Noticing worries

LAST month a business student at Korea University in Seoul posted a large bulletin on a wall in the university grounds. In bold black pen, Ju Hyun-woo recounted the week’s events: thousands of railway workers dismissed for striking; the suicide of a farmer in protest at the construction of electricity pylons near his village; and the conservative ruling party’s proposal to expel an opposition politician for questioning the legitimacy of the president, Park Geun-hye. Mr Ju asked readers: “How are you all feeling nowadays?”

Answers came in thick and fast, and most people said they were not fine. Within a few days dozens of handwritten posters—known as daejabo—were pinned up next to his, on issues ranging from high gas bills to gay rights. Now Mr Ju reckons almost 1,000 have been tacked onto university walls around the country. Students in Japan, America, China and Chile have followed, posting pictures of their posters on the “Can’t be OK” Facebook page, which gathered 260,000 followers in a week.

Social media have long been a haven for anonymous dissenting voices in South Korea. But Mr Ju says he wanted to “take responsibility” for his poster: he signed it and stood in front of it for ten hours, engaging passers-by. Breaking with a tradition of politically charged, militant daejabo, used in the past by Korean students to demand change, Mr Ju left readers to come up with their own grievances—and answers.

The group’s catchphrase, an everyday greeting, has potential to unite not just students but disgruntled workers, housewives and high-school pupils, says Park Mi, the author of a book on Korean student movements. An opposition politician has used it in a daejabo he posted in offices in South Korea’s National Assembly, promising to work harder to help those who are “not fine”. On January 1st a man calling for the president’s resignation died after setting himself on fire—a rare form of dissent associated with the heyday of activism in the 1980s against the then military dictator. (Park Geun-hye happens to be the daughter of South Korea’s longest-running dictator, killed by his spy chief in 1979.) Police found the man’s last diary entry, entitled “How are you nowadays?”.

The connection to the 1980s protests has awakened memories of students bringing down regimes. But Park Mi points out that the “How are you?” protest is not a revolutionary one like that in the 1980s, the aim of which was to end the dictatorship. If today’s student rebels have a cause, it is a highly diffuse one.

For Mr Ju the biggest problem is that Koreans do not ask themselves “if they are OK”. And they put up with limitations on free expression. Police stood behind barricades in front of daejabo posted on the back gate of Seoul’s government complex on December 19th, preventing people from reading them. The education ministry warned high schools that posters could have a “negative effect on the learning environment”. Some schools have cut class discussion time; a school in Seoul’s Gangnam district destroyed a daejabo by one of its pupils (he has taken the case to the human-rights court).

Most participants have now taken down their own daejabo—including Mr Ju himself, whose poster will be preserved in Korea University’s museum as the “document of a democratic movement”. For Mr Ju such posters are meant to be temporary. They are, he says, “just the beginning”.