Korean Anthropology - Public Safety videos on the Seoul Metro

Choosing not to own a car*, either when I’m in London or in Seoul, means I’m a frequent train and bus user to get just about anywhere, except when I have to travel somewhere with K, who I don’t think has ever been on public transport in his life. Each of the nine subway lines (adopting the American style name as they do here in Seoul) has its own character and style.  Some of the lines have public safety video’s they frequently show travellers.  These are no ordinary public safety videos – they have provided me with yet another highly scientific, Korean anthropological study opportunity.

How to use an Escalator and a Gas Mask

I live quite close to the Number 2 - Green Line - subway. Or underground. Or metro.  (It gets very confusing when speaking with foreigners to not have a single, standard, ubiquitous word to describe a train that runs underground in a tunnel and stops frequently for commuter passengers.) The Seoul Metro is really quite impressive. Easily one of the best things about the city. Plus the fact that they have public toilets in every station.  Free toilets mind you - none of this absolutely desperate for a pee at Kings Cross station only to find out that you haven't got 20p in your pocket to pay for the hideously dirty facilities. And the travel is cheap - you can cross the city for about 900 to 1000 Won, about 50p.  Seoul Metro clearly cares about the 4 million passengers per day it lugs around, they say they care but more than that they make sure they’re safe every second of the journey.

Nowhere more safe than on line 2 where most of the trains have video monitors mounted throughout the train. And when not showing you in 4 languages where you are and where you are about to be, public safety videos are shown (no sound – you have to figure out what to do in their constructed emergencies entirely from the visuals). For the benefit of all those people who will never have the privilege of travelling on the Seoul Metro line number 2, I will now give you a written full description of each of these videos. Please, no need write to thank me – it is my duty as an amateur anthropologist.

I’ll begin with my favourite – what to do when your Metro is the target of a missile attack.  (Not an everyday occurrence but better to be prepared.) With high realism in the special effects (they should win an award for this), the opening shot shows a typical subway entrance just before aforementioned missile arrives and obliterates the whole thing in a massive ball of fire leaving an empty street (a clean, no-jump cut in there with some of the best Art films from the 50’s). Inside the station, there are body parts and ketchup everywhere, people twitching on the ground and the concrete floor seems to be on fire for no obvious reason.  Apparently it is not a good idea to board the train in circumstances such as these and so we are informed with a big red ‘X’.  At this point, our hero emerges (he will re-appear in later videos).  He looks a little geeky, about 17, but clearly knows his way around a missile attack.  He takes charge, calling for help on ‘something’ (I think he is talking to his hand) and starts giving orders and helping the evacuation. Oddly, a number of people suddenly appear waving light batons of the type used to direct aircraft to the apron, about 6 of them directing 2 people who are carrying a stretcher full of body parts. Then the big no-no, don’t rush for the lift (we all know that one of course). But look – there’s our hero, not so brave anymore, trying to push people out of the way so he can get in first, and it gets the big red ‘X’.   Now I realise that seeing a video of a missile attack on a subway may not give everyone a warm comfortable feeling that all is right with the world, but not everyone knew that if you do get blown up, then all the bits of you will get stretchered out safely.

Video 2: Escalators. Being a modern and trendy city, escalators are everywhere in the Seoul Subway system and so it is important to know how to use them.  I previously thought that I knew everything there was to know about boarding, travelling and de-boarding an escalator but what a shock I got when I watched the Seoul Metro Public Safety on Escalators video. Apparently standing too far back on the step is no good.  Standing too far forward is possibly worse. And, in a miracle of bodily coordination you have to put both feet in this favoured middle position AND grab the handrail at the same time. Whew! (No wonder it seems to take so long for most citizens of this country to get on the frikken escalator.)  I’m sure this video is helping to slowly but surely spread the news throughout the populace of how to use this amazing device. One of the under-estimated dangers is walking on the escalator.  There is a quick cut to a man in a hurry.  Not only in a hurry but he looks evil as well. He is positively bounding down the Seoul Metro escalator, possibly approaching walking speed, when we see !! a group of Proper Users !! with their feet firmly planted on the stair and their hands on the rail. Good people.  The evil one descends, his pace quickening as he starts to dodge in, then out among the hapless travellers. Then, in an almost seamless cut that you almost don’t notice if you put your fingers in your eyes, the special effects team insert store mannequins to replace the people. They go in all directions like bowling pins, ending up in pieces at the bottom of the ride.  The lesson is, don’t walk on the escalator, because if you do, other users will turn into mannequins.

