Koreans’ Indoor Childhoods are Clouding Their Vision

In yesterday’s Korea Times. Long-term readers may recognize the topic from this brief report I gave on it back in January, but as I’ll explain, I’m very glad I decided to take a second look at the science involved:

Why do so many East Asian children wear glasses? Because they don’t get enough exposure to sunlight, according to a study released by the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence in Vision Science earlier this year. Which may well prove to be a damming indictment of education cultures that confine huge numbers of children to institutes when they’re not at school.

Rates of myopia (short-sightedness) have dramatically increased in East Asia over recent decades. To pick the best-known example, data on male conscripts in the Singaporean army shows that 40 years ago, roughly 25% of Singaporean children finishing high school had myopia, but now that figure is closer to 90%, despite students being healthier and taller overall. Similar rates are found in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Guangzhou Province in China.

These general figures belie what is actually a very real threat to public health. Beyond simply consigning 9 in 10 students to eyewear, according to Dr. Ian Morgan of the Vision Centre, up to 20% of students in those regions are in the “high myopia” category, which translates into a roughly 50/50 chance of going completely blind by the time they are middle-aged. Governments across the region are expressing serious concern.

Previous popular explanations for the worsening vision included East Asian children spending more time at their desks and computers (“near work activity”, when the focus of vision is within a short range over an extended period) these days, or alternatively that there is a special East Asian genetic susceptibility. Both theories have been demolished by researchers at the Vision Centre, who compared myopia rates of 6 year-old children of Chinese origin in Singapore and Sydney.

In brief, only 3% of those in Sydney suffered from myopia, compared to 30% in Singapore. That there was any difference undermines a genetic explanation, but whereas most people might have expected it to be accounted for by the latter’s greater amount of near work activity, to researchers’ surprise in fact Sydney children did more, which suggested that the myopia must be triggered by some other environmental factor. Eliminating all other variables, the critical factor appeared to be that Sydney children were spending far more time outdoors. To be precise, 13-14 hours a week compared to 3 or 4.

While the exact mechanism between sunlight exposure and preventing myopia is still to be determined, the researchers believe that the neurotransmitter dopamine is responsible: known to inhibit eyeball growth, sunlight causes the retina to release more of it.

Evolved to literally keep an eye on the horizon, humans are naturally long-sighted (with short eyeballs), but our eyeballs lengthen as we grow and become more accustomed to near work activity. Myopia occurs when the eyeball has grown too long, meaning that the focus of light entering it falls short of the back of the eyeball, requiring corrective lenses to correct it.

That Singaporean children don’t get enough exposure to sunlight may sound counterintuitive, but in fact the hot and sticky climate makes children more inclined to spend time in air-conditioned environments indoors, and just like in many East Asian countries with more agreeable climates there is also a relative lack of parks and open spaces. Regardless, culture is undoubtedly the biggest factor. Australia is well known as a sporty outdoor country and after-school institutes are almost unheard of. In contrast, many East Asian children’s 6-day school and institute schedules deprive them of sleep to levels that would be considered borderline child abuse in Australia, sapping them of the time, energy or inclination to play outdoors in the sun.

There are additional medical problems associated with a lack of sunlight. Light skins are very popular among many East Asian women, evidenced by the plethora of “skin-whitening” pills, lotions and creams available in cosmetics stores, and in Korea it is already a common sight this spring to see women making sure to cover their faces with books and handbags as they cross a sunlit street, even if just for a few seconds.

While there is nothing at all wrong or unhealthy with this in itself – quite the opposite – the sun is avoided to excess by South Korean women. A 2004 endocrinology study by Severance Hospital in Seoul showed that the nation’s women are seriously deficient in Vitamin D, making them more likely to suffer osteoporosis later in life. In fact they posted the lowest Vitamin D levels of all 18 nations surveyed, with 88.2% of the women surveyed failing to reach a healthy threshold.

While it is possible to absorb Vitamin D through food, the surest way is through exposure to a few rays of sunlight every day, and Korean women would be well advised to ask themselves if ultra-pallid skin is really worth the price of full health. Just as Korean parents might wonder if higher TOEIC scores are really worth the price of their children’s long-term health (finish).

( Not so cute if they go blind in 20 years, and who don’t quite have that healthy glow about them in reality…)

I confess, I struggled with the science in this article. No, not because it was out of my field of expertise: as it so happens, not only do I have very bad eyesight myself (-7.5 for those of you who know what that means), and so am intimately familiar with diagrams of long and short eyeballs and so on from countless visits to opticians, but in fact my original major at university was astronomy too (no, really), and I learned so much about optics instead of actually looking at stars that I ended up dropping that major altogether!

