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Korea Blog: Finding a New Seoul in the Old Buldings of Kim Swoo-Geun, Architect of Modern Korea

Sunday, October 30, 2016

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Like many a Westerner with an interest in Korea (and without any stake in the relevant historical conflicts), I’ve also cultivated a parallel interest in Japan, and I find few things Japanese as interesting as I find Japanese architecture. Who, I began to wonder as I learned more about the architecture of Japan and the culture of Korea, stands as the Korean equal of a Kenzo Tange, a Kisho Kurokawa, or a Tadao Ando, with their deep concerns not just for the aesthetics but the shape of society to come? I didn’t have an answer until, on a walk through central Seoul with scholar of the both the Korean language and built environment Robert Fouser(whom I more recently interviewed here on the Korea Blog), I first visited Seun Sangga, South Korea’s first large-scale residential-commercial complex.

Built in 1966 during the mayoral term of Kim Hyon-ok, nicknamed “the Bulldozer,” the kilometer-long linear development, which stretches across blocks and blocks of downtown Seoul, didn’t take long to draw disdain as a “concrete monstrosity” (or the Korean-language equivalent thereof). “The phrase reverberates,” says defender of British brutalism Jonathan Meades in his documentary Concrete Poetry of that now-standard architectural slur. “Any modest, self-effacing newspaper columnist can be sure that he will please readers with the same ready-made formula. For, as we all know, concrete monstrosities are culpable of virtually everything: they promote every known social ill, and many which have yet to be revealed.”

Though it does contain plenty of concrete, Seun Sangga is, of course, not British, nor is it exactly a work of brutalism. We could, perhaps, call it a work of pure developmentalism, erected as both a symbol of and a contribution to to the country’s fast-growing postwar economy: in addition to the massive amount of retail space on the lower floors, this “city within a city” had first-class apartments (at least by the standards of Korea in the 1960s) on the upper and even boasting such then-unheard-of amenities as a fitness center. It nevertheless fell so far short of its even more ambitions original design, which included glass atria and a transportation system to connect all the buildings together, that the complex’s architect disavowed it.

Read the whole thing at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

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Los Angeles in Buildings: the Pico House

Friday, October 28, 2016

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Thanks to (past Notebook on Cities and Culture guest) Nathan Masters of Lost L.A., I’ve returned to KCET, where I previously spent a year excerpting pieces of my book-in-progress A Los Angeles Primer (still collected on my author page here), to write a new series called “Los Angeles in Buildings.” It begins today with the Pico House, the booming city’s first luxury hotel built by California’s famously extravagant final Mexican governor Pio Pico:

Soon Los Angeles will have its new tallest building in the form of the 73-story Wilshire Grand Center, a billion-dollar hotel-retail-office complex that will no doubt open to fanfare commensurate with its scale. So, in its own day and for similar reasons, did the Pico House, a three-story hotel named for Pío de Jesús Pico, the last governor of Mexican-ruled Alta California before its 1848 annexation by the United States. After getting out of politics, Pico went on to make a fortune as a cattleman, and by the late 1860s he had the idea to build a hotel. And he wouldn’t just build a hotel, but a luxury hotel – and not just the most luxurious hotel in downtown Los Angeles, but the most luxurious hotel in all of Southern California.

The realization of this dream cost somewhere north of $80,000 (a princely sum in those days), an amount Pico and his brother Andrés raised by selling most of the land they held ­– and they held a lot of it – up in the San Fernando Valley. This bought, among other things, the services of Ezra F. Kysor, a Yankee who’d come west and become Southern California’s very first professional architect. Though the city’s architectural history holds Kysor in higher regard for the Cathedral of Saint Vibiana, built six years later and a half mile down Main Street, he took on the Pico House as his first project in Los Angeles, coming up with an Italianate Victorian design, something of an East Coast import that unambiguously signaled the end of the aesthetic isolation of the adobe period.

Pico also spent the money on serious opulence, by the standards of the time and place: 80 bedrooms, 21 parlors, and a French restaurant arranged around a central courtyard with a fountain and an exotic-bird aviary, all with gas light and running water, all behind an exterior finished to look like blue granite. It once even advertised an “elegant Billiard Parlor and Reading Room connected with the establishment,” targeting – and attracting – countless guests of means, who, after the Southern Pacific Railroad opened Los Angeles to the rest of the country, could take the hotel’s free bus shuttle straight in from the train station. It didn’t take long to get there; the parcel of land Pico used, which once belonged to his brother-in-law, was right on the Plaza, at one time the center of Los Angeles public life.

