Tamna: A Radical New Korean Drama?

With thanks to reader Ezra de Leon for passing the news on, a new Korean drama called Tamna the Island (탐나는도다) appeared over the weekend, and for readers of this blog especially it is noteworthy in many important respects.

The most obvious is for having a foreigner in the lead role, a 24-year-old French model named Pierre Deporte, who has already appeared on Korean screens in the one-off male version of the Misuda (미녀들의 수다; Chatting With Beautiful Women) talk show. Here, he plays a 17th-Century Englishman who washes up on the shores of Jeju Island, and crucially he has some form of love relationship with the local female diver (haenyo/해녀) who finds him, played by teenager Jang Beo-jin (장버진). This is nothing short of revolutionary for Korean screens.

I haven’t found any confirmation of that relationship beyond this Korea Herald article unfortunately, but the first episode did feature an underwater kiss between them, albeit for the sake of giving him oxygen while hiding. But regardless of the ultimate form of their relationship though, Extra Korea! is correct in noting that it will probably be the first non-negative portrayal of a Western male on Korean television in a long time.* In addition, Javabeans, a rare non-tabloidish source on Korean dramas, also appreciates the drama’s reversal of gender roles:

…in Tamna, the women are hard-working and tough, at all ages from moms down to young girls. The men are painted a little more cartoonishly, but I think there’s potential for more than just comic relief in the setup that shows them as the weak ones in terms of the gender balance. They cower and defer to the ladies, who, while not quite Amazonian, have agency over their own lives and families. I hope the drama explores that dynamic a little more — they don’t have to make a big issue of it, but it’s a refreshing change.

Unfortunately I missed the first two episodes, which played on MBC at 7:55 on Saturday and Sunday night. But never fear, for in that above link a description of the first is provided that is so detailed it will surely take as long to read as it would have to have watched the episode itself!

Personally, I’ve been more than convinced to watch the 20-episode series in full, and I plan to download the first two episodes from the MBC website and watch them for myself before this Saturday. Admittedly, the descriptions of the “excruciating English” and “very silly, goofy” style of the drama would normally have put me off, but then I’ve recently learned that it’ s also true that “progressive” Korean directors have a habit of introducing radical social themes through comedy, and I’ve realized that I’ve probably been too dismissive of the genre previously. Certainly that may be reading too much into this particular drama though, so I’ll try to watch it with an open mind.

In the meantime, have any reader seen episodes 1 and 2 already? What did you think?

Update: My wife and I watched Episode 1, and we agreed that it was not without its charm: in particular Jang Beo-jin’s character was very cute, and difficult not to take an instant liking to. And I confess, it was difficult not to keep my eye off her lithe body also, which we got to see rather a lot of. Not to imply that the producers sexed her costume up by any means, but presumably a haenyo’s clothes would indeed have been more functional than modest, and so not without reason have generations of (male) Koreans grown up to images of scantily-clad Jeju divers!

Unfortunately though, the Jeju slang used in the drama was so thick and frequently used that explanations were given for mainland Korean speakers(!), and this rendered the drama very bad for studying Korean, which was my other main aim with watching it. I’ll still follow it via Javabeans then, but personally I’m going to switch to Brilliant Legacy (찬란한 유산) instead, which just finished with record ratings.

Update 2: Invariably a mere ploy to create interest in a drama, I usually never pay attention to rumors of its stars dating, but for what it’s worth Jang Beo-jin was rumored to be dating Im Joo-hwan (임주환) before Tamna aired. He’s the third member of its anticipated love-triangle with Pierre Deporte.

*See here for a positive portrayal of a Southeast Asian man on the big screen recently. Unfortunately those are equally rare, and ironically the movie also features the typical negative stereotypes of Western male English teachers.

(Image sources: Naver; Korea Herald)

Korean Sociological Image #14: How And Why Koreans Became The World’s Greatest Consumers

( Source )

If you’re reading this, then the news that Koreans now spend more and save less than Americans may well come as a bombshell.

