“The industry blows so much hope into these kids with all the audition shows… and now this is what they come out with?”

“Kids should learn composing and writing lyrics instead of trying to become singers… You make a lot more money that way.”

“A dose of reality for the students of today… Is it worth the gamble to risk your futures for that 0.1% chance? How are they going to apply singing and dancing to the real world? By becoming karaoke girls?”

“Well, it was their choice to give up studying to become singers so they’ll figure out a way if it doesn’t work.”

“I find it hard to believe that there are really a million trainees at the moment… That means 1 out of 10 teens are a trainee. I bet the number also includes people who make passing statements about wishing to become a trainee but aren’t actually…”

“Even the 70-80% who do make it into college have a difficult time finding jobs in the real world..”

What should be done about this? Perhaps heighten the standards for K-pop hopefuls? It’s not enough to just now how to sing and dance - anyone can develop sufficient skills  if they train hard enough over a number of years. 

It seems like an endless cycle - the fact that the number of K-pop debuts per year is on the rise gives off the impression that anyone be an idol if they ‘try hard enough’. Agencies are too constantly on the lookout for more potential ‘hit-makers’ to make it under their name. The reality is, not everyone will go as far as debuting, let alone making it big as the likes of SNSD or Super Junior. Oversupply and under-demand. 

There’s also the problem of restraints as both a trainee and an idol. As mentioned in the article, many young hopefuls and stars can barely make time for school. Many are also prevented by both contractual limitations and time itself from pursuing other ventures, both professional and personal. The detriment of this is the most salient when one’s future as an idol star looks dim. They’re expected to invest so much time and energy on their K-pop career, a path that they themselves have the least amount of control over as others manage them from head to toe. And when it doesn’t work out, the individual is casted aside, left struggling with a loss that wasn’t entirely her or his own doing. On top of that, what do they have to fall back on when they’ve spent the last several years doing nothing but train? If they were allowed to pick up or work on other projects outside the authority of their management, they would have so much to fall back on. Individual control and agency over the products you are making is so important in terms of your sense of personal achievement and self-worth. In the world of K-pop, the product is literally you. It’s messed up that you are the one most estranged from yourself.

(article found via TGN)

Celebrities have helped to drive the trend, as they scramble to keep ahead of digital technology that mercilessly exposes not only their physical imperfections, but any attempts to remedy them, said Rando Kim, a professor of consumer science at Seoul National University.

“Wide-screen and high-definition TV put pressure on them to look good in close-ups,” Mr. Kim said. “And with the Internet, where people like to post ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures, they can no longer hide it. So they go public, often talking proudly about it on TV.”

That, in turn, has encouraged greater openness among ordinary South Koreans.

But in recent decades, cosmetic surgery has become a weapon in Koreans’ efforts to impress others, “like buying an expensive handbag,” said Whang Sang-min, a psychologist at Yonsei University.

Doctors say their main patients are young women entering the marriage and job markets. “As it gets harder to find jobs, they’ve come to believe they must look good to survive,” said Choi Set-byol, a sociologist at Ewha Woman’s University.

Talked about this issue countless times before, I know. However, this article is one that was recently released. Just sharing for those who are interested. 

Think about what this relatively new “openness” can do to how people set standards and criterion in the realms of friendships, employment, relationships, marriage… or just to how people perceive each other.

“Usually low levels of education, with an unstable job. Lives by herself or in a boarding house, has open and impulsive sexual values. A person whose socioeconomic situation is low, and who lives apart from her parents,” is how a website health guide operated by the past Ministry of Health and Welfare defined unwed mothers.

…according to the survey “Koreans’ attitudes toward and perception of unwed mothers and fathers,” carried out in 2009 by the Korean Unwed Mothers Support Network and the Korean Women’s Development Institute, unwed mothers were found to be the group that experienced the most prejudice, after homosexuals.

Also, of the 2,000 people who participated in the survey, over 60% answered that unwed mothers “are people who lack judgment and a

sense of responsibility.”

Things are changing (ie. organizations are starting to mobilize against this derogatory perception of the “미혼모” (mi-hon-mon/”unwed mother”)), but to think that as recent as 2009 there were pre-1900s attitudes floating about… 

In South Korea, it has come to this. To reduce the country’s addiction to private, after-hours tutoring academies (called hagwons), the authorities have begun enforcing a curfew — even paying citizens bounties to turn in violators.

South Korea’s hagwon crackdown is one part of a larger quest to tame the country’s culture of educational masochism. At the national and local levels, politicians are changing school testing and university admissions policies to reduce student stress and reward softer qualities like creativity. “One-size-fits-all, government-led uniform curriculums and an education system that is locked only onto the college-entrance examination are not acceptable,” President Lee Myung-bak vowed at his inauguration in 2008.

This is such a surprise, though I’m not sure if it’s a nice one. I like how the country’s finally stepping up and doing something about its messed up education system, but “hagwon crackdowns”? I know this is just a part of the entire system of reforms they’re implementing, and I do agree that shutting down hagwons is part of the remedy, but I can’t help but feel something is off here.

