Published on April 21, 2019.
Drawing on an essay by TEI Taikin published in a SAPIO special feature, this piece argues that one reason Korean anti-Japanism has been encouraged is that Japan has failed to answer back forcefully enough.
The author criticizes the combination of Korea’s groundless sense of self-importance and the self-denigrating, anti-national mindset of Japan’s Asahi-aligned cultural elites, arguing that together they have amplified Korea’s “bottomless evil” and “plausible lies.”
The essay points to the abnormality of a postwar Japanese discourse in which attacking one’s own country and government came to be mistaken for intelligence, and calls for Japan to acquire the power to respond more firmly and persuasively on the world stage.

2019-04-21
What else can one call it but a spectacle rare even in the world,
that incorrigible people who think it is intelligence to belittle and degrade their own country and to attack their own country and government
have long been called so-called cultural figures.

The following too is from the opening essay in this month’s SAPIO special feature,
which analyzes the pathology of Korea from the perspective that the root cause of Korean “anti-Japanism” lies in the discriminatory consciousness traditionally embedded in the country called Korea,
and which places Korean writers at the center of that analysis.
It is from an essay by TEI Taikin, specially appointed professor at Tokyo Metropolitan University.
The bold emphasis other than the title is mine.
Omitting the opening section.
Japanese people should answer back.
Japanese people too bear responsibility for having encouraged discrimination among Koreans.
Because Japanese people respond far too little, that has ended up inviting anti-Japanism.
Whenever there are anti-Japan movements or statements in Korea, Japan must respond in a full and forceful manner.
If the Japanese answered back with two or three times the volume of what was said to them, Koreans would surely revise their view of the Japanese at least a little, but do the Japanese have that kind of fighting spirit.
Today’s Koreans think that “the Japanese are inward-looking,” and I do not think that is wrong.
For example, how many Japanese are there who can go out into the world and deliver a persuasive speech in English in rebuttal to Korea.
By gaining the power to answer back, Japan ought to be able to correct their errors.
In the first half of the essay in the previous chapter, there was also the following title.
Self-esteem is running wild.
To the laughable self-esteem of the Koreans,
which has no basis whatsoever…
which is nothing more than the fantasy of a country that has long practiced flunkeyism toward China, resting only on the fact that China is a large country…
there has been added the GHQ-brainwashed mentality of the Asahi and the so-called cultural figures who have moved in step with it,
with communism, Comintern thought, and Marxism all jumbled together,
and on top of that a layer of sham moralism,
forming something that can only be called a bizarre spectacle of the world.
These are people who know only their own provinces and Tokyo, who know only postwar Japan, who merely devour Western books,
and, as I have mentioned many times, have in the true sense scarcely ever set foot in Kyoto, Nara, or Shiga,
that is, they have never done fieldwork in Japan…
they know absolutely nothing of Japan, knowing only their own families and Tokyo.
This childish and foolish sense of self-abasement has become two sides of the same coin,
and in that way Korea’s “bottomless evil” and its evil of “plausible lies” have been further encouraged.
What else can one call it but a spectacle rare even in the world,
that incorrigible people who think it is intelligence to belittle and degrade their own country and to attack their own country and government
have long been called so-called cultural figures.