Republished on August 21, 2020. Drawing on Koji Matsumoto’s examination of the origins of South Korean “anti-Japanese ideology,” this article considers restrictions on Japanese culture, the continuity of administrative and legal institutions from the period of Japanese rule, South Korea’s adoption of Japanese policies and laws, and the contradiction between these realities and its official anti-Japanese narrative.

August 21, 2020
This article republishes a chapter originally released on September 11, 2019.
The following is taken from an article by Koji Matsumoto published in the September issue of the monthly magazine WiLL under the title, “Stand Up to South Korea’s Lies: Why Does South Korea Continue Its ‘Anti-Japanese’ Campaign? Confront South Korea with Historical Truth and Expose Its Fabrications.”
The evaluative statements concerning individuals, countries, and organizations below are retained as statements contained in the original text.

Text

I am republishing the chapter issued on September 11, 2019, under the title, “Alexis Dudden, an agent of South Korea and astonishingly crude and unintelligent, dominates the American historical establishment.”
The following is from an article by Koji Matsumoto published in the September issue of the monthly magazine WiLL under the title, “Stand Up to South Korea’s Lies: Why Does South Korea Continue Its ‘Anti-Japanese’ Campaign? Confront South Korea with Historical Truth and Expose Its Fabrications.”
This is an article that not only the Japanese people but people throughout the world must read.
Unless one reads this article, one cannot understand the postwar history of the Far East at all.
Alexis Dudden, an agent of South Korea and astonishingly crude and unintelligent, dominates the American historical establishment.
The United Nations is the same.
The time has long since come for the international community to recognize and be ashamed of its own ignorance and stupidity.
Above all, there is the Nazism called anti-Japanese education that South Korea, a country of bottomless evil and plausible lies, has continued for the 74 years since the war.
In China, Jiang Zemin began the Nazism called anti-Japanese education in order to divert the people’s attention from the Tiananmen Square Incident, and it continues to this day.
The international community’s failure to confront the Nazism they call anti-Japanese education has created today’s extremely unstable and dangerous world.
China’s increasing arrogance, South Korea’s madness—the madness of the Korean Peninsula—and Putin’s increasing arrogance are all the result of the international community having continued to leave unchecked the Nazism practiced by China and the Korean Peninsula.
Taiwan is pro-Japanese, while South Korea is anti-Japanese?
—Published this March, The Origins of South Korea’s “Anti-Japanese Ideology” (Soshisha) is a major work of 650 pages, with extensive notes, quotations, and references, and it compellingly conveys the background and reality of South Korea’s “anti-Japanese” stance.
Could you begin by telling us what motivated you to write this book?
Editor’s note: Bold passages in the text are quotations from The Origins of South Korea’s “Anti-Japanese Ideology.”
Matsumoto:
In 1982, I was transferred from the Ministry of International Trade and Industry—now the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry—to the Embassy of Japan in South Korea, and I stayed in South Korea for about three years. Throughout that entire period, I kept feeling that something was wrong.
To give one example, at the time there were restrictions on Japanese popular culture, and imports of Japanese films and records were effectively prohibited.
As far as music was concerned, songs with a particularly strong Japanese cultural character, such as kayōkyoku popular songs and enka, were especially targeted.
When I asked the reason, I was told that because Koreans had suffered terribly under Japanese rule, they felt aversion and hostility toward virtually everything Japanese.
But when you think about it, isn’t that a little strange?
If they hated Japanese culture that much, there would be no need for the government to regulate it.
No one would go to see Japanese films or feel like listening to Japanese music in the first place.
There is actually an interesting example from Taiwan.
After Japan’s defeat, Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang government, which came to Taiwan, also adopted a policy of excluding Japanese culture.
Yet for a period of time, it permitted the importation of Japanese films.
Shintoho’s Emperor Meiji and the Great Russo-Japanese War—released in Japan in 1957—was screened, and it is said that whenever Emperor Meiji, played by Kanjūrō Arashi, appeared on screen, the entire audience stood up. This became a major problem, and imports of Japanese films were once again prohibited. (Laughs.)
Perhaps the South Korean government feared that something similar might happen.
People often ask why, although both had been under Japanese rule, Taiwan is pro-Japanese while South Korea is anti-Japanese.
However, I came to think that their underlying attitudes toward Japan might actually be surprisingly similar.
This was more than thirty years ago, but contrary to the “official perception,” I wondered whether South Koreans did not, deep down, truly reject the period of Japanese rule, Japanese culture, or things Japanese.
That gave rise to my awareness of the question: what exactly does this mean?
This was not merely a matter of culture in the narrow sense.
When I walked around the cities, the atmosphere looked very much like Japan.
The scale was smaller, but even the underground shopping districts were not very different from those in Japan.
Government offices were almost exact copies as well.
I had been assigned to economic affairs, so my counterpart was South Korea’s Ministry of Commerce and Industry, corresponding to Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry, and everything from the office layout to the arrangement of desks was almost identical to MITI. (Laughs.)
When you think about it, that is only natural.
The South Korean government inherited the Government-General of Korea from the period of Japanese rule. Officials from the Japanese home islands left, but Korean officials, who had accounted for roughly half of the bureaucracy, remained in place.
That organization became the South Korean government through the period of the U.S. Military Government.
In other words, both the institutions and the people had remained continuous since the era of the Government-General of Korea.
