2024-02-27
The South Korean government’s lies and fabrications are that relentless. I immediately sensed the danger.
April 16, 2019

I am reposting a chapter first published on December 5, 2018, under the title “The Japan–South Korea relationship portrayed in South Korean history education is, so to speak, one of ‘a 100% perpetrator and a 100% victim,’ of ‘absolute evil and absolute justice.’”

Astonished and appalled by President Lee Myung-bak’s words and actions near the end of his term, I wondered what kind of country South Korea really was and searched the internet for information about South Korea and the Korean Peninsula… In one hour, I came to understand the reality of the Korean Peninsula.
Having subscribed to the Asahi Shimbun for many years and received a postwar education, I learned for the first time about a reality of South Korea that I had never understood.

Even without searching, surely anyone can see that North Korea is a country so terrible that words cannot describe it.
Just now, I found another article that embodies the true value of the internet, the greatest library in human history.
What is happening in South Korea now should make sense only after one learns these facts.
In other words, without knowing these facts, one cannot understand South Koreans… and that is extremely dangerous for Japanese people.

Just as I personally encountered an evil so severe that it led to a grave illness that nearly cost me my life, Japan, in fact, has long continued to encounter this evil… to be exposed to it.
They have displayed their evil not only toward Japan but also in the United States and at the United Nations, which they have made their principal arenas.

The truth presented by this painstaking work reveals the true nature of anti-Japanese propaganda.
The world has overlooked the fact that, for seventy years after the war, countries such as those on the Korean Peninsula and China—countries of “bottomless evil” and “plausible lies”—have continued to practice Nazism in the name of anti-Japanese education against Japan, a country where the turntable of civilization turns as an act of divine providence and which must lead the world alongside the United States.
It is no exaggeration to say that this is the real reason the world remains unstable and conflict never ceases.
The fact that I… having had no choice… appeared like this, bringing The Turntable of Civilization with me, was, in fact, very important—not only to me and my readers, but to Japan and the world.

The article I found follows.
Emphasis within the text, apart from the headings, is mine.
It was after I read a South Korean history textbook.
Japanese people were depicted as cold and merciless “demons.”
It claimed that modern Japan had done “nothing but slaughter and plunder” in Korea.
◆ Why Did South Korea Rewrite History? Considering the Motives and Background (Part Two) — Takaaki Yamada
The Syngman Rhee Era: The Beginning of South Korea’s True Misfortune
Now, let us return to the main subject.
With Japan’s defeat, authority over Korea passed from the Governor-General’s Office to the United States.
At first, various factions squabbled over the founding of a state, while the Soviet Union was quick to install a puppet.

The provisional government and independence army themselves were not recognized. Syngman Rhee, however, had been a member of that government, had studied in the United States, and had lobbied there; in the end, he was installed as the head of an anti-communist puppet government.
His self-serving demand that “South Korea be admitted to the Allied Powers,” however, was rejected.
It was thought that people who had neither fought nor shed blood had no right to push themselves forward.
Thus, when South Koreans call themselves “citizens of a victorious nation” or “members of the Allied Powers,” it is simply contrary to fact.
One cannot help feeling sympathy over the fact that this man seized dictatorial power as the first president.
The period from Rhee’s return to his exile was a “dark age,” and it is extraordinary that contemporary South Koreans lack a memory of it.

In many respects, Syngman Rhee himself was the root of all evil, and his era was precisely what South Korean history education portrays as “Japanese imperial rule.”
The first evil Rhee committed was the “Jeju Island Incident”—in short, a mass slaughter of communists and islanders suspected of being communists.
As a result, tens of thousands of civilians were killed, and tens of thousands more fled to Japan and settled there.
The massacres continued afterward, and the island’s population fell sharply.
Similar massacres, though on a smaller scale, took place in other regions.

