It's not, as one of the scholars on Dave's ESL Cafe will have you believe, celebrating Koreans who are rude to foreigners.
Have a close look about 60% of way thru. The main theme is 'Korea Pride.'
As I said, keep an eye out and state here what you see when the Korean guy pushes the white guy.
It's more like 'Korean inferiority complex raises it's head' than pride. Maybe I'm misreading it.
The Grand Narrative has a translation, and though Annalog posted on the video first, it wasn't until reading TGN's post I learned that one of the actors is Mahbub Alam, star of a film this summer "Bandobhi." Though it's irrating to hear politeness encouraged as a means to boost Korea's brand---there's that B-word again---it's very nice that this company is calling attention to the treatment of foreigners. Of all colors. More of this kind of awareness would be useful back home, too.
22 comments:
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...and "them."
When I saw the video, I thought it was racist. It seemed to promote Korean pride by pushing past the white guy. Only until I read the translation did I understand its real meaning. Well done Korea. It is perhaps the best thing I have seen Korea do. Perhaps I am overoptimistic. I once read a profile of South East Asians being forbidden to use a certain sauna in Seoul.
Now if I can only get the Asians in Toronto to stop standing in front of the subway doors...
PS--does any white guy here let Koreans push past them like that on the escalator?
Look, Koreans don't push past other people because they are rude, I just think there are just different concepts of yielding, and holding doors for other people.
Personally, I wait for other people to move out of the way, and get out of the way if I am blocking a door or something like that. It is all because I like to create space for myself. People who live in a city of 20 million people might not care too much about space and just might want to be first.
Kobaco can run all of the ads it wants, but that isn't going to change the way that people see themselves and not see others in public. I have to give it to them for trying though.
"Koreans don't push past other people because they are rude, I just think there are just different concepts of yielding, and holding doors for other people."
This subject has come up countless times with Korean friends of mine, and I can assure you that many South Koreans find it quite rude and irritating as well. I also noticed that there was hardly any pushing or shoving in public when I was up in Pyongyang, so it's not necessarily a universal "Korean" trait.
In any case, if like you say this is just "Korean culture," then this is just going to have to be accepted by non-Koreans living here, and yet at the same time that would seem to undercut the notion of South Korea becoming a truly "multicultural society" in which individuals and difference are genuinely respected. The reason why people tend to ignore strangers in public here is because they are not recognized as "individuals," and therefore don't really exist.
That's the basic problem with the "uri" concept, which is incanted multiple times in the Kobaco ad; anyone who is not a part of "us" is automatically "them" or, really, "no one." For this reason, one can't help but feel that this ad is promoting the idea that being more polite to non-Koreans is mainly worthwhile because it will help "our national brand" -- rather than promoting the idea of respecting individuals and different types of people.
This ad is quite confused in my opinion despite its better intentions, and is a part of the very problem it seeks to critique.
I agree with King Baesu:
Koreans know this behaviour is rude, as the video indicates, otherwise there was no reason to use that example. Also, Koreans in Canada notice how many Canadians open or hold doors for those behind. Ask a Korean in your country if they find such door holding behaviour courteous, and, by extension, the lack of such behaviour as rude.
Also, people don't have to know there behaviour is rude for the behaviour to be rude. Ignorance is no excuse for incivility.
The false note in the ad is that the Korean who pushes past is a well-dressed young guy. From my experience young men are the least likely to do that. The times I've collided with young guys they've apologized profusely - as do I to them, thus saving face all around.
The ad would have been WAY better had it shown a 50+ ajumma bowling over 외국인. Or a young woman texting without paying the slightest attention to the world or where she is walking. Or better yet a group of four of five Koreans of any age blocking a sidewalk, escalator, or doorway without any regard for other people.
You'd think in a crowded land the people would have a well developed sense of politeness. Yet Koreans have responded to the problem of overcrowding by ignoring everyone around them and even acting with extreme passive aggressiveness.
