The Black-Haired Foreigner
Ki-jo did have an idea. Whether Hee-jun would accept it, once it was set before him, was another matter.
At Hee-ja's wedding he had heard from her father that the eldest son, Hee-jun, had run a business up in the North. The man was no bungler at commerce, then, and Ki-jo doubted he would take fright at the mere scale of what was about to be proposed. He settled on offering a venture that promised a fat margin and called for almost no salesmanship—and better still, one in which being Korean would count as a real advantage once Hee-jun was working in the United States.
"Have you ever heard of jungseok?"
"Jungseok? I've heard the word, but..."
"We call it that because it's a heavy stone. In America they call it tungsten."
"Tungsten?"
Hee-jun was not the only one thrown by the unfamiliar mineral. Ma-ryang and Soon-young looked just as puzzled.
"You mean I should buy tungsten in Korea and sell it in America?"
"Yes. That's right."
"But the distance to America..."
"The Pacific is plenty wide, I'll grant you. But once that stone crosses it, the price will leap several times over what you paid in Korea."
Tenfold, more or less—assuming the ore was refined before it was sold.
"Wouldn't it be better to collect scrap iron here and sell it to Japan? I asked around in Busan, and people say that business is doing quite well."
"Of course. That's a fine trade too."
Ki-jo smiled faintly. Korea had no steel mill in those days. The country was reduced to selling off the scrap the war had left behind and importing finished steel from Japan in return.
"But if you want in on it, you'll have to clear out the scrap collectors who already hold the ground—and the gangsters tangled up with them—in a single stroke."
"I... is that so..."
Hee-jun's face fell.
The scrap men had dug themselves into Busan while the war was still on, and a whole knot of interests had grown up around the trade. Collectors, officials, politicians, and gangsters were lashed together tight. In Ki-jo's view, breaking into the scrap business in Busan would be harder than cracking the brick market in Seoul.
"Scrap exports are lucrative, no argument. I looked into the trade myself. Japan is short of iron right now and paying good money for Korean scrap."
"How much profit is there in selling scrap?"
Hee-jun couldn't quite let the notion go, and he wanted the margins spelled out.
"Scrap brings about twice the price of iron ore, weight for weight."
"I see."
"The trouble is, you can't move it in steady bulk the way you can ore. What you collect rises and falls, and the cost of hiring men to gather it and haul it is nothing to dismiss."
"I suppose that's true. It isn't like iron ore, where you dig a set amount out of the ground every day, load it on a train, and pack a ship to the gunwales."
"Exactly. Collecting and selling scrap makes money, but it's less stable than it looks, and it isn't easy. Men have had bombs go off on them while they were picking through it."
In the 1950s, losing a limb—or a life—while scavenging scrap was a common enough accident.
"I used to raise sheep in Pyongan Province. It was the same with that. People will say, what's so hard about turning sheep out into a pasture and shearing them when the time comes? The reality is different. And here I've gone and made the very same mistake."
"Not at all. I don't know much about other lines of work either. I'm only telling you what I've looked into."
Ki-jo soothed him with a few soft words and pressed on.
"But did you know this? Scrap is worth twice the price of iron ore, yet turn that ore into steel and the price becomes seven times what it was."
"Hm... But building a mill to make steel would cost a fortune. And you'd need the technology, besides."
"Of course. On the other hand, buy the ore when it's cheap and sell the steel when the price is high, and the profit can be enormous."
"I'm sure it would..."
Hee-jun nodded.
Judging that he had laid enough groundwork, Ki-jo turned the talk toward tungsten.
"Korea is rich in three things under the ground. Tungsten, graphite, and limestone."
"Is there really that much tungsten?"
"There is. And the Korean ore that carries it ranks among the finest in the world. Weight for weight, it holds two and a half times as much tungsten as ore from other countries."
"As much as that?"
"Yes. That's why, under the Japanese occupation, they opened something like eight hundred mines here to dig it out."
Ki-jo knew the Japanese rush on tungsten mines in those years had rivaled the American gold rush, or the modern fever for mining bitcoin. Tungsten was a material for weapons, and the First World War had been raging.
