Suicide Is Symbol of Workplace Prejudice

In life, Mike Lee was a Korean immigrant like so many others in Los Angeles, working hard to support his wife and children.

For four years that responsibility formed a shield against the ridicule he said he endured from his Japanese bosses. Lee eventually became so distraught he confided to a company counselor that he felt like killing his tormentors.

Instead, he killed himself.

Now, in death, Myung-Sub Mike Lee has become a symbol of what can happen when foreign cultures export prejudice to the United States. His diary is a log of insults to his Korean culture and his accent; some were aimed at his Japanese wife for marrying a Korean.

Lee’s family and supporters say workplace harassment broke him. His suicide last fall at 39 has galvanized the Korean American community, prompting labor, community and religious leaders to spearhead protests against Lee’s former employer, Nippon Express USA Inc.

Three days before Lee hanged himself in the garage of his Torrance home, Nippon Express settled his discrimination lawsuit. The worldwide shipping firm issued him a check for $50,000 without admitting wrongdoing. But Lee had become despondent. He was out of work and faced a criminal trial for making threats, jeopardizing his chances for U.S. citizenship.

Lee’s supporters, some of them Japanese Americans, say he was the victim of age-old animosity between Japanese and Koreans. They believe his troubles have their roots in Japan’s takeover of Korea nearly a century ago, which reinforced the island nation’s belief in its superiority over other Asian neighbors.

Korean Americans say they are especially upset because Lee’s Japanese supervisors were acting on their prejudices in America--a neutral territory.

Lee’s death continues to resonate in Los Angeles, home to the largest number of Koreans outside Asia. The Committee for Justice for M.S. Lee, representing a broad spectrum of organizations, is demanding a public apology from Nippon Express, punishment for Lee’s superiors and financial compensation for his death.

“But for the fact that Mike Lee was Korean, he would not have been subjected to that kind of working environment,” said the Rev. Hyun-Seung Yang, head of the committee. “There must not be another Mike Lee case anywhere.”

Mike Lee’s diary provides the narrative propelling his supporters. In it, Lee recounted his humiliation and anger at Japanese bosses who spoke disparagingly--sometimes against him, sometimes against all Koreans.

“Is it a crime to be a Korean?” he wrote after one of his supervisors ordered him to carry a toothbrush and brush after eating kimchi, the pickled cabbage served with Korean meals. He was told the smell offended Japanese customers.

The way Lee spoke Japanese bothered them too, according to his diary, provided to The Times by family friends.

“If they find out you are a Korean, it would not be good for the company,” Lee quoted another supervisor as saying. “There are many Japanese who do not like Koreans.”

Lee, a senior export agent, also endured demeaning remarks about his wife, according to his diary.

“Your wife appears to me to be the kind of a woman who would go out with any man at night,” one supervisor told Lee. The remark came after the Lees had invited company employees to celebrate the purchase of their first home, the diary said.

Lee wrote that he was so upset that he could not think of a reply. That night, he could not sleep. He said he despised himself for not having offered a retort.

Another time, while two bosses were drinking beer in the office, Lee wrote, one asked Lee whether the small size of his wife’s breasts affected the couple’s sex life.

“After that, whenever I saw them, I would feel such pain and rage that I felt like I would go crazy,” he wrote. “ . . . I hated my plight--the plight of having to be in the same room with these people.”

John Gibbons, human resources manager for Nippon Express, acknowledged that Lee’s managers were “profoundly insensitive at times.” They “made mistakes,” he said, and have since been reprimanded and some of them reassigned. But Gibbons denied they had discriminated against Lee because of his ethnicity.

In the company’s view, Lee’s managers had an excessive desire to please Japanese customers in the Los Angeles area.

“They wanted to make sure that Japanese customers felt as welcomed and at home at Nippon Express here as they would in Tokyo,” Gibbons said.

He said it is difficult to interpret the comments recorded in Lee’s diary. “It’s tough for someone outside the two languages and two cultures to identify exactly what the intention was, or the interpreting filters that would go into hearing a particular comment,” he said.

Diana Rowland, a cross-cultural consultant who has been training Nippon Express managers since last summer, said the problems show what can happen when “proactive steps are not taken,” but are not a result of the firm’s being “less sensitive or caring of the employees than most companies.”

For six years, Nippon Express has conducted a management program for Japanese supervisors assigned to the United States. The company hired Rowland--after the complaints by Lee and others--to provide customized sensitivity and behavior training for managers working in the southwestern U.S.

