UNSRC Korean Cultural Society

From the Los Angeles Times
South Koreans want their sub-TV
In South Korea, subway riders are becoming addicted to free TV on their cellphones. But declining ad revenue and mounting debt may force cellular operators to pull the plug.
By John M. Glionna

February 27, 2009

Reporting from Seoul — Lee Suk-hee can stomach much of the belt-tightening that South Korea’s gasping economy has asked of her, including fewer shopping sprees and more nights eating dinner at home.

But here’s where the 47-year-old homemaker draws the line: Don’t try to take away the free reality TV she watches on her cellphone while riding the subway every day.

“I bought this cellphone to watch television,” she said during one recent underground trip. “I’d feel really bad if it went away.”

It may. Reeling from declining ad revenue and mounting debt from providing the expensive service at no additional cost to subscribers, South Korean cellular operators may soon cancel subway TV coverage that has yet to turn a profit.

Losing underground TV reception may not seem like much to consumers in the U.S., where many are still struggling with cellular dead zones and where a switch to full above-ground digital TV service may leave millions staring at useless analog sets.

But for many South Koreans, subway TV has become a familiar part of their daily routines. Phone companies in this digitally crazed nation in 2005 were the first to launch mobile TV that could be tuned in on phones just about anywhere — even in the subway tunnels deep beneath Seoul and other cities.

Today, nearly 10 million cellular users are watching soap operas, sports and sitcoms on a special frequency dedicated to portable viewing — enjoying it all on larger digital-quality screens and high-tech handsets to improve reception.

In Seoul, for example, companies offer eight video and 10 audio channels on new cellphones. There’s also a subscription-based satellite service, but few consumers have shelled out for it.

But the proposed changes by cellphone service providers would leave users with only static in the subway, and no TV signal until they hit street level again.

“It’s tough. We would love to do this business; however, we don’t have the money now,” said an official for the union that represents TV content providers, who asked not to be named.

He said the South Korean government should help fund the service in a sort of U.S.-style government bailout. “It is up to our government,” he said. “Service on the subway is a public issue.”

Cellphone channel-surfing skyrocketed in South Korea during the 2006 World Cup soccer matches. Throughout last year’s Beijing Olympics, subway riders crowded around the portable TV screens of fellow passengers for a look.

The service is made possible by so-called transmission network gap fillers that relay signals underground. But each of the half-dozen cellular providers says the service has become too expensive.

In a struggling economy, the providers say, the $250,000 annual fee each pays subway companies for the service is a make-or-break amount.

In a competitive market, it’s better to do away with subway TV than ask subscribers to pay for it. The possibility of dropping it all together — once considered remote — is now on the table, they say.

Meanwhile, some South Koreans are watching more than two hours of TV a day on their cellphones, and government officials predict that TV-capable phones will soon be as ubiquitous as camera phones are now.

Young tech-savvy consumers here remain hungry for new electronic gizmos. Research shows that South Korean youths replace their cellphones every 11 months. One in three students sends 100 text messages a day. And 97% of cellphone users purchase vanity ring tones from the Internet.

But as the unemployment rate soars, it’s uncertain whether cellphone users will reach further into their pockets to pay for subway TV.

On his afternoon subway commute, aboard a train crowded with glum-faced salary men and grandmothers with grocery bags, Kim Tae-woo laughed at a variety TV show. The 16-year-old student said it would be hard to get along without a service he has come to prize.

“I’d be pretty annoyed,” he said. “I wouldn’t be able to watch TV anymore. That’s too bad.”

john.glionna@latimes.com

Ju-min Park of The Times’ Seoul Bureau contributed to this report.

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International Herald Tribune

The forests of southern Korea yield a prized elixir
By Choe Sang-Hun
Tuesday, February 24, 2009

HADONG, South Korea: At this time of year, when frogs begin stirring from their winter sleep and woodpeckers drum for newly active insects, villagers climb the hills around here to collect a treasured elixir - sap from the maple tree known as gorosoe.

“It’s important to have the right weather,” said Park Jeom Sik, 56, toting plastic tubs and a drill up a moss-covered slope. “The temperature should drop below freezing at night and then rise to a warm, bright, windless day. If it’s rainy, windy or cloudy, the trees won’t give.”

For centuries, southern Korean villagers like Park have been tapping the gorosoe, or “tree good for the bones.”

