| By Boye Lafayette De Mente |
Where doing business in Korea is concerned, one must first have connections. Generally, the next most important thing is sogaejang (soh-gay-jahng) or "introductions." Koreans therefore spend a great deal of their time and energy arranging for sogaejang to people they want to do business with or get something from. Among the most valuable sources of introductions are relatives, university professors who taught the individuals they want to meet, classmates, alumni brothers and sisters, leading government bureaucrats, as well as bankers and businesspeople who have strong relationships with the people involved.
Ranking government bureaucrats and corporate executives who take up second careers as consultants and mediators after retirement are often valued as much for their introductions as their advice. Those with high public profiles are especially effective as go-betweens.
Korean businesspeople and government bureaucrats tend to be tolerant of foreigners who approach them without introductions, particularly if the foreigners concerned are people they would like to know for their own benefit, or if the reason the foreigners approached them is especially interesting to them. On virtually all other occasions, however, the receptions foreigners get are usually very polite and hospitable, but stop there.
The situation changes entirely if one goes in with a sogaejang from someone with whom the individual has a relationship. The stronger the connection, the more obligated the individual is to respond favorably. It therefore behooves foreign businesspeople in Korea to adopt the Korean custom of using introductions, making the practice a regular part of their overall approach to doing business. In this approach the personal factor in Korean society should not be ignored. Generally, the more personal the relationship connecting two people, the stronger the social debt that binds them together and the more concerned they are about fulfilling their obligations to each other.
There are, of course, exceptions to these general rules and customs, particularly among the growing number of Korean businesspeople who were educated abroad or spent years in overseas assignments, but it still pays to approach even these people with good, strong introductions because they dramatically speed up the process of establishing the desired relationship.
MYONGHAM: Playing Your Name-Cards Family and given names are of special importance in Korean society, playing a much more specific and vital role than names do in most other countries. There are several reasons for this phenomenon. The first, or earliest, of these reasons is the fact that Koreans trace their ancestry as a people to a single tribe made up of a relatively small number of families. Tribal custom allowed only elite core families to have family names.
Over the ages, these elite families grew into clans and their names became more and more sanctified. Members of these families revered their ancestors and their names. (Early in Korean history given names were known as "taboo" names, and were not used by most people.) There was also an element of ancestor worship in Musok (Muu-sok) or Shamanism, Korea's indigenous religion, which contributed to the importance of keeping detailed records of names.
The introduction of Buddhism and Confucianism into Korea in the 4th century A.D., both of which also included reverence for ancestors as major tenets, brought more emphasis to family names and genealogies. In 1392 the new Choson dynasty proclaimed Neo-Confucianism, a much more detailed and stricter form of Confucian concepts, the state religion and the foundation of Korean society. The centerpiece of this new social system was filial piety and ancestor worship, making it mandatory that Korean families record the names and honor the memories of their ancestors.
The Choson dynasty formally lasted until 1910, but the custom of keeping track of and honoring family names had become so deeply embedded in Korean culture that it survives to this day. Still today there are only a few hundred surnames in all of Korea, each with its own historical pedigree and status. The "middle" or "generational" name is also a key to identifying individual Koreans within the context of their family tree and sometimes their birthplace as well.
More than half of all Koreans have only six family names-Kim, Lee (Li, Yi), Pak (Park), Choe (Choi), Jung (Chung), and Chang (Jang).
On a social level, it is extremely important for Koreans who meet to get their respective names right and to quickly establish their relative status in order for them to know how to behave toward each other. Until the relative social position is clearly established, communication is severely limited. Both parties use a high standard of respect language in order to avoid the possibility of offending someone who may be higher on the social hierarchy.
On a business level, getting names right is not only a social imperative it is also essential to properly identifying individuals for any kind of future reference. Myongham (m'ohng-hahm) or "name cards," therefore play a vitally important role in Korean business and society in general. Name cards help overcome the serious problem of same and similar names by giving company affiliation, departments, sections, titles, phone numbers, and so on-all of which are usually necessary to distinguish between the hundreds of thousands of Kims, Lees, Choes and Parks.
When a single large company has as many as 200, 300 or even more employees named Lee, Kim and Pak, not having detailed information about a particular individual can make it impossible for telephone operators, receptionists and others to identify and locate the right person.
Foreign businesspeople meeting Korean contacts for the first time must be especially diligent about getting their name cards and making sure that their cards provide enough information to distinguish them from other people in the their company who have the same or similar names. Another aspect of the name problem is that there are several different ways of spelling the Romanized versions of a number of Korean's most common family names. Name-cards make it possible to use the spelling preferred by the individual concerned.
It is fairly common to receive a name card of an individual whose rank is given as dae-u (dae-oo), which means "high rank" or "senior rank," but does not given any additional information about the individual. These are generally people who do not have a specific position or title such as goes with being the head of a department or division manager, or being a director, and so forth, but have been designated as dae-u to indicate their status in the company. They are often former government bureaucrats who have joined the company but are not direct-line managers.
The term dae-u is also used in reference to the kind of treatment that is given to VIP's and other special guests whom companies want to impress for one reason or another.
IRUM: What's in a Name Today there is no universally accepted way of writing Korean names in roman letters. Some people and some publications connect the first name and generational name with a hyphen. Others do not. Some capitalize the first letter of generational names when they are connected to the first names. Others do not. Some younger Korean couples are dispensing with generational names altogether.
A further complication results from the fact that many of the most common names in Korea may be spelled two or three different ways. The pronunciation of some of the syllables of the Korean language are also pronounced differently by many people, making the names sound different even though they are the same. When spelled with roman letters, Yi, for example, may be spelled as Rhee, Lee, Ree, Rii, Le, or Ee. Pak often sounds like Park when it is pronounced, and some people with that name spell it that way when they write it out in roman letters.
This name situation creates special problems for foreigners who are newly arrived in Korea and try to telephone people they have recently met. Not being aware of the seriousness of the situation, they frequently fail to get or to remember the titles and sections or departments of the people concerned, and are therefore unable to identify which person they are calling for.
It is very important for foreign travelers and businesspeople visiting Korea to carefully write down the full name, title (if any), and company section of all Koreans they might want to call or meet again. On a personal level, it is also wise to get their home addresses and often their position in the family (first or second son or daughter, etc.).
A growing number of Koreans who have attended graduate and post-graduate schools abroad (and become bilingual and bicultural) resolve the problem of their generational names by combining them with their first names the way the Republic's first president, Syngman Rhee did. A growing number of internationalized parents dispense with generational names altogether, giving their children single first names.
Friends and married couples in this group who dated for relatively long periods before marrying, as well as others in the younger generations, also commonly refer to each other by their first names plus the title ssi(sshe), which is an honorific that is sometimes translated as "mr,"or "miss" but when it is used to a husband, wife, or friend in its proper Korean context it does not have the sometimes awkward nuance that results from combining mister, mrs. or miss with a person's first name. Calling a spouse or friend Mr. Bob, Mrs. Mary or Miss Michelle just doesn's sound right.
Excerpted from the forthcoming book, "NTC's Dictionary of Korea's Business and Cultural Code Words (NTC/Contemporary Publishing Company), by Boye Lafayette De Mente. De Mente is an author of more than 40 books and currently works as a consultant on Korea, China, and Japan. For more information about his currently available work, check out the internet site (http://www.dancris.com/~phxbooks/).
