“Korea is the poor man’s Japan,” a well-meaning friend of mine told me nonchalantly many years ago, as I waited to board a flight to Seoul. “Go In with this mindset and it won’t disappoint you the way it did to me.” Ironically, I ended up intensely disliking Korea intensely after my first trip there, which admittedly took me only to the capital. I felt the country lacked a singular cultural identity, to say nothing of how cold and closed-off the people seemed to be. The …