Read the whole thing at KCET.

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Seoul Urbanism on TBS eFM’s Koreascape: the Bus

Thursday, October 27, 2016

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Each month I join Kurt Achin, host of Koreascape on Seoul’s English-language radio station TBS eFM, for an exploration of Seoul’s urban spaces. Today we spend a day riding on Seoul’s buses, which form a transportation network even more impressive, in its way, than the world-class Seoul Metropolitan Subway. We reveal three of the lines that provide the best tours of the cityscape a thousand won or two can buy, point out the kind of attractions you can spot out the windows along the way, break down exactly what the various route colors and numbers mean, take a look at the books written specifically about exploring Seoul by bus, and figure out why buses here don’t carry the American stigma, as Lisa Simpson once put it, of being only “for the poor and very poor alike.”

Stay tuned for further explorations of Seoul’s architecture, infrastructure, and other parts of the built environment. You can hear our previous segments here.

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콜린의 한국 이야기: 세운상가

Saturday, October 22, 2016

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한국에 큰 관심이 있는 나는 일본에도 오랫동안 관심을 기울려 왔다. 요즘에 나한테 가장 재미있는 일본에 관련된 것은 건축이다. 좋아하는 일본 건물과 쿠로카와 키쇼나 탕게 켄조 같은 건축가들이 꽤 많아서 언젠가부터 한국 건물과 건축가에 대해서도 알아가게 되었다. 건축에 관심이 있는 사람의 대부분은 일본에 비교하면 볼만한 좋은 건물들이 거의 없다고 생각하지만 서울을 살펴보면 의외로 흥미로운 것들이 풍부하다. 한국에 이사온 몇 달 후에 처음으로 직접 본 다시 가고 싶을 정도로 흥미로운 한국 건물은 세운상가였다. 60년대에 종로에서 콘크리트로 지어진 거대한 단지는 전에 본 적 있었던 다른 도시 공간과는 완전히 달랐다.

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나는 세운상가를 처음 간 그 후 그 건물을 설계한 사람은 한국의 60 년대부터 80년대를 아울러 제일 유명하고 30년 전쯤에 돌아가셨지만 지금도 제일 유명하다고 할 수 있는 건축가인 김수근이라는 걸 알게 되었다. 그런데 김수근 본인은 원래 설계와 많이 달라서 세운상가를 싫어하고 의절했다고 한다. 계획대로 실현되지 않은 여러 것들 중에서 유리덮개와 고유한 교통 시설이 그 중 하나다. 그래도 실제로 존재하는 세운상가는 적어도 나에게는 아주 매혹적이다. 나의 관심은 심미적인 것 뿐만 아니라 단지 안에 세계가 존재한다는 점 때문이기도 하다.

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서운상가는 종로에서 퇴계로까지 뻗어 있는 세운강동상가와 청계상가와 대림상가와 삼풍상가와 풍전호텔과 신성상가와 진양상가라는 건물들로 구성되어 있다. 그 중에서 삼풍상가는 무너진 삼풍백화점을 지은 같은 회사에서 지은 건물이고 삼풍상가만이 마지막으로 그 이름을 여전히 가지고 있다. 건물마다 셀수 없는 많은 가게들이 있는데 그 가게에서 파는 물건들은 다 다르지만 대부분은 전자 제품을 판다. 예전에는 많은 한국사람들이 처음으로 오디오나 컴퓨터를 사러 세운상가에 가던 것을 그들은 기억한다. 세운상가에는 인쇄소와 사무실과 식당과 카페와 내가 좋아하는 80년대 이후 많이 변화지 않은 옛날식 다방도 있다. 내가 자주 냉커피를 마시고 주인과 수다를 떨러 가는 그 다방은 서울에서 제일 편안한 곳들 중 하나인 것 같다.

