The Grand Narrative

 ( “Ignite Your Beauty” by yangkuo)

Introduction

As requested (and no, that wasn’t really me), here is the second part of my examination of Keiko Tanaka’s chapter entitled ”Japanese Women’s Magazines: the language of aspiration” in the book The Worlds of Japanese Popular Culture: Gender, Shifting Boundaries and Global Cultures, edited by D.P. Martinez (1998).

I’ll take up pretty much where part one left off, again underlining examples Tanaka gives to distinguish them from her commentary, but before I do, let me second the photographer’s suggestion that the above photo is much better viewed large (just click on it). I’m not really interested in Misaki Ito (安斉 智子), but it really is a very aesthetically pleasing shot. I was especially thrilled to find this news article via the notes to the photo too, especially after I wrote this, but unfortunately it’s no longer available.

The Prescriptive Character of Contemporary Women’s Magazines (Continued)

( “Kawaii” by yangkuo)

I think that part one’s examples of the authoritative, teacher-like language used in Japanese women’s magazines speak for themselves, but in hindsight Tanaka’s next point about how unique they are is much more important than I first thought. This is because Japan is well known as an authoritarian, rank and status-conscious, patriarchal society….yada yada yada…and so it would be natural to attribute the examples to that, and to think that all Japanese magazines use similar styles of language too. But actually, and very significantly, it’s only women’s magazines that do so. Like Tanaka says:

In their attempt to nurture young women readers, these magazines use imperatives and other prescriptive expressions in a way which is unusual in Japanese society. Even in situations where imperatives are commonly used in English, Japanese equivalents are not:

Whip the cream until it just holds its shape, then fold into the cheese with the caster sugar.

One thinly slices two onions. One chops two rashers of bacon into pieces approximately 1 centimeter long.

Or, again, as in a bilingual computer manual, in which the instructions “Expand the phrase…Press Return” become:

One expands the phrase…One presses the return key (p. 122, emphasis added)

I can’t speak any Japanese at all, but I do know that what Tanaka says of the use of imperatives in Japanese, that they are usually confined to family, close friends or, indeed, teachers, is true of Korean, as is the contrast between this “authoritarian and intimate” language of women’s magazines and that normally used in advertisements too:

[Whereas] the use of imperatives is frequent in English advertisements, notably seen in verbs such as “buy”, “choose”, and “get”….Japanese equivalents are hardly ever in the imperative, though imperative expressions crop up here and there; however, they tend to be vague when it comes to what the audience is urged to do, as in:

Those who are walking, stop for a while.

Oh, come and play.

It is September. Please find something good. (pp. 122-123)

It’s still tempting not to read this much into the prescriptive language used; it’s hardly surprising that young Japanese women, after being treated like children for most of their lives (just like in Korea) would gravitate towards magazines that used the authoritative, reassuring language that they were used to. Hence, in a kind of demand and supply snowball effect:

Japanese women’s magazines…seem to have developed a style which their audience takes to, or at least accepts, just as [it has been argued] that the American tabloid press has. While the latter achieves this “largely through its departures from official (correct) language” and has “a tone of disrespect running through it”, Japanese women’s magazines manage it by appropriating the language of the classroom and a prescriptive tone. (p. 123)

Does This Mean That Japanese Women Are Merely Weak, Passive Consumers?

( “Photo Technic” by yangquo. Also best viewed large)

Tanaka admits that the common thread of all the examples she gives is the way in which the magazines seem to “stand in for authority figures vis-a-vis their readers.” They also, to judge from the language used:

…treat their readers as pupils who aspire to achieve standards defined by the editors. Considering the popularity of these magazines, there appears to be no shortage of pupils who have failed to outgrow their school days. (p. 127)

I’m not sure if that is intended to be sarcastic or not, but it’s certainly true that doing nothing but studying for their entire adolescence leaves suddenly ostensibly “adult” Koreans with little knowledge of how to meet the opposite sex and/or even how to dress, and with virtually the same education system then I can’t imagine that young Japanese adults would be any different. With still living at home thrown into the mix too, then “failing to outgrow their school days” is only natural behaviour, if immature by Western standards. But more serious is the charge that Tanaka is:

…going along with the tendency to treat women as the weak, passive, and subordinate party, as opposed to the powerful, manipulative, and dominant publishing industry.

In response, she quotes Dominic Strinati from page 217 of his book An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture, who says:

…the view of women as passive consumers manipulated into desiring commodities and the luxuries of consumption by the culture industries has begun to be challenged by feminist theory and research. Within the context of the emergence of what has been termed “cultural populism”, it has been argued that this notion of the passive consumer undervalues the active role of they play, the way their appreciation and interpretation of cultural consumption may diverge from that intended by the culture industries, as well as the fact that consumption cannot simply be understood as a process of subordination.

( Photo by plynoi )

 Strinati concludes that:

…consumption does not simply represent “the power of hegemonic forces in the definition of women’s role as consumer”, but rather “is the site of negotiated meanings, of resistance of appropriation as well as of subjection and exploitation”…(p. 218)

Strinati wrote that in 1995, and if anything, I imagine that the internet especially has made all consumers much savvier and more assertive since, which I give examples of here. Writing in 1998, Tanaka does say that it is important to keep in mind the strength the growing influence of young Japanese women as their disposable income rises, and with the benefit of ten years distance I can personally say that their spending habits did prove crucial to Japan’s ultimate economic recovery too. But ultimately Tanaka is still relatively dismissive of this:

While these caveats are all worthy of attention, it remains the case that these powerful consumers seem to be highly insecure in some respects. (p. 218)

And because of their lack of life-experience like I mentioned, then it is little wonder that young Japanese women:

…crave authority figures to instruct them as to how they should cope with this new unsettling new world of choice. Further research might concentrate both on the roots of this insecurity and on the multiple ways in which [magazine] writers attempt to maintain the loyalty of their target audience through the use of a tone of authority.

