I’ve seen a lot of changes in Korea in my 60 years here. Aside from the country's dramatic economic growth, I’m interested in looking at the family and how it has been impacted by the rapid changes in Korean society.
When I first came to Korea, I was impressed with two things: families and the educational system. Korea was one of the poorest countries in the world in 1965, after being exploited by the Japanese, divided against its will and recovering from a senseless war. Yet families were strong and there was a lot of pride in family and tradition. Part of the family tradition and one’s identity was the “jokbo” or Korean genealogical records outlining family history. I was impressed with how families did everything they could to ensure that the younger generation has access to education.
These two values of family and education have shifted between then and now, and are likely shifting again as we go into the future. In 1965, it was still important to have a large family, but sometime in the 70’s, the social paradigm shifted and it became important to control population growth. Everyone — and that means everyone — got behind the slogan “have only two and raise them well” to reduce family size.
I’ve commented elsewhere that this was a kind of brainwashing. It was so effective that one rarely sees any family from the 70s through to the new millennium that did not have two children. Part of the problem became the throwaway phrase at the end of the slogan — “raise them well.” That alone is not the reason for today’s overarching materialism, but it contributes to it.
I know a few of the families that chose not to follow the social norm. One family that I knew well had eight children. When the mother took her little brood to the store with her, people would ask if she were watching the neighborhood children. She’d respond that they were all hers only to meet with the questioner’s attitude shifting from approval to critical as if they believed she was going to ruin the country and cause everyone to starve to death. Nowadays, that family and the other families who refused to be have fewer children are considered social heroes that are saving the nation.
But the nation has gone one step further. Now, the birth control movement has become the “don’t get married” movement, and the “get married but don’t have children” movement or the “one is enough” movement. Korea's fertility rate fell to a historic low at 0.65 in 2023, and Seoul, the paragon of all the social ideals in the country, was recorded at 0.55 the same year.
When I first began to study Korea, its value and family systems, I discovered jokbo. I wrote one of my master’s papers on the Korean adoption system. Traditional adoption in Korea was a matter of handing over children to members of the extended family. It meant taking a son from one place in the jokbo and moving him to another. A man without a son would find a clansman who had more than one son, and the man without a son would adopt the other son as an heir who would inherit his property and perform ceremonies after his death.
Well, that works if you’ve got extra sons. In modern Korea, that paradigm has shifted. There cannot be enough “heirs” to cover all the ancestors, so who goes without ceremonies after their death? It turns out, everyone: Koreans aren't doing ancestral rites any longer. Yes, there is some degree of carrying out the tradition — but it is dying. A young man I met has been taking pictures over the years of tables of food offered to ancestors. The offerings are getting simpler and simpler, symbolizing the declining interest in such ceremonies. There was a time when almost everyone performed ancestral ceremonies. Now, there are fewer and fewer who do.
Where is the Korean family going? If the new Korean society has its way, opening the workforce and other social organizations seeking to advance women's rights, how will the family be different in the future? One thing I see on the horizon is a new view of jokbo. Jokbo will continue to exist in the future, but like so much in modern Korea, the paradigm will shift and jokbo will be like that in the West — equal for men and women. Traditional jokbo will become resources for people to look up their ancestors, both male and female.
When people talk about their ancestors in the future, it will no longer be only those who have the same surname. This will include all with whom they share DNA and their grandmother’s lines as well. Genealogical research will expand and be more like the eight great, great grandfathers’ charts that Korea used before they were swept away by the male dominance of the last three centuries.
Source: Korea Times News