More then, because the authors of the articles I linked to in my original post proved to be much less concerned with how sunlight prevents myopia as explaining that it had been discovered that it did, and so what proved to be the key information about the effect of dopamine on inhibiting the growth of the eyeball was missing from them. Fortunately though, I eventually found it in this press release by the Vision Center itself, and suddenly everything clicked. But without it, those articles and the dozen more I pored over while researching this post simply don’t make sense, and although it’s tempting to forgive those authors that lacked a science background especially, some advice from my (last) high school physics teacher seems apt here: if you can’t explain something to someone else, then odds are you don’t understand it yourself.

Words I’ve lived by for the past 16 years. Meanwhile, my frustrations with science reporting aside, see here for more information on the Severance Hospital study demonstrating Korean women’s severe Vitamin D deficiencies. And I’m too harsh really: this radio interview of Dr. Ian Morgan is still useful and interesting despite everything.

Update: Unfortunately, as parents’ angry complaints against this proposal for a 10pm curfew on hagwon teaching indicate, the norm of keeping children indoors studying until as late as 12:30am(!) five to six nights of the week isn’t going to change anytime soon.

Where do Ajosshis Come From? Part 3: Manchukuo and The Militarization of Daily Life in South Korea

 

( Movie poster for “The Longest 24 Hours,” (기다리다미쳐, 2007), a lighthearted look at military service from the perspective of conscripts’ girlfriends; also known as “Crazy4wait.”  Source )

It’s been quite a while, so to remind readers, in Part One of this series I argued that a virtual gender apartheid existed in modern Korea, with women excluded from economic and political life here to an extent much more reminiscent of Middle Eastern countries than what one would expect in a modern liberal democracy. If that sounds like mere hyperbole to new readers, then sure, it probably would to me too(!), but by all means examine the evidence given there, to which I would now add that Korea has the lowest number of working women of all developed countries also, and that spousal rape isn’t even a crime here (see #2 here).

How to explain this? Well, naturally many specific elements of Korean women’s disadvantaged position in Korean society are no great mysteries: decades of salaryman male-breadwinner forms of employment for instance, explain a great deal about the lack of women in senior positions in companies (a parallel is how the Cultural Revolution four decades ago resulted in an “intellectual skills gap” that still affects the Chinese economy), and deeply hierarchical and sexist Neo-Confucianism has had a profound influence on Koreans’ worldviews, even extending to how men’s and women’s bodies are perceived and valued differently, and from which it is no great leap of the imagination to see echoes of in – amongst other things -  the widespread use of doumi (도우미) or female “assistants” and scantily-clad “narrator models” (나레이터 머델) here to sell mundane household items or open even the humblest of new stores and restaurants respectively.

( With apologies to Michael Hurt for the use of the top image, but like he says, despite their ubiquity most doumi are embarrassed by their jobs and very reluctant to have their photos taken; after half an hour of looking (in Korean!), this is the only similar one I could find. Bottom image taken from here)

But both those and many other factors commonly cited are by no means confined to Korea, and while going into greater detail would undoubtedly tease out plausible reasons why Korean women are worse off than, say, their counterparts in Japan or even China (hardly well-known for gender equality in themselves), here I am more concerned with the systematic nature of women’s exclusion in Korea. Ergo, however cliched it sounds, this series is all about seeing the forest rather than the trees.

With that in mind, based on my readings of especially Kwon (2001) and Moon (2005) and on my own nine years’ experience of the militarism that is still inherent to many Korean institutions (especially schools) in particular, then I laid the blame for that exclusion squarely on the continuation of and widespread public acceptance of the universal male conscription system, and all that that entails: nothing else seems adequate to explain so widespread and pervasive a phenomenon.

Again, that may well sound somewhat exaggerated at first: after all, South Korea is by no means the only country in the world to have conscription, and while I’d venture that a cross-country comparison would undoubtedly demonstrate at least a tendency towards lower levels of women’s empowerment in those countries that had it, that the “feminist paradises” of Sweden and Norway also have it, for instance, shows that any link would by no means be clear-cut. But then for most of the brief history of South Korea the military has had a uniquely pervasive role in society, one not revealed by any casual comparisons with other military regimes, and this really needs to be fully appreciated and understood before some of my more outlandish sounding claims about the effects of conscription on gender roles here can be assessed objectively. Hence, while it will take us far in time and space from what would normally come under the rubric of “Korean gender issues” – and which explains the 9 month hiatus, for unfortunately my beginning to write the series coincided with my wanting to examine more “traditional” aspects of that subject – I realized that the Korean military itself needed to be studied first, and so Part Two was about its origins in the Japanese colonial state, again much greater in size, scope and ambitions than a simple conflation with its European and US counterparts would suggest.

