Originally published on December 5, 2018.
This chapter criticizes the structure of South Korean history education for portraying Japan as “absolute evil” and South Korea as an “absolute victim,” arguing that such anti-Japan education has distorted modern Japan–South Korea relations.
It points to the political order since Syngman Rhee, fabricated historical consciousness, anti-Japan indoctrination, and the hypocrisy of presenting friendship outwardly while spreading hatred through public education, insisting that Japan must no longer fall for such tactics.

2019-04-16
A deceptive posture toward Japan, one that outwardly dissembles while inwardly uses public education to proclaim Japan a devil, cannot be tolerated.
Japan will no longer fall for that trick.

I am republishing here a chapter I originally published on 2018-12-05 under the title:
“The Japan–South Korea relationship depicted by South Korean history education is, so to speak, one of ‘100 percent perpetrators and 100 percent victims,’ of ‘absolute evil and absolute justice.’”
When I was astonished and appalled by the behavior of President Lee Myung-bak in the final stage of his presidency, I asked myself what sort of country South Korea really was, and searched the internet about South Korea and the Korean Peninsula…
In one hour, I understood the reality of the peninsula.
For the first time, I came to know the true nature of South Korea, something I had never understood despite having long subscribed to the Asahi Shimbun and having received a postwar education.
As for North Korea, one need not search at all to know that it is a country of indescribable awfulness.
A little while ago, I found yet another article that represents the true essence of the internet, the greatest library in human history.
What is happening in South Korea now should only make sense once one knows these facts.
In other words, unless one knows these facts, one cannot understand the Koreans…
and that is extremely dangerous for the Japanese.
Just as I personally encountered an evil so great that it led to a grave illness that nearly cost me my life, Japan too had in fact continued for a very long time to be exposed to this evil…
to remain under assault from it.
Not only toward Japan, but in the United States and at the United Nations as their main battlegrounds, they have continued to display that evil.
The truth presented by this laborious work is the true nature of anti-Japan propaganda.
Against Japan, which, under God’s providence, is a country in which the turntable of civilization revolves and which must lead the world together with the United States…
the world has overlooked for seventy years the fact that countries such as those on the Korean Peninsula and China, lands of “bottomless evil” and “plausible lies,” have continued to practice a kind of Nazism under the name of anti-Japan education.
It would not be too much to say that this is the real reason the world remains unstable and full of conflict.
That I…
reluctantly…
appeared in this way bearing The Turntable of Civilization…
was in fact something very important not only for me, of course, and for my readers…
but for Japan and for the world.
What follows is the article I discovered.
It was after reading South Korean history textbooks.
The Japanese were depicted as cold-hearted and inhuman “devils.”
Modern Japan was portrayed as having done nothing to Korea but “massacre and plunder.”

Why Did South Korea Rewrite History? — Considering Its Motives and Background (Part Two)
Yamada Takaaki

The Rhee Syngman era, which marked the true beginning of South Korea’s misfortune.

