Medical Treatments in Korea

Korea has perhaps an unexpectedly good and efficient healthcare system, with doctors surgeries and hospitals aplenty in the average city.  If you get sick in Korea and you have medical insurance you will receive some of the best quality care going, but there are some strange little oddities that go on from time to time.

Over-treatment

I don't know if Korean people are just overly paranoid about their health or they simply want to fully utilise their health cover to the best of their ability, but they do seem to have some seriously over the top treatments at times. 

If you are sick with a cold or a stomach bug and go to the doctors in Korea for some medicine they are likely to put you on a saline drip or at least offer to.  I had never been on one before I came here but I was sort of bullied into it the other day when I had a stomach complaint.  It did cost me a little extra money, although I have to admit I felt about a hundred times better after having it.  I don't know that it was wholly necessary though (maybe the Koreans are on to something though, as I said it did make me feel much better).  My wife does it all the time and because she is a nurse she even does it herself or does it for friends and family for ordinary cold symptoms.  It is all quite normal.

When I sprained my ankle a couple of years ago in Korea, I knew what I had done because it had happened to me before.  Although painful, I refused to go to the doctors because I knew what would happen.  Any, even very minor injury, is often treated by placing unnecessary strapping or casts to the affected area.  At the all-boys high school where I work there are always students hobbling around on casts, wearing neck braces, or have bandages over arms.  At the time of writing I have just taught a class where a student came in looking like he had been in a car crash with a big neck brace.  It turned out that when I asked him what he did, he had just slept strangely and woken up with a sore neck in the morning.

Korean Alternative Therapies

The popular traditional therapies in Korea appear to be some different forms of acupuncture and Chinese medicine.  As a proponent of the scientific method, I have always been sceptical of alternative therapies because, essentially, by being called 'alternative' it means that they are unproven.  This especially relevant to Chinese medicine and acupuncture because they have both been extensively tested and found to be no better than placebo time and time again.  Some ingredients in Chinese medicine have been shown effective but these don't come around very often.

Everybody knows what acupuncture entails but there is an interesting type of acupuncture in Korea called moxibustion.  This involves applying heat to the body with a stick or a burning cone of mugwort.  This is then placed over injuries or pressure points to stimulate and strengthen the blood - although what exactly 'strengthening' the blood does is a bit of a mystery to me.  This technique is often used alongside the more conventional form of acupuncture and the use of round glass jars with the burning mugwort inside is common.  This results in dark circles forming temporarily on the backs of the patients, which many foreigners may have seen in the showers (resembling an attack from a giant octopus) if they use the public baths or go to the gym.

Eating Korean Porridge (죽)

If you are sick, Korean doctors, bosses, and everyone will recommend that you eat porridge.  When I was first in Korea I was a little confused as I thought that meant good old-fashioned oat porridge with a bit of jam and sugar.  In Korea, though, porridge is rice based and is sort of a gloopy, soupy mixture of rice, vegetables, mushrooms, and sometimes meat or fish.  This description doesn't make it sound all that appetising but it is really good, healthy, and easy to digest, and for this reason it makes perfect sense to prescribe it.

Drips in the Streets

One of the iconic sights of Korea, I reckon.  Hospital patients can regularly be seen outside hospitals or even down the local supermarket with a saline drip attached to them, walking around with it.  People even sit outside on a drip and smoke cigarettes.  In my view, if they are sick enough to need a drip they should not be out and about.  The reason that they are walking around with them is that they don't really need them, harping back to the first point I made in this blog post.

The Injection in the Butt

I am sure that anyone living in Korea for an extended period of time or anyone who has been a little sick here would have had the needle in the backside treatment.  I had it done a couple of times when I was very new to Korea and suffering with acute irritable bowel syndrome brought on by eating their bread, which is made with milk (I am lactose intolerant).  Bent over in painful stomach cramps I went to my employer for help in going to a doctor before I started my day's work.  I said it was unlikely that I would be able to work that day.  My boss simply took me to a doctor's surgery where they gave me the injection.  I was then told to have an hours rest and come to work as normal.  It did not make any difference whatsoever.

Korean Pills

Go to a pharmacy in Korea and you will be likely to receive an array of brightly coloured pills for even mild complaints.  It all seems a bit worrying but apparently it is only this way because in Korea they do not combine all the ingredients into one pill and prefer to leave them separate.  In all likelyhood 3 or 4 brightly coloured pills have exactly the same effect as just the normal one or two in our countries. 

The Koreans may well be on to something, however, as numerous studies on the placebo effect have shown that sugar pills with brighter colours tend to make people feel better than a simple colourless pill.  Also, expensive brand pills in supermarkets often have the same result in making people feel better than cheaper brands do, despite there being exactly the same quantities of active ingredient in them.  Maybe they are trying to boost the psychological effects of taking the medicine.

Attitudes to Abortion in Korea

In August this year South Korea's constitutional court upheld a 59 year long ban on having abortions.  South Korea banned abortion in 1953 with exceptions for rape, incest or severe genetic disorders. 

This may come as a surprise for anyone living in Korea who keeps their eyes and ears open. With my close connections in Korea I have known a number of Korean women of varying ages who have had abortions.

