Korean Funeral Customs You've Seen in K-Dramas, Explained

A New York Stage Just Brought Jesa Home

This past spring, Ma-Yi Theater Company and The Public Theater staged the world premiere of “Jesa,” a play by Jeena Yi about four Korean American sisters who fly home to perform their late father’s jesa, the ancestral memorial rite where families set food before his photograph and bow. The show opened March 20 at The Public’s Shiva Theater and did well enough that its original April 5 closing date got pushed back a full week, to April 12. For a story built entirely around a Korean ritual that most American theatergoers had never seen named on a marquee, that’s a real vote of confidence.

It’s also a useful jumping-off point. If you watch Korean dramas, you’ve almost certainly sat through a funeral scene that felt foreign in ways you couldn’t quite name: mourners in white instead of black, a spoonful of rice pressed into a dead man’s mouth, cash changing hands at what looks like a wake, everyone bowing to a portrait before they bow to the family. None of that is dramatic license. It’s documented custom, and Jesa is one recent example of that custom crossing over onto a stage built for a US audience. This piece unpacks the customs themselves, in the order a Korean funeral actually unfolds.

The Three-Day Funeral (Samiljang)

A traditional Korean funeral, or jangnye, most commonly runs three days – a format called samiljang. The family and close relatives keep vigil for the full stretch, typically at a hospital mortuary hall or a dedicated funeral home rather than at a house of worship, before burial or cremation on the third day. That’s the structure laid out in official Korean funeral-culture references, including the National Folk Museum of Korea and the Korea Funeral Culture Promotion Institute, the government-affiliated body that publishes formal mourning-etiquette guidance.

If you’re used to the American rhythm – a single evening visitation, a funeral service a few days later, burial that same week but rarely on a fixed schedule – three unbroken days of round-the-clock vigil is the detail that tends to surprise US viewers most. It isn’t three days of grieving alone in a room; it’s three days of receiving visitors, eating together, and taking shifts, which is part of why Korean drama funerals so often double as a stage for family conflict to surface. Everyone who matters to the plot is, quite literally, stuck in the same room for three straight days.

Preparing the Body: Yeomseup and Banham

Before any of that vigil begins, the body is prepared through a set of rites known as yeomseup. The deceased is washed, and the face is covered with cloth. In a step called banham, rice – traditionally along with coins – is placed in the mouth using a willow spoon, symbolizing provision for the journey to the afterlife; the ears and eyes are also covered with cloth. Only after this is the body dressed in burial garments and wrapped for the coffin. These details come from the Academy of Korean Studies and Korea’s national culture information archive, both of which document banham as a distinct, named step rather than incidental staging.

This is usually the scene that makes American viewers do a double take, because nothing in a US funeral home’s typical process looks like it. Embalming in the US is a private, clinical procedure performed off-screen by licensed professionals; yeomseup, historically, was closer to a family or community act with symbolic content attached to every step, from the rice to the willow spoon. A drama doesn’t need to explain banham for it to register as significant – it’s one of the more literal, visual translations of “we are sending this person somewhere” that Korean funeral custom offers.

Why White Is Korea’s Color of Mourning

Korea’s national heritage authority documents white as the traditional color linked to Korean mourning dress, historically worn by the bereaved through extended mourning periods. That legacy carries into the flowers, too: white chrysanthemums – the ‘Baekgang’ and ‘Shinma’ varieties tracked on Korea’s official flower auction market – are the standard bloom for condolence wreaths and floral tributes at Korean funerals today.

Analysis: for a US reader, this is the single most disorienting swap in a Korean funeral scene, because it runs backward from Western convention. Black is the color Americans read as “someone died”; white is the color Americans read as “someone got married.” A funeral hall banked in white chrysanthemums, or a family dressed head to toe in white, can register as oddly festive to an unprepared American eye when it’s actually the opposite – Korea’s version of solemn black. Once you know the color coding is simply inverted, not absent, those scenes stop looking strange and start looking exact.

Bowing to the Portrait, Giving Buuigeum

Visitors at a Korean funeral bow toward the deceased’s portrait or altar first, then bow to the bereaved family while offering brief condolences – an order and etiquette formally published by the Korea Funeral Culture Promotion Institute. Rather than sending flowers or a card, the standard gesture is buuigeum: condolence money placed in a plain white envelope labeled with the term “buui,” with its own conventions for how the envelope is addressed and handed over.

Practical: if you’re ever attending a funeral in a Korean or Korean American community and don’t know the choreography, the two moves to remember are bow-to-portrait-then-bow-to-family, and cash-in-a-plain-white-envelope rather than a Hallmark card or a bouquet. It’s the functional cousin of the casserole-and-sympathy-card instinct in the US – a way of materially supporting a grieving household – just routed through an envelope instead of a casserole dish, and worth having on hand before you need it, not while you’re standing in line to pay respects.

Jesa: Honoring Ancestors at the Table

Jesa is a separate ritual from the funeral itself – an ongoing ancestral memorial rite, held specifically as gije when it falls on the anniversary of a family member’s death. The family sets out an offering table of food and bows before a memorial tablet or photograph of the deceased, a practice documented by both the National Folk Museum of Korea and the Academy of Korean Studies. It’s this rite, not the funeral proper, that the Off-Broadway play “Jesa” dramatizes: four sisters, one table, one father’s photograph, years after his actual funeral has ended.

Analysis: that gap between funeral and jesa is worth sitting with, because it points to something Korean dramas do structurally that a lot of American television doesn’t. US prestige dramas tend to save a funeral for a season finale – one big, climactic goodbye. Korean dramas more often treat ceremonies like jesa as something that recurs, a beat the family returns to year after year rather than a door that closes. A funeral episode isn’t necessarily the end of a character’s presence in the story; jesa is built to bring them back, on schedule, indefinitely.

“May I Help You?”: The Funeral Director Rom-Com

Not every Korean drama treats this subject matter solemnly. “May I Help You?” – an MBC romantic-comedy-fantasy that aired back in late 2022, from October 19 to December 22, starring Lee Hye-ri as a funeral director who grants the last wishes of the recently deceased – built an entire premise around a mourning-industry job most American sitcoms would never touch for laughs, let alone romance. It’s a reminder that funeral custom in Korean pop culture isn’t confined to prestige tearjerkers; it’s common enough on-screen material to anchor a network rom-com, precisely because audiences already recognize the rituals it plays with.

How These Customs Travel to Korean American Communities

None of this stayed behind in Korea. Jesa’s Korean American premise – sisters who grew up in the US returning to perform a rite their father would have recognized – exists because Korean American households keep performing samiljang, buuigeum, and jesa on this side of the Pacific, adapted to American funeral homes, American work schedules, and American mortality-care logistics, but not abandoned. If a scene in a drama sent you looking up “why is everyone wearing white” or “why did she hand over an envelope instead of flowers,” the honest answer is that you were watching a real, still-practiced custom, not an invented one – and if you know a Korean American family observing a loss, the etiquette above is the same etiquette that applies at their door, not just on your screen.