The Warehouses of Yeongdeungpo
"Confirmed."
Kijo had been making frequent trips to Yeongdeungpo, searching for ground on which a great logistics warehouse might stand. The district had been a major industrial zone since the years of Japanese rule, and its situation alone set it apart. The Gyeongbu and Gyeongin lines crossed there, the port of Incheon lay close at hand, and raw materials and finished goods could even be moved along the Han itself. Empty land was still plentiful, and with the river so near there was good water in abundance. It was perfect country for a factory. And so the first district south of the Han to be developed under the colonial government—the Gangnam of that era—was Yeongdeungpo.
A handful of firms had come to stand for this most favored of industrial sites. Chief among them were Joseon Leather, the largest tannery in the Orient, and Gyeongseong Spinning and Weaving.
Joseon Leather had been founded by Japanese on a plain calculation: buy up Korean cowhide, turn it into leather goods, and the profit would be enormous. At the center of it stood Kata Kinzaburo, a Japanese leather man who had opened Taiwan and brought immense gains home to Japan. He had nothing but praise for Yeongdeungpo, above all for the water a tannery could not do without. The Han's clean, plentiful flow was ideal for washing hides and for dyeing them. The plant he raised at Dangsan-ri, in Yeongdeungpo-myeon, Siheung-gun, Gyeonggi Province, produced military goods from the start, supplying the Japanese armies in Korea and Manchuria, the Government-General of Korea, and others besides.
Then the First World War broke out, and the company struck it rich. It exported military leather to Europe, and imperial Russia ordered in such volume that Joseon Leather was reborn as the largest leather firm in the Orient. The great flood of 1925, which overwhelmed Seoul, submerged Yeongdeungpo and cost the company dearly, but the Second Sino-Japanese War brought a second windfall. After liberation the plant was sold off as vested property and clung to a bare existence. With scarcely a cow left in Korea, cowhide could no longer be had, and the old boom did not return.
If Joseon Leather was the finest company the Japanese had planted in Yeongdeungpo, the finest raised by Korean hands was Gyeongseong Spinning and Weaving. It had been founded to stand against imported Japanese cotton cloth and against the Japanese firms the colonizers had set up on Korean soil—a modern enterprise built wholly on Korean capital. Proclaiming the revival and the self-reliance of the Korean economy, it was established on October 5, 1919, with Park Yeong-hyo as its president. In 1923 it raised a mill in Yeongdeungpo-eup, brought in machinery from the Toyoda Automatic Loom Works—the company that would later become Toyota—and began its contest with Japan.
In the early years its skill fell short, and it could not match Japanese goods. From 1930, though, it expanded the Yeongdeungpo mill until it held 672 looms in all, and when Japan swallowed Manchuria and that market opened, Gyeongseong crossed over and made its money there. It kept enlarging the plant and buying up other cotton mills, growing as it went. It was a company that had preserved its national capital and gone on growing even under colonial rule, and when the Korea Stock Exchange opened in 1956 it was one of the first twelve firms on the board.
Unlike those two manufacturers, Kijo was in distribution. Even so, he meant to take the gift of location that Yeongdeungpo, that naturally favored industrial ground, had always offered. The district may have been the Gangnam of the 1950s, but it bore no resemblance to the Gangnam of later years. Land there was not yet dear, and empty lots were still everywhere. Having assumed the debts of Hyundai Construction and used that money to buy up great stretches of Yeongdeungpo ground, he set to building warehouses at once. Cheongsan Construction did the work.
Mindful of how often fires broke out in those days, he set the buildings well apart, and where the warehouses of the time were timber, his were concrete—cement block that Cheongsan Brick had made from cement out of Yeongwol. For the roofs he chose the corrugated tin that came off the American bases, so that a flying spark would find nothing to burn. He planned a fire company of the complex's own, to serve inside the vast logistics base. Water would be drawn from the Han and held in a tower beside the warehouses, so that a blaze in one block could be kept from leaping to the next. He had the tower linked by pipe to the roof of every building, and ordered a sprinkler system designed to run on gravity alone, with no pump at all.
