Word: seoul
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...Chung, 67, has spent six years hammering this zero-defects message into the heads of Hyundai's employees?and the result has been one of the most surprising turnabouts in automotive history. A few years ago, Hyundai, South Korea's largest car manufacturer, was a synonym for "shoddy." Seoul was the only place in the world where you were likely to see large numbers of its cars on the street. Today, the company's line of pleasantly stylish, relatively inexpensive and certifiably reliable sedans and sport-utility vehicles is tailgating the industry's best-known brands in several prime markets...
...break down interdivisional barriers, Chung forced designers, engineers and factory managers to work as a team by creating joint committees to examine blueprints of new models and weed out potential defects. Twice a month, Chung summons senior managers of Hyundai and Kia into a conference room at his Seoul headquarters to analyze reliability issues, sometimes bringing in a whole car and lifting it up on a hydraulic platform to get a firsthand look. Likewise, the company's 68,000 workers are encouraged to make suggestions for improving quality in regular factory-floor meetings. Late last year, Yu Seung Byul...
...North Asia, it was supposed to be the year of living harmoniously. In January, South Korean President Roh Moo Hyun rang in the Korea-Japan Friendship Year in Seoul by announcing, "Let's be friends happily and head toward the future." This sunny message was an echo of the event's catchy theme song, Dance with Me, performed by Korean singer Lena Park and a Japanese band called Chemistry. China also picked up on the good vibes and was making efforts to put aside its long-standing antipathy toward Japan: a group of women climbers from Japan and China arranged...
...dressing down, while a text-message campaign urged Chinese to boycott Japanese goods. One of China's largest supermarket chains, Nonggongshang, said its 1,200 stores would no longer stock products from Japanese companies whose top brass are associated with a group sympathetic to the new textbook. Meanwhile, Seoul?where people were already angry that a Japanese prefecture recently claimed a remote rocky islet as its own, even though the Korean coast guard has been patrolling it for 57 years?reacted with similar indignation. Particularly galling to South Koreans was that Japan's education czars had directed four Japanese textbook...
...gamut of the arts since its reinvention began in 2001. Today, more than 70 artists, musicians, writers and cineasts?including director Park Chan Wook, winner of the Cannes Grand Prix 2004 for his film Old Boy?have settled in the 500,000-sq-m valley, 40 minutes north of Seoul. The community is still a work in progress (60 buildings have been completed and 20 are under construction), but tourists will find plenty to see, including cutting-edge architecture, cinemas, caf?s, galleries and craft shops. More important, it's a blissful change from the heavy atmosphere that hangs over...