Wearing Hanbok to visit Gyeoungbokgung palace

by Holly

Last summer when I was in Korea I had heard that you could rent hanbok (traditional korean attire) to wear while touring around the main royal palace in Seoul, Gyeongbokgung. We like costumes and have seen plenty of hanbok in k-dramas, so we were excited to do this while in town.

I had some concerns about cultural appropriation and in general want to be sensitive about giving offense while being a guest in other parts of the world. I didn't research this particular thing too much, but at least the Koreans I have talked to about this activity did not seem to feel there was anything problematic about foreigners dressing up in traditional Korean clothes for a day while touring historic sights.

I think in general Koreans view it as a positive thing for foreigners to be interested in their country and culture. Historically, they have not usually had the luxury of choosing to be isolated and limiting contact with the outside world. Being sandwiched in a perilous part of the world and not as big and powerful as adjacent countries, Korea could not afford to ignore the outside. The outside world (Japan, China, the mongols, Americans, Russians, etc.) frequently demanded interaction whether or not anyone in Korea desired it to be so. In recent history, probably Koreans thought of their country as a smaller player than the giants around it. Maybe this contributes to Koreans feeling a little surprised but open when an outsider takes an interest in learning more about Korea.

In recent years, the worldwide wave of Korean cultural exports has drummed up tremendous interest in the country and culture from whence these products sprung. For instance in Malaysia, I've talked to people who say their teen kids have memorized so many k-pop songs even though they mostly don't know what the lyrics mean. A friend of a friend who grew up with Korean parents in the middle east says when she goes home lately there are tons of people in that country learning Korean and wanting to chat with her to practice. In Malaysia there are Korean stars on billboard ads, imported Korean snack foods at the supermarket, and Korean restaurants all over. In America this is true to a much smaller degree, but all the same I think there is a far higher level of awareness about Korean culture now than there was 10 or 20 years ago. My experience has been that Koreans feel like this is all a bit bizarre, but appreciate the fact that people are interested.

So anyhow, while in Seoul we stayed in an adorable new-build small house executed along the lines of a Hanok, a traditional Korean house.

It was just a short walk from the palace. We made a reservation at the 3355 Hanbok rental shop mainly because it was along our pedestrian route to the palace. We met up with our friends who were staying nearby and walked down to the shop at mid-day.

The two ladies in the shop helped us choose our clothes and get dressed, and we bought add-on hair service for the female members of our party.

I saw a hat that looked like the magistrate's hat in Arang and the Magistrate, so the staff helped me pick an outfit which would go along with that hat. The hat did not fit especially well, but it looked good.

Buster put up some resistance to getting dressed up, but at the end of the day he asked if we could buy his outfit to take home.

Child 1 was especially pleased with her outfit and hairdo.

Child 1 and I went on a guided tour of the palace for about an hour, but the weather was becoming hot even for those of us who have been living near the equator so the littler kids played in a shady grove near the big pond.

One of the coolest things about traditional Korean buildings is the underfloor heating. These builders were putting in radiant heat centuries before westerners even knew it existed! Fires are kept burning by feeding fuel in at small stone chambers in the foundation layer of the building and the exhaust runs under the floors, exiting on the far side of the building through chimneys. I'd love to learn more about how this was actually done; why didn't the smoke come out in the rooms? How often did these flues catch on fire? How was the draft started to keep air moving the right direction? What materials were used to contain and spread the heat in the floor? Below are some very nice masonry exhaust chimneys in the queen's garden which are the outlet for the heating system under the queen's chambers.

The brickwork, masonry, and tile roofing were exquisite all around the palace compound.

After the tour, Child 1 and I went to meet up with the rest of our group. We chilled out at the National Folk Museum for a while on the east side of the palace grounds.

After returning our costumes, we had a delicious dinner at a restaurant around the corner from the rental shop, then the little kids played on the grass on the grounds of a nearby art exhibition institute (which also had a few relocated historic palace buildings).

