Over the past couple of decades, Korea has emerged as a global manufacturing hub for cars, electronics, memory chips, cosmetics etc. However, what is even more remarkable is its emergence as a global soft power with Korean movies winning Oscars, Korean TV dramas getting a global audience, its music bands or K-pop going viral as well as Korean food becoming popular world cuisine. So how did Korea become cool globally:
“There is a theory that the government in Seoul engineered the coolness, starting from the early 1990s, and that the effort intensified under President Kim Dae-jung after the Asian financial crisis left its economy reeling. There is no doubt that South Korea marketed a form of entertainment as a cultural export so that it can enhance the appeal of other products.”
But Manu Joseph argues that there are other factors that drove this as he learns from this book, The Birth of Korean Cool by Euny Hong:
“Her portrait of South Korea before it became cool would be hilarious to Indians because Korea even in the early 1990s suffered a lot like India.
It was the opposite of cool. The youth were obsessed with studies. They were spanked by parents and teachers. Some parents brought canes to school and gave them to teachers to beat their wards with. Parents arranged the marriages of their children. Government officials measured the length of skirts and if hemlines were too high above the knees, girls had to go home and change; and long-haired men received forced haircuts. The minds of the young were not free.
Euny Hong says a Beatles could have never happened in Korea because young men were busy studying. Social strata were set and social peace came from the unspoken expectation that everyone would stay in their lanes. Koreans were also trained to develop false pride in their nation, in a way very familiar to us, as they spuriously claimed their ancestors invented a host of things, including the spoon. Koreans also liked to say that they have been invaded by many aggressors but they themselves never invaded another nation.”
What then changed? “Something happened in 1992 that she suggests might be the very origin of ‘Hallyu,’ the Korean wave. A Korean civil servant took contraband to Hong Kong in a diplomatic pouch that evaded scrutiny—it was “a Beta-max tape of a Korean television drama called ‘What is Love’.”
The civil servant wanted the Korean consulate to get it on Hong Kong TV. It was a big hit. It showed a culture that was alien to Hong Kong, where men returned from work and made dinner. What is Love showed Korean men as “a superpower” and women serving them.
Despite the culture shock, somehow all this was entertaining. The Korean government meanwhile spent millions to improve the production quality of its dramas. Several nations got hooked, including Cuba.
It appears that culturally, most of the world was not Western, but Korean. This is one of the reasons Euny Hong suggests: that the popularity of K-culture, though state-sponsored, might be a more organic phenomenon, something that stirred human nature in ways Korea didn’t expect.”
Joseph in his usual quirky style shows this non-obvious phenomenon behind the world’s newest soft power before presenting the following startling fact that shows the change in Korean culture:
“Being cool is such a promising career in Korea that in 2012, for a major televised singing contest called Superstar K, 4% of its population auditioned.”
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