The Government's Giant K-pop Festival Has a Name. Half of It Belongs to JYP — and the Contract Was Too Secret for the Committee Chair to See

FANOMENON is meant to be Korea's state-backed answer to the world's pop festivals, planned for December 2027 by a presidential committee co-chaired by 박진영. His company filed the trademark first. On 7 October, at the National Assembly, a lawmaker put the contract on the big screen, the chair halted the audit, and 박진영 conceded that the way the name was taken was 'not normal'.

By The Editors9 min read

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Opinion

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K-Movie

A Japanese Cartoon About Small Cute Creatures Opened at Number One in Korea. Tom Cruise's New Film Is Seventh on the Booking Board, With Cruise in Seoul to Sell It

《극장판 치이카와》 took 122,291 admissions on its opening day, the biggest start for any animated film released in Korea this year, and by the next morning held 39 per cent of every advance ticket in the country. 《디거》, Alejandro G. Iñárritu's black comedy with Tom Cruise as an oil baron, opens on 3 October with 2.6 per cent — behind a Venice prize-winner in its second week — while Cruise makes his thirteenth visit to Korea, more than any other Hollywood actor. Iñárritu was meant to come too. He cancelled the night before.

11 min read

K-Drama/Variety

Korea's 《야구여왕》 Built a Women's Baseball Team Out of Olympians, Lost 36–0, and Now Has to Win 60 Per Cent or Be Disbanded

채널A's sports-variety series is managed by Choo Shin-soo on his days off, captained by an Olympic handball medallist, and has a catcher who kept goal for the unified Korean ice hockey team at PyeongChang. On 17 September a 22-year-old golfer — drafted 115th by New York in America's new women's professional league, and never signed — caught for the first time, hit her first home run and closed out the game. The team is 5–2. The sport it plays has thirty elite women registered in the entire country.

14 min read

Language

Korea Asked 200 Citizens Whether to Put a Hangeul Sign on Gwanghwamun. They Split 105–101, Then Voted 155–51 That It Is Not Needed.

The government convened its first-ever citizens' deliberation and spent eight hours on a signboard. The panel divided almost exactly in half on whether adding a Hangeul plaque would honour both the heritage and the alphabet — and then, overwhelmingly, said an exhibition would do the job instead. Both answers are coherent, which is the interesting part. The plaque they were arguing about is three years old, and the one before the one before it was in Park Chung-hee's handwriting.

11 min read

Beauty

K-Beauty Just Had Its Biggest August on Record. Its Two Largest Companies Went Backwards.

Korean cosmetics exports hit $1.31 billion in August, up 52 per cent — the fastest monthly growth in nearly three years. Almost none of it belongs to AmorePacific or LG Household & Health Care, whose export value fell 23 per cent in the first half. Small brands are now 68.7 per cent of what Korea ships. And China, which took more than half of it five years ago, now takes one seventh.

11 min read

Business

In April, Nongshim Cut Prices to Help With Inflation. In August It Raised Them, Using the Same Sentence.

Korea's biggest noodle company cut sixteen products in the spring, framed as joining the government's price-stability drive. Four months later it raised forty-three, framed as joining the government's price-stability drive. The products it cut are precisely the ones it left alone in August — and its own filings show the cost pressure it blames has not yet reached its margins. The awkward part is that the cost pressure is real.

13 min read

Tech

Korea Now Scans Every Image Uploaded to Its Big Forums. The Man Running One of Them Can't Tell You If It Has Ever Worked.

Since 1 July, Korean platforms above a size threshold must run every uploaded image through an AI filter that checks it against a government database of illegal recordings and blocks it before it posts. One operator published his own logs. Over a full year of the earlier video version, 1,615 blocks resolved down to about 33 that might have been real — and he cannot tell you whether any of them were, because keeping the files in order to check them would break a different law.

12 min read