Top Quotes: “The Birth of Korean Cool: How One Nation is Conquering the World Through Pop Culture” — Euny Hong

Introduction

“It’s easy to forget that in 1965, South Korea’s per capita GDP was less than that of Ghana, and even less than that of North Korea. As recently as the 1970s, North and South Korea’s GDP were neck and neck.

Today, South Korea is the world’s fifteenth largest economy and Seoul resembles the type of space-age city that Arthur C. Clarke imagined in his novel 2001: A Space Odyssey. Plans are underway to construct an “invisible” skyscraper near Seoul — one that will use cameras and LEDs to create the illusion from a distance that the building is not there.”

“I don’t think that Koreans, if they’re being honest with themselves, believe their music will take up significant market share in the United States or western Europe. Instead, it’s about getting the crucial but still dormant third-world market hooked on Korean pop culture — eastern Europe, the Arab nations, and soon, Africa.”

“Right now, the third-world countries are too poor for most western nations to care about. This is where Korea has a peculiar, unreproducible advantage over every single other nation that has been a global pop culture power: it was once a third-world country. Thus Korea understands the stages of other nations’ development; it has carefully studied these cultures to determine what kinds of “K-culture” products would be most favored there.

And Korean economists are hard at work gauging the rate at which these nations will become wealthier and have more purchasing power. You can bet that once the citizens of these countries are able to afford to buy mobile phones and washing machines, they’ll buy Korean brands. Why? They’re already hooked on Korea the Brand.

If this sounds like a national campaign, that’s because it is. The South Korean government has made the Korean Wave the nation’s number one priority.

Korea has multiple five-year plans, the likes of which most democratic and capitalist countries have never seen. The government felt that spreading Korean culture worldwide was dependent on Internet ubiquity, so they subsidized Internet access for the poor, the elderly, and the disabled. Currently, the government is wiring every single household with a 1 gigabit-per-second connection — which would make it two hundred times faster than the average Internet connection in the United States.”

“A Korean record label will spend five to seven years grooming a future K-pop star. This is why some Korean artists sign the thirteen-year contracts binding them to indentured servitude; the first half of that period is spent on training, and the company can’t reap the rewards of its investment unless the artist stays on past the incubation period.”

“In addition to building a high-tech Internet infrastructure, South Korea is one of only a handful of countries whose government pours its own money into investing in its nation’s start-ups. In 2012, government funds constituted over 25 percent of all venture capital money disbursed in Korea. A mind-boggling one-third of venture capital in Korea is spent on the entertainment industry — more than on any other sector.

And here’s another five-year plan: in 2009, when the South Korean record industry was suffering a loss in revenue because of illegal music downloads, the government allocated $91 million to rescue K-pop. The plan included building a K-pop center with a three-thousand-seat concert hall (a work in progress) and regulating the nation’s norabangs — karaoke rooms — to make sure the owners are paying royalties for all the songs in their machines. Most countries would never stand for using public funds to audit karaoke rooms.”

“Individual stalls also sometimes have buttons you can press to play light music so people don’t have to hear how you’ve chosen to spend your time in the stall.”

Education

“Along the same lines, schoolwide tests for intestinal parasites were conducted too. The teacher would distribute white envelopes the size of a credit card. Then the teacher would remind us, “Please write your name on the envelope before you put your poop in, because you’ll find it difficult to write on it afterward.”

The next day at school, the samples would be collected in a big bag. Invariably, some students would not have their sample, and the teacher would hit them on the head or the arm. The students would always say as they were getting thwacked, “But I didn’t poop yesterday, teacher!” and then everyone would laugh.

Supposedly the samples were sent to some national lab to be inspected for parasites; the lab would then send deworming pills to the affected students. I don’t think my school had any cases of parasites during my time there; at that point, parasites were ceasing to become a serious problem.”

“We were among the first schools to ban school uniforms, which were seen as an imprisoning holdover from the period of Japanese colonial rule, which lasted from 1910 to 1945. In practice, though, the liberal dress code had so many restrictions that they might as well have reinstated the uniform. We weren’t allowed to wear clothes with any non-Korean lettering on them. We also weren’t allowed to perm our hair (although in retrospect, they were just trying to save us from ourselves). If you had naturally wavy hair, you literally had to have a doctor’s note to prove it.

