Bound for America
At ten o'clock on the night of November 12, Ki-jo boarded a Northwest Airlines flight out of Haneda Airport, bound for Seattle.
He traveled with the five reporters who had come from Korea with Chairman Park. They had been chosen to suit Park Chung-hee, who despised a corrupt press: men selected precisely because they were thought uncorrupted.
The reporters sent by their papers were puzzled that Ki-jo had joined them in Japan.
"President of DBC—were you chosen for the delegation to America as well?"
"Yes, that's how it turned out. I reported to the Supreme Council that I had to buy broadcasting equipment in the United States, and they made room for me."
"I see. A lucky man."
They all accepted the explanation.
"At this rate, I wonder if the television stations won't end up with the right to report the news themselves. Congratulations."
Shim Yeon-seop, chief of the research department at Dongyang News Agency, offered the compliment.
In those days television had no authority to broadcast news.
"I hear KBS starts television at the end of the year. They'll be reporting the news too, then. The newspapers had better brace themselves. Ha ha ha."
Another reporter chimed in. Even so, their faces stayed easy. Television sets were still too scarce, they seemed to think, to crack the newspapers' stronghold.
Ki-jo took an empty seat. Beside him sat Lee Young-hee of the foreign desk at Hapdong News Agency, wearing a rather gloomy look.
"I'm glad we'll be making the trip together."
Ki-jo offered his hand, and the stiffness in Lee Young-hee's face eased as he returned the greeting.
"A pleasure."
Once the plane was up and settled on its route, Won Chung-yeon, director of the Office of Public Information, came back to the reporters' seats with a bottle in hand.
"You all worked hard in Japan. Have a drink, then sleep soundly all the way to America. We'll be over the Pacific the whole day. Stone sober, it's a hard flight."
Handed a precious bottle of Western liquor, the reporters were delighted, and grateful. They passed the glasses around, each taking a turn—but Lee Young-hee of Hapdong alone refused, and the others did not press a man who kept so clearly to himself.
Ki-jo drank whiskey to loosen the tension and the fatigue, then spoke to the silent reporter beside him.
"What was the atmosphere like at the talks?"
Lee Young-hee's face turned cynical.
"I pressed a Japanese reporter until he talked. After the meeting, he said, Chairman Park dropped into a deep bow before the commandant of the Manchukuo Military Academy—at the closed banquet, no less. And with the Japanese prime minister and the political establishment looking on."
Ki-jo nodded. He already knew the story.
"Teacher or not, for the man who represents a nation to show himself like that... I can't tell whether he was simply naive, or whether he meant something by it."
Before the Korean War, Lee Young-hee had witnessed the Yeosu-Suncheon Rebellion while training as a seaman. During the war he had served as an officer and seen the Geochang massacre of civilians and the National Defense Corps scandal, and those sights had turned him toward progressive convictions. He was a man who would become a spiritual pillar of the progressive camp well into the 1980s. A clean life as a journalist was why he had been chosen for the chairman's press corps on this American visit—but he was no admirer of Chairman Park Chung-hee.
Ki-jo, for his part, believed the bow Park had made at that banquet to General Nagumo, former commandant of the Manchukuo military academy, had been deliberate. By showing himself that way, Park had moved the sitting and former prime ministers, the ruling-party politicians, and the ministers in the room, and Ki-jo knew that Japan's attitude toward Korea had turned more favorable afterward. He was certain the chairman had not done it out of naivete. The Park Chung-hee he knew was not so innocent a man.
Even so, he had no wish to spell out for Lee Young-hee that the chairman was, in effect, practicing a diplomacy of supplication toward Japan and the United States. Lee Young-hee was stubborn. Even after communism collapsed in the 1990s, he would for a time refuse to grant that capitalism had won.
When Ki-jo said nothing and only listened, Lee Young-hee apologized.
"We've only just met, and all I've done is talk negatively. My talk must be tiring."
"Not at all. I like listening. What you had to say was fascinating."
Ki-jo gave him a broad smile. Whether the smile loosened him or not, Lee Young-hee began to talk at length.
"It's a complete mystery to me why I was picked for this delegation. When May 16 broke out, I said to my colleagues: the most corrupt institution in the Republic is the army, and they're staging a revolution? Does that make any sense? And still they're hauling me all the way to America. I can't help wondering if this isn't the old habit of handing one more rice cake to the man you can't stand."
Listening on to criticism that sharp, Ki-jo began to tire. He understood why the other reporters kept their distance. Not everything the man said was wrong, but hours of talk like this did not suit him. Ki-jo was no contrarian. He meant to live in accord with whatever age he found himself in, to seek out what hope that age offered and work toward it.
It was Park Tae-joon who rescued him.
"President Lee, might I have a word?"
Park Tae-joon called him away and moved him up toward the forward seats, then brought him to Chairman Park. Around the chairman sat Park Byeong-gwon, minister of finance, and Song Jeong-beom, deputy director of the Economic Planning Board.
It was nearly midnight. Whether from the cabin's yellow light or from the journey itself, the chairman's face looked all the more exhausted. He turned bloodshot eyes on Ki-jo and smiled, gestured him into a seat, and, once Ki-jo had sat, asked:
"Did you get anywhere in Japan?"
