There’s an ancient rule in Korean culture that says women should obey their father before marriage, husband after, and son if they’re widowed. Called ‘rule of 3 obediences’, it has parallels in India and other Asian cultures. Oddly, even after 70 years of breathless development in South Korea, it is considered virtuous.
The country is an industrial powerhouse, leader in everything from chips to ships, but in its culture married women are expected to defer to mum-in-law, slog around home without help, produce heirs, and shoulder all caring duties. They must also resign themselves to much less pay than men. South Korea has the highest gender pay gap – women earn roughly two-thirds as much as men – among OECD countries. Its eastern neighbour and world’s third largest economy, Japan, is second, with women earning three-fourths as much as men.
Somehow, education, technology, prosperity and Western exposure have not broken patriarchy’s hold on Asia’s most advanced countries. It’s the main reason why South Korean and Japanese women don’t want to marry. But some, it seems, are using marriage to a foreigner to break free.
Why are women willing to break race barrier?
The Japanese are known to be insular and ‘kokusai kekkon’ – marriage to a foreigner – is uncommon. In the 1970s, only about 0.5% of marriages fell in this class; their share peaked at 6% in 2006. What’s interesting, Anna Jassem of the European Commission points out in a paper, is that while Japanese men want foreign brides from neighbouring countries – China, Philippines – Japanese women prefer American and British husbands.
In 2016, Jassem says, 26% of foreign grooms in Japan were Korean, but they don’t really count as foreigners because most of them are “Japan-born and -raised Zainichi Koreans…indistinguishable from the Japanese”. So American men, who accounted for 17% of foreign grooms, were in top position. Japanese men in kokusai kekkon marriages, however, showed the strongest preference for Chinese (37%) and Filipina (23%) brides. Only 2% of them married an American woman. What explains this contrast? Jassem says “low-status” Japanese men who can’t find Japanese brides look for “ideal, traditional brides” abroad, but women marrying foreigners are mostly “office workers” hoping to “find romantic love and escape the patriarchal gender expectations of their own culture”.
Korean govt data shows a similar trend. In 2023, Korean women in Korea married 1,386 American men (28% of inter-racial marriages) and 921 Chinese men (18%). Grooms from France, Italy, Germany, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand – all ‘white’ countries – added up to 830 or roughly 17%.
Drill down deeper and you find about 60% of Korean-Chinese unions were remarriages, as against just 11% of Korean-American unions. Data also shows a steady increase in Korean women marrying foreigners, from 4,117 in 2021 to 4,659 in 2022 and 5,007 in 2023.
For Korean men, Vietnamese brides (4,923 or 33%) were the top choice, followed by Chinese (2,668) and Thai women (2,017). American brides? Just 558 or less than 4%.
Why white men seem better partners
Is it possible that Japanese and South Korean women are voting against patriarchy with their feet? A Pew report in 2017 showed a trend across the Asian community in America, with women more likely than men to opt for inter-racial marriage. In 2015, it says, 29% of Asian marriages in America were to a person of different race or ethnicity. More than a third of newlywed Asian women (36%) chose a husband of another race, as against a fifth (21%) of newlywed Asian men.
Asian women’s decision to marry outside their race is possibly a reaction to the patriarchal pressures they expect within their own community. A Statista survey of Koreans in March found that 42% of women “didn’t feel the need” to marry. In May, The Korea Herald reported that among Korean women who didn’t want to marry, almost 93% were wary of “housework and childbirth”. More recently, Korean paper Hankyoreh’s survey found that 84% of women think having a child is a disadvantage. Roughly three out of four women said simply getting married puts them at a disadvantage.
So, marrying a white man, as researcher Nadia Y Kim found in her 2006 survey, seems a rosier option. The idea may be based on depictions of white masculinity in Hollywood – Kim pointed out that Ghost, Titanic and Russell Crowe’s The Gladiator had been some of the biggest hits in South Korea until then – but it has many takers. Besides, the West has made enormous strides towards gender parity. Where South Korea held 105th place, China 107th, Japan 125th and India 127th in last year’s Global Gender Gap Index, UK was 15th and US 43rd.
It’s not surprising then that white husbands seem “heroic, gender egalitarian, hence, ideal mates” to a large set of Asian women, and they choose to break the race barrier for a “companionate” marriage, rather than one “driven by patriarchy, family honour, and/or economic need”.