Seoul Man: A Memoir of Cars, Culture, Crisis, and Unexpected Hilarity Inside a Korean Corporate Titan (18 page)

The Korean king hastily reinstated Admiral Yi as head of what was left of the navy. He assessed his situation: he had the thirteen ships and about two hundred badly demoralized sailors. Yet, only two months later, on October 26, 1597, Yi found himself forced into a last stand against the mighty Japanese fleet as it
sailed around the Korea Peninsula to the west coast and China. He had one chance: to lure the Japanese into the narrow Myeongnyang Strait, off the southwest corner of Korea, and stop them there. If he failed, the Japanese would have unfettered access to the west coast of Korea—the only part of the peninsula still held by Koreans—and a clear route of attack across the Yellow Sea to China.

The Japanese armada sailed 133 warships and some 200 supply ships. Yi had 13 ships, total. But he had an intimate knowledge of his country and a keen strategic mind.

Yi knew that the Myeongnyang Strait was too narrow for the Japanese force to outflank Yi’s thirteen ships, which forced a head-on conflict and immediately reduced the Japanese advantage. The tactic of using a narrow passageway to withstand a vastly superior force dated to at least Thermopylae.

Yi knew something else about the strait: it had rough currents, which inhibited maneuvers and compelled the mighty Japanese force to break off and attack in smaller groups of boats, further leveling the odds. But Yi’s secret weapon was the tidal flow in the strait. Its currents changed direction every three hours. The Japanese did not know this.

Twelve of Yi’s boats anchored reluctantly at the north end of the strait, still shell-shocked from the rout two months earlier and spooked by the size of the looming armada. They watched the Japanese fleet crowd its way in, riding the current north. Yi probed the enemy, sailing only his flagship forward and loosing cannon and arrow fire on the lead ships. Inspired by this show of aggressiveness, Yi’s twelve other ships followed, engaging the Japanese. The battle commenced.

By this time, the currents had begun to shift and flow swiftly southward, surprising the Japanese. Their ships drifted backward and collided with each other. Confusion engulfed the Japa
nese. Yi ordered a full-out attack, and his thirteen ships rode the force of the current directly into the foundering Japanese ships. Densely packed, it was a target-rich environment for Yi’s cannons and archers. The Japanese ships that weren’t destroyed or sunk on their own retreated. By battle’s end, the Japanese had lost thirty-one warships and Yi had lost none. Japanese sailors who had leapt from their sinking ships were consumed by the tide, which flowed so swiftly that it produced a roaring sound. For this reason—and possibly for the immense loss of Japanese life—Myeongnyang became known as the “Screaming Strait.”

Admiral Yi’s victorious last stand shocked the Japanese and helped turn the course of the war, essentially blocking off the Yellow Sea. More important, it gave the Chinese enough security at home to allow its navy to move its ships away from defending its harbors to join Admiral Yi’s fighting fleet. This created a balanced force to oppose the Japanese at sea and cut off naval supply lines to invading Japanese ground forces in Korea.

One year later, Admiral Yi struck the final blow of the war, joining with a Chinese commander to lead an armada of 150 Korean and Chinese ships against 500 Japanese ships that were attempting to break out of an allied blockade at the southern tip of Korea and re-form with the rest of their navy. Again Yi effectively used his home court advantage, deploying intelligence gleaned from local fisherman spies and his ability to maneuver the Japanese into a narrow strait. He used his technologically superior cannons to keep the Japanese at arm’s length, foiling their chief naval tactic, which was boarding and hand-to-hand combat. By the end of this battle, the Japanese had lost more than half of their ships. The war was effectively over.

But Yi would not live to see it. Struck down by a bullet during the battle, Yi issued a final command to his eldest son and nephew, who saw Yi fall: “We are about to win the war—keep beating my
war drums. Do not announce my death.” Yi’s nephew donned his uncle’s armor and led the fleet’s flagship in victory in disguise.

In
The Influence of the Sea on the Political History of Japan
(1921), British Royal Navy admiral and historian G. A. Ballard wrote of Yi: “It is always difficult for Englishmen to admit that Nelson ever had an equal in his profession, but if any man is entitled to be so regarded, it should surely be this great naval commander of the Asiatic race who never knew defeat and died in the presence of the enemy; of whose movements a track-chart might be compiled from the wrecks of hundreds of Japanese ships lying with their valiant crews at the bottom of the sea, off the Korean peninsula.”

