In 2000, Lotte catcher Lim Soo-hyuk collapsed after running from first to second base during a game versus the LG Twins. He fell into a coma and never came out of it – dying at Kangdong Sacred Heart Hospital in Seoul on Feb. 7.

I hate to use a death or a funeral to make what I think is an interesting point about Korean culture, but media coverage of funerals here has always interested me. Lim had a heart condition doctors were not aware of before the time of his collapse. His family sued the Lotte Giants and LG Twins in April of 2003, eventually settling out of court for the sum of 330 million won. That was shortly after I arrived in South Korea, and I remembered seeing photos of Lim’s comotose body in a hospital bed, his eyes open, rolling backward, thinking it was really odd that journalists would be allowed to photograph such a thing. To say nothing of people being interested enough to put it on their blog.

However, things like people laying comatose in hospital beds, along with a couple other situations people in the west might find inappropriate subjects for photographing — police murder scene recreations and funerals — are fairly commonplace in the Korean media.

I have no opinion on this whatsoever, but I always find it interesting to see a funeral become a media event. To some extent, particularly when a celebrity dies, I would think this creates the temptation to use a funeral as a vehicle for self-promotion, which is pretty disgusting, at least on the surface.

The photo used for Lim’s wake was actually quite wonderful. It’s the kind of photo I think most anyone would be proud to have stand as a representation of our life:

Of course there are occasionally public funerals in the west — Michael Jackson recently, and Ronald Reagan a few years ago. But I’d label those as exceptional cases of people that lived under heavy media scrutiny anyway.

Koreans tend to grieve very openly and publicly, something that has always struck me as very healthy and therapeutic — except in the case of Kim Il-sung’s memorial in North Korea, which I dare you to watch longer than the 23 seconds I just lasted.