inferno, in the form of World War II, that would claim the lives of
millions. B.C. had both financial and patriotic reasons for entering business
—even if it meant working with his Japanese overlords.
“Koreans have no solidarity. Therefore, they cannot be expected to
manage something like a joint venture,” he wrote. “At the time, the
Japanese looked down on us in this way....My decision to embark on a
joint venture had financial reasons, but there was also an unyielding desire
to prove such scorn wrong.”
Born in a rustic rural town called Uiryeong, B.C. had an upper-class
upbringing; he studied economics at Tokyo’s elite Waseda University, a
pipeline for Korea’s future leaders. He had to drop out of college after a
year due to illness, returning home to a country in disarray. Koreans would
soon be forced to worship at Japanese shrines in reverence to the Japanese
emperor. They were required to speak Japanese in public. Korean laborers
and prostitutes were being shipped off in the service of the Japanese
military.
After B.C. was forced to shut down a failed rice-trading venture in
1937, he took time off to travel in China and Korea for a year and study the
markets. During this time he noticed a gap in the fresh produce market. In
March 1938 he opened a vegetable and dried fish shop at the site where I
would stand on that chilly autumn day in October 2013. It had nineteen
employees, bringing in fresh produce from the countryside and shipping it
to China and Manchuria, the industrial base of the Japanese war effort, in
what is today northeast China.
He named his vegetable shop “Samsung Sanghoe,” the “Three Stars
Shop.”
“In placing my hopes in this new business venture, I chose the name
myself. Looking back even now, it was a name that brimmed with drive,”
he wrote in his memoir. “The ‘sam’ [‘three’] in ‘Samsung’ symbolizes the
big, the many, and the strong, and is a number that our people like the
most. ‘Sung’ [‘star’] means to shine brightly, high above, its light pristine for
all of eternity. Be big, strong, and eternal.”