Published August 22, 2020. Drawing on the work of historian Junko Miyawaki, this article examines the postwar division of the Korean Peninsula, Syngman Rhee and Kim Il Sung, the outbreak of the Korean War, internal bloodshed in South Korea, the Syngman Rhee Line, the occupation of Takeshima, and the destruction during the war of infrastructure developed under Japanese rule. It presents an interpretation of modern Korean history that challenges ideological narratives surrounding the peninsula.

August 22, 2020
The following is from a book that a friend of mine, an exceptionally avid reader, strongly recommended that I purchase.
It is a work by Junko Miyawaki, one of the world’s leading scholars of East Asian history.
It was Masayuki Takayama, the unparalleled journalist of the postwar world, who first made me aware of her existence.
Her late husband, Hidehiro Okada, was one of the greatest historians in the world, as Professor Hiroshi Furuta, a great scholar whose existence the Asahi Shimbun never informed the public about, has repeatedly stated.
I also think that Junko Miyawaki is one of the people who has lived one of the happiest lives in the world.
Her extraordinary insight goes without saying.
Alexis Dudden, who is nothing other than an agent of Korea dominating the American historical establishment, and John Dower, who made a name for himself as an anti-Japanese scholar after freely playing with Japanese women in Japan immediately after the end of the war, ought to boil the dirt from beneath her fingernails and drink it.
Her clear and lucid writing, and consequently the extreme readability of her work, also prove that she is a scholar of the very highest rank.
This is a book that not only the Japanese people but people throughout the world must read.
Japanese people should immediately go to their nearest bookstore, Amazon, or elsewhere and buy it.
All the more so because a book filled with the scholarly achievements of such a genuine scholar costs only 900 yen.
Chapter 8: The Tragedy of the Korean Peninsula Divided into North and South
The Division and Occupation of Korea Was a Tragedy, but There Were Also Serious Problems with the Qualities of Its Leaders
The tragedy of the postwar Korean Peninsula began when the North was occupied by the Soviet Union and the South by the United States, but there were also serious problems with the qualities of the leaders on both sides.
President Syngman Rhee called for “unification by advancing north,” while Chairman Kim Il Sung spoke of “the completion of the national territory.”
Under the constitutions of both North and South, the other state effectively did not exist.
Under such circumstances, the outbreak of the Korean War was inevitable.
On June 25, 1950, North Korean forces, led by tanks, surged across the 38th parallel.
For many years in Japan, even school textbooks stated that the Korean War had been started by the South, but this was because left-wing forces were overwhelmingly powerful in Japan at the time, and a simplistic formula prevailed in which socialism represented everything good while capitalism was an evil force that exploited the people.
To give an extreme example, it was even said that Soviet nuclear weapons were “clean,” while American nuclear weapons were “dirty.”
It is a good example of how ideology can distort the truth.
Why did Kim Il Sung believe that he could unify the South by force?
As stated earlier, the North was not well suited to agriculture, but because it was rich in mineral resources, Japan had developed industrial zones there.
To supply the electricity needed to operate those factories, Japan built in the North what was then one of the largest dams in the world.
It is the Supung Dam, which North Korea still operates today.
Even if the North was not exactly a paradise on earth, modernization had advanced further there than in the South.
That was the reason Kim Il Sung invaded the South.
Koreans Killed One Another During the Korean War
In the early stages, North Korea won an overwhelming victory.
The South Korean army collapsed and retreated.
President Syngman Rhee blew up the bridges over the Han River, abandoned his subordinates, and fled alone to Busan.
The United Nations commander, General MacArthur, succeeded with the Inchon landing operation, completely reversing the course of the war and giving the UN forces the advantage.
Syngman Rhee then returned to Seoul, but what he did next was extraordinary.
In 1951, the Ganghwa Island civilian massacre occurred.
Ganghwa Island had temporarily been occupied and ruled by North Korean forces, and island residents were massacred on the grounds that they had supported the North during that period.
Furthermore, because senior officers of the National Defense Corps embezzled supplies, 90,000 South Korean soldiers were left to starve to death in the middle of the Korean War.
The only explanation that can be given for this is Syngman Rhee’s hatred of Japan.
He disliked generals who had graduated from the Japanese Military Academy, disliked units that had received Japanese training, and disliked everything that bore any Japanese influence.
