Sports Culture & Korean History (June 10th, 2020)

안녕 everybody~

Welcome to the seventh blog post of this semester! Due to some schedule conflicts, we put two topics together!

This week we will be covering Korea's Work and School Life Culture.

Starting off with Korean Sports Culture, we talked about a few things in relation to this topic. We did a comparison between athletes and entertainers as Korean shows tend to feature athletes (current and retired) as guests or even as hosts. Branching out from this, we talked about which path would be easier: entertainment or sports. Jun talked about how entertainment might be a bit easier of a path to take due to athletes joining in the entertainment business themselves after their life as athletes end or unless they move on to become coaches for the respective sport they were a part of.

We further delved into the difference in treatment between athletes and idols who appear on shows. We can see idols must know the norms of show etiquette before they are able to host their own programs while novice athletes are shown to an extent host shows with popular entertainers. Yoorim talked about how it could be most likely due to how citizens view athletes as a prideful figure due to their accomplishments in their respective sports. 

To wrap up this topic, we talked about what athletes in other countries were like and whether they were similar to athletes in Korea.

Dori talked about how in the US they would typically make ads for sportswear such as shoes or for healthy foods. In terms of television shows, they would do a workout regime for kids on Nick and even have appearances on singing shows similar to 미스터리 음악쇼 복면가왕 (The King of Mask Singer). Mars said Malaysia was similar to the US, different from Korea. PJ said that they would separate athletes from entertainment as a whole and have them focus on representing sportswear. Jun talked about how in Fiji they would have the rugby players promote for their sponsors, there was an ad where they would advertise phone plans or phones by having rugby players toss the phone around like a rugby ball or simply have the players using the phones and talking about how great the deals are.

We then moved on to the next topic which was Korean History. Having the Korean expert, Yoorim, explain to us a simple summary of Korea's history ended being "South Korea was invaded by North Korea while North Korea was invaded by South Korea." We tried to imagine what Korea would be like if they didn't go through the events that made them what they are today and it was pretty difficult. Dori said she couldn't imagine a country without having their own dark moments. In Korea's case, if colonization never happened, it would be hard to imagine where Korea would be at especially in terms of economic value and development. It really makes it difficult to imagine Korea as a first world country if they didn't go through the colonization and dictatorship eras. We further went into a discussion of the effects of the leading representatives of countries. This was in relation to whether we feel our generation is the ones to change the viewpoints within Korea or not. Ultimately we all agreed that how the country develops and changes depends a lot on the leader of the country as they are the ones who will decide the fate of the country through their policy implementations.

We ended with a closing statement from Yoorim being " History should be remembered, the end."