Mark James Russell

Books, blog and other blather

Category: Korean society (Page 1 of 2)

At last — Pop Goes Korea is back!

July 13, 2017 / / 0 Comments

PGK2

Okay, so this took a few months longer than I expected last fall. But at least, Pop Goes Korea (2nd Edition) is out and for sale.

The new version is 10,000 or so words longer than the old one, with all sorts of updates throughout. In addition to updates to each chapter, I’ve also added essays about Korean indie music, another about classic rock, a followup Q&A with Sean Yang (founder of Soribada) and a new Q&A with Dami Lee, the web cartoonist.

Best of all, the 2nd edition is also a lot cheaper, for $4.99 on the US Amazon site.

Oh, but all the photos are gone. Sorry, but I didn’t want the hassle of dealing with all those photo rights all over again. And, besides, this is the internet age, so I assumed people could just search and find all the photos they wanted for any subject.

For now, it is only available as an ebook at Amazon, but I am planning to upload it to all the major ebook sites soon enough.

Okay, it is a bit of an old book for such a high-turnover, constantly changing topic. But I think it holds up fairly well (and there really is nothing else that covers the same territory in English). And for the occasional student of pop culture, hallyu or modern Korea, I thought it would be useful to have my book easily available.

Thanks to all who read the original edition, and to those who are interested in the new one. I really appreciate your time, and I hope you find the new version interesting and useful.

 

 

Pedro Pelo Marco (Me!) — Brazil Comes to Seoul

May 31, 2017 / / 0 Comments

Here is a fun project I participated in last year, but it only recently hit the airwaves—one of Brazil’s most popular travel programs, Pedro Pelo Mundo (Pedro Around the World).

Pedro Korea

Host Pedro Andrade and his wonderful team came to Korea last summer, where they met with a whole bunch of experts in food, fashion, tattoos, and more, to talk about what makes Korea so fascinating. And they were nice enough to ask me to be one of their guests, too.

Pedro Mark Hongdae

So we walked around Hongdae and talked about music (K-pop and other genres), and plenty of other things about Korea. It was a lot of fun.

Mark Pedro 2

Unfortunately, the full show is not online, so you can’t enjoy it all. But you can get a taste of it here, with a segment on the Cheonggyecheon.

What country am I living in anyway?

April 16, 2016 / / 0 Comments

It’s been a crazy couple of weeks at my local supermarket. Even though I live way at the edge of Seoul in a fairly desolate area, my GS Mart now has:

  • Shallots
  • IPA
  • Pale ale
  • Ricotta cheese
  • Kettle chips

It really reminds of just how much Korea has changed since I first arrived, back in the 1990s. Back then, foreign goods usually required a trip to a black market, in Namdaemun or Itaewon or Shinchon. Very few beers or non-Korean vegetables were around.

But now, even the most plain supermarkets offer brussel sprouts, a selection of cheeses and some decent beers, not to mention Vietnamese and Thai sauces. The options are really pretty wide-ranging.

Korean food has really improved, too. There are a whole bunch of good sauces and soup stocks that Korean companies offer.

But for the moment, I’m just really excited about pale ale and shallots.

Phish Tales

February 13, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Long wall of text coming. Sorry.

Anyhow, no, I’m not talking about the jam band. “Phish” as in trying to scam someone to get their personal information, like passwords or credit card details, usually so you can steal their money. Phishing is quite a problem in Korea, often turning up in news stories, but in the last week, two phishing incidents hit pretty close to home — some scammers tried to steal from a relative yesterday (let’s call her “F1”), and the friend of a friend actually lost 20 million won to another scammer earlier in the week (“F2”).

In each case, the method used was rather similar, so I wonder if this is a problem that’s getting worse, or if two incidents just happened to hit close to home. These phishing attacks are pretty devious. Like most grifts, they’re designed to take advantage of human nature and our personal blind spots.

The scam begins with a phone call. A guy claiming to be with the police says that you have been targeted in a bank fraud and identity theft. They’ve caught the guy, but there will be lawsuits and all sorts of legal hassles. They warn that not taking care of this right away could result in months of trouble and your bank accounts could be frozen for a time.

But then they offer a solution — if you go to the police’s website, you can register your information and protect yourself. Of course, the URL they mention is not “go.kr” and not the real Korean police website. It looks the same, but it is “.com”.

Throughout, they keep talking fast, trying to stop you from thinking, lulling you into a rhythm, taking advantage of most people’s tendency to want to please others and be respectful. They also know your name and same bits of personal information (easily bought on the black market), designed to make them sound official.

