and three.

As a manager of quality control, Mr Uchino was constantly training workers, attending meetings and writing reports when not on the production line. Toyota treated almost all that time as voluntary and unpaid. So did the Toyota Labour Standards Inspection Office, part of the labour ministry. But the court ruled that the long hours were an integral part of his job. On December 14th the government decided not to appeal against the verdict.

(”The worker salutes progress and capitalism” by drpritch)

With the exception of the quotation of Uchino’s widow in the final paragraph below, I don’t think the Economist makes any statement about Toyota’s possible mistreatment of its workers here. But I do remember that the end of this November article A Wobble on the Road to the Top mentioned that its much vaunted environmentalism was open to the criticism that it was all just for show (see the truthabouttoyota website for more information), and if that turns out to be true then I’m certainly much more open to the idea. I can’t find any links worry, but I remember that in Korea, sometime last year a worker at either LG or Samsung resigned and sent a letter to all employees, complaining of the long, unpaid hours and the mundane reality of working as a salaryman, and I do know that Samsung doesn’t allow unionization. While looking for links, I also found the article New Tech, Old Habits that describes how, despite the technological sophistication of their products, many Japanese and Korean companies will not allow workers to do things like take laptops out of the office, or allow them full access to work files from home, thereby forcing them to stay past midnight and so on, often for mundane tasks that could be just as easily be done at home.

That article is so good, I think I’ll write about it in my next post. In the meantime, can anyone help with information about the very public resignation of that worker in Korea, or can any Japan-based or Japan-savvy readers tell me what Toyota’s reputation is like really?

The ruling is important because it may increase the pressure on companies to treat “free overtime” (work that an employee is obliged to perform but not paid for) as paid work. That would send shockwaves through corporate Japan, where long, long hours are the norm.

Official figures say that the Japanese work about 1,780 hours a year, slightly less than Americans (1,800 hours a year), though more than Germans (1,440). But the statistics are misleading because they do not count “free overtime”. Other tallies show that one in three men aged 30 to 40 works over 60 hours a week. Half say they get no overtime. Factory workers arrive early and stay late, without pay. Training at weekends may be uncompensated.

I’m glad that the Economist has finally mentioned that some statistics can be misleading, as it has been misled by them itself on many occasions.

(”Something I found off the internet” by James, the Sexy and Virile Korea Studies Guru)

During the past 20 years of economic doldrums, many companies have replaced full-time workers with part-time ones. Regular staff who remain benefit from lifetime employment but feel obliged to work extra hours lest their positions be made temporary. Cultural factors reinforce these trends. Hard work is respected as the cornerstone of Japan’s post-war economic miracle. The value of self-sacrifice puts the benefit of the group above that of the individual.

Toyota, which is challenging GM as the world’s largest carmaker, is often praised for the efficiency and flexibility of its workforce. Ms Uchino has a different view. “It is because so many people work free overtime that Toyota reaps profits,” she says. “I hope some of those profits can be brought back to help the employees and their families. That would make Toyota a true global leader.” The company is promising to prevent karoshi in future.

(”Suicide Pact” by The Flip)

With my plans for coming blog posts, and me discussing Japan almost as often as Korea these days, then I’m flirting with the idea of expanding the scope of this blog to encompass not just Korean but also Japanese, Chinese and Taiwanese social issues (”An irreverent look at Northeast Asian social issues”™), but for now this link to “Overwork Kills 600,000 Chinese” will have to do for the Sino side of things. But with the phenomenon in Japan being so well-known that even Americans Western teenagers who couldn’t locate Japan on a map may have heard of it (I’ve seen it on the “funny” section of the nightly news before), then my argument that Korean workplace culture is so similar to that of Japan would imply that there would be a wealth of material on it, and indeed there is, at least in Korean: a search of 과로사 on Naver reveals many self-help sites, internet clubs (this is Korea remember), news, books, and you can even watch a few videos of salarymen killing themselves if you’re so inclined.

In English, I only found this downloadable pdf file entitled ”Depression a reality in Korean workplace“ from 2006, still interesting, but only indirectly related. To try to help fill the gap, I found this Korean article on the original Economist article above and fell asleep translating it last night, but in the cold light of day have realised that its just a carbon copy of the original (it would have been fun to translate it and then see the original though). Over the next week, I’ll keep looking for easy short, readily translatable Korean articles on the subject, especially on Korean rather than Japanese cases, and get stuck into them once I’m back in Korea next week.

