Misaeng, and Twenty Years On
These days, because I have occasion to use Korean from time to time at work, I have taken to watching Korean television dramas of the business variety — partly, I suppose, as a way of keeping the language in some sort of working order. My Korean tutor recommended one in particular, and so did a friend who had fallen rather deeply into the world of Korean drama.
The series in question is Misaeng — which, for those readers who haven’t come across it, is a 2014 production based on a popular webtoon, set inside a vast trading conglomerate in Seoul, and following a young man who joins the firm as a contract employee, having failed in his earlier attempt to become a professional player of baduk, the game we in Japan call go.
It runs to twenty episodes, and for a time I rather avoided it on the grounds of its length. But I have now watched it through, and watching it has stirred up something in me — a set of memories from twenty years ago — and so I find myself, here in May of 2026, wanting to set those memories down in writing.
I am a graduate of Chosen University. For readers who have never lived in Japan, some brief explanation may be in order. Chosen University — Chosen Daigakko, in its Japanese reading — sits at the apex of the network of ethnic Korean schools in Japan: schools founded by and for the zainichi community, the descendants of Koreans who came (or were brought) to Japan during the colonial period and who, after the war, remained.
These schools, in their earliest days, were essentially apolitical institutions; my forebears wanted only that their children should be able to study the Korean language and to learn something of Korean culture. But after a series of repressive measures on the part of the Japanese government, they came to feel that some form of state patronage was necessary. Now, although more than ninety per cent of the Koreans living in Japan trace their origins to what is today South Korea, it was North Korea that extended its support — partly, I think, because at that time the North, backed by the Soviet Union, was rather better off than the South, which was then under a military dictatorship. It must have seemed, in those days, the rational choice; but it was a choice from which there could be no going back. Even now, some seventy years on, the schools remain under North Korean patronage — a circumstance which, in the present moment, has become a very difficult one indeed.
My father, who served for fifty years as a teacher within this school system, was, I think, an important figure in the way that system functioned. For the son of such a man not to attend Chosen University would have been, to those around us, a thing very difficult to countenance — I can readily imagine the trouble it would have caused, had I declared I was not going — but in truth I had spent my high school years almost entirely on football and had not really studied, and so the question of other options scarcely arose.
I cannot say what the situation is now, but Chosen University did, in those days, conduct an entrance examination of a sort — though for form’s sake more than anything else, I think, since I almost never heard of anyone failing it. Classmates who had struggled with the mathematics of an ordinary primary school were nevertheless admitted. This is not to say that everyone there was a fool — there were clever students too — only that, as with the rest of the Korean school system, the spread of intellectual ability was very wide indeed.
What this meant, practically, was that the diploma itself could not serve as outward evidence of one’s intellectual standing. To say “graduate of Tokyo University” or “graduate of Kyoto University” is, in Japan, a kind of public statement about a person’s capacities; to say “graduate of Chosen University” is rather more like saying “Japanese” or “born in Tokyo” — a fact about one’s origin, but not, by itself, a signal of anything in particular. The diploma carried, in other words, no signalling effect, for better or worse. And since most large Japanese companies filter their applicants by university name — sensibly enough, given the cost of evaluating candidates from scratch — to be a graduate of Chosen University was, at the outset of any job search, to be on the wrong side of that filter.
What outward evidence of intellectual character I could muster in those days amounted to two things only: a sixth-dan rank in go, attained in my middle-school years, and a TOEFL score of 260, achieved by studying English at university. (The test was still administered as a computer-based exam, scored out of 300, in those days.)
To change my position, I wanted to study abroad. But I made, regrettably, the choice of applying to MBA programs — where work experience tends to weigh heavily — and so I failed. Even had I been admitted, I am not sure I could have raised the money. Someone had told me they would help if I went abroad, and on the strength of that assurance I had let myself believe it; but the warm intentions of others, I now understand, are not the firmest of foundations on which to plan a life.
One could call this episode a piece of foolish recklessness, and be done with it. But twenty years on, I find I am able to think of it more structurally.
The greatest difficulty I faced in those days, I now believe, was simply that I had not been able to connect myself to the right kind of network.
The contrast with the world of go makes this plain. The Ryokusei Go Academy, where I studied as a boy, was at that time among the most distinguished of the children’s go schools in Japan, and many of its alumni went on to become professional players. Through playing against the senior students who had already turned professional — but more importantly, through simply being among them in the ordinary rhythms of daily life, since on Saturdays and Sundays we would spend the whole day at the academy, eating together, training together, exercising together — one came to understand, almost by a kind of osmosis, what becoming a professional actually entailed. Around half of my friends from those years went on to become professional go players (which, given that the profession admits only a handful of new members each year, is no small thing).