Even North Korea exercised less hair totalitarianism. According to some leaked North Korean barbershop posters, the late Kim Jong-il permitted perms as one of the eighteen accepted hairstyles for women. (Based on photos of North Korean government officials, the perm seems to be almost mandatory for men.)”

“For one thing, girls had to take home economics and boys took engineering. I loved home ec, but we did learn some pretty weird lessons. My eighth-grade home ec teacher told us, “If you want to start out right with a marriage, always cook the food your husband likes, not the food you like. Your children will naturally develop the same tastes as your husband.”

Gender was still an indicator of destiny. Starting from tenth grade, South Korean students had to study another foreign language in addition to English. Excellent idea.

But at many high schools, they would only let boys take German and girls take French. No boys allowed in French class and no girls allowed in German class. No exceptions.

But Korea has made giant strides in leveling the playing field for women. Until as recently as 1991, South Korean women were not permitted to be the head of the house-hold, meaning they could not make legal decisions on behalf of the family. In the event of a divorce, a wife was not entitled to an equal division of property and children were automatically granted to the father’s custody.

Just two decades later, in December 2012, South Korea elected its first female president, Park Geun-hye.”

“He was singing that he can down a coffee in one gulp, as if he were talking about downing a shot of 100 proof alcohol. This is Psy’s way of saying, you Gangnam types may be rich and fancy, but your roots are humble, you’ve become a bunch of wusses with too many skin products, and what’s more, this city still needs cleaning up.”

“In 1987, every schoolchild in South Korea made a mandatory donation toward the construction of the Peace Dam, a project of then-president Chun Doo-hwan. The North Koreans were allegedly building a dam of mass destruction close to the north-south border; it would collect water flowing from the north and then one day, when we least expected it, North Korea would unleash the water and flatten Seoul. The retaliatory Peace Dam, to be built in the south, would send the water back north. I do not pretend to understand the engineering involved.”

“My school enforced rules to make the increasing income disparities less visible. Students were not permitted to wear watches exceeding 20,000 won in value or shoes that cost more than 9,000 won — about $15 and $7, respectively. We were not permitted to be picked up or dropped off at school by private car; this became a matter of controversy, since students were often required to stay at school very late into the night, so safety was a concern.

Korean law prohibited private tutors for school subjects, for fear that this would give an advantage to the wealthy (this law has since been repealed). Most students at my school had them anyway. Periodically, the school would give the students a sort of denunciation pop quiz, with questions such as “Who among your classmates is receiving private tutoring?””

“Having a U.S.-made pencil case [was banned]. Buying Korean-made goods was part of our duty in “helping Korea pay off its foreign debt” — that was the party line. The same line was used to explain why we weren’t allowed to turn on the classroom lights: during daytime hours, we relied entirely on natural sunlight. The teachers never explained what this debt was all about, but we knew it was an embarrassment on the level of a national bedwetting.”

“The no-foreign-school-supplies rule was enforced by way of surprise inspections, heralded by the teacher suddenly yelling midlecture: “Everyone, put your hands on the top of your head!” This would send all the students into full-on freakout mode, trying in vain to hide their Japanese mechanical pencils in the gaps between the floorboards, like a drug dealer flushing his stash down the toilet.”

“My eighth-grade homeroom teacher hit every single student in the class after exams. It wasn’t because of overall poor performance. It was just something she always did. The number of times students got hit equaled the number of their class ranking in the exams: the top-scoring student got hit once; the second-ranking student got hit twice, and so on until the final student got hit sixty times. The teacher did it without an ounce of anger or vengeance. She said, “I’m being fair. Even the top student gets hit.”

Corporal punishment in Korea has been phased out over the last decade, and it became officially illegal in 2011 — but there are loopholes. The laws only prohibit a teacher from striking a student directly, but it’s technically still permissible for a teacher to ask students to punish themselves.”

“Even the students supported the teachers’ prerogative to hit them. In 2003 — when corporal punishment was starting to disappear — a survey conducted by a Korean NGO representing teachers indicated that fully 70 percent of Korean students said that corporal punishment was fair. The Korean newspaper Joong Ang Daily reported at the time that students in the same survey said that the “honor” (I assume this means social status) of teachers had “eroded.” But the real jaw dropper is that a third of the respondents “criticized themselves and their parents for not respecting teachers enough.”

Students criticized themselves and their own parents, rather than the teacher? In other words, students felt that teachers could do no wrong.”

