East Asian Welfare Center (3)
Taesu had stepped in because Kim Sangro had been talking to him about welfare on the Japanese side.
I mentioned China earlier, but Japan is the same. Even if a Joseon subject drifts ashore in Japan, they give him all sorts of provisions and send him back. The same goes for a Japanese person who washes up in Joseon.
Well, if the other side is providing welfare, there’s no way Joseon can refuse to do the same.
At this time, stranded castaways are handed back and forth through Dongnae Waegwan and Tsushima.
And?
China is the suzerain state, so it doesn’t ask Joseon to reimburse the cost of relief. It would be beneath its dignity. But Joseon and Japan do not serve one another, so the state has to foot the bill.
For example, when a Japanese person drifted into Joseon, Joseon returned the castaway and billed Tsushima for the expenses incurred. The reverse worked the same way.
There was nothing yet quite like the drift-ship clause that would later be included in modern opening treaties, but the basic principle was already there.
What does that have to do with us merchants? That’s a state matter. Even if money changes hands, the office—Dongnae-bu—would be the one receiving it.
That’s where it gets important. In principle, Japanese subjects aren’t supposed to be sent back overland. If they drift ashore in Jeju, they have to be ferried by sea to Dongnae and handed over to Tsushima.
Obviously, that was because of spies.
Hamel, another castaway, had also been allowed to return to the Netherlands only after agreeing to spill every scrap of Joseon’s information to Japan once he escaped. There was a reason they had been made to push around weed-cutters in the market.
But what Kim Sangro was talking about had nothing to do with national security.
The boats for Dongnae have to be arranged by the Jeju magistrate. If they try to seize the vessels of lowborn local sailors like me, that would be risky. If a flimsy boat is used and gets damaged again, the responsibility would be huge.
Taesu thought, so what you’re really afraid of isn’t spies—it’s that those cash-strapped Jeju riffraff might skim some Japanese sailors off the sea and turn pirate—but he kept that to himself.
So you’d buy merchants’ boats, or use naval vessels?
The naval boats are all rotting away—what would there be to use? It’s not just buying a merchant’s boat. We’d hand the task over and have them carry it out.
By then Taesu had caught on.
It was exactly like a twenty-first-century government outsourcing welfare services.
Anyway, on this one point alone, Joseon had surpassed the modern world: privatization.
Japan pays Dongnae-bu, Dongnae-bu pays Jeju, and Jeju pays people like us?
That’s right. That’s why I said it was a little complicated. Still, it’s far more proper than drifting deliberately around the coasts of China, Japan, or Joseon. No need to worry about losing your head, either.
To Taesu, it sounded more like courier work, so it didn’t offend his conscience.
As he mulled that over, he noticed something else strange in Kim Sangro’s story: a country he had never heard of.
I understand the rest, but I’m just curious—why would a Joseon subject drift along the coast of Joseon?
Joseon would never relieve Joseon subjects. The Joseon Taesu knew was a country that took relief from its own people.
But Joseon people were always wiser than Taesu gave them credit for.
Why, they cut their hair and lie about their names, pretending to be Chinese.
Taesu imagined a pack of improvised Huang Feihong types saying, “My name is Mao Zedong, and this one here is Xi Jinping.”
Compared to that, the Harbin crew forging passports like mad in twenty-first-century China suddenly seemed almost sincere. No matter how openly Korean companies treated personal data like a public good, Taesu knew that kind of fraud still took real money.
I suppose now I understand why they’re so determined to keep the country shut.
With the state’s pathetic ability to control anything in this era, the moment they gave up even seclusion, the country would be ruined. The foreign threat was bad enough, but the domestic one was worse.
Taesu looked at the man who embodied seclusion itself.
Heungseon Daewongun probably did it because he judged that to be the right course. The problem was that even with seclusion, the country still collapsed.
Still, more important than any of that was the East Asian welfare-center outsourcing business.
Taesu called Yi Ha-eung over.
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He didn’t know why that lowborn wretch was the one making the proposal, but in the end Taesu’s idea sounded sensible enough even to Yi Ha-eung.
These people had to be sent back to Japan as quickly as possible—and quietly.
