ITAEWON CLASS EXPOSES UGLY TRUTH OF KOREA | Kdrama Deep Dive

what is up ducks quack quack welcome to kdrama deep dive where we dive deeper into the hottest kdramas on this episode we're gonna deep dive into eat a lone class originally based on the webtoon series and is a current mega hit in Korea and worldwide through Netflix today we're going to talk about the certain themes and scenes within the drama that might be interesting to non-koreans now these will be today's topics about kdrama eating class also regarding life and business in detail and I've interviewed special guests to actually have experience of that field to look forward to that let's leave the sensitive topics to the end and start on some general background knowledge first let's talk about the drama's background ito on itself now people who haven't been to Seoul or Korea might not know anything about eat owns so I'm gonna assume that you guys have zero knowledge about it well here I am in front of the actual filming sites of the drama which proves that the place actually exists Itaewon is one of the most popular districts in Seoul probably equivalent to Kangnam in Hongdae is it really that international like it is in the drama though yes Ito most many pubs clubs and cuisines that vary in style from American Indian Pakistani Turkish Southeast Asian Spanish Mexican German Italian French and more it's known that approximately 20% of the whole residents in this area are foreigners on a Friday or Saturday night I'd say that more than 30% of the whole population there are foreigners also most of the embassies are located in this area it also has custom retailers that sell big sized clothes above 2x large that cannot be found anywhere else in Korea then why is it so international it's mainly because of the US troops that were stationed there right next to eat olan is the Yongsan US military base the u.s. occupied the military base that was formerly used by the Japanese after they retreated in 1945 also geographically Yongsan is in the center of Seoul and right in front of Han River which means it served as the entry gate to the palace and the capital city so even in the old days this area was populated by many non Koreans the Hamilton hotel which appears a lot in the drama is the center and landmark of Ito because it's right in front of the subway station the Halloween parties are a signature of eat owned as well since Koreans traditionally don't celebrate Halloween all who wish to do flocked to this area and it literally becomes a nightmare I promised myself I'd never go back to eat ona again on Halloween and second do you remember when said oh he moves his pub to a big that area is called kill me donkey and it's located right next to each other but you have to go up and down a hill walk like ten more minutes to reach it also the alley itself is an uphill so business-wise it's not actually the best place to do a business however company done kill was an exception because suddenly hip cafes pubs and restaurants started popping up in this area as young business owners open up their businesses in that area as social media became bigger areas like these became more popular because they were close to Main districts but less crowded and quiet and also him after that many other places like this such as Tommy donkey which is next to the time she looted tower started to pop up with the same characteristics as coma donkey and the leaden video tag name however the downside of these places are that once the hype dies out hypnotist ale the business overall declines as well so currently call me donkey is pretty much dead during the weekdays and a little better in the weekends that's why you could see the honey night pooja struggle in the drama because of the location also in the drama you could see Khun soo the second son of chunga company proposing to the company to buy out a whole street and make it into one of the next company done gills and sell the buildings once the prices hit the peak before the downfall third what does it take to own a business in detail and how high is the rent also what does it like to live in e tone let's get some answers from actual experts feeding international and exciting nightlife international and fibers so you never get bored key words freedom everybody is so chill down it's open to everybody have one did I feel really free the houses of my old residential areas the buildings are not really in good quality the old buildings have a long story so that's an interesting one no I was given the opportunity to partner up with a friend of mine and I was when I first opened up my first bar and now amber is my second you tell I was always known as the melting pot of Korea all the different foreigners and cultures come together being someone that's from America you just naturally migrated over here yes first and foremost his language is a barrier following the different laws each and every year it changes one thing in particular about utility because it's the foreigners melting pot it's also a very transient part of Seoul most of the foreigners are teachers or military or they're here temporarily like your regulars they eventually leave and you have to recreate that kind of comfort with each and every person actually relate to it a lot obviously aspirations to have successful business detail on his mentality when it comes to writing a business and