A Business Trip
A few days after Frank's visit to Cheongsan, Ki-jo and Ma-ryang climbed into a jeep with Lieutenant Cedric at the wheel and set out for Suwon Airfield. Waiting for them on the field was a C-47 Skytrain. The transport took the three men aboard and lifted off for Japan.
They were on the ground in five hours. By train, the run from Seoul to Busan alone took thirteen. Stepping off at Haneda Airport, Ki-jo looked around. Haneda, which would one day swell into a great international airport, was still hardly more than an American base—packed with U.S. military aircraft, with a civilian airliner showing only here and there.
So this is Japan...
His first impression of a country he had never set foot in was the thick smell of oil and the noise. The transport's engines, left idling for the turnaround, and the reek of burning fuel came at him mixed with the sea wind.
Lieutenant Cedric took the three of them to the base office and saw the entry formalities through.
"You said you know someone in Tokyo, didn't you?"
"Yes. That's right."
"If any trouble comes up in Japan, come find me. I'll be at Haneda Base the whole time."
Ki-jo and Ma-ryang were wearing U.S. Army dress uniforms, the surest way for Koreans in Japan to be properly looked after. In the immediate wake of the Korean War, a Korean entering the country was often taken for a North Korean or a spy, put through a harsh interrogation, or simply deported.
Cedric saw them as far as the gate. Waiting out front, having already received their telegram, stood Oguchi, turned out in a handsome Western suit.
"Good to see you, Mr. Oguchi."
"Welcome to Japan, Mr. Lee Ki-jo."
Perhaps because of the goodwill struck up back in Korea, Oguchi seemed genuinely glad of him. After introducing Ma-ryang, Ki-jo made straight for the first purpose of the trip: the Ajinomoto factory. Oguchi spoke up at once.
"Take my car. The plant is inside Tokyo."
His own car? Ki-jo looked where Oguchi was pointing. A black sedan, with a Ford badge on the nose.
Hm...
He had taken the young man for the son of a comfortable house, but he had not imagined the family was rich enough to keep a car of its own. Ma-ryang looked quietly startled as well.
Who on earth have I gone and tied myself to?
Ki-jo swallowed his surprise and got in with Ma-ryang. The three of them headed for the Ajinomoto plant, going over the story they meant to tell. Ki-jo had already been frank in his letter about why he was coming to Tokyo, along with a request for help in buying MSG cheap, and he had asked Oguchi to interpret when he called on the factory with two American soldiers in tow.
"Mr. Lee's English is so fluent they'll never suspect a thing. Even in Japan, people who can speak English are scarce."
Oguchi said it cheerfully as he drove. The young heir seemed to treat a trip to buy MSG as if he had been let in on some thrilling adventure.
At the factory the three of them went to the sales office. Oguchi introduced Ki-jo and Ma-ryang as Korean-American soldiers and dangled the prospect that U.S. Forces Korea would soon be buying in quantity, so this was the moment to open a trading line by letting the goods go cheap. The uniforms did the rest. The Ajinomoto man was thoroughly taken in—Ki-jo's English was fluent besides—and when Ki-jo produced a wad of dollars and offered to settle the whole amount in cash, the clerk knocked another twenty percent off the wholesale price.
Oguchi, whose face Ki-jo had saved on his visit to Korea, repaid the debt that way. The Ajinomoto representative agreed to deliver two truckloads of MSG to Haneda Airport the following morning.
Outside the plant, Ki-jo thanked him and asked him to get in touch if he ever had business in Korea again. Oguchi answered with a question of his own.
"You still have things to do in Japan, don't you?"
He was referring to the grass seed Ki-jo had mentioned in his letter.
"I was thinking of calling on a seed merchant."
"Don't bother with a seed shop. Come meet my father. He's at home now."
What was this? What did the father do, that the son should be so eager?
Ki-jo was thrown, but the man was offering help, so he got back into the car and they drove to the house.
When they pulled up in front of the Oguchi residence in Bunkyo Ward, Ki-jo and Ma-ryang were briefly at a loss for words.