When one is in the right place, the right people are there with one, and the information one needs in order to make decisions comes in without any great effort on one’s part; and if, in concert with those around one, one then makes a reasonable effort in a reasonable direction, reasonable results tend to follow. The reason I was able to decide, without any lingering regret, that I would not pursue go professionally was precisely that I was in the right place — close enough to that world to judge for myself that the life of the professional go player was, as we used to say, a country of demons.
At Chosen University, by contrast, there was virtually nothing of that sort. Or rather, much of my energy in those years went into managing the objections of classmates, teachers, and my own father, all of whom resisted the path I was trying to take. Had I been in a place where a certain number of people were thinking about studying abroad, where such things were encouraged, I think the matter would have proceeded altogether more easily.
What I was saying, in those days, was that I would join a foreign investment bank, then move into private equity, and by the age of thirty-three set up my own fund to bring about social change. (I think I wrote this somewhere on the blog I kept around 2005 — though I closed the blog down some years ago, when a person of evidently fragile mental state began posting comments on every entry, and now I no longer know where those old writings have gone.)
To return to the thread: my teachers were exasperated by this trajectory of mine. I remember well being told to stop chasing clouds and look at reality. Out of curiosity, the other day, I asked Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT what the probability would have been of someone with my profile actually achieving the things I had described, and all three converged on a figure of less than 0.01%. So the teachers were, in their judgement, quite right.
I gave up on studying abroad and began looking instead at graduate programs in Japan. This must have been around November of 2005. The weather had grown cold; I remember the evening I made the decision, walking along the main avenue of Ginza, past Kimuraya — the old bakery — and Mikimoto, the pearl jeweller. I had nothing, I thought, but I would manage somehow whatever came; I would not lean on anyone but would simply do what I could and live by my own efforts. Tuition at a domestic graduate school came to a little over a million yen a year, and that, I judged, I could meet by working part-time.
The only programme still accepting applications at that point, and the only one I felt I genuinely wanted to attend, was the Graduate School of Finance at Waseda. As it happened, the writer Kazuyo Katsuma — now well known in Japan as an economist and author, but at that time still relatively obscure — had been a year ahead of me in that programme, and I had once sent her a message through GREE (which was then one of Japan’s social networks) to ask what she thought of the school. She told me it was a good school if one chose one’s professors carefully. She turned out to be right.
I was, by good fortune, admitted. It was only then that I learned I had to pay the entrance fee and tuition almost immediately, and that proved very difficult to arrange. My mother alone could not manage it; in the end it was my father who helped.
I do not share many of his opinions, but I am quite certain that he is a respectable man. Over the years I have come across a great many people, between the ages of forty and seventy, who still speak of him with great fondness. He spent that reputation almost entirely on the Korean community, and very little of it on his own family. (My mother, who served as the de facto CFO of the household, suffered a great deal as a result; even now I am astonished at how she managed our finances.)
A few days after my mother had asked him to find the money from somewhere, my father came home, called me into a small, untidy room, and handed me the cash in a crumpled envelope. I went off to a nearby ATM to make the bank transfer.
And so I went to graduate school. The Waseda Graduate School of Finance was, in those days, around eighty per cent working professionals, with the remaining twenty per cent recent graduates from undergraduate programs — roughly a hundred students per cohort, with perhaps three per cent of them being outliers of the Kazuyo Katsuma sort. Since it was a programme for working people, classes were held on weekday evenings and on Saturdays.
I therefore looked for a temporary position — something that would let me work from nine to five, ideally at a foreign financial institution where I could use English. What I found was a temp role at what is now Morgan Stanley Capital. More than half of the team were non-Japanese, so the working language was English. The manager who interviewed me took a liking to me, and I was hired with very little fuss. So began the rhythm of those years: working from nine until five, leaving the office at half past five, and going on to graduate school.
It is here that things begin to resemble Misaeng most closely. In those days, Morgan Stanley had three classes of staff — regular employees, contract employees, and temporary employees — and between them ran a great many invisible lines. The colour of the lanyard on one’s entry card was different; the background colour of the photograph taken for the internal directory was different; and so on. Within the regular employees themselves there were further gradations: those who had joined upon graduating from university, and those who had come from other firms; and within that again, the relative standing of one’s division. Those who had joined from university tended to be treated more attentively, and people working in the most prestigious divisions would often interact as equals with people two grades senior in other parts of the firm.
Misaeng, I understand, was based on close interviews with employees of Daewoo International — once one of the great trading houses within the Korean conglomerate system, now no longer with us — and so it is possible the situation is much the same in Korean firms. But I have often wondered why large organisations create these sorts of caste-like structures at all. Perhaps, in a high-stress workplace, having such a hierarchy lends a certain stability: those who are not at the bottom can look down at those who are, and feel a little better, and the organisation as a whole holds together. Those who govern sometimes use minorities as targets of attack for much the same purpose; and if firms are doing this with the same intent, it is, I think, a rather mean-spirited business.
