Donald Kirk

The inside story of the resurgence in Korea of the Rev. Moon's Tongil Group featuring interviews with two of his most favorite sons, one taking care of business, the other the church

On The Cover/Top Stories
Sons Rise in a Moon Shadow
Donald Kirk
Forbes Asia Magazine, April 12, 2010
Reverend Moon's sons are vying, even sparring, to restore a spiritual enterprise.
Days before the Reverend Moon Sun-Myung turned a spry 90 in February, a pair of his sons prominently joined him to inaugurate the new Unification World Headquarters Church in Seoul. The splendid five-floor structure has a marbled lobby, an all-embracing prayer room with Islamic inscriptions and portraits of Christ, Buddha and Confucius, and a main hall large enough to hold 1,200 of the faithful.
The two brothers, Moon Kook-Jin, 40, and Moon Hyung-Jin, at 30 the youngest of the Rev. Moon's seven sons and seven daughters, represent the best hopes for infusing new fervor into the Unification empire as both a business and a religion. The father and his 67-year-old wife, the flock's "True Parents," as they call themselves, now live mainly in Korea, sequestered in their "palace" nestled in mountains halfway between Seoul and the demilitarized zone.
Obviously, much remains of a movement that had peaked by the time the 1997--98 Asian financial crisis devastated the Tongil Foundation, the core Moon business group in Korea. Many of those packing the new hall to pray, applaud and sing along with the man who would be messiah were donors to the $100 million project, which adjoins a modern apartment complex on a prime site near the historic U.S. military headquarters.
But revival, both financial and spiritual, is the mission now. The business empire cum religious movement slowly disintegrated for years. These days Kook-Jin and Hyung-Jin are working in tandem--Kook-Jin turning the nonprofit Tongil group into a viable if secondary chaebol or conglomerate, pumping funds into the church and educational enterprises while Hyung-Jin revs up a congregation once in danger of becoming old and moribund.
Yet the stirrings in Korea find this dynamic duo at odds with an older brother in the U.S., Hyun-Jin, whose Unification Church International (UCI) operation there has grown removed from them and, it would seem, from their father. UCI apparently is not donating funds into the American branch of the church, led by sister In-Jin, 44.
Kook-Jin, as chairman of Tongil, sits at its headquarters in Seoul's prosperous Mapo ward several miles from the new church. Raised as Justin in the U.S., he came into the post nonsalaried but with a living allowance that supports him, his wife and four children in a posh residential district--with a mandate to plug the money drain. "We're starting with the people based on job descriptions and job qualifications," he begins a conversation in his 11th-floor office suite. "I looked at the staffing independent of whether these individuals were church members."
Kook-Jin ordered new it systems, streamlined work flow, brought in "a lot of professionals." Above all, he jettisoned losing companies, stripping the Tongil group down from 34 to 15 with an emphasis on leisure activities, apartment complexes and construction projects. Then there's the Ilwha Company, which makes pharmaceuticals, ginseng tea and a barley drink called McCol. Ginseng is long identified with Moon, and Ilwha's nonfamily president won a nod in March from the Blue House for outstanding Korean business management since the company was rescued from receivership after 1998.
Of the Tongil entities, only Ilshin Stone, which has a quarry in Korea, is publicly traded. After losing heavily as late as 2006, it made $1 million in 2009 on sales of nearly $50 million, but these were down from better numbers posted in 2008.
At the same time, the foundation finances about 20 religious and educational institutions, including the Sunmoon University, 40 miles southeast of Seoul, and the Little Angels, a song-and-dance group that the Rev. Moon's longtime top aide and soul mate, Pak Bo Hi, is taking on a tour to the U.S. in June. And, of course, Tongil donates to the church, though how much, and whether by personal or corporate channels, is not clear.

 

On The Cover/Top Stories
Side (Arm) Business
Donald Kirk, 04.02.10, 02:20 PM EDT
Forbes Asia Magazine dated April 12, 2010

 

Kahr Arms, the pistol manufacturer that Moon Kook-Jin founded fresh out of college in 1993, has nothing to do with the Moon family empire in South Korea or the U.S. But it was the crucible in which he forged his skills as a businessman.
Kook-Jin (or Justin, as he is known to friends and associates back in the U.S.) can no longer devote much time to his unlikely entrepreneurial start. When returning to his American roots, however, he's likely to be at the Kahr headquarters in Pearl River, New York, a secluded village not far from the Hudson River in Rockland County, or visiting its plant in Worcester, Massachusetts. He has seen it grow to annual sales of $20 million. It's a "100% private company," he says, "and I'm the sole stockholder."
Kook-Jin's fascination with small arms is not just a business matter. He took up target shooting as a hobby at age 14 while living on his father's Westchester County estate and prepping for college at the nearby Hackley School. He went on to study economics at Harvard, where Larry Summers was one of his professors and Lawrence Katz, also a noted economist, advised him on his thesis on labor supply and single mothers receiving welfare. Upon graduating magna cum laude he invested his energies in Kahr. (The name has no meaning other than providing a suitably hard-nosed Germanic sound.) "I started it from scratch," he says, but left after a few years to pursue an M.B.A. at the University of Miami. And then he was back at Kahr.
"We make the world's most size-efficient pistol," he says proudly. "For any caliber, our guns are the smallest," and the 9-millimeter model "the most popular," he says. "We sell a lot to police"--and, though he doesn't say so, to a lot of others who favor a small "pocket rocket." Kahr holds seven patents in gun design.
Kook-Jin holds an American passport and crisscrosses the Pacific every few months. He has no chance to engage in target shooting in Korea, where guns of any kind are mostly illegal, armed holdups rare and target-shooting simply not done outside the armed forces.