V. Groupies
Essay #V from “Korean Culture – Very Informal Essays” by Horace H. Underwood, Executive Director Emeritus, Fulbright Korea. (download entire document here korean-culture-essays-hhunderwood)
One student is nothing. A batch of students is more powerful than a university. A big batch of students is more powerful than a government.
Korea is a collective society. While we Americans revere the individual and think that individual rights and individual development are the highest good in society, Koreans believe that the group is far more important than the individual. This is one of the major factors working against individual initiative in Korean students. (Parenthetically, Korean students can be very good indeed in showing initiative and creativity in the right setting; however, it’s usually a group setting.)
Korean language reinforces this idea in Koreans from an early age. Everything is “uri”, which means”us” or “our.” When Koreans refer to their own language, they do not say “Korean”, they say “our language.” They do not refer to Korea, but to “our country.” Not home, but “our house,” even, yes, “our wife” or “our husband” (this does not imply gleeful spouse-sharing, but “the person who has the role of wife in our house”). All this reinforces the sense of the group, rather than the individual, as the basic unit of society.
Of course, the “basic unit” can be of different sizes for different situations. “Our family” is a few people; “our department” might be several hundred, “our university” is many thousand, “our country” is 50 million (or 70 million, if you include North Korea). But in each case the sense is of being part of a group, a group with limits. Everyone inside the group is “in”; others are “out.” The individual finds identity as part of the group. And the group is in competition with, feels exclusiveness, perhaps hostility, toward everyone outside the group.
This emphasis on the group rather than on the individual is reflected in Koreans’ ideas about privacy. Seeing how Korean children seldom have their own room and how children often sleep in the same room with their parents (at least until the age of seven or eight), and how everyone walks into everyone else’s room in the family, Americans complain that Koreans have no privacy. On the other hand, seeing how our houses have no walls around them, and how everyone who walks past can look across the lawn and right into the windows if they want, Koreans complain that Americans have no privacy. Of course, for us, privacy is for the individual in (or against) the family; for them, privacy is the family against the world.
For Koreans, the word “kae-in,” meaning “private” or “individual,” is actually a word with rather negative connotations, in contrast to the very positive connotations “individualism” has in English. Thus it is not surprising to learn that “individual initiative” is generally not valued very highly in Korea. Of course, there has been some change as modernization has taken hold, and many individual entrepreneurs have succeeded. And nowadays some Korean parents are teaching their children to get ahead by being highly assertive, though such children are still perceived by others as obnoxious or bullies. As I mentioned, group initiative can be highly successful, for instance, in setting up small groups of three or four students and giving them brainstorming assignments. The hierarchical leader of a group will often make quite bold decisions – through in the name of the entire group, not the individual. It remains true that in Korean organizations individuals seldom feel comfortable taking action by themselves. There must be group discussions and group consensus before the group leader states what action is to be taken.
Koreans feel they are by no means as consensus-oriented as the Japanese. In the broadest of generalizations, Koreans are also considered to be more feisty than the Japanese, more open with their feelings, more likely to break out of the mold and act as individuals and make decisions (for good or bad); generally they seem to Americans to be not as hard to “read.” Nonetheless, Koreans and Japanese are somewhat similar in their relation to the Confucian tradition, and both traditions are quite different from ours. In fact, if you think about it, isn’t it a bit odd to say that the individual (one person) is more important than the group (many people)? In any case, as you deal with Koreans, don’t be frustrated if they show a relative lack of individual initiative. How could they possibly have it when their culture tells them it’s bad?