There was no other choice. If the shogunate was still in its right mind, it would be cautious about one failed spy operation for a while.
“So you’re saying we should classify them as castaways unrelated to the shogunate and send them back? And ask the Jeju magistrate to handle things smoothly?”
“That’s right. They weren’t even shipwrecked while trying to invade us, so why stir up trouble on purpose by dragging the civil office—no, the magistracy—into it? Our cargo’s almost all loaded anyway, so go and come back fast.”
It was the tone of a man talking to a royal prince as if he were some day laborer waiting around the side of the road.
“...I know you don’t serve anyone, but isn’t that a bit much? We’re not serving you, either, you know.”
Taesu thought about it for a moment.
Well, someone like Yi Ha-eung was a little too much to treat as a free public AI. He could read too.
So Taesu paid the monthly fee for the premium option.
Yi Ha-eung found himself speechless when he saw Park Axe casually fishing a basket of tangerines out of the trade goods.
“Go have some tea with your friends and eat these as snacks.”
“They’re not snacks, they’re tea sweets. No, that’s not the important part—”
Yi Ha-eung was just about to ask whether this was supposed to be his wages when he shut his mouth with a snap.
Come to think of it, this wasn’t just about him.
The people who would have to stand at the front and smooth over this Japanese-castaway incident were Park Axe’s so-called “friends.”
Yi Ha-eung and the Crown Prince Hyo-myeong faction.
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It was said that wherever Park Axe went, strange foreign ships seemed to appear and the navy would be doomed, but Park Axe was still only a merchant.
He was outside the state’s traditional public-security apparatus, which specialized in monitoring scholars and the military.
Lowborn people were hard to see unless they were directly committing some major crime. It was a bit like not paying much attention to ultraviolet light you can’t see until your skin starts breaking out in rashes.
That was why there wasn’t a single district magistrate or county commander who had ever even tried investigating Park Axe.
If anyone was investigated, it would be Yi Ha-eung and the Crown Prince Hyo-myeong faction, who had been with him. Crime belongs to the people one wants to punish.
The same would go for the case of the “messenger of the Japanese shogunate who drifted ashore in Jeju.”
Suppose Yi Ha-eung, right here, tried to cut himself off from Park Axe’s welfare project and made a righteous accusation.
That merchant Park Axe had dealings with the drifting Japanese! Those Japanese were surely spies sent by the shogunate to Joseon!
The first question that would come out of Kim Jwa-geun’s court didn’t even need to be spoken aloud.
Then why were you and Kim Jeong-hui there?
...
Oh? You were also there when the English ships attacked Gangjin, weren’t you?
England and Japan? You’ve only ever picked the vilest enemies in the world to conspire with, haven’t you?
So you’re just trying to sacrifice a single lowborn man and cut the tail off, is that it?
It was difficult even to call it a stretch. If a beating had taken place and Yi Ha-eung reported the bat instead of the assailant, that would have been even more ridiculous.
At that point, any excuse would be desperately thin. If he told the truth—that he had gone to see Kim Jeong-hui—then he would become a truthful traitor.
I was strolling aimlessly, reciting poetry and prose at my leisure, when by chance I found myself all the way in Jeju…
The State Council would probably marvel at his talent for walking on water and treat Yi Ha-eung exactly like Christ.
Joseon had no crucifixion, but it did have dismemberment by pulling apart the body, which was no less impactful.
He’d rather not be resurrected, thank you very much. If the precedent from two thousand years ago meant anything, resurrection didn’t come with a wound-healing option. Still, if all four limbs rose separately and started running around, even the doubting apostle Thomas wouldn’t dare say a word.
Yi Ha-eung had no choice but to admit it.
They had to help Park Axe conceal his operation with everything they had.
Even if that operation destroyed the state, it would be the same.
If Yi Ha-eung himself was ruined, that was the end of it. But if the state was ruined, it could be rebuilt.
It wasn’t even his state anyway. It was Kim Jwa-geun’s state.
If you changed “Kim Jwa-geun” to “his own son,” it was probably exactly the thought the real Heungseon Daewongun would have had in history.