Among Syngman Rhee’s war crimes against Japan, his invasion and seizure of the Japanese territory of Takeshima and the killing of Japanese fishermen are well known. In fact, even before that, he tried to invade Tsushima.
He had assembled troops at the southern tip of Korea for that purpose when North Korea launched its lightning invasion.

Given that he could massacre even his own people without hesitation, it is not difficult to imagine that the South Korean military would have carried out a major massacre on Tsushima.
When the Korean War broke out, Rhee’s paranoia about internal enemies intensified, and he had large numbers of people registered with the National Guidance Alliance—an organization for the reeducation of communists and their families—executed.
The exact number massacred by the military and police is unknown, but some say it exceeded one million.
The matter was not only obscured by the war; it continued to be concealed under the military governments that followed.

The South Korean military was initially driven into the southern part of the peninsula, but with the entry of U.S. forces it regained ground and reached the Yalu River on the China–North Korea border four months later.
The war should then have ended with North Korea’s collapse, but China’s entry pushed the forces back to the 38th parallel, and the war ultimately continued for three years.
As a result, millions of soldiers and civilians died, and most of the Korean Peninsula was devastated.

Incidentally, South Korea has not demanded, even once, that China confront or settle its past, despite China’s having prolonged the war and increased the number of casualties.

Syngman Rhee subsequently remained in power as a dictator until the middle of 1960.
Rhee purged not only communists but anyone who opposed him, treating them as political criminals, and thoroughly suppressed demonstrations and opposition movements.
South Koreans who remembered the period under Japan were indignant at the time, saying, “In what sense is this ‘liberation’? This society is far worse than it was under Japanese imperial rule.”
Rhee suppressed this movement through a reign of terror involving control of thought and speech, a system of informants, and secret police.

In this way, he monitored and suppressed pro-Japanese thoughts and words, made the generation that had experienced the Japanese period fall silent out of fear, divided the generations, and used the media and public education to implant “false memories” in children.

*During the Pacific War, Korea was not bombed and had virtually no conscription (the war ended before the small number who were conscripted could be sent to the front). With only the requisitioning of goods and compulsory labor, it received exceptionally favorable treatment for a “colony.”
As a result, when the war ended, Japan proper had suffered enormous numbers of war dead and been reduced to ashes, while Korea was almost unscathed.

In other words, the economic and social conditions of Japan and Korea had been completely reversed after the war.
Yet by the time Rhee departed, South Korea had fallen into the ranks of the poorest countries, and their positions had reversed once again.
In the end, Rhee contributed nothing to the development of South Korean society or its economy. He merely wielded dictatorial power, imposed oppression, massacred his own people, and impoverished them.

Incidentally, the South Korean government still conceals this disgrace. At the same time, it invents massacres by the Japanese military that never occurred and teaches children a false history. Does that not make it something like an accomplice?

Why Was a False National History Passed Down?
After Syngman Rhee’s exile, South Korea went through a period of turmoil, but Park Chung-hee eventually seized power.
As is widely known, he was a former officer in the Japanese military. By concluding the Treaty on Basic Relations between Japan and the Republic of Korea, he normalized relations between the two countries and obtained enormous sums of money from Japan.
Park developed heavy industries such as steel and petrochemicals, expanded social infrastructure, and achieved the rapid economic growth known as the “Miracle on the Han River.”

Even so, with Japanese funds amounting to more than twice the national budget and a neighboring country that, with a sense of mission, carefully taught technical skills and know-how step by step, (omitted) I do not think producing a “miracle” would have been particularly difficult.

South Korea was thus able to escape poverty with Japanese aid and cooperation not once, but twice.
Yet President Park Chung-hee did not correct the propaganda that cast Japan as absolute evil.

Because he thoroughly suppressed anti-government demonstrations and movements, he became the object of resentment among some citizens.
A military dictatorship, which inevitably creates internal friction, needs a target toward which people’s hatred and dissatisfaction can be redirected.
North Korea and the communists were not sufficient for that role.
In any case, many anti-government activists were sympathetic to them.
He needed an “enemy of the people” that transcended ideological divisions.
Perhaps for such political reasons, Park continued the education that demonized Japan.