This week abortion hit the headlines with a case of an Indian woman in Ireland who was refused an abortion despite being in severe pain from the pregnancy.  She later died of septicemia brought on by an obviously invalid pregnancy.  So are Korean attitudes to abortion similar to those in Ireland, a country which has the same laws against abortion?  The answer is that, strangely, despite the similarity in guidelines, the two countries are poles apart.

Abortions in Korea take place in hospitals and apparently sometimes without anesthetic because hospitals have to register each time they use it, and since abortion is supposed to be illegal they do not want to do this.

The most shocking thing about abortion in Korea, however, appears to be the flippancy and the ease with which it is undertaken, made even more surprising because it is against the law.

UN statistics estimate abortions to run at about 20 per 1000 births in Korea, which is exactly the same as the US (there must be a lot of rape, incest and/or genetic disorders in Korea as abortion is legal in most of the US), but in Korea many abortions go unreported.  I would shudder to think of the actual figures; this is a problem that could be getting out of hand.  The behind closed doors and prudish nature of the Korean people towards sex could also be causing a lack of knowledge in the family planning department.  Fear of family reactions to news of an unwanted pregnancy or a pregnancy before marriage may also push young people to have abortions in secret.

Back in England I had known a few people who had abortions and it literally wreaked havoc to their mental health, causing some level of depression in everyone I had known to have the procedure.  The women I knew who had abortions were guilt-ridden and clearly emotionally damaged by the whole experience.  What I have seen in Korea does not match the consequences of abortion that I saw in England.

The process itself is obviously never an easy experience and as a man, and someone who has not experienced it through a partner, I cannot comment on the procedure itself but I cannot imagine it is pleasant. 

But it is not so much the speed of the physical recovery that is shocking but the mental recovery and the relative ease with which some of the Korean women, and their partners I have heard about, come to their decision.  Sometimes the reasons for their abortions have seemed of mere inconvenience rather than a genuine problem of bringing up the child.

Being a non-religious man and erring slightly liberal in my political opinion, I am actually in favour of pro-choice and not of a ban on abortions generally, but it still troubles me when it looks like such an important decision is taken without too much due care and attention and appears to not overly perturb the person in question.

Of course, it should not be a surprise that Koreans do not follow this law banning abortions.  Korean people are regularly quite selective with the supposed requirements of their government.  Think of traffic laws (as I have said before there must be some), employment laws - such as those requiring Koreans to work no more than 40 hours a week unless they are paid overtime (there is a loophole that says maybe 52 hours but they even exceed that) - and rules on dog meat which Korean Food Sanitary Law states is an illegal food ingredient and the Seoul Metropolitan government categorizes as 'repugnant food'.  All of these rules and regulations are flouted everyday in plain view of anyone who cares to look and not bury their heads in the sand.

It is the social attitude towards it all, though, that is most disturbing of all.  To my eyes it is as clear as day that the value and sanctity of life is not as high here, whether it be human or animal.  This also includes the care and treatment people and non-humans receive during life and not in matters of just life and death.

For another example of this, I needed to not look any further than my own Korean family.  My uncle in-law used to have two Jindo dogs (a famous and traditional Korean breed)  for a number of years.  While they were alive they were rarely if ever let off the short leash that they were tied to outside their house in all weather (it can get seriously cold in Korea in winter).  The younger dog would still get excited when anyone came near, desperate for attention, but for the older dog it did seem that his life had broken him and taken away all of his spirit.  To make a sad story even sadder still, I went to the house for dinner a couple of months ago and the dogs were not there, they had both been sold to the dog meat trade.

Can we seriously think that people would do the same to a pet in the West?  There are obviously cases of abuse but these are among the poor, the uneducated, and the trouble-makers in our societies.  In the case of my uncle in-law and his family they are a perfectly pleasant and nice Korean family in every other respect.  It is clear that this is a cultural attitude and not a case of a few rotten eggs, that's the difference.  A further reason for thinking this way was because of the amount of students I have taught who had dogs in the past but told of how their parents had sold them for dog meat also.

The case of Koreans eating dogs is old hat and to be fair not many people do it anymore, but it has always been the treatment of them that has aggravated me more.  They too often display a callous lack of respect for the animal's life and I believe this also shows in their attitudes towards abortion.

Bring up the issue of dogs around a Korean and they often point to the hypocrisy the West shows towards animals, after all we keep pigs (and other animals) in small pens and kill them, with the average pig life having vastly more suffering than a pet dog in Korea.  They are in a way correct, but whilst logically I must agree, I have a moral intuition that there really is something special about a dog.  We have had a faithful partnership with them for thousands of years and it shows in how we dote on them and vice versa.  It feels like the betrayal of a trusted friends and I feel this guilt on behalf of everyone that does not care about their welfare.

The same argument can be made with abortion.  I recognize, and agree with the views of  people like Peter Singer who draw a comparison between abortions and killing animals for meat.  He says that a cow, for example, will suffer far more than an unborn fetus with a nervous system that is not fully developed.  Therefore, if we are so concerned about a fetus we should be, in fact, more concerned about the cow.  Again, there is great logic in this and perhaps he is 100% right and that it is just because we all merely favour our own species, but I have a niggling sense inside that we should not be so frivolous with the unborn, and abortions, although allowed, should be as a last resort with all the alternatives carefully considered.  This is not the feeling I get from many of the people I have talked to and learned about in Korea, who must for obvious reasons remain anonymous.