I base that on the natural assumption that, as an English speaker interested in Korean sociology, most of your earliest and most-deeply held views on the subject were likely gained from English books. Nothing wrong with that of course, but in a society as rapidly changing as Korea, these can get dated rather quickly.

In turn, if one’s original views are not regularly updated by practical experience of the country and/or Korean-language sources, then they can easily become ossified. Alternatively, they can become hostage to those Koreans with English skills, whom – with no offense intended to the Korean journalists I very much rely on as a blogger – are generally well educated and more affluent than average Koreans, and undoubtedly have class-based agendas to the ways they present Korea to the outside world.

I realize that I’m very much projecting here. But then so fundamental has Korean’s high savings rate been to its postwar economic development, that I’d wager most readers shared my image of Koreans as relatively frugal (as a whole), either by reading that explicitly for themselves or by inferring it from other aspects of Korean sociology. Indeed, this ostensibly dry economic factoid had a profoundly gendered impact in the Korean context.

With apologies for the following necessarily simplistic account, a high savings rate was the natural consequence of the fact that, until the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997-1998, Korea had the most “salarymen” in the world (despite the term being associated more with Japan). As salarymen generally worked at the same company for most of their lives, and made enough of an income and side-benefits to provide for their wives and children, then there was only a minimal welfare state to provide for them should the need arise: hence, these savings provided the safety net that the state didn’t (as well as investment funds for Korean business).

Which brings us to the graph on the right, which shows that the books were not wrong. It would have been very difficult for historiography to have caught up with the massive drop in 1999 however, which the Washington Post article describes as “the steepest savings decline in the developed world.” In hindsight though, somehow Korean society had to pay for its huge transition from having the most salarymen in the world in 1997 to having the most irregular, part-time workers in the OECD less than a decade later. And the money certainly wasn’t obtained by women entering the workforce either, as despite having the lowest rate of women’s participation in the workforce in the OECD in 1997 – so the potential certainly existed – it has resolutely stayed at the same level ever since (see here and #2 here), not unexpected given that women were explicitly targeted for lay-offs as part of the economic recovery.

But this process of “housewifization” is the natural corollary of a male breadwinner system, and has in fact occurred in every developed capitalist economy as women became more valuable as consumers than as factory workers: Korea is merely the most extreme example. Hence prominent 1960s feminist Betty Friedan’s thoughts on the impact on women themselves still have a certain poignancy for Korean women even today:

Why is it never said that the really crucial function…that women serve as housewives is to buy more things for the house… somehow, somewhere, someone must have figured out that women will buy more things if they are kept in the underused, nameless-yearning, energy-to-get-rid-of state of being housewives…it would take a pretty clever economist to figure out what would keep our affluent economy going if the housewife market began to fall off (The Feminine Mystique, 1963, p. 197).

Friedan also pointed out that this consumption was a source of false autonomy, and that marketers in women’s magazines:

“…manipulated housewives into becoming insecure consumers of household products, by giving the housewife a ’sense of achievement’ to compensate her for a task that was ‘endless’ and ‘time-consuming’ (Oh & Frith*, 2006, p. 10).

( See here for a discussion of the above advertisement )

In this vein, one does not have to subscribe to a belief in, say, a vast patriarchal conspiracy or historical-determinism to acknowledge that housewifization – and the accompanying cultural changes – thus has capitalist imperatives. What makes Korea (and other “developmental states“) unique, however, was that from the outset economic growth was explicitly conflated with national-security and anti-communism by the Park Chung-hee (박정희) regime of 1961-1979. Hence upon reaching a consumer-driven stage of development, the Korean government promoted consumerism with a zeal more akin to what one would expect from a communist regime (see this series for an in-depth look at this).

