Understanding others
I have thought about how we can reduce cultural differences. As I expected, my final answer is ‘trying to understand each other.’ It is very simple and I think it is the best solution, but unfortunately many people don’t seem to act on it. For example, westerners abhor Korea’s custom of eating dogs. But when Koreans criticize the French custom of eating horses, what can they give in reply? I think people should be free to dress and eat anything (except human flesh), and they should also be free to live anywhere. Westerners rear dogs to ‘see and enjoy’ but we rear them to ‘eat’. Understanding people of other cultures is very difficult. I think the only solution is to educate others to understand and love each other.
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Ji Eun,
Your assumption that Westerners “abhor” dog-eating is, well, it’s wrong. Most Westerners don’t care much what people on the other side of the world happen to eat. They might think it’s strange, or even disgusting (just as I am sure you’d find it disgusting how some people in some cultures eat insects!), but they tend not to have very strong feelings about dog soup in general.
I think the Korean media is to blame for the myth that Westerners uniformly HATE the practice of eating dog soup. They televise every small protest they can, and characterise it as if it were a big protest representative of public opinion. There’s a difference between “a few extremist members of an animal-rights group” and “America” or “France”, but from what I’ve seen and been told, the media in Korea doesn’t tend to distinguish this. After all, upsetting people is a way to make them buy newspapers.
So another part of the solution is also to educate *oneself*, and to regard the media with a critical eye. After all, the news media is first and foremost a business with the main goal of making money.
Believe me when I say most people outside Korea would never attend a protest about dog soup. They just honestly don’t care that much or think it’s important. And by the way, there are more than a few Westerners living in Korea who enjoy and even regularly eat dog soup. (I like it, for example.)