Published on July 30, 2019. This article introduces Nishioka Tsutomu’s “Monthly Report on the Korean Peninsula” in WiLL and discusses Lee Young-hoon’s Anti-Japanese Tribalism, which criticizes South Korean historiography, university education, the comfort women issue, and wartime labor rulings as products of falsehood. It also examines the claim that South Korea’s universities and judiciary have been shaped by decades of anti-Japanese education and false historical narratives, while criticizing the Asahi Shimbun and pro-Korean voices in Japan.

July 30, 2019.
It is probably a natural consequence that the Asahi Shimbun, which has sent its employees to study internally at such South Korean universities, is in reality a newspaper company that should more correctly be called traitorous and treasonous.
It is probably a natural consequence that the Asahi Shimbun, which has sent its employees to study internally at such South Korean universities, is in reality a newspaper company that should more correctly be called traitorous and treasonous.
To begin with, at the point when someone tries to study in South Korea, it would be more accurate to say that he is a person who understands nothing at all about things.
The following is what I wrote in a chapter published in June 2017 under the title, “I was surprised that he had been a professor at Ritsumeikan University, but I was even more astonished and appalled that this man’s foremost disciple was Hakoda Tetsuya.”
The preceding text is omitted.
Wakamiya Yoshibumi, who even served as chief editorial writer, Kiyota Harufumi, Uemura Takashi, Hakoda Tetsuya, and others all studied internally at Yonsei University.
It is no exaggeration at all to say that Alexis Dudden is the height of low intelligence and evil, and her expression also reveals the foolishness and narrowness of her distorted ideology.
That laughable “Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal,” held from December 7 to 12, 2000, was organized by her and others.
I am truly appalled even by the fact that this queen of anti-Japanese propaganda in the United States derived from South Korea is a university professor, but the time has long since come for people throughout the world to know that she is also proof of the incorrigibility and stupidity of the species called university professors.
The university where she studied was also Yonsei University.
That is why I noticed it immediately.
I realized that Yonsei University is one of the headquarters of anti-Japanese propaganda and one of the headquarters of KCIA activity behind the scenes.
The following text is omitted.
In light of the facts pointed out by Professor Lee, it was not anything so grand, but rather that all South Korean universities were made of anti-Japanese propaganda.
The foolishness of the Asahi Shimbun, the Constitutional Democratic Party, and others, which have continued to praise such a country, has truly reached an extreme, though there are also quite a few fools such as Ishiba Shigeru even within part of the Liberal Democratic Party.
The following is from Monthly Report on the Korean Peninsula, serialized in the monthly magazine WiLL, released on the 26th, by Nishioka Tsutomu, one of the world’s leading experts on the Korean Peninsula.
The title of this month’s issue is “Why Are Koreans Liars?”
It is an essay that not only the Japanese people, but people throughout the world must read.
The other day, on an election-results program, Hashimoto Toru, who is also a lawyer who belonged to the Japan Federation of Bar Associations, a den of anti-Japanese leftists, loudly harangued viewers with an outrageous argument on Japan–South Korea relations.
I harshly criticized it as being lower than toilet paper, and at the same time became convinced that, as he is now, he is not a vessel fit to bear responsibility for national politics.
But this is precisely the kind of essay that a person like him must read with his eyes wide open.
The preceding text is omitted.
South Korean universities are factories of lies.
Meanwhile, in South Korea, conscientious scholars are engaged in a fierce battle in the arena of speech.
I am now writing this manuscript in Seoul, South Korea.
This is because Professor Lee Young-hoon and others, representative conscientious scholars who directly criticize South Korea’s anti-Japanese attitude and whom I introduced in the previous issue, have published a book that presents their arguments in an easy-to-understand form, The Root of the Crisis of the Republic of Korea: Anti-Japanese Tribalism, and its publication event was held on July 17.
In that book, Professor Lee explains as follows why he uses the unfamiliar term “anti-Japanese tribalism” instead of the term “anti-Japanese nationalism.”
“South Korean nationalism is distinguished from the nationalism that arose in the West.
In South Korean nationalism, there is no category of the free and independent individual.
The South Korean nation is itself one group, one authority, and one status.
Therefore, rather, the word tribe is correct.”
On that basis, he makes the following painful self-criticism, saying that South Korean historiography is a hotbed of lies, and that because Koreans have received such education, they have come to tell nothing but lies.
“The fact that the people of this country have made lying a daily habit, and that the politicians of this country use lies as a means of political strife, is most greatly the responsibility of the lying scholarship of this country.
