SuperGardenKorea : Understanding Korea. Growing with Korea.

  Inside the meeting room, the numbers just won't line up. Both sides are digging in. By the third time the same sentence gets repeated, someone lets out a sigh and says it. "Let's eat first, then we'll talk." If you're the foreign partner in the room, this is the moment your eyebrows go up. Wait — are we stopping the meeting because we're hungry? The negotiation is stuck, everyone's on edge, and someone just suggested lunch. In the last piece , we looked at "Did you eat?" as a greeting, and "let's grab a meal sometime" as the phrase Koreans use to leave a door open when they part ways. But it turns out meals play an even bigger role once you step into a Korean business setting. The role just changes shape depending on where you are in the relationship. There's a meal that starts things off, a meal that keeps the door ajar, and — as in that tense meeting room above — a meal that talks a deal back from the edge. "Shall...

Growing up, the moment I took off my shoes at the door,  my grandmother's words were already waiting for me. "Have you eaten yet? Go eat something." She asked every single time she saw me — even right after I'd told her I just had. As a kid, I hated hearing it. Does she really think I can't feed myself? Such needless worrying, I used to think, more than a little sulky about it. But somewhere along the way, I noticed I'd started saying it myself, several times a day — to a coworker on my way into the office, to a friend after lunch, to my parents on the phone in the evening. So why do we even ask this in the first place? I got curious enough to actually look into it. Not a Greeting. A Way of Checking In. Here's the short answer: "Did you eat?" was never meant as a greeting. Digging into it, I found that my grandmother's constant asking carried a heavier story than I'd realized. Korea was an agricultural society for most of its histo...

  These days, when you stop liking someone, the solution is usually simple. You cut them off. You block them. You never see them again. If your feelings are gone, ending the relationship feels like the obvious, rational move — no wonder "the courage to be disliked" has become such a popular idea. I get it. Honestly, I agree with that logic most of the time. But spend enough time in Korean society, and you start noticing strange scenes. Someone who was grumbling "ugh, I can't stand the sight of him" just yesterday shows up the next morning with a coffee for that exact person. They clearly seem to dislike each other, and yet the moment things get hard, they're the first ones to show up for each other. People who were fighting an hour ago end up sharing dinner and soju by the end of the week. What is going on here? Koreans gave this feeling a name a long time ago. Jeong (정). The Word That Doesn't Translate People have tried translating jeong into E...

  "Some words never fully reveal themselves in a dictionary. You only understand them once you understand the people who use them." That's exactly what "uri" (우리) is like. Have you ever been talking with a Korean friend and heard something like this: "Oh wait, hold on — our mom is calling." If you've studied any Korean, you already know that uri technically means "our." So taken literally, the sentence becomes "Our mom is calling." Most people pause right there. Subtitles and translation apps quietly smooth this over into "my mom" every time — but what you actually heard, in the room, was uri . It's my mom. So why "our"? The translation isn't wrong. If anything, this one small word turns out to be a surprisingly useful key to understanding Korea. "It's a Collectivist Culture" Isn't Quite the Full Answer There's a standard explanation that always comes up. "Korea is a...

I've only ever known war through books and television. The sound of shells falling. Footsteps running for a bunker. What it feels like to lose your home overnight. I can't claim to understand any of it. Right now, in Ukraine, in the Middle East, real people are living through that cruelty. In the face of their grief and loss, I'm just someone watching the news from a safe distance. Still, a thought keeps returning to me lately. As someone living on one side of the world's oldest surviving Cold War-era military line, the words "defense" and "arms industry" feel heavier than they used to. So I want to write this one carefully. Korean defense companies have been posting record-breaking numbers lately, and the headlines keep coming. But behind those numbers is a simple fact: somewhere, these weapons are actually being used. And a weapon being used, anywhere, means someone's life has gone wrong. This isn't a piece meant to boast, standing on s...

  July 2026, Ankara, Türkiye. The President of Korea took the stage at NATO's defense industry forum. He said this: "Let's move beyond simply trading weapons systems, toward a partnership where we research together, produce together, and operate together." NATO's Secretary General called Korea's defense industrial base "fantastic." After that speech ended, I couldn't shake one thought. A little over seventy years ago, this country barely had a gun to its name. 1950: We Had Nothing Before dawn on June 25, 1950, North Korean troops crossed the 38th parallel. The Korean military had the will to fight, but not the weapons to fight with. Mostly surplus M1 rifles supplied by the US military after World War II — no tanks worth the name, barely any artillery, and next to no anti-tank weapons or ammunition reserves. North Korea pushed south behind Soviet T-34 tanks. In the opening days of the war, Korea's forces collapsed with almost nothing to...

  My younger brother lives in Ulsan. Ulsan was once the city with the highest average income in all of Korea. That was when shipbuilding, automobiles, and petrochemicals were all running at full speed at the same time. Then shipbuilding began to crack, and the mood shifted. Foreclosure listings flooded the market, and the streets grew quiet. These days, my sibling says things seem to be slowly coming back. The worst is probably over. But it's still hard to say the local economy has truly recovered. The news talks about Korea's shipbuilding revival. But the temperature on the ground rises more slowly than the headlines suggest. So how did the crisis begin — and how did the industry get to where it is today? The End of the Boom: Korea's Shipbuilding Collapse (2008–2016) In the early 2000s, Korea was the world's number one shipbuilder. A significant share of the world's vessels were being built in shipyards in Geoje, Ulsan, and Mokpo. Order backlogs were overflowi...

  Originally published: July 6, 2026 | Updated: July 7, 2026 Today, July 6th. The global defense industry is holding its breath. Canada is expected to announce the preferred bidder for CPSP — its next-generation submarine program worth up to $44 billion USD in construction costs alone — today. Hanwha Ocean of Korea and Germany's TKMS have been locked in a head-to-head competition for nearly a year, and the verdict was widely expected before Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney departs for the NATO Summit in Ankara on July 7th, according to Canadian broadcaster CTV. By the time you read this, the result may already be out. Whatever it turns out to be, the fact that Canada deliberated this carefully, this long, says something in itself. It means the two contenders were evenly matched — and that this decision carried real weight for Canada, too. What makes this even more striking is that Canada isn't the only front. Across the Pacific, the United States has been sending its ow...

  In the previous episode, we explored why the world depends on Korea's memory semiconductors in the age of AI. That naturally led to another question. How did these two companies become the world's memory giants? There's no way to fit all of their "blood, sweat, and tears" into a single article, but I did my best to trace the most fascinating chapters of their journey. Samsung Electronics and SK hynix. Their paths could not have been more different. Yet both companies faced moments when everything seemed lost—and both eventually rose to the very top of the global semiconductor industry. Samsung Electronics: The Tokyo Declaration That Changed Everything In March 1982, Samsung founder Lee Byung-chul traveled to the United States to receive an honorary doctorate from Boston University. Afterward, he visited Silicon Valley, touring semiconductor facilities operated by IBM and Hewlett-Packard. At the time, there were barely 1,000 personal computers in all of South K...