The Road to a Scolding
On December 21, the executions of Lim Hwa-soo, Kwak Young-joo, and Choi In-gyu were carried out.
That same day, joy and sorrow split apart among the condemned. Minister of Home Affairs Hong Jin-gi, sentenced to death over the shootings during the April 19 uprising, was not put to death. The firing in front of Gyeongmudae had been Kwak Young-joo's, and the court had ruled that responsibility for the shootings across Seoul lay with Hong Jin-gi—and yet Hong lived. It was the same leniency shown to those tied to the Masan Uprising shootings, who had been given life imprisonment. The story that he had survived because judges and elites out of Keijo Imperial University, now Seoul National University, had closed ranks around him felt uncomfortably plausible.
There was, however, one change worth noting. Unlike in the original history, the death sentence against Jo Yong-su of the Minjok Ilbo was not carried out. Chairman Park seemed to have been swayed by the close attention the foreign press had paid, during his tours of Japan and the United States, to whether Jo would be executed. Gijo found himself wondering whether the Chairman was changing, little by little. It was a welcome thing.
He folded the newspaper and offered a brief prayer for Kwak Young-joo's repose.
Lunchtime came, and he was just getting ready to eat with the secretariat staff when the telephone rang. The call was from the office of the Chairman of the Supreme Council.
"The Chairman asks whether you've had lunch."
Gijo understood at once that he was being summoned to eat, and answered that he would come right away. He told the others he would take his lunch out, left his office, and walked toward the Supreme Council building.
Six minutes on foot to Chairman Park's office. Six hundred steps, no more.
As he walked, he turned over the thought that he was about to be scolded for using the paper warrant to see Kwak Young-joo. He had used that warrant twice on the very man who had humiliated Chairman Park and blocked his road to promotion—once to meet Kwak himself, and the next day to arrange a visit for his family as well. There was no way it would look good. The paper warrant had not been made for such a purpose. He would be cautioned, or pressed to explain himself. Even so, he judged it a thing well worth bearing, and his steps stayed calm.
Arriving at the Chairman's office, Gijo knocked.
"Come in."
He opened the door to find Chairman Park seated before the sofa, grinning.
"You're here. The udon's getting cold."
On the table in front of the sofa sat two bowls of pot udon, a hundred hwan apiece. Gijo ate with him, plastic chopsticks in hand. It was cheap udon—only six slices of yellow pickled radish—so they had to be sparing with them. When the Chairman drained his broth to the last drop, Gijo lifted his own bowl and followed suit.
The simple meal done, Chairman Park took out an Arirang cigarette and lit one. Gijo did the same, and the Chairman let out a short laugh.
"You've got money to spare. Why don't you smoke Cheongja?"
"Arirang tastes better."
"Tastes better, my foot. Cheongja tastes better."
"If I only smoke what's good, I'll end up on foreign cigarettes. A man ought to stop at a reasonable level."
At that, Chairman Park grinned.
They smoked in a room far too shabby, and utterly bare of ornament, to be called the office of the Chairman of the Supreme Council. Gijo smiled at the black cat figurine on the Chairman's desk—a gift from Secretary of Commerce Hodges during the visit to the United States.
"Do you still pet that cat often?"
"Ah. That thing?"
Chairman Park gave the figurine a glance.
"I give it a good rub every day. Wouldn't want those reporter bastards cursing me.... But it's an American cat, so maybe its luck doesn't take in Korea. The Korean press still seems to hate me."
Gijo and Chairman Park laughed out loud.
When the laughter faded, the Chairman moved to clear the udon bowls himself. Gijo offered to do it.
"Leave it."
Park opened the door and handed the empty bowls to his secretaries. Gijo liked that unassuming side of him. Plainness and frugality were the man's greatest charms, and he hoped the Chairman would keep, for a long time yet, this habit of thinking of the nation before power. Set against the memory of how his later years would go, the figure before him now seemed almost beautiful.
