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\u201cI\u2019ve been to China and I\u2019ve been to Japan,\u201d says Rana Mitter at the beginning of his BBC Radio 3 documentary South Korea: The Silent Cultural Superpower<\/em><\/a>, \u201cbut I\u2019ve never got off at this place before.\u201d Increasingly many Asia-savvy global travelers have uttered variations on that line in the past decade, having known, of course, of this country\u2019s existence and even of its history, but never having regarded the actual experience of it as a priority. Why has that changed?<\/p>\n
The BBC has clearly taken an interest in the question, having sent potter Roger Law here at the end of last year for the five-part seriesArt and Seoul<\/em><\/a>, and now having had Mitter come and take a closer look at why so many of us know something about Korean culture today while so many of us knew almost nothing about it yesterday.When I interviewed Michael Breen<\/a>, author of the respected bookThe Koreans: Who They Are, What They Want, Where Their Future Lies<\/em>, he mentioned that, when he wrote its first edition in the 1990s, only when a friend pointed it out did he realize that he hadn\u2019t said a word in the text about the products of Korean culture, and at that time didn\u2019t feel he needed to. Now almost every major piece of writing about South Korea begins with them.<\/p>\n
The Silent Cultural Superpower<\/em> looks for the sources of modern Korean culture in many of the stops in Seoul that, if you follow Korea\u2019s presence in the international media, you\u2019ll expect: the tourist-thronged shopping streets of Myeongdong; the hip caf\u00e9s<\/a> of the historically countercultural Hongdae district; the sidewalk across from the Japanese embassy where protesters express their views on the \u201ccomfort women\u201d issue in no uncertain terms; Zaha Hadid\u2019s Dongdaemun Design Plaza<\/a> (a \u201chuge, sinuous, gorgeous egg of a building\u201d as well as a \u201cstatement about what Korea is now\u201d); and the foot of Lotte Tower, the under-construction symbol of the power of those giant corporations, a lineup also including such now globally known names as Hyundai, Samsung, and LG, that have \u201cpowered this country\u2019s economic miracle and sent it global.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n