First, a little background: For Korean kids, school doesn’t end at 3 o’clock. After regular school, the vast majority flock to one or more of the countless neighborhood ‘hakwons’ (independent tutoring schools) to learn more stuff until late. English, math, science, piano, art, etc. — there are hakwons for everything under the sun, all promising to make kids perform better than their peers, all ready to suck up parents’ money.

Anyway, today I was at a friend’s home in the vast apartment wasteland that is North Seoul, when suddenly I heard the faint sound of someone playing a most familiar tune on piano: the SMB theme. It certainly isn’t out of the ordinary to hear the reverberation of kids playing piano in Korean apartment buildings, but this was a first for me.

Upon asking, I was informed that learning the Mario theme in piano lessons has recently become a big thing among kids, a nice diversion from the boring numbers they generally have to trudge through. This may be minor anecdotal evidence, but it’s still more proof that Nintendo and its DS are making a real impression upon Korean kids, a neat thing to witness firsthand in a place where the company virtually didn’t exist a year ago.

Now if only the piano-addicted ten year-old who lives below me would catch on…