Once the bowls were cleared, Chairman Park sat back on the sofa and lit a fresh cigarette. Gijo had the sense that he wanted to speak of the Kwak Young-joo matter and was holding the words back, so he spoke first.
"I'm sorry, Mr. Chairman."
Park blew out a stream of smoke and grinned at him.
"We just enjoyed a good bowl of udon together. What's all this?"
It seemed the Chairman had called him to lunch precisely to show that he needn't worry over that matter. The business of Kwak Young-joo appeared to be closed, and Gijo said no more of it.
Chairman Park stubbed his cigarette in the ashtray.
"I need you to give KBS a hand."
"You mean KBS-TV?"
"Yes. They start test broadcasts on the twenty-fourth, and there's still a great deal lacking. I went to look the place over. People were running in circles. They don't seem to know yet what they're supposed to do, or how."
Gijo nodded. The KBS-TV station had broken ground on October 10 and been finished in barely two months. From what President Lee Man-ik had told him, they had been raising a concrete building when the weather turned cold, and for fear the concrete would freeze they had even scattered salt over it, putting the place up like a military operation. Gijo remembered the story that whenever it rained, water streamed from the studio ceiling.
"DBC has at least a few years of broadcasting behind it, doesn't it? I hear they use two cameras in the studio. KBS is barely managing with one."
"I'll dispatch DBC's engineers to KBS."
"Good. Thank you. The equipment is RCA, same as DBC's, so the instruction shouldn't be difficult. The machines came in from America ten days ago. Not a soul there could handle them with any confidence."
"They were probably afraid of breaking something that expensive."
Gijo spoke up for the KBS staff.
"I'm counting on you."
"Yes, Mr. Chairman."
"Oh, and another thing...."
Chairman Park went on about the station.
"If we want television to catch on quickly, what should we do?"
The Chairman took a keen interest in the media. He seemed to have judged that it was radio, that mass medium, which had completed his unfinished "revolution." In the dawn when nothing was certain, the radio had announced that the revolution had succeeded, and the whole nation had believed it. Gijo wondered, just faintly, whether Park meant to raise up television—stronger than radio—so he could show his own face and promote the regime. Even if that was the intent, Gijo believed that growing a television industry required KBS to succeed.
"What if they ran test broadcasts for about a week, and then, from the New Year, showed films for two weeks or so?"
"Films?"
"Yes. It's something I learned running DBC. What satisfied viewers most was movies. They loved being able to watch a film at home for nothing, and they took real pride in inviting friends and neighbors over to show them a movie on the television."
"Films...."
Chairman Park stroked his chin and nodded.
"A film every day for two weeks.... That doesn't sound bad."
He jotted a brief note on the pad in front of him, then turned back to Gijo.
"While we were in America, I told the Broadcasting Culture Association to take orders for television sets. They took orders for eleven thousand in all."
The Chairman seemed to feel that was a considerable number. Gijo, though, knew that more than twice that demand still lay waiting.
"So I'm thinking of taking another ten thousand in a second round."
"That seems a sound judgment."
"You think so? You mean you also believe there are more people who'll buy sets?"
"Yes. If the price can just be brought down to a hundred thousand hwan or below, a great many people will want a television in the house."
"Ha—under a hundred thousand hwan, they'd sell plenty. From what I've been told, the cheapest set was 128,800 hwan. And that was a Japanese set. The RCA model was 256,900."
Chairman Park meant to put televisions into people's hands on twelve-month installments, with the government buying the sets outright and selling them on to the public. Orders were being taken the way subscriptions for apartments were taken, and the fervor was extraordinary. Gijo knew that the second round of applications next year would whip up a popularity one could fairly call a television craze.
To apply to the government for a set, a citizen had to buy an application form that cost a hundred hwan, and buying the form and putting in a subscription was no guarantee of being chosen. Even so, people crowded in the way they crowded apartment lotteries in a booming property market. Citizens come to buy installment applications packed the Korea Broadcasting Culture Association on Taepyeong-ro 1-ga and the KBS station in Jeong-dong until the lines stretched outside the buildings like falling dominoes, and the police had to be called out just to keep order.
