A serious thing I was thinking about was ‘frugality’, which is quite related to the places I am going to visit in Japan. Japan had gone through a very long depression, which nowadays is called ‘Lost 25 Years’. The long depression changed everything from trivial spending patterns to the pursuits people have in their life. Japanese drive smaller cars to cut spending on transportation than the ones typical Koreans drive even though real GDP per capita of Japan is about 1.5 times higher than Korea. Japanese pursue more environmental friendly lifestyles adopting stricter practices of recycling than Koreans do.
Korea also has been getting through a long depressive economy since the financial crisis of 2008 and it seems that it won’t end soon. It has been 10 years. But except for some imported terms such as ‘New Normal’, which was suggested to describe long and unending depressive economic situation throughout the world, no specific term to clearly depict the last 10 year economic downturn of Korea was not coined yet.
There could be various reasons for that, but one of them seems to be quite cultural. Professor Yoo Hong Jun who is renowned for his series of field trip books of Korean cultural heritagestitled ‘My Diaries for Field Trips of Cultural Heritages(나의 문화유산 답사기)) pointed out the strength of Japanese to conceptualize various kinds of phenomena. When there is an array of phenomena seen clearly and distinctively, Japanese tend to invent a simple but clear term which represents those serial and related phenomena. Simply speaking, they like to define things (I am still figuring out the origin of their favor of defining).
Of course, there are pros and cons for defining. It has pros in terms of that people can be stimulated swiftly to change their cognitive dull understanding of the situation to the sharp one. After the term of ‘Lost 10 Years’ was recognized and used nationwide, most people in Japan changed their cognitive understanding of the economic situation and even their own individual economic stance for the future. They tried to save more money to prepare for the unpromising future. Although no one can’t say Japanese economy has escaped from the depression, overall Japanese have more savings than Koreans and are better positioned to retire more smoothly. How about Korea? The most risky factor that could pull the Korea economy to the ground is the dangerously high debt level of individuals. The total amount of household debt has reached 1,400 trillion won and the saving rate has been quite low. But Koreans are still maintaining their spending patterns they made when the economy was booming. They change their cars more frequently(it got slow down recently). They even prefer bigger and more luxurious cars. They still buy apartments without deep consideration over the perspective of financial risks such as slow or abrupt prices falling. What if a term which describes the last 10 years was introduced?
Cons can be suggested. The origin for the cons is the nature of simplicity of a term. A term makes a series of phemonema recognized clearly, but it doesn’t explain the phemonema 100%. Surely, the overall economic situation of the Japanese economy has been in or closer to depression, but there were upturns shown. Moreover, for the 25 years, Japansese got through harsh structural change from manufacturing based one to manufacturing and service integratively combined one. The competitiveness of the IoT was the result of the industrial structural change. However, the ‘Lost’ in the term ignores those positive aspects of the term of '25 years' and emphasizes only negative ones.
Then, is it necessary for Korea to have a term to describe the last 10 years’ economic flow? I would say yes. The last two administrations have reiterated the downturn of the world economy after 2008 financial crisis, and shed their mal-practices. Moreover, they directly and indirectly oppressed the civil movement to evaluate their economic policies and consequences politicizing it as a trial to bother the administrations’ sincere practice. The process to get the era a name is the one that gives Koreans a critical opportunity to figure out what happened for the last 10 years as a big pattern and find a way to get out the trap we think we have been stuck in. Let’s define it!
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