Ess-Board

Last weekend, I moved one step closer to being able to relate to my students on their level by learning how to "Ess-board." The Ess-board is extremely popular with Korean children, and some adults also use it as an exercise tool. It's a little bit like a skateboard, a surfboard, and a snowboard combined (none of which I've ever ridden before), and yet it's completely unlike any of those things. A Korean company, Decolee, began marketing the Ess-board to the growing customer base of the Korean leisure industry in 2003-2004. However, it's originality is questionable as it is remarkably similar to the Wave Board and the Ripstik caster board, both of which may or may not have been developed before the Ess-board, it's difficult to determine which came first. Essentially, all three consist of two oval shaped platforms connected by a shaft in the middle. The two platforms can move independently of each other and pivot back and forth along the shaft's axis. Each platform has one wheel attached to the bottom of it, which can also pivot 360 degrees. The rider's momentum is maintained by twisting the platforms back and forth with one's feet. It's actually much more of a workout than it seems! One of my waygukin friends, who is still a child at heart, purchased one about a month ago (at 150,000 won they aren't exactly cheap) and has been learning to ride ever since. He was gracious enough to give me a lesson, and although my first few attempts were failures I soon got the hang of it. It's definitely a lot of fun, and I can't understand how it hasn't taken off all over the States, except that the skateboarding industry is probably actively working to suppress it's introduction. I can't do any tricks, but I can make a complete circuit of the exercise track in Daundong, where my friend lives, which is an accomplishment as far as I'm concerned.

Apparently, the Dutch are avid Ess-board enthusiasts as well and have been developing all sorts of new tricks. Here's a promo video for a Dutch Ess-boarding collective.

Making Amends?

I know I'm a little behind the headlines with this one, but this seems to be a small step toward a meaningful resolution of one of the worst chapters in the history of the Japanese occupation of Korea, i.e. forcing Korean "comfort women" into sexual slavery. Prime Minister Abe had previously denied any evidence that women had been forced to engage in sex during the occupation... and then admitted that there might be some evidence... and then withdrew that statement. Although Abe's comments of a couple days ago fall short of a true apology (as my friend Ja-young said, she would love to have seen it in Japanese in order to understand that subtleties involved in what he actually said), it is definitely a step in the right direction. I am by no means an expert about this piece of colonized Korea's history, but I am aware that it is still one of the chief reasons for resentment of Japan in Korea. At any rate, one can only hope that further reconciliation can be reached and that someday the crimes of the past can be acknowledged for the disgusting acts of inhumanity that they were.

Copyright Infringement, Anyone?

... Not that I'm one who has ever been known to passionately defend the intellectual property rights of multinational corporations; I just thought this was sort of amusing. Whoever "Donald Donuts" is, they had a big promotion in Seongnamdong this weekend with boxes of donuts going for 3,000 won.

The Internet in our apartment was out for a few days, so my apologies for the lack of updates. However, I have a new (much better) digital camera so expect some more posts of pictures, especially as spring has finally sprung in Ulsan.

Hangeul

As an addendum to my previous post about learning Korean, I thought I might relate a little of what I've learned about the origins of hangeul, the Korean alphabet. Like Japanese, and unlike Chinese, modern Korean has its own alphabet, which is more or less phonetic. Certainly, this makes learning the language easier than it would be if "everyday" Korean was still written in hanja, the Chinese characters introduced to the peninsula from Manchuria in the 4th century B.C. since the student of Korean would have to memorize tens of thousands of different characters (obviously, it is still important to learn hanja because it helps one understand Korean vocabulary that is borrowed from Chinese and it sometimes appears in newspapers). During the Three Kingdoms period of Korean history (1st to 7th centuries C.E.), hanja was adopted by the royal courts as a means of written communication. However, it was only taught to the elite classes, and so that vast majority of Koreans remained illiterate. Three methods were developed to represent the specificities of Korean vocabulary, syntax, and grammar while using the original Chinese phonemes and semes: idu, which was used primarily for legal contracts even after the invention of hangeul; gugyeol, which Confucian scholars and Buddhist monks used to make annotations to the Chinese texts that they studied; and hyangchal. Although these writing systems were useful for professionals, Korea still lacked a popular, unified script that reflected the unique character, so to speak, of the peninsula.

