{"id":820,"date":"2012-07-31T14:18:48","date_gmt":"2012-07-31T21:18:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=820"},"modified":"2012-07-31T14:18:48","modified_gmt":"2012-07-31T21:18:48","slug":"peter-hyun-and-the-space-group-of-korea-seoul-the-magnetic-city","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=820","title":{"rendered":"Peter Hyun and the Space Group of Korea: Seoul: The Magnetic City"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"\u201cTaller and more ruggedly built than their counterparts in Tokyo, Manila, or Bangkok, the people of Seoul exude a sense of resiliency and vitality,\u201d writes Peter Hyun in this book\u2019s introduction, \u201cso much so that they make the other Asians look downright indolent.\u201d Ah, perhaps we have here a publication of the Korean History Channel<\/a>. \u201cSeoul\u2019s women, with their well-scrubbed, rosy-cheeked faces, look strikingly healthy and beautiful.\u201d Read books from Korea on Korea printed in a certain era, and you\u2019re never far from propaganda, but the country\u2019s peculiar flavor of nationalism merits study. \u201cThe Koreans are a people with a strong sense of historically justified fear that their own fate has rarely been in their own hands,\u201d Hyun writes toward the end. \u201cThis sober fact explains much of their drive to build economic and social stability as well as to preserve their own cultural identity.\u201d A few pages on, he finds room for a parting shot: \u201cFurthermore, the Koreans are the only people in the world who make even the Japanese \u2014 often accused by Westerners of being maniacally devoted to their work \u2014 look lazy.\u201d<\/p>\n

In between Hyun\u2019s words come pages and pages of pictures, making Seoul: The Magnetic City<\/em> essentially a photo book sandwiched between a few very short essays. The images cover the usual stuff: weddings, festivals, street scenes, colorful traditional dances, kids running around, old people shopping in complicated-looking grain markets, rush-hour traffic, historical landmarks, hulking new towers sometimes still under construction. While traveling, I, like many others, tend to turn my head for new things amid old or old things amid new. The long-standing (for varying definitions of \u201cstanding\u201d) but rapidly and recently developed Seoul, with its gates and temples surrounded by sweeping infrastructure and futuristic high-rises, seems to provide just these sort of contrasts in great abundance. On a side-trip to Seoul during a stretch in Taipei, my friend Nick filled an entire blog post<\/a> with pictures of the traditional and the modern coexisting there.<\/p>\n

Written \u2014 or shot, if you like \u2014 in 1984, the book examines a Seoul clearly on a bewilderingly fast rise but still not quite as far open as it would crack after the 1988 Summer Olympics. East Asia of the eighties fascinates me; I\u2019ll read any book or watch any film from that slice of the space-time continuum. (Most of the language-learning videos I use date from that era, too, and I watch them every day.) Don\u2019t let the Korean History Channel hear, but eighties Japan fascinates me most of all. Presented with the opportunity to simply drop myself into a time and place, I feel I\u2019d have no choice but Tokyo from about 1960 through 1990. Until that technology comes along, though, good old photo books still offer the next best experience. Using Seoul: The Magnetic City<\/em>\u2019s sometimes strangely dim and indistinct but large and often striking pictures for that purpose, I found myself surprised by the look of the townswomen. Well-scrubbed and apple-cheeked though they may have been, they dressed so… frumpy.<\/em> The ladies of the Japanese eighties must have inflated my expectations for aesthetic boldness.<\/p>\n

Then again, Korea had to more or less rebuild itself from the early fifties, after the Korean War; Japan had more to work with after the Second World War. In any other country facing the kind of historical setbacks Korea has, you\u2019d expect the women to look dowdy even today. In 1984, their style, usually a reliable reflection of development, seems to have been a lagging indicator. The dullness of their dress, then \u2014 if you\u2019ll allow me to emulate the voice of this book\u2019s most boosterist passages \u2014 stands as a testament to the South Korean \u201cMiracle on the Han River,\u201d an industrialization, technical specialization, and lifestyle modernization so forceful that it left even a sector as aggressively au courant as women\u2019s fashion<\/em> panting to catch its breath. All reports from the streets of Seoul today, however, assure me the issue has been corrected \u2014 possibly too<\/em> corrected. You can cool it on the plastic surgery, ladies. That eyelid one freaks us out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cTaller and more ruggedly built than their counterparts in Tokyo, Manila, or Bangkok, the people of Seoul exude a sense of resiliency and vitality,\u201d writes Peter Hyun in this book\u2019s introduction, \u201cso much so that they make the other Asians look downright indolent.\u201d Ah, perhaps we have here a publication of the Korean History Channel. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,5,41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-820","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-korea","category-seoul"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/820","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=820"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/820\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":824,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/820\/revisions\/824"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=820"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=820"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=820"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}