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As regular readers will know, I’m an avid reader of the Economist, but I like to think that I know one or two things about Korea that its UK-based writers wouldn’t, and sure enough I’ve found its rare articles on Korea to be quite superficial. But I don’t have time to read much more than the Economist these days, so those mistakes in it about a country I know makes me worry about the mistakes it’s passing on to me about countries and/or issues I don’t know, and while it’s not always wrong to do so, having a dogmatic pro-market editorial stance on virtually everything doesn’t help either.

(Photo by paranoidroid)

Fortunately though, today’s topic is Japan, which although I haven’t lived in I’d say I know better than…well, the other 99% of people who haven’t (I even know that there was a prime minister with a funny name in the late-1980s), so I feel at least semi-qualified to sift through the Economist’s special report on Business in Japan, discard the odd piece of libertarian rhetoric, and find the nuggets of genuinely interesting and useful information (and it’s got to be said, there are many). As for why I’m writing this post on a blog about Korea…well, I’d be surprised if 99% of the readers of this blog weren’t equally interested in Japan, but as for the other 1% of you, there are more objective reasons to do so: regardless of how much credence commentators give credence to the “developmental state” model of Japanese development and/or its adoption by various other North and Southeast Asian countries (more on that next month), virtually all acknowledge the strong similarities between the economic histories of Japan and Korea, and so developments on the former often have a lot of resonance in the latter.

(Photo by plynoi)

But regardless of what you think of all that, I’m not actually looking at the whole report and am just looking at the section on the Japanese Labour Market (although if you’re interested in the management-style aspect of the convergence vs divergence debate, its overall argument that Japan is moving to a hybird system would be right up your alley), and what’s striking is how I could have just changed the names and the decade and, no offence, most readers would have had no reason not to think it was about Korea (I would have been fooled too). Tempting as it is to cut and paste the whole thing though, instead I’m going to assume that readers are already familiar with this post of mine where I describe how in ten short years Korea has gone from having the highest numbers of lifetime-employment, extensive non-salary side benefits, male-breadwinner “salarymen” in the OECD (and world) before the Asian financial crisis, to having the highest number of irregular, temporary, and part-time workers in the OECD today. In the absence of a welfare state, the scale of the social upheaval of that shift is self-explanatory, which has meant that since I’ve written that post highlighting the shift I’ve yet to go into the details of it on this blog myself, perhaps subconsciously feeling satisfied with merely getting that information out on the blogosphere.

On that basis, it’s high-time to fill in the gaps, which ties in nicely with some plans for the new year for myself and the blog I mentioned in my last post, so let me begin here by drawing your attention to where the Economist report illustrates the extent of Japan’s own shift, and what exactly Japanese companies and the government are doing about it. Once I’m back in Korea I’ll see if their Korean counterparts are following suit, or have any home-grown approaches and policies not mentioned here. But like the Economist’s choice of header illustration (below) shows, the inferior position of women in both countries features prominently, and making it possible for women not to sacrifice careers while having children is arguably their most pressing problem. Not in the sense that raising the fertility rate to 2.1 is a universal panacea, more that improving the postion of women, urgently needed in its own right, will have knock-effects that will help to fix much of both societies’ other flaws too (not to mention those of many Western ones as well).

Much of the article is about the formation of a two-tier, highly unequal labour market. To begin:

[Back in the early 1990s] the traditional Japanese “lifetime employment” model was deeply entrenched. It is often said that this model is now collapsing and that the era of “jobs for life” has come to an end. But the reality is more complicated. For one thing, the traditional lifetime-employment system existed for only a few decades, and only at large Japanese firms; it was never universal.

It’s well overdue, but this admission is well overdue: in the past, the Economist was as culpable as authors of “journalism-lite” pieces in Time magazine in perpetuating the stereotype that Japan was full of salarymen. Having done so, it would be nice for them to dig deeper and find that Korea had far far more as a proportion of all workers, and so the scale of its shift was all the greater and more interesting, but that’s probably asking too much.  

The system is now slowly crumbling, but only at the edges….Most of the salarymen inside the traditional system will stay there until they retire. But the labour market is becoming more flexible in several ways.

Mid-career job changes, once unheard of, are no longer quite such a rarity. The strict seniority system is giving way to a greater emphasis on performance-based pay and promotion on merit. And the number of “non-regular workers”…is increasing. But much of this reflects efforts by Japanese companies to shore up the lifetime employment system for its “regular workers”, involving necessary concessions to keep the old system going.

