Seo Gab-ho
"Well, as the old saying goes, a caterpillar has to eat pine needles. A man ought to do what he does best, shouldn't he?"
Ki-jo nodded.
Seo Gab-ho would cross into Korea earlier than any other businessman among the Koreans of Japan. In 1963 he would take over the Yeongdeungpo mill of Taechang Spinning, then under the management of its banks, and establish Sakamoto Spinning. In 1967 he would change the name to Bangrim Spinning, and in 1973 he would found Yunseong Spinning in Gumi, North Gyeongsang, and build the house still larger.
But the following year Yunseong Spinning would burn to the ground in a great fire, and hard on the heels of that, with the first oil shock, the parent spinning company he ran in Japan would fail. Whether it was the blows falling one upon another, Seo Gab-ho—who had been fighting with everything he had to set the firm to rights—would die suddenly a few years later.
Ki-jo did not think it right, even for the man's own sake, to push the spinning business any further. Better to see the hard-won money earned through the Korean War put into work that still had a future than sunk into a textile trade slowly sliding into decline. He chose his words with care.
"Toyota makes automobiles now, but wasn't it a company that built looms before that?"
"That's right."
"Why don't you try making something else, President Seo?"
Seo Gab-ho laughed at the suggestion.
"And what do you suppose I'd be any good at? If there's a field you'd recommend, let's hear it."
He seemed to be asking lightly. Ki-jo named a heavy trade.
"What would you say to oil refining?"
"Oil refining?"
Seo Gab-ho started.
"Yes. Put up a refinery and you can draw off the feedstock for chemical fiber as well, so it would serve the spinning business too. And Ulsan sits well for a refinery."
"That would be fine, of course. Only I'm a complete outsider when it comes to refining and chemicals. Heh heh heh."
He granted the point, and in the same breath set the practical difficulty beside it.
"You didn't know the spinning trade from the day you started, either. I can't say whether the Korean government will extend tax exemptions to Japanese firms, but it has promised that if a foreign company invests in Korea, it will not set up a state enterprise in that field. I believe the promise will cover Japanese companies as well. And I expect it will also keep other private firms from coming in."
It amounted to saying that if Seo Gab-ho went into refining, the business would be very nearly his alone.
"I run the largest transport company in Korea. Every drop of oil the country burns depends on America and the American army. I want the trucks running on oil refined in Korea—and, if I can help it, over asphalt made in Korea too."
He laid out the prospects of the refining industry, and he appealed to Seo Gab-ho's patriotism. The man was fiercely patriotic. Anyone who would buy a patch of land worth its weight in gold in Japan and present it to the Korean government with no conditions attached had to be counted patriotic on an entirely different scale from other businessmen.
"Even under the Syngman Rhee government, America once cut off the oil for sixty days because we wouldn't do as they wished. Build a refinery in Korea, and that sort of thing won't happen."
At that, Seo Gab-ho's face grew serious.
If the man showed real interest, Ki-jo meant to introduce him to Professor Yu In-ho. Yu was an expert member of the heavy and chemical industry subcommittee under the Planning Committee of the Supreme Council. Commissioned by the revolutionary government, he was drawing up a plan for the construction of a refinery, and, deeply nationalist in temper, he was trying to see the plant raised with national capital. The paper warrant Ki-jo had received from Chairman Park let him call on anyone he pleased and speak his piece.
Hearing the story of the Syngman Rhee years, Seo Gab-ho nodded. Even so, a refinery struck Ki-jo as a great gamble for him, and so he urged another venture as well.
"Have you heard of the loan consortium for Korean steel?"
He brought up KISA. Seo Gab-ho said he never had, and Ki-jo laid the matter out at length. A steelworks of a million tons was to rise in Korea, and even a man without the technology could come in by way of capital. America was leading the effort, so a Japanese firm need not fear any disadvantage for taking part.
Seo Gab-ho's heart was stirred, yet it was a field he did not know, and he could not bring himself to step forward. Unexpectedly, it was Shin Kyuk-ho who answered.
"This KISA—how long is it set to run?"
Ki-jo was glad of the interest. In the history he remembered, Shin Kyuk-ho had meant to come into Korea through steel and oil refining. Chairman Park had opposed him, unwilling to entrust the nation's backbone industries to a Japanese, and the dream had gone unrealized. The refining and the steel Ki-jo had raised only to persuade Seo Gab-ho, he judged, had touched that old dream.
"KISA is being pursued only for a time, through the end of 1963. If the capital it needs isn't raised within two years, it will be dissolved."
"I see..."
American leadership, and the several institutional safeguards, seemed to sit well with the cautious Shin Kyuk-ho. Once he showed interest, Seo Gab-ho's own bearing changed. He put a question to Ki-jo.
"On the refining side, has no loan consortium like KISA been formed?"
A man in chemical fibers, he seemed drawn to oil all the same.
"It hasn't been formed yet. But I know a man in the government who is pushing the refining business."
Lee Hu-rak did not let the opening pass.
"I don't believe I've finished introducing President Lee to my two elder brothers. President Lee received a paper warrant from Chairman Park, didn't he?"
"A paper warrant?"
"Yes. He's pushing the steel-mill business together with Supreme Council member Park Tae-joon, and he was given a single sheet telling him to meet whomever he must and drive the thing forward, with nothing to hold him back. President Lee, show it to them."
