Dramas I watched with my Korean husband

My QJweb column has been updated.

【The not-always-happy daily life of a divorced woman in her late 30s】

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A first in the article! Includes a photo of my husband!
This time, it's about how my husband came to love Japan!
Neon Genesis Evangelion changed my husband's life.

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I would really appreciate it.


Since I started taking an interest in Korea because of my husband, I hadn't watched any Korean dramas at all.

Thinking I should at least cover the major ones to help with my Korean studies, here is the story of when we watched a few Korean dramas together. (On a 75-inch TV! On a super impressive screen! *smug*)


Crash Landing on You
I enjoyed watching it while asking my husband, who has finished his military service, things like, "Is this for real?" and "Does a place like this actually exist?"

When I repeated the lines from the drama, he told me, "That's a very heavy North Korean accent, so you probably shouldn't learn that lol."

Even though it's played by Korean actors, it's mostly a North Korean accent, and I was quickly absorbing it, so I thought, 'This is bad!' and stopped watching it in study mode halfway through.

Squid Game
One of the games features 'dalgona candy' (ppopgi).
When my husband saw it, he said, "Wow, that brings back memories."
Apparently, when he was in elementary school, there was someone selling them in front of the school gate on a cardboard box, and everyone would play it after school.

The price was about 10 yen, and I was surprised that my husband, who was born in the Heisei era and is six years younger than me, had an episode that sounded like it was from the early Showa era.

I feel like I might have seen Japanese dalgona at festival stalls when I was a child, but I don't think it was something you saw on a daily basis on the way home from school.

Is it like the paper theater storytellers of my parents' generation? (I learned about that from Chibi Maruko-chan too)

D.P.
We started watching it together after it was recommended by my husband's friend, but the depiction of the military in the first episode was so realistic that my husband, who had served, and his friend all watched it with bitter expressions. (Even though he was the one who recommended it lol)

At one point, he turned his eyes away saying, "I can't watch this," and the chime sound for waking up in the drama is apparently the same one used in the actual military, so he covered his ears during that scene.

It seems that if a man who has finished his military service sets this sound as his morning alarm, he will definitely wake up, and in 'A Killer Paradox', there is a scene where the protagonist sets it as his alarm.

It seems my husband has many traumas—or memories he'd rather not remember—about the military, and when he sees someone in camouflage in the city, he makes a bitter face and says, "I don't understand the point of wearing camouflage as casual clothes."

However, my father really likes camouflage, and when we had a BBQ in the garden of my parents' house in the summer, my husband told my father, who was wearing camouflage pants, "That's nice!"—while hiding his true feelings, of course.

This is true for both movies and dramas, but there is just so much slang in the dialogue.

In Japanese, it's translated as "Damn it" or "Hell!", but my husband says that in terms of actual nuance, "It's not as cute as 'damn', there is no word in Japanese to express this!"

It comes up so often that I learned it easily, but it has a blasphemous meaning and can lead to irreversible trouble, so I want to be careful not to use it by mistake.

In the first place, I wish they wouldn't keep repeating those lines in movies and dramas.

My husband is always saying, "Japan is the best after all."

Many of the charms of Japan that left an impression on my Korean husband were unexpected from my perspective.

His love for Japan started with anime, but now he seems to love various aspects of Japanese culture, enjoying a wide range of it, such as wearing kimonos and smoking from a kiseru pipe.

How much do you love Japan?!


It seems he traveled all over Japan during his college years using the Seishun 18 Kippu and sleeping in parks, so he's probably traveled around the country more than I have.
How much do you love Japan?!


Project X is his favorite program, and he seems moved by the stories of Japan during the period of high economic growth.

A new series started recently, so he was excitedly recording it.
How much do you love Japan!!

If he loves Japan this much, while I'm happy, I also want him to take a little interest in Korea.