Kijo Is Good at Side Businesses, Too
At the American Cultural Center, Kijo had found himself, out of nowhere, saddled with a radio-distribution business. When he came back to the office, though, his face was bright.
The staff knew he had gone there to choose students for study abroad, and one look at him was enough to tell them the errand had gone well.
"President, did you meet plenty of bright students to send to Harvard?" Shim Hansu asked.
Kijo broke into a wide smile. "Of course. I met two."
"As many as two?" Kim Seogwang, seated beside Hansu, stared with his eyes gone perfectly round. "Didn't you say we could send only one student abroad this year?"
"That's right. Exactly one."
"Aigoo, what a shame. So one of them must have been turned down... tsk."
Seogwang fretted over it for no reason at all, as if the loss were his own.
Kijo, settled at his desk, called Hansu over. When the man came, he drew out the second student's papers, laid them before him, and asked, "Mr. Hansu, do you know where this address is?"
Hansu studied the address on the application a moment. "President, isn't this Haebangchon? Down at the foot of Namsan..."
"That's right, Mr. Hansu. You can tell from the address alone now. Excellent."
At the praise, Hansu scratched the back of his head. "That time you gave me leave, you said, 'Learn the lay of Seoul. There'll be things I'll want to ask of you later.' Heh heh."
Kijo looked on the modest answer with quiet satisfaction. Being asked was not the same as being able. In a short span Hansu had gotten hold of the city's geography, and it seemed he had done it with the same knack he had picked up in the days when he ranged the mountains after game.
"I have a favor to ask, Mr. Hansu. Find out how this student's family is situated, and what sort of name he has in the neighborhood."
Hansu went over the papers with care. "So you want me to look into Jeon Hyeon-su's household, and his reputation?"
"Yes. That's right."
"Understood, President. Only, seeing the boy lives in Haebangchon, things at home must be very hard..."
Kijo nodded.
Haebangchon was a settlement that had grown up when people driven from their homes in the North came south in a body just after liberation and took to living there together. After the Korean War, refugees and folk pouring up to Seoul from the provinces had swollen the neighborhood still further. Those without money threw up unlicensed plank shacks along the slopes of Namsan until the place had become one vast hillside slum.
"I'll be on my way, then, President."
Hansu said it with a visible lift. It had been some time since he had slipped the dull grind of the office for work that suited his nature—hunter's work—and the pleasure of it was hard to hide.
"On your way, stop by Hannam-dong and tell President Lee Man-ik I'd like to see him."
"Yes, President."
Hansu swung onto the bicycle left out front and shot off toward Yongsan.
In less than an hour a jeep drew up before the office on Sejong-ro. It was Lee Man-ik's. Man-ik came in through the door, taking the greetings of the department heads as he passed.
"You sent for me, Chairman?"
"Come in. I know you're busy, and I'm sorry to have called you over. Let's step into the private room."
Kijo took him through.
In the 1950s, anything a mobile phone might have settled in a few words had to be carried by messenger and then handled face to face.
"What is it, Chairman?"
Kijo explained the situation briefly. Lee Man-ik started.
"You are saying you must take on a radio-distribution business?"
"Yes. That's how it turned out."
"But..."
Man-ik could not get the rest of it out for the worry on his face. Kijo answered him calmly. "It's nothing much. It isn't the main business. It's a side venture, so even if it fails, the real work won't take much of a blow."
He meant it. He thought of the radio business as little more than a bonus stage: a success would be welcome, and a failure would leave the main enterprise unharmed. All the same, he had a feeling that if he satisfied Frank this once, a sizable "gift" would follow.
"Even so, the radios would have to be manufactured and put out at a low price. That is hardly an ordinary business..."
Kijo turned to the worried man with a request. "I'm afraid I'm going to have to impose on you, President Lee."
"Name it, Chairman. If it is something I can do, I will do all of it."
"Gather officers and enlisted men out of the Signal Corps for me."
"Signal Corps officers...?"
What Kijo wanted, first, was men who had come up through the army's technical branches. In the Korea of the 1950s, the largest pool of people who actually knew communications work was in the military: men who had come through the Korean War issued American equipment, taught to run it, and shown the principles of the machines and the simpler repairs.
"I want people who can leave the service and work at Cheongsan, the way the Cheongsan Development staff did. Pay and treatment, I mean to make the same as theirs."