Part of that was the slogan “Consumption is Virtuous” that I originally planned to use in the post title, which comes from a translation of a late-1970s Korean newspaper report I read at university, and indeed the original Korean – “소비가 미덕이다” – rings a very faint bell in my wife’s mind. And given that Korea’s intense economic nationalism and high tariff barriers largely remain, then this is very much a phase that Koreans haven’t really left yet either, as reflected in the common theme to both of the advertisements in this post and the following commercial, which as I put here as being their:

…hyperreal associations of apartments and modern appliances with modernity and civilization, [so intense as to be] a huge qualitative and mental leap beyond any such links in the minds of Westerners. Or rather a leap backward to 1950s and 1960s, because, as with so much about Korean society, perhaps the Western concepts of consumption during and immediately after suburbanization there are a much more appropriate parallel.

And, from this related post, an apt demonstration of the fact that changing social mores are often difficult to disentangle from the capitalist imperative to create false needs for new products:

On that note, I accept (again) that the above is a very simplistic account of the history of the Korea economy, and if you’re after a more detailed economic discussion of this news about the savings rate specifically, then the comments to this post are a good place to start. I also accept that Koreans by no means consume to the extent that they do simply because of government policies, and so by all means read the additional reasons and examples mentioned in the Washington Post article. To which I would add this post and the following article from an old Korea Herald I’ve scanned, which explain why Koreans continue to buy so many large cars despite living in one of the most mountainous, densely-populated, best-served with public transport, and smallest countries in the world:

Consider also this excerpt from p. 103 of Social Change in Korea, published in early 2008:

Back in the 1980s, owning a car – any car – was a status symbol. Now, size matters. Among the sedans sold before 2000, there were more subcompact or compact cars than mid-size or larger models. Since then, mid- and full-sized sedans have come to occupy a greater market share than smaller ones. Only 16.3% of the sedans sold in 2006 (as of July) were smaller models, as compared to Japan’s 61.2%, Italy’s 55.3%, Britain’s 52.1% and Germany’s 23.3%. The United States is the only nation among car-manufacturing countries that sells a smaller proportion of small cars than Korea (emphasis added).

Considering the surge in oil prices at the time that would have been written, and the travails of the US car industry just a little later, then this is probably no longer the case, and an apt symbol of Koreans displacing Americans as the “avatars of consumerism gone mad.”

In hindsight though, this shift is less of a surprise and more the logical culmination of Korea’s particular path of capitalist development. Unfortunately, like the Washington Post noted, is also part and parcel of a society currently under extraordinary stress, as is Korea’s steadily deteriorating economy. But one wonders when Koreans will realize that they can no longer afford to fritter their money away on mere status symbols.

(For all posts in the “Korean Sociological Image” series, see here)

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*Oh, Hyun Sook. and Frith, Katherine (2006) “International Women’s Magazines and Transnational Advertising in South Korea”, Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, Dresden International Congress Centre, Dresden, Germany, Jun 16, 2006.

Korean Sociological Image #4: Where do Korean Politicians Come From?

Apologies for the small size, but if you can see the pink and orange blobs for Korean politicians that were originally civil servants or in the military respectively, then you get the idea.

The graph is from this article in the Economist magazine, which asks the question of why professional paths to the top vary so much, but unfortunately only mentions South Korea when it says…

Countries often have marked peculiarities. Egypt likes academics; South Korea, civil servants; Brazil, doctors (see chart 2). Some emerging-market countries are bedevilled by large numbers of criminals, even if this doesn’t usually show up in their ‘Who’s Who’ records.

…yet is no less fascinating for all that. If I reluctantly confine my brief discussion to South Korea here though, then that predominance of civil servants among Korean politicians should be no surprise to anyone familiar with its Twentieth Century history (see here and here), and I’d expect to find much the same in other postwar “developmental states” also, particularly Japan that is their model and the former colonial power of most.

But of course their importance goes back much further than that (see here), as indeed it does in China, which has historically provided Korea with many governmental and political models to emulate. Hence the Economist is quite correct in painting Chinese Communist Party officials with (literally) the same brush also, for despite their modern ideological labels they are in many senses merely performing what are really quite timeless roles.