the ethics behind it team is the most important thing do you have in place to represent your brand and your image he's doing it the right way timing is everything we want to rush everything along and see me salsa very quickly but when it comes to running a successful business it takes time a lot of hard work that goes into that if the bill from the ground up the approach of a business and running a franchise even got a count your steps once you have a lot of money it becomes a lot more easier to just make more money maybe Taiwan is the spot these days it is definitely prevalent here any time you have your big players that pretty much continue to be successful and what they do because they have the money to back them up it's really hard to compete on that level as a small business owner and Red's sometimes becomes an issue these days for some reason in detail on the rent it continues to grow even though the economy is going down word on the street they're trying to gentrify tell us the building owners is deciding to either spike off the retsoor afford it anymore and they kicked you out or you know you just gotta pay think about what to me done was at one point to me that was one of the hottest places to go these these if you roll down Johnny down gear it stays a lot businesses shut down hopefully fingers crossed Etan classes putting turned me down and how long till I'm back more than that and forth remember the number one pub in Itaewon changa puta and how the evil president made his success by starting on under the bridge pocha then what is a puta puta is short for Putin mata which is an old-fashioned streetcar bar people get food like fish cakes topokki and Sunday as an Jew Koreans always have to eat something while drinking and that food is called Anju that's why food quality is really important for the pub business in Korea and in the drama many of these old fashioned pocha concepts bring nostalgia or a retro feel which appeal to all demographics thus the concept has been borrowed by major big pubs in Korea where a big pub has all kinds of small food stalls in one place you can order whichever style of anjou you want and drink as much as you want this porch a style pub is what you see in the drama as the Changa pub and many similar places exist which are extremely popular in Korea among young generations another fun fact weirdly enough some of these pocha pubs have a reputation as hunting spots which means dudes go around tables and try to make instant matches and drink with women nowadays poachers with the sole purpose of hunting activities are popping up with technology based systems of hunting just like the first son Kang gunam proposed as an idea in the drama however as I said hunting is mostly enjoyed by people in their early or mid 20s so it wouldn't be a suitable concept for a place like eat a land that has a relatively higher age demographic fifth let's talk about huge food franchises and companies like Jiang Corp Korea is special in that it has many big food companies that have several franchises under the mother company CJ food would be one huge company it has Buffay franchises to cafes Korean food noodles BB q grills Chinese a food court business and on these food places owned by a huge conglomerate like CJ are usually trustworthy because they have a certain high quality standard in food sanitation and also have a joint point system where you can interchangeably collect and use points among other Brants personally when I saw eat own clash chunga Corp reminded me of a specific food company in Korea called bubble and Korea bubble and Korea was founded by this guy called pickle one who started from the bottom from scrap managing several restaurants on his own and eventually made his whole food brand empire Peck is now a TV celebrity and appears in all food-related shows and has his own multi-million subscriber YouTube channel as well his company Taborn has many of Korea's favorite food brand ad buried from bbq's Chinese noodles beer pubs beauty about pasta fried food beef soup cafes and more over porches while all his food chains are extremely popular his pocha brand - pooja is a name out there in all young and busy districts where people go not to only drink but enjoy the Anju hanshan pooja is well known for good food and especially spicy chicken feet and six I guess many of you might have been shocked of the corporate culture in the drama on how scary it is and how the father and sons get to rule and inherit the company and owning all these multiple food brands in one company well that doesn't apply only in the food business Korea has a unique conglomerate driven economy and the dependence on it is really high as well there are many conglomerates like these and these companies are specifically called Tabo companies Tabar means a big company that is owned by a certain family and relatives that have monopoly over the market the biggest example would be Samsung Hyundai and LG for example Samsung has Samsung Electronics who is owned by ego Nene and matched by his own son ejo and then we have Samsung C&T that has construction fashion Hotel Resort and theme parks the fashion and hotel sector is managed by EBU Jin the daughter of Egon he and after that there are others like Samsung insurance capital investment heavy machinery engineering biologics food foundations blah blah blah and then there are affiliations