Recently, I happened to see an advertisement for ‘Spy Family’ Season 3. Even from just the trailer, I could feel the cheerful and warm atmosphere where family members grow together. At that moment, I wondered why Japanese content consistently emphasizes the importance of family to such an extent. And naturally, I began comparing it with the parenting and marriage content commonly found in Korea.
Source: ChatGPT
Contrasting Landscapes of the Low Birth Rate Era as Shown in Cultural Content
It’s clear that both Korea and Japan are experiencing serious birth rate crises. However, the way the two countries accept this crisis and reflect it in popular culture is fundamentally different. This is most notably demonstrated in how family and child-rearing are portrayed in content.
Japan rediscovers the value of family as a community and places it at the center of narratives, creating a warm and positive atmosphere. In contrast, Korea is flooded with content that portrays marriage and parenting as destructive elements of life, reinforcing sentiments that make people hesitate about marriage and give up on childbirth. These cultural differences go beyond simple expression styles and directly influence people’s practical judgments and emotions, potentially serving as structural causes of low birth rates.
Japan: From the Importance of Family to Discourse on Pseudo-Families
In recent Japanese cultural content, narratives that reexamine traditional family structures while encompassing ‘pseudo-families’ not based on blood relations have become prominent.
A prime example is ‘Spy Family,’ which features a seemingly completely abnormal family relationship, but warmly depicts how they care for each other and form bonds. This work goes beyond simply reinterpreting family, raising new questions about ‘what is family’ in modern society. It poses this question to viewers as well, convincingly conveying the message that communal life is still possible despite the trend of family dissolution.
Other works like ‘Chibi Maruko-chan,’ ‘My Home Hero,’ and ‘Tama e Market’ also embrace various family forms, emphasizing the emotional stability and depth of human relationships provided by the home space. Japanese content particularly favors narrative structures where conflicts are overcome and relationships restored. In other words, it highlights the value of ‘living together,’ reinterpreting marriage and parenting not as destruction of life but as processes of growth and bonding. Furthermore, this trend also implies an intention to present cultural alternatives to social problems such as single life, lonely deaths, and the collapse of local communities.
Korea: The Repeated Narrative that Marriage and Parenting Equal Catastrophe
Korean content is heading in a completely different direction. The representative variety show ‘My Golden Kids’ dramatically highlights problems and conflicts in the child-rearing process, as well as parental helplessness. While this awareness positively exposes the real hardships of parenting, with dozens of similar programs airing each year, the image that remains in the public’s mind becomes fixed on the simplistic formula of ‘parenting = hell.’
Additionally, shows like ‘Couple’s Trouble,’ ‘Marriage Hell,’ and ‘The World of the Married’ revolve around post-marriage conflict, catastrophe, betrayal, and violence. These contents follow cynical narrative structures that don’t allow even a single moment of hope, and are constructed in ways that completely shatter trust in the institution of marriage itself. While there is a function to reveal and reflect on society’s dark sides, when consumed too one-sidedly, culture functions beyond a warning to become a suppressive mechanism. For instance, even algorithms for YouTube content about marriage and parenting often induce consumption centered on negative narratives.
As a result, Korean content repeatedly injects the negative message of “don’t do it,” gradually reducing the life choices of the younger generation. Due to exaggerated portrayals beyond reality, marriage and parenting can become imprinted as a frightening future for those who have not yet experienced them.
Cultural Change Should Precede Birth Rates
The government invests trillions of won annually implementing various policies such as childbirth grants, expanded parental leave, childcare support, and tax benefits. However, the actual effects remain minimal. The reason is clear: institutions can be changed, but emotions and imagination don’t change easily.
When people imagine marriage and parenting as phases of life, they first recall sensations and images formed through cultural content. Japanese content provides warmth and possibility to that imagination. Despite the hardships of reality, it carefully conveys the sentiment that living together is still worthwhile. Korean content, on the other hand, portrays a future more terrible than reality, intimidating people in advance and making them give up.
Therefore, what’s needed now is a cultural reset before institutional changes. We need to build a content ecosystem that breathes positive emotions into various life forms—whether marriage or single life, parenting or caregiving—and convincingly demonstrates their possibilities.
Culture is the ‘picture of life’ that a nation presents to future generations. And what color that picture takes shows what kind of life society is recommending to the next generation. The picture Korea is currently painting is excessively dark and cynical.