“The Korean political system was a meritocratic aristocracy — what an incredible oxymoron. A man from all but the very lowest classes had the right to sit for the kwako (originally instituted in the tenth century). Not only was it really hard, but it was also administered only once every three years. In a given exam year, only a hundred or so people would pass, out of thousands of applicants. If you passed it, you were instantly given the title of yangban — you became an aristocrat. Not only that, but your whole family line was upgraded in the process. There’s a catch, though. A big one. Your male heirs have to pass the kwako exam as well. If your descendants failed the exam three generations in a row, you and your family were stripped of the yangban title and went back to being nobodies. Does this not sound like something out of Grimms’ fairy tales?

Ever since then, Korean students have been studying as if their lives, their family’s lives, and the future lives of their entire bloodline depended on it.”

“The ban on private tutoring was officially lifted in the late 1990s, largely because it was impossible to enforce.

The legalization of private tutoring has proved a disaster. Korean parents throw money fanatically at hakwons. A family will typically pay anywhere from $1,000 to $4,000 per month per child for these extra after-school lessons.

According to Kim Young-sun, 2.8 percent of the Korean GDP is spent on hakwons. To give a sense of how huge 2.8 percent is, that’s over half of what Korea spends on its entire public K-12 education system.

Some hakwons specialize in prepping students for the SAT exam required by U.S. universities. According to Sid Kim, who owns Wise Education, a respected and successful hakwon, some SAT summer prep courses offered by “ultra-elite” hakwons with “star teachers” charge $20,000. Just for the summer. Just for the SATs.

According a 2012 report on education issued by the Pearson publishing group, “The [Korean] government has become so worried about the extent of these studies that it has banned hagwons from being open after 10pm, but still needs to send out patrols to shut down those which mask illegal, after-hour teaching by posing as self-study libraries.”

In other words, there are study-easies. Like speak-easies, but for studyholics.”

“University entrance anxiety is regarded as one of the reasons that Korea has the highest suicide rate of any nation in the industrialized world. In fact, the most common cause of death for Koreans under the age of forty is suicide; for most other OECD nations, the leading cause is auto accidents or heart attack. Hanging is the most popular method, constituting 44.9 percent of all suicides; poison comes in at a close second.”

Japan

“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.

The result of all this abuse is a culturally specific, ultra-distilled form of rage, which Koreans call han.”

“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 Dodo 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 Ul-leung 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. 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 where, 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.”

“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.”

Adoption

“He was born in Korea, out of wedlock: “My mother and father were in love,” he said, but his father was already married with three kids — a serious problem for their son.

This was the mid-1980s, when illegitimate children had no legal status. “My mother would not have been able to register me as a person, not even under her own family line, because she was not a man. There was a lot of social stigma against [illegitimate children]. All the schools would have known I didn’t have a father. It would be hard to get into university.”

“My mother begged my father to take me in, because of the hojok,” he said. His father did take him in for a while, but “my stepmother didn’t care for me much at all,” Daniel recalls.

One day, Daniel was told that his mother was coming to pick him up. But the woman who showed up at his father’s home was not his mother. She was a representative from the Holt orphanage — Korea’s most established orphanage and adoption agency, founded in 1955 by American Christian missionaries. “She took me to a noodle restaurant and a toy store and brought me a change of clothes. I was upset, I didn’t exactly know what was happening.”

What had happened was that Daniel’s father and stepmother declared that they were not going to take care of Daniel anymore, so his mother put him up for adoption. Daniel was six years old at the time.”

Cuisine

“My first winter in Korea, I saw something I’d never seen before: a kimjang — the nationwide custom of making enough kimchi to last the winter. This seemed to me like the lamest seasonal ritual ever.”

“Every household, rich or poor, takes dozens, scores, even hundreds of heads of Napa cabbage, and piles them into large rubber vats (the same kind in which many women washed their clothes) or, in many cases, the bathtub. Every individual leaf of every head of cabbage has to be massaged individually with a mixture of red pepper, salt, garlic, and fermented anchovy paste. To me this makes about as much sense as making sure there were enough cow pies to last the winter.

From an early age, I found kimjang absurd and irrational, which of course it wasn’t. The fermentation process gave kimchi a long shelf life, enabling Koreans to eat vegetables all winter long and avoid vitamin deficiencies.”

