This article republishes a passage originally posted on October 7, 2015.
Drawing on an essay by Abe Nangyu published in the monthly magazine Seiron, it examines how the myth of “forced mobilization” was formed and amplified through GHQ’s preferential treatment of Koreans, the Kim Hi-ro incident, and the distortions of postwar Japanese discourse.
It is an important piece for reconsidering the structure of fiction that became embedded in Japanese society through issues surrounding resident Koreans, illegal entry, Chongryon, and the role of progressive intellectuals.

2019-04-21
By giving preferential treatment to Koreans over Japanese, they stirred up ethnic conflict, used it as a breakwater against Japanese resistance to the Occupation policy, and sought to govern the military occupation more smoothly.

The following is a passage I posted on October 7, 2015, under the title:
Since there is no further space to print any serious essays, there is no way it could be conveying the truth.

This month’s issue of the magazine Sound Argument is again filled with truths that people who live by subscribing to the Asahi or the Mainichi, and watching only the news programs of TV Asahi or TBS, can never understand.
And yet the price is only 780 yen.
By contrast, the Asahi, which fills about half of its limited pages with advertisements no different from those of a sports paper, still charges about 5,000 yen a month.

The following is from pages 178 to 187 of an important work by the Korea problem researcher Abe Nangyū.
Mr. Abe Nangyū.
Born in 1939 in Fukuoka Prefecture.
Graduated from Kogakuin University.
He served as a senior researcher at the former Agency of Industrial Science and Technology under the old Ministry of International Trade and Industry, and at the National Chemical Laboratory for Industry.
After retiring in 2000, he served until 2003 as head of the Tsukuba administrative office of the Chemical Technology Strategy Promotion Organization.
His specialty is mine and industrial pollution treatment technology.
His books include An Outline of the Tsukuba Science City Years, and his co-authored works include The Military Industrialization of North Korea and A Study of Japan–North Korea Relations after the War.
He is currently preparing to establish the “Museum of Trade Materials with the Communist Bloc.”

Readers should notice that his painstaking work also proves the correctness of my own arguments one hundred percent.
All bold emphasis other than the title is mine.

World Heritage Defiled by Chinese and Korean Anti-Japan Agitation
The Past of Resident Koreans Hidden by the False “Forced Mobilization” Theory
Why Was the Myth of Forced Mobilization Created?
The People Who Crossed the Genkai Sea after the War

As a historical issue between Japan and Korea, “wartime requisition” has emerged following the issue of the so-called comfort women of the Japanese military.
It was once called “forced mobilization” and was remembered as an “atrocity of Imperial Japan.”
Because the actual circumstances have gradually been clarified and the image of “atrocity” has been denied, fewer people now call it “forced mobilization,” and it is more often referred to as “forced labor” or similar terms.
In any case, the reason wartime requisition remains a source of conflict between Japan and Korea is that the memory of this equation of “forced mobilization = atrocity” remains deeply rooted.

In 1968, at a snack bar in Shizuoka Prefecture, Kim Hi-ro, a second-generation resident Korean in Japan, shot dead two men including a debt-collecting gangster, and then barricaded himself in a ryokan at Sumatakyō Onsen in the same prefecture.
When Kim, as a condition for releasing the hostages, demanded an apology from an active-duty police officer who had made discriminatory remarks against resident Koreans, the media sensationally took up the case during the standoff as part of the “Korean discrimination issue.”
Within Japan, activist groups and those styling themselves intellectuals began to support Kim Hi-ro.
And although Kim had killed two people with a rifle, he escaped the death penalty in court.
The incident had a major impact on the later movement among resident Koreans in Japan.
The greatest of these effects was that a myth was created:
“Resident Koreans have always been discriminated against.
And at the root of that discrimination lay Japan’s prewar ‘forced mobilization.’”
It was propaganda promoting the image that they had been brought to Japan in the same way that Black people had been taken from Africa to America as slaves.