of Samsung like Shinsegae a-- the biggest department store and multiplex business in korea and also CJ which is the biggest food and entertainment business in korea these affiliation groups are technically separate from Samsung itself but they originate from the founder of Samsung and also the current owner families are all married to each other or have some kind of relative relationship so it would it be an understatement that Korea is basically under Sampson's control this applies to all the other table companies as well every big corporate is tied to each other thus corporate culture is extremely family driven and or intuitive that's why the first son usually becomes the CEO of the biggest company and the daughter would get a relatively smaller subsidiary and the second son would get another company and on and on even if the children lack work skills and efficiency like chang-geun on nobody really rebuts about it due to the preformed system where all the family members own enormous portions of shares and stocks and have power that's why this is becoming a constant problem in the Korean society because first of all it's not fair and second the second and third generation table kids think they're the law and go around behaving like pricks belittling older people than them and making crimes however they always seem to get away so what you saw in the drama regarding chunga and the president's attitude on how he looks down on his employees as dogs and how the son gets away with murder and stuff are actually not so off from the real society here and there these incidents get spotlight on the news and the most infamous one would be the peanut return incident when the daughter of korean air toyota ordered the captain to return an already departing plane with 250 passengers in it and made a flight attendant to kneel on the floor and make her apologize and throw something at her all out of the reason because the flight attendant didn't serve macadamia nuts in a bowl then toyota made the captain and flight attendant to get off and replace them also speaking in the business standpoint it's nothing surprising to see these chaebol companies trying to steal from and buy off emerging successful small businesses because they have huge capital they simply use methods that appeared in the drama to either buy a business or make them go dead and seven now speaking of second gen and third generation chaebol family kids because they come from wealthy families all of them of course graduate Harvard and have MBAs but not only is a high education status important for only tribal kids but Korea in general is extremely obsessed with education that is why Park said OE in the drama always gets belittled and made it even harder for him to achieve success in that society in Korea 93 percent of students graduate high school and 70 to 80 percent proceed to college parents sacrificed most of their money and invest in private academies for the kids in order to get them into college also there's a very present hierarchy in the Korean universities and everyone aims to enter at sky solve Korea and Yonsei however if you can't make it there everyone wants to go to university located in Seoul at least and after that the other big cities and after that even nameless ones in regional areas even though the nameless colleges won't really help you gain success or grant any academic value Korean parents and the society have this mindset of you have to at least graduate college to be treated as a human being which is to an extent true especially in the job market because of the education inflation you won't stand a chance if you don't at least have a college education also sadly many people actually do look down upon people who haven't made it into college in society and those people without college diplomas likely get the jobs that are least popular in the job market which usually leads to low income or manual labor so PUC said oh and the drama gets expelled from high school and people belittle him by calling him truned or which means middle school graduate being a middle school graduate and also having a criminal record in Korea means you have very very limited options for a job and in the dramas Haraway eventually decides to go on a fishing boat a fishing ship is considered one of the toughest and hardest jobs out there which people all try to avoid but because of its difficult it's known that you at least get paid well that's why people who have little options try their luck on fishing ships also there are a lot of bad rumors about fishing ships in general that usually people who get abducted or criminals who have nowhere else to go end up on them because you can't escape or get caught in a boat stuck in the middle of the ocean for months now it's even harder for an ex-con to get a job than a middle school graduate to get one every decent job in Korea requires your criminal record submitted oh and the reason why you eat tofu after getting released from prison is because first tofu is rich in nutrients especially protein that'll help you recover and second it's white so it's a ritual to wish you to live a pure and clean life like tofu and third usually prison serve rice with beans mixed in it so tofu is a cooked form of beans and therefore you can't go back to beans and number eight about racism in Korea you might have found a lot in the scenes regarding the