WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: ZERO_SUGAR
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◈ The Hunting Genius of the Japanese Colonial Era
Chapter 10
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The Real Deal
The market street he stepped into after threading through a few alleys was bursting with life.
"Cotton cloth, anyone need cotton cloth! Real fine cotton!"
"Octopus! Come see his lordship the red octopus, hauled straight from Sokcho by palanquin!"
The shouts of the stall merchants mixed with the voices of customers haggling over prices, all of it humming together.
Han San cut through the crowd like he belonged there. The scenery of 1933 was strange and yet something he had missed. A peculiar age where modern boys in suits and women under veiled skirts shared the same streets.
'Whew.'
Han San lingered a moment, lost in the sight, then shook his head to clear it and pressed on.
After a while, a wooden building caught his eye.
Slash-and-burn settlers, their A-frame carriers loaded with charcoal or dried bracken, were bowing their heads before a Japanese clerk.
"Hey! What's wrong with this charcoal? This isn't even third grade!"
"Aigoo, my lord. Please overlook it just this once. I need to trade for at least some potatoes for my wife and kids..."
"Tsk! Fine, I'll mark it third grade! Next! Did you dig up mushrooms or a pile of dirt?"
A sign on the front of the building read [Inje County Forestry Cooperative].
Han San clicked his tongue.
'No guns or blades, but they might as well be robbers.'
For the sake of sustainable plunder, the Government-General used a leash called [grading].
First grade, second grade, third grade. They slapped on grades however they pleased and tossed out prices that didn't reach even a quarter of a quarter of a quarter of market value, and the settlers took it gratefully.
Because that was the only chance the settlers had to touch currency, the "jeon" and the "won."
In Go Tae-chon's way of putting it, you could call it something like a [guild ques-t window]. The Korean peninsula in this era really was a fantastical world where green forest bandits, guilds, and collection quests all existed.
The problem was that, from the standpoint of a Korean like Han San, you had to slap the prefix "dark" in front of that "fantasy."
Han San pulled his gaze off the Forestry Cooperative without a second thought.
'That's the place only ignorant folk with no connections crawl to, eating mustard while they cry, getting their noses cut off with their eyes wide open.'
To touch real money, you had to break through not the [quest window] but the [exchange].
Quickening his step again, Han San finally stopped before a handsome building raised from red brick.
The sign bore the characters [Cheonbo Pharmacy][1], written in fine flourishes.
Ding-a-ling.
At the sound of the door opening, Ma Jong-sung, proprietor of the pharmacy, looked up from the newspaper he had been reading at his desk.
His finicky eyes swept over the visitor. Shabby cotton clothes, a dirt-caked A-frame carrier. The moment he confirmed the typical look of a mountain slash-and-burn settler, Ma Jong-sung's oily face scrunched up.
"Take your begging somewhere else. Go dump your turd-lumps at the cooperative. Get lost before I call someone on you."
Ma Jong-sung said it with nothing but a jerk of his chin.
The visitor, Han San, paid it no mind. He drew a bottle from inside his coat and set it on the table.
"Badger oil."
"Badger?"
Ma Jong-sung's eyebrow twitched. He picked up the bottle and held it to the sunlight.
A faint glint passed through his eyes.
It wasn't only because this was something hard to come by in these times. It was because the oil inside the bottle was clear, without a single bit of residue.
Looking at the state of the one who'd brought it, the stuff had surely been rendered down in a cauldron, so how had such a primitive method produced something this clean?
'Not bad...'
But Ma Jong-sung, of course, did not put that into words. Never give away even empty flattery for free—that was the first principle of proprietor Ma Jong-sung, a man of Gaeseong merchant stock[2].
If anything, he glared.
"Look at the state of that bottle. You don't even know what hygiene is? Stuff that goes into medicine, in a beat-up bottle like this—look at this, tsk!"
"......"
"One won fifty!"
Ma Jong-sung said it as if granting a great favor.
"Normally I wouldn't even take it, but the kid's pitiful, so I'll give you that. Leave it or don't. If you don't like it, get out."
A small grin caught at the corner of Han San's mouth.
Goods that should fetch three won fifty jeon had been chopped to a quarter right off the bat.
The eighteen-year-old Han San of his past life would have flushed red at once. 'No, it's badger oil! Do you know how good this is for burns!' he would have pleaded. 'Do you know how clean I kept this bottle!' he might have whined, feeling wronged.
The Han San of now was different.
Arguing it out [with his mouth] like that would, at best, drag the haggling up to one won fifty becoming maybe one won seventy. By then his throat would be worn dry, and he'd end up saying ah, fine, taking whatever, and backing off.
Like hell he would.
So instead of his mouth, Han San put his hands to work.
"I was thinking of selling this too."
Han San untied the carrying sack lashed to the top of his A-frame carrier and set it on the table.
Wriggle, wriggle.
Watching the sack writhe and twist, Ma Jong-sung's eyes narrowed.
"And what's this now?"
"What does it look like?"
Han San's hand shot into the sack like lightning and came back out, and Ma Jong-sung's eyes ripped wide open.