That never occured to me, but in hindsight it’s obvious. But it’s a bit of a sweeping generalisation, so one of my next tasks is looking at chaebol/재벌 and/or employment sectors in Korea individually and seeing if there really is a core group of privileged salarymen in each that everyone else is shoring up through lower wages. Even if this deliberate-sounding strategy is true for Japan, I’m not so sure it is for Korea, where salary, benefit and/or job cuts in 1997-98 were much more immediate and devastating than in Japan’s much slower, more drawn-out crisis in the 1990s.

Under the traditional system, companies hired graduates and then invested heavily in their training and development. To keep workers loyal and protect their investment, they offered lifetime employment on steadily increasing pay, with generous fringe benefits and a lump sum on retirement. Employees worked their way up through the ranks, so age and seniority were tightly intertwined. This made it hard for people to switch companies in mid-career. Women who left to have children found they could return only to more junior, part-time positions. People competed fiercely for jobs at the best companies-but once they were in, their performance made no difference to their pay.“At Mitsubishi your salary went up by the same amount, no matter how hard you worked. My friends at foreign firms found this unbelievable,” recalls Mr Mori (my italics).

If you want to find out who Mr. Mori is, read the report for yourself. In the meantime, had he read my blog posts on the Korean Education system (starting with this and especially this), very similar to the Japanese one, then he wouldn’t have been so surprised: it’s just an extension of the fact that in both countries, which university you go to is much much more important than what you actually learn there. The article goes on to mention that Japanese companies have been slowly implementing performance-based pay and meritocratic promotion schemes in response, but they haven’t been very successful, older salarymen hating working under younger employees (ie, in their late-40s) and vice-versa. Old habits die hard I guess. But young people no longer expect to stay in the same company their entire lives, and those in their 20s and 30s are much more likely to countenance doing so. In addition:

More portable pensions have further increased labour mobility. Under the traditional Japanese system, employees qualified for a lump sum at retirement (over and above the state pension scheme) after 30 years at the same firm, which strongly discouraged mid-career moves. But some firms, most famously Matsushita, a big electronics manufacturer, have introduced a new scheme in which employees waive the lump sum at retirement in return for a higher salary. They can then put some of their extra pay into a personal pension plan, akin to an American 401(k), which they can take with them if they switch employers. This is particularly popular with women…

I wonder why? Given the Korean government’s fixation on small, ultimately useless financial fixes for dealing with pressing issues, then I wonder if the same is happening here?

As the labour market has become more dynamic for regular workers…the gulf between regular and non-regular workers has widened. When the recession took hold in the early 1990s, the idea that Japanese firms would make workers redundant was unthinkable. Instead, to maintain lifetime employment, companies held down pay and benefits for existing employees and stopped hiring new graduates. Spurred by changes to employment law, they also began to take on more non-regular workers on lower pay and short-term contracts. Whereas in 1994 non-regular workers accounted for only 19% of the labour force, the figure has since risen to 33%. This created a “lost generation” of graduates who were unable to get full-time jobs during the 1990s, got stuck in low-paid, non-regular positions in which no training was provided and found it difficult to move into regular employment.

It goes on to to talk about all the freeters, “NEETs” and “net-cafe refugees” that comprise much of that lost generation. Yep, I too had only heard of the first.

The protection of regular workers, in short, has come at the cost of a growing army of non-regular workers. The irony is that companies that claim to be committed to lifetime employment can meet this commitment only by cutting back on hiring regular workers and relying increasingly on non-regular workers. “Toyota and Canon say they are still keeping lifetime employment, but to do so they are introducing a large number of non-regular workers,” says Keio University’s Mr Seike. Canon, for example, now employs 70% of its factory workers on non-regular terms, up from 50% in 2000 and 10% in 1995. Non-regular workers typically earn half as much as regular workers for comparable work. About half of them are not covered by company pension or health-care schemes. But although the use of low-paid, non-regular workers reduces firms’ costs, says Randall Jones of the OECD, it has the broader effect of constraining consumption, “so the expansion is still not firing on all cylinders.”

