We do not know whether the few Westerners who found themselves in Korea in the 1600s ever cooked Western cuisine and then shared their food with Koreans. In all probability, something like it might have happened, but the Koreans were presumably not sufficiently impressed to describe their culinary experiences in writing. Thus, it is safe to assume that the Western cuisine remained quite unknown in Korea until the 1880s.

When missionaries established the first Korean schools for girls, they ― naturally enough ― began to teach housekeeping. After all, in those pre-feminist times schools were supposed to prepare good Christian wives and mothers for good Christian Korean families. Of course, the housekeeping they taught was Western: partially because the teachers themselves knew no other, and partially because they saw the Western lifestyle as embodiment of civilization which they wanted to spread in Korea. It is known that around 1890 the girls in the Ewha School learned how to cook Western meals.

Around the same time, Western cuisine was sampled by Korean dignitaries who attended receptions in foreign missions. The Russians were especially prominent. Miss Sontag, a sister of the Russian envoy’s wife, was a very skilled chef. She is now remembered as the person who introduced coffee to King Gojong and thus to Koreans, but it was by no means her only exploit. Back in the 1890s she often sent her cookies and other homemade dishes to Queen Min. After all, maintaining warm relations with a powerful and charismatic queen was good diplomacy!

In 1902 Miss Sontag was granted royal permission to open the first modern hotel in Seoul. Among other things, this hotel had a restaurant which mostly served Russian fare (and, frankly, Russian cuisine is not so very different from that of Western Europe). Some visitors loved the food while others found the restaurant too informal for their taste. Nonetheless, very few patrons of this establishment were Koreans.

Despite these pioneering efforts, Western cuisine came to be known in Korea only in colonial times, and largely through Japan. What passed (and still sometimes passes) in Korea for a Western cuisine is a Japanized version of German cooking. The major meal in this system is the pork cutlet known in Japan as tonkatsu and transcribed as dongaseu in Korea. It is normally served with soup, simple salad, and a choice of rice or bread.

In the 1920s and 1930s, there were only few places in Seoul where one could taste even such a simplified version of Western cooking. There were a couple of restaurants in major hotels, the famous Grill at the Seoul railway station, and a handful of Western restaurants scattered across the more affluent parts of Seoul.

The situation changed in the late 1950s. In those days, Korea was heavily dependent on American food aid which usually came as shipments of wheat and wheat flour. Neither had much to do with traditional Korean cuisine. But the precious calories should not be wasted, and Western style dishes began to spread in Korea. Various kinds of bread enjoyed a particular popularity, supported by the intense propaganda of the alleged nutritional qualities of Western food.

Some food was smuggled out from the U.S. military bases. For example, nearly all the coffee consumed in Korea until the late 1960s came from the bases: the import of coffee into Korea was illegal in that period (coffee was seen as a luxury item, and the government did not want Korean businessmen to waste hard currency on luxury items).

As late as 1975 guide books made it clear that foreign visitors to Korea would have serious difficulties in looking for Western food in Seoul. The books insisted that restaurants could be found only in hotels, while on the street only some surrogates existed. However, by the mid-1980s it was not true anymore. Western restaurants could be found across the country, even in small towns far away from the capital. Indeed, between 1978 and 1993 Western restaurants were the fastest growing segment of the restaurant industry. During those 15 years, their number in Seoul increased almost fifteen-fold, from 646 to 9,586. Over the same time, the number of Chinese eateries tripled, while numbers of Korean and Japanese restaurants increased approximately tenfold.

The late 1980s was also when pizza became widespread. Initially some Western observers believed that Koreans would never accept pizza because of their dislike for cheese and tomato sauce. But they were proven wrong, even if Korean-style pizza normally leaves much to be desired.

But what about home cooking? As is usual with exotic food, people could not easily master the basics of foreign cooking. However, the growth of the pre-cooked food industry saved Korean housewives from the troublesome necessity of studying Western cooking technologies before making a donkaseu. From the 1980s it has been sufficient to place a precooked piece on a pan and put it inside a microwave. A breakfast of toast and coffee has become very common with the more affluent middle class families, too.

And finally, in 1979 the fast food industry arrived in Korea. The soil was ready and fast food chains enjoyed a major success here. But that is another story…

Prof. Andrei Lankov was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and now teaches at Kookmin University in Seoul.

Source:Korea Times

By Andrei Lankov

Traditionally, most East Asian countries have had few scruples with regard to extramarital sex as far as males were concerned, but before 1900, Japan was remarkable in the development of commercial prostitution on a grand scale.

In this regard it was different from Korea, where in old times only the rich and famous could afford to buy expensive sexual services from gisaeng girls, while the “low orders” usually had no access to commercial sex whatsoever.

The Korean nationalists love to stress this fact, explaining it as another indication of the alleged “spiritual purity” of Koreans. Well, less lofty explanations are more likely, but it is difficult to deny that the large-scale prostitution industry was created by the Japanese presence.

