VOL.77/2024.12

Understanding Today’s Korean Society

A Sociologist’s Pick

2024.06.03

Characters are one of the oldest forms of human media. The way we produce text with letters takes many forms, depending on each region’s historical traditions and culture. In alphabetic cultures that use a phonetic writing system, text is written horizontally from left to right. Alphabetic cultures write in syllables, rather than grouping syllables together and representing them in phonetic units. In contrast, East Asia’s Chinese character cultures adopted vertical writing, and it has been a long-standing cultural tradition.
The vertical writing style branched out into many different forms in the 20th century, with different countries making different choices. While modern Korean and Chinese languages have adopted horizontal writing, modern Japanese still retains vertical writing. Whereas Japan uses a combination of Chinese characters and its own alphabet, hiragana, modern Korean, unlike Japanese, chose to write in purely Korean characters, embracing the tradition of Chinese characters and grouping consonants and vowels into syllables.
It is an unusual phenomenon that East Asia’s long-standing common tradition of vertical writing and the use of Chinese characters to denote meanings has fragmented by country since the 20th century. The book Hangeul and Typewriter: the Technique, Art, and History of Hangeul’s Mechanization (Yukbi Publishing) explores how the Korean language came to adopt horizontal writing instead of vertical, and to abandon the Chinese characters in favor of Hangeul, through the interpretation of the controversies surrounding the typewriter, which was developed with the goal of mechanizing Hangeul.
I recommend this book to anyone who is curious about Korea’s choice to be a Chinese character culture but have a different writing style than modern China and Japan.

Gender is still a hot topic in Korea. While women have long since surpassed men in university admissions and are excelling in academic achievement, their gender equality is still lagging behind, ranking 105th out of 146 countries with a gender gap index of 0.68, according to the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Gender Gap Report 2023.
In Korea, women’s social participation is still mostly limited to certain sectors, such as education and the service industry. There are fields that have been less open to women’s engagement - the construction and heavy chemical industries are examples. I’m a Blue-collar Woman (Hani Books) is a collection of interviews with Korean women in these sectors who have entered the male-dominated professions. Through the voices of blue-collar female workers in these fields, we learn how they came to work in these occupations and overcame the challenges they faced as pioneers as the first female blue-collar workers to enter these occupations.
I recommend this book to anyone interested in the vivid voices of modern Korean women - especially blue-collar female workers, ranging from builder carpenters to welders, ready-mixed concrete drivers, home repair workers, and more.

Written by Nho Myung-Woo (Professor of Sociology at Ajou University, owner of Nieun Bookstore, a bookstore specializing in humanities and social sciences books)