"After the 1997 Asian financial crisis South Korea realised that it was overly dependent on heavy industry, notably shipbuilding and carmaking."

"Ministers decided that the creative industries might successfully diversify the economy, after a team of economists pointed out that the film Jurassic Park alone had generated the same profit as selling 1.5 million Hyundai cars. They got behind everything from media and the arts to food and drink. A campaign for traditional Korean food supported restaurants, chef training and marketing. It has helped Korean food to travel alongside the 'K-wave' of pop culture. Kimchi is spreading like sushi and ramen did a generation ago...."

From "All points east — how the West got hooked on Korean and Japanese culture/K-pop titans BTS are taking on the Grammys, manga is on the London stage and Japanese literature is breaking records. What’s driving the boom?" (London Times).

We're told that BTS is very popular because of their "mix of pop, hip-hop, R&B and electronic music, with lyrics about mental health and social pressure," and it made me wonder what the group is saying about mental health and social pressure. So, the world being what it is, I said to Grok, "All I want from you is about 10 quotes from BTS songs that are 'lyrics about mental health and social pressure.'"

Click through if you want to know.

"The Korean supergroup BTS has pulled its blockbuster album 'Arirang' from Grammy Awards consideration, in protest..."

"... of the new Asian Pop Music Performance category....The Recording Academy has been cooking up new categories for years. It started out with 28 in 1959. We’re up to 100 now.... Some reflect true genres and discrete markets. But most are the malignant offspring of the record business’s historical segregation, which divided Black and white artists into separate genres and markets, even if they were playing sonically similar music.... After a song from 'K-Pop Demon Hunters' won big this year, Asian Pop was created...."

Writes Dan Charnas, a professor at the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at NYT, in "Pop Music Is the Problem" (NYT gift link).

Here's how I'd frame the question: Why don't the Grammys have a category called White Pop Music?

There are 2 directions to go with that question. You could say it's white supremacy or you could say it's anti-racism.

"Michelin-starred chef faces jail for garnishing desserts with ants."

A headline in The London Times. 

Prosecutors [in South Korea] put the total number of individual ants served at roughly 49,000. The owner argued the dried insects were only used in a “small part” of the restaurant’s 15-course menu, largely as a topping for sorbets, and that restaurants in countries such as Denmark, the UK and Australia also serve ants. They noted diners were also able to choose non-ant toppings, including fermented vinegar and edible flowers, and disputed the prosecution’s estimate, claiming only about 60 per cent of diners opted to try the ants.... 

Ants are not among the ten insect species approved for human consumption in Korea. Grasshoppers, locusts, brown-banded cockroaches and two-spotted crickets, however, are among those deemed safe to eat.

A City Without Loneliness.

An ad I'm seeing:

That's appearing at the NYT, with the article "Trump on His Presidential Library: He’ll Write His Own History/In his determination to own and control every document in his future library, the president is working to shield his administration’s inner workings from public view."

Trump's library — which might include a hotel — is in a city I'm sure has some loneliness, Miami. But let's think about Seoul, South Korea, and what it has decided to talk to us about — loneliness.

Does it just want us, over here in America, to know that it's taking care of its lonely people, with counseling and hugs from an imaginary animal? I clicked "learn more" and got "In An Age Of Loneliness, Seoul Reimagines The City As Care" which is a sponsored New York Times article. 

Seoul has a loneliness hotline, we're told. Also, "The Seoul 365 Challenge Program" — inviting residents to go outside once each day. And, my favorite, the "Mind Convenience Store," where "Anyone can step in, sit down, eat, and rest, and" — with the help of a facilitator called "Everyone's Friend"— "begin to connect."

"Some time ago my older brother became obsessed with Korean skincare, which he discovered on TikTok."

"In his early fifties, he spends nearly all of his spare time on this app, imbibing a steady stream of drag queens, Democrats and women washing their faces. This formula had sufficiently influenced him to plan a trip to Seoul, where he wanted to get 'skin treatments that are illegal in the US.' Would I like to come with him, he wondered? If it isn’t clear by now, my brother is gay. So am I, but he’s better at it than I am...."

