Tuesday, May 22, 2007

The More You Know (about Korea) with Bell
- Korean honorifics seem to deal primarily with age. (ex. Oppa is used from females to older males, Hyun is used from males to older males, etc.) In comparison, Japanese honorifics have more to do with a person's status; when explaining Japanese honorifics, the words "inferior" and "superior" are often used, which don't exclusively relate to a person's age.

- Rock in general is not a popular music genre in Korea, which is why good K-rock bands like THE TRAX often get left in the dust. This breaks my heart. :(

- Korean citizens (I think males in particular rather than females) are forced to do at least two years of military service some time during their life. Celebrities are not excluded from this, although they're allowed to wait until they're older and their careers slow down.

- Whereas stalking is the main issue for celebrities in Japan, in comparison, Korea has a major problem with anti-fans. Yunho of DBSK actually got poisoned by an anti-fan a couple years or so ago (he was fine after a few weeks hospitalization), and then other anti-fans threatened to do similar harm to the other band members and even certain celebrity friends of theirs.

- It's considered very noteworthy if a Korean group or artist is able to "break" into the Japanese music industry, but not so much the other way around. Same goes for the rest of Asia. (I recently wrote a short paper on this very topic for Creative Writing; my argument was that the international popularity of foreign music typically has more to do with that country's economy rather than a language barrier.)

- Not about Korea, but I found this interesting: Yunho stated in an interview that Japan is seen as a country with many individualistic people--which is funny to me, since I have the exact opposite view of Japanese society as a whole. Perhaps Japan seems more conformist to Americans, but more individualistic to Koreans?

Okay so this ended up being more of a Japan/Korea comparison than anything, but whatever. :)

Moral of the post:



Korea is srs business. You don't mess.
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