Which meant that once he had failed to put Park Axe under his command, everything was already over.
If he couldn’t force that far more powerful man—stronger in violence and wealth alike—into submission through traditional authority, he should have cut the rope then and there.
Why did wise elders usually oppose marriages with a huge gap in family wealth? In the end, it was because the balance of power tilted too far.
It was a law of the world that the young Yi Ha-eung, still too green to know it.
Taesu said it the way a manager of a first part-time job always speaks when he’s the one teaching ordinary Koreans the brutality of the world for the first time.
“Ah, and don’t eat all those tangerines by yourself. Give a few to the Cha family woman at Songbang too—the one in the mill there, Cha Un-hong.”
Yi Ha-eung was not Taesu.
He wasn’t irrational enough to dig in his heels just because his pride was hurt. He didn’t even have an ex-rank axe, after all.
He had Ha Jeong-il tell the Japanese, “We’re sending you back, so don’t be stupid and go on about the shogunate.”
Then he left quietly with the basket of tangerines in his arms.
He and the officials of the Crown Prince Hyo-myeong faction all made a deliberate effort not to dwell on the truth: that in this Jeju, they had effectively become Park Axe’s subordinates, just like people who go through with a marriage everyone opposed and then try not to think about the regret afterward.
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At this time, the Jeju magistrate was Yi Ui-sik, a man who had followed a solid, orthodox military career every bit as impressive as the state-property overlord O Chi-hyeon.
His older brother was Yi Eung-sik, commander of the Royal Guard, so the pedigree needed no further explanation. Yi Ui-sik himself had also earned merit by strengthening Jeju’s defenses against the ever-frequent appearance of foreign ships.
He reexamined the military registers and uncovered seven thousand men dodging service.
Yi Ui-sik proudly reported this, and the court was stunned to learn that one-tenth of Jeju’s population had been dodging military duty. That was why the English bastards had come and gone as they pleased, stealing cattle and surveying the island.
In any case, Yi Ui-sik used the discovery to supplement or establish thirty-one local units, and he separately selected sharp-shooting soldiers to create a special force called the Byeol-a Byeong-po-su.
That had happened just the year before. It was easy to see why the common people of Jeju had come to hate the island’s officials.
But to fully turn a Joseon military project—one that only ever looked great on paper—into reality, money was needed.
When Kim Jeong-hui and Yi Ha-eung visited the magistrate, Yi Ui-sik was in the middle of wrestling with that very problem.
At least it wasn’t a Western ship, so he could relax a little.
A Japanese ship, however, brought with it its own kind of nuisance: the familiar inconvenience of routine work.
“So the Japanese merchants were shipwrecked, were they? Well then, we’ll need to prepare a sturdy boat and send them back. Hmm. That Park fellow from Ganghwado, was it….”
Yi Ui-sik was already speaking as if half his heart had gone over to the idea.
“I’ve heard of him too. This time he came to Jeju and sold a great deal of grain and cotton cloth without gouging anyone, and the local gentry praised him for it.”
Chusa Kim Jeong-hui said it as though he had not personally been pulling the strings behind those local gentry.
“That’s right. He’s just the sort of man worth entrusting with the work, Magistrate. Unlike most merchants, his hands are clean.”
Yi Ha-eung, who was privately wondering whether those hands were clean because they’d been washed in blood, hurriedly added his own endorsement.
“There has been much state business in Jeju lately. This may be a chance to handle it without spending much in state funds.”
At those words, Yi Ui-sik’s eyes flashed with schemes for enriching the state and strengthening the military.
Yi Ha-eung was still too inexperienced to win a beating competition against Park Axe, but he was still a hero of his generation.
The truth was that Joseon was a kingdom of incompetence.
Under King Sunjo, a mere county magistrate had violated the king’s mares, and a mere merchant had openly ignored the king’s anti-monopoly edicts.
Under King Heonjong, some self-important scholar had staged an unprecedented at-home civil service examination on his own, and even the anti-corruption law—which should have been beyond challenge—had been cut down with a “don’t be absurd.”
As for King Cheoljong, there was nothing to say.