I too think that, so long as the practice of sending sleepy teenagers to study for long hours after school continues, then young Japanese and Korean women too will continue to prefer magazines like this. Like I said, it’s only natural that they would, and I want to re-emphasize that, lest I’ve ever inadvertently implied that I consider them stupid and/or immature for doing so. Moreover, as Michael Hurt says, not coincidentally the source of the photo underneath, there’s plenty of evidence that Korean women at least are beginning to reject the dictates of fashion magazines and be much more assertive and individualist in their fashion choices, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find the same of Japan too.

( Photo by feetmanseoul)

And the implications of this change? Hell, they make studying Korean society fascinating just by themselves!

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(Photo by annick777)

Introduction

At least by the editors of women’s magazines anyway (with apologies to the S&M crowd). Sure, your first impression may well be that in that sense then almost all women like “being told what to do,” but then the consensus of those that have actually studied the damn things (magazines I mean) is that in this part of the world they’re unique in the prescriptive tone of language that they use, much more akin to that of teachers in schools and after-school institutes than anything else. And when I say “unique”, I mean that very few other kinds of written media are so patronizing towards readers, even in a region where a constant acknowledgement of someone’s higher rank and status is fundamental to the languages.

I’ve already discussed possible reasons for this in these posts; today’s is just a quick a presentation of evidence for and confirmation of those from Keiko Tanaka’s chapter entitled ”Japanese Women’s Magazines: the language of aspiration” in the book The Worlds of Japanese Popular Culture: Gender, Shifting Boundaries and Global Cultures, edited by D.P. Martinez (1998). The book itself has been sitting unopened in my bookcase for years, bought back when I was doing my MA and could convince my wife that I was required to buy up to a dozen books for it every few months (occupational hazard of being married to a geek), and there it would have remained had my research for a Korea Studies conference not forced me into a desperate search for any sources on East Asian popular culture that I could find.

(Source)

Readers may be surprised that I took so long to read it, especially as Japanese popular culture is usually the first thing that East Asia geeks like myself begin studying in any real depth. For those few of you that aren’t yet East Asia geeks yourself, the reason for that is because of being corrupted by Japanese history lecturers, who have a strange tendency in otherwise normal lectures to suddenly whip out, say, The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife onto the overhead projector and then proceed to talk at great length and detail about tentacle sex manga, all the while in the same nonchalant manner and style of voice that he or she was talking about Edo Period economic policy five minutes earlier. Once one’s interest is aroused, as tends to happen after going through that surreal experience, then there’s more than enough interesting books on oddities like it to keep one occupied for a lifetime…and I don’t have the money.

Having said that, there’s a lot of crap out there too, and much of it, like tentacle sex manga, up there with ASEAN and postmodernism in being created for the sole purpose of providing jobs and publishing opportunities for academics. Oh yes, and for shocking students with too. Although saying things like “period pain” to mixed groups of 19 year-olds is about as risqué as I could get at my last job myself, I have to say that watching pompous freshmen squirm in embarrassment at it has been one of the highlights of my ESL career.  

(Source)

No tentacle sex in this otherwise excellent book though, maybe because most of it was researched before the internet really took off. And while the usual caveats about extending Tanaka’s conclusions apply, I’d be very surprised if they weren’t just as relevant today as in 1998, or to women’s magazines of most other East Asian countries too. Of Korean women’s magazines in particular, while I don’t go so far as to religiously read them myself (no, really), I do have sufficient Korean ability and experience with different media here to bet money on them applying to those for instance.

The Prescriptive Character of Contemporary Women’s Magazines

(Photo by Wallami)

I’ll let Tanaka herself do most of the talking from now on. Starting off after her short potted history of the industry then:

The prescriptiveness of the language employed in women’s magazines is a striking characteristic. The tone of the many of the features is blunt and hectoring, a curious point, given the alleged Japanese concern with politeness and the avoidance of confrontation. Even when not directly ordering readers about, the magazines draw lessons for young women from a surprising variety of events.

By arguing that there is a characteristic common to [these] magazines, I do not intend to suggest homogeneity amongst [them] or their readership….I hope that by examining a feature shared by these magazines, some general strategies in production of this particular form of popular culture will emerge.

The core of my argument is that these magazines not only provide detail, but also tell their readers what to do and what not to do. The manner in which this is done could be seen as almost patronizing and condescending. Compared to Japanese features, English equivalents may be similarly detailed but do not have the same prescriptive tone. (p. 117)

And with that she provides the first of ultimately over 100 examples from magazines, which to be polite, are a bit of a drag typing out here. I will do some, which I’ve underlined to make easier to pick out, but I think I can be forgiven for only providing the bare minimum to make my point, and especially for dispensing with mention of the sources and a romanization of the original Japanese!

( “Her Bikini’s Still Ugly” by 27)

The examples she starts with are used to contrast the overall prescriptive tone of Japanese women’s magazines with the overall more suggestive tone of English ones, but then she demonstrates with more that prescription is hardly unique to the former, which also sometimes use suggestions too. But:

This said, audiences are more often told what to look out for:

Céline motifs…it is effective to show them off by using a number of them concentrated around the region of your hands.

The loafers which have been popular all this time cannot be overlooked either.” (p. 118-119)

Japanese magazines know what is right for their audiences and tell them so in no uncertain terms:

This is about the best length for the jacket.

It is desireable to have all four basic items.

These magazines even make up their readers’ minds for them:

You no longer want anything less than “cheap and good” clothes.

We have decided to have your hair done in a bob next time. (p. 119)

And then she says that while statements of this type translate rather well into English, in Japanese they may well be regarded as patronizing, something which I’ve found can just as readily be lost in the translation of Korean to English too. But the success of these magazines suggests that readers do not mind the language, and in fact her informants have told her:

…that the tone has never caused them any annoyance or irritation. They all mention as a reason for buying the magazines that they can expect practical and detailed information on fashion and other related matters.

This raises the question as to where such language might come from, and my suggestion, from the resonance of the language, is that it comes from the authoritarian tone used by Japanese teachers in school.

(Photo by alexanderbot)

She then gives examples of expressions used which rely on familiar phrases from the classroom, then those that demonstrate how:

The magazines are keen on grading and they sometimes flatter their audience for following what they say with a kind of ranking:

Please enjoy this fashion, which is superior by one rank.