Now that Japan seems to have largely recovered from its lost decade, unemployment is only at 3.6%, and while I don’t know how accurate that is - I know that since 1997 the Korean government has deliberately used very conservative methods for its own statistics - at least non-regular workers are increasingly free to choose which sucky, non-advancing job they’ll go for. Hence, some companies are”converting” their non-regualar workers into regular workers to retain them, but the danger still remains that:

…Japan will find itself with a generation of middle-aged workers with inadequate levels of training, says Mr Seike. What is needed, he says, is a scheme to encourage companies to invest in training those in their 30s, with some of the training costs provided by the government. But the best way forward would be to close the gap between regular and non-regular workers by reducing the pay and benefits of the first group and creating better conditions for the second.

(Photo by kenchanayo)

And then it discusses the population pressures forcing reforms like this regardless, giving the cool graph below (see here for a dynamic Korean one, no pun intended). I’m sure readers will be familiar with those, as with the fact that Japan finds large-scale immigration unacceptable(despite what this happy clappy article entitled Chinese Immigrants Chase the Japanese Dream in Time magazine says - God knows what possessed me to buy it at HK airport), and so it will have to have encourage more old people and women to work in order to maintain its workforce. And to this end…

…the government has already passed a law requiring companies to raise their mandatory retirement age or provide retraining and re-employment for older workers. Most companies favour the second option: the seniority-based pay system makes the oldest workers the most expensive, so it is cheaper to offer them lower-paid work in semi-retirement than to keep them on as full-time employees.

Japan’s elderly are still willing to work, unlike their counterparts in Europe, notes Mr Seike. In theory, older workers could be put to good use training their younger colleagues. Raising the retirement age to 70 would roughly halve the rate of decline of the workforce. Increasing the participation rate of women from its current level of 61% (versus 69% in America) would help even more. Japan’s working-age population is expected to decline by nearly one-fifth by 2030, and boosting female participation would be the single most effective means of limiting the decline.

Many of the measures needed to do that, such as reducing the inequality between regular and non-regular workers and placing more emphasis on merit-based pay and promotion, would also improve flexibility more generally, notes Kuniko Inoguchi, who was minister for gender equality under the Koizumi government. But other measures that would specifically benefit women, such as better provision of child-care facilities, are also needed. Only 33% of children between the age of three and the mandatory school age (six in Japan) are in formal child care, compared with the OECD average of 73%. New rules for corporate child-care schemes and maternity leave for non-regular workers came into force in April. Big companies tend to offer child-care facilities already, but 90% of women in jobs work at small firms, which need to be persuaded to follow suit, says Ms Inoguchi. (italics added)

The corresponding figure for Korea is 26% (see my post here), but that is from 2001; the Economist’s one on Japan would be much more useful if they told us which year it was from as well. As for corporate child-care schemes, there is a law in Korea that states that large firms with over 300 workers must provide free child-care facilities for workers, but there are no penalties for non-compliance and so most don’t, so I’d be interested to see what the de facto situation is like in Japan too.

Finally, something from the leader article too. The figures for Korea are surely worse, so president-elect 이명박/Lee Myung-bak should take heed - 5 years of little improvement in them under his predecessor would have been the primary cause of his landslide election victory on Wednesday.  

Japan prides itself on being an egalitarian society. In a survey carried out in 1987, 75% of the population identified themselves as middle class. By last year the figure had fallen to 54%, and the number of people who identified themselves as below middle-class had risen from 20% to 37% over the same period. Worries over rising inequality were cleverly exploited by the opposition in the upper-house elections this summer, which led to the downfall of the prime minister, Shinzo Abe. His successor, Yasuo Fukuda, has pledged to continue along the path of reform while addressing inequality.

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(Photo by Hiromy)

Yes, I know that picture is actually from Japan: I’ve started…ahem…to pay attention to the copyright of photos I find on the internet, and beggars can’t be choosers sorry. As for today’s post, some very quick blog/personal stuff first, but if you’d rather skip that, fuck off scroll down to the next photo.

Given the increasing geekiness of this blog, I don’t think readers will need me to defend my claim that I find Korea to be a fascinating place to study, but I’ve noticed that until recently most of my posts seem to highlight some negative aspect of Korean life, point out what should be but isn’t being done about them…and, well, that would be that. There’s nothing wrong with that per se, but surely it can get a bit repetitive after a while, and although there’s definite limits to the political activism a non-Korean can do here, merely blogging about Korea’s problems ultimately leaves me open to the charge that I’m no better than the Itaewon-dwelling expats I denigrate so much, claiming to know so much about Korea but never doing anything but complaining about it.

