The Korea Times

The subversive optimism of 'Castaway on the Moon'

Contemporary Korean cinema and dramas have become synonymous with a certain brand of high-octane bleakness. Color-graded trauma porn, 4K nightmares about gapjil, psychological torture, zombies, rape and an omnipresent sense of societal rot. Then, there is Lee Hae-jun’s "Castaway on the Moon (2009)." To watch it is to experience friction against modernity. You will be immediately struck by the wonderful blues and greens. The color and cinematography by Kim Byung-seo is fantastic. As is Jung Jae-young’s face, which gives you fear, disbelief, happiness and boredom all perfectly. But most importantly, I love that it is a film that refuses to treat mental illness as a commodified set-piece. It doesn’t want to you suffer. It wants you to heal. It dares to approach the fragility of the human condition with color, jazz, humor and, perhaps most radically, a genuine empathy that warms the heart without ever becoming marshmallow-sticky. It is a masterpiece of gentle subversion — the religious metaphors and social criticism stand alongside the numerous poop jokes. It tells you that boredom

Jul 13, 2026By David A. Tizzard

The subversive optimism of 'Castaway on the Moon'

Opinion

The Korean dystopia is a Western coping mechanism

Journalists love to get Korea wrong. Some are paid to share explosive takes that feed into the subsconscoius orientalist views of the wider world; others just do it for the social media clout. And you only realize how wrong they are when you get off the internet and spend an afternoon in Sokcho, Daegu, or Chuncheon. For anyone that does this, something becomes immediately apparent. Korea isn’t actually that bad. (Or great). The people get along. The kids go to school. The young people date. And everyone drinks ice americano. There is a weird sensation that comes from watching someone deliver a sociological autopsy of a nation in a 14-minute YouTube video essay. Perhaps it’s just the new era where the average internet user is operating under the delusion that a Netflix subscription is functionally equivalent to a PhD. However it arises, the narrative they’ve constructed is a sort of paint-by-numbers cyberpunk dystopia. The chaebol function as overlords, capitalism has been cranked up to some terminal level of suffering, and joy is lowkey against the law. Every Korean male is a to

Jul 4, 2026By David A. Tizzard

The Korean dystopia is a Western coping mechanism

Opinion

Latte Stage Capitalism

To talk about the café economy in Seoul is to talk about an architecture of disappointment. A noisy and rumbunctious ever-moving organism of tents, ajumma, toasts, street hawkers, and fake goods has been usurped by air-conditioned coffee shops, all playing the same music, offering the same drinks, and providing the same service. (Admittedly, however, only one of them has recently been forced to issue a groveling apology for not knowing anything about Korean history or, perhaps, knowing too much about Korean history). Latte is horse Korean people are often traditionally associated with tea. My friend Brother Anthony has written books on the subject and proudly offers anyone who visits his office to drink from a wonderfully small cup as he creates concoctions of herbal goodness. And we’re not talking the British kind of “white with two sugars please, darling.” Korean tea is a rainbow of flavors. The southern regions of Boseong and Jeju produce the famous green tea. Yuja tea is made with citron and honey and always given to those with a cold. Boricha (barley tea) is a daily herbal r

Jun 27, 2026By David A. Tizzard

Opinion

Can plastic surgery hide national history?

I’ve spent over two decades living here and seen just how good Korea is at the glow-up. It’s a nation that loves looksmaxxing. Things get shiny. Polished. Airbrushed and tucked. From celebrities’ faces to citizens’ ID cards, everything gets cleaned. Including the history. The industries of memory have been working on the national identity with the same clinical precision as is applied to noses and eyelids. Korea remembers itself primarily as a victim while forgetting the moments when it exercised power over others. On June 23, 1965, South Korea struck an agreement with Washington to send its troops into Vietnam. They contributed approximately 325,000 troops to the Vietnam War, the second largest foreign military contributor in the conflict. In doing so, they earned an estimated $5 billion dollars. The Miracle on the Han River, the hardworking Koreans in the textile factors, fields, and foreign lands is true. But it would not have likely happened without war. A war that created the country. A war that divided the country. A war that funded the country. All of them demarcated as

Jun 20, 2026By David A. Tizzard

Can plastic surgery hide national history?

Opinion

The tiny invisible Korean bow

There’s a bow in Korea that’s so small I’m sure it’s probably imperceptible to most foreigners. If you don’t know it’s happening you won’t be able to see it. It happens in a fraction of a second and involves the head dropping but a couple of millimeters. (Actually most of the time the head seems to go forward, horizontally from the neck across the shoulder blades, rather than down). If you pay attention most of the normal bowing protocol still applies in that the eyes shift down and the eyebrows raise slightly. Some, the braver and bolder in society, will maintain eye contact during all of this however. This bow, this tiny invisible Korean bow, doesn’t really have a specific name. And it doesn’t have a name for the wonderfully paradoxical reason that it’s so damn ubiquitous. It’s literally everywhere. And like the story of the fish who don’t know what water is or how I had to try and come up with a term for the Korean culture or leaving phones and laptops on tables to mark space, the things which most fill our daily lives are often the least described. The tiny