Luckily for F1, once they started saying they needed her to transfer them money, she got really suspicious. She said she needed to check their info and would call back, asking them for their names and departments so she could call them back. They said to use the number on her caller ID, but she said no, she’d call the main police switchboard and the operator could pass her along to them. They immediately hung up.

F2 was not so lucky, and sent a lot of money.

It’s easy to look down on people who get scammed, but grifters are smart at recognizing glitches in human nature, and “hacking” our behaviour, like how a computer hacker breaks into online networks. That said, there needs to be a lot more education in Korea about how to protect your personal information.

More annoying, though, was the response of the real police. F1 called the Mapo Cyber Police division, but their response was “If you didn’t lose any money, don’t worry about it.” They said they could do anything about it and weren’t interested in filing a report or gathering information. So lazy and amateurish (and, unfortunately, typical).

tl:dr — Don’t ever give away your personal information over the phone and be careful about online. Korea’s lack of information security is getting ever more dangerous.

 

Why Korea is up my alley

December 24, 2014 / / 0 Comments

Close to my home, there is this small, nondescript alley. Or, rather, there was. Just one year ago, the alley had nothing but a super-cheap lunch place and a lot of residences (and stacks of garbage). Here is an image of it taken from Naver from just over a year ago.

Hongdae Alley 2013

Now, however, that alley has been turned almost completely commercial. There’s a “Mongolian” lamb grill, an Izakaya, a croissant shop, a grilled seafood place, a fancy dessert shop, and a pretty good Chinese restaurant.

Hongdae Alley new

Not to mention a Japanese bakery, Aoitori, which is bizarrely one of the trendiest joints in the area for drinks later in the day (it turns into a quasi-pub, with cocktails and wine, in the evening).

Aoitori

And that’s just on this 50 meter stretch. When you go to the end, the cross alley now has a Mexican-Japanese fusion pub, a huge chicken place, a hair shop, plus three of the buildings are now being renovated or completely rebuilt.

Hongdae alley

In short, there’s a real dynamism here, a sense that everything is constantly in flux. And I really like that. Of course, all change also implies a sense of loss and someone inevitably gets hurt, but I like living in a country that is still moving forward.

Imagine this happened in alley after alley, block after block, and you might get a sense of how much energy there is in Hongdae these days. Every time I think this neighborhood has hit a saturation point (for bars, coffee shops, galleries or whatever), it just keeps on growing.

Joining Colin Marshall’s Notebook

November 23, 2014 / / 0 Comments

The charming and insightful Colin Marshall, host of the website Notebook on Cities and Culture, recently traveled to Korea to turn his analytical eye here.  He wrote several articles about Korea for The Guardian, and he also conducted a whole bunch of interviews with artists, thinkers, trendsetters, and, well, me.

You can listen to me here, going on about a whole bunch of Korea-related things, like pop culture, art, win and Pringles.

Many thanks to Colin for the fun afternoon. Sorry the audio wasn’t clearer, but we were talking at Mudaeruk — a great cafe, but it can be noisy.

Coffee proves hotter than smut

February 27, 2014 / / 0 Comments

I’ve long joked that the only force stronger than “adult entertainment” in Korea is coffee. Many people over the years have tried and failed to institute moral campaigns against red-light districts, massage parlors, room salons and other vices in Korea. But once the nice, modern coffee shops move into a neighborhood, they push out all those bad things.

Turns out that it’s not just a joke. The Korean JoongAng Daily has a story today about how the number of coffee shops in Seoul have been increasing by 16.7% a year since 2008, but bars have declined by 1% and adult-entertainment facilities have dropped 2.4%.

My one quibble with the article is the continued myth that Koreans used to be shocked by the price of a Starbucks coffee. Coffee shops in Korea, even pre-Starbucks, were surprisingly expensive — and back then, most offered just instant coffee. Just because offices and universities had 100 won coffee machines doesn’t mean that coffee shops were cheap.

Korea’s real estate: 6 impossible things before breakfast

February 20, 2014 / / 0 Comments

While there is a lot to like about Korea, its economy, people, etc., there are two major issues that totally stymie it: education and real estate. They are the two biggest contributors to inequality in Korea. And they are the two areas that are completely wrapped up in their own mutually exclusive paradoxes, basically because everyone is so busy arguing over how to treat the symptoms that they do not understand the disease.

Today, real estate is back in the spotlight, as the government wants to relax anti-speculation regulations in order to jumpstart the real estate market. Good luck with that.

