Press Freedom: KBS Walkout and the Steady Decline of Press Freedom in Korea

So on Facebook tonight, from a handful of friends, the word was that KBS only aired 20 minutes of news during the 9pm broadcast, and then finished the hour off with marine wildlife.

Photo from a Facebook friend: turtles gettin' busy

The Korea Times reported that KBS reporters have walked off the job as a way of demanding the resignation of the CEO, who is accused of trying to influence programming to be more friendly to the president, and to appoint people friendly to the president to important positions in the organization. More here.

The Sewol Tragedy once again plays into this series of events: the public accounting for poor media coverage of the disaster and rescue started days ago, with apologies and self-reflection. One aspect of that has been, again, suppressing or massaging stories in order to make sure the President appears in a positive light.

Related, on May 1st, Reporters Without Borders released its 2014 World Press Freedom Index, which reports on the media environment of the previous year. Visit it here. Read The Press Freedom Index's methodology here. (PDF) South Korea ranked 57th in the world, seven places down from last year.

Korea's press freedom index rankings have been on a steady decline for a while. Here are the results since 2002: The first column is the year. The second column is South Korea's ranking in the world, and the third is Korea's score. A 0.00 score means a perfectly free press, and a 100 score means a total lack of press freedom. The scoring system was re-calibrated in 2013, when Reporters Without Borders started tracking incidents of censorship, and other countable items, themselves, instead of through the word of their contacts (hence the big jump from '12 to '13).

Year     Rank      Score
2002     39          10.50
2003     49          9.17
2004     48          11.13
2005     34          7.5
2006     31          7.75
2007     39          12.13
2008     47          9
2009     69          15.67 (low point due to the 2008 beef protests and government response)
2010     42          13.33
'11-12   44          12.67
2013     50          24.48
2014     57          25.66

The high point for Korea's press freedom was 2006, meaning that in 2005, South Korean media faced less censorship and manipulation than any other year. Since then, with a blip in 2010 (after a low point in 2009), the slide has been fairly steady, dropping between 2 and 8 places per year. These drops were not large enough in any one year to attract special mention in any of Reporters Without Borders' global summary reports, but dropping 26 places from 2006 to 2014... bothers me.

Freedom House, which also reports on press freedom worldwide, downgraded South Korea's rating from "Free" to "Partly Free" in 2011, again due to government intervention in media coverage -- presidential appointments to important media outlet positions, again. (More on the 2014 report here) (Freedom House's 2013 report on South Korea here. Nice and concise.)

In 2011, Frank LaRue, special rapporteur to the UN, also reported on freedom of expression in South Korea. His final UN repot, however, mentions South Korea in specific only a handful of times: this Amnesty International report puts those points all in one place.

The National Security Act - read Amnesty International's report  -- was written in 1948, and has a kind of a cold war "Blank Check" feel to it, with some vague wording about "anti-state activity" that can cover just about anything, in case the KCIA ever needs to trump up some charges. Read up.

Now, I get it, that as recently as the 1980s, South Korea had extremely limited press freedom, and robust and vigorous institutions don't just install themselves overnight-especially institutions with as many moving parts as a free press, and especially installed right on top of a non-free, censored and manipulated press. And being really healthy for a while doesn't mean a long-free press can't suddenly take a nosedive (even the USA, our self-proclaimed model democracy, has had some embarrassing drops). On the other hand, the fact that South Korea's not only backsliding, but steadily backsliding over an extended period, bugs me a lot, and I find it cynical and spurious that the fangless North Korean threat is still being invoked in order to block that website, delete that tweet, and hound that reporter. The antidote for speech you don't like is more speech, not censorship, and a robust democracy is confident enough in itself that it can bear the existence of a fringe movement without flipping the f-stop out.

I and a few friends have been working on a podcast lately called the Cafe Seoul Podcast, and our latest episode was inspired by Korea's slide in press freedom rankings, but the KBS walkout seems like a good time to share it.

Here is the podcast episode. In it, I interview John Power, who has worked as a reporter for a few of Korea's English language outlets. In case you aren't interested in the other stuff (awesome as it is), the interview starts at 33:40.

The darn thing won't embed, so here's the link.

The interview was edited a bit for length, so here is the raw cut of the full interview... because especially when the topic is free speech, I feel like listeners deserve to hear all the questions and answers.

And here's the link for this one.

And here it is on SoundCloud.


And here are the questions I asked John Power, and the times you can skip to, to find them:
2:00 - "Tell us about yourself"
2:30 - "Why is press freedom vital for a healthy democracy?"
3:18 - "Freedom house reports press freedom worldwide is on the decline, and other countries in Asia are dropping or ranked lowly on press freedom indexes; what's going on, and do you think the conditions in other countries affect what happens in Korea?"
6:00 - "Who are some of the players that are affecting press freedom in Korea for the better or for the worse?"
9:20 - [Bearing in mind cases like Na Gom-su-da and the blogger Minerva cases] "Can you explain for our readers what a chilling effect?"
10:30 - "In your opinion, what are steps that cold be taken to get Korea climbing instead of dropping in these press freedom indexes?"
14:50 - "In response to what some see as the corporatization of Korean (and world) media, some have pointed to social media and citizen journalism as the antidote… what are your thoughts on this?
17:35 - "Who do you trust more to handle Korea’s media responsibly: the chaebol, the government, “citizen journalists” or who?"
18:45 - Other Cafe Seoul cast members join.
20:40 - The National Security Act is still invoked because "There are North Korean spies out there" - is that a big enough threat to be concerned about, and censor, media?

24:00 - Differences between the way Korea is reported on in English, and in Korean.

26:15 - Have you ever had a story you worked on censored? Have you ever self-censored?

Elegy for the Sewol Tragedy: Waiting For A Miracle. Some personal thoughts

Read KimchiBytes.
Read The Secret Map's fictional "letter from Sewol"
Read Brother Anthony and Korean poet Ko-Un's creative effort: art and grief go together well.
Photos taken at the City Hall and Cheonggyecheon Plaza memorials for the Sewol Ferry victims.

The character 왜 means "Why"
Why why why why why?

Analysis aside, here are some personal thoughts:

If you're connected to Korea, you've probably spotted this image. On social media, everyone had this image or a yellow ribbon like it as their online profile photos.

The Korea Herald explains that the yellow ribbon campaign commemorated, and as time went by, mourned the victims of the April 16 Sewol Ferry disaster. The text says "하나의 작은 움직임이 큰기적을," translated by The Herald as "one small movement, big miracles." The ribbon pictured first turned up on April 21st, but there were no such miracles after the rescues made on the first day. We are still waiting.

As the mourning continues, I notice something I have always admired about Koreans:  in times of great joy or crisis, the entire nation galvanizes. South Korea is usually fractured and polarized: north/south, Gyeongsan/Jeolla, political and class and generational fault lines all regularly explode into public antipathy. Yet World Cup Fever still carries everyone away, the figure skating hero captures our eyes and dreams, and then she is no longer Yuna Kim, but "Our Yuna." It becomes "Our team." There is also "Korea's singer" "Korea's little sister" and Korea's representative X in diverse fields. When a Korean does well abroad they are suddenly everyone's brother, sister, uncle, aunt. The same spirit brings Korea together in times of grief and crisis. People pulled gold teeth out of their mouths, and gave up heirloom gold, to help out during the 1997 Financial crisis. Why? Because it's "Our" country, and "Our" crisis. Much of the language at the Sewol memorial in City Hall is familial, or collective.

At the City Hall Plaza memorial.
Those yellow ribbon images again.

This heart was made of yellow paper boats, hand-folded.

And all of Korea grieves now, because these are "Our" children, taken away through entirely preventable causes. "We" failed to protect them. "We" let scofflaws and crooks willfully put lives at risk over a profit margin, and it is already too late for "our" lost children.