Writes Ben Kawaller, in "My gay brother and I went on a beauty trip to Korea. It hurt/At 41, Ben Kawaller crossed the globe for a skin treatment that’s illegal in the US. Was the pain — and the four-figure price tag — worth it?" (London Times).

A brief description of one procedure: "the general idea is they burn off your face and the one that grows back is nicer."

"... president... jailed for life for leading insurrection...."

Full headline, in The Guardian: "South Korea’s former president Yoon Suk Yeol jailed for life for leading insurrection/Ex-leader sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labour over failed martial law declaration in 2024."

The Seoul central district court found that Yoon’s declaration of martial law on 3 December 2024 constituted insurrection, carried out with the intent to disrupt the constitutional order. Judge Jee Kui-youn said the purpose was “to send troops to the national assembly to blockade the assembly hall and arrest key figures, including the assembly speaker and party leaders, thereby preventing lawmakers from gathering to deliberate or vote.” In sentencing Yoon on Thursday, the court pointed to his lack of apology throughout the proceedings, his unjustified refusal to attend hearings, and the massive social costs his actions inflicted on South Korean society....

The South Korean band plays "YMCA" for Trump.

Omg the South Korean band is greeting Trump at the airport with YMCA. 😭

The ultimate sign of respect. pic.twitter.com/Up1DvTcYUO

— johnny maga (@_johnnymaga) October 29, 2025

"The convention is one of the many ways that monks around the country are working to demonstrate the modern relevance of a religion that some young people see as old fashioned, esoteric and..."

"... relegated to secluded mountaintop temples.... ... Buddhism faces a particularly steep challenge in South Korea, where Protestantism, a branch of Christianity, overtook it to become the most popular religion for the first time in the latest census. In South Korea and some other Asian countries, Christianity tends to be associated with modernity and rationality, while Buddhism and folk religions are often seen as more old-fashioned, Professor Chia said. Some young people at the Busan expo said they were trying to shake that idea. South Koreans tend to see the religion as one that is for older people and can only be encountered at 'temples deep in the mountains,' said Ju Yeo-jin, 30, a vendor selling casual streetwear style clothing and accessories, wearing a pageboy cap over her short bleached hair. 'The Buddhism I’ve experienced is fun and cool. I want to convey that feeling.'"

I'm reading "Is South Korea’s 'Buddhistcore' Aesthetic a Fad or a Spiritual Awakening? Young South Koreans are buying Buddhist merch. Monks and experts hope the buzz will translate into deeper engagement" (NYT).

I think Americans associate Buddhism with modernity and rationality — but not because of expos and "merch"! To me, it seems modern and rational to retreat to a temple deep in the mountains. Maybe to young people the religion of one's own region will always seem "old-fashioned" and based in tradition. Just imagine people from elsewhere looking over and perhaps it will seem newly modern. Or what the hell, buy a "red heart-shaped magnet reading, 'Sentient beings I love you'" or "key chains of the Buddha in neon and with hearts for eyes, and streetwear-style T-shirts with slogans like 'Shut up and meditate.'" Maybe that will work.

"I sincerely apologise for causing trouble despite being a person of no importance."

Said Kim Keon-hee, quoted in "The fall of a first lady: limos and luxury to a cell with no bed/Kim Keon-hee — the dog-loving wife of Yoon Suk-yeol, the impeached ex-president of South Korea — is in prison on suspicion of corruption and election meddling" (London Times).

Critics have compared Kim to Lady Macbeth, Marie Antoinette and, for her extensive cosmetic surgery, Michael Jackson. She lent an aura of glamour to Yoon, 64, a solemn former prosecutor.... There are 16 criminal allegations against her including suspicions that an expressway road project was changed to end in an area where her family owns land in Yangpyeong, east of Seoul.... Her one-person cell has a small table that can be used as a desk and for eating meals and a floor mattress to sleep on, said one source.... She can be held for up to 20 days while an indictment is prepared, but is unlikely to be granted bail according to legal analysts....

"In South Korea, many parents bed share because they want to savor a close relationship with young children 'who one day won’t need them anymore'..."