This post continues where that left off, focusing on the short-lived Japanese colonial state of Manchukuo (Manchuria region, 1932-1945), which eventual nreturnees to Korea among the  720,000 Korean immigrants there (from 1932-1940) and a sizable proportion of the South Korean bureaucracy, armed forces, and police of the 1950s and 1960s had some first-hand experience of living in and working for. In particular, Manchukuo was where president Park Chung-hee (1963-1979) above (source) spent most of his formative years as an officer in the army (even going so far as to sign an oath of loyalty to it in his own blood), and, as we shall see, is what he would effectively recreate in South Korea in the 1960s and 70s.

Korea’s Wild Wild West?

( Source )

Okay, first the big picture:  what were Japanese motives in occupying what was to become Manchukuo? Well, primarily because it greatly expanded the Japanese imperial empire, still much smaller, weaker, and younger than its European and American counterparts as explained in Part Two. But more practically speaking, it also provided:

• A bridgehead for the invasion of China, well connected by rail and road links to Korea even before the 1930s
• A buffer-zone between the USSR and both the more developed and crucial colony of Korea, and indeed there would be several clashes between the two on the Machukuo border in the late 1930s
• An important source of particularly mineral resources in its own right, without which the later invasion of Southeast Asia wouldn’t have been possible
• And finally, an escape valve to ease Japanese (and Korean) domestic agrarian population pressures and poverty, exacerbated by the depression.

( The Prewar Expansion of the Japanese Empire. Source )

The 2008 movie The Good, The Bad, The Weird (좋은 놈, 나쁜 놈, 이상한 놈) in the poster above happens to be set there, and by all accounts it is fun to watch, but unfortunately its depiction of life there in the 1930s as Korea’s version of the Wild West is probably exaggerated at best. While it’s true that the Chinese Warlord Era as a whole is not exactly well known for the stability or internal coherence of its various regimes, and that things would have been quite chaotic around the period when warlord Zhang Xueliang withdrew his forces from the region and ceded it to the elite Kwangtung Japanese Imperial Army after the Mukden Incident of September 18 1931, that strategic retreat was largely dictated by forces beyond his control, such as Chiang Kai-Shek being unable to provide assistance. In fact, his regime was far more coherent than most of that era, being able to effectively wipe out opium-trafficking and internal corruption in the previous decade for instance. Moreover, much of the state bureaucracy was bequeathed to the new Japanese colonial state, and as soon as April of 1932, it was one of the most controlled, regimented regimes in Northeast Asian history.

Don’t worry if that was all above your head: suffice to say that Manchukuo state organs were in many senses grafted onto the preexisting ones of Zhang Xueliang’s regime, but with the crucial difference that recent events meant that there were no longer any substantial non-state actors like a business or landed class to impede them in instilling notions of loyalty and nationalism in their new pool of workers and soldiers.

And whom were by no means unwilling victims of the process either. For example, writing about the Korean “Truth Commission on Forced Mobilization under the Japanese Imperialism (sic)” in 2006, Michael Breen said:

The Truth Commission on Forced Mobilization under the Japanese Imperialism (sic) announced on Monday that 83 of the 148 Koreans convicted of war crimes were victims of Japan and should not be blamed….

[But they] were not tried as soldiers or POW camp guards who had done their jobs. They were tried for over-zealousness, for decisions and actions over and above the call of duty. They were the thugs, the brutes, the monsters, the most horrible of the ”horrible people”….By what authority does the Truth Commission have to remove their individual responsibility with its class act defense of nationality? Such skewed morality led to the crimes against the lowest class– ”prisoners” — in the first place. People who committed crimes against humanity are not innocent by virtue of being Korean any more than Japanese who brutalized Koreans are innocent by virtue of being Japanese.

….[the Truth Commission] should recognize that the idea that Koreans were all unhappy citizens of imperialism bar a few collaborators is a myth. Koreans were Japanese citizens, and it did not occur to many to support the allies against their own country. Ask anyone who lived in that period, and they will tell you that the political correctness of the post-colonial generation is distorted.

