Mark Peterson is associate professor of Korean, Asian and Near Eastern languages at Brigham Young University in Utah.
One of my favorite pastimes is looking at names, particularly unique names. I guess it's the genealogist in me. When I watch sporting events, other people look at the athletic skill of the competitors — I look at the names on the backs of the jerseys. In American sports, there is always a new name I’ve never seen before.
Koreans are always proud of being the first or the best at things. Having the lowest birthrate in the entire world, however, is a “best” that is really the worst.
On the heels of a recent trip to Japan, coincidentally, I was asked by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism to write an essay for their webpage, Korea.net, on the positive cultural relations between Korea and Japan. The current government is taking a conciliatory position vis-a-vis Japan, in contrast to the previous administration, which took a more confrontational approach. I suppose that the variations of policy are a good thing and a byproduct of government by democracy. It’s a healthy kind of pendulum swing, the essence of democracy.
In the past two years, after hearing about an unusual battle in the middle of the Korean War between a Utah National Guard battalion and two regiments of Chinese "volunteers," I've been helping make a documentary film about the battle.
If you don’t know who Sam Richards is, you don’t watch YouTube. He is a YouTube megastar and a fan of Korea who is well known throughout the Asian country as the professor from Penn State University who discovered Korea in recent years and features it in some of his online lectures.
Recently, the New York Times published an article saying that the high-class restaurants in New York that featured French cuisine for decades are being replaced by high-class Korean restaurants. So, on a recent trip to New York, yes, I had to try one of these new upscale restaurants. It was very expensive, but it was really, really tasty. Wonderfully creative dishes with exciting flavors that overwhelmed the senses.
In my last article, I mentioned the Korean Institute of Confucian Culture (KICC), a one-year old, government-funded institute in Nonsan, North Chungcheong Province. I stated that it was the third of three similar institutes that preserve historical documents, sometimes by “entrustment” — where the owner retains ownership even though the document is kept in a safe storage environment at the institute. And sometimes by gifting. I have decided to gift my collection of old documents to KICC.
On my recent trip to Korea, the Korean Institute of Confucian Culture appointed me as an Honorary Ambassador of Confucianism. I thought today I would write about that, not from a personal perspective, but from the perspective of why Confucianism might need an ambassador.
I’ve been thinking about the Korean phrase “Chal salgiwihayeo” which can be basically translated as "in order to live well." I used to hear that phrase back when I first came to Korea as an aspirational statement, a hope, a goal. And indeed, Koreans that I used to know, sacrificed, saved, worked and studied for the coming days in the hopes they could "live well."