The characters are fictional. The fear isn’t. From the KCIA and Korea’s meth trade with Japan to the strange light and darkness of the 1970s, here’s what Made in Korea is really drawing from.
Watching Made in Korea as a Korean is a slightly strange experience. Neither Baek Kitae nor Jang Geonyoung existed. But the world they move through is not unfamiliar at all.
The KCIA, the Blue House, the presidential security office, the Red Army Faction, methamphetamine, high-end kisaeng houses, the private secrets of powerful men. Even the hijacking that opens episode one is taken from a real event.
So watching this purely as a crime noir means missing something. Baek Kitae is fiction. The era that let a man like Baek Kitae operate was not.
Haven’t caught up on the plot yet? Start here: Made in Korea Season 1: Full Story and Ending Explained
The Hijacking in Episode One Really Happened
On March 31, 1970, Japan Airlines Flight 351, flying from Tokyo to Fukuoka, was hijacked by nine members of the Communist League’s Red Army Faction. It’s known as the Yodogo hijacking, after the aircraft’s nickname. The hijackers demanded to be flown to North Korea, and the plane did in fact land at Gimpo Airport in Seoul.
The South Korean government went so far as to disguise Gimpo Airport as Pyongyang to deceive the hijackers. In the end the passengers were released, and the hijackers went on to North Korea.
Made in Korea drops a fictional character, Baek Kitae, into this real event. The hijacking is history. Everything Baek Kitae does inside it, moving as the businessman Matsuda, is invention.
Korea in 1970 — Getting Brighter, and Getting Darker
The drama only ever shows the president’s photograph. His name is never spoken, but Korean viewers know exactly who he is. Park Chung Hee, the man they called Gakha, His Excellency.
After taking power in a 1961 military coup, he made anti-communism the central justification for how the state was run, and through the 1970s he concentrated power further. The Anti-Communist Law, created just after the coup, was used broadly enough to suppress criticism of the government and the press along with it.
One of that government’s most powerful instruments was the KCIA. It was not simply an agency collecting intelligence on North Korea. It gathered domestic and foreign intelligence, held direct investigative authority over national security cases, and could coordinate the intelligence and investigative work of other state bodies, including the military and the prosecution. Crucially, KCIA investigations did not fall under prosecutorial supervision.
Which is why the scenes where Baek Kitae threatens a prosecutor and drags his family in to manufacture an espionage case aren’t as absurd as they look. This was genuinely an era when state power suppressed people through detention and torture outside legal process, and through fabricated spy cases.
North Korea Was Building the Same Thing
For international readers, there’s an interesting comparison to be made here. During the same period, North Korea also ran a powerful internal surveillance apparatus, justified as protecting the state from external enemies.
In 1973, Kim Il Sung split the national security functions out of the existing security apparatus and created the State Political Security Department, a separate secret police organization. It handled internal surveillance and regime security, and reported directly to the supreme leader.
The South spoke of anti-communism. The North spoke of defending the system. The ideologies were opposites, but in one respect they mirrored each other strangely well: both grew agencies that watched and suppressed their own citizens, justified by the need to guard against an enemy outside. On the 1970s Korean peninsula, an intelligence agency wasn’t just an intelligence agency. It was fear itself.
And in the Same Era, the Economy Was Growing Like a Miracle
This is exactly why Koreans don’t feel one simple thing about the 1970s. For some people, the Park Chung Hee era means dictatorship, torture, press control, and human rights abuses. For others, it’s the decade when a poor country started building factories, growing exports, and developing at astonishing speed.
The Park government built the foundation for conglomerates like Samsung and Hyundai through export-driven policy and state-directed finance and industrial planning. At the same time, it suppressed the labor movement hard and looked the other way on brutal working conditions. Economic growth and authoritarianism existed simultaneously.
How you assess this era remains one of the significant dividing lines in how Korean society looks at its own past. One side says Korea grew because that strong state existed. The other says economic growth cannot justify dictatorship and abuse. Both are looking at a real part of the 1970s.
What makes Made in Korea interesting is that it points the camera at the darker half.
Why the Light in This Drama Is So Strange
This is less a historical fact than the thing I felt most strongly watching it.
Made in Korea uses lighting to an extreme. The bright places are very bright, and the dark places are impossibly dark. Hwang Gukpyeong’s office is the clearest example. The scene where Kitae waits hidden in darkness and shoots him is almost too symbolic.
It’s hard to read this as period noir styling alone. Korea at the time was growing fast. Highways were being built, factories were going up, money was starting to move. On the surface, a country getting brighter. But no one knew what was happening where that light didn’t reach.
In KCIA basements, people were being beaten. In back rooms, politicians passed money to each other. In the dark corners of society, drugs were being manufactured. And even a prosecutor could be turned into a North Korean spy if someone decided to make it so. A country where the bright places are very bright and no one can see what happens in the dark. That’s what I think this drama’s imagery is showing us about the 1970s.
Woo Min-ho Didn’t Pick This Era by Accident
This territory is familiar ground for director Woo Min-ho. He made Inside Men, The Man Standing Next, and Harbin. He’s returned again and again to power, politics, and what happens to people inside them. He’s said himself that with Made in Korea he wanted to ask what power fundamentally is, and why people change when they get it.