“Lee Charm gives some insight into the philosophy underpinning Korean food. “Confucianism made its way into every aspect of life even food. Food is based on the theory of the yin and yang, and the five elements. Every meal has to have five tastes: sour, bitter, sweet, spicy, and salty. There are also supposed to be five colors and five textures. Every housewife, without thinking of it, follows these rules. That’s why Korean food is so healthy. It’s based on the philosophy of the cosmic energy.”

Many people outside Korea subscribe to the belief that Korean food contains mystic healing properties. The SARS bird flu epidemic of 2003 made kimchi ubiquitous throughout Asia. SARs raged throughout China, Southeast Asia, and even Canada and parts of Europe, with about 8,000 reported cases and about 750 deaths.

Meanwhile, South Korea experienced zero bird flu-related deaths (there were two cases, both nonfatal). Many theories as to South Korea’s immunity have been postulated; none were conclusive. One study suggested that the enzymes contained in kimchi strengthened immunity in birds; some people made the mental leap to assume that this also protected them from bird flu.

Through a combination of South Korea’s own reports, a post hoc fallacy, and urban legend, China and other Asian countries concluded that kimchi was the magic elixir protecting the Koreans from the disease. In 2003, Korean kimchi exports went up 40 percent over the previous year; in China alone, the increase was 245 percent.

Despite the preponderance of “evidence,” I remained unconvinced about kimchi’s medicinal benefits, so I consulted Jia Choi, who holds a PhD in Korean food from Ewha Womans University in Seoul. Choi is the president of Seoul-based O’ngo Food Communications.

I asked Choi why Koreans needed to eat something as extreme-tasting as kimchi, whose sodium, spiciness, and sourness literally draw the moisture from one’s mouth.

She explained that it had to do with compensating for the neutrality of rice. “In other countries, fish or meat is the staple,” she said. “In Korea, it’s rice. And kimchi goes really well with rice.” Choi elaborated that all fermented items are highly addictive, not just kimchi. “It’s the same with cheese and beer. When people start eating fermented items, it’s hard for them to stop.”

The Korean hot pepper used in kimchi is actually from Japan, which got it from Spain, which got it from the Americas. The pepper has only been in Korea since the seventeenth century. But the Japanese don’t use the pepper. It leapfrogged over to Korea.”

“Koreans drink a lot — in higher quantities than such booze stalwarts as United States, UK, France, Germany, or even Japan, according to the World Health Organization. The pastime of drinking has many rituals. A night of drinking in Korea happens in upwards of three different drinking establishments, in three phases. It’s not considered sporting to go home until everyone does.

The staples of a Korean bar crawl are beer and soju — a potato wine cheaper than most types of bottled water. It’s sweet and goes down easily, so it’s easy to overdo it, and it really packs one wallop of a hangover. Jinro Soju is the most popular brand; astonishingly, it is also the world’s number-one-selling liquor brand, surpassing the likes of Smirnoff vodka, Bacardi rum, and Johnnie Walker scotch. In 2012, Jinro sold over 580 million liters worldwide.

Even when you’re totally plastered, you have to observe basic Korean boozing etiquette: You don’t pour your own alcohol; if you want some more, you hint at this by pouring alcohol into someone else’s glass, whether this person wants it or not. That person must then offer to pour some into your glass. This is one of the reasons why there’s so much peer pressure among Korean drinkers: if everyone around you has stopped drinking, you might have to wait for quite a while before someone offers to top off your glass.”

Economics

“By necessity, I mean shame. After decades of concerted effort to pull itself out of poverty, South Korea’s economic boom hit a wall in 1997 in the form of the Asian financial crisis.

If it were not for the crisis, there might never have been a Korean Wave. The debt emergency, which effectively halted many exports, forced South Korean industries-including entertainment — to think outside the box in order to make up for lost revenues.”

“Wealthy women relinquished their wedding rings and athletes turned in trophies and medals to be melted down into ingots to help the national cause. The gold drive raised some eight metric tons of privately donated gold in its first week alone. South Korea knew that it was a poor country not long ago, and they had learned that defeating poverty was a national effort.”

“Korea made some of its best decisions in the wake of the crisis. Its information technology, pop, drama, film, and video game industries as we know them today all arose out of a last-chance, long-shot gamble to get out of this hole.”

“Korea has no natural resources and very little arable land. Compounding the problem is that labor costs have risen so dramatically in the last twenty years that the country cannot rely solely on manufacturing as a source of wealth.