One feeling I've picked up is that these are not isolated cases, either. "We" feel that it could have been any of us. Everybody went on school trips like this. One day my son will. Everybody has boarded a train or a boat not knowing whether it cleared its last inspection with room to spare, or just barely, or only because somebody was hurried, or called in a favor. On the streets, we have all passed the preschool with a plastic slide instead of a fire escape, tut-tutted helmet-less scooter drivers weaving through traffic. In my first year, a fire lit by some kid in my seventh floor hagwon was doused with water carried from the bathroom sink, because the legally required fire extinguishers were locked in the owner's office. In my second year, our seventh-story kindergarten had one day of classes on the second floor while the fire inspector came by, because the seventh floor had a permit for special activities but not regular classes. Our secondary fire escape was a pulley. Just this January, I saw a car tear through a crosswalk at passing lane speed, and had a middle-school girl crossed two steps faster, I would have seen her die. These are anecdata: not much on their own, but Korea's workplace injury and traffic fatality statistics confirm what the smell test suggests: there but for the grace of God go any of us.

This "Graduation class photo" really hit me.

News stories corroborate. Here, Popular Gusts lists some of the incidents that could been wake-up calls. Fake certificates at a nuclear plant. The Daegu subway fire. Sampoong Department Store. Seongsu Bridge. These names are repeated like a shaman's grief ritual. All the low or no-casualty incidents like this (KTX 2013) and this (KTX 2011) appear and disappear on page 6 of the paper. Remember the time Lotte Adventure in Jamsil was shut down? Barely a blip on the public memory radar. And the most recent collision between two subway trains, only a few weeks after this tragedy suggests that those in charge of safety standards are still dropping balls.

At times like this it feels to me like Korea is two different countries at the same time, one built right on top of the other. The first is a corrupt kleptocracy, a country of dirty fire traps, short cuts and sweat shops, held together by guts and profit, run by wealthy wheeler-dealers with well-placed friends, populated with beaten down factory workers, low-wage drones, headlong delivery drivers, and the discarded humans who didn't run fast enough, now collecting recycling material on the street. Buildings with poor foundations, sketchy wiring, bad welding and corners that aren't square, literally or figuratively. Get it done, do it fast, next contract. All of Korea looked this way from the 1950s to the late 80s. Let's call it Grimy Old Korea, and have a moment of silence for Jeon Tae-il, the martyr of Grimy Old Korea, and the patron saint of what came after.

Korean language doesn't always include pronouns.
Literally, it says: "Sorry. Won't forget you."
Spirit of the phrase: "We're sorry. We won't forget you."
People could lay white flowers on the display, and bow.

There is another Korea built over top of Grimy Old Korea. Construction started in the 1990s. This is a Korea where taking a year abroad happens. Where kids grew up with cellphones, and people visit coffee shops and have photo blogs. Its citizens grew up wondering where to find free wi-fi, unlike their grandparents, who grew up wondering if they would eat meat that week. In this Korea people buy organic. They buy new shoes instead of visiting the cobbler near the bus stop. They wrinkle noses at squatter toilets. Let's call the country they live in Shiny New Korea. It has public parks that are no smoking zones. Grimy Old Korea smokes there anyways, though.

At City Hall 

Money is part of it, of course. Living in Shiny New Korea is pay as you go, and Korea is as safe as you can afford it to be, up to a point. Not all rich are part of Shiny New Korea, though. If you've ever had gangsters evict a tenant, or settled a grievance with a lead pipe, you're part of Grimy Old Korea. And not everyone trying to inhabit Shiny New Korea is privileged: the distinction cuts across generation and education and geographical region as well as class. Many would-be Shiny New Citizens are simply concerned parents and grandparents, buying second-hand foreign imports less for the prestige and more for the assurance that German and Swedish inspection codes are less susceptible to greasy palms. They scour blogs and word-of-mouth networks to verify what's good, what's safe, which preschools meet fire codes and run background checks on their teachers, and which restaurants don't disinfect. Those hours spent looking things up are the tribute they pay to ward Grimy Old Korea off another day.

The parents and grandparents with blood, skin, and kin in the game hope public transportation and public buildings are managed and inspected by members of Shiny New Korea, doing their jobs to the letter, and not the other kind. But even if you spare no cost, track the user reviews and get the import with extra airbags, sometimes Grimy Old Korea runs a red light coming the other way, and there's nothing you can do. Grimy Old Korea cannot be shut out entirely, and it can snatch away your kid, your dream, or your health, just like that.

To be fair, Grimy Old Korea had a good run, and accomplished a lot: the vitality, the entrepreneurship, the energy and determination of those same generations that filled the country breakneck quick with fire traps, tombstone apartment blocks and smokestacks, also demanded and achieved, at great human cost, a democracy wherein the Shiny New Citizens are free to complain about the wi-fi. Korea's modern history is knotty, and resists simplifying narratives.

Memorial at Cheonggyecheon Plaza

Academics and technocrats would employ the language of uneven development: advancement always follows the money first, before extending to everyone else. And in a country that developed as quickly as South Korea, it's no surprise that the contrast is sharp. Parts of this country feel like somebody threw a white tablecloth over a table cluttered with takeout. Of course the crystalware is crooked: there's a side dish beneath it! But with countries, you can't just clear and wipe the table before setting out the nicer new dishes. And some of the old dishes are nice, in their fashion.

Shiny New Korea and Grimy Old Korea don't often see eye to eye. Grimy Old Korea sidesteps the accusations of recklessness and ruthlessness with the language of nation building. It takes a tragedy like this for Grimy Old Korea to hang its head, to stop pleading "It's what everybody was doing!" and agree that they all rushed too quick, overlooked too much, and favored filling their own coffers over designing a nation made for its people.

Inside a globe of yellow ribbons:
the white flowers used in Korean funerals

Maybe this tragedy, after so many ignored warnings, will finally be the violent turning of a new leaf. Maybe the shame on one side, and rage on the other, will finally stop settling for band-aid solutions and transmute into real change, real accountability, until Grimy Old Korea is a closed chapter, and public safety is no longer a luxury for the moneyed. That would be a different kind of miracle than we started off hoping for.

There was a promise implicitly made in Grimy Old Korea's heyday, that the nation under construction would be worth the work. That sacrifice and strain would mean future generations enjoy a better nation than the parents inherited. That was the deal. There is a yearning for Korea to be prosperous, but to round that out by also being compassionate, not just toward shareholders, but toward the strangers who live and die, grieve and starve, and still check nervously for Grimy Old Korea barreling toward them at every crosswalk.

I wish that the next generation of leaders, contractors and entrepreneurs would see their neighbors, and moreover their customers, tenants and passengers, as part of the great "We," not just during times of crisis and joy, but all the time. The delivery that we want right now is not the one that buzzed by on a sidewalk motorbike, with a metal takeout box that nearly clipped my son. We'd rather have those in power deliver on that promise made in the 60s and 70s, that one day we will be able to enjoy, in peace and safety, the fruit of the sacrifices and griefs we have been asked to bear for too too long. We've worked so hard and lost so much: why are we still so unhappy? Why do these things still happen?

The takeout delivery always arrives on time, but the delivery that really matters, has been delayed again and again. And with our yellow ribbons waving in the downtown, maybe that is the miracle we are still waiting for.

People could write a note on these papers. So I did.

A Few More Links On Culture

Here:
Read two examples of ways to talk about culture (in the broader sense)

From the New York Times - "The Case For Disobedience" which includes these lines, which I think are crucial to understanding the public response, and the most relevant cultural angle to the issue:

“The elder generation’s responsibility for the younger generation has always been a central Korean value,” Christopher Hill, a former U.S. ambassador to Seoul and the Dean of the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver, told me. “It’s absolutely counter-cultural to have crew members not take responsibility, which explains the national revulsion.”

From Jason Lim, for The Korean Herald - "But Korean Culture Is To Blame" talks about the culture of unbridled capitalism and profit-seeking, the way too many Koreans, for too long, have been willing to sacrifice too many other concerns, for profit. If you stretch the meaning of culture one way -- to mean the behavior and values reflected in every day life, then it's a cultural argument. If you stretch culture the other way, to mean the framework of ideals reaching out of the past, you'd say "that's not culture: profit isn't a Confucian value!" Defining terms helps. The other most relevant way culture plays in:

But it’s not just the love of money. After all, who doesn’t like money? But it’s the almost Machiavellian pursuit of money, growth, and success that has reached its peculiar zenith in Korea and trampled any other considerations in its way, including safety. The Washington Post quotes Professor Lee Chang-won of Hansung University as he poses the question, “The thinking is, is it worth stalling progress to deal with these regulations if there’s only a 1-in-10 million chance of something going wrong?”