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내가 냉커피를 마신 그 다방의 창문을 통해서 세운상가가 지어졌을 때는 그냥 도로였던 청계천을 지금은 볼 수 있다. 서울 도시미관을 개선하기 위한 노력으로 만든 청계천으로 인해 오래된 세운상가를 전부 철거할 계획도 초래되었지만 막상 현대상가라는 한 건물만 철거되고 그 자리에는 공원이 들어섰다. 최근 몇 해 동안 세운상가에 대한 관심이 증가하고 있어서 재개발 대신 세운상가를 개선하기 위한 중소 규모의 프로젝트들이 제안되었고 화가와 갤러리스트와 기술자 같은 사람들이 거기서 여러 가지 사업들을 착수했고 벽화와 작업자와 서점과 갤러리 같은 장소가 생기기 시작했다.

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나는 몇 주 전에 세운상가에서 열린 비둘기 오디오와 비디오 페스티벌이라는 축제에 참석했을 때 평상시에는 올라갈 수 없는 옥상에서 뮤직 비디오 상영을 보면서 서을의 야경을 즐겼다. 내가 본 그 야경은 멀리 서울 시내의 고층빌딩들과 조금 더 가까이 서을 극장의 보라빛과 세운상가와 아주 가깝게 위치한 작은 공장들이 서 있는 모습이다.

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그 축제 후에 최근에 열린 서울건축문화제에서 미래에 어떻게 세운상가를 운영할지를 보여주는 야심찬 재구성 계획을 보았다. 사실 나와 내 여자친구가 살고 있는 신촌 아파트의 계약을 연장할 수 없었더라면 우리는 아마 세운상가로 이사갈려고 했을지도 모르겠다. 건물의 대부분 위층들에는 한국 60년대의 기준으로 보았을 때 고급스러운 아파트가 있지만 지금의 기준에서 보면 건물의 외관은 조금 허름해 보이기도 한다.

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미국 도시들에서는 극단적인 보호주의자들이 있지만 나는 그 정도까지는 아니지만 세운상가가 철거되지 않아서 무척 기쁘다. 옛날에는 서울에서 건물들이 함부로 지어졌고 또한 쉽게 헐렸지만 요즘에는 도시 공간의 미적인 면을 강조해서 좀 더 신중하게 설계되고 현재 존재하는 건물들도 더욱 현명하게 사용되고 있다. 어떻게 보면 그런 생각과 잘 어울린 건물을 설계한 김수근 씨는 시대를 앞서 갔던 건축가였다.

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나는 김구슨 씨가 설계한 인사동과 인접해있는 원서동에 있는 공간 사옥이라는 건물에 가끔 커피를 마시러 들린다. 공간 사옥은 1971년에 지어진 이후 다른 건축가들이 세로운 부분을 추가해 왔는데 내가 커피를 마시는 곳은 통유리로 지어진 다른 건축가가 설계한 신관이다. 또한 공간 사옥에는 아라리오라는 현대미술관도 있지만 나는 갈 때마다 커피를 마시면서 유리 벽을 통해 풍경을 바라보는 것 밖에 하지 않았다.

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공간 사옥과 세운상가를 설계하기 전에 김수근 씨는 예술과 건축에 대한 한국어와 영어로 된 잡지를 창간했다. 나는 김수근 씨 살아생전에 출판되고 그 후 반세기 넘게 출판된 SPACE라는 잡지를 읽으면서 읽을수록 내가 가장 좋아하는 한국 잡지라는 사실을 깨닫게 되었다. 잡지 뿐만 아니라 나는 SPACE를 출판하는 회사가 최근에 출판한 세운상가에 대한 책도 재미있게 읽고 있다. 한국에 그런 잡지와 책도 나오고 있어서 어느 때보다도 지금 많은 사람들은 서울의 형태와 본질과 역사와 미래에 대해서 좀 더 관심을 가지고 생각하고 있는 것 같다.

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내가 서울 전에 살았던 로스앤젤레스도 서울처럼 아무 계획없이 무분별하게 20세기에 크게 팽창되었지만 21세기에는 SPACE 같은 환경을 새롭게 인식시키는 잡지가 없어도 사람들이 도시의 형태에 대해서 좀 더 신중하게 생각하고 있다. 많은 사람들은 서울에서 세운상가 같은 옛날 장소들에서 서울이 미래에 어떤 도시가 될지에 대해서 파악하려고 노력하고 있다.

