Seeing How The Other Half Lives; Dueling exhibits of everyday life in Osaka and Seoul show Japanese and Koreans that they are more alike than different Atlantic Edition
The show in Seoul, which runs until May 6, gives Koreans--who are banned from watching Japanese TV--a rare glimpse of Japanese daily life. Instead of focusing on one home, the Seoul museum replicates several, including the tiny traditional house where an elderly Kyoto woman lived for 60 years. Her t...
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| Published in: | Newsweek (International, Atlantic edition) p. 92 |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Magazine Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
New York
Newsweek Publishing LLC
08-04-2002
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| Edition: | International ed. |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Get full text |
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| Summary: | The show in Seoul, which runs until May 6, gives Koreans--who are banned from watching Japanese TV--a rare glimpse of Japanese daily life. Instead of focusing on one home, the Seoul museum replicates several, including the tiny traditional house where an elderly Kyoto woman lived for 60 years. Her thrifty life is visible everywhere in the battered utensils, old electronic appliances and worn-out furniture. The Seoul show also reconstructs the apartment of a 24- year-old college girl studying fashion design near Kobe. (Unlike the [Lees], the Japanese did not surrender all their possessions--nor did they agree to reveal their names.) According to the exhibit, the girl's primary concerns are "music, magazines and fashion," just like any girl in Korea. Visitors to the two shows are struck by the similarities in their lifestyles. At the Osaka museum, Hiroko Hayashi, 43, picked up a child's pair of Snoopy pajamas and neatly folded it. "My kid makes a mess and I clean up after her," says Hayashi. "Mr. Lee's wife probably does the same." Shizuo Kato, a student who has never been to Korea, said that country no longer felt foreign. Both museums feature traditional outfits, books and photographs that illustrate life's milestones, including birth, college, military service (in the Osaka show only) and funerals (Japan's typical Buddhist cremation, compared with Korea's Confucian burial). In Seoul, middle- school student Lee Yoon Jai looked at an exhibit on Japanese salarymen (including subway tickets and aspirin) and exclaimed: "The [Japanese] people's lives are not much different from ours, [and] if they live like us, they must think and act like us." |
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| Bibliography: | ObjectType-Article-1 content type line 24 SourceType-Magazines-1 |
| ISSN: | 0163-7053 |