Kim Yong-ju
Ki-jo, who had come down to Busan with Oh Yang-soo, called the next day at a former Japanese residence in the city — a tidy, imposing house where a wealthy Japanese had lived in the colonial years. It was the home of Kim Yong-ju, the first president of Korea Shipping Corporation.
He knocked at the front gate, and a servant came out. Once he had stated his business, he was admitted a moment later. Shown into the parlor, he came face to face with Kim Yong-ju, a man of no simple character.
"How do you do? It's a pleasure to meet you. I'm Lee Ki-jo, from Seoul."
"Welcome. I'm Kim Yong-ju."
They exchanged greetings and sat facing one another.
"You're the gentleman who runs the Miwon factory in Geoje-dong, aren't you?"
"Yes, that's right. I also have a shipping firm in Nampo-dong. We haven't been at it long under the name Cheongsan Shipping, but we already own three large vessels."
"I know. You secured a tungsten export contract through Korea Shipping, didn't you?"
"That's correct."
Kim Yong-ju already knew who he was.
"That... affair you stirred up at Seomyeon Rotary early last year? I've heard the stories. Ha ha ha."
As if marveling that the man at the center of the rumor that had set all Busan buzzing now sat before him, Kim Yong-ju studied Ki-jo at his leisure. Ki-jo, though, was more aware of another pair of eyes — a child's, watching him from behind a potted plant at one side of the parlor.
"Moo-sung, don't hide back there. Come out and greet your father's guest properly."
A boy of about five stepped out from behind the plant and bowed.
"Hello, mister."
"Hello there."
Ki-jo stroked the boy's head as he came closer and drew a thousand-hwan note from his wallet.
"You have to say thank you when you take it."
"Thank you."
The boy snatched the money and shot out of the parlor, vanishing somewhere else in the house. Watching Moo-sung — two years younger than Yeong-su — Ki-jo smiled.
"My third son. He hasn't quite come into his sense yet."
"Ha — he looks about my son's age. What a charming boy."
Seeing the childhood of Kim Moo-sung, a man who would one day be spoken of as a contender for the presidency, Ki-jo could only laugh. For now the boy was nothing more than a curious, shy child.
"But as for why you've come to see me..."
Ki-jo smiled at him. Had the matter not been urgent, he would never have sought Kim Yong-ju out. He himself had not expected the day would come when he would.
"I've come to ask your help in recovering a ship."
He spoke with careful deference to a man twenty-five years his senior. Kim Yong-ju was a year older even than Jeon Hyeong-pil.
"A ship...?"
Kim Yong-ju looked puzzled. Puzzled or not, Ki-jo wanted to toss Korea Shipping a single vessel and be done with them — the company that had been coveting Cheongsan Shipping's freighters.
"When you were president of Korea Shipping, wasn't there one ship you never managed to bring back from Japan?"
The question startled him.
"How do you know about that?"
"Once I got into the shipping business, I happened to hear of it."
"And what do you mean to do with that ship?"
"I came because I want to get it back from Japan and return it to its rightful owner."
At the proposal Kim Yong-ju laughed outright. He stopped, stroked his chin, and said,
"Even when I was serving at once as president of Korea Shipping and as envoy to Japan, I couldn't settle it. To go looking for that ship now... I'm afraid it's far too late."
To understand the ship Ki-jo meant to recover, one had to go back before Liberation. Under Japanese rule Kim Yong-ju had led a varied career and run businesses of many kinds. In the years just before Liberation he had been in shipping out of Pohang, holding the local agency for Osaka Shosen, the Japanese line, and making a considerable fortune in stevedoring, warehousing, and coastal trade.
When the U.S. Army liberated southern Korea in 1945, he saw a new opening. As the American Military Government, now ruling the south, moved to nationalize every vessel and every asset in Korean waters, he threw down a gambler's stake. He put two million won into Joseon Yusen, the line the Japanese had been running. In liberated Joseon he was the only man who put serious money into the company. Everyone else looked on it with cold indifference, for when Japan surrendered most of Joseon Yusen's ships had been in Japan, hauling war matériel.
Even so, he had his reasons. The Military Government was deeply anxious about securing electricity inside Korea, and coal for the thermal plants had to be moved by ship from Samcheok. His calculation was simple: if there were no ships, the Americans would have to find some, one way or another. How was the United States supposed to govern a country with no electricity? That, it seemed, had been his reckoning. Before long, it proved correct.
