The Grand Narrative

(Photo by +~*aRyaNa*~+) 

The Paradox 

For new readers, Part 1 was an outline and discussion of the first part of the 2003 journal article “Neo-Confucian Body Techniques: Women’s Bodies in Korea’s Consumer Society“ by Taeyon Kim. To quickly recap it, she argues that women weren’t really thought of as individuals in Joseon Dynasty Korea, as the state ideology of Neo-Confucianism considered them incapable of the spiritual transcendence that men were. Instead, the best they could aim for in life was continuing a husband’s “ki”, or spirit, through the production and upbringing of sons and the efficient management of his household. Hence Kim describes them as “subjectless bodies,” as not only were they not really individuals but their physical bodies were not really their own either, merely being vessels for and tenders of the more precious ki instead.

In terms of the ideals for women’s appearance, this meant that the physical attributes required for both were prized more than beauty. On top of that, adornment and/or alteration of the body was not condoned for either sex, as the physical body was one’s inheritance of ancestors’ sacred ki. And herein lies the paradox, as on the one hand Neo-Confucianism still pervades all aspects of Korean life today (I’ll take readers knowing and agreeing with this as a given), but on the other hand, modern Korea appears to be in the midst of a decidedly non-traditional celebration of youth and the female form. What gives?

Neo-Confucian Consumption Motives 

(Photo by !°jeon ji-hyun)

The short answer is that appearances can be deceptive. It is certainly true that modern media images of Korean women are not Neo-Confucian in the 19th Century sense described above, and it’s difficult to argue just by looking at them that advertisements, for instance, are any different to their counterparts in Western countries. Of course, systematic cross-country analyses of numbers and types do reveal significant and telling differences, and if readers are interested in those then I highly recommend reading the 2006 journal article entitled “Content Analysis of Diet Advertisments: A Cross-National Comparison of Korean and U.S. Women’s Magazines” by Minjeong Kim and Sharron Lennon, downloadable here. But surveys like those do not chronicle average Korean and Western women’s reactions to them, and herein lies the essential differences between them.

In Western countries especially, most (although not all) advertisements for a product have to actively suppress and disguise the notion that people may feel compelled, influenced or forced into purchasing that product, whether by the ad, by peer pressure, or some other unwritten social rule. Instead, people are encouraged to conceive their purchase in terms of personal choice, individuality, empowerment, and - especially if the target consumer is young - maybe liberation, and the breaking of rules too (I discuss these notions in more detail in this very academic post). Of course, these advertising norms probably operate for a good proportion of advertisements in Korea too. But in the case of advertisements for products related to one’s appearance, be they cosmetics, clothes, or plastic surgery, then it turns out that most Korean women make purchases for precisely the opposite reasons. Indeed, not only is there no stigma in doing so, but they positively embrace the opportunity to conform to and harmonize with social norms through their consumption choices. 

Lest that assertion sound like a typical exaggeration of a mere Caucasian male, surveys that Kim cites indicate that most Korean women explicitly justify their choices in those Neo-Confucian terms, and definitely not the individual empowerment, entitlement, and personal assertion of one’s individual choice that Western women tend to do in similar surveys. That is not to say that Western women (or men) can’t and don’t also passively follow fashions, and it’s not necessarily a negative or dehumanizing thing either (again, see this post for more on that). But very few Westerners would admit to it.

(Photo by Matzepeng)

I see no reason to doubt the results of those surveys (which I can provide the details of if readers wish), and while my own female Korean friends for instance, are certainly as liberal and free-willed as any Westerner in their clothing and cosmetic choices - that’s why we’re friends - they can’t counter the mass of empirical evidence Kim provides and the anecdotal evidence from the media and on the streets of Korea. If Neo-Confucianism is pervasive in modern Korean life then, and Korean women consume cosmetics, clothes, and undergo plastic surgery operations largely for the sake of Neo-Confucianist motives, then it’s time to call a spade a spade and argue that Korean society’s new emphasis on women’s appearances is (somehow) Neo-Confucianist too. Indeed, it would be strange if only this particular aspect of Korean life was so different.

