6.27.2005 – Over the Aleutian Islands, Alaska

As I make my way home, I’ll put down my impressions of Korea after a visit of a little over a week and add some of my experiences that didn’t get into previous journal entries.

Most of my initial observations have not been significantly altered. I did eventually see a lot more people dressed in traditional Korean clothing—for women, the sort of flowery tops and what, for lack of a better term, I’ll call Korean culottes: loose, three-quarter length pants; for men similar sorts of shirts, but more often without the flowers, and long pants. But I didn’t see more than a few hundred people dressed that way out of I have no idea how many people I saw in Korea, but it must have been at least a hundred thousand. Most of the people in Korean dress were in places out from downtown Seoul, and virtually all of those dressed in traditional Korean style were over 50, most over 60. I saw no one under 35 or so who was not dressed in American style.

Around the middle of the week, I realized that I had not seen any women who appeared to be pregnant. I thought that was curious, and the only two possible explanations that came to mind were that perhaps it is not considered proper in Korean culture for obviously pregnant women to be seen in public (which seemed unlikely) or that the birth rate must be very low. Then, late on Friday afternoon, after returning from the DMZ, I saw in a matter of a few minutes, three pregnant women. I saw one more each on Saturday and Sunday. “Maybe they’re only allowed out on weekends,” I thought, but quickly rejected that hypothesis. Clearly there just aren’t very many pregnant women in Seoul (my guess would be that birthrates are higher in the countryside), which would seem to indicate something good about stemming population growth.

Speaking of body shape, many young Koreans are much taller than I had anticipated. It seems likely that changes in nutrition have had a similar effect in Korea to what they have had in the West, where the average height has been increasing for decades..

One dramatic difference from the United States is that I saw only a handful of Koreans who appeared to be at all overweight and no one at all who was obese—American tourists aside, of course. The only exception in addition to American tourists were some of the fat Buddha statues.

But give the Koreans a chance. With the proliferation of American fast food outlets in Korea, there is hope that they can begin to catch up with Americans in girth as well as height.

As for the American T-shirts I mentioned in an earlier entry, there never was an exception to what I had observed in the first two days. I saw thousands upon thousands of T-shirts with words, logos, and messages on them, and not a single one was written in Korean. The very few that were not in English were in French or Italian (names of stylish designers).

Nike swooshes are everywhere in Seoul. Among baseball hats, of course the damned Yankees are by far the most common. I had the pleasure, though, of seeing someone with a Yankees cap on just after I had been watching on MLB.TV on my laptop as Pedro Martinez was mowing the Yankees down.

I saw a guy in a full Mets jersey when I was at Changdeokgung palace. I almost said something to him like, “Let’s Go Mets!” but that was right after the Mets’ disastrous West Coast trip and their sweep by the Mariners, so I was in no mood. There were a lot of Dodgers caps and many Red Sox caps (they apparently like a winner), a few White Sox, and a smattering of many others. I didn’t see any Cubs hats, though. As I said, they must like winners. Several people were wearing Michael Jordan jerseys and I saw a guy wearing an Atlanta Falcons Michael Vick jersey. I saw somebody with an FDNY hat.

A sampling of some of the T-shirts I saw Koreans wearing: “Barbie,” “The Waltons,” “California,” “Los Angeles,” “New York,” “I ♥ NY,” “The Bronx,” “Kurt Cobain, 1967-1994,” and, perhaps most significantly for where Korea is headed in terms of American-style self-indulgence, Cobain’s line from “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” which was in sky blue letters on a pink shirt worn by a guy: “Here We Are Now, Entertain Us.” I also saw a store named simply: “I Want.” How American.

The most fundamental principle of American marketing, as well as of American culture, “Sex Sells,” is fully kicking in in South Korea—or at least in metropolitan Seoul. Sex is used to advertise everything, and sexy fashions are displayed on female bodies all along the streets.