Now then, let us return to the main thread.
With Japan’s defeat, governing authority over Korea was transferred from the Governor-General’s Office to the United States.
At first, the various factions quarreled over the founding of the state, and the Soviet Union quickly set up its own puppet.
Although the provisional government and the independence army themselves were not recognized, Syngman Rhee personally, having studied in the United States and engaged in lobbying there, was eventually installed as the head of an anti-communist puppet regime.
However, his selfish demand that “Korea be added to the Allied Powers” was rejected.
It was thought that those who had not fought and shed blood had no right to thrust themselves forward.
Therefore, it is simply contrary to fact for Koreans to call themselves a “victorious people” or “members of the Allied nations.”
One cannot help but feel dismay that this man seized dictatorial power as the first president.
The period from Rhee’s return to Korea until his exile was a “dark age,” and it is abnormal that present-day South Koreans lack any memory of it.
In every sense, this Syngman Rhee was the root of all evil, and his era was in fact precisely the “Japanese imperial era” as depicted in South Korean history education.
The first great crime committed by Syngman Rhee was the “Jeju Island Incident,” which was, in essence, the massacre of communists and islanders merely suspected of being communists.
As a result, tens of thousands of civilians were killed, and tens of thousands of others fled to Japan and remained there.
The massacres continued thereafter, and the island population sharply declined.
Similar massacres, though smaller in scale, were also carried out in other regions.
When speaking of Syngman Rhee’s war crimes against Japan, the invasion and seizure of Takeshima, Japanese territory, and the massacre of Japanese fishermen are well known, but in fact, even before that, he tried to invade Tsushima.
He had massed troops at the southern tip of Korea for that purpose when North Korea launched its lightning invasion.
Since he was capable of massacring even his own people without hesitation, it is not difficult to imagine that the South Korean army would have committed a large-scale massacre in Tsushima as well.
When the Korean War broke out, Rhee accelerated his paranoia about internal enemies and ordered the mass execution of those registered with the National Bodo League, an organization meant to reeducate communists and their families.
The number of people massacred by the military and police is not precisely known, but is said to have exceeded one million.
Not only was the matter obscured by the war, but it continued to be concealed under later military regimes as well.
At first, the South Korean forces were driven into the southern part of the peninsula, but with the intervention of the U.S. military they recovered, and four months later had reached the Yalu River on the Chinese-North Korean border.
Yet what ought to have ended with the collapse of North Korea was pushed back once more to the 38th parallel by the intervention of Chinese forces, and the war ultimately continued for three years.
As a result, millions of soldiers and civilians died, and most of the Korean Peninsula was laid waste.
Incidentally, South Korea has never demanded of China any reckoning or confrontation with the past, despite the fact that China prolonged the war and increased the number of victims.
Afterward as well, Syngman Rhee remained in power as a dictator until the middle of 1960.
Rhee purged not only communists but also anyone who opposed him as political criminals, and thoroughly suppressed demonstrations and protest movements.
Koreans who remembered the Japanese period were angered at the time, saying, “Where exactly is the ‘liberation’ in this?
This society is far worse than under Japanese rule.”
Rhee suppressed this movement through terror politics consisting of thought control, systems of informing, and secret police.
Thus, he monitored and repressed pro-Japan thoughts and words, created a divide between generations by causing those who had directly experienced the Japanese era to fall silent out of fear, and implanted “false memories” into children through the media and public education.
During the Pacific War, Korea was not bombed, and there was in effect no conscription there either (except for a small number of conscripts, the war ended before they were sent to the front), and as a “colony” it received extraordinarily favorable treatment, limited to requisitioning of materials and compulsory labor.
As a result, when the war ended, the Japanese mainland had been reduced to ashes with massive war dead, while Korea was almost unscathed.
In other words, after the war the economic and social conditions of Japan and Korea had completely reversed.
Yet by the time Syngman Rhee left power, South Korea had fallen into extreme poverty, and the two had reversed once again.
In the end, Syngman Rhee contributed absolutely nothing to the development of South Korean society or economy, and merely wielded dictatorial power, imposed oppression, massacred his own people in large numbers, and impoverished the country.
Incidentally, the South Korean government still conceals this disgrace, and instead fabricates massacres by the Japanese military that never occurred, teaching children false history.
Would that not make it something like an accomplice?

Why Was a False National History Handed Down?

