where it needs to go and making micro adjustments to the nervous
system. “You must control your food and diet,” he said. Okay, then:
more kimchi for me.
WHAT HAPPENS IF you take someone with a fairly radical notion of
happiness and set him loose to make national policy? The answer
might look like Bhutan, where the king and his retired-king father
ride bicycles up and down mountains with shit-eating grins on their
faces and encourage the populace to do the same. Or it might look
like Singapore, where the late Lee Kuan Yew, the prime minister for
twenty-five years, ordered free schools, decent housing and the
planting of over a million trees. Increasingly, it might look like South
Korea. The man with the grin on his face is an influential academic
named Shin Won-Sop.
To understand just how committed Korea is to better-health-
through-forests, I paid a visit to the headquarters of the Korean Forest
Agency in the new industrial city of Deajun. There I was pleased to
find my old shinrin yoku contact Juyoung Lee, who’d been hired away
from his post in Japan to conduct research for South Korea. Lee now
works for the agency’s human welfare division. It’s remarkable that
any forest agency even has a “human welfare” division. It wasn’t so
long ago that the main job of forest agencies the world over was
simply to facilitate cutting down forests. When I first met Lee two
years earlier, he was swatting mosquitoes and suctioning sensors off
my forehead on a Japanese mountainside. Now he wore a stylish suit
in a modern high-rise filled with pink cubicles. (Not sure what the
significance of the pink was, but I can’t resist reporting that the city
of Seoul recently spent $100 million painting special parking spaces
pink for women. They are supposed to make women happy, but they
are also longer and wider, leading many not to feel happy but to feel
insulted by the implied dig on their driving ability.)
Lee escorted me through the maze of pink to the spacious outer