In the 1850s, Japan was “opened” to the world, but for decades afterward it remained a very poor place, so “export-oriented” prostitution became a major industry there.

The Japanese working girls, known as “karayuki-san” (“those going overseas”), plied their trade across Asia, from Sydney to Vladivostok, from Shanghai to Singapore, usually supervised by Japanese brothel owners.

A Japanese prostitute and brothel remained ubiquitous components of urban life in the Asia-Pacific for the decades between 1870 and 1920, and remittances from these girls, who duly sent their earnings back home, were said to be the third biggest foreign currency earner for Japan at the turn of the 20th century.

Of course, neighboring Korea became one of the areas where Japanese prostitution flourished. Contrary to the now common misperception, typical commercial sexual encounters in Korea before 1900 did not involve a poor Korean girl serving some lusty Japanese male.

If anything, the situation in which a Korean male purchased sex from a Japanese female was probably more common. Until the 1910s, the vast majority of prostitutes operating in the country were Japanese.

When a Japanese man in the southeastern port of Busan opened a brothel around 1880 where he employed four Korean women, his establishment was immediately closed down, and both he and his female employees were punished.

In the early stage of the Japanese presence in Korea, until the 1890s, the consular authorities did not want mixed establishments, lest it would produce unnecessary complications.

The brothel keepers and their female employees were among the first to arrive in Korea once it was open for foreign trade and exchange in 1876. As is clear from a dispatch by a Japanese consul, in 1881-82, there were a hundred Japanese working girls in Busan.

A few dozen prostitutes plied their trade in the northeastern port of Wonsan, another important port city. From the beginning, the Japanese consular authorities in Busan were pressing Tokyo for permission to legalize prostitution and establish some supervision over the “vice.”

Initial suggestions were rejected, but then the government gave up, and in late 1881 prostitution was legalized.

The Japanese consulates in Busan and Wonsan issued the brothels with sets of instructions, more or less similar to those used in Japan (in those days foreign consuls wielded administrative power and could issue and enforce laws in regard to “their” communities).

The prostitutes had to be registered, checked for sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) on a regular basis, and brothel keepers were expected to pay taxes. By 1883, there were 94 registered prostitutes in Busan, working in nine brothels and serving a population of 997 males.

However, in Incheon, Korea’s third major open port, things did not move as smoothly. The Japanese foreign ministry rejected the demands to license brothels there. It was believed that the attempt to legalize prostitution in Incheon would lead to some political problems.

Unlike Busan and Wonsan where the foreign community was almost exclusively Japanese, Incheon had a sizable number of Western residents, and Japanese diplomats were afraid that an open endorsement of prostitution would damage the country’s image. These were Victorian times, after all, and Japan was very sensitive to what the West thought of it.

The Japanese consuls in Incheon were keeping pressure on their supervisors, citing the frequency of STDs and other dangers associated with the clandestine sexual industry which flourished in the port city, but Tokyo stressed that such activities should not be officially endorsed in the presence of Westerners with their Victorian ideas about sexuality.

Being disciplined officials, the Japanese consuls tried hard to impose regulations they likely considered unnecessary.

The regulations did not help: The presence of young migrant males, being used to commercial sex back home, was bound to produce a huge demand for prostitution ― legal or not.

In the 1880s the Japanese consular authorities in Incheon, in an attempt to curb the problem, even briefly prohibited the immigration to Korea of Japanese women aged between 13 and 30 if these women were neither wives of Japanese migrants nor employees of some officially recognized business.

Once again, the regulations remind us that in the prostitution industry at that time both the sellers and buyers of sexual services were Japanese.

However, the situation did not last. The arrival of Japanese troops during the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95 made official recognition of brothels unavoidable.

Around this time, a small but growing number of Korean women also began to be lured or forced into prostitution by Japanese pimps. Prostitution ceased to be a strictly Japanese business and soon spread through Korean society as well.

Prof. Andrei Lankov was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and now teaches at Kookmin University in Seoul. He has recently published “The Dawn of Modern Korea,” which is now on sale at Kyobo Book Center and other major bookstores. The book is based on columns published in The Korea Times. He can be reached at anlankov@yahoo.com.

Source: Korea Times

Of all alcoholic beverages, beer might be one of the oldest. It was drunk in ancient Mesopotamia about five thousand years ago; was tremendously popular in medieval Europe; and during the last two hundred years or so beer drinking has spread across the globe.

It was a European import, of course, but peoples in distant lands embraced it with great enthusiasm, and Koreans were no exception.

It seems that we relish accurately pinpointing the first time a Korean tasted this beverage. This historical event of great significance took place in 1884, when Korean and American representatives celebrated the signing of a treaty between the two states.

The surviving pictures of the banquet clearly show that beer bottles were present on the table. Perhaps, some Koreans tasted the strange liquid, even if it remains unknown what they thought of its peculiar taste, so different was it from the beverages they were accustomed to.

However, this was but a small episode, which probably did not have much impact on the consumption of beer in Korea. After all, to the Korean dignitaries of the era it did not matter which strange beverages those odd Western barbarians were ready to consume.