After Syngman Rhee fled into exile, South Korea was for a time in confusion, but the man who ultimately seized power was Park Chung-hee.
As is well known, he came from the former Japanese military officer corps, normalized Japan–South Korea relations through the conclusion of the Basic Treaty, and obtained enormous funds from Japan.
Park fostered heavy industries such as steel and petrochemicals and expanded social infrastructure, thereby realizing the rapid economic growth known as the “Miracle on the Han River.”
Still, if one has Japanese funding amounting to more than twice the national budget, and a neighbor who, out of a sense of mission, teaches technology and know-how step by step, it would not seem all that difficult to produce such a “miracle.”
Thus South Korea was able, not once but twice, to escape poverty through Japan’s assistance and cooperation.
Yet President Park Chung-hee likewise did not revise the propaganda that cast Japan as absolute evil.
Because he thoroughly suppressed anti-government demonstrations and movements, he became the object of resentment among some citizens.
For a military dictatorship that inevitably generated internal friction, a target onto which people’s hatred and dissatisfaction could be diverted was indispensable.
North Korea or communists were not enough for that purpose.
Indeed, many anti-government people were their sympathizers.
What was needed was an “enemy of the people” unrelated to ideological distinctions.
Perhaps for such political reasons, Park Chung-hee simply inherited the education that demonized Japan.
Moreover, he made all the achievements derived from Japanese economic aid into his own accomplishments, so unlike the public image of him commonly believed in Japan, it is difficult to say he was a very fair-minded person.
Indeed, it seems he even added something extra to public education.
That was the cultivation of pride of the sort that says, “Our people have always been great.”
In other words, he appears to have strengthened a self-exalting view of history (though I note that I have no materials at hand on this point, and this is only hearsay).
But conversely, that also meant degrading Japan as a “culturally backward country.”
For the superiority of one’s own people emerges by comparison with others, and the comparison target could naturally not be China, but ancient and medieval Japan.
South Korean children are taught such things as, “Our ancestors taught the Japanese such-and-such,” or, “In the old days, we were more advanced than Japan.”
Among the advanced cultural elements said to have been transmitted by Korea are rice cultivation, weaving, architecture, Buddhism, paper, and writing in ancient times; pottery-making techniques at the time of Hideyoshi’s invasions; and medicine, Confucian learning, and painting and calligraphy through the Korean missions in the Edo period.
Thus, through comparison with Japan, they come to hold an ethnic sense of superiority, along the lines of “Until the Meiji Restoration, Korea was the more advanced cultural nation,” or “Our ancestors were teachers who civilized the barbaric Japanese.”
Then, because Hideyoshi’s invasion and modern Japan’s invasion are emphasized so heavily, they naturally become enraged that “our kindness was repaid with enmity.”
Thus is completed the foundation of a “strange history education” that cultivates, down to the present day, both a sense of superiority toward Japan and a consciousness of victimhood.
The later presidents Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo, being from the same military academy line as Park, also inherited anti-Japan education.
The reasons were surely much the same as above.
Military regimes inevitably require some target to absorb the people’s hatred.
Chun Doo-hwan, moreover, was a man who from the outset carried out the repression of citizens seen in the Gwangju Incident.
He too wanted to replicate Park’s miracle, and sought to draw enormous economic assistance from Japan.
As a means to that end, he picked quarrels over the textbook issue.
Why would such a man revise anti-Japan education?
In 1988, South Korea at last transitioned to a democratic system.
In principle, freedom of thought and expression was more or less guaranteed.
But by then, through forty years of domestic propaganda, the “false memories” had become completely established as fact, and it was already too late.
South Koreans had completely fused psychologically with the “father of the nation.”
Now the independence activists themselves had become the identity of the Korean people.
In other words, the ordinary people had come to believe that “we courageously fought and defeated the devil called Japanese imperialism,” and because they had become guardians of that myth, overturning it was no longer easy.

“Japan–South Korea Friendship” That Never Existed from the Beginning

Now, it is not that I have had no personal associations with Koreans myself.
If I speak of those experiences, it is that “they do not feel like strangers at all.”
Around me there are people who did business with Koreans and were deceived, cheated, or had payments defaulted on, but fortunately I myself have never had a bad experience.
So personally, I still think of the Koreans I know almost like relatives.
Perhaps the Japanese of a hundred years ago, who devoted themselves to the modernization of Korean society with a somewhat extraordinary degree of goodwill and sense of mission, did so out of feelings like these.
That they “did not seem like strangers,” or that “they looked like long-separated brothers living in miserable conditions,” was perhaps nearer the truth.
Yet even in such personal relationships, I found it strange that even intelligent and gentle Koreans would suddenly change expression when the subject turned to history.
It resembled the way a person abused in childhood suffers from flashbacks.
I learned the reason fifteen years ago, when I read a translated South Korean history textbook.
The Japanese were depicted as cold-hearted and inhuman “devils.”
Modern Japan was portrayed as having done nothing to Korea but “massacre and plunder.”
The lies and fabrications of the South Korean government are merciless to that degree.
I instantly sensed the danger.
Children naturally grow up believing all of it to be fact.
This is equivalent to a “brutal Japan” propaganda even greater than the “brutal Anglo-Americans” propaganda spread by Japan during the war.

