[Korea Encounters] What foreign journalists saw covering 1988 Olympics

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Tue, June 19, 2018 | 06:04

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[Korea Encounters] What foreign journalists saw covering 1988 Olympics

Posted : 2018-02-06 18:04

Updated : 2018-02-07 15:12

This file photo shows Korean athletes making their entrance at the 1988 Seoul Olympics. / Korea Times file

By Matt VanVolkenburg

In 1988 Korea opened its doors to the world and welcomed Olympic athletes, tourists and journalists to Seoul. Some of the latter were already familiar with Korea, but many newly arriving journalists attempted to understand the country that had produced the "Miracle on the Han."

One such writer was P.J. O'Rourke, whose article "Seoul Brothers," published in the Rolling Stone magazine during the Olympics, was the result of a visit during the 1987 elections. Though justifiably criticized for racist comments about "pie-plate" faces and "identical anthracite eyes," and weighed down with interminable kimchi jokes ("you could have used our breath to clean your oven"), O'Rourke's article evinced a certain grudging respect for Koreans.

While covering a police assault on a student-occupied government office, he described the effects of tear gas, writing, "That the students could even stand in this maelstrom was a testament to Koreanness." Firefighters trying to ascend ladders to the roof got as close "as even a Korean would dare." As O'Rourke put it, "It's not enough that these guys are better than we are at making cars, ships, TVs, stereos, cameras, computers, steel and binoculars; now they're building a better Berkeley and Kent State."

A less humorous, more measured approach to Seoul marked travel writer Pico Iyer's writing for Time. Trying to understand the city, Iyer described it as "a place of extremes." Seoul featured a "clangorous mix of order and warmth"; it was "high-tech with a human face," or "Anarchy by the numbers" (which echoed O'Rourke's description of "spontaneous regimentation"). As Iyer put it, "the city wears its emotions on its streets. Everywhere one is grabbed by shoves and shouts and smells and smiles." On this same note, he wrote, "this is a brawny, rough-and-tumble, rollicking place, animated by the earthy good humor of its Chaucerian folk. Hurly-burly impromptu is the way of Seoul."

Ian Buruma, in an article for The New York Review of Books, found that the Olympics' "ritualized patriotism" encouraged "xenophobia instead of openness" and commented on the "often hysterical" chauvinism the Korean press directed at the U.S. and Japan. He perceived "a country that is either superbly confident or racked by anxiety. Whenever one assumes it to be the former, evidence of the latter tends to break through."

Buruma wrote of how a government spokesman privately criticized the "crass attitudes of Americans" and their willful refusal to understand Korean culture, as compared to Germans who "understood the symbolic depth" of the opening ceremony. To this, Buruma responded, "Well, I thought with an element of spite: they would, wouldn't they."

In addition to his observation that "Koreans have a tendency to take a messianic view of the nation itself," Buruma perceived Korea as "one of the few countries that combine a capitalist economy with the militant patriotism and obsession with folk culture more often seen in Communist states." His statement that "South Korea wants, no craves, to be recognized as a great nation and a democracy" brings to mind O'Rourke's conclusion that "I guess democracy is something that if you're going to be really up-to-date, you just can't do without."

It was precisely such flippancy in the U.S. media's approach to Korea that would unleash something no one expected at the Seoul Olympics: a wave of anti-Americanism that would alter perceptions of the ROK-US alliance for decades to come.

Matt VanVolkenburg has a master's degree in Korean studies from the University of Washington. He is the blogger behind populargusts.blogspot.kr.

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