Cosmetic surgery for men

The recent case of fugitive Ichihashi Tatsuya disguising his appearance through cosmetic surgery made the folks at FTV wonder why men get such procedure. To investigate, they traveled to South Korea, a country that is apparently far ahead of Japan when it comes to the idea of men getting surgery to make their faces look better.

Some points from the video:

• Surveys of Japanese and Korean men find that most Japanese men have a problem with the idea of men getting cosmetic surgery. The opposite is true for Koreans, who see no problem with getting cosmetic surgery. After all, if women are doing it, what’s wrong with men doing it?
• We meet two Korean men who had work done on their faces. One man is concerned about his face getting a bit saggy as he ages. Another noticed how dark lines under his eyes always stood out in photos, so he had surgery to improve on that.
• The number of Korean men getting cosmetic surgery has been increasing in recent years. Some men develop an addiction of sorts, seeking operations to fix every little flaw they perceive in their faces.
• 76% of South Korean women interviewed said they had no problem with the idea of men getting cosmetic surgery.
• When asked what they thought of a fugitive like Tatsuya Ichihashi getting cosmetic surgery to evade capture, most people seemed surprised that such a thing would happen.
• A veteran police detective says he is aware of a case in 2007 involving a fugitive who had plastic surgery and disguised himself as a woman. However, his act wasn’t very good and he was arrested after somebody reported the existence of a suspicious individual to the police. Another case in 2007 involved a woman who scammed some money from a man and used some of it to pay for plastic surgery. She was arrested after suspicions about bandages on her face led police to test her fingerprints. (The South Korean government keeps a database of every single citizen’s fingerprints.)
• Korean and Japanese plastic surgeons interviewed said they had never heard anything from the police about how they should be on the lookout for criminals, so they apparently don’t do much to avoid an Ichihashi-like situation.

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