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내가 서울에 살고 싶은 이유는 여러 가지가 있는데 그 중에서도 사람들이 도시를 더 나은 장소로 만들고자하는 그 노력 자체 즉 세운상가 같은 오래된 건물도 보전하는 행의 등 사람들의 인식이다. 이러한 인식은 나에게 또한 중요한 의미를 준다. 내가 서울에 살며 세운상가 같은 내가 제일 좋아하는 장소에 거주하면 좋겠지만 그러한 곳이 아니여도 무관하다. 서울이라는 도시는 나에게 그러한 의미로 남아 있다.

Filed in architecture, Seoul, 한국 이야기 | | Comments (0)

Guardian Cities: Where Is the World’s Most High-Tech City?

Thursday, October 20, 2016

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Before long, Santiago could be a city full of electric vehicles charged by “smart” power grids, many of them driving on highways equipped with traffic-reducing automated variable toll pricing. Perhaps a new arrival to the Chilean capital would go for the chance to found a technology company, incentivised by programmes like the state-backed, foreigner-friendly Start-Up Chile, in “Chilecon Valley”. And perhaps they’ll stay for the capital’s reputation boasting the most advanced public transit system in Latin America.

Or they might opt for Africa instead of South America, to take advantage of the assistance offered by organisations like SmartXchange in Durban. Not only does South Africa’s third largest city now have an increasingly tech-savvy middle class population, it has schools like the Durban University of Technology, whose Urban Futures Centre is even developing technological solutions to the common challenges of drug use, security and policing strategy. If these succeed, Durban, like Santiago, may count itself among the highest-tech cities sooner than the rest of the world could imagine.

An urbanite cannot live by startup incubation alone – only implementing the latest technology within a sound built and social environment can make a city truly hi-tech. Indeed, I kept hearing the same answer from current and former San Franciscans asked to name the best such cities in the world right now: “Not San Francisco.” Yet last year Tech Insider’s ranked the “undeniable epicentre of all things tech, from its gigantic start-up culture to its venture capital scene to its population of designers and programmers,” at the top spot. If San Francisco doesn’t rank among the most hi-tech cities in the world, which city could?

Read the whole thing at the Guardian.

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Diary: An Urbanist in Okinawa

Wednesday, October 19, 2016

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I had to step out of Korea this past weekend, and Peach, my discount airline of choice, offered three possible destinations: Osaka, the first city I ever visited in Japan and still the one in which I spend the most time; Tokyo, which I could stand to explore some more but which Peach only flies into and out of in the middle of the night; and Naha, the capital of Okinawa Prefecture, still terra incognita to me. I chose the mystery door number three, packed lightly enough to stay under Peach’s ten-kilogram carry-on limit (like most airlines in their class, they have a tendency to nickel-and-dime for everything from checked backs to paper cups of instant coffee), and figured I’d spend a day and a half or so exploring the city as extensively as I could, getting a quick hit of that always-savorable sensation of the urban unknown.

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Having moved to Korea last November, October remains the only month I have yet to experience in full there, though Seoulites tell me that the air usually turns chilly somewhere toward the middle or end of it. We definitely got into sweater weather within the past couple of weeks, and so I wore one onto the plane, but right on the tarmac at Naha International I realized I shouldn’t have bothered. I stepped out not just into air much warmer than I’d expected, but under a sky blacker than any I’d ever seen before. It’s one thing to know your destination is a tropical island, but quite another to have enough experience with tropical islands — I’ve never even set foot on Jeju, Korea’s Okinawa, or Hawaii, America’s — to put yourself physically into tropical receptivity mode before you get there.

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Waiting to get through immigration, I researched where to get a plate of taco rice once I got into Naha proper. Most of the knowledge about Okinawa I’d brought in with me came directly from Nēnēs records (especially when made with Ryuichi Sakamoto) and Takeshi Kitano’s Sonatine, but I’d also come across the curious fact that this humble Tex-Mex plate had somehow come to represent modern Okinawan cuisine. Much like Korea’s budae jjigae, an equally un-photogenic stew involving Spam, instant ramen noodles, and a slice of American cheese, taco rice has a history wrapped up in that of the local U.S. military base. I never did spot a single American soldier (I’ve heard the areas they frequent in Okinawa make Itaewon look charming and prostitute-free), but I did manage to eat my fair share of the dish invented right outside the gates of their camp.