Those who in the senior grade should give it a finishing touch with a purple scarf. (p. 120)

In some magazines, expressions “reminiscent of school tests are rife:

You get a circle [for a correct answer] for wearing a long-knitted jacket or a waistcoat on top.

This suit is only just a borderline pass mark.

The last two expressions were from magazines that cater for young twenty-somethings and even high-school students, and so that language would obviously be more familiar and acceptable to them than older women. As a whole, the language of those magazines specifically targeted at that age group:

…tends to be fairly colloquial, closer to spoken language than is usually the case in a written textbook, but similar to the language of cram school textbooks, which are meant to reproduce live lectures; many of these prescriptive expressions…are strikingly similar to those used in [cram school] textbooks….and a high proportion of the readership of the magazines would have attended such institutions. (p. 121, emphasis mine)

( Photo by superlocal)

Sound like somewhere you know?

On the surface it may not seem all that surprising or profound to hear that these magazines for 18-25 year-old Japanese women talk to them like schoolchildren, and that most of the readers don’t mind…hell, some of them are schoolchildren. But think about it: what Western 18 year-old doesn’t think that he or she is more knowledgeable than the adults and authority figures that previously had to be deferred to, and revelling in new-found freedoms and independence? A magazine that treated them as the language used here seems to, as “pupils who aspire to achieve standards defined by the editors” (p.127), would go under before the ink on the pages was dry.

Ultimately, the language of Japanese magazines, which doesn’t translate well, is masking profound and deep differences between cultures. In particular, Tanaka writes of the particularly prescriptive 25 ans magazine:

…this tendency…may be related to its main objective, which is expressed as “For nurturing discerning eyes and individuality”. I have argued elsewhere that in Japan individuality (kosei) is more about being fashionable and sophisticated than about actually “doing one’s own thing”. (pp. 121-122, emphasis mine)

And there you have it: evidence from Japanese women’s magazines demonstrates that what Taeyeon Kim and Minjeong Kim and Shannon Lennon have said of the real meaning of “individuality” in Korea is completely paralleled in Japan. This is what one would expect if the former’s arguments about Neo-Confucian notions of women as “subjectless bodies” applied not just to Korea but all of East Asia, not coincidentally the gist of the abstract I’m writing. It’s also yet another case of some aspect of East Asian life that superficially appears identical to its Western counterparts, especially to outsiders and expats, but which in reality even the briefest of investigations proves to be quite different.

( “Seoul City Hall” by jstifani)

And that’s the point I wanted to make. There is a great deal more to Tanaka’s article, mostly her reaction to various counterarguments to the above, and especially to the charge that she is portraying young Japanese women as too passive, naive and unthinking, but for the sake of reader’s eyesight I think I should stop there! But the rest is just as interesting, and I’d be quite happy to devote a second post to it if any readers want.

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( “Gravity” by nickwheeleroz)

Korea and the World

At the end of Part One, I mentioned that the Korean education system is routinely held up as a model for the West by foreign observers, and gave an example from The Economist magazine here. Here is a more recent example from The New York Times too. 

Now before I came to Korea, I had a great deal of respect for both news sources, but the longer I’m here and the more articles about Korea I read in them, I realise that I can’t trust the accuracy of either.  Anyone with just a few months of teaching experience in either a Korean university, public-school, or after-school institute knows that the system as a whole possesses numerous and systematic flaws, and that Korean parents themselves are simply desperate to have their children taught overseas. So what gives? Why do reporters that supposedly “read between the lines,” always “question everything,” and are paid to do the research that I do for free routinely produce such complete crap about Korea? If I lived in, say, Syria, would I find the same of English-language articles produced about that country? Or is this something…surely not unique, but more pronounced in Korea than elsewhere?

Scott Burgeson, introduced in Part 1, makes a convincing case for the latter. To finish my discussion of his thoughts on the decline of Korean Studies programs overseas:

…the fact of the matter is that it is almost impossible for a non-Korean critic to make a decent living writing about Korean culture for English-speaking readers. Thus, the lack of public or private grant assistance for Western critics covering Korean culture means that it is difficult to find commenters on Korean culture in the popular English-language press who actually know what they’re talking about (or who are not simply hacks).

I remember when I interviewed the Japanese director Suzuki Seijun in Tokyo nearly ten years ago, the staff at the Japan Foundation were extremely happy to hear about my work and went out of their way to provide stills from his films to print in my magazine at no cost to myself. They did not care whether I had a degree behind my name or not, but were simply pleased that I was helping to promote Japanese culture to an English-speaking readership — and I might note that an extremely transgressive director Suzuki is hardly a “respectable” standard-bearer of Japanese culture. My interactions with the Korea Foundation have been, well, in the interests of being diplomatic, quite the opposite. Perhaps I am burning bridges by posting this kind of message to the List, but since I gave up applying for grants here many years ago, I know that it will not affect me one way or the other so I really don’t care anymore.

There are many reasons why Korean culture is and shall continue to remain relatively obscure on the world stage, and my experiences as an independent critic here are just one more example of why this is so.

As explained in Part One, much of the problem is most Koreans thinking that only those affiliated to a university are “qualified” to write about Korea. Sure, there would be no direct link between that and those reporters mentioned above, but it reduces the already limited pool of people “engaged” with Korea, and like I explain here, their connections with Korea and Koreans have an impact far greater than they may at first appear. Hence, for one, the ultimately unsustainable nature of the Korean Wave compared to its Japanese counterpart, which I’ve discussed in many posts here.

(Image by gyoul)

This reminds me of what GordSellar has described as:

…the standard, near-universal conviction among Koreans that a positive image of Korea must be presented to the world. It goes without saying that, in this sense, the image can only really be positive if it’s presented in terms that will appear positive on the world’s terms, rather than on Korea’s terms.

And the fact that, in Korea:

…on some level, for many Koreans, a discussion is also a promo-op, a chance to represent the nation in a positive light, to make people think well of their nation; or, if it is not that, it devolves into a more basic “defense” of the nation, which is hardly any more useful for finding out people’s real opinions.

