Connections
Cho Choong-hoon possessed one formidable advantage that Ki-jo lacked. Connections.
He held a choice network at home and abroad — influential men in Korea and officers of the U.S. military, and a considerable web of contacts in Japan besides. Ki-jo had long believed that one of the finest benefits of going into business with him would be the chance to draw on that network.
"If you've got a few dollars to spare... there's a man I know in Japan..."
Ki-jo already had a grasp of Cho Choong-hoon's Japanese connections. The greatest of them was Kenji Osano, head of a real-estate development company called Kokusai Kogyo, a figure scarcely known in Korea. But when the man died, Japan turned a fierce light on his passing.
The papers ran headlines like those and covered the story at full scale. That was the weight of the man. He had been a titan with the political and business worlds of postwar Japan in his grip.
Ki-jo remembered an article that had appeared in a Korean newspaper in 1986.
In Korea it was handled as gossip: a billionaire with influence in Japanese political and business circles had died.
"There's a man called Yamano who does business in Japan. He asked me whether I wouldn't buy some Japanese buses off him."
Hearing Choong-hoon out, Ki-jo realized it was not the man he had expected. Typical of Cho Choong-hoon, king of connections — the people he knew were never just one or two. Even so, Ki-jo knew what he was about to say.
"Japanese buses?" Ki-jo asked, feigning ignorance.
"Right. What he does is supply buses to the U.S. forces in Korea. But the terms he signed with the military are a peculiar sort."
Cho Choong-hoon stuck a cigarette between his lips and laughed, as if the contract struck even him as strange.
"He contracted to deliver Japanese-made buses to the U.S. forces and replace them with new ones after two years. The buses the troops have been riding, he hauls back to Japan and sells secondhand. That's the business he's in."
Ki-jo nodded. In modern terms, it was something like a lease, or a subscription.
"You're saying I should buy those buses?"
"That's right. Used buses must be overflowing over there, because he asked me if I wouldn't take the ones he meant to ship back to Japan. Said he'd let them go cheaper than the Japanese wholesale price on used stock. Must have figured there wasn't much profit in hauling them home — he even offered to knock off the cost of shipping them to Japan."
"How many does he mean to sell?"
"Thirty."
In the history Ki-jo remembered, Cho Choong-hoon would buy thirty buses in just this fashion in 1960, and run them as reserved-seat coaches on the Seoul–Incheon line. Because of Ki-jo himself, that history seemed to have shifted, if only a little.
"I'll take them."
"Good. You thought it through. Buses the GIs have ridden for barely two years are as good as new. I hated to see a thing like that slip past, so I asked you. If my dollar situation were a little easier, I'd have bought the lot myself. Ha ha ha."
A smile came to Ki-jo of its own accord. Now that he had truly joined hands with Cho Choong-hoon, the benefits were pouring in.
"I was thinking you might buy those buses and sell them on — or, better, run a bus company of your own."
Ki-jo nodded, though he had no intention of doing as Choong-hoon imagined. A bus company was in his thoughts, yes, but he saw the right moment for it as the 1960s, once prices had steadied and Seoul was groaning under an explosion of people. For now, public transit cost so much that ridership had fallen away. While Syngman Rhee was off on his visit to America, the government had raised commuter-train fares fivefold, on the pretext of bringing them in line with reality. This was an age when prices leapt overnight, true enough — but a sudden fivefold jump in the fare was as good as telling people that if they had no money, they could walk.
"I'll settle the contract terms and send word before long."
"Thank you, hyungnim. You've helped me this much, and I'm ashamed I sold you the house in Hannam-dong."
"What kind of talk is that? Nonsense. We're businessmen. Giving and taking ought to be clear."
"Even so, taking full price from you for the house doesn't seem to have been right."
"Ha ha, listen to you. I'd been looking around Buam-dong for a villa where I could entertain American officers. There was a fine stone house someone had left half-built. But the place you're putting up is bigger, and better. Perfect for throwing a banquet with a view of the Han River — that's what I'm telling you. Ha ha."
What Choong-hoon meant was that Ki-jo's mansion in Hannam-dong had come cheaper than houses in Buam-dong, close to the heart of the city, and that he had been able to save money on it.
