From The London Times
Death is not the last thing on their minds
Leo Lewis
A Korean investment banker friend of mine died recently, but only for ten minutes. He’s a very busy man, you see, and a coffin leaves frightful creases in a good suit.
Since his fake death and elective entombment Kang Dae has been insufferable. He jabbers about how much he adores his daughter, sees the outlines of animals in shapeless clouds, smacks his lips over the “sweet, sweet taste” of Hite lager (think of Kestrel without the class). I hope this wears off soon. I found myself nostalgic for the days when all Kang Dae did was obsess about his bonus.
His temporary demise was organised by one of the many “coffin academies” that have sprung up across Korea. The ten-minute taste of death is tailored to Koreans’ loony blend of masochism and sentimentality. You write saccharine letters of farewell to loved ones. You craft a pithy eulogy. You blub about the cruel waste of a life. You sit through a drab sermon on the preciousness of the soul. You pay your 20 quid. They box you up.
The idea — and it has been tediously successful in Kang Dae’s case — is to make you think deeply about the important things in life. Tragically, the Korean corporate sector has bought into this claptrap: Kyobo, a large insurance company, now stipulates that all of its staff must “die” at some point in their careers.
The moment when the coffin lid is nailed into place is, for aficionados, an exquisite agony. Others burst into tears and hammer for release from the suffocating darkness. There is even a whiff of competitiveness: Kang Dae felt that his self-penned epitaph (“In this tomb lies a true Korean”) outshone those of the other fake corpses in his group. “More ... well, you know, sort of cool and noble,” he says, taking a swig from his tankard of Hite and looking dreamy.
Or, as Bela Lugosi’s Count Dracula put it rather more elegantly as he clambered into his coffin: “To die, to be really dead, that must be glorious!”
Mobile messaging
I take a swift tour of the showroom at Samsung’s gleaming new headquarters in Seoul. The old place was guarded by chisel-jawed commandos with black flak jackets, mirror sunglasses and a smouldering hatred of the world. But they have evidently gone for a slightly softer image, and the visitor is now greeted by smiling lovelies and a screen full of ghastly brand values like “friendship” and “togetherness”.
What has not changed, however, are the desperately silly mock-ups of future technologies. It is unfair to single Samsung out: all electronics companies will, at some stage of the tour, direct you to “the living room of tomorrow”, where clean, well-behaved children thoughtfully bring their mothers a cup of tea on an anti-gravity tray before the family collapses in hysterics at some joke the janitor-bot has told.
Samsung’s version includes a “café of tomorrow” where, for reasons that are not explained, everyone wears white and neither customers nor waiters have any sleeves. But the star attraction is the future driving experience: a man is told that his wife is going into labour (apparently they don’t have a gadget for that). He rushes to his Minority Report-style car and screeches off to the maternity ward. Disaster! Even in the future, the Seoul traffic is a bitch. Sweating with nerves, he types out a text message saying “wife having baby!” and presses “send”. The words instantly appear on the internal displays of all the other cars in the immediate vicinity. The traffic parts like the waters of the Red Sea and he speeds off to fatherhood. Ahh!
I’m no futurologist, but I’m pretty sure that if the next decade gives us the ability to send a terse verbal message directly to the windscreen of fellow road-users, things could get out of hand. If I were driving in Seoul in 2020, I would almost certainly have “Michinnom!” on speed-dial.
Double bonus
It turns out that Kang Dae’s newfound love of planet Earth is not only caused by his mind-bending brush with the afterlife. He works for one of those Wall Street banks that required a mighty wodge of taxpayers’ money to stay in business and is now cheerfully paying out bonuses to scoundrels like him.
But, Kang Dae tells me with a glint of triumph, he has somehow convinced his eagle-eyed wife that bonuses this year will not be paid. Along with a like-minded gang of schemers from the trading floor, he has persuaded her that the bank is holding back the money “for sensitive political reasons”.
She watches the news, and can perfectly grasp why her husband’s firm might want to be a little humble and circumspect.
Kang Dae, meanwhile, has readied a secret account into which he plans to funnel the loot. I have never seen him so happy. For the first time since he married, the entire pot will be his to squander alone.
He was careful not to tell me what he was getting in the way of cash, but I imagine it will cover the cost of a weeping squadron of professional mourners bewailing his next phony death.