Korea is held back by an additional political handicap. According to a Korean economist who is also my dad, Korea is lacking in one huge technological advantage from which nearly every other industrialized nation has benefited for years: the option of letting the military lead the technological curve.”

“Korea is not permitted to pursue military technology on an aggressive scale. In accordance with the 1953 mutual defense treaty between South Korea and the United States, South Korea cannot make any major military decisions without U.S. support. In other words, Korea can’t compete with the big technological players in certain areas. Thus it has been forced to focus elsewhere.”

K Pop

“In 2009, a North Korean defector to the south told Time magazine that in North Korea, bootleg American movies fetched 35 cents on the black market, whereas South Korean movies cost $3.75, because the punishment for being caught with the latter is much more severe.”

“Holograms can enhance stage performances. For example, a K-pop band can give a quasi-live simultaneous performance in all the world’s major cities without actually being physically present.

Also in the works are artificial rainbows, as well as fireworks whose shapes can be manipulated and changed at will — for example, to take the shape of traditional Korean designs — without the use of CGI, “It’s very tricky, but we’re developing it,” said Choi.”

“”Koreans are better at packaging and marketing. Look at Samsung, for example. With K-pop, the songwriters are not Korean. They’re European. The people who do the editing studied in the United States; they’re multinational. The dance choreographers are from everywhere. It’s really a factory.”

Many of the songwriters are European — Swedes especially. “Korean pop is based on Europop,” Lee explained. Which totally explains why K-pop songs sound like Eurovision Song Contest entries. He elaborated, “The European sound influence is electronic and techno music. There’s a heavy electronic base.””

“Park’s iron-fisted policies were partly in response to North Korea, which was putting most of its resources into building its military; this made South Korea extremely nervous. In 1972, Park responded to the threat of invasion as any sensible ruler would; by banning miniskirts, long hair on men, and rock ‘h’ roll. That pretty much ruled out mods, rockers, and hippies — imminent threats to national securty.

Police would stop women on the streets, take a ruler to their skirts, and force them to go home and change if the gap between the hemline and the knee exceeded twenty centimeters. They would grab long-haired men and cut off their hair on the spot. No doubt these tactics will go down in the annals of history as the most effective war prevention gesture of all time.”

“They appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show twenty-five times, ranking them among the top ten most frequent acts in the history of the show, which aired from 1948 to 1971. They appeared more often than Louis Armstrong or Patti Page. In fact, they appeared on the Sullivan Show as often as the very act on which they modeled themselves: the McGuire Sisters.

Imagine what Asian Americans must have felt in 1959, the first time the Kim Sisters appeared on the Sullivan Show. I was incredulous even in 2013, watching their old clips on variety shows, being introduced by the likes of Dean Martin. In one clip, the Kim Sisters appear on a 1960s-era Saturday night variety show, The Hollywood Palace. The host opened with: “We have three sisters from Korea who rate among the most versatile entertainers in the business. They play about twenty instruments: saxophone, clarinet, trumpet, drums, and several others.”

“The U.S. population is 300 million, and Korea only has 50 million. Yet Korea has the same number of pop artists as the United States.”

“A staggering 4 percent of the population of South Korea auditioned in 2012 for Superstar K, Korea’s biggest televised singing competition. That’s 2.08 million would-be K-pop stars competing in a single year in a country with a population of 50 million. By contrast, even the behemoth American Idol only has about 80,000 contestants in a given gear, amounting to a minuscule 0.03 percent of the U.S. population.”

Plastic Surgery

“Now middle-school children get plastic surgery during their winter school break. It’s not considered weird.It’s considered normal.”

“If you were to assemble all the various descriptions of what Koreans find beautiful — narrow face, alabaster skin, etc. — you would find that the Platonic ideal of Korean beauty is based on the features most closely associated with North Korean women.”

Film

“In his native North Korea, he is celebrated as a man of many superlatives, including being the alleged world record holder for the most holes in one in a single golf game — eleven out of eighteen holes — and that was on his very first time ever on the green, according to his official biography. He has never made a bowel movement, supposedly. Kim Jong-il also invented the hamburger. Almost touchingly, North Koreans have a lot of pride in their heritage, though it’s for absurd reasons. The few foreigners who have been permitted to tour North Korea report bizarre trivia passed on to them by some pretty unironic local tour guides: Koreans are such a glorious race that they created not only the world’s great technological innovations but also the spoon.”

