Knew a bloke (my neighbour when I was a kid) who spent three and a half years as a prisoner of war to the Japanese. He did the whole nine yards… Changi, Burma Railway. Anyone with even a passing knowledge of history will have some idea of what that involved… starvation, extreme maltreatment, tropical diseases, poor to non-existent medical treatment, even summary execution.
You'd think that anyone who'd gone through all that wouldn't have a hell of a lot of time for the Japanese, but the interesting thing was, this bloke said he didn't mind them particularly. They were harsh taskmasters, but you knew where you stood with them. (I'm only repeating what he said.)
However, he didn't come home without some serious emotional baggage. Where he had some grudging respect for the Japanese, he loathed the Koreans with a passion that had not abated twenty years after the war. There was a reason for this. The Koreans made up the majority of the prison camp guards in the Japanese Army, (because the Japanese considered such work beneath the dignity of a Japanese soldier), so he would have seen many more Koreans than Japanese. The Koreans were also treated terribly by the Japanese, so it might be said that human nature being what it was, they just passed on the grief to the prisoners.
However, the really interesting thing my neighbour said about the Koreans, which, having read the posts above from asiania pilot, shows (I think), that he was an astute judge of human character.
His comment? 'Every race thinks that they are superior to all other races. The Koreans know they are.'
This attitude of racial superiority might be advantageous in an army where soldiers are pitted against soldiers of another nation with the object of defeating them in battle. It may not be quite so advantageous in a multi racial, multi cultural cockpit of a modern jet aircraft. The fact that many local pilots in KAL and Asiania are ex military (often single seat, fast jet) pilots might have some bearing on the problems some Westerners seem to encounter when working with them. The fact that these local pilots are allowed to carry over their military rank, if only tacitly, when they come to the airline might not be seen to help from a Western perspective.
I think it's clear from what asiania pilot has said above that some Korean pilots sees any Westerner coming to Korea to work as a failure in his own country and seriously below their standards. I think it only fair to say that some Western pilots who attempt to do so do in fact have chequered histories. But until there's a total turnaround in the attitudes of the older Korean pilots to CRM, accepting criticism from junior crew and to acceptance of people not of their culture, there are going to be continuing problems in Korean cockpits, problems that will sometimes lead to accidents.
I'm told there's hope. The younger graduates of the civil training programme are said to be breaking this military mindset. However, in the short term, they are the poor sods we hear about being beaten by their training captains.