SuperGardenKorea : Understanding Korea. Growing with Korea.

Talk about K-culture's global success long enough, and the government's role always comes up. The story goes that Korea strategically built its cultural industry decades ago, and that's what led to Hallyu's success today. But run the timeline backward, and that explanation leaves gaps. Korea's cultural talent was already growing well before the government seriously got into the business of cultivating it. Back in the 1980s and '90s, I was the kid waiting by the radio every evening for the pop chart countdown, remote in hand, ready to hit record on a cassette the second my favorite song came on. Korea already had good music back then. No shortage of talented musicians, no shortage of bands trying new things. The good content already existed. What changed was the environment around it. When the Government Controlled Culture It sounds natural today that Korea's government supports K-pop and dramas going abroad. Thirty-some years ago, the picture looked ver...

  In December 2027, a massive cultural event is set to take over Korea. Four of the country's biggest entertainment companies are joining forces on a mega-festival called Fanomenon. But before I even got to the scale of it, the name stopped me. Fan + Phenomenon = Fanomenon. Fan and phenomenon. Why put "fan" front and center, instead of some flashier word like K-pop, or star, or artist? More Interesting Than 520,000 People Judging by ambition alone, the scale is already something. Running December 2nd through 12th at Seoul Arena in Changdong and KINTEX in Goyang, organizers expect 520,000 visitors over 11 days, including roughly 200,000 from overseas. They're projecting about ₩1 trillion (roughly $730 million) in economic impact, with a separate Fanomenon festival planned for LA starting May 2028. It's not just K-pop performances, either. The plan folds in beauty, fashion, webtoons, film, TV, and games — a single event meant to let people experience K-culture in on...

In the last piece , I opened with a story about the driver's license I got 26 years ago, and ended up feeling pretty sober about the numbers. Korea's autonomous driving industry was trailing far behind on the world map. Digging into it out of curiosity, what I found wasn't as impressive as I'd hoped it would be. But while the government was busy redrawing its roadmap and strategy, Korean companies were already out there, each expanding their own turf. So I went and looked at them, one by one. Teaching Cars to Drive Themselves — Hyundai Motor Group and Motional The first place that caught my eye was, oddly enough, the United States. In March 2026, Motional — Hyundai Motor Group's autonomous driving joint venture — launched a robotaxi service with Uber in Las Vegas, using the Ioniq 5. These are SAE Level 4 vehicles, carrying real paying passengers through the city. By the end of the year, the plan is to go fully driverless, with no safety operator behind the whe...

In 2000, at the turn of the millennium, I got my driver's license. It was more of a symbolic gesture than a practical one. In Seoul, public transit gets you almost anywhere, so I never really planned on buying a car. I got the license anyway, because I was convinced the future was about to arrive — self-driving cars, people commuting through the sky. That's what "millennium" meant to me at the time. Twenty-six years later. Drones now deliver packages. Delivery robots roll down sidewalks. Cars have gone electric, and AI has started encroaching on the driver's seat itself. And yet the one thing I was actually waiting for — a car that drives itself, with a person in it — still isn't part of daily life. Meanwhile, I keep seeing headlines about robotaxis picking up passengers somewhere in the world. So where does Korea actually stand? I went looking for an answer. The numbers were more sobering than I expected. The Rest of the World Is Already on the Road ...

While writing my last piece on Korea's food waste recycling rate, I got curious about something else. What about the other stuff — PET bottles, paper, plastic in general? Korea assigns specific collection days for sorted waste, whether you're in an apartment complex or a regular neighborhood (I'm not actually sure if the day varies by region). You peel labels off PET bottles, separate the caps, and set clear PET bottles aside from colored ones entirely. Given how thoroughly this is all sorted, I assumed the country had to be doing a great job. Turns out the real story is a lot more complicated than that. Korea already has a reputation as a "great recycler" Let's start with the part that isn't wrong. In the 2022 Environmental Performance Index (EPI), a joint report from Yale and Columbia universities, Korea ranked first out of 180 countries in the recycling category. The index scores countries from 0 to 100 based on how much of their metal, plastic, paper,...

  At a guesthouse my friend runs on Jeju Island, the instructions for sorting food waste are posted on the wall — in English, Japanese, and Chinese, with pictures. At first I thought, does throwing away trash really need a manual? But once you look closer, it makes sense. Rice counts as food waste, but chicken bones don't. Some fruit peels are fine, others aren't. And you're supposed to drain the liquid out first. Here's the thing, though — it's not just foreigners who get confused. Until recently, I was throwing onion skins in the food waste bin myself. And I've lived in Korea my whole life. So I got curious. Why did Korea end up building a system this complicated in the first place? Not everything that came from food counts as "food waste" The simplest rule of thumb is this: it's not about whether something is edible, but whether it can be turned back into feed or another usable resource. And this confusion isn't just a Jeju guesthouse proble...

  I was watching TV a while back, and a clip came on of some Korean celebrities traveling abroad. They were waiting for a train at a station, and the train just... didn't come. Long after it was supposed to arrive, still nothing. Unfamiliar country, unfamiliar station — the cast members kept glancing at each other, visibly flustered. Am I standing in the wrong spot? Did I read the time wrong? Turns out, in that country, trains running late was just a normal thing. The locals around them stood there completely unbothered. Watching it, I honestly couldn't wrap my head around it. If there's a scheduled time, isn't sticking to it just... the baseline? Yeah. I'm Korean, alright. Two Perspectives, Talking Past Each Other One of the things that seems to shock foreigners most about Korea is this exact thing: speed. In parts of Europe, sending in your phone for repair can mean waiting weeks. In Korea, it's done in 30 minutes. At restaurants, side dishes show up bef...

Honestly, I have a confession: the last piece was basically an excuse to write this one. While digging into what "Baedal Minjok" actually meant, I stumbled onto something I never expected — this company had already changed hands once before. And the app we all open without thinking, it turns out, has been quietly trading for trillions of won. I had no idea, until then, about Baemin's acquisition history. And I was honestly stunned that a piece of everyday infrastructure like this could move for that kind of money. So I decided to actually dig into it properly. This Is Actually the Second Time As it turns out, this isn't the first time "Baedal Minjok" has ended up under foreign ownership. In 2019, Woowa Brothers — the company that runs Baemin — was acquired by Germany's Delivery Hero (DH) for roughly 4.75 trillion won (around $3.2 billion). A company famous for its "We are the delivery nation!" patriotic branding wound up, at the very same...

I grew up hearing adults say it all the time. "We are the Baedal Minjok — be proud of it." I had no real idea what it meant. I just nodded along, sensing, vaguely, that it was something old and something to be proud of. And now I really have become part of the "delivery nation." A few days ago, on a stiflingly hot evening, I opened the Baedal Minjok app without a second thought. Then, mid-scroll, I caught myself trying to remember what those five syllables — Baedal Minjok — actually meant. Nothing came to mind. I've opened this app a few times a week for years, and somehow I'd completely forgotten the original meaning packed into its name. I felt a little ridiculous, googling it right then and there. "Baedal" Originally Had Nothing to Do With Food The "baedal" here isn't the delivery (配達) we all know — the one that brings fried chicken to your door. It's a different, older word: the one in "Baedal minjok," "Bae...