From Spitting to Shaming: The K-Social Code

Courtesy of Irem Clingir

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 their throat in a guttural performance that resulted in them dripping a huge white waterfall of saliva on the floor. Spitting and all the resultant noises was as regular as a Kakao notification today. I hear a lot less of the gum smacking so favoured by ajjumas riding buses and subways, too. It used to be a full-on, mouth-open routine, masticating away. But it was always this crack they would do with the gum, exploding it across the top of their mouth, that would make my skin crawl and shoulders arch.

Today the subways are silent. Almost deafeningly so. Before smartphones were invented, people sat three or four abreast, chatting. Gossiping. Sharing crackers. Striking up a conversation with someone further down the line. The whole carriage got to hear whose son was going to what university, whose husband was getting fat, and where the best gopchang could be bought.

This shift isn't just changing tastes or culture whizzing around though. It is the physiological byproduct of a nation climbing Maslow’s hierarchy. Sociologists often point to a "civilizing process" that accompanies economic surges, where the rising middle class begins to privatize their sensory space. What happens is that as people get richer, moving up the hierarchy of needs, they eventually come to trade the communal — the shared smell of garlic and the boisterous gossip of the subway carriage — for the sterile. The private. They want personal space. Freedom for their nose and ears as reward for the newfound affluence.

Robert Sapolsky has argued that when a society moves out of survival mode, the brain’s "sensory gating" becomes hyper-selective. When you aren't worried about where your next meal is coming from or the stability of the national grid, your amygdala has the luxury of being offended by the wet smack of an ajumma’s gum. Korea has thus achieved a level of affluence where silence is no longer a void to be filled with conversation, but a commodity to be protected at all costs. Its citizens increasingly intolerant of the human noise that used to define the city.

But the "quieting" of the Korean sensorium isn't just the byproduct of a fatter GDP or some organic migration toward "refinement." That would be too easy. And the world is many things, but never that. There’s also a growing hyper-efficient, peer-to-peer policing. The kind that the Stalinists in the North would be proud of. With 51 million people packed into a space the size of Indiana, the only way to maintain the illusion of personal sovereignty is through a rigid, almost monastic adherence to an Unspoken Code. The Korean “big other."

Spirituality, morality, and virtue has been outsourced to the omnipresent unblinking eye of the CCTV, creating a culture where the fear of being "that person" is the primary driver of civic decorum. I see it every morning as I wait to start my radio segment. The guest before me is tasked with sharing the latest stories from social media, and every morning it’s the same. “Citizens are outraged at footage of a person eating kimbap on a park bench but leaving carrots all over the path.” And, “Someone spilled their coffee all over a table and just walked out.” Finishing the shame session with, “And I mean this person’s face is all over the internet. The comments are going crazy.”

Most of us, therefore, live in fear of being the one whose daily habits or human error becomes a viral grievance on a Kakao group chat. Men in their forties hesitate to wear certain clothes lest they offend the taste of the young. It’s a transition from the messy, communal "jeong" of the village to a high-resolution urbanity where instead of just respecting each other’s space, we actively vanish from it. Korea is now a nation of self-policing units, perpetually nunchi-ing to such a recursive degree that the room has become devoid of the human glitches that once made the city feel alive.

What I was smelling and hearing in 2006 wasn't just a lack of etiquette, though ashamedly that’s often how I perceived it at the time. “How can they spit?!” I would mutter under my breath. What I encountered was closer to the lingering ghost of the Korean village. It was a culture still in the throes of a sociological puberty. The physical habits of the maeul being shoehorned into the concrete reality of a global megacity.

It feels like now, the Korea of 2026 has finally transitioned into a hyper-individualized urbanity where the highest form of civic virtue is invisibility. Moving from a society where your business was my business, and my elbow was probably in your ribs, to a society of bourgeois self-regulation that views any uninvited sensory input, be it the scent of a fermented side dish or the pitch of a phone conversation, as a primitive transgression against the private sovereignty of the individual.

But every now and then the village rears its head. A smile. A sneeze. A crackling laugh. People shouting. Kids hollering. Drinking. Soju. Kimchi. More soju. Staring at foreigners. Smiles again. All of this is a reminder that while Korea has successfully engineered the noise out of its subways, it hasn’t quite managed to engineer the humanity out of its people. And thankfully, so very thankfully, it’s got rid of the spitting and bondaegi.