In my October 16, 2017 article, “In Other Words, the South Korean Government Concealed the Process Leading to the Agreement for Forty Years,” I introduced, through an essay by Mio Sugita, the core of the Japan-Korea Claims Agreement concerning the wartime labor issue.
What is important is the fact that, during the negotiations for the normalization of diplomatic relations in 1965, the Japanese government proposed to the South Korean government that Japan would provide compensation to individuals.
However, the South Korean government asked Japan to pay the funds in a lump sum, saying that compensation to individuals would be handled by the South Korean government.
In other words, an agreement was reached under a structure in which Japan would pay funds in response to the request of the South Korean government, and the South Korean government would compensate its own citizens.
Even more serious is the fact that the information concerning the negotiations over the Japan-Korea Claims Agreement, which lasted for fifteen years from 1951 to 1965, was not disclosed to the South Korean people until 2005.
That is to say, the South Korean government concealed the process leading to the agreement from its own people for forty years.
This is a decisive fact in understanding the wartime labor issue.
Unless one knows the structure in which the South Korean government failed to inform its own people of the truth and shifted that responsibility onto Japan, one cannot see the essence of the wartime labor issue.
At that point, I wrote that instead of reading someone like Haruki Murakami, who grew up reading the Asahi Shimbun and writes novels with a historical awareness resembling that of an agent for China and the Korean Peninsula, people should read the writings of commentators such as Mio Sugita, who fight to restore the truth of Japan and the Japanese people that was lost through GHQ and the distortions after Japan’s defeat.
This shows that my criticism of Haruki Murakami was not merely literary evaluation, but was directly connected to the question of whose words we should read within the history war.
In my November 11, 2017 article, “Because They Are Among the World’s Leading Masters at Putting the People Under Collective Hypnosis and Guiding Public Opinion Toward Their Own Ideology,” I criticized even more clearly the power of propaganda centered on the Asahi Shimbun.
The Asahi Shimbun incited the people before and during the war, and after the war, it reversed course and created a discourse space that turned the Japanese military and the Japanese state into villains.
Concerning the issue of mass suicides in the Battle of Okinawa as well, the responsibility of the Asahi Shimbun-like discourse space, and of Kenzaburo Oe, who cooperated with it, is extremely grave.
Before the war, they incited the people toward annihilation.
After the war, they shifted that responsibility onto the Japanese military.
There could be no more perverse story than this.
I saw the Asahi Shimbun as a master of propaganda, no less than communist one-party China or the Korean Peninsula with its totalitarian character.
Among the world’s leading masters at putting the people under collective hypnosis and guiding public opinion toward their own ideology.
That is the Asahi Shimbun.
Among the scholars and cultural figures who remained in a relationship of complicity with this abnormal discourse space, the representatives most easily understandable to readers around the world were Kenzaburo Oe and Haruki Murakami.
These two are symbolic figures of postwar Japan’s pseudo-moralism and Asahi Shimbun-like historical awareness.
Kenzaburo Oe took part in a false historical awareness concerning the Battle of Okinawa, and Haruki Murakami circulated discourse disadvantageous to Japan throughout the world concerning the Nanjing Incident and the theory of eternal apology.
In the autumn of 2017, I was criticizing them as the two most famous figures within the Asahi Shimbun-like propaganda space.