Of some of the older Korean women I have knowledge of, some have had multiple abortions and although I have obviously no idea what is going on inside their heads, I don't sense that much remorse in them, at least certainly not on the level that I could see in women in England.

Of course, you could throw the argument on its head by saying that we in the West are too caught up with the issue of the sanctity of human life.  The West has a Christian tradition and even if people are atheists like me, much of our moral intuitions are shaped by almost 2000 years of Christian culture.  Before the Christians, infanticide was a common cultural practice in ancient Greece and Rome, where parents would leave their sometimes only slightly disabled children on hilltops to die of exposure or even throw them off of cliffs.  This wasn't done because they had no heart or moral sense - indeed the Greeks, especially, had a famous and solid grasp of morals that was much ahead of their time - they simply had a different cultural philosophy.

In Christianity, the church ingrained a special value upon human life, even from the moment of conception which puts an extremely high value on all life.  This high value might seem a wonderful thing, but has consequences itself in stopping us from ending lives (even our own) when a high degree of suffering is making life not worth living, and obstructing possible life saving (and life improving) scientific research, such as that done using human stem cells.

Korea does not have a Christian history imprinted on the cultural make up, it has a Confucian tradition which values social harmony and the group.  With this way of thinking, individuals are not necessarily special, it is the group that comes first.  Under this line of thought it is therefore understandable to me how it might be easier for some Korean people to handle abortions with less emotional importance.

There are obviously Korean people and indeed Western people who reject or accept certain parts of their cultures to greater and lesser degrees and this is not applicable to everyone, but the pattern of behaviour cannot go unnoticed.

I am not a fan of Christianity and think we need to move on from it more quickly than we are doing, but it did give us this important sense of value of life, which although needs tweaking a little, is nonetheless quite precious.  Maybe, however, we could do with meeting Korean culture somewhere in the middle and perhaps the guilt experienced by many women from abortion is really quite unnecessary, a hangover from deep lessons of Christian inspired history and while abortion should never be taken lightly it could be thought of a little less gravely than it is currently in the West.

Update: Here are some sources that validate some of the conclusions which may seem to have been made from anecdotal evidence in the article.  These sources would seem to back up my observations.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-vognar/animal-welfare-poverty-_b_1560440.html - on the link between the poor and animal welfare.

Below are a number of articles that may validate my point about the casual nature of abortions in Korea.

http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/terminating_koreas_abortion_culture

http://articles.latimes.com/2009/nov/29/world/la-fg-korea-abortion29-2009nov29

http://www.thekoreanlawblog.com/2007/11/abortion-in-korea.html

http://www2.hu-berlin.de/sexology/IES/southkorea.html#9

Below is taken from the above link, an admittedly fairly old study (1996), but does seem to back up what I have noticed.

C. Abortion

 HYUNG KI CHOI AND COLLEAGUES (REDACTED BY HUSO YI)

In Korean law, an induced abortion, defined as the removing of a fetus before the twenty-eighth week of gestation, is allowed in cases of genetically inherited diseases, transmitted diseases, incest, rape, and those cases that may greatly harm maternal health. However, it has been used as a form of contraception in Korea, and the number of induced abortions runs between 1.5 to 2 million cases annually. There are 600,000 newborns in Korea each year, and the number of abortions is nearly three times the number of deliveries. The total number of abortions in Korea is the second highest in the world. One out of two married women has experienced an abortion. Eighty percent of abortions are done for gender-selection purposes, using an ultrasound scan to ascertain the gender and then selectively abort female fetuses. Those who seek abortions for reasons defined by the law account for only 20 percent of all abortions. Unmarried women have 18.5 percent of the induced abortions; 26.5 percent of these women were between ages 16 and 20. The overwhelming majority of women who had an abortion, 77.9 percent of married women and 71.3 percent of unmarried women, reported satisfaction with the results of the abortion. This reflects, perhaps, the fact that abortion has become commonplace in Korea (PPFK 1996).

Is a Clash of Culture Inevitable and Irreconcilable?

From the perspective deep inside the culture of Korea with Korean in-laws it starts to become clearer to me why the East and West do have so many problems in relations.  There are some key differences based on our core values that are simply not compatible with each other.

Let's start with the West and our core values: freedom, equality, and individuality.  There are obviously others like fairness, for example, and even respect is important, it is just not as important and is over-shadowed by the others when push comes to shove.

In the East (focusing on Korea) the core values are contrary to the West: respect and duty.  This is not to say that freedom, equality, and individuality are not at all important but they are superseded by respect and duty.

Everyone, to some degree, is probably aware of these differences but some practical examples are needed to illustrate just how badly these can clash sometimes, and I can give some from personal experience.

In Korea, the old have a duty of care for the young and in return the young have a duty to respect and obey older people's wishes, especially that of family.  As a son in-law I fall into to this family dynamic and I am expected to obey my in-laws when they ask something of me.  Most of the time I accept this duty, not least because often they are not asking for the world and it is better to simply not cause any trouble.  This is not to say, however, that this cannot be tiresome on occasion as even the mundane, like going round for dinner, to a small degree, requires that I abandon my own core principles.

When I arrive, where we go, how I behave, and when I leave are all out of my hands, so that is freedom gone.  Throughout the whole time I have to respect the in-laws also, bowing, respectful language, turning away when I drink, etc.  Equality gone.  Individuality is the only thing that remains but even then I am required to conform, which is certainly not in my nature, so I think we can safely say that is all my core values jettisoned.

