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◈ The Hunting Genius of the Japanese Colonial Era

Chapter 73

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The Skirmish (3)

What must not be forgotten is that, right now, Han San and Old Woman Wangdae were locked in a struggle for power.

What is power?

Han Bada, a pillar of the military dictatorship and a six-term assemblyman, defined it concisely: it can only be won through war.

[As for war, my elder brother would know best, having fought real battles and even taken a field commission. But since I retired at the rank of brigadier general myself, let me add a word of my own...

In war, winners and losers are bound to be sorted out.]

What was the condition for Old Woman Wangdae to come out the winner?

Trampling Han San? Establishing her authority over Middle Hamlet and Lower Hamlet?

No.

It was maintaining the status quo.

Upper Hamlet sat at the top of Sebeom Valley's ecosystem. Old Woman Wangdae ruled Upper Hamlet, and Upper Hamlet ruled the hamlets below it.

In this land where the legend of the three Mountain Lord Mamas had been handed down, that rule was total, spanning the spiritual and the practical, and—until the lower hamlets came clinging along—the economic as well.

So Old Woman Wangdae had no need to prove anything or make an effort. She already sat in the winner's seat.

[But the champion has the champion's sorrow.]

Winning simply by holding your ground is a clear positional advantage, and at the same time a yoke that dulls the body and the mind.

Every time Han San came back from trading, the water channels in Sebeom Valley multiplied, and praise for him and distrust of Upper Hamlet showed themselves openly—and yet Old Woman Wangdae did nothing at all. When Han San grasped that fact, he saw right through her scheme.

In short, Upper Hamlet was saying this:

[You mean to take Meokbawi Valley for yourselves? Go ahead, then. Can you ignorant bumpkins even handle it? Do as you please. When some irreversible disaster strikes, I can see plain as day your ignorant, vulgar selves weeping and wailing in regret.]

Another thing to understand is that everything in this world happens for a reason.

Everyone is as clever as everyone else. Limits arise only from the constraints of the age and the bounds of knowledge.

If something that looks inefficient had nonetheless held up for long enough, that meant that beyond the ignorance and the oppression, some sliver of rationality dwelt within it.

By the same logic.

'That the Deok-tae clan managed Meokbawi Valley for nearly fifty years, and that the village tacitly allowed it, means some sliver of rationality dwelt in that unspoken pact.'

In the pouring rain, Han San drove his shovel to break open the throat of a water channel, saving one more neighbor's house from flooding, and thought.

'The fact that some management and flood control, however rudimentary, was being carried out.'

Put into more modern language, it went like this.

The Deok-tae clan was a premodern contractor granted a monopoly over Meokbawi Valley. They doled out the valley and its attendant interests as they pleased and pocketed the private gain.

At the same time, Deok-tae spent his own time and his own manpower keeping it up. He kept trash and sediment from piling up, kept the gorge valley from drying out, kept it from overflowing and causing flood damage.

In short, in exchange for taking a decent cut for himself, he had kept the folk above him free of bother.

But then Han San seized Meokbawi Valley from that Deok-tae clan. He opened it up.

Shared it.

Now everyone in the village could use the valley however they wished.

What would happen?

If everyone grew happy, that would of course be wonderful—but the American scholar Garrett Hardin, in an essay he contributed to Science in 1968, pointed out that reality was not so beautiful.

The name of that essay was The Tragedy of the Commons.[1]

A month earlier, when Deok-tae had Meokbawi Valley taken from him and was left stranded like a duck's egg on the Nakdong River, Upper Hamlet held a council to deal with it.

Yun Cheom-ji, one of Upper Hamlet's powers, wore a clear, serene smile the whole time and said simply,

"Leave it be."

They needed only to sit quietly and wait, Yun Cheom-ji said.

When Deok-tae lost Meokbawi Valley, Upper Hamlet could have played many moves.

They could have mobilized all their manpower to back Deok-tae, or forced a one-sided concession out of Han San under the guise of a seemingly neutral mediation.

But Old Woman Wangdae, and Upper Hamlet with her, did none of it.