Previously I’d thought that the monstrosities in the English-language media presenting news of the “success” of the Korean Wave overseas were as bad as they were because they primarily for a domestic audience; over 95% of the readers of the English-language Korea Herald, for instance, are Koreans. And for sure, that still plays a large role, as too does the fact that most Korean authors on the Korean Wave are well aware that they’re writing propaganda rather than actual news. But seeing as how most Koreans think that Korea must always be presented positively to non-Koreans, but positive in their terms rather than Koreans’, then I’m increasingly convinced many of those authors are genuinely convinced that what they’re writing is what non-Koreans want and will respond positively to. That the results are usually anything but is, I think, a reflection of the self-imposed relative isolation of Korea that I’ve described in these two posts.

It’s a long shot, and for sure there is bad English all over the world, but nothing symbolizes this to me more than the signage at stadiums for the 2002 World Cup here. Billions spent on what in many cases have become little more than white elephants 6 years later, but the designers of things specifically designed for non-Koreans didn’t feel the need to consult even a dictionary, let alone the opinions of an actual non-Korean:

(Source)

(Update: There wasn’t really any appropriate place for it in this post, but I did want to mention this factoid often uncritically accepted overseas too. See this article on that too, and thanks to GordSellar for passing it on)

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(Source)

Don’t worry, I’m not going to rail against the Wondergirls again. But whatever you make of what I’ve said about their clothes and dancing in previous advertisements of theirs, once you hear about their less than stellar academic achievements you can’t help but laugh at them being used as ambassadors for Korean education.

Man, what will they be used for next? The Wondergirls phenomenon has got to stop!

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(Photo by Jeremy Chae. The sign reads “We split up…” )

Introduction: Another Failed Hub 

Is it possible to have such a thing as a Korean Studies hub? California certainly appears to be one, but the state’s huge budget crisis is forcing university administrators to take a hard look at all programs offered, and in fact Korean Studies programs are so limited and unpopular that they’re going to be the first to be cut. Soon, it may be impossible to study even the language in Los Angeles, even though it has the largest population of Koreans outside of Asia.

(Illustration by Aquarius-Campo)

This post isn’t about the cuts; the field of Korea Studies is always going to be overshadowed by Chinese and Japanese Studies anyway (and those fields are going to be feeling the pinch in California too). But the cuts have naturally created quite a stir in the already very small Korea Studies community worldwide, and reading this comment left by Scott Burgeson in that thread has made me realise that the failure to create a hub is not so much on a par with Korea’s abysmal efforts to create various hubs at home, more it’s because of a complete lack of interest in the first place. That lack of interest says a lot about the sort of education that most Koreans value, and also the ultimately self-defeating ways that they choose to present themselves to the world. I’ll discuss the first of those in part one here, and the second in part two, using Scott’s comment as a framework.

Education and Status in Korea

( “Form over Substance” by mlakner)

Scott’s comment is a reply to this part of a comment by Gari Ledyard, a professor of Korean Studies at Columbia University in New York: 

Many people in Korea and in the overseas Korean communities tend to see the existence of Korean Studies in the universities of the world as a validation of their worth and importance, but give little attention to the work we produce.

And here is part of Scott’s reply to that:

As an independent critic unaffiliated with any academic institutions myself, I have also found Prof. Ledyard’s statement above to be true, albeit with slightly different implications as far as my own work is concerned. In my dealings with Korea-based foundations here in Seoul over the years, both public and private, there seems to be little recognition that Western critics covering Korean culture also deserve some support, be it through language-study grants or publication assistance. If you are a critic (or even scholar) but are not with a graduate program somewhere or do not have an advanced degree, you simply are not taken seriously by grant-giving foundations here.

And later:

I feel this is a short-sighted strategy and when you get right down to it, is not really based on lack of financial resources on the part of Korea-based foundations, but is simply based on some sort of irrational or status-linked prejudice that because you do not have an advanced degree behind your name, you are simply not useful as a tool that can be used in the cause of “validating the worth and importance” of Korean international prestige in the way that only institutions of higher learning apparently can (yes, this last statement is meant to be sarcastic).

Scott has made a similar point in a different context here. As he is no doubt fully aware, these dogmatic, outdated associations of “worth and importance” with institutions of higher learning are unfortunately also held by most ordinary Koreans too. It can have positives, like the concerns of university students being taken much more seriously by the public than their Western counterparts, not an insignificant factor behind their large role in the democratization movement in the mid-1980s. But I’ve had the misfortune of learning of the negatives for myself from job interviewers, who have literally laughed in my face upon learning that the MA I was then studying was done online.

( “Jerry, the Inconsiderate Asshole Elephant” by Kevin Lacamera)

But while reading my resume for the first time in the interview room is dammed inconsiderate, especially as it meant I’d completely wasted the 150,000 to 200,000 won I’d spent taking the KTX from Busan and staying overnight for the interview, it’s hardly only in Korea that interviewers that do things like that. So too, is a general disdain for online degrees, even if those interviews did predate Korea’s fake degree scandals (see here and here for more on those). But I’d argue that the style of resumes that Korean employers demand today demonstrate that they’ll still feel the same way about non-traditional qualifications fifteen years from now, even though most of the rest of the world has already moved on.

Koreas’ Lack of Political Correctness

Remember the first resume you wrote after graduating? Mine barely filled half a page. But then an older and wiser friend showed me how to do a ”skills-based” resume, and later some interviewers in New Zealand did indeed ask about and seemed to be impressed by what I’d supposedly learned as president of the environmental group at university, even though all I seem to remember of that time myself was taking advantage of my position to impress naive freshmen. But Korean resumes? They’re forms. Not only do they require things like your D.O.B. and your photo, which as far as I know are illegal for employers to demand in Western countries, but they only have space for the barest of details of your academic history, work experience and TOEIC score and so forth.

(Swiped from here. Hope Michael doesn’t mind.)