Finally, in 1440, King Sejong of the Joseon dynasty ordered a team of linguistic scholars to set about creating a way to accurately represent spoken Korean in distinctive graphemes. King Sejong and the creation of hangeul is one of the most important of Korean national myths. Many Koreans take great pride in this event in their history (for example, a few months ago one of our one-on-one interview questions at work was "Who was the greatest person in history?" to which the majority of my students answered "King Sejong, because he invented hangeul"). Over the course of six years, the scholars undertook an exhaustive survey of Korean vocabulary and accents, as well as studying different Asian writing systems. The project is considered by many to be the greatest scientific and cultural achievement in Korean history. The scholars eventually developed what we know today as hangeul, possibly based on a contemporary south Asian script. It is perhaps the only writing system in the world still in use today that is the result of such a scientific and methodical survey. In 1446, hangeul was codified in a document called Hunminjeongeum. There is a national holiday on October 9th to commemorate is adoption as the official national language.

There is an interesting footnote to this story that I found in an article by a German professor of Korean studies, Werner Sasse. Apparently, part of the reason for the invention of hangeul arose from the need for a standardized rhyming dictionary! As in China at that time, civil servants were chosen according to a system of meritocracy and an important part of the government examination was writing poetry in Chinese. Since the pronunciation of Chinese characters on the peninsula had become very confused by the 15th century, the hangeul project would give potential civil servants a method of determining the way words were actually pronounced (by providing a more accurate phonetic representation of spoken Korean) and therefore make rhyming easier.

Set It To A Beat

My last post elicited a response from "Blake" back in the States, in the always happening borough of Brooklyn, who informed me about a project he's working on to create educational Korean hip-hop music through Swagger Lou Press and his company, Flocabulary, which creates hip-hop themed educational material. Any of you that know me also know that hip-hop is one of my many passions, so of course I was intrigued. You can check out one of the songs, "Ahn-nyeong-ha-sam," here on the Flocabulary website (there are also links to other Flocabulary projects, which have been lauded by the likes of Cornel West and Howard Zinn). From what I can gather, the MC is a whitey waygukin like yours truly, living in Korea, most likely in Seoul. The lyrics are especially amusing for any foreigner living over here; I urge my fellow waygukins to take a listen. Incidentally, Korean hip-hop is alive and well, as the musical genre has become a worldwide phenomenon over the past 30 years or so of its life. I am told by my friends that most Korean hip-hop songs are about girls and partying, a little tamer than some of the crime tales that are popular back home. Korean is actually a very aesthetically pleasing language for hip-hop, given that it sounds quite staccato to begin with (at least to an outsider's ear) and there are so many words that rhyme. The only Korean hip-hop megastar that I can recognize is the televisually ubiquitous MC Mong, who seems to be a funny, gimmicky rapper, sort of like an early Eminem without the references to abusing prescription pain medication and fantasies about killing his girlfriend. B-boy culture (break dancing/locking/popping to the uninitiated) is also popular in Korea; there are several b-boy contest specials on Korean TV, mostly held in Seoul I gather. And since there's been a dearth of good hip-hop coming from the States recently (although I urge everyone back home to buy the new Devin the Dude album on Tuesday!), the Korean take on the art form is a welcome break from the same-old-same-old.

Hangungmal

I am now in my second week of Korean language classes at the University of Ulsan and I have really been enjoying learning the language of the people I live among, as well as being back in the university atmosphere (if only for a few hours per week). I think that taking classes now, after I've already been in-country for six months, was a good idea because I have already learned hangeul (the Korean alphabet, which deserves its own post actually) and a few key phrases in Korean. It's shocking how much I've learned just from being around my students everyday; I sometimes think that I'm learning more than they are (which doesn't say a lot for my teaching abilities!). Here are three things that I really like about Korean:

Honorifics: Sure they make learning a language that much more difficult, but they also make it that much more interesting. Additionally, learning how to use honorifics teaches one about social stratification in a given society. As I've mentioned before, age is all-important in Korea, in large part because it effects which honorific level to use when speaking to someone, whether they be senior, junior or chingu (friend- someone who is the same age as you are). The point of any social interaction is to denigrate yourself and exalt your conversation partner through language. To illustrate my point: a couple of weeks ago, I was out on a Friday night with a group of my Korean friends and they decided to play a trick on one of the girls, Da-eun, by convincing her that one of the boys was younger than her. She ordered him to "Drink up!" using the very familiar form of the imperative, which is commonly used when talking to people younger than you, especially children. As it turned out, he was in fact her senior, and poor Da-eun was extremely embarassed. In some ways, I wish we had something similar in English. Certainly, there are ways of speaking English (parole) that are reserved for specific situations and people, but there isn't anything comparable on the level of langue, which would make the subtleties of Anglo-American social interactions more legible to non-native speakers.

