Where I'm at

by liberal japonicus

The title is not a meditation on political systems and my opinions, it is a bit more literal. Where I'm at is South Korea, where I'll be a for a year. So, below the fold, an open thread-y set of observations and unbridled speculation. For those who find some of this unbelievable, please ask probing questions and for those who have some experience in Korea, please chime in.

I'm in the city of Daejeon, an hour south of Seoul and 2 hours north of Busan as an exchange professor. I arrived on March 1st, which is coincidentally Korean Independence Day, with the Japanese appearing in the role of colonial overlords. I had (and pretty much continue to have) no Korean, but the advertisements were a bit strenuous, which I discovered was because this was the 100th anniversary of the original event, which occurred on the same day in 1919, when demonstrations demanding independence from Japan occurred all over the country. It was linked to the death of abdicated Emperor Gojong in Jan, who may have been poisoned by Japanese assassins as well as the Versailles Peace Conference, where Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points proposal of determining the sovereignty based on the interest of the affected populations made a big impact. And while I'm sure it was not a problem, it did seem a bit strange to tell people that I was American (oh, we love you!) from Japan who has half Japanese-American.

18 months of military service is required for all young men, and often students leave in the middle of university to complete this obligation. It is strange, after being in Japan, to see young Koreans out and about in camouflage. When I showed a picture of my brother with a deer he had bagged, dressed in green camouflage, one of my students said 'oh, he's a soldier?'.

I've got my reservations about obligatory military service, but it makes teaching at university a lot easier. Having roughly half the boys with that experience, there is a lot more seriousness than their counterparts in Japan. There was also a comment here about how the obviously military presence contributes to a more conservative approach to government and I think that is true. Perhaps this is just background noise for Koreans, but every subway station is set up to operate as a bomb shelter and there are lockers for gas masks and water in all of them. They are also a lot deeper that the equivalent structures in Japan, often another full story underground. While there is an existential threat in the form of North Korea, it seems attenuated. More on that below.

Of course, a phatic comment would be 'Korea is not Japan', and I do realize that, but the notion keeps popping up. But it is not that simple.

As an example, there is a lot of Japanese food here and a lot of Koreanized Japanese foods. Figuring out which is which has been a full time task. I went the other night for sashimi, the Japanese dish of raw fish served with soy sauce and wasabi, a horseradish relative. But Koreans ate 'sashimi', and everyone said that in Korean, it is (회) hoe, but they don't use that word because everyone knows sashimi. Looking it up in Google Translate, I get 생선회 (saengseonhoe). Imagine that across a whole range of dishes. I know the Japanese word, but I'm never sure if I should use the Japanese word, figure out the Korean. This extends to a lot of the vocabulary. Korean vowels are tough, and seemingly unpredictiable. In Japan, if I pronounce an English word with Japanese vowels, it is often understood. That doesn't get me far here, but after sounding out the word, I'll sometimes realize that it is a Japanese word, or at least a cognate. Generally, if they are Sino-Korean words, they are similar. Unfortunately, unlike 20 or 30 years ago, Koreans no longer use hanja in signage, everything is in the indigenous script hangul. There is something totally deflating about sounding out a word 4 or 5 times and then suddenly realizing you know the word, but you can never remember the pronunciation because the vowels are different.

Japanese also has a separate script for foreign words, katakana, so even if you don't understand any of the Japanese, you have these little life rafts to cling to. Korean does adapt the pronunciation of the English words and people who learn the script fluently become quite adept at picking out the foreign words. The word computer is 컴퓨터 (keopyuteo) and it's easy to pick out that it is foreign because the consonants (ㅋ,ㅍ,ㅌ) have the extra line indicating plosive and the reduced vowel in the 1st and 3rd syllables becomes eo (ㅓ, the same vowel that you have in Seoul), so foreign words can be distinguished, on average, by these overall differences. On average, which means that only by processing a shit ton of text can you pull that out. And when you are at the stage of standing on the sidewalk sounding out signs, not really an option.