Hence, the second part of Kim’s article is about how this modern phenomenon is a warping of and adaptation of Neo-Confucian ideals of women’s roles to new capitalist and consumerist circumstances. But while I originally wanted to outline and discuss that in this post, first I wanted to place those circumstances in their historical context, and because that took up too much space then I had to move Kim to Part 3 (to come soon). I focus so much on that context myself mainly because it’s interesting (of course), but also because while a discussion of it would have been too far removed from Kim’s focus (and area of expertise) of women’s bodies for her to consider covering, I think it considerably adds to and strengthens her argument.

The Developmental Context of East Asian Consumption

(Photo by Fritz Hayek) 

I’ve already demonstrated that although Korean women and, say, American women, can both be labelled as “consumers,” they can and do both make radically different consumption choices, or make the same choices but for radically different reasons. Sure, this is obvious, but I’m as guilty as anyone in generalising and using labels here, so it’s good to remind ourselves of it. But if we shift our attention to the differences between most Westerners and most Koreans (and East Asians) as a whole, the first fact of note is the fact that most Korean university students’ parents easily recall the days when possession of some must-have items like a fridge, radio, color TV and car were essential signifier that one’s family had made it into the then swelling ranks of the middle-class. On that basis, its fair to say that they still imbue their consumer goods with much more status and importance than most Westerners do. Hell, many of the university students themselves too. This explains Koreans’ love affair with big cars and SUVs for instance, and in one of the most oil-lacking, mountainous and densely-populated countries in the world.

(Photo by benhuh)

On top of that, Korean governments since 1961 have explicitly and fervently extorted Koreans to consume these items, provided that they were made in Korea. It’s easy to simply attribute this to and write off as mere nationalism, only different in degree to, say, the “Buying Kiwi-Made” campaign in New Zealand, or Democratic presidential candidates in the US criticising NAFTA in election year. But this is quite wrong. If you’ll bear with me for a moment, to properly understand women’s fashions in Korea you need to understand a little of it’s well, political history first. No, really.

When Park Chung-hee/박정희 took power through a coup in 1961, while his military regime of course relied on the use of force, it would be naive to assume that it didn’t have a great deal of popular support. And so, originally at least, his military regime’s sole claim to legitimacy was its perceived ability and capacity to produce the economic development seen as necessary for national security after the chaotic years of the Syngman Rhee/이승만 presidency. While linking the economy and security this way may sound absurd in 2008, it’s important to be aware that North Korea was actually ahead of South Korea economically until the late-1960s, and in addition to this Park was (justifiably) deeply concerned about the US possibly withdrawing its security guarantees to South Korea in the wake of its foreseeable withdrawal from Vietnam. Hence the development of POSCO and the Korean steel industry for instance, which, far from being the carefully planned and coordinated developmental success story it is often touted as today (it is the third largest steel producer in the world), was pursued despite the advice of Korean economists at the time, let alone American ones. Instead, as Mark Clifford explains in chapter five of this must-have book, Park didn’t care about the economics of it; he simply wanted the ability to produce tanks and ships should the US no longer provide them.

(Posco Center, Seoul. Photo by Ian Muttoo)

This is why Korea is often known as a “Developmental State,” as too are Japan, Taiwan and Singapore, which faced similarly dire circumstances in the Cold War and reacted in similar ways. Neo-liberal economists in particular are loath to admit that state-led development can be successful, and so they continue to critique the economic policies of these Developmental States decades later, but this excessive focus on economic minutiae has overshadowed the fact that they were and are primarily socio-political, not economic, phenomenons.