In my book, this is a legitimate cultural argument, because profit is one of the values and priorities by which Koreans make judgments and decisions for action. Held up to survey results like these - wherein 2010 a larger percentage of Koreans listed wealth as the most important determiner of success than any other country, and had a top 5 result in this one. Is that a slam dunk proof? No. But it's enough to warrant further investigation.

Sky Kauweola's Tumblr blog has a piece about Cultural Determinism and the "Fundamental Attribution Error" I name-checked but didn't really expand upon in my last post. I encourage you to read it.

That article also links to a discussion of the obedience issue, in the context of older studies on "destructive obedience" - obedience of authorities, even when it goes against one's better judgment: the famous Milgram experiments (where doctors told subjects to administer electric shocks to unseen victims, and the rate at which people delivered strong enough shocks to kill -- even while hearing screams of pain -- because the Doctor told them to, was shockingly high.

Bringing the Milgram experiments into the discussion of hierarchy and obedience to authority is an extremely useful addition to the conversation. Humans do seem wired to obey authorities and leaders, which is why (as protests online and offline gain steam) the point comes home, again and again how important it is for us to choose the right leaders.

Sewol Ferry and Problems with Citing Culture

In the last post (part 1 is here) I wrote a rundown of the (large large) number of articles that use the Sewol Ferry tragedy as a jumping-off point for discussions about Korean culture.

(A few newer articles I liked, and one overly masochistic one:
Jae-ha Kim's culture post
WSJ's Korea Real Time blog - Blame and Shame
A journalist, on the ethics of overcoverage and media treatment of the disaster. One of my favorite takes on the story so far.
Letter asking the president to step down goes viral.
A discussion of "parachute appointments" - where retired government ministry workers move into leadership positions in the private sector, such that personal relationships rather than institutions drive public/private relationships, and cronyism gets entrenched
When self-flagellation goes to far, you see this from the official government website.)


In this post, I'd like to talk specifically about why the culture angle is troublesome. A few things:

The Various Meanings Thing

It doesn't take much exploring to see that even when culture is under discussion, people have different ideas of what culture means, what aspect of a culture needs to change, and how to do that. This is the first problem with citing culture to explain phenomena: when somebody says "culture" it could mean any of the following:

1. Arts and media, overall
2. Arts and media of the elites. Or of the common folk, specifically.
3. Arts and media of the elites, or the common folk, in an arbitrarily chosen and usually idealized time in the past
4. Patterns of behavior in very specific contexts, among specific groups, sometimes even in specific locations (Korean test culture, gamer culture, rape culture, Portland hipster culture)
5. General, broad patterns of behavior, communication, and so forth, in a society
6. The framework of generally shared beliefs and values in a society, which contribute to the patterns of behavior in #5
7. Anything that happens that someone likes/dislikes, wants to preserve/change, or is similar to/different from how things happen where (or when) the observer is from
8. Anything someone who's "not from around here" notices more than once, the cause or purpose of which they can't easily ascertain 
9. A set of prescriptions (usually made by elites or fuddy-duddies) that young, or uneducated, or cosmopolitan, or provincial, or vulgar people should obey, and if they don't, they will be to blame when the country goes to hell in a hand-basket
10. All of the above in a big undifferentiated lump, often saddled with an explicit or implicit judgment

With so many meanings, conversation about culture would clearly work best if people paused to clarify what they mean by culture, and any participant considers that two people working on different definitions will talk past each other. All parties should also be alert to anyone who's moving the goalposts, accidentally or on purpose.

More to the point, if someone hasn't really thought about, or clarified what they mean when they say 'culture', it's much less likely that a line of thought starting on a muddy and ill-defined notion will end in a place that's clear and illuminating: Mythbusters literalism notwithstanding, you can't polish a turd.

TL/DR: The word culture can be used to refer to a lot of different things, so it's helpful to specify what you and others mean when you start tossing the word around

The Broad Brush vs. Getting Specific Thing 

Culture has a lot of definitions, but some of them can be quite all-encompassing. It's fun to paint with a broad brush, but glossing over details is risky: it's hard to know which details not to gloss. Culture is often part of an event, an issue, or the decisions people make, but it's most often several steps removed from the actual, immediate causes. It influences history more in a Rube Goldberg sort of way, than in a smoking gun sort of way.



The risk is that by focusing too much on culture, more immediate causes get ignored, which would be irresponsible.

And even when there is a pattern, there is a high burden of proof on anyone asserting that it is a cultural issue before anything else. You have to first identify, then show that all those other factors are less relevant than culture. Even if you can show that something happens only in Korea, or in a special way in Korea, you still have to demonstrate that it isn't any of the other features unique to the Korean situation, but culture. Unless you've defined culture so broadly that everything is culture, in which case the term is uselessly broad.

In the Sewol Ferry case, safety standard adherence (protocols, corner-cutting and greed) safety awareness (education, training of staff and officials), regulation (government institutions), implementation (transparency, corruption, rule of law), and enforcement (institutional efficiency, rule of law, cronyism, corruption) are all areas to look at before the nebulous "culture," and are all areas that every society struggles to deal with effectively and efficiently. Can culture be an exacerbating factor in any of these areas? Sure it can. But decisive? The burden of proof is on you to show how culture is the most important factor, in concrete and specific ways that are actionable through policies and interventions. If you can, you've accomplished something really useful.

TL/DR: Apply Occam's razor before positing culture as the decisive factor in something. Or add some qualifiers.

The Identity Thing

Because the word "culture" can mean all kinds of things, all the way up to "the entirety of how a society organizes perceives, represents and perpetuates itself," even somebody speaking an a narrower, limited sense of culture (for example, 'dating culture'), can be misunderstood to be speaking in the broadest sense possible, or making implicit judgments about the broad culture, by the way they talk about the specific one. This sometimes causes defensiveness, because people often take their culture as an important part of their identity. I have witnessed people defending things they admitted, upon cooling down, were mostly indefensible, simply because they felt that an outsider was attacking their culture in ignorance or spite.

Interestingly, people tend much less to get their backs up when one speaks more specifically. Talking about institutionalizing safety inspections or removing corruption from regulatory bodies provokes the rising of many fewer hackles than talking about a culture that does not value human life, to take the Sewol ferry case. If you cannot tell the difference between talking about a culture of corruption and talking about a corrupt culture, you will have a hard time avoiding defensive reactions.

TL/DR: People tend to associate their culture with their identity, so either get ready for defensiveness, or use more careful and specific language.


The Agency Thing, The Arrogance Thing, and The Monolith Thing

Spend a minute reading what fundamental attribution errors and ecological fallacies are.

Sometimes, inlaid in discussion of culture, is the idea that people have a hard time acting outside of their culture's patterns - that their culture defines the limits of their possible behavior. This is "cultural determinism." It often comes with the attitude that everybody within a culture shares some unchangeable fundamental traits (Essentialism). Or that "those people" are somehow fundamentally "different from us" (Orientalism). These attitudes frame a discussion as if cultures were more powerful than individuals' decision-making abilities -- that the kids on that ferry really WOULD obey the captain's orders even to the point of risking their own lives.

By skipping too quickly past other causes in which human choice is more prominent, or focusing too emphatically on culture, we're treating people as if they don't even control their own decisions, and letting some off the hook too easily. Can we offer all sound-minded human beings the dignity not to put culture above personal agency? (That's a rhetorical question. Yes we can. And we need to.) Culture doesn't take away our power to make decisions, nor our responsibility for them. Using culture to try and get a free pass, or let someone off the hook because they "couldn't help it" because of their culture is dehumanizing, and either condescending or disingenuous.