(Sinfest) 

No don’t worry, I’m not going to swing completely the other way to compensate and give happy, clappy stories about Korea that would not be out of place on the government propaganda channel otherwise known as Arirang, but when I get back to Korea in a few weeks I do mean to see if there’s any proactive environmental, rights-watchdogish…hell, even feminist clubs and/or organizations I can join. Sure, I have fiendish ulterior motives, one of being that all my Korean friends have now left Busan and I’m lonely I need Korean friends to bounce ideas and opinions off, and the other is that translating short newspapers on the blog in noooo way implies Korean fluency, so yeah, I’ll also be joining to get Korean practice.

Having said all that, I’m in Australia at the moment and about to go off and hang out with kangaroos and emus for a couple of days, so the actual joining will have to wait. To prepare though (for coming back I mean, not the kangaroos) I’ve been checking out the excellent and self-explanatory blog TwoKoreas: Labour, Social Movements, Politics to learn more about the dirty, stinking, hippy, lesbian communists I want to get to know better in 2008, and in the process I came across the site LabourStart which gives regular, recent information about the scum of the Earth’s strikes, demonstrations and general activities in Korea and around the world. Seriously, regardless of your political orientation it does present a side of Korea rarely shown on Korean TV, but still absolutely necessary to understanding it, so from now on I’ll be checking it out pretty regularly myself.

(Photo by e-chan. Also from Japan…I’m terribly sorry)

But having said all that, I clicked on the LabourStart link in the first place because I noticed its links to the following news stories from the OECD’s “Policies for Balancing Work and Family” report. Normally I’d hate to just copy and paste the articles, but they’re all from the Korea Herald, which means they’ll only be available to subscribers after a few days…so it’s, well, paste it or waste it really. I’ll probably be referring back to them a lot in the future, but if anyone from the Herald has a problem with them in the meantime, let me know (update: the English ChosunIlbo has a similar short report that will be online for much longer)

First, this one from Wednesday:

Korea has most unfriendly work conditions for women in OECD: report

Korea Herald 12.12.07

Korea has the most unfriendly work conditions for women among the world’s more advanced economies, said a report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) which was quoted by Yonhapp News Agency.

The report cited by the National Statistical Office (NSO) showed that South Korean women work more hours that others in the 30-member OECD, while getting paid less than their male counterparts.

The findings showed that 77 percent of women workers put in more than 40 hours a week at their jobs in 2005. This, the report said, is much higher than the average 49 percent tallied for the whole of the OECD in the same year.

I can’t speak for the accuracy of the statistics in other countries, but that figure of 77 percent of women put in more than 40 hours a week under-emphasises the amount of work most Koreans do. While longer hours certainly doesn’t imply greater productivity (see Baltimoron’s comments to this post), in my own personal experience, most career-orientated Koreans of either sex would often work 60+ hours a week. Saying “more than 40″ implies that it may be or 43 or 45 or something, which doesn’t sound too onerous, but those hours would be very rare in Korea.

The NSO said the percentage was 13 percentage points higher than the United States where 64 percent of women put in more than 40 hours a week at work. The figure for Japan was 48 percent, while that for Sweden was 40 percent.

The report also showed that women workers were paid far less than male workers. It said male workers were on average paid two times more than female workers in Korea. The low salaries may help explain the lower percentage of well-educated Korean women who join the workforce compared to other countries.

As of 2004, the OECD report said the employment rate for Korean women with collage degrees or above stood at 57 percent compared to 59 percent for those with high school diplomas. Korea is the only OECD member where the participation of well-educated women in the workforce is below that of those with high school diplomas or less.

In the case of the United States, Australia, Germany, Britain and the Netherlands, the percentage of women with collage degrees or above in the workforce is 20 percent higher than those with less education.

I didn’t expect that. But in hindsight, a ready explanation comes to mind. Is it because women with only high-school diplomas are more likely to do be doing menial, non-advancing factory jobs, but in Korea the kind of jobs that most tertiary-educated women would want to do are just so difficult to continue after marriage and having children that they just drop out and become housewives? In 7 years teaching in Korea, I have met many well-educated, intelligent married women who join English classes even if their English is fluent, all simply because they are bored at home. At the moment that’s the only explanation that makes sense to me, but I’m interested in hearing any other ideas. After I finish this post I’ll ask my wife what she thinks, and once I get back to Korea I’ll ask my Korean friends (both female, both now housewives) as well.

In addition, the OECD report said the employment rate of Korean women was 52.5 percent for those of hiring age, which is below the 56.1 percent for other member states. “The OECD said such practices as nudging female employees to quit regular positions after they have children, and lower pay levels compared to males must be corrected if work conditions for woman are to be improved,” an NSO official said.