Furthermore, he took all the credit for achievements made possible by Japanese economic aid. Contrary to the image generally held of him in Japan, it is hard to call him a particularly fair-minded person.
Indeed, it seems that he added something else to public education.
That was the cultivation of pride along the lines of “our people have been great since ancient times.”
*In other words, he seems to have reinforced a self-glorifying view of history (I should note, however, that I have no materials at hand on this point and that it is based solely on what I have heard).
But the other side of this was to disparage Japan as “culturally backward.”

A people’s supposed superiority emerges through comparison with others, and the object of comparison could hardly be China; naturally, it was ancient and medieval Japan.
South Korean children are taught that “our ancestors taught the Japanese such-and-such” and that “we were once more advanced than Japan.”
Among the advanced cultural practices said to have been transmitted by Korea are rice cultivation, weaving, architecture, Buddhism, paper, and writing in ancient times; pottery techniques during Hideyoshi’s invasion; and medicine, Confucian learning, calligraphy, and painting through the Korean embassies of the Edo period.
Through this comparison with Japan, they come to feel a sense of ethnic superiority: “Until the Meiji Restoration, Korea was the more culturally advanced country,” or “Our ancestors were teachers who civilized the barbaric Japanese.”
When Hideyoshi’s invasion and modern Japan’s invasion are then emphasized, they naturally grow indignant, believing that “our kindness was repaid with hostility.”
This laid the foundation for the “strange history education” that continues today, cultivating both a sense of superiority over Japan and a sense of victimhood.

Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo, who later became presidents, came from the same military-academy lineage as Park and continued anti-Japanese education.
The reason was probably much the same as described above.
A military government inevitably needs a target to absorb people’s hatred.
Chun Doo-hwan, moreover, was a man who began by suppressing civilians in an event such as the Gwangju Incident.
He also wanted to achieve a miracle like Park’s and sought to obtain enormous economic aid from Japan.

As a means to that end, he picked a quarrel over the textbook issue—why would such a man correct anti-Japanese education?

In 1988, South Korea finally moved to a democratic system.
At least formally, freedom of thought and speech was largely guaranteed.
But after forty years of domestic propaganda, “false memories” had become firmly established as fact, and it was already too late.
South Koreans had become completely identified in spirit with the “father of the nation.”
Independence activists are now central to Korean national identity.
In other words, ordinary citizens believe that “we bravely fought and defeated the demon of Japanese imperialism.” Because they are the guardians of that myth, overturning it has become difficult.

“Japan–South Korea Friendship” That Never Existed in the First Place
It is not as though I have had no personal relationships with South Koreans.
My experience of those relationships is that “they hardly feel like strangers.”
Some people around me say they have been deceived in business with South Koreans, had things stolen, or been left unpaid, but fortunately I have never had an unpleasant experience.
Personally, therefore, I still think of the South Koreans I know almost as relatives.
Perhaps it was out of feelings like these that Japanese people a century ago devoted themselves to modernizing Korean society with goodwill and a sense of mission that were, in some respects, beyond the ordinary.

Perhaps the truth was a feeling that “they do not seem like strangers” or that “long-lost brothers appear to be living in miserable circumstances.”
Yet in those personal relationships, I found it strange that even intelligent and gentle South Koreans would suddenly change expression whenever the subject happened to turn to history.
It was rather like someone who suffered abuse as a child being tormented by a flashback.

I learned the reason for this fifteen years ago, when I read a South Korean history textbook in translation.
Japanese people were depicted as cold and merciless “demons.”
It claimed that modern Japan had done “nothing but slaughter and plunder” in Korea.

The South Korean government’s lies and fabrications are that relentless.
I immediately sensed the danger.
Children naturally grow up believing that all of it is true.
This is equivalent to “brutish Japan” propaganda even more extreme than the “brutish Americans and British” propaganda Japan spread during the war.