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Since 2003, Naha has had a monorail connecting the airport to downtown and beyond, a pleasant surprise in a city of only about a million people. I had my Suica payment card (which, despite the fact that I don’t actually live in Japan, doesn’t leave my wallet these days) ready to go, but the monorail turned not to accept it, so I just bought an individual ticket at one of the machines, using the only piece of Japanese cash I had on me, a single ¥10,000 bill fresh from the ATM. The equivalent in America would be a $100 bill, the insertion of which into a vending machine of any kind — assuming the machine could even accept it — would have caused a life-threatening avalanche of change, but in Japan you just get back a manageable few coins along with a neat stack of bills automatically sorted into appropriate denominations. (Honolulu, meanwhile, has struggled for decades and spent billions of dollars to get a rail line built at all.)

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The more cities I experience, the more clearly I define the most revealing elements of a city to check out first: its rapid transit system and its representative dish, of course, but also its representative architect, its representative coffee shop, its representative jazz bar. I found that last soon after the monorail deposited me at one end of Kokusai-dōri, Naha’s main shopping street. Jazz Live Kam‘s, a Kokusai-dōri institution since lord knows when, brought to mind a description I once read of Peter Cat, the Tokyo jazz bar Haruki Murakami ran in the 1970s before becoming a writer: “a place where time stood still.” (I have a feeling Murakami himself would heartily approve of Kam’s, not least because of the cats, a couple of Naha’s countless healthy-looking strays, reliably found asleep outside the entrance of the building.) I stopped in to listen for a couple of hours, and the night’s quintet (including owner Hidefumi Kamura, “Kam” himself, on the piano) played its last few sets of the night to an audience consisting only of me.

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I took the measure of Naha’s coffee situation the following morning, as the first customer of the day at Mahou Coffee, which opens at 10:00, limits itself to 66 cups sold per day, and prohibits in its book- and antique-decorated “silent coffee space” such un-tasteful things as computers, smoking, excessive photography, and children. Such an establishment would, I suppose, bear the label of a “third-wave” coffee shop in America, and probably get made fun of for all its rules and fragility, but in Japan it embodies everything one wants to see in a small business. From there I set out on foot in search of the work of the only Okinawan public architect I’d ever heard of, the still seemingly uncelebrated Nobuyoshi Kinjo, designer of Naha Tower, Naha Civic Hall, and the University of the Ryukyus Museum.

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I couldn’t find Naha Tower, and after consulting its Japanese Wikipedia entry realized why: it was demolished in 2014, having stood for just over forty years (albeit empty since its owner’s 2008 bankruptcy). A few hours later, I arrived at Naha Civic Hall to find it still standing but mostly cordoned off and looking ready for the wrecking ball, its roof wrapped by the same palliative-looking netting I saw on Kisho Kurokawa’s Nakagin Capsule Tower earlier this year. Still, some of its offices remained open if seemingly unmanned, and I could get close enough to take pictures of Naha’s “pantheon of culture” in what a Japan Update article published just the day before confirmed as the final days before its closure “for good because of its deteriorated condition,” given that “a recent seismic capacity evaluation states there is a high risk that the hall would collapse in a case of an earthquake.”

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As I circled the building looking for angles, a primly dressed woman about my age approached and asked what I was doing. Smelling officialdom, I explained in my broken Japanese that I have an interest in architecture and just came to take pictures. “This building… will close,” she said, meeting me halfway in equally unsteady English and going on to ask why I’d come to Okinawa and whether I liked it. I told her I liked it quite a bit, even though I didn’t have much time to spend there, and that I’d certainly been enjoying the taco rice. “Oh, taco rice,” she said, somewhere in the middle of an oscillation between the languages. “My favorite!” Eventually, and as if she’d only just remembered why she’d struck up the conversation in the first place, she almost apologetically handed me a brochure. “Where can we find answers to life’s big questions?” asked its front page — the conclusion of the softest sell I’ve ever experienced from a Jehovah’s Witness.