[ An aside that I have to mention… Every time I see this video I am reminded of when I was a child of 7 or 8 and went with my father to meet my grandmother who had just arrived to visit from one of the more rural regions of Canada. In the airport, my gran (then about 70 but not looking a day over 90 and fairly rotund) encountered her first escalator. She stood in front of it for a long time (30 seconds) before she thought the better of it and took the stairs. All the while with smart-ass me loudly trying to show her how easy it was by running up and down it. ]

The next video shows a confrontation, again, between good and evil. Good, in the form of our geeky hero making another impressive show of improvised organisational skills, and Evil, making an appearance as a mad bomber. Or bottle roller. He’s one of the two, I’m not sure which. However, we are certain he is evil because he has shifty eyes. I don’t recall seeing such shifty eyes on a film villain since Boris Karloff in ‘The Sea Bat’ (1930) but just to make it really clear to you, on the closeup of the shifting eyes, you can see this villain has heavy eyebrow perspiration as well.  How evil is that?  Well, not quite enough. Sitting on the train, he suddenly pulls what looks to be a lit Molotov cocktail out of his coat. But here his technique suffers a bit. I’m pretty sure the point of a Molotov is that you throw it and break the bottle. Could be wrong. He rolls the bottle. Different.  Nevertheless, the effect is devastating. There is suddenly smoke everywhere and people pouring off the train.  Of course, they won’t find the exits without our hero who also distributes gas masks.

Every subway station has a blue cabinet with glass doors where emergency gas masks are stored. Each cabinet has about 25 or 30 gas masks, just a guess, but in that region. One cabinet on each side of the tracks. A bit of maths now, but stick with me. Remember when I said 4 million travellers per day at the beginning? Well, a  train has about 10 cars, each at peak hour holding about 100 people on average. Round numbers are easier. That makes about 1,000 people all going for the 25 gas masks, or 40 people per mask.  I think in the midst of a bomb attack that would be exciting to watch.  But instead, on the video, we see an orderly queue of about 10 people calmly waiting for their gas mask to be handed to them. But then, they all rush for the lift again! NO, that’s wrong. Didn’t you learn anything from the missile attack??

[Another aside.  This actually did happen to me on the Piccadilly line recently. Heading home late one night and someone let off a small tear gas canister. I only caught the trail of it, but that was enough. It really hurt. One guy was in really bad shape. However, in good London tradition, even though the emergency cord was pulled, after 10 minutes or so of everyone milling about, people changed carriage and the train carried on. ]

Last example, on the off-chance that maybe my readers find verbal descriptions of public safety video’s a tad non-exciting. The scene opens with a father and daughter, aged about 4, walking along a near-deserted path in a beautiful springtime park. They walk along happily, hand in hand, idyllic, bucolic bliss, until they meet – An On-comer.  Yes, another man, with a moustache, coming towards them.  Approaching, approaching… and then grinding halt as they almost smash into each other. (Yes, we’re still in the park on the path).  They jostle back and forth for a few minutes, faces getting red, tempers close to boiling point, unable to figure out how to get past one another, when the little girl suggests with a gesture, why not move over to the other side of the path? The day is saved! They can walk on! Oh happy day!  I’m not exaggerating (much). This is a video where apparently people need instruction on how not to bump into each other.

Hundreds of thousands of years of evolution have given humankind remarkable spatial skills originating in the necessity to survive by hunting on the broad savannah.  Try it sometime – we have an amazing ability to predict the trajectory of other objects. If you’re driving a car, at speed, and you can see another car approaching the same intersection as you, you instantly know whether or not you are on a collision course. Minute changes in your speed or direction or the other car (your prey) are processed in real-time and always you know whether or not you will hit or miss.  Not so here. People seem to walk directly at you all the time. Nobody here seems to have this skill. I’ve asked several foreigners about this and everyone instantly agrees – Koreans have somehow missed out on the hundred thousand year hunting lesson on the savannah.