This isn't a house. It's a mansion...
The place stood in a quiet, expensive residential quarter, and even there the Oguchi estate was far and away the largest and most splendid. Ma-ryang, knowing Oguchi understood Korean, kept his mouth shut, but his face said the rest plainly enough.
Hyung, this fellow doesn't look like the son of any rice-shop family.
Ki-jo was thinking the same thing. Oguchi had said they dealt in rice, but judging by the scale of the house, his father was a grain merchant on a very large scale. The guess was not wrong.
Inside, in a European-style drawing room, they met the father—Oguchi Yasumasa—and the man carried the air of a great merchant.
"You came from Joseon, I hear?"
"Yes. It's an honor to meet you."
Ki-jo offered the greeting with full formality. Something about Yasumasa, the weight of a man who moved large affairs, drew the words out of him of their own accord.
"It's been a long time since I've met anyone from Joseon. A pleasure. When I was young I went there to buy rice... That was when our Oguchi Trading Company made a great deal of money."
Just as he had thought: a grain merchant. And he would have made an enormous fortune at it. Japan's history of rice shortages stretched back more than a century, and with rice futures and a well-oiled system for cornering the market, there was better money in rice there than in Korea.
"We brought rice grown in Iri—Iksan—in through Gunsan Port... Yes, I believe the place was called Daejangchon. A village laid out on a grand scale to grow rice in Joseon."
Remembering it, Yasumasa seemed to cheer up, his face brightening. The extraction of Joseon's rice was, for him, a pleasant memory of having made his fortune. He appeared not to know that men like him had cut in half the rice Koreans themselves had left to eat.
"A fellow named Hosokawa was the landlord out at Daejangchon. Where he is now, and what he's doing, I couldn't say... Heh heh."
Listening to that comfortable reminiscence, Ki-jo and Ma-ryang felt a sourness settle in them. They held it down and let nothing show. They had come to Japan to do business.
"You're looking for grass here in Japan?"
Only after he had talked himself well into the past did Yasumasa recall what his son had told him.
"Yes. Turf for a golf course."
"Is that so?"
His face changed sharply from the one he had worn while reminiscing. It fairly overflowed with life.
"You're going to build a golf course in Korea?"
"Yes. Nothing grand—a modest, scaled-down course."
"Do Koreans play much golf?"
"It isn't for Koreans. It's for the American troops."
"Ah! I see. The U.S. Army... There must be a great many of them in Korea..."
Yasumasa considered something for a moment, then asked.
"Roughly how large a course do you mean to build?"
"It isn't settled yet. I planned to put a course inside the base when we do the construction work there."
"And the area of the base?"
"About fourteen square kilometers."
"Plenty of land. A nine-hole course ought to fit, then..."
"Nine holes?"
"If you're going to build it, build it properly for the Americans. Otherwise there'll be talk afterward. And of course you'll give them a clubhouse."
Ki-jo had never drawn the picture that large. The golf course had been nothing more than a pretext for the trip to Japan. Even so, the advice had a logic of its own. A proper course would please the senior American officers, and in time Koreans who played the game would appear as well. Through the 1960s there would be almost no courses in the country, and men of influence would go to the ones on the U.S. bases to play. If he could say he had built the course they used, there would be people glad of it.
"Thank you for the advice, Mr. Yasumasa."
"Not at all. I was only speaking as a man who loves the game."
He demurred, but he looked inwardly pleased to have given counsel on golf. Only then did Ki-jo begin to see what had been in front of him all along. On a shelf against the wall behind Yasumasa sat a trophy, and fixed to it was an albatross, the long-winged bird.
A trophy for making an albatross!
Yasumasa was a golf fanatic himself.
"Korea is cold. You'll need grass that doesn't freeze to death."
His thoughts on the game showed no sign of stopping.
"Yes. I'm looking for that kind of variety here."
"No need to look. I already have it. Against the day I build a course in Hokkaido, I found a strain that stands up well to cold weather."
