The Ulsan Industrial Center
At dawn on Saturday, February 3, 1962, Ki-jo boarded the special train pulling out of Seoul Station. He was bound for the groundbreaking of the Ulsan Industrial Center.
The train carried Chairman Park and the principal members of the Supreme Council for National Reconstruction, Prime Minister Song Yo-chan and every minister under him, senior generals, and the ambassadors of the major powers, the United States and West Germany among them. President Yun Bo-seon, the symbolic head of state, had chosen not to come. It looked like a protest against something Chairman Park had said at a recent press conference—that politicians of the old stamp would best be following the people's will if they stayed out of the general election ahead.
When Ki-jo stepped into the carriage set aside for the business world, the men of the Korea Employers Association had already settled in around Chairman Lee Byung-chull. He gave them a nod in passing and took a seat apart with the members of Cheonwoohui.
All the way to Ulsan the talk kept circling back to the industrial district. As yet the place existed only as a symbol. No one had settled who would build what, or where; the lots had been sketched in vaguely and nothing more—a refinery over here, a fertilizer plant over there. Even so, the groundbreaking was a declaration of resolve. The Republic of Korea meant to industrialize.
Somewhere along the southbound run, Namkoong Ryun, an old acquaintance of Ki-jo's, came over to the Cheonwoohui seats. He had formerly been president of the Korea Shipping Corporation and now headed Far Eastern Marine.
"Room for one more?"
They laughed and made a place for him. In the whole Employers Association, only two men could sit and talk and laugh easily with Ki-jo: Lee Byung-chull and Namkoong Ryun. They were also the two who had worn themselves out persuading government men that Ulsan had to be made an industrial district. Thanks to them, there had been no need to talk Chairman Park around.
Kim Jong-hee of Hanwha put a question to Namkoong.
"I heard land in Ulsan's going for fifty hwan a pyeong—not even four square yards. Isn't that cheap past all reason?"
"You'll see for yourself when we get there. There's nothing in Ulsan. A scrap of salt flat, a pear orchard. Ten men or so scraping salt, maybe three or four growing pears."
"And we're putting an industrial complex on a place like that? If the site were any good, wouldn't those Japanese have planted themselves there long ago, back under the occupation?"
Namkoong answered with a dry chuckle.
"Chairman Park said the very same thing. So I dug up a secret Japanese report and laid it in front of him."
"A secret report?"
"From the 1940s. A plan to turn Ulsan into an industrial city of half a million souls. The papers were still sitting with the Joseon Port Construction Company, the firm the Japanese had hired to do the survey. I got hold of them and turned them over. With the Americans bombing the home islands whenever they pleased, Tokyo wanted to shift mainland factories down to Ulsan."
"If they surveyed it in wartime, wasn't the work slapdash?"
"Not a bit of it. You wouldn't believe how thorough those Japanese were. Depth of the Taehwa, usable water by the season, the soil all around, even the soundings off Bangeojin—it was all in there. Chairman Park took one look and his jaw nearly hit the table."
At the mention of a report that held everything worth knowing about Ulsan, Chung Ju-yung's eyes lit up.
"If you've still got that report, I'd be grateful for a copy."
Ki-jo smiled, thinking of the Chung Ju-yung who, in the history he remembered, had built a shipyard at Ulsan. If Chung built one in this history as well, Namkoong's papers would serve him well.
"I'll have a copy made for you, President Chung. It's a precious report—use it carefully. Without it, we nearly put the complex in Gimhae. Ha!"
"Gimhae? Why Gimhae?"
"Because they found iron sand there."
"Iron sand?"
"Out along the Nakdong, in the sandbars at Gimhae. Tie a string to a magnet, drag it through the sand, and iron filings come up in clumps. Chairman Park heard the story and said, if we built the complex in Gimhae, couldn't we make steel from the iron that comes out of the ground? Those were his words."
"Iron sand out of a riverbank? That wouldn't amount to anything, would it?"
"Not a thing. But the chairman's a soldier. He doesn't know economics, so he comes out with innocent talk like that. Ha ha ha. Still, I'll grant him his hunger for development. Once he grasped what Ulsan was worth, he drove the thing forward without a glance over his shoulder. If USOM, the American aid mission, hadn't dug in its heels, it would have moved even faster."
"And why was USOM picking a fight with the Ulsan district?"
It was Chung who asked.
"Oh, I don't know. You Koreans, quit straining yourselves to industrialize. Whatever you try, Japan next door will do it better—what makes you think you'll manage? Something along those lines."
"Hah. Those Americans. They were a British colony themselves, and they fought a war with Japan, and still they take Japan's side. Funny bastards."
Cho Choong-hoon clicked his tongue.
Ki-jo found it amusing, the way Koreans hung the word bastard on the great powers. America was a power Korea could not hope to approach, and Japan the richest country in Asia, and yet there was a spirit in the talk that quietly held both of them cheap. Alongside that spirit ran a peculiar sense of equality: if you can do it, why can't we?
"One more thing. Under the occupation the Japanese moved part of the Wonsan refinery down to Ulsan, and the outfit they set up was called the Joseon Sagi Company. Strange name, isn't it?"
Everyone laughed. Ki-jo let out a short breath of a laugh himself. To a Korean ear the name rang exactly like Joseon Fraud Company, and the ground where it had stood was the very site where Korea Oil Corporation—the future SK Energy—would one day rise.
The special train pulled into Ulsan Station, and Chairman Park and the principal figures went on ahead to the ceremony. Ki-jo lingered and looked around the station. The road out front was packed solid with people. Word had gone around that Ulsan was about to have a spectacle worth seeing, and they had come pouring in to find out what it was. It was a Saturday, and unseasonably warm; sightseers had gathered like a cloud bank and were streaming toward the grounds. In an age when a weekend offered nothing much to watch and nothing much to enjoy, it was an ordinary scene.
