Korea Part II or Life as a Japanese Tourist

My second trip to Korea took place just about a year after the first, under very different circumstances. My switching jobs from Look Japan to the law firm at which I worked next did not require a trip to Seoul for a visa, since I was merely changing jobs, not work statuses. But, as it happened, my law firm selected Seoul for the bi-annual company retreat in October 1992.

Company retreats in foreign countries were a product of the Bubble Economy of the 1980s, when the Yen suddenly tripled in value thanks to the Plaza Accords, where the United States forced Japan to revalue its currency to make Japanese goods more expensive in the U.S. and U.S. goods cheaper in Japan. (Fat lot of good that did! Twenty years later, we still run a huge trade deficit with Japan, and they still don't want to buy our cars. Don't blame them.) Suddenly, traveling abroad became less expensive than traveling domestically, and a lot of Japanese companies held their company retreats overseas.

This trip took place on a whole different level than my previous trip. We were on a packaged tour and stayed at the Hilton Hotel in the middle of Seoul. We were chauffeured, shuttled, and buffeted throughout the three-day, two-night stay. During this time, I got to know what it's like to be a Japanese tourist on a packaged tour in a foreign country, and it was a great change from my trip the previous year.

We were met at the airport by a bus with a Japanese-speaking tour guide. She was very pretty, but there was something slightly sleazy about her, as if she had just graduated to tour guide from bar hostess or perhaps even prostitute. It became clear very quickly that her primary objective was to try to get us to buy stuff from people she and/or her company knew.

After getting on the bus, our very first stop was at one of the beautiful imperial palaces I had visited the previous year. However, we were hustled in as a group for a mere half-hour visit, which not only missed the most beautiful part of the palace -- a viewing pavilion surrounded by a man-made lake -- but spent 15 of the 30 minutes arranging a group picture and taking pictures of some of our female employees in traditional Korean dresses (hanbok). We then stopped at a store in Itaewon, which for those of you who know Japan, is the Roppongi of Seoul, where the American servicemen hang out at gaijin bars. We then went to the hotel to check in before being shuttled off to dinner.

Dinner was another tourist trap. We were taken to a massive restaurant with hundreds of other guests, all of whom also seemed to be Japanese. We had a private hall where we had some of the blandest, worst Korean food I have ever eaten. Although many Japanese people now eat very spicy food and you can get great Korean food in Tokyo, in those days, many if not most Japanese could not tolerate spicy food and hated the taste and smell of garlic. In fact, ninniku kusai ("reeking of garlic") used to be an ethnic slur used by Japanese to describe Koreans. (Similar to the way that WASP Americans before WWII sometimes referred to Italian Americans derisively as "garlic eaters.") As we ate our tasteless Korean food, we watched a group of Korean women clad in hanbok and sporting expressions of utter boredom perform what I assume was a "traditional" Korean dance.

After the dinner, one of the male lawyers who was widely known in the firm as a sukebe (a lecher), prevailed upon Miss Dubious Tour Guide -- whom he was hitting on very hard -- to take us to a bar for drinks. Mr. Sukebe then invited some of the female paralegals I was friends with, who felt they could not say no because of Mr. Sukebe was a lawyer and they were only paralegals. The paralegals then begged me to go along with them so they would not be alone with the lawyer. Miss Dubious Tour Guide then took us to -- of course -- a karaoke bar run by friends of hers that seemed to cater exclusively to Japanese businessmen. I have no idea how much it cost because, per Japanese etiquette, Mr. Sukebe paid the tab, but I know the whiskey was watered even before Miss Dubious Tour Guide showed us the mizuwari (whiskey & water) making skills she had no doubt perfected at her previous job, because I drank glass after glass of mizuwari and did not even develop a small buzz. Most of the evening was spent watching Mr. Sukebe trying to convince Miss Dubious Tour Guide to accompany him back to the hotel. I don't know if he succeeded or not.

When the evening was finally, mercifully over, we got into a couple of taxis to the Hilton. I said "Hilton" to the driver. He did not understand. I said "Hiruton," with a Japanese accent, thinking this might be closer to the way they said it in Korea, but still, no recognition. I tried "Hilton" a few more times with various accents until finally, the driver said "Ah, Hilton!" and we sped off.

The next day was our "free" day -- free of Miss Dubious Tour Guide and her ripoff establishments. Since I was the only one of my friends who had been to Seoul before, I led a party to one of the markets and then to Insadong Street and one of the palaces. For lunch, we decided to try to find a restaurant off the beaten track and away from tourist areas, and wandered down some of the dirt back roads of Seoul until we found a place that looked good -- no English or Japanese writing anywhere, just pictures of food in the window, as you typically find in a Korean restaurant. The male Japanese lawyers looked nervous and wondered if the restaurant was "okay" (i.e., "safe"), but fortunately the intrepid female lawyers and paralegals pushed ahead.

Inside the restaurant, we were seated at a large table on the floor. One of our group called for a "menu" -- fortunately, that word is the same in English, Japanese, and Korean. Our waitress pointed at the wall behind us, which was entirely written in hangul script. We shook our heads and said, "No, menu." The waitress once again pointed at the wall. This happened two or three more times. In the meanwhile, another waitress had quietly come up behind (the restaurant was empty because it was about 2;30 in the afternoon), and I watched her face the light bulb went off in her head and an expression of understanding came over her face. A minute later, she came back with menus with pictures on them, from which we ordered. One intrepid paralegal began ordering food from the menu, and then changed her mind halfway, and started pointing to the pictures, saying, "not this one, that one." I am sure the waitress, who spoke neither Japanese nor English as far as I could tell, thought she was saying "this one and that one, too."

It did not matter. When we got the food, it was extraordinary -- the diametric opposite of the previous night's awful tourist fare -- with kimchi that was so delicious that you couldn't stop eating it even though every bite inexorably increased the heat in your mouth to the point of being unbearable. More touring in the afternoon, and I then led the way to a restaurant near Insadong Street where I had eaten on two nights the year before.

On our last day in Seoul, we did not have time for touring, as we had an early flight back to Tokyo. We ate breakfast in the hotel and then boarded our bus to the airport. Miss Dubious Tour Guide was there again. The pictures we had been made to take on the first day suddenly appeared and were offered to us for sale as souvenirs. Sure enough, just before the entrance to Kimpo Airport, our bus stopped once more so that we could go to a tourist shop and spend the rest of our Won. At this point, I realized that the terrible food, the watered whiskey, and the rest of the attempts to separate the Japanese tourists from their money were all part of a subtle Korean effort to extract some measure of revenge on the Japanese for their repeated invasions and decades of colonial rule in Korea.

In the shop, I bought my only souvenir of the trip -- a vacuum pack of radish kimchi (gaktooki), suitable for bringing through Japanese customs, which instructed in English and Japanese to open it and allow it to ferment for a couple of days before consuming. I did, and it was delicious.