May 18
On May 18, 1961, the third day of the revolution, Kijo met the Japanese Sasaki at the Bando Hotel.
Sasaki was Kyodo News's correspondent in Seoul—not a staff reporter, but a freelancer. Soldiers lay thick through the city, a tank stood before Namdaemun, and a man in a white revolutionary armband kept watch by the hotel elevator, yet Sasaki was nothing but at ease. He had on a pair of round sunglasses.
"Do these suit me?"
He asked it with a sly little grin. When Kijo said they did, Sasaki smiled, satisfied.
"The cadet review in front of City Hall today was a fine sight. Unlike Japan, which has no army left, Korea still carries a great deal of the old Japan's feel."
Chun Doo-hwan was gone, but the Korea Military Academy cadets' street march in support of the revolution had come off all the same. Whoever had led it hardly mattered. When a new power is born, someone loyal to it is bound to appear.
Sasaki sat with his hands clasped behind his back and put on a solemn face.
"Well? I was copying the Korean general I saw in front of City Hall. Do I look the part?"
He did a fair imitation of Major General Park Chung-hee. When Kijo said he couldn't quite tell, Sasaki broke into a laugh.
"A Japanese imitating a Korean was never going to be easy. Koreans are born with a kind of force. We Japanese have to wring it out of ourselves."
Kijo wasn't sure what this inborn force of Koreans was supposed to be, but the revolutionary soldiers had plainly left a deep impression. Sasaki loosened the heavy air of Seoul with a light touch, then came to the point.
"From what I've been able to find..."
He took out a notebook, checked his notes, and went on. Kijo was looking for an ocean-going fishing vessel fitted with a cannery. Cheongsan Fisheries caught tuna, froze them as they came aboard, and sold them to Japan—a trade that did nothing but fatten the Japanese ships that turned the fish into cans and sold them on to America. He meant to run deep-sea boats that could can the catch the way the Japanese did, and take a better return.
"There is a deep-sea boat that can turn out canned goods, as you asked..."
Sasaki narrowed his eyes, looking displeased.
"The cheap ones, frankly, are in no condition at all. They say you're better off buying a used ship that hasn't been long off the ways—except that costs more than ordering a new one. Hard to believe, isn't it?"
"Not in the least. Order a ship and you wait forever, so people pay a premium for a relatively clean used one. And since it's an ocean-going boat, a vessel whose faults have already been proven out will cost more still."
"Exactly. You catch on quickly, so I'll speak plainly. Better, I think, to buy a used ship that costs more than a new one than to order a new boat in Japan."
Kijo agreed. Sasaki, brought in by an introduction and given the work, had done better than expected. He had been in Korea in the colonial years and had served as a war correspondent during the Korean War, and those who knew him praised him without reserve. Now, with the military revolution making travel abroad impossible, a man with wide connections in Japan and a reputation one could trust was the best means of scouting goods and factories.
"And the cannery machinery, from what I've found..."
Sasaki closed the notebook and looked at him in earnest.
"Sir—do you really mean to put kimchi in cans? I've looked into it. There isn't a Japanese firm with the skill to can kimchi."
Kijo smiled at the way the man turned grave the moment the business grew serious.
"I'll see to the kimchi myself."
At that assurance Sasaki cocked his head.
"Won't that be difficult? I covered the front and the rear both during the Korean War, and however much Koreans love kimchi, they never sent it up the line. I supposed it was because the stuff spoils hard in summer and freezes solid in winter. What do you mean to do, canning kimchi like that?"
The reason was the war in Vietnam. Supply combat rations to the Korean forces, and there was serious money in it. To Sasaki, who seemed genuinely worried for him, Kijo said:
"Develop a way to keep kimchi, and other foods won't be hard to can. I've already thought through how to can the kimchi itself."
"How do you mean to can something that ferments so easily?"
"Make it as stir-fried kimchi."
"Stir-fried kimchi?"
"Sour kimchi, fried with something like perilla oil."
"Ah. I've seen that."
The gravity left his face.
"Fry kimchi and it keeps better. The fermentation is checked, and the heat and the sourness stay as they are."
"Just as I thought. Koreans know Korean food."
Sasaki nodded, smiling, opened the notebook again, and began to rattle off the canners he had looked into.
"To my eye, the firm that cans umeboshi—pickled plum—looks right for it. Shall I get in touch?"
He was a professional. He worked as thoroughly as he was paid, and there was something about him of a department chief at Cheongsan.
"Good."
At Kijo's approval he drew a circle in the notebook and slipped it into the inner pocket of his suit. The business done, he turned to idle talk.
"That general who brought off the coup... In Japan they're saying he's a communist."
"I shouldn't think so."
"That was my feeling, too, when I saw him in front of City Hall. Less a communist than a samurai."
A samurai. Kijo thought there was something in it.
"Which is why I tell you I'm not particularly worried about Korea."
"Why not?"
Sasaki scratched at his temple.
"Japan has had its shoguns, stronger than the emperor, since long ago, hasn't it?"
"It has."
"People think they became shoguns because their armies were strong. In fact most of the famous ones rose on economic power. What a shogun watches most closely is the okane—the money."
He said it with his fingers curled into a circle.
"Korea's shogun will certainly grow the wealth that holds his power up. The old shoguns squeezed the farmers dry. A shogun of this age will squeeze the people and build industry out of them."
Kijo nodded, conceding the point, and Sasaki added, more modestly:
"That's how Japan's modernization and industrialization actually happened, you know. They made the nation rich and strong by keeping the people poor."
It was a sharp piece of insight.
