The Grand Narrative

(Source)

History or art? Most people would probably say the former, but then the mountain ranges and valleys in the map above have little relation to reality. Still, I think it’s an…ahem…simply beautiful piece of work myself, but unfortunately don’t know where it’s from. Can any museum-visiting readers help out?

As you can probably guess, I’m quite a fan of maps (I’m not alone!), and have about 20 or so just of various parts of Korea. I used to have two laminated, detailed maps of my local area hanging up in my kitchen, but I took them down once I discovered a nice, secluded park 10 minutes from my apartment, which the maps had deprived me of visiting for three years because the park isn’t on either (places to get some quiet and seclusion are very rare and precious here!). In their place, I’ve been combining my interest in Korea, history in general, geography and near-future science-fiction by looking at maps of how what Northeast Asia will look like in the near future as the sea-level rises, what it looked like 20,000, 19,000, 18,000…(and so on) years ago, and how the whole world will look like with a 100m sea-level rise. And don’t get me started on the supercontinent of Pangaea Ultima due to appear in 250-400 million years time!

(Update: A big thanks to Jer, who tells me where he got the original shot from here)

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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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Well, you already knew that Alice was a girl, but then if she doesn’t get you smiling this Sunday morning, then nothing will.

But here’s an ultrasound of her 16 week-old sibling, which the doctor has just told us he’s 90% sure is a girl. Click on the picture for a much bigger image.

At the moment we’re thinking of calling her “Elizabeth Jeong Turnbull”, after my sister’s middle name. What do people think? As I explain here, her first name has to be English ( “Jeong” is my wife’s family name), and I’m a big fan of long, elegant and/or dignified Christian names that can’t be shortened easily. Of course, Elizabeth can easily be shortened to “Liz”, but I’m gambling that she’ll still prefer Elizabeth herself.

Still, my wife and I are still very open to other suggestions. Having said that, anyone that comes up with “Hannah” will be severely punished for their lack of originality…!

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( “Mask” by sam samant,a)

1. Introduction 

Back in the second part of Part Two, I discuss the phenomenon of so many Korean women using whitening make-up, usually to excess and in situations where it is completely inappropriate, like on the treadmill at the gym. It’s easy to sound like I’m exaggerating when I describe how much it is used in Korea, but in fact Korean women’s desire for light skin is so strong that, by the time they reach menopause, they have serious vitamin D deficiencies (actually the worst in the world). Apparently, that’s what three decades of not being able to even cross a sunny street without covering your face does to women.

It sounds inconvenient and unhealthy and, based on what I discuss about the socio-biology of cosmetics in Part Two, anti-instinctive too. Clearly, there must be some strong cultural pressures towards and/or advantages to light skin for Korean women that outweigh these disadvanages. In the comments to that last post GordSellar and SkinnySteve argue that the primary explanation is the historical association of light skins with sedentary, indoor elites, and while I agree that that certainly plays a role, it can’t explain why the practice is so widespread across Northeast Asian countries in particular, nor why the vast majority of the ”ideal”, light-skinned Northeast Asian women in those countries’ medias have undergone such a plethora of cosmetic surgery operations also. I’ll respond to their comments in detail in the third section of this post.

( “Eye of Blue” by ~Dezz~)

Meanwhile, the most notable of those operations is “double-eyelid” surgery, which I variously hear that 60-80% of Korean women have received by their mid-20s, and both argue that the practice either predates contact with Westerners and/or is not reflective of a Korean desire to look Caucasian. Personally, I think it’s too much of a coincidence that the most sought after cosmetic surgery operation by Korean women is for a bodily feature found naturally in much greater numbers amongst Caucasians. By itself it could be coincidence, but combined with: the skin-whitening as explained; the decades of articles in Korean women’s magazines extorting readers to turn their “incorrect” and “flawed” Korean bodies into Caucasian ideal shapes and forms (which I’ll explain momentarily); and finally the numbers of Caucasians in Korean advertisements, (which I’ll cover in section four), then naturally I do think that the primary purpose of whitening make-up and cosmetic surgery by Korean women is indeed for the specific purpose of making them look more Caucasian. As least in 2008.