So, the introduction of beer only began at earnest in the 1890s, when Japanese merchants introduced the Sapporo brand to Korea.

Japan is also a relative newcomer to the world beer scene. However, by the 1890s Sapporo was one of the oldest Japanese breweries, established in 1877, soon after the beverage was first introduced to Japan.

Two other major Japanese breweries, Kirin and Asahi, began to sell their beverages in Korea a bit later, in the early 1900s.

The Korean name for beer, maekju, is of Japanese origin, but consists of two Chinese characters (the Chinese themselves use different characters, however). It means “barley liquor.”

It seems that the first small brewery (I would probably not apply the modern description of “microbrewery”) began to operate in 1908 in Seoul, being open by Kirin.

Initially most of the consumers were local Japanese settlers, but in due time the beer began to win approval from Korean customers as well.

The year 1933 was a great turning point in the history of the Korean beer industry. Almost simultaneously, two large breweries began to operate in Seoul (well, not quite in Seoul, strictly speaking, since the Yeongdungpo area where both factories were located, was only formally included in the city limits a few years later, in April 1936).

Both factories were Japanese property belonging to major Japanese brewers. In August, a large brewery was opened by the owners of the Sapporo brand, and in December Kirin joined the race, opening its facility nearby. Thus the great saga of the two competitors began.

After liberation from Japanese colonial rule in 1945, both breweries were confiscated by the authorities and for a brief period they remained government property but they were soon privatized.

The brewery which once was managed by Kirin became the Tongyang Co., producers of the OB brand, while its competitor became Crown Beer, eventually renamed Hite Beer.

For the subsequent decades these two companies constituted the backbone of the Korean beer industry. There were some minor players, but they were very minor indeed, and seldom lasted for long.

The first years of independence were a hard time for everybody, including brewers. It is difficult to believe, but it was the shortage of bottles, which was the major impediment in the late 1940s when two major companies were running at only 20 percent of their capacity.

The Korean War struck a new blow, so in 1954 the country produced 13.5 million standard (that is, 0.5 liter) bottles of beer. This means that the average Korean in those days consumed one bottle per year ― almost unbelievable by present-day standards. Most ingredients had to be imported from overseas until the 1970s, when local production began.

It is remarkable that beer was seen as a somewhat glamorous beverage, a drink of the upper middle class. In Korean movies romantic couples drank beer where characters of a Western production would drink champagne.

Even the taxman saw beer this way: It was taxed much more heavily than soju, the supposed liquor of choice of the common folk. Since 1997, beer has been taxed at 130 percent while for soju the tax level is merely 35 percent. In earlier days, the difference was even greater.

The rise in beer consumption began in the 1970s, following both urbanization and an increase in income levels. The new city dwellers wanted to drink something more sophisticated than old good makgeolli or other common beverages.

They also had money to afford this pleasure. This was also when beer halls began to proliferate across the country (yes, until the 1970s there were no “hoffs” in Korea).

Beer consumption in 2000 was about 32 liters (or some 64 standard bottles) per capita. If one takes into account only adults the figure will be close to 70 liters.

This is not very high compared to the great beer-drinking nations of Germany, Ireland and the Czech Republic.

For example, in Germany in 2001 the per capita consumption was 123 liters, nearly four times the Korean level, and Czechs were drinking even more, some 160 liters! Still, in recent decades beer has accounted for almost exactly half of the alcoholic beverage market in the country.

Since then, however, beer consumption has begun to decrease. It seems that it is losing its old glamorous connotations, and is increasingly seen as a beverage of overworked aging company workers. The current craze for all things healthy, the “well-being boom” also contributes much to this decline.

Prof. Andrei Lankov was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and now teaches at Kookmin University in Seoul. He has recently published “The Dawn of Modern Korea,” which is now on sale at Kyobo Book Center and other major bookstores. The book is based on columns published in The Korea Times. He can be reached at anlankov@yahoo.com.

Source:Korea Times

Korea has had a notorious reputation for doing a lousy job of properly promoting itself to foreigners (ie, Arirang, VANK, etc…). More often than not, the marketing is done through the eyes and mind of Koreans, as if knowing how to promote to Koreans equates that the same strategy should be applied to promoting to foreigners (ie., Arirang, VANK, etc..). Lord knows that we are tired of hearing the same old conversation from Korean strangers who when we first meet, utter such things as ‘Have you tried kimchi???’, ‘Do you know that Korea has 4 distinct seasons???’, ‘Oh, you know kimbap?!’

It’s almost become expected to hear a pop and fizzle after Korea announces that they are going to release a ‘revolutionary’ English site or travel guide or some other kind of tourism media catered to foreigners. But something truly magical has happened. I don’t know if heads came together and said ‘Guys, we absolutely suck at trying to understand how to connect with foreigners and foreign tourism’, and perhaps they brought in a US marketing firm to pull this off, but their new promo video for Korea tourism is stunningly perfect in the way that it hits the target audience that has oft eluded them:

HT to Marmot.