CedarBough Saeji Profile picture
May 5, 2023 11 tweets 5 min read Read on X
KOCCA (Korea Creative Content Agency), tracks the cultural industries and releases the latest gov't figures. As of now, the most recent figures are until Dec 31 of 2021. #KOCCA won't release the 2022 figures until next year. So, do you want to see how the industry is doing? #kpop Image
If you look at this you can easily see that music remains a small part of Korea's cultural exports. Even though we see growth year after year, the growth is not happening on the same rate as the growth in games (Wow! Almost 70% of Korea's cultural exports!).
The cultural industries themselves are not all of Korea's exports, and if you compare the dollar amount of these exports below, you can see how much they dwarf music, which still exports under 1 billion USD. This doesn't mean the cultural exports aren't important, they are. ImageImage
The cultural industries are employers of Koreans, and the exports of culture have an outsized impact on global understanding of and feelings about Korea. #softpower #publicdiplomacy
Here's the number of culture related businesses: Image
And here are the size of those businesses in terms of numbers of employees (many smaller companies aren't profiting). Also, the size of employees does not include idols (because of the type of contracts). Image
So, where is Korea sending those cultural content exports? As you can see #China, #Japan, and #SoutheastAsia are the big players. North America is the 2nd biggest for consumption of Korean publishing, and 3rd for games. Europe still is a relatively small consumer. Image
I've basically explained this on the slide, but the biggest issue here is definitely that despite the frosty relations between China and Korea, the Chinese market is pretty consistently showing up for Korean cultural exports. Image
You might also be interested in the sales of Korean cultural contents DOMESTICALLY (how much K-pop, games, etc. made in Korea are consumed in Korea). Here we can see that games do not dominate in the same way. Image
And here is the cultural contents IMPORT data for Korea. Note that Korea imports a total of 1,204,704,000 but exports a total of 12,452,897,000 USD. Not too shabby! Image
And this is where Korea is importing FROM. (I already talked about this earlier in the week, but yes, look at Korea's love affair with North American cultural contents.) Image
I hope that these statistics entertain you, or give you a greater understanding of cultural flows in and out of Korea. The entire report is available on KOCCA's website (in Korean).

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More from @TheKpopProf

Apr 5, 2023
Everyday I see posts in different internet communities from people who are in love with #Korean culture and now want to live (study/work) in #Korea. This is both beautiful and somewhat worrying. It's beautiful that everyone is enamored with #KoreanMedia products, but
Korea is not a fantasy. It's a complex country with good things (food) and bad things (price to buy a home). To have the type of life you may fantasize about after watching some #Kdramas, the best step is to push your Korean language #fluency to the utmost possible.
And, because language is intimately tied to culture, to understand Korean at an advanced level, you need to also study the history and society of Korea. I have a pinned tweet with a bunch of book recommendations, and there are also great open access journals that
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Apr 3, 2023
Just take a bus. Or take three buses. If you don't have enough money to travel in Korea... don't come here? It's well known that it's not particularly cheap in Korea.
Apparently this begpacker's response is that Korea is racist. I'm not saying Korea isn't xenophobic, but young lady, YOU. ARE. WHITE. White people get SO MUCH slack/help from Koreans compared to every other foreigner.
In case any of you are unfamiliar with the idea of begpacker: theguardian.com/travel/shortcu…
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Jul 13, 2022
Just in case anyone was confused:
Korea has amazing activists who are working so hard. Creative protests. Original approaches. Long-standing dedicated fighters for social and cultural change. If you are not Korean, and you want to help Korean society become XXXX, donate.
Over the years I've frequently taught units on Korean protests, b/c protests are so intimately tied to so much of Korea's history: Korean people have continually fought to make their country, their workplace, their community better. As a non-Korean it's my place to support them.
There are groups for migrants workers' rights. There are groups for LGBTQ+ activist issues. There are groups for women's rights. Disability activists. Groups specific to issue XXX and groups specific to issue YYY. For the environment. Against corruption. Runaway kids.
Read 10 tweets
May 31, 2022
One of my totally awesome students wrote today "everyone complains about #Koreaboos but the Korean gov't is actively making them."

And oh my gosh, so much truth.

The Korean government does not see the cringe in the #Koreaboo. They see an enthusiastic consumer. They see
someone who reflects back to them a vision of Korea that they love. It strokes their ego. They do not correct the errors and misunderstandings of the Koreaboo, they *do not care.* They will feed the Koreaboo with exotified elements, or over the top praise of an idol.
The Koreaboo is a manifestation of a fantasy relationship with Korean pop culture (or some parts of it), but to Korean bureaucrats the foreign interest in Korea is already a poorly understood fantasy, to them there is no difference between the Koreaboo and my awesome student.
Read 5 tweets
Aug 25, 2021
Do you spend a lot of time thinking about the intersection of tradition and K-pop? Well, I do. It is because of releases like this. #강민수 #AQUINAS
And of course this powerful video that dropped earlier this week: #StrayKids #소리꾼 #스트레이키즈
Because of government sponsored fight songs like this #PSY #Korea
Read 19 tweets
Aug 24, 2021
The way "do research" has been dumbed down in the present day is... making me wish I had a different word for what I do. Anti-vaxxers and the like with their "do your research" even though their "research" is only finding random information online that agrees with them,
regardless of the accuracy of said information.

Exhibit A: an opinion piece in a newspaper.
Exhibit B: a peer-reviewed academic publication.
Exhibit C: information you collected by going to the source/ creating new studies.

Which one of these is less reliable?
The problem is the anti-vaxxers probably aren't seeing the academic research, and they don't have the training to create a new study-- so they just read newspaper opinion pieces until they find something that agrees with them.

This is why national education spending &
Read 4 tweets

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