The Korea Times

From Spitting to Shaming: The K-Social Code

Korea 2026 is not just Korea of the early 2000s with taller buildings, faster internet, AI everywhere, more Dubai chocolate, and increasingly outrageous beauty standards. It is that, of course. But alongside all the hardware upgrades, there has also been a change in culture and civic behavior. My early adventures in Korea were an attack on the senses. And not in the way it is today for millions of people shopping in Olive Young, drinking fancy Americanos, and vibing by the Han River with a wide range of foreign booze and biscuits. At the turn of the millennium, the place smelled a lot different. The garlic poured out of the ajjoshis on the subway in the morning. Kimchi got into every nook and cranny. Soju was an ever-present, giving the city an almost ethereal ethanol bath. It was still common to find bondaegi on most corners. And if you’ve never turned a corner and got a blast of hot silkworm cooking in a street vendor’s pot, have you ever really lived in Korea? But it wasn’t just the smells. It was also the noise. I was constantly looking behind me as people hocked up half thei

Feb 28, 2026By David A. Tizzard

From Spitting to Shaming: The K-Social Code

Opinion

Namdaemun after Namaste

I spend most of my days speaking and writing about South Korea. Culture, politics, music, art, people, philosophy, and food. When you go so deep into any subject, it’s possible to unconsciously adopt a form of tunnel vision that prevents you seeing anything else. The Korean expression for this is “u-mul an gae-gu-ri” — the frog in a well. It describes someone who mistakes the limits of their environment for the limits of the world. The idiom originates from a Daoist fable in which a frog living in a well invites a turtle to see his amazing home, only to then be dumbfounded when the turtle describes the vastness of the ocean. I try to travel as much as I can, particularly to give my young children cultural experiences beyond the classroom. Unsurprisingly, my trips to various countries have also changed my views on the country I’ve called home for the past 20+ years. Six months ago, Singapore reminded me that Korea isn’t as clean and safe as it could be. That multiculturalism and diversity is possible in an East Asian context. And that lookism and fashion doesn’t need to d

Feb 21, 2026By David A. Tizzard

Opinion

The meat envelope and the machine: Notes on the ontological honesty of PLAVE

I used to think virtual idols were a gimmick. A kind of high-gloss, dancing Tamagotchi. The kind of thing you point at and say “Ah yes, late-stage capitalism,” before moving on to something with a pulse. Then, faced with more Hallyu lectures to teach and articles to write, I started to do some research and explore PLAVE. PLAVE is a five-member virtual K-pop group. They don’t have physical bodies. They chart. They sell hundreds of thousands of albums. They win music shows. They have fans who cry, laugh and argue. This is usually where the ontological panic sets in for the uninitiated. How can people feel this way about something that isn't real? But that question assumes a definition of "reality" that hasn't been updated since the mid-20th century. It assumes reality begins and ends with the meat-envelope of the human body. I’ll admit my own bias here. I grew up in the long shadow of rock ideology and the belief that authenticity lives in sweat, drugs, mistakes, egos the size of mountains and lungs running out of air on stage. Even Bowie, patron saint of artifice, still had a bod

Feb 1, 2026By David A. Tizzard

The meat envelope and the machine: Notes on the ontological honesty of PLAVE

Opinion

Hyun Bin is outrageously handsome

I love Korean history. And I really love it when Korean film, drama, and literature stop trying to polish it and instead let it bleed. I love post-liberation Korea: the mess of it, the brutality, the improvisation, the uneasy marriage of capitalism and authoritarianism. This period is one of the best narrative sources in modern cinema and art. What I don’t love are those saccharine Joseon fantasies where everyone looks like they just stepped out of a skincare commercial, the women styled with twenty-first-century makeup techniques, the men built like personal trainers, and the past rendered as a kind of nationalist mood board. Too much of that stuff feels less like history and more like branding. No! Give me curfews. Give me dictatorship. Give me the sound of forbidden music bleeding out of cheap radios under military rule. Give me sex, fear, ambition, corruption, and the kind of loud, boisterous energy that only exists when people are surviving under pressure. These things happened right here, on these streets, to the woman rolling my kimbap, to my father-in-law, to my wife when sh

Jan 24, 2026By David A. Tizzard

Opinion

Learning Korea Without Korean

More than once I’ve walked up to a counter in a coffee shop and seen the two people working there silently and almost imperceptibly shift places. The one working the counter shifts her glance backwards; the one pouring milk into a jug slides silently forward into place and replaces her at the checkout, smiling nervously. They have switched spots based on who is better adapted at speaking English. All of this happens so fast that it barely announces itself as a decision at all, and I am sure there are people for whom it happens regularly and yet goes completely unnoticed, like a familiar tune playing just under the volume of conscious attention. I smile, keep my eyes relatively low, and order in Korean. This usually causes a flicker of surprise, but nothing more. And then I ask a question. I make a small comment about the weather. And only then does it become clear that the little dance they performed so efficiently was, at least this time, unnecessary. It is worth saying that this experience does not unfold in the same way for everyone. Someone who appears Korean, or simply Asian, w

