Measured Excess

Status, Gender, and Consumer Nationalism in South Korea

Laura C. Nelson

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780231116176
• eBook ISBN: 9780231529136
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Economics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

-- Elise Mellinger, University of Hawaii--Manoa, Korean Studies

CHAPTER 1

CONSUMER NATIONALISM

The task of ethnography now becomes the unraveling of a conundrum: what is the nature of locality, as a lived experience, in a globalized, deterritorialized world?

Arjun Appadurai, “Global Ethnoscapes: Notes and Queries for a Transnational Anthropology.”

In 1997 the economies of eastern Asia stumbled. Even before the summer devaluation of the Thai baht, industrialists, international financiers, and global money traders were signaling their shaken faith in what had seemed to be the world’s most vigorous economic region. As investors pulled out of Asia, currencies and stock markets from Thailand to Seoul tumbled toward disaster. By the end of the year, the South Korean government was forced to admit that the nation had insufficient foreign currency reserves to make upcoming payments on its external debts. The International Monetary Fund proposed a “rescue package” of U.S.$57 billion in loans, tied to a number of financial and commercial reforms, to save the nation from bankruptcy.

Yet only a few months before the “Asian Crisis,” the western side of the Pacific Rim had been touted as the world’s growth engine. Japan held a long-standing position as an industrial leader, but the economies of South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore were themselves now considered substantial players, and close behind them was a flock of new “Tigers”: Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines, along with the enormous looming economic potential of China. These countries shared a set of development characteristics—high rates of savings, impressive investment in human capital, investment in production capacity—that policy makers had viewed as the miracle prescription for other struggling nations in Africa, Latin America, and the former Soviet Union. Indeed, what made the Asian financial crisis particularly unsettling for many analysts was that the Asian model of development had appeared to rest on solid, strategic economic foundations.

The causes of the Asian economic collapse are complex and beyond the scope of this book; the prospects for the Pacific Rim and for South Korea, in particular, are still unclear. Yet in their efforts to rebuild their economy the South Korean government and South Korean people are drawing strength from many of the same themes that motivated the work of industrialization in preceding decades. The key role of economic policies often obscures the subtle importance of cultural factors in the process of economic development, and the selection of an export-focus for the domestic economy—the strategy shared by all the Pacific Rim nations—creates identifiable stresses on the local population. In this book I examine how South Koreans’ sense of national identity motivated much of the hard work of development beginning in the 1960s and continuing through the early 1990s and how intersections between international economic processes, the flow of time, and the mundane experience of life shape and strain the sense of national mission.

Within a week of landing in Seoul to conduct research into South Korean consumer practices, I set about equipping myself as an urban anthropologist. Among the items I purchased was a clipboard to provide a stiff backing for the paper I would hold on my knees as I recorded my observations. Although I had brought along from the United States an old, battered, particle-board clipboard, I decided to replace it: not only did I feel, in situ, that it gave off a jarring “impoverished student” impression, but the A-4-sized paper most common in South Korea hung raggedly over the bottom of the American-made product. I went to Dong-Bang Plaza, a rather small but sleek marble-faced department store owned by the Samsung Corporation and built next to Samsung’s headquarters in the center of town. I chose a dusky lavender-colored plastic clipboard designed with a handy penholder at the top right corner and a ruler marked on the right side.

When I made my selection, I considered several factors: aesthetics (the color appealed to me), efficiency (I appreciated the penholder as well as a ledge along the left to keep my pages straight), the apparent durability (satisfactory), and the price (although it seemed a little high, it was not outrageous). I wanted to buy a useful object that would please me and communicate a feminine professionalism to the women I would be interviewing.

During my fourteen months in Seoul, I received a score of compliments on this clipboard. Women admired, with me, the color and the design. Several inquired where I had purchased the clipboard. Every one of them asked me whether it was made in Japan or (South)¹ Korea.

