Drawing on an essay by Masayuki Takayama, this chapter discusses what it portrays as Korea’s premodern backwardness, the infrastructure built under Japanese rule, the postwar seizure of Japanese assets, the funds provided through the Japan–South Korea normalization treaty, and the reality behind the so-called “Miracle on the Han.”
Tracing the story from Theodore Roosevelt’s view of Korea, through the assassination of Hirobumi Ito, to Park Chung-hee’s demand for Japanese money, it argues critically that Japan was made to shoulder an enormous share of the Korean Peninsula’s modernization.

2019-04-24
Theodore Roosevelt said that Japan should take care of such an uncivilized people.
Saying, “We want no part of it,” the United States promptly shut down its legation and cut off diplomacy.
This was immediately after the Russo-Japanese War.
Japan did not want it either.

That Masayuki Takayama is the one and only journalist in the postwar world is, thanks to The Turntable of Civilization, by now surely a well-known fact among discerning people throughout the world.
The following is from his latest work.

◎Chapter Three.
There Is No Limit to Their Shamelessness.
A South Korean President Lives Off Japan Across Two Generations.

In the days of the grandparents of today’s Koreans, they lived in thatched houses with mud walls and did not even have toilets.
The monetary economy was also underdeveloped, and so there were no shops either.
They wore plain cotton cloth, and it was the custom for a woman who had given birth to a boy to boast of it by opening the front of her clothing and exposing her breasts.
Kō Bun’yū expresses it mildly as “a hidden region of Asia,” but to describe it as it appeared, it was closer to “a Papuan settlement strayed into the mid-latitudes.”
Theodore Roosevelt said that Japan should take care of such an uncivilized people.
Saying, “We want no part of it,” the United States promptly shut down its legation and cut off diplomacy.
This was immediately after the Russo-Japanese War.
Japan did not want it either.
Because of the foolishness of this country, Japan had been forced into two wars, the Sino-Japanese and the Russo-Japanese, and in those two campaigns lost 120,000 officers and men.
So Japan made it a protectorate for five years, developed its infrastructure, and waited for it to become self-reliant.
But all they did was make a noisy commotion.
In the end, they even assassinated Hirobumi Ito, who opposed annexation.
Thus there was adopted the annexation policy that “the calamity would be removed by giving them an education as human beings,” and so began the so-called thirty-six years of Japanese imperial rule.
During that time, Japan poured twenty percent of its national budget into the peninsula and continued to cast the light of civilization into that remote region.
For example, they could not make the wheel of a cart.
So they knew nothing of waterwheels, carts, or trains.
Thus, during the protectorate period, Japan opened a railway running the length of the peninsula, linking Busan to Keijo, now Seoul, and further north to Sinuiju at the far end.
It was this Gyeongui Line that Kim Dae-jung made a great fuss about when he said he had reconnected the railway that had remained divided between North and South.
This railway crossed the Yalu River and connected with the South Manchurian Railway and the Trans-Siberian Railway as well, and by the third year of Japanese imperial rule, the people of that remote land could buy tickets in Seoul for London.
Japan built schools, taught what is now Hangul, built power plants, and brought the light of civilization into people’s homes.
It gave names such as Ryoko to nameless women who went with their breasts exposed, and taught them to cover their chests as well.
Incidentally, the only time in those thirty-six years of Japanese imperial rule that they made an uproar saying they disliked a clean environment without corruption or torture was the March First Movement.
Japan lost the war against Britain and America, and these troublesome people came under the patronage of the United States and the Soviet Union.
Japan had at last laid down its burden, but immediately war broke out on the peninsula and three million people died in North and South.
Japan was spared from being drawn into war thanks to the foolish MacArthur Constitution, but the karma generated by Korea was not something that could be so easily shaken off.
They simply confiscated assets worth a total of 90 billion yen in the currency of the time, including railways and dams built by Japan, and even private enterprises such as Nippon Chisso.
Among these were also the historical collections of Keijo Imperial University, whose value they could not understand.
In addition, heavy industrial facilities and machinery were brought in from Japan in huge quantities.
This was done in accordance with the policy of Edwin Pauley, head of the reparations mission, who said that “Japan needs no industrial power beyond pots and kettles.”
On top of that, the Koreans tried to obtain wartime reparations from Japan as well.
Even Shigesaburo Suzuki of the Socialist Party, exasperated, refused, saying that there was no justification for that when they had not even fought a war.
Ten years later, Park Chung-hee in the end took away 500 million dollars, saying, “Delete the word reparations and give us the money.”
It was an amount equal to twice South Korea’s national budget at the time.
Park also demanded technical cooperation, and on the base of the infrastructure built by Japan, he sought all at once to modernize South Korean industry using machinery that came from Japan and Japanese technical expertise.
The funding consisted of money taken from the Japanese government, supplemented by remittances from Korean-Japanese pachinko parlors.
What was accomplished with this is what the world calls the “Miracle on the Han River.”
Some may say, “So ninety percent of it was thanks to Japan, wasn’t it,” but the remaining ten percent was certainly done by the Koreans.
Considering that only a century earlier they had been a people in a remote backwater, that would count as a fine performance.
Incidentally, included in that ten percent is the Seongsu Bridge across the Han River, which became a symbol of the miracle.
A bridge built by Koreans collapsed after only fifteen years, on a day without wind, and thirty-two people died.
Since the Seoul department store whose collapse killed five hundred people had been built only six years earlier, this at least had nearly three times the service life by comparison.
Now the daughter of Park Chung-hee, who created the Miracle on the Han by living off Japan, became president.
That alone already gave one an unpleasant feeling, and then in her inaugural speech she said that she would “bring about a second Miracle on the Han River.”
What sort of pretext would she use this time to come begging again.
I certainly do not recall having educated them that way.
(Issue dated March 14, 2013)