They simply let Meokbawi Valley be opened—without seizing it. Without blocking it. Without warning.

Without so much as a scrap of advice.

They left the water channels of Meokbawi Valley free for anyone to use as they liked, and stood by even as Han San's fame rose—perhaps they had even planted spies to egg it on.

Because summer was near.

Because it was the monsoon season.

Because the great power of nature would give a proper schooling to those bumpkins who, with not the least knowledge nor shame, drew off the water and used it however they liked, at the mercy of their own greed!

But entrusting everything wholly to nature carried its own risk, of course.

'Surely Old Woman Wangdae can't actually bend the weather to her will?'

Hoisting one terrified child onto his back and carrying the child out of a house half-collapsed under a surge of dirt, Han San thought that.

And in fact the ploy seemed not to be working. This year's monsoon season had ended as if it never even came. It was the very moment Upper Hamlet's dignity was about to lose a little of its shine.

But by an incredible coincidence, this was the year Typhoon 3383[2] arrived.

Rain that poured as if the sky were tearing open. Beastlike wind and rain that raged back and forth across all of Seorak.

Disaster—especially disaster on a scale no human's paltry head can comprehend—makes a person humble. Because that is the essence of the divine.

When the people do not fear majesty, then great calamity descends.

If the common folk do not fear majesty, great crisis will strike!

Suffer the pain of a house washed away, of family injured, of a few—perhaps a few dozen—dead. When such tragedy struck, the bumpkins who had run wild without knowing how high the sky was would at last learn their own vulgarity in their very bones.

Only then would those bumpkins accept that they had been under the protection of a greater being all along. They would repent, atone, and take refuge.

And that was not all.

'All the arrows of that anger and resentment would have poured down onto me.'

Beginning with "there was never anything like this when the Deok-tae clan had Meokbawi Valley firmly in hand," they would have frothed at the mouth: "Why did you go poking your nose in for nothing, dividing up Meokbawi Valley among us and causing this tragedy?"

By that time, Han San's fame, which had risen so high, would have been nothing but a prelude to hurling him down into a pit that much deeper.

The problem was that Han San was in Middle Hamlet.

Han San—the returnee who had survived a hellish age and come back having seen the future—knew far more than that.

Upper Hamlet meant to do nothing?

Meant to stand with hands behind their backs and wait until Middle Hamlet and Lower Hamlet came clinging and begging?

'In that case,' Han San thought in the pouring rain, baring his teeth in a beastly grin, 'go on doing nothing from here on out too!'

Choices come with consequences.

At a glance, Upper Hamlet's choice looked clever. They believed they could flaunt their presence merely by standing by, with no need to expend strength or resources.

But they overlooked one thing.

What if, in that moment of crisis when everyone had fallen into despair, someone stepped forward and took all that disaster head-on?

What if he solved it?

Where would the hearts of those bumpkins Upper Hamlet had looked down on and mocked come to rest?

The answer was given by the Middle Hamlet Husband Youth Corps, which swelled at an accelerating pace as time passed.

"Pull! Harder!"

"It's lifting! It's liftiiing!"

Shouts that tore the sound of the rain to shreds rang through Middle Hamlet. In those people's hands—the Middle Hamlet husbands' hands—a thick rope was lashed to the wall pillar of a log cabin on the outskirts that had tilted halfway over.

Rain squalls like the claws of a wild beast hammered their bodies, but the oil-soaked waterproof coats they wore at least kept their arms and legs from being snatched away.

"Uh—ryaaaaaah!!"

Not everyone from Upper Hamlet was such an elegant beast, either, and Im Baechil, Upper Hamlet born, had come out here too, veins standing on his neck as he heaved on the rope.

"Well done, Baechil-hyung! Uncle Choi!"

Just as the sweet-hot smell of exertion came panting out of their mouths, Han San slipped like a thunderbolt in under the pillar where it had finally lifted a little.

"Sajang! Danger—"

Chuk Hong-cheol clicked his teeth and cried out before he knew it, but a moment later Han San came swiftly back out, a half-fainted woman on his back.

"Honey!"