Other than that, I confess to being surprised at the number of politicians with military backgrounds, even though I’ve written a great deal about the pervasiveness of military culture in Korean daily life. One shouldn’t make too many generalizations from so little information though, and so I’d hesitate to make any links between the low numbers of politicians that were formerly lawyers and Korean legal culture also, although I’m certainly tempted!

(For all posts in the “Korean Sociological Image” series, see here)

Korean Sociological Image #3: From Asian to Caucasian

If you weren’t aware of it previously, then learning about the pressure Korean women are under to have cosmetic surgery for the sake of getting jobs certainly makes you less judgmental about it. Here are two quick excerpts on the subject from this excellent article from The Independent, which I found via this article about the cosmetic surgery component to Korea’s recent drive to become a hub for medical tourism.

First, from the introduction:

The patients crowding the waiting rooms of plastic surgeons in upmarket neighbourhoods such as Apgujeong want jobs with industrial conglomerates such as Samsung or LG. They are rushing to clinics for chieop seonghyeong or “employment cosmetics,” surgical procedures designed to improve a job seeker’s chance of being hired.

Ahn Yun-Seon is a typical candidate. A 21-year-old economics student, she has a job interview scheduled for early May. Last week she spent 1 million won (£538) for surgery on her gums and ears. She hopes to get a job in a bank. “Female bank employees must wear their hair tied back,” she said. “It’s important to have nice looking ears and a good smile.”

And then the conclusion:

Parents in Korea, especially in Seoul, spend a fortune on their children’s education and often go deep into debt to secure them a place at a top university. Knowing the sacrifices their parents have made, many young Koreans are prepared to go to extremes in search of a good job.

“People doctor their CVs and the photos they send to employers,” said Lee Ho-Jeong, who graduated from Hanyang University. “Doctoring their faces is the logical next step, especially when people are scared that they won’t get hired.”

But much more curious than the demand, is its manifestations in Korean women’s choices of cosmetic surgery operations, for they tend to plump for (no pun intended) – double-eyelid surgery, the shaving down of high cheekbones, Romanizing of noses, and so forth – all of which have the effect of making one’s face look much more Caucasian than Mongoloid (East Asian). And place those choices in the context of an East Asian mania for light skin also, then when one sees the image above (source: Scoubi), an advertisement for this cosmetic surgery clinic in Busan, then it’s difficult not to conclude that Korean women have Caucasian ideals of beauty, as I argued in this post in April last year.

Naturally that post aroused quite a *cough* heated debate in the comments section, not least from Korean women themselves, and to be fair I now acknowledge the historical role that, for one, light skins have played as a sign of the non-farming, indoor elite (albeit not just in Asia). And also the fact that I was strongly influenced in my original opinions by seeing such things as an abundance of Caucasian models in Korean advertisements, and that so many Korean cartoon characters tended to look Caucasian also, whereas in reality “Caucasian ideals of beauty” are only one of a host of factors responsible for each (see here – scroll down a little – and here respectively).

But as Michael Hurt wrote in 2005, arguments that modern ideals of appearance are merely extensions of historical associations of light skin and so forth, must confront the:

…big, fat, white elephant in the room that is America and the West. You have to consider how having white skin here in Korea is not simply a matter of lightness anymore, of being a sign that one doesn’t have to work outside in a field. The relative pallor of one’s skin is now inevitably linked to notions of civility and class that are also reflected against the very real presence of white people, who are not surprisingly, positively associated with notions of civility and class.

But which has been notably absent from counter-arguments that I’ve heard so far. So although I’m always open to changing my mind, and think I have a pretty good record on this blog for admitting when I’ve been mistaken and/or changing my mind upon hearing new evidence, until someone actually addresses that point at all then I’ll continue to believe that “Caucasianness” is a very strong, albeit usually subconscious and/or indirect, influence on modern Korean women’s cosmetic surgery choices. But by all means, if you disagree then please try and prove me wrong!

Update: Turns out, this post led to some lively discussion on this K-pop blog, even though the first image wasn’t loading properly at the time!

(For all posts in the “Korean Sociological Image” series, see here)