DDONGCHIM

Ddongchim is one of the most unpleasant and violating acts you can be exposed to while keeping your pants on. Ddongchim is also probably the weirdest habit that I have encountered in Korea. Definitely the most invasive. What creative being imagined this as an appropriate form of play, whose fertile mind created it and who first thought that it should be institualized and given a name? How did it evolve? In olden times, were there ddongchim Olympics with medals awarded to those who could ddongchim the emperor, a moment of glory followed by a swift execution? Maybe that was how you became a royal concubine, a flirtation finished by graceful buttock play. Was it part of courtship, a game played between young lovers? Who knows? What I do know is that now it seems to the chosen and time tested way to torment foreign teachers.

You’ve just read the paragraph above and unless you have lived in Korea, you’re still none the wiser about what is ddongchim. Stage one of a successful ddongchim (ddong translates to shit and chim to pinnacle or needle therefore shit pinnacle or shit needle) is to select the victim of your pre-emptive strike. This target is generally a male, although females are sometimes subjected to the invasion. When the target has been sighted and blindsided, stage two comes into play. The hands are joined together with two fingers from each hand sticking out the front like a finger gun. The third stage is commence attack, the hands like a laser guided missile as they make their way towards the victims posterior finishing with a four fingered rectal jab. Stage four involves the recovery out of attack mode and the quick get away followed by incessant laughter. Apparently, there can be a fifth stage which involves a triumphant sniff of the fingers after the attack but fortunately I never witnessed this final indignity.

 Unfortunately, I have experienced the indignity of the first four stages of this arse attack many, many times. Young children at school, sometimes working in cohorts of two or more, would plan an attack. The planning seemed immaculate, like they had been at the R&D stage for months, swarming around like sharks on a diseased and isolated fish, ready to pounce at the most opportune time. The fingers would penetrate deep leaving me rearing like a wild brumbie with ears ringing from adolescent laughter. The first time this unfortunate event happened to me was around Christmas. No one had thought to communicate to us that a ddongchimm was a possibility, or if they had, I hadn’t listened. In any event, the inauspicious debut of the ddongchim happened one week when the students at our school were all girls. The first time it happened I discounted it, believing it to be an accident. But the second and third time confirmed that it was no mere accident, rather a concentrated attack on my dignity. This was confirmed by the accompanying bouts of laughter that were only enhanced by my intense questioning of the young ladies involved. Nothing I could seem could make them understand the pain that their violation had caused me and they remained unrepentant. In the end, I shrugged it away and placed it into the weird Korean culture folder. It still happens infrequently from time to time, with the antagonist usually a male student, sometimes a female student and sometimes a combination of sexes. I learnt to deal with it in my own way, telling the students off and reminding them that such behaviour in an overseas country would be inappropriate and would perhaps led to a beating in more homophobic parts.

Apparently, the ddongchim is also prevalent in Japan, where it’s called kancho (slang for enema). The Japanese have refined kancho to an ever-greater form that that practiced in Korea. In Korea, it seems largely restricted to children. Not so in Japan, where adults still regularly indulge in this fetish and even dedicates airtime to it, where a TV game show presenter routinely molests random people on the street who are minding their own business. It is immortalized in print, in child comic books like the anime Naruto. A friend of mine taught for a long time in rural Japan and said his buttocks were under constant attack from young boys and girls, even after my friend made repeated impassioned threats (which I believe) to his students that anyone caught giving an anal massage to Paul sensei would receive a short and brutal beating which would be accompanied by a slow and painful death. He also said he received the final indignity, the long deep smell of the fingers following the kancho. To illustrate how pervasive it is in Japanese society an arcade game, Boong-Ga Boong-Ga or Spank ‘em, was developed by Korea for the Japanese gaming. It simulated ddongchim, the first game simulated to stimulate the prostate. Players scored points by doing a ddongchim on a model arse in the game console. A plastic finger is attached for hygiene purposes. Players can choose to punish up to eight characters; ex-girlfriend, ex-boyfriend, gangster, mother-in-law, gold-digger, prostitute, child molester and con artist. The level of anguish of the character can be watched via a monitor. For exceptional players, the machine will present a small plastic trophy in the shape of a pile of faeces. Maybe this could be an alternative form of punishment judges are allowed to sentence criminals to. “You are sentenced to 6 months of daily ddongchim punishment administered via the Boong-Ga Boong-Ga delivery system. Or maybe not. I know a few people who would love this, wouldn’t even see the indignity as punishment but as pleasure.

Such public anal touching tactic is rarely, if ever, encountered in Western society. The only thing similar that I can think of is John Hopoate, an Australian rugby league player who was banned for inserting his fingers into opponent rectums. His reasoning was that it was off-putting and upsetting and I couldn’t argue with that. 

Knowing that ddongchim is popular in both Korea and Japan, I was interested to know whether this phenomenon was known in China. When I was holidaying with friends in China, my friend Rob and myself decided to find out. So we asked our tour guide, David about it on the first night of our quick four-day tour of Beijing. “David, in China, do kids come up behind you and stick fingers in your bum?” David replies, “Do you guys want prostitutes?” Rob and I got a little flustered, with the double anxiety of being aware of the glare of our partners and not wanting to seem to David like we were sex tourists (which we weren’t). “No David, little kids who come up behind you and stick fingers in your bum?’ David nods knowingly “Ohh, you want child prostitutes”. We protested our innocence for a moment before realizing that it was lost in translation. Giving up, we slunk back into our chairs in disgrace; aware that David would no doubt be keeping a close watch on these couple of sickos he had the misfortune of showing around Beijing for 2 more days. Making it worse was that both Rob and I had dodgy looking moustaches from competing in EV’s annual March Moustache Madness Month. If it wasn’t bad enough that David thought we were paedophiles, we also looked the part. If you read this post and plan to teach in Korea and Japan, you have been forewarned.