Korea: The Land that PC Forgot
By Andrew Weber, Staff Reporter
The Korea Herald Weekender section (front page)
Friday, September 22, 2000It is a warm Saturday afternoon at Seoul Land, Korea's second largest amusement park in the city of Kwachon. Three Africans make their way through the crowds. They wave and flash big smiles, sometimes stopping to shake hands with a child. They are not real Africans, but Koreans in thick costumes made of brown wool and felt.
The staff at Seoul Land refers to them as their "African characters."
"Caricatures" would be a better term. The faces of the costumes have massive bright red lips. The wear loin cloths and carry spears. All have bones through their noses.
"The bones are not meant to be realistic, they are just meant to be funny accessories," said Cho Young-shin, who works on the parade and event-planning team at Seoul Land.
The Koreans in African suits are part of Seoul Land's global village parade, which makes two laps around the park daily. The parade includes a strikingly authentic Korean royal procession and an English queen played by a beautiful Caucasian model.
Cho said she doubts anyone could be offended by Seoul Land's "Africans." The purpose of the parade is to "provide some fun for Korean children," she said. Park officials say they have not received a single complaint.
That Koreans have not yet embraced Western notions of political correctness is no big news to any foreigner that has lived in the former Hermit Kingdom.
What is surprising, however, is the prominence of blatantly racist images and caricatures in modern Korean popular culture.
Equally shocking to non-Koreans is the often angry defense made by Koreans of their right to display images that would draw legions of protestors practically anywhere else in the world.
Case in point, "The Third Reich" bar in Shinchon, which features a staff clad in swastika-covered uniforms and posters of Adolf Hitler. The bar is still doing a booming business despite being featured in stories by Time, the Associated Press and The South China Morning Post. The owner has made a slight compromise: he changed the name to "The Fifth Reich."
"Why should we change our concept," said Chung Hwa-man, the bar's manager. "We are the only Nazi bar in Seoul."
Not any more. Recently, a bar in Ahyon-dong opened sporting hand-painted murals copied from Nazi propaganda posters and framed photos of concentration camps.
Many are quick to point out that such cases are isolated and the work of a few "frogs in the well" - Koreans with scant exposure to other cultures.
But there was nothing isolated about the recent advertising blitz by Freechal, one of Korea's hottest Web companies, to promote its elite "Master Community." The company's ad for its new online meeting space, which was plastered across Seoul subways and appeared in a number of magazines and sports dailies, contained a photo of a young Korean in a leather SS outfit giving the "Heil Hitler" salute that is illegal in Germany.
"It is not a Nazi, but a Nazi-like image," said Kim Son-mi, director of marketing for Freechal. "We wanted to convey a powerful and charismatic image to promote our new Master Community."
And what if any foreign tourists from, say, Israel or Germany, happened to be riding the Seoul subway system at the time the Master ad was up? "I can't see how anyone would think we were offending people," said Kim. "Our advertising campaign was targeted exclusively at young Koreans and that image is not a big deal to them."
Koreans, too, are often portrayed in far less than flattering ways in other countries, as most Koreans are acutely aware.
"Falling Down," a Hollywood film in which a penny-pinching Korean shopkeeper appears, raised so much ire that its distribution was banned for nearly a decade. Complaints were even lodged by Koreans with the Polish government in the early 1990s because the country's school system still had in use communist-era textbooks that claimed Seoul started the Korean War.
And heaven help the unwitting foreigner that in the presence of a Korean lets the "Sea of Japan" slip from his lips when referring to the body of water that Koreans insist can only be called the "East Sea." One would think Koreans might be less reluctant to gore other people's oxen.
Perhaps the one positive thing that can be said about Koreans' use of culturally insensitive images is that they are equal-opportunity offenders. Korean TV audiences howl at hot-tempered Chinese restaurant owners who wear pigtails and anachronistic Mandarin outfits. In editorial cartoons, Caucasians are usually drawn with banana-length noses.
And the Saudi Arabians depicted in "The Children's World Picture Atlas," published by Yearim Press, are mustachioed, sunglass-wearing sheiks jumping for joy while standing next to a gushing oil well.
But Africans and blacks seem to get it the worst. Despite reams of angry letters to the editor of Korean newspapers and frequent complaints from resident Africans, "Somali kimpap" is still on the menu of a number of Korean restaurants. (The rice balls which have been given the nickname are thin and without meat, making them the perfect lunch for dieters.) Koreans offer a number of defenses for their frequent use of images that would spark demonstrations in other lands. Perhaps the biggest being that they are intended for Korean eyes only.
Another common defense is ignorance.
At Uncle Tom's Cabin in Apkujung, when a customer sits down for a drink, bartender Lee Kyu-song hands him or her a copy of Harriet Beacher Stowe's classic anti-slavery polemic novel, the insides of which have been pasted with a copy of the house menu. Lee says he had no idea that the bar's "concept" was a painful and emotional symbol to African-Americans.
"We only wanted to create a warm, country atmosphere," said Lee.
The same state of blissful ignorance reigns just around the corner at the Harlem Hof, where you won't find nostalgic pictures of Cab Calloway or menus tucked inside James Baldwin novels, but rather graffiti-covered walls and a imposing police mannequin.
Said owner Jae Jin-ju: "No one could get offended here. This is not a real Harlem bar, but just one with a little bit of Harlem's mood."
Perhaps one of the big reasons that such insensitive images still have such currency is that many Koreans offended by them are afraid to speak out.
A young professional who wished to be identified as Cho said that he is bothered when he hears his superiors and co-workers making racist comments about some of their firm's foreign clients, but would never dream of challenging them.
"The problem is that I lived abroad for a long time and everyone knows it," said Cho, who went to high school in the United States. "If I said something they would just think I was trying to show how sophisticated I am."
Expats too often experience the same unwillingness to rock the boat.
"Koreans can get very defensive if you point out something you believe is offensive," said Jim Young, a Canadian who has lived in Korea for the past four years. "They will say that you just don't understand Korean culture."
Still, four years hasn't acclimatized him one bit to the frequent negative images of non-Koreans he sees in the media here. Recently, he was angered by a segment KBS aired on Aboriginal culture during its Olympic coverage.
The piece showed footage of Aboriginees doing traditional dances, but instead of their traditional music, KBS dubbed in "The Lion Sleeps Tonight," a Zulu-inspired doo wop song by The Tokens, a 1960s pop group from the United States.
"What does a song about an African jungle have to do with native Australians," said Young. "It's like they are saying that all black people are from the same jungle."
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