"So you're telling me to take the good, cheap ore mined in Korea and sell it in America?"
Ki-jo nodded.
"Hm..."
Hee-jun stroked his chin, turning something over.
"What about selling the tungsten to Japan? It's closer."
A laugh rose in Ki-jo, but he swallowed it. Hee-jun was fixed on Japan, the market nearest to Korea. It wasn't a foolish notion. It was perfectly rational. The yen stood high, and freight, above all, would come cheap. Both of them spoke Japanese well enough that the business itself would not be hard.
But Japan would soon sign a trade agreement with Communist China. It would happen the following May, and Syngman Rhee, outraged that Japan should deal with the very communists who had invaded Korea, would lay trade sanctions on her. By August he would go so far as to order a total severance of trade with Japan. Commerce between the two countries would seize up because of it.
Even without Rhee's measures, Japan would be buying cheap Chinese ore. To sell tungsten ore there was to take the easy road and walk straight off a cliff.
But how do I explain that? It hasn't even happened yet...
He worried over it, then made up his mind. Better to say what he wanted than to try to explain.
"Rather than selling to Japan, what I'd like, President Park, is for you to buy the ore and carry it all the way through to refined tungsten."
"What?"
Hee-jun nearly jumped.
"You want us to refine the tungsten too?"
"Yes. Tell Roberts to look into acquiring a refinery. Or build a tungsten refinery in Korea, draw the metal out of the ore, and sell that."
At the sheer scale of it, Hee-jun was not the only one struck dumb. Ma-ryang and Soon-young could not close their mouths either. In those days, telling a man to build a steel mill or a refinery was not far from telling him to build a rocket to the heavens.
Hee-jun drew out a handkerchief, wiped the sweat from his brow, and spoke.
"I'll talk it over with my brother-in-law."
"Please do. Nothing I've told you is false, but if you're going to persuade him you'll need grounds to stand on. This isn't a matter of a coin or two."
"That's true."
"Then, before you leave for America, stop in Japan and call on the American Chamber of Commerce there—the ACCJ."
"The American Chamber of Commerce in Japan?"
"Yes. Ask them to request, from Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry, the data on the tungsten buried in Korea."
No country knew the resources lying under Korea better than Japan. They were the bastards who had combed the land without rest since the colonial era. And if America asked them to hand the surveys over, they would produce them at once.
"But how would I even walk into the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan..."
"Aren't you an American?"
"Ah! That's right... I keep forgetting I've become one. Ha ha."
Hee-jun scratched the back of his head.
"Ask the ACCJ to request the materials and they'll see to it gladly. The place exists to serve American businessmen."
America was riding an extraordinary boom, the stretch of years later remembered as the most abundant in her history. Employment ran near enough to full, interest rates and prices stayed low, and wages were rising. A young man and woman could finish high school, marry at once, and—so long as they found work—raise children, buy a house, and buy a car.
In a season like that, demand for tungsten overflowed. Resistant to heat, it went into everything from the filaments of light bulbs to the parts of machines that ran hot, the edges of cutting tools, weapons, knives, even ballpoint pens. What was more, after the Korean War the United States was stepping back from the faith that nuclear weapons could answer every need, and turning its defense policy toward conventional arms. Demand for tungsten as a material of war would only grow.
Whatever the cause, Ki-jo's argument was landing. The light in Hee-jun's eyes grew keener by the moment.
"In that case—what if we simply acquired a tungsten mine in Korea outright?"
A good idea. The question itself showed that Hee-jun had a businessman's grain. But—
In the 1950s tungsten accounted for half the export earnings of the Republic of Korea, and there was no chance the government would sell a mine away. It had put capital into Korea Tungsten and was running the firm, in all but name, as a state enterprise, reaching deep into the mining, the sales, and the rest of the management.
"That would be difficult. A tungsten mine is the goose that lays the golden eggs, and the government of the Republic treasures it."
"I see."