Requiring personal details is bad enough in itself. Having said that, when I first came to Korea in 2000, I just thought of it as part and parcel of Korea’s lack of political correctness, in many ways quite refreshing after spending a long time in any Western country. But the longer I stayed here, the more I realised that I’d been confusing a lack of political correctness with basic discrimination.

For sure, there are benefits to providing personal details. For instance, if an employer is after a recent graduate for a position, and would never hire, say, a 30-something instead, then a great deal of time and effort is saved by both the employer and the 30-something by this information being required on the resume (the note at the top of the first resume in the picture reads “나이 너무 많음”, or “too old”). That’s common sense, and rather than being a justification of Korean-style resumes from a Korean (not that it would be diminished if it was), actually I think I first read it in the British The Economist magazine, libertarian to a fault.

But then consider an interview from the The Guardian Daily podcast I heard maybe six months ago, of I think some British senior civil servant responding to criticisms of recent legislation banning discrimination against homosexuals by landlords and religion-based adoption agencies. Some landlords, for instance, were loudly arguing that being forced to accept homosexuals as tenants went against their own morals and/or religious beliefs, to which the interviewee rightly pointed out that nobody would ever publicly consider refusing, say, Black or Indian tenants on similar grounds today, precisely because legislation preventing that was put in place twenty years ago.

Ergo, anti-discrimination legislation, when enforced, does ultimately have effects on the way people think. And so long as it remains legally and socially permissible for Koreans to judge a person’s (and especially a woman’s) suitability for a job based on their appearance and age, then most Koreans are going to have little reason not to.

Status Rather than Genuine Learning

I possibly digress with that last point; the main message I’m trying to get across is that, for Korean employers, all that is important is what you look like, how old you are, where you went to university, and where you have worked previously. This isn’t just a guess either, albeit a reasonable one: Korean friends have confirmed it. Not to put too fine a point on it, nothing else you’ve done in your life means shit.

Note that I said “where” you went to university rather than what you studied there. It’s difficult not to be reminded that this is yet another Korean case where appearances matter more than reality, a consistent theme throughout this blog. I like to use quotes from the 1992 novel Rising Sun to illustrate these, as it was written back when East Asia and especially Japan seemed to be taking over economic dominance of the world, especially after the financial crises of the US in the 1980s (see here and here if those are news), and so it is full of facts and figures that appear alarming to the Western reader, but don’t hold up to objective analysis. For this case, one that came to mind was a scene where main character Lieutenant Peter Smith is surprised to learn that the city which has the most PhD-holders per square kilometre is not Boston, as he guessed, but in fact Seoul. He was suitably impressed. But he would be less so if he knew that 16 years later, Korea has yet to ever appear on a “Top 100″ list of world universities, based on any criteria.

( “Plagiarism” by AMICHAELMURRAY)

In the original draft of this post, I had begun writing a great deal about how this boils down to the status of Korean universities in Korea, and of academics in general, considerably outweighs the minimal amount of learning by students and genuine original research done in and by them, but then I realised that I was merely repeating what I’d already said in my earlier series on Korean education here and here.  Rather than merely rehashing that then, let me focus in this post on one symptom of that: plagiarism. Consider what one of Gord’s students had to say about it, (very leniently) punished for plagiarising an essay by being forced to write an essay about, well, plagiarism:

 …some of the content in the essay was depressing. Especially her comments about how rampant plagiarism is in other classes, and especially her previous major, a science-related major. She described a nightmarish scene of lab reports handed down over many waves of students, identical (verbatim), and the profs, she said, “just don’t care.” And then you end up with totally incompetent juniors or seniors who are leaving school because they have no idea what they’re supposed to know or understand before graduating.

That’s simply no way to fuel creativity, inventiveness, and professionalism. It’s the way to build up a profoundly unstable set of industries, stuck either buying or (yet again) copying technologies from others. You end up having to fake results (Hwang Woo-Suk) or steal them (Go San), but it’s not just that. You end up with people pretty much unequipped to argue about issues, or to pull apart any misrepresentations of the facts that are presented with even a modicum of sophistication or abstraction. You end up with an easily manipulated polity, a society that doesn’t know what it thinks. You end up with endless kneejerk reactions, with dysfunctional democracy, and with a chronic case of anomie.

You can hear similar stories from virtually any ESL teacher working in a Korean university. In short, plagiarism is endemic to Korean academia, and diminishes claims that an education at a prestigious Korean university says anything more about a job applicant than an ability to pass the largely multiple-choice test required to enter that university. But again, like resumes, it is true that the system does have some good points, Wikipedia, for one, saying: 

The great virtue of facts-based testing is its objectivity. Though harsh, the system is believed to be fair and impartial. The use of nonobjective criteria such as essays, personal recommendations, and the recognition of success in extracurricular activities or personal recommendations from teachers and others could open up all sorts of opportunities for corruption. In a society where social connections are extremely important, connections rather than merit might determine entry into a good university. Students who survive the numbing regimen of examinations under the modern system are at least universally acknowledged to have deserved their educational success. Top graduates who have assumed positions of responsibility in government and business have lent, through their talents, legitimacy to the whole system.

Seoul National University Veritas lux mea (Latin: The truth is my light) 진리는 나의 빛

Korea University Liberty, Justice, and Truth 자유·정의·진리

Yonsei University The truth will set you free. (John 8:32) 진리가 너희를 자유케 하리라 (요한복음 8:32)

But still, that is not what universities are for. And on top of what Gord says, let me paraphrase Daniel Pinchbeck in the end to his short story “Dropping Out” in this book:

For one history class, I read the works to Pierre Bourdieu, a French sociologist. Bordiey wrote about the concept of “culture capital” - how cultural experiences acted as a boundary between the elites and the lower classes. I saw how the high price [of entrance to prestigious Korean universities] was a prime example of “culture capital.” The purpose of [those universities] is not education so much as it is a way of signifying one’s membership in a certain class. A degree [from one of those universities] is an indoctrination in high expectations, not hard actualities. I still maintain a sharp awareness of how the machinery of privilege works, how certain universities create an elite that reinforces itself through school connections, and the alumni’s shared, smug belief in their own entitlement.