I saw a young woman, maybe about 18, yesterday walking with her mother. The daughter was wearing a shirt that read: “Darling, maybe my legs aren’t so beautiful—I just know what to do with them.” I wonder whether she—and especially her mother—understood the message.

I saw a few pro-marijuana T-shirts, including one that read: “Hippie Marijuana Festival.” Koreans, it would seem, are on the road to ever-greater American-style consumption and self-indulgence. They have a long way to go to catch up to Americans in this regard, though. They are still very industrious. But I saw some young Koreans who looked like they were trying to be like the hipsters Norman Mailer referred to in the 1950s as “White Negroes”—“Bronze Negroes” in this case, perhaps. But generally they’re just beginning to move from the work ethic and production-oriented capitalism to the consumption ethic.

 Right after seeing on a subway an ad using the famous Marilyn Monroe photo with her dress flying up as she stands over the air coming up from a subway grate, I saw just the same thing happen to a Korean woman wearing a white dress. Weird.

I had been warned that I would find people just pushing others in the streets as they tried to get where they were going, without so much as an “excuse me,” but this wasn’t the case at all. No one was pushing. Everyone was very respectful of others’ space. In fact, the only person who bumped into me (and he didn’t indicate any sign of regret) was a Buddhist monk in a subway station!

The Seoul subway system is very easy to navigate. I had absolutely no trouble getting around town, or to nearby locales served by the subway and bus system. I had been concerned beforehand because the guidebook I had said there are no street signs in Seoul and it’s very difficult to find addresses. This was not at all the case. Everything is well marked and key signs are in English as well as Korean. Riding the subways so much, I quickly got into the old New York mode of strap-hanging, but the straps are lower on the Seoul subways and they have plastic handles, which I kept bumping my head into when I got up from subway seats.

Seoul is a generally very clean city—except for the air, which makes L.A.’s look pristine, but is certainly not as bad as Jakarta’s—but it’s not Singapore clean. Then again, possession of chewing gum isn’t a felony in Korea, as it is in Singapore. Merchants are out sweeping the sidewalks every morning.

Here’s something refreshing: In Starbucks in Korea they call a small coffee “short,” not “tall,” like they do here.

Fashion is a very big deal. Women are into shoes in a big way. Women’s shoes are for sale everywhere and in vast quantities—along the streets, in subway stations, anywhere you can imagine. In the subways there are large mirrors, before which women often pause to check out their appearance.

“Made in the USA” still seems to carry a certain cache in Korea, especially when it comes to cosmetics.

Older women with green sunglass visors accost Koreans on the streets trying to hand them fliers for restaurants and stores, but they leave foreigners alone.

The money is very easy to deal with, since $1 equals about 1000 won, so all you need to do is knock off three zeroes and you know what something costs in dollars.

Many little kids, when they see you are an American, say, “Hi.” There were people smoking (outside), but not nearly as many as I had expected. People riding motor scooters on the sidewalks was a little disconcerting, but there weren’t many of them

There is no hint of street crime. Only political violence seems to be a potential problem (in addition, of course, to the North Korean military poised an hour away).

The polite little bowing of the head is nice—and especially useful when you don’t know any Korean! One thing that’s kind of confusing is that the word for yes is “ne,” and sounds more like “no.”

It was a fascinating week to be in Korea. All sorts of major events were happening there: Visits by a North Korean delegation to President Roh to discuss the North Korean nuclear program; the South Korean government telling Bush to back off and cool down his rhetoric against North Korea; Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi visiting Seoul for a tense meeting with President Roh to discuss Japanese refusal to acknowledge the nation’s crimes during its colonial occupation of Korea and WWII; massive demonstrations outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul; people reenacting the forced march of captives to the north; the revelation that Kim Jong-il approached Bush in 2002 with an offer to stop the nuclear weapons program in exchange for American assurances of recognizing their sovereignty and not attacking them and Bush’s idiotic brushing off of the overture; and, on Saturday, the 55th anniversary of the North Korean invasion of South Korea.

