A video posted June 20 to the YouTube channel “Kingbatjyu” showed a man who had taken off his shoes and stretched his bare feet across a Seoul subway pregnancy-consideration seat, spreading himself across three seats total and blocking other passengers from sitting or passing, according to a June 22 report by Herald Business reporter Chae Sang-woo. What made the clip spread wasn’t the man’s behavior itself — it was a younger passenger who walked over and calmly confronted him on camera: “Everyone else would probably also like to take their shoes off and stretch their legs out. But we don’t, because this is a public space.” When the man pushed back, “Are you saying I’m dirty?”, the passenger replied, “Do you think your feet are clean?” and held his ground until the man relented.
The clip taps into a running, low-grade conflict on Seoul’s subway system. Pregnancy-consideration seats — marked pink, reserved regardless of whether the car is crowded — exist specifically because pregnancy in Korea often isn’t visually obvious in the first and third trimesters, and advocates have spent years pushing back on the assumption that an empty-looking seat is available to anyone. Complaints to Seoul Metro about non-pregnant passengers occupying these seats run to roughly 7,000 a year, more than 20 a day on average, making this one of the most persistently reported etiquette disputes in the entire system despite each individual incident rarely escalating beyond an awkward standoff.
For visitors used to more ambiguous unwritten rules around priority seating elsewhere, the Seoul system runs on a stricter, more literal social contract: these seats function as reserved space, not first-come-first-served overflow, and a growing body of viral confrontation videos like this one exist specifically to enforce that norm publicly when quieter appeals fail.
Source: Chae Sang-woo, Herald Business, June 22, 2026.
