What's Korean for 'Real Man?' Ask a Japanese Woman
By NORIMITSU ONISHI
Published: December 23, 2004
TOKYO, Dec. 15 - Consider Yon-sama, the $2.3 Billion Man.
A 32-year-old South Korean actor past his prime in his homeland, he has become, thanks to a syrupy television series, the most popular man in Japan, the object of desire of countless middle-aged women, the stimulus behind an estimated $2.3 billion rise in economic activities between Japan and South Korea.
Widely known here for a year, his popularity may have peaked a few weeks ago when thousands of women in their 40's, 50's and older thronged the airport to greet him. A thousand of these same middle-aged Japanese women - a group not known for rowdiness like, say, English soccer fans - then ambushed him at his hotel here. They jostled one another for 10 minutes to get a glimpse of the actor; some threw themselves at his car.
Ten women, aged 43 to 65, were taken to a hospital for bruises and sprains. One 51-year-old woman from Oita Prefecture, in faraway western Japan, had her foot run over by a tire.
At a news conference later, Yon-sama, sighing several times and never once flashing his, well, $2.3 billion smile, told his fans, whom he calls his family: "I'm terribly sorry that some members of my family were hurt. I just pray that there are no serious injuries."
Fads come and go in Japan, but this one touches upon several deep issues in Japanese society and its relationship with South Korea. In a society gripped by a pervasive malaise, where uncertainty and pessimism fill magazines with headlines about men and women who don't marry, don't have children, don't have sex, Yon-sama seems to touch upon the Japanese nostalgia for an imagined past, and upon middle-aged women's yearning for an emotional connection that they lack and perhaps believe they cannot find in Japan.
What is even more striking is that they are looking for it in South Korea, a country that the Japanese colonized in the first half of the last century and condescended toward in the second half. In the nexus of power, gender and love, Japanese women may have turned to blue-eyed Americans but never looked twice at a Korean. Nowadays, thanks to Yon-sama, Web sites for young Japanese women looking for Korean men are multiplying.
Kim Eun Shil, a South Korean scholar of women's studies and a visiting professor at Ochanomizu University here, is researching the effects of Yon-sama on "postcolonial relations between Japan and Korea." In the past, to Japanese, Korea conjured up images of "dark, noisy, smelly," she said, but now Yon-sama's middle-aged fans associate Korea with "beautiful things" and look to him as the idealized male.
"The women are creating a fantasy," Professor Kim said, "because they are disappointed in reality."
South Korean pop culture has been drawing fans here in recent years, but the turning point came last year with the broadcast of "Winter Sonata." A miniseries about first love, lost memory and unknown family ties, its very corniness, or purity, was praised by older Japanese, who said it reminded them of simpler times at home.
The main character - a sensitive, bespectacled architect with hair dyed brown and a scarf tied in a different way in each scene - was played by Bae Yong Joon. The actor was soon nicknamed Yon-sama by Japanese who added "sama," an honorific reserved for Japanese royalty.
Thanks in great part to the drama and its actor, Japanese tourism to South Korea surged by 40 percent in the first 10 months of this year. Many Japanese women went on organized tours of the locations where the drama was filmed; others went to study Korean at Yon-sama's alma mater. All that resulted in an extra $2.3 billion in economic activities, according to a recent report by the Dai-ichi Life Research Institute.
"I will make great efforts so that I will be as popular as Yon-sama and be called Jun-sama," Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi said in August during elections for the upper house of Parliament.
Yon-sama's huge following here left South Koreans grasping for sometimes arcane explanations.
Youn Jung Suk, a specialist on Japan-Korean relations at the Sejong Institute in Seoul, said Japanese women were genetically predisposed to like the actor because he is from Pusan and many Japanese originally came from that corner of South Korea. "Well, that's my theory at least," Professor Youn said in a recent interview in Seoul.
In Japan, Yon-sama's middle-aged fans said he had qualities lacking in Japanese men: that he was sincere, pure, giving, passionate and soothing. Many Japanese women, even younger ones, have begun to think they could find those qualities in Korean men.
"I'm a 17-year-old girl who loves Korea so much," Haruna wrote on k-plaza.com, a Japanese Web site devoted to all things Korean. "I want to be an international couple in the future. I have an impression that Korean men are very much sincere."