Why are hagwon owners getting criminalized now? After all, they’re only responding to the natural supply-and-demand forces of the bigger economy. What needs to be focused on is what’s currently taking place — this shift of values. Police are snooping around sending kids home from midnight private schools, but does society really understand what exactly is going on? People do things in reaction to their immediate reality — that is, merely on the basis of their personal lives. They see authorities shutting down their businesses, they’re not gonna think, “oh, they’re doing this for the better” — no. They’re going to get mad, ask why the government is taking away their jobs (remember, South Korea’s not faring so well in the employment sector), and they’re going to either re-open business or succumb to darker means of sustaining a livelihood. It’s just going to be this endless cycle of delinquency. What the government needs to do is ensure that their people a) understand that new values are emerging and will be enforced, b) assure (and enforce the assurance) that their kids will receive the education they need, and c) convince (and prove) that putting the kids through extra hours of studying will really not do anyone any good. How can this be achieved? Government-funded seminars, public awareness campaigns, strict enforcement on universities to drop the current admissions process and integrate the unacademia-based approach into their regulations, and, well, in my eyes, abolish the entrance-exam system, although that may be going out on a limb. But seriously, that may exactly be one of the biggest igniters of competition among students… and by that, I actually mean among parents.

This was so heartbreaking to read. Regrettably, like in many other places around the world, South Korea still has a long way to go in terms of women’s rights. 

The following week I re-visited the clinic but this time a different doctor checked the fetus. And what she said made me upset. Basically, she told me that I shouldn’t have such a loose lifestyle, that I should care more about contraception, why I had waited so long before coming to visit, and so on and so forth. But I had no choice, since if I go to a different clinic I have to pay for the ultrasound again.

This part was especially disturbing. I perceived it as a micro-example of ‘shaming the woman’: it’s her own fault she got pregnant, her sexually active lifestyle is an irresponsible one, and just a bunch of other bs ‘moral’-injections this young university student doesn’t deserve to hear.

I remember watching an episode of MiSuDa a while back in which there was a discussion about female reproductive health in South Korea. (I couldn’t find the video online, unfortunately.) While the foreigners were saying how regular visits to the gynecologist was not only normal but also important, the Korean female celebrities on the show confessed that they are incredibly intimidated from seeing the doctor even for a routine checkup because in many people’s  eyes, it suggests possible pregnancy (and the gossip gets especially ‘scandalous’ when it is known that the celebrity is not married). If this is the case for the nation’s biggest stars when it comes to something like pregnancy, I can only imagine what regular girls and women must endure when the issue at hand is abortion. According to Roboseyo, women get reprimanded by their local pharmacists even if they’re only buying birth control pills! (By the way, check out the rest of his post for a good overview of his thoughts of what should be done in terms of making reproductive health services more available to women in South Korea.)

Also, I’m not so sure about the availability of family-planning services in South Korea, but based on the following stats, it seems that the lack or inefficiency of such services is having quite a detrimental effect:

… the reasons why married women, who make up 58 percent of the women who have undergone abortion procedures, chose to have abortions are because they do not want children (70 percent) and financial difficulties (17.5 percent). In the case of unmarried women, 93.7 percent said they underwent an abortion procedure because they were not married. They are saying that having children is difficult because of child-rearing and economic burdens in the case of married women, and because of social prejudice and financial difficulties in the case of unmarried women.

(source: originally The Hankyoreh, via The Grand Narrative)

I say “detrimental” because why is it that more than half of the married women who chose to go through abortions have it because they didn’t want kids? Though abortion is a choice to rid yourself of an unwanted pregnancy, this huge percentage suggests that the forms of birth control available are shitty because they don’t seem to be working, or women are not even aware of its availability; therefore making abortion the only choice, and that in itself is wrong.  

And as for that whopping 93.7% of unmarried women who got abortions, holy shit! Who says it’s absolutely necessary for you to be married in order to rear a child? (A society that stigmatizes unmarried women (and pregnant women in the workplace)  does!) Regardless, again, what happened to birth control? (Oh wait, nevermind.)

You know what else sucks? Apparently South Korea has one of the lowest birth rate in the world, and the Lee Myung-Bak administration actually believes one of the causes of this are abortions, which is why it decided to reinforce its anti-abortion laws in 2009. A closer analysis of the problem will reveal deeper and more fruitful reasons than this (then again, we’re talking about the same guy who condemns homosexuality as abnormal, so yeah): 

• A problem of unemployment and financial instability. The unemployment rate has rose from 3.6% to 4% this year. True, the economy’s been stabilizing since its darker days in the late 1990s, but BBC states that there are still concerns about its rising inflation. If Korean families are not confident about their financial situation, then they won’t have kids, simple as that. (And women have no choice but to turn to abortion if birth control have been forced out of the question.)
• Sexual discrimination. In the workplace, domestic violence at home… Based on the excerpt above, we seem to be talking about a society where a woman cannot feel secure and stable without having a man by her side. 
• Placing the MOGEF in charge of family affairs. Because seriously, this is the same damn agency that has continually contradicted itself from the windows to the walls during the recent song ban fiasco. 