Jan 17, 2026By David A. Tizzard

Opinion

Five reasons I stayed in Seoul

“Seoul is vast. … And yet, vast as it is, once three million seven hundred thousand people actually try to live in it, it proves no easy place to breathe. Everywhere you go, wherever you arrive, it is packed — stuffed to the seams. Houses keep creeping farther out toward the suburbs, yet year after year they are never enough. There are no jobs. People grow sharp-tongued and sly, the authorities groan under a torrent of abuse, and the newspapers do nothing but scream at the top of their lungs.” Written in 1976, Lee Ho-cheol’s “Seoul Is Full” offers an unsettling portrait of Korea’s capital: overwhelming in scale, overpopulated to the point of psychic compression, and structurally incapable of supplying enough work or shelter for the bodies it contains. Nearly half a century on, the city’s basic conditions appear to have been normalized. Those of us who have succeeded in becoming Seoulites are, to a certain extent, sympathizers and accomplices in this outrageous transformation. And yet, the attraction remains strong. We want to be in Seoul. Want to walk its streets. Sit

Jan 10, 2026By David A. Tizzard

Opinion

On the misuse of 4B feminism to explain Korea

I recently gave a group of 11 young women the opportunity to speak at the Royal Asiatic Society. For months they prepared their topics, posters, and digital content, filled with nervous excitement that they would be talking to professors, diplomats, and members of society about the real issues that affected their lives. They spoke of outrageous beauty standards; they said that parents did not always understand their hobbies and the career paths they chose; they revealed what it was like dating foreign guys. And they did all this with passion and enthusiasm. Taking the freedom afforded them and demonstrating true courage to show the world who they really were and what they actually thought. The talk that night received a great ovation. People whooped with excitement. They clasped their hands, offering gratitude and praise. Thanks to technology, the talk given in downtown Seoul was examined in Polish lecture halls and Italian media offices. A great success. It was only afterward, while reading the analyses and reports that followed, that I felt the dull recognition of something that had

Jan 3, 2026By David A. Tizzard

On the misuse of 4B feminism to explain Korea

Opinion

Why letting teachers afford homes is still called communism

Every Korean president promises change. They use lofty words like revolution. They promise that everything that happened in the past would simply be a footnote to what is about to take place. People hold their breath. “It’s about to start,” they think. The struggle, the war, the division, the colonialism. Everything will now be solved and the country will become a place for the people. Having sacrificed more than one could possibly imagine, after enduring hardships so outrageous they make you baulk, having democratically chosen a leader, the time has come. The destiny fulfilled. And then… And then. Plus ca change. I remember when President Moon Jae-in’s administration sent me a special gift set upon entering office. It was a wonderfully ornate set of drinking glasses and traditional Korean liquor. My family looked at me askance. “Wow,” they thought. From the Blue House? To you? The guy that sits around reading books and drinking? It was a lovely gesture and I am thankful for it. However, it didn’t stop me writing about issues that troubled him (these generally revolved

Dec 27, 2025By David A. Tizzard

Why letting teachers afford homes is still called communism

Opinion

Do you have a K-face?

I was sitting in a hairdresser’s chair doing what one does in hairdresser’s chairs, which is to become briefly, helplessly reflective, staring at my own head from angles normally reserved for security camera footage, when a woman I had never met before walked past, stopped abruptly and did a double-take at my reflection. There was a pause. Then, with genuine delight, she smiled and said, “You have such a small face.” This was not flirtation. There was no reference to my hair, my age or any feature traditionally associated with human attractiveness in the West. It was simply an observational statement, delivered as though she had just confirmed a pleasing fact about the weather. This was also not the first time it had happened. Anyone who has taken photos with Korean students, colleagues or teammates will recognize the moment. You line up, the phone comes out, the camera flips, and suddenly everyone sees themselves on the screen next to you. There is a brief, silent calculation. Then realization. Faces are compared. Space is renegotiated. People begin to step backward. This is n

Dec 14, 2025By David A. Tizzard

Opinion

Korea: A teenager with a PhD

There’s a certain kind of self-reinforcing, and surprisingly addictive narrative that forms around Korea whenever the global commentariat gets going. You’ve seen it. The greatest hits of online cynicism: Their gender attitudes are medieval; their exam system is inhumane; their culture manufactures emotionally constipated robots; everyone is depressed; beauty standards are dystopian; K-pop is fake; they’re all racist. Spend ten minutes among the disenchanted on Reddit and you’ll find people diagnosing Korea’s every flaw with the authority of late-night armchair psychiatrists, all while using the country as a kind of geopolitical emotional support animal. They drag it down so they can feel better about living in suburban Ohio or on the outskirts of Vancouver. Then head to YouTube, where creators who once loved the country suddenly discover that capitalism pays better if the thumbnail reads “I survived the MOST RACIST COUNTRY in the world” and their eyebrows are raised in that patented O-shaped shock we see everywhere on the platform. Bonus points if they have their finger

Dec 6, 2025By David A. Tizzard

David A. Tizzard

Read more

From Spitting to Shaming: The K-Social Code

Namdaemun after Namaste

The meat envelope and the machine: Notes on the ontological honesty of PLAVE

Hyun Bin is outrageously handsome

Learning Korea Without Korean

Five reasons I stayed in Seoul

On the misuse of 4B feminism to explain Korea

Why letting teachers afford homes is still called communism

Do you have a K-face?

Korea: A teenager with a PhD

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