They will also tell you that from 1937-42, Koreans in the Japanese army were volunteers — who included King Kojong’s son, an army general — and that large-scale forced conscription only started in 1944. The Commission should know that those rounding up comfort women were Koreans and those torturing people in police stations were mostly Koreans. Koreans, in other words, were more ”horrible” to Koreans in many cases than the Japanese were. The solution to this dilemma is to accept the notion of individual responsibility.

And according to Suk-Jung Han in his July 2005 Japan Focus article “Imitating the Colonizers: The Legacy of the Disciplining State from Manchukuo to South Korea,”  similar senses of citizenship were instilled in new Manchukuo citizens by means of:

• State-Sponsored Confucianism
• Mourning Rituals and Ancestor Worship
• State-foundation Gymnastics
• Anti-Communist Rallies

A combination which will probably sound very familiar to those of you even with just the most basic of knowledge of South Korea’s history. Indeed, as Han’s article is only 14 pages long and very readable in its own right, rather than provide a detailed discussion of what you many of you will go on to read there regardless, it’s probably wiser if I just provide some excerpts here, starting with:

The legacy of Manchukuo can be seen in numerous “naturalized” events in South and North Korea. So-called “national ceremonies,” such as paying a one minute silent tribute to the war dead in front of monuments, marching, lectures on the “current emergency situation”, movie-showing, poster making, student speech contests, rallies, big athletic meetings, and so on- largely related to anti-communism, and all too familiar to South Koreans for several decades from the 1950s- were originally national events of Manchukuo in the 1930s.

For state-sponsored Confucianism, some crucial clues as for how South Korea has come to be known as “More Confucian than China”:

South Koreans grew accustomed to the Confucian ideology of loyalty and filiality (choong-hyo) stressed by Syngman Rhee’s regime (1948-1960) as well as Park Chung Hee’s (1961-1979). The post-liberation ideology was different from the Confucianism of the Chosun dynasty, which had been not only the official ideology but also the basis of ethics and cosmic philosophy. The former was less intense than the latter. But Confucianism was still influential in the post-liberation era. Important Confucian concepts, like loyalty to the nation, were instilled in students. It was Manchukuo that energetically patronized Confucianism. Manchukuo differed from mainland China where Confucianism was severely attacked by the May 4th intellectuals and their heirs. Also, Manchukuo differed from Japan in the 1930s when Shinto was deployed as the state religion.

About the importance of mourning rituals and ancestor worship, which might sound outlandish to many outside of Korea, but intimately familiar to anyone who’s ever experienced either of the two biggest occasions of the year Seollal or Chuseok in an actual Korean home, and learned first-hand just how morbid they can be, at least symbolically:

Although monuments for the war dead began to supplement Confucian shrines as the site of important ceremonies, the mourning ceremony, either for ancestors or soldiers, was long essential to Confucian practice inside and outside the home. In April, 1935, officials and army officers attended a great mourning ceremony (zhaohunji, shokonsai), held at the newly built monument in the capital. The assembly, opening ceremony, invocation of the spirits, enshrining of the dead, offering of food, and tributary speech solemnly proceeded. This was simply one example of numerous mourning ceremonies of subsequent years, particularly after the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war.

The mourning ceremony for dead officials, policemen and soldiers was an important an event, next only to one worshipping Confucius. Although prewar Japanese society also had ceremonies for the war dead at Yasukuni shrine, they were not equal to those in Manchukuo. In Japan, all the war dead (except those who died in hospitals, rather than at the front) were enshrined at Yasukuni. Ceremonies for all were held there at fixed dates. In Manchukuo, by contrast, ceremonies were held at numerous places and at various times. Each ministry of the central government, central police board, army district, province, and county office organized a committee for constructing monuments. Monuments and plazas for the war dead were built across the nation.

(Offerings of food and drink at a temporary mini-shrine devoted to the spirits of dead ancestors, to whom I and all other male members of the family must bow dozens of times in ceremonies on Seollal and Chuseok at my parents-in-laws’ house. Jolly occasions they ain’t, and quite frankly I’d much rather (literally) enjoy the former especially with dragon dances, fireworks and street festivals in Taiwan or China instead. Source)

For state-foundation gymnastics:

Most middle-aged and older South Koreans remember Jaegun gymnastics from the 1960s. “Jaegun chejo shiijak (let’s start Jaegun gymnastics), one, two, three, four!” The song was broadcast in the early morning across the country in the 1960s following Park’s military coup. [9] Most family members woke up to this song-like command and practiced Jaegun gymnastics, still practically asleep. Jaegun, meaning reconstruction (of the state or nation), was the catch phrase of Park’s regime. Several other songs about Jaegun were written and propagated for citizens and students to memorize. The model for Jaegun gymnastics was the Jianguo (state foundation or construction of the nation) gymnastics of Manchukuo. Jianguo and Jaegun had the common Chinese character of foundation or construction (“jian” in Chinese, “gun” in Korean). Jianguo was the essential word in Manchukuo, from “Jianguo spirit”, “Jianguo celebration day” to “Jianguo University” and “Jianguo exercise.” Hence, construction and reconstruction were the key words for Manchukuo and South Korea.

