Why Is Korea So Strange?

By Jon Huer

Many foreigners who enter Korea try to understand ``Korean thinking" but end up finding the enterprise quite baffling and frustrating.

To put it simply, most American businessmen, diplomats, military personnel, tourists, teachers and any number of those who have had a brush with Korea find its thought pattern among the strangest, and its behavioral rationale among the most difficult to comprehend.

Many conclude that Koreans are too impenetrable and weird to understand. They cite the mad-cow protests, the National Assembly brawls, the Internet madness, and now the ``Minerva" phenomenon, among others, as examples to demonstrate this sense of incomprehensible strangeness about Korea. If these examples are not good enough to indicate Koreans' ``strange" thinking, another more recent example might suffice.

On Jan. 14, a teenager called Gimpo Airport and told them that there was a bomb on board a plane bound for Jeju Island. While suspecting it to be a prank call, the authorities still halted the 18 flights scheduled for the island and took precautionary measures. No evidence of a bomb was found and the flights resumed, but with a terrific bill of extra expenses and inconvenience in the aftermath.

Why aren't the authorities pushing to enforce the law against the prank calls, which are punishable by up to three-years' imprisonment? ``Because we're afraid of the reactions [from the public] that the punishment is too harsh." (Chosun, Jan. 16) Enough said.

This sense of incomprehensibility is surprising to most casual observers because Korea ``seems" to be so modern and westernized. Its highways are first rate, its technology some of the most advanced, its cultural consumption among the most affluent. It has one of the best-educated populations in the world.

Why is Korea so strange and weird, contrary to what's on the surface? As a sociologist who has lived and taught in Korea for over a decade and as one who believes in rational explanations for all social phenomena, I am going to offer two explanations: geography and language.

As for geography, if you take Europe as the starting point and expand your horizon in both directions, east and west, the Korean Peninsula is seen at the very edge of the world.

If Alexander the Great had pushed on toward the ``farthest point of the world," as he had originally wished, he would have stopped in Korea. Of all the nations he encountered on his eastward progress, the cluster of the tiny kingdoms now called Korea would have been at the very edge of the known world.

Indeed, Korea is virtually the remotest tip of the known world to Americans and Europeans. Korea's social structure, food, clothing, manners of living, language and other aspects of life are some of the ``strangest" the Western world has known about. Even Nepal, as remote as it seems from the Western sphere of things, is more familiar than Korea to the rest of the world. No wonder Korea's internationally-recognized moniker is the ``Hermit Kingdom."

Western civilization never reached Korea, even remotely, until, very oddly, Japan opened it by force in the early part of the 20th century. The strange and alien feelings that the American GI's had upon coming to Korea during the Korean War (1950-53) are somewhat shared by today's visitors to Korea if they stay long enough to go deeper than the tourist's cursory attention.

As for language, linguists and anthropologists the world over routinely list the Korean Language as one of the most difficult languages, if not the most difficult, to learn. What makes it so is its uniqueness.

The expressiveness of the Korean language and the variations and shades of meaning it is capable of producing is mind-boggling to most Westerners. Even the commonest verb, like ``to eat" or ``to live," when combined as a compound verb ``to eat and live," is so loaded with emotions and feelings that only native Koreans can comprehend and communicate them among themselves.

Then you add all the combinations and permutations of socio-economic ranks, regional differences, educational levels, familial and gender statuses, and other such assumed situational variations, and it's no wonder that even the most astute linguist can merely scratch the surface in his effort to penetrate the Korean mind.

Shrouded in this mind-fog and stranded in this cultural orbit, few Koreans are strong enough or fortuitous enough to escape the Korean uniqueness/strangeness that is ordained in their language. The power of language on the Korean mind is so absolute that even their extensive foreign travels or English learning seem to have failed to produce any influence on their ability to escape into a semblance of global objectivity or modern rationality.

As a blessing, the language has protected Korea's identity like a secret code. As a curse, it keeps Korea forever in the black hole of impenetrable oddness.

Trapped by such immutable aspects of history and culture, Korea will remain strange and incomprehensible to the rest of the world for a long time to come.

The writer teaches sociology at the University of Maryland University College, Asia. He can be reached at jonhuer@hotmail.com