DISQUS

Efren · 1 year ago

It's usually the case though--people who have higher educations usually have more knowledge and are able to advocate for their own health, regardless of race, gender, etc.--but obviously, there are other things that need to be explored to see what the correlations are for smoking and drinking for Korean men.

Moye · 1 year ago

Jen, I'm going for your theory.

gordsellar · 1 year ago

Yeah, definitely there are cultural factors. (Which may exist in other Northeast Asian countries, but I know firsthand in Korean culture they exist.) Drinking especially is a major part of socializing here, is a major part of smoothing over workplace disagreements (among men: women tend to just cooperate on the work more carefully), and the drinking culture here is geared toward excess, to forced drinking-as-bonding, and to required drinking outings at work (to the point where companies that declare they will not hold forced drinking parties are seen as the unusual ones, though that is slowly changing). It's absolutely not unusual to see guys in suits completely drunk out on the sidewalk by 9 or 10 pm. And as a personal note, a medical intern I know had to fake an alcohol allergy to avoid being forced to drink by doctors on nights off (even on nights when she had early morning rounds or ER duty the next day. And needless to say, it usually affects one's grades, as an intern, or one's workplace status.)

A survey last summer by one of the major newspapers, I think it was, apparently found soju to be the main source of caloric intake for working men, (followed by sam gyeop sal and rice, in that order; for women, number one was instant coffee). I don't know how reliable the survey was, but...

Finally, an unmissable link would be the correlation between drinking and higher education here. College students form very strong bonds as freshmen -- social networks that outlast most other networks formed in University, according to some paper I read a while back. And guess which year of university is, as one Korean professor I know put it, "a drinking contest"? (There are reasons for it, of course; the fact that senior year of high school for any college-bound student is a single long gauntlet of study culminating in a college entrance exam means that freshmen year is almost guaranteed to be a time to goof off. But nonetheless, the fact is that freshmen year is when drinking habits -- usually excessive ones -- are not just picked up but enforced, with elder students getting the freshies druunk out of their gourds by insisting they have more and consume it quickly.)

I should note I'm not criticising. I'm just noting the fact. I'm actually kind of studying Korean drinking culture in relation to the Gin Craze in England, and there are a lot of parallels. If I were subject to the kinds of stresses and social pressures that many Korean guys are, I'd probably be right there with them with a bottle of soju in hand.

Oh, and on the smoking: it's widely thought that smoking habits are picked up during mandatory military service, if not before, because cigarettes are *dirt* cheap (and about the only form of consumption possible on the wages that conscripts get) and because, well, everyone else is smoking, so it becomes part of the culture of masculinity. (Links between military service and other elements of masculinity as coonceptualized in Korea these days are also noticeable, too.)