character King tony in e-town class and one scene he gets kicked out of a club because of the fact that he's black and he doesn't speak English even if he speaks Korean so homeside only do I have little experience in clubs so I've asked around and the responses were shocking while all the white people I asked answered that they never had any problems getting into any clubs in any areas black in Southeast Asian or Indian friends answer that they had experienced it bends in club if Ben means entrance ban when the security or staff doesn't let you in because of some sort of disqualification they see in you so for example even for me I might get a bend in certain clubs because I'm too old or I'm in a tracksuit or something and sometimes they just kick out people who look ugly to them but anyways back to the racial issues I'd have to admit that Korea still has a lot of prejudice against people of color or people who come from nations that have lower economic status or living level than Korea and recently one of my black friends confessed that she couldn't enter a club because she was unable to read the menu board listed in Korean however I'm not that sure about Ito in clubs because the population there is pretty diverse so I'm sure that most of the clubs would allow everyone inside as for more general issues in racism you could see that even the também crew members at first discriminated Kim Tony because he was black and assumed that he spoke English when they found out that he didn't they showed disappointment and tried to force him to learn English and also East Hall goes on even further by saying that you're not Korean but you're not Korean multiple times even though Kim Toni continuously argues that he is Korean this sadly would be another truth in the Korean society because Korea is so homogeneous we don't actually see very much diversity around us like the US or Europe or other hot traveling spots in Asia thus the word Korean to Koreans means Asian and specifically Korean ethnicity and moreover Koreans even distinguished Japanese and Chinese people by looks and language so it's not like how the word American is thought of in the concept of an idea of citizenship or nationality regardless of ethnicity also most Koreans usually assume that everyone white or black is probably from America and speaks fluent English or we usually ask where are you from as the first question because talking to a foreigner is pretty rare in an ordinary Koreans life plus in the drama you could see that Tony's grandma did not approve her son marrying a black woman and having Tony international marriage is extremely rare in Korea even now and as the grandparent January is very very conservative marrying a foreigner would have come as a shock to the grandma also in general regarding multicultural families there's always a stigma behind it because from the past most of the multicultural families were formed out of a remote international marriage which basically means Korean men who could not afford to get a proper Korean wife with their own ability would reach out to agencies that mediate international marriages from countries mostly in Southeast Asia and the agency would show pictures of each side and the wife would come to Korea and live with a likely poor guy in a not-so-good atmosphere and naturally the kids from these families would experience discrimination in schools because kids don't know any better and since they look different however among the younger generation the perception towards foreigners are rapidly changing and opening up so there is a silver lining in the future ix honey in the drama is a special character as well and there's a scene where Coons who slips through the media that she's a transgender hoping that it would damage her reputation and popularity on the cooking show technically speaking consume might have made an effective move in the context of Korea that's why his father also compliments him and that's because Korea is still very conservative towards lgbtq+ and the general public haven't discussed against anyone related to that so younger people might be more accepting about it but when it gets to the 40s and above people say really bad things about LGBTQ whenever a related article is on Naver the Google of Korea most of the comments are about how these people are causing a lot of nature how they're spreading HIV for their own lesson pleasure and how they don't want their kids to get influenced by it during the media we're creative so I don't know the exact reason behind this hate but I speculate it's mostly because of the misinformation and the high Christianity rate in Korea does people like Kony appearing on nationwide TV shows would definitely cause negative voices honestly it would be extremely hard to get a simple waitress job in Korea if you were transgender and I doubt that many business owners would employ a transgender employee as well lastly about the age gap one of the main themes in e-town class is love tension between poxy doey esau and nada however one US had always first excuses for not accepting Jesus love is age despite personally seeming like a relatively open character in all aspects such as back grounds race and LGBTQ issues he stalls on specifically age issues while I think a 10 plus year age gap would be considered rather weird were talked about in any society around the world maybe there are