The Birth of Korean Cool (6 page)

My favorite anonymous Korean American author of the blog “Ask a Korean” puts it best: “The Korean [he refers to himself thusly, in the third person] cannot see why ‘rote
memorization’ became a dirty word in education somehow. . . . There are certain things about contemporary America that drive The Korean crazy, and this is one of them: The idea that the
process of learning is somehow supposed to be fun. Just drop it. Forget it. What is fun is the result of learning—the infinite amount of fun when you finally put the finished product to
use.”

That said, I disagreed with my Korean teachers as to what kinds of information need to be committed to memory. For example, I don’t think it was really necessary to make us memorize the
Beaufort wind scale, which is a nineteenth-century method of measuring wind speed, on a seventeen-point scale, by how choppy the water is. That was in seventh or eighth grade. Unless you are a
sailor with not even the most basic technology for measuring wind speed, you will never, ever need to use this. And if you do need to use it, you can probably look it up. Like, in a book or on a
computer.

We also had to learn a rock density scale by heart. For example, limestone’s density ranges from 1.93 to 2.90g/cm
³
; the exam tested our knowledge on such data for a dozen or so
other rock types. I’m sure this information will come in handy the next time I find myself trapped in a limestone quarry.

My memorization skills were so well honed at Korean school that it’s now become an involuntary and automatic reflex. I have almost perfect recall of conversations I’ve had going back
about twenty years or so. If required, I can recite an entire thirty-minute exchange verbatim. Sometimes this is useful, as when I’m arguing with a male companion about whether one of us did
or did not break some previously made promise. However, my gift of recall is very annoying to other people. They forgot to tell us at Korean school that memory does not lead to a happy life.

Annoying or not, being trained in rote memorization, along with discipline, obedience, worship of authority, and good old-fashioned terror of failing is one of the cornerstones of Korea’s
accelerated success.

Cosmetically, a lot has changed in Korean schools. Class sizes are a great deal smaller—around thirty-two students; in my day, it was sixty. Corporal punishment is gone. Schoolrooms
actually turn on their electric lighting. Most schools reintroduced uniforms, ending the open-attire policy of my day, which was really fortunate, since the latter was a charade. All students,
regardless of gender, take both home economics and technology. Korea was the first nation in the world to install Internet access in 100 percent of all primary, middle, and high
schools.
⁸
The surprise inspections for foreign school supplies have been rendered unnecessary by Korea’s wealth, plus the fact that Korean-made
school products are now quite excellent.

“[KOREANS] ARE THE CRUELEST, MOST RUTHLESS
people in the world,” wrote Ian Fleming in
Goldfinger
, adding that Koreans have no
respect for human life. In this scene, the supervillain of the title is explaining to James Bond why he picked only Koreans as bodyguards, among whom is the stocky, grunting, subhuman karate expert
Oddjob, who decapitates people by hurling his razor-sharp black bowler hat at them.

Fleming’s description of Koreans is regarded as widely racist, but my desire to be offended is contradicted by a sheepish “How did he know?” sort of feeling.

In order to understand the Korean drive that propelled the country to wealth, you have to know that Korea has been the whipping boy of fate for five thousand years. The peninsula has been
invaded four hundred times in its history, and it has never once invaded any other nation, unless you count its participation in the Vietnam War.
¹

The result of all this abuse is a culturally specific, ultra-distilled form of rage, which Koreans call
han
. I usually find it pretentious when someone says that a particular word is
untranslatable, but
han
really is untranslatable.

By definition, only Koreans have
han
, which arises from the fact that the universe can never pay off this debt to them, not ever. (Koreans are not known for being forgiving.)

Han
is never-ending. It is not ordinary vengeance. As Korean film director Park Chan-wook (
Oldboy, Stoker
) told me, “
Han
only occurs when you cannot achieve
proper vengeance, when your vengeance is not successful.” (It is worth mentioning, however, that Park emphatically denies that his movies are about
han
.)