Exploring Kyoto while dressed in Kimonos

by Holly

We heard about this activity from a friend of ours who was recently in Japan with her son. Apparently a thing to do in Kyoto is rent kimonos and walk around town in them to see some sights. We all love costumes in general so this sounded really fun to us.

I picked a rental shop (there are lots) close to where we wanted to walk around called Wargo Kimono Rental, just around the corner from Gion-Shijo station. They had a wide selection, prices were fair, and they clearly do a lot of volume and have the process down to a science. We bought add-on hair styling for the ladies in our party.

The weather was pleasant and it was surprisingly enjoyable to stroll around the historic Gion neighborhood admiring the buildings, temples, and gardens while dressed in costumes.

While the majority of the other kimono-strollers seemed to be foreign, I definitely overheard quite a few people dressed up speaking Japanese. Domestic tourists? We saw quite a few people who looked Japanese but then spoke American english, so maybe Americans with Japanese heritage coming to see the land of their ancestors. Talked with a few tourists from Taiwan and mainland China too.

I did wonder before we did this how Japanese people feel about foreigners coming to their country and dressing up in costume versions of their traditional clothes. I can certainly imagine some people could take that in a negative way. Would people view this as cultural appropriation? A degrading and trivial consumption of a pastiche version of a culture not our own for our ephemeral amusement?

Our outlook was that we went to Kyoto to learn about and experience some aspects of traditional Japanese culture, and while we recognize it is not our culture, it can be more powerful and more fun to at least partly put yourself into a more immersive experience. We love to go to living history museums in America and elsewhere for just this reason; even though it is obviously fake and all a put-on, seeing how things worked and how people dressed with your own eyes is just a different and altogether better way to learn something new. It is much more fun to wear a kimono than to look at one through glass in a museum. For instance: how heavy are those things? Are they comfortable? How do you pee? Are they hot? If I were choosing, I would like that pattern, etc.

So while I wasn't 100% comfortable doing this, it seemed mainstream enough that we went ahead with it.

One thing I find interesting about kimonos is that while they are structurally pretty straightforward, the fabrics used are so bold and colorful. So many other aspects of traditional Japanese aesthetic strive to be elegant exercises in understated simplicity, but these fabrics are about as flamboyant as you can imagine.

We first walked through Gion district along alleyways and small streets from the shop to the entrance of the Marayuma park complex. In doing so, we passed through a rally of the noisy ultra-right wing nationalists Uyoku dantai.

Like anyone who has spent any time in Japan, I had on previous occasions seen the convoys of flag and speaker draped black vans driving around Tokyo blaring martial music and xenophobic screeds at high volume. But for all the noise, they had seemed like a relatively uncommon activity and had been conducted in an orderly fashion. I don't think I had ever seen any people outside the vehicles on the street taking part in the demonstrations.

As we approached the entrance to the park on a side street, I heard the sounds of the speakers and thought to myself that maybe there were some nationalist vans driving by, but I wasn't sure. As we turned the corner, we encountered a phalanx of riot police with shields and batons lining the street with a huge convoy of black busses and vans slowly crawling past, blaring their usual fare from the ubiquitous loudspeakers. There were people with signs marching as well, and some were having heated words with the cops. Maybe we should have turned back there, but it didn't seem too crazy and there was a large volume of uninvolved persons coming in and out of the park just on the other side. I figured we could quietly slip past the commotion and get into the park. This plan may have worked if we hadn't been dressed up like peacocks in kimonos.

As we walked past, an older gentleman lost it and started screaming at the top of his lungs seemingly at us. He approached menacingly and seemed quite unhinged. I could not tell at all what he was saying; my japanese is extremely limited and I bet the things he was saying were not what I studied for vocabulary in the two semesters of japanese night school I took a few years back. Fortunately for us, two younger guys (probably plain-clothes police) grabbed him one on each arm and dragged him struggling away to another side street where police vans were waiting.

Needless to say this was terrifying for the kids, who have lived a lucky and privileged life thus far such that they have never encountered anything like that. Child 2 in particular took it hard and was crying and wanting to go back to change out of our clothes and go home. Of course this experience made me further question how appropriate it was for us to be dressing up like that at all.

