A song of Seoul: Denmark's music-loving ambassador touts trust, wind power and rye bread

Seoul’s ambassadors are often gastronomes keen to share a taste of their home cuisine. In this series, the Korea JoongAng Daily asks the diplomatic corps to introduce our readers to their favorite restaurants representing cuisine from their homelands, while chatting about issues of interest to our Korean and global audience. — Ed.

Danish Ambassador to Korea Mikael Hemniti Winther follows a personal rule for nearly every diplomatic posting: Write a song about the host country, and if possible, shoot a music video to go with it.

The hobby dates back at least to a 2001 posting in Vietnam, where he fronted a band with a fellow diplomat and played Western music at venues across Hanoi.

“I realized slowly that you can put the two things [diplomacy and music] together, and sometimes use one trade to reinforce the other,” Winther said during an interview with the Korea JoongAng Daily on Sept. 16.

Now more than a year into his term in Seoul, Winther has wrapped up recording his newest track with a Korean producer. Its working title is “Alleys of Seoul.”

To most Koreans, Denmark conjures Legos, bicycles and Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales — but also one of the world’s happiest countries, with a welfare model that they want to study.

Asked what Korea — already a superaged society — might take from Denmark’s welfare model, Winther turned the question around. Trust, rather than high tax rates, is the real starting point, he argued, since a society accepts high taxes only once it trusts that the government will spend them fairly.

“This is one of my favorite questions,” he said. “Trust in society, in my opinion, comes basically from the fact that government can be trusted. [...] We have the lowest corruption level in the world. Some of this willingness to pay taxes is connected to that.”

Over lunch at Acid House, a natural wine bar serving Nordic dishes in the posh Sinsa-dong neighborhood of southern Seoul, Winther described how Copenhagen turned into a genuine culinary heavyweight. Copenhagen counted 21 Michelin-starred restaurants holding 31 stars combined in this year’s Michelin Guide Nordic Countries, including three restaurants with three stars — more than any other Nordic capital.

“Danish food culture has only become interesting, honestly, in the last 30 years,” he said. “We were a farming country, not very international, for many years, [...] so our food didn’t develop much.”

That started to change only after decades of exposure to French and Italian cuisine, and later Thai, Chinese and Japanese food, with a small but growing wave of Korean restaurants now opening in Copenhagen.

The rest of the conversation moved through the 75th anniversary of Denmark’s 1950-53 Korean War hospital ship, the nation’s offshore wind initiatives and why Seoul — rather than Tokyo — was chosen to host Denmark’s Asian innovation hub.

Below are excerpts of the interview, edited for length and clarity.

Q. Your postings included more than two decades in Asia. How does Seoul compare?

I came from China before. Shanghai and Seoul have something in common: very hardworking, very dedicated, an extreme focus on education in families, extremely high trustworthiness.

I ride an Italian scooter around — very popular in Seoul, so I bought one too — and I’m never worried about it. I think that I could leave it with the keys in and disappear for four hours, and someone would run after me and say, “You forgot your key.”

[I’ve also noticed that] Korean people are more direct than anyone I’ve met. You’re almost as direct in conversation as Danish people, and we are more direct than anyone in the Nordic countries.

You’ve written songs about the cities in your past postings. What’s the story behind the hobby?

I have a very serious hobby: I play guitar, sing and write songs during my diplomatic missions. I slowly realized that you can put the two things together and sometimes use one trade to reinforce the other. Here in Seoul, people have said, “We don't want to hear your Shanghai song; we want to hear a song about Seoul, about Korea.” So I’ve just finalized the lyrics, and next week, I’m going to record it with a very professional pianist and producer connected to the Korean music industry. The working title is “Alleys of Seoul.” I’m fascinated with all the small alleys — that’s where all the secrets are; that’s where all the action is; that’s where all the real people are.

Tell us about what’s on the table today.

Smorrebrod, hard to pronounce for foreigners, so in English, you’d just call it an “open sandwich.” The difference from other countries is that you put the toppings on top of the bread instead of beside it, which is what confuses people. [Like in] Sweden, it’s a classic lunch staple in Denmark. Even as a kid, every schoolkid would have a package — flat, with some cold cuts or fish on rye — and we’d eat it during the lunch break. It was completely a staple food; 95 percent of Danish people would eat this.

It’s just like in Korea. When you were poor, you’d eat rice, and the wealthier you became, the more you’d add to it. It evolved the same way here. For a long time, it was unchanged, but as consumers grew more sophisticated and incomes rose, people wanted something more refined — prawns, caviar, ideas borrowed from other countries. Kimchi on an open sandwich, maybe, someday. Korean food is getting more popular in Denmark too.

