Using an NHK program on the slums of the Philippines as a starting point, this essay examines the true nature of colonialism and Japan’s historical role on the Korean Peninsula.
By contrasting documented conditions before annexation with post-annexation development, the author challenges the prevailing claim that Japan “colonized” Korea.
The article demands that those spreading falsehoods either provide proof—or stand revealed as the greatest liars in human history.

September 28, 2016
NHK broadcasts a program titled “The World Now” every Saturday evening at 6 p.m.
Last week’s episode featured Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte.
For the reasons I have already described, I have never once been to the Philippines.
That made the impact all the greater.
I was astonished by the severity of the slums in the Philippines.
In other words, I was shocked by the poverty of the Philippines.
As the title “The World Now” indicates, this was not something of yesterday but of the present, which made it all the more striking.
At the same time, I thought that this fact itself also serves to correct the world.
Japan went to war against the United States and, in the end, suffered the greatest war crimes in human history, having its entire land reduced to ashes and two atomic bombs dropped upon it.
Those who claim there was no racial discrimination involved are of the same yellow race, but they are essentially limited to countries such as China and South Korea, which continue anti-Japanese education that is Nazism itself and fascism itself.
South Korea took advantage of Japan’s condition at that time and began to tell every conceivable lie.
One of the most egregious of these is the lie that Japan colonized the Korean Peninsula.
As you know, I have repeatedly lamented how the world—represented in this case by the United Nations—is made up of such shoddy knowledge, lies, and falsehoods.
The current state and reality of the Philippines represent the true condition of countries that Western powers made into colonies during the age of colonialism.
This is the truth of colonialism.
Even more miserable than today’s Philippines was the Korean Peninsula before it chose annexation with Japan.
I have introduced several times that Isabella Bird, one of the world’s greatest travelers of the time, wrote that the conditions of the Korean Peninsula, one of the poorest countries in the world, were even worse than those of today’s Philippines.
Regarding Seoul before annexation, Bird wrote that the roads were so narrow that cattle could not pass each other and formed a labyrinth, that the stench from filth discharged from houses was overwhelming, and that until she saw Beijing, she considered Seoul “the dirtiest city in the world,” adding that “until reaching Shaoxing, the stench of Seoul was the worst smell in the world,” and that “for a city and a capital, its wretchedness is truly beyond description.”
Those who claim that Japan colonized the Korean Peninsula during the thirty-five years from August 29, 1910, when Korea chose annexation with Japan, to September 9, 1945, when the Government-General of Korea surrendered following Japan’s defeat in the war against the United States, must prove that the present-day Korean Peninsula is filled everywhere with slums equal to or worse than those of the Philippines.
Such slums do not exist.
The truth is that during those thirty-five years, Japan poured more than 20 percent of its national budget into the Korean Peninsula and developed it, as a unified state, into a modern nation comparable to the Japanese mainland.
The Koreans raised in Nazism itself and fascism itself initiated by Syngman Rhee, along with the shoddy and incompetent individuals around the world—led by Alexis Dudden—who have come to believe, or have been made to believe, these lies, must immediately fly to the Korean Peninsula, film images showing it to be a country filled with slums like the Philippines, and broadcast them worldwide.
If they cannot do that, they will prove themselves to be the greatest liars in human history.
Perceptive readers around the world should be able to understand that this essay of mine is also one of the Nobel Prize–class papers, among the greatest works of the twenty-first century.