Today, Admiral Yi can be seen in defiant statuary on the main street of Seoul, within sight of the president’s residence. He is Korea’s greatest military hero and the embodiment of the spirit still felt by many Koreans: “We may be small, but we are smart, we are courageous, and we are relentless.”

And lest you think Admiral Yi is lost to dusty Korean history and remembered only glancingly when today’s Seoulites walk past his statue, if at all, you are wrong. In 2014, a Korean studio released a big-budget epic recounting Admiral Yi’s 1597 stand against the Japanese, called
The Admiral:
Roaring Currents
. Not only did it break every box office record in Korea, it became the highest-grossing Korean-language film in North American history.

Admiral Yi-ism works its way into many parts of daily Korean life. Rebekah and I had a young American friend who was working as a copy editor at the English-language version of one of the big Korean daily newspapers. His job, he joked, “is putting a headline on yet another story about how Korea is better than Japan.”

There’s a larger point to the Admiral Yi story: the constant,
frequently irritating, sometimes violent presence of Japan on Korea’s life. It is unavoidable. And it’s something many Koreans just can’t forget or let go, and for good reason. Enough Koreans remain alive who remember the most recent time Japan set its sights on Korea: the period from 1910 until 1945, when Japan ran Korea as a subjugated colony.

In the nineteenth century, Korea was still a protectorate of China and paid yearly tribute to the Ming dynasty. Which is why the Chosun court recoiled in diplomatic horror and indignation in 1868 when the Japanese sent Korea a message saying a new government had been established in Japan. As harmless and indeed neighborly of a gesture as that sounds, the Koreans took it as a grave insult. Why? Because the missive contained the Chinese characters for “royal decree.” None but the Chinese emperor was allowed to use these symbols, the Koreans believed, and their use by the Japanese was arrogant and intolerable self-aggrandizement, equating themselves to the Chinese. The Koreans refused to receive the letter or recognize the new Japanese government. Diplomacy failed to resolve the stand-off between Japan and Korea, and in 1875, with relations between the two countries still poor, a small Japanese warship patrolled too near the Korean island of Gangwha, a hot spot since the battle with the Americans only a decade earlier, and sent a small boat ashore in search of drinkable water, the Japanese later said. A nearby Korean fortress interpreted the presence of the warship and the landing party as an act of hostility and opened fire.

Unlike the Korean hermit kingdom, Japan had been opening to the West and importing the latest technology—chiefly, modern weaponry. The Japanese warship returned the volley with superior firepower, destroying the Korean guns, and sent marines ashore to clean up before retreating. As a result, the following year Korea was forced to sign a treaty opening up the country to trade
with Japan. Once they had a foothold in Korea, the far stronger Japanese expanded their influence, forcing the politically unstable Korea to sign a number of unequal treaties. In 1910, Japan took the final step: it annexed the Korean Peninsula to an empire the Japanese were planning to significantly expand by military means.

The colonization, like many, was a combination of modernization and brutality. The Japanese brought in technology and built infrastructure. At the same time, Koreans were forced to take Japanese surnames, learn Japanese, accommodate as many as 1 million Japanese immigrants, and watch their land-ownership system get overturned. Once World War II started, millions of Koreans were conscripted to work at Japanese war-effort factories at home, in Japan, and elsewhere in the Japanese battle theater. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of Korean males volunteered to serve in the Japanese military, and while some rose to the highest ranks and ended up fighting the Americans and Allied Forces in the Pacific, most were distrusted by the Japanese and relegated to noncombat laboring roles until the very end of the war. Some Koreans serving in the Japanese imperial forces were killed not by enemies but by suspicious Japanese.

For Korean females, the war was equally brutal. Once a foreign territory had come under Japanese control, it was customary for the military to establish “comfort stations” for the Japanese soldiers. There, women coerced or kidnapped from other Japanese-occupied territories—Korea and China, mostly—were forced to have sex with Japanese soldiers. They were called “comfort women,” or sex slaves, as former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton termed them.