One more thing (slippery slope warning): elevating culture to the point that it completely, or significantly, determines a person and a society's entire range of possibilities and potentials echoes an ugly period in history. The attitude that some cultural features put a ceiling on a society's potential for attainment or development was used a long time ago to justify "advanced" countries colonizing "primitive" cultures. Including Korea. (cf: The White Man's Burden). Even today, the words "traditional" or "indigenous" are sometimes code words for "backwards" or "uncivilized." Watch for that.

Cultures are not undifferentiated monoliths and hive minds, nor are they fixed and unchanging, nor do they appear out of an ahistorical vaccuum, nor are they rigid determiners of their members' abilities choices or potentials. Cultures contain diverse elements, they change constantly, in response to specific events conditions and stimuli, and people constantly stretch the definition by not fitting the mold. Muddy, vague, context-removed generalizations about culture deny all of this.

TL/DR: Saying culture took away someone's ability to make a rational decision is degrading. Humans have brains, and make choices, and are accountable for them.

The Silencing Thing


All those complex forces that influence cultural change? All those debates and discussion about identity, history, priority and future that, all together, comprise a society's conversation with itself about what kind of society it is? Those conversations are full of voices. Voices from people inside the culture. Who experience it first hand and know it intimately. Who are the very best source of knowledge and insight into the nature of a society, and whose conversations provide concrete examples of how cultural backgrounds manifest in actual social behavior. And whose assent is needed if anyone wants to create any kind of cultural change. And ignoring all that contestation, all those contradicting voices, all those ideas and values and conflicts, in order to fit some image, silences them.

There is no need to speak on behalf of the members of a society, as they have their own voices, and the best commenters start with references to those voices. Denying a society's members the chance to speak for themselves is another way of dehumanizing a group. And it's been done too often, to all kinds of groups, and every time it happens, we are poorer for the lost opportunity to learn something new. And this is what it looks like to people who actually know the conditions on the ground. Some of the cultural discussions regarding the Sewol disaster have reflected, and been reflected by sources written by Koreans, for Koreans. Others have not. Guess which ones I take more seriously.

A discussion of culture that is not in tune with what people in a culture are saying themselves, is woefully incomplete, and could never persuade them to affect cultural change anyway.

TL/DR: Societies are full of self-aware people who make good points about what their culture/society is, and what it needs, and they deserve your attention.

The Complex Text Thing

Because culture is such a big, messy, slippery, contradictory thing, it is possible to find confirmation of just about anything one wants to find. Wanna prove Koreans are backwards and provincial? Chat up some folks in the countryside or an old, low-income neighborhood. Wanna prove they're hip and cosmopolitan? Head to Garosugil.

You can conclude Koreans are incredibly polite or rude, loud or quiet, shy or ribald, moderate or intemperate, generous or ruthless, all depending where you fix your gaze, in the same way that the same bible was used to support the Civil Rights Movement and to justify slavery. Koreans slavishly obey authorities? That chapter in Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers, the way public schools are generally run, something about North Korea's Cult of Kim, and this spurious "death by obedience" explanation support the narrative. Koreans mistrust authorities and have a cherished history of defiance? Donghak peasant revolt, March 1st Movement, 1961, 1980, 1987, and 2008 corroborate that.

Somehow everybody seems to find what they're looking for. (Source)

Yes, there are prevailing patterns, which can be identified. A culture is not a pure ink blot with no meaning or form at all, but the whole system is so complex, dynamic, and contradictory that anybody who wants to go there needs to step carefully and offer more than anecdotes.

TL/DR: Cultures and societies are so complex you can prove anything by focusing your gaze in the right place. It doesn't mean you've made a compelling case.


Conclusion: Enough Lecturing Already, Roboseyo!

So is culture off the table entirely? No. Of course not. But it should be clear by now that bringing culture into a discussion is a minefield: there are more ways of doing it wrong than doing it right, and it should be done with tact, rigor, or both. Both. Minefields are most safely navigated when you know where the mines are hidden, obviously.

It should also be clear that the person with the most credibility is the one who is in tune with the voices on the ground. Is a foreign correspondent the only one talking culture of obedience? Someone who doesn't even live here? Do your Korean friends shake their heads vigorously when you posit culture of obedience as a contributing factor, or do they nod sadly? Does the article you just read reflect the discussions actually happening AMONG THE PEOPLE CONCERNED?? Is their take gaining domestic traction, getting translated and forwarded among Koreans? Because the word coming through translation is talking about crony culture, of corruption and corner-cutting culture, not hierarchy and obedience.

Can we talk about safety regulation, implementation and enforcement in Korea without bringing culture into it? We sure can!

We could start with Heinrich's Law - Heinrich studied industrial safety in the early 1900s (in America, which also had to take some time to figure things out, and still regularly muffs it), and found that for every accident causing major injury or death, there were 29 similar accidents causing a minor injury, and 300 no-injury accidents -- close calls and such.

A quick google search reveals that Heinrich's law is still being debated and challenged today... but the big takeaway is this: accidents don't occur out of the blue. Before The Big One happens, there are warning signs - minor incidents - that attentive and proactive leaders/inspectors/regulators/staff members can identify. There are measures that can be taken so that the big one doesn't come to pass. Big accidents aren't one-offs, in most cases: they're convergences of lots of factors. Fatigue and bad visibility and a rushed itinerary and mechanical failure and late response and lack of training and failure to accurately assess the situation and a badly timed hangover, and and and. The Sewol disaster has been dissected at least enough by now that it's clear this is the case here as well.

These direct influences must be addressed effectively. No discussion of culture is needed. Now... why has corner-cutting been tolerated? Why is there so much cronyism between national associations and government ministries? Why have so many warnings gone ignored? We're getting meta now, which is fine after the most pressing issues have been addressed. And maybe maybe maybe culture plays into that, and let's have a conversation about it! I'm sure the locals have lots of good things to add, and are hoping their leaders will be decisive and clear-minded enough to create useful solutions, systems that are designed for early recognition of problems, that have regulatory teeth to punish corner-cutters, and not just stopgap and politically convenient band-aid solutions.

Wouldn't it be nice if all the public anger got channeled toward such solutions rather than cultural self-excoriations! Would that this new enthusiasm for due diligence and safety awareness got extended to all kinds of other sectors... I'm sure you can guess which. One of them involves better use of traffic cameras.

In Part 3, I'll talk about Culturalism, as per Ask A Korean, and Culturalism, as per what it actually is.

Sewol Ferry, Safety Awareness and Citing Culture: A Rundown

You have heard, no doubt, about the Korean Sewol Ferry disaster still in progress off Korea's southwest coast. The death toll keeps climbing, and the window for living survivors closed days ago. Part of the families', and public anger is due to the fact much of the pivotal first hours were wasted by slow or disorganized responses. The rescue and salvage reports are one heartbreak after another.

Prayers and heartfelt condolences to the families, and to everybody touched by loss in this tragedy.

Some links for reading:
This Chosun Ilbo article lists  the many things that went wrong.
And this Joongang editorial gives a pretty good glimpse of how emotionally distraught the public mood is, and how Koreans have been excoriating their own society because of this tragedy.
That the (normally tight-lipped) president herself has laid a judgment on the crew that bailed out too early, calling their desertion of duty "like an act of murder" (the Guardian didn't like that) gives you a sense of just how hot public emotion is running regarding this.
The tragedy has even impacted the Korean economy.
The official main cause of the capsize has now been announced.
Andrew Salmon's latest piece for Forbes, discussing first world hardware/infrastructure vs. not-yet-first-world software/norms and practices, and his first piece, about Korean leadership, has a great closing paragraph. His piece in South China Morning Post, where he was the first to mention a culture of obedience, not so much.

For more of my own views, a podcast I'm involved in just covered the issue.

There were some heroes. But not enough.

Prayers and heartfelt condolences to the families, and to everybody touched by loss in this tragedy.

