{"id":4821,"date":"2019-08-10T21:09:32","date_gmt":"2019-08-11T04:09:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=4821"},"modified":"2019-08-10T21:09:32","modified_gmt":"2019-08-11T04:09:32","slug":"korea-blog-the-suicides-in-south-korea-and-the-suicide-of-south-korea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=4821","title":{"rendered":"Korea Blog: The Suicides in South Korea, and the Suicide of South Korea"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Every journalist covering South Korea must, at one point or another, write about suicide. Not only do a\u00a0greater percentage of people kill themselves here each year than anywhere else<\/a>\u00a0(though Lithuania comes close), the very act of killing oneself can plausibly be tied to other widely lamented conditions in Korean society. A CEO\u2019s suicide might result from the pressures of a \u201chypercompetitive\u201d economy (as might that of a long-unemployed father), a student\u2019s suicide might result from a low score on the all-important\u00a0college entrance exam<\/a>, a young woman\u2019s suicide might result from being attacked by her social-media followers (or even from the failure of a\u00a0cosmetic surgery procedure<\/a>\u00a0to deliver the expected results). But trends more recently identified by global media may produce a subject as reliable as the suicides that happen in South Korea: the suicide of South Korea itself.<\/p>

The quantitative view of this national suicide involves a figure of which reporters have already made much: Korea\u2019s startlingly low birthrate. \u201cIn 1960, South Korea had a total fertility rate of more than six children per woman, high enough to cause a population explosion,\u201d\u00a0writes Bloomberg\u2019s Noah Smith<\/a>. \u201cA country needs a fertility rate of about 2.1 \u2014 a little more than one child per parent \u2014 to maintain long-term population stability. South Korea\u2019s fertility is now about half that number. And it\u2019s still falling.\u201d The country\u2019s record-low birthrate of 0.98 puts it below even the famously fertility-challenged Japan, which still manages more than 1.4. As soon as Korea\u2019s figure was reported last year, doomsayers began projecting the trend toward predictions of what year, exactly, the very last South Koreans would die off.<\/p>

Good riddance, more than a few Koreans in their twenties and thirties might have thought, as long as they take this society with them. The refusal to reproduce as a kind of protest against the expectations of modern Korea has proven an appealing media angle, and this summer has seen a good deal of coverage of the so-called \u201cno marriage\u201d movement among these younger Koreans. The impact of its name in Korean turns on a difficult-to-translate linguistic distinction: while calling someone \u201cunmarried\u201d in English has no strong connotations, the word\u2019s standard Korean equivalent,\u00a0mihon<\/em>\u00a0(\ubbf8\ud63c), implies that its object may not have married yet but one day will. An alternative term has thus gained traction in recent years:\u00a0bihon<\/em>\u00a0(\ube44\ud63c), which suggests a deliberate choice not to marry, and thus not to engage in anything that comes along with marriage.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Read the whole thing at the Los Angeles Review of Books<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Every journalist covering South Korea must, at one point or another, write about suicide. Not only do a\u00a0greater percentage of people kill themselves here each year than anywhere else\u00a0(though Lithuania comes close), the very act of killing oneself can plausibly be tied to other widely lamented conditions in Korean society. A CEO\u2019s suicide might result […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4821","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4821","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4821"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4821\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4823,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4821\/revisions\/4823"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4821"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4821"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4821"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}