In my experience most cultural traits either have an underlying rationale or can be explained as an historical contingency that has outlived its original motivation and been transformed into a cultural trait. I suspect that the reason Koreans buy and carry so many tissues is a holdover from the days when public restrooms had no toilet paper. If you were anywhere outside of your own home -- whether at a restaurant, classroom, museum, what have you -- and had to use the toilet, you needed to have some tissues with you. So it made sense that tissues were sold everywhere, and were often given away as business promotions or advertisements.
Toilet paper is pretty much everywhere in Korea now. Toilet paper in public bathrooms is a good diagnostic for how developed a country is, I think. When the economy is sufficiently developed that institutions can afford to give toilet paper away for free, and when it's worth so little that patrons won't steal rolls from public bathrooms to bring home, you can tell the country has moved out of "developing" status.
But people here in Korea still carry tissues, and they are still available everywhere.
Here are some pictures of a tissue pack that I really found amusing. The structure is fairly typical; a folded plastic container containing two tissue pockets.
Front:
Back:
One of the inside flaps when unfolded open:
But I still can't figure out why Koreans use metal bowls and cups to hold burning hot liquids. Can anybody explain this?
What I want to know is what that apostrophe is doing there between Porky and Dreams in the first picture. But I would.
ReplyDeleteTwo explications for the anapostrophism:
ReplyDelete1) Raye and I watched a video entitled "Touring Korea" last night. According to this video, which was made in 1988, Korea is a very high-tech nation. [Yes, we frequently spend our evenings watch ing 20-year old VHS travel videos from the library. The party never stops around here.] Thus, I assume the front cover of this tissue packet is actually a digital interface of some kind (which I'm sure would be much cheaper and easier than printing with ink in the long run, at least for a high-tech nation like Korea).
Apostrophes frequently get altered significantly when going from one computer to another. Sometimes the poor possessive s gets caught up in the shenanigans as well. For example, when I read cracked.com at work (there's something redundant in that phrase), their possessives all come out just as s-less apostrophes. However, if I were to read cracked.com on my home computer (that remains a theoretical manner), then I might see the apostrophe and s in full.
Evidence for this theory would be if you also saw tissue packets saying things like Sparky%%s Reverie. Unless you can prove that such packets don't exist, my theory has been validated.
2) Koreans have figured out that, in English, apostrophes, final esses, and, indeed, anything placed near the end of a word, is really just a matter of optional ornamentation. This is not actually a secret. Most English speakers have been publicly declaring this to the face of the world for quite some time, crying themselves to sleep every night because nobody ever seemed to notice. Now, someone has. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
This theory can also be tested. To test it, simply take a large "magic marker" and proceed to every English-language sign in Korea. Once there, use said marker to add (or subtract) all manners of punctuation, letters, numbers, bells, and whistles to ends of the English words. If the nation is not immediately thrown into disarray as a result of your actions, this is proof that such symbols are mere ornamentation.