The Tongnyeong's Ambition (4)
The mood in the conference room had grown a shade darker.
"Ministers. Do you know the secret to a truly fine cut of pork?"
"I beg your pardon?"
I had summoned the cabinet without warning and launched into a discourse on pork, and the faces around the table went blank with confusion. Among them I turned to Park Yung-hyo, the Minister of the Interior, whose expression had taken on a particularly vacant cast of late.
"Not long ago, while I was touring the Ban-chon quarter near Sungkyunkwan, some of our people in the butchering trade treated me to a few cuts of meat. As they packed a catty of pork for me to take, they said, 'These French boars we brought in have plenty of flesh on them, so they sell well enough — but unlike the sows, once they get their blood up, the meat turns so tough you hardly know what to do with it.' So I told them—"
Ever since the Republic had made two friends in Europe, manufactured goods had poured in from both countries in overwhelming volume — but that was only half the story. I had deliberately hounded the French Foreign Ministry, running myself ragged to secure breeding rights from their livestock programs. The result was already visible: cargo ships laden with pigs and chickens from the south of France were docking at Gunsan, while American cattle streamed through the port of Busan. The recent improvement in the rice-and-soup bowls served in Hanseong's eating alleys and taverns was owed entirely to that effort.
I pressed on.
"Except for the ones you'll breed to keep the line going, cut the balls off every last one of them. That ought to take some of the fight out of them, don't you think?"
A queasy look passed around the table. And how, exactly, would Your Excellency know a thing like that? their faces asked. I ignored the stares on purpose and delivered the next conclusion in a voice as even as still water.
As expected, the remark went well beyond anything they had imagined. Some faces went pale. Others looked at me as if they could not trust their own ears. I kept on, laying out my theory of international diplomacy for the lot of them.
"To pursue the Kingly Way, mediated through Neo-Confucianism and grounded in the spirit of the Three Principles of the People — that is right and proper. But toward the hostile states that stand in the path of our Republic, our people, and the radiant glory of the Korean nation, we will need to be a little more cruel."
"I am not entirely certain, Your Excellency, what you mean by—"
"I am saying only this: among the neighbors that ring this country, this Republic, a certain amount of pruning is in order."
I meant every word. If it would guarantee this nation's permanent peace and stability, and the inexhaustible glory of our people, I was prepared to start a world war rather than chase some endless revolution toward universal justice and the equality of all mankind.
"The continent will stay quiet for a while. From the beginning, the fruit of the Tripartite Alliance was never that Pacific League I talked up with such a thick coating of bluster, nor some lofty dream of permanent prosperity in which a three-nation economic assistance treaty would shower wealth on everyone. The Tripartite Alliance is nothing more than a pretext — a device to ensure that no power capable of unifying the Central Plains is born for centuries to come."
That was the truth. It was the conclusion of a relationship I had planned and built from the first brick. I had never wanted the Chinese nation to sit down in earnest and debate the equal rights and liberties of human beings. I wanted them to go on living this age exactly as they were living it now. For them to settle for the present, or to look away until they grew used to the sufferings of this world and fell behind — that was what served our people.
And division.
That part of the plan I had explained to no one, and this was not the place to air it. I swallowed it in silence and turned the ministers onto another subject.
"Then how ought we to handle the island country next door?"
"In time, they too will need to be muzzled."
The answer came from a quarter I had not expected. I turned my head toward the voice.
It was Lee Wan-yong, the Special Secretary — his face a shade darker, a little more weathered by the sun, than at our last meeting.
Silence spread through the room. I looked at him for a long time without speaking.
The reunion was a somewhat uncomfortable one, but his answer was correct. I had been hoping, without quite saying so, for precisely this sort of reply from the cabinet — and Lee Wan-yong, who had most recently handled the dirtiest work of anyone present, had simply come nearest to it first.
From what he said next, though, it was clear that while his recent assignments had opened his eyes, he had not yet thought seriously about the concrete business of how we were to castrate Japan and take the reins. Perhaps it had only been that animal instinct of his, the one that let him read the current of a room as if by witchcraft.
"A method, however, does not readily present itself. We are neighbors, yet one cannot ignore the sea that fills the distance between us. And to raise the old humiliation at Ganghwa Island now would be no different from dousing the people's spirits — spirits burning like a prairie fire on the news of victory after victory in the North."
It was here that I realized how much Lee Wan-yong had learned on that brief excursion abroad. The man who, just before leaving Hanyang, had treated people like a machine during his interview with me was gone. He had learned, while fabricating photographs and incidents, to watch the eyes of the press; and he had grasped both the prestige of the Republican government and the fiery temperament of the Korean people.
