I feel uneasy dismissing this new way of things and harkening back to the more meaningful old days, because the crispy clear meaning back then often stemmed from war. When you had adversaries threatening to destroy your country of course it felt so much more fulfilling to train to be any number of supporting or active roles. Without that pressure, things seem to lose that sharp drive but perhaps we are better off. It is also probably true that we have not evolved to live in a state of peace, and have a long way to go as a race to become accustomed to it.
I’ve lived in Japan—in and near Tokyo—for four decades, and on the trips I’ve made to Seoul I’ve enjoyed observing similarities and differences between the two cities. One of the differences was uniformed soldiers riding the subway in Seoul, something I’ve never seen in Tokyo. Another was what looked like emergency supplies stored on subway platforms; I’m guessing they were there in case the subways had to be used as bomb shelters. (I can’t read Korean, so I might have misidentified the items or their purpose.)
Postwar Japan has done a lot of preparation for natural disasters but has had essentially no civil defense measures against military threats. That might be changing, though. Just a couple of weeks ago, for the first time, the city of Tokyo designated 105 subway stations as emergency evacuation sites in case of missile attacks [1, in Japanese]. This was prompted not only by the continued threat from North Korea but also by what has been happening in Ukraine.
Disaster preparedness is different from feeling threatened. Visiting Seoul rubs off differently than actually living there. For instance, seeing military men on the subway is nothing out of the ordinary to Koreans because military service is compulsory. To outsiders, it may evoke images of heightened threat or militarism. To insiders, it's "oh hey, it's some young men."
I am tempted to speculate that the average Japanese civilian is more worried about the threat of North Korea than the average Korean civilian.
I was mostly thinking of a much more severe war cycle like WW1 or WW2 which have been out of most living people's memory at this point and so don't drive the culture as much any more. Before that it was constant bloodletting. We truly live in unprecedented times.
As a Korean I can tell you we mostly don’t care about their threats day to day. Their missiles don’t even make our news cycle sometimes. But we did care when they were more brazen (like sending specialists to assassinate our president) and now anti-communism is one of driving ideologies of our society, for better or worse. Calling someone “socialist” can be an insult :p
I didn't get that from day to day life, but you'd probably feel it in things like mandatory military service, and the fact that escalators going down to subway stations were deeper than normal.
> When you had adversaries threatening to destroy your country
They have exactly that threat from North Korea. But I suspect that the culture of "rampant consumerism and materialism" is part of how they deal with that (also the cuteness thing he mentions possibly plays a part)