Hence consumerism has links to national security in Developmental States, and all the choice government slogans like “Consumption is Virtuous” that I saw in old photographs of Korea from the ’70s in economic journals in the archives room of my university library. And while the corollary of Park’s developmentalism was authoritarianism, and average Koreans were expected to be content with and prolific buyers of Korean goods, imports being shut out by high tariffs in order to develop Korea’s own industries (which is why such a stigma remains on imports today), what I want you to take away from all the above is that:

• Koreans are used to being told what to buy.
• These choices have often been couched in terms of contributing to a higher purpose.
• Those that didn’t subscribe to these higher purposes were given few alternatives, and the state was encouraged in stigmatizing them.

It is no great conceptual leap for Neo-Confucian women to go from being subservient to the higher purpose of ki, and their bodies to be imperfect versions of men’s, to furthering the higher purpose of improving the economy and maintaining national security by consuming Korean goods, and finding common identity in a turbulent century by following the new fashion industry’s edicts to improve their imperfect bodies by following their rules for fashion, cosmetics, and body shapes. Those will be the subject of Part 3.

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Wow, a picture really does say a thousand words.

I’m in the middle of writing the next post, but in passing I thought I should mention this excellent video about the struggles of migrant and irregular workers in Korea that I just came across at Two Koreas. Not only does it present them much more succinctly than the thousands of words of virtual ink I’ve spilled on related subjects myself do, but it reminded me of how important Korean fluency is for being aware of and having a real understanding of Korean issues, for this less-glamourous side of Korea is rarely presented in the English-language media.

Not to imply I’m fluent myself of course. But the having the Korean text above and the English subtitles below means that, albeit with the liberal use of the pause button, I’ll be able to use the video for getting some Korean listening and/or reading practice with this afternoon. And before I forget, I found the excellent site Seoulidarity.Net through that post at Two Koreas too, with many posts of a similar nature. Even if you disagree with the politics of both sites, they’re both great for keeping informed, and certainly much more interesting than the average kimchi-making fare for practicing Korean with.

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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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(”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 my previous post on this subject (again, apologies for the length of that), I argued that the phenomenon of most Koreans living with their parents until marriage is less a timeless, unchanging part of Korean culture that most Koreans will claim, and more a simple reflection of the financial difficulties of living away from home without parental support, most notably the low wages in the service industry and astronomical costs of “key money” required for renting. Of course, legions of homebound but financially-independent Koreans in their mid to late-twenties would beg to differ, but then if financial circumstances had forced me to spend my early-twenties living with my parents then viewing it as “normal” and part of my national “culture” would have allowed me to cope with it too.

I’m sure I’m doing a grave injustice to it, but by arguing that this supposed element of Korean culture is in fact economically determined, in this respect at least I’m subscribing to the Marxist “base and superstructure” view of social order. I’m not quite as determinist as Marx was of course, but I do certainly think that if the economic “base” of conditions in the service industries and real-estate system change here, then the “superstructure” of Korean living arrangements and habits will surely follow. Or in other words, despite sentiments today I expect that when young Koreans can afford to live away from home then they will, and ultimately rates of premarital sex and cohabitation will reach those of Western countries today. By the time my now 18-month old daughter will be at university, I fully expect that like my readers, Koreans too will regard not having sex and/or living together before marriage as simply crazy…hmmm, only 18 years…okay, maybe not she enters, more like when she finishes her PhD. But it will happen.

Thinking this means I take sides in a much bigger and well-known sociological argument I’ll discuss below, but don’t worry, you don’t need to even have ever opened a book on sociology to understand it (although I don’t know how you found the blog though!). 

Convergence vs Divergence

Very basically, I believe that the dictates of capitalism mean that as a country develops, its society and culture “converge” towards those of the most advanced capitalist countries of North America, Europe and Australasia. Now, let me hand you over to Yoshio Sugimoto, pp. 18-19, who points out that:

Japan provides a logical testing ground for this debate since it is the only nation outside the Western cultural tradition that has achieved a high level of industrialization. On balance, a majority of Japan specialists, be they culturologists or institutionalists, have tended to underscore the unique features of Japanese society, thereby siding either explicitly or implicitly with the [divergence] stance.