2. Sources

 (Photo by Scoubi) 

To be fair to Gord and Steve, so far I’ve never mentioned on the blog the fact that, say, Korean women’s magazines do explicitly say that the Korean body is flawed and Caucasian bodies the ideal. There’s very little on the subject in English, especially on Korea (in fact the 2006 article I discuss in the fourth section is the first of its kind), and unless you’re fluent in Korean and are an avid reader of women’s magazines yourself then the only real way of knowing this would be to read the journal articles that I have. I’m not saying that having read them makes me smarter than readers, or that the journal articles themselves aren’t open to interpretation, but…well, that’s what they say, and they do appear to fatally undermine arguments against the links I make between cosmetic surgery, skin-whitening, and a desire to look Caucasian.

Let me (belatedly) provide an example:

The article presents what it considers to be particular features of Korean women - short legs, big face, yellow skin - as problem features that can be corrected by certain types of clothing and colours: ‘For Korean women the best look is the formal tailored suit with padded shoulders. This square shaped suit helps make big faces look smaller and puts the entire body in order’ (italics added). [The author] implies that the imperfect Korean body is disordered but can be put back in order through the tricks of fashion. The body is something to be rearranged so its apparent flaws are concealed or eliminated. These flaws themselves stand out as imperfections because they are features peculiar to Koreans and absent in white models.

That was from page 104 of the 2003 journal article “Neo-Confucian Body Techniques: Women’s Bodies in Korea’s Consumer Society” by Taeyeon Kim (details and abstract here), which was the basis for these posts that I started last month. Since finishing those, I’ve read very similar descriptions of articles in Japanese, Taiwanese and Singaporean women’s magazines too, and because women in those countries also desire light skins and share “Eurasian” ideals of women’s bodies, then I think that basing, say, modern ideals of Japanese women’s skin colours and body forms the white-face painting of geisha is useful and necessary, in a parallel of what commentators said about Korea, but neither the Japanese or Korean hostorical specifics can explain why those ideals are so common to the region.

(Korean Jeon Ji-hyun (전지현). Photo by wongtai231, from this ad)

What does link the region then? Let me adapt the remainder of Taeyeon Kim’s paragraph above, by replacing “Korean” with “East Asian”:

All three elements, the Neo-Confucian woman’s subjectlessness, the perception of East Asian bodies as imperfect, and fashion’s function to re-order the disordered East Asian bodies, make East Asian women’s bodies particularly prone to alterations, rearrangements, and re-creations of the body.

In simple terms, these elements provided a base upon which individual countries’ own culture and histories of the use of cosmetics and so forth built upon. They were important, but I do seriously doubt that those East Asian populations with the means to afford cosmetic surgery operations would have done so quite so readily and in such large numbers without a shared philosophical framework that gave such leeway and encouragement for women to do so.

( “Asian or Caucasian?” by c0nn0r. Anybody know who she is?)

That’s the gist of what my theory, anyway, which I’m in the process of researching and fleshing-out, like I discuss here. But for the remainder of this post, first I’ll address points Gord and Steve raised in much more detail, and after that I’ll discuss the phenomenon of large numbers of Caucasians in Korean advertisements.

3. Response to Comments

Sorry in advance if my chopping and pasting and combining of comments maybe (inadvertently) misrepresents commentators’ arguments; I encourage readers to click on the links to their names and read their comments in full before moving on. Also, much of what I’m quoting below I’ve already responded to earlier (they’re the detritus of many rewrites of this post, sorry), so here I’ll try to concentrate on things I haven’t mentioned already.

Here goes then:

In Part Two, Steve said:

In regards to Korean women trying to whiten their skin in order to look more Caucasian, I used to agree, but as I’ve learned more about Korean history and culture, as well as seeing traditional dance performances, I’ve come to conclude that Korean women have been painting their faces ghostly white for a long, long, time because it makes them look more upper-class in the sense that they’re not out working the fields in the hot sun.

