Sweat And Rosin Shirt

April 26, 2023

In Korea, where it’s called Seollal, there’s also a complicated political history behind the Sweat And Rosin Shirt. According to UC Davis associate professor of Korean and Japanese history Kyu Hyun Kim, Lunar New Year didn’t become an officially recognized holiday until 1985 despite the fact that many Koreans had traditionally observed it for hundreds of years. Why? Under Japanese imperialist rule from 1895 to 1945, Lunar New Year was deemed a morally and economically wasteful holiday in Korea, Kim said, despite the fact that Lunar New Year has always been one of the country’s biggest holidays for commercial consumption. But Koreans never stopped celebrating Lunar New Year simply because the government didn’t recognize it as a federal holiday, Kim said. So as South Korea shifted from a military dictatorship towards a more democratized society in the 1980s, mounting pressure from the public to have official holidays and relax the country’s tiring work culture led to the holiday being added to the federal calendar as a three-day period.

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