The Japan–South Korea relationship depicted by South Korean history education is, so to speak, one of “100 percent perpetrators and 100 percent victims,” of “absolute evil and absolute justice.”
It has become a cheap morality tale of good and evil, the sort of thing a fake hero would devise.
Because Syngman Rhee seized dictatorial power as the first president, this fiction truly became the founding myth, and because its indoctrination has continued to this day, even ordinary South Koreans have become psychologically unified with this falsehood.
South Korea is an abnormal country that has continued as a state for sixty-five years to carry out indoctrination education that implants hatred and prejudice toward a specific people.
What is more, it tries to force upon the Japanese as well these counterfeit notions that contradict the facts, calling them “correct historical awareness.”
Since the whole country believes, in scientific and objective terms, things that are not true, this has already entered the realm of “faith.”
In other words, besides Christian countries, Islamic countries, and Buddhist countries, one should think that there also exists on this earth a fourth kind of country: an “anti-Japan true-faith country.”
South Korea is a cult organization.
Therefore, Japanese who say with a straight face that South Korea is a friendly nation or a partner that shares the same values are either profoundly ignorant, foolishly good-natured, or some kind of operative.
The truth is that it is the most unfriendly of countries, and one with different values.
Those who are pro-Korea, or perhaps subordinated to Korea, are now flustered by South Korea’s “sudden” anti-Japan turn, saying, “Japan and South Korea were supposed to have gotten along so well until now,” or “This is only conflict at the level of politicians and governments; after some time we should surely return to our former friendship.”
There is no medicine for such stupidity.
South Korea was from the beginning this kind of country, and the only reason it has now begun raising one grievance after another is that changes in the situation have made it unnecessary to conceal its true nature any longer.
To begin with, there is a great gulf between what Japanese imagine by Japan–South Korea friendship and what South Koreans mean by it.
The Japanese literally imagine “an equal friendship.”
But among South Koreans the relationship is premised on “100 percent perpetrators and 100 percent victims,” and so when they speak of “friendship” or “cooperation,” it carries the meaning that “the Japanese must properly understand their position as perpetrators.”
To put it another way, it means, “Serve the victims.”
Therefore, whether or not Japan and South Korea need reconciliation is a different dimension of the question, but to believe that it can simply be achieved is naive.
Personal exchanges and dialogue between Japanese and Koreans should certainly be promoted, but one must not place excessive expectations on their effects.
It is rather like leaving untouched the mother body in the rear that continues laying alien eggs one after another, while only defeating the individual creatures attacking on the front line.
For such efforts to have any real effect, the mother body — anti-Japan indoctrination education for children — must first be defeated.
Yet however gravely mistaken it may be, a country’s education is, after all, an internal matter.
If reform is possible, only Koreans can do it.
As for that possibility, I cannot say anything.
Still, in the end it is only an unscientific occultism that legitimizes counterfeits.
If the light of truth is shone upon it, falsehood will gradually dissolve.
But in a sense, that would amount to the collapse of the very national structure of the Republic of Korea.
That is why the government fears the truth of history, effectively controls freedom of thought and speech, and even engages in silencing people.
Seen from another angle, that can also be taken as a desperate last struggle.
Meanwhile, is not the attitude Japan should take already clear?
First, Japan should demand, “Rewrite your history textbooks in accordance with the facts.”
At this stage, this is no longer merely a domestic matter.
South Korea has implanted hatred and prejudice toward Japan in its children while pretending, at the political level, to be a friend and partner.
In this way it may be said to have deceived Japan through a split-personality diplomacy and used it skillfully.
Probably inwardly they had been sticking out their tongues, thinking, “The Japanese are easy to fool.”
But from now on, a deceptive posture toward Japan, one that on the surface says things like, “Japan and South Korea should cooperate with each other,” or “Actually we do not dislike Japan,” while in public education it proclaims Japan a devil, can no longer be accepted.
Japan will no longer fall for that trick.
There is no future for South Koreans who do not face the truth of history.
First, the root must be corrected.
Only then can anything else be discussed.