"Then the business you intend is no side venture at all, is it? My men and I came because we were promised employment for life..."
"Yes. It is permanent employment. And what I'm asking of you is a recruitment."
Man-ik looked frankly bewildered. Kijo, for his part, had no hesitation whatever about hiring military men from the communications branch. In Korea at the time, anyone who had laid hands on communications equipment ranked among the finest technical labor there was, and even if the radio project failed, there would be no shortage of ways to use them. They were elites, well able to carry whatever else he set them to. Cheongsan's work was expanding, and hands were short. Once he counted the people Cheongsan Shipping would need when it opened before long, the case for gathering skilled men quickly was plain.
"I'll also give preference to men who operated communications gear in the field during the war, or who have experience stringing wire lines."
"Wire communications? Was the task you accepted not a radio-distribution business...?"
"For now, please move the matter forward as I've asked."
"Ah. Yes, Chairman..."
Kijo took a sheaf of bills from a small safe and put it in Man-ik's hand. The money was for the recruiting.
"Former signal officers and enlisted men together—if you can gather about fifty, that will do."
"Yes, Chairman."
True to his military upbringing, Man-ik received the instruction as he would an order from a superior. It was not hard to see why, in the early years of industrialization, former officers were so gladly taken into private companies.
Having set Hansu and Man-ik to their tasks, Kijo had nothing to do but wait for the man from RCA to arrive out of Japan.
Through the few days he waited on that man, Kijo bought the house beside the Cheongsan office and hung a new signboard out front.
Things having gone that far, the five department heads—the original four, with Seong Dae-ik now counted among them as head of accounting—could hardly help taking an interest in the radio business. Whenever Kijo was out, the original four put their questions to Dae-ik, who kept the books. The man who handled the money was always the first to grasp both the shape of a new venture and the plan behind it.
"Dae-ik, how much did the President set aside for the radio business?" Kim Seogwang asked.
"He allocated one million hwan."
"A million hwan? And he means to start a radio business on that?"
Jang Ma-ryang was no less startled. The reserve Kijo had earmarked for the venture was startlingly small.
"Well... to speak frankly, I don't believe that budget would even buy a factory site. They say there's cheap land out toward Yeongdeungpo, but bringing in radio parts looks difficult as well. It seems to me the President has only set money aside, for now, to cover wages for the Cheongsan Radio Communications staff."
"Only wages?" Seogwang's face had gone grave. "There's no plan for the land, or for what the parts will cost?"
Not one of the five could get a sense of how Kijo meant to run the thing.
Seogwang, a cigarette between his lips, turned on Shim Hansu, who had been out of the office more often than not of late. "And you, Hansu. What've you been doing, roaming around outside all this time?"
"What do you think? I'm working on the President's orders, same as anyone."
"What kind of work?"
"That's a secret. The President never said I could talk about it."
"Then he never said you couldn't, either. Come on, out with it."
"Even so, I won't."
Close-mouthed and loyal, Hansu did not so much as part his lips under the pressing of his elders. Seogwang could coax and wheedle all he liked; it did no good.
While the five were airing their worries over the radio business, Kijo himself was standing in Sogong-dong before the U.S. military PX—the building that would one day house the main store of the Shinsegae Department Store.
He was waiting on two men: Frank, and someone from RCA's Japan branch. Before long a car from the American Embassy drew up at the curb. Frank stepped out, and with him a man in an immaculate suit. Frank made the introduction.
"Mr. Lee, this is Mr. Jacob, deputy manager of the RCA Japan branch."
Kijo shook hands with Jacob, come from Japan, and while he did, Frank watched him with a look only half convinced. The face said it plainly enough. I brought you the man from RCA Japan, just as you asked. Now what are you going to do?
"Shall we go inside?" Kijo said.
The PX occupied a building raised in 1930 as the Mitsukoshi Department Store, the finest department store in the Republic of Korea: a site of 730 pyeong, some 2,400 square meters, and a total floor area of 2,300 pyeong, about 7,600. Jacob glanced up at it—no poor cousin to a Japanese department store—and his expression asked whether a building like this had really been standing in Korea.