Unlike previous events like the Daegu subway fire or the Namdaemun Arson, this one doesn't begin with an unwell person planning an act of malice. This is the convergence of an aggregation of small human errors that, each one on its own, could have been untangled, but with an unhappy convergence, the knot just got too big. One too many corners cut. One too many excuses made, shortcuts taken, standards glossed over, regulations hand-waved, and suddenly we're expecting about 300 dead, many of them high school students. And the fact it was children on a class trip really brought it close to home, because every Korean adult went on class trips like this in school.

Koreans have been very hard on themselves as a country... so much so, that I'd suggest readers take any editorial they've read with a grain of salt, as many of them have put more weight on the emotive side than the analytical. I've heard from a few people the sentiment that "we've just been pretending to be an advanced nation all this time" -- somebody told me there's a Korean saying that a wooden water bucket is only as deep as the shortest piece of wood, equivalent to the English "a chain is only as strong as its weakest link" - meaning that shortcomings in some areas undermine all the advancement Korea has made in other areas. So do us all a favor, readers, and don't take lines like "We’re like Stone Age cavemen waving smartphones in the air. Look at us!" completely at face value, or pull them out next time you're trying to prove a point about Korea. These are emotionally charged times, and some people have right lost their perspective. That's allowed. No need to be a jerk about it.

Source

There's a lot of public anger for failures at every level -- from crew, to captain, to the company, to safety inspectors, to government emergency response protocols and organizations, and the media has made an even bigger mess of things, rushing a number of false stories to press, only to be embarrassed when those text messages, and that diver giving interviews, turned out to be fakes.

And the online commentary has run the full gamut, from sharp and pointed, to vague, mushy and half-baked. And, of course, somebody brought in the cultural explanation.

The Korea Times here mentions two outlets -- CNN and Time, that suggested Korea's Confucian heritage would make the students more likely to follow the orders to stay below deck until it was too late to save themselves. Financial Times also critiques the cultural argument.

In the remainder of this post, I'm going to run down some links where you can read up different views of different cultural arguments. In my next post, I'm going to get a bit more general, in discussing why the cultural argument has problems, what they are, and how to avoid them. Click on the links in this one to read various positions on something that's now being hotly discussed in various places.

Blogger Waegukin, who actually works with Korean high school students, does a handy dismantling of the idea Korean students would be obedient past the point of self-preservation, saying,

"We’ll never know exactly what happened to the students on the boat: what choices they made and what they tried to do. But one thing I am certain about: they died as thinking individuals, with individual dreams for the future, doing their best to survive and help their friends. To suggest otherwise is grotesque." 

Jakob Dorof, at Vice Magazine, of all places, launches another successful rebuttal... by actually knowing more about Confucianism than "uh... something about hierarchies." He gets a block quote, too (my emphasis in bold):

In truth, however, the catch-all of “South Korean culture,” or even neo-Confucian obedience in particular, fails to account for what happened on Wednesday. The problem with such arguments is their suggestion not only that the Sewol crew and harbor officials were blinded from moral responsibility by cultural programming, but also that the hundreds of students and others left on the ship were socially hardwired automatons who, though cognizant of their ability to escape, felt too inhibited by a respect for their elders to move. This is excessively reductive, for one, but falls apart altogether when you consider that many of the people who stayed onboard were in fact elders of the crew. Furthermore, if Confucian doctrine were the be-all and end-all under these circumstances, then what of li—a fundamental Confucian precept that encourages those beneath an authority to disregard orders if they seem irrational or unjust?

His article also goes into specific detail about what was happening when, with a timeline of events, and then he puts his finger on something much more plausible, and the one that's been much discussed in local media: "The real problem, at all levels, seems to be protocol—or rather, the absence of one." The Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, and Choe Sang-hun's piece in the New York Times all devote significant column space to the problem of poor awareness, training, and adherence to safety protocols in South Korea, as does the local paper of note, the Chosun Ilbo. I can't find back the article that mentions the fact that... in every other case except the one where the captain and crew panic and bail, the best way to survive an accident like this is to follow instructions from people are trained for dealing with them. The problem is that in this case, that trust was misplaced. The people who were supposed to be able to assess the situation accurately and choose the actions that minimize loss of life failed. And why they failed is the conversation that needs to happen. I would be horrified if the next time there's a ferry mishap in Korea, dozens of passengers panic and jump overboard in life jackets, or unnecessarily commandeer life boats because they don't trust the crew telling them that in most cases, staying on the boat is the safest thing to do.* (see update below) This Joongang article discusses the flipside of that "obey authority" canard: that seniors are supposed to take care of their juniors... a duty at which those responsible for the students - from the crew right up to the government - failed. This blog post agrees, asserting that more Confucianism, not less, would have helped the situation.

That's a bit of reading for you to try, if you want to have a handle on the "culture of obedience" thing.

The other place culture is being discussed, which I think is a bit more on point, is in the realm of adherence, awareness, and education about safety.

Strangely, some of the ones I think are on point make similar points to some of the ones I don't like... but the way they make them is different, and that matters. Burndog, on all those little rule-breakings that go on all the time: "there seem to be so many occasions here where people don’t give a fuck about laws or rules, and I think that that turning a blind eye, if it happens enough, can lead to the sort of tragedies that happen in Korea". Adeel on cultural reactions to national tragedies:

The explanatory power of culture is not as great as we think, and I'm not even discussing cultural differences that are really just myths or far reaches. Korean honorifics and hierarchy don't cause plane crashes. The Afghan tradition of hospitality doesn't explain why the Taliban protected Osama bin Laden. The Spanish fondness for siestas didn't cause last year's train crash that killed 79 people. Rugged American individualism doesn't explain the 2007 bridge collapse that killed 13 people.

This one's just a fragmented mess. What does China have to do with anything? Smudgem has some anecdotes about safety awareness and training. Which is (not really) culture. The Marmot and his commenters have contributed over 800 comments on Sewol blog posts on that site.

So... even in a case where Korean commentators and foreign ones alike have decided that culture is on the table for discussion, we've got a variety of views on what aspect of culture is relevant to the discussion here, and we've got people discussing it in anecdotes and uselessly broad strokes, as well as ones that draw clear and plausible lines from cultural contexts to observable phenomena.

People are going to talk about culture. And that's allowed. Let's talk for a bit about talking about culture. This post is getting long... so I'll do it in a follow-up post.

Prayers and heartfelt condolences to the families, and to everybody touched by loss in this tragedy.

*Update: It seems, with the collision between subway cars on May 2nd, exactly what I predicted here came to pass: told to wait in the subway cars for rescue, passengers instead forced the door open and made their way out. The sudden influx of upset civilians didn't exacerbate the situation in this case... but it could have.

Beautiful Rivers and Mountains 아름다운 강산 - Shin Joong Hyun 신중현

A friend on Facebook recently asked a group I belong to for suggestions on niche Korea blog topics that aren't being filled right now, and I suggested he take older Korean music -- rock and pop stuff -- and make a blog dedicated to making the modern history of Korean music more accessible to English readers. Since G'Old Korea Vinyl stopped updating, that seems to be one gap crying to be filled. Matt from Popular Gusts does too, but not nearly often enough. [Update] and we can't forget The Korean's long-running countdown of the fifty most influential Korean music artists.

If I'm wrong, and you know just the website I should be following, please tell me in the comments, of course!

So a few weeks ago, I saw this on TV. (Warning: if you only click on one video in this post, don't let it be this one.)

It's actor and singer Im Chang Jung, whom I first recognized from raunchy sex comedy "Sex Is Zero," the Korean equivalent to "American Pie" where he played Korean iteration of the Jason Biggs character - the one who gets humiliated a lot. He does well enough as a singer that he got the final performance of an episode of 불후의 명곡 ("Immortal Song" is how the show title's translated. Here is the Show's Facebook Page). "Immortal Song" is a show where they call in one of the great artists from Korea's past, and ask young, up-and-coming artists, less-established bands, and sometimes stars or idols singing solo (not with their superstar groups), to do versions of that artist's songs, and the artist gets to give them a score and choose a winner.

Lee Sang Mi was judging this time, and one of her old favorites, it appears, was a cover of Shin Joong Hyun's "Beautiful Rivers and Mountains" (see her do it live, here) Im Chang Jung did a version of that song (아름다운 강산). My wife said "Oh, that's a Shin Joong Hyun song" to me, and the story came back to me from my Korean Pop Culture class.