Death is not the last thing on their minds
Leo Lewis
A Korean investment banker friend of mine died recently, but only for ten minutes. He’s a very busy man, you see, and a coffin leaves frightful creases in a good suit.
Since his fake death and elective entombment Kang Dae has been insufferable. He jabbers about how much he adores his daughter, sees the outlines of animals in shapeless clouds, smacks his lips over the “sweet, sweet taste” of Hite lager (think of Kestrel without the class). I hope this wears off soon. I found myself nostalgic for the days when all Kang Dae did was obsess about his bonus.
His temporary demise was organised by one of the many “coffin academies” that have sprung up across Korea. The ten-minute taste of death is tailored to Koreans’ loony blend of masochism and sentimentality. You write saccharine letters of farewell to loved ones. You craft a pithy eulogy. You blub about the cruel waste of a life. You sit through a drab sermon on the preciousness of the soul. You pay your 20 quid. They box you up.
The idea — and it has been tediously successful in Kang Dae’s case — is to make you think deeply about the important things in life. Tragically, the Korean corporate sector has bought into this claptrap: Kyobo, a large insurance company, now stipulates that all of its staff must “die” at some point in their careers.
The moment when the coffin lid is nailed into place is, for aficionados, an exquisite agony. Others burst into tears and hammer for release from the suffocating darkness. There is even a whiff of competitiveness: Kang Dae felt that his self-penned epitaph (“In this tomb lies a true Korean”) outshone those of the other fake corpses in his group. “More ... well, you know, sort of cool and noble,” he says, taking a swig from his tankard of Hite and looking dreamy.
Or, as Bela Lugosi’s Count Dracula put it rather more elegantly as he clambered into his coffin: “To die, to be really dead, that must be glorious!”
Mobile messaging
I take a swift tour of the showroom at Samsung’s gleaming new headquarters in Seoul. The old place was guarded by chisel-jawed commandos with black flak jackets, mirror sunglasses and a smouldering hatred of the world. But they have evidently gone for a slightly softer image, and the visitor is now greeted by smiling lovelies and a screen full of ghastly brand values like “friendship” and “togetherness”.
What has not changed, however, are the desperately silly mock-ups of future technologies. It is unfair to single Samsung out: all electronics companies will, at some stage of the tour, direct you to “the living room of tomorrow”, where clean, well-behaved children thoughtfully bring their mothers a cup of tea on an anti-gravity tray before the family collapses in hysterics at some joke the janitor-bot has told.
Samsung’s version includes a “café of tomorrow” where, for reasons that are not explained, everyone wears white and neither customers nor waiters have any sleeves. But the star attraction is the future driving experience: a man is told that his wife is going into labour (apparently they don’t have a gadget for that). He rushes to his Minority Report-style car and screeches off to the maternity ward. Disaster! Even in the future, the Seoul traffic is a bitch. Sweating with nerves, he types out a text message saying “wife having baby!” and presses “send”. The words instantly appear on the internal displays of all the other cars in the immediate vicinity. The traffic parts like the waters of the Red Sea and he speeds off to fatherhood. Ahh!
I’m no futurologist, but I’m pretty sure that if the next decade gives us the ability to send a terse verbal message directly to the windscreen of fellow road-users, things could get out of hand. If I were driving in Seoul in 2020, I would almost certainly have “Michinnom!” on speed-dial.
Double bonus
It turns out that Kang Dae’s newfound love of planet Earth is not only caused by his mind-bending brush with the afterlife. He works for one of those Wall Street banks that required a mighty wodge of taxpayers’ money to stay in business and is now cheerfully paying out bonuses to scoundrels like him.
But, Kang Dae tells me with a glint of triumph, he has somehow convinced his eagle-eyed wife that bonuses this year will not be paid. Along with a like-minded gang of schemers from the trading floor, he has persuaded her that the bank is holding back the money “for sensitive political reasons”.
She watches the news, and can perfectly grasp why her husband’s firm might want to be a little humble and circumspect.
Kang Dae, meanwhile, has readied a secret account into which he plans to funnel the loot. I have never seen him so happy. For the first time since he married, the entire pot will be his to squander alone.
He was careful not to tell me what he was getting in the way of cash, but I imagine it will cover the cost of a weeping squadron of professional mourners bewailing his next phony death.
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