And still as big a part of the collective Korean psyche that there are still many references to it in popular culture, even that explicitly catering to young people that would barely remember it, if at all. One recent example of which was in a commercial for an eyeliner, as I discuss here:

Also of note:

In Manchukuo, exercise and sanitation were important fields in which the regime invested. There were special weeks of exercise and street cleaning. During this time, the human body came under the jurisdiction of the state. One month after its foundation, the regime prepared an athletic meeting….Imitating the German fascists, the rulers of Manchukuo were interested in the physical training of citizens….Through sports, Manchukuo sought international approval, for which the regime was so thirsty.

This importance of this will become apparent in later posts when I discuss Korea’s population control policies of the 1960s and 1970s, only marginally less rigorously pursued and personally invasive than their Chinese counterparts, and a good illustration of which is the withdrawal troops from the DMZ at the height of tensions with North Korea in order to implant IUDs and perform (voluntary, but rather highly encouraged) sterilizations on citizens in remote rural areas and islands. No, really.

( “Crimson Dawn” by Spargett. Source )

And finally, for anti-Communist rallies:

South Koreans became sick and tired of anti-communist rallies (bangongdaehue) or “Great gathering for destroying communists” (myulgongdaehue) under Syngman Rhee’s and Park Chung Hee’s regimes. Old folks and housewives were led by officials of city districts and neighborhood districts, and students led by teachers gathered in great stadiums and shouted anti-communist phrases. Again, the model was Manchukuo. In prewar Japan, of course, there was mass mobilization (through such organizations as the Military reservist association and National youth association). After the Manchurian Incident, in particular, jingoism spread among news media, magazines, movies, and literature. According to Louise Young, however, neither government repression nor market pressures can entirely explain the enthusiasm in the 1930s. It was voluntary. Journalists of Asahi or Mainichi supported the army, because they had conviction (Young 1998: 79). Also, the main enemy in Japanese society was not necessarily communist Russia (although it may have been for the Japanese army). Hence, there were no anti-communist rallies in Japan. By contrast, there were myriad anti-communist rallies in Manchukuo. Also, Manchukuo had many more occasions for rallies. Manchukuo was a pioneering place of maximum mobilization, summoning people day and night. The fascist gatherings of Germany and Italy flowed to both North Korea and South Korea through Manchukuo.

Hell, for all its anti-Japanese rhetoric, even at least one of South Korea’s national holidays (until 2005) ultimately comes from Manchukuo too:

In 1936, “tree-planting day” was added. There were other celebrations such as, those for Japan’s withdrawal from the League of Nations, the entry of Japanese soldiers to Manchuria, the visit of Japanese royal family members, and the abolition of Japanese privilege, even one for the founding of the post office.

For a little more on the national-security mania of South Korean military regimes, see here, but that will be the main topic of *cough* a much bigger Part Four.

But let me stop this post here, for Han’s section on “Inheritors in the 1970s,” in which South Korea sounds like a carbon copy of all the above, really needs to be read in its entirety, and my amount of copying and pasting has already become a little excessive. Apologies for that, and I don’t like looking lazy either, but I confess that the question of how to summarize an article that most readers would go on to read regardless proved such a stumbling block for me that it’s taken me nine months to return to it. And that was despite the fact that the next post in the series will be about something I read in 1997 which – in no uncertain terms – was such a revelation to me that without having done so I literally wouldn’t be in Korea or even East Asia today too, let alone have started this blog (but hence its title). Better then, to be a little lazy in this one post then to procrastinate any longer!

( Image by yewenyi (文意). This monument is in Democracy Park, Busan, which I talk more about here )

//

Creative Korean Advertising #7: Get the Native Tongue?