With his wealth and his passion for the game, a course in Hokkaido was entirely within reach. Why he was set on Hokkaido in particular, Ki-jo could not say. In any case, the price. Price was the problem.
"I can't even imagine what grass that survives a winter must cost."
At the mention of money, Yasumasa waved a hand.
"Take it and plant it first. Then keep me informed, as time goes on, of how it grows in Korea."
He seemed to mean to use Korea, colder in winter than Japan, as a kind of test field. Somewhere along the way the talk had begun to run like a conversation between businessmen.
"Build a proper nine-hole course, and plant the finest grass. This is advice from a man who has done business. The first time you do a thing, even if you take a loss, you must do it so that no one else can match it. Only then will the ones who come after not dare to follow. Take my advice, and you will never regret it later."
His eyes were full of passion and certainty.
"I will."
The way Yasumasa looked at him made Ki-jo faintly uncomfortable. It was the face of a man who seemed to have gone back in time and found his younger self sitting across from him.
"Tell me honestly. You haven't capital to spare, have you?"
"No. I haven't."
"Your age..."
"Twenty-four, by the Japanese count."
"Ha ha. Yes. I started in business at that age myself, and I was always short of money. Hard going... Ha ha..."
Smiling with satisfaction, looking Ki-jo over with care, Yasumasa asked something else.
"Are you married?"
What was the old man on about? The question came out of nowhere.
"I am."
"When?"
"At twenty—no, nineteen, by the Japanese count. My child is already five."
"A pity..."
A pity how?
"Yoshinori."
Yasumasa called his son's name, and the look in his eyes had gone cold. The moment Ki-jo saw it, he knew there was trouble between father and son. From everything he had seen of Yoshinori, the young man had no instinct for business at all. It was exactly the look of a successful merchant regarding, coldly, a son who cared nothing for the trade. Yoshinori himself seemed to draw in a little when his father called him.
"From now on, keep company with Mr. Lee, and watch carefully what he does. There will be something for you to learn."
"Yes, Father."
Yoshinori bowed his head as he answered.
There was nothing wrong with forming a tie to a Japanese millionaire's house, but Oguchi Yasumasa's manner was another matter.
You shouldn't handle a child that way...
To compare them while the person himself stood there was the worst of it, and Ki-jo felt sorry for the young man. Then again, only after his final regression had he himself been able to see his son Yeong-su for what he truly was. Everyone is clumsy at being a parent. It is something you do for the first time, and doing it well is hard. Yasumasa looked to be in his late fifties or early sixties. Ki-jo, who had lived a life out to ninety, did not think the man had yet reached the age at which a parent grows wise.
Only when the grandchildren come does it strike you, how poorly you treated your own child. Parents are mostly like that...
He thought of his own experience. As a man, he wanted to tell Yasumasa to be warmer with his son. But he was inside a twenty-five-year-old body now, and he could not go meddling in another household's affairs. Satisfied that the Oguchi father and son had made his business in Japan easy, he brought the talk to a close.
When he and Ma-ryang rose, the two of them pressed their guests to stay the night in the mansion. Ki-jo did not want to. What Yasumasa had asked him still sat wrong.
He had no wish to linger. They rode Oguchi's car back to Haneda, and when they got out to say goodbye, Oguchi spoke first.
"Please don't take what my father said too much to heart."
"Which part...?"
"The question about whether you were married. I have a troublesome younger sister, and that's why he asked. These days he's desperate to marry her off."
"Ha ha. It didn't trouble me in the least."
Ki-jo shook his hand and sent him home. No matter how fine a car a man drove, no matter how much he stood to inherit, a son his father would not acknowledge could not be happy. Watching him go, Ki-jo felt a pang.
"Is the work already finished?"
He put it to Ma-ryang, who looked faintly awkward.
"Well, it's... Soon-young, she..."
Ah, right. Cotton and silk. Only then did he remember what the women of the house had demanded.
"Come on, let's go buy that cloth, and fast. If we show up without it, there'll be hell to pay."
The two of them hurried off toward the heart of Tokyo.