Ki-jo then worked the transport partnership with him down to its particulars. He ran a transport company of his own, and his trucks outnumbered Hanjin's, so they agreed to paint both company names side by side along the trucks. In English the name would read HANJIN–CS TRANSPORTATION. They used CS rather than Cheongsan because American soldiers found Cheongsan hard to pronounce. Earnings would be divided according to the number of trucks that hauled, and out of the share that came to Ki-jo he would give Choong-hoon an additional ten percent.
With the contract settled, Ki-jo headed for the match factory in Yeonsu-dong.
There, two hundred workers who had come over from Cheongsan Brick were running a trial production. Most of those who had come from the brickworks to Incheon were women. The men handled the machines and the raw timber; the women folded cardboard boxes and packed the matchsticks into them. The one commanding the hundred and fifty women was Deputy Plant Manager Lee Bongok.
"Come in, President."
"How are you finding it? Is the work manageable?"
"Nothing to it. Folks who used to make bricks say their fingers itch, handling these little sticks of wood."
Ki-jo had grown used to the speech of people from the North. Northerners were blunt, and yet, like the people of Chungcheong, they enjoyed coming at a thing from the side. Since he had begun these years a second time, most of those he had bound himself to were displaced persons out of the North. They had a harder grip on survival than people born in the South, and, unexpectedly, they had planted themselves in the vital places. Northerners held sway over the gangsters of Seoul and the private moneylenders of Myeong-dong, and there were quietly a great many of them in the army and the civil service as well. Under Syngman Rhee in particular, the army had split into two great factions: men of Pyongan Province, and men of Hamgyong.
"Did the work finish up all right?" Jang Ma-ryang, who had been looking over the machines, came up and asked.
Ki-jo's eyes went to the tents pitched in the factory yard. "I worry the workers are sleeping poorly. I'm sorry, making them spend another winter under canvas."
"Don't talk that way, President. In the war we slept with the sky for a roof. A tent with a stove going — that's heaven, and no other heaven besides."
Lee Bongok spoke for the two hundred living in the tents. Once again the virtue of the northern-born showed itself. They were tough, and they complained little.
Ki-jo walked the plant with Ma-ryang and Bongok. For its day, the match factory was surprisingly well fitted with machinery — mixers, planers, machines for laying down the striking surface, and more. But aside from the moments those machines were running, the work was mostly done by hand.
He followed the making of a matchstick from the first step. It began in the yard, with the cutting of imported logs.
"Italian poplar," he said, running a hand along a straight log two meters long.
"Yes. Soft wood, but tough. Good to handle."
The men set in with saws and cut the logs down into lengths of thirty-six centimeters. Once a log was cut, the stripping of the bark began.
"Hey, Kim — there's bark left on that. Feed it to the machine like that and you'll ruin the blade!"
At Lee Bongok's shout the worker looked abashed and went back to knocking the bark off the wood. Logs stripped clean were locked into the planer. Turning, they were shaved into sheets 2.2 millimeters thin, and when those paper-thin sheets were gathered and fed to the cutter, sticks 4.2 centimeters long poured out.
The sticks were carried to the drying shed and left three days to draw the moisture out, then run through the dryer once more and put into the polisher. The polisher's work was to take the rough surface of a stick and make it smooth. Even that much of the process showed how much labor a match demanded.
"Just making the sticks takes more than three days. When you make them, handle them as cleanly as you can, so nothing fouls them. Clean enough that a person could walk around with one held in the mouth."
He pressed the point of cleanliness once more. "If the sticks are dirty, the housewives who touch a match while they cook will turn against them, and so will the men lighting their cigarettes."
"I'll keep it in mind."
Bongok put his instructions away in her head.
Ki-jo moved on to where they made the head compound. The compound was the heart of a match — the head itself — and it had to be blended in the right proportions: diatomaceous earth, powdered glass, sulfur, powdered pine resin, and the rest. Potassium chlorate and glue heated until it melted were poured over those powders, pigment was added, and the mixer turned it all into a finished red paste. Dip a stick lightly into that paste three times, and the match's round red head was done.
He took up a finished match, studied the shape and size of the head, and struck it. It caught, but after a slight lag, and the catch was not clean.
"Try changing the amounts of glue and potassium chlorate. The flame doesn't flare up the way it should."