Hee-jun looked regretful. Ki-jo found he rather liked the look of it.
"Ask the ACCJ for the file on just one place. Yeongwol, in Gangwon-do."
The Sangdong Mine at Yeongwol was, as a single mine, the largest of its kind in the world. He could not recall the figures exactly, but as he remembered them the reserves in the 1950s stood at something like thirty million tons.
In the future Ki-jo had already lived, the famed investor Warren Buffett would take the Sangdong Mine into his own hands. Even Warren Buffett had set a high value on it.
In any case. Whether the thing would come off, he could not say. He told Hee-jun everything he had worked out. All the rest hung on the will of Hee-jun and of Roberts.
Hee-jun, who had been sunk in thought, broke the silence.
"Let Cheongsan Shipping handle the carriage. It would turn my stomach to watch an American line, or a Japanese one, haul the ore."
"Ha ha. We only have the one ship, you know. And she's no more than ten thousand tons."
"Isn't there some good way around it?"
Now it was Hee-jun putting the question to him.
"There is, as it happens. Roberts only has to give me a few more ships. Let him hand them over free of charge for now, and I'll pay him back out of what I earn carrying the freight."
"Ships cost a fortune. Are you sure that's all right?"
All right? The trouble was finding anyone willing to let him have ships on credit in the first place. Ki-jo explained why it would work all the same.
"Right now there ought to be a great many ships lying idle along the American West Coast."
"How would you know that...?"
"I have a friend at the American embassy."
He let it go at that.
Cargo along the West Coast had thinned, and idle hulls were plentiful. Some of them were shifting through the Panama Canal toward the East Coast, where the freight still held, but the western shore was in poor shape. Japan was the reason.
When the Korean War broke out, shipowners had ordered vessels from the yards or taken them on charter, certain that a flood of supplies would be poured into a Korea at war. The American government, however, chose not to move war matériel from the United States to Korea. It adopted instead a policy of producing the goods in Japan, right next door, and shipping them across from there. Most of the supplies were procured in Japan, so the volume leaving the American mainland for Korea fell well short of what anyone had expected. And once the war ended, even that volume collapsed.
The First Indochina War, which had begun around the same time, was going badly for France as of 1954, and American material aid was shrinking with it. On the West Coast, the only routes with any life left in them were the ones bringing Japanese goods to America or carrying aid grain to Korea. Ships built or chartered in hopes of a transport boom sat in harbor with nothing to do, and vessels belonging to thinly capitalized firms might well already be mortgaged to the banks.
If Roberts picked up ships of that sort cheap and passed them along, Ki-jo could haul the ore.
"If Roberts gives me the ships and trusts me with the shipping, I'll serve as his agent here in Korea. I'll deal with the government officials and clear up whatever trouble arises on this side."
"Understood. Then all we have to worry about is selling the ore inside the United States."
"Yes. And if you can, talk him into building a refinery in Korea. The profit would grow, and in return for putting the refinery up you could try demanding a monopoly from the government."
"If a refinery costs too much, Roberts may find it hard to swallow."
"If he truly balks, suggest building a chemical processing plant in Korea instead."
"A chemical processing plant?"
"Yes. Rather than crushing the raw ore by machine and sorting out only the tungsten-bearing portion, there's a method that uses chemicals to extract the metal. The recovery is higher, but Korea doesn't know the process and can't use it."
"How would we get hold of that technology?"
"Simply enough. You buy the chemicals in America. Inquire with a firm that manufactures the reagents for extracting tungsten, and they'll teach you how to use them. In return, of course, you'd have to sign a supply contract with them."
"Ah. So there was a way like that."
"Even if all you offer is the chemical plant, your hand will be stronger when you sit down with the government. Korea would be learning a new technology, and in the end the profits would rise as well."
As Ki-jo set one scheme after another on the table without a hitch, Ma-ryang and his wife gazed at him with something near to awe.
"Isn't my brother-in-law something?"
Soon-young whispered it to Ma-ryang.
"You're only just now seeing how impressive Brother is?"
Ma-ryang answered her.