Seoul Man: A Memoir of Cars, Culture, Crisis, and Unexpected Hilarity Inside a Korean Corporate Titan (19 page)

A year later, with Toyota still reeling, a cascade of tragedies enveloped Japan.

The Tohoku earthquake of March 11, 2011, five months after Rebekah and I arrived in Korea, was the biggest to hit Japan since modern records were kept more than one hundred years ago. It triggered a tsunami that struck shore hours later and flooded the Fukushima nuclear reactor near Sendai, in the north of Japan, unleashing radioactivity into the water and air.
Nearly 16,000 people died and another 2,600 went missing, according to the final records. The impact of these triple disasters had significant impact not only on Japan but on the region, crippling Japan’s economy for most of the year, especially its mighty auto industry.

And they impacted our family life.

Rebekah and I were driving around the military base in Seoul two days after the quake struck, and she got a phone call from one of her bosses at the embassy. She asked if Rebekah could possibly be ready to fly to Japan the next day to help with a region-wide State Department effort being mobilized for the stricken country. Of course, Rebekah said.

Then her boss embarrassedly asked: “And how much do you weigh?” There was a chance Rebekah and her colleagues would be airlifted from the U.S. embassy in Tokyo to Sendai to help find and evacuate Americans. For that to happen, the U.S. government needed to know the total weight of all the personnel in Japan so it would know how many helicopters to send.

The next day Rebekah was in a war room at the U.S. embassy in Tokyo. She and her State Department colleagues had one major goal: to find Americans. Communications between several areas of Japan and the outside world were cut off, and the U.S. embassy was besieged with frantic calls and e-mails from people in the States unable to get in touch with their friends and relatives in Japan. U.S. citizens in foreign countries are encouraged to register with the U.S. embassy in their host country precisely for this reason: so your government can find you in emergencies and put you back in touch with your family.

We of course were nervous for Rebekah to be sent into a disaster zone with an unknown radiation hazard. But she retained conversational Japanese from her time there as a teacher. She would be a valuable asset.

Also, and this is in no way to glamorize the assignment, one of the reasons that people join the Foreign Service is to try to make a difference in times of crisis. For part of her posting in Seoul, Rebekah directly helped her countrymen in distress. Lots of Americans travel the world on spiritual or self-discovery quests. A surprising number of them end up in Seoul, out of money, perhaps struggling with a mental illness, and sleeping in the train station while losing touch with family members back home, who are worried sick. At the end of their rope, the families call the U.S. embassy in desperation. Rebekah and her embassy colleagues helped these Americans, putting fathers back in touch with lost sons and solving seemingly insurmountable paperwork problems with the Korean government that prevented destitute Americans from being repatriated.

But much of her posting was in the visa window at the embassy. Intellectually, she knew that granting visas to Koreans who wanted to work and study in the U.S. was an important job and made many dreams come true. But it was a dull grind and there was no way to see the end result of her efforts.

Here in Japan, she loved the Tokyo embassy esprit de corps with her fellow officers from Seoul and around the region. Putting an American student on the phone with her crying mother back in the States—this was satisfying. For the first time as a U.S. Foreign Service officer, she felt like her job mattered. If there were any doubt she was in a danger zone, the aftershocks that shook the hotel at night reminded her.

In the days that passed following the receding of the tsunami waters, Rebekah and her Foreign Service colleagues were able to locate many Americans as they wandered out of their refuges and found a telephone. But just as many Americans in Japan had not registered with the U.S. embassy, and Rebekah and her colleagues leaned on the Japanese officials for help, they had their own pri
ority: find missing Japanese citizens, of which there were tens of thousands.

Rebekah and her colleagues exchanged increasingly frantic calls and e-mails with one family of a twenty-four-year-old American woman who was in Japan to teach English. The family was able to get in touch with their daughter’s friends and others who knew her, but their daughter had not been found. Feeling helpless on the far side of the world, the American family readied to board a plane to Japan to look for their daughter. But just before they did, Rebekah and her colleagues delivered the terrible news that Japanese authorities had finally found the body of the young English teacher.

