Korea

A line has started appearing on kiosk menus at some Korean cafes that has nothing to do with coffee: “restroom only, no purchase required, 2,000 won.” Most cafes now lock …

Musinsa’s “Sodam Sanghoe” (“small-talk store”) concept opened its Daegu location on June 12, and drew roughly 2,200 visitors on its opening day alone, according to Musinsa’s newsroom disclosures. The store …

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, …

“Chamgyoyuk” (“True Education”), a 10-episode Netflix Korean original that premiered June 5, has climbed to No. 6 on Netflix’s all-time chart for Korean originals by cumulative views, trailing 5th-place “The …

At a Western-style restaurant in Seoul’s Gangnam district on May 1, a man in his 50s opened his self-introduction with, “My legs are strong, and I don’t have a belly.” …

Rotation speed-dating and solo-drinking bars already reshaped how young Koreans meet each other. The newest addition doesn’t look like a dating tool at all: Setlog, a habit-tracking app that pings …

South Korea’s fertility rate rose to 0.99 in January 2026, nudging up against the symbolic threshold of 1.0 for the first time in years. Statistics Korea recorded 26,916 births that …

“Kim Bujang” (“Manager Kim”), the SBS Friday-Saturday action-revenge drama marking So Ji-sub’s return to the network after 13 years, posted a 15.7 percent nationwide rating (per Nielsen Korea) for its …

Less than a year ago, signs went up at some Starbucks Korea branches reading: no personal desktop computers, no printers, no power strips, no partitions. It was a direct response …

FlareUp is not a brand most shoppers outside Korea would recognize. It’s a contemporary womenswear label that, as of last year, barely had a footprint beyond Musinsa’s domestic platform. In …