I’d suggest that most Japan specialists do so because of the special Orientalist role that Japan has in the Western and particularly American imagination, and regardless, very few Western social scientists originally became interested in Japan because of its similarities with back home. By 2007, of course Korea is too a prime candidate for study, but in the English-speaking world it tends to get overshadowed by the deluge of material on its neighbour. When my Korean is good enough, I plan to see what work has been done on this debate by Korean sociologists, but in the meantime, what Sugimoto says about Japan is still very applicable to Korea. To continue then:

Many convergence theorists see the so-called unique features of Japanese society mostly as the expression of the nation’s late development, lagging behind the early-developer countries. Ken’ichi Tominaga, for example, regards four patterns of transformation presently in progress in Japan as pointers that suggest that it is becoming increasingly like advanced Western societies.

I can’t get into it here, and this Wikipedia link doesn’t do it justice, but that first line is a core component of the ”developmental state” view of East Asian political-economy that I’m a big proponent of. I’ll blog more about that next month.

First, Japan’s demographic composition is changing from one in which a young labor force compromises an overwhelming majority of the population to one in which the aged compromise the larger portion. The proportion of those who are sixty-five years of age and older exceeded the 10 percent mark in France in the 1930s, in Sweden and Britain in the 1940s [and so on] while Japan reached this stage in the middle of the 1980s. This means that the comparative demographic advantage that Japan enjoyed in the past has begun to disappear.

Second, Japan’s family and kinship groups have dwindled and even disintegrated in a way similar to that in Europe and the US. Nuclear families are now the norm, and the percentage of singles has increased. While the anti-convergence theorists use the Japanese family system and kinship networks as a cornerstone of their argument for the distinctive character of Japanese society, Tominaga underscores their decline and suggests that the Japanese are undergoing a Western-type experience somewhat belatedly (italics added)

I’m sure you can see why I added the italics. Like I alluded to in my last post, its not just Western social scientists that emphasise differences, as naturally defensive Koreans would too like to exaggerate their uniqueness against domineering Japanese and now Western culture.

Third, so-called Japanese management is changing. There are many signs that the twin institutions of permanent employment and seniority-based wage structure cannot sustain themselves. Company loyalty is weakening among young employees. The aging profile of the corporate demographic structure makes it difficult for starting workers to expect smooth and automatic promotions at the later stages of their career….

I’ve always loved the above picture: the young woman is quite relaxed, while the salaryman is rushing to catch a bus, probably trying to make a meeting or something. To me, its signifies how her generation are not going to put up with the crap work-ethic that their parent’s generation subscribes to, and indeed I’ve already taked a great deal about changing workplace culture and management styles in Korea here. By coincidence, this week there is a special report about this in Japan in the Economist, and I’ll write a post about that from Australia’s sunny beaches on my vacation next week. If you can’t wait, you can read the report for yourself here and here. 

Fourth, the emphasis of the Japanese value system is gradually shifting from collectivism to individualism. The rising number of students enrolled in universities and other institutions of higher education leads to the mass production of citizens exposed and orientated to individualistic and rational thinking. The disintegration of the family and kinship systems, plus the gradual dissolution of the local community, tend to liberate individuals from intense social constraints imposed by these traditional structures. As Japanese workers become accustomed to material affluence, their legendary work ethic tends to dissipate and their lifestyles become more hedonistic. In this process, the Japanese are inclined to lose a sense of devotion to the groups and organizations to which they belong and to experience the state of anomie much as do citizens of advanced industrial societies in the West.

I’m not so sure that Japanese universities do this…Korean universities sure as hell don’t…but regardless of the reasons, young Koreans are certainly much more individualistic than those even five years older than themselves, let alone their parents.

