Korea
An old peninsula culture, now split into two countries, ordered above all by the family, by age and rank, and by the duty owed to elders and ancestors. The complete guide, the forces first.
Korea is an old culture on a peninsula in northeast Asia, today divided into two countries, the prosperous and democratic South and the closed North. Its way of life rests on a few deep forces, most of them shaped by centuries of Confucian teaching: the family and the duty owed to parents and ancestors; a careful ordering of people by age and rank that runs through speech and manners; a strong pull of the group over the self, and the deep bonds of warmth and loyalty that Koreans build with one another; and a religious life that layers old spirit beliefs, Buddhism, the Confucian ethic, and a large Christian population. From these come a fierce drive for education, a bold and shared cuisine, family holidays centred on the ancestors, and a daily life of respect and courtesy.
The family and the ancestors
The deepest force in Korean life is the family, and the respect and duty that bind its members across the generations. For centuries Korea was the most thoroughly Confucian of societies, shaped by the teaching that a well ordered family is the root of a well ordered world, and at the heart of that teaching is the duty children owe their parents. This duty, the honouring and care of one's parents and elders, is taught from earliest childhood and held to be among the first of all the virtues, and it does not end with a parent's death but continues toward the ancestors who came before.
A person in Korea belongs first to a family and a bloodline, not to themselves alone. The family name and the line of descent matter greatly, traced traditionally through the father and his sons, and the eldest son in particular carries a special weight of duty and inheritance. The family is felt as a single body reaching back through the generations and forward to those not yet born, and a person's conduct reflects on the whole of it, bringing honour or shame to parents, ancestors, and name alike.
The bond with the ancestors is kept alive through memorial rites. On certain days, above all the great family holidays, Koreans set out a careful table of food and drink for their forebears and bow before it, honouring the parents, grandparents, and earlier generations and thanking them for their care. Many Koreans believe that the spirits of the dead do not depart at once but remain near their descendants, watching over them, and the rites renew the tie between the living and the dead. Whatever a Korean's religion, these observances are widely kept, for they are less a matter of belief than of being a good child and a faithful member of the family. To understand Korea is to begin with the family and the long line of which each person is a part.
Age and rank
Flowing from the same Confucian root is a careful ordering of people by age and rank, which runs through every meeting between Koreans. In this view each person stands in a definite relation to every other, above or below, senior or junior, and a great deal of social life turns on knowing which. Age is the plainest measure: an older person is owed respect and deference by a younger, and so among the first things Koreans establish on meeting is who is older, the better to treat one another rightly.
The Korean language itself is built around this order. It has several levels of politeness, and a speaker must choose words and endings to match the standing of the person addressed, speaking up to elders and superiors with respect and more plainly to juniors and close equals. People are commonly addressed not by their bare names but by titles that mark their role or relation, the teacher, the elder, the section head, and to call a senior simply by name would be rude. A younger person shows respect in countless small ways, lowering the eyes rather than staring, offering and receiving things with both hands, and giving way to elders.
This ordering reaches beyond the family into school, work, and daily life. The bond between a senior and a junior, the one who entered a school or a workplace earlier and the one who came after, carries real weight, the senior owing guidance and care and the junior owing respect and loyalty, much as an elder and a younger sibling would. Rank and seniority shape how people speak in a meeting, who defers to whom, and how decisions are reached. To live well in Korea is to read these relations quickly and to give each person the regard their age and standing call for.
The group and the bond
Koreans hold strongly to the group and to the bonds that tie people together, more than to the standing of the lone individual. A person tends to think of themselves as part of a we, the family, the school year, the workplace, the nation, and Koreans often say our where others would say my, our country, our company, even our mother. Belonging to such a group brings warmth, support, and identity, and a Korean will go to great lengths for the people held to be their own.
At the heart of this is a feeling Koreans call jeong, a deep bond of affection and attachment that grows between people over time. It is the warmth, loyalty, and sense of connection that builds among family, friends, neighbours, and workmates, a tie felt as something real and lasting that holds people to one another through trouble as well as ease. Hard to put exactly into other words, jeong is prized as one of the warmest things in Korean life, the glue of the close relationships a person depends on.
