The Birth of Korean Cool (22 page)

Koreans have been using a variation of
furoshiki
to package their CDs. The CD of Brown Eyed Girls’ “Cleansing Cream” album comes with a forty-page photobook, a
twelve-page calendar, four postcards printed with members’ signatures, and a folded poster, all neatly packaged in a lavender hard case, going for 12,800 yen (around $120) on Amazon.co.jp.
The Big Bang “Special Edition” album weighed just over a pound and included a hundred-page photobook. The real wow factor was that the CD opens like the DVD drive of a computer; it
slides open automatically if you lay the album flat and press a button. For all these extras, the CD costs around 7,000 yen (about $70). More typically, a K-pop CD with fewer bells and whistles
will run from $20 to $40, which is still quite expensive. And yet the Japanese buy them. In droves.

Japanese pop now seems like a distant memory, especially since the Japanese seem to have given up even on their own turf. For the last three years, K-pop bands have swept all the major
categories at the Japan Gold Disk Awards—based on music sales and downloads.

VIVE LE HALLYU: THE SECRET BEHIND K-POP’S SUCCESS IN FRANCE

Korean pop culture’s biggest fan in western Europe is one of the few countries in the world with a sense of exceptionalism equal to its own: France.

In April 2011—over a year before “Gangnam Style” appeared—tickets for a multiband K-pop concert in Paris sold out in less than fifteen minutes. There was only one concert
date scheduled for the six-thousand-seat arena Le Zénith, featuring K-pop’s super elite groups, all from the SM Entertainment record label: Girls’ Generation, TVXQ!, Shinee,
f(x), and Super Junior. Within days, hundreds of Parisians did a flash mob protest in front of the Louvre to demand additional concert dates. Parallel flash mobs appeared in
eleven other French
cities
, including Lyon and Strasbourg. The story was covered by the Korean press as well as the French press, including the daily
Le Monde
.

If you think that the eleven-city flash mob was a spontaneous show of support for K-pop in France, you have not been paying attention. For  here, too, there was an invisible hand behind the
K-pop machine: as always, a close cooperation between the Korean government and private enterprise. Even the appearance of the media was due to a tip from a Korean civil servant.

I interviewed the man in question—Choe Junho, a theater director by trade and now a professor at the prestigious Korean National University of Arts. He was director of the Korean Culture
Centre in Paris from 2007 to 2011—an organization sponsored by the Korean government, devoted to disseminating Korean culture abroad. The Paris branch was founded in 1980 and was one of only
three such centers in the world (now there are about twenty-five, according to Choe). When Choe took the helm, Hallyu was already taking hold in France. Under his reign, Hallyu in France became a
legend.

The rise of Hallyu was due in part to the popularity of Korean films like Park Chan-wook’s
Oldboy
(2003) and Bong Joon-ho’s
The Host
(2006), the latter of which was
hailed by France’s top news sources—including
Le Monde
—as the best film of the year.
⁷
Choe, in his capacity as director of the
Korean Culture Centre, worked tirelessly to blast France with Korean culture—largely with the assistance of Korean government funds. In the winter of 2003–2004 he screened eighty-five
Korean films at the Centre Pompidou, Paris’s modern art museum.

It’s a reciprocation of interest since Koreans have been diehard fans of French literature and culture for ages. Koreans love the raw emotions and irrationality of French literature far
more than they do the social satires and comedies of manners they associate with British fiction.

Victor Hugo’s
Les Misérables
was required reading in Korean schools, as was Alphonse Daudet’s short story, “La Dernière Classe,” for both my
parents’ and my generation. Set in the Alsace in 1870 or 1871, around the time of the Franco-Prussian war, Daudet’s story features a schoolteacher, Monsieur Hamel, who announces that it
is to be his last day teaching, because all the French staff are to be replaced by Germans. His last lesson of the class is to impress on them the beauty of the French language. He tells the class,
at great personal risk, that as long as you keep your language, you will never be a slave.