Hahm In Hee, a sociologist at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, said she was amazed at the Japanese women's perception of her brethren. "I want to respect their belief, and there is no reason why Korean men wouldn't show these sides of themselves to Japanese women," she said.
Asked about Korean women's perceptions, though, she added: "Although it cannot be described in one go, this is how Korean women generally perceive Korean men: They tend to be self-centered and immature. They are dependent on their mothers and wives. But since they are proud, they don't want to show the fact that they are dependent. So they tend to try to control women to hide this dependency."
Like many cross-cultural romantic fixations, this one, being based on a television character, was perhaps bound to be divorced from reality, as some Japanese men pointed out, somewhat resentfully.
"Why are Korean men so good?" the film director Beat Takeshi wrote in a magazine called Sapio. "They are supposed to be pure and more sincere than Japanese men. But that's only in dramas, and naturally, Koreans are the same as Japanese men. They lie, they have affairs, and are sometimes violent."
The director compared the "Yon-fluenza" of these "hags" to the sex tours that some middle-aged Japanese men take of South Korea, where women are supposedly "more reserved and humble" than Japanese women.
Yon-sama's fans do not go on sex tours, but Beat Takeshi was right insofar as their desire is grounded in exoticism. Men - from white men who trolled Harlem during the 1920's to the present-day Japanese sex tourists - have long looked elsewhere for something they felt they could not find at home.
At a recent matchmaking party that a matchmaking service gave in Seoul, 13 Japanese women were presented to 14 Korean men. After the party, though, the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun quoted a 30-year-old Japanese woman as saying, "Not everybody is Yon-sama."
Indeed, not even Yon-sama could be Yon-sama, as the actor himself perhaps realizes. He declined an invitation to appear on "Red and White," the year-end show on NHK, the national broadcaster, which features Japan's top stars. He offered a vague excuse. NHK is reportedly still pleading with him. He has yet to change his mind.
Better, surely, to not let reality intrude.
NORIMITSU ONISHI :Writer
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/23/international/asia/
By NORIMITSU ONISHI
Published: December 23, 2004
TOKYO, Dec. 15 - Consider Yon-sama, the $2.3 Billion Man.
A 32-year-old South Korean actor past his prime in his homeland, he has become, thanks to a syrupy television series, the most popular man in Japan, the object of desire of countless middle-aged women, the stimulus behind an estimated $2.3 billion rise in economic activities between Japan and South Korea.
Widely known here for a year, his popularity may have peaked a few weeks ago when thousands of women in their 40's, 50's and older thronged the airport to greet him. A thousand of these same middle-aged Japanese women - a group not known for rowdiness like, say, English soccer fans - then ambushed him at his hotel here. They jostled one another for 10 minutes to get a glimpse of the actor; some threw themselves at his car.
Ten women, aged 43 to 65, were taken to a hospital for bruises and sprains. One 51-year-old woman from Oita Prefecture, in faraway western Japan, had her foot run over by a tire.
At a news conference later, Yon-sama, sighing several times and never once flashing his, well, $2.3 billion smile, told his fans, whom he calls his family: "I'm terribly sorry that some members of my family were hurt. I just pray that there are no serious injuries."
Fads come and go in Japan, but this one touches upon several deep issues in Japanese society and its relationship with South Korea. In a society gripped by a pervasive malaise, where uncertainty and pessimism fill magazines with headlines about men and women who don't marry, don't have children, don't have sex, Yon-sama seems to touch upon the Japanese nostalgia for an imagined past, and upon middle-aged women's yearning for an emotional connection that they lack and perhaps believe they cannot find in Japan.
What is even more striking is that they are looking for it in South Korea, a country that the Japanese colonized in the first half of the last century and condescended toward in the second half. In the nexus of power, gender and love, Japanese women may have turned to blue-eyed Americans but never looked twice at a Korean. Nowadays, thanks to Yon-sama, Web sites for young Japanese women looking for Korean men are multiplying.