I told myself it was only that a change had come over him, as one had come over Yun Chi-ho, and I threw the answer to the ministers.
"If you shift your thinking a little, there is no need for us to cross the water at all."
"What do you mean by that, Your Excellency?"
"We do not go over to them. We arrange for them to come over to us. Is that not the simpler thing?"
I had all but handed them the answer, and still they cocked their heads. Even Choe Ik-hyeon, the Minister of Agriculture — the eldest man in the room, and the Neo-Confucian scholar of the highest repute — was among the baffled. The old dynastic style of address had been abolished as a relic of the former regime, and with it the name of every ministry and subordinate organ had been comprehensively replaced. He muttered that he could not get a purchase on the idea at all, and that the young, as ever, saw farther than their elders.
I spoke to the ministers who still could not find their bearings.
"Consider the enemy's weak point. They opened their ports to the Western powers more than ten years before we did, that much is true — but for every step they took toward modernization and industry, the Western nations stripped them of a corresponding measure of wealth. The Japan that the Gentlemen's Observation Mission toured may not have been Japan as it truly was."
At first, a quiet refusal. They offered no rebuttal, but their faces would not simply believe me. That was the trouble with first impressions. It was hard to admit, but Japan was at present the most advanced nation in the Far East, and a considerable number of this age's intellectuals carried, each in his own measure, a debt of inferiority toward that outward face.
It might simply be wounded pride talking.
Those who had belonged to the Observation Mission, or who had visited Japan any number of times for private reasons, put on a look of mild distrust and stared at me as if issuing a challenge. But I had the knowledge of the twenty-first century, and on that foundation I had already issued the Ministry of Finance its orders to investigate. The early going had been difficult, yet once I drew in the monk Yi Dong-in — a man with old ties to Kim Ok-gyun — as an intelligence agent, I had been able to gather a good deal more evidence on the state of Japan.
With a look of complete conviction I made my declaration to the ministers, and in particular to the young Turks of the Gaehwadang and the pro-Japanese officers who had come up through the military academy.
"We have lived it ourselves, and we are living it still: there is no such thing as goodwill without a motive. The colonial empires of the great powers never hesitate, given the slightest opening, to slip a collar around the neck of a weaker country. The only way to throw off that yoke is to stand up and fight their pressure in the open. That is precisely why, immediately after the revolution, I refused the countless secret offers of compromise and submission that the Qing dangled before us, and declared a revolutionary war that might well have driven our people into still deeper suffering. A brief submission might have bought us a short peace — but it would have been a slow suicide we pronounced upon ourselves."
And that was the force that allowed the Republican People's Army, for all its shortages of training and firepower, to keep driving the Qing troops in Liaodong before it. The morale of an army whose ranks, from top to bottom, were locked together by a single purpose, a single cause, and a single justification did not break easily — and beneath the surface of a revolutionary war, this conflict had the strong character of a war of independence, a defensive war in all but name.
The Political Officers posted to every battalion and regiment preached it daily: you must defend your home, your family, your country. The soldiers of the People's Army, armed in ideology, or convinced that through revolution they had seized the rights of the people with their own hands, carried a kind of superiority into every engagement against a Qing army that lost and lost again. That confidence had been transmuted into a morale and a fervor that would not readily die down. An infinite engine, in so many words.
"For the same reasons, Japan has merely chosen a brief submission. They have the temperament of fighters, the same as we do, and they are the sort of men who believe their own Kingly Way is the correct one. So they, too, have kept honey on their lips and a dagger in their guts, and they harbor a grudge against the Westerners who shattered their peace. But they never had the courage to sound the trumpet of a people's revolution, and the old vow to kneel for a time in the name of revenge has gone dull against the modest wealth and convenience that Western technique brought them. All we need do, then, is strike at that spiritual weakness — at their fear."
And Japan's circumstances were, by rights, much the same. No — the history that would one day soak twentieth-century Japan in blood and ruin was precisely that history. They had shuddered at the terror of invasion pressing in from without, driven their own people without mercy, and in the end made war upon the entire world. One could pick apart the causes of that war — economic depression, natural disaster, ideological background, and the rest — but set all of that aside, and Japan's condition was still the bottomless fear and dread its own people nursed toward the foreigner.
At that moment Yun Chi-ho, Director of the Public Security Committee — the only man in the room whose face showed he had been genuinely moved by the speech — asked a question, his eyes bright.
"When you speak of a weakness of spirit, Your Excellency…?"
I answered without a flicker of hesitation, and a short gasp broke around the table. At the center of it stood Master Choe Ik-hyeon. He cried out a single word.
"A teacher!"
I nodded to him with a set face and went on.
