Seeing How The Other Half Lives.

Osaka housewife Tomomi Taguchi cautiously opens the door to Lee Won Tae's cozy three-bedroom apartment. Lee, 43, is a middle-class bureaucrat who lives in Seoul with his wife, mother and two children. The apartment's little entrance is decorated with a framed reproduction of a classic Korean painting, an autograph-covered baseball and a replica of Giuliano de Medici's marble head. In the dining room, mail- order catalogs and magazines clutter the table. The modest-size kitchen is packed with appliances, pans and utensils. Taguchi, 51, hesitates, but cannot resist reaching up to open a cabinet, immediately exposing plates, cups, bottles of vitamin supplements and wrinkled tea bags. "Wow, this is just like my kitchen," she exclaims.

In any culture, it is against etiquette to open closets in somebody else's house without asking. But here, visitors are encouraged to touch, open and even sit on anything they please. It's the centerpiece of "Seoul Style 2002: Life as it is--with the Lee family," a large, fun-packed and ambitious exhibition at the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka. "We want the Japanese to see how Koreans live, literally," says Toshio Asakura, the museum's professor in charge of the exhibit, which opened March 21. That feeling is mutual: since late February, the National Folk Museum of Korea in Seoul has hosted the similarly elaborate "Japan, Our Close Neighbor" exhibition.

As part of the cultural exchange leading up to Japan and Korea cohosting the World Cup in May and June, their two national museums collaborated on the dueling "reality" shows. They helped each other with research and curating--the first such large-scale cooperation ever to take place between the museums. With these exhibits, the cultural exchange that began when the World Cup 2002 was announced in 1996 has "reached a new level," declares Asakura.

So far, precious antiques and traditional-music performers have gone back and forth between the countries. TV programs have been coproduced, and visual artists from both countries have exhibited in both. Korean rock bands, films and recipes have conquered the Japanese market; Japan's cartoon characters have flooded Korea, and Seoul has temporarily lifted its ban on Japanese pop music through the summer. Despite occasional political clashes, the two nations have cultivated their friendliest relations in years. A joint poll conducted by Japan's Yomiuri Shimbun and Korea's Hankook Ilbo newspapers earlier this year found that 47 percent of Japanese and 32 percent of Koreans think that the two countries have a good relationship, up from 37 percent and 19 percent, respectively, when last surveyed in 1996. And now the people of the two countries are ready to share the details of their day-to-day lives.

At first the Osaka museum planned to build a typical Korean house. To get ideas, Koji Sato, the Ethnology Museum's associate professor, researched the belongings of Lee--an acquaintance of a colleague--and his family. But after spending several weeks cataloging everything the Lees owned--some 3,500 items--he realized that it would be interesting just to showcase their home. Since both Lee and his wife, Kim Young Suk, 40, ...