Alcohol use around the world over the centuries is a vast topic, but coming from a US religious community that prohibited all alcohol, I was duly impressed while serving in the peace corps in rural South Korea with the social utility of drinking to moderate the rigid hierarchies of local culture there and to provide a place for blunt truth telling otherwise impossible.

The costs of alcoholism were readily visible as well, but I do believe drinking culture in South Korea is a hidden partner to its vaulting economic and cultural success from the ruins of the Korean War.