Korea is rarely in the news and many people know little about it before they come here, and have no ../e_imgs in their heads of what to expect. In contrast, many people have an ../e_imgs of China in their heads as an in your face Asian experience, complete with strange foods, Buddhist temples, and chickens being beheaded as you walk past butchers in the markets, or of Japan as a futuristic technoville where at any one time more people are online than off. Both are true to a certain extent, whereas Korea…is somewhere in between.

On the surface Korea is very developed, and so where it is behind places like Japan or Canada are in things not immediately obvious, like having an average of 35+ students per teacher in schools (not your institute!), still having a 6-day workweek (again, most institutes are 5 days!), or Koreans thinking that stopping at traffic lights is an abstract concept that doesn’t apply to them. These sorts of things are much more difficult to “fix” than building airports or providing broadband internet access to every household.

In Korea’s “defense”, it is easy to forget (or not know) that 30 years ago Korea was as poor, backward, and considered as bad a place to live in as, say, Rwanda is today. To turn that into the world’s 10th biggest economy so quickly is absolutely amazing. But North America and Europe had a leisurely 200 to 300 years to get to where they are today ? can you imagine what Korean society must have gone through to do all that in 30 years?

If you traveled a little in developing countries you quickly see juxtapositions of old and new, like Malaysian fishermen watching Kylie Mynogue music videos on the net, or Brazilian teenagers wearing rapster-style clothing. But what makes Korea so interesting to live in is that these sorts of things aren’t isolated incidents, but the mix of tradition and modernity in Korea is constant, everywhere, and in your face. You can’t escape it by going to remote temples in the mountains, because monks will take a break from their meditation to chat to friends on their camera-equipped cell phone. Or alternatively, you could spend a day with some Korean friends playing computer games in internet cafes, watching Matrix Reloaded at the cinema and having pizzas for dinner, in other words just like back home, but when walking home all of a sudden they decide they want a final snack of insects from a roadside food stall. When it happened to one of us, it felt like aliens had taken over our friend’s bodies (remember the ‘V’ sci-fi mini-series from the ‘80s anyone ? it was just like that!).

You will probably get used to things like that happening in the end. What stays interesting though are Koreans themselves. Korea was and still is a deeply conservative country, was a military dictatorship until 1987, and foreign investment and foreigners didn’t start arriving in any great numbers until the early 1990s. So the clash of “Western” culture with traditional culture that you see all over the world was very quick and sudden in Korea. For example, all countries have rebellious teenagers towering over their parents, but in Korea every teenager is about a foot taller then their parents because the Korean diet has changed so much so quickly (they’re eating more wheat than rice now). Or alternatively you may have whom you regard as quite sophisticated and intelligent Korean friends in their late-20s, but who will act like shy, coy teenagers when you mention being more intimate with the opposite sex than sending “daring” text messages on your cell-phone (not that there’s anything wrong with that), whereas those just 5 years younger may be completely comfortable with the idea.

Of course, places like Japan and Taiwan also developed very quickly and are equally as fascinating as Korea in that sense. Japan however, began developing over 20yrs before Korea and is now a “First World Country” whereas most Koreans won’t claim Korea to be. This may account for some expat’s opinions of Japan which we’ll give below; many foreigners living in Korea have been to Japan at least once for a visa run, so you will find many expats in bars happy to claim that they know everything about Japan because they went to Fukuoka for 36 hours.

The most often-heard comment is that Koreans are much more friendly than Japanese people. Of course even we Koreaphiles won’t pretend that is true even for a moment. What probably explains the comment is that Japan is a much more “international” country than Korea (although nothing like places like Hong Kong), and has tens if not hundreds of thousands more foreigners living there. So unlike many “Hermit-Kingdom” Koreans, who often freak out if they see you and give you double portions of everything in restaurants, cause traffic accidents in their rush to say Hi and shake your hand, and will be ecstatic if you speak any Korean, Japanese people will usually not give you a second glance and won’t be at all surprised or particularly grateful if you speak to them in fluent Japanese. Not because they’re unfriendly, but because you’re no big deal.

Japan is a cleaner and much more orderly place than Korea, and because it is a relatively more open place to international influences then your average Japanese employers is probably more experienced at dealing with foreigners than his or her Korean counterparts. Overall is more likely to feel like home then Korea (especially if you’ve just come from there!), at least in the big cities, and if that’s what you’re after then Japan is probably your better bet.