And Gord said:

I also would take issue with the idea that Korean women are (at least consciously) trying to look white. After all, as far as I can tell the double-eyelid obsession was in place BEFORE they met us folk, since some percentage of Koreans are born with it naturally (like my fiancée, for one). Paleness, again, would be a sign of domesticity, and thereby a sign of higher status. (And anyway, there’s lots of anecdotal evidence that even in very remote, non-Westernized societies, there are preferences for paler members of the group…my mom has observed it in many groups living in the bush in Malawi, for example.)

I readily agree that Koreans have historically associated lighter skin with stuck-indoors-all-day elites, and that it may well be a universal phenomenon; I first read of it myself while studying Medieval history when I was fourteen, and if you’re interested you can read a specific chronology here of how tanning in turn became a signifier of the leisured (Caucasian) classes, starting in the early 20th Century. But while it’s difficult to empirically quantify, things like Korean women’s vitamin D deficiencies do point to specifically Koreans (and East Asians) desiring lighter skins to a surprising degree, and I don’t think these historical associations are a sufficient explanation.

I’m very surprised to hear about Koreans being obsessed with double-eyelids before meeting Westerners, especially before modern cosmetic surgery allowed Koreans to get them for themselves (I’ll return to this point in a moment). I’d be the last person to doubt the veracity of anything Gord said, but I’d be very grateful if he or anyone else could point me in the direction of sources on that; after all, if all goes well, I’ll be presenting a paper on it in Fukuoka in September!

(Photo by bowtie614)

Steve continued: 

Nowadays, though, I think that it may be playing a part (like, 30-40%), but I still don’t think attempting to look Caucasian is the motivation. I think a Korean woman might say “I buy face whitening cream to look more beautiful” but highly doubt she’d say, “I buy face whitening cream to look like a white woman.” You still don’t see that many Korean women with dyed blond hair walking around, after all.

Like Gord mentions earlier, I’ve never said that Korean women consciously want to look Caucasian (although I still think that some surely do). Arguing that they do reminds me of the British stand-up comedian Ben Elton making a joke about women thinking about making their faces resemble their aroused vaginas as they put on lipstick in the morning (God, considering he said that in 1985, no wonder he got the reputation that he did!); that they don’t doesn’t mean that it is not ultimately a factor in the origins of the cultural habit, just like I won’t think about the universal desire for humans to distinguish ourselves from other animals when I shave tomorrow morning, or that my tie is actually a phallic symbol when I get dressed after that. Well, actually I will now, in a pink elephants fashion, but you get the idea.

What do they consciously say are their motivations then? Well, Gord says:

I’d say Korean women, at least younger ones, are trying more to look like Hyori or Jeon Ji Hyun or some other icon of Korean femininity than, say, Julia Roberts.

As this old post of Robert Koehler’s demonstrates, that’s certainly true. Steve also says:

As far as the double-eyelid surgery is concerned though, I think if anything that trend has come about from Koreans’ own desire to conform. I read somewhere (actually, I think it was an MTV documentary by Soojin Pak, but I can’t remember the title) that a certain percentage of Asians naturally have the double eyelid, so it’s not as if the feature is alien to Korea/Asia. What they see, though, is all the rich and famous people in the world sporting the double eyelids, combined with the Koreans that already have it, and now the double eyelid is considered trendy and beautiful. Again, it doesn’t strike me as overtly trying to look like a Caucasian person. It seems like Koreans are fascinated with big eyes as well, a feature that tends to creep me out more than anything, and I suspect the double-eyelid surgery may haveus much to do with giving an appearance of having bigger eyes than anything else.

(Photo from PopSeoul!)