Pinchbeck was writing about Ivy League schools in the US, but you can see that the Korean education system fits like a glove to the passage, one of its supposed strengths being the nurturing of elites that both expect their high status and are uncritically granted it by average Koreans, regardless of their actual skills for running government or business.

But despite all these negatives, readily apparent to anyone who has spent some time in Korea, the Korean education system is still routinely held up as a model by most Western observers, and the linking of valuable commentary on Korea only to those of status that is a reflection of that system in turn accounts for a great deal of misrepresentation of Korea overseas. I’ll discuss that in part two.

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(Number 5 of 7 Pictures of the Wondergirls on this Chinese porn site, found a whole three minutes after typing “Wondergirls” into Yahoo Image Search. Sorry to those of you who have regrets about the picture suddenly appearing on the screen in front of all of your students and colleagues, but, as you shall see, that you have those regrets at all neatly demonstrates one of the points I’ll be making!)

This post is a direct response to the second comment left by Chris in my last post on the Wondergirls. While I still think that he has deeply mistaken views about the Wondergirls and the issues they raise, I also think that a great number of people probably share them, and so it is worth me devoting a post to specifically addressing some (though not all) of his points, rather than losing my arguments at the end of a long line of comments that few people would bother scrolling through again.

Before I do, I must apologise in advance to Chris if highlighting what he said word for word here feels like a personal attack on him. But I don’t know how to avoid that.

Look More Closely

Fortunately for the sake of warming up readers up, we can start with something simple:

James, I don’t know how to convince you of Daegu high school girls’ clothing habits, but when out downtown on a weekend you can’t walk 10 feet without seeing a young woman who is obviously under 18, wearing high heels and/or a short skirt. Even when we took our high school students to the Busan Aquarium for a field trip, my very own students dressed much the same as some of the WG. You’re just going to have to trust me on this one.

This may sounds facetious, but I’m afraid that I really don’t think I can be convinced without photographic evidence.

I’ve put both videos up again below to stop people have to scroll between posts: in the first video certainly, the quasi-uniforms that a couple of the girls are wearing would be a strange sight in real-life. but are still within the boundaries of appropriateness and good taste. I never actually said that they weren’t. I don’t think many school students are wearing shorts as high as those orange ones between 0:14 and 0:17 though, but I’m willing to concede that there may be some, although I’ve never seen any myself.

But none of those observations apply at all to the second ad:

To paraphrase Bulgasari, bizarrely, if the ad to encourage voting was indeed re-fashioned to sell teenage sex instead, then the ad wouldn’t need to be changed much visually. To mention its features in order of least suggestive to the most, there are: none of the shirts being tucked in; two of the girls wearing suggestions of waistcoats, one of which is more akin to a crop-top considering it starts just underneath her breasts; and that one looks to be wearing a skirt but is in fact wearing an extremely high and tight pair of shorts with the pattern of the skirt. And don’t get me started on the dancing, or what any of all this has to do with voting.

Certainly, two girls are wearing clothes not dissimilar to normal school uniforms, and I think that when combined with the quasi-uniform patterns and designs of the other girl’s clothes, certainly would give the impression of normality with just a casual, single viewing. But repeated viewings and pausing reveals that 3 of the uniforms are anything but, and not at all like what you’d see at any Korean school, whether in Daegu or anywhere else.

Cultural Relativism?

Second point is perception. You and many others find the WG clothing and dance overly suggestive, while myself and many others do not. Who’s to say who’s correct? You say one of the girls strokes her breasts, I see her run the hands up the side of her body in an uninterestingly blase manner….

I won’t insult Chris’s intelligence by saying that he doesn’t know what cultural relativism is, but let me refer readers to When One Culture’s Custom Is Another’s Taboo by Barbara Crossette (New York Times, March 6 1999), to my mind a classic on the different but related and relevant subject of how “do democratic, pluralistic societies like the United States, based on religious and cultural tolerance, respond to customs and rituals that may be repellent to the majority?”. It’s also very short, well worth spending the 5 minutes it would take to read in its entirety. But for now, let’s consider just this: 

But going more than half way to tolerate what look like disturbing cultural practices unsettles some historians, aid experts, economists and others with experience in developing societies. Such relativism, they say, undermines the very notion of progress. What’s more, it raises the question of how far acceptance can go before there is no core American culture, no shared values left.

Many years of living in a variety of cultures, said Urban Jonsson, a Swede who directs the U.N. children’s fund, UNICEF, in sub-Saharan Africa, has led him to conclude that there is “a global moral minimum,” which he has heard articulated by Asian Buddhists and African thinkers as well as by Western human rights advocates.

“There is a nonethnocentric global morality,” he said, and scholars would be better occupied looking for it rather than denying it. “I am upset by the anthropological interest in mystifying what we have already demystified. All cultures have their bad and good things.”

Murder was a legitimate form of expression in Europe centuries ago when honor was involved, Jonsson points out. Those days may be gone in most places, but in Afghanistan, a wronged family may demand the death penalty and carry it out themselves with official blessing. Does that restore it to respectability in the 21st century?

(bold added)

(Number 2 of the aforementioned series)

I hope that reference doesn’t make Chris rehash accusations of Orientalism against me, because the point I gained from that was that there are standards and limits that can not be crossed by the glib defence that him and I, and by extension Koreans and Westerners too, have merely different, but equally valid perceptions of what is and isn’t sexually suggestive. Somewhere out there, there are divisions between innocent and sexually suggestive that the vast majority of humans would agree upon, even though there will always be some individuals and groups of people that don’t for various reasons, and I think Gord explains very well why in this particular instance Koreans themselves do not see the Wondergirls as sex symbols.

But while they have limited exposure outside of Korea, the rest of the world does see them that way. Pictures or videos of the Wondergirls are certainly still some distance from child pornography, but then the first picture above especially and the place where I found them in particular give at least one demonstration of what’s being done with them and what non-Koreans consider them as, and that should at least give pause to the people who still protest that they’re nothing more than, say, innocent fashion shoots. And remove the Korean element from them, and the first thing most people familiar with the topic would say is that both photos above look like they’re from a Japanese schoolgirl photobook.