If this is beginning to sound like a moan, you maybe right, but honestly I accept most of this from week to week without that much trouble, only if I am tired or in a bit of a bad mood do I become slightly grizzly about it or if I have spent too long in their company.  It is clear that I need to compromise some of my own culture's beliefs in order to make things run smoothly with my wife and her family, so I don't mind too much, especially as my wife's parents are good people, they were merely brought up from the opposite side of the world to me.

Every now and then, however, (perhaps even as little as once a year) a situation comes up that reminds me of the fragile nature of the peace between our cultures.  I can think of a few instances where I have flat-out refused to do what my in-laws require of me, where what they have asked has just tip-toed over the line of what I believe is acceptable.  On a couple of these cases in point, my wife has lied to her parents to avoid conflict, not just little white lies, but some pretty whopping porky pies.  To a Western ear, lying to your parents sounds abhorrent but I have learned that this is common in Korea and what's more I believe this is preferred to honesty by parents themselves if the honesty causes any disruption in the social order or the family dynamic.  Some of the lies my wife has said to her parents have been so transparent they must have known she was lying, and I see this in the culture generally, it really seems as if lying is not that bad a thing to do if it maintains the status quo.

On two other occasions, however, no lie could save the situation.  The first is the situation I shared in the post on 'My Korean Family' where I met her (rather wealthy) uncle for the first time, who invited me for dinner with the rest of the family the next day and then about an hour before the scheduled meeting time informed me, via my wife, that he would like me to pay for all ten people present.  I refused as I had only met them for an hour or two the day before and felt this was stretching my charity to them a little too far.

The other occurred last week after I had just finished dinner at home on a Wednesday night at about 8 o'clock.  My wife received a phone call from her mother, who was drinking (and drunk) with a friend. Her friend decided to phone up her daughter and ask whether they could meet with them with her son in-law, and because they were Korean they dropped everything and joined them at short notice.  This is done more as a way of showing-off just how wonderful your family is, in Korean culture, and as cynical as it sounds, the most probable reason for her friend to call her daughter to meet was to make my mother in-law feel jealous.  These acts are painfully easy to see for what they really are, even if you do not have a great grasp of the language, but my mother in-law took the bait and was indeed jealous.  This was all the motivation she needed to call us over.

Now, there might be times where I would be a willing participant in this little status game to save any aggravation but that night was not one of them.  I was tired, ready to relax, and wanted to get up early for a run, and besides she had given us no notice whatsoever, just 'come now!'  My Western ideals started clapping like thunder inside my head, 'I am not here to be used and commanded by someone else' was my immediate reaction.  However, after a few minutes of seeing my wife looking a bit upset and wondering what on earth she was going to say to her mother, I offered a compromise and that was that I would go out but I did not want to sit in a smoky bar.  We could have gone to one of the many coffee shops around or even met around their house which was close by but that was not acceptable.  We had to meet on exactly her terms because that would show her friend what a dutiful and wonderful daughter and son in-law she had.

While I have some sympathy for my mother in-law in this situation - it is her culture after all - this was grossly unfair on me, and especially unfair on my poor wife who was stuck in the middle.  What should have happened was that she was fine to ask if we wanted to join her but not to demand it and certainly not to be upset with my wife when I did not go.  In my eyes, she was behaving like a dictator and from my point of view and my core values, I cannot respect this and in-fact I actively want to disobey this behaviour simply because it flies in the face of my principles.  From her perspective though, I was not respecting her wishes and not fulfilling my duty as a son in-law and she was probably as offended at my behaviour as I was of hers.  The difference is irreconcilable and the only thing that can be done is to paint over the cracks and forget about it.

Bring these same issues up to societal, country, and regional level and it is easy to see where we have problems in relations.  What we think is important and right, deep down inside, is not only different but opposed and actually clash head on.  I have a deeper understanding than most and I am keen for things to work out well because of my wife but most people do not have this close cultural connection or so much vested interest in a pleasant outcome.  No wonder we have problems in the world.

The important thing to remember, even though these differences are so damaging and cause a fair amount of anger and conflict, is that there is no doubt that my in-laws are good people and no doubt that most Koreans are good people, this goes for Chinese, Japanese, Iranians, Afghans, Russians and all the others we might have troubles with.  Travel teaches you this, most people are great, even if you don't enjoy their culture.  What's more I am good too, and so are the vast majority of people from Western countries also.  Just because we offend each other sometimes does not mean one side is evil and the other righteous.  On the other hand, maybe it is just because of where I was brought up but I genuinely think that Western core principles really are better, but many in the East will of course dispute this.  So we have come full circle again and it could be that there is no solution, we'll all just have to live with it the best we can, like I have to.

Brand Names and Status Games

One of the first observations my mother made of Korean people when she visited me a few weeks ago was that everyone wore such nice shoes, especially the women, but the men also.  A short time later she also noted that many of them had designer handbags, watches, and clothes. 

I suspect the reality of Korea was nothing like what she might have pictured when I first told her I was planning to work there.  I am guessing she would have had visions of Thailand or Vietnam, places where you can see development but also has its lion's share of poverty.

