Korea Unmasked Analysis

The comic, “Korea Unmasked” is sort of a helpful and animated way to understand the

Chinese, Japanese, and Korean culture; the comic first introduces the three main nations and the

value that each of these nations hold most dear or what value they had strived to keep and to

uphold for the entirety of their nations existence. The Chinese hold the idea of “one” to be their

most important value; this nation holds unity amongst other things to be the highest value. The

Japanese believe that harmony, or the preservation of peace and the avoidance of conflict to be

top priority. Finally, the Koreans believe that originality, or upholding the Korean identity is to

be the highest of values. In the comic, you can see why these values
During the beginning of China’s existence, there were numerous power

hungry people who sought to create their own country within China, and with the size of the

country, many people sought to do the same. These power mad individuals created chaos and

endless conflict within the country, and so at one point after years of conflict, the Chinese

decided to unify all the warring factions and to eliminate all those who opposed the unity that

had been created; emperor Qin Shi Huangdi unified china in 221, and more or less spent two

thousand years in peace and unity. China started taking in nations and granting them autonomy

amongst each other, with the condition that they recognize China as its figurehead. Throughout

its history china has shown this attitude and is still evident today. The Chinese take pride in their

culture and think that they have the best culture even if it isn’t the case at all; the Chinese are

also very selfish in that they usually tend for themselves and the comic reveals that China has

been abused by other nations and so had to look out for themselves. this attitude today is still as

strong as ever, even though it doesn’t need to be but it is still embedded within the minds of
Being a peninsula, Korea would often be

overrun or passed through by other nations since it was a natural bridge between island countries

and continental countries, this also meant that numerous nations would leave some sort of

cultural impact amongst the Koreans. And in fact, this was the case of Korea: many cultures

would mix with the Koreans and breed mixed cultural children. Since this problem was so

prominent, the Koreans resorted to strict exclusion of mixed breeding to preserve the pure

lineage of Korea. This would result in them holding tradition and orthodoxy as their highest

value, this would also explain why Koreans seem to be very stubborn and unwilling to change

their outlook.

This comic did teach me a lot and was very entertaining to read. There were a lot of things that

I realized while I was reading this, like: a nation’s attitude can sometimes be attributed to their

geographical location. Like in the case of Japan, who found it wise to not be in conflict with

each other, which resulted in them prioritizing peace amongst other things. Reading the comic

also made me realize that a country’s attitude would be very difficult to change since this