“Dissatisfied with North Korea’s propaganda films, which he apparently admitted were artistically substand-ard, this François Truffaut of northern Asia did what any self-respecting film producer would do in that situation: in 1978, he arranged for the abduction of South Korea’s top film director, Shin Sang-ok, and his actress ex-wife, Choi Eun-hee. He had them brought to Pyongyang and forced them to make Cannes-caliber propaganda films for him. In Kim’s own mind, this howling human rights abuse was just the logical extension of his enthusiasm for his hobbies.”

“Periodically, North Korean aircraft would airdrop little packs of chewing gum or candy over Seoul; these were wrapped in notes containing North Korean propaganda.”

“In 2009, the Korean media empire CJ Group launched the world’s first so-called 4-D theaters, which are like 3-D theaters with the addition of smell and tactile sensations. For example, when the movie Avatar was screened at Korea’s 4-D the-aters, there was light rain and mist during some of the scenes taking place on the planet Pandora. I’m not sure how many films really need to be shown this way, but it’s a totally immersive, otherworldly experience.”

TV

“In recent years the U.S. military base has reduced its presence in Korea, citing budget cuts and probably shifting priorities to the “war on terror”; only twenty-five thousand troops are stationed there now, about half as many as during the cold war. The United States is turning over the Yongsan base in Seoul to the Korean government, which is transforming the space into a series of large public parks.”

“In the 1980s, Koreans worshiped, feared, and resented the United States. Korean university students staged violent protests including an absurd number of self-immolations against the U.S. military presence. The protests were focused on ousting President Chun Doo-hwan, who served from 1980 to 1988; but since he was thought by some to be a lackey of the United States, anti-Americanism was always stated or implied.

Of course, in between shouting “Down with the Yanks,” many of those very students were applying to graduate schools in the evil imperialist United States.”

“In those days, there was no demand for Korean television shows, not even in Asia. It was going to be an uphill battle to convince a Hong Kong station to pick up the show. In order to ensure the network would not have an excuse to say no, Chung and the consulate’s office convinced Korean companies in Hong Kong to buy ad time during the shows and used Korean government funds to dub it into Cantonese, at no small expense.

Their efforts paid off: ATV started airing the show. It became so popular in the region that during the time slots that it aired on Thursday and Saturday evening, “there were no people or cars on the street,” according to Chung; everyone was at home watching the show.

Furthermore, the series caused a cultural ripple in Hong Kong society, said Chung, introducing Korean Confucian concepts of spousal roles. “In those days in Hong Kong, the husband cooked dinner after work. But the show sabotaged this, displaying the father as a super-power. When they watched the show, they saw the wife cooking, which caused kind of a syndrome.”

I’m not at all sure that this was the kind of cultural transmission Koreans had in mind, but regardless, the seeds of an addiction were planted. The show got picked up by mainland China’s CCTV. A slew of other Korean dramas followed; their popularity spread throughout Asia — Japan, Vietnam, Malaysia, and the Philippines.”

Conclusion

“Japan’s pop culture dominance is hurting, and not just in music. Sanrio, the Japanese company that invented Hello Kitty, had a sales slump from 1999 to 2010 and is trying to bring in new characters to reduce its reliance on Hello Kitty. The Japanese film industry suffered greatly from the decline of anime. As for the once dominant video gaming industry — well, it’s not a good sign when one of Japan’s top game designers (Keiji Inafune, creator of Mega Man) announces, “Our game industry is finished.”

South Korea is ready to rush in where Japan now fears to tread. Japan lost its place as cultural tastemaker in Asia, about ten or fifteen years ago. There are a number of reasons for this. First of all, Japanese pop culture, like the Japanese archipelago itself, is too isolated from the rest of the world to have remained a sustainable global influence. This is evidenced by the phrase Japan Galapagos syndrome — coined by the Japanese themselves — which compares Japan’s cell phone market to the South American island that has its own species and ecology. In 2010, Japanese electronics company Sharp launched a tablet in Japan that was initially sold nowhere else in the world, appropriately called the Galapagos tablet. Similarly, many of Japan’s video games are for the Japanese market only.

Some say the problem is Japan’s reluctance to learn English; they’re an island nation, and like many countries with a long history of colonialism, they still have a sense that other people should try harder to learn their language. J-pop bands don’t strategically include non-Japanese members, for example.