Unlike North Americans who collect maple sap to boil down into syrup, Korean villagers and their growing number of customers prefer the sap itself, which they credit with a wide range of health benefits.

In this they are not alone. Some people in Japan and northern China drink maple sap, and birch sap has its fans in Russia and other parts of northern Europe. But no one surpasses southern Koreans in their enthusiasm for sap, which they can consume in prodigious quantities.

“The right way is to drink an entire mal” - 20 liters, or about 5 gallons - “at once,” said Yeo Man Yong, a 72-year-old farmer in Hadong. “That’s what we do. And that’s what gorosoe lovers from the outside do when they visit our village.”

But how? How can you drink the equivalent of 56 beer cans of sap at one go?

“You and your family or friends get yourselves a room with a heated floor,” Yeo said, taking a break under a maple tree in Hadong, 290 kilometers, or 180 miles, south of Seoul. “You keep drinking while, let’s say, playing cards. Salty snacks like dried fish help because they make you thirsty. The idea is to sweat out all the bad stuff and replace it with sap.”

Drinking gorosoe has long been a springtime ritual for villagers in these rugged hills, for whom the rising of the sap in the maples is the first sign of the new season. Some villagers even use the sap, which tastes like vaguely sweet, weak green tea, in place of water in cooking.

In the past decade, thanks in part to the bottling industry and marketing campaigns by local governments, gorosoe sap has become popular with urban dwellers as well.

“I send most of my sap to Seoul,” said Park, who harvests 5,000 liters of sap in a good year.

Koreans may have been drinking sap as early as a millennium ago, historians say. According to one popular legend, Doseon, a 9th-century Buddhist monk, achieved enlightenment after months of meditating cross-legged under a maple tree near here. When he finally tried to get up, his stiffened legs would not work. The sap from the tree fixed the problem.

Yeo said that villagers used to make a V-shaped incision in the tree and insert a large bamboo leaf to run the sap into wooden or earthenware tubs. Then they would carry away the sap-filled tubs on their backs.

Today, villagers usually bore holes into the trees with a drill and insert plastic spouts. A maze of plastic tubing carries the sap to holding tanks downhill.

Gorosoe sap sells for about 2,500 won, or $1.60, per liter. Hadong produces 1.2 million liters of sap a year from its wild maples. Although most sap harvesters here are tea or persimmon farmers who gather sap on the side for extra income, some enterprising villagers have begun planting thousands of maple trees as a primary business venture.

Some rural governments host gorosoe festivals for tourists, with activities ranging from sap-drinking contests to rituals venerating mountain spirits. A popular place for drinking sap is public bath houses, where customers take the tonic while relaxing on heated floors. Picnics are another favored venue.

Promotional pamphlets advertise the sap’s purported benefits: it is good, they say, for everything from stomachaches to high blood pressure and diabetes.

Lee Jae Eung, a naval officer attending the gorosoe festival in Geoje, an island east of Hadong, with his two daughters, said he liked the sap because “it soothes my stomach after a hangover.”
Most of these claims have yet to be substantiated, said Kang Ha Young, a researcher at the Korea Forest Research Institute.

“But one thing we have found is that the sap is rich in minerals, such as calcium, and is good, for example, for people with osteoporosis,” Kang said. “Somehow, our ancestors knew what they were doing when they named it ‘tree good for the bones.”‘

Villagers say the best time to collect gorosoe is when temperatures swing between below freezing at night to around 10 degrees Celsius (50 degrees Fahrenheit) by day. The seesawing temperatures build up pressure inside the tree and cause the sap to flow more easily when the trunk is punctured, preferably on its sunny side.

Now that sap-gathering is becoming more commercial, some environmentalists have criticized tree tapping as “cruel.”

“I oppose boring holes in a tree and drinking its sap,” said Kim Jeong Yon, 46, a tourist visiting Geoje.

Kang says careful tapping is harmless. To ensure this, the national forest authorities recently began requiring licenses of sap collectors and regulating the number of holes they can bore into each tree.

Gorosoe farmers, who were doing a brisk business selling sap to visitors from makeshift stands, acknowledged the need for restraint.

“The trees donate their blood to us,” said Yang Heung Do, 51. “If you donate too much blood, you get weak. So we drill only one to three holes per tree, depending on its size.”

