B.C. admired the Japanese people’s resilience. Already a new
generation of Japanese entrepreneurs, trained in the military and toiling
away in their bomb-damaged offices, were experimenting with new
technologies that would bring them global success in the decades to come:
Sony, Toyota, and Honda. These new companies were called the keiretsu,
and they were run not always by families but by shareholding collectives
between companies, centered around a private bank, marking a break in
Japanese business tradition. They decided to embrace the keiretsu (“group”)
corporate structure because the U.S. military government banned holding
companies, in its attempt to remove the zaibatsu families.
South Korea followed with its own ban on holding companies. But its
business leaders were determined to keep the zaibatsu practice of top-down
family rule. So they embraced the cross-shareholding practices similar to
Japan’s newer keiretsu companies, and found loopholes to pass those cross-
shareholdings to their children, through charitable donations and mergers
within their business empires.
Two months after his tour of more than fifty factory and business sites
in Japan, B.C. came home to South Korea to shocking news.
On June 25, 1950, North Korean communist forces had crossed the
thirty-eighth parallel and invaded the South.
“Past noon and until evening,” B.C. wrote, “trucks filled with soldiers
continuously raced through Seoul, headed north. Citizens were clapping for
them, wishing them victory and good fortune. What is to become of the
business, or beyond that, my life?”
After staying up all night with his family, B.C. heard a thunderous
sound. He looked outside to see an unfamiliar tank displaying the North
Korean flag on its turret. The enemy, he realized, had entered Seoul.
Four days later, party officials knocked on the door, demanding to
inspect his assets and test his ideology. Capitalists were being accused of
collaborating with the Americans and Japanese. They were brought before
“People’s Courts” in public squares, where they were executed by firing
squad. North Korean soldiers and local opportunists broke into Samsung’s
warehouse and looted the company of its inventory.
Two weeks later B.C. saw a powerful communist chief riding around in
a late-model American-made Chevrolet. “I recognized that it was my car,”
he wrote. “I felt an anger that could not be put into words.”