Koreans love this story, largely because it’s exactly what many Koreans felt when the Japanese colonized Korea in 1910 and banned the teaching of Korean in public schools.

Thanks to Hallyu, the western countries with whom Korea has felt kinship are starting to find the feeling is mutual.

Choe is wholly French-seeming in his demeanor and flawless in his mastery of the language, but he still possesses that Korean knack for marketing. In the summer of 2009, he created a nonprofit,
the Korean Connection, which brought together eager French disciples. According to the French daily
Le Figaro
, the group has one hundred thousand members. In October 2010, Choe asked the
group what Korean cultural event they would most like to see in Paris. They overwhelmingly responded that they wanted a K-pop concert.

Knowing that 2011 was to be his final year at the Korean Culture Centre, Choe wanted to go out with a bang and leave Paris with a taste of Korea it would not soon forget. He approached the
Korean Ministry of Culture to request funds for a K-pop concert in Paris in June 2011. “The ministry said they had no money for it; I told them, ‘If we do this concert in Paris, you
will see Hallyu really take off in Europe.’ ” The ministry was able to give Choe about 250,000 euros, but it wasn’t enough to cover expenses like enticing Korea’s top talent
and renting out a concert venue.

Choe then approached the Korean megalabel SM Entertainment to ask them to put up funds for a giant concert in Paris featuring their own acts. They stalled for a month, said Choe, “because
they didn’t want to do a project in cooperation with the Korean government, and they thought it would not be profitable for them.” After Choe promised not to interfere in any way with
the production or creative vision of the concert, SM agreed to put on the show. On April 26, 2011, the ticket agent Live Nation put the tickets online at 10:00 a.m.; they were sold out in fifteen
minutes; this led to illegal scalping, with some tickets going for 1,500 euros.

Choe was determined to get SM to stage another concert. He came up with the idea of staging multicity flash mobs, and used his young French allies at the Korean Connection to help. In order to
achieve the maximum impact he had to make the whole thing appear as though it was spontaneous. He contacted the local journalists for the Korean networks KBS, MBC, and SBS and tipped them off that
something interesting might be happening on Sunday at 3:00 p.m. in front of the Louvre’s giant glass pyramid.

Choe coached his French moles for the camera. “I gave them tactics,” he recalled. “I said, for KBS, get a French person who speaks Korean [to approach the camera], for MBC, get
someone who sings [K-pop songs], for SBS, get someone who dances. If it was the same for all the channels, it wouldn’t be interesting.” Choe had expected only fifty to show up at the
Louvre; instead, there were between three hundred and a thousand (accounts vary). They broke out into a group dance to some of SM Entertainment’s biggest hits, such as the Super Junior song
“Sorry Sorry.” They shouted their demand in unison,
“Une deuxième date de concert à Paris!”
One more concert date in Paris!

Once the Korean networks started airing the flash mob footage, SM realized they had been beat; they arranged for a second concert. But Choe was not done. He encouraged the Korean Connection to
greet the K-pop stars as they arrived at the Paris airport. To his surprise, thousands of fans showed up. “The police said it was the biggest crowd they’d seen at Charles de
Gaulle—they lost count.” Like many other Hallyu success stories, this one was brought about by a harmonious effort of government, industry, and fans.

Per his promise to SM Entertainment, Choe stepped aside and let it have full creative control. So successful was Choe’s disappearing act, in fact, that the French daily
Le Monde
claimed in its laudatory coverage that the concert was the brainchild of SM Entertainment’s chairman Lee Soo-man. “The Korean Wave Conquers Europe,” read the
headline.
⁸

“This is the first time I have talked about [my involvement] with a reporter,” said Choe. “We used the budget from SM Entertainment very well. We used it to get press; we
didn’t pocket it.” It was the gift that kept on giving; both the supply side and demand side became aware of each other. This opened the floodgates for K-pop stars to book in Paris; no
more need to cajole the record label.

