Published on July 14, 2019.
Prompted by the introduction of Masayuki Takayama’s latest book, the author discusses the history of the Korean Peninsula, the yangban system, the status of women, slave-like structures of domination, and the essence of anti-Japanese propaganda surrounding the comfort women issue. He critically examines the historical differences between Japan and the Korean Peninsula, the Japanese view of slavery as seen in the example of Yasuke, and the structures of domination that he argues remain in Korean society today.

July 14, 2019.
In the course of introducing the latest book by Masayuki Takayama, the one and only journalist in the postwar world, the passage at the beginning appeared.
“Until the twentieth century, when Japan went to Korea, women over there did not have names.”
In the course of introducing the latest book by Masayuki Takayama, the one and only journalist in the postwar world, the passage at the beginning appeared.
When President Lee Myung-bak was in the final stage of his presidency, I witnessed his sudden landing on Takeshima and his statements that His Majesty the Emperor should come to Korea and apologize, and I wondered, what kind of country is Korea?
Or what kind of people are Koreans?
As I have already written, I then searched for the first time on the Internet, which I have repeatedly described as the greatest library in human history, and in just one hour I understood the history and reality of Korea, that is, the Korean Peninsula.
I take pride in believing that I was the first person to state clearly to the world that what characterizes the Korean Peninsula is the yangban.
When I learned the nature of the yangban, I immediately realized that it was the prototype of the strange practice of mikajime-ryō, or protection money, among Japanese yakuza.
That is because almost all Japanese yakuza are Korean residents in Japan.
Not working oneself, but extorting others and living off others…this is a tradition that continues uninterrupted not only among yakuza, but also among politicians on the Korean Peninsula…and, in essence, among the astonishing number of naturalized Korean opposition-party political operators in Japan’s opposition parties who are the same as they are.
For a recent example, it is obvious if one looks at the behavior of Kim Jong-un and his party at the U.S.–North Korea summit in Singapore.
They did not even have an airplane that could safely take them to Singapore, and they did not even have the money to pay for the party’s lodging expenses, yet they shamelessly stayed at the finest hotel.
Their behavior is to continue nuclear development calmly while not only oppressing the people but driving them to the brink of starvation.
Merely speaking dissatisfaction with the government in casual gossip by the well gets one taken to a correctional camp, tortured, and in the end killed.
Some years ago, when a report and recommendation concerning North Korea’s extremely severe human-rights violations were adopted, I was astonished when I saw the torture instruments that were revealed.
The reason was that they were exactly the same as the tools I had learned about in one hour when I discovered the reality of the yangban…the tools with which, when the people could not provide the money or food demanded by them, they were brought to the yangban mansions, confined, and tortured.
Today, now, in this chapter, all Japanese citizens and people throughout the world must learn the real truth.
Until the twentieth century, when Japan went to Korea, women on the Korean Peninsula did not have names.
On the Korean Peninsula, the king and the yangban reigned, and all the other people were members of discriminated classes.
…Even scholars were so.
Women were the private property of the yangban, that is, slaves.
That is why women did not have names.
The yangban, so to speak, treated women as objects.
Not only were they made into sexual playthings of the master; they were also humiliated by the master’s wife, who was jealous of that fact, in ways such as having sticks inserted into their private parts, tortured to death, and thrown into the Han River…and the yangban received no punishment at all.
Whenever the river rose, those corpses would be caught on branches along the riverbank…that was the everyday reality of the Korean Peninsula until Japan annexed it.
In other words, the Korean Peninsula was a country in which the majority of the people were slaves.
What about Japan, on the other hand?
Japan is a nation extremely rare in the world, indeed it is no exaggeration to say unique, in that it had no slaves and hated the very concept of having slaves.
This is obvious if one searches Wikipedia for “Yasuke,” but I will excerpt the opening.
Yasuke, whose birth and death dates are unknown, was a black man who came to Japan during the Sengoku period, and as a slave owned by missionaries, he was presented as a gift to the Sengoku daimyo Oda Nobunaga, but Nobunaga took a liking to him and took him into service as one of his retainers.
Omission.
On February 23 of Tenshō 9, or March 27, 1581, Valignano brought him along as a slave when he had an audience with Nobunaga.
In The Chronicle of Lord Nobunaga, it is written that “a black monk came from the Christian country,” and his age is described as about twenty-six or twenty-seven, with “the strength of ten men” and “a body black like an ox.”
After Nobunaga was convinced that his skin was truly black, he showed great interest in this black man, negotiated with Valignano to obtain him, named him “Yasuke,” raised him to the formal status of a samurai, and decided to keep him close at hand, according to the Jesuit annual report on Japan; it is said that Nobunaga liked Yasuke and intended eventually to make him a lord, or castle lord.
Also, according to Kaneko Hiraku, a manuscript believed to be a copy of an autograph manuscript handed down in the Kaga Ōta family, descendants of Ōta Gyūichi, the author of The Chronicle of Lord Nobunaga, and held in the Sonkeikaku Bunko, contains a description saying that this black man, Yasuke, was given a private residence and a short sword, and at times served as a tool-bearer.
It is no exaggeration to say that from ancient times, to a degree incomprehensible to the world outside Japan, Japan was a true democratic nation, and the Japanese were a rare people who did not possess the sense of treating others as slaves.
The lawyer at Rikkyo University who had held an important post in the Japan Federation of Bar Associations went all the way to the United Nations many times, and regarding the comfort women issue, which The Asahi Shimbun had spread throughout the world by relying on the lies of Yoshida Seiji, and which lawyers such as Mizuho Fukushima seized upon as an ideal material for attacking the Japanese government and extorting money from it, and to which North Korean spies in South Korea then attached themselves, he said, “They were not comfort women; they were sex slaves.”
This lawyer, who boasted in an interview article in The Sekai Nippo that he himself had made the term “sex slave” take root, might in fact be someone with the DNA of the Korean Peninsula, which, until Japan annexed it, was, without any exaggeration, a dreadful slave-system state, might he not?
The reason is that, without even bringing up the example of Nobunaga, a genuine Japanese person would never conceive of such an idea as “sex slaves.”
That this manner of turning others into slaves still remains in Korea today is brilliantly revealed by Murotani Katsumi, one of the commentators who knows the reality of Korea best, in his serialized column “The Shape of the Neighboring Country” in this month’s issue of the monthly magazine HANADA.
His essay, too, is required reading for the Japanese people and for people throughout the world.
When they learn how much evil lies behind the anti-Japanese propaganda that the country of “bottomless evil” and “plausible lies” continues to carry out all over the world, the fools who call themselves intellectuals and have taken it seriously will, before going to hell, come to know their own foolishness so deeply that they will wish to crawl into a hole if there is one.
I will introduce this from the next chapter onward.