The ceremony had been laid out on a low hill with the blue sea spread below. They had set the grounds with their back to the future refinery site at Gosa-ri, in Daehyeon-myeon, Ulsan County, and the rite went forward to the crack of dynamite. It was the moment the heart of the First Five-Year Economic Development Plan set off at a run.
Ki-jo sat among the businessmen, in the place reserved beside Chairman Lee Byung-chull. Side by side, they listened to Chairman Park.
He called on them to work a miracle to match the Ruhr in West Germany, and to bring back the ancient splendor of Silla.
When the ceremony ended, the principal guests moved on to the Bulguksa Hotel in Gyeongju for a banquet. Ki-jo had already braced himself for the violence that would break out there.
With cabinet ministers and the ambassadors of several nations in the room, Killen, chief of USOM, rose to speak. Where a word of congratulation belonged, he threw cold water.
"...For a Korea lacking capital, technology, and resources alike, to build a complex on this scale is premature..."
At the sudden note of disapproval, Korean faces tightened. Chairman Park's hardened. The Cheonwoohui men seated with Ki-jo went blank, as if they had all thought the same thing: What?
Ki-jo watched Kim Yong-tae, who had come representing the KCIA as its economic adviser. Across Kim's face the thought was plain. That son of a bitch. Killen had opposed the Ulsan complex from the start, and now he was showing his teeth even at the celebration. Kim looked past enduring it.
Red to the ears, he shot to his feet the moment Killen stepped down from the podium and went straight for him. He seized the American by the collar, shook him, and shouted, choked with rage.
"You bastard! We're thrashing around just trying to live, and you stand there sneering!"
With that he slammed Killen to the floor.
Everyone in the room was aghast. Killen, chief of USOM, was a man of formidable power. He held the Korean economy in his fist—a rank above the prime minister.
When security officer Park Jong-gyu started to rush in, Chairman Park stopped him, as if he feared an overreaction. Instead he turned to Jo Sang-ho, the protocol secretary.
"A fine performance, with every foreign mission in the room. Stop him. Now."
Jo ran, barely hauled Killen clear of Kim Yong-tae's shoe before the American could be trampled, and dragged Kim out of the banquet hall. Kim's voice came back after them, a howl thick with grievance.
"That bastard! He tells us if we've got money for a complex we ought to spend it buying American goods—and you're not boiling over? You're not angry!"
He was shouting it at Jo, who was hauling him away.
"Let go of me! A bastard like that needs a beating within an inch of his life! Half-kill him while you still can, or he'll never stop looking down on us!"
As the voice kept coming, Chairman Park pressed a hand to the side of his head, as if it ached. An American official beaten in his presence, with the ambassadors looking on—his face asked, plain as speech, how he was supposed to clean this up.
In the midst of it Ki-jo checked the West German ambassador and the American. Ambassador Bungel of West Germany looked quietly satisfied to see the revolutionary government at odds with an American official. Samuel Berger, the American ambassador, wore an expression of pure discomfort.
Then Lee Hu-rak, spokesman for the Supreme Council, stepped forward and took the room in hand.
"Ah... From what I could see, there was a problem with the interpretation. Adviser Kim Yong-tae seems to have misunderstood Director Killen. My apologies. I'll offer them to Director Killen in his place."
It was quick work. While Won Chung-yeon, director of the Office of Public Information, sat stunned and vacant, Lee Hu-rak handled the moment cleanly.
"A round of applause, if you please, to comfort Director Killen after this unfortunate incident."
At his word the whole room applauded. Chairman Park looked at Lee Hu-rak and gave a small nod. Lee seemed to have earned himself a mark in the chairman's book.
"What on earth was that... A thing you'd see on a day-labor gang..."
Chung Ju-yung was hard enough, and stubborn enough, to throw a flying kick on a construction site, but a scene like this at a formal gathering, with the head of state in the room, seemed more than he could believe. This was Korea past dynamic and straight into a brawl. The revolutionary government was still green. The hunger to live well ran deep, and with that hunger came impatience, and a great deal of anger.
A few days after his return from Ulsan, Ki-jo went to the National Film Production Center on Sejong-ro. The Center made and distributed the government's films and assisted both public and private production. With its automatic black-and-white processing plant, it handled the developing of every domestic movie print in the country.
There he met Director Shin Sang-ok and looked over the footage shot at the Ulsan groundbreaking. The dynamite blast, and the local people who had come out to watch, were caught with startling clarity.
"Did you get many shots you can use in the picture?"
"Yes. Quite a haul. I think we can have it finished in six months."
Shin had agreed to make the film the KCIA had requested, under the working title A Fertilizer-Plant Man and a Country Girl. The story was obvious, but he turned out a smooth scenario in a hurry. He was every inch the box-office director who ruled the 1960s.
"We shouldn't use the shots with Chairman Park in them, should we?"
Director Shin asked.
"No. Leave them out. It'll look like a government promotion reel, and nobody will come."
"Right. Otherwise we'll end up with something as bad as The Independence Club and Young Syngman Rhee. Ha!"
Shin laughed as he brought up the Syngman Rhee propaganda picture Lim Hwa-soo had produced in 1959 on a fortune put up by the Liberal Party.
Ki-jo studied the faces of Chairman Park and the government men caught on the film. It sat badly with him that President Yun Bo-seon, who ought to have been there, was missing. The political calendar was warming the country by degrees, and he had a foreboding that, just as in the history he remembered, President Yun and Chairman Park Chung-hee were headed for a rupture.