Hanja: As in Japanese, many words in Korean are borrowed from Chinese. There is a way of writing these characters, known as hanja in Korea and kanji in Japan, that students learn in school, although I think it is becoming less and less popular in Korean curricula. However, many of these loan words are also written in hangeul and used frequently. For example, saram is the purely Korean word for "person," while in is the Chinese character, used in waygukin (foreigner) and migukin (American) for example. Our professor told us that it is usually considered more polite to use the Chinese loan words as it indicates that the speaker has been educated. In addition there are two counting systems used for different situations, one based on pure Korean numbers (hana, dul, set...) and one Sino-Korean system (il, i, sam...). The Sino-Korean system is used for counting anything that would usually be represented in a text-artifact by written numbers (1,2,3...), such as monetary amounts, telephone numbers, ages, years, etc., while the Korean system is used to count things. However, both are used to measure time, the Korean system to count hours and the Sino-Korean to count minutes, which keeps things interesting.

Economy of language: I don't really know enough Korean yet to meaningfully comment on this, but Korean seems to me to be an economical language. In other words, many of the tools we use in English to draw contrasts between things in language, such as articles and conjugations based on person, for instance, are absent from Korean. Comprehension of any given utterance comes as much from its context as it does from what is being uttered. It makes things a little more complicated at first, but it gets easier.

I had forgotten how much I love learning languages, I guess I'm just a big ol' dork like that! I hope to be able to have a conversation with one of my taxi drivers by the end of three months; already I can stumble through in broken Korean and "Konglish" for a good ten minutes.

An Introduction To Social Categories

A few weeks ago I was chatting with one of my free-talking classes (comprised entirely of fifth and sixth grade girls) when they asked me, "Teacher, do you know what a doenjang girl is?" I replied honestly that I didn't, only being aware of the word doenjang in reference to the soybean paste that is used in doenjang jigae. They explained (sort of) that "doenjang girl" is a label given to young Korean women who are "conspicuous consumers;" that is, they have developed a taste for (mainly) American cultural goods and, in the words of my student "Ann," have "gotten hooked." A recent article in the "Munsu Journal," an English-language magazine published by University of Ulsan students, helped define the term further, as well as providing some clues as to its etymology (although, I'm still confused as to how soybean paste got in there). Apparently, "doenjang girl" was popularized last year by Korean netizens (i.e. Korean internet users) to describe young women, mostly of high school or university age, who consume "western" clothing (non-Korean name brands), food (in the form of chain restaurants like Outback Steakhouse and Bennigan's, which are remarkably popular here), and drink (Starbucks) and romanticize the "New Yorker" lifestyle that they see on imported American television programs such as "Friends" and "Sex and the City." Another way of putting it is (and I quote Kim Eun-eui of the "Munsu Journal"): "A woman who is filled with vanity but has no ability."

Needless to say, I am intrigued that such a social category exists, especially as there are so many issues about contemporary Korean culture embedded in the label. Miss Kim makes several astute observations in her piece, some of which I will recount here. First of all, she points out that it's not just any woman who happens to buy a Starbucks coffee or carry a Louis Vuitton purse that gets labelled a doenjang girl; there seems to be an unmeasurable point at which the consumption of foreign, particularly "western" and American goods, is deemed problematic and opens the consumer up to ridicule by wider Korean society. Korea, like most places on the planet right now, is not immune to American economic and cultural hegemony, and for the most part American cultural exports are embraced with open arms. However, their is also a strong nationalist strain among Koreans (somehow related to their past as a colonized subjects, I suspect) that is reflected in their consumption patterns, as evidenced by the failures here of Wal-Mart, Carrefour, and Nestle, just to name a few. It is almost as if a person can be judged to be "too" friendly toward these "western" goods that they become like caricatures, so obsessed with anything non-Korean that they end up appearing as poseurs to their Korean peers and are viewed as ignoring their "own" culture (I would argue that we have similarly prejudiced social categories in the States, although in entirely different contexts, such as "wigger," "Oreo," and "banana.")

