When the chairman visited a Samsung manufacturing plant, employees
were told to park behind the plant, as their cars were too ugly—apparently
they offended his aesthetic sensibility. Mints were placed in the bathroom
for employees to use, to sweeten their breath from the kimchi (Korean
pickled cabbage) that they ate at mealtimes. Employees were cautioned not
to gaze down from the windows at the chairman when he arrived. Security
guards lined the road, and when the chairman’s limousine pulled up, a long
red carpet was rolled out.
“One employee was charged with trying all the local restaurants in a city
where the Lee family was to visit,” a former employee told me. “He’d write
reports on their dishes and wines.”
When the chairman and his family traveled to Germany, staying at the
five-star Hotel Adlon in Berlin for a week of vacation in August 2004,
Samsung booked the entire fourth and fifth floors and a full conference
room, setting up a “situation room” where his aides could monitor the
chairman’s every move and ensure his well-being.
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THE WAY SAMSUNG LOYALISTS (especially its older generation) talk about
the chairman and his family—the way they venerate him and seem to
regiment themselves as hard-fighting units inside the company in almost
military fashion—reminded me oddly of the military-like culture of North
Korea, which I had visited and reported on for almost a decade in my time
in South Korea.
The odd similarities between the traditional culture of Samsung (and
other South Korean companies) and the totalitarian dictatorship of North
Korea are no coincidence. The Korea scholar B. R. Myers has written about
North and South Koreans’ belief in a shared, ancient bloodline that informs
their politics and societies today. South Koreans, he argues, have identified
strongly with the Korean race that transcends the border with North Korea,
a far stronger identification than with their democratic system of
government.
The result, he says, is that North Korea is the world’s most nationalistic
country, while “the second-most-nationalist country, in my view, is South
Korea, which is completely open and completely wired, and still dominated
by a very paranoid way of looking at the outside world.”
For example, I watched a video that had been leaked by a Samsung