Reminds me of a few business trips I did to Korea about 8 years ago. Loooooong hours, but lots of 'make work' projects and redoing everything because a manager didn't like or approve of some minor subset.
The redoing my partner saw was often because an experiment didn't result in what the researcher expected. Rather than try to figure out what went wrong (or why their expectations were wrong), they'd spend lots of time repeating exactly the same thing.