The reader may be surprised to learn that although I had come to Seoul to study consumer practice and nationalism, when I selected this clipboard I had not considered its country of origin. This was a fortunate oversight, as I almost certainly would have chosen a product made in South Korea to assert my solidarity with the women I would interview, and I would thereby have missed the following encounters:

The first woman who asked me about the clipboard was a contact at the South Korean governmental organization that had granted me my initial research stipend. When she asked me where the clipboard was manufactured, I turned it over and together we discovered the “MADE IN JAPAN” mark, in English, on the back. “*It’s very nice,*” she said (we were speaking in English), “*but I would never buy it. There must be ones almost exactly like it made in Korea.*” This provided a nice segue to her reminiscences of her college days (which, like those of many young South Koreans, included among other activities participation in a study group examining South Korea’s contemporary relations with Japan and the United States through a neocolonial analysis), but although her demeanor remained friendly I felt a little like I had been caught by the hostess of a party flirting with her lover.

The next time I was asked about the clipboard, I was chastened and afraid of giving offense. I told the woman, who lived in the upper-middle-class neighborhood where I conducted much of my research, that the clipboard was made in Japan but that I hadn’t known this at the time I’d purchased it. The tone of apology in my voice didn’t register with her. “*Things made in Japan are so much cuter than the ones made in Korea, and they’re better quality, too,*” she responded. She then got up and took me to her laundry room, where the maid had left some clothes hanging to dry. “*Look at the difference between these clothes pins. These,*” she said, taking some small pink clips from the rack, “*were made in Korea and these—*” she took a few more from another rung of the rack “*—were made in Japan. The color is nicer, and the Japanese ones are stronger.*”

These and similar scenes replayed themselves throughout the year.² My clipboard was not the only object to elicit such commentary. My shoulder bag, shoes, pens, cosmetics, clothing, and short-wave radio (an item banned in South Korea) were all noticed and often admired. I was always asked, “*Where is it from?*”

Seoul in the early 1990s was a sophisticated city rich in consumer goods, but nevertheless my foreign-made belongings generated significant curiosity. Although the consumer market in South Korea had expanded greatly during the previous decade, the array of products still lacked diversity. Manufacturing and selling were highly concentrated in the South Korean economy: the South Korean economy was notoriously oligopolistic. In the early 1990s the thirty largest industrial corporations (known as the chaebŏl) accounted for 28 percent of the nation’s total manufacturing capacity (U.S. Department of State 1994). South Korea’s industrial concentration was in part a matter of the extent to which the chaebŏl were diversified (and so commanded within each corporate group a share of the economy spread across a range of sectors) and was in part a matter of the dominance of a small number of these firms in any single sector of the economy. In the early 1990s the three³ domestic automobile makers—Hyundai, Daewoo, and Kia—for example, shared almost the entire personal car market, with only a dozen or so models between them. Most major appliances were manufactured by Samsung, Lucky-Goldstar, Daewoo, or Hyundai. Blanc-Noir, Esquire, Renoir, and one or two other brands of shoe dominated the brand-name market, so that one encountered the same pair of shoes over and over again on the feet of women passing by. In her study of the structure of South Korean industrial successes, economist Alice Amsden concluded, “Korea has acquired one of the world’s most concentrated economies” (italics in original; Amsden 1989:121).

Amplifying this effect of market dominance, even small-scale competitors often chose to imitate each other rather than to innovate. When fresh-brewed-coffee shops suddenly sprouted everywhere in the early 1990s, the successful chains (Jardin, Doutor, Waltz, for example) had nearly identical interior design themes (sparse and clean, decorated in primary colors with wood trim) and charged the same prices for the same selection of coffee drinks; in a short span of time many new, independently owned cafés emulated the established players, and ultimately the new style cafés shouldered aside older, homelier coffee and tea houses (tabang). Similarly, the success of the gleaming 7-Eleven and Circle-K convenience stores that opened in the wake of the Seoul Olympics prompted more than a few mom-and-pop corner shops to transform their cluttered, dingy aisles of wares into orderly product displays. The stores’ names mimicked their models: my bus to town passed by a 9-Ten shop every morning. In the fashion sector, the popular Tomboy and Village clothing boutiques for young consumers were nearly indistinguishable, and they were closely shadowed by a herd of other, smaller fashion shops with outfits of the same cut and color.