some of Korea's own perspectives that add to it this is my personal opinion in observation but the military service aspect kicks in a lot as you may know Korean men have mandatory military service for two years either student or working you must finish the two years service before year 30 thus most college students go to the military after their sophomore year in college once they resume to college men are in their junior year and at the age of 24 and their female friends who enter in the same year are mostly are already in the work field so these men get to do college life with younger girls than their own age but we have a word for these dudes back from the military and it's called pull tuck same connotation behind it is like the dude who was separated from society for two years that doesn't even know how to use Instagram or hashtags and where's like he's in the sixties I know this is harsh but college students are also immature after all so a certain barrier forms between men and women and college and in some cases men who finished their military service and who are in their senior year try to date freshman year woman which would result in an age gap of minimum six to maybe max eight years these cases sometimes disgust women and the do becomes a mockery within the school so in general people have this weird perception on old men trying to date young women and that's what Sarah we must have feared and been afraid of even though I think it was just a petty defense mechanism excuse for himself to reject easily well actually if a 30 year old guy dated a 20 year old girl he would be frowned upon by everyone and be called in names like Paul Newman or such as thief or predator and also it might look weird if the owner and manager of the bar dated together so yeah another aspect that might kick in about age is that Korea in general is very age driven as well Korean has strict honorifics in the language itself and we have certain manner rules towards older people and age is kind of like a power in Korea so try to figure out a 10-year age gap relationship would be very uncomfortable in various ways as well now that we've dive deeper into Itaewon class background knowledge and social context time for my personal review of the drama first of all I really in because it showed a very realistic viewpoint of Korea and deals with various issues that Koreans don't usually want to show to the outer world and at the same time it is a motivational rags-to-riches revenge success story and all the characters are pretty unique with their backgrounds and personalities the main character puck Soto is an ideal figure in our society that would honestly be hard to exist considering his traits of diligence and determination after getting deprived of education opportunity and becoming an ex-con as well he also accepts an ex-gang member transgender twenty-year-old sociopath girl and black Korean and a table kid as his crew and he doesn't get angry about all the schemes and petty obstacles he receives from his enemies although it's extremely dirty and unfair he's too good to be true I know this might be random but the character Park said oh he reminds me of another famous anime character Luffy from one piece because both of their ultimate goal is to achieve freedom which they define as the power to not let anybody hurt their loved ones which is in their minds the best and most powerful also they don't care about social norms and standards they both recruit diverse members that might have shady pasts that are minorities in society that are freaks or sometimes that even attempt to harm themselves both characters have their own journey and goal and don't try to take shortcuts and enjoy the process valuing people and friends as the most important thing both characters only know how to do the right thing which is sometimes very reckless and inefficient but at the end becomes a human magnet and attracts very strong allies but because of this character and storyline detail and class became one of my favorite K dramas up to date which blows a certain motivation and passion inside myself as well anyways that was my short commentary review I hope you enjoyed watching each film class and this video as well I hope this video helped you guys get a better understanding on drama and the Korean society as a whole if it did please support us on patreon so we can deliver more content like this in the future as well we'd really love to become the bridge between you guys and K content so tell me what your thoughts were about the drama in this video in the comment section and any further questions are welcomed as well don't forget to subscribe turn your notifications on by our merch I will see you guys next time in another kdrama deep dive bye bye [Music]

Channel: DKDKTV

Views: 678,383

Keywords: 10 things itaewon class, itaewon class ending, itaewon class deep dive, kdrama deep dive, dkdktv drama, dkdktv itaewon class, itaewon class park seo jun, itaewon class reaction, itaewon class review, itaewon class ep 16, itaewon class ep 15, itaewon class background, itaewon class behind the scenes, itaewon class best moments, itaewon class kim da mi, park seo jun, park seo jun kim da mi, park sae royi, park sae royi hair, sae royi, park seroi, dkdktv explained, 이태원 클라쓰

Id: OutGsIwEg5o

Length: 23min 44sec (1424 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 21 2020