Rebekah came home after two weeks, after being wanded by Korean officials at Seoul’s Incheon Airport and found to be radiation-free, which was no small relief to both of us. It was an intensely emotional time for Rebekah, full of both great joy and sorrow for the families of the Americans in Japan and the Japanese themselves.

But Rebekah’s emotional stake ran deeper. At one point in her life, she was a twenty-five-year-old English teacher in Japan. She lived and worked in Sendai, a city that had been obliterated by the tsunami. It was not lost on her that it could have been her family that had received that awful phone call from the U.S. embassy.

Rebekah had come to love Japan from her time teaching there. Returning as a Foreign Service officer to see the destruction and terrible human toll was heartbreaking for her.

“Japanese people were calling us at the embassy, terrified about the radiation,” Rebekah recalled later. “They were saying, ‘Our government is not telling us the truth about the radiation. Please help us.’”

It was this feeling of helplessness and fear of the unknown that stayed with Rebekah.

“We had planes waiting for us at the airport to take us out if the radiation became a problem,” she said. “But they didn’t.”

The Japanese tragedies also threw into sharp relief the differences between Japan and Korea.

For instance, in the aftermath of the disasters, world newspapers were filled with unbelievable photos of hundreds of Japanese patiently standing in long, single lines, waiting for fresh drinking water. Unbelievable to anyone, that is, outside of Japan.

One of my Korean team members, seeing one of these photos, joked, “If those were Koreans, no one would be in line. They’d all be shoving up to the front.”

It’s not for nothing the Japanese have often been called the British of Asia, so impeccable are their manners and civilized behavior. But you may never know what a Japanese person really thinks of you. And because Japan is a culture of “yes,” because saying “no” is seen as an insult, you may get something promised to you that can never be delivered.

The Koreans, on the other hand, are often called the Irish of Asia, and it’s not just for the drinking, which the Japanese (and Chinese) can easily match. In the right setting, you’ll hear what Koreans have on their mind. If you have a blemish on your face, colleagues will helpfully point it out all day, because they want what is best for you. Conversely, if you’re looking especially good, you may be told you’re having “a good face day.”

But I came to admire this bluntness and directness. If you’re a tourist in a country, then you’d want to be in a place like Japan, possibly the most mannered nation in the world, because you’re only ever going to get surface-deep with the locals and it doesn’t matter what they really think of you.

But if you’re going to work and live every day with colleagues, then you’d better be certain they mean what they say. And generally I found Koreans did, tough as it could make daily life for
both Korean and foreigner. Frequently my non-Korean Hyundai colleagues from around the world would e-mail or phone me in Seoul to complain or lament that their Korean bosses had told them they had “failed” at some task rather than informing them in a more gentle, more Western fashion that their performance could be improved. Koreans actually pride themselves on this sort of socially enforced toughness. It has been one of the keys to their rapid ascent.

Comparing corporate behavior at the rival countries’ national champion automakers tells you a lot about national personality.

Both Hyundai and Toyota use the Japanese-created “just in time” manufacturing system, which reduces the overhead of excess inventory. Both are Confucian in corporate hierarchy. Both are run by scions of their founders.

But after that, national character takes over. If Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda is scheduled to speak at the 2020 Detroit Auto Show, unless he is dead, you can bet your life he will be there. If Hyundai vice chairman Chung is scheduled to speak at next year’s Detroit Auto Show, you may not know he’ll be there until he mounts the stage. Most likely the vice chairman’s visit has been scheduled and canceled a half dozen times in the month beforehand, sending executives and staff scurrying this way and that to initiate and then halt preparations. This is quite sensibly to ensure that the vice chairman is exactly where he needs to be, tending to the most important thing in the company at that moment.

Things are well planned at Hyundai, but they actually
happen
at the last minute, in an all-hands-on-deck crisis mode.

Turns out, this has its benefits for the consumer.