It was probably around then that democracy began to sprout in Joseon.
At least up through Heonjong they were still of royal blood, but from there on it really was a kingdom where anybody and everybody could be king.
A king is defined by bloodline alone. Therefore bloodline matters; ability has nothing to do with legitimacy. If you want to choose a king by ability, then just have democracy.
So in principle, once Gojong ascended the throne, there shouldn’t have been any room for Yi Ha-eung to wield power.
After all, this was power that even the king’s father should not have been able to wield in the first place.
Whether it was Won-beom or Gae-ddong, what difference did it make? You could ignore them both equally.
But in actual history, the moment Yi Ha-eung took the title of Daewongun, he swept away the powerful clans and carried out reforms.
Setting aside whether those reforms were a colossal blunder, that should be judged as capability, not backing.
That “ability of Yi Ha-eung” had now, however crudely, begun to show itself here in Jeju as well.
Yi Ha-eung’s words had struck directly at the core of Yi Ui-sik, the Jeju magistrate.
He had said “spend less in state funds,” but that phrase, while avoiding direct responsibility, also led Yi Ui-sik to think of a way to bring in money.
In Joseon, the way to build wealth was through thrift, after all.
Yi Ui-sik immediately wrote up a document.
It was addressed to the Dongnae magistrate.
It said that the Jeju magistrate was assigning Park Axe the outsourced work, and that the Dongnae magistrate should collect payment from the Japanese and hand it over.
As Taesu had expected, there was no need to collect the money in Dongnae and then send it back to Taesu again.
In the end, financial dealings among Joseon offices were extraordinarily active.
That was because each office was, in effect, an independently budgeted armed group—no, an economic unit. Turning government departments into usurers to optimize returns was not some unspoken custom; it was an official job requirement.
In the past, even the state-level battle alchemist Park Mun-su had created value out of nothing by sucking the money out of other offices wherever he was assigned.
He had even once cursed out another official in the king’s own presence, demanding repayment of interest. King Yeongjo, who desperately needed Park Mun-su’s philosopher’s stone, merely called him a mad bastard and let it slide.
Yi Ui-sik also took Park Mun-su the Great Minister as his model.
The money he pushed onto Dongnae as debt acknowledgment far exceeded the usual fee for this kind of contract work. Since Jeju was an island, the cost of goods was a little higher, so there was nothing to be done about that.
And Yi Ha-eung then paid the “government contract procurement fee” he had received from the perceptive Cha Un-hong—because if Park Axe had been told to handle that part, he probably would have hit someone—directly to the magistrate.
That fee would be used closely for the defense of Jeju.
If someone had had the impertinence to ask whether Jeju’s defenses were even capable of stopping foreign ships and whether it might not be better to do nothing instead of drawing resentment, their head would have been smashed like a stone grandfather statue.
With this money as seed capital and the proper trappings in place, the men exempted from military service could no longer dodge forever.
They had to fulfill their service. That meant they had to pay.
And the Jeju magistrate also served as the Jeju defense commissioner. Yi Ui-sik, as military administrator, could use that “defense budget” to buy up Jeju specialties and save the local economy—and his own career in the capital.
In short, it was a joint civilian-military economic drive. What finer scheme could there be?
Having thus contributed to Jeju’s economy, Park Axe’s merchant house launched its boats for a gratifyingly international and solidarity-driven welfare contracting business.
Of course, going straight to Dongnae would be wasteful.
When you privatize something, you naturally end up doing side businesses for the sake of “efficiency.” Once the Railway Office becomes Korail, for some reason it starts doing real estate too.
So first they headed for their original destination: Tongyeong, the Gyeongsang naval headquarters, also known as Samdo Naval Command Headquarters.
Author’s Note
1. When the apostle Thomas heard the news of the resurrection, he said he couldn’t believe it unless he saw it for himself, heard it himself, and put his hand into the wound—and then, after checking, he believed (Gospel of John). In other words, the wound remained exactly as it was.
2. Jeju’s population, according to the household register survey from 1845, two years before the present point in the story, was 76,761. If you include Daejeong-hyeon and Jeongui-hyeon, it seems like it would be even larger.