The Military Government arranged for Joseon Yusen to charter twelve vessels, wartime standard ships among them.
It also recovered five ships that had belonged to Joseon Yusen and had been carrying munitions in Japan, and brought them back to Korea. With the vessels chartered from the Americans and the ones returned from Japan, Kim Yong-ju ran a shipping business in earnest. But the largest and newest freighter on Joseon Yusen's books he never got back.
At the time that ship was hauling cargo under SCAP — the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers — which then governed Japan. The Military Government in Korea ordered the vessel recovered, but that government itself was an organ under MacArthur. MacArthur, ruling Japan, took someone's advice and commanded that the ship not be sent to Korea. And so one vessel of Joseon Yusen's remained behind.
Later, when Kim Yong-ju was posted to Japan as envoy and tried to claim her, it was already too late. In 1948 the Military Government was dissolved, and the legal authority that could have compelled the ship's return to Korea vanished with it. In 1952 Japan, too, was released from Allied occupation and became an independent state. The two bodies that might have enforced the claim, one in Korea and one in Japan, were both gone. The years he served as envoy were the height of the Korean War, and the Korean government had no spare attention for a single freighter.
When Ki-jo mentioned the ship, a look of old regret crossed Kim Yong-ju's face, as if the past had come back to him.
"But why, all of a sudden, do you want that ship back?"
Ki-jo explained. Korea Shipping's sailors had defected to Cheongsan Shipping in large numbers, and by way of compensation the company was throwing a tantrum, demanding that one of Cheongsan's ships be chartered to them for a long term at a bargain rate. Kim Yong-ju was not in the least surprised by so unreasonable a demand.
"I was president of Korea Shipping myself, but that company has more than its share of problems... Being a public corporation with no real owner, it gets pushed this way and that by whoever happens to hold power..."
Ki-jo knew exactly what he meant. Kim Yong-ju had been driven out of the presidency overnight, and the story went like this.
Syngman Rhee's wife, Madame Francesca Donner, kept a French secretary, a man named Vinnokko. One day the secretary came to see Kim Yong-ju. Calling at the president's office, Vinnokko announced that two American wartime standard ships were available in Sweden, that the consul stationed in San Francisco had agreed to buy them at 1.2 million dollars apiece, and that Korea Shipping Corporation was to purchase the vessels.
Kim Yong-ju refused on the spot. Wartime standard ships were plentiful in Japan as well, and bought there they ran no more than seven hundred thousand dollars a hull. Bought in Sweden, once the cost of bringing them to Korea was added, they came to more than 1.4 million dollars each. More than double the price — an absurd transaction. As president of Korea Shipping, he had made an entirely proper and rational choice.
But after that, Syngman Rhee neither summoned him to Gyeongmudae nor sought him out at all. Then, in March 1952, Kim Yong-ju was abruptly dismissed, and the man who succeeded him brought the Swedish ships into Korea.
Ki-jo understood the sour look on the man's face. The feeling seemed to be: what good would it do to hand a ship to Korea Shipping Corporation, run so irresponsibly and so loosely under the Rhee government? Judging by the fact that he later entered the National Assembly not for the Liberal Party but for the Democratic Party, his sense of betrayal and disappointment in Syngman Rhee must have run deep.
"Just tell me where the ship is, and which company she belongs to. I'll see to the rest myself."
Kim Yong-ju seemed to think for a moment, then shook his head.
"Getting the ship back from Japan would be a service to the country, I suppose. But with relations between Korea and Japan as frozen as they are, do you really think it's possible?"
Ki-jo tried to read the mind behind that answer. It was hard to tell whether the thing truly looked impossible to him, or whether he simply loathed the Rhee regime.
"You tried to find the ship while you were in Japan, and as envoy there you know that country better than anyone. Your judgment must be the right one..."
With a show of regret, he pretended to concede the point. Then, lightly, he turned the conversation.
"I'll take it that recovering the ship is impossible. But before I go, I'd like to thank you."
"Thank me?"
"Yes. As a citizen of the Republic, and of Seoul, I know that the palaces inside the Four Great Gates were preserved, and that the people of the city were spared, because of you. So I thank you."
At those words Kim Yong-ju's expression softened a little. Ki-jo did not miss it. It was the face, he thought, of a man who wanted to be acknowledged by the world.
