The Samcheonri-ho
The strategy Gijo had settled on was to stage the most effective prize campaign he could for as little money as possible, and thereby provoke Cheil Jedang.
If Cheongsan's lean, efficient promotion stung Cheil Jedang into answering with a giveaway of extravagant scale, the government would have to step in. In the original history, that was precisely what had happened: once Miwon and Mipung locked themselves into an excessive prize war, the state drew its sword. A ban on giveaways would leave only one field of battle — the merit of the seasoning itself. That was the larger picture Gijo was painting.
November 7, 1957. Ipdong, the traditional start of winter.
Gijo went down to Busan to buy bicycles. He called on Kia Industry, the first company in the country to build a domestic machine, and asked its president, Kim Chul-ho, about purchasing bicycles to give away as customer gifts.
"You mean to order ten a month?"
"That's right."
"Just as well. If you'd asked for a hundred, I would have turned you down."
Kim Chul-ho said it with a smile. When Gijo asked why, he answered.
"Build a bicycle and it sells at once. Wholesale and retail reservations from all over the country have the books full. We simply can't accept a large order."
Gijo nodded. In the 1950s a bicycle — no fuel, and hardly ever a breakdown — was the finest means of transport a city laborer or a country farmer could dream of. After the war, bicycles were used more than trucks. This was the decade when people hauled nearly any load on two wheels, so whether the machine was for the commute or for market trade, its uses were so broad that it was only natural every one sold the moment it was made.
He introduced the man he had brought with him.
"This is Manager Jeon Hyeon-su of Cheongsan Seasoning. I hope you'll look after him."
Jeon Hyeon-su bowed deeply to Kim Chul-ho. Gijo wanted Hyeon-su, who did nothing at the Busan plant of Cheongsan Seasoning but work, to grow acquainted with the industrial men of the region. He had brought him along on purpose, to widen the younger man's circle. Standing before Kim Chul-ho, he sang his praises.
"In truth he's as good as the president of Cheongsan Seasoning. He's the very man who learned the technology in Japan and created Miwon."
"Is that so?"
Kim Chul-ho brightened.
"Kia did the same, if I'm honest. We stole technology from Japan, we bought it — we did all of it."
He laughed, rough and open. Gijo knew enough of the man to have expected exactly that. Mention that Jeon Hyeon-su had learned his craft in Japan, and Kim Chul-ho was bound to warm to him.
Kim had never managed to develop the bicycle's wheel — the rim — on his own. He had even tried to smuggle himself into Japan to bring a technician back. After buying blueprints there at great difficulty and failing to make a rim from them, he had finally paid a large sum to bring a Japanese technician over, and only then succeeded. Jeon Hyeon-su and Kim Chul-ho had histories that rhymed.
Buying the bicycles was a very simple transaction, but by connecting the two men Gijo meant the visit to build something more than a sale. Busan was the center of industry now, and connections made there would surely matter later.
For the moment he bought two Samcheonri-ho machines, to display in front of Cheongsan's head office in Seoul. When he took hold of one in the factory yard, the weight of it surprised him. Lightweight design had nothing to do with this bicycle. It was raw steel, through and through — a black machine of the kind people called a rice-shop bicycle, a makgeolli-shop bicycle, after the deliveries it was built to haul. The frame alone weighed more than twenty kilograms, and it would carry five times its own weight without complaint. It was the tough common man's pair of feet.
Gijo and Hyeon-su decided to ride once around the Kia Industry plant. The bicycles were so heavy that to start you had to push them forward and swing up as they rolled; the frames were too long and too heavy to mount the way one mounted an ordinary bicycle, seated and pedaling from a standstill. They rode a loop of the grounds. The machines were so solid that when they ran the unpaved road, the steel frames swallowed the vibration and the shock.
"A fine bicycle."
Gijo said it with a smile. Hyeon-su, out of the plant for once and riding with the wind in his face, looked just as pleased, grinning from ear to ear. Gijo decided they should ride a little farther. He climbed a low hill with a view of the sea and looked out over the water. The sea off Busan, which had kept company with his youth, was always dear to him.
Hyeon-su, standing in the sea wind beside him, asked a question.
"Sir, if you mean to offer bicycles as Miwon prizes for a long time, why not build a bicycle factory of our own?"
He seemed to think making them would be simple.
"Well... I don't think it would be that easy."
Gijo knew that, in the reality of the 1950s, building a bicycle was no small thing. Technicians were scarce, and so was the steel to build with. By the 2020s, specialist parts makers would be so developed that one could simply order components and assemble them. The 1950s were not like that. The country produced no iron of its own. Men rolled the steel drums the U.S. Army had brought into Korea, formed them into pipe, then hammered the pipe flat into sheet. Gijo had seen it with his own eyes inside Kia Industry: drums stacked to one side, rolled and flattened, every single part made by hand by the factory hands. Mass production was still impossible. To build one proper bicycle, you had to gather craftsmen capable of making every part. Short of buying an entire factory, it could not be done.
"Shall I go to Japan and learn how to build them?"
It was the ambition of a department manager still in his twenties, full of fire. Gijo looked at him with quiet pride.
"No. I don't think you'll need to go that far."
He said it with a small smile. Hyeon-su couldn't quite follow him. Gijo had just said bicycles were hard to make, and in the next breath that there was no need to go learn the technology. Gijo did not explain why. He couldn't.
