This essay examines Professor Lee Myung-young’s concern over the spread of a distorted historical narrative promoted by North Korean influence and its role in deepening tensions between Japan and South Korea.
It highlights the dangerous irony of ideological rifts emerging within the liberal bloc—rifts that ultimately benefit totalitarian powers.

2016-07-01

What follows is a continuation of “Even if he was a physician, would Professor Lee’s father have gone so far as to threaten a Soviet soldier with falsehoods in order to save Japanese people?”
When Professor Lee was in the old higher school system, his father told him to go to the Japanese Army Academy.
This was because he wanted him to learn military technology there and then join the “independence forces” that were conducting guerrilla activities in China and Manchuria.
His father intended to achieve Korean independence even if it required fighting a military war against Japan.
Nevertheless, he could not permit Japanese women to be unjustly raped by Soviet troops.
It is utterly inconceivable that there had been forced recruitment of comfort women resembling the slave hunts described by Seiji Yoshida.
Professor Lee was concerned that, due to North Korean operations, a distorted view of modern Korean history had been spreading since the 1980s.
According to this “anti–South Korea historical view,” North Korea executed pro-Japanese collaborators and pursued an independent nation-building path while maintaining a certain distance from China and the Soviet Union, whereas South Korea failed to punish pro-Japanese collaborators, and furthermore, Park Chung-hee—a pro-Japanese figure—seized power through a coup, turning the country into a pro-Japanese state.
Under this historical narrative, South Korea may appear economically prosperous, but from a nationalist standpoint, it is North Korea that supposedly possesses national legitimacy.
The logical perversion involved in valuing North Korea—where under a hereditary dictatorship residents live in fear of denunciation and surveillance and the vast majority suffer from hunger and poverty—over South Korea, which has joined the ranks of advanced nations as a democratic state, hardly requires explanation.
However, the reason President Park Geun-hye has been unable to abandon a hardline anti-Japanese stance also lies in the prevalence of this anti–South Korea historical view.
She fears criticism that “your father, President Park Chung-hee, was a pro-Japanese figure who graduated from the Japanese Army Academy,” and even Park Chung-hee himself, the greatest contributor to South Korea’s development, is denied as a “pro-Japanese collaborator,” a distorted historical view to which she cannot directly respond and instead accommodates.
Seen in this light, it becomes clear that bilateral relations between Japan and South Korea have deteriorated due to historical narratives that deny each nation’s own history.
Forces that seek to create cracks within the liberal bloc—one that must confront the totalitarian powers of North Korea and China in unity—are no doubt smirking with satisfaction.
To be continued.