The arrest in 2016 of the oldest daughter of the Lotte Group's founder for suspected bribery and other misdeeds represented the latest chapter in the ongoing saga of South Korea's fifth-largest conglomerate company, or chaebol. Over the years, it seems most of the major chaebol that dominate the South Korean economy—such as Hyundai, Samsung and Hanjin—have passed through very public struggles among the ruling family members, as if they were staging a television drama from the dynastic past.

Indeed Lotte's aging founder, Shin Kyuk-ho, must have felt like Yi Seonggye, the founder of the Joseon dynasty, who abdicated in the face of murderous infighting over the throne among his children. Lotte's place in modern Korea carries powerful historical overtones in other ways as well, including the complex hold of traditional family practices and Japan's prominent role in South Korea's economic development.

The story begins in Ulsan, the home region of Shin Kyuk-ho, in the closing years of the Japanese colonial period (1910–1945), when the peninsula was caught in the throes of Japan's war against China and the United States. Back then, Ulsan was not the powerhouse center of industry as it is now, so Shin made his way to nearby Busan, the growing gateway to and, in many ways, product of Japan, in order to attend high school. Upon graduation, he moved to Tokyo to attend Waseda University, somehow avoiding conscription into the battlefront as a student soldier.

This was also when Shin's first daughter, Yeong-ja, was born, with a familiar name for that generation of Korean females, given that it could easily be rendered into a common Japanese name as well. Upon Korea's liberation in 1945, Shin stayed in Japan, joining hundreds of thousands of Koreans who, for whatever reason, made that difficult choice.

He began his company in the late 1940s and chose the name “Lotte” in reference to the love interest (“Charlotte”) of Werther, the anxious young protagonist in the famed novel by Goethe. This unusual name for a company thus reflected Japan's outsized role in absorbing and transmitting the globalizing currents of Western culture in the early twentieth century throughout East Asia, including of course in its colony of Korea.