"Hiik!"
Hsssss!
A snake with a triangular head and stripes coiling around it tight as the strands of a rope was caught in that hand.
"A, a seven-step snake!"
Ma Jong-sung nearly tumbled back onto his rear. Hsss, hssss! The banded krait thrashed, lashing its tail again and again, but Han San's hand, clamped on its head like a press, did not budge.
If anything, it bore down harder, as if to crush the viper's skull.
"Take a look, boss."
Drip, drip.
That was the sound of bright yellow venom running down the viper's fangs and falling onto the table.
"Just woken from its winter sleep—see this? This, this here. Real fresh, isn't it."
"Uh, uh, uh..."
"This much would be top stuff for a tonic, wouldn't it? Hm? What do you think?"
Ma Jong-sung couldn't get a word out.
How could a man of Gaeseong merchant stock, washed all the way down to Inje, fail to grasp what it meant?
'This bastard... he's the [real deal]!'
His depth was on another level. This was no clueless greenhorn who'd gotten lucky catching a single badger and come trotting in.
You couldn't cheat someone like this.
No, you must not cheat someone like this!
It wasn't that the snake show made him feel physically threatened. No, honestly, he did feel a little threatened, just a fingernail's worth—but that wasn't the only reason.
It was that cheating would harm the second principle of a Gaeseong merchant, the [pursuit of sustainable profit].
'If he were the kind to come once and never again, I'd fleece him to the bone, but...'
Why? Because that was the way to maximize profit.
But a real deal who could pin a snake helpless with his bare hands? Given how the sack was still wriggling, that meant there was one more in there, didn't it?
'Which means he caught them himself...'
By the time Ma Jong-sung had thought that far, Han San spoke with a slight smile.
"Oh, right, boss. I didn't quite catch that earlier... how much was the badger oil again?"
Ma Jong-sung gave a dry cough. He answered faster than flipping his own palm.
"Three won. No, I'll round it to three won fifty."
"That's more like it, right? Then these guys? I've got two of them."
Han San asked while tossing the banded krait back into the sack.
Ma Jong-sung answered quickly.
"Sixty jeon... no. Seventy! Two of them, so one won forty."
"Aw, you've got no heart."
Han San cinched the sack shut.
"Three won fifty for the oil and one won forty for the snakes—that's four won ninety, isn't it." He spread one hand wide open. "Make it a clean palm. Round it to five won."
Ma Jong-sung started to say something, but Han San got there first.
"If I ever come across more snakes, I'll bring them to you first, boss, for sure."
"Sss, this kid..."
Ma Jong-sung wore the face of a man with a bitter taste in his mouth. But that line just now was exactly what he had wanted to hear.
A supplier of the real deal walking in on his own two feet was a perfectly winning trade.
"Here, take it! I'm not leaving myself a single coin, I swear."
Han San took the five one-won bills Ma Jong-sung held out, pocketing them with a slight smile.
"Thank you. I'll come again."
"Yeah, you'd better." Ma Jong-sung grumbled. "But don't come back too soon. Aigo, my heart's still pounding, I tell you."
His coat pocket now nicely padded, Han San left the curse behind and stepped out the door.
Five seconds later he came back.
"Ah, boss. I'll take the bottle and the sack back too. I'm a bit pinched right now, so I have to save every little thing like this."
"Huh? No, taking them is fine. The bottle, sure, but if you take the sack, the snakes inside it..."
"Should I just dump them here?"
"Ah, you crazy bastard! That hemp sack hanging there! Take that—I'll just give it to you!"
"Thank you."
The five won inside his coat sat heavy.
A fortune a dock laborer would have to grind four full days to grasp. The urge rose in him to sweep up the whole market street right then and lay it all in his family's arms.
But Han San did not head straight back to the stalls.
'Gathering information comes first.'
He could hardly do his asking around with an A-frame carrier loaded down on his back.
'And fill the belly a little too.'
Han San grabbed some newspapers at the corner shop in front of the town post office.
"Give me the morning and evening editions as a set."
"Five jeon each, ten jeon total."
"Buying them all at once, no discount?"
"They're from just yesterday. And paper's good for all kinds of things, you know? Pay the list price. I'm not the owner either—I'm only minding the shop for a bit."
Not a chink to wedge a tooth into. Han San sighed and paid what was asked. Then he picked a gukbap[3] house, slid open the door, and went in.
"One bowl of gukbap."
"Yes, sir. Ten jeon."
Twenty jeon flew off like a mountain bird in the span of a few breaths, but it was a necessary investment.
He steadied his stinging gut, sat down, and spread out the papers.
[Showa 8[4], April 7, Friday]
'A Friday paper dated April 7, 1933.'
Han San did not mistake that for today's date. This place was Inje, not Gyeongseong.
The corner shopkeeper had said so himself, hadn't he—it was from yesterday.
Which meant.
'Today is Saturday, April 8, 1933.'
Good. From now on he would use this date as his reference.
Han San's eyes began to skim the type. The memory that had sharpened after his return drank in the information printed in the paper, filing it away along the index in his head.
