How ‘Squid Game’ Reflects South Korean Culture and History

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In the 1970s, Ms. Pyun claimed, a Western-model tracksuit would have indicated that the wearer experienced some level of education, or lived in a significant metropolitan space, where by other Western apparel models, including denim and miniskirts, began to substitute much more modest, common designs of gown. “With a university or company logo,” she reported, a tracksuit “could be a image of envy. Without the need of 1, adult guys would be appeared down on.”

In an job interview with the Korea JoonAng Day by day, the show’s art director Chae Kyoung-sunshine also mentioned Saemaul Undong, or New Village Movement, as a reference. Initiated in 1970 by former President Park Chung-hee, Saemaul Undong was a govt-funded, neighborhood-led social and economic system to speedily industrialize and build the country’s housing and infrastructure.

Outdoors of Seoul and other significant metropolitan metropolitan areas, Korea remained a mostly rural country with thatch-roofed properties in the postwar period of time. Saemaul Undong, which outfitted communities with setting up components to renovate from the ground up, is widely credited for laying the groundwork for the country’s economic increase — identified as the “Miracle on Han River” — even as President Park, a navy leader who enforced martial legislation and was assassinated in 1979, stays a controversial figure.

“My technology kind of jokes about how inexperienced grew to become a image of general public support personnel,” Ms. Shin claimed.

As a baby expanding up in Korea during that time, “I heard the expression ‘Saemaul Undong’ every working day,” she said. Universities and communities would commence their mornings with a daily training drill to the tune of Saemaul Undong’s marketing campaign tune — a chanson composed and composed by President Park himself — with a bootstrap concept that likened actual physical toughness to countrywide and economic electric power. The movement’s emblem, a shiny green flag, images a sprouting yellow orb at its centre.

In spite of increasing the overall standard of living, Saemaul Undong “was a political procedure that directed the rural people to just stick to the government’s directions to lead to the economic system,” stated Yumi Moon, a history professor at Stanford University, and it involved a specific quantity of coercive erasure of cultural traditions.