You're probably not still wondering about this, but I thought I’d chime in, just in case someone else has a similar problem.
My advice is to send your query in polite straight forward (limit use of idioms) English. In my experience, working with publishers in Korea (albeit on the buyer end of things) is that every person has some English ability and every company has at least one staff member who handles English language correspondence. You might not find someone who can (or is willing to) talk to you on the phone, but you can depend on there being someone to read an email.
The same advice holds true for all of the publishers in all the countries I have worked with and that's most of East Asia.