This chapter was published on October 26, 2015.
The following is from “Masayuki Takayama Takes on America, China, South Korea, and Asahi,” Themis, 1,000 yen, by Masayuki Takayama, a man of genuine integrity and backbone whom it would be no exaggeration to call the most sensible newspaper reporter in postwar Japan.
In an essay that conveys the facts properly in his distinctive manner…readers of the following chapter, which criticizes the foolishness of the Japanese mass media that have made so much of Kang Sang-jung…
Will surely all think:
My insight into this individual was one hundred percent correct.
pp. 192–197
The passages between asterisks are mine.
Pseudo-Japanese Masquerading as Japanese: Just Who Do You Think You Are?
Groups That Crush the Fingers and Faces of Bodies in the Disaster Area to Steal Rings and Gold Crowns
Kang Sang-jung, Who Called Himself “Tetsuo Nagano”
NHK’s “Sunday Art Museum” is produced quite lavishly, using its abundant viewing-fee revenue.
For example, it carefully shows, one by one, rarely seen works such as the Rinpa painter Sakai Hoitsu’s paintings of autumn grasses.
Much as I hated to admit it, it was a program I could not help watching.
I write “was” in the past tense because, at a certain point, Kang Sang-jung was appointed its host.
His statements are colored by an extortionate mentality that demands atonement through claims such as “we suffered discrimination” and “we were forcibly brought here.”
In reality, his father, who came from South Gyeongsang Province, came to Japan because he could no longer make a living.
Toward the end of the last war, there was something called wartime labor conscription.
There was a shortage of workers.
So workers were recruited from the Korean Peninsula.
＊On this subject, I have written that Japan excluded the people of the Korean Peninsula from wartime labor conscription until the very last moment.
Takayama also demonstrates that fact.
The timing given above—toward the end of the war—is the evidence.
At the same time, I have also written that wartime labor conscription was a perfectly ordinary practice carried out by all the Western countries during the twentieth century, a century of war.
Asahi Shimbun, which has reported this as forcible abduction and the like, has single-mindedly pursued the denigration of Japan…
We failed to realize that it was an entity that should have been severely punished for treason against the state…
And continued paying approximately 5,000 yen in subscription fees every month.
Thus, we ended up living our lives even respecting the so-called intellectuals who grew up reading Asahi, a representative example being Kenzaburo Oe…
More on this another day.＊
That is what they call forcible abduction, but his father was one of those who, quite separately from that, slipped into Japan on his own.
Japan did not actually permit such illegal entry, but it turned a blind eye in his case; his father settled in Kumamoto, brought over a woman from the peninsula, established a household, and Kang Sang-jung was born.
Although this was not a case of the name-creation and name-changing policy, he called himself Tetsuo Nagano and went from Kumamoto’s Seiseiko High School to Waseda University.
What other country would give an illegal entrant and his child such nondiscriminatory treatment?
Yet he knows no gratitude.
He says he was bullied in high school because of his background.
His old friends, by contrast, are indignant at the accusation, saying that they did not know he was Korean and therefore had no intention of bullying him on that account.
Is the claim that he was bullied not his own invention?
If not, and bullying really did occur, was it not simply that everyone disliked him because of his unpleasant personality, rather than because of his background?
Watching his everyday conduct, I cannot help thinking that this is the more likely explanation.
He often discusses Takeshima.
Having grown up in Japan, he knows perfectly well that Takeshima is Japanese territory and that Japanese people would not commit the injustice of distorting historical facts to claim it as their own territory, as his compatriots or the Chinese do.
Does “We” Mean “Our Korean Compatriots”?
Yet he brazenly says things along the lines of, “We [Koreans] are merely exercising effective control over our own territory.”
With a warped disposition that cannot honestly accept even the facts before his eyes, can he really understand art?
Can he appreciate the beauty of Korin’s “Irises,” which moved Van Gogh, or understand Japanese sensibilities?
So I watched “Sunday Art Museum” once with him as host, and then stopped.
When he mumbles in that indistinct low voice, even the most beautiful things give off a stench of decay.
