You'd be absolutely correct. But you forgot: Churches! Churches!
Look at my crown. Look at it!
I've long considered Korea "Asia's big secret." As Westerners, we usually have at least a passing knowledge of Japanese and Chinese culture usually gained through some media, most often movies. A lot of people also have some concept of what they think Southeast Asia is like, even if it's just the word "exotic" (which it is). But I, and I'm sure the vast majority of others have zero idea about Korean culture, and when you arrive in Korea you come in with only the vaguest of stereotypes which might include
Korea is in Asia. Asians are supposed to be short. So, Koreans are short
Korea is in Asia. So they probably use chopsticks
Korea is in Asia. So everybody is probably Buddhist
According to the Library of Congress, Buddhists make up 25% of the religious population of South Korea. What might surprise people who have not traveled to Korea or are living here, is that Christianity is a massive religion in South Korea - it comprises 25% of the religious population as well. So for every Buddhist, you have a Christian. However, Christianity is arguably more visible, significant, and powerful in South Korea than any other religious practice.
The temple near my old house in Anseong
at the foot of 비봉산 (Mt. Bibong)
Buddhist temples in Korea that aren't massive tourist traps are traditionally situated in one of two places: either at the foot of a mountain, or on the top of a mountain. Buddhism is certainly alive and well in South Korea, but it requires one to go seek it out. That isn't to say you will never see a monk in Korea, because when traveling in large cities like Seoul it isn't out of the ordinary to see a monk or two traveling in the subway. But Christianity is immensely more visible.
From my apartment right now, I am within 50-100 meters of three churches. Churches in Korea are large. And every single one of them is adorned with a neon red cross at the top. Some even have two steeples with a red cross on each one. When traveling by taxi from where I live to Suwon, the capital of my province of which my town is a suburb, you spend a few minutes in an area without many buildings and a lot of open land. In that area, especially at night, one is struck by the sea of red crosses visible in all directions. I would say that you could not drive for more than ten minutes in a medium sized town without encountering a church.
The Red Cross
Another factor that leads to the visibility of Christianity of Korea is that many branches of Christianity here, especially Jehova's Witnesses, are tenacious in missionizing non-believers. Here's a few examples. I had a doctor last year who I visited several times. During my last appointment with him he formally tried to introduce me to his faith by asking me questions like "Is there a God? What happens when you die? Have you heard of Jesus Christ?" Please bear in mind this is during an actual medical consultation. On numerous occasions I have been stopped on the street, preached to, and encouraged to go to church with them. This most recently happened last week, when a car pulled over alongside me as I was walking on the sidewalk to the gym. A middle-aged Korean woman tried to get me to go to work and tried to hand me a pamphlet from her car. Christians have come to my door while I'm cooking breakfast. In Korea, it is common to advertise your affiliation with your church by attaching your church's placard onto your apartment door. When I moved into my apartment, one was already affixed to my door and I can't get it off.
Just another of the many, many ways Korea defies any conventional stereotypes about Asian cultures.
안녕하세요? In Between Soju를 읽어서 감사합니다. 잘 지내세요? Hello. Thanks for reading In Between Soju. How are you doing?
(Annyeong haseyo? In Between Soju-leul il geo seo kam sa ham nida. Jal ji nae seh yo?)
My Korean vocabulary board. I write words I'm studying here
then hope they enter my mind with a combination of staring
...well, just a lot of staring
Disclaimer! Lots of Korean follows! And just for fun, I'm going to phonetically translate the Korean so you at home can follow along! There will also be exciting speculation between language and culture! If you'd rather go back to watching internet memes or whatever it is you do online, please click the following link! Or if you just want to really waste time properly, you can do that here!
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Anyone still here? Alright!
그럼 저는 시작할거예요...
So, when you meet a Korean for the first time especially in a social situation, if you're a man, you will be asked the following things especially if the person you're talking to is also a man.
1) What's your name?
2) Where are you from?
3) What is your job?
4) Excuse me, how old are you?
5) Do you have a girlfriend?
5a [if answer to 5 is yes]) Oh, is she pretty/Korean?
5b [if answer to 5 is no]) WHY NOT?!