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But then, nothing in humble Naha seems to come with a hard sell. Donald Richie once said he admired Osaka for its unabashed vulgarity, as I do, and what I enjoy about the capital of Okinawa has something reminiscent in it of what I enjoy about Kansai’s merchant metropolis. Call it a kind of urban rusticity, underscored even by the cars on the road: despite Japan’s formidable barriers to old-car ownership, in Naha I spotted a fair few spiffy old models from the 1970s or even 60s here and there (as well as newer ones clearly stylistically influenced by these same predecessors). The two cities also have in common the culture of the shotengai: despite Osaka’s comparative enormousness, Naha feels as if it has almost as many miles of covered market streets — or at least as much if not more life going on within them.

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Still, the same rules I trust in the rest of urban Japan broadly apply in Naha. To reference Richie once more, “the places you have fun after dark in Japan are always hidden. The unknowing foreigner walks along Tokyo’s Ginza or along Kawaramachi in Kyoto, lonely, little knowing that just a few blocks over are lanes of bars and blocks of cabarets.” Stick, in other words, with the side streets and the shotengai, although I must say Kokusai-dōri, home of Kam’s Jazz, impressed me with how late it stayed active. But I did have my best taco rice by far on a narrower, darker parallel street, at a cantina called Borracho’s after finding the go-to high-street taco rice tourist spot closed for the night. It came sizzling on cast iron, just like a good bibimbap in Korea, and the waiter stirred in plenty of minced garlic as I watched. The memory, much like that of my private concert above Kokusai-dōri, has already taken on the feel of a dream.

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Korea Blog: Kevin M. Maher’s English-Teaching Expat Novel “No Couches in Korea”

Sunday, October 16, 2016

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Korea has inspired several volumes of English-language travel writing, even narratives of extended sojourn in or repeat visits to the country over long periods of time, but a full-fledged, high-profile memoir or novel of the expatriate-in-Korea experience has yet to materialize. Kevin M. Maher’s No Couches in Korea, which recounts the experiences of a young man who leaves his native America, his girlfriend, and their cat behind to teach English in the coastal city of Busan, falls somewhere between memoir and novel. Though formally neither here nor there, it nevertheless opens a window onto the sort of lives lived within a quasi-professional subculture that, for better or worse, has colored and continues to color the expat community in Korea to a deeper extent than most anywhere else in Asia.

The author’s biographical blurb unhesitatingly informs us that, just like his protagonist, he “first arrived in South Korea for a one year stint in 1996,” although the book’s narrator bears not the name Kevin M. Maher but Adam Wanderson. Driven purely by a lust for, well, you guessed it, the 26-year-old Adam signs on to join the “wave of English instruction spreading from Japan through the rest of Asia, now seeping into South Korea,” and less than 24 hours after his flight touches down finds himself cast before a roomful of expectant, if not proficient, middle-school students. “Typical Korean bullshit,” declares his only slightly more experienced colleague over and over again. “If you have a white face, they figure you can teach English. No one here speaks English well; it doesn’t matter if you’re good or bad — they’d never know.”

Adam has entered the shady if tolerably lucrative world of hagwon (Maher uses the alternative romanization hogwan), the private educational institutes in which Korean students still spend so much of their time outside regular school hours. But many hagwon count as educational in only the loosest sense of the word, drilling kids in preparation for the Suneung, Korea’s all-important equivalent of the SAT, or, as in the “English” classes we see Adam “teach,” having a Westerner repeat nouns at them over the course of a couple of hours. In one instance he throws up his hands and has the class play hangman, a game that now dominates the English-class memories of entire generations of Korean students.

Read the whole thing at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

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콜린의 한국 이야기: 피터캣

Saturday, October 8, 2016

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나는 거의 매일 글을 쓰러 커피숍에 간다. 일주일마다 두 번 정도 가는 커피숍은 없지만 일주일마다 한 번씩 꼭 가는 커피숍은 몇 군대가 있다. 그 곳들 중에서 일본인 소설가 무라카미 하루키 씨를 테마로 한 피터캣이라는 북카페가 있다. 왜 카페가 그렇게 흔히지 않은 이름을 가지냐면 무라카미 씨 작가가 되시기 전 70년대에 도쿄에 있는 피터캣이라는 재즈바를 운영하셨기 때문이다. 서울에 있는 피터캣에서는 사장님이 어쩔 때는 재즈 음반을 틀고 어쩔 때는 무라카미 씨와 관련된 다른 음악을 튼다. 카페의 책장들에는 무라카미 씨가 쓰신 모든 책들을 찾을 수 있는데 무라카미 팬이 즐길 수 있는 다른 작가들이 쓴 책도 있다.

