What’s Korean for ‘Real Man?’ Ask a Japanese Woman

Consider Yon-sama, the $2.3 Billion Man. A 32-year-old South Korean actor past his prime in his homeland, he has become, thanks to a syrupy television series, the most popular man in Japan, the object of desire of countless middle-aged women, the stimulus behind an estimated $2.3 billion rise in economic activities between Japan and South Korea. Widely known in Japan during the year of 2010, his popularity may have peaked a when thousands of women in their 40’s, 50’s and older thronged the airport to greet him during December of that year. A thousand of these same middle-aged Japanese women – a group not known for rowdiness like, say, English soccer fans – then ambushed him at his hotel here. They jostled one another for 10 minutes to get a glimpse of the actor; some threw themselves at his car.

Ten women, aged 43 to 65, were taken to a hospital for bruises and sprains. One 51-year-old woman from Oita Prefecture, in faraway western Japan, had her foot run over by a tire. At a news conference later, Yon-sama, sighing several times and never once flashing his, well, $2.3 billion smile, told his fans, whom he calls his family: “I’m terribly sorry that some members of my family were hurt. I just pray that there are no serious injuries.” Fads come and go in Japan, but this one touches upon several deep issues in Japanese society and its relationship with South Korea. In a society gripped by a pervasive malaise, where uncertainty and pessimism fill magazines with headlines about men and women who don’t marry, don’t have children, don’t have sex, Yon-sama seems to touch upon the Japanese nostalgia for an imagined past, and upon middle-aged women’s yearning for an emotional connection that they lack and perhaps believe they cannot find in Japan.

What is even more striking is that they are looking for it in South Korea, a country that the Japanese colonized in the first half of the last century and condescended toward in the second half. In the nexus of power, gender and love, Japanese women may have turned to blue-eyed Americans but never looked twice at a Korean. Nowadays, thanks to Yon-sama, Web sites for young Japanese women looking for Korean men are multiplying. Kim Eun Shil, a South Korean scholar of women’s studies and a visiting professor at Ochanomizu University here, is researching the effects of Yon-sama on “postcolonial relations between Japan and Korea.” In the past, to Japanese, Korea conjured up images of “dark, noisy, smelly,” she said, but now Yon-sama’s middle-aged fans associate Korea with “beautiful things” and look to him as the idealized male.

Please note that this article was written on December 23, 2004. Yon-sama is now 38 years of age.

I dedicate this to Don and to all of the hot Asian men out there!

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