The Birth of Korean Cool (7 page)

Hilariously, South Korea and Japan always jointly condemn North Korea’s missile tests. I feel there have to be at least a few South Koreans who are crossing their fingers behind their
backs when making these kinds of statements.

In 2008, one prominent Korean intellectual wrote a controversial op-ed saying that South Korea should allow North Korea to build a missile base on Dokdo, and that South Korea should help
subsidize it.
⁴

Dokdo is just one example of Japanese-Korean animosity. More massive bickering between the two nations occurred in 1996, when FIFA—the international soccer regulatory body—made the
unpre ce dented move of granting the two nations co-hosting rights for the 2002 World Cup.

Clearly, FIFA officials had no idea about Japanese-Korean relations; otherwise they would never have agreed to this.

Once the two nations won their bid, it was just about the last decision they were able to agree on. The first nightmare was what the cup would be called. Japan and Korea fought over whether it
would be called the Japan-Korea World Cup or the Korea-Japan World Cup. In theory, it should have been Japan-Korea because, alphabetically, Japan comes before Korea. But Korea won that argument.
According to rumor, this was part of a compromise between the two countries: Korea’s name would appear first and Japan would get to host the crucial final match.

To drive the point home, some Korean World Cup paraphernalia spelled Korea with a
C
: Corea. (I have a red World Cup souvenir towel to prove it.) “Corea” is not the word for
Korea in either English or French. It’s Spanish, which is not an official FIFA language.

In fact, I’ve even heard Koreans make the claim, which I find highly dubious, that Korea really is supposed to be spelled with a
C
, and that Japan forcibly changed the first
letter to a
K
so that Japan would always come first alphabetically.

During the tournament, some matches were held in Japan; some in Korea. The players had to fly back and forth between the countries. It was deeply annoying for everyone. FIFA realized its initial
error of judgment, and in 2004 made it illegal for multiple countries to cohost the World Cup.

When I first moved to Korea, the country had been independent of Japan for forty years. But the bile was still there.

I also soon discovered that some of the Korean vocabulary I knew was not actually Korean; it was Japanese. Not only that, I was not allowed to use these words. One of the first phrases my
parents taught my sisters and me when we started school in Korea was, “I have to go to the
byonso
.”
Byonso
, meaning “toilet,” was a Japanese word, a
leftover from the colonial area. One of my sisters said this to the teacher on the first day of school, and the teacher corrected her, saying pointedly, “You mean, you have to go to the
hwajangshil
”—the latter being the Korean and politically correct term.

Many Korean kids I grew up with, myself included, had an inferiority complex when it came to Japan. I mean, any kid could plainly see that Japanese mechanical pencils were much better than
Korean ones, which broke all the time. The Japanese lunchboxes were compact and retained heat; the Korean ones were bulky and your lunch was always cold by midday.

My favorite rock bands always toured Japan; however, these bands never performed in Seoul (with the exception of Duran Duran).

What does this have to do with the Korean Wave, you ask? Though many Koreans would not like to admit it, a lot of their drive and motivation arose from a desire to beat Japan at something,
anything. In the 1980s, all of Asia had benchmarked Japan as the nation to aspire to economically. Currently, only Korea is succeeding. And
han
has a lot to do with it. In the late 1990s,
Samsung had set its sights on the Japanese electronics giant Sony as the company to beat. Not IBM, not Microsoft, not Apple, but Sony.

BODY AND SOIL ARE NOT TWO

Like many Koreans, my parents are guilty of what I would call “nature fetishism.” They’re not the only ones; Rousseau had an idealized notion of the
“noble savage,” for example, and Thoreau wanked on about Walden Pond while having his mom do his laundry.

I can’t begin to count how many times I was on some kind of trip with my parents and they woke me up at dawn because it was mandatory that I watch the fucking sunrise.

This gets at the heart of two least-favorite pastimes: waking up early and nature fetishism. The two are intertwined.

In Korea, I genuinely got the feeling that sleeping late was kind of a sin. It was considered slovenly. I wasn’t even allowed to sleep in on nonschool days. Koreans are very into the idea
that the body cycles should be in harmony with the natural environment. Thus, it was against nature not to wake with the sun.