Of course, one of the amazing things about Korean is the script, which is perhaps the most phonologically faithful linguistic script. (And because it is logical and made up of building blocks, it is also a gas to be able to type in the script, so I can write something and it doesn't look like it should be done in crayon!) Because it is so phonologically faithful, one can write any foreign word that has Korean pronunciation and plop it in the sentence. This makes the status and role of English here a bit different. In Japan, there is a lot of performative English, English that is not there to communicate, it is more there to indicate that yes, Japan loves the appearance of being international. In Korea, while almost everything is in Korean with not a hint of English (it took me four phone menus in Korean to get to the English operator for my bank card), and English ability is more randomly spread out in the population. Meeting people who, as children, spent large chunks of time in English speaking countries. While it may seem like a small number, there is the phenomenon of gireogi appa (기러기 아빠) or goose fathers, whose wife and children go to live in an English speaking country and who stay in Korea working. In fact, the wikipedia page gives eagle, penguin and sparrow dads as varieties. While Japan has tanshin funin, where the father lives away from the family because of a job transfer, the idea of the family doing the transfer and the dad staying back is rather different. This is coupled with an education scene where kids are learning English from the age of 4 or 5 at private hagwon, private schools for tutoring and cramming. Japan has there equivalent, but it is no where near the ubiquity here in Korea. This is also coupled with pushes to _reduce_ English teaching. This makes it feel that there are a lot more people with English ability of various ranges here in Korea, and it doesn't seem strange to end up with this bizarre codeswitching. It seems that because English in written Japanese is neatly isolated by the cordon sanitaire of a separate script, it doesn't spill into communicative functions while in Korea, it seems to. (some articles I'm working through on this are found in the refs to this paper) All this makes English both more and less foreign. Or perhaps foreign in a different way that it is in Japan.

I could go on and on about language, but some other things that strike me. I have a long spiel about how Japanese and Koreans aren't really different, it is just that their modernizations took place at different times and those modernizations reflect those periods, but alas, the blog post format is too small to contain it. Still, a few hints.

Strike me or nearly did. Korean driving is fast. Really fast. Taxis and buses are very cheap, but everyone goes about 20 km/h over the speed limit. When I get into a bus, I feel like I am in a Korean remake of Speed. They drive on the same side of the road as the US, which is hell for me cause I'm habituated to look the other way first because of living in Japan. And right turn on red is a thing, but they seem to have left off 'after stop'.

Korean society is feeling a similar push as Chinese in terms of surveillance. CCTVs are everywhere. One couple I met said that they moved into their apartment and a week later, their picture was on the wall of the elevator for putting their trash out on the wrong day. On the other hand, some Koreans have suggested to me that the reason the country is so law abiding is that it is hard to get away with anything. I am astonished that people leave their phones, computers even wallets at their table at a coffee shop when they go to the restroom and stories of lost and forgotten things returned with nothing missing rival the stories I know in Japan. Not that I thought Koreans were more likely to steal or that there was something in the Japanese cultural make up about this, but in Japan, with their push for service, it seems like an outgrowth of making the customer happy where as in Korea, that isn't really there so much.

My life seems to revolve around food here and omg, Koreans love their food. I'm still trying to get the names, but there are tons of things I've had that I have to have again. Korea also has a coffee shop culture. There are 10 (ten) coffee shops within a 5 minute walk from my apartment and I don't live in a particularly built up area. I really don't understand the economics of it, students come in and spend hours so I don't see how they get the turnover to stay in business. On the other hand, the indigenous coffee culture has meant that Starbucks does not have the hold that it has gotten in Japan.

It's not just Starbucks, there is a protectionist vibe here. Whereas in Japan, Starbucks, 7-11, KFC, McDonalds are like mushrooms after the rain, they seem to be much more scarce here and Korean versions give them a run for their money. There is a Costco here in Daejeon, but two indigenous companies, HomePlus and Emart, copy the big box style and forgo the membership model. I might attribute it to the attenuated existential threat mentioned above, leading people to buy and shop Korean.

Another big change was the penetration of cashless transactions. Hardly anyone uses bills (I think this might be one of the reasons why Costco is having trouble, you can't use Korean bank cards there, but I can use the mastercard that I have thru the Japanese Costco, but each time I've used it, the cashier does a double take) A friend said that I might just have been in Japan too long and not caught up with the rest of the world, which is true, but I still find it strange to use a card to pay for a latte or a taxi or a candy bar.

There is a growing scandal about K-pop stars that has a number of very interesting offshoots, but I'll save that for another day. As a way to wrap this up, it seems that Korean society has a lot of mechanisms to keep foreign culture at bay, but in the language, nothing really to hold back the tide.