Another interesting aspect of the ad is that the Korean fans cheering in the stands -- which cannot help but invoke the mass cheering seen during the World Cup games here -- are wearing blue "Korea" shirts rather than the archetypal red.
Is it too conspiratorial to think that the new LMB administration -- the ad was made in June 2008, during the height of the anti-US beef protests, no less -- was seeking to distance itself from the "progressive" red of the previous Roh Moo-hyun and Kim Dae-jung administrations, by "rebranding" Korea itself with the much cooler color of blue?
Weiki
So true about the Ajuma. They should show an ajuma budding inline.
And what the hell is it with Koreans spreading out on sidewalks? They do the same goddamn thing in Toronto. It's so annoying.
There should be three walklanes on sidewalks: Men (the fast lane), women (slow lane), and Asians (any slower and they stop lane).
Interesting comments so far, thanks.
King Baeksu: Was the ad made in June, 2008? I thought it was more recent. When I added the title on Youtube last night I erroneously labeled it as June, 2008, rather than June, 2009. But the blue Korea uniforms are interesting, and as you pointed out very different from the usual red.
Brian, I just went by the date on the title when I first saw it, but even if it's more recent the point stands that it's been produced by the LMB admin.
Is this related to that Etiquette compaign a while back?
The Korean National Football team used to wear blue.
I saw a longer, less confusing version of this ad today. It had an extra scene, of a young woman annoying others by yelling into a laptop phone at a coffee shop; and the message, repeated four times, seemed to be Korea Great, Koreans Not So Much.
It's a nice try; but again, the flaw in the ad is that the rude behavior is all by young persons. Whereas, when I think of Korea I think of drunken ajosshis emitting their foul odor of soju, kimchi, and cigarette smoke, and spitting every thirty paces in the street, pausing only to stare at me as if they've never seen a foreigner before. And I think of ajummas who walk through me, over me, in front of me, on top of me, without even blinking (or saying excuse me) as if I'm invisible. Young people I can handle. It's the old people who behave like peasants and are the great turn-off to this place.
The Korean national baseball team wears blue. Perhaps we're looking at baseball fans.
Comparing Pyeongyang and Seoul is a bit foolish, the two cities have been completely separated with different cultural situations for over 60 years. The way people behave in their personal space probably has a lot less to do with concepts of us and them and more to do with other variables.
I think that in the case of blocking doors obliviously, Koreans have a different concept of a door. In Korean door is moon, which can also mean gate. My co-workers constantly confuse door with gate in English, but I think that there is some reason to this. During Josun times people carried name tags and weren't permitted to travel freely between cities. Therefore if someone wanted to gain admittance to a city, they probably had to hang around city gates and wait for special permission, the way that student wanting to talk to teachers today hang around the outside of a teachers office waiting for acceptance. So in Korea this would be considered the polite thing to do.
It would also be considered impolite and almost unthinkable for someone like me to say, "Get the fuck out of the way," when someone blocks a door. This, however, is a highly imaginable consequence when in a city like New York.
Back to the streets of Korea though. Even though many people know that their behaviors might be seen as rude, they also don't expect any consequences. So in this light I reject John Heueresque reductions of Korean culture that can be seen in crap cross cultural communication pop psychology books that do less to promote understanding and more to promote racism. Using uri stuff, with collective identity mumbo jumbo isn't really all that helpful IMO.
If people aren't recognized as individuals, then how is it that a major clusterfuck of humanity like Myeong-dong manages to cooperate so harmoniously? Motorcycles, cars, Koreans, Japanese, and girls hawking face care products in colorful miniskirts all manage to not bump into each other that much. But even if some person sending a text message, bumps someone eating ice cream, there are most likely going to apologies thrown around rather than one person saying "Whatch the fuck where you are going you stupid piece of shit!!"