According to an ancient Korean proverb,
Shin to bul ee
: “Body and soil are one.”
⁵
In other words, humans are basically an
agricultural product, literally coming from the earth. Though this saying has no connection with Judeo-Christianity, it has some parallels with the biblical notion of God making Adam from the
earth. It’s a concept that predates Confucianism or any official organized belief, which is why this idea seems incongruous with what Seoul looks like today—jam-packed skyscrapers with
very little open space. The westerner in me finds this hard to stomach. I’m in agreement with something Woody Allen once said: “Nature and I are two.”

In a way, “body and soil are one” is a powerful anti-intellectual sentiment. It implies that the body has supremacy over the mind. It’s exactly the opposite of
Descartes’s famous dictim: “I think, therefore, I am”—which is the very foundation of modern western culture.

Much of this body-and-soil philosophy has its roots in shamanism. Like many modern, westernized Koreans, I had always thought shamanism was some embarrassing part of Korea’s primitive
past, practiced only by the illiterate.

Up to 80 percent of modern-day Icelanders “cannot completely rule out the possibility that elves exist”—according to various polls. When I first heard that, about five years
ago, I laughed incredulously and thought there must be something really wrong with Iceland.

So imagine my shock when Lee Charm, head of the Korean Tourism Organization, told me that the same proportion of Koreans—up to 80 percent—adhere to the ancient beliefs of shamanism
in some form. He added that there are now fifty-five thousand practicing shamans in Korea—“more than the clergy of all the other religions put together.”

Shamanism is linked to animism, the belief that everything has a spirit, rather than the idea of transcendent gods, and it is the most primitive form of religion in the world. Druids, for
example, had similar beliefs.

In premodern Korea, before the tenth century, shamanism was the closest Korea had to a religion—but basically it was mostly a loose agglomeration of female witches and soothsayers who
communicated with spirits and demons in order to cast spells for good luck. People paid them loads of money to chant for hours or even days, to bring everything from good crops to conceiving a
baby.

Not shockingly, shamans—called
mudang
in Korean—are often viewed as mentally ill women. They sometimes channel spirits in their rituals. I’ve heard from semireliable
sources that some shamans claimed to have channeled General Douglas MacArthur, who is considered a hero by many Koreans because he led the UN forces in a triumphant attack that saved Seoul from
being captured by the North Koreans. This does not, however, explain why old shaman women would up the ante on their hustle by donning MacArthur’s trademark sunglasses and corncob pipe.

I think it’s fair to say that a lot of Koreans don’t really want shamanism to be part of modern Korea. In fact, shamanism was made illegal in Korea in the fourteenth century, and did
not start to become legal again until the late twentieth century—and even then, only in certain regions.

I had a hard time finding anyone in Korea who was willing to discuss shamanism on the record until I came across an American, David A. Mason, who is a professor of Korean cultural tourism at
Gyeongju University and a longtime ex-pat in Korea. A self-professed atheist, he’s been making an academic and personal study of shamanism in Korea for decades.

When Mason told me more about shaman rituals I couldn’t see how anyone could help but find it embarrassing and stupid. According to Mason, the basic shamanistic belief is the
sanshin
—the mountain spirit. “In my home town there are shaman shrines where the woman advertises she got her powers from a certain holy mountain man that she can call upon.
It’s a big sales point.”

In essence, shamanism is the belief that all happiness stems from harmony with nature. Says Mason, “If we have bad health or bad luck, it means there’s some mistake in our
relationships, either to nature, to other people, ancestors, or the spirits.” Traditionally, a shaman ceremony could last up to seventy-two hours. Shamans would offer concrete advice, such as
“Move the tomb of your ancestor.”

There are no clear figures on how many shamans continue to operate or how much they charge, because it’s still largely illegal and unregulated. Most areas that have lifted restrictions on
shamans are remote. “They can run you through the ringer if you’re the client,” says Mason. “Surely, [rates go] from hundreds of dollars up to thousands quite easily, and we
hear rumors that for a rich person, the really great shamans do it night and day, and get a million dollars for this.”