This post reminds me of the joke about someone who wrote a book entitled Japanese in 4 weeks. The author was confronted by an angry reader who asked how could anyone could write a book with such a misleading title, as it was impossible to learn Japanese in 4 weeks. The author said the title had nothing to do with learning Japanese, it was just a statement about how long it took to write the book...

Anyway, 안녕히계세요!

Comments

[CaseyL]

You are a treasure! It's fascinating to see South Korea through a Japanese lens, with the American lens coming after.

Looking forward to the next installment!

[JanieM]

Agree with CaseyL that this is wonderful, lj. Just a quick comment for the moment, on this:

A friend said that I might just have been in Japan too long and not caught up with the rest of the world, which is true, but I still find it strange to use a card to pay for a latte or a taxi or a candy bar.

I'm with you there. They will pry the cash from my dead, cold hands, and one of the last shreds of possible anonymity with it.

[wj]

I've got my reservations about obligatory military service, but it makes teaching at university a lot easier. Having roughly half the boys with that experience, there is a lot more seriousness than their counterparts in Japan.

I recall a similar lack of seriousness on the part of many students from my own college days. I don't think the critical factor is military service per se.

Rather I think it is a matter of whether the students have had some experience (almost necessarily outside the school environment) where they were forced to take responsibility for themselves and their actions. In short, an enforced reality check -- which doesn't happen when the only situations you have experienced are home, high school, and college.

Professors have long noticed the difference in attitude of students who attended college after working for some time. As I recall, the usual explanation was "older and therefore more mature". But the difference isn't age as such. It's the kinds of experience the student has had.

[Nigel]

Agreed, this is excellent, and I look forward to any further instalments, should you have the time.

How about Subway - is that as common as it is in Korean dramas, or is that simply excessive product placement ?

[Girl from the North Country]

Completely agree on the excellence front.

The UK/London is famous for the ubiquity of CCTV as well, I wonder how it compares with Korea? And of course I'm fascinated by (and hoping for more of) the food-related stuff.

Like Nigel, very much looking forward to the next instalment!

[CharlesWT]

Due to the ubiquity of dashboard cameras in cars in Korean dramas, I thought it might be a legal requirement. On checking it seems the cameras are a defense against staged accidents and insurance companies give car owners a discount for installing them. The cameras are often used as a plot device since, apparently, they're often on even when a car is parked.

[Michael Cain]

It's been 20 years since my sister and her family lived in Daegu, but the stories she still tells are cleaning the soot from the outside air off the inside sills every morning, and her chronic sinus infections that cleared up in three days every time she got back to the US. How's the air these days?

[laura]

One of my clients taught school in Korea years ago and her memories of those years are the few not yet stolen from her by dementia. She especially remembers the pink cherry blossoms and how sweet the children were.

Thank you for this interesting article. I know very little about Korea; you make a good tour guide!

[CharlesWT]

North Koreans come to South Korea expecting a country where their language is spoken. But SK language is peppered with some many English and other foreign words, they often find themselves at a loss.

[liberal japonicus]

Thanks for the comments. Agree with wj that it is not military experience, it is any experience outside of school. The thing is, what sort of experience (outside of progressives dreaming about a required service in the Peace Corps/Americorps) would it be possible to implement so that everyone has to do it? (and the fact that it is only the boys creates some problematic notions in regards to women/equality/feminism)

CCTV, I've not seen comparisons, but this article talks about their prevalence in Korea
https://www.securityinfowatch.com/video-surveillance/press-release/10552614/in-south-korea-cctv-keeps-a-very-close-eye

from the article
CCTV cameras are not the only surveillance method used to track crimes. With seven out of 10 Koreans using mobile phones, tracking call records and locating the owners of the handset has become a convenient method in fighting crime.

and

Since the start of the year, the Seoul Metropolitan Government has been granting a 5 percent discount in automobile taxes and a 2.7 percent discount in auto insurance fees for drivers participating in the 'No Driving Day' campaign, which requires them to leave their vehicles at home for one day a week.

The drivers participating in the program are required to install electronic tags on the front windows of their cars, which allows traffic authorities to track their movement.

The electronic tags attached to cars, enabled with radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology, will broadcast information from the cars to readers the authorities have installed at major traffic points in the city.

This article
https://news.cgtn.com/news/3d51544e78634464776c6d636a4e6e62684a4856/share_p.html
says
The number of closed-circuit cameras installed in public locations in South Korea has more than doubled to nearly 800,000 over the past five years. Including private spaces, that figure balloons to eight million cameras in a country with a population of 50 million.

