Last updated on August 16, 2024
October was a busy month for fans of the Korean language. On Oct. 9, another Hangeul Day passed without the day of rest its commemoration so deserves.
Instead, the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism sponsored a number of high-profile events in honor of Hangeul. The middle of the month saw the former launch of the King Sejong Institute, the government’s official organization for teaching Korean as a foreign language.
The history of Hangeul Day goes back to 1926, when the Korean Language Society, the leading organization that promoted the use of Hangul, decided to celebrate the day that King Sejong promulgated Hangeul as a way to promote literacy in Korea.
Hangul Day became an official public holiday after liberation from Japanese rule in 1945 and remained so until 1991. During those years, Korea was the only nation in the world with a public holiday to celebrate the creation of a writing system.
In 1991, the government was worried that about the negative effects of “too many holidays” on the economy, and downgraded Hangeul Day and several other holidays to “national celebration days” without a day off.
Since then, every year produces opinion pieces that lament the loss of Hangul Day as a public holiday and call for its restoration. For 21 years, the arguments have remained the same: supporters argue that Hangeul deserves to be honored by a day of rest; opponents argue that increasing the number of holidays will hurt the economy. Few debates in Korean society have been so static.
The problem is that opponents of Hangeul Day do recognize that Korea has changed greatly since 1991. The standard of living has risen dramatically and the manufacturing sector has declined as the service sector has expanded. Korea’s GDP per capita is now approaching that of Japan.
The idea that an additional day off work and school will hurt the economy makes sense in the manufacturing paradigm in which the number of hours worked affects the amount of production. In the service paradigm, the relationship between hours worked and output is vague and greater leisure time helps stimulate consumption.
Indeed, in the early 2000s, Japan started celebrating some Saturday and Sunday holidays on Monday as a way to stimulate consumption. The economy did improve somewhat in the early years of the decade only to dive in 2008 after the near collapse of the U.S. economy. In the end, addition of a few more days off, however, probably had little effect on the Japanese economy; the same would be true in Korea if Hangeul Day became a public holiday again.
Among OECD countries, Korea ranked second to Mexico in 2011 in the average number of hours worked per worker in a year. Though things have changed recently, Korean work places still absorb large amounts of private time in work-related socializing after work. Students are no better off.
A statistic that included after-school cram school classes in school hours would no doubt put Korea at the top of the number of school hours per student in a year. The bottom line is that Koreans are busy ― no doubt too busy ― and could use more rest.
Supporters of Hangeul Day became more vocal this year and benefited from support from the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism. As summer turned to fall, they launched a nationwide signature campaign. On November 1, supporters won their biggest victory yet as the National Assembly voted 189 to 4 (4 abstained) in favor of a resolution calling for the restoration of Hangeul Day. This puts pressure on the Lee Myung-bak administration to make Hangeul Day a public holiday.
As soon as the votes were cast, The Korea Employers Federation (KEF) issued a statement against restoring Hangeul Day citing the negative effects on the economy of an additional public holiday.
Instead, the KEF called for increasing the number of public events that honor Hangeul Day. The KEF’s concern over the economy is natural given the current weak patch Korea is going through, but its arguments against Hangeul Day are anachronistic.
The larger problem with the KEF’s stance is that public holidays are not about economics. They are celebrations of the persons, events, and things that make up a given nation’s identity. Celebrating Hangul Day as a public holiday thus gives Koreans a chance to pause and take pride in their greatest cultural achievement. It will focus attention in school and elsewhere on the unique and, indeed, scientific structure of Hangul. Korean school children need to grow up knowing that celebrating Hangul is important enough to merit a day off from school.
If Hangul is not part of the Korean national identity, then what is?