Following the suicide of Kang Min-gyu, the vice-principal of the South Korean school whose students died on a ferry last week, Adam Taylor explored the country’s epidemic:
South Korea has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, more than double that of the United States. According to one recent OECD report, Korea had bucked a trend of falling suicide rates among developed nations, with suicide rising to become the fourth most common cause of death. Unlike most other countries, South Koreans actually become more likely to commit suicide as they age.
High-profile suicides have become a regular feature in the media. Former South Korean president Roh Moo-Hyun jumped off a hill to his death in 2009. Park Yong-oh, a well-known businessman who once led the Doosan Group, the country’s oldest conglomerate, also committed suicide that year. In 2010, singer and actor Park Yong-ha committed suicide at the height of his career, just one of a string of suicides in the entertainment industry, and earlier this year, a well-known reality TV show was taken off the air after a contestant killed herself.
A reader fills us in on the ferry tragedy, which he calls “Korea’s 9/11″:
I’m not sure whether the lack of Dish coverage is reflective of your editorial filtering process or of the level of general media coverage, but this is the ONLY story in Korea right now and one the world needs to know.
Last week a Korean ferry sank while carrying a high school class full of kids en route to Jeju, a popular resort island. Some 250 are missing and by now most likely dead – but what makes the tragedy really horrific is that it was easily preventable. The captain instructed the kids to stay in their cabins instead of preparing to evacuate, which he then promptly did himself. When the ship started to list and sink, they were too crushed in the hallway to get out.
Unsurprisingly, families are howling at the captain’s irresponsibility and cowardice. But the problem runs deeper than the individual level. Officers were woefully undertrained – they hadn’t ever drilled in emergency preparations or even read the manual – so they were clueless about what to do except save their own skins.
This is unfortunately representative of Korean business culture at large, which is notoriously unprofessional and short-sighted. Projects are planned based on overly optimistic assumptions and executed as a series of frantic lurches from one deadline to the next. Deals are cemented informally over “hwae-sik” after-work dinners (usually with drinks) rather than in writing at the office. Employees are measured by face-time, not output. The litany goes on, and anyone – Korean or Westerner – who’s done business both in and out of Korea can expound at length.
This strategy of cutting corners and playing fast-and-loose with the rules pays dividends when everything goes well: back in the ’70s, Hyundai initially became a world-class competitor by undercutting foreign competition to win fat contracts in the Middle East. But when the strategy breaks down, it does so catastrophically: recall the Asiana SFO crash last December was attributable to human error.
In terms of scope of tragedy, this ferry incident is Korea’s 9/11. It has already triggered immense teeth-gnashing and soul-searching, but it remains to be seen whether those emotions translate into meaningful change. Please help bring much-needed awareness to this tragedy, both so that the world may share in these families’ grief and so that they can bring pressure to bear on Korean business practices so that these avoidable tragedies – Asiana, the ferry – do not recur.