When I first came to Korea I met a guy named Kyeong-ho. He told me two stories I will never forget.

The first involved his military service. For six months he had to destroy hundreds of pigs every day in a government effort to control an outbreak of foot and mouth disease in South Korea. He buried most of them alive.

The other story happened when he was 12 and his mother took him to his favorite restaurant, followed by an afternoon at a local amusement park. She bought him candy and let him go on any ride he wanted. On the way home they stopped at a hospital. When he asked his mother why they had stopped at the hospital she said, “Don’t care about that.”

Kyeong-ho was circumcised that afternoon.

While this might sound crazy to a Western reader, it’s common for Korean boys to be circumcised in their early teens. I knew one guy who had it done during his pre-military physical. Why are Korean men circumcised? To hear them tell it — and I’ve asked three or four — it’s so they don’t look different from their peers.

Circumcision is a topic that often goes undisclosed. It’s been this way for a little over 2,000 years (first undertaken in ancient Egypt — see photo above). The blog Coming Anarchy has a History of Male Circumcision, told in two parts here and here, and I recommend it as a means of getting your feet wet on the topic.