Centered on the alleged realities of Yangban rule on the Korean Peninsula, this essay argues that women were treated as private property—slaves without even personal names—and links that social pattern to later authoritarian practices.
It contrasts this with Japan’s historically rare aversion to slavery, citing the story of Yasuke, and extends the argument into a critique of the very mindset that frames others as “sex slaves.”

2019-01-04

Today, now, in this chapter, all Japanese citizens and people throughout the world must know the true truth.
A chapter I published on 2018-07-10 titled “The Yangban, in effect, treated women as objects” is being read thanks to a welcome number of searches.
“Until the twentieth century—until Japan went to Korea—women over there had no names.”
I encountered this opening line while introducing the latest book of Masayuki Takayama, the one and only journalist in the postwar world.
When I witnessed President Lee Myung-bak, in his final period, suddenly landing on Takeshima and saying that the Emperor of Japan should come to Korea and apologize, I wondered: what kind of country is Korea, and what kind of people are Koreans.
As I have written, I searched for the first time on the internet—which I repeatedly call the greatest library in human history—and in just one hour I understood the history and reality of Korea, that is, the Korean Peninsula.
What characterizes the Korean Peninsula is the Yangban.
I take pride in believing that I was the first to state this clearly to the world.
When I learned the Yangban’s manner of being, I immediately realized it was the prototype of the bizarre yakuza practice in Japan called “mikajime-ryo.”
Because almost all Japanese yakuza are Zainichi Koreans.
Not working themselves, extorting others, and living by feeding off others—this is a tradition that remains not only among yakuza but also among politicians on the Korean Peninsula, and in essence among many naturalized Korean opposition politicians in Japan who are astonishingly similar to them.
A recent example makes it obvious: observe the behavior of Kim Jong-un’s entourage at the U.S.–North Korea summit in Singapore.
They had neither an airplane to travel safely to Singapore nor the money for lodging, and yet they shamelessly stayed at the finest hotels.
They continue nuclear development without shame while not only oppressing the people but driving them to the brink of starvation.
Merely voicing dissatisfaction with the regime in casual conversation can get one taken to a re-education camp, tortured, and ultimately killed.
Some years ago, when the United Nations issued reports and recommendations on North Korea’s severe human rights violations, I was astonished by the torture tools that were revealed.
Because they were exactly the same as the tools used in the Yangban reality I learned in one hour—tools used to abduct people to mansions, confine them, and torture them when they could not provide the money or food demanded.
Today, now, in this chapter, all Japanese citizens and people throughout the world must know the true truth.
Until Japan annexed Korea in the twentieth century, women on the Korean Peninsula had no names.
On the Korean Peninsula, the king and the Yangban reigned, and all other people were members of a discriminated class.
Even scholars were the same.
Women were the private property of the Yangban—slaves.
That is why women had no names.
The Yangban, in effect, treated women as objects.
Not only were they used as sexual playthings of the master, but they were also abused by the master’s wife in jealousy—violated with a stick forced into their private parts, tortured to death, and thrown into the Han River—yet the Yangban faced no punishment.
Those corpses would get caught on riverside branches whenever the river rose.
That was the everyday reality of the Korean Peninsula until Japan annexed it.
In other words, the Korean Peninsula was a country where the majority of the people were slaves.
Then what about Japan.
Japan is a nation extraordinarily rare—one might even say unique—in that it has had no slaves and has long detested the very concept of owning slaves.
If you search “Yasuke” on Wikipedia, it is immediately clear, so I will excerpt the opening.
Yasuke was a Black man who came to Japan in the Sengoku period and, as a slave owned by missionaries, was presented as a gift to the warlord Oda Nobunaga, but he was favored by Nobunaga and taken into his service.
(omitted).
On February 23, Tensho 9 (March 27, 1581), when Valignano met Nobunaga, he brought Yasuke along as a slave.
The Shinchō Kōki records “a black monk came from the land of the Christians,” describing him as about 26 to 27 years old, with “the strength of ten men” and “a body black as an ox.”
Convinced that his skin was truly black, Nobunaga showed great interest, negotiated with Valignano to have him transferred, named him “Yasuke,” raised him to the formal status of a samurai, and kept him close; the Jesuit annual report in Japan says Nobunaga liked Yasuke and intended in time to make him a lord (castle master).
According to Taku Kaneko, a manuscript presumed to be a copy of an autograph text handed down in the Kaga Ota family, descendants of Ota Gyuichi, the author of the Shinchō Kōki, states that Yasuke was given a residence and a short sword, and at times served as an attendant.
To a degree that is incomprehensible outside Japan, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that from ancient times Japan was a true democracy, and that the Japanese were a rare people who did not possess the sensibility of treating others as slaves.
A lawyer from Rikkyo University who held a key position in the Japan Federation of Bar Associations went repeatedly to the United Nations,
after the Asahi Shimbun rode on Seiji Yoshida’s lies and spread them worldwide,
and lawyers such as Mizuho Fukushima pounced on the issue as a perfect tool to attack the Japanese government and extract money from it,
and North Korean spies in South Korea latched onto the comfort women issue,
declaring, “They are not comfort women, they are sex slaves,”
and boasting in an interview with Sekai Nippo that he himself established the term “sex slaves.”
Could it be that this lawyer is in fact someone who carries the DNA of the Korean Peninsula, which until Japan’s annexation could hardly be called anything other than an outrageous slave-system state.
Because without even citing Nobunaga’s example, a genuine Japanese person would never conceive of the notion of “sex slaves.”
Even today in South Korea, this mode of enslaving others remains, as Katsumi Murotani, one of the commentators who knows Korea best, brilliantly reveals in his serialized column “The Shape of a Neighboring Country” in this month’s issue of HANADA.
His writing too is required reading for Japanese citizens and people throughout the world.
Once they learn how much evil lies behind the anti-Japan propaganda that the country of “bottomless evil” and “plausible lies” continues to spread across the world,
those fools who have called themselves intellectuals and accepted it,
will learn their own foolishness—so much so that before they go to hell, they will want to crawl into a hole.
I will introduce this in the chapters that follow.