It does appear that everybody has money and is displaying this to everyone else.  It can be difficult to pick out the wealthy from the relatively poor.  It is almost like an arms race but it's not about who has the strongest weapons it's about who has the best brands and most expensive gear.

Status really matters in this part of the world, the Joseon Dynasty was the longest running Confucian empire and ideals of status within society run very deep in this line of thought.  High status used to be based on bloodlines, scholarly accomplishment, battlefield triumphs, or good business acumen, but these days it is increasingly displayed by what people wear and own.

As well as the status element to their culture, Korea also is a group centred culture, which makes fitting in and being accepted by your peers and others even more important than it is in Western culture.  This means if one person has brand name shoes or a designer watch everyone else tends to follow.

You can see the fall-out from all of this by just walking the streets but things become even worse when you are transported into a school.  There seem to be a few must-haves for my high school students; colourful brand name trainers, North Face jackets, and - something I have only recently noticed - big divers-like watches.

If I sound a little out of my depth here in talking about what is fashionable, you would not be wrong.  I have always distanced myself from all this brand name nonsense.  It has always looked like a perfect waste of money to me and it has a divisive and shallowing effect on society generally.

This is how the war of status is played out in the classrooms and streets of Korea with trinkets bought from some of the most over-priced and pretentious department stores you will ever see.  No wonder these places can afford to employ about 2 or 3 members of staff for every section and brand they sell.

I just do not know how Korean people afford all these things.  They work some of the longest hours in the world then flitter all their cash on over-hyped garbage that they simply don't need and won't make them happier.  It is all simply to make themselves either be as good as or better than the next person.  You don't have to be a philosopher to realise this is not a great recipe for living the good life.

So are we in the West so much more enlightened?  Well, when it comes to brand names maybe we do have more people who show disdain for them and because of our culture it may be a little more acceptable to not go along with the crowd.  Many people do, however, still have an obsession with it, indeed we are the originators of it and it is further fuelled by the celebrity obsessed masses.

It has to be said, though, that our status games are fought on a battlefield with slightly different rules.

My country has spawned the slightly cringe-worthy phrase 'Cool Britannia' and I think this sums things up quite nicely, essentially it's saying we are not powerful anymore, but we are at least trendier than everywhere else.  In the UK status is still important for people - it always will be in a social primate species - but it is not necessarily possessions that show-off someone's status it is their levels of confidence, arrogance, and sometimes their disdain for others, in short, how 'cool' they are.

Being 'cool' is how you are socially accepted and how you climb up the tree of status, exactly like the brand name obsession of Korea.  Now, brand names can aid in this, but - conversely to Korea - one biggest aspects is being individual, being crazy, standing out in a crowd or rebelling against 'the system', whatever that is.

While expressing your individuality might seem like a good idea that would breed a healthy unrepressed sort of society, actually the opposite is true.  There will always be the true characters that are genuinely different and that are natural and comfortable with being set apart from everybody else, but the fact is that most people are not like this at all, they only act this way to make others believe that they are.

'Statistics show that the average person doesn't think they are very average at all.'  I have always liked this quote because it really is so true.  This is also a little depressing for people from my culture who want to be different, wild, or crazy, because most just aren't.  So in the 99% of people you see that are acting in a confident, outlandish, or in a maverick kind of manner, most of them are doing just that, acting, and it is not for the benefit of letting their personality run free, it is for everyone else so they can climb that status ladder.  These people are on a par with those that are carrying the Prada bags, Gucci watches, and North Face jackets.

Coming back to Korea, it is not just us Brits that have this disease it has afflicted most of the Western world.  When foreigners display 'the bulldozer effect' - this being a lack of sensitivity in handling touchy cultural situations - it is often directly related to looking good.  One classic way of looking 'cool' is not caring about convention and doing things your way.  Well, if people do that here, many Koreans will be offended, but then again they don't care, right?  Offence is sometimes necessary, especially when there is injustice involved, but this is rarely the motivation behind most issues in Korea involving offence caused by foreigners.

English teachers living in South Korea provide an interesting experiment in status games because almost everyone is in the same boat; they have the same job, the same kind of apartment, and are mostly as unaware as each other of the culture in which they reside. 

Now don't take this the wrong way but I always thought there was just something a little strange about many of the foreigners that come to Korea, some do not appear to be that genuine.  Firstly, I should say that this does not apply to everyone I have met, but still a fair few fit into this bracket.  This could be because they are in a foreign situation with no friends they have known for a long time, so they try too hard to impress.  It could also be exactly because of the equality in jobs and lifestyles that they have to stand out somehow.

Some people who come to Korea to work have problems that are not of their own making as it is always a possibility (in any country) to meet unscrupulous people, but many create their own problems and this has a lot to do with the attitude they display in trying to elevate their status.  Whatever happened to acting humble in a unfamiliar place? 

Some people I have met in Korea have stepped off the plane in Incheon and approached each situation as bold as brass with a confidence and dare I say an arrogance which I could see would upset people, not only here but in any country.  It is like stepping onto a football field having never played before and expecting to be on the same level as professionals.  Everyone deserves respect but when the Western bulldozer comes through it must be hard for some Korean people to show it sometimes.

Finally, if anyone is having problems out there, you should know that status is so important here.  If you accept the position of lower status and swallow your pride it can enable an escape from a variety of sticky situations.  Transcend the brand names and status games in any culture and life usually tastes much sweeter, perhaps even more so in Korea.