In September of 1959, when Typhoon Sarah struck Busan, Kia Industry's factory would be leveled. Kim Chul-ho would scrape together private loans and try to save the plant, and in the end the company would choke on a shortage of cash and go bankrupt. Gijo had calculated that far from the beginning. From the moment he decided to use bicycles as prizes, he had also kept in mind the chance to enter the bicycle business. He wanted to use his knowledge of the future to help people. He was also a businessman, and he meant to acquire a company once it fell into financial distress.
"Hyeon-su. Get along well with President Kim from here on. Keep at it, and the day may come when we can build bicycles ourselves."
He left it vague on purpose. After they had taken their fill of the sea wind, Gijo returned to the Kia plant, loaded the bicycles onto a truck, and went back to the Miwon factory.
Back in Seoul, with the bicycles set out on display, Gijo learned that Dan Sa-cheon had telephoned while he was in Busan.
"What did President Dan come looking for me about?"
At the question, Dae-ik answered.
"He wouldn't tell me the details. But something I heard in Myeongdong has been troubling me."
Seong Dae-ik visited Myeongdong on a regular schedule to meet Baek Grandma and take the measure of how money was moving there. He came back with more than the flow of funds. He came back with rumors, and rumors, more often than not, were what actually helped the business.
"They say President Lim Dae-hong has been in and out of the private loan market for several days."
"Has he?"
Gijo thought he knew why Lim Dae-hong was haunting Myeongdong. Lim's Miwang was struggling to promote its goods. Gijo had seized the seasoning market first, and Cheil Jedang, the latecomer, was shoving its way in on the strength of its capital. Miwang was the one taking the worst of it. Denied any chance to recover its initial investment, the company could not gather money, and without money it could not mount a promotion. Without promotion, sales would fall again. The vicious circle would keep turning. If Lim meant to raise funds in Myeongdong's private market and spend them on a campaign, then he was walking the worst road open to him.
"Keep collecting rumors about Mr. Lim. Don't let even a small one slip past you."
"Yes, sir."
Dae-ik began passing through Myeongdong more often than before, gathering what he could. A few days later he reported what he had heard.
"Sir, they say Mr. Lim went to see Baek Grandma."
"What did he propose?"
"That if she invested, he would divide the profits in proportion to her stake. He swore up and down that she should leave the management to him — development, promotion, all of it."
"And what did Baek Grandma decide?"
"She refused."
Gijo nodded. Baek Hee-yeop — Baek Grandma — invested only in companies that stood first. A third-place firm would not even have entered her eye.
"Manager Seong, watch whether Mr. Lim goes to see Mr. Dan."
"Yes, sir."
Gijo was certain Lim Dae-hong would end up at Dan Sa-cheon's door. These were days when a bank loan for a company was harder to catch than a star in the sky. If a man needed a large sum, Dan Sa-cheon was the only one who could supply it. But Gijo did not believe Dan should be trusted lightly.
The Dan Sa-cheon he knew was a man skilled at hostile takeovers. If a sound company suffered a temporary shortage of cash, he would covet it, and to such a firm he would first lend only a small amount. A businessman who opened dealings with him would rejoice at having formed a tie with the Cash King of Myeongdong and feel secure behind it, never noticing that he had just set his first foot into a mire. Repay that first loan, and nothing much went wrong. Go back a second time, a third, and the terms worsened by degrees. Try then to find a private lender with kinder conditions, and you would discover that a man who had once borrowed from Dan Sa-cheon could borrow from no one else. That was the rule.
The businessman had no choice but to keep depending on him. And when the debt could no longer be borne, Dan Sa-cheon took the company. He would carve up its assets and sell them off, or set the company back on its feet and sell it to another businessman, or keep it for himself. Dan had run businesses of his own and entered the loan market with money those businesses had earned; he had a certain confidence in commerce. It was only that the returns in private lending were so good he neglected ordinary business.
If Lim Dae-hong's Miwang passed into Dan Sa-cheon's hands, the market would change sharply. Gijo tried to foresee what would follow if Dan jumped in through Miwang. At present the field was two strong and one weak. If Dan acquired Miwang and poured capital into a head-on challenge against Miwon and Mipung, an order of three strong players would form at once.
Gijo did not think that would be a bad thing. Dan Sa-cheon's entry, as he saw it, was the shortest path to ending the excessive competition already raging in the seasoning market. If Dan joined the prize war, he would trust the power of his money and enlarge the board in a single stroke. Cheil Jedang would not sit still. Once the competition grew fierce, the government would step in. The whole thing might even be settled without Gijo having to lift a finger.
If the contest were then fought on pure ability, with giveaways forbidden, he was confident he could leave both Dan Sa-cheon and Lee Byung-chull behind. Soon the age of acid-hydrolyzed seasoning would fade, and fermented seasoning, richer in savor, would sweep the market. Gijo would meet that shift early. Cheil Jedang would bring in the technology through its partner, Ajinomoto. Unless Dan Sa-cheon treated Lim Dae-hong as a treasure and entrusted him with the research, Miwang had no future. That was Gijo's judgment.
He decided not to contact Dan Sa-cheon, and held his breath, watching to see how the map of the seasoning market would change.