"... said Inae Kim, an office manager in Seoul. She sleeps in two adjacent king-size beds with her husband and their two girls, ages 5 and 7.... In some East Asian societies, choosing not to bed share can be seen as 'harsh parenting'.... Ms. Kim... sleeps better without her kids in the bed, she said. But her husband insists on family bed sharing because he sees it as essential for a close relationship with his daughters. Some of Ms. Kim’s friends have children who stayed in the family bed until age 12, even at the expense of their parents’ sleep quality and sex lives. That would be too much for her, she said. So she and her husband have decided that their girls will move into what is now their playroom in about two years. Whether that will happen on schedule is an open question. The plan is to install bunk beds, Ms. Kim said with a laugh, but neither girl wants to sleep on top...."

From "Sharing a Bed With Your Kid? It’s Totally Normal in Asia. Bed sharing tends to be unpopular and contentious in the United States. But in many Asian countries, the question is often not whether to do it, but when to stop" (NYT).

Meanwhile: "Many Western parents put infants to sleep in cribs or beds in a separate room — often using a practice known as 'sleep training,' in which infants are taught to sleep independently. Modern ideas about separating mothers and babies at night have their roots in campaigns by 'Victorian-era influencers' in Britain and the United States...."

Feminism doesn't come up in this article, presumably because it is romanticizing the "other" and questioning the "West." Are we not supposed to notice that Inae Kim is unhappy with the burden and disorder of bed sharing and the loss of sleep and sexual connection to her husband, who insists that closeness to the daughters must predominate?

"'There’s nothing beneficial about them,” Ahn Yeon-sik said this week as he hosed down lovebugs from the front of his bar in Incheon...."

"Nearby, a man trying to sit on a bench swatted the bugs with a piece of cardboard. A pedestrian ducked swiftly to dodge a pair bearing down on her. 'I’m told they hate water, but it hasn’t worked,' Mr. Ahn said, pausing to bat one away from his neck. He added that he had also doused them with mosquito spray and soju, a popular spirit, to little effect...."

The NYT reports. 

We're told the bugs tend to look twice their actual size, because they are commonly seen stuck together, mating. 

"Even the fumigation didn’t help, said Nam In, who runs a coffee shop.... 'They’re just trying to appease us psychologically,' he said as lovebugs crawled on his cafe’s windows and tile floor. 'The number of bugs is beyond human control.'... One hiker scraped off lovebugs that were clinging to a railing along a trail and collected them in a small plastic bag. He brought them home and put them in his freezer, then made them into a burger patty that he cooked and ate in a YouTube video...."

"South Korea’s export of babies peaked in the 1980s, with as many as 8,837 children shipped abroad in 1985. Children were 'sent abroad like luggage'..."

"... the commission said, presenting a photo that showed rows of infants and young children strapped to airplane seats​.... Mia Lee Sorensen, a South Korean adoptee who was sent to Denmark in 1987, said the commission’s findings provided the 'validation' that she had been seeking. When she found her birth parents in South Korea in 2022, they couldn’t believe she was alive. They told her that her mother had passed out during labor and that when she woke up, the clinic told her that the baby had died...."

From "World’s Largest ‘Baby Exporter’ Admits to Adoption Fraud/A South Korean truth commission called for the country to apologize to those who were sent abroad 'like luggage' so that adoption agencies could profit" (NYT).

"South Korea’s likely next leader would support President Donald Trump’s efforts to restart dialogue with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un..."

"... and would even consider nominating him for the Nobel Peace Prize if there was a significant breakthrough, signaling a sharp change from Seoul’s current hard-line approach toward Pyongyang...."

From "South Korea’s likely next leader wants warmer ties with China, North Korea/Lee Jae-myung says he would support President Donald Trump’s efforts to restart talks with North Korea — and even consider nominating him for the Nobel Peace Prize" (WaPo)(free-access link).

"I hope there will be a situation within this year under which we as a party officially nominate Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize,” [Lee Jae-myung] said.... 