When word got around that Kijo was throwing up a logistics warehouse of almost crazed expanse south of the Han, people laughed. It wasn't even a factory, they muttered—just warehouses on the empty plain of Yeongdeungpo.
But one man saw what a warehouse was worth before anyone else. Kwon Gi-dong of the South Seoul Materials Warehouse had come charging in, back in the early days of the brick business, with a whole crowd of materials dealers at his back. He had led the dealers' revolt that brought Yongsan Brick down. At first he had treated Kijo easily, as a president still young enough to be spoken to without ceremony. Not anymore. Pressed down by a presence that had grown beyond anyone's casual approach, he now addressed him with awkward care as President, President.
Coming out to the site, Kwon said, "President, how did you ever think of a thing like this? At this scale you could hold every bit of freight in Seoul and still have room to spare. All that's left for you is to make the money. Ha ha ha."
Kijo had already heard as much from the Americans. When he brought in the heavy equipment and started raising the great logistics center, the U.S. Army engineers came by out of curiosity, stared, and let fall a remark.
"You live in America or something? This is bigger than a decent warehouse back home. You're going to scrape up a fortune over here in Korea."
They said it because the place outsized the warehouses on their own bases, and the ones they knew in the States.
Kijo turned to Kwon Gi-dong. "If you run short of space, lease a warehouse from Cheongsan Distribution. I'll let you have it."
"You mean it? Thank you, President."
Kwon bobbed a bow. Kijo had not forgotten him—the man was as good as an outside benefactor of the brick business—and he still looked after him.
There was another man, though, with his eye on the warehouse complex: Lee Byung-chull of Samsung. The call came while the site was being made ready and the buildings were going up one by one. Kijo took it, gave him leave to tour the work, and waited for him in front of the Yeongdeungpo Warehouse Complex.
Lee Byung-chull's car arrived, and Kijo met him at the gate. His rival offered a warm greeting that made the competition between them seem, for a moment, beside the point.
"Good to see you. You've been well, I trust?"
They shook hands, and Kijo put him in the company's open-top jeep and drove him through the grounds, where the work was in full cry. He knew the pattern. Once Lee Byung-chull had walked through another man's operation, a similar one of his own was rarely far behind. There was the time he had gotten leave from Koo In-hwoi of LG—the man to whom he had married his daughter—toured the Goldstar television plant, and promptly founded a Samsung television plant of his own. If he smelled money, in-laws and all the rest ceased to matter. That was Lee Byung-chull.
Kijo let it pass. Refusing the tour, he thought, would not keep the man out of the business. Better to show what there was to show than to be petty about a request, and to keep the tie between them intact. They were rivals in Miwon, but Cheongsan and Samsung were also trading with each other. Soon-young's Cheongsan Confectionery and the Miwon plant in Busan used flour from Cheil Sugar, and Samsung in turn placed its television advertising with DBC and entrusted its freight to Cheongsan Transport. Just as Samsung would one day compete with Apple while still supplying it with parts, Kijo competed with Samsung and made use of whatever the other side did well.
When the tour was over, and Lee Byung-chull seemed to have taken the measure of the place, he said, "Thank you for showing me around yourself. I expect Yeongdeungpo will become the finest logistics base there is."
His expression was a complicated one. It was the face of a man asking himself whether a distribution network this large might not make seasoning very hard to sell, anywhere in the country. Word had it that Cheil Sugar had been thrown into a fluster when Kijo, pressing the contest over seasoning, began multiplying Cheongsan Stores—shops that sold Miwon and nothing else. According to what Kim Seogwang had learned through a friend on the Cheil Sugar staff, once Miwon's sales started climbing straight up, Lee Byung-chull had said as much aloud.
"He's landed a blow on me."
Kijo could read a little further in the man's face. It was the alarm of someone realizing that if a warehouse on this scale ever ran as it should, the seasoning business was finished.
"When the warehouses are done, come again," Kijo said, and he said it with confidence. "I'll show you the real thing then."