All this talk of Korean real estate being “hot” or “in a slump” completely misses the point because the housing market here is besieged by two contradictory needs:

  1. To lower prices, so apartments are more affordable.
  2. To keep prices rising, so the real estate market stays active.

Making matters worse, Koreans overwhelmingly use their apartment as their primary investment/savings tool, much moreso than in most countries (74% in Korea versus 42% in Canada or 25% in the United States). So to burst the bubble would ruin a lot of people.

But apartments in Korea are so expensive — the average home price is 7.7 times the average income (versus 3.5 in the United States), and that’s just nationwide, in Seoul that ratio is much worse — that rising prices would ruin a lot of other people.

Clearly, the country needs to deleverage household debt, but everyone cannot deleverage at once without causing a recession. So what is the solution? I’m no economist, but the only thing I can see would be letting inflation rise. Like in many countries these days, Korea’s inflation is persistently running below expectations, a sure sign that demand is slack. But if the country were able to get inflation up to, say 4%, then over a few years, that home price-to-income ratio could come down without reducing household spending.

Or maybe there are other solutions. But clearly, continually yo-yoing between pushing up the real estate market and then clamping down on it is a strategy doomed to fail.

Social Mobility in Korea

January 9, 2014 / / 0 Comments

A couple of thoughts on the decline of social mobility in Korea, which has been in the headlines and opinion pages lately. In case you had not heard, a survey by a government think tank showed that fewer Koreans are exiting poverty today compared to eight years ago. In 2005, 31.7% of low-income households rose to middle- or high-level, but in 2012, only 23.5% did so.

Troubling, to be sure. But it is interesting to note how little of this problem in Korea is about wages. Korea has one of the most equal wage structures in the world — before taxes. After taxes, it drops to 20th (just ahead of Canada), but back in the mid-00s, it fell to 17th, so a bit of a drop relative to other countries.

The big problem in Korea is not so much wages as it is the rising cost of housing and education, and the debts that come with them. Which is why it drives me nuts listening to newspapers, other pundits and the government talk about “re-starting the moribund real estate market.” The real estate market is already overpriced and harming Korean families; driving prices higher is insanity.

Education is crazy, too. Or, rather, schooling is. As I have written before, that is more about rent seeking and high barriers to entry in the labor market than it is about any real interest in education. Until Korea fixes how its companies and leading the government hires and promotes, nothing will change about its universities; and until people’s perspectives on going to university changes, nothing about its education system will change. Like the real estate market, this is basic economics — you have an inelastic, high-demand resource (the top 3 schools), so everyone is pursuing the same objective. And, as you learn on page 1 of your economics textbook, in a perfectly free market, profits drive to zero.

It’s worth noting, though, that while Koreans are very sensitive to inequality, they also remain very hopeful that things will be better for their children. That optimism is very important.

UPDATE: Oh, and keeping Korea’s well-educated women out of the workforce isn’t helping any.

 

Tuesday Morning Links

October 15, 2013 / / 0 Comments
  • For the Korea JoongAng Daily’s 13-year anniversary issue — and to mark the 60-year anniversary of the end of the Korean War — I wrote an overview of the history of Korean movies. You probably know the broad strokes of this story already … However, I was lucky enough to get some wonderful details from actor Ahn Sung-ki, producer Jonathan Kim, and the big boss of CJ Entertainment Miky Lee. Huge thanks to all of them for taking the time to talk to me. (Korea JoongAng Daily)
  • Interesting article on Lee Shin-young, who is reportedly the first female horse trainer in Asia. (Korea JoongAng Daily)
  • Unfortunately, one big detail in the previous story was wrong — Lee Shin-young was not Korea’s first female jockey. That honor goes to Lee Ok Rae, who rode back in 1975 (Horse Racing in Korea blog)
  • Google vs. Korean government over future of Internet freedom in Korea (New York Times)
  • Something funny about Korea complaining about Chinese smokers. (Korea JoongAng Daily)
  • Hard to believe, but I can still remember a time when smoking was allowed on airplanes on domestic flights in North America. But one by one, countries are slowly turning against the (smelly) (and sublime) habit.
  • Today, the International Herald Tribune is no more. It rebrands as the International New York Times. INYT? Doesn’t exactly scan well, does it? As my first article for the IHT was nearly 10 years ago, I’m a bit  sad about the change. For me, when I think of the Herald Tribune, I am always reminded of that scene from Breathless, when we first meet the Jean Seberg character:

« Older posts

© 2024 Mark James Russell

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