The same care for the group gives weight to how one is seen by others. A person's standing, dignity, and good name in the eyes of their fellows matter greatly, and much courtesy goes into not causing another to lose face or be shamed before the group, and into keeping one's own. To preserve harmony, a Korean may hold back a blunt opinion, soften a refusal, or sense what others feel without their having to say it. The group, the bond, and the keeping of face together shape a social world in which the individual is held closely within the circle of their people, owing much to it and receiving much in return.
Faith and the spirits
Korea's religious life is an unusual layering of several traditions that have long lived side by side. Beneath all the others lies the oldest, the native belief in a world full of spirits, in gods of the mountains, rivers, and household, and in the dead. Its keepers are the shamans, most of them women, who are held able to reach the spirit world, to carry messages between the living and the dead, and to drive off misfortune and sickness through their rituals of music and dance. This old folk belief was never wholly displaced and still runs quietly beneath Korean life, consulted in times of trouble even by those who follow other faiths.
Onto this came the great imported traditions. Buddhism arrived more than sixteen centuries ago and shaped Korean art, thought, and temple life, and its quiet mountain monasteries remain among the country's treasures. Confucianism, more an ethic than a religion, came too and in time soaked so deeply into Korean society that, as the rest of this guide shows, it orders the family, the manners, and the relations of the whole people whether or not anyone calls themselves a follower. To these, in modern times, was added Christianity, which spread widely in Korea as in few other parts of Asia, so that today a large share of South Koreans are Christian, Protestant and Catholic alike.
The result is a country where these strands coexist and overlap. About half of South Koreans now claim no religion at all, while among the religious, Christians and Buddhists are the largest groups, and the old spirit beliefs persist beneath them all. Cutting across every tradition is the reverence for ancestors, kept by Christian and Buddhist and unbelieving families alike as a duty of the family more than an article of faith. Koreans hold their religions, like much else, with a practical and open spirit, drawing on whichever serves a need without troubling much over the lines between them.
The drive to learn and rise
Few things mark modern Korea more than the fierce value placed on education. It grows from the old Confucian honouring of the scholar and of learning, from the centuries when study of the classics and success in the state examinations was the surest path to standing and office, and that reverence has carried into the present as a near universal drive to educate one's children and to rise through schooling. To do well in school, to enter a famous university, and to win a good post is held to be the way a person and a family secure their future and their honour.
This drive shapes the lives of the young to an extraordinary degree. Korean children study long hours, at school and then late into the evening at private academies, all bending toward the great college entrance examination that can set the course of a life, a single test for which families prepare for years and on whose day the whole country quiets to let the students sit it. Parents pour effort and money into their children's schooling, and a child's success is felt as the family's success, the fruit of the duty between the generations.
The same drive helped remake the country. The hunger for education and advancement, joined to hard work and sacrifice, was among the forces that lifted Korea within a few decades from poverty to wealth, and it remains a source both of the nation's strength and of real strain, for the pressure on the young is heavy and much debated. To understand modern Korea is to see how an old respect for learning became a powerful spur to striving, binding family duty, personal hope, and national ambition into one.
The table
Korean food is bold, varied, and deeply tied to sharing, and a Korean meal looks unlike any other. At its centre is a bowl of rice, set among a spread of small side dishes that are placed out together and shared by all at the table, so that everyone reaches into the same dishes through the meal. The side dishes may number a few or many, of seasoned vegetables, fish, egg, and more, and chief among them always is kimchi, the spiced and fermented vegetables, most often cabbage, that accompany nearly every Korean meal and stand as the very emblem of the country's cooking.
Fermenting and bold flavour run through the cuisine. Alongside kimchi, Koreans build their dishes on fermented pastes of soybean and red pepper, on garlic, and on the heat of chilli, giving the food a depth and a fire admired around the world. Soups and stews are everyday fare, and grilled meat cooked at the table, the well known Korean barbecue, is a favourite way to gather and eat. With it, and on many social evenings, comes soju, the clear and potent spirit that is the national drink.
The eating carries its own courtesies, most of them rooted in respect for age. The eldest at the table is served first and lifts their spoon first, and the younger wait for them and try not to finish before them. Drink is poured for one another rather than for oneself, and a younger person pours for an elder with both hands and turns slightly aside to drink before them, as marks of respect. To share a Korean table is to take part in the warmth of the group and the careful regard for elders that order so much of the culture.