A former Hyundai executive who worked for years at one of Hyundai’s keenest rivals, put it this way: Everyone in the auto industry takes about four years to build a car, from first idea until it rolls off the assembly line. At most automakers, the final design
is locked in place eighteen months before that car rolls off the line. This leaves adequate time for marketing, advertising, dealership training, and so on. “At Hyundai,” he said, “we’re literally making changes on the car until a month before it comes off the assembly line.”

Of course, this causes chaos. But it means that when a customer buys a “new” car from one of Hyundai’s rivals, that car is really eighteen months old and no longer on the cutting edge of the industry. When you buy a Hyundai car, it’s so up-to-date, the paint is barely dry, and there are a few thousand sleepless, exhausted Koreans to thank for it.

10

SEJONG THE GREAT: GIVE-AND-TAKE WITH CHINA

China has a much different and far more patriarchal relationship with Korea than does Japan. Unlike Korea and Japan, which are separated by the East Sea of Korea (which the Japanese call the Sea of Japan), the Korean Peninsula is connected to China, and the border between the two peoples has moved back and forth since at least the fourth century
B.C.
, capturing members of Chinese and Korean ethnicity under alternating flags as the Chinese waged various invasions and Korean dynasties rose and fell. Successive Chinese dynasties understood that the Korean Peninsula was not only a trade market but also an important defense against invaders.

Most of the inhabitants of the Korean Peninsula—by then unified under the first great Korean dynasty, the Silla—became tributaries of China’s Tang dynasty in the seventh century. The Chinese saw themselves as emperors of the entire world, with
China at the center. The Koreans had little choice but to agree, sending yearly tribute to the Chinese emperor in return for nominal protection. This recognized Korea as the smaller and lesser state to China’s dominant position. Trade and culture flowed from China to Korea.

The ties between China and Korea became set in stone during Korea’s Chosun dynasty, thanks to its founder, Yi Song-gye (no relation to the later Admiral Yi), who ruled from 1392 to 1398. He cultivated close relations with China’s Ming dynasty and imported technology and ideas. But of all the ideas Korea absorbed from China, none was more powerful or durable than the institutionalization of Confucianism in Korean culture. Confucianism had come to Korea from China in the sixth century
A.D.
Eight hundred years later, King Yi made it the official Chosun state religion.

Despite the weaving of Confucianism into Korean DNA, it could be argued Yi’s greatest contribution to Korea was his bloodline. His great-grandson became Korea’s most remarkable man: Sejong the Great.

Born in 1397, Sejong was the youngest of three sons of the third king of the Chosun dynasty. Bookish and inquisitive, Sejong was not destined for the throne. That right belonged to his oldest brother, who proved to be an excellent man of leisure but not a worthy successor. Sejong’s father removed his oldest son from the line of succession and the middle brother became a monk, clearing the way for Sejong to take the Chosun crown in 1418, at age twenty-one.

Korea, like many other cultures, was a caste society, based on birth or, as it was called in ancient Korea, “bone rank.” It was impossible to rise above your birth rank. Sejong broke open this idea. He astounded his royal advisers on his second day on the throne, seeking input from all ranks. He appointed the lower
classes to civil service jobs. He felt it was critical that the people have the ear of the king and asked to hear directly from them.

In order to facilitate this, Sejong did nothing less than invent the modern written Korean language, Hangul. Before Sejong, only the ruling classes knew how to read and write. There was a spoken Korean language, but the written language of the Korean court was Chinese, and the few literate Koreans used a pared-down version of Chinese known as
hanja
, borrowing Chinese characters to transcribe spoken Korean. A literate underclass was considered potentially restive and politically dangerous, and some of Sejong’s advisers opposed the spread of written language to the peasants. So the king worked on his language in secret, possibly with some help from trusted members of his Hall of Worthies researchers. In 1443 or 1444, records indicate, Sejong debuted his twenty-eight-letter phonic alphabet. (Four letters have become obsolete.) Hangul is simple and was designed that way so uneducated peasants—and even American executives—could learn it. Korea was still five hundred years away from becoming a democracy, but its earliest seeds were sown here. Sejong promoted the idea that one could advance on merit, not just privilege.