This barrage of questions will usually be qualified by the statement "you are so handsome" thereafter (yes, men do this to each other)
One thing that strikes a Western person quickly is how obsessed Koreans are with age. And for good reason, because if they don't know how old you are, they will have no idea how to speak to you in Korean. Communication actually becomes impossible until age, or other social standing, is established. I will explain.
I like to 먹다
Here's the Korean word for eat: 먹다 (mok-da)
And here's a sentence meaning I eat rice: 저는 밥을 먹어요 (jahneun babeul mogahyo)
Easy right? No. That sentence presupposes that I already know how old you are (older than me) or that we're new acquaintances. Now, if we were of similar age, or we are good friends now, I can speak to you like this:
나는 밥을 먹어 (Naneun babeul mogah). I get to change the "I" from 저 to 나 and I drop the 요 which makes it less formal. So there's formal, and not formal, easy one might think?
If the situation is you are older than me and/or I respect you, the sentence changes to
저는 밥을 먹으세요 (Jahneun babeul mogahsehyo)
If the situation is I don't know how old you are at all, or what your social standing is, or I know one or both of those things but I want to be deferential then its
저는 밥을 먹습니다 (Jahneun babeul mogsumnida)
And then all of these situations have their respective permutations in the past and future tenses!
The point is here that without knowing age, a dialogue in Korean becomes impossible. Age is critically important in Korea, and you see it here reflected in their language. A man must nearly always be older than a women in a dating situation (fairly normal in the West, but nearly compulsory in Korea). Food is served according to who is the oldest and youngest, a point that I've touched on here. Age can even determine trustworthiness and inherent personal worth. While in English, one might use a different vocabulary or use/omit slang or colloquialisms based on the person you're talking with, because age isn't formally established at the outset of a conversation, one uses their best judgement in the situation and proceeds accordingly but in Korean age formally determines how one speaks, and is formally established at the beginning of a meeting so that a conversation can actually take place.
Another example is that among any group of people of similar ages, someone has to be the oldest person. This needs to be established because in Korea, you're not allowed to say the name of the person if they're older than you. And the words are different by gender!
Men -> 형 older brother (hyeong) 누나 older sister (noo na)
Women -> 오빠 older brother (oh bba) 어니older sister (ah ni)
And even in the case of twins, one of the twins has to be born before the other. So the younger will always address the older by one of those four words, depending on the situation.
But even more important than age is social standing. And this is where you can perhaps read into the mind of how Korean culture works.
My girlfriend, who is Korean, teaches me Korean about once a week. Thankfully, she speaks incredible English. She was correcting my writing and used a form of a verb I didn't understand. The verb was 오다 (oh da) meaning to come. I had transcribed "When is our friend coming here?"
언제 진구가 여기에 와? (onjeh chinguga yahgieh wa)
To which she slightly modified to:
언제 진구가 여기에 오니? (onjeh chinguga yahgieh oh nee)
The translated into English, it is an identical sentence in terms of direct meaning. But the change from 와 to 오니 is that 와 is 'standard' and 오니 is 'literally another option to say the same thing to a younger person or somebody that you are close with but if you want to say 와 go right ahead it's totally the same anyway because you're going to use 와 and not 와요 in the same situation'
But!
She studies English formally with a friend of mine in town. She explained that she would use 오니 with me, but never with our friend. Our friend is two years younger than she is, but she would never use 오니 with her because she is her teacher. Even in a social setting, not a class setting, she would never use 오니 with her because social standing supersedes all, even age. Language is so tied into the culture that without asking those string of questions I outlined earlier above, communication becomes impossible. They are so critically important, but whether language reflects the culture or the culture reflects the language is a post for another time.
A sense of community and togetherness is one of the strongest characteristics underlying Korean culture. It manifests itself in a multitude of forms, but one of the most common and most prevalent is attitudes toward food and dining. In the West, each person dining out orders a personalized meal. While sharing does happen, it isn't a terribly common thing to do. There are plenty of restaurants in Korea that serve personalized meals, but when a group of people all go out together to share a meal it is far more normal to go to a barbeque restaurant and order as one large group. This creates a notion of togetherness and community and helps to serve as a bond between friends, co-workers, or even strangers meeting for the first time.
