I mentioned some interesting anecdotes my favorite teacher told us in class recently in my last posting. Another thing she brought up was what she saw as a huge change in Korea’s singing culture. As with previous and future postings from my time here in Korea, I must apologize if I write anything which is either common knowledge or obviously mistaken. I simply don’t have a strong enough knowledge base related to Korea yet to be sufficiently selective or critical about some of what I hear and experience.
When my teacher started talking about how much Koreans love singing, I remember that, while at Harvard, I had to endure one of those “national virtue” lectures in Korean class that, after years of Chinese and Japanese language classes, I’m really getting sick of. Back in that earlier class, we were told that the Korean race, the Korean 민족, had a unique love for singing. More than any people in the world, the Koreans love to get together and sing songs and have a deep appreciation for music. I was worried my teacher here was about to give us a dose of the same.
Now, I know absolutely nothing about this subject, but yesterday my teacher told us something, which if true, is a much more interesting side to this “Koreans love singing” story. She says that she thinks the Korean “noraebang” or karaoke box, was introduced to Korea in 1988 or 1989. She claims that before this time there was “Karaoke” in hotels and in some bars and such but not karaoke boxes of the kind we find in Japan, Taiwan, China, Korea and around the world today. She says that after their introduction, they spread like wildfire all across the country and the habit/culture of noraebang in the social life of Koreans expanded just as quickly.
She then talked nostalgically about how the appearance of noraebang changed Korean singing culture. I admired the way she refrained from elevating her description of this pre-noraebang age to some kind of “authentic” and pure past as compared to some inferior and cold modern present, but she clearly did feel a sense of loss. She claimed that before the rise of noraebang culture, it was very common for large groups of students, friends, etc. to go to restaurants and sing together there. She says they often banged their spoons on the table so much so that it was a very common sight to see bent spoons and dented tables everywhere in Korea. After the rapid introduction of noraebang culture, however, she says that the habits of singing together in groups, especially in restaurants but also at personal house parties, etc. slowly began to change and become more restricted to the noraebang. She also claimed this also had a strong negative economic effect on the restaurant business. She believes, for example, that a rapid decline in the number of restaurants in the Sillim area close to Seoul National University is connected to this shift in habits of socialization.
There are unfortunately a lot of aspects of Korean society and socializing that I will never get to experience. I loath smoke to the point it makes me nauseous and I don’t drink alcohol at all. I’m simply not willing to compromise on either of these points so I have basically excused myself from a large range of social activities in Korea. I can only frequent larger restaurants or chains that follow the non-smoking regulations, and only study or meet friends in large chain coffee shops which are non-smoking. Everyday I spend in Korea, however, I look around me and realize that there are many worlds of culture, activity and socialization which I will never really experience or fully understand.
Update: I totally missed Antti’s recent posting on this topic which tells us much more useful information about the introduction of Noraebang to Korea in 1991.
Ditto for me here. Those of us that refuse to drink, smoke, or be around those doing the same will never be able to experience a major sub-set of whatever culture we happen to be living in. Them’s the breaks, kid. I actually think I might enjoy karaoke if could be completely separated from the alcohol/tobocco, but it can’t/won’t so I’ll just have to live without it.
The part about ‘our culture has a unique love of music/singing’ made me laugh. I hadn’t heard that about Koreans, but I’ve heard that same comment from Chinese, Hawaiians, and probably half a dozen other nationalities.
Konrad! I’ve been reading your postings, particularly the ones about your study in Seoul this summer, with great interest. I especially sympathized with this one. My experience with those narratives of “national virtue” was that they often result from feelings of being threatened, and that when people start to feel more relaxed, they are less likely to feel the compulsion to lecture.
At least in the cases of Japanese and Korean classes I’ve taken, though, the classroom runs the risk of becoming a place not for instruction in a language but for the performance of normative ethnonational belonging. I guess that I have just learned to “read through” or “read around” performances of that sort, and not to challenge or probe unless I think there is a chance of getting somewhere.
Having said all that, it’s great that you’ve got a language instructor who’s willing to be so open and to tell you what’s on her mind. Reading her account of groups singing in restaurants reminded me of the first trip I made to Seoul. A friend took me to a 茶房, and we sat there enjoying our tea. The group next to us was enjoying some cake and before we even knew it they had put some on a plate and sent it over to us. It’s hard to imagine that kind of use of public space in any large city in the US.
It seems to me that if you don’t like alcohol or tobacco, then the best thing to do would be to look for other people who share your tastes. Incidentally, in Korea, I found that even time spent in chain coffee shops could be educational. I remember going to a very poorly patronized 도토루 in Seoul (are there still any there?) and watching a fascinating clash of cafe cultures at work: The middle-aged male patrons that day showed strong resistance to the idea of waiting to pick up their own orders and clearing away their own trays, and finally a staff member had to do these tasks for them.
Funny that we should both write an entry on noraebang on almost the same day (here’s mine). The general wisdom is that noraebang appeared first in Busan in 1991; Weekly Donga has been able to track down the origins in some detail:
(cut and paste from my own entry, borrowing the Donga Weekly article)
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It was Mr Hyôn Ch’ung-dan, who kept a game room (oraksil) in front of the Donga University in Busan. He used to visit Japan often in search of new electronic leisure gadgets, and in early 1991 he brought a song accompaniment machine to Korea. He put Korean songs by himself in it, and installed the machine in his game room in April 1991. It was a glass box for 2-3 persons. Mr Hyôn was already busy at that time developing “multivision” effects, and with the release of the “Assa Panjugi” (앗싸 반주기), developed with Yeongpung Electronics, which showed lyrics in a monitor, the road for the popularity of noraebang was opened. It took one year for the noraebang boom to reach Seoul from Busan via Masan and Daegu.
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Interesting to hear that the teacher presented the student-style singing together as the “older” style replaced by noraebangs, while I guess it could be argued that it may have been a recent development of a modern Korea as well. Now if Keith Howard of SOAS was reading this he might have a word or two to say, but let me just suggest that it should also be possible to maintain that noraebang reproduces the Korean tradition of singing alone.