Kim Eun Shil, a South Korean scholar of women's studies and a visiting professor at Ochanomizu University here, is researching the effects of Yon-sama on "postcolonial relations between Japan and Korea." In the past, to Japanese, Korea conjured up images of "dark, noisy, smelly," she said, but now Yon-sama's middle-aged fans associate Korea with "beautiful things" and look to him as the idealized male.
"The women are creating a fantasy," Professor Kim said, "because they are disappointed in reality."
South Korean pop culture has been drawing fans here in recent years, but the turning point came last year with the broadcast of "Winter Sonata." A miniseries about first love, lost memory and unknown family ties, its very corniness, or purity, was praised by older Japanese, who said it reminded them of simpler times at home.
The main character - a sensitive, bespectacled architect with hair dyed brown and a scarf tied in a different way in each scene - was played by Bae Yong Joon. The actor was soon nicknamed Yon-sama by Japanese who added "sama," an honorific reserved for Japanese royalty.
Thanks in great part to the drama and its actor, Japanese tourism to South Korea surged by 40 percent in the first 10 months of this year. Many Japanese women went on organized tours of the locations where the drama was filmed; others went to study Korean at Yon-sama's alma mater. All that resulted in an extra $2.3 billion in economic activities, according to a recent report by the Dai-ichi Life Research Institute.
"I will make great efforts so that I will be as popular as Yon-sama and be called Jun-sama," Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi said in August during elections for the upper house of Parliament.
Yon-sama's huge following here left South Koreans grasping for sometimes arcane explanations.
Youn Jung Suk, a specialist on Japan-Korean relations at the Sejong Institute in Seoul, said Japanese women were genetically predisposed to like the actor because he is from Pusan and many Japanese originally came from that corner of South Korea. "Well, that's my theory at least," Professor Youn said in a recent interview in Seoul.
In Japan, Yon-sama's middle-aged fans said he had qualities lacking in Japanese men: that he was sincere, pure, giving, passionate and soothing. Many Japanese women, even younger ones, have begun to think they could find those qualities in Korean men.
"I'm a 17-year-old girl who loves Korea so much," Haruna wrote on k-plaza.com, a Japanese Web site devoted to all things Korean. "I want to be an international couple in the future. I have an impression that Korean men are very much sincere."
Hahm In Hee, a sociologist at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, said she was amazed at the Japanese women's perception of her brethren. "I want to respect their belief, and there is no reason why Korean men wouldn't show these sides of themselves to Japanese women," she said.
Asked about Korean women's perceptions, though, she added: "Although it cannot be described in one go, this is how Korean women generally perceive Korean men: They tend to be self-centered and immature. They are dependent on their mothers and wives. But since they are proud, they don't want to show the fact that they are dependent. So they tend to try to control women to hide this dependency."
Like many cross-cultural romantic fixations, this one, being based on a television character, was perhaps bound to be divorced from reality, as some Japanese men pointed out, somewhat resentfully.
"Why are Korean men so good?" the film director Beat Takeshi wrote in a magazine called Sapio. "They are supposed to be pure and more sincere than Japanese men. But that's only in dramas, and naturally, Koreans are the same as Japanese men. They lie, they have affairs, and are sometimes violent."
The director compared the "Yon-fluenza" of these "hags" to the sex tours that some middle-aged Japanese men take of South Korea, where women are supposedly "more reserved and humble" than Japanese women.
Yon-sama's fans do not go on sex tours, but Beat Takeshi was right insofar as their desire is grounded in exoticism. Men - from white men who trolled Harlem during the 1920's to the present-day Japanese sex tourists - have long looked elsewhere for something they felt they could not find at home.
At a recent matchmaking party that a matchmaking service gave in Seoul, 13 Japanese women were presented to 14 Korean men. After the party, though, the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun quoted a 30-year-old Japanese woman as saying, "Not everybody is Yon-sama."
Indeed, not even Yon-sama could be Yon-sama, as the actor himself perhaps realizes. He declined an invitation to appear on "Red and White," the year-end show on NHK, the national broadcaster, which features Japan's top stars. He offered a vague excuse. NHK is reportedly still pleading with him. He has yet to change his mind.
Better, surely, to not let reality intrude.
NORIMITSU ONISHI :Writer
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/23/international/asia/
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.