I’ll grant that despite my saying that there are limits to what 15 year-olds should be able to do and wear on national TV, it’s still a grey area and there are indeed issues of freedom of expression to consider too. But in Japan, the refusal of legislators to draw more specific lines between supposedly artistic pictures of underage girls in school uniforms and swimsuits and child pornography, for instance, led to nearly two decades of “art” photographers constantly pushing the boundaries, ultimately ending up last year with U-15s and even preteens in variously:

• their lingerie
• g-strings
• shoestring bikinis or whatever they’re called, with only the smallest of triangles covering their nipples
• doggy-style poses
• swimsuits stretched tightly over their labia while they’re on a gyrating chair simulating the “cowgirl” sexual position, their genitals sometimes only 10cm away from the camera.

All still technically legal because the law only prohibited nudity. It was only with those latter, most recent cases that legislators finally and belatedly stepped in and started making prosecutions (as I discuss here). I’m not saying that this will inevitably happen in Korea, Japan has a long pornographic tradition that Korea lacks for one, but not drawing lines between innocent and sexually suggestive dancing and photos at earlier points in Japan did ultimately lead from swimsuits to in-your-face child pornography there. So while sexually suggestive photos and videos of 15 year-old girls on TV will not lead to child pornography in themselves, unchallenged they certainly are a significant potential step in the same direction. And that is why the Wondergirls matter.

This is also connected to what Chris says later:

So far all I’ve seen regarding this issue from blogs like the Metropolitician and now the Grand Narrative are emphatic but nebulous statements that there is most definitely some correlation between the rise in popularity of wonjo gyojae and the increased sexualization of young women in Korea, OR that the WG are inappropriate because they might lead to REALLY bad things like that 6-year old girl who was really wearing next to nothing for no reason at all and dancing wayyyy more suggestively than the WG do in that youtube video. This is like when George W. said that gay marriage should not be allowed because, well if you let two men or two women get married, what’s to stop people from marrying their dogs or washing machines?

Chris does mention other factors behind the rise of wonjo gyojae/원조교제 than Korean teenagers’ increased sexualization as represented to me by the Wondergirls phenomenon, and these are all just as valid, but the absence of hard evidence for a correlation between, say, a future increase in teenage prostitution and the emergence of Wondergirls phenomenon, doesn’t mean that they can’t at least be a factor either. Even if they end up being 100% responsible, I’m not sure that hard evidence of a correlation that would satisfy Chris would even be possible, and am open to suggestions. But Chris seems to be saying that the absence of hard evidence means that media images of teenagers aren’t a factor in teenage prosituion at all, and that’s clearly not true. It would though, be difficult to accept if you didn’t view the above ads as sexual at all. Here is some extra evidence, although I sense that for some people there will never be enough:

Forced Sexualization, Cause and Effect

Actually, the second part of that original comment is the most revealing:

You say one of the girls strokes her breasts [in the first video], I see her run the hands up the side of her body in an uninterestingly blase manner….

Sure, she’s not working in a strip club, but her hands definitely go over her breasts, albeit very quickly. And I can’t imagine that there is a single woman in the world who wouldn’t make the same, really very unnatural gesture without knowing exactly what she’s doing. In that girl’s case, that she’s doing so in “an uninterestingly blase manner” is spot on, and suggests two possibilities:

1. That she knows what she’s doing and why a woman would do it, but her youth and sexual inexperience means that while she knows the basic mechanics of the gesture, she doesn’t really know how to pull it off in a more sexually appealing manner (ie, smiling, looking in the viewer’s eye, maybe licking her lips).

2. That she doesn’t know what she’s doing, and is only doing it because she’s being specifically told to do so by the producer of the video, and it’s thus to her it’s just another, uninteresting part of the video to be gotten over with. And judging by the other moves that the producer got her to which weren’t in the video, then I’d say that this explanation is much the more likely. See 3:02-3:32 of this video which shows the making of the commercial too:

My ass that that’s “just dancing”. Well, her ass rubbing against the big letter G at 3:26 to be precise. Why did the producer want her to do that? Maybe, just maybe, to use her ass to titillate male viewers, thereby helping to sell the product? Heaven forbid!

On a final note, and going back to the notion of hard evidence for links between the Wondergirls and other issues, I recall that there are a pair of orange books about Korean feminism sitting in most English sections of Korean bookstores which I’ve been meaning to buy ever since I started writing so much about Korean women’s body images several months ago (I don’t know the names sorry). I didn’t buy them earlier because they were full of mostly postmodernist waffle, but I desperately want one of them now because I recall that one essay in it discusses how Shim Mina/심민아’s (a.k.a “Miss World Cup 2002″) unconventional means of gaining public attention meant that, years later, it become perfectly acceptable for women to wear such revealing clothes in public, starting with similar national sporting events and increasingly outside of them too.

This is an example of supposedly “nebulous links” being more concrete than they first appear, and in this case may well have even provided part of the background to what the Wondergirls do being considered acceptable by Koreans. So I’ll try to find and buy the book soon.

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I’ve just found two videos to accompany the story I translated in the last post. The first is a rather strange montage of (blurred) images of the students, complete with a surreal choice of soundtrack. It’s technically safe for work, but sometimes the blurring and the pixellation is a little sloppy, and so I’d avoid watching it at work myself. But do watch it, because it gives you a much better impression of how unusual the student’s behaviour was than the news report in the second video does.

I saw for myself that the news report did give the students’ side of things, but my wife says that overall the tone was pretty critical. Having seen the pictures in the first video now, I can’t say I’m surprised.

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Given how much child abuse has become such a topical issue in the Korean blogosphere recently (see here and here for starters), naturally I assumed the worst when I saw the pictures and article below. Fortunately, the truth is completely benign, but…jumping ahead, let’s just say that I have mixed feelings about it.