In the middle of the Korean War, people of the same South Korean nation became embroiled in internal conflict and killed one another.
The phenomenon of internal fighting breaking out at the very moment when people should have been fighting an external enemy is a pattern that has been repeated many times throughout the history of the Korean Peninsula.
I remember a Korean writer living in Japan lamenting that the history of his country was a history of internal quarrels in the midst of crises threatening the very survival of the nation.
It calls to mind the fact that among today’s Japanese opposition politicians there are many who seem to have inherited their DNA.
In January 1952, Syngman Rhee unilaterally proclaimed the Syngman Rhee Line, after which the seizure of Japanese fishing boats and the killing and detention of Japanese fishermen occurred frequently.
Then, in April 1953, South Korea occupied Takeshima.
The indiscriminate pursuit of one’s own interests amid confusion is another phenomenon frequently seen on the Korean Peninsula.
For them, looting amid a fire is taken for granted.
The Korean War reached an armistice agreement in July 1953, but it was the United States that signed the armistice agreement; South Korea did not approve it.
No South Korean government leader signed it.
The Republic of Korea was not fulfilling the role of a state.
Even though it was its own war, it behaved as though the matter concerned someone else and demonstrated no autonomy whatsoever.
That is why the North introduced the Juche ideology and looked down upon South Korea.
Then, in 1954, President Syngman Rhee proposed a constitutional amendment in order to abolish the provision prohibiting a president from serving a third term.
This became the famous “rounding-off constitutional amendment.”
Although the vote fell one short of the required number, they declared that rounding the number off produced a majority in favor and thereby made a third presidential term possible.
It was an incident that clearly demonstrated the casual attitude toward the rule of law in which laws could be interpreted in whatever manner suited them.
The Korean War Burned Away the Entire Legacy of Japanese Rule
The Korean War was truly a miserable war.
The number of South Korean military dead, wounded, and missing was 990,000.
Including North Korea, the number of dead, wounded, and missing reached 1.91 million.
The United States military alone suffered 150,000 casualties, while the Chinese forces suffered 900,000.
Altogether, among military personnel alone, three million were killed, wounded, or went missing, while the corresponding figure for civilians was two million.
This was on the same scale as the so-called Fifteen-Year War in which Japan is said to have invaded the Chinese mainland—although the reality was completely different.
In just three years of the Korean War, roughly the same number of casualties occurred as during Japan’s fifteen years of war.
Even allowing for the dramatic advances in military technology, these are astonishing figures.
As a result of wartime destruction, in the South alone, 44 percent of factories and buildings, 42 percent of machinery and industrial facilities, and 80 percent of electrical generating capacity suffered damage.
Despite the modernization that had finally been achieved during the period of Japanese rule, that legacy was reduced to ashes.
At that time, the combined population of North and South Korea was 25 million.
There were five million households.
The scale of the devastation was equivalent to one person being victimized in eight out of every ten households, and one million people fled from the North to the South.
It is said that the number of people belonging to separated families reached ten million.
The government of Syngman Rhee, having been driven back by the North Korean army as far as South Gyeongsang Province, had no fair and properly regulated conscription system and simply seized the sons of poor villages indiscriminately and sent them to the battlefield.
Japan did nothing of the sort.
Japan’s system of conscription functioned properly.
Conscription on the Korean Peninsula was not introduced until the final stages of the war, and there were also local people filled with patriotism who volunteered.
Koreans were even angry that they were not being conscripted, saying that this showed they were not being treated on the same basis as Japanese.
In Manchuria as well, the worst killing began after Japan’s defeat.
During the Chinese Civil War between the Nationalist and Communist armies, the two sides repeatedly massacred people while fighting over towns.
It was this that left Manchuria devastated.
Korea was even more tragic than China.
The devastation of Korea was caused by the Korean War; it was not devastated by the annexation of Korea by Japan.
Although Koreans were caught up in the confrontation between the two great powers, the United States and the Soviet Union, they lost any place to assign responsibility for the tragedy of the war they themselves had brought about, and therefore came to terms with it by projecting that responsibility onto Japanese rule and condemning Japan.
Later, the Republic of Korea in the South achieved dramatic economic development during the presidency of Park Chung-hee, but this too was made possible with assistance from Japan.
One of the historical laws of the Korean Peninsula is that it develops only by benefiting from the prosperity of neighboring great powers.