I've known about Shin Joong Hyun for a while. I even wrote about him a few times on the blog: Here and most recently here. Shin is known as "The Godfather of Korean Rock." He cut his teeth performing as Jackie Shin on US army bases. Read his interview by Mark James Russell here. Popular Gusts talks about him here here and a few other places. His song Mi-in is discussed here. I talked with a few friends about this song on Facebook a while ago, and want to thank Matt and Gregory and everyone whose contributions there led to this post. During the late 60s and 70s, he was like the Prince of the 80s and the Jimi Hendrix of the 60s combined for Korea: he was doing new things with the guitar, and combining genres and sounds from abroad in wildly interesting ways (Hendrix) and meanwhile, when he wasn't recording his own music, he was writing songs and producing music for many of the other best artists of the era (80s Prince). Korean rock music of the time was really, really interesting.

And then Yushin happened. Longtime dictator Park Chung Hee shifted his dictatorship into high gear with the Yushin constitution, where he declared a state of national emergency... because he didn't have total power yet, and needed it, I guess. His moral vision of the country excluded decadent rock and roll, and music got regulated more and more strictly. The very fun movie Go Go 70s explores the police persecution of artists (trailer).  Artists of the time were required to have a "건전가요" - one "wholesome song" on each album, a song that encouraged people to work hard, or save money, or be somehow virtuous, which painted an idyllic postcard image of Korea. Flowers in my basket, going to the market and stuff. The Korean wiki suggests these as representative examples: 아 대한민국 시장에 가면 어허야 둥기둥기. President Park had enough invested in this moral vision of his, he actually even wrote a "wholesome song" himself. Here it is, with a HUGE thanks to The Korean, who slipped me the link on Facebook.


UPDATE: More on this song - including an English translation of another patriotic song also written by Park Chung-Hee is at Popular Gusts now.

There are lyrics under the video box if you can read Korean. I haven't been able to find a translation of them - they're all geographical names (think This Land is Your Land), strength and sweat and pride and ancestors and greatness - but just listen to that military aesthetic.

According to the interview by Mark Russell linked above, in 1972, Shin got the call from the President's office: the president wanted him to write a song in praise of the dictator. He refused.

Instead, he wrote the song "Beautiful Rivers and Mountains" -- or 아름다운 강산. Now, I really want you to listen to the song right above this. Then immediately after, listen to the song right below. The lyrics are in the "about" section under this version of the song.

This is the 1972 version from the Shin Joong-hyun Anthology. The version he wrote and recorded just after being asked to glorify the president in song. (If you only click on one video in this post, let it be this one.)


So... the president asks you to sing a song praising the president. The style he would prefer, if the video above is any indication, would be a terse, military march. President Park was also known to admire sentimental ballads.

Instead, you go into the studio, and write a huge, shambling, sweeping, psychedelic song that builds and builds and builds to a wild cry of passion, with lyrics like this (these aren't all the lyrics - as translated on the youtube link above):
Opening lines: Blue Sky / White clouds / A thread of wind rises / To fill my heart...
In this beautiful place, you're here and I'm here...
Hold my hand, let's go and see, run and see that wilderness...
Into this world, we were born. This beautiful place. This proud place we will live.
Today I'll go to meet you... time will pass, we will live together, then fade and fall.
Spring and summer go, Fall and winter come. (at 3:58:) Beautiful rivers and mountains!
(4:05-4:30) Your heart, my heart, You and me, Us Forever We are all, all in endless harmony.

It is a sweeping, gorgeous tribute to the beauty of Korea, and Shin's pride in his country, it contains time, seasons, mortality, harmony -- this is Shin's love of his land, with a loose, sloppy song structure, no chorus, few repeats, just a love poem sung straight through, all draped in shambling psychedelic, fuzzy, decadent rock sounds, ending with an extended musical washout as "we are all in endless harmony" disappears into the endlessness of great music.

There you go, Mr. President.

So instead of singing a tribute to the President, Shin pointedly, and passionately, sings about the beauty of the land. NOT the beauty of the government, the leader, or a vision of greatness for the people. No exhortations to respect your teacher or work hard. The rivers and mountains. He places all the politics and ambitions and dreams of the people under a giant sky of washing guitar, and sings that they will fade and fall, but the land, the beautiful land, will outlast them all.

To me, knowing the story of it, the song screams, "I love this country, Mr. President. Not you." Not only is it a pitched act of defiance, it also might be the best song he ever made.

Of course, he was on the president's shit list then. His albums and songs started getting banned, and finally in 1975 they pinned marijuana possession on him, and arrested him. His songs were banned from being played until President Park's assassination in 1979.

I just can't get over this song. As I listen to the song again and again, each time it gets more powerful to me. Be careful about listening to it repeatedly on headphones in public spaces, I guess. This Starbucks got really dusty. The section at the end - the "Your heart, my heart, you and me, us forever..." - is a cry of passion. The version with the most beautiful climax might be this, by Kim Jung-mi, who infuses it with so much longing, but the way the original spirals off into the sky at the end has the sweep and scale the others lose when they shorten it. It's a beautiful song that reminds us what is used to mean to say something was "epic" -- before the bros seeped all meaning out of the word by overusing it.

If Park Chung-hee's song got an embed, Kim Jung-Mi's version deserves one, too. If you only click on two videos in this post, let this be the second one:


After the ban on him was lifted, though, music tastes had changed. From Mark Russell's interview:

Shin says, with a soft, matter-of-fact bitterness. “It was completely physical, with no spirit, no mentality, no humanity. That trend has carried over all the way to today, so people are deaf to real music. They don’t know because they are never exposed to it.”

Here's the 1980 version he recorded with "Music Power." The meandering intro is gone. The bass is higher in the mix, the rhythm is more driving. It's a disco song now. A disco song.



I mean... it still kind of rocks, but the synth (rather than rock organ) is a big letdown for me.
The horn section at 3:10 becomes the "hook" in the cover version at the beginning of this post. He's also repeating lines now, rather than letting the song end with a musical meditation.

To me, this sounds like he's trying to make a pop song, rather than trying to make a great song. And it's better than most disco songs you'll ever hear, but it's still a gelded version of that original, which sounds like it's coming down from the top of a mountain. The call at the end after the cry, 아름다운 강산, the climax of the song, where the lyrics come faster, before ending with the musical breakdown - the "Your heart my heart, run together" just after 5:00 here, has none of the emotional impact from the original.

And the sad thing is, the disco version? That's the one that got grabbed, and popularized... as if to prove, to twist the knife on Shin's assessment that "people are deaf to real music." We heard it up above, sung by Im Chang Jung and Lee Seon Hee, whose version is here, and whose version the other singers are referencing. She has a powerhouse of a voice, but the song includes a synthesizer making ocean noises, and '80s power chords. You can almost hear the feathered hair and shoulder pads. And oh. Did I mention? In case you didn't click, the version on Immortal Song at the beginning of the post has a rap solo added. As if the point hadn't already been made. (Apologies to any JYP disciples who think every song is better with a rap solo... I disagree.) And just to make that point really hurt... here is Orange Caramel's version. In case, along with rap solos, you think aegyo is another thing that makes every song better.


Again, I disagree.

And that's the legacy of the song. A defiant cry to heaven, turned into a disco standard. I'm not sure what to make of that, except to just go back and listen to the original again.

In 2006: Shin did a "Last concert" (Covered here by Mark Russell)

That horn "hook" in the 1980 version sounds way better as a power guitar riff, in my opinion. But the song is all the way down to 5 minutes. Now, for a "greatest hits concert," I guess maybe he doesn't have the energy to keep calling out to the skies, especially when the public has chosen the disco version anyway... but I can't help but feel wistful and sad that this is what's come of the song.

I think the gelding of this song is symbolic of what happened to all of Korean music when President Park clamped down on Rock Music. Korea could have been the heartland (or hub, if you will) of an Asian rock scene that might have done all kinds of interesting things we'll never know, because by the time the censors loosened their grip, public tastes were no longer with the innovators. That is a tragedy if you care about Korean music, and I do.

