This essay argues that wartime conscription was not limited to Koreans but was a duty imposed broadly on Japanese citizens as well, including Koreans who were treated as imperial subjects at the time.
It then recounts a tragedy involving a Korean special-attack pilot heard in Chiran, portraying the inescapable pain produced by the historical fact of national annexation.
The piece further warns that expectations for inter-Korean unification may underlie South Korea’s heightened posture toward Japan, and that unification could result in the North’s political system engulfing the peninsula.
Finally, it emphasizes the role of the internet as humanity’s greatest library in resisting propaganda, information operations, and “plausible lies.”

2019-02-04
Whether the people in the South truly wish to see that grotesque political system of the North spread to cover the entire Korean Peninsula is a precarious question.
The following continues from the previous chapter.
◎Koreans and Japanese alike were conscripted
Even regarding the issue of so-called conscripted workers that they now take up, condemn, and demand compensation for, it was not only Koreans who were unilaterally conscripted by the government at the time, but also many Japanese citizens.
During the war there was a popular song that expressed avoidance of conscription, and I still remember hearing it often: “Isn’t conscription hateful, bamboo chopsticks in a chipped bowl—this is no Buddha, yet it is only a single bowl of rice, how pitiful.”
In the extraordinary circumstances of war it was a labor duty imposed equally on the people, and it was the same for Koreans as well, who were also among the people, so even concerning conscripted workers it should have been the same as a matter of citizenship, with no particular form of discrimination to speak of.
More painful to me than that is the tragic story of a Korean member of the special-attack units that I heard directly from Tome Torihama, who was beloved as a mother figure by the pilots at Chiran, once an army base for such units.
He, an elite among Koreans, volunteered to become a pilot, yet on the night before his sortie he visited her home, lamented what would become of his homeland Korea after Japan lost this war, and, unable to sing before his comrades the song of his homeland, “Arirang,” he sang it through tears and departed.
This, surely, is an incomparable tragedy that the heavy historical fact of national annexation brought about, one that could not be avoided.
◎Do the people of South Korea wish to be swallowed by North Korea
Behind the abnormal swelling of South Korea’s attitude toward Japan seen today, there must be expectations for merger and unification with the North.
North Korea, their compatriots, is undeniably a nuclear power and possesses destructive capability that could, if it chose, annihilate Japan.
Meanwhile Japan, afflicted with nuclear neurosis, has no intention whatsoever to possess what it should and could possess, and instead accepts being America’s pet.
Yet the gap in national maturity is beyond comparison, and even the number of Nobel Prize laureates—an index that can be said to reflect the maturity of civilization and culture—makes the difference plain.
Especially in the natural sciences, while South Korea has zero, Japan’s number of laureates since the start of this century has even surpassed that of various European countries.
Even if they ignore the facts of history, cling to grievances, disregard international rules, and pick fights to vent their frustrations, it may win applause domestically and score points for their administration, but in the end it can only result in tightening the noose around their own neck.
Even if someday the divided North and South Koreas are unified, judging by the present condition of the government in the South, the South will surely be swallowed by the North with ease.
Whether the people in the South truly wish to see that grotesque political system of the North spread to cover the entire Korean Peninsula is a precarious question.
The dangerous future of the current Southern government, absorbed in scoring points within the present situation, is not something Japan can treat as someone else’s problem.
In fact this is true for the world as well, but until now—until the emergence of the internet as the greatest library in human history—the world was always ignorant, foolish, and the kind of world that could be moved by fake news.
Now, one-party dictatorship states where propaganda is everything, and countries like those on the Korean Peninsula whose reality is a totalitarian state akin to Nazism, repeat attacks in the form of information operations against nations and individuals in many ways, but within the greatest library in history there will eternally continue to exist God’s will that never permits their “bottomless evil” and “plausible lies.”
Foolish media completely ensnared by them—the reality is that media around the world is infected with leftist infantilism, pseudo-moralism, and the sickness of political correctness.
But within the internet, the greatest library in human history, there is what Kūkai said—evil cannot be eliminated—even saying the media is the symbol of evil is no exaggeration—yet we must not stand by; we must hammer in good deeds, fill everything with good deeds so that evil cannot slip in even between the fingers.
There are countless true intellectuals and true elites in the world, and for the sake of society and for the sake of others, even today they are striking their keyboards.
Above all, so that “bottomless evil” and “plausible lies” will never be allowed to conquer the world.