>>513108819 (OP)
The worst part is that your average Korean white collar worker who works for a chaebol like Samsung probably does about 3-5 hours of actual productive work a day, if at all. The rest of the day consists of purely theatrical, quasi-religious humiliation rituals designed for showing acts of servitude for the managers and owners. It’s the same thing in Japan but not nearly as intense.
Here’s an example: imagine that it’s your supervisor’s supervisor’s cousin’s birthday. Not only are you expected to know this, but you’re expected to show a form of recognition.
So you go out and buy a blank card, hand-write a message, put it into a nice envelope, and hand-write another message WITHIN the message to look extra appreciative. Then you give it to the assistant to the supervisor of the supervisor’s supervisor’s assistant, who tells you that he is too busy as a test, so you come back during your “lunch” break to re-deliver by hand (thus passing the test), but later in the day you get a phone call saying that the note was sent back (another test) so you go to the original person that you gave the note to, insist that it get sent, he says it’s impossible (another test), you insist that he put you through to the supervisor of the supervisor’s assistant of the second recipient of the letter, thus passing both tests in one fell swoop.
The original letter gets thrown in the trash somewhere along the chain, never meeting its intended recipient at the end of the chain, but that’s beside the point. You spent most of your day tracking the progress of the note and making a show of using every option available in the scope of your power to do it, thus absolving you of any wrongdoing since you did everything that you could, and everyone knows it now. You’re now not at risk of getting fired for not sending a note.