But you know what? You can still listen to the original, so it's not a total loss, I guess.

My man, Shin Joong Hyun

The Un-Rustling of Jimmies, or Roboseyo Your Five Tips Are So Mean!

I'd like to thank The Marmot, and also The Big Hominid, for writing up my Five Tips post. I got a few defensive reactions to as well: some people seem to have been reading it as "Five Ways Roboseyo Thinks He's Smarter Than Other Bloggers, And You In Particular" or "Five Ways Lifers Are Looking Down Their Noses At Noobs" or "Five Hints To Shut Down Your Blog, Asshole" --As Marmot's Hole commenter Briere says, "But in my opinion what Rob has done is give a big 'shut it' to others who want to express an opinion. It is elitist to try keep others out of the conversation, and that is what a list like Rob's attempts to do." So a few sentences are in order.

First, I do think that the piece was written with the appropriate caveats and explanations that a careful, or even just moderately un-rushed reading would make my intentions clear... but in case anybody skimmed it and decided I was telling people, or them in particular to "Shut it," let's start with the point that every person has the right to write out their opinions and experiences of living in Korea, and anybody who tries to invalidate their experience should go piss up a rope.

But when people are taking their lived experience of Korea, and trying to go a bit deeper, to understand something within a larger context than their own daily lives, or when people are trying to write authoritatively about Korea - for example, foreign correspondents, or when locals read stuff that's written English, and get confused or upset that this is what "foreigners" seem to think about Korea... then I think these principles are useful for sifting through everybody who's positioning themselves as authorities or experts on Korea, to figure out who backs it up, and who, despite ponderous tones, is actually only speaking for themselves (not that there's anything wrong with that).

This is relevant because someone who doesn't know the terrain sometimes accidentally shows their ass, like the time The Diplomat used satire blog Dokdo Is Ours as a source for an article about Korea's information economy (on page 2), and a few guidelines would have helped them. Or when those defensive nationalist netizen brigades take a personal experience of Korea, and decide it makes a person deserving of an online campaign, or the exposure of their personal data, leading to physical threats against their person. Or simply when someone is looking for more knowledge about Korea, but go to the wrong source, and end up in a "blind leading the blind" bind, getting mired in the Dave's/Bitter Expat echo chamber. It's a shame when someone doesn't spot the phoneys, ends up getting misled, and has their learning process slowed by getting sidetracked on such rabbit trails.

I don't think anybody needs to stop writing, but I do think that it greatly increases the credibility of those posing as knowledgeable, when their writing demonstrates a clear understanding of the limits of their expertise. And the writing I respect the most chooses topics where the limitations of their own knowledge are not hindrances to the points they are trying to make or at least where they cop to the gaps, and leave those spots as questions and suggestions rather than definitive statements.

When I wrote this list, then, here were the people I was imagining would find it useful:

• foreign correspondents still getting to know the area
• Koreans or other "Korea defenders" thinking about starting a netizen backlash to "correct" someone's "wrong opinion"of Korea
• people unsure where to turn to increase their knowledge about Korea
• readers (usually Korean) upset that these are the opinions foreigners are forming about Korea
• people wishing to avoid common pitfalls, while trying to start writing more seriously about Korea

Is there a place for people writing about Korea, who don't actually know a whole ton? Absolutely. I will defend their right to write as they please, and wish them luck: go back and read the first three years of my blog posting (they're all still up there, in cringe-inducing glory). It'd sure be hypocritical for me to say other writers don't have the right to throw themselves into the online discourse meat grinder if they wish to... and hopefully it'll inspire their curiosity, and they'll have some interesting, knowledgeable, and patient, so patient, commenters and correspondents to show up and point them toward more knowledge and better sources, the way I was lucky to have.

So... are the five tips hard and fast rules? Nope. And which of the five tips (or others one could add) are more or less relevant will change for different topics - language is more important in talking about local culture and trends than it is in talking about foreign policy or security, for example, and having Korean language ability, or Korean ethnicity, doesn't automatically make someone an expert any more than marrying a Korean or living here for a long time does, though each of those gives someone access to certain kinds of knowledge about Korea, that might be useful for writing about certain topics. At best, let's hope they're a reminder to think critically about whatever one reads, wherever one finds it, and think carefully about the source of an opinion or argument before deciding to let it rustle one's jimmies.

To hammer that home, I'll give The Big Hominid the final word: I think he read my article exactly as it was meant to be read, and the thoughtfulness of his response demonstrates that well, wrapping up with this:

Don't take Roboseyo's post too literally; instead, when you're reading something about Korea, adopt what we in religious studies call a hermeneutic of suspicion—what normal folks call taking that with a grain of salt. That hermeneutic of suspicion is, I think, what Rob is driving at.

5 Signs the Author of the Article you're Reading Doesn't Actually Know Much about Korea

Lately, every Thursday at 10:30am, on TBS radio, (101.3 in Seoul), I've been doing a list-based segment. I've had some fun, and done a variety of topics, and perhaps I'll post some of them on the blog... but today's got a really good response, and I've been asked to re-post it on my blog, for anyone who's having trouble accessing it from the TBS website, or prefers text.

The topic: 5 signs the Author of the Article You're Reading Doesn't Actually Know Much About Korea

You know how it is: whenever global or OECD rankings come out, whenever a Korean hits the global stage, whenever something's written about Korea in a prestigious magazine, or bidding opens for another major global event... it becomes clear that in general, Koreans in high places (and perhaps many ordinary folks as well) really really do care what non-Koreans think about Korea. I've written about this before... perhaps my most memorable (to me) being "In Which Roboseyo Exhorts Seoul City Not To Get In A Snit About Lonely Planet." One result of this abiding interest is the occasional case where some article, blog post, or other bit of writing gets far more attention than it deserves, through social media, netizen backlash, anxiety that someone Doesn't Like Korea, or whatnot. At times, people taking a blog more seriously than it deserves have waged online and even offline harassment campaigns, and shut down blogs and even chased people out of the country.

Caveat: I'm well aware that there are three fingers pointed back at me for a bunch of these. Watcha gonna do?

from here (updated)

So, here are five times to take an English article about Korea with a grain of salt... or a progressively larger one. People trying to learn about Korea should think twice about using an article as a source, and people wanting to defend Korea should think maybe not worry so much about the writer's wrong opinion and respond with "who cares?" instead when...

1. Their main source of authority is marrying a Korean or teaching English in Korea for a while. 

If the topic is "courtship in Korea" or "the hogwan where I work"... buckle in and enjoy a personal story that doesn't have any larger meaning. If the author is making sweeping generalizations, without providing evidence of being up to date and informed in the news, policies, and public discussions about the issue, other than in a really vague "I heard on Dave's that..." sort of way, well, maybe don't bother getting worked up about it, and click the "ignore" button in your head.

Teaching at a hogwan doesn’t make a person an expert in Korean educational policy, and it doesn’t mean they know a single thing about public education. And having beers with a public school teacher to trade stories is not necessarily enough to balance out that weak spot. Same for talking with one's spouse and their friends, unless one's spouse or some of their friends are informed and keep up to date on these issues, and makes statements about them starting with "Well here are the main stakeholders in the issue and what they want..." rather than "Koreans don't like this." When I asked my wife, "What do Koreans think about this?" back when I used to do such things, she used to answer "I don't know. Go find out." This is the best answer.

The caveat of course is that there are trained journalists and excellent researchers who just happen to be working as English teachers and/or married to Koreans... but they'll be pointing to their sources, not to their spouses.

2. All their quotes are from English teachers or bloggers.

In these first two, I am clearly throwing my own under the bus... 

found here

If a foreign correspondent or random writer doesn't know a lot about Korea, or lacks the tools to interview the Koreans knowledgable in an area, here's the first thing to do: a google, and a search of Facebook groups and pages. They'll come across some blogs, and a forum like Dave's ESL or Facebook's Every Expat In Korea, where all the bitter lifers and English teachers who haven't learned the better places to make connections go to vent and preach outdated Korea knowledge to newbies and invent new racist terms.