Night "Study" Exposed

I know for a fact that most Korean students absolutely hate being at school for all hours of the day, but that does not stop them making the best of a bad situation.  Night study in my all-boys high school is normally self-study and the teachers just leave them to it without supervision most of the time I think.  This gives the students the opportunity to sneak in a bit of fun between bouts of learning.

The typical impression of Far Eastern people and especially their students back home in England is that of a population of serious, smart, nerdy computer geeks who all want to become doctors and therefore study unhumorously day and night.  Granted, many of them do like computer games and it does seem that many of them want to become doctors but the reality of a Korean student's everyday world could not be further from the classic stereotype of over-seriousness.

I sometimes experience a sneak preview of the kind of shenanigans that go on after dark in their behaviour between classes.  I am probably the only teacher in the school that arrives early for class to set up computers, sort things out, and just have a casual chat with the students, so I see a little of what they get up to.

Classroom Sports/Activities

1. Flip-flop table tennis
The students push four tables together to make the playing area and sandwich some flip-flops in the middle for a net, then use one more flip-flop for a bat/paddle.  This way they only need to remember the ball.  Some of them are amazingly good at it and have almost masterly control using only their slipper.

2. Baseball
They scrunch up paper into a tight ball and seal it with sellotape, thereby making a baseball, a small broom is then utilised as the bat.  Not much running can be done but they have a pitcher, some fielders, and a referee calling the strikes.  To add some atmosphere, sometimes a student will plug his MP3 into the TV speakers and play some encouraging music inbetween pitches.  Some students join in with chanting and cheerleading and some just sleep through it.

3. Hockey
Desks turned around make for perfect hockey goals and a golf ball is used for the hockey ball.  The students usually only have two small brooms per classroom so they have to borrow some more from the neighbours to have a full and interesting game.  This game tends to cause the most disruption as desks are cleared to make room for the playing area.  There are frequent breaks for lost balls under tables, bags and other obstructions.

4. Sirum
A traditional Korean sport, which is kind of a mix between sumo and wrestling.  I feel a smidgeon uncomfortable walking in on all of these activities but this one is probably the most dangerous as students go tumbling around.  Other teachers do not appear to be too bothered by what goes on in the classrooms in breaks between classes, so I try and be lenient.  I guess they figure that if they get injured in this time, it is their own fault and they will learn from their mistakes and it is their room and if they wreck it they have to fix it and clean it (now theres an idea).

5. Arm Wrestling
Probably the most common of the classroom sports and there is usually one student that particularly excels in each class.

6. Fighting
General fighting with punching, kicking, wrestling, and slapping is a regular feature of the ten minute breaks.  I have never seen anything turn nasty, however, although occasionally you can see students sitting on their own and studying outside classrooms, this is sometimes due to fighting and also smoking in the toilets.

7. Dancing
I rarely see this with my students but there are sometimes coordinated dance moves practiced with a group of boys.  Any search on youtube will show many more of these which they surely copy from K-Pop music stars.  I would not mind betting that the girl students are even worse with things like this but it does appear funnier when the boys do it.  Here some examples of what I have found on youtube  (Skip to just over 1 minute on the second video).

8. Annoying other students
Some students are simply plain annoying and try their best to irritate other students in a great many novel ways.  See the clip below.

9.  Random Events
Rather worryingly, I walked in on one student being held down and pants partly down with his boxer shorts out and being spanked.  He also had his mouth gagged by a belt.  Perhaps they were trying to replica their favourite pornography scene.  I just shook my head and walked on by without asking any questions.

Actually, one of the best things about schools in Korea is the responsibility they give to students.  After reading my previous posts on older people you would be forgiven for thinking that Korean kids never do anything of their own accord without being told what to do first, but oddly enough they are given a kind of freedom that in many ways would never happen in Western countries.

I have experience teaching in England and teachers would rarely trust students enough to leave them unsupervised in a classroom.  It is common that teachers lock classrooms to avoid students wrecking the place at breaks and lunchtimes.  Of course, usually students do not have their own rooms and they travel from class to class throughout a typical school day.  The great benefit of the Korean system is that they are responsible for their own room (and their school) - for maintaining it, repairing it, and cleaning it - and this makes them far less likely to trash it.  Despite all my Korean students mucking around I have never seen an incident that you would regard as unsafe or anything broken.

This system of responsibility is fantastic but it obviously cannot work on its own and the culture has much to do with why it is successful.  There are a couple of cultural reasons that Korean students are quite a bit easier to manage than Western students; the first has to do with a level of automatic respect they have for teachers and older people, and the second is their group centred culture.  The first is fairly self-explanatory, but the reason for the second is because if an individual does something wrong within the group, the whole group can be punished for not dealing with or preventing them from doing it.  This way you never have to argue about who did it and what is fair, the group will just accept the punishment (with maybe a little resistance) without feeling that their human rights have been violated. 

As a teacher you do not have to waste time being fair, you can simply punish the group and the group itself will make sure justice prevails in the end by admonishing the individual responsible themselves.  Again they are responsible, not only for their own, but for others behaviour.  This dramatically cuts down on teacher's time spent dealing with behavioural problems, you really can (most of the time) trust Korean students from about the age of 11 upwards in a way you would never do in most Western countries.

