One of the oddest phenomena in Korea today is the nostalgia for a past that never existed in Korea. We see in advertisements little bits of memorabilia from a distant age in America, but that has no place in Korea today. In this first of these two pictures, we see a few fascinating artifacts that have little to do with anything Koreans might remember from childhood.
The second image is even more startling. I remember from my own childhood such classic VW buses. They are associated closely for Americans with the greening of America in the early 1970s after the terrible political conflicts of the 1960s. But Koreans have no personal memory of these buses, which were not sold in Korea as far as I can ascertain. It seems a special mythology of Korea has been created as cultural variation of the United States and bits of a rather alien origin have been imported into that Korean imagined past.
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Emanuel Pastreich