I visited four sites on the UNESCO World Cultural Heritage List: Jongmyo Shrine, Changdeokgung Palace, Hwaseong Fortress, and the Ganghwado Island Dolmen site. All were interesting. Jongmyo is a Confucian shrine dedicated to the spirits of the royalty of the Joseon dynasty.

Changdeokgung (the Palace of Illustrious Virtue) is a very impressive complex still under reconstruction. Some say it will rival Beijing’s Forbidden City when the renovations are complete. While impressive, it is certainly no Versailles, Peterhof, or Schoenbrunn. But it was built between 1405 and 1412, well over two centuries before Versailles. This site has to be viewed as part of a guided tour, and two interesting items came up during the tour. One was at a pond on the grounds. Our guide said that a small building above the water on the far side of the pond played a very important symbolic role in the history of Korean monarchs. The building is called, she said, the Water Gate. I, of course, immediately thought of how another building named Watergate played a very important role the history of one of America’s would-be monarchs. Then the guide went on to explain that the Joseon monarchs said that the king is like the water and the people like the fish, so the people cannot live without the king to sustain them. I was struck again, because this is the same metaphor that Mao Zedong used, but he said the people are the water and the revolutionary guerilla fights are the fish, who can only survive with the people to sustain them. It seems that Mao took a pre-existing idea that had supported the established order and turned it on its head to support revolution.

Later we entered an area at Changdeokgung with men’s quarters on one side and women’s quarters on the other. Our guide pointed out that the door to the men’s quarters was higher than that to the women’s area. Under Confucianism, she said, men are considered more important than women. I remembered some of the sets on the back lot at Universal Studios, where they also had two doors, one for men and one for women, but in that case the men stood in front of the shorter door, to make them appear taller.

On Saturday, I went to Hwaseong Fortress, in Suwon, about 40 minutes south of Seoul, but reachable by subway. It seems like a sort of mini Great Wall of China. The part where I began required walking up stone steps and an incline to the top of the wall, a vertical ascent of 160 meters—not an easy climb, but a day in the park compared with my day in the park at Bukhansan on Wednesday.

On Sunday, I took a bus out to Ganghwado Island, an hour and a half west of Seoul, to see the Bronze Age megaliths—similar to but smaller than Stonehenge—called dolmens, which were used as burial places. The largest of these was very impressive.

Both the dolmen site and a very interesting Neolithic settlement site in Seoul, along the banks of the Han River, Amsa-dong, which I visited after sessions ended at the Congress on Tuesday, will be very useful to me in teaching my prehistory course.

The trip to the DMZ, as well as seeing Incheon, where MacArthur made his famous landing, and experiencing Korean itself will add significantly to my ability to teach about the Korean War.

Later on Sunday, I went by the Japanese Embassy and saw how it is ringed by police in full battle gear with shields, and with police vehicles, to guard against attack by angry Korean demonstrators. Then I visited the main Buddhist temple in Seoul, Jogyesa. It is being renovated on the outside, but the interior was open and beautiful.

Finally a tour through the Insa-dong arts district to buy some gifts, as it began to rain late Sunday afternoon. From what I was told, the rain came right on schedule for the beginning of the rainy season. I wondered whether that had anything to do with the timing of the North Korean invasion in 1950.

At the Incheon Airport this morning, I was called in because they saw something suspicious on the X-ray of my luggage and wanted me to open it and be there as they examined it. They quickly located what it was: my travel alarm. I was on my way again momentarily.

The flight home is taking a much more southerly route than the flight to Korea did. I assume that this is to take advantage to tail winds blowing from west to east. We are flying just south of Alaska, where the sun doesn’t shine for 24 hours as it does where my flight last week went in the extreme north. But I am seeing a beautiful sunset, to the north—that’s a first for me.

Can’t wait to get home to my love.

RSM