Myojo Foods
April 3, 1961.
Kijo had come back to Japan from Singapore, and he did not go straight on to Korea. He meant to acquire the technology for making ramen before he left.
He had no trouble moving through the country on his own. His Japanese was fluent, his clothes were neat, and he was tall; set down among the Japanese, he drew no second glance.
He went at once to Myojo Foods in Shibuya, Tokyo, and demanded to see President Okui Kiyozumi. He asked for the man with such unshakable confidence that the staff took him for someone important. A short while later Okui came out to receive him in person. Learning that his visitor had come from Korea, he led Kijo into the president's office, accepted the card held out to him, and asked why he had been sought out.
"What brings you to me?"
Kijo faced him with all the assurance he could muster.
"I intend to build a ramen factory in Korea. I want to buy Myojo Foods' technology for the noodles and the soup."
Not a trace of deference in it—money on the table, technology in return. Okui only blinked at him. Watching the man fluster, Kijo judged the odds of a deal to be high. A reaction like that meant Okui thought some benefactor he had never dared to dream of had walked through his door.
Kijo knew exactly how Jeon Jung-yoon, founder of Samyang Foods, had brought ramen technology into the country. Jeon would go first to Nissin Foods, Japan's largest ramen company, and offer to buy their know-how, only to be refused outright. He would then come to Myojo and make the same inquiry, and President Okui would prove remarkably eager to sell the technology to Korea. Over the objections of his own executives, Okui would sell Samyang both the noodle process and the soup process. The staff would insist that the soup technology, at the very least, must never leave the company; behind their backs, he would hand that over as well.
He had his reasons. Blocked by the fortress Nissin had raised over the Japanese market, he was already looking abroad. In 1965 he would enter Brazil, where many Japanese had settled, and take root there. Myojo would succeed so thoroughly that the company name itself came to mean ramen in Brazil. But the Myojo Foods of the present was still wrapped in the dark before dawn.
In 1960 the company had succeeded in developing the world's first cup ramen, only to fail at the new-product announcement, suffer a public humiliation, and watch its nationwide distribution contract for the cups torn up. It had tried after that to sell the product on its own, but the containers failed an oil-resistance test, and commercialization collapsed. Kijo was confident that Myojo, strapped for cash by that failure, would receive his offer kindly.
"If Myojo Foods will supply the ramen-making technology, I will pay you twenty thousand dollars."
Okui's expression shifted, just barely. Kijo took it for a good sign.
"I mean to use machines from Ueda Noodle Machinery. Teach me how to run them, and turn over the whole of the packaging technology, soup included."
At the name of Ueda, Okui looked startled. That firm supplied Myojo's noodle machines. He was curious how a Korean had even heard of it, but he gave no immediate answer. The man driving at him so hard was unsettling, and he seemed to know Okui's circumstances down to the last detail. While Okui, cautious in the Japanese manner, was still turning it over, Kijo threw in another offer.
"Teach me the instant-ramen technology as well, and I will add seven thousand dollars."
This time the jolt went straight through him. The offer would make good the losses of an instant-ramen venture into which the company had poured its development money and recovered not a cent. Nor was Japan, just then, a place where instant ramen could be sold. After the war over bagged noodles, the industry had plunged into a contest over instant ramen, and when that market failed to grow, the fight had curdled into attrition. Nissin, strongest of them all, had opened the campaign, but Nissin's instant ramen had no container of its own and sold poorly; it was only bagged noodles emptied into a bowl and steeped in hot water. Myojo, by contrast, had developed a modern cup ramen, yet while it faltered, unable to manufacture the cup, ferocious interference closed in. Nissin and a host of other firms were attacking one another, each suing the rest on the claim that its patents had been infringed.
Okui looked once at the Korean pressing him so hotly, cleared his throat, and asked.
"How are things in Korea these days?"
"Rice is short. Wheat flour is plentiful."
Okui nodded.
"So this is a moment when ramen truly has to be developed."
"It is."
Kijo answered, then turned the question back on him.
"And how are things at Myojo Foods? I heard the instant ramen has put you in difficulty."
Okui was thrown by a young Korean blunt in a way one rarely met in Japan, but he soon laughed, a little hollow, and spoke plainly. The man from Korea seemed to know Japan's situation far too well.
"Yes. That's right. I'm worn out by the cup-ramen disputes. To sell cup ramen here I would have to fight several companies at once, and their interests are tangled together."
Kijo said to him:
"It would be a shame to waste the instant-ramen technology Myojo worked so hard to develop. It's a full grade above Nissin's, and it's a pity to see it buried as it is."
Okui nodded. Kijo did not loosen the reins.
"There won't be disputes like that in Korea. I'll succeed with the container Myojo couldn't bring off. Sell me the technology."
At a proposal so brimming with nerve that it bordered on impudence, President Okui broke into a broad laugh.
"Do you already have a container in mind?"
"Instead of the Styrofoam cup you developed, I mean to use a paper cup. Styrofoam is weak against oil. But line the inside with a thin film of polyethylene, and it will stand up to the oil in the noodles."