How has Danish food culture evolved?

Honestly, it’s only become interesting in the last 30 years. We were a farming country, not very international, for a long time. Now we have some of the world’s most famous restaurants in Copenhagen — far more than the other Nordic countries.

Korea has become a superaged society. What could it learn from Denmark’s approach to aging and patient-centered care?

In Denmark, we have more experience caring for [older adults], and we’ve focused heavily on the individual — what we call patient-oriented health care. We’re looking beyond just health to quality of life: having a good environment, having people to talk to, a bit of money to read books or travel. For years, municipalities have worked on the principle of “help to self-help.” The goal isn’t only to provide care but to help people stay independent for as long as possible.

We have a health diplomat at the embassy who works only on health issues, both commercially and for mutual learning. One concrete result is that the embassy launched the Korean-Danish Life Science Alliance in spring this year, bringing together five Danish life-science companies, including Novo Nordisk, operating in Korea. Its mission is to improve the quality of life for patients in Korea and beyond, with patient-centered care as one of its pillars.

Denmark’s model rests on high taxes and a high level of social trust. Isn’t that hard to transplant onto a society with a different tax burden and social consensus?

Trust in society, in my opinion, comes basically from the fact that the government can be trusted. If a judicial system is completely fair to everyone, then people start trusting government institutions.

The second level of trust is about the willingness to pay taxes. That comes when each of us feels that it’s not wasted on something that we didn’t think it should be spent on. That means the government must be fully accountable. We have the lowest corruption level in the world, and some of this willingness to pay taxes is connected to that. The word “accountability” is very important; so is transparency.

Denmark is the world leader in offshore wind. How are the two countries cooperating on that front?

Korea has a need, a wish and an ambition to diversify its energy sources. You’re living in the same world as the rest of us, with the Strait of Hormuz and the war in Ukraine. In geopolitical competition, things can pop up suddenly and make it impossible to get energy. We work government-to-government — we invite and happily receive many visitors from Korean institutions in the energy and climate sector to come to Denmark to see our system because we’re No. 1 in offshore wind. More than 50 percent of our electricity comes from renewables, and we have some of the most ambitious climate goals.

Whenever I visit Korean companies, I also sense the complexity. Offshore wind requires big, long-term investment, and that takes clear frameworks for international companies to commit massive amounts of money. I sense very strong ambition and political commitment across the entire National Assembly and government. The challenge is if you change government, and priorities shift — without consensus-building, these long-term, ambitious projects become hard to sustain.

Orsted, a Danish multinational energy company, said in an internal memo that it would not bid for its Incheon project in the government’s second-half auction. How do you think this affects Danish companies’ confidence in the Korean market?

I don’t want to go into each company’s individual decisions. To maintain interest from international companies, the government needs to ensure it can provide sufficient predictability and a clear framework. Danish companies are confident as long as that framework is there.

It’s the same with investment. Investors need to know what has to be fulfilled at each step to make it profitable because they’re often waiting 20 years before they see a return. That takes confidence that the government will make sure the framework leads to a price that makes it worthwhile. I don’t get pessimistic about it — I see it as a reminder for the government. I think Korean people and the Korean government want renewable energy, so they’ll keep working through this complex challenge.

Denmark doesn’t run a separate trade office here. Why is that?

We used to call it a “trade council”; we now call it “economic diplomacy” because it’s actually integrated into our diplomatic efforts. We’re probably the only country in the world where everything is this integrated under one embassy. Instead of a separate office, we have the Innovation Centre, which is also part of the embassy.

It’s set up only in countries where we find the level of innovation so high that it’s a more equal-level cooperation. Korea got the Innovation Centre very early on — it was one of the first. Korea was a real up-and-coming economy, and we can use it as a laboratory for our innovation, while Korea benefits from what we bring to shipbuilding, bioscience, the health industry and design.

Seventy-five years ago, during the 1950-53 Korean War, Denmark sent the hospital ship Jutlandia to Busan. What does that history mean today?

It was the first time any hospital ship was ever sent that far. It didn’t just treat the wounded. It also cared for civilians in Korea. The crew trained a large number of medical doctors, and I think that contributed to building up what became a widely admired Korean health system.

It wasn’t something the government just did. You had to apply to be a nurse or a doctor to get on that ship, and there was massive interest, far more than there was space for. We were also victims of war, from World War II, and we saw how devastating that was. We ourselves were evolving as a caring country, building our own welfare system — and that made people start caring, for human reasons. It built trust between our two nations, and that trust still matters today.

BY SEO JI-EUN [[email protected]]