South Korea’s Tragic Failure
BUSAN, South Korea — It was an autumn day 31 years ago. I was a high school freshman, excited about the field trip. After taking the train to the southern tip of the Korean Peninsula to the harbor city of Mokpo, my classmates and I boarded a ferry en route to Jeju Island, the same place the Sewol was headed on April 16 when it sank, leaving more than 300 people presumed dead, scores of them schoolchildren.
We were given no information about safety or evacuation procedures. I never saw life vests or lifeboats. The black ocean had its gaping maw wide open before us, but danger was not on our minds. We were young and the big ship was nothing more than a huge playground to us.
The banner hanging over the school gate where we gathered for the trip read, “For the Creation of an Advanced Fatherland.” Chun Doo-hwan, the military dictator at the time, proclaimed his intention to make South Korea an advanced nation every time he spoke, and as a result, this slogan was plastered everywhere.
After a long period of hardship under imperialism, civil war and division, the drive to become a modern nation was something akin to a national religion. Most South Koreans, myself included, believed that the manufacturing and selling of products that the West wanted was our ticket to modernity.
Just as Chun Doo-hwan promised, the South Korean economy took off. In 1988, we were host to the Summer Olympics in Seoul. The eastern coast, where once only fishermen had lived, was transformed into an enormous shipyard. Hyundai started making automobiles and Samsung started making televisions.
South Koreans’ sense of national pride soared. When traveling abroad, we would be greeted by ads for South Korean products the moment we stepped foot outside a foreign airport. We became one of the world’s top 10 trading nations. Our soccer team represented Asia in consecutive World Cups. South Korean films played in theaters around the globe.
The Sewol tragedy has called into question all of these great achievements. Many South Koreans have begun to wonder if the unfettered growth — and the lax government regulation that accompanied it — has come at too high a price.
To outsiders, the Sewol disaster may seem like another tragedy that we will inevitably overcome. But here in South Korea, it feels like the country may never be the same again. It has traumatized our national psyche and undercut our self-image.
We are awash in self-reflection. Has all of our progress been a facade? Are we, in fact, an advanced country? One inconsolable parent put it best on the cover of a national weekly: “Is this what we call a nation?”
It’s difficult to find meaning in a tragedy of this proportion — which was a preventable accident — especially when emotions are still so raw, but there are some practical lessons to be learned.
According to many news reports, the Sewol was carrying more than three times its legal limit of cargo, and with that load improperly secured to the decks, the boat tilted and sank, taking with it with hundreds of passengers.
The captain appears to have violated procedure by leaving the ship in command of a young and inexperienced mate during his break. No more than two of the 44 lifeboats on board the ship were deployed as the ship sank, and the necessary safety protocols either weren’t followed or never existed. Crew members ordered passengers over the intercom to stay in their cabins when they should have been ordering an evacuation.
Like many South Koreans, I’m furious that the senior crew members, including the captain, were among the first people to escape from the sinking ship.
Other South Koreans with the responsibility of taking care of passengers acted completely differently from the crew of the Sewol when faced with an emergency.
Last July, the crew of Asiana Airlines Flight 214, which crash-landed in San Francisco, stayed aboard the aircraft until the end and heroically guided their passengers to safety. Female flight attendants carried injured male passengers on their backs off the burning airplane.
What was the difference between these two groups? Rigorous training.
Asiana and Korean Air are both well-known for the exhaustive safety training their flight crews receive. New crew members must go through several weeks of safety training on an aircraft simulator, practicing emergency evacuations, water landings, fire safety protocols and emergency medical treatment. The airlines enforce mandatory annual refresher courses for their flight crews.
By contrast, throughout all of last year, Chonghaejin Marine Company, the owner and operator of the Sewol, only spent about $520 on safety education for its employees. (Their entertainment expenses, on the other hand, were about $59,000.) Surviving crew members spoke of having to consult the emergency manual as the ship was going down.
But the lack of training is only partly to blame for the Sewol disaster. Poor government oversight of the shipping industry was also a factor, which explains much of the anger among South Koreans for President Park Geun-hye, whose approval ratings are dropping fast.
The government, it turns out, has been neglecting safety regulations for passenger ships and did not mandate safety education requirements for the crews of passenger ships. As a result of the Sewol sinking, several current and former officials from a maritime inspection have come under investigation.
Ferry crews must have much more stringent training requirements. The coast guard should conduct periodic surprise inspections to check the crews’ knowledge of safety procedures and to confirm that all of the safety equipment is in good working order. And the government should drastically step up its maritime inspection regime.
Three weeks after the Sewol sinking, South Korea is still reeling. We can already see subtle shifts in society. Public trust in authority appears to have collapsed. On May 2, two Seoul subway trains collided, knocking out the power in the cars. The passengers ignored the announcement asking them to stay put, and immediately began prying open the train doors to escape.