Pressed by Lee Hu-rak, Ki-jo drew the paper warrant from inside his coat and held it out to Shin Kyuk-ho and Seo Gab-ho. At the sight of the document bearing Chairman Park's signature, both men's faces changed.
"You're about a fine piece of work. So that's why you've come all the way to Japan to find us."
Seo Gab-ho's eyes were full of trust. He was a man itching in every limb to put money into the homeland.
"Well then, I'll go up to Seoul before long, see Chairman Park, and see this professor who's pushing the refinery, too. That's what we ought to do, wouldn't you say, younger brother?"
Shin Kyuk-ho nodded, slowly.
From then on Ki-jo was able to enter more deeply into the talk. The two businessmen from Ulsan took a keen interest in the fertilizer plant and the power-tiller factory he had built, and he explained both to them with all his heart. He knew they were patriotic men, and that in the history he remembered they had thrown themselves into investment in Korea. Even so, he did everything he could to stir their appetite for it. Just as he himself, before he grew attached to Eundae-ri and built his enterprises outward from it, had poured himself into the development of that plain, the two of them were prouder than anyone that their hometown of Ulsan had come up in the world on the strength of his factories.
Lee Hu-rak talked fervently of the Ulsan that had risen because of Ki-jo.
"Factories went up on what used to be nothing but reed beds and sand flats, you know. And the bus runs all the way out to Samnam-myeon now. You know that?"
Samnam-myeon was the home village of Seo Gab-ho and Shin Kyuk-ho.
"The bus goes clear out there?"
"Yes. Mornings and afternoons it hauls the locals who work at the plants, and in between a bus goes in every two hours so people can get out."
"It does? A bus going in—now that's good to hear."
"Oh, and that's not the half of it. President Lee has a bicycle company too, and a worker who does a good job gets a bicycle out of him, see? He cut a new road as well, so the buses and the bicycles go whipping along it."
Under that boasting, Seo Gab-ho and Shin Kyuk-ho looked at Ki-jo as if he were a man of their own hometown.
"If that were all, I wouldn't even be opening my mouth. There's the power-tiller factory, isn't there? He lends the tillers out to the people who farm, so the village has no more need of an ox. An ox! A man who sent his child up to Seoul to study sold the beast off early, raised the tuition that way, and these days he uses a tiller. Ha ha ha."
Lee Hu-rak's boasting did not let up. Listening, Shin Kyuk-ho showed a particular interest in the news that Ki-jo had planted Cheongsan Stores even in the Ulsan countryside and was running a distribution business there.
"How does the distribution business look in Korea?"
Ki-jo knew that if Shin Kyuk-ho came into the country he would be a formidable rival in distribution. He answered honestly all the same. If the man brought capital out of Japan and invested it in Korea, the country would gain by it, and come to no harm.
"Several department stores are going up in Seoul just now, but they're all much of a muchness. However bad the times, the rich still want finer goods. If you're thinking of distribution, build a high-end department store on the Japanese model, and it cannot fail."
Shin Kyuk-ho nodded.
What had begun as a promise that the two men would visit Seoul stretched on for two full hours of talk about the Korean economy. Ki-jo and Lee Hu-rak saw them off in front of the mission and remained standing until the car that carried them had passed out of sight. When the two had vanished, Ki-jo spoke.
"You've worked hard."
"Hard? I was the one who was supposed to talk them into Seoul, and you did every bit of the persuading, President Lee. Ha ha ha."
Lee Hu-rak handed him the credit.
"They seem like truly fine men. I think they'll invest in Korea in a large way."
"Well, it's not that they're my hometown people or anything. Both of those elder brothers love their home village, and they love the old country, something fierce. Brother Kyuk-ho is particular, yes, but that's only because he's a man who does things exactly right. Don't go feeling sore at him."
"Not at all. I never felt anything of the kind."
Ki-jo understood the hearts of the compatriots in Japan well. Of the ten diplomatic missions standing in Japan, nine had been given to the homeland by those compatriots, who bought the land and raised the buildings themselves. When Seoul was awarded the 1988 Olympics, it was they who gathered a donation of ten billion yen and offered it up. The Jamsil Olympic Stadium, the Olympic Parktel, the Olympic Hall, the Misari rowing course—all of them rose on money sent home from Japan.
In the days when a modest apartment of about seven hundred square feet in Seoul cost twenty million won, these were people who sent 54.1 billion. The donations collected at the time from compatriots everywhere else in the world, Japan aside, came to six hundred million won in all. Even the Korean-Americans, so full of boasts and so loud of voice, were nothing beside the compatriots in Japan.
Ki-jo thought their patriotism could not help being unusually fierce. The more the Japanese marked them apart with the slur Chosenjin, the more bitterly they set their jaws. They could endure being hounded and slighted by the Japanese themselves. What they could not endure was the homeland being slighted.
The Korean government, by contrast, had known only how to use them, and had never truly helped them. It fabricated spy cases against students from Japan who had come to study in the mother country, and even when it welcomed them as Koreans, there would come a moment when it asked whether they were not Japanese after all, and shut them out.
Turning that tangled bond over in his mind, Ki-jo went into the mission with Lee Hu-rak. Had he followed his heart, he would have told President Seo Gab-ho to sell this splendid, costly building and put the money into Korea. But that was not how the heart of a compatriot in Japan worked. These were people who believed that unless the Korean mission stood on ground that looked handsome and expensive even to Japanese eyes, they and their children would be looked down on—and words like his, he thought, would never reach them.