On the opposite shore, though, he found “a beautiful world,” says Okuhara. The people he met were expressive and confident. He loved the boisterous food stalls that lined the city’s open-air markets. “It is a culture in which you don’t have to be self-conscious about your lust for food,” he says. “I think that’s very human.” Upon his return, Okuhara began studying Korean and in 1997 designed a Web site dedicated to what he called “Korea envy syndrome.” The site posts essays and travelogues that celebrate Korea’s attributes, while poking fun at Japanese stereotypes of the country. He occasionally reviews Korean music and movies, and in a section prefaced with the warning “You might not want to enter,” offers Korean perspectives on Japan’s brutal colonization. His recurring theme: Japan lacks Korea’s confidence, passion and kindness. “These things must be important, otherwise I wouldn’t be so touched by them,” he says. “I hope for the Koreanization of Japan.”
He is no longer alone. A decade of political and economic malaise has steadily eroded Japan’s once vaunted sense of superiority. Japanese have long worried that they were falling behind the West; now even Koreans–Japan’s closest neighbors and long considered the barbarians at its gate–seem to have gained the upper hand. Korean movies and pop music attract millions of Japanese fans. Korean women are idealized for their beauty, men for their prowess as lovers. Seoul is beating out London and New York as this year’s coolest vacation spot for Japanese tourists. Frustrated dotcomers gaze longingly at the entrepreneurial atmosphere that has transformed South Korea into the most-wired country in Asia. “Japan envies a South Korea that can change and is changing,” says Kan Kimura, an associate professor of Korean studies at Kobe University, “even though Japan doesn’t want to change, and can’t.”
Not so long ago, Japan thought it would remake Korea in its own image. In 1910 Emperor Meiji annexed the Korea Peninsula to blunt what the Japanese leaders of the late 19th century considered “a dagger aimed at Japan’s heart.” The plan: export Japanese settlers to the area, impose Japan’s language and culture, and build an enduring empire on mainland Asia. Koreans resisted mightily and to this day resent the Japanese for their bloody rule. Japanese, for their part, continued to look down upon their neighbors even after losing their colony in World War II. When pro-capitalist South Korea and other Asian countries implemented industrial policies modeled after Japan Inc., Tokyo likened them to geese flying in formation behind its benevolent lead.
Many Japanese remain culturally arrogant and openly xenophobic. But their number is dwindling, while the ranks of those who admire and even envy Korea have risen dramatically. In a recent government survey, 51.4 percent of respondents reported warm feelings toward South Korea, up from 35.8 percent in 1996. The new fascination owes much to the different ways the two countries have handled their most recent woes. After the won collapsed in 1997, threatening to take down major banks, Seoul accepted a humbling IMF bailout. As part of the bargain, the government implemented sweeping financial reforms, shuttered bankrupt companies and thoroughly globalized its economy. Japan, in contrast, has failed to fix its bad banks or fully open its markets. Today, says Kimura, “Japan, a huge Titanic, is sinking slowly within sight of a small new ship called South Korea.”
Japanese, particularly those working in technology, worry that their country is missing the boat. (According to a recent newspaper poll, 80 percent of Japanese are concerned about the future of their economy.) They point to the success of Korea’s New Economy, which outpaces Japan’s by almost every digital measure. Its households are 40 percent more likely to be wired, and Koreans spend an average of 18 hours each on the Internet monthly, as opposed to just five hours for the average Japanese. Nasdaq Japan, which opened last year, lists only 48 companies compared with the five-year-old Kosdaq’s 610 firms.
Then there’s broadband. Korea boasts 3 million ADSL subscribers, compared with fewer than 40,000 in Japan. The result: Koreans move data 10 times faster on the Internet. This bandwidth gap means Internet broadcasting has flourished in Korea–where about 1,000 companies now stream music, games and video–but floundered in Japan, where fewer than 100 firms are in business. “Even if we think of great content to offer online, most people are not ready to receive it,” laments Yoshiyuki Dempo, president of the Japanese venture company Polytech. “Sometimes we wish we were in Korea.”
The digital divide between the two countries will only widen farther. As the IT revolution has stalled in Japan, programmers have not kept pace with advances in technology, leading to a shortage of talent “with immediate, usable skills,” says Takahito Casino, president of the Internet consulting firm and content provider IMJ Corp. That’s not a problem in Korea, he says. Programmers are not only more proficient and cheaper, but “speak English better than Japanese in the business do.” To ease its labor woes, IMJ recently cut a deal with the Seoul-based firm Clic Communications to utilize Korean engineers.
A decade ago the idea that a Japanese company would have to seek Korean technical help would have been unthinkable. By the same token, few Japanese would have deigned to look anywhere but Tokyo (and Hollywood) for their entertainment: for years Japan has served as Asia’s pop-culture factory, churning out music and fashions emulated across the continent. Last year, however, the runaway success of Korean spy blockbuster “Shuri” turned that assumption on its head. Set in contemporary South Korea, the thriller follows a love affair between a sexy North Korean assassin and the hunky KCIA agent assigned to kill her. Blood-soaked and paced like a John Woo shoot-’em-up, the film depicts South Korea as high tech, sophisticated and, above all, cool. The film earned $14 million at the Japanese box office despite a limited release and won lead actress Kim Yunjin a fanatical Japanese following.