My mom describes
han
this way: “When sad things happen not by your own design but by fate, and over a long period of time.” I asked her to give me examples of
han
.
They were grim: “If a baby is abandoned by his parents and suffers throughout his childhood because there is no one to take care of him, then he feels
han
toward his parents. If a
woman gets married young and her husband abandons her for another woman and leaves the wife no money, and the wife has to live a life of strife, then she builds up
han
toward her husband
and herself. And finally, Koreans have
han
toward the Japanese.”

But Koreans do not consider
han
to be a drawback. It’s not on the list of traits they want to change about themselves.

The word
han
came up several times during the course of my interviews for this book. When I asked the co-creator of the popular Korean soap opera
Winter Sonata
, Kim Eun-hye,
why Korean dramas contained so much human misery, she said, “Well, you know, Koreans have a lot of
han
.” When I asked a top music executive why old Korean songs  were so
sad, he said, “Koreans have a lot of
han
.”

It’s the opposite of karma. Karma can be worked off from life to life. With
han
, the suffering never lessens; rather, it accumulates and gets passed on. Imagine the story of Job,
except when God gives him a new family and new riches, he has to relive his suffering over and over again.

One enduring example of the persistence of
han
is Korea’s emblematic song—not the national anthem, but the song that represents Korea more than any other: a folk song called
“Arirang.” It’s so old that no one really knows how old it is. It’s so universally Korean, in fact, that even North Koreans play it on their news broadcasts and consider it
a symbol of their nation, too. The gigantic mass spectacle North Korea hosts every year is called the Arirang Games.

What is this song about? In verse one, a spurned lover says, “Ye who hast tossed me aside and left me, I hope you get a foot disease before you have traveled ten li.” (The subsequent
stanzas are more conventional love declarations.)

That first stanza is spiteful and vengeful. And it speaks volumes that Koreans have used “Arirang” as their international ambassadorial song, without any discussion about changing
the lyrics. They don’t question whether it’s okay to air this kind of hostility in public.

Han
reminds me of Carl Jung’s concept of racial memory—the idea that the collective experiences of a race are hereditary. Thus, the memories of our ancestors are encoded in
our DNA, or at least in our unconscious. The neuroses the current generation endures is because of the suffering of their ancestors.

Han
doesn’t just mean that you hate people who have wronged you for generations. It also means that random people in your life can spark the flame of
han
. Someone who
cuts you off in traffic or disappoints you with his or her friendship can unleash the anger of generations. I have never seen so many roadside fistfights, or so many people permanently shunning
their friends, as in Korea.

Some claim that one can die from
han
. The disease caused by
han
is called
hwa-byong
in Korean, which literally means “anger illness.”
Hwa-byong
is
an actual, medically recognized condition. It is listed as a “culturally specific disease” in Appendix 1 of the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
, fourth
edition (DSM-IV).

What I found astonishing in the course of researching this book is that many Koreans ascribe Korean success to
han
. It makes sense, in a way. A race that has been under constant threat
knows it can survive anything.

The degree to which the Japanese and Koreans hate each other is dumbfounding. The animosity is at least six hundred years old.

Korea’s more recent grievances against Japan stem from the fact that Japan invaded Korea and colonized it from 1910 to 1945. During this time, Japan famously forced Koreans into
involuntary manual labor; thousands of Korean women were forced to become “comfort women”—sex slaves of Japanese military officers. (The Japanese government officially apologized
in 1993, but in December 2012, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe threatened to retract the apology.)

It was illegal for Korean schools to use the Korean language in the classroom. Koreans had to take on Japanese names—my surname would have been Tokuyama if the Axis nations had won World
War II. Until 1992, Korean nationals living in Japan had to report to the immigration authorities and get fingerprinted every six months—even though one’s fingerprints don’t
change every six months.

In fact, hating the Japanese might be the only thing that North and South Koreans have in common.

Against all odds, North and South Korea have started unofficially cooperating to get Japan to stop claiming sovereignty over the Liancourt Rocks, a tiny pair of islands between Korea and Japan,
in the Sea of Japan.