Jun 6, 2026By David A. Tizzard

Opinion

Because Trump dropped bombs, the Korean government bought me my bananas

I’m now at the stage where I’ve been living and working in Korea longer than many of my university students have been alive. I remember the toilets that were little more than holes in the ground. The aggressive street-level sounds of men hawking bootleg DVDs and low-sheen neckties from folding tables. The pachinko parlors that lined Jongno. The high-temperature public anxieties of mad cow protests. Individual cigarettes sold illegally out of cardboard boxes at local pharmacies. And the constant wet throat-clearing soundtrack of old Seoul. My god, the spitting. Much has changed since then. I’ve developed a great burning love for the people and the culture. I throw myself at it – the history, the music, the social concepts, the politics, the art, the food, and the language. While I often give my university lectures in English, I spend my days talking to people in Korean. Discovering the nuances and battling through my own difficulties with the grammar and the vocabulary. Even when uttering a simple hello or thank you, people now look at me with an eye raised: “Where are you fr

May 30, 2026By David A. Tizzard

Because Trump dropped bombs, the Korean government bought me my bananas

Opinion

Searching for the Korean Buddha

On Monday, the people of Korea get a national holiday. No work. No school. No rush hour traffic and packed subways as people scramble to their offices. Just a nice long weekend as the weather turns beautiful. Sun. Mountains. And iced-coffee. And it’s all for Buddha’s Birthday — or more literally “Bucheonim osin nal” meaning "the day when the Buddha came." During my time here I’ve come to understand how Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism differ from the monotheisms back home. With things like Christianity and Islam, there’s a god. And you believe in that god. People of course have varying degrees of belief and this waxes and wanes during their life. But ultimately, someone’s association with the religion is defined by their belief. It creates a dichotomy. You either believe or you don’t. You can’t really be a Christian and a Muslim because that would be to believe in two different stories and your belief in one would go some way to discredit your belief in the other (generally, of course). But East Asian worldviews are more like a philosophy than a religion. They fun

May 23, 2026By David A. Tizzard

Opinion

What Korea taught me about learning

When I was pursuing my master's degree here, I had a teacher named Choi Chi-won. He was my guide. The one who taught me much of what I would later come to know about Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism and the Enlightenment period of Korea. He challenged me in the way that all good teachers do: pushing, probing, setting high standards and asking questions to which I didn’t always know the answer. If we are lucky, we will all meet at least one teacher like this in our lives. Someone who transcends the role of merely being an educator, a servant of the system and into something more impactful. And yes, that was his name. The same exact name as the legendary 9th-century Silla scholar-bureaucrat who mastered the classics and famously struggled against a rigid system. The moment Professor Choi perhaps had the biggest effect on me was when I was sitting my comprehensive exams before writing my dissertation. I had passed all of them, with only my exam on Taoism left. At the time, Taoism was my favorite subject. The Tao Te Ching, the Zhuangzi and all the wonderfully paradoxical stories that floa

May 17, 2026By David A. Tizzard

Opinion

Korean culture without K

Korean culture often breathes most freely when it isn’t looking over its shoulder at an international audience. When the focus is on the Korean people, it resonates more deeply, more authentically, and with everything that gives it a special charm. Whether in dramas, music, movies, or literature, the Korean language produces something so idiosyncratic that it becomes, paradoxically, universal. But what is Korean culture? Everyone has a different definition and understanding, but for the purpose of this exploration, Korean culture is that which is produced by Koreans for Koreans. It’s a mirror. Conversely, K-Culture is when it’s produced by people for those outside Korea. It’s the billboard. So when Daniel Dae Kim releases his “K Everything” series for CNN this week, the letter “K” reminds us that this is more likely for Sally in Sacramento than it is for Sujin in Seogwipo. And that’s okay. This isn’t to argue the supremacy of one over the other. Different people speak different languages and want different things. And yes, some works straddle the dividing line so sk

May 9, 2026By David A. Tizzard

Opinion

Why are there 'two' Koreas?

Two decades ago, as I packed my bags to come to South Korea and begin a journey that would change my life in unimaginable ways, my grandmother, somewhat proudly, though perhaps also with an air of slight trepidation, told her friends that I was going to South Croatia. For those of you suddenly reaching for a map, the Dalmatian Coast has, to be best of my knowledge, never been divided from the mainland. Korea, however, has been divided in two. What is interesting is that most of my international students have little knowledge as to how, or why, there are two Koreas. They assume it must somehow be because of North Korea – because that is obviously the ‘bad’ Korea. We have seen Vietnam divided in two (a Communist North and a Capitalist South), Germany divided (on the same ideological lines East and West). Ireland was divided between the Nationalists (and Catholics) in the South and the Unionists (and Protestants) in the North. India and Pakistan also split on religious grounds. Then there is Cyprus and Yemen. Closest to home, following the Chinese Civil War, the Nationalists there

May 2, 2026By David A. Tizzard

David A. Tizzard

Read more

The subversive optimism of 'Castaway on the Moon'

The Korean dystopia is a Western coping mechanism

Latte Stage Capitalism

Can plastic surgery hide national history?

The tiny invisible Korean bow

Because Trump dropped bombs, the Korean government bought me my bananas

Searching for the Korean Buddha

What Korea taught me about learning

Korean culture without K

Why are there 'two' Koreas?

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