Shin Kyuk-ho was born in Ulsan, then under Japanese colonial rule, in 1921 as the eldest of five sons and five daughters in a farming family belonging to the Yeongsan Shin clan.[page:55] In 1941 he stowed away on a ship to Japan, where he attended Waseda Jitsugyo High School and studied chemical engineering at Waseda University’s kōgakkō, adopting the Japanese name Takeo Shigemitsu.[page:55]

He initially opened a rice-cooker manufacturing plant in 1942, which was later destroyed in an air raid, leaving him an unemployed graduate until he founded Lotte in 1948 as a small confectionery operation.[page:55] Lotte expanded to South Korea in 1967 and grew from selling chewing gum into a major multinational conglomerate, eventually ranked as South Korea’s fifth-largest chaebol by 2017.[page:55]

Among Shin’s many siblings was his younger brother Shin Choon-ho, who founded Nongshim, the South Korean food conglomerate known for instant noodles, creating a parallel food empire alongside Lotte.[page:55] Another relative, nephew Shin Dong-won, is noted in public records as part of the extended Shin business clan.[page:55]

This means the broader Shin family tree branches into at least two major corporate groups: Lotte, straddling Japan and Korea, and Nongshim, rooted squarely in South Korea’s packaged-food market.[page:55] Both lines illustrate how a large rural family from Ulsan produced multiple founders at the top of Korean consumer capitalism.

Shin’s first wife, Noh Soon-hwa, died in 1949; the couple had one daughter, Shin Young-ja, born in 1944.[page:55] Young-ja later became a prominent Lotte executive and, decades on, a central figure in investigations into Lotte-related bribery and embezzlement, illustrating how the first branch of the family stayed embedded in the group.[page:55]

In 1952, Shin entered into a common-law marriage in Japan with Hatsuko Shigemitsu, with whom he had two sons: Shin Dong-joo (born 1954) and Shin Dong-bin (born 1956).[page:55] Much later, in South Korea, he formed another common-law union with Seo Mi-kyung, with whom he had a daughter, Shin Yu-mi, born in 1982.[page:55] This overlapping status led Korean media to describe Seo as effectively a concubine, and Dong-bin himself referred to her as “my father’s girlfriend.”[page:55]

Hatsuko Shigemitsu, Shin’s Japanese partner, was in a long-term common-law marriage with him rather than a formal legal union under Japanese civil law, according to Seoul Shinmun reporting.[page:55] Their sons, Shin Dong-joo and Shin Dong-bin, became central players in the management and succession of Lotte’s Japanese and Korean operations.[page:55]

Dong-joo, the elder son, was for years more prominent in the Japanese arm, while Dong-bin, the younger, ascended within Lotte in South Korea and eventually emerged as group chairman, especially after a high-profile succession struggle between the brothers.[page:55] The fact that both sons carried the Shigemitsu name in Japan while using Shin in Korea encapsulates the binational structure of both the family and the conglomerate.

In Korea, Shin maintained a separate common-law relationship with Seo Mi-kyung, who lived discreetly with their daughter Yu-mi in Seoul’s Bangbae-dong, in what media dubbed a “separate annex.”[page:55] Yu-mi, born in 1982, remained largely out of public view until a public family power struggle in 2015 drew attention to her and her mother.[page:55]

Legal and media debates have questioned Seo’s status, with some calling her a third wife and others insisting that, because bigamy is illegal, she should formally be seen only as Shin’s “informal partner.”[page:55] Yonhap and Money Today reported on allegations that Lotte companies provided favors and business opportunities to Seo and Yu-mi, indicating how this third branch also intersected with corporate assets.[page:55]

Although the article on Shin focuses on his life, related Korean coverage describes a 2015–2016 succession battle in which elder son Dong-joo and younger son Dong-bin fought for control of Lotte Holdings in Japan and Lotte Group in Korea, each claiming their father’s backing.[page:55] The conflict played out in shareholder meetings, cross-border board decisions and media campaigns, while an increasingly frail Shin was wheeled in and out of public appearances.[page:55]

Ultimately, Dong-bin solidified his grip on the group, while Dong-joo was pushed out of key roles, illustrating how the Japanese-leaning elder line lost out to the Korean-based younger line.[page:55] At the same time, sister Young-ja and the Seo–Yu-mi branch sought to protect their own stakes and positions, turning the Shin family into a textbook example of chaebol succession politics.

During Japan’s 1980s–1990s asset bubble, Forbes ranked Shin as the world’s fourth-richest person in 1988, with an estimated personal fortune of 8 billion U.S. dollars at the time, the highest ever for a Korean national.[page:55] By 2006 he and his family ranked 136th on Forbes’ global billionaires list, and in 2009 he placed 38th among South Korea’s richest people.[page:55]

In December 2017, at age 95, Shin was sentenced to four years in prison for embezzling 128.6 billion won (about 119 million U.S. dollars) from Lotte, though he was allowed to remain free due to poor health.[page:55] He had retired as a board director of Lotte Holdings in June 2017 after nearly 70 years in the role, and died in Seoul in January 2020 at age 98.[page:55]

Shin’s long-cherished dream of Lotte World Tower — the sixth tallest building in the world and the tallest on the Korean peninsula — was realised in 2016, three years before his death.[page:55] Korean coverage quotes him saying he did not care whether the tower made profit, as long as it could “raise the national prestige of Korea.”[page:55]

Behind that skyline symbol, however, stands a fractured family structure: a first daughter in legal trouble, two rival sons of a Japanese common-law wife, and a younger Korean daughter and mother whose status remained contested even at his funeral.[page:55] Together with his brother’s control of Nongshim, the extended Shin–Shigemitsu clan shows how the Asian century of family businesses is written in chewing gum, ramyun packets and skyscrapers — and in the quiet legal fictions that hold, or fail to hold, such dynasties together.[page:55]