When Japan’s former prime minister, Shinzo Abe, nominated him for the same award in 2019, he called it “most beautiful.”...

Last year, Lee survived an assassination attempt after a man stabbed him in the neck during an event. “I collapsed and looked at the blue sky and thought, ‘Oh, that sky will soon disappear from my sight. This must be death,’” Lee said. “Now, the time I have left feels like a bonus. It made me a freer person, less worried about the preciousness of my life.”

"She doesn’t believe in labels for her own sexual orientation and has little interest in dating other women, but she does believe in political lesbianism..."

"... as a way for women to establish lives separate from men — with an emphasis on the 'political' rather than the 'lesbian.' 'I don’t need to try being a lesbian, because in political lesbianism, I can just be a person, like a normal person — a human being. I can be in a safe place,' she told me as we drank sweet-potato lattes at a campus café. The most important thing, in her view, is the absence of men. 'Always, when I use the word "safe place," it means the place for women.'"

From "A World Without Men/The women of South Korea’s 4B movement aren’t fighting the patriarchy — they’re leaving it behind entirely" (New York Magazine).

That's featured on the home page, but I see: "This story, about women in South Korea who identify as part of the 4B movement, was originally published on March 8, 2023. In the days following the election of former president Donald Trump, interest in the movement has spiked dramatically."

Yes, I showed interest in it yesterday, here, linking to the NYT article "A Sex Strike Is a Losing Strategy for American Women."

And I blogged the New York Magazine article the day it came out, here, March 8, 2023. I quoted more of it at the time, and — I see now — I included that "political lesbianism" quote. 

"Hospitals and shops catering to pets have become ubiquitous, while childbirth clinics have all but disappeared..."

"... as South Korea’s birthrate has become the lowest in the world. In parks and neighborhoods, strollers are more often than not carrying dogs. Online shopping malls say they sell more baby carriages for dogs than for babies.... 'Liam is like a child to me,' said Ms. Sim, 34, who does not plan to get married or have children. 'I love him the way my mom loved me. I eat old food in the refrigerator, saving the freshest chicken breast for Liam.' Her mother, Park Young-seon, 66, said she felt sad that many young women had chosen not to have babies. But she said she had come to accept Liam as 'my grandson.' On a recent weekend, the mother and daughter joined six other families who took their dogs on a picnic to Mireuksa, a Buddhist temple in central South Korea. So-called temple stays are a way for ordinary people to meditate and enjoy the monastic quiet. Now, some temples encourage families to bring their dogs along. All participants, human and canine, wear gray Buddhist vests and rosaries."

From "One of the World’s Loneliest Countries Finds Companionship in Dogs/They have become pampered family members in South Korea, which has the world’s lowest birthrate and where much of the population lives alone" (NYT).

"South Korea’s birth rate is the lowest on the planet, at 0.7 per woman. The population officially began shrinking four years ago..."

"... and is projected to halve by 2100.... President Yoon Suk-yeol has described the population decline as a 'national emergency.' He and his wife Kim Keon-Hee are dog owners but do not have children. Experts say this reflects a broader societal shift, with pets filling emotional needs among a cohort of young people who are increasingly individualistic.... The shift in attitudes towards dogs in South Korea is perhaps most starkly illustrated by the fact that it only recently banned the consumption of dog meat.... Dog meat stew, known locally as boshintang, is eaten mainly by older Koreans in the summer.... The practice, often defended as cultural tradition, has faced growing opposition from... from younger Koreans who increasingly view dogs as companions rather than livestock...."

From "Raise children? No, South Koreans just want to pamper their pups/In the country with the lowest birth rate in the world, young people cite financial constraints and intense working conditions as reasons to choose pets instead" (London Times).

"I grew up in South Korea, where there are two words that can roughly translate as 'laziness': geeureum and gwichaneum."