"Yes, President."
"And the cut faces of the sticks were rough. The part a person's hand touches has to feel right. People judge a thing by sensation first, more than they realize."
Bongok's face hardened. His counsel was gentle, but it stung. She ordered the workers to bag every piece they had turned out. Whatever was judged defective would be gathered and handed to the Cheongsan people, to be used at home. When three hours in the mixer left the compound useless, the workers in charge of the blend sighed over the materials gone to waste.
Ki-jo had no choice but to be strict about the making of matches. Old brands passed through his mind — UN, Girin, Bisa, Saja, Seonggwang, Joyang, Hwarang, and a host of others. At the height of the trade there had been three hundred match factories across the country, enough that some people collected the different brands as a hobby. The competition was that fierce. A buyer might start with whatever matches came to hand, but if the sticks snapped easily, or if they would not catch in the rainy season, word spread at once and the market closed up.
Yet the opportunity, at the same time, was boundless. Even after electricity grew plentiful, a day would come when a single blackout in downtown Seoul sent ten or twenty thousand boxes of matches flying off the shelves as if it were nothing. There had been a time when the children of a neighborhood ran to the store on their parents' errands, buying matches to light the candles. Blackouts that drove those sales would come as regularly as meals, so selling matches would be no hard thing. Made well, they would sell like wildfire.
Last of all he examined the box for Cheongsan matches. On the rectangular cardboard carton a pine and a crane had been drawn. His were Pine-and-Crane matches. The picture was the work of a sign painter in Dongducheon: a green pine and a white crane on a red ground, the whole impression so like a hwatu card — one of the bright flower cards people gambled with — that it leapt to the eye.
"I pointed out a few problems today, but on the whole you've made them well. Thank you for the work."
"We're grateful."
Bongok had worried over his inspection of the factory, and he had been stricter than she expected. Her heart sank. Seeing her face, Ki-jo wondered if he had driven them too hard, and he spoke to lift her spirits.
"Bongok — still, you've made matches that actually catch fire. That's no small thing. I didn't know myself that making them was this delicate. I used to think a match was just a match."
He patted the shoulder of a crestfallen Bongok. She had been holding her head a little low, and now she spoke.
"It puts me in mind of the old man who sold matches at the station, back when we were on the refugee roads. We had no money then, so we couldn't buy them, and when we cooked out of doors we suffered for want of a spark. I'll make matches that are cheap and good, so plenty of people can use them without hardship."
She turned those hard years over in her mind and made her resolve.
"Let's make plenty of cheap, good matches and sell them across the country. It's well within our reach."
After encouraging Bongok and the workers, Ki-jo went outside with Ma-ryang. A good distance from the factory, lighting a cigarette, he asked, "The plant seems to have found its feet. It should be all right to leave it in Bongok's hands, shouldn't it?"
"I figure it would."
"Then I'll need you and Hansu to help with the trucking."
"Trucking?"
"Yes. Before long we'll be hauling canned beer for the U.S. military."
Ma-ryang nodded. He saw at once that hauling canned beer would be no ordinary job. Korea had no brewery, and yet if you went into a high-class bar and had the money, you could buy a beer and drink it. Where did the stuff come from? Every bit of it was American military beer that had leaked out through the black market. Haul beer, he thought, and all manner of trouble would come of it.
"Don't think of what we're hauling as beer. Go at it as if we were moving ammunition in the middle of a war."
"Understood."
Ma-ryang thought he saw why Ki-jo had left him and Hansu behind in Seoul and Incheon. Hansu was gentle by nature, and as the second-youngest of the five section chiefs, people tended to take him lightly. But Ma-ryang could tell from the boy's ordinary bearing and the look in his eyes: Hansu had more backbone than he showed, and he would fight well. A child who had roamed the mountains since he was small and taken wild game with a bow could not be a careless thing. He was simply kind-hearted, friendly with people and quick to smile, and so his presence did not press hard on anyone.
Riding back to Seoul with Ki-jo, Ma-ryang thought the canned beer would be hauled the way a man ran a military operation. The Cheongsan hands Ki-jo had held back from the match factory, and kept in reserve, were all of them rough, hard-handed men who knew how to use their strength.