Another salient point of Miss Kim's is that the doenjang girl category has arisen to give a negative connotation to the most emancipated generation of Korean women and the economic power that they wield. As youth unemployment continues to rise, jealously of the conspicuously consuming Korean woman by out of work young Korean men leads to a knee-jerk reaction against Korean feminism. The doenjang girl label is hastily plastered on any woman who expresses her independence, especially with her pocketbook. Perhaps it isn't a cross-cultural issue at all, but one of localized gender stereotypes. However, my students assure me that there are also doenjang boys, i.e. boys who wear foreign fashion labels and quaff their Starbucks on the way to Bennigan's.

Whether a reaction to the Korean woman's changing role in society or to the increasing influence of foreign over domestic culture, the doenjang girl label is interesting, and maybe even useful, for the outside observer as an indicator of contemporary social attitudes in Korea.

The Future Is Now

I saw this Korea-relevant article from the BBC today and thought I'd share it here. As one can see, Korea is beginning to seriously consider what the world will look like once "social" machines are fully integrated into the daily routines of the everyman and woman. I am surprised by the government's prediction that every Korean household will have a robot in it by 2020 at the latest, but I'm not an expert, so what do I really know? Being aware of the current state of capitalist production and contemporary legal concerns, I imagine that the Robot Ethics Charter will have a lot more to do with intellectual property rights and guarantees against pirated copies or whatnot than it will with actually addressing the impact that interactive machines that are human-like in appearance will have on human society. This isn't exactly my branch of anthropology, so I can't say that I have much to add to the discussion, but I'm sure someone out there is working on a journal article about this right now. At any rate, it will be interesting to see if the vision of the authors of the Robot Ethics Charter does indeed come to pass.

On another, unrelated note (and keeping in line with my penchant for celebrating my favorite authors on this site), a happy 80th birthday to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whose novels make me want to become fluent in Spanish (and visit South America).

The Tigers Are Back

It's time for the beginning of the K-League (soccer) season and today was the first home match for Ulsan Hyundai. Even though it was quite a wet day (we are in the midst of what promises to be several days of rain), we trekked down to Munsu stadium to watch the Tigers take on Gyeongnam FC. There were many other fans and supporters there who were undeterred by the rain, more than on the previous occasions that I've attended a match. The Tigers started off strong, scoring a truly fantastic goal in the ninth minute. The players clearly had a tough time with the slippery pitch and there seemed to be a lot of errors, but most of them came from the Gyeongnam side. At the end of the second half, Ulsan's defense fell apart, and even though the goalkeeper made three spectacular saves in a row, number four got past him in the eighty-fifth minute and the match ended in a one-one draw. As a matter of fact, I have yet to see Ulsan win in person, but hopefully their next home match will have a more favorable outcome.

Samiljeol/Jirisan

(The view from the summit of Jirisan)

Today is a public holiday in Korea known as Samil-jeol, literally the " March 1st (3-1 )memorial" ("sam" is "three" in the Chinese-Korean number system, and "il" is "one;" hence, March 1st). The holiday commemorates the Declaration of Independence from Japanese colonial rule signed on March 1, 1919, nine years after the start of the occupation. Although Korea wouldn't be free until 1945, the Declaration was a symbolic gesture and is remembered as the beginning of the Samil movement, a year-long series of uprising against the Japanese military in which it is estimated that 7,500 Koreans were killed and 45,000 were arrested. Although the occupation didn't end then, the Japanese military police were replaced by a civilian police force and some of the most objectionable policies that the Japanese had instituted were removed.

Because of the holiday, we had a day off from teaching. However, this did not mean that I was free to fritter away my day in Ulsan as Jessica and I joined Mr. Park and the rest of our colleagues for a day of "membership training" at Jirisan National Park, about three hours northwest of Ulsan. According to Mr. Park, Jirisan is part of the "triumvirate" of (South) Korean mountains: Halasan, on Jeju-do, is the highest mountain, Seoraksan (where we visited last fall) is the most beautiful, and Jirisan is the largest in area (at least the mountain range it is a part of is the largest). We left Cheonsang at 6:00 A.M. and arrived just after 9:00 for a breakfast of fermented vegetables and rice porridge, a completely vegetarian and traditional Korean countryside meal. The trek to the southern summit (not the main summit, apparently) took just under an hour and wasn't particularly difficult. Even though it was an overcast day and low-lying fog (or pollution, I can never tell the difference) obscured the view of the valley from the summit, it was still a beautiful place, and I'm sure it is even more stunning in the fall when the leaves are changing. Afterwards, we headed to a traditional village market in Hwagae where a transvestite performer called Jessica and me out as the only waygukins on scene, thereby embarrassing us both. I am exhausted, but glad to have seen another of Korea's natural beauties.