All this responsibility suggests a greater maturity among Korean students but it certainly does not feel this way when you teach them.  They have a childish like innocence, even the ones that you know are smoking in the toilets at lunchtime and talking about pornography (a favourite pastime for high school boys students in Korea in my experience).  Teaching a class of 16 and 17 year olds in Korea feels more like teaching 14 and 15 year olds in England. 

When my mother visited a couple of weeks ago she remarked on stories of my students with the belief that they were less mature and they do feel this way, but I am not so sure.  I think they are simply nicer, and - I hate to denigrate the young people of my own country - friendlier, with a much greater sense of fun than students of a similar age in England.  They make teaching a pure joy, I do not think I could have a better job.  I actually look forward to returning to work after a break and my mood is usually lifted after teaching a class rather than the opposite.  I am not one to overstate things like this, or indeed tend to find pleasure in working at all, and it is all down to my students, which is perhaps why you could forgive me on being so harsh in my previous posts on the culture of putting so much pressure on young people here in Korea. 

The Stories Behind Korean Food

When my in-laws decided to make a two hour detour from a trip back home the other day to visit a town that was famous for Deokkgalbi, I have to admit I was none too impressed and sceptical of the difference there would be in the quality of the food just because a city or town is famous for it.  It sounded like annoying Korean logic at work again. 

Maybe I have been living here too long, but I think I am starting to sympathise and understand this point of view on food.  I started to be turned around by a trip to Jeonju the other day with my mother, who was visiting for a couple of weeks.  Jeonju is famous for bibimbap, and it has to be said their bibimbap is mighty good, without doubt the best I have had.

Now everytime I go to a different city I enquire with my wife as to what food they are famous for (I am sounding like a Korean, I know) and I try to sample it.  Here is just a short list of famous foods from different cities:

Jeonju (Jeollabukdo) - Bibimbap
Uijeongbu (Gyeonggido and site of big US army base) - Budae Jiggae
Busan (Gyeongsanamdo) - Fish cake
Chuncheon (Gangwondo) - Dakgalbi
Damyang (Jeollanamdo) - Doekkgalbi
Mokpo/Naju (Jeollanamdo) - Hongeo (highly aged and fermented fish, below), which is the most disgusting thing I have ever tasted.
Gyeongju (North Gyeongsanamdo) - Bread
Geumsan (Chungcheongnam-do) - Ginseng
Eumseong (Chungcheongbuk-do) - Red chili peppers
Sokcho (Gangwondo) - Oechingho Sundae

I am sure there are a whole lot more, indeed whenever I visit a certain area with my wife and her family I am told of the different speciality foods. 

Apparently, during the Joseon dynasty these speciality foods from all over Korea were often brought together for Kings to eat.  In fact, the higher the position in Joseon society, the more side dishes - from all corners of Korea - you were entitled to eat.

It is not just where the food comes from but also the stories behind them that can be so interesting and shows what a deep connection with their food they have in Korea.  Although I am highly sceptical of some of their supposed properties, the stories of their creation and their history can sometimes be quite interesting.

Have you ever been given some bibimbap (Doshirak) in a metal box in a galbi restaurant that you had to shake?  The story behind this  is that parents used to give these to their children for school lunch and put them in their bags.  As they walked to school and ran around all the ingredients would all mix up and this is the reason it is sometimes still served this way in some restaurants.

I always wondered about the Korean fascination with spam and cheap processed meat.  It seems a strange combination with most of their other quite natural and healthy food.  Budae Jiggae is a spicy soup with spam and cheap little frankfurters in it and I learned of its origin the other day.  It is obvious when you think about it, it is from American soldiers and their rations during and after the Korean War.  The Americans brought lots of this processed meat with them and the Koreans used it, adding it to many foods.  This why Budae Jiggae is famous in Uijeongbu, which is a big US army area.

The story of some of their slightly less palatable sounding foods also shares a similar logic.  Koreans do tend to use just about all of the meat on animal that they can, any plant or vegetable, and anything that crawls on the ocean floor.  Chicken feet, pig's intestine, pig spine (Gamjatang, left), dog, Hwae (raw and sometimes still moving sea creatures, below), and sundae (various inner organs of a pig or cow) are all still quite popular, with the exception of dog which is becoming less and less popular as time goes by (it is the older population that mainly eats this).  Like the processed meat they probably would not have chosen to use these things if they had had the choice, but life - until very recently - has always been quite a testing experience in Korea with their harsh winters, boiling hot summers and with the Korean War still fairly fresh in their history.  Put quite simply, 'beggars can't be choosers', and most people were very poor especially at the time of the Korean War.  They had no choice but to adapt and make the most out of their sources of food.

I am a vegetarian in England but in Korea I choose not to be because of the difficulty in finding vegetarian options, and eating everything that Koreans put in front of you is a good way of getting them to like you, especially the in-laws.  The good thing about my meat eating in Korea is that I get to try these foods (with the exception of dog) and the fact is that the Koreans have done such a good job of making them edible that they are very often delicious.  You can find yourself trying all sorts of odd delicacies that sound disgusting but end up being extremely tasty.  Chicken feet is my personal favourite.

These are the the few stories that I am aware of, but I would be fascinated to learn some more as a man who attaches quite a high importance to food.  Korean culture is extremely rich in the food department and is one of the aspects of living in Korea I really do enjoy.