But I think the point that average Korean women are whitening their skins and undergoing cosmetic surgery because they want to look like rich and famous Korean women is, to be blunt, irrelevant: it merely changes the focus of our attention, but doesn’t answer the question of why rich and famous Korean women (rather than average Korean women) are doing so. And returning to the point about double-eyelids, I confess that when I first read Gord’s comment that Koreans were obsessed with them before Western contact, personally I doubted it very much. And were it to be true (and for sure, it might be), I still find it too much of a coincidence that that particular body feature, which Caucasians just so happen to naturally have in far greater numbers than East Asians, has become virtually a mandatory requirement for young Korean women.

(Update: Sorry, I just realised that I forgot to respond to Steve’s point about Koreans’ fascination with big eyes. But personally, I don’t think that that fascination is exlusively Korean or even East Asian for that matter. And while I’ll readily admit that big eyes are certainly, say, a prominent feature of manhwa (만화) or manga for instance, that is more to make especially female characters look more youthful rather than a fascination with big eyes per se )

Steve also says:

So, yes, it LOOKS like Korean women are trying to look Caucasian, but that doesn’t mean that’s the real motivation, and I haven’t seen any evidence to really suggest that Korean women are running around trying to meet a beauty standard intended for the whole purpose of appearing like the very Caucasians Korea is continuously trying to keep at arm’s length.

( “Swede Revenge” by cheese bikini)

That last point is very eloquent, and is a good, pithy way to round off a university paper or a newspaper article, let alone a comment in a humble blog. Unfortunately, it’s also completely wrong. It doesn’t take academic study of Korea and/or of Anti-Americanism in Korea and abroad to know that public displays of antipathy towards America and/or Caucasians and/or Foreigners usually go hand in hand with fascination, jealousy, and extensive trade and cultural links, and the stark differences in the way Caucasian and non-Caucasian foreigners in Korea are treated is evidence enough that Koreans don’t want to keep Caucasians “at arm’s length.” When non-Koreans are negatively-portrayed and scapegoated by the Korean media - and I’ll be the first to admit that that happens entirely too often - invariably it’s for domestic political purposes and/or to deflect attention from Korean society’s own flaws.

Finally, Gord says:

There’s no shortage of students who are happy to suggest that contemporary images of Korean femininity are *fueled* by Western icons of “beauty,” but I think it’s worth throwing in a grain of salt, since many of the same students who are talking about this now, were one semester ago regurgitating rather distorted versions of Edward Said’s Orientalism. *shrug*

For sure, and that’s something to bear in mind when reading the next section.

4. Images of Caucasians in Korean Women’s Magazines

(Photo by Mr Rock Man)

Because this post is already rather long, I’ll do little more then outline the conclusions Minjeong Kim and Sharron Lennon come to in their article ”Content Analysis of Diet Advertisements: A Cross-National Comparison of Korean and U.S. Women’s Magazines” (Clothing and Textiles Research Journal, October 2006), and readers can form their own opinions from those.

Because of a lack of prior research (pretty typical for Korean Studies) they write that null hypotheses were developed:

Hypothesis 1: There will be no difference in the percentage of diet advertisements in Korean and U.S. Women’s magazines.

Hypothesis 2: There will be no difference in the percentage of female model’s ethnicity in Korean and U.S. Women’s magazines.

The two Korean magazines they used were Women Sense/우먼센스 and Jubu Life/주부생활, and the two U.S. magazines were Red Book and Good Housekeeping. You can read details of the hypotheses and methods of the samples from pp. 351-353, and details of the results from pp. 353-359.

 (Source)

Hypothesis 1 isn’t relevant to this post, but it is to Parts One and Two, and is still very interesting.

In a nutshell, Kim and Lennon found that the hypothesis was false, and the percentage of diet ads in Korean women’s magazines was significantly higher than the percentage in U.S. women’s magazines (11.8% to 3.5%), and also that they tended to promote passive dieting methods, reinforcing the idea that buying their advertised product will solve weight problems with no effort required on the part of the user. Unfortunately, most of those claims are completely false, but because diet products are technically considered supplements in Korea, they are not regulated by the strict guidelines used for pharmaceutical products. Even in the rare cases that companies are prosecuted by the Korean Consumer Protection Board, penalties are minimal and companies often merely close down, reopen under a new name, and go on selling the same product with a different name.

