September of Chaos
At eleven o'clock on the night of August 18, 1954, the National Assembly of the Republic of Korea passed, by unanimous vote, a resolution opposing the withdrawal of UN forces from the country. The next day, August 19, politicians and citizens packed Dongdaemun Seoul Stadium for a nationwide rally under the banner "Oppose the Withdrawal of U.S. Forces from Korea." On the twentieth, demonstrators surged up to the American Embassy to protest the pullout. It was a crisis without precedent in the years since the Korean War.
The demonstrations against the United States that had begun at the end of August showed no sign of burning out. Through September they broke out not only in front of the Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission but before American bases the length of the country, and they never let up. Students and laborers were only the beginning; one trade and civic organization after another carried the protests on in turn.
The turmoil had been set off by an announcement the United States made after Syngman Rhee's visit to Washington: that it would withdraw four divisions from Korea and leave only two behind.
None of the uproar inside the country slowed America down. The United States set about bringing Korea to heel. Even as it issued a statement dismissing Korean fears as excessive, it turned economic pressure on the government, demanding in the sternest terms that Syngman Rhee—who had been holding to a strong-won policy—raise the official exchange rate. The claim was that the won's gross overvaluation was costing money to the United States, which was the one giving the aid.
In truth, measured against Korea's real strength, the rate the government had fixed was indefensible. Even so, a deeper American intent showed through: to set straight a Korean government with no realistic feel for economics or for security.
Seoul pushed back hard, and the protests against the withdrawal grew fiercer still.
Called in to the American Cultural Center in the middle of September, Kijo found Frank with displeasure written plainly across his face. Before he so much as came to the reason for the summons, Frank let his grievances spill.
"How does Korea get away with this? A few days back, some man tried to climb the wall of the ambassador's residence. You want to tell me that makes sense?"
In front of Kijo he could not quite bring himself to say the words "ungrateful Korea," but his face said them for him.
"Out at the bases right now, the men are standing post with live rounds in the chamber. Worried the very Koreans they protected might come storming into the compound."
What he wanted to say, it seemed, was that Americans had bled to hold the communist armies back, and Korea was answering that debt by treating the United States with contempt.
"We knew the first wave was a government show. Your side even tipped us off beforehand. They've quit doing that. The Korean government is stepping further over the line by the day."
Kijo heard him out without a word.
The anti-withdrawal protests had indeed been led by the government at the start. As they went on, though, more and more of them rose on their own. The ordinary citizens and students in the streets were not there because anyone had forced them. If Frank had come away thinking his contacts in the Korean government had failed to warn him of a march in advance, those were most likely the demonstrations that had sprung up of themselves.
Before his regression, Kijo himself had marched with an anti-withdrawal crowd in Busan. In those days he had carried the fear that the Americans were leaving, and the desperate sense that the peninsula might fall to communism. He felt none of that anxiety now. He answered according to the course of history as he knew it.
"I imagine the protests will have lost a good deal of their force by around November."
Frank nodded. "They had better. Otherwise Korea is going to pay dearly for this."
Knowing what steps America would take and how the affair would run, Kijo was not greatly worried. The United States was watching the situation in Korea with care, and preparing both the carrot and the stick it meant to use.
"If you're calling a turn for the better in relations come November, then get ready ahead of time. Once the politics here settle, word may come down on how the budget is to be spent."
"You mean the budget for breaking ground on the MSG plant?"
"That's the one. You've got a proverb here, haven't you—give rice cake to a crying child? We'll make the Korean government cry, and then we'll give the rice cake to you."
What he meant was plain enough. Once the Korean government had been made docile, Washington would approve the building of Kijo's seasoning plant, the better to encourage investment in the country's light industry.
Kijo told him what he had already decided.
"I'm thinking of putting the seasoning plant in Busan. If we're importing raw materials to process, Busan is the best site there is."
"Fine. No need to report that to me. Spend the money first, and report after."
He said it, but he did not look as though Kijo's telling him was any bother. Even if there was no need to report every particular, Kijo thought it wiser to keep him informed. A man who lived on information nearly always preferred knowing to not knowing.
Frank drew a document from his desk drawer and passed it across.
"The file on a CIA front company. A food company. Officially, the story has to be that you're producing MSG under a technical partnership with this firm, on investment you've brought in."