Inside the splendid marble shell, every manner of goods brought over from America was on display. Everything was marked in English. Daily necessities and luxuries that could not be had anywhere else in the country filled the place, and it was another world. American servicemen and their families, Americans living in Korea, wealthy Koreans no one could say how they had gotten in, and sweethearts who had come along with the GIs all mingled with some three hundred employees, and the floors were bustling.
Kijo went up with Frank and Jacob to the appliance department on the third floor. The moment Jacob reached the radio corner, he frowned. The corner was packed with sets from the rival house, Zenith. Koreans crowded the shop, gazing in open admiration at the hundred-dollar Zenith radios and buying them one after another.
Jacob watched that, then asked a clerk, "How many Zenith radios do you sell in a day?"
"Fifty or sixty a day. Zenith, we can't keep them in stock. Most popular thing in the country."
The clerk, with no idea he was speaking to a man from RCA, introduced the line with pride. Jacob was struck dumb.
"Show me the bestseller."
The employee brought over Zenith's hottest model and set it on the counter. It was a vacuum-tube radio built in the shape of a carrying case, called the Trans-Oceanic. Jacob turned it this way and that. When he opened the lid of the black case—a handle on the body, a gilt Zenith logo on the lid—the tuning scale, the dial, and a single speaker lay revealed. Forty-three centimeters wide, twenty-nine high, eighteen deep: heavy and crude. His face said he could not for the life of him see why such a thing should be popular in Korea.
In America it was the sort of set laborers and soldiers carried outdoors and listened to on batteries. At home it was a cheap, mass-market model, made by a Zenith that had run up against RCA's dominance and gone looking for a niche.
"Does this run on both AC and DC?"
"Yes, sir. In Korea that's the kind you have to use. The power cuts out all the time."
Jacob nodded at the clerk's kindly explanation. Kijo urged him to take the radio out of its case and look at the back.
Jacob did. At the line stamped there, he caught his lower lip between his teeth.
"A product made in Japan..."
Only now did he seem to understand, and Kijo explained. "Zenith has set up subcontract plants in Japan, where wages are cheap, and supplies radios to the U.S. military PX. Through the PX alone, twenty to thirty thousand sets a year sell in Korea."
"That many?"
Jacob's eyes widened. He had the look of a man who had never once thought of Korea as a market for radios.
"And that's only what sells at the PX. Zenith radios come in as smuggled finished sets, too, or as parts."
"Hm..."
Radios sold so well in the American market that RCA had taken little interest in military supply. There was no need to stamp themselves as makers of cheap goods by chasing contracts with the army.
"Have you ever looked into how the Zenith sets assembled in Japan are selling?"
"No. RCA has never had any particular reason to concern itself with Zenith..."
Without quite meaning to, Jacob had let show the disdain in which he held the firm.
Japanese radios, though, would before long grow into a formidable rival of the United States. Japan's output would rise to five million sets in 1958, and a year later, in 1959, it would double and reach ten million. Ninety percent of that immense volume would be exported, and most of the goods would pour into the American market and begin to seize the trade in cheap radios.
Korea, too, would become a consumer market for those low-priced Japanese sets. In 1958 the country would import 98,000 Japanese radios, and the next year, 1959, 200,000. Nearly all of them, of course, would travel by other than lawful roads—smuggled through Hong Kong, or turned loose on the Korean market by way of the U.S. Army. Korea would rank among Japan's five largest export markets for radios. By then even the names well known in the country—America's Zenith, Germany's Loewe-Opta, Britain's Bush—would be hard pressed to stand against the Japanese product.
"How did a thing like this happen? In America, Zenith isn't fit to hand its card to RCA..."
Jacob put the question almost to himself, looking ill at ease.
But now and then a second-rate product from an advanced country is received as a luxury in a poorer one. Buick, of General Motors, was for a time taken in China for a finer automobile than Cadillac, because Puyi, the last emperor of the Qing, and Sun Yat-sen, founding father of the Republic of China, had both gone about in Buicks. On the strength of that history, more Buicks sold in China than in the United States.
Korea was no different. The cheap Zenith sets the American army had carried in during the Korean War were what Koreans first came to know, and the notion spread that a radio meant Zenith.
Kijo had let Jacob of RCA see that Zenith was striking at a gap in the market, and that the force behind it was merchandise turned out on subcontract in Japan. Jacob looked as though the warning had landed well enough. The moment had come to draw on RCA's strength in earnest.