I've not watched Korean dramas (I really should have to work on the language, but now that I'm here, there is something pathetic about getting wrapped up in something on the screen when I can get out), so I see Subways, but they aren't anything like starbucks or even McDonalds here in Japan, so I suspect there is some product placement going on as does this writer
http://koalasplayground.com/2018/08/22/subway-quadruples-stores-and-sales-in-four-years-thanks-to-k-drama-product-placement/

There's a post there about how much Koreans can be influenced by pop culture that I hope to write in a few months.

And yeah, the air was pretty bad when I got here, and it was apparently particularly bad this year. My throat has been scratchy and I've gone with masks, but I wear glasses, so they have a tendency to fog up.
https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2019/01/14/South-Korea-issues-particle-pollution-warnings/5731547520973/

Finally, about language, I'm sure that is true. My father, when he visited me in Japan 30 years ago, couldn't understand young Japanese, but when we went to an prefectural rest facility onsen full of 60 and 70 year olds, he could understand them with no problem. Again, one advantage in Japanese written language is that foreign words (and therefore new borrowings) are identified by the katakana script, but that is not available for Korean.

[Hartmut]

How does Korean script deal with the tonality of the language?

[liberal japonicus]

Hartmut, the script just gets across the sounds, there's no (I think) prosodic information there. Though I'm coming up blank with a language that does have prosodic information in the script.

[Doctor Science]

This is a great post, LJ! I look forward to seeing more from you about this cross-cultural adventure.

Speaking of which, one reason I kind of dropped off the radar around here recently is that I fell into a Chinese drama (Guardian 镇魂 and can't get up.

And in two weeks Mr Dr Science gets a robot hip, to go with his 2 robot knees!

[Hartmut]

lj, Vietnamese uses the Latin alphabet but with
tons of diacritics to indicate tone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_alphabet
It's an exception though. Must be a real pain to type on a normal keyboard.

[liberal japonicus]

You are right Hartmut, I didn't think of Vietnamese even though I've been studying it off and on for the past 10 years. I tend to study it (and Korean) like Kurt Vonnegut (I think) described someone learning a language (and it may have been Korean), the person treated them like bird songs and just responded in kind (I'd be indebted if anyone could find that quote, so I know I'm not just making it up)

With Thai, you can read the tones off the script because they pattern with particular letter combinations, so even in the absence of diacritics, there is some tonal information there. Korean isn't a tonal language, but Middle Korean was tonal and some of that was retained in some dialects so you have a pitch accent system like you have in Japanese, where some words can be distinguished (HAshi vs. haSHI/chopsticks vs. bridge) but regional accents/dialects can have an effect.

Anyway back to learning Korean, I was trying to pronounce the phrase
엊떻게 지내세요/eo-tteoke jinaeseyo, and the last word sounds like it is french je ne sais yo, which is how I remember it, so the half remembered phrase about learning a language like it was birdsongs strikes a chord.

I may have mentioned this, but I've been using the app Drops
https://languagedrops.com/
which isn't designed specificially for Korean (in fact, I was talking to a bartender about her 주서기/juseogi and she said that isn't a word (it's the thing that you use for juicing lemons and I thought it was a juicer, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juicer>wikipedia said that it is more precisely called a reamer) (unfortunately, I forgot the Korean name she told me, so another bar crawl is in order) But it is unfortunate because a mixer is a 믹서기/mikseogi and the gi suffix is often attached to things that are tools it seems.

And I bring this up because the Drops program always puts up words so that the final part is prominent. If it did it in English, (and it may do this), when it gives you parts of words, it would always have the -er/-or suffix as a building block so you get to a point where you identify those syllables and always put them at the end, which is interesting, but it has me thinking that there is more regularity then is actually there.

[William Jouris]

For that matter, even English orthography has some ways to indicate tone. They are generally called punctuation marks (e.g "?"), but viewed from a distance, what they indicate is tone.

[Nigel]

I hadn’t realised the birthdate in Korea is almost as low as that in Japan:
http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201905050008.html

[Nigel]

The partnership between Vietnam and South Korea which has arisen in the last decade is a remarkable story:
https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Asia-Insight/South-Korea-banks-on-Vietnam-alliance-after-China-chill

[wj]

No doubt South Korea and Vietnam are glad for each other now. With the US being feckless, any neighbor of China is going to be thankful for every relationship they've got.