Holidays and the family year
The Korean year turns on two great holidays, both of them festivals of the family and the ancestors. The first is the Lunar New Year, in winter, when Koreans travel in their millions back to their family homes to gather across the generations. There the family performs its memorial rites for the ancestors, and the young make a deep, full bow to their elders, kneeling to the floor to wish them a good year and to receive their blessing and often a gift of money in return, and all share special foods, above all a soup of sliced rice cakes eaten to mark the adding of a year.
The second is the autumn harvest festival, Korea's thanksgiving, held at the full moon of early autumn. Again families journey home and gather, again they honour the ancestors with rites and tend the family graves, thanking the dead and the season for the harvest, and they make and eat together small stuffed rice cakes shaped for the occasion. These two homecomings are the great fixed points of the Korean year, when the roads fill, the cities empty, and the scattered family becomes whole again around its elders and its dead.
The passages of a life are marked with their own feasts. A baby's first birthday is a large and joyful celebration, the child dressed in the bright traditional clothes and set before a table of symbolic objects to grasp one, the choice taken as a happy sign of the life to come. A sixtieth birthday was long honoured as a great milestone, a full turning of the traditional calendar and once a rare old age, marked with a banquet given by grateful children. Weddings join two families as much as two people, the couple often wearing the traditional dress for part of the day. Through these feasts, as through the holidays, the family gathers again and again around the milestones of its members.
Everyday courtesy
Korean manners are warm but careful, and a visitor soon meets the small courtesies that carry the culture's respect for others and for age. The bow is the common greeting and mark of respect, a nod or a deeper bend according to the standing of the other and the formality of the moment, often joined now with a handshake in which the younger or junior person may support their own arm as a sign of deference. Things are given and received with both hands, or with a supporting hand, when offered to an elder or a person of rank, a small gesture of respect repeated all day long.
Care for clean and proper space runs through the home. Shoes are removed at the door of a house, for the floor is a place to sit and even to sleep, and traditionally the floor itself is warmed from beneath, an old Korean way of heating the home that makes the warm floor the natural place to gather. The traditional dress, with its short jacket and long, full skirt or trousers in bright or soft colours, is now kept mostly for holidays, weddings, and great family occasions, where its grace marks the day as special.
Beneath all these is the constant attention to the other person's age and standing that this guide has described, shaping how one speaks, gives way, and shows regard. A Korean reads quickly where another stands and offers the fitting courtesy, and the visitor who shows respect to elders, receives with both hands, and follows the lead of their hosts will be met with the warmth that Koreans extend readily to those who treat their people and their customs with care. These manners are not cold formality but the daily form of a deep regard for others.
The nation
Korea is a mountainous peninsula reaching south from the Asian mainland, and for most of its long history it was a single country with one people, one language, and one culture. That changed in the last century. After thirty five years of harsh colonial rule by Japan, ended in 1945, the peninsula was split in two, and from that division came two states that remain divided to this day: the Republic of Korea in the south and a separate, closed state in the north. A terrible war between them in the early 1950s ended without a true peace, only a long armed truce along the line that still cuts the peninsula in two, and the two Koreas have gone their very different ways ever since.
South Korea, with which the wider world is most familiar, is home to around fifty two million people, nearly half of them gathered in and around the capital, Seoul, one of the great cities of the world. From the ruin and poverty of the war, the South rebuilt itself with astonishing speed into a wealthy, advanced, and democratic country, a rise so swift it is often called a miracle, and it now stands among the leading economies and most connected societies on earth. In recent years its culture has swept the world, its pop music, its television dramas, its films, and its food admired and followed across the globe in what is called the Korean Wave.
For all its success, South Korea faces a heavy challenge in its own numbers. Koreans now have fewer children than the people of any other country on earth, so few that the population has begun to shrink and to age quickly, raising hard questions about the nation's future. Yet the old culture endures beneath the glass towers and the fast pace: the family still gathers for the great holidays, the young still bow to their elders, the ancestors are still honoured, and the deep regard for family, age, and learning that this guide has described still orders the life of one of the world's most dynamic nations.