"Dang. Ricetard didn't catch on! Let's try something new!" Source

For someone who doesn’t know the terrain, it’s not always easy to separate people who REALLY know what’s going on, from people who are good at writing as if they know what is going on. And both bloggers and Facebook blowhards LOVE to act like they know more than they really do. I should know: I am both a blogger AND a Facebook blowhard. To choose to open a blog at all, you need to have a reasonably high opinion of your own views... or you wouldn't project them across the internet... and take someone with a reasonably high opinion of their own views, whose blog isn't getting as popular as quickly as they'd like, and send them an e-mail from the Washington Post... if they're anything like I was in my starting-out blog phase, they'll be so flattered at being asked for a quote, they'll provide one without ever thinking about whether they're actually qualified to do so. I used to. I am still a sucker for ego strokes, ear scratches, and shiny things. I am actually a cat.

Source. (warning: cute cats)

A persistent reporter or writer will eventually track down the kinds of people — policy makers, researchers, or other experts or sources who have more reliable answers. And to be fair, some bloggers and English teachers are great researchers, and would give well-sourced replies.  But someone only using sources like blogs, easy-to-find youtube channels, and English teachers… may just not have looked very hard, so factor that in when evaluating their writing. 

3. They use Han, Jung, Confucianism, Nunchi, Chaemyon, and other “Magic words” to explain Korean culture

Examples (added in 2019). Example. Example. Example. Example. Malcolm Gladwell explained all of Korean culture in a doozy of a chapter in his book. There are too many examples to list. 

People talk about the theme of a story as if the theme were like the string that a sack of chicken feed is tied with. They think that if you can pick out the theme, the way you pick the right thread in the chicken-feed sack, you can rip the story open and feed the chickens. But this is not the way meaning works in fiction. (source)

That's a quote from Flannery O'Connor's book Mystery and Manners. She's an author I studied as an undergrad. I love the image of a string on a bag of chicken feed -- once you find the right string to pull, the whole bag comes open effortlessly. There are people who think that invoking "Confucianism" does the same thing: like a skeleton key, all Korea's secrets are magically laid out, just by saying (as pretentiously as possible) Confucianism!

One of my favorite sayings is "When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” and this is where a lot of amateur analysts get stuck when they want to write about Korea, but they don’t ACTUALLY know a lot about Korea. Things like Confucianism, or Korea's rapid economic growth, or troubled democratization, or the colonial experience, or any word that a pretentious friend might be likely to intone in a low voice, "There is no translation for this word" runs the risk of being taken, and applied to way more situations than they're actually relevant, or given way more explanatory power (or mystery) than they deserve. Inside the expat echo chamber, and among "I must make sure my expat friends get a VERY specific image of Korea" Koreans, there is great danger of their over-and-mis-use.

South Korea is a society that works like other societies. It follows a logic that makes enough sense to enough of the people here that they can generally muddle through. Most phenomena have specific origins that are discoverable by any searcher willing to read books rather than blogs, and those "magic words" are often part of the background, but they're very rarely an adequate explanation on their own. The mistake people make is to put their finger on something like Confucianism and then stop looking. Confucianism is more often the sauce than the actual steak: often part of the mix, but not the meat.

The danger of "magic word" analysis is that it often comes out of orientalism, or leads to it, and thinking of Koreans as some "mysterious unknowable eastern people" is not conducive to careful critical thought, nor helpful in applying one's knowledge of the country to encounters with actual, living Koreans who don't fit the stereotypes.

Confucianism, and all those other "magic word" concepts, are not skeleton keys. They are single pieces of a puzzle, single threads in a web. Trust writers who are looking at the others as well.

4. They refer to Koreans as if all Koreans share the same opinion on issues, or talk about “Korea” as if it were a character in a drama.

"Korea wants..." "Korea always..." Who is this Korea you speak of?  "Koreans are..." "Koreans all...""Koreans can't..." This is called "monolithic thinking" -- as if Korea were a monolith, an undifferentiated hive mind with no diversity of intention or opinion.

Korea is not actually like this:

Koreans: not the borg. Source.

In fact, Korea is sometimes like this:

Source - 2008 beef protests

and this

and this

and this

If Koreans all generally agreed on everything, a vigorous protest culture and a tradition of public dissent would be inconceivable.

Korea's a diverse, divided country. Left and Right, North and South, Southeast, Southwest and Seoul, Gangnam vs. populists, wealthy vs. the rest, Christian and Buddhist, Pro and Anti [you know which countries go here]. There are robust debates in Korean society on almost every topic, and even in areas where you get general consensus (it's very rare to find Koreans think Dokdo doesn't belong to Korea) you'll still find dissent in the details (but some think public demonstrations, boycotts or rude behavior toward Japanese tourists are the best strategy for laying that claim, while others would prefer it be dealt with at the government-to-government level). A lot of these disagreements spill over into street protests. That a writer hasn't located these debates, or can't access them because of language problems, doesn't mean they don't exist. Burndog regularly points out what you might call the "If I haven't seen it, it doesn't exist" error common on blogs and commentary about Korea. 

Writers who say “Korea is” “Korea wants” or “Koreans all…” are usually guilty of lazy thinking: a more careful thinker will write about what specific groups are doing, or want, and how they're disagreeing with other groups, not what "Korea" wants.

5. (And this is the biggie) They don’t know any Korean.

Becoming an authority on Korea without speaking Korean is kind of like being a hearing impaired musician. Yes, Beethoven proved it’s possible… but it’s really really hard and really rare. It’s possible to write a very good piece about Korea, without speaking any Korean — I’ve read some — but it’s much MUCH easier if you CAN. 

Signs that a writer doesn’t know Korean include romanization or name errors — it doesn’t take too long to learn the two main romanization systems, and once you’ve learned them, it’s easy to spot errors. If someone's putting Korean sounds into English letters all helter-skelter, they have seriously put their credibility into doubt — ANYBODY who’s studied Korean beyond taxi level has learned how to romanize correctly, and will. Anyone who uses the wrong part of a Korean person's name as their family name completely discredits themselves - if they call Kim Jong-un "Mr. Un" or "Mr. Jong-un," don't trust their understanding of Korea one whit, because it takes five seconds on Google to learn that Korea puts the family name first, and it should be "Mr. Kim," and they haven't even put in that tiny modicum of effort.

Other signs include using Korean words incorrectly or in the wrong context, or doing what I call “dictionary translations” - where the word they’ve translated IS what you find in the dictionary or google translate, but it’s being used in the wrong way or in the wrong context (usually as if it had exactly the same usage and meaning as it does in English -- the error students make coming the other way when they say 'I was scary when I watched 'The Ring''). These errors show that a writer not only doesn't know Korean, but hasn't even bothered to check that translation with a single Korean speaker. If they have been so lax on doing their due diligence, don't take their writing that seriously.

Another sign of this is ONLY using English language sources — nothing against the English language newspapers and websites, which are getting better every year, but using them means an author receives a filtered version of Korea, not the original they could access if they read Korean. Errors are just more possible if an author is experiencing Korea by proxy, through an extra layer of remove.

And something I've been noticing as I get deeper and deeper into my life in Korea: people who don't bother to work on the language seem to have a pretty hard ceiling on how well they can understand and engage with the country. Once they've bumped up against that ceiling, their investment in the country starts to suffer diminishing returns. I might write about that more in another piece, but for now:

Remember that no one of these signs, totally on its own, is definitive, and as with dear deaf Beethoven, even someone checking all five boxes might write something really good. But in general, checking two, three, four, or all five of these boxes is a pretty good sign that you shouldn't take an article very seriously, and perhaps the article can be taken as one person's view and then forgotten: no need to be forwarded, shared, spread, translated into Korean, or the subject of a netizen backlash. Writing like this speaks for itself, and what it's saying is "not worth your grief."

If you disagree, or love this post, or have some other points to add, feel free to drop a comment in the box below, and thanks for reading!

Thanks to The Marmot's Hole for the link love!