Was the background of the Kim Hi-ro incident really a “discrimination issue”?
It has generally been said that Japanese looked down upon Koreans, but in postwar Japan after the dissolution of the Empire of Japan, the U.S. Occupation forces, that is, GHQ, adopted a policy of preferential treatment toward Koreans.
By giving preferential treatment to Koreans over Japanese, they stirred up ethnic conflict, used it as a breakwater against Japanese resistance to the Occupation policy, and sought to govern the military occupation more smoothly.
This was one of the standard methods often seen in Western colonial rule, where they facilitated governance by encouraging ethnic conflict.
I believe that this deliberately stirred-up “ethnic friction” encouraged Kim Hi-ro’s line of argument.

At the time the Empire was dissolved, of the nearly two million Koreans then living in Japan, about 1.6 million returned home.
By the end of 1946, there were only around 400,000 resident Koreans left in Japan.
Yet by 1959, when the “repatriation movement” to North Korea began, that number had increased to 600,000.
Needless to say, those were only the public figures.
GHQ’s preferential treatment policy toward Koreans, which encouraged ethnic conflict, did not merely cause Koreans who aimed to return to the Korean Peninsula to remain in Japan.
Rather, it created the conditions for a reverse flow back into Japan.
It is impossible for a population to increase by 1.5 times in so short a period.
During this time, about 60,000 people were arrested for illegal entry.
It has been pointed out that for every 60,000, there were three times as many illegal entrants who were not arrested.
That would amount to approximately 200,000, and numerically it matches the difference between 600,000 and 400,000.
Yet the meaning of this fact — that among the 600,000 resident Koreans in Japan, 200,000 were illegal entrants — has hardly been treated as a serious issue.

The Fiction of “Forced Mobilization” Admitted Even by the Man Who Named It
That is also because the image has become fixed that resident Koreans in Japan are people who were “forcibly mobilized.”
The publication that triggered this was the 1962 work by the resident Korean historian Pak Kyŏng-sik, On the Forced Mobilization of Korean Laborers during the Pacific War.
As for the term “forced mobilization” used there, Pak Kyŏng-sik himself said he had been inspired by materials on the investigation of the “forced mobilization of Chinese,” published in the May 1960 issue of Sekai, the magazine of Iwanami Shoten.
Yamada Shōji, a researcher of the massacre of Koreans at the time of the Great Kantō Earthquake, pointed out on this basis that “forced mobilization” was not Pak’s original coinage, but was probably borrowed because the term “forced mobilization of Chinese” was already known.
(omitted)
Pak Kyŏng-sik’s On the Forced Mobilization of Korean Laborers during the Pacific War was published by Korea University.
Regarding the term “forced mobilization” used at that time, the resident Korean writer Kim Tal-su declared that it was indeed a coinage by Pak Kyŏng-sik.
On the other hand, in his final years Pak reportedly argued obstinately to Yamada that “forced mobilization is not limited to transport by physical restraint” (In Memory of Pak Kyŏng-sik).
These words of Pak Kyŏng-sik make clear that Pak himself, the man who coined the term “forced mobilization” for Koreans, acknowledged that there were no Koreans who had come to Japan through physical violence.
If travel undertaken of one’s own will under the “imperialization ideology” counts as “forced mobilization,” then the one hundred thousand people who crossed to North Korea under the influence of the repatriation campaign promoted by Chongryon as “North Korea is a paradise on earth” would also have to be counted as victims of “forced mobilization.”
Pak Kyŏng-sik stated that he himself was not “a Korean who had been forcibly mobilized,” yet in 1965 he published Records of the Forced Mobilization of Koreans (Miraisha).
Today, that work of Pak’s is understood to have established the term “forced mobilization” firmly within Japanese society.
By the way, where did the 200,000 illegal entrants mentioned earlier disappear to?
At the very least, the existence of illegal entrants was widely known until the mid-1970s.
While one hundred thousand crossed the sea through the repatriation movement to North Korea, the number of illegal entrants was increasing, and they were also expected to serve as labor supporting the base layer of industry in the Hanshin region.
Many Japanese today have forgotten that many resident Koreans were illegal entrants.
In that process there was the Kim Hi-ro incident.
One could also say this was because Chongryon launched a movement in response to claims surrounding Kim Hi-ro and the incident, such as:
“Because resident Koreans have been discriminated against, his crime should be reduced by one degree.”
That movement consisted of Chongryon forming the “Investigative Committee into the Truth of the Forced Mobilization of Koreans,” in order to promote clarification of “forced mobilization,” described as a “dark side” of Japan’s modern history.
This movement began in Hokkaidō and Kyushu in 1973, and with the cooperation of Japanese scholars and civic activists trapped in a masochistic view of history, many investigative reports were issued.
And in Chongryon (General Association of Korean Residents in Japan, published in 2005), which commemorated the 50th anniversary of its founding, Chongryon came to place emphasis on “forced mobilization” in explaining why Koreans live in Japan, yet it is common knowledge that even among Chongryon’s leadership there were illegal entrants.