Lee lodged his discrimination complaint in 1998. But the company dismissed it, saying it lacked merit. Then a year ago, two colleagues, Malena Cervantes and Jun-Ho Chang, sued Nippon Express--after earlier lodging complaints--accusing the company of harassing them because of their ethnicity. Chang settled out of court for an undisclosed sum and left the company. Cervantes’ case is scheduled to go trial in June.

Lee apparently attracted the attention of high-level company officials last spring, after he was called to testify in the lawsuits filed by Cervantes and Chang.

Six weeks after his deposition, Lee was asked to meet with the human resources manager. Gibbons, 36, came from the firm’s New York headquarters to mediate Lee’s complaint and to make sure Rowland’s training began on schedule.

“My husband was so happy to find someone from the company who seemed sympathetic to his situation that he spoke from his heart,” said Lee’s widow, Junko Lee.

During two lengthy meetings, Gibbons told Lee the company would reprimand his supervisors and require them to complete management and cultural sensitivity training, according to a court petition filed by the company. He also offered Lee a settlement, should Lee resign, court records show.

But Lee told Gibbons if the company interpreted his supervisors’ behavior as simply a “misunderstanding or lack of cultural sensitivity,” he would be “extremely unhappy,” according to court documents.

On July 7 and 9, Lee told Gibbons his bosses had so angered him he felt like killing them. The comments led to the filing of felony charges against Lee.

Lee’s criminal defense attorney unsuccessfully sought to have the charges dismissed, arguing his client had never directly threatened anyone and the comments he made were conveyed to Gibbons in a “therapeutic setting,” court documents said.

Lee said Gibbons tricked him by encouraging him to speak “freely, openly and honestly” about his feelings about the company, records show. He was being frank with Gibbons because he believed their talk was confidential, Lee wrote in his diary. He had no intention of harming anyone, he wrote.

“I believe the company sent him to trap my husband by getting him to speak honestly about his feelings. I cannot forgive them,” said Junko Lee, who returned a $25,000 check the company sent her at Christmas. She has also refused to accept her share of the $50,000 settlement that her husband signed.

Gibbons said, “I can see why Mike may have felt betrayed, that in the context of the three-hour heartfelt conversation that something like a declaration that he was going to kill someone would be used later.”

But he could not take Lee’s threats lightly, he said, because his “first thought was the safety” of other workers. He said Lee seemed a “desperate” man, with a potential for violence.

Lee was arrested July 9 at work. Nippon Express then obtained a court order keeping him away from the Torrance facility, as well as the homes of his six supervisors.

Lee’s defense attorney, Dennis Chang, said the legal trouble would have eventually been resolved.

But Lee’s widow said her husband saw no way out of his problems. The two had met in Australia while they were students there in the 1980s. She recalled how he had courted her by teaching her tennis.

“I regret that I didn’t tell him I loved him and respected him,” said Junko Lee. “Nothing I did could get him out of his depression.”

Such pain is cumulative, said Elwood B. Hain Jr., a law professor at Whittier Law School and one of a group of scholars, ministers and business executives who visited the Japanese consul general in Los Angeles to voice their concerns.

“Sensitive people--people who are warm and caring--will become raw and every little touch will set it off,” he said.

Companies are legally responsible for preventing a hostile workplace. That includes tending to expatriate managers who, once in America, must learn new laws and ways to contend with an ethnically diverse work force.

“The problem comes when they attempt to translate what in many cases are perfectly good management styles within their own cultural context into the U.S. context,” said Ernest Gundling of Meridian Resources, a San Francisco company that offers management consulting and training to clients around the world.

Cultural sensitivity is about seeing things through the eyes of another, said Dennis M. Houlihan, president of Roland Corp. US, whose parent company, Roland Corp. Japan, is the world’s largest maker of electronic musical instruments.

Such training, he said, adds richness to workplace relationships. “Suddenly, a lightbulb goes up and it begins to make sense why somebody reacts the way they do,” he said.

The Rev. Brandon Cho, of the United Methodist Church of Simi Valley who does cross-cultural counseling, believes Lee’s death involved several misunderstandings.

From an Anglo point of view, he said, Lee’s threat had to be taken seriously. But from a Korean perspective, it was an expression of pent-up anger and resentment.

“Instead of reporting to the police, a counselor could have been provided to help him,” Cho said. Perhaps the qualities most needed in a multiethnic workplace are civility and compassion, he added.

“In so many ways, life has multiple realities, and the same event is a different event to different people,” Hain added.