"Well. That's all I mean. What would a half-breed like me know? Ha ha ha."
He had called himself a half-breed. While Kijo was still searching for an answer, Sasaki smiled.
"My mother was Korean."
"Was she."
Kijo took him for a shrewd man. The confession had the look of self-mockery, but calling himself a half-breed was also a clever way of keeping himself safe in Korea: it thinned the ill feeling toward the Japanese, and at the same time let it be quietly known that Korean blood ran in him. A deft stroke.
"Dinner tonight is on me. Japanese, or Korean?"
Sasaki thought for a moment.
"Let's go to Yonggeumok."
He had named a chueotang house in Euljiro, a place that served the thick country stew of loach. Kijo laughed and rose with him. On the way, Sasaki said:
"I take after my father at the table, so I'm fond of eel, but Korea doesn't seem to enjoy eel the way Japan does. No pheasant, then chicken—I thought I'd settle for loach."
He was a strange sort of man. Not quite possible to call him Japanese, and not quite possible to call him Korean either.
The eighteenth. Kijo had worked late and come home before the martial-law curfew at ten, and he was in the yard, finished washing his face and drying it on a towel, when a car sounded in the alley and the neighbor's gate opened.
"Dad!"
Ye-ri's glad cry, and then the voice of Kim Jong-pil's wife welcoming her husband. From what Kijo knew, this was the first time in three days that Kim Jong-pil had come home since the revolution began. In this history, too, the coup seemed not to have settled until the eighteenth.
It was the day Lee Han-lim, commander of the First Army and the man who might have crushed the revolutionary troops, was arrested and hauled in; the day the Military Academy cadets marched the streets; the day Prime Minister Chang Myon, fifty-four hours in hiding, showed himself at last; and the day the cabinet voted to resign in a body.
General Magruder of the U.S. Eighth Army, who had opposed the coup with all his force, shifted toward a more conciliatory line and even sent an Eighth Army intelligence officer to Kim Jong-pil. Decisively, Park Chung-hee went inside the Eighth Army compound and sat down with Hausman.
Hausman, who had invited him to his own residence, received him warmly. The same Hausman who had looked down on Park and tried to strip him of his uniform was said to have treated the man now risen as a nation's "de facto leader" with the courtesy due a head of state. When Park explained that he had been arrested just after returning to Seoul from the operation against the Yeosu-Suncheon Rebellion, but that he was no communist, Hausman stopped him. No good, the judgment went, could come of dragging up the past.
Park asked, with careful courtesy, "Mr. Hausman, won't you go to Washington for me?" Hausman went into another room and showed him four airline tickets the whole family had already booked for a holiday in America. Both men smiled, the story went, at the thought that they had reserved the tickets ahead as if they had known it would come to this.
After Hausman reached America and met alone with Lemnitzer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the CIA sent Kennedy a report. It said that Park Chung-hee appeared to have had no contact with communists since the Korean War. It also recorded that when the coup broke out in Korea, "no resistance of any kind existed." An indifferent public, Prime Minister Chang Myon's abandonment of resistance, Chang Do-young's double game, President Yun Bo-seon's compromising attitude—all of it was in the report.
Reading it, Kennedy set aside the suspicion that Park was a communist and acknowledged that he had become Korea's de facto ruler. He drew a line, too, under General Magruder, who had protested the coup so fiercely, and let him know that his road to promotion was finished.
For the coup forces, May 18 was a happy day in more ways than one.
Kijo was wiping the water from his face and about to go inside when Kim Jong-pil crossed the yard and called to him.
"Mr. Lee."
Kijo turned. Kim Jong-pil came up in long strides, took his hand, and said:
"Were you badly startled?"
The first words put a chill through him. Kim Jong-pil's name was not yet known among the revolution's core. The camp had revealed only Army Chief of Staff Chang Do-young, Major General Park Chung-hee, and retired Marine Major General Kim Dong-ha. The Chosun Ilbo alone, in its evening edition on the day of the May 16, had carried a single line: that Chang Do-young and Park Chung-hee were together in the Chief of Staff's office, and that Lieutenant Colonel Kim Jong-pil was in that room as well.
Kijo thought the young man of thirty-five, drunk on the revolution's success, was letting it show in spite of himself that he belonged to the revolutionary camp. He feigned ignorance of the hidden architect and spoke only of the man's wife's uncle.
"I never thought Major General Park Chung-hee would raise troops."
At the congratulatory note, Kim Jong-pil laughed brightly.
"On my way home today I saw the citizens heading in early to make the martial-law curfew. Watching them all fall in with the new order and do their part—it moved me."
His face was truly overcome. Months under the eyes of the intelligence services, and then a revolution staked on his life: of course the world would look different now that it had succeeded. Kijo understood him.
"I hope a better world opens from here."
"Of course. It won't be the world we had. You may count on that."
Kijo smiled as he shook the confident hand. But thinking of what lay ahead, he felt this was no moment for unmixed gladness. Kim Jong-pil had only set his foot on a road where he would be held in check for the rest of his life—checked by the eighth class of the Military Academy, the revolutionary comrades he had trusted; checked by an America that suspected his ideology; checked, in suspicion, by Park Chung-hee himself. And yet the man before him wore the face of a victor with the whole world in his grasp.
When his daughter Ye-ri called, Kim Jong-pil let go of his hand.
"We'll have a meal together sometime and talk. I'll be on my way."
He crossed the yard and went back to his own house. Watching that back, Kijo thought it would be a long while before he saw the face again. He hung the damp towel on the line strung along the porch and went into his room.