The official said that Korean men worked the most per week among OECD members states, but the difference between their working hours and those of men in the United States and Japan was not great.

(Ahem, still have a lot of copyrighted pictures to get rid of…but at least it was taken in Korea, yes?)

And then one from Thursday. I’ve only included the last third of it because the first two-thirds gave exactly the same information as the one on Wednesday, just in slightly different words. This is one reason why I haven’t subscribed to the Korea Herald in many years.

Korean Women Work Longest Hours in OECD

Korea Herald 13.12.07

…

The average salary for Korean women was also significantly lower than working men, a gap that is more than two times the OECD average, the report found. It highlighted that the yawning difference discouraged women from seeking jobs.

The National Statistical Office explained the country’s socio-economic shortcomings to a lack of systemized employment policies and a family-unfriendly employment culture compared to advanced countries, where the female employment rates and birth rates are rising.

As of 2005, Korea had the lowest fertility rate, of 1.1, while the employment rate of females (aged 15 to 64) stood at 52.5 percent, lower than the OECD average of 56.1 percent.

The report addressed the need for Korean companies to be more family-friendly. It stressed the need to protect the rights of full-time female workers, rather than relinquishing their full-time positions before and after giving birth.

It suggested wages should not be determined by hours worked but on performance, stressing that full-time employees should have more flexible working hours and part-timers more job security with the aim of being more family-friendly.

By Yoo Soh-jung

(sohjung@heraldm.com)

(Photo by Brookesb)

And finally, an editorial from Saturday. It’s always good to see, but to be honest I’ve been reading virtually identical opinions across the English-language media ever since I became interested in the issue. Again, once my Korean ability becomes good enough to translate articles from broadsheet newspapers, at least in a time-frame that’s actually useful to someone anyway, looking for evidence of similar sentiment in them is one of my first priorities. But surely if they’re in English sources on Korea then they’re in the Korean ones too? After all, its not like they’d offend North Korea (and so are taboo). So there’s really no excuse for some action on it from the next Administration come Wednesday. It’s well overdue, so here’s hoping.

[Editorial] Pro-family Policies

Korea Herald 15.12.2007

As Korea struggles to boost its very low birthrate - on average Korean women had just 1.08 babies in 2005, the lowest birthrate among all Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries - it is clear what it must do. Rather than provide one-time cash payments to women who give birth, the government should increase female employment by promoting family-friendly policies. 

Over the last 25 years, the relationship between employment and birthrate has changed. It may catch many people by surprise that studies now show that countries with the highest female employment rates are also among the countries with the highest birthrates.

Female employment in Korea in 2005 stood at 53.1 percent, relatively low compared to the OECD average of 56.1 percent. On the other hand, France, a country which has succeeded in bringing its birthrate up to 1.94 after years of decline, had 57.1 percent of its women in employment.

A recent OECD study also highlighted a glaring anomaly in the composition of the Korean female workforce. In all OECD countries, except Korea, women with a university education achieve higher rates of labor force participation than those with lower levels of education.

There could be many reasons for the comparatively low labor force participation by Korean women. The long working hours and the significant wage gap between men and women discourage women from continuing to work when they have children.

The pattern of female employment through lifetime shows that women leave work at childbearing age, reentering the work place once the children are older. When they return, they are given lower wages and positions with less responsibility. Women’s careers are interrupted again when they leave jobs to take care of elderly parents, a responsibility which often falls on the women.

Korean businesses must adopt more family-friendly policies to retain female workers. Having talented women leave the workforce when they have children — usually at a time when they are at their most productive — is a tremendous waste of investment in human capital. This is especially so when many of the top achievers in various civil service exams and professional qualification exams are women. Furthermore, with the labor force projected to decline in the near future, it is essential to have more women join the labor force. In other words, family-friendly policies are not a luxury but a necessity.

In this vein, the new law on promoting a family-friendly social environment could not have come sooner. When the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family scored 831 institutions in the government and private sectors as well as universities on a Family Friendliness Index which measured, among other things, the availability of flexible working hours, childrearing support and a family-friendly culture, the average score was a dismal 41.7 points out of a possible 100.

Family-friendly policies are a win-win strategy for both the employees and the employers. Employees will be better able to achieve a work-life balance — an issue that is becoming increasingly important as people seek a better quality of life — and companies will benefit from greater employee productivity and loyalty.