As the name suggests, the Liancourt Rocks are literally two large volcanic rocks and a few dozen smaller rocks that are barely big enough for a seagull to land on. The total surface area is 46
acres (0.19 square kilometers). They are known as Takeshima in Japan, and as Dokdo in Korea. Obviously, I’m going to refer to them hereafter as Dokdo.

How small is Dokdo? Well, the very biggest of the islands, the West Islet, is so small (21.9 acres: 0.09 square kilometers) that if the terrain were completely flat, you could walk from one end
of the island to the other in five minutes. Except that it’s not flat; it’s basically all cliff, and it’s very windy.

How habitable are these rocks? Consider: in the year 2
BC
, the Roman emperor, Augustus, was so horrified by his daughter Julia’s disgraceful and public adultery
that he gave her the worst punishment he could think of, barring execution. He banished her to the island of Trimerius. Which is three times bigger than the Dokdo West Islet.

Which is to say that Dokdo is theoretically too hostile even to be a Roman penal colony. And yet a few Koreans live there voluntarily. Their
han
keeps them alive.

Dokdo had no official permanent residents until 1981, when a Korean octopus fisherman living in nearby Ulleung Island was so incensed by Japan’s continuing claims on Dokdo that
he made
his permanent home there.

A handful of Koreans choose to live there—no more than four in total at any given time—purely as a patriotic gesture. Furthermore, over six hundred Koreans have registered their
official address in Dokdo, though they do not physically inhabit the island. This practice arose from the National Dokdo Permanent Address Registration Movement.
²
The island is also patrolled at all times by a fleet of about thirty-seven Korean police.

Meanwhile, Japanese residents started registering there in 2005. But not a single one of them actually set up home on the island. That’s the difference between Korea and Japan in terms of
their respective determination to claim the islands as their own.

Dokdo is to Japan and Korea what Alsace-Lorraine was to France and Germany—if Alsace-Lorraine were a tiny burp of skipping stones surrounded by a sea, hit with year-round gusts, and
basically uninhabitable. Japan and Korea have been fighting over Dokdo since the fifteenth century, despite the fact that apparently the rocks are eroding. What’s at stake? Well, natural gas
deposits, fishing rights—and pride.

Korea claims that Japan lost Dokdo to Korea as part of its surrender agreement to the Allies at the end of World War II. Japan claims that the Treaty of Peace with Japan—signed in
1951—did not mention Dokdo as part of the colonized territories that Japan was expected to relinquish. Wisely, other countries don’t really want to get involved in this turf war.

At my elementary school in Korea, I learned a children’s song called “Dokdo Is Our Land.” It’s catchy. The first verse goes, “There is a lonely island 200 li
southeast of Ulleung Island that birds call their home. No matter how much someone claims this is their land, Dokdo is our land.” All five verses to the song end with “Dokdo is our
land.” I think there’s a subtle message in there somewhere.

In 2008, new editions of Japanese textbooks declared Takeshima to be a Japanese territory. For Koreans everywhere, this was the last straw (or the first of many last straws, as it would turn
out).

And it was this tiny pile of pebbles that led to a miracle of miracles: on November 13 of that same year, twenty-odd North and South Korean representatives convened at a hotel in Pyongyang to
hold the Inter-Korean Forum to Oppose Japan’s Distorted History and Japan’s Maneuver to Rob Dokdo.

As Reuters aptly wrote at the time, “It took six decades for the divided Koreas to meet to talk about Japan’s colonial past, but it took them just two hours to agree they had common
grievances with their Asian neighbor.”
³

As someone told me, “Is it really a coincidence that every time North Korea tests missiles, it always happens to be over Japan?”

On December 4, 2012, North Korea’s official news agency, KCNA, published a blistering editorial against Japan’s claim to Dokdo, saying, “In view of Japan’s sovereignty
claim over Dokdo, we would like to say that we are taking explicit steps.” Then, on December 12, North Korea launched a three-stage rocket, the Unha-3 (which it called a
“satellite”). It conveniently crossed over Japan’s Okinawa prefecture before landing in the sea near the Philippines.