Focusing on the work of Shoichi Watanabe, this essay challenges the narrative of Japan’s colonial rule over Korea and criticizes postwar media and academic narratives.
It calls for a reassessment of modern Japanese history and global historical understanding.

January 19, 2019.
There was the great and now-deceased Shoichi Watanabe, who continued to inform the world that Japan did not make Korea a colony, and that contemporary international language and documentation themselves made this clear.
The previous chapter also reveals how serious it was that the Seoul bureau chief of NHK, effectively Japan’s state broadcaster, spoke as though it were an established truth that Japan had ruled Korea as a colony.
NHK, the Asahi Shimbun, and the so-called scholars, lawyers, and cultural figures who echo them have continued to insist, out of self-denigrating and anti-Japan ideology, that Japan colonized the Korean Peninsula, despite the historical circumstances under which annexation occurred.
How grave this sin has been is demonstrated in the most grotesque way by the Korean Peninsula, a region of “bottomless malice” and “plausible falsehoods.”
NHK, the Asahi Shimbun, and the so-called intellectuals and cultural figures who align with them—know shame.
It has been made unmistakably clear that such figures are the true traitors to the nation.
This is the true face of evil and its manifestation. It is you who have continued to lend your hands to it…you faithless and contemptible fools.
Were you trapped by money.
Or by honey traps.
Truly, you are the lowest of people.
In stark contrast stands the great Shoichi Watanabe, who almost single-handedly continued to inform the world that Japan did not colonize Korea, and that contemporary international language and documentation themselves made this clear.
Japan did not make Korea a colony.
It annexed it.
That is the historical truth, and Professor Watanabe fulfilled his duty as a master of English literature in continuing to teach this.
I feel ever greater respect knowing that he was from Yamagata Prefecture, neighboring my own birthplace.
No such “colony” ever existed anywhere in the world.