If They Are “Bad Japanese,” Is It Permissible to Kill Them?
In the Kim Hi-ro incident, progressive intellectuals who said they had been “shocked by Kim Hi-ro’s appeal” began to move.
One of them was the philosopher Shunsuke Tsurumi, who passed away not long ago and had spoken of wanting “to be on the losing side.”
But I found it highly questionable whether a man capable of killing people with a rifle could really be called one of “the losing side.”
Among those who joined the “Association to Consider Kim Hi-ro” were figures then regarded as progressive men of culture: Masato Ara, Shōzō Inoue, Akihira Sugiura, Kanji Seki, Kenzō Nakajima, Takashi Hatada, and Ichirō Hariu.
According to the afterword to Kim Hi-ro’s Court Statement by the French literature scholar Michihiko Suzuki (Professor Emeritus of Dokkyo University, published by Hyakuni Shobō in 1970), the eight coordinators of the Kim Hi-ro Trial Countermeasures Committee were Shinichirō Ōsawa, Hideki Kajimura, Hiroshi Kubo, Katsumi Satō, Minoru Satomi, Michihiko Suzuki, Osamu Mitsuhashi, and Setsuko Miyata.
I myself met three of them — Hideki Kajimura, Katsumi Satō, and Setsuko Miyata — at the Japan–Korea Research Institute in Mejiro.

The murder case committed by Kim Hi-ro was viewed severely and criticized by people such as Tsuneari Fukuda, Yūji Aida, and Renzaburō Shibata.
At the time, however, Japanese who made critical comments about Kim Hi-ro were in the minority.
Those three, including Fukuda, were accused of not taking the Kim Hi-ro incident seriously, of making light of it, and of distorting it.
The fundamental idea behind defending Kim Hi-ro’s murders is symbolized by the following words.
“Certainly, Kim Hi-ro killed two people.
And you say that murder is an absolute evil.
But then what about the acts of Japanese who took the lives of countless Koreans?”
(From the afterword to Kim Hi-ro’s Court Statement)
The “you” in that quotation probably refers to Fukuda Tsuneari, Aida Yūji, Shibata Renzaburō, and others like them.

Suzuki anticipated that “you” would answer, “That was a prewar matter, something done by a previous generation.
There is no reason for me to bear responsibility for it,” and then he responded as follows.
“However, I do not believe that qualification has been granted even to you.
For we ourselves are precisely the ones who have inherited this grim history and are reproducing it.”

Michihiko Suzuki was born in 1929, so he must have retained memories from immediately after the defeat, and memories of Koreans running wild as well.
What Kim Hi-ro denounced at Sumatakyō was the discriminatory remark of a police officer:
“You Koreans come to Japan and never do anything decent!”
But that was a phrase wrung out of the police officer’s own life experience.
And it was also words that overlapped with the life of Kim Hi-ro, who was enraged by them.
Until the moment when Kim Hi-ro killed two Japanese and barricaded himself in Sumatakyō, he had spent the prewar years in a juvenile reformatory for theft, and the postwar years repeating theft, fraud, and robbery, moving back and forth between prison and Japanese society.
That is precisely why the police officer’s words must have struck him so deeply.
On the other hand, the police officer who uttered such words had lived a life of maintaining public order by cracking down on Koreans who had behaved arrogantly from immediately after the defeat.

Did the progressive intellectuals who supported Kim Hi-ro have no feeling of sympathy for the police officer who had stood face to face with such people and protected public order in Japan, or for the two Japanese who were suddenly shot dead?
Were they saying that because they were gangsters engaged in moneylending and collection, they deserved to be killed?
It is said that one of the two men who were killed was not in fact a member of any gangster organization.