Shocked? Unfortunately asbsent or ineffective regulations are a fact of life here, as things like almost all Korean Vitamin C drinks containing carcinogenic benzene and 88% of Korean organic food is completely fake demonstrate.  Not only is little done about this, but I recall that in that benzene case above the KFDA wasn’t allowed to mention the names of the three vitamin C drinks that didn’t have benzene…how ironic that Koreans have to turn to a Chinese news source to find out what they’re drinking.

In such circumstances, it’s no wonder that impressionable young girls take the messages of dieting product companies to heart: as Kim and Lennon report (p. 357), in 2002 half of Korean high school girls were anemic because of dieting-induced malnutrition, and were considered unqualified to give blood.

(Source)

Hypothesis 2 was also found to be false: U.S. magazines had larger percentages of White than non-White models (84.9% vs. 15.1%), whereas Korean magazines had much more equal percentages of White and non-White models (52.3% vs. 47.7%).

In Kim and Lennon’s words:

Instead of having predominantly non-White (Korean) female models in Korean magazines, White female models were as common as non-White models. The number of White models was actually greater than the number of non-White models. The presence of White female models in Korean women’s magazines to this extent suggests that the Western cultural ideal for women is ubiquitous and widely accepted among Korean women. Korean magazines seem to portray and promote Western feminine beauty as ideal and subsequently pressure Korean women to achieve the Western ideal. Subsequently, this indicates that the Western cultural beauty is not limited to Western countries anymore but has gone global. (p. 358)

Naturally I agree: it’s certainly telling that Korean women’s magazines have more Caucasians than Koreans in them. But it’s not unreasonable to argue that Kim and Lennon are making too much of a conceptual leap, without also considering the extent to which having Caucasian models in advertisements is a sign of wealth, class, and of a country having “made it.” Not coincidentally, the first time Caucasian models were even allowed in Korean advertisements was shortly before Korea was admitted to the OECD in 1996. As Taeyeon Kim (referenced earlier) explains:

 A casual browser of Korean women’s magazines might observe that many of the models or settings in the advertisments are Euro-American or look Euro-American. This image has become ever more pervasive. In June 1994, changes in laws allowed the Korean advertising industry to use foreign models and celebrities, which quickly led to a sharp increase in the use of foreign models to sell domestic wares. No longer were only foreign products sold to Koreans with a foreign face, now even domestic products were marketed to Koreans by the likes of Cindy Crawford, Meg Ryan, and Claudia Schiffer. (p. 103)

(Photo by Mmmonica)

She still comes to much the same conclusions as Kim and Lennon though:

While there does seem to have been a gradual increase in recent years of Korean models in domestic advertisements, these Korean models nearly all have features that have already been reconstructed to meet the prevailing standards of beauty which, if not totally white, are at least a melding of Asian and Western features, the ideal encapsulated by the increasingly popular ‘Eurasian’ look. Many of the articles and beauty tips in these magazines function on the assumption that the Korean body is flawed while the white body is the standard norm.

I don’t read Korean women’s magazines, but I have noticed the virtual absence of Korean women in lingerie advertisements here (it’s difficult not to notice, given the number of ads on subways and cable TV here). Or to be more precise, the fact that Korean models in them will almost invariably be fully clothed (a very rare exception below), but Caucasian (usually Russian) models will more usually be wearing only the lingerie. Sometimes in the same infomercial you’ll have Russian models in their lingerie but the Korean models fully clothed, holding the lingerie in a hanger. Seeing those for the first time years ago, it was difficult not to conclude that they reflected some pretty warped notions of Korean feminine virtue and foreign lasciviousness. 

(Photo by menacingPanda)

To be sure, many Koreans do indeed have some warped notions of Korean feminine virtue and foreign lasciviousness. But now I think I was mistaken, and realising that the Russian models are signifiers of “developed country status” makes their numbers and their sharp distinctions with Korean models in ads more explicable. So despite what the two journal articles I’ve quoted at length in this post say, the mere presence of Caucasians in Korean advertisements certainly does not necessarily mean that Koreans have embraced and aspire to Western ideals of feminine beauty. But having said that, I do find the overall weight of evidence compelling.