모든 나라에 있는 독자들은 현재 세계에서 제일 인기가 많은 소설가일 수 있는 무라카미 씨의 작품들을 즐긴다. 나는 일본어와 한국어 공부를 시작하기도 전인 12년 전에 무라카미 씨의 소설을 처음으로 읽었다. 베스트셀러였던 “노르웨이의 숲”을 읽으면서 그 1960년대의 일본을 배경으로 한 소설에서 평범한 것과 이상한 것이 섞여 있는 분위기는 내 관심을 사로잡았다. (“노르웨이의 숲”은 한국에서 원래 “상실의 시대”라는 제목으로 출판되었다.) 그 후로 나는 무라카미 씨가 쓰신 다른 소설들을 찾아서 읽었다. 피터캣의 사장님도 포함될 수도 있는 대부분의 무라카미 씨의 팬들은 앞서 말한 똑같은 경험을 한 적이 있을지도 모르겠다.

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무라카미 씨가 쓴신 작품들이 왜 그렇게 인기가 엄청난지에 대한 질문에 대답하는 것은 사실 조금 어렵지만 결국에는 그의 소설을 읽은 대부분의 사람들이 중독자가 되는 경향이 있는 것 같다. 그러한 이유로 피터캣 같은 무라카미 씨를 테마로 한 모임 장소가 필요한 것이 아닐까? 그런데 피터캣에 오는 대부분의 사람들은 서로 대화를 잘 하지 않은 편이고 주로 혼자 음료를 마시면서 글을 쓰거나 책을 읽거나 공부를 하거나 음악을 듣는다. 여자친구와 같이 올 때도 있는 내 경우에는 몇 시간 동안 여자친구와 나란히 앉아서 그런 조용한 시간을 보낸다.

무라카미 씨의 소설 속에 등장하는 주인공들은 자주 혼자서 책을 읽거나 음악을 듣거나 도시의 길를 걸어다니거나 요리를 하는 등 피터캣에 오는 손님들처럼 비슷하게 생활한다. 나는 무라카미 씨가 쓰신 에세이 책들을 읽음으로써 무라카미 씨도 그런 사람이신 것을 알게 되었다. 내가 한국어를 배우기 전에는 무라카미 씨가 쓰신 많은 에세이 책의 대부분을 읽을 수 없었다. 왜 일본인 작가가 쓴 책들을 읽기 위해서 한국어를 배울 필요가 있었냐면 무라카미 씨가 쓰신 모든 소설들은 영어로 꼭 번역이 되지만 그의 대부분의 에세이 책들은 거의 영어로 번역되지 않는다. 그러나 일본어로 된 글은 영어보다 한국어로 훨씬 쉽게 번역될 수 있어서 무라카미 씨가 쓰신 모든 글들을 한국어로 읽을 수 있다.

앞서 말한 피터캣에는 무라카미 씨의 모든 글을 다 소장하고 있어서 누구나 쉽게 그의 책을 읽을 수 있다. 시간이 가면 갈수록 나의 한국어 읽기 속도가 빨라지고 있어서 피터캣의 책장들에 보관되어져 있는 무라카미 씨와 관련된 책들을 다 읽고 싶어졌다. 피터캣에는 무라카미 씨가 쓰신 에세이 책과 재즈에 대한 책과 여행기 뿐만 아니라 다른 작가들이 쓴 무라카미 씨에 대한 책들도 있다. 그 책들 중에서 가장 놀라운 것은 한국인 작가가 쓴 무라카미 씨와 연관된 레시피 책이다. 그 책의 표지에는 “무라카미 하루키의 책에서 꺼낸 위로의 요리들”이라는 글이 쓰여져 있다.