The Aging Population of Korea

This is following on from last weeks post about the stress created by the relationship between the young and old in Korea and particularly regarding families.  I argued strongly that the pressure of providing for people in old age was just too much for the younger generation in Korea.

By chance, I stumbled across an episode of Newsnight (BBC) on youtube shortly after posting last weeks blog http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BjbWdwDB7s.  The subject was about the problems we face as a planet with the growing population of people over 60 in the world.  Here are some of the statistics summarised from the programme, sourced from the UN:


- The over 60s are the fastest growing age group in the world.

- By 2022 there will be an estimated 1 billion over 60s.

- By 2050 there will be an estimated 2 billion over 60s.

- By 2050 there will be more people over 60 than there will be under 15 (for the first time in history).


The UN predicts that the problem of an aging population on the economy is not just an issue for the rich nations but also in the developing world, where it is the duty of the young to take care of their family in old age.  Because of this governments and indeed older people themselves are not making provisions for later life and could suffer as a result.

In Korea's case, it is not a developing country anymore, but it still has very much a developing world way of dealing with people in their old age.  As I mentioned in my previous article, there is a debt that young people owe to their parents and this is to look after them, both by caring for them personally and by financially supporting them when they are older.  This being almost the sole way of taking care of elderly people cannot continue for very much longer, especially as South Korea has one of the lowest birth rates in the world.

It is not that young people caring for their parents in later life is a bad thing, we all should be giving our parents a measure of care and attention and maybe aiding them financially too, but it cannot be too demanding and other measures must be put into place.

Government pensions are one solution.  In Korea, there is a pension scheme but unlike my country there seems to be no state pension, whereby even if someone pays no money into a pension scheme, they will at least get some return from the government because of paying taxes throughout their lives.  The results of this can be seen in Korea when you see the sad sight of very old people carting huge amounts of cardboard around city streets.  The problem with state pensions, however - as is experienced in the UK - is that they are quite a tax burden for the country.  For this reason my own country's government has been controversially reducing the amount paid out for pensions steadily over recent years.

By far the best solution (and the most ethical) in an aging world, is for people to take responsibility for their increasing longevity and pay for themselves.  This is the idea behind personal pensions and is undoubtedly the only real way forward.

So with personal pension schemes in place in Korea, why are the old still so reliant on the young to provide for them when they are older, even in families that have had good jobs and healthy incomes?  Well, it all comes down to keeping the standard of living that they have had for their whole lives or even improving on it.  I think the older population of Korea really expect that for all the hard work they have put in to bringing up their children they should reap a dividend of an easy and comfortable life in their old age, wanting for little.  This is further exacerbated by the feeling of superiority many older people have towards people who are younger.  They are old, they deserve better than the young.  It sounds a little reductionist and over-simplified, but live in Korea for long enough and this is a conclusion that you cannot help but make. 

South Korea also has a brand name obsession and this is not exclusive to the young, older people still want the prettiest and shiniest new brands so they can show off their high status to their friends.  Do not underestimate the importance of this factor in Korea.  In my experience, shows of status often dominate many conversations between friends and acquaintances of my parents in-law and in many other situations.  There seems almost a constant battle between people - even those that have been friends for decades - of one-upmanship in this regard, revealing petty jealousies that are so transparent it defies belief at times.

This is the annoying arrogance of entitlement that older people sometimes have in this part of the world.  They feel they are entitled to respect, to money, to be obeyed, to give advice (that should be followed) and entitled to the life of Riley just because they are old.  It has irked me since day one living in Korea, this 'arrogance of age and position.'  The other unpleasant aspect of it all is that Koreans do not even have to be that old to exhibit this attitude, as merely a higher position at work, a year older, or simply being a man can create the same condition.

This even cropped up in a book I was reading recently on the Korean war.  It was a sore point and a regular complaint of the Americans and their allies that the Korean soldiers of high rank would rarely listen to anyone, both the South Koreans under their command or their foreign allies.  Allied commanders remarked that they would walk around with an air of superiority, giving orders but not doing any work of their own accord.  Their age and rank gave them a perceived right to be respected without ever really earning it and although Korean soldiers earned a good reputation for themselves in the following Vietnam war, the same could not be said of the Korean war with allied forces having little confidence in them.

Korea has undoubtedly made some of the greatest strides forward of any country in recent history, which they deserve immense credit for.  Many still seem to be stuck in pre-Korean War way of thinking, however, and this needs to change to adapt to the modern world.  Maybe things will change with a more open-minded younger generation, but I don't know that I would like to make a bet on a smooth and quick change of attitudes in the culture of age and respect.

The respect culture in this part of the world combined with the importance of social status combine to create a feeling of, 'well I suffered when I was younger, now it is my turn for some payback and some boot-licking from anyone I can get to do it.'  From my experience of twenty and thirty-something Korean people, they often display short memories of how they suffered when they were new to jobs, and when they were teenagers and lose empathy for those under them, both in age and in positions in work rather too swiftly.  Will they carry this into old age and keep piling evermore pressure on the young in the future?  Only time will tell.

Update: I also came across another interesting article in the Wall Street Journal on the age issue in Korea and how change might be starting to take place: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443624204578057550057990388.html?mod=googlenews_wsj