And on that note, because I sense I’m beginning to lose the thread of things at this late stage of a much too long post, I’ll put this subject to rest for now!

Update 3: Years ago, Robert Koehler mentioned the Korean model Jang Yun-ju (장윤주), one of the few Korean models “that nobody will ever accuse her of cutting up her face to look white”. In a less academic phase of the blog (hey, we’ve all been there), I linked to many pictures of her here.

Update 2: Great, just great. I type all that, and only then do I discover this post of Michael Hurt’s on the same topic.

Update 1: By coincidence, KoreaBeat has just posted a link to photos with the theme “Korean Girl Discovers the Joys of Whiteness”.

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I’m probably over-analysing it when I say that, to me, this recent ad of Kim Tae-Hee’s (김태희) is another example of a distinctive “2000s” style, but then that would hardly be a first for me:

(Found via Mongdori)

I’ve been humming it for days now. Here’s a recent song that it immediately reminded me of:

I like both despite myself. Bob Dylan or Tracy Chapman probably wouldn’t approve, and 10 years ago an ex-Sandinista guerilla lecturer of mine didn’t think much of Barbie Girl either, but then us Generation Xers will take what shared icons and sources of identity we can thank you very much.

So too, will Generation Y Koreans.  No matter what I say about the Wondergirls, I’ll be the first to admit that the popularity of “Tell Me” is primarily because it’s just so difficult to shake the (not all that bad) rhythm out your head. Hell, our 15 year-old students will probably still be singing and dancing to it at 노래방s in 2038:

As will I be of the aptly-named “Can’t Get You Out of my Head” by Kylie Minogue, which followed me on computers all around Malaysia on my 2 week trip there in 2002. The song is haunting enough in its own right, but has special meaning to me as a personal symbol of globalisation:

Admit it, you’re humming along to at least one of those videos by now…

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(Update2: Those technical problems in turn mean that I can’t reply to a notorious troll over there, but fortunately his comments don’t really deserve a reply. Still, he’s no ordinary troll, and you have to admire his skill in trying to goad me into a response)

(Update: I’d like to thank bumfromkorea over at the Marmot’s Hole for telling me about Time and Cinderella, two movies that deal with the Korean plastic surgery industry. I would thank (probably) him there, but for some reason every time I write a comment on that post it just disappears)  

(“Liberty Leading the People“ by Eugène Delacroix)

Introduction

Today’s post is a bit of a light-hearted break from all the intense and/or very academic posts I’ve been writing recently, but I think that the points I’m making are still quite valid. Sure, if I’d wanted to convey that impression more effectively then probably I should have used a different title instead, but then I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t usually choose them with SEO in mind (Search Engine Optimization to non-bloggers). Sorry if that sounds a little cynical, but then consider this internet classic on the differences between what people say they read and what they actually do read on the internet. Meanwhile, if pictures of Lee Hyori are what you’re really after, then you’ll find plently to choose from here.

Korean Celebrity Culture 1: Different Standards

(Photo by lej pics. Yes, I know Lee Eun-ju/이은주 on the right committed suicide in 2005, but rather than making my choice of picture tasteless, actually I think that that illustrates my points all the more)

The original motivation for this post was my volunteering to translate this ”news” article about Lee Hyori’s recent chest X-rays for readers over at Dave’s ESL Cafe (I guess I’m a real glutton for punishment). I did last night, but PopSeoul! has already translated something very similar here, saving me the trouble of putting it up.

The article I translated is stupid, as is the endless speculation about whether or not Lee Hyori has received breast enlargement surgery: for one, you can see the before and after evidence for yourself here, and I discuss that in more detail here. Of course she has. Like I say there, I think she was very attractive without them, but they certainly didn’t harm her career, and while I may often sound critical of plastic surgery, I’m not against it per se. But why then, this endless, repetitive speculation? Because she refuses to admit it. Or rather, ironically, being a celebrity means that she’s not allowed to admit it, at least in Korea.