At the start of the meal, the servers bring out a set of dishes without being asked. These the side dishes, or 반찬 (banchan), are provided by the restaurant at no additional charge (although the cost is usually factored into the cost of the meat). 반찬 is different at all restaurants and is one of the ways people mark the quality of the restaurant. Typically, 반찬 includes various kinds of 김치 (kimchi) such as cabbage kimchi, daikon radish kimchi, or bean sprouts, but more expensive and famous restaurants will usually provide tofu, several kinds of seafood, garlic, salts and seasonings, and sometimes some kind of 김치찌개 ( kimchijjigae - kimchi soup). All of these dishes are shared amongst all that are there. Everyone eats from the same plates and bowls and dishes are passed around freely around the table.
Meat is then ordered collectively and is either cooked by somebody sitting at the table, or in the case of more expensive restaurants, one of the employees stands by your table and cooks it for you. The meat is cooked on a grill in the center of the table where everyone will eat from. Because everyone is eating the same thing from the same place, everyone has the chance to enjoy the same experience together. Whether the food is good or bad, everyone will walk away sharing a common experience that creates another link that binds relationships between people. Compare this with a Western style restaurant. Everyone orders exactly what they want and eats it off a private, personal plate. One's experience of the restaurant is similarly locked into one's personalized experience of the meal. Perhaps a restaurant doesn't prepare a certain dish well, but another dish properly. The person whose meal was satisfactory will have a positive reaction towards a restaurant but will be unable to share this experience with the person whose meal was unsatisfactory. All people's tastes are idiosyncratic and not everybody at a Korean restaurant is going to enjoy the meal, but all reactions towards a meal at a Korean restaurant stem from the same food, cooked from the same plate, and eaten together. For better or worse, everyone present at the restaurant creates their emotional reaction from the same stimulus, and this can be shared and understood by everybody at the table.
Dining etiquette is also structured around groups, sharing, and the relationships between people. It is considered improper to pour a drink for yourself, especially alcoholic drinks. After everybody's ages are established, the youngest person at the table or nearest to the bottles should pour all the drinks for everybody at the table and then serve it to the rest of the diners beginning with the most senior or oldest person and working down from there to the youngest person at the table. This shows respect for the people with higher social standing as well as shows respect towards the group at large. Because everyone is eating and drinking together, practices like this help to create a scene of a temporary family. It is a small gesture, but an important one. With alcohol, another set of rules comes into effect that further reinforce the communal attitude while also giving more respect to each individual at the table. You should never pour your own alcohol. Somebody must do this for you, even for the youngest person at the table. This also extends to refills of alcohol. You should be watching for people to finish their glasses, and if somebody has finished, you should immediately pour for them. For the person who has finished drinking, it is not considered impolite to ask someone to pour for them. A common way to show politeness and friendship with somebody is after finishing your drink and after having poured yourself another, to then top off the drinks of everyone else near you while you still have the pitcher in your hand. In Korea, this doesn't happen. Instead, if somebody wants to refill the drink of another for politeness sake, it is appropriate to tap someone's glass to say "hurry up and finish this so I can pour your another." In the situation of proposing a toast, two things happen. The people at the table must tap their glass under the glass of the person who proposed the toast. In order to show further politeness, the younger members at the table should turn aside while drinking. There is a lot to consider when eating and drinking to comply with drinking in the Korean fashion, but these social codes serve to honor to the community at the table, and build solidarity amongst all present. By complying with Korean etiquette, each person identifies their social standing relative to each other, building a community with elders and youngers that all can partake in, and share together.
No culture exists in a vacuum, and individual participants are free to modify or ignore these codes altogether. Some rules of eating can be done away with in order to further the sense of community and togetherness among people of similar ages, or amongst couples. Turning aside to drink is commonly disregarded amongst people of similar ages. Another truly Korean way to show affection for the people sitting with you is to feed them with your chopsticks. This can be done for both platonic or romantic reasons. It is considered acceptable for men to feed each other. It is also acceptable for someone of higher standing to feed someone of a younger standing. This is a good way for a person of higher standing to lessen the formality at the table with those people who are younger or junior.
All of these codes serve to establish a community at the table. Social standings are reinforced, and a sense of togetherness and family is built. Sharing a meal is one of the most common ways to tie people together in a sense of community around the world. Everyone at the table belongs to each other to some degree. In the Korean style, eating and drinking is critically important to establishing togetherness.