"Still, I do regret importing the sets to sell them. The drain on foreign currency will be severe. Isn't there some way around it?"
Gijo was already pushing a joint television plant with Sanyo Electric. Sanyo's president, Iue Toshio, however, feared that demand inside Korea would be thin, and had grown somewhat reluctant to move. It struck Gijo that the project would sit better if it were tied to the Chairman's policy.
"What if you made it a condition that any company supplying televisions to the government must build a television plant in Korea?"
"A television plant?"
"Yes. Announce that a joint venture with a domestic firm will earn extra points in the bidding."
"Hm... a joint plant. If they build a factory here, it would be a chance to pick up television technology."
"Yes. And if you mean to put a set in every home, it would also help, while you're at it, to levy only a low tariff on imported parts—or to exempt them from duty altogether."
"Lower the tariffs, and national tax revenue falls...."
"To settle an electronics industry in Korea, concessions are necessary at the start. If you take the long view, please think of it as laying the groundwork to earn foreign currency by exporting Korean-made televisions."
"Would a television made in Korea have any real chance of being exported?"
"It would. But in the early stage, you'll have to encourage exports by way of bonded processing."
His own business was his own business, but Gijo believed that bonded processing trade was necessary if Korea's electronics industry was to grow.
"Bonded processing—that means bringing parts in duty-free, making the goods, and exporting them as they are?"
"Yes. Hong Kong earns foreign currency that way. If Hong Kong can do it, there's no reason we can't. The catch is that at the outset you have to give up customs revenue. In return, the firms can earn foreign exchange, raise Korea's reserves, and make up the tax take through corporate taxes. The advantages are considerable, in more ways than one."
"I see...."
Chairman Park quietly wrote the words bonded processing on the memo pad. The hand was a good one.
"We'll have to talk about the radio program as well. I'm thinking of putting two hundred thousand sets into the farming and fishing villages. Should that be bonded processing too, the way we're talking about for television?"
"Of course. Radios have an even better chance abroad than televisions. If we make low-priced sets in Korea, we can bring the price down to two-thirds of a Japanese radio, or even half."
"That much?"
Chairman Park's eyes widened.
"Yes. The competitiveness is more than enough."
The Chairman nodded, then asked, "Cheongsan is in radios too, isn't it? How many could you supply the government right now?"
"We have forty thousand in inventory."
"Forty thousand?"
Chairman Park was startled. With the 1962 radio distribution program in mind, Gijo had been running the radio plant at full capacity from the moment the first set came off the line.
"Lucky said they hardly had any stock. You've piled up quite a few...."
"We had to place bulk orders for parts in Japan if we wanted to bring the price down even a little."
Chairman Park wore a look of understanding. He was silent a moment, then spoke.
"The government has no money at present. What if we refunded part of the purchase price against this year's taxes, or waived taxes later in place of payment? Would you go along with that?"
Gijo agreed at once, and put a question of his own to the Chairman.
"Cheongsan currently holds televisions from RCA and several other makers. I don't know whether to supply them to the government or sell them on our own. There's nothing wrong with the quality, but they're products of the fifties, so they're a little awkward."
"Handle that as you see fit."
"Understood."
Gijo finished with the Chairman, returned to headquarters, and called in Seo Gwang to have the television inventory checked. Seo Gwang came back with a full count of the unsold low-priced American sets and the RCA models left over from what they had been selling through Dongdaemun Market.
"Sir, the televisions that won't sell—why...?"
Gijo smiled.
"Because I have a feeling those two hundred and fifty-eight sets are about to sell like hotcakes."
"What? Truly?"
Seo Gwang asked how that could possibly be.
"Just watch a little longer. The chance to sell them will open before long."
Gijo gave him a quiet smile.