I have not watched NHK in the year since.
Kang appears not only on NHK but also on TV Asahi.
It is always the same stations that like foul-smelling things.
Once, when I saw him on “Asa Made Nama TV,” he was saying “we.”
From the context, he seemed to mean “we Japanese,” but when discussing Takeshima, he used it to mean “our Korean compatriots.”
When agitating about forcible abduction, he uses it to mean “Korean residents in Japan.”
Just who do you think you are?
As a Japanese person, I want at least to make it clear that I reject your speaking as though you were Japanese.
In fact, there has been a remarkable increase in these pseudo-Japanese who halfheartedly put on a Japanese face.
In the recent great earthquake disaster, the Japanese people affected shared their pain and helped one another.
Money from Korean-Affiliated Pachinko Operators
At such a time, JR East, which hurriedly closed its stations, drove out passengers, and suspended services, did not at least look Japanese to me.
JR East provided Shinkansen technology to China over Japanese objections.
It is a mystery why such a company goes unpunished.
Hotels and convenience stores put business aside, providing toilets for people stranded away from home and sheltering them from the night’s cold.
Asahi Shimbun alone was different.
While everyone else was disregarding profit, Asahi announced, “If you donate relief money through us, we will print your name in the newspaper.”
And, what is more, “for donations of 1,000 yen or more.”
Nobody was doing these things in pursuit of a return.
But it appealed to people’s baser instincts: having one’s name in the newspaper would not be so bad.
It was nothing more than a new form of newspaper sales promotion: instead of detergent, it offered to put your name in print.
Profiting greedily from other people’s misfortune.
And only from 1,000 yen upward.
That meant a child’s saved-up pocket money of 500 yen was rejected because it would not help expand newspaper sales.
A thoroughly base idea.
Kan had received money from a Korean-affiliated pachinko operator.
His wife, too, eagerly awaited year-end gifts from the pachinko industry.
Banri Kaieda also acted as a representative of the pachinko industry’s interests.
When the earthquake halted the pursuit of that matter, Kan looked for a scapegoat to divert the criticism.
That scapegoat was TEPCO.
“Beyond expectations” is no excuse.
Compensation must be unlimited; surrender all the company’s assets.
Nationalize the company and dismantle it—he hurled abuse of this kind.
There was neither pity nor compassion.
It resembled the denunciation of Lin Biao or a Cultural Revolution struggle session.
Kan and Kaieda made nuclear power plants the symbol of evil and had the Hamaoka Nuclear Power Plant shut down as well.
The so-called intellectuals were also taken in by Kan and joined in a chorus demanding that nuclear power be abandoned altogether.
This turn of events resembled the atmosphere during a period after the war when, at MacArthur’s prompting, left-wing scholars clamored for the dismantling of the zaibatsu and the dismantling of the state.
The Shocking Situation Reported by Shingo Nishimura
As a result, Japan wandered astray for sixty years, and now Kan is using the same tactic again.
Kan is a criminal unfit to be a politician, yet he resorts to schemes to pin blame on others and secure his own survival.
It is a method that anyone with even a single drop of Japanese blood would never employ.
The given name of Kaieda, who teams up with such a Kan, is Banri.
It is a name derived from China’s Great Wall.
In English, it is “long wall,” but its meaning is “a useless encumbrance.”
He is not merely useless but harmful as well.
While pseudo-Japanese debase politics, the patriot Shingo Nishimura reports that a shocking situation is unfolding in the disaster-stricken areas.
While Self-Defense Forces personnel identify bodies, mark them with red flags, and work to recover them, strange groups reportedly appear, cut off the fingers or crush the faces of the bodies, and steal rings and gold crowns.
Yoshifuru Akiyama reported that, during the First Sino-Japanese War, he saw civilians outside Jinzhou’s castle attacking dying Chinese soldiers, stripping off their clothing, and searching for money and valuables.
It is the same scene.
There are more people masquerading as Japanese in the Japanese archipelago than one might think.
(June 2011 issue)