"Our Republic set a clear road before the people, and the people, judging that road to be the right one, threw themselves into the revolution. That is how our cause was at last able to awaken into a true cause. But what of Japan's circumstances? Together with the comrades who once cried 'Overthrow the shogunate,' they toppled the Tokugawa bakufu of Edo — a house that had enjoyed a robust golden age for fully two hundred and fifty years — and believed they had moved their emperor to the true center of power. Look at them now. Japan has split again, into Satsuma and Choshu; into Kyoto and Tokyo; into constitutionalism and a feudal oligarchic dictatorship, locked in conflict; into Ezo and the people of the home islands. Why should that be?"
Why? Because from the moment they 'overthrew' the one thing that bound everyone together, they never once considered what would replace it. To be honest, the Restoration of Imperial Rule was just another round of political struggle. No — it was nothing more than the anti-shogunate faction teabagging the bakufu to prove they had won.
If those men had truly wanted peace, a better future for Japan, a defense against foreign invasion — what would have been so disadvantageous about a union of the imperial court and the shogunate? The Restoration of Imperial Rule was an excuse. They had simply nursed a deep grudge against a bakufu that, through two hundred and fifty years without political change, a stable age, had done nothing but kick away the ladder whenever they tried to climb.
And so, even though the Meiji Restoration had brought industrialization and modernization to a successful close, it had never matured politically — and in the end it could not prevent that unfortunate business of the military running wild. They had already left a precedent in which blood was how you seized power and settled everything. What were their descendants supposed to watch and learn?
But our Republic was different. Our people were different.
"A firm cause."
The ministers turned the words over several times. I kept talking at the men lost in thought.
"In the end they cried out for change, but the cause they raised at the time was one they themselves forgot, and that those who finally dismissed it as a joke came to the end they deserved. It would have gone far better if they had at least remembered the purity of it — that it began as a struggle for survival, a thrashing about to defend the country from foreign invasion."
If the whole of the Japanese people had possessed a cause of their own that all of them could accept, a birthright around which high and low might unite, they might have been spared the misfortune of the military running wild and, companionably, walking into the atomic bomb. A birthright, after all, is a concept that begins with respect for the life of the other and for one's own.
I remembered the orange flash that had met me in Seoul, and a shudder ran through me. It had happened only once. Once was enough.
And so I had decided. In this age, in this world, I would leave no such precedent.
A number of the younger ministers, caught by the hardness of my will and the look in my eyes, surged to their feet and swore.
"I will stand with you."
"I will stand with you as well, Your Excellency."
"I so swear."
A relay of loyalty oaths, begun in the old call-and-response of men receiving an order and repeating it back. They were all familiar faces, most of them from the Gaehwadang and the cadet faction. I did not check the speeches and vows that broke the rhythm of the meeting. I waited in silence until they had finished their ceremony.
When Yun Chi-ho at last sat down again, his eyes bright with joy, I declared the session back in order.
"Very well. Minister of Finance — you may begin."
The man I had named rose quietly from his seat. He was the man who held the Republic's purse: a walking moneybag. Eo Yun-jung.
"Eo Yun-jung, Minister of Finance, delivering the briefing. First: the greater part of Japan's economy and industry is financed by the British pound, the American dollar, and the franc of the French Republic. Of these, the nation that has extended the largest volume of credit is, naturally, Britain."
He had the Ministry of Finance clerks distribute a report, arranged in the now-familiar columns of a spreadsheet, one copy for each of us. They had recently been able to purchase printing presses at a bargain from America and France, and here was the result, arriving even onto the desks of our conference room.
For a long while the only sound that filled the chamber was the whisper of pages turning.
Then Yi Yong-ik — sitting as representative of the Hanseong Central Promotion Society, and at the same time as Vice-President of the Korean Federation of Business — raised his hand with a question.
"This section indicates that the Banque de France and several commercial banks have recently demanded early repayment of their loans. What is the significance of this?"
Just as he said, a chart leaped off the page, a graph that climbed to a strange and startling height: the enormous bonds and loans the Japanese government owed to France.
"I will explain that myself."
I stepped in once I had confirmed it. This was the underside of the last war, a side they did not know.
"France backed the shogunate. Britain, on the other hand, backed the men who meant to overthrow it."
"You are saying they intervened in a civil war?"
Most of those present today had never known that such a thing had happened. When a few of the ministers and vice-ministers who had studied abroad chimed in, uncomfortable, that the account I was giving was accurate, the gazes of the elderly ministers and observers from the Confucian literati went sour. I could hear the thought ringing in their heads as clearly as if it had been spoken.
There it is. You can never trust a Westerner!
So rather than contradict them, I took the direct approach. I would egg them on. Their thought was the correct one.