Whats in Korea to See?

Korea Lacks Identity for Tourism Destination

By Jon Huer

By nature, tourism is one of the peripheral items earmarked for ``expendable incomes.'' Once called ``traveling,'' it was prevalent among the wealthy. With the advent of the middle-class stratum eased transportation, traveling has been metamorphosed into ``tourism'' and, like fast food, has become one of the great world commodities.

Jon Huer
Professor of UMUC-Asia

As such, it has to have appealing qualities to those who have expendable money to spend on something that catches their fancy. Korea is not one of those fanciful attractions.

After having traveled to quite a few places in Europe and Asia, including a 15-year sojourn in Korea, we can emphatically say Korea would not rank among the top attractions for would-be tourists looking for comfortable fun. We have asked our relatives in the States to visit us in Korea and their response was almost unanimously incredulous: ``What's in Korea to see?'' While we were in Singapore for a few months, we enjoyed a stream of visitors, compared to none in Korea.

What makes Korea so unappealing to the purist-but-casual tourists who are not Korean War veterans or their families members, shoppers from China or Japan, aspiring English teachers, or business-related visitors?

From a macro perspective, Korea lacks an identity as a tourist destination. It lacks the historic legacies of European countries, the orderliness and good-shopping reputations of a Singapore, or the friendly comfort and relaxation of a Thailand.

Korea has little bit of everything, but in the competitive world of tourism, this lack of identity is fatal. The high-rise apartment buildings are almost uniform and gray and individual houses have no style that could be identified as ``Korean.''

People who plan to visit a foreign country choose one among many countries that compete for their quick attention. In this competitive attention-calling mental process, the first and last weapon is identity as a tourist destination. Korea does not have anything as uniquely its own on the image level.

On the micro level of actual traveling in Korea, the problems and challenges are almost insurmountable. For casual tourists looking for easy fun and comfortable transportation, Korea is a living nightmare in which to get around.

Most people you encounter on the road, especially store workers, do not speak English; Romanized road signs are totally inconsistent and difficult to comprehend and road markers are so insufficient and unclear that one does not follow them. In spite of the occasional encounters with the sweet, friendly natives, general experiences with Koreans are tinged with unfriendliness, indifference and even rudeness.

Culturally, Korea is both ultra-traditional and ultra-modern, making its culture fascinating to anthropological and characterological observers, but not to tourists, who are nothing but fast food-eaters with digital cameras on the go. To them, the attractive old Korea is completely obscured by the modern hustle and bustle. Conversely, modern Korea is hampered by old habits and features that oddly obstructing its cutting-edge modernism. You can visit a Korean office, governmental or commercial, and amid the fancy computers you will find a worker who is at odds with his ultra-advanced machinery, with his old-Korea thinking and behavior, which would hardly be called efficient, friendly or modern. This sort of mixture, if well combined, can be quite interesting and appealing, but for now, it merely creates a sense of oddity and puzzlement.

On the sociological level of analysis, there is something more than the easily observed aforementioned.

Korea is appreciated only on the deepest level of interaction with the human heart, and tourism does not promote this kind of deeper knowledge. A typical tourist is not interested in discovering the human heart, but merely in interesting sights and impressions. Korea is full of grief, anger, torment and confusion over its history, current conflict and uncertainty. Everything about Korea requires the deepest of human irony and pathos to fully comprehend and appreciate. Words, smiles, gestures, and actions that express Korea and Korean-ness are never casually given out or stylized (typically like the Japanese). Things Korean are so deeply felt and truthfully conceived that to understand Korea is to understand the very depth of humanity in its most painful and joyful existence.

Unfortunately for Korea's tourism aspirations, this makes Korea almost an antithesis of all that tourism stands for. Tourism thrives only when things are highly ``commercialized,'' that is to say, highly superficial. Tourism, at its most successful, resembles a fantastically efficient military operation: planeloads of people land; they are whisked here and there on schedule; workers are well trained to deal with such repetitious activities and they smile and offer comfort to the transient, here-today-gone-tomorrow crowds. Singapore, Thailand, and Austria, for example, where tourism is a significant part of the national industry, operate best for the quick and gone. Unlike the old ``travelers,'' tourists do not linger to find out more about their destination and its people. To fall in love with Korea is to go beyond the surface and the superficial, but tourism is just that--the surface and the superficial. Korea's tourist aspirations (and its official confusion about why it's unsuccessful with its aspirations) must reckon with this inherited contradiction.

All this is offered as an analysis of why Korea generally fails at tourism and as a clarification as to what needs to be done if Korea aims to become a viable tourist attraction to the world. For all its aspirations, Korea must know what tourism is and what Korea is. To those who comprehend and appreciate the true Korea, this conclusion has been and is almost self-evidently, if painfully, obvious.

The writer teaches Sociology for the University of Maryland University College, Asia, and can be reached at jonhuer@hotmail.com

10 Suggestions for Boosting Tourism
1. Create a national symbol by which foreigners can identify Korea in the way they do with Mt. Fuji for Japan and the Eiffel Tower for France.

2. Make an effort to engender the image of a ``happy nation,'' whereby every Korean becomes an ambassador of friendliness to foreigners.

3. Clean up, in a major way, all the wrong, incorrect, and confusing English signs in Korea, starting with Incheon airport.

4. Improve the cleanliness of restaurants, from street vendors to exclusive eateries, provide foreigner-friendly menus and descriptions, and require all food-handling personnel to wear clean, identifiable uniforms, including hats, while serving food.

5. Give lessons to all Koreans on international-public manners and etiquette for when flying, traveling by car, on the street, in public restrooms and at ticket windows.

6. Encourage all Korean citizens to slow down in their daily lifestyle so that the hectic and often savage pace of Korean life can be more comfortable for themselves and to foreign visitors.

7. Upgrade all price-tagging practices at shops and stores, except in designated places where haggling is recognized as part of the attraction.

8. Wage a national campaign of honesty in commercial transactions dealing with foreign tourists, especially with the taxi drivers, to promote trust.

9. Check regularly all information provided in English to visitors to ensure accuracy, even at small and infrequently-visited locations.

10. Last but not least, require all immigration officers to smile and smile and smile some more when they check visitors' passports.

Who is Jon Huer?
Jon Huer received his Ph.D. in Sociology from UCLA in 1975 and is the author of a dozen books of social criticism, including The Dead End in 1977, which TIME Magazine’s Lance Morrow called “an important and often brilliant book”; The Wages of Sin in 1991; Tenure for Socrates in 1990; The Great Art Hoax in 1992; The Fallacies of Social Science in 1989; Marching Orders in 1988; The Post-Human Society in 2005; and The Green Palmers.

Most of these titles are available at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com. Dr. Huer last taught at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, where he was an associate professor of sociology before joining the University of Maryland University College in 1994 and is currently professor of sociology at UMUC-Asia. He specializes in American society and considers himself an avid observer of all-things Korean.