Others, like pop culture critic Lee Moon-won, point out that Japan is a big enough consumer market as it is (the population is 100 million) and is less dependent than Korea is on foreign exports. For many Japanese companies, it’s not worth the huge risk of a very, very costly overseas marketing campaign.

It’s not just their large population that makes Japan an independently robust market. The Japanese consume a lot, in general. They like new things. On the streets of Tokyo’s residential areas, it’s not uncommon to see large piles of consumer electronics left at the curb, in perfectly good condition — televisions, DVD players, stereos — because a family has moved and they want to buy all new stuff, rather than take their old electronics with them.

Korea, by contrast, has less than half the population of Japan. Thus, says Lee, Korea had to rely on the export market, “which means they had to pay attention to international tastes to make music that would have global appeal.”

Previously, however, K-pop had no international distribution channels. “In order to spread music, you have to have about twenty people pounding the pavement and visiting American radio stations with vinyl records. The Korean music industry had no way of doing that.” Only with the advent of the Internet and YouTube was Korea able to break the distribution barrier.”

“In 2012, Japan overtook the United States in domestic CD and online music sales. Japan saw $4.3 billion worth of sales in this area, as opposed to $4.1 billion in the United States — which is a big deal, considering that Japan’s population is just over a third of the U.S. population.

A big reason behind robust sales is that Japanese people still buy CDs. CD sales make up 80 percent of Japanese record sales, and digital music downloads actually dropped by 25 percent in 2012. As Bill Werde, Billboard editorial director, explained in an interview with Bloom-berg, “[The Japanese] love packaging. You can’t even buy a little trinket in a Japanese store without having it neatly wrapped and folded and handed to you. I think there’s something cultural in the want to have this sort of CD booklet and the album art.””

“The local market was not a good long-term strategy; with a population of only 50 million, Koreans could only buy so many games. So the gaming industry and the Korean government focused on exports.

Korean-made video games now constitute a quarter of the world market. Even most Koreans have no idea how big Korea’s gaming industry. As Kim told me, “In a [Korean] quiz show, one of the questions was, ‘What is Korea’s biggest cultural export?’ It was a multiple choice between films, K-pop, video games, etc. The correct answer was ‘video games,’ and everyone was shocked.” Korean video game exports bring in 1200 percent more revenue for the country than does K-pop. In fact, online games account for 58 percent of Korea’s pop culture export revenue.”

“Samsung generates about one-fifth of South Korea’s GDP, and it’s the ninth most valuable brand in the world.”

“Beginning in 2009, the country has stepped up its efforts in “knowledge sharing” — passing on the secrets of its affluence to some thirty-odd developing nations from four continents, from Algeria to Turkey to Bolivia to the Philippines. In other words, Korea is peddling a wealth kit, something like a combination of a self-help book and the Marshall Plan. Korea is offering these countries a neat little package containing funding, nation-building experts, and strategies — the centerpiece of which is the advice that all countries build government-funded research and policy institutes whose sole purpose is to carry the country from third-world to first-world status.

What rewards does Korea reap from this seeming beneficence? Most likely, a great deal. For one thing, the knowledge-sharing initiative guarantees that Korea gets in on the ground floor with emerging markets. By the time these countries get on their feet, they will already have established partnerships with both the Korean government and Korean industry.”

“A somewhat alarming example of this is the Korean government’s decision, under the presidency of Park Chung-hee, to limit the expansion of universities so as to ensure that there would be enough blue-collar workers to populate the nation’s factories and keep the boilers running, so to speak. It was draconian and seemingly uncivilized, and no doubt many suffered for it, but it is hard to argue against its efficacy. Even those workers who might have been cheated out of a university education still have a much higher standard of living than they would have with university degrees if the nation continued as a barely inhabitable backwater unable to recover from the Korean War. In fact, their sacrifice was not in the name of some long-term, abstract hope: those workers were able to see the benefits of living in a rapidly growing nation within their own lifetimes. Their salaries and standard of living rose visibly in five-year increments.

In most capitalist countries, private industries would find this level of government intervention intolerable. Not in Korea, though: the Korean government has always run itself like the board of directors of a giant corporation with 50 million employees. Decisions made at the national level, like making Hallyu a top priority and throwing billions of dollars at it, were arrived at after exhaustive market research and with the close, willing cooperation of its private enterprise sector.”