Southeast Asia has in recent years been bowled over by “the Korean Wave”, a fad for Korea’s popular culture. Known as Hallyu, it was unleashed as the state’s tool in the proliferation of Korea’s cultural influence and a foreign policy instrument, designed to strengthen the country’s political and economic relations with the Asia-Pacific in particular.

Hallyu comprises of various cultural elements, ranging from films, soap-operas and music to fashion and cuisine. For Korea, the assertion of Hallyu signifies its cultural independence from Asia’s older civilisations, its reconstruction of “Koreanness” in modern garb, and its inclination to take on regional politics through the use of soft power. On the surface, the Korean Wave seems to have been well received by Southeast Asian. At a deeper level however, a sense of discontent amongst some local communities towards Korea is gradually on the rise. Separately, the Korean government has also failed to address any enduring impact of the Hallyu.

A sentiment is being shared that Korea’s cultural messengers, including tourists, businessmen, and missionaries, have largely misrepresented the Hallyu while interacting with Southeast Asia. There are a number of reasons for this.

First, the exercise of soft power has proven counterproductive when left to the vicissitudes of Korean tourists. Undoubtedly representing the few, some tourists have been referred to as “Ugly Koreans,” behaving in a brutish fashion while travelling in the region. Some resorts were said to have banned Korean tourists because they leave their rooms in shambles after their stay. In 2001, in the middle of Indonesia’s Ramadan season, a group of drunken Koreans at a karaoke bar attempted to force waitresses to engage in sexual acts. Similar tales were told in Thailand and more recently in Cambodia where Koreans have been identified in the underage sex industry, as reflected in the report of the United Nations Inter-Agency Project on Human Trafficking in the Greater Mekong Sub-Region.

Second, aggressive Korean Christian missionaries have also diminished the adhesive quality of the Korean Wave. These missionaries have been known for offering assistance and shelter to North Korean defectors in Thailand. The Thai government for its part, has tried to discourage North Koreans from using Thailand to seek asylum, fearing it could disrupt diplomatic relations with both Seoul and Pyongyang. The same also took place in Vietnam where the interference of missionaries in the refugee issue led to a diplomatic incident between Hanoi and Pyongyang.

From another perspective, the spread of Christianity à la Korea has also upset many in Southeast Asia. In the Philippines, where the majority of the population commits to Catholicism, Korean missionaries have zealously sough to attract locals to their Protestant denominations, which are perceived by local religious leaders with suspicion. Korean missionaries tend to use finance to recruit locals and new converts to work together with them in evangelising and establishing churches. However, some have done so at the cost of corrupting innocent people.

Third, bad behaviour on the part of Korean businesses has also provoked ill feelings among the locals. Korean bosses have increasingly become synonymous with fraud, human rights abuse and people who are ignorant of the sensitivity of local cultures. Korean managers have gained a notorious reputation as being among the harshest and most abusive “foreign investors” in the world, with the term “military culture” employed to characterise Korean management practices.

The question of to what extent the Korean government has been willing to use the Korean Wave as its foreign policy tool is crucial. Although this phenomenon has received much publicity at the state level, it remains a low priority in the current government’s list of to-dos. It certainly has not been prioritised in key diplomatic tasks as stipulated in the website of Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Exactly how the government cooperated with Korean cultural messengers in the promotion of the Hallyu has never been explained.

There is also little to suggest that an increased understanding of the impact of Korean culture abroad was ever a major concern of Korean policymakers. Likewise, it is also doubtful that the Korean Wave was originally designed as a policy that promoted national identity abroad, but was intended for domestic consumption and propagated for domestic consumption. Hence, the intention was to perfect Korean cultural products for a nationalistic purpose rather than to use them to win hearts and minds of the Southeast Asians.

Some have argued that the Koreans had become the Japanese of the 1960s-70s, who arrived in Southeast Asia during the height of Japanese popular culture. As the Japanese reinvented themselves to become more responsible and better behaved in light of wartime atrocities in some Southeast Asian states, the Koreans today are partly perceived to have taken the form of Japan’s past notoriety.

Nonetheless, the negative aspects of Hallyu are repairable, particularly since Korea and Southeast Asia do not have any bad history between them, unlike in Japan’s case. Korean tourists, missionaries and businessmen need to be aware of the growing tension that has taken root in Southeast Asia against many Koreans over the years. An education program to guide Koreans on the traditions and other cultural practices of various Southeast Asian nations may well represent a viable policy option to limit the damage already done.