It’s unlikely South Koreans will ever again trust the voice on the intercom when a disaster is unfolding.
Young-ha Kim is a novelist and short-story writer. This article was translated by Jenny Wang Medina from the Korean.
Young-ha Kim
Young-ha Kim (김영하) became a contributing opinion writer for The International New York Times in the fall of 2013. Mr. Kim is a writer who lives in Pusan, South Korea. Since 1996, he has published six novels — including three published in the United States: “I Have the Right to Destroy Myself,” “Your Republic Is Calling You” and “Black Flower” — and four short-story collections. He has won the Dong-in, Hwang Sun-won, Manhae and Yi Sang literary prizes — all of the major awards for novels in Korean. His works have been translated into more than a dozen languages.
Born in Hwacheon, near the border with North Korea, in 1968, Mr. Kim is a graduate of Yonsei University and worked as a military police detective before focusing his career on fiction writing
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/07/opinion/kim-south-koreas-tragic-failure.html
The Case for Disobedience
LONDON — A recent Reuters story on the sinking of the South Korean ferry, the Sewol, attributed the high death toll among high school students in part to cultural reasons: “Many of the children did not question their elders, as is customary in hierarchical Korean society. They paid for their obedience with their lives.”
It is tempting to think that American teenagers with their liberal educations and readiness to question authority would have reacted to orders to stay put below deck as a ship lurched and began to sink with a “Hell, no, I’m out of here.” Common sense would have trumped obedience. Personal initiative would have resisted what turned out to be a death sentence from members of the crew. More would have survived. The toll of dead and missing, most from a single school, would not have reached more than 300.
There may be some truth to such speculation. Questioning and discord are central to American vitality. But I wonder.
Certainly, South Korea is a society with strong vertical lines where respect for elders and for the teacher (the pronunciation of the words for “captain” and for “teacher” are similar in Korean) is a powerful social force. On the other hand, it is one of the more rambunctious of Asian societies, a vibrant, super-wired democracy with frequent student and street protests. It is not a place of meek obedience or across-the-board Confucian deference to authority.
I am more struck, in fact, by the troubling cultural similarities between West and East that emerged in the disaster than by the differences. When the Sewol’s captain, Lee Jun-seok, opted to be among the first off the doomed ship — like 14 other now arrested crew members responsible for the ferry who boarded the first two rescue boats — he followed the craven example of Italy’s Capt. Francesco Schettino, who abandoned the sinking cruise ship Costa Concordia after it hit a reef off the Italian coast in 2012. In that disaster 32 people were killed.
Captains, Western or Eastern, don’t put their passengers first any longer, it seems. Women and children first has become a quaint notion in a globalized world of moral relativism. To go down like Capt. Edward Smith on the Titanic — to choose duty over self-preservation — is just so 20th century: Lee knew he was leaving children below deck to their fate, just as Schettino knew tourists would perish.
It may be just an unhappy coincidence that these men were the captains in the most recent maritime disasters. I don’t think so. Personal responsibility has eroded as a value. So has duty. So, even, has nobility. This is one price you pay for a hedonistic, ultra-material world — and for the unbearable lightness of cyberexistence — whether in the Orient or the West.
Koreans are in shock — at the incompetence, at the moral cowardice. The prime minister has resigned (something that would not happen in the West). President Park Geun-hye has said the flight of the crew as they told passengers to stay put was “like a murderous act that can never be understood or forgiven.”
More than the obedience of the children, this turpitude strikes me as the cultural lesson of the disaster. “The elder generation’s responsibility for the younger generation has always been a central Korean value,” Christopher Hill, a former U.S. ambassador to Seoul and the Dean of the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver, told me. “It’s absolutely counter-cultural to have crew members not take responsibility, which explains the national revulsion.”
Asian nations like Malaysia and South Korea (radically different as they are) have developed very rapidly. Inequality has grown in money cultures where growth is a supreme value. The recent aviation and maritime disasters that have left hundreds in watery graves have been reminders of the fissures — in both competence and morality — that the glossy surfaces of these societies conceal.
I said I was not persuaded that a Korean culture of obedience caused the high death toll on the Sewol. I think it was more a culture of irresponsibility that is global. Still, it is important to teach disobedience, a fact often forgotten. Disobedience to crass or unconscionable orders is of critical importance to the preservation of human dignity.
When I was based in Berlin, Germany renamed a military base after Anton Schmid, a soldier in Hitler’s army who disobeyed orders, saved hundreds of Jews and was executed by the Nazis in 1942 for his acts. Schmid, a sergeant, was moved by the suffering of Jewish children in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius who had been condemned to mass slaughter. He wrote of the children to his wife: “I could not think and had to help them.”
Schmid’s words resonate. It took decades for Germany to honor an extremely rare act of disobedience in this way. The world could use a few more monuments to disobedience.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/29/opinion/cohen-the-case-for-disobedience.html?_r=0