At the chairman's question, Ki-jo told everyone there what he had found. The heart of it was this. Japanese industry, too, looked favorably on building a steel mill in Korea. Diplomatic relations, though, had to come first; if Korea-Japan ties were normalized, commercial loans at five or six percent a year seemed within reach. Those loans would not come from the cash-poor steelmakers themselves, but from Japan's general trading houses.
Chairman Park and the others nodded.
"What conditions are the Japanese firms setting? Can we live with them?"
To that, Ki-jo said no.
"Why not?"
"For one thing, the interest on a commercial loan is far too high. We have to get the Japanese government to guarantee it somehow and upgrade it to a government loan. Then we can bring the rate down to around one and a half percent."
The chairman nodded.
"And we have to keep the Japanese trading houses from inserting themselves. They'll try to skim a middleman's margin any way they can, and the project cost will balloon."
The mood around the seats was one of agreement.
"It won't be easy."
"No. But I'll work to make Japan offer better terms. I'm thinking of bringing in American and German firms and provoking Japan with an open bid."
As Ki-jo laid it out with heat, Chairman Park smiled.
"And in America—how do you mean to try? To my mind, American businessmen won't see you as readily as the Japanese."
"I've already asked USOM for help."
"USOM?"
"Yes."
Judging that approaching American firms one by one would be difficult, Ki-jo had asked Frank to arrange something on the order of KISA—the Korea International Steel Associates, an international consortium to finance a Korean steel mill. In the history he carried in his memory, KISA was the body formed to build Pohang Iron and Steel, eight companies from five countries. His own design ran along the same lines: the United States would never, alone, underwrite heavy and chemical industry in Korea, so he would gather firms from several nations into one organization and have them build the mill. Frank had agreed, and promised to set a meeting with an official of the American aid mission so the scheme could be laid out.
Learning that Ki-jo had already been in touch with USOM, Park Chung-hee asked:
"How did you meet the USOM people?"
"I went to them with the paper warrant you wrote for me. You did say I might meet anyone, didn't you?"
At the bold reply, Park Chung-hee let out a short smile. In his eyes Ki-jo was only a young man of thirty-two, and the nerve of planning all this with USOM without leave beforehand seemed, to him, worth indulging. Meticulous as ever, though, he put a question.
"How do you mean to persuade the American officials?"
"With the theory of comparative advantage."
"Comparative advantage?"
Ki-jo explained that a Korean worker's wage was not even a fifth of a Japanese worker's.
"At the present exchange rate, a Korean worker's hourly wage is less than fifteen cents."
"And so?"
"If we build a mill in Korea on a par with Japan's, I mean to argue that we can turn out steel as cheaply as that wage gap allows."
"That's if we make steel equal to Japan's."
"Yes. At first we won't. But bring in Japanese technology and work at it, and I believe the lower grades of steel can catch Japan quickly."
"And other countries? Suppose an American official says they could build a mill in the Philippines, or Thailand, or Taiwan, and produce steel just as cheaply as you."
"Right now, wages in the major Southeast Asian countries run close to twenty cents an hour."
Ki-jo stopped there and let the pause hang. Chairman Park had a habit of falling silent whenever something was said, turning it over for a while. When the thought seemed to have run its course, Ki-jo spoke.
"If you raise the exchange rate, we can double the wage gap with those Southeast Asian countries."
"What do you mean by that?"
Song Jeong-beom, deputy director of the Economic Planning Board, answered.
"Raise the dollar rate and you lower the value of the won, and the hourly wage in dollar terms drops sharply. To American eyes, Korean labor then looks extremely cheap. An optical illusion."
"Hm..."
Park Chung-hee considered it, then asked:
"Wouldn't import prices leap?"
"We promote domestic production and encourage people to buy Korean goods. It may be hard in the short run, but over the long one, as domestic goods multiply and Korean exports grow, prices will settle on their own."
At that, the deputy director urged caution on the chairman.
"What President Lee describes is how a high-exchange-rate policy looks when the economy actually runs well on it. If everything goes ideally, yes. If it fails, prices shoot sky-high, the way they did in the early 1950s."
The chairman sank into thought, his face grave. Ki-jo felt no resentment toward the man for urging caution. He was right, too. But there was no economic policy without side effects. The question was who would bear them, and who would have the nerve to drive an export policy built on low wages. This was a course Korea would have to take someday—and Park Chung-hee would, in fact, take it.
After a long deliberation, Park spoke.
"We'll think on that by stages. First I'll see that American aid isn't cut off. I'll put out the fire in front of us—you do your utmost to persuade the American officials."
He was worried about American aid, which was steadily shrinking. Worse, the Kennedy administration was pressing him with the threat that aid to Korea might be cut off entirely, and he was in a difficult spot.
Ki-jo talked a while longer with the chairman and the economic officials, then returned to his seat. It was nearly two in the morning. The reporters had already drunk themselves to sleep. Snores rose here and there, but Lee Young-hee had his reading light on and a book open.
Ki-jo quietly wished him good night, then lay down in the seat beside him and drew up the blanket. Even Lee Young-hee, critic of the Park Chung-hee government, was working to widen his knowledge and his thought by reading. Their ideas of the right direction differed, but in the end, Ki-jo thought, this man too was striving to make a better country. If efforts like these accumulate, might they not, in time, let the Republic develop in balance?
He set the thought aside, closed his eyes, and courted sleep.