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International Herald Tribune

By Jennifer Steinhauer
Published: February 25, 2009

As the sun begins to sink behind the Santa Monica Mountains and the northbound traffic thickens on the 405 freeway, the hungry refresh their browsers.

After obsessively checking the Twitter postings of the Korean taco maker to see where the truck will park next, they begin lining up - throngs of college students, club habitués, couples on dates and guys having conversations about spec scripts.

And they wait, sometimes beyond an hour, all for the pleasure of spicy bites of pork, chicken or tofu soaked in red chili flake vinaigrette, short ribs doused in sesame-chili salsa roja or perhaps a blood sausage sautéed with kimchi, all of it wrapped in a soft taco shell.

The food at Kogi Korean BBQ-to-Go, the taco vendor that has overtaken Los Angeles, does not fit into any known culinary category.

One man overheard on his cellphone as he waited in line on a recent night said it best: “It’s like this Korean Mexican fusion thing of crazy deliciousness.”

The truck has become a clear cult hit in Los Angeles, drawing more buzz than any new restaurant. A sister vehicle and a taco stand within a Culver City bar were added to quell the crowds, which Kogi’s owner put at about 400 customers a night.

The brainchild of two chefs, Kogi has entered the city’s gastro-universe at just the right moment. Its tacos and burritos are recession-friendly at $2 a pop. The truck capitalizes on emerging technology by sending out Twitter alerts so fans know where to find it at any given time.
Yet Kogi’s popularity and the sophistication of its street food also demonstrate the emerging firepower of this city’s Korean food purveyors.

In the last few years, second-generation Korean Angelenos and more recent immigrants have played their own variations on their traditional cuisine and taken it far beyond the boundaries of Korean-dominated neighborhoods.

These chefs and entrepreneurs are fueled by technology-boom money here and in South Korea, culinary-school educations and, in some cases, their parents’ shifting perspectives about the profession of cooking.

In the last year, new Korean restaurants have popped up on the restaurant strips of Washington Boulevard in Culver City and Beverly Boulevard in West Hollywood. In an area of West Los Angeles dominated by Japanese restaurants, bibimbop has joined the fray.

The Korean taco truck may be the ultimate outgrowth of the evolving Korean-American culture and inventiveness, inspired in part, like so many entrepreneurial adventures, by a bit of desperation.

In September, the chef Roy Choi, 38, who began his career at Le Bernardin in New York and worked as the chef in several Los Angeles restaurants, including RockSugar, found himself out of a job and running out of cash. He had coffee with Mark Manguera, a former co-worker, who suggested that they operate a taco cart with a Korean twist.

At home that night, Choi said, the idea, which had sounded half crazy in the morning, began to make some sense. “I have always been searching for a way of trying to express myself,” he said. A business model with seven partners was quickly formed. The marketing plan included putting someone in charge of social networking, through which Kogi got its initial publicity when the truck first rolled out, two months after the fateful coffee date.

Then there is Choi, who called himself “the angry chef.” He works every night with about five employees who squeeze into the tiny, pristine space, clowns-in-a-car style, grilling meats and whipping up sauces for the crowds who wait, sometimes as long as two hours, for their tacos.

The idea, Choi said, was to bring his ethnic background together with the sensibility and geography of Los Angeles, where Koreatown abuts Latino-dominated neighborhoods in mid-city and where food cultures have long merged. Former Mexican restaurants, now Korean, serve burritos, and Mexican workers populate the kitchens of Korean restaurants.

“We tried to marry two cultures,” Choi said, “with this crazy idea of putting Korean barbecue meat inside a tortilla. We have never tried to make it any more pretentious or different from that, and we wanted to be very simple but delicious.” To that end, Choi said, he buys from the meat purveyors used by some of the city’s high-end restaurants and scours the farmers’ markets for the best vegetables.

The whole operation is part culinary event - the tang of pickled cabbage, the melt-on-the tongue caramel of seared meats, the bite of red chili flakes and jalapeqos - and part party. Choi likes to park his truck at the UCLA campus and outside bars and clubs around town, to take advantage of the street theater.

This week, his team began leasing space in the Alibi Room, a lounge in Culver City, serving up kimchi sesame quesadillas ($7) and hot dogs with kimchi sauerkraut and Korean ketchup. “It has evolved into a socio-cultural thing for me,” he said. “It is my vision of L.A. in one bite.”

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