Culture
From travel to subculture stories
Broken Clocks, Rising Dust: Death of a Street
If the places with history all close one after the other, what will Insadong be? * Read our in-depth coverage about the end of the Insadong of the past: Insadong: Breathing Its Last
Seocheon: Overlooked, All the More Authentic
The mudflat is vast, stretching as far as the eye can see. A few fishermen in thigh-high rubber boots waddle through pools of seawater. Two elderly women are hunched over, digging up shellfish. We gingerly hop from one rock to another, trying not to fall while still admiring small sea
K-Pop: Stream Like You Breathe
Every morning when Kim Eun-ji gets up, she looks at her desktop computer, iPad, and smartphone to see if they are streaming music without problems. Although all sounds are muted, there are six digital music platforms streaming music 24/7 on her gadgets. She checks to see whether any of
Do Convenience Stores With No Staff Signal a Future with Fewer Jobs?
Inside, the convenience store looks like any of the countless shops one finds on almost every street in South Korea. Under bright fluorescent lights there are shelves of instant noodles and snacks, refrigerators stocked with iced coffee and soft drinks, racks of mobile phone chargers and cables. But unlike other
No-Kids Zones and the Myth of "Parasitic Mothers"
A year ago, a friend of mine, a female radio producer in Seoul, confided that visiting someone who had just given birth horrified her. She talked about this young mother as being cooped up in the apartment all day while her husband worked, and feeling her intelligence diminishing to the
Removed from Context: The Unbearable Lightness of Korean Hip Hop
While I was surfing the web I came across an image making fun of Korean hip hop: “Typical Korean hip hop.jpg. Rapper gets pissed at nothing.” (Source: User “Gaedrip” via online community Clien) Of course, this is a joke. Hip hop is mainstream in South Korea.
What It's Like to Love "B-list" K-pop Idols
On Oct. 19, 150 people, mostly young women, stood in the cold early autumn air since 6 a.m. for two hours to be ushered inside a building in the far western corner of Seoul. They waited so they could watch the same song-and-dance sequence performed three times by a
The Crazy World of Call Bells in S. Korea
The history of call bells in South Korea can be traced back to the beginning of the 1990s. Daily newspaper Kyunghyang Shinmun introduced the call bell in its “New Technology, New Product” column on May 14, 1990. As described by Kyunghyang, it was a wireless device developed by a company
Was Chuseok Ever Fun?
Between Sep. 29 and Oct. 9, more than two million passengers used Incheon Airport, South Korea’s main international travel hub. It set a record for the normally busy facility. What made the traffic all the more special is that it coincided with Chuseok, one of the country&
Insadong: Breathing Its Last
Every South Korean used to need a seal for conducting legal affairs, and I was fourteen when I had my first seal carved. We could have gone to any seal shop in the neighborhood, but my father insisted that we go to Insadong and make a family outing out
Nothing Says Chuseok Quite Like Spam
Half a century ago, most South Koreans would never have imagined that in the 21st century, canned meat from the U.S. — not exactly seen as a culinary delicacy in its motherland — would be the most popular gift for Chuseok, the Korean holiday marking the harvest season. Back
The Other Side of K-pop and Korean Music: Labor Abuse
Korean music is synonymous with glamorous K-pop stars like PSY, Big Bang, Girls’ Generation and Super Junior. But they are a lucky few that can earn tens of thousands of dollars or more with each performance. They are a very small part of the music industry in South Korea. Earlier