The more parsimonious answer besides people not existing because they live out side a group, is that there is massive distraction (loud music, girls in miniskirts, textmessaging), a lack of severe tongue lashings and intimidation, and super high population densities, that all contribute to a system where light pushing and shoving is tolerated. (Not to mention primary schooling where "Keeping ones hands to them selves," isn't really advice that is basic curricula.)
"Comparing Pyeongyang and Seoul is a bit foolish, the two cities have been completely separated with different cultural situations for over 60 years."
I think you missed my point.
"So in this light I reject John Heueresque reductions of Korean culture that can be seen in crap cross cultural communication pop psychology books that do less to promote understanding and more to promote racism."
Said the guy who argues that present-day Koreans run around in downtown Seoul with Choson-era conceptions of doors and gates.
Granted, my simple observation about how Koreans interact with doors is a bit weak, however, people who chalk every piece of Korean behaviour up to something that they read about Korean collective identity, or Korean tribalism, is becoming a bit of a tired epistomology.
"people who chalk every piece of Korean behaviour up to something that they read about Korean collective identity, or Korean tribalism, is becoming a bit of a tired epistomology."
And yet it is Koreans who do this more than anyone else. Are you saying that Koreans themselves have no clue about their own culture? And here I was thinking it was Lee Myung-bak who was the current reigning dictator! Of course there are plenty of individualized types of behavior to go along with more general patterns of culture here, but obviously this paradigm is strong enough that the South Korean government is even producing commercials like this one to try to address the phenomenon directly.
According to your logic, Kobaco is simply tilting at windmills, and perpetuating racism. Your own "anti-reductionism" is itself a form of reductionism, is it not?
Yes, we are all humans at the end of the day, but such a rosy way of viewing the world hardly accounts for the existence of nationalism, wars, different religions, etc., etc. Indeed, if we're all just human and all cultures are pretty much the same, what's the point of traveling abroad or living in another country at all? And who's to say that such a transcendental, universalizing perspective is not itself a form of Western cultural imperialism imposed on Asian cultures that most definitely do view themselves more often as "collective" rather than "individualistic" societies?
No campaign will ever get Koreans not to act rude. Even in the simpleset form, such as the nearly 10 years the ongoing effort to get them to stand on the left of the escalator and walk up the right, falls upon deaf ears. These people are passive-agressive in everything they do. If the overnment tries to get them to change their behaviors (rudeness), they will always reject that. Only once Korea begins losing foreign direct investment and the economy falters as a result, may persuade Koreans to change a little bit, but not much.
nb has awoken a couple of questions I've been meaning to ask. Sincerely, this is not meant to be a rant, just a couple of niggles.
The escalator system nb mentions has obvious virtues. However, Seoul Metro has been running a campaign this year (mostly in the form of posters) showing a foreign woman holding a big yellow "NO" card prohibiting people from escalating in single file.
What is that all about?
Also, why do people insist on sitting by the aisle when on buses, even during peak times rather than sitting by the window so that free seats can be easily reached and crowding eased?
While reading these comments I'm wondering if some are applying their culture to Korea? Maybe we make a big deal of being bummed into just because in our respective Western cultures it is very rude (and deadly in some parts of the USA).
When I lived in post-communist Europe (Slovakia, eastern Germany, and Hungary), there was plenty of rudeness to be had: Being bum-rushed in a bus; people jumping in line; and people not saying excuse me or sorry in their own language when they bumped into you. I figured that during communism things were hard and one had to be aggressive to get that last banana bunch or roll of toilet paper. We have to not compare Koreans with Canadians, Brits, or Americans and look at it in the Korean context.
As for me, when someone "accidently" bump into me, I ignore and just see it as one of the small negatives of living in a foreign country.
@daniel: I believe the subway posters are saying "Stand in TWO lines on the escalators, don't have a standing lane and a passing lane" I suppose this is because people were getting bumped and knocked around as people passed them on the way up the escalator. But having EVERYBODY stand two-by-two and wait like dumbasses until you reach the top is not a solution.
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