Even if Lee Byung-chull answered fire with fire, built great warehouses of his own, and leapt into distribution, Kijo was sure he could rout him as he had in the Miwon business. He wanted that confidence on display, so the man would not step lightly into the trade. He weighed something else as well. In the history he remembered, Lee Byung-chull had never cared much for distribution, and Samsung's ventures into it had come to little. No one could be good at everything. For all his strengths, Lee Byung-chull had weaknesses to match them.
Lee Byung-chull spoke with the look of a man setting down what he had decided to set down. "I feel I've taken too much of your valuable time, and I'm sorry for it. Is there anything you might ask of me?"
Kijo answered at once. "I'd like to see the inside of the Cheil Industries plant. I've looked at the factory from the outside. I've never been within."
"Is that so? Very well. You have only to say when. If I can't show you the plant myself, I'll speak to my people, so you may look your fill at whatever hour suits you."
"Thank you, President Lee."
He had gotten what he wanted. The interior of the plant was one thing. There was something else he meant to confirm.
A few days later he telephoned Lee Byung-chull to say he would visit Cheil Industries. When the other man apologized and said he could not guide him in person, Kijo was all the more pleased.
"That's quite all right, President. In exchange, let me name the employee who shows me through."
The request seemed to catch Lee Byung-chull off balance. A brief silence followed.
"Is there someone at our company you already know?"
"Yes. A man named Chun Doo-hwan. He was an army lieutenant, and then he joined Cheil Industries."
"Is that so? I'll look into it. If the man is there, I'll see that he shows you around."
"Thank you, President."
Kijo put down the phone, and a smile of quiet triumph crossed his face.
All the while he had been steadily tracking Chun Doo-hwan. Through Kwak Young-joo he had succeeded in getting the uniform off the man's back, but the road to that end had not been easy. Chun had protested his innocence to the last and held out until the military police hauled him in, and even there he swore he would take it all the way to a court-martial. When Kwak Young-joo, pissed off past all patience by that resistance, joined forces with Won Yong-deok and turned him over to the CIC, Chun did not last more than a few days before he broke. However strong a man might be, a few days of torture in the hands of the army's counterintelligence corps had a way of ending like that. In the end Chun Doo-hwan was dishonorably discharged.
The others went a little differently. Roh Tae-woo gave in first. He yielded to the offer that if he left the army of his own accord, every charge against him would be wiped clean, and he was able to separate from the service with his name intact. Choi Seong-taek and Baek Un-taek had held out alongside Chun, but when the man who resisted hardest was passed to the CIC, they lost their nerve and accepted. They were reduced in rank, and then dishonorably discharged.
Kim Bok-dong was the real surprise. He survived. Like Chun, he had maintained his innocence from the first hour to the last and refused to bend. What divided their fates were the superiors who thought well of him. The tactical officers who had trained him as a cadet at the Korea Military Academy, the classmates who had studied beside him, the seniors and juniors who knew him—they stepped forward and sent petitions to the Minister of National Defense and the Army Chief of Staff.
Won Yong-deok, commander of the military police, had at first refused to budge. But when the officers showed signs of carrying a petition all the way to Syngman Rhee, he let Kim go clean. Kwak Young-joo, who had been furious with Chun Doo-hwan, likewise buried the matter in quiet, afraid Rhee might come to hear of it. That was how Kim Bok-dong lived.
In his heart Kijo felt sorry toward him. The man had belonged to the Oseonghoe, and there had been a time when he joined Hanahoe, but he had been repelled by the way Hanahoe conducted itself under Chun Doo-hwan and those around him, had withdrawn, and had taken no part in the December 12 military revolt. To remove Chun, Kijo had had no choice but to sweep him up with the rest. If Kim were driven from the army, he meant to hire him and see him through.
He made ready to go and meet Chun Doo-hwan, who was working at the Cheil Industries plant. Chun was friends with Lee Maeng-hee, Lee Byung-chull's eldest son. When Lee Maeng-hee heard that Chun, tortured by the CIC and cast out of the army, had nowhere to go, he had gotten him a place at his father's company. Kijo wanted to look upon the man he had removed ahead of history, for history's sake—the Chun Doo-hwan who had not yet committed his crimes. He was curious what sort of man the Chun Doo-hwan of the 1950s would prove to be.