Nonetheless we continued to the park, which was very beautiful, if a bit crowded. There were numerous school groups on tours; one of them wanted to take pictures with us while while practicing a little English.

We also saw what looked like a wedding procession. The couple must have either been important or well off! I wonder how much it costs to book this place as a venue. The outfits of all the wedding party were exceedingly well executed.

All the way up deep into the park, we were plagued by the increasingly distant but still audible amplified sounds of the nationalist rally, which served to dampen our spirits some. Further up in the park the crowds thinned significantly and it would have been a peaceful place for reflection, if not for the sounds of the rally.

We exited out the south side of the park on Nene-no-michi street and walked past a number of other picturesque shrines and temples. Kyoto is chock full of amazing stuff like this; walk down almost any street and you will see some. Here is an espaliered pine tree, with a limb probably 10 meters long.

I have been working on some apple tree espaliers in my backyard at home for about 6 years now. The sustained effort needed to accomplish even the modest results I have seen made me acutely aware of how much unbroken effort across many decades it would take to get this pine tree on some random building on the street looking like this.

One place along this street we decided to explore a little more was Kodaiji temple. We walked partway up the mountain inside the grounds of this temple and admired the beautiful buildings and landscaping. We ducked out of a rain shower under the wide eve of a temple building. While resting our feet and waiting for the weather to abate, we contemplated this freshly raked zen gravel garden.

Buster was excited to see they had a lovely bamboo grove, it being his favorite grass.

We had tea and dango at the tea house on the temple grounds.

We ended up walking about 10km this day. I had wanted to get the wood sandal geta at the rental shop, but they talked me out of it; maybe for the best.

We ducked into a small restaurant on the way back to the station and had an amazing dinner there. Possibly the best beef we have ever eaten; cost a fortune for four small bites but I'm glad we did that at least once. It had a sublime flavor and was almost like eating butter it was so tender. There are many wonderful things about living in Malaysia, but beef is not one of them.

K-pop dance class in Gangnam

by Holly

I spent most of last summer in Korea building industrial solar wafer making machines in an outpost township of Asan. This smallish town is about 90 minutes south of Seoul, and on a number of occasions I had a day off and was able to get up to Seoul by bus to see sights and do some fun activities. Among other things, I took a kimchi making class near Mangwon, carved a name seal with an art teacher, spent the night on the floor of a public bathhouse, went to some korean-english language exchange sessions at a cafe, learned some cake decorating techniques, went dancing at a club in Hongdae, and watched the sun set at Namsan.

But probably the most fun thing I did was to take a k-pop dance class for beginners through Airbnb experiences. We danced to Ddu-du-ddu-du by Blackpink and it was a great way to spend an afternoon. When I came home and my kids watched the video of my group dancing, they said "Dad, we can do better than that!". I said BRING IT. So when we got to Seoul this year for a few days for vacation in June, I signed myself and my two daughters up for a weekday afternoon session of the same class. Son and wife were not interested enough to actually come our for this, so they hung out in our cute neighborhood near Bukchon.

This time we danced to Kill This Love, by Blackpink. The class was smaller and had a higher percentage of foreigners vs. last time I did it, which was on a Sunday. The class format is that you learn the moves for about two hours, then do two takes of a video with a small group of classmates. Here is our group, along with the dance instructor.

Last time, I had a hard time remembering the moves in such a short amount of practice time, so I did some homework before class this time. I was amazed to find that there are tons of high quality dance tutorials for these songs! (example) Even Blackpink has a stripped down version of the music video with just dancing in a studio, which allows you to appreciate just how amazing these performers are at learning and flawlessly executing these dance sequences with flair, rather than being distracted by sequin covered tanks, etc. in the regular music videos. The choreography for the class was simplified vs. what Blackpink does, but a little practice before we went got me familiar with the types of moves in the song and the general way they were strung together.

Anyway, this time the videography was not as clever at disguising our mess-ups and clumsiness when doing our final shot. But we still had a great time together at this activity. Here is our final video.