But first and foremost, what is needed is a change of mindset. People need to be educated and enlightened about reproductive health and the importance of its awareness. The stigma surrounding gynecology and birth control methods need to be removed, and people need to understand that part of the core of female empowerment is the right of a woman to have full control over her own body. To quote Change.org (via The Grand Narrative, thank you very much ^^), 

Abortion shouldn’t be the only, desperate choice of women whose voices are silenced by their society, and it shouldn’t be used as a form of population control by the government. It should be one option for women who have the power, education, and awareness to make informed decisions. Unfortunately, it seems South Korea still sees abortion as one more issue for men to deal with, one more choice they make when and how they feel like it.

Only a woman can make decisions about what to do with her own body, not society. 

[Edit: Read Depressing Facts’ reblog of this post, who elaborated with insightful reasons behind Korea’s strict regulations]

(Sorry I’ve been posting nothing but links to articles these days. I’m currently working on a new post, but it may still be a while. I’m really preoccupied with packing and goodbyes as I’m about to fly back to Canadaland for school T_T)

A quick rundown of the banning spree the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family seems to be having fun with nowadays (extracted from the article):

• More than 2,600 songs have been banned in the past two years after being flagged for ‘hazardous media content’…
• This month, 24 songs have been banned as a result of their references to alcohol - 160 for this year alone…
• The Korean public have also blamed the Ministry’s unclear standards and inconsistency in censoring music. While the aforementioned songs were categorized as “hazardous” due to references to drinking, Nam-jin’s “Empty Glass” and Lim Chang-jung’s “A Glass of Soju”, whose major themes are alcohol, escaped the regulation [ko]. 

Agencies have already taken matters into their own hands. In fact, SM Entertainment has already won their lawsuit against the Ministry for issuing a ban on “Another Day,” by SM The Ballad group, while Cube Entertainment plans to follow suit for the condemnation against BEAST’s newest album. 

And it’s about time, too. I understand the intent here, but banning songs and restricting creative rights and freedom of expression is honestly not the best way to battle society’s ills. 

(found via The Grand Narrative)

It may take you a while, but it’s soooooo interesting. I definitely learned a few new things today. 

A particular point of interest is in the final installment of the series, where The Korean argues that Confucianism is not “the only mode of thought that guides Korean society…”

In fact, the Korean would say Confucius is not even the philosopher whose ideas guide modern Korea the most. Any guesses about who that philosopher might be? Buddha and Dharma, based on Korea’s long Buddhist tradition? Lao Tzu and Zhang Tzu, the pillars of Taoism?
—————-
Would you have guessed… Thomas Hobbes? In his book Leviathan, the 17th century British philosopher described the state of nature: bellum omnium contra omnes, “the war of all against all.” In such state of nature, life of a person is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

—————-

Hobbes might as well have been speaking of the way Korea found itself as it began its venture as a modern nation in the 1940s, devastated by Japanese imperialism, World War II and Korean War. Just how ugly Korea was post-World War II is described in harrowing detail by a recent book, “Birth of the Modern Man.” The book, which chronicles the history of Korea’s public medicine, recounts the disastrous state of Korea’s public health. Within one year of the liberation, 2.3 million Koreans from overseas (mostly from Japan and China) returned to Korea. During Korean War, 500,000 people escaped North Korea to come to the South. Cholera epidemic covered the country. Seoul, in particular, was a crowded sea of bodies, alive and dead. In 1950, there were 800,000 refugees in South Korea without a home. Out of the 440,000 infants born in 1948, 180,000 died before their first birthday. During Korean War, American medics reported that a surgery for a Korean soldier shot in the stomach usually entailed catching hundreds of parasites that were crawling out of the dying host.

—————-

In the face of these Hobbesian conditions, Korea dragged itself to where it is now by, in significant parts, allowing the war of all against all to happen. The winners of that war — the Lee Byeong-Cheol (founder of Samsung) and Chung Joo-Young (founder of Hyundai) of the world — have built the empires that few in the world, and even fewer in the shithole that was Korea, could dare to envision in their wildest imagination. The losers barely carried on with their lives with no one else to alleviate their misery, or simply died off.

—————-

Understanding the mindset created in this process — of brutal competition and (literal) survival over the next person in every aspect of life — is the more important to understanding Korea than understanding any other Eastern philosophy, including Confucianism. This survivalist philosophy — crude and uncivilized, yet pragmatic and efficient — pervades Korean mindset more than any other philosophy. Like a black hole, this survivalist philosophy (or is it an anti-philosophy?) pulls in everything around it and twists its surroundings in accordance with its pull.

—————-

(source)

Please take the time to check out the rest of Ask A Korean! as well. Real interesting stuff. So adding him to the recommendations list. 

(Found via The Grand Narrative)