Manu Joseph: How Korean pop culture conquered the world—and can anyone really claim credit for it?

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Before dawn last Wednesday, three sisters in Ghaziabad, all minors, jumped out of a high-rise flat and ended their lives. In the confused explanations that followed, it emerged that the girls were fixated on Korean pop culture and that their family had tried to restrain them.

This column has consistently maintained that the primary cause of such deaths is mental health that can manifest itself in forms often mistaken as ‘reasons.’ The tragic case of the sisters is unusual but the obsession with Korean pop culture is very common in India and around the world. Usually, it is an obsession with no gravitas. South Korea is supposed to be cool, especially to those who aren’t from there.

How did it become cool? There is a theory that the government in Seoul engineered the coolness, starting from the early 1990s, and that the effort intensified under President Kim Dae-jung after the Asian financial crisis left its economy reeling. There is no doubt that South Korea marketed a form of entertainment as a cultural export so that it can enhance the appeal of other products. Still, the role of Seoul in the triumph could be an exaggeration.

I can see bureaucrats taking credit and marketing people flogging the greatest thing they have marketed—that behind every success story is marketing. Then what explains Korea’s undeniable coolness across the world? There are reasons other than government investment. For instance, the dourness of the West and how alien it is to most of the world.

Also, Korean culture was misunderstood by foreigners. Misunderstanding is one of the most underrated transmitters of novelty because when people misunderstand, they assume their own biases as the truths of other people. I