He was a truly complicated man. In the 1930s he had thrown himself into the anti-Japanese movement. Then, from the 1940s, he had swung sharply into collaboration and been branded a turncoat. In the end he was never entered in the Dictionary of Pro-Japanese Collaborators, nor indicted by the Special Committee on Anti-National Activities. But once his son rose in politics, his record was examined all over again. The Hankyoreh, citing the Maeil Sinbo published under Japanese rule and the records of the Rally of Public Officials for the War Front, reported that he had spoken in support of conscription for the empire and had urged the building of a Shinto shrine. His son, Kim Moo-sung, demanded a rebuttal, but after a court fight he lost. Every remark Kim Yong-ju had made under his Japanese name, Kaneda Ryushu, survived in the historical record and was accepted as fact.
Even so, Ki-jo thought the man before him was not someone who could be judged so easily. That he had fought for independence was certain. That he had collaborated was certain too. It would have sat better if he had collaborated first and turned to the independence movement afterward — but in any case, Ki-jo had not come to pass judgment. What he needed now, desperately, was Kim Yong-ju's help. He set about drawing out the part of the man that took pride in a success, hoping to turn him toward a yes.
"If you hadn't gone to General MacArthur, all of Seoul would have been destroyed, and a great many of its people would have died."
During his years as envoy in Japan, Kim Yong-ju had gone to MacArthur, Supreme Commander of the Far East, and persuaded him not to bomb the heart of Seoul, then occupied by the North Korean army. The city center had no strategic value, he argued — only civilians and cultural treasures — and he asked that the bombs fall only on Yongsan, where the rail station and the bridges were. That was why, when the war ended, the old city inside the Four Great Gates and the royal palaces were still comparatively intact.
Reminded of his own achievement, Kim Yong-ju smiled.
"How did you know that?"
"I learned of it while working with the U.S. Information Service."
"I see... In those days I was afraid Seoul would be scorched to the ground. Every day the Americans were sending formations of B-29s from Japan over the city. I thought Seoul would be finished."
He spoke, recalling the past.
"General MacArthur said this to me then."
"So that's what he said."
"So I told him: it would be fine if Seoul were reborn as a new city, but Korea has suffered invasion after invasion, and little of its cultural heritage remains. If even that burned away in this war, Korea would become a country without a history. In the end General MacArthur granted my request. Ha ha."
Ki-jo supposed the man carried a great deal of regret over that complicated past. Someone who had worked hard for independence, only to turn collaborator a few years short of Liberation, would surely wish he had held out a little longer. To such a man, Ki-jo quietly laid bare a fault of his own.
"I volunteered for the People's Army during the war myself. I got out in the end, but thinking of it now still makes my head spin. At the time I believed it was the right thing."
He was speaking in the light of the foolish thing he had done in his first life, volunteering for the People's Volunteer Corps. Even if he had not stepped forward at once, he would eventually have been conscripted and thrown onto the front — but the fact that he had volunteered was one of the dark chapters of his life.
Showing that chapter had its effect. Whether from a sense of shared suffering or not, Kim Yong-ju nodded and encouraged him.
"Even so, you're living earnestly now, aren't you? A man only has to live rightly from the present onward."
The words seemed meant as much for himself as for Ki-jo. His expression grew complicated for a moment. He closed his eyes, opened them, and spoke.
"I'll tell you everything I know. Go and look for that ship."
Ki-jo was grateful to see him come back around.
"Thank you."
"There's nothing to thank me for. That ship belonged to Korea Shipping to begin with."
Kim Yong-ju gave him what he knew about the ship they had failed to recover. Ki-jo talked with him a while longer, then rose. Before he left, Kim Yong-ju mentioned the broadcast he had organized in Busan to find separated families, and praised it as truly fine work.
"Knowing you were the man who did that, I thought I ought to tell you. It occurred to me that, in a life as short as this, one shouldn't spend it tripping up people who are trying to do some good..."
Ki-jo thanked him again and again for the change of heart.
As he was leaving, little Kim Moo-sung came trailing after him. Ki-jo glanced back.
"Moo-sung, what's your dream?"
At the question the boy grinned shyly and hid behind his father. Ki-jo gave the child, who still knew nothing of the world, a broad smile, and went back to Nampo-dong, where Cheongsan Shipping kept its office.