Instituting family-friendly policies may appear complex as they require new and creative methods of managing personnel and work procedures. It is when the person at the top of the organization is committed to family-friendly policies that they have a greater chance of taking firm root. It is time for our business and government leaders to rise to the new challenge.

(Photo by Brookesb)

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Back in part one, I mentioned that there is still no single volume, definitive guide to Korean sociology, and so to get a good overall picture there seemed to be no alternative but to purchase a lot of books on more specialized aspects of Korean society such as marriage, developmentalism, education, gender studies, consumerism, ethnic nationalism, democratization, social welfare…and so forth instead, something like at least 15-20 books in the end. Of course, only complete Korea studies geeks like myself would ever contemplate doing so, but then ever since I started reducing the number of pictures of Korean women in bikinis on the blog, complete Korea studies geeks are increasingly the only people who still read it. Naturally, I would like to focus on things that keep both all of my remaining readers happy.

How to do that? First, to reward those who’ve read this far, let me point out that rather than pasting them up here, if you’re so inclined you can find pictures of Korean women to your heart’s content all by yourself here and here (both SFW, and a big note of appreciation to Lost Nomad for the latter). Second, my original intention was to gather all those 15 books or so I mention into a big pile on my desk and review all of them in this post, but it’s proved a much bigger task than I thought, and sorry, but I can’t do it before I go on vacation next week. If you can’t stand the nail-biting tension until mid-January, you can see the books I’m going to talk about (amongst others) in advance by clicking here, but if you do may I highly recommend downloading Razor while you’re browsing, definitely worth the wait.

Having said all that, just look at what I picked up in Kyobo:

Korean Society: Civil society, democracy and the state 2nd. ed. (2007) edited by Charles K. Armstrong

This isn’t a general guide to Korean sociology, it’s about the development of Korean civil society, much drier and more specialized, chapters examining pressing Korean sociological issues like this somewhat lacking. Actually you may have seen this book yourself years ago, which is why I’ve put up a picture of the firstedition to jog people’s memories, but were put off by the price: I think I first saw this in hardcover in Kyobo maybe in 2004, mine for…88,000 or even 120,000 won or so? Something outrageous like that. Naturally then, I was pretty pleased to find a revised paperback edition for a mere 44,230 won, but even that was still the cost of a night’s drinking, and given all the other books in my backpack already then buying it justifiably aroused the ire of my wife later. But actually before I saw it I’d already chosen to buy this book:

The Political Economy of Democratic Consolidation: Dynamic Labour Politics in South Korea (2002) by Sun Hak Tae

And once I’d decided to buy that, just had to buy Korean Society as a…well…general overview of the subject to guide me through it. Sure, that may well sound akin to buying some nice, light reading like Lenin’s Imperialism as a brief guide to Marx’s Das Kapital, but let me explain.

After coming from the Royal Asiatic Society earlier, full of ancient and obscure books about Korea, I was very surprised to find still ancient and obscure but bigger, better and cheaper books at the otherwise modern Kyobo store. Two were published in the mid-1990s and provided a wealth of data about things like women’s workforce participation rates and other social indicators back then, and another literally gave a day by day account of absolutely everything that happened during the Asian Financial Crisis and the restructuring afterwards. All three would have been invaluable resources, at least for me, but I simply wouldn’t have been able to physically carry them back to Busan (hmmm, maybe I should see if I can order them before you all rush out and buy them). I was thinking pretty much the same about The Political Economy of Democratic Consolidation, a very dry, weighty 585 page tome, and oh-so-attractively presented in the minimalist binding and typeface that minor university presses lavish on works based on their students’ theses, of which they maybe expect to sell five tops. But I flicked through it, and after reading in the introduction that the author intended to apply the theoretical model outlined in this next book below to the case of Korea, would have brought it home to Busan even if it meant leaving my wife and daughter behind, for it’s that good.

Capitalist Development and Democracy (1992), by Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne Huber Stephensand John D. Stephens

Primarily because of a charismatic ex-Sandanista/lecturer of mine, before I came to Korea I’d actually studied Latin America just as much if not more than East Asia, and was planning to go to Nicaragua eventually; lacking enough machismoto handle the pelvic thrusts in the Tango and any Che-Guevara’s hair however, Korea was probably the right move in the end. At university about a year earlier, I’d been studying Latin American politics for most of my time there, and of course knew a lot but all too often it had felt like learning history at school, in this case mere memorization of different countries’ political histories, and I often despaired of ever making connections between events and seeing trends, let alone being paid in the future to make predictions based on my knowledge. But then I read the book above, the bulk of which is about democratization, but which uses the experiences of all Latin America countries over the past 150 years as case studies to test their theoretical model. And once I read it, I had a wonderful moment where everything I’d learnt in the last 2-3 whole years of study of the region, which had often felt as effective as banging my head against a brick wall, suddenly all became clear in less than an hour.

