The Seoul Footnote

The Scene A storefront two floors above a coffee shop in Daechi-dong advertises a winter intensive. The banner gives the length in weeks rather than days: four weeks, mornings only. The staff member at the desk is precise about one thing. This is a camp, she says, not a hagwon. There is no registration certificate on the wall because, she explains, none is required. Payment goes by transfer to an account number written on a slip of paper, and the printed handout lists a daily schedule but nothing about getting money back. Three weeks in, the child stops going. The parent asks for the unused portion and is told, politely and with apparent confidence, that the refund rules for private teaching institutes cannot reach a four-week camp. The reason offered is arithmetic: the statute attaches at 30 days, and this course runs 29. That answer rests on a single sentence of definition, and the sentence uses the number 30 three times. One use measures the course. One measures several courses a...

The Scene Paragraph 1 of Article 17 of Korea's electronic commerce consumer statute is built from three subparagraphs, and every one of them ends in seven days. The first of the three carries two starting events rather than one, because it has a proviso. Four start dates, one number, and nothing on a checkout page tells you which is yours. The version most shoppers carry around is the simplest: seven days from the day the parcel arrives. That is usually right, but not for the reason people give. It is not the main rule. It is the output of a proviso that displaces the main rule, and the proviso bites only because a different article fixes which of two documents may arrive first. The main rule counts from the day you receive the written statement of contract terms — the document Article 13(2) requires, carrying the matters that article lists — which in ordinary online shopping is usually the order confirmation that lands in your inbox when the card clears. Count from there and...

The Scene A lease on a small apartment in Seoul is signed on a Tuesday. The balance of the deposit clears on Friday morning. Keys change hands, boxes go up the stairs, and by early afternoon the tenant is at the community service center filing the move-in report. The lease contract comes back with a fixed-date stamp on it. Everything on the checklist is done, in the right order, on the same day the money moved. At three o'clock that same afternoon, a bank registers a mortgage against the property. The registry clerk records it with Friday's date. Nothing in that sequence looks like a mistake. The tenant moved in, registered, and stamped the contract without losing a single day. And yet, if the property is later sold or auctioned, the bank's Friday mortgage outranks the tenant. Not by a technicality of office hours, and not because the clerk was faster. Under the Housing Lease Protection Act, the tenant's protection had not started at any point on Friday. It starte...

The Scene A character in a Korean drama sets a branded coffee cup on the table, and the camera stays on the label a beat longer than the scene needs. How long that label may stay on screen, and how large it may be, are fixed by two separate numbers that sit in a Korean presidential decree rather than in the production budget. What the Rule Actually Says The chain runs from a statute to a decree, and the split is the point. The statute names the category and hands every number downward. The Broadcasting Act (방송법), in force on 21 April 2026 as Act No. 21572, lists the permitted kinds of broadcast advertising in Article 73(2) and puts indirect advertising seventh and last on that list. 제73조(방송광고등) ② 방송광고의 종류는 다음 각 호와 같고, 방송광고의 허용범위ㆍ시간ㆍ횟수 또는 방법 등에 관하여 필요한 사항은 대통령령으로 정한다. 7. 간접광고 : 방송프로그램 안에서 상품, 상표, 회사나 서비스의 명칭이나 로고 등을 노출시키는 형태의 광고 In English: the kinds of broadcast advertising are as follows, and matters necessary for the permitted scope, time, frequency or method of broadcast adver...