Convergence theorists concede that these four transformations have not yet run their courses, but maintain that they head undeniably in the direction of convergence with advanced industrial societies, contrary to the view of unique-Japan theorists who frequently ignore the significance of different levels of development and make erroneous static comparisons between Japan and Western societies. It would be fair for social scientist to compare Japan’s present features with their counterparts in Western countries several decades ago. (italics added)

I said it in the last post, but it’s worth saying it again: you can’t compare the rates of premarital sex, flatting and cohabitation in, say, Korea and America, and make meaningful conclusions without also comparing things like wages, real-estate systems, accessibility of sex-education and contraception and so on…but then it’s human nature to do so. Despite my criticisms of Koreans for doing so in this case, we all do it.

On that note then, that basically is the convergence vs divergence debate that my own area of interest is a small part of. Of course, I’ve just scratched the surface, and you could fill a library with all the material on it. But very quickly, I should mention that there are two major alternate versions of it too:

The convergence debate gained another twist with R. P. Dore’s formulation of the reverse covergence hypothesis. According to his argument, industrialized societies are converging on a set of patterns observed not in Euro-American societies but in Japan. This proposition finds considerable support with the proliferation of the so-called Japanese-style management around the world: and increasing number of industrial and industrializing societies appear to have adopted the systems of multi-skilling, just-in-time, and enterprise-based labor negotiations….

The reverse convergence perspective signaled a new phase in the debate in which the West was no longer regarded as the trailblazer in industrial development. Advancing this line of thinking further, another position which one may label the multiple convergence thesis has gained ground in many years. It postulate that two or more types of convergence are observable, depending upon when industrialization began or the type of cultural background that predominated.

The multiple convergence perspective has many versions. One of them is the so-called late-developer hypothesis that Anglo-American capitalism was a unique type of development of early industrializers, while late-developer societies such as Japan had to evolve different social configurations to cope with different domestic and international constraints. Murakami, for example, contends that, unlike Anglo-American societies, Japan, Germany, Italy and other late-developing countries could not achieve political integration suitable to industrialization as its initial phase. To cope, these countries had to devise a strategy of catch-up industrialization by preserving some elements of traditional heritage while establishing a powerful bureaucracy which steered the process of development.

And he goes onto say that “Japan’s economic structure is regarded at the most refined and polished of this type,” and the last paragraph reminds me of developmental states again. I’m still a convergist, but I’d be much more sympathetic to multiple convergence than the reverse variety, as the Korean postwar economy, for example, is well known to have been a virtual carbon-copy of the Japanese one, and Japanese investment across East Asia since the Plaza Accord of 1985 has certainly spread Japanese workplace practices and the developmentalist state model across East Asia. And although the multiple convergence thesis led to things like notions like “Confucian Capitalism,” “The Pacific Century” and “Asian Values,” all (finally) shown to be somewhat bogus after the Asian Financial Crisis like I briefly explained, the links and similarities make East Asian development as a whole much more explicable.

A Hypothesis about the Western Experience

In my last post I said I would talk about how flatting, pre-marital sex and cohabitation became virtually universal in Western countries…but I’ve never actually studied that, I just have some ideas: although even I will not hit the libraries on my vacation, I will pick the brains of my parents whom I’m flying to see tomorrow. What I’m expecting to find is that higher living-standards, and the quirk of male university students being exempt from conscription for the Vietnam War, meant that it was first young Americans that left their parental nest in droves, and so surely I will find instances of French parents, for instance, saying something like this in response:

“Those crazy Americans….what complete sluts. Having children out of wedlock, never getting a job, always being high in dirty apartments…That will never happen in France…French children are better behaved and more respectful of their parents’ wishes…that’s part of our culture…”

But of course French children did too when they could afford it. Please don’t pick apart that example, which I’m sure you can, just get the gist. I may be completely wrong, but I’ll still be happy to find out. And I’m not for a moment arguing that Korean or Japanese families will ultimately become carbon copies of their Western counterparts, “weekend couples” in both being decidedly Northeast-Asian. But even that too is based on low married women’s work participation rates, and as I’ve shown, those too are unsustainable…the study possibilities are fascinating but endless, yes?

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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 so