Comments on: Early Western Perceptions of Koreans: Part III – Of Labor and Laziness

By: Takeshima

Takeshima — Fri, 25 Nov 2005 11:23:11 +0000

Comment deleted for racist content.

Takeshima, open debate is welcome here but racist comments are not.

By: Jonathan Dresner

Jonathan Dresner — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 19:03:42 +0000

This is great stuff, Konrad. Thanks.

By: Antti Leppänen

Antti Leppänen — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 15:13:33 +0000

What the Western (and Eastern) observers most likely refer to is what made smoking the pipe (kombangdae) a marker of status among Koreans; that the smoker had a pipe so long that he needed a servant to light it. As the long pipe was a key component in the image of a yangban, downgraded in the modernizing writing on Korea, smoking would make a fitting issue in commenting the level of Koreans’ backwardness.

By: kmlawson

kmlawson — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 14:16:06 +0000

I can’t agree with you more, and you are especially right in pointing out that, ‘It seems that the observers probably have more in common than the lazy objects of their observation’

The smoking thing puzzles me too, especially since the Japanese commentators who are chiding Koreans for their “poisonous” “addiction” to tobacco as somehow indicative of their hopeless laziness come from a country where tobacco usage is hardly minimal. Indeed, the fall in popularity of the long Korean pipe is followed by the rise of the Japanese cigarette in the Korean market of the late Chosôn period!

By: Owen

Owen — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 13:59:27 +0000

Thanks for kicking things off with a really interesting topic. This thing about ‘laziness’ is something that has struck me before. As you rightly point out, this must be put into the context of the many other cases where whole groups of people have been cast as idle. I think you could find almost endless similar examples from 18th, 19th and 20th century writing by ‘Westerners’ encountering Africans, Asians, people from ‘the tropics’, nomads, hunter gatherers, people in kinship societies, people in ‘despotic’ peasant societies, peasants in 18th/19th century Europe, aristocrats in 18th/19th century Europe and so on ad infinitum. It seems that the observers probably have more in common than the lazy objects of their observation. I think what it points up most of all is the world of wage labour, industrialisation, capital and commerce from which these observers came. To them, anyone who did not conform to the expected behavioural patterns of their capitalist societies (including, I think it it safe to assume, many groups of people within those societies themselves) was considered lazy.

Smoking as an indicator of idleness or dissolution strikes me as similar to the periodic scares in Britain over various addictions preying upon the lower echelons of the working class, from the gin craze of the 18th century to ecstacy and crack in recent times. The strange thing is that smoking in itself doesn’t make you lazy, so it must have been something about the manner in which Koreans smoked that so upset the Japanese observers.