The remarkable conclusion I reach about my lovely videos …. Where is the cynicism in Korean society?  Why am I the only person on the train watching these videos and smiling?

And two links apropos my topic today…

http://www.cnngo.com/seoul/life/female-only-zone-resurrects-seoul-metros-after-19-years-834708

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWcDTEaATxI

*  ok, there's a '95 Porsche in a garage in London that I’ve been trying to fix up but it has been in storage for nearly 2 years and I'm going sell it as soon as I get back.

Korean Anthropology - Women

Conventional wisdom in Anthropology would dictate that the subject of a discourse should be focussed in scope, single-mindedly sticking to the purpose at hand. Never having let lack of qualifications or traditional ideas like ability and experience to interfere with what I wanted to do, I’ve decided the next topic in my anthropological studies of Korea should be…

 

Women

Yes, all 25 million of them. Together.  Not too broad a topic I think (didn't intend the pun).

In one of the first business meetings I had shortly after I arrived here earlier this year, when I went out for lunch with the client, he asked me what I thought about Korean women, aren't they beautiful? Having worked in a number of foreign countries over the years for extended stays, I was familiar with this type of leading question, some kind of male fraternity thing where a business contact sees that you are on your own in his country and feels compelled to introduce you to a working girls agency.  Not really my thing, so best thing to do is backpedal quickly, change the topic. 'Um well, yes they're very nice. I think. Very tall, they seem to have abnormally long legs', I mumbled.  Or something like that, maybe the part about the legs I only said inside my head.  But this time, the reason he asked wasn't at all to introduce me to Seoul's seedier side - he was only looking for an opportunity for his pet rant - facial feature artificial reconstruction. 

He launched into it, " It is all fake! None of it real. All these pretty girls have been to the clinic. "   I can only suppose that he had a teenage daughter who was pestering him to pay for her desired surgery. The rant went on for quite a while, he was quite upset at the number of teenage and twentysomethings who chose to put their faces under the knife.   Reliable statistics are not readily available as all of this happens behind closed doors of private clinics. One source at Leeds University, suggested it might be as high as 30% for selected groups of the population (by comparison, 1% of the population in the UK have done plastic surgery). It is rising in popularity among men but the main voluntary victims are teenage girls and young women.  The advertising is ferocious. The underground stations, billboards, magazines will feature pictures of a fairly gruesome looking, photo-shopped 'Before', looking like the poor girl got her head caught in a vertical press and the glamourous and glossy 'After' shot. The pressure must be enormous. According to my business contact, it is the most sought-after high school graduation gift for young girls. Unlike the West, breast implants (a truly bizarre thing to do to oneself) are not overly popular, the operation of choice is the 'double eyelid' removal. Which I don't understand - I've not seen anyone walking around with a double eyelid, where is it anyway? On the forehead?

But it works. Korea is filled with huge numbers of young women who look exactly the same as images of women in glossy fashion magazines and the ubiquitous advertising.  According to statistics (please refer to www.FormosaStatisticalEvidence.com, a great site where I get all the documented evidence I need, currently under construction) the Republic of South Korea has the highest proportion of women who look like a glamourised advertising image. I hold myself back from using words like 'pretty' or 'attractive' as these are subjective terms and I'm supposed to be attempting to be an anthropologist. But I have to say, as a male, it isn't really interesting. (Advice to my male readers - from past experience, I'd say if you've got a chance to date a woman who aspires to look like a model in a magazine, most likely you are better off to date the original, i.e the magazine.  I don't mean that to sound cruel,   but any relationship where one party is self-absorbed on image and style, may not have much of a chance.)

So what about the other 70% of the female population of Korea?  Are they filling the corridors of industry?  Has the feminist revolution inspired them to break the shackles of male oppression and lead Korean society to a Brave New World?  Well, they've got the coffee shop waitressing covered, cinema attendants, supermarkets are all ok. As part of my work, I've been around to factories and manufacturing facilities, offices both big and small, engineering labs, research labs - and yes, women are there, but they make the tea, greet visitors and stand in as decoration.  They've got bucket loads of them in Admin - teams dedicated to adding up the numbers from 1 to 5 and then others handle the numbers from 6 to 10. Yes, I know - Europe and the UK are not all that much better.   