This imitative tendency generated a precarious seesaw between novelty and uniformity. The underlying sameness offered a stark background for contrast, and innovations, fads, and fashions stimulated curiosity, desire, and criticism as well as imitation. Novelties appeared and proliferated so fast that they soon became ordinary; while I was there this was true of the cafés and convenience stores as well as of the new “traditional” style tea houses, the Belgian waffle stands, and the p’ansori craze.⁴ While the youth market was the most visible market segment for many fashions (a phenomenon that consistently drew critical commentary from the media), mature members of the middle and upper classes often followed fads as well: for example, when the South Korean version of the Japanese karaoke club (noraebang) swept through Seoul social life in the early 1990s, many leisure-class housewives carefully polished their renditions of popular songs to enliven their evenings out.

Even the architecture of the city exhibited this pattern. Apartment complexes erected by Hyundai, Samik, or Woosung were assemblages of nearly indistinguishable blond concrete blocks, each building rising a dozen stories or so, punctuated by three or four entryways and by verandas displaying racks of drying laundry, children’s bicycles, and brown pottery jars for staple condiments and kimchi. Bars, restaurants, and small grocery stores not only offered similar items and looked alike in almost any neighborhood in Seoul, but despite their different functions, they were very similar in design: they had the same aluminum-frame sliding windows looking on the street (and often the same blue plastic coating to cut the heat of the sun), aluminum swinging entry doors, bare concrete floors, low ceilings, and dark walls. Snaking through the alleyways in different neighborhoods, I was likely to encounter in each a bakery named for one of the ancient dynasties (“Koryo” or “Shilla”), a cramped real estate office with two or three men lounging inside, and more than one small church, each marked with a red neon cross. Women and old men wandered the streets or rested in the shade in the daytime. In almost every neighborhood I passed by old women (halmŏnis, literally “grandmothers”) wearing colorful loose, printed trousers or a skirt and a loose, printed short-sleeved shirt, both of slick, artificial fiber.

This is not to say that neighborhoods were identical. There were major distinctions: between mostly commercial and mostly residential districts, between the apartment block neighborhoods and the neighborhoods composed of smaller-scale residences (single-family houses, duplexes and triplexes, and three- or four-story “villa” apartments), between rich neighborhoods and poor ones. And within these categories people themselves marked and learned the textural distinctiveness of their communities. Much less were homes, or halmŏnis, or neighborhood restaurants (with special recipes and familiar hosts), indistinguishable. Nevertheless, the material culture created an underlying impression of reiteration and familiarity. And, as I shall argue later, overall this similarity helped to reinforce the constructed image of South Korean social coherence and homogeneity.

But this material backdrop was more than the stage setting of everyday life in South Korea. Since the early 1960s the South Korean population had participated in a national project to forge out of their poverty, through industrial development, a nation that could claim international respect on account of its economic strength. During the period of my fieldwork, the proliferation of products and the improvements in the material environment were visible signs of national success in achieving this goal. They were also, paradoxically, a cause of widespread public anxiety.

MAKING A NATIONAL ECONOMY: AN OVERVIEW

It is impossible to appreciate the significance of consumption in the creation of discourses of South Korean national identity without some familiarity with the outlines of South Korea’s dramatic economic development. At the beginning of the 1960s South Korea was ranked among the world’s poorest nations, with an average annual per capita income estimated at less than $125 (United Nations 1962). This group included such countries as Burma, Congo, India, and Kenya and was below a group of better-off developing countries: El Salvador, Ecuador, the Philippines, and Rhodesia, for example. In 1991, a generation later, the average urban household head earned about $1,700 (829,350 wŏn) in monthly wages alone⁵—South Korean incomes had reached parity with those of many European countries. The story of the South Korean economic “miracle” has been told and retold many times in a search for lessons other nations can take from South Korea’s success (for example, Mason et al. 1980; Amsden 1989; Haggard et al. 1994; Chung H. Lee 1995), and it has also been examined from more critical perspectives (e.g., Hart-Landsberg 1993; Clifford 1994; Lie 1998). It bears telling again here, at least in brief,⁶ to provide a frame of reference for understanding the individual and collective actions and outlook of contemporary people in South Korea.

