Alarmed by a rapid rise in drug offenses, the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety said Tuesday it supports a legislative proposal to ban references to narcotics in food advertisements as something irresistibly good. “Using drug references to promote food can have a negative effect on children or adolescents,” a ministry official said. “Once the proposed bill gets passed by the National Assembly, t...

KakaoTalk meltdown exposes peril of ubiquitous tech

Film studios inspired by K-pop music videos lure content creators, fans

Test your knowledge of Korea with our weekly quiz on the language, culture, history or anything K-related. -- Ed. Find the answer at the bottom of this page. You may know of Samsung just as a TV or phone brand. But on its home turf of South Korea, it is a household name for many more things -- almost too many. Here, a person can be living in a Samsung apartment, wear Samsung suits to work, eat...

Koreans do not stick their spoons or chopsticks vertically into their rice. This behavior is reserved for funeral ceremonies or for a jesa, a memorial service where food is offered in memory of the deceased. This is why foreigners should refrain from doing this; it would be considered rude and offensive. By Min Byoung-chul Min Byoung-chul is an endowed chair professor at Chung-Ang University wh...

The anonymous professional networking app which requires a work email to sign up is changing workplace cultures around the world

Over 30 percent of international schools in South Korea have been using textbooks that refer to the East Sea, a body of water between South Korea and Japan, only as the Sea of Japan, a lawmaker said Tuesday. As of August 2020, 12 of 38 international schools were using textbooks that solely use the Japanese name. The number of those textbooks with the Sea of Japan reference marked 24, according t...

Shoemaking heritage The interior of Seongsu Station on Seoul Subway Line No. 2 is decorated with shoe-related installations and paintings that explain the shoemaking heritage that runs deep in the neighborhood. Shoe factories began clustering in this part of Seoul in the late 70s and 80s. Before, Geumho-dong had a large concentration of shoemakers, as it was the manufacturing base of Kumkang, o...

South Korea needs to bring in more professional foreign workers to cope with a continuous decline in the working-age population, a think tank said Friday. According to a report published by the Korea Institute for Industrial Economics and Trade, educators, researchers, engineers, artists and highly-skilled workers accounted for a mere 10 percent of last year’s total 406,669 foreign nationals wit...

On Sept. 18, a teenager’s cartoon satirizing President Yoon Suk-yeol won a top prize at a local cartoon contest. No major news outlets gave it major coverage. The work was displayed for three days until Monday at the Bucheon International Comics Festival. It drew some attention, and mixed comments, on social media. Then on Tuesday, a day after the exhibition’s end, the work was thrust into the ...

Places across Seoul that commemorate King Sejong and his creation of Korea's writing system

From a ruler to an academic, a musician and a linguist, King Sejong wore many hats. And the 15th-century monarch who invented Korea’s writing system Hangeul has also been an inspiration for Korean filmmakers and TV drama producers. The most recent of the big-screen attempts to convincingly depict Sejong was 2019's “The King’s Letters,” directed by Jo Chul-hyun and starring none other than “Paras...

Test your knowledge of Korea with our weekly quiz on the language, culture, history or anything K-related. -- Ed. Find the answer at the bottom of the page. October 9 is a public holiday in Korea marking the birthday of Hangeul, the country’s native writing system. Hangeul was invented and introduced by King Sejong, the fourth king of the Joseon Dynasty, in the 15th century, which makes it one...

Here's what to expect at Korean campus fests

This game is called "malttukbakgi," or the piling game. First, the heads of two teams decide which team is the offense and the defense by playing rock paper scissors. Then the leader of the defensive side stands against a large tree or wall and the rest of the players place their head between the legs of the person in front of them, making a horse. The objective of the team on offense is to cli...