The issue became a significant roadblock to better relations between Korea and Japan for years, with heated accusations flying back and forth. But the two sides began talking in earnest
in early 2015 with a mind toward resolving the issue, and, days before the year ended, they announced an agreement to break the stalemate. Japan, which believed it had apologized sufficiently for its past and denied its government had any part in running the comfort women system, apologized anew and acknowledged its military was involved. Japan agreed to pay about $8 million to the forty-some surviving Korean comfort women, and both sides agreed to stop criticizing each other.

Despite the deal on the comfort women, relations between Korea and Japan have remained tense since the 2012 election of Shinzo Abe as Japanese prime minister. Koreans reacted viscerally to Abe’s elevation, fearing the earliest reawakenings of Japanese imperialism. During a prior one-year tenure as PM in 2006 to 2007, Abe had shown his nationalist stripes. Before becoming prime minister, he followed other PMs and visited Japan’s Yasukuni Shrine, the third rail of Japanese-Korean-Chinese politics. The shrine houses the remains of Japanese war dead from many eras—including more than 1,000 war criminals from World War II. In Japan, a politician’s visit to the shrine is a patriotic duty; in Korea and China, it is a Japanese slap in the face.

Since its defeat in World War II, Japan’s military policy has been pacifist. The country could defend itself against invasion but not extend its military beyond Japan’s shores. Shortly after Abe was elected, he began flexing Japanese military muscle in small but symbolic ways. The Japanese military sent its first military aid overseas since World War II. A year later it sold military planes to India, the first sale of Japanese military hardware to another nation since World War II. At the same time, Japan would coordinate disaster relief in the Philippines, something no Korean could object to.

Before I left Korea, I was discussing Abe with a Korean friend. Almost every Korean I talked to had a highly negative opinion
about Abe, and many saw him as the beginning of something bad for Korea. Their fear only increased as Abe faced a slumping economy at home and attendant rising nationalism. Some, like one of my Korean friends—a rational, highly educated, well-traveled executive—worried that Abe might revive Japan’s expansionist past and gaze hungrily west across the sea to Korea.

I was incredulous.

“Come on,” I said to my friend, “this is the twenty-first century. After all that Japan suffered in World War II, after seventy years of being a model world citizen, you actually think Japan might militarize again?”

My friend, who had a much fuller and personal grasp of Korea’s history than I did, and whose grandparents grew up during the Japanese occupation of Korea, simply said, “Could be first step.”

Because relations between the two countries have been so sour, and because of Korea’s high tariffs on imported cars—designed to protect its domestic automakers, such as Hyundai—it was almost impossible to buy a Japanese car in Korea until very recently. The first Japanese brand to open dealerships in Korea was Lexus, in 2000, to tap into affluent Koreans’ increasing taste for luxury goods. In 2013, Korean auto journalists shocked the nation, and certainly Hyundai, when they selected the Toyota Camry as Korea’s Car of the Year. Koreans, especially younger ones, are buying Japanese cars.

The converse so far has not been true.

Hyundai tried selling cars in Japan but to little effect, thanks to that country’s even tighter protectionist laws. Hyundai’s efforts in Japan were not for wont of trying, however. The company established a technical research center in Japan, which not only benefits Hyundai but is a show of good faith that automakers typically make in foreign countries where they plan to make a
long-term commitment. But the import climate proved too hostile for Hyundai and it stopped selling, or trying to sell, cars in Japan in 2009. Hyundai’s failure to crack the Japanese car market is not unique: 90 percent of all car sales in Japan are by Japanese automakers. By comparison, cars made by the Big Three amount to about 45 percent of the U.S. market.

Nevertheless, when Hyundai decided in 1999 to improve the quality of its cars, it looked to Japan. Toyota, Honda, and Nissan were the industry benchmark for high-quality volume carmakers. They had built deservedly great reputations for making automobiles with outstanding fit and finish, groundbreaking production methods, and terrific engineering. Hyundai had to at least rise to their level to be considered a global contender.

By 2010, Hyundai was getting there. Its gains in quality—and sales, especially in the U.S.—were being noticed with nervousness in the Japanese car industry, which was having its own problems. Toyota was just digging out of an image crisis of epic proportions in the U.S., with quality flaws leading to massive recalls, accidents, lawsuits, and relentless, pile-on media coverage—including from yours truly, when he was at the
Washington Post
—regarding something that came to be called “unintended acceleration.” Suddenly, mighty Toyota seemed vulnerable. Some journalists and thinkers began talking about Hyundai as the New Toyota and Korea as the New Japan.