( Source: I Believe in Advertising )

This being a Korean idea for an advertisement, then its understandable that the following accompanying English explanation of it is rife with minor mistakes, but there’s still a certain irony in “the native tongue” being advertised by people that clearly don’t quite have it themselves yet(!). Having said that, those few people with the ability to notice would be the least likely to consider signing up for a language course there, and in itself the concept is quite creative:

In order to promote intensive foreign language courses at Korea University, we have designed a poster box with foreigners’s tongue flier attached. The tongue-like fliers contain catch phrase like “Get the native tongue” along with contact information of the institute. When pulling out the flier, students can visualize themselves speaking in fluent tongue just like the native speakers. This as can convey the message to the students and the institute will be remembered as an optimum place to improve their language skills.

While we’re on the subject of advertising for institutes, you may also be interested in this report about Korean singer Shin Hae-chul (신해철), according to the Korea Times “a K-pop singer famous for his open and sarcastic criticism of government education policies” that have lead to their proliferation, but whom is widely considered to have sold out his principles recently by appearing in an advertisement for one. Here is a tabloid news report on that and the netizen reaction for those of you who speak Korean, and below is the offending advertisement itself (source), to which I’ve included this particular netizen’s take on it, who (probably tongue-in-cheek) likens Shin’s actions to students these days wearing Che Guevara t-shirts, “a symbol of resistance and revolution”, but of whom in reality something like 33% of which are actually studying to become a decidedly unrevolutionary civil servant instead, as that’s “a safe and secure job.”

Perhaps Korean and Western university students are more similar than they first appear? ;)

(For all posts in my “Creative Korean Advertising” series, see here)

A Small Victory for Independent-Minded Korean Students? (Updated)

(Update: One more reason unfettered access to student loans is so important is because only 60 out of 400 Korean universities allow students to pay their tuition with credit cards. For more on why these odd rules exist, and on Korean student loan rates and information in general, see here)

Why do Koreans generally stay at home until marriage? With some figures on the numbers of different household types in Korea now at hand, then I’ve recently been re-examining that question, but still see no reason to change my view that the combination of high rents and low wages is primarily responsible, or at least much more so that universal panacea for inquisitive foreigners otherwise known as “Korean culture.” But there are other factors of course. Consider this from Mondays’ Korea Times:

Student Loan Plan Shelved

By Bae Ji-sook, Staff Reporter

A plan to allow students to get loans without their parents acting as guarantors has been scrapped, the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology said Sunday.

The National Assembly recently withdrew the measure since Korean civil law does not allow adolescents to make legal decisions on their own, the ministry said.

The initial plan aimed to help students who were unable to get loans because their parents were divorced or were from single parent families.

”If necessary, we will seek a revision of respective civil laws. Since its purpose is to help poor students pursue higher education, student loans should be available to more students, without barriers,” a ministry spokesman said.

Why do I suggest that this might be a victory? Well, because while the scrapping of the plan is certainly a tactical defeat so to speak, given the ministry’s apparent attitude as revealed by that last statement of theirs,  then it does look like that university students will ultimately be given the opportunity to secure loans without the approval of their parents.

That students necessarily should take up the offers of loans is of course debatable, and I speak from bitter experience when I say that eighteen and nineteen year-olds of any country are not exactly well-known for their prudence and financial sophistication when given sudden access to lots of money, to be paid back in some distant future. But the only way for young adults to leave the family nest against the wishes of their parents, the move by implication meaning that they’d be – heaven forbid – openly engaging in premarital sex, as opposed to the present-day subterfuge in love-hotels that maintains their (and thus their family’s) reputations? That is of course by having the funds to do so, and sometimes an adult’s simply got to do what an adult’s go to do, debt, reputation or otherwise.

Personally, my father and I are very glad that student loans were available to me as a 19 year-old myself back in New Zealand, as we were literally very close to blows by that point, and it was simply essential for our relationship that I move when I did. Fourteen years later, both that and many other aspects of my life are much much better as a result, so much so that even if I could go back in time I’d still make the move, even with knowledge of my struggling with a mountain of debt today before me. But with no loans available, and so having to have had stayed at home instead? I shudder to think.

On a final note, I have a question for readers, particularly those with Korean partners and/or friends and/or students who are young enough to be university students themselves and/or remember how the Korean student loan system operates. Do all students currently require parental approval, regardless of their age? Obviously that would have quite an impact on their ability to leave home! Or is there a cut-off point, after which even the Korean state acknowledges them to be an adult, and responsible enough for his or her own financial decisions? My wife didn’t get loans herself, which I’m thankful for, but with that and her university days being so long ago then unfortunately she can’t remember how they operate exactly, so I’d be grateful for any information.

(Image sources: Raysoda )