중고생들 왜이러나? 졸업식 뒤 막장 ‘알몸 뒤풀이’ 2008-02-19

What on Earth are Middle School Students Doing? Naked Graduation Antics

[중앙일보 김진희] 최근 인터넷에 중고생의 ‘알몸 졸업식 뒤풀이’ 사진이 잇따라 올라와 충격을 주고 있다.

[Joong-Ang Ilbo Kim Jin-Hee] Recent Pictures of Middle School Student’s ‘Naked Graduation Antics’ Create Quite a Stir on the Internet

지난 15일 서울 중랑천변에서 남자 중학생 10여명이 졸업 기념으로 벌거벗고 물놀이를 하다가 경찰에 조사를 받은 데 이어 개인 블로그나 주요 커뮤니티에는 전국 곳곳에서 행해진 알몸 뒤풀이 목격담이 이어지고 있다.

On the 15th of February at Jungrang riverside in Seoul, about 10 middle-school boys were observed stripping themselves to celebrate graduating middle-school, prompting a nation-wide police investigation of personal blogs and internet communities with similar accounts of middle-school children stripping.

네티즌 ID’탄젠트’는 “최근 노원역 모 백화점 앞에서 졸업빵 후 교복이 찢겨진 여학생을 실제로 봤다”며 “팬티만 입고 가슴은 손으로 가리고 뛰어가더라”고 전했다. 그는 “밀가루 뿌리고 계란 던지는 일은 봤어도 옷을 찢는 것은 처음 봐 무척 깜짝 놀랐다”고 말했다.

One netizen with the ID ‘Tangent’ was very surprised at seeing some virtually naked female students running in front of a department store in the No-won station area. He or she said that ”their uniforms were ripped and torn, and they were only wearing panties while covering their breasts with their hands,” and added that “Of course, I’ve seen graduating students throwing flour and eggs at each other before, but never anything like this.”

인터넷에 올라오고 있는 사진에는 여학생들이 주로 속옷만 걸친 채 밀가루를 흠뻑 뒤집어 쓰고 있고 남학생들은 속옷까지 벗어 던진 모습이 담겨있다. 네티즌들은 “시대가 변해도 너무 변했다” “도를 넘어섰다”고 비난하고 있다.

Also on the internet are pictures of female students only wearing underwear and covered in flour, and some of boys completely removing their underwear and throwing it away. Netizens are saying that “times have definitely changed,” but criticised the students, saying that behaviour like that is “over the limit.”

문제는 일부 학생들의 일탈 행위가 자칫 유행처럼 번질 수 있고, 졸업식 후에 행해지기 때문에 학생들을 단속하기도 쉽지 않다는데 있다.

Although only a minority of students do things like this, this behaviour has the potential to become a new trend. Unfortunately it is difficult to prevent, as students do it after official graduation ceremonies, when they are unsupervised.

서울 교육청 관계자는 “알몸 뒤풀이는 요즘 들어 많이 나오고 있는 일탈 행위인데 학교 안에서 하지 못하니까 밖에서 하는 것 같다”며 “앞으로 졸업식에서 장학금 지원이나 참고서·교복 물려주기 등 건전한 방식으로 뒤풀이를 하도록 학생들을 지도해야 할 것”이라고 말했다.

According to a spokesperson for the Seoul Education Office, “These nude post-graduation antics are becoming very popular recently, and because they can’t be done at school then they must all be occurring in public,” and so “it is much healthier if we encourage students to give their books and uniforms to their juniors rather than ripping them up, perhaps by offering scholarships to those who set good examples.”

김진희 기자 (Kim Jin-Hee)

(Photo by Sunderban)

For readers not based in Korea, bear in mind that Korean students usually graduate middle school at 16, and so probably just the age difference alone means that graduating middle school is much more important to most Koreans and worthy of celebrating than, say, graduating from my own middle school in New Zealand was to me when I was 12. Hence the antics more usually associated with graduating high school students in Western countries, and my wife says that she got up to similar things at that age, albeit with clothes on, when she graduated herself over ten years ago.

My gut instinct is that this is merely good, clean, harmless fun - God knows Korean teenagers get precious little enough opportunities for that - and that it is pretty tame compared to what many of their Western counterparts get up to. Hell, any complaints from teachers and parents should focus on the risks of pneumonia more than anything else.

On the other hand, I can’t shake off a nagging suspicion that it’s more than just coincidence that these sorts of games start appearing so soon after 16 year-old girls in the bare minimum of clothes have started appearing on Korean TV. Not that I’ve been looking, but I’ve been here 8 years, and it’s the first time I’ve heard of any Korean teenagers doing things like that, let alone ones that young. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that seeing the Wondergirls in mini-skirts and suggestive poses has instantly persuaded formerly innocent and pure Korean girls (and boys) to imitate them. But I do think that although Korean social and sexual mores are quickly changing, and that Korean teenagers would have eventually starting doing things like this regardless (see this post at Gusts of Popular Feeling, for instance, to learn more about the increasing sexualization of Korean teenagers since the mid-1990s), nevertheless the appearance of Korean girl groups surely had some part to play in teenagers doing this in 2008 rather than say, 2010 or 2015? We shouldn’t forget how important they are as role models.

Again, for an excellent summation of all of these issues, see Michael Hurt’s recent post.

(Update 1: There’s a thread about this at Daveseslcafe here, and through that I found an English-language article about it here)

(Update 2: For some videos, see the next post)

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(Photo by Yume_Love) 

Blog Plans 

Like Aaron’s post over at East Windup Chronicle has reminded me, I’ve always had a strange mix of subjects on the blog, but I really do seem to have been all over the place recently, with posts like Lee Hyori’s taste in men at one extreme and others like my “Search for the Korean Fantastique” series and Lee Myeong-bak’s plans to disband the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family at another. The former post is light and fun, and - let’s face it - certainly does no harm with getting hits, but the latter posts aren’t some sort of compensation for it. No, really. Actually, it’s more the other way round: these days, I put a lot of time and effort into my long posts, and in the process of writing them I usually learn a great deal about the subject and sometimes even myself too, so much so that, to be honest, I’m really not all tha