The one man here who had been pulling the rope bare-handed, with no waterproof coat and no gloves—the master of this crumbling house—felt tears burst from his eyes.

Han San tossed his head back to shake the water from his hair and shouted.

"Uncle! I know how you feel, but right now take your wife to our house! Uncle Park! Jun-ha-ssi! Help him! The weather's a mess and the path's dark, so Jae-seok-ssi, guide them so nothing goes wrong!"

"A-all right! San!"

"Yes, sajang-nim!"

So that couple was guided to Han San's house, and the same procedure the Choi family and the Park family had gone through unfolded.

Wash the body, eat hot meat porridge. The wife was put to work inside, and the husband came back to the site in a waterproof coat and gloves, gear in hand.

"Wh-where in the world did you get things like these..."

To the Middle Hamlet Husband Youth Corps rookie (five minutes since joining), who came back kitted out with gear as if he'd been packaged in a factory and muttered like a man whose soul had left him, Chuk Jun-ha grinned and said,

"Ah, where else! These are all things our sajang-nim and the grand old sajang and the grand old madam prepared one by one."

The moment Han San caught on to Upper Hamlet's true intent, he had prepared these things in his spare moments and asked his mother and father to help—and now they were shining like this.

"San..."

"San."

"San!"

The rescued came back to the site and rescued others, and those people came back again and supported still others, and in only a few hours the Middle Hamlet Husband Youth Corps had grown to include nearly all of Middle Hamlet.

A little later, that "nearly" fell away too.

"Sajang! This is the last house!"

Chuk Hyeong-don, coated in mud, shouted with vigor.

Behind him, all the neighboring husbands of the Middle Hamlet where Han San lived his life were looking up at him, an eerie heat about them even in the wind and rain.

Han San swept back his wet hair and grinned.

"Good!"

The Middle Hamlet folk grinned too. The downpour was as strong as ever, the wind striking their faces as strong as ever, and still they grinned like madmen.

"We really did hit them all!"

"Didn't even take a few hours! Well, how many people even live in our village!"

"That's right! Put the men's hands together and a thing like this is done in a snap!"

Disaster makes a person humble, but it also plays the fire that tempers.

However much the Water Tiger howled here in Seorak, there was no longer any disorder on the faces of these warriors who had escaped its jaws and hauled their neighbors' bodies out too.

Han San raised the hand holding the pickaxe high.

"Shall we head over toward Lower Hamlet now too, uncles?!"

The Middle Hamlet Husband Youth Corps's reaction was ecstatic.

"Ah, of course! Those money-grubbing greenhorn gents, living in the lowest-lying ground of all—who knows how they're faring. We, who've lived here a long time, ought to help such frail gents; I knew it right off!"

"Me too! I knew it too!"

"The song of support ringing out across Middle Hamlet...!"

As a result of Upper Hamlet choosing to stand by like that, Sebeom Valley's old ecosystem was smashed to pieces amid the great disaster of Typhoon 3383.

All of this happened in a single day.

As if it were the exact opposite reading of the verse "when the people do not fear majesty, then great calamity descends"—

Once the common folk begin to stop fearing majesty, the side that once held that majesty can no longer rule those below!

And so, later, Park Il could not help grousing to Yun Cheom-ji, seated across from him.

"Yun Cheom-ji."

"..."

"Didn't you tell me to wait?"

"..."

"You said if we waited they'd all come crawling of their own accord, so I waited, and now the whole game's collapsed..."

And so Yun Cheom-ji added his name to the roster of figures who did nothing but wait and ended up the fool. It was a great achievement rivaling that of the manager of the Korean national team at the 2026 World Cup.[3]

[1] "The Tragedy of the Commons" is a 1968 essay by American ecologist Garrett Hardin arguing that individuals acting in their own self-interest will deplete a shared, unregulated resource, even when doing so harms the group as a whole.

[2] The typhoon numbering here follows the East Asian convention of naming storms by year and sequence (e.g. the 33rd year of Shōwa, third typhoon of the season), rather than a personal name.

[3] A tongue-in-cheek anachronistic aside by the narrator (Han Bada), referencing a real-world national football team's management decisions as a byword for costly indecision.

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