"Geeureum’s connotations are more or less identical to the English—the word bears the same condescension. But gwichaneum lacks the negative valence. There’s even a kind of jest to it. To feel gwichan... is to not be bothered to do something, not like it, or find it to be too much effort. The key to understanding the term, however, is how it fits into Korean grammar: You can’t say 'Bob is a gwichan person'; you can only say something like 'Doing laundry is a gwichan endeavor for Bob.' The term describes tasks, not people. It places the defect within the act. Errands that are gwichan induce laziness in you.... Gwichan nails what’s wrong with the litany of errands that plague our everyday existence: Many of them don’t merit our devotion.... Gwichanism (a popular neologism in Korea) is not an apologia for anti-productivity or anti-work, and the gwichanist will still fulfill their vital life obligations. You see, gwichanists aren’t unproductive; they’re perhaps meta-productive, interrogating the merit of every undertaking.... [E]mbracing gwichanism allows me to assert the primacy of my preferences, however esoteric...."

Writes Sheon Han in "The Case for Selective Slackerism/How a Korean term helps me reconcile my moments of discipline and sloth" (The Atlantic).

In this view, as I understand it, it's not that you avoid all chores. It's that you differentiate among chores and you view the chores as the source of the laziness. It's interesting to think of the activity itself as producing the feeling and to relieve yourself of a moral burden in feeling lazy.

Is English lacking the words for this distinction between 2 types of laziness? I can see that I have a tag for "laziness" and a separate — and important! — tag for "idleness." There are also many English words in the general area: "apathy," "inertia," "lethargy," "sluggishness," "sloth," "lassitude," "loafing" (I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease...)....

But perhaps none of these words expresses the difference between the general resistance to work and the resistance only to a particular type of work. And yet, let me suggest "irksome." We speak of the "irksome task." That does seem to blame the task itself and not our own laziness. It makes sense, in English, to say I am not a lazy person, but that is an irksome task.

"The modern men’s perm is loud for a hairstyle so soft. On TikTok, the hashtag #menperm... has garnered more than 20.7 million views."

"Those videos often begin with a man in a salon chair, pictured from the shoulder up. The camera orbits around his head just before a final shot of his crown: silky, voluminous waves lacquered with the aplomb of K-pop boy bands...."

I'm reading "Why Are More Men Getting Perms? The modern male perm is softer, more natural and has taken off, thanks to K-pop and TikTok" (NYT).

TikTok is very powerful. Videos don't just get views. They garner them.

"4B is shorthand for four Korean words that all start with bi-, or 'no'..."

"The first no, bihon, is the refusal of heterosexual marriage. Bichulsan is the refusal of childbirth, biyeonae is saying no to dating, and bisekseu is the rejection of heterosexual sexual relationships. It is both an ideological stance and a lifestyle, and many women I spoke to extend their boycott to nearly all the men in their lives, including distancing themselves from male friends.... For Youngmi and many others who subscribe to its basic premises, 4B, or 'practicing bihon,' is the only path by which a Korean woman today can live autonomously. In their view, Korean men are essentially beyond redemption, and Korean culture, on the whole, is hopelessly patriarchal.... While 4B’s adherents may hope to change society — through demonstrations and online activism, and by modeling an alternative lifestyle to other women — they are not trying to change the men whom they view as their oppressors.... Even young women who are not members of the movement echo that they could not imagine dating or marrying a Korean man...." 

From "A World Without Men/The women of South Korea’s 4B movement aren’t fighting the patriarchy — they’re leaving it behind entirely" (NY Magazine).

"South Korea recently broke its own record for the world’s lowest fertility rate. Figures released in November..."

"... showed the average number of children a South Korean woman will have in her lifetime is down to just 0.79. That is far below the 2.1 needed to maintain a stable population and low even compared to other developed countries where the rate is falling, such as the United States (1.6) and Japan – which at 1.3 reported its own lowest rate on record. And it spells trouble for a country with an aging population that faces a looming shortage of workers to support its pension system.... [M]ore than $200 billion has been spent trying to boost the population over the past 16 years.... A monthly allowance for parents with babies up to 1-year-old will increase from the current 300,000 won to 700,000 won ($230 to $540) in 2023 and to 1 million Korean won ($770) by 2024.... Government-funded nurseries are free..."

From "South Korea spent $200 billion, but it can’t pay people enough to have a baby" (CNN).