Bored, I looked for an article to read from Korea Journal.

If you want to see an academic view of Korean society (now and before), KJ is a great source online for free.  Only the most recent  issues are unavailable to non-paying viewers, but if you know how to play around with HTML, you can probably figure out how to read them as well.

The article that caught my attention was about the large number of old men who  gather at the Jongmyo shrine.   (Here is GI Korea’s post on the place.)

Jongmyo is a large, historical park where the ancestral tablets of the rulers of the last dynasty are kept and honored once a year in a spring ceremony you should try to check out if you can.  I believe it happens around May.

The article made me think of a few things:

I remember going to Pagoda Park either in 2002 or when I was teaching in Korea in the late 1990s.  It also had a large group of older men hanging out.  I was there to take pictures, and my Korean wife was with me, and it made her (rightfully) nervous being in the area.  Besides being a younger woman, she would have been seen with a foreign male.  Around a lot of older, conservative Korean males, that can be a problem…

Which reminded me of the day she and I were officially married:  We left the Seoul city office that handles the paperwork and got on the subway because I had classes to teach at the hakwon later on.

When we got on the car, I noticed a very old, short, wrinkled Korean man was giving a speech – wearing the traditional white, casual outfit and had on what looked like a “dunce” cap.

I didn’t pay him much attention, but I noticed soon that his voice was growing louder and that I could understand what he was saying.  I had gotten so used to tuning things out because I couldn’t speak Korean, it took me a little time to catch that he was speaking now in English — and good, unbroken English – and he was slowly walking my way…

What was he saying?

He was ridiculing the “Russian devils” and “American devils” who had destroyed Korea…

Great!!

I ignored him until he got right on top of me and kept talking about how my shoes were new and life was good — Go Home!!  Go Home!! – and I was so special – Go Home!!  Go Home!! — you get the point.

At the next stop, I went to get off.  My newly minted wife was hesitant, because of the veneration of the elderly thing in Korean culture, but eventually followed —- the old man with us — smiling from ear to ear that he’d struck a nerve — and continuing to yell, “Go Home!!  Go Home!!”

I was going to jump back on the train as the doors started to close, but my wife wasn’t reacting fast enough, and I jumped back off.

Another train was coming in the other direction, so we three crossed the platform and my wife and I got on and the old man – still grinning from ear to ear and yelling for me to go home – decided not to join us, thankfully…

We rode up one stop, got off, and waited to switch trains for one heading where we wanted to go…

What fun…

The article also reminded me that – contrary to my bad subway experience – the strongest supporters of the US-SK relationship in Korean society are the elderly – who are dying out by now…

It dawned on me one day —– the older Koreans are the ones who have had the most experience with the US in Korea.  They had memories going back to the Japanese colonial period.  They saw the hopes of an independent, whole Korea dashed when it was divided into North and South Korea.

They also saw Korea at its most poor after the Korean War.  They saw a divided Korea killing itself during the war.

They also saw the greatest level of dependency on the United States.

— But —- they were the only segment in Korean society when I got there in 1996 who could rightfully be called “pro-American” – by which I simply mean they were not anti-American, anti-USFK, and saw positive value in the relationship.

How ironic…

The most fervent anti-America Koreans are the recurring university generation.  And the younger you go among Korean adults, the higher percentage of anti-US thought you’ll find…

Here is an interesting quote from the article:

Such rallies nowadays take place almost every day, and generally revolve around the issue of the nation still being “infested with leftists” or “the reds.” The organizers of the rallies are self-avowed “patriots,” and their pro-American bent shows as they put up placards featuring the American flag alongside the Korean flag. A crowd of a few hundred older men gather around to listen. Quite often, rallies of this nature invite counter-arguments from someone in the crowd angered by the speaker’s remarks. It may begin with someone shouting, “All nonsense! Sounds like you wanna be a slave to America!”

This reminded me of being in Korea in 2002 at Yonsei University’s Korean language school.  Every morning waiting at the crosswalk to cross the large, business street, there would always be a young Korean male (a different one usually) making a speech to the world.

Others were often there with him handing out a large number of flyers – usually filled with images and heated prose against USFK and the armored vehicle accident that happened that summer.

I always asked for a copy of the flyers because they didn’t usually try to hand one to me since I was a foreigner.

My Korean was too weak to follow what the guys were saying, but I could guess.

One day, while we were waiting, a late 30 something or early 40 something woman started yelling in fairly short bursts at the student.  She spoke in Korean and English.  I didn’t get the impression she was doing it because I was around – a foreigner.  In fact, I think he might have been doing it before I got there.

She was yelling stuff like, “But we had the World Cup!!”  “We have the 11th economy in the world!!”

She looked like a professor-type, and she was trying to rebut the youthful idealist with hard facts…

An exchange of this sort typically develops into an outbreak of bickering and roaring, ensued by pushing and shoving, if not harsh fighting.  When an eye-catching event like this takes place within the park, which happens almost everyday, well over a hundred spectators easily gather in a minute, looking on until the commotion ebbs.

Well, THAT is good to know…I won’t be going to Jongmyo during one of the periodic spikes in anti-US activity…I don’t want to get caught in the crosshairs of that…

Another thing about the elderly male pro-US-SK relationship people, they are often career veterans of the military.  I got used to seeing handfuls of them as counter-protesters against the radical university students union and radical labor union thugs.

In contrast, the two times I went to the park (I have a good collection of photos examining the park in whole because of my interest in the history of Korean Confucianism in the last dynasty) – I never saw signs of trouble and noticed that mostly older women, but perhaps men too, I forget, were taking care of the grassy spots using hand clippers — showing a veneration of Korea’s cultural heritage…

Upon closer examination, certain lifestyle tastes can be observed that the Jongmyo park adequately caters to. Preference for the outdoors is one of them (Yi 2002). For instance, many Jongmyo park regulars mention the “stuffiness of being indoors” as the main reason for their not wanting to spend time at the Senior Welfare Center, no matter what amenities it offers. They often add, “it is nice and airy out here.”

Just before this, the article wonders why Pagoda Park has declined in preference to Jongmyo.  I immediately thought of the issue of space.  Pagoda Park isn’t that large, as I remember it, and Jongmyo is.  If you have spent a lot of time in Seoul or elsewhere in Korea, and you miss green grass, Jongmyo is a place to go…

This is about where I quit reading for now…