The biggest news had come from across the Pacific.
[US President's Executive Order... Private Hoarding of Gold Banned, Up to Ten Years in Prison for Violators.][5]
Han San's eyes narrowed.
It was news of an executive order President Roosevelt had signed only three days earlier, on April 5. America, reeling from the Great Depression, was moving to call in privately held gold.
'Was there something going on around this time too?'
His sharpened memory, sure enough, was no help on subjects he had never cared about. The fuss over America and gold and whatnot had been because of that Nixon fellow or whoever, around the time he was past fifty, he thought...
But even without knowing the fine details, seventy-four years of seasoning pierced straight to the heart of it.
'Gold prices are going to shoot up like crazy. No wonder this is around when the place was crawling with men swinging pickaxes.'
It was because Gangwon here was riddled with gold mines too. The age of the gold rush. The frenzy of the gold rush had not skipped over the Korean land ten thousand leagues away.
'Public order's going to turn to garbage.'
His head ached, but on the other hand it wasn't all bad. The murkier the water, the wider the radius a fish gets to swim in.
On top of that, if he managed to build up capital down the line, this drifting riffraff that had rolled in from outside might turn into unexpected help...
Holding a few vague plans in his head, Han San moved on to the next article.
[Pro-Manchukuo[6] Volunteer Army Seizes Haiyangzhen... High Tension Toward Qinhuangdao]
Propaganda lines about the Manchukuo front were splashed across the page in giant letters. On the surface it was a discussion of stabilizing public order, but Han San read what lay beneath.
The Empire of Japan was a monster that never knew satisfaction. Right up to the moment it bit into Pearl Harbor and its belly burst, "more territory" meant nothing to those people but "a wider front."
They would need more supplies.
Sure enough, the very next article backed that up.
[New Capital Construction Five-Year Plan... Large-Scale Road Works]
It was about building roads more than twenty-six meters wide in Hsinking, the capital of Manchukuo, and laying railways underground.
The roads running from the Empire into Manchuria would grow wider than they were now too.
'The new road work sites are going to get bigger.'
Massive construction, carving down hills and boring through forests. Sebeom Valley couldn't escape its reach either. After all, even back when the new road sites first opened, hadn't that pack of riffraff called the Lower Hamlet latched on like a tumor?
"Gukbap's up."
Around then the soup gukbap came out, steaming away. Han San kept drinking in information even as he picked up his spoon, and he didn't stop even after he had read the papers through.
'The newspapers stuck on the walls.'
He hadn't stopped at the gukbap house to indulge in luxury.
Old, out-of-date newspapers pasted thick over the walls in place of wallpaper. Those yellowed bundles of information were enough to bring the past few months leading up to now into sharper focus.
[Rural Revitalization Movement Now in Full Swing Across Gangwon][7]
Han San slurped down a mouthful of broth. The hot soup ran down his gullet, but a chill crept up his spine.
Han San knew well what the seemingly harmless Rural Revitalization Movement actually meant.
'The slash-and-burn settler clearance project.'
In that moment, a bell seemed to toll in his head.
'The flood next year isn't only about the flooding.'
The pickaxes of prospectors, drawn by the gold prices surging out of America, tore up the land for all it was worth.
The road works stretching toward Manchuria felled forest wherever they reached.
The Government-General's pressure on the slash-and-burn settlers, growing fiercer, shook the mountains wherever it reached.
At the end of those vast currents, the Great Flood of the Gap-sul Year next summer—the one that had taken his parents—sat with its maw gaping open.
Han San steadied his breath. Unlike the loose gums of a seventy-four-year-old man, the pure white teeth of an eighteen-year-old youth bit deep into his lip, but his eyes soon settled into cold calm.
'My family comes first.'
Han San cleaned out the rest of the gukbap. The earthen bowl came down with a clack.
"Thank you for the meal."
Han San set down his money and stood. There was one more place he had to stop by to be sure of the situation.
[1] Cheonbo Pharmacy: 천보약당 (天寶藥堂), roughly "Hall of Heavenly-Treasure Medicine" — a herbal apothecary.
[2] The Gaeseong (Kaesŏng) merchants, or songsang (송상), were a famed class of Korean traders known for their nationwide networks and meticulous double-entry bookkeeping; the name was a byword for hard-nosed commercial shrewdness.
[3] Gukbap (국밥) is a humble Korean dish of rice served in, or alongside, a hot meat broth.
[4] Shōwa (昭和) was the Japanese imperial era name used in colonial-era dating; Shōwa 8 corresponds to 1933.
[5] U.S. Executive Order 6102, signed by President Franklin Roosevelt on April 5, 1933, banned the private hoarding of gold during the Great Depression.
[6] Manchukuo (만주국) was the puppet state Japan established in Manchuria in 1932, nominally headed by the last Qing emperor, Puyi; its capital, Hsinking ("New Capital"), is present-day Changchun.
[7] The Rural Revitalization Movement (농촌진흥운동), launched in 1932, wrapped its rural-uplift rhetoric around a drive to clear slash-and-burn settlers off the land.
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