This is not a question of right and wrong so much as one of taste — but I have never been able to like such things. Perhaps that is not unconnected to the fact that I had myself once been at the very bottom of such an organization. The peculiar state of mind that comes with being a temp employee — that not-quite-articulable sensation of being outside the caste altogether — is, I suspect, something one has to live through to understand. In any large organisation there are some people without much warmth in them (though at Morgan Stanley the great majority, I should say, were very gentlemanly indeed), and such people direct their unkindest words at those in the weakest positions.
I, however, was simply grateful to have the work at all, given my underground standing, and I do not think I complained even once. Every day I went on quietly, doing the Excel work that was given me as quickly and accurately and clearly as I could (on my first day I did not even know the difference between Ctrl-C and Ctrl-X). Whenever I was asked to do anything, by anyone, I said only, “Yes, I will do it.” There was, of course, no training programme for temps, so whatever I did not know I taught myself.
In the beginning I left at half past five every day; but in time the work increased, and on days when I had no classes I began to stay late. Then came days when I would go to my classes and afterwards return to the office to keep working.
After about four months of this — it was the height of summer — my manager asked to speak with me. We sat outside, behind Yebisu Garden Place (the area we used to call YGP), each of us holding a latte from Benugo, the café that was then in the building. It was a fine evening, and the light from the setting sun was beautiful.
He asked me whether I would like to become a regular employee, and I said yes at once.
He was Japanese-American — born to a family that ran a barber shop in Los Angeles — and had worked his way up himself, and so he had been kind to me throughout. He was an able man, and was rising steadily through the firm.
As in Misaeng, it was, at that time, exceedingly difficult for a contract or temp employee at Morgan Stanley to become a regular one. In the four years I subsequently spent at Morgan Stanley Capital, I do not recall a single other person making that transition.
Looking back now, I am made to understand how small a part my own ability played in the matter. First, you needed someone with enough political weight inside the firm to create a vacancy for you. Second, the market had to be in your favor (it was 2006, which turned out to have been one of the very best years). Third — because such precedents create a sense of unfairness among the other contract and temp employees — there had to be sufficient evidence that the individual involved was capable enough to justify the exception.
The third of these one could address through effort. The first two were not within reach of ability or character alone. To have been employed as a temp in that particular office, in the April of 2006 — which, looking back, was just before the financial crisis began to gather — was simple good fortune.
Several similarly difficult things have happened in the years since. There was, for instance, the move to Unison Capital as an investment professional, despite my having had only middle-office experience; and then the matter of founding a microfinance business in Japan — a field with which the country was largely unfamiliar — and not only keeping it from collapse but actually growing it. None of these, when I look at them honestly, can I attribute to my own ability alone.
As I mentioned at the start of this piece, the difficulty of getting from a graduate of Chosen University with two unaccounted-for years on his résumé to where I am now is, in the estimation of the artificial intelligences I consulted, more difficult than a camel passing through the eye of a needle. So when a friend asked me recently whether I would want to do my life over, I answered at once: “No — this life of mine has been too lucky. I would not.”
I am, of course, aware of having done a certain minimum of things on my own part. I did, I think, do my best to study and to work in earnest; and when I failed or was treated unkindly, I tried, as far as I could, not to lose heart and not to lose my integrity. That I was raised to such a temperament I owe to my parents. Whatever capacity I have for symbolic processing I owe, I suspect, to go — and that too I owe to my parents, who secured help from relatives so that they could send me to the academy.
But none of that, by itself, was enough. It is because there were people watching me, who saw fit at certain crucial moments to feel sorry for me and to extend a hand, that I am where I am now. The latter is not something one can control. It is simply, in the end, good fortune.
Gojo had a difficult year last year. But to me, having come from the underground stratum of the business world, the situation I now find myself in remains, even after such trouble, like something out of a dream. If I were to describe last year’s troubles to my twenty-years-ago self in dejected tones, he would, I suspect, stare blankly at me and ask why on earth I was upset. I am, after all, living inside one of the most favourable scenarios — perhaps less than 0.01% probabiliy — that he could possibly have imagined.
Beyond meditation, beyond ultra-marathons, I think it is the difficulties of those younger years that account for whatever resilience I have. To know that if, at the very worst, everything were to be taken from me, I would still understand the shape of the life that lay beyond — to have my past self’s quiet confidence that one would, even then, go on living — is no small thing.
I do not know exactly who is reading this note. But I suspect there is a certain number of people for whom, through some accumulation of coincidence and misfortune, life has become very hard. To continue working sincerely without losing heart is no guarantee that some road will open before one. Deliberate action is a necessary condition for the present to improve; it is not a sufficient one.
But we have only the one life, and so, if one is not to regret it afterwards, I think one has nothing to do but to do one’s best each day. Treat the results as more or less a product of chance; and whatever happens, day by day, live a life that one can be at peace with.