Crazy for Japan(일본열광,日本熱狂)

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 'Crazy for Japan'(일본열광、日本熱狂）is the book which has kept me buying flight tickets for Japan.  Whenever I feel curious over questions such as why Japanese behave overly(?) humble or why the streets in Kyoto is clean enough say that they are sterilized, I open the book and find clues.  Clues on the book are based on 'Cultural Psychology' which I think is still quite a new thing in Korea. The author, Kim Jung Woon(김정운), studied cultural psychology in Germany and got a doctoral degree (when 'Kim Jung Woon' is googled in Hangul, a member of Super Junior comes out and I guess that in English pronunciation his name sounds quite like the name of the leader of North Korea, Kim Jung Un(김정은)). He claimed that he is the first Korean who majored in cultural psychology and received the degree related to it.

 I enjoyed his books including 'Crazy for Japan.' I thought he is quite stylish as a Korean scholar (even as a middle-aged man) and  has a sort of  freedom spirit inside. More than anything, his books have given me chances to  check and think more deeply over what I have as my own frames of thoughts. It was the same with Japan and Japanese people. His cultural psychology approaches to the Japanese behavioral patterns and social phenomena are quite intriguing and logic considering that he overcame typical Korean authors' approaches of simply comparing Japanese cultures with Korean ones. Most of all, he is creative enough to treat questions that we think are trivial and not worth raising such as;

Why  the girl characters in Manga or Anime show thier white panty slightly

Why there are so many 'Love Hotels' in spite of the fact that Japanese population has sex the least frequently in the world

Why Japanese say "daizyoubudesuka(大丈夫ですか)?" even in the situation that an old grandma slipped and fell down(daizyoubu(大丈夫) means a fit and brave man)

Why Japanese men pretend to hide thier penis with thier towels or sometimes  thier hands even though they don't actually hide it

Why Japanese movies about adultery essentially show trains

Why Japanese men are so obssessed with the sizes of ladies' breasts

Why Japanese Ryokan(旅館) arrange blankets and pillows on the floor in advance for thier customers

Why Japanese books are written to be read not from right to left but from top to bottom

I was curious about most questions above, too. I wanted to overcome the dichotomous thinking over Japan and its people, which I guess is still wide spread in Korea.

Titles: Japan exists(left) and Japan doesn't exist

In the Prologue of the book, Dr. Kim says that Koreans just look down on(or ignore) Japan while Chinese dislike them. He manifests like this.

"Disliking and looking down (or ignoring) are completely different from each other considering the cognition linked to them. Dislike includes recognition of the reality despite having negative emotions to the object(like Japan). However, looking down is denying recognizing the reality. It is kind of distortion of cognitive recognition accompanied by hostile emotion, which leads to serious problems. One of the problems is that it prevents seeing genuine yourself as well." 

He points out the collective obsession to dichotomous thinking and wide-spread attitude of looking down on Japan and Japanese people by Korean population and says those kind of things are not helpful for Korea and its people at all, which I agree. 

I resumed to read his books before the travel and have followed some of the things he did. He says that he could look more intelligent and sexy, when he was reading books in Korean, Japanese, English, and German on the flight. I read books in Korean, Japanese, and English on the flight coming back to Korea( I didn't learn German yet, but am cosidering of learning it because I felt doing four would do better than doing three). I stayed in Japan about a month in order to get my own answers over questions like why Japanese culture looks so unique and attractive to foreign, especially Western population and so on. 'Crazy for Japan' was useful for getting more sophisticated answers. And I am still crazy for Japan!