(Photo by mona)

I’ve already written a great deal about the differences between Western and Korean celebrity culture, so let me just give the briefest outlines of them here.

Discounting the big differences between Western countries, to a greater or lesser extent Westerners almost expect their celebrities to live hedonistic lives, and the public and the justice system as a whole gives them a great deal of leniency to do so that is not granted to ordinary mortals like ourselves. But Korea is the exact opposite, and female celebrities in particular are held to impossibly higher standards. Hence when it is revealed that they have taken drugs or had sex before marriage, for instance, then the public reaction is swift and severe, even if they didn’t actually do the heinous crimes of which they’re accused.

And so while Korea has one of the largest plastic surgery industries in the world, and a majority of women have had some form of operation or another, Koreans seem to want to keep this a secret from non-Koreans, and celebrities in particular definitely can’t admit to having received it themselves (with exceptions for aspiring stars).

I think that the movie 200 Pounds Beauty/미녀는 귀로워? is one of the rare popular Korean movies that draws attention to this (I discuss it here); if readers know of any others, please let me know. I also think that the dichotomy between the Korean public’s standards for themselves and for celebrities also partially plays a role in the their toleration of sexually-suggestive dancing and provocative clothes from the Wondergirls/원더걸스 too, because many parents, say, that regard both as innocent and cute would never tolerate the same from their own daughters. But after all the virtual ink I’ve already spilled on that, I’ll wisely stop there and let readers make their own judgements.

Korean Celebrity Culture 2: Promotion of the Mundane

(D-War/디워)

Amongst non-Koreans living in Korea at least, the both the Korean and especially English-language Korean media is notorious for portraying any cultural product destined for overseas consumption as world-class, on a par with Hollywood productions (if it is a film), and enthusiastically received by non-Korean audiences, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Gordsellar describes it as a “standard, near-universal conviction among Koreans that a positive image of Korea must be presented to the world”, and I myself (somewhere amongst these posts) have interpreted the effects of this on the Korean media to be its portrayal of the Korean Wave/한류 as Koreans would like it be received rather than it actually is, and even if this was the only problem the Korean media had, then it would be in a very sorry state indeed. Unfortunately, it’s not, as this and the following case reveals.

By this stage, you may well be asking how on Earth the Korean Wave is related to Lee Hyori’s breasts? Are they a cultural product? Well…yes. Consider this article about her trip to Hong Kong in 2003, but before you do, let me provide some background:

• Men like women’s breasts
• There are some men in Hong Kong
• Lee Hyori has breasts
• Lee Hyori went to Hong Kong

Therefore, even before the big event I would have bet money on some men in Hong Kong liking her breasts while she was there. An article about the test of that hypothesis is not news, and of course the fact that it was in a Korean tabloid also means that it wasn’t news too. But ironically, this celebration of Hong Kong men’s interest in Lee Hyori’s breasts is news precisely because it was in a Korean tabloid.

The mainstream Korean news media is amongst the most populist, unprofessional, racist and xenophobic in the world, and is more than happy to portray all non-Korean men as perverted, pedophilic sexual predators whenever it suits them, so you can imagine what the tabolid press is like. Not unsurprisingly, this means that many Korean men (but by no means all) are resentful of Korean women in relationships with non-Koreans. Hence KoreaBeat points out that it was simply bizarre that a Korean tabloid newspaper would revel in non-Korean men ogling one of “their” women, and I’m suprised that I didn’t notice the incongruity myself when I read it at the time.

Now, I’d be the last person to describe Lee Hyori’s breasts as mundane…but sorry, at the end of the day, they’re still just breasts. So considering all the above, is there any other explanation for the positive spin of the article other than the desire for self-promotion overriding the xenophobia, which, after all, is usually just a mere convenient device to use when Koreans want to deflect attention away from their own problems?

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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&