Administrative culture under Japanese rule, the broad framework of organizations, the arrangement of divisions, and other earlier structures were inherited, so it was only natural that they resembled those of Japan.
“Japanese society, just across the sea, was always like a model answer sheet, which Koreans copied furiously.” (Kim Si-bok, 1981)
“The general shape of South Korean politics, society, and culture is developing in a manner that imitates Japanese customs.” (Choi Il-nam, 1994)
To give a more specific example, when I was stationed there, the internal organizations of Japan’s MITI and South Korea’s Ministry of Commerce and Industry contained a number of units with very similar names.
For example, MITI had bureaus called the Basic Industries Bureau and the Consumer Goods Industries Bureau.
In the early 1980s, MITI underwent organizational reform. Terms such as “basic industries” and “consumer industries” had not originally been used, but bureaus bearing those names were created with considerable effort.
Then, shortly afterward, the South Korean Ministry of Commerce and Industry was reorganized, and bureaus with similar names, such as the Basic Industries Bureau and the Consumer Industries Bureau, appeared there as well.
There were also special public corporations everywhere that performed functions very similar to those in Japan.
Whenever a new administrative need arose, South Korea would first investigate what Japan was doing and then establish a special public corporation.
Therefore, when someone from one of these South Korean organizations came to see us, we Japanese officials could usually tell what kind of institution it was simply by hearing its name.
If someone said he was from the Industrial Bank of Korea, we would think that it was essentially something like Japan’s Small Business Finance Corporation, and that assumption was almost invariably correct.
“Don’t you have any Japanese materials?”
I do not know exactly what the situation is today, but as far as I investigated during the 1980s and 1990s, even the wording of legal provisions was extremely similar.
For example, compare Japan’s Trade Union Law, revised in 1949, with South Korea’s Trade Union Law enacted four years later in 1953.
◆Under this law, a trade union means an organization or federation thereof formed primarily for the purpose of enabling workers, acting autonomously as the principal actors, to maintain and improve working conditions and otherwise improve their economic status. Under this law, a worker means any person who lives on wages, salary, or other equivalent income, regardless of the social standing or type of occupation. (Japan)
◆Under this law, a trade union means an organization or federation thereof formed by workers, acting autonomously as the principal actors and uniting voluntarily, for the purpose of maintaining and improving working conditions, promoting workers’ welfare, and otherwise improving their economic and social status.
Under this law, a worker means any person who lives on wages, salary, or other equivalent income, regardless of type of occupation. (South Korea)
The South Korean version is a little longer, but they are very similar.
Furthermore, the first article, “Purpose,” of Japan’s Temporary Measures Law for the Promotion of the Electronics Industry, enacted in 19573 [as written in the original], and South Korea’s Electronics Industry Promotion Act, enacted in 1969, is almost identical.
◆The purpose of this law is to contribute to the sound development of the national economy by promoting the electronics industry and thereby modernizing industrial equipment and technology. (Japan)
◆The purpose of this law is to contribute to the development of the national economy by promoting the electronics industry and thereby modernizing industrial equipment and technology. (South Korea)
It is impossible to quote every provision, but in short, many South Korean laws have the character of translations of Japanese laws.
Such similarities could not have occurred by coincidence.
As a kind of established practice, the expression “Japanese materials” was frequently used in South Korea at that time.
When officials were considering a policy and a proposal came up from below, the bureau chief would ask, “I understand that, but don’t you have any Japanese materials?”
Whenever a new policy or law was being planned and drafted, senior officials always demanded Japanese materials.
Perhaps they felt reassured if the proposal followed them.
Whenever something new was to be created, a study mission would be sent to Japan to investigate various matters, and what it learned would then become a new South Korean policy or law. This had almost become customary.
One reason for this was that, from the latter half of the 1950s through the beginning of the 1960s, laws from the period of Japanese rule were “transplanted” in South Korea.
“Transplantation” is a term in legal studies meaning, in short, that a foreign country’s laws are regarded as one’s own country’s laws and applied as they are.
Of course, some younger legal professionals could not read Japanese, so translations were also made.
Because fundamental laws such as the Penal Code, Civil Code, and Commercial Code had been inherited from the period of Japanese rule, new postwar Japanese legislation also fitted easily into South Korean society.
South Korean history textbooks state things such as, “Japanese policies caused enormous obstacles to Korea’s modernization and development and were of no benefit whatsoever to our people,” but I believe you can see that this perception is completely detached from reality.
It was President Park Chung-hee who put an end to this “transplantation” and shifted to laws unique to South Korea, but Japanese laws continued to be received afterward.
“Reception” here means developing laws on the basis of pre-existing ones. South Korea also introduced distinctive provisions of its own, such as the crime of adultery, but fundamentally the legal structure from the period of Japanese rule was carried over almost as it stood.
I do not think that has changed very much even today.
Probably, if specialists in architecture or urban engineering examined the structure of cities and underground shopping districts, they could analytically explain which elements of Japan were adopted and how they were incorporated.
Why does a country that is anti-Japanese resemble Japan so closely?
And this is not simply a matter of old institutions or remnants having survived. South Korea has consistently and voraciously continued to absorb Japan even after the war.
What it says and what it does are different.
Something is strange.
I came to feel that there must be something major that was not being discussed.
To be continued.