"Understood."
Frank finished all he had to say, then was quiet for a moment.
"I ran a little hot earlier, didn't I?"
"Not at all. Anyone might have. I understand."
Kijo gave the abashed American a gentle smile.
Not even the CIA could know everything. Had American intelligence officers truly grasped the state of their host countries and the feeling down on the ground, they would never have suffered such staggering humiliations in Vietnam and in Cuba.
Frank praised the wired-radio business Kijo had made a success of, and little by little he cooled. He added that the home office had judged the venture a success and meant to apply it in countries whose circumstances resembled Korea's.
"Still—your government's been dressing that wired-radio business up as if the president himself had led it. Doesn't that gall you?"
"It's all right. It isn't Cheongsan's core business."
"Don't file it away as a sideline. Think about expanding it. You go into broadcasting, and we can help."
True to the CIA, he was letting it be known that if Kijo meant to found a pro-American station, they would back him as far as he cared to go.
"I'll think it over."
He said so, but he had no great interest in broadcasting. Every time a regime changed, Korea's broadcasters changed hands, and were merged away or shut down. Of the stations built in the fifties and sixties, few were still alive in the nineties. Broadcasting was a field in which it was hard to keep a lasting business going in Korea. Even Samsung and LG had gone in early, only to be driven out of it—half by their own choice, half by compulsion.
"I hear your government has licensed CBS, the Christian Broadcasting System. I asked around at the Office of Public Information. Facilities better than KBS, they say, and the outfit looks promising. You give the word, and we can get you equipment and records that put CBS's to shame."
A Korean station was smaller than a single local station in America. Frank could have backed him to any extent he liked, so long as he agreed to do it. Kijo's response was tepid.
When the talk was done, he left the American Cultural Center. Out on Euljiro, in front of the building, disabled veterans had dug in for a sit-in. Artificial arms and crutches in hand, they were shouting their diehard opposition to an American withdrawal.
To the CIA's eye they might have looked like men demonstrating on orders from the government. Not to Kijo's. Each face carried a desperate sincerity of its own—the look of a man afraid that if the Americans pulled out entirely, war would come again to this land.
He passed them by and went back to the office, and from there he put through a call to Oh Yang-soo in Busan.
"Brother Yang-soo."
"President Lee! What's the matter?"
"We're going to have to buy land in Busan."
"So the seasoning plant's been approved?"
"Yes. I expect the approval by the end of November at the latest."
"All right. But that young fellow who went off to Japan to learn how Ajinomoto does it—can he really come home with the know-how?"
"I believe he can."
Kijo trusted Jeon Hyeon-su. It had taken Lim Dae-hong a little more than a hundred days in Japan to uncover Ajinomoto's manufacturing method. From learning the process there, through the trial and error of making a product, the building of a plant, and the day a product finally went on sale, the whole of it had taken a year. Kijo knew what mistakes the man had made, and how he had put them right.
Nearly two months had passed since Jeon Hyeon-su had gone to Japan and taken a job at an Ajinomoto plant. Two months still remained before the end of November. Time enough, as Kijo judged it.
"I took you at your word and already have a parcel picked out. I can buy it quick. How much am I allowed to lay out for the land?"
"So long as it isn't wildly above what the neighborhood is going for. If they won't come to terms, tell them you'll pay in dollars."
"Right. These days, if you've got dollars—well, there's nothing you can't do. The dollar's king, isn't it? Ha ha!"
Kijo finished with Yang-soo and called Oh Seok-mun into the private room off the office.
"You sent for me, sir?"
"Director Oh, sit with me a moment."
Oh Seok-mun, a stonemason by trade, was Cheongsan Development's unsung talent. He chose the fine stone that went into the exteriors of Cheongsan Housing, bought it at a fair price, and saw to the design as well. Kijo had always been grateful to him for the way he worked on without a word.
From the small safe in the private room he took a thick wad of cash, set it in Seok-mun's hands, and said what he had called him in to say.
"I'd like to give you a month or two of leave, Director Oh."
Startled by the cash and the holiday both, Seok-mun asked, "A month or two off? We're right in the thick of the work."
"There's something I need to ask of you. Take this money, find good granite, and make me a large granite cauldron."
"A granite cauldron, sir...?"
"Yes. A fairly large one."