What happened to women with engineering degrees?  In high school, GCSE's and A-Levels, women excel in math and sciences, year after year surpassing boys (who are sadly addled with so much testosterone during those years they are lucky to be able to pull up their zips let alone pass a physics exam). But then, where do they go? Somewhere between being the top students at science and math A-Levels, they simply disappear - they never make it into the engineering schools. Which means they never make it into manufacturing and design. And if they're not in manufacturing and design, what's left is hairdressing. (Yes a rather biased view against the Arts, Politics, Business and Finance sectors but I'll invite anyone to try to prove the relative value.) 

Before I left for Korea, I was working on a large manufacturing project that took me around several countries in Europe for the better part of 2 years. During the last year I had a student on an internship assigned to me. A young woman (let's call her D, not her real initial) who is reading for her degree in Process Manufacturing. We spent several months travelling around France and Germany together and became good friends (only friends! ).  I wondered to her many times during late night dinners, where do all the women engineers disappear to. She didn't have a good answer. But she admitted that it was relatively easy.  There was no open difficulty, there was no misogynist  machinery stacked against her and, mostly, she was judged on her ability. (Which was considerable, she is really bright and capable).  But almost alone. In her class there are but a handful of female engineers. In western Europe we have no excuse for this. The feminist revolution started more than a hundred years ago and exploded in the 60's and 70's, but then has gone no further.

Another anecdote - back in the 80's I had just graduated with my completely useless music degree but managed to get a job with one of the top high tech American companies that was getting started in Europe.  I ended up (again) travelling all over Europe in factories, offices and so on. Never met a single woman engineer.  After a couple of years, I was asked to go back to the company R&D headquarters in one of the deep south states in the US for a period to work on a product.  I was shocked - well over 40% of the engineering workforce were women.  For heaven's sake, one came out of the NASA astronaut program. Granted, the majority of this was software engineering. But even so.  This was nearly 25 years ago.   In this respect, North America is decades ahead of Europe and Asia.

So where are the Korean women engineers. I haven't seen one yet.  There is a woman, maybe mid 20's, at one of the facilities where I go, who works as a sort of receptionist. There is a large hall at the office entrance, where they have conference rooms and some exhibits. Most of the time it is empty. Occasionally I have to pass through to get somewhere else.  She sits at a desk by herself, nothing but a ledger book and a pen in front of her. Every time I walk through, she stands and bows.  I nod back. I've not seen her do anything else. What a job, huh?

Yet another anecdote. (I realise this is unscientific anthropology, nothing but stories).  There is one Japanese company that I work with.  By pure coincidence, the engineer assigned to my project is a woman. The only one in the company research centre who isn't in administration. She's very good as it happens. But quite shy and withdrawn, uncertain about her English as she is about her abilities. I had dinner last week with the outgoing, retiring chairman of the company - a man with some integrity. He told me about the resistance he had had from within the company over the years about her. Openly hostile, backstabbing, nasty, misogynistic male colleagues. It took her many years to just to get promoted to a basic level well below her qualifications. I think Korea is not vastly different from Japan.  Unless something dramatic happens, there is another 5 or 6 decades of the sole role for women being bowing glamour mannequins.  So yes, rather harsh language but this topic is something that can get me angry.  A waste of human beings, and entirely self-inflicted.

Rather than another anecdote, I'll finish on a proper anthropological fact.  I've already mentioned in an earlier post how few Korean women smoke - less than 5%.  I was told by a Korean woman friend, that not very long ago, as recently as in the 90's, if a woman was seen smoking in public, she would get slapped (presumably by another woman). Now I found this to be a particularly charming story when I first heard it, as I immediately assumed this was some kind of self-appointed anti-smoking police.  I like the idea of smokers getting a good slap. But, on reflection, I suppose not - the slap police are more likely to be interested in repression. 

But, curiously, this small percentage is increasing ! Everywhere else in the world, both male and female, the percentage of the population who smokes is dropping. Except for Korean women.   I take this as conclusive proof that men have no monopoly on stupidity - it is equally distributed among both genders.