The success of “Shuri” has also underscored doubts about Japan’s domestic film industry. Lee Bong-Ou, the Tokyo-based movie producer who brought “Shuri” to Japan, believes the flick is emblematic of a quantum leap in Korean filmmaking–from introspective dramas to Hollywood-style blockbusters–that Japan has failed to make. “Japanese films have become rather French in style, very private,” he says. “South Korean movies are made with the audience in mind.” For years now, the most vital movies at the Tokyo International Film Festival have not been homegrown; last year almost 70 percent of box-office earnings in Japan came from foreign films. “We don’t have directors or producers who are willing to take up difficult themes and make entertaining movies,” says Japanese movie critic Jun Edoki. “Japan is declining culturally as well as economically.”
Evidence of that crumbling dominance can be found across the cultural spectrum. Korean pop music–K-pop as opposed to the more familiar J-pop–has caught on with Japanese audiences looking for fresh faces and a more dynamic sound. Korean performers have “star quality,” says Shigetomo Yamamoto, a 30-year-old graphic designer from Osaka. “They are larger-than-life figures, like Japanese artists years ago.” Yamamoto travels to Korea once a month to load up on new CDs, which he plays while moonlighting as a DJ at an Osaka club. K-pop concerts in Japan now draw thousands of young office ladies and students. Last year a Japanese publishing company launched a new magazine called Hot Chili Paper to promote Korean music, film and street culture in Japan. A few months later it closed down another title, J-Book, that was meant to introduce Korean fans to Japanese music and movies. The shift, says editor-in-chief Song Shin Young, marks a sea change in Japanese attitudes. “Japanese people, especially the young, are willing to accept Korean culture without hesitation,” he says. “Ten years ago that wasn’t true.”
Japanese have even begun to rethink some of their most cherished stereotypes. Until recently the ideal of beauty has been Western and most cosmetic products have been imported from the United States and France. But now Japanese women’s magazines are full of how-to features with titles like “Learn From Korea: Beauty, Food, Water!” that champion the beauty of Korean women. The hottest topic, by far, is how to cultivate “perfect” Korean skin, which is thought to be more pale, supple and unblemished than any other.
Not since Japan’s Naomi Campbell craze of the mid-1990s has a single foreign look so dominated. Toa Industries, a pickled-vegetable maker in Saitama, north of Tokyo, writes on its Web site: “Korea has no fat women, and their skin is more beautiful than Japanese women’s skin. This, it is said, is because they keep eating kimchi.” Il Mare, a Korean cream popular in Japan, utilizes salt seeped in fresh bamboo. Japanese women now travel to Korea in record numbers, mostly to visit salons for traditional herb masks and skin scrubs. This year Korean tourism officials expect about 2.7 million Japanese, nearly double the number in 1996.
The fascination with all things Korean, though, runs more than skin deep. Japan’s newest idol is a martyred 26-year-old Korean student named Lee Su Hyon. On Jan. 26, Lee and a Japanese photographer were killed by an incoming commuter train in Tokyo as they attempted to save a drunken man who had fallen onto the track. For Japanese–many of whom fear the nation has lost its way on a very fundamental level–Lee has become the paragon of vanishing Confucian virtues. Citing his heroism, the media have unleashed broadsides on Japan’s tuned-out teens. The country’s largest newspaper, the Yomiuri Shimbun, thanked Lee for “showing us that people can be noble.” Letters from readers flooded in. “It’s difficult to imagine that Japanese youth these days would go out of their way to help others,” read a typical contribution, sent by a housewife in Tokyo. “Lee’s courageous actions,” wrote a salaryman in Chiba, “remind us what we once had in this country.” So far, three Lee biographies have appeared in Japan, one of them entitled “My Son, a Bridge Between Korea and Japan,” written by his grieving mother.
Indeed, the personality cult has gone far beyond Lee by this point. Yasunori Okadome, chief editor of the political magazine Truth of Rumors, sees the furor over the Korean student as an attempt to harness gaiatsu (foreign pressure) to solve Japan’s problems. “Most [newspaper] editors feel disappointed in Japanese youngsters for their lack of morals or social responsibility,” he says. “For these kids, risking their lives to save another is beyond their imagination. In this case, the gaiatsu comes from a Korean student who set a courageous example. If Lee had been a Japanese youngster, I don’t think the media would have played the story so big.”
Old prejudices still linger: South Korean hackers recently crippled the Japanese Ministry of Education Web site to protest a proposed textbook that they say justifies Japan’s wartime aggression. Tae kwon do classes, glitzy K-pop concerts and blockbuster films like “Joint Security Area”–which is slated for a Hollywood-style mass release in Japanese theaters next month–may only be servicing the unending quest of Japanese youth for something new to obsess over. But those who would champion the superiority of Korean values are saying more about a Japan that has become fixated on its own flaws. What Japanese are looking for next door may be their better selves.