On a sheet of paper Kijo drew the cauldron of Lim Dae-hong's that he had carried in his memory—the one Lim had built, after all his false starts, when he made the first MSG in the history Kijo remembered. To fix the shape of it in his mind, he had gone to the Miwon plant in Gunsan, measured the cauldron on display there, and studied it closely. Seok-mun gazed hard at the rectangular vessel taking shape under his hand, a meter and a half wide and a meter and twenty centimeters high.
"What is this, sir?"
"A granite kettle, for extracting a substance called glutamic acid."
"A kettle—then perhaps a cast-iron one, made to order..."
Kijo laughed. "Use cast iron and you'll have a disaster on your hands. Drawing that substance out takes strong hydrochloric acid. An iron kettle would dissolve in no time."
"Hydrochloric acid..."
Seok-mun scratched his head, turned it over, and said, "Then what if you used onggi? The old earthenware jars stand up to acid quite well."
"Hydrochloric acid won't dissolve onggi, no. But it weakens the bond that holds the clay. And the method we have to use—acid hydrolysis—means applying the acid at high heat. The jars would crack before long."
"Ah... yes. I understand. Then I'll make the cauldron to the drawing you've done, sir."
"Thank you, Director Oh. Do you know where the granite has a name?"
"Yes, I do. Good granite comes out of Iri, in North Jeolla."
The answer startled Kijo. In that earlier history, the stone Lim Dae-hong had used for his great granite kettle had come from Iri—present-day Iksan.
A man who knows his trade really is something else...
He broke into a wide smile. "That's the place. Go to Hwangdeung Mountain in Iri. Word is the stone there is excellent."
This time it was Seok-mun who looked startled.
"However did you know that? That's something only fellows like me know—men who've eaten stone dust all their lives..."
"Ha ha. I just caught it by ear."
Kijo brushed the question aside and pushed the wad of cash toward him. This time Seok-mun did not decline.
"Director Oh, once you start making a granite kettle, gaps will open whether you want them or not. We'll need a way to seal them."
In the history that had actually happened, Lim Dae-hong was said to have closed the seams of his granite kettle with some special compound, but he had never revealed what it was, and Kijo had never been able to learn it either. He hoped the answer would come from Oh Seok-mun, who knew stone.
"To start with, I'll dress the stone from a single block as far as I can, so there's no joint and no gap."
"I'm counting on you. And you'll be off in a strange place for a good while, so don't go alone—take your family. Find lodgings with the money I've given you."
He handed over the keys to a truck as well.
"When the granite kettle is finished, bring it to Busan. It can sit in the Cheongsan Shipping warehouse."
"Yes, sir."
Oh Seok-mun was grateful: for a task that let him practice the trade he knew, and for the ample cash and even the truck Kijo had put behind it.
After Seok-mun took the money and the keys and left the private room, Kijo lit a cigarette and adjusted the schedule he had laid out in his head. The first object was a plant of some five thousand square meters in Busan. The finer points—the equipment, the materials, the mixing ratios—Jeon Hyeon-su would bring back with him, and the granite kettle at the heart of the acid-hydrolysis process Oh Seok-mun would build.
Into the early sixties they would sell MSG made by acid hydrolysis; after that, fermentation would have to be brought in. The granite cauldrons would be unnecessary then. But in the years when MSG could be held as a monopoly and sold at its dearest, those cauldrons would do extraordinary work.
As the cigarette burned down toward its end, the seasoning war between the Miwon Group and Cheil Jedang came back to him all at once.
Will Chairman Lee Byung-chull reach for the seasoning business this time as well...? They say he and Chairman Lim Dae-hong fought until the blood flew...
A hollow laugh rose in him at the thought of contesting the seasoning market with a figure as large as Chairman Lee Byung-chull. Even so, he was confident he could win that war, chairman or not. Join the method by which Chairman Lim had beaten Cheil Jedang to the method he himself had worked out, and he was certain he could shake off Cheil Jedang's pursuit.
Kijo stepped out of the private room and looked south along Sejong-ro. An anti-withdrawal column was advancing on City Hall in a tight scrum, arms locked over one another's shoulders. A union contingent, or university students. The slogans ran rougher than the students', and the movements were larger. Union men, by the look of them.
September had become the season of protest, so much so that you could tell who the marchers were from the look of the march alone.