WHEN I WAS AT SCHOOL IN KOREA IN THE LATE 1980S,
students up to high school age were banned from entering video game arcades, at least during the
academic year. Which of course meant that I went anyway. It was the schools that enforced the ban; teachers would rotate responsibility for raiding the neighborhood arcades and kicking students
out. Video games were considered a corruptor of youth, or we were supposed to be studying instead—something along those lines. The arcades were nothing to write home about. They were in
dingy, windowless, poorly lit rooms and run by thugs, as one would expect from a semi-underground industry. Most of the games were from the United States and Japan, they were several years behind
the times, and there weren’t that many of them to begin with. They didn’t usually have marquee games like
Pac-Man
; they were mostly fixed shooter games like
Galaga
.
They were never really that popular.

Consequently, Korean video games took a long time to get off the ground. All content industries—games, books, comics, movies, songs—were tightly regulated by the government, which
made it hard to import games from abroad. It was also not the best incentive for Koreans to develop their own games.

Fast-forward to 1998. It’s the height of the Asian financial crisis. Unemployment levels have doubled. One of the few industries that are booming is PC rooms—what Koreans call
Internet cafés. They are full to bursting, but not with happy kids; rather, with humiliated, unemployed businessmen and women having to kill time on the Internet all day long. Little did
these unemployed executives know that their sad hours spent procrastinating and evading reality would give rise to one of Korea’s biggest cash cows.

It was the unemployment crisis that gave birth to the Korean video game industry, now the second-largest in the world after China’s.

At first, the unemployed spent their days at PC rooms looking for jobs and printing their CVs—as well as avoiding the pitying eyes of their families. To while away the time, they started
to play video games. Their heavy gaming use did not go unnoticed. In fact, it became an important component of a perfect storm, for at that moment, the country was trying to find new industries to
focus on.

In the throes of the Asian financial crisis, President Kim Dae-jung declared that Korea would become the most technologically advanced country in the world. It might sound kind of
counterintuitive to announce, in the middle of financial turmoil, that you are about to spend an enormous amount of money on infrastructure, but Kim saw that technology was the way forward.

Once again, government and industry joined forces to create the online gaming industry. Kim significantly increased venture capital for computer hardware and online networks and created tax
incentives for software start-ups, including video game designers.

Korea’s Internet culture at that point was already very powerful. Kim’s government started investing more money to create an even faster, more far-reaching Internet. Private ventures
banked on the Internet as well. At this point, according to Kim Sung-kon, who works for the gaming industry lobby group KAOGI (Korean Association of Gaming Industry), the final component of the
video gaming ecosystem came into play: “Game developers started to create more games to leverage the expanding infrastructure. So the network, games, and content came together all at the same
time.” It was a self-perpetuating beast.

A ready audience was waiting. Gaming was already a popular pastime in Korea by that point; in fact, in 1996, the Korean video game company Nexus released what it claimed was the world’s
first MMORPG—massively multiplayer online role-playing game—though the United States released several games at around the same time. The game, called
The Kingdom of the Winds
,
was based on a graphic novel about a fantasy version of ancient Korea (an English-language version of the game was released in 1998). But, as with all Korean products, focusing on just the local
market was not a good long-term strategy; with a population of only 50 million, Koreans could only buy so many games. So the gaming industry and the Korean government focused on exports.

Korean-made video games now constitute a quarter of the world market. Even most Koreans have no idea how big Korea’s gaming industry. As Kim told me, “In a [Korean] quiz show, one of
the questions was, ‘What is Korea’s biggest cultural export?’ It was a multiple choice between films, K-pop, video games, etc. The correct answer was ‘video games,’
and everyone was shocked.” Korean video game exports bring in 1200 percent more revenue for the country than does K-pop. In fact, online games account for 58 percent of Korea’s pop
culture export revenue (official term: the content industry): about $2.38 billion in revenue in 2012, out of a total of just over $4.8 billion.
¹

One of the more popular Korean-made games in the west is the free, online role-playing
Maple Game
. If you’ve never heard of it and are wondering why you can’t think of a
single Korean-made video game, it’s because Korean video games are exported primarily to China, Japan, and Southeast Asia. What about America and Europe?