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당연한 이야기일 수 있지만 내가 그 책들을 다 읽고 싶으면 피터캣에서 많은 시간을 보내야만 할 지도 모르겠다. 다행히도 거기에서는 오전에는 리필이 가능한 커피를 마시면서 책을 읽을 수도 있고 오후에는 무라카미 씨가 제일 좋아하시는 음료인 맥주를 마실 수도 있다. 하지만 피터캣에서는 나를 제외하고는 외국인 독자를 많이 볼 수 없음에도 불구하고 무라카미 씨의 독자들은 전 세계에 널리 퍼져 있다. 무라카미 씨가 쓰시는 이야기들은 전통이 약해져 가고 국경들이 그다지 중요하지 않게 인식 되어 가는 21세기의 현실과 어울린다.

무라카미 씨가 쓰신 책들은 거의 모든 언어로 번역되 있어서 어떠한 외국어를 배우고 있는 친구가 나에게 어느 작가의 책을 읽으면 좋겠냐고 물어보면 나는 항상 무라카미 씨가 쓴 책을 추천한다. 재즈 뿐만 아니라 야구와 탐정 소설에도 큰 관심이 있는 무라카미 하우키 씨가 쓰신 책들은 미국인인 나에게도 미국 문화를 이해하는데에 많은 도움을 준다. 나는 무라카미 씨가 쓰신 소설들의 스페인어 번역본을 읽을 때는 스페인어를 더 잘 이해하게 되었고 요즘 한국어 번역본을 읽으면서는 한국어를 더 잘 이해할 수 있게 되는 길목에 서 있는 것 같다. 나는 언젠가 원래 무라카미 하루키 씨가 쓰신 일본어로 된 책을 읽게 될 그 날을 희망해 본다.

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Seoul Urbanism on TBS eFM’s Koreascape: the 63 Building

Tuesday, October 4, 2016

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Last week I joined Kurt Achin, host of Koreascape on Seoul’s English-language radio station TBS eFM, for a journey around, through, and all the way up the observation deck of the 63 Building.

Known locally as the “gold tooth,” this iconic, gold-glassed skyscraper beside the Han River opened in time for the 1988 Olympics, providing a piece of the background for the torch-lighting ceremony that opened the games. Designed by architectural mega-firm Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, it became a public attraction from the first day of its reign as the tallest building outside North America (having one-upped Tokyo’s Sunshine 60), offering not just office space, dining, and retail, but various attractions for the whole family such as an aquarium and Korea’s first IMAX theater. Having announced the country’s arrival into the developed world, it continues to inspire: the singer Forty’s song “63 Building,” for example, came out just last year.

This comes as the first in a series of monthly urbanism-themed segments Kurt and I will record for Koreascape. Stay tuned for further explorations of Seoul’s architecture, infrastructure, and built spaces of all kinds.

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Korea Blog: Watching Korea Develop Through Sixty Years of Commercials

Sunday, October 2, 2016

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Not long after I moved to Korea, an American expat of decades’ standing described the country to me as approaching the end of its “long 1950s.” He meant, I think, that all the qualities we rightly or wrongly associate with America in the 1950s — family solidity, lifetime employment at large companies, robust economic growth, national self-esteem, public morality, broad societal consensus on a host of issues — only recently began to break down here. Whether to revere that era or to revile it, American culture still revisits the 1950s fairly often, and it tends to play off an image many of us came to know through television, the medium that defined it.

Television in America, which began with experimental broadcasts in the late 1920s and early 30s, took the basic form we know today in the 40s, but only after World War II did televisions themselves enter widespread use. South Korean television, in line with the country’s late but rapid development by comparison to the West, began broadcasting 1956, just three years after the end of the Korean War, and blew up in the following decade. And so we in the 21st century can now take a glimpse into that and the subsequent periods in Korean history with that most convenient form of time travel, watching the massive quantities of old television commercials available on the internet.

When I now attempt to explain something of the nature of Korea, I often describe it as an almost brand-new society trying simultaneously become as modern as possible and to connect itself directly to the distant past. This plays out in the oldest Korean commercial I’ve seen, an advertisement for a soap and toothpaste brand called Lucky that, in the course of well over two minutes, combines a crudely animated scene set in the Joseon Dynasty (the pre-colonial period from the late 14th to the late 19th century constantly revisited by television dramas in the subsequent six decades) with no small amount of footage of the industrial marvel that is the Lucky Factory itself.

Read the whole thing at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

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