As for what a shaman ritual looks like, that runs the gamut as well. “For some short sessions,” Mason said, “you just sit with the shaman in front of a big boulder or in front
of a pine tree.” Mason confirmed that some modern business owners, when opening a new store or location, occasionally hire shamans to hold a traditional good-luck ceremony to anoint the new
space. “They don’t want the public hearing a rumor that their business is going to have bad fortune, so instead they want to spread the rumor that a shaman has been there.” These
business-site rituals are sometimes conducted with a dead pig or a pig’s head on a stake.

Mason pointed out that as much as Koreans want to bury their shaman roots, the influence of this faith is still very apparent today.

In recent decades, the biggest enemies of shamanism have been Korea’s many fervent Christians. Which, said Mason, is highly ironic, since Korean Christianity is rather shamanistic.

If you’ve ever been to some of these churches in Korea, you know exactly what he’s talking about. Even at some churches of “mainstream” denominations, like
Presbyterianism, people can be seen going into a trance and speaking in tongues.

An important aspect of Korean Christianity that has its roots in shamanism, said Mason, is that Korean Christians pray for real-world benefits in a way that far exceeds their western
counterparts. “The major religions—Christianity, Judaism, Islam—are supposed to make you a better person”—not a wealthier person.

Another huge irony is that shamanistic rites crept into Confucian practices, even though it was the Confucian rulers who stamped out shamanism in the first place. Most notably, the rituals
associated with ancestor worship—
jae sa
. Or as I like to call it, picnicking with the dead. At least twice a year, my family would take a long drive to the family gravesite, and
we’d conduct these rituals I didn’t understand. We would burn incense in an urn in front of the graves, then pour alcohol into a separate urn—sometimes rice wine, sometimes red
wine. Then one by one, we’d bow to the dead. Then we would lay out food and have a picnic right by the tombs, which I found morbid and kind of inappropriate. Only when I was much older was I
told that we were literally supposed to be acting as if the dead were eating with us.

Shamanism doesn’t fit in very smoothly with Korea’s modern ambitions. Neither does the whole “body and soil are one” nature fetishism. First of all, Seoul has very little
in the way of green space, despite impressive recent improvements. The air is polluted. And as for the belief that harmony with nature leads to happiness, how do you explain the fact that, as
mentioned in the previous chapter, South Korea has the highest suicide rate of any country in the industrialized world?

One reason may be that Korean culture is very skeptical about mental illness. Aside from traditional fear that insanity is a type of demon possession, which is a universal concept, Koreans also
believe that depression and schizophrenia come from being misaligned with nature—an ancient, animistic holdover—which is another way of saying that it’s the victim’s
fault.

What it comes down to is this: Racial depression is okay. Individual depression is not okay.

Another reason for the high suicide rate is that Koreans are unforgiving of failure, an attitude that has contributed both to success and misery. As much as Koreans love their rural nostalgia,
they are no match for a thousand years of Confucianism in Korea.

CONFUCIANISM, THE MOST STRESSFUL BELIEF SYSTEM ON EARTH

Let me give you an example of why I always had such a hard time passing for a real Korean. One central tenet of etiquette in Korea is that you have to pay attention to who
you are in relation to those around you: Man or woman? Older or younger? Professional rank? Etc., etc. You base all of your actions on hierarchy. In fact, this is the reason why it is never
considered rude to ask someone’s age—technically, you ask when they were born. Without knowing which party is older, no one knows how to act or speak.

If someone new enters the room, you have to recalibrate your behavior. It’s part of being Korean. But for me, it never came naturally. I was twelve when we moved to Korea; that is way too
old to learn.

I always felt that interacting with people in Korea is like being in one of those Hollywood movies in which FBI agents or spies have to raid a  house to arrest a gang of criminals. The
agents might enter the front door with the best attack plan in the world, but every time they enter a new room, there’s a brand-new set of data they have to take in, on the basis of which
they have to make split-second decisions: Is there anyone else in the room? Armed or unarmed? Where are they in the room? Do you need your night vision goggles? Are the members of your team
situated such that no one’s back is exposed?