The Japan–South Korea relationship portrayed in South Korean history education is, so to speak, one of “a 100% perpetrator and a 100% victim,” of “absolute evil and absolute justice.”
It has become the sort of cheap morality tale one might expect a false hero to invent.

Because Syngman Rhee seized dictatorial power as the first president, this fiction truly became a founding myth. The indoctrination has continued to this day, and even ordinary South Koreans have come to identify in spirit with this impostor.

South Korea is an abnormal country that, as a state, has spent sixty-five years using indoctrination in education to instill hatred and prejudice against a particular people.

What is more, it tries to impose these falsehoods on Japanese people under the name of a “correct understanding of history.”

When an entire country believes things that are scientifically and objectively untrue, it has reached the level of “faith.”
In other words, alongside Christian, Muslim, and Buddhist countries, we would do well to think of a fourth kind of country on this earth: an “anti-Japanese truth-cult state.”
South Korea is one vast cult.

So any Japanese person who says with a straight face that South Korea is a friendly nation or a partner sharing the same values must be extraordinarily ignorant, hopelessly naive, or some kind of agent.

The reality is that it is an exceptionally unfriendly country with different values.
These pro-South Korean people (or should I say people subservient to South Korea?) are now flustered by South Korea’s “sudden” anti-Japanese stance. They fret, saying things like “Japan and South Korea have always got along,” or “This is only a dispute between politicians and governments; after a while, we should be able to return to our former friendly relationship.”
This is what the saying “there is no cure for fools” means.

South Korea has always been this kind of country. It has now begun picking quarrels over everything simply because changing circumstances mean it no longer needs to hide its true nature.

To begin with, there is a wide gulf between what Japanese people mean by Japan–South Korea friendship and what South Koreans mean by it.
Japanese people imagine, quite literally, a relationship between equal friends.
But South Koreans proceed from a relationship of “a 100% perpetrator and a 100% victim.” Thus, when they speak of “friendship” or “cooperation,” what they mean is that “Japanese people must understand their position as perpetrators.”
Put another way, it means “devote yourselves to the victims.”

Whether Japan and South Korea need to reconcile is a separate question, but it is too naive to believe that reconciliation is possible.

Personal exchanges and dialogue between Japanese and South Koreans should certainly be encouraged, but we must not expect too much from them.
Doing so would be like fighting off individual aliens attacking on the front line while leaving untouched the mother creature behind them, continually laying more alien eggs.

For such exchanges to have a real effect, the mother creature (the anti-Japanese indoctrination of children) must first be defeated.
However profoundly misguided it may be, a country’s education is ultimately a domestic matter.
Only South Koreans themselves can reform it.

I cannot say whether that is possible.
In the end, however, this is an unscientific occult belief that treats a counterfeit as “legitimate.”
When the light of truth shines on it, falsehood will gradually dissolve.
In a sense, though, that would amount to the “collapse of the Republic of Korea’s national order.”
That is why the government fears the truth of history and, in practice, controls freedom of thought and speech and even silences people.
Seen another way, those actions could be taken as a desperate last struggle.

Meanwhile, should Japan’s course of action not be clear?
First, Japan should demand: “Rewrite your history textbooks in accordance with the facts.”
At this point, objections about domestic affairs are beside the point.
South Korea has instilled hatred and prejudice against Japan in its children while pretending, at the political level, to be a friend and partner.
Through such two-faced diplomacy, it could be said to have deceived Japan and made good use of it.
Perhaps, in their hearts, they stuck out their tongues and thought, “It’s so easy to fool the Japanese.”

From now on, however, a deceptive posture toward Japan—outwardly saying “Japan and South Korea should cooperate” or “We do not really dislike Japan,” while using public education to portray Japan as a demon—will no longer work.
We will not fall for that again.

South Koreans who refuse to face the truth of history have no future.
The root of the problem must be corrected first.
Only then can we talk.