Well into the nineteenth century, Korea retained the political structures and cultural practices that characterized the period generally known as the “Chosŏn era,” five centuries (1392–1910) of continuous rule by kings of a single lineage. Neo-Confucian philosophy guided government and literature; the economy was based on feudal relations of peasant cultivators and a land-lord class of scholar-bureaucrats known as the yangban. Unlike neighboring China and Japan, Korea failed to develop much in the way of urban culture or merchant and artisan society. The royal court generated little commercial demand, and the countryside was characterized by a subsistence-level economy. Most Koreans were farmers. Korea shunned most foreign intercourse: the Korean court had a tributary relationship with the emperor of China, and many of the court’s luxury goods were Chinese imports, but aside from that Korea engaged in only a small amount of occasional, regulated trade with Japan (and in some unauthorized exchanges at the Chinese border). In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, however, Korea, known to many Westerners as the “Hermit Kingdom” because of its resistance to foreign religious, trade, diplomatic—and military—emissaries, was suddenly brought into the maelstrom of competing colonial and imperial plans. The new Meiji government in Japan saw the neighboring peninsula as a market for Japanese goods and a testing ground for imperialist energies focused, ultimately, on Manchuria and China. Russian eastward expansion included designs on Manchuria as well, and Japanese and Russian interests clashed over influence in Korea. China wished to protect its suzerainty in Korea as well as its authority elsewhere from Japanese encroachments. These three powers competed (as did, to a lesser extent, the United States, Germany, France, and Britain) in Korea, marshaling diplomatic skills and military might and appealing to different elements at the Korean court.

Weaknesses internal to Korea had left the country vulnerable to the predatory interests of foreign powers (Palais 1975). The Korean court in the second half of the nineteenth century was crippled by factional antagonisms: between orthodox Neo-Confucian scholars and students of Western culture (“enlightenment”), between those who were open to foreign influence and the isolationists, and between family-based power groups, in particular between the queen’s family (the Yŏhŭng Min), the regent (the Taewŏngun), and King Kojong. Alliances and power shifted among these camps. The government was also confronted by domestic unrest: an armed peasant movement known as Tonghak (“Eastern Learning”) swept across the countryside in 1894. At root Tonghak was a spiritual movement, which blended elements of Buddhist, Confucianist, Taoist, and Catholic beliefs with indigenous shamanism and proclaimed the essential equality of all people. At the same time, Tonghak inspired violent rebellion; the aggression of the Tonghak peasant army was fed by the prosaic facts of destitution and desperation in the Korean countryside. By mid-century, increasing rents and growing tax levies pressed hard on Korean peasants; after the country was opened to international trade in 1876, rising taxes, along with exports of rice to Japan and the encroachment of Japanese fishers in Korean coastal waters further impoverished Korean farmers and fishermen. Armed Tonghak bands rose up across the nation (mostly in the southern half), demanding a purge of venal officials from government, an end to slavery and caste oppression, alleviation of the tax burden, and the expulsion of foreigners from the country. Ultimately, the king, unable to put down the revolt with Korean troops alone, requested assistance from China and thus provided the Japanese with an excuse for the Sino-Japanese war.

The Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) was ostensibly fought over which of those two foreign powers had the right to supervise the Korean government. The Chinese army was humiliated in this brief war, and in victory Japan gained its first new territory (Taiwan) as well as a greatly improved position in Korea. The Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) was the culmination of Japanese and Russian rivalry over Manchuria, northern China, and Korea; as Japan prepared for war with Russia (which it initiated with a surprise attack on Russian installations at Port Arthur, at the tip of the Liaotung peninsula west of northern Korea), Japan sent troops into Seoul and force...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Preface: Notes on Methods and Writing
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1. Consumer Nationalism
• Chapter 2. “Seoul to the World, The World to Seoul”
• Chapter 3. Producing New Consumption
• Chapter 4. Kwasobi Ch’ubang: Measuring Excess
• Chapter 5. Endangering the Nation, Consuming the Future
• Chapter 6. Coda
• Appendix
• Notes
• References
• Index