Unchanging South Korea Celebrates Its Ancient Roots : Asia: Autumn Moon Festival honors ancestors and Confucianism, as is the custom.

Yun Dal Yong, 57, the fourth son in a family with nine children, was not sure how many relatives had gathered in his home Thursday morning to honor ancestors in this farming village nestled against a tree-capped hill north of Seoul.

But about 100 attended the main ceremony to venerate the last four male generations of Yuns. It was held at the nearby home of his uncle, the patriarch of the current Yun clan. And before the day would end, about 25 other ceremonies would be held at one Yun household or another in the clan village, in which nearly everyone is related.

The occasion was Chusok, the 2,000-year-old Autumn Moon Festival, a day on which Paju and South Korea as a whole return to the nation’s ancient Confucian roots. Combining the gift-giving of a Christmas, the feast to celebrate a bountiful harvest of a Thanksgiving and the traditional worship of ancestors, Chusok underscores the amazingly unchanging nature of the South Korean people.

“The core of Korean culture is Confucianism, and the core of Confucianism is the ritual of worshiping ancestors,” said Chang Ju Keun, a retired professor with expertise in Korean folk customs.

Most of South Korea’s 8 million Christians as well pay reverence to ancestors on Chusok, albeit often without great enthusiasm and usually with prayers instead of offerings of food, he said.

Thanksgiving and ancestor worship are linked by a belief that the ancestors helped spiritually with the harvest--or for city-dwellers, with the family fortunes.

For all, Chusok brings ordinary life to a halt.

So overwhelming is the celebration that this year an estimated 26 million of the nation’s 43 million people staged a mass migration to their native towns to carry out the rites. Most of the others gathered with relatives in their own homes.

The Bank of Korea put an extra $3.8 billion worth of won currency into the money supply to cope with the splurge of shopping for gifts and food. Beef, pork and rice were released from government stockpiles to forestall price increases. Offices, factories and shops of all kinds closed. Hotels curtailed services.

“We wish our readers a happy holiday,” declared the Korea Times in a front page announcement that no newspapers would be published for three days.

Chusok falls on a single day--the 15th day of the eighth month by the lunar calendar (Thursday this year)--but the day before and the day after have been made official holidays to facilitate travel.

A Chusok ceremony shows how the idea of women as a secondary entity is reinforced year after year by Korean custom, although much of Confucian-based discrimination against women has been eliminated from the nation’s laws in recent years.

Yun, for example, told of how the wives did nearly all the cooking for the Chusok feast the day before. The men, he said, did nothing.

And when Yun’s uncle, the patriarch, had rice wine poured into separate cups for each male member of the four past generations and led the fathers and sons of the current extended family in deep bows for each of the ancestors, the women and girls stayed in the kitchen or outside.

The bows continued until the tips of the foreheads of the men and boys touched their hands on the floor before a table filled with offerings of wine, rice cake, fruits, fish and songpyon --half-moon shaped rice cakes stuffed with chestnuts, beans, dried Chinese dates and sometimes powdered sesame.

The older girls, wearing traditional Korean dresses in blazing colors, and their mothers brought out tables afterward and filled them with a feast the likes of which most Koreans see only twice a year--on this day, Chusok, and on New Year’s.

Yun said his clan’s custom is to collectively visit the graves of the four generations of ancestors--all located on the hill behind the village--only on New Year’s. On Chusok, family members go individually if they wish, he added.

Shades of difference in the fervor with which Koreans celebrate Chusok have emerged. But it is hard to find anyone for whom the core point of ancestor worship is missing.

Kim Yung Dae, a Bank of Korea director, for example, got together for Chusok rituals and a meal with his brothers and their families not in his native town in southeast South Korea but rather in Seoul.

Traffic is so bad that “it’s just too much trouble to go back to the native home,” he said. “We visit our ancestors’ graves at other times.”

Retired professor Chang sees change occurring even within his own family, but he remains convinced that the spirit of Chusok will survive.

“I have one son and two daughters. They are all married, with one daughter each, and don’t intend to have any more children. The tradition, however, is centered on sons. (In addition), one of my sons-in-law has never visited his native town since he left,” Chang said.

Even so, he insisted that “thinking of ancestors on Chusok will never change. That’s Korea.”

Chang Ji Yon, 19, a sophomore at Seoul National University who is not related to the retired professor, said she and many of her friends regarded Chusok as “just another holiday.”

“My father, a pharmacist, has to work, and we are not planning any ceremony,” she said. “But we will have a better meal than we usually do.”

Chang confessed, however, that another reason for forgoing the Chusok ritual at her home is that a grand commemoration of the anniversary of the death of an ancestor is coming up just a week from now, and the family feels obliged to conduct rituals for that occasion. (In those memorials, both male and female ancestors of the past four generations are honored once a year, for a total of eight commemorations.)

Lee Jung Woo, 23, a university student, said he would interrupt studies for an examination to enter graduate school to attend the family Chusok rituals at his uncle’s home, visit the tomb of his paternal grandfather and then go back to his studies.

To him, younger Koreans are “less ritualistic” but actually more fervent than their elders about the worship of ancestors.

“We think our root is our ancestors--the pillar of our culture,” Lee said.