To the geeks reading, I’m sure you know what I mean, because after somehow reaching one revelation while we’re students, where so suddenly we understand so many things about the world…we become geeks by continuing to study for the rest of our lives, in quiet desperation to reach another. I’ve only had three more experiences like that, my most recent about Korea naturally, and so it was to flesh out and bring some sense of closure to that that I’d already decided to buy The Political Economy of Democratic Consolidation when I realised that it was based heavily on Capitalist Development and Democracy, my previous highly-cherished muse. After that, well, I would have paid 60,000 more than the 20,000 won I did pay for it.

Unfortunately, after stringing you along like that, I’m going to have to break your hearts, because I can’t do justice to it in the remaining space in this post, but I’ll do my best to give you a brief introduction. First, if you haven’t read my post Manufacturing, Childcare and Salarymen: Why Korea is such a fascinating place to study yet, please do so, because I’m very proud of it these subjects are intimately linked. Assuming that you have then, let me begin by quoting from Chapter 4 of Korean Society by Hagen Koo, entitled Engendering civil society: The role of the labor movement (pp. 73-94):

…this chapter takes issue with privileging the role of the middle classes in the making of South Korean democracy and civil society. Against this prevailing assumption, I argue that South Korean democracy and civil society did not occur as the “natural” outcome of economic growth and the expansion of the middle class, but as a consequence of persistent struggles by students, intellectuals, and workers against successive authoritarian regimes….Those who stress the conflictual aspect of South Korea’s transition to democracy…tend to give prominence to the role of students and dissident intellectuals. The aim of my chapter is, however, [to show] that spirited working-class struggles…played a critical role in bringing about both democratic transition and the expansion of civil society. This is not to argue that the working class alone played such a role. Rather, it was the close interaction between the grassroots labor movement and the student-led democracy movement that enhanced the power of social movements against the authoritarian state….And it is through involvement in labor struggles, directly or indirectly, that many students and intellectuals gained critical consciousness and later became leaders of the civil society movement. Those who are actively involved in the post-1987 citizens’ movements do not represent ordinary middle-class citizens, but those who had experienced the political and social movements of the pre-1987 period. (pp.73-74) (italics added)

Admittedly, in itself it is hardly a great revelation that members of the ”386 Generation“ of today were strongly influenced by events in their twenties, but its always good to remind ourselves of the volatility of life in Korea back in the mid to late-1980s. And regardless of what you may think of Roh Moo-hyun’s political ineptitude, for instance, he was a pretty fine human-rights lawyer back then, and you can often see traces of his then necessary confrontational style and populism in his political outbursts today. Seeing as how I’ve heard from psychologists that the vast majority of people’s personalities are set by the time they’re 30, and that certainly seems true of myself, then I would be very surprised if the democracization struggles hadn’t formed the prism through which the 386 Generation view events today.

And just to be clear, the “386 Generation” is a new term, and may just refer to politicians in the Roo Moo-hyun Administration, so Koo is arguing that the then young members of all groups involved in the democratization movement, many now presumably higher up in the hierarchies of their respective organisations, all retain this confrontational notion of politics today. Student groups now have different members of course, but for corporatist reasons many didn’t disband as soon as Roh Tae-woo declared the first free presidential elections in 1987, but instead morphed into the forerunners of the environmentalist, feminist and anti-American student groups of Korea today.

But having said all that, remember that that was 20 years ago, and so despite that strong influence Korean politics should not still be like that today. Of course, Korea is not quite the military regime it was in 1987, indeed riot police are no longer always the bad guys, but not only do frequent and sometimes violent strikes and demonstrations seem to be the norm (for an excellent blog on that, try TwoKoreas), but Korea has by no means fully democratized even in ”soft” areas like freedom of expression yet (see here too for a notorious recent libel case). Overall, it seems to have moved little beyond the ”procedural” democracy of mere elections and votes, and it is only on this procedural level that Korean politics appears like the mundane multiparty systems in readers’ home countries. This was starkly shown to me personally when I turned on the TV on election