Here's a question for you: what is the indicator that best represents the OPENNESS of one country? Music? Cuisine? Or law?
Growing up in the country of confucianism, I spent long time thinking about the best indicator that depicts the openness of South Korea. Fashion sounded good in the beginning, but I soon realized that rapid development of social media and the extreme generation gap between Gen-Z and others made it difficult for fashion to be an accurate indicator. I tried to come up with the best answer that explicitly shows the level of openness, but it was not easy as I expected. However, few weeks ago, I came up with my final answer in a very unexpected manner when I went to a supermarket and listened to a conversation between a mother and a son.
I was bored waiting in a long line and my ears hurt so badly since I was wearing sunglasses, face mask, and my Airpods altogether for so long. So I turned the music off and opened myself up to the rest of the world and started listening to the conversation between a little boy and his mom who were standing right in front of me. I do not remember the exact context of their chat, but one word used both by the boy and his mom immediately caught my attention: 틀리다 (Teul-li-da) which means 'wrong' in Korean.
There are two words in Korean which people always get confused with: 틀리다, meaning 'to be wrong', and 다르다, meaning 'to be different'. Have you ever played the 'spotting-difference game'? The one that asks you to find the differences between two seemingly-identical pictures? More than half of Koreans call it 'spotting-wrong game'. When people say lemon and lime are different, they occasionally say that lemon and lime are '틀리다' instead of '다르다' because it is a very old habit of Korean language. They do not do it intentionally, I can assure you, but it is a highly common habit which you can spot in every five minutes around you if you are talking with native Korean speakers.
So these two words literally enlightened me in the middle of my journey to seek the best indicator for South Korea's openness. The fact that 틀리다 and 다르다 are used in such manner and that the word 'wrong' is used more often, in my opinion, reveals that Korean society is pretty immature in distinguishing difference from wrong.
Confucianism was and still is a dominant stream of thought in Korean culture. Because it dominated the way how people live and think, certain ideals of confucianism began to infiltrate the Korean language and this, this case of 틀리다 and 다르다, is one of the best examples. Confucianism values uniformity and stability. Unchanging patterns and standards are comforting under confucianism while innovation and drastic changes brought by open minds are considered threats to social order. Confucianism will praise you if you quickly blend into the pre-existing group, not if you determine to revolutionize it (even with good intention). Being different, according to Confucius, is most of the time bothersome and dangerous since it will bring changes at some point; in other words, there only is a very thin line between being different and being wrong under confucianism.
So, for Koreans, perhaps it was natural to confuse 틀리다 and 다르다 as their parents, grandparents, and the entire society were perceiving difference as something wrong or undesirable. Even though time has changed and the new generation is definitely more anti-Confucius compared to their ancestors, language, as it always were, still contains the legacy of those old days.
And this is why I decided to choose 'language' as the indicator that depicts South Korea's level of openness. I will continue my journey in order to prove my theory with more examples and perhaps will come back with another article called <Openness II> since my theory was defeated by some other indicator. Until then, please let us know your thoughts. As always, we are more than delighted to listen to your opinions!