Okui's eyes widened.
"We considered paper cups ourselves, then gave up. Pour in hot water and the cup is too hard to hold. Only Styrofoam let you get a hand around it at all."
Kijo smiled. The Japanese habit of lifting a rice bowl in the hand had locked them into the notion that cup ramen, too, had to be eaten while held.
"If an instant-ramen cup is hot, most people won't grip it. They'll lift the noodles with chopsticks. Koreans don't hold the bowl when they eat."
Okui laughed at the clarity of it. Heard aloud, it was obviously true, and he found himself warming to the Korean who had just handed him a hint for the container. At the twenty-seven thousand dollars Kijo had named, he decided he would turn over the technology in full.
"The truth is, Myojo itself received its pasta technology from an Italian firm called Pasta Ricci. We benefited from that while the war was being fought in Korea. Thinking of it that way, I find I want to sell the technology to you. Ha ha."
Kijo thought him a kind-hearted man. Once he had the man's character in hand, he kept on pressing.
"I want to sell the noodles and the soup separately, so I would ask for the soup-packaging technology as well."
"You've already seen what's wrong with ramen as it's sold. Send the noodles and the soup out mixed together, and the aroma suffers, and it looks worse to the customer. But that technology is still in development."
"When you finish it, hand that over too."
Okui could only laugh, both hands thrown up before the young man's audacity.
"All right. I'll give it to you."
He praised Kijo for his command of ramen and for the quality of his ideas, and Kijo, finding him cooperative, offered other notions for the business—Chinese-style ramen, curry ramen—stirring the man's imagination.
Kijo suspected that the goodwill was not only a matter of strained finances. The mood of the times had something to do with it. In Japan then, there were people who felt a debt toward Korea. Not every Japanese took colonial rule as a matter of course. Postwar Japan still had a living conscience. Many intellectuals condemned the emperor and the statesmen who had started the war, and argued that a Japan which had burdened the world ought to be raised up again so that it might do the world some good. Was Okui not one of those Japanese?
For a transfer fee of twenty-seven thousand dollars, Kijo got everything he wanted. Okui, too, was glad to see money arrive from a Korea he had never once imagined as a market for Myojo ramen. The sum Kijo had put on the table was precious cash for a company in difficulty, and Kijo even secured an agreement that Myojo could demand no royalties from Cheongsan.
"President Okui, if Cheongsan's ramen-making grows strong, please consider OEM production as well. It would help you in the fight with Nissin. You could supply the Japanese market more cheaply."
He said it remembering that Myojo would, in 1986, entrust OEM production to Samyang Ramen.
"I'll consider it. See that you make Myojo's seasoned ramen well in Korea."
Over two days of talks with President Okui, Kijo drew up the contract.
April 5.
With the Myojo agreement finished, he set about buying a ticket to Korea, but seats on the thin routes home were not easy to find. He spent three more days in Japan, and only on April 8 did he board a plane and leave.
Back in Korea, he set down at the company the two boxes of ramen he had brought from Japan and walked toward home with a light heart. Nine days had passed between the contracts in Singapore and Japan and his return, but the results were excellent, and he could be satisfied. Those nine days had put enormous force behind the plywood business, the windfall of Vietnam War procurement, and the ramen venture.
He was stepping into the alley, glad at the thought of seeing his family after nine days, a bag in hand with the Tiger Balm, the beef jerky, and the kaya—the coconut jam—he had bought in Singapore, when a black jeep caught his eye. It was parked facing the front gates of his own house and of Kim Jong-pil's. Kijo thought he knew whose it was, and why it stood there.
The day before he landed—April 7—Park Chung-hee would have come up to Seoul and, for the first time, met face to face with the eighth-class graduates of the Korea Military Academy, the men who had resolved on a coup. They would gather on the roof of a hotel in Myeongdong and pledge themselves to revolution. Before those classmates, the same men Kijo had seen on the day Kim Jong-pil moved house, Park would tell them to live together and die together for the sake of it. Expecting serious disorder at the first-anniversary ceremony of the April 19 Uprising, they would resolve to launch the coup under the pretext of putting that disorder down. The date they fixed was not May 16. It was April 19.
But they prepared so carelessly that rumors of soldiers plotting a coup for the nineteenth reached the ears of university students. The students called off the demonstration they had planned and let the anniversary pass in quiet. History would run that way. And the movements of Park and the eighth class, meeting on a hotel roof to slip the eyes of the intelligence services, were in fact being tracked in every detail. The jeep before Kijo's house had been sent by the intelligence section of Lee Hu-rak, of the Central Intelligence Committee—the man who was following them.
Kijo pretended not to notice it and went inside.
The moment he stepped through the gate, Yeongeun, who had been playing in the yard with Yeongjun, cried out in delight. Sunrye heard her and came out, and the whole family threw their arms around him, overjoyed.
At the sight of them, tears stung his eyes. This was the family he meant to protect, no matter what came.