Which is why there’s no clear hero here. Jang Geonyoung does stand on the more righteous side. But even he attaches himself to the chief presidential secretary in order to bring Kitae down. In the final scene, when he drinks the liquor poured into that man’s shoe, we’re being shown that he too has become someone who attached himself to power.
It starts looking like a villain against an honest prosecutor. It gradually becomes a question of which power you align with. I think that captures the era well. It isn’t that justice didn’t exist. It’s that justice alone couldn’t accomplish anything. That’s why Jang Geonyoung loses in Season 1.
Korean-Made Meth Really Was Sold to Japan
This is the part of the drama that looks most far-fetched, and it’s actually close to the historical record.
In the early 1970s, Japan tightened enforcement against methamphetamine production and trafficking. Manufacturers operating in Japan crossed over to Korea and passed on their techniques there. Meth made in Korea was then smuggled back into Japan. When production became difficult in the tightly regulated country, the manufacturing base simply moved next door to the looser one.
The numbers make the scale clear. According to Japan’s 1987 police white paper, Korean-made product accounted for 87.4 percent of seizures of one kilogram or more of stimulants in Japan in 1982. By 1984, that figure had collapsed to 5.2 percent as joint Korea-Japan investigations reduced the smuggling itself.
So the drama’s basic structure — manufacture in Korea, hand it to the Japanese yakuza, sell it in Japan — isn’t invented. But there’s an important difference. The idea that the KCIA systematically manufactured drugs and exported them to Japan is the drama’s fiction. Baek Kitae is fiction. What the show did was take a criminal market that genuinely existed and connect it to the KCIA.
“Selling Drugs to Japan Is Patriotism” — Someone Actually Said This
Kitae makes a strange argument in the drama. Make meth in Korea, sell it to Japan, foreign currency comes in and Japanese people get hooked — therefore, patriotism.
It’s absurd, but it isn’t invented. Someone really said it.
Lee Hwang-soon was Korea’s biggest meth manufacturer in the 1970s, and the line he left behind was this: “I’ll destroy Japan with philopon.”
Lee based his operation in Busan, manufacturing meth and moving it to Japan. Arrested in 1972 for gold smuggling, he was released on a medical suspension of sentence and vanished — and during that period he found a chemist and learned how to manufacture meth. He wasn’t caught again until 1980.
The film built on this man is The Drug King, where Song Kang-ho’s character also talks about drugs as an export and calls it patriotism. And here’s the interesting part: The Drug King is also a Woo Min-ho film. That explains a great deal about why the drug storyline in Made in Korea feels so familiar.
Only twenty-five years had passed since the end of Japanese colonial rule, and the government was pushing exports and foreign currency like a national mission. Feelings about Japan, and the language of earning foreign currency. Kitae attaches both to his own crimes.
Every time the word patriotism comes up in this drama, it makes me a little uncomfortable. Samuel Johnson’s famous line from the eighteenth century applies here: “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” It isn’t that patriotism itself is bad. It’s closer to a warning that patriotism can be the last thing a scoundrel reaches for to justify what he’s done.
It fits Baek Kitae exactly. For him, patriotism isn’t a conviction. It’s the language he uses to justify his appetite.
So What Exactly Is “Made in Korea” Here?
The drugs are made in Korea. But it’s hard to read the title as meaning only that. Baek Kitae is also made in Korea.
What produced him wasn’t only his own appetite. There was a KCIA that stood above the prosecution, a political establishment that needed money, a country hungry for exports and foreign currency, and an era in which using that power could take you higher. Baek Kitae is the man who adapted to that system fastest.
Jang Geonyoung, by contrast, believed the law would work. By the end of Season 1, the difference between them fits in one sentence. Geonyoung believed in the law. Kitae found the people who move the law. That’s why the villain wins.
But I don’t think this drama is simply saying that 1970s Korea was terrible. There was enormous economic growth in this era, and the energy that turned Korean society into what it is now detonated during this period too. At the same time, behind all of it, the state was detaining and torturing people, and political power and the intelligence agency stood above the law.
An era when light and darkness were both at their strongest. Woo Min-ho shows us both of them through the image itself. And Korean viewers all know what’s coming. In 1979, the president in this drama is killed, and another villain appears. That’s what makes this drama so uncomfortable to watch. The people of this country would have to wait a long time yet before justice came back.
Basic Info
Director: Woo Min-ho
Writers: Park Eun-gyo, Park Joon-suk
Cast: Hyun Bin, Jung Woo-sung, Woo Do-hwan, Park Yong-woo, Cho Yeo-jeong
Episodes: 6
Release: December 24, 2025 – January 14, 2026, on Disney+ and Hulu
Season 2: September 9, 2026, with two episodes weekly through September 23
Haven’t caught up on the plot yet? Start here:
Made in Korea Season 1: Full Story and Ending Explained
Looking for more Korean thrillers with this much twist density?
Mousetrap: What You Need to Know Before You Watch
Should You Watch The East Palace? A Korean Viewer’s Take
Agent Kim Reactivated: What You Need to Know Before You Watch
A Shop for Killers Season 1: What You Need to Know Before Season 2
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