As I see it, the history and sociology of this country are hotbeds of lies.
The universities of this country are factories for manufacturing lies.
I can say that, and be confident that it is not a great mistake.
It began roughly in the 1960s, so already sixty years have passed in that way.
That is why, entering the 2000s, all the people and all the politicians came to lie calmly.”
He then lists the lies in his own field of specialization, South Korean historiography.
“If one lists what kinds of lies South Korean historiography has told from ancient history to modern history, there is no end to it.
The lies are rampant mainly in relation to the history of Japan’s rule over this land in the 20th century.
I will list only a few of the things refuted in this book.
The textbook description that the Government-General seized 40 percent of the country’s land by making it state-owned land through the land survey project was a nonsensical novel.
The textbook claim that rice from colonial Korea was shipped to Japan was the product of ignorance.
The claim that Japanese imperialism mobilized Koreans as laborers during the wartime period and abused them as slaves was a malicious fabrication.
The march of lies reached its peak with the Japanese military comfort women issue.
The common belief that military police and police abducted virgins from the roadside or took women from washing places and dragged them to comfort stations was a blatant lie for which not even one case has been discovered.”
After criticizing historiography this far, he thoroughly criticizes the Supreme Court’s wartime labor compensation ruling of October last year, saying that those lies have even spread to the courts.
“For sixty years, lying scholarship has written lying history and taught it to the younger generation.
The generation that grew up receiving that education has finally become Supreme Court justices, so it is not so strange that the judiciary of this country conducts lying trials.”
The negligence of the Supreme Court justices.
It is a little long, but because it concerns the cause of today’s worsening Japan–South Korea relations, I would like to introduce the main part of Professor Lee’s criticism of the ruling.
“Let us talk about the ruling handed down at the end of October 2018 by the Supreme Court, ordering Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal, which succeeded the company, to pay 100 million won each to four people who had worked at Japan Iron & Steel before liberation from Japanese rule.
The plaintiffs filed the lawsuit almost 20 years ago, and I think they were originally people who went to Japan and brought suit there.
Their persistence in finally winning after repeated losses is itself considerable.
What is the substance of that persistence?
In any case, the Supreme Court, on the premise that Japan’s rule over Korea was illegal, judged that Koreans had been mobilized all the way to Japan for an aggressive war and abused as slaves without being properly paid monthly wages.
The Supreme Court’s written judgment begins with a description of the ‘basic facts’ of the relevant case.
My impression after reading that part was, in a word, ‘This is a lie.’
I do not intend to argue about the legal principles of the written judgment.
I am not a legal expert.
The focus of my judgment is only one thing.
Those ‘basic facts’ are not facts.
No, there is a strong possibility that they are lies.
The Supreme Court did not verify whether the plaintiffs’ claims were facts.
I cannot find such traces in the written judgment.
I want to ask the lofty Supreme Court justices of our country this.
‘Is a trial that does not verify claims that may be lies truly valid?’
Of the four plaintiffs, two responded to recruitment in September 1943 and worked as trainee workers at the company’s Osaka steelworks.
They say that Japan Iron & Steel forcibly saved most of their monthly wages and had the dormitory superintendent keep their passbooks and seals, but that the superintendent never returned the money to the end.
That is the basic content of the damage the plaintiffs claim to have suffered.
As a historian, I am very familiar with this kind of fact.
I have heard many similar cases from many people.
As the written judgment suggests, there is a strong possibility that the two plaintiffs were minors at the time.
There is a strong possibility that the superintendent was not an employee of Japan Iron & Steel, but a Korean who was the owner of a workers’ camp or dormitory where laborers lived together.
They were generally Koreans.
Only that way could communication and control be possible.
Later, the superintendent returned to Wonsan together with the plaintiffs.
This fact supports the following inference.
I think the superintendent may have been the plaintiffs’ guardian or protector who accompanied them from the time of departure.
My argument is as follows.
The claim that Japan Iron & Steel did not pay wages to the plaintiffs does not hold.
The written judgment itself, which discusses forced savings, proves that point.
If the wages were not conveyed to the plaintiffs, the culprit was the superintendent.
Therefore, whether the superintendent actually did that cannot be known unless the superintendent is investigated.
The superintendent may have been sending monthly wages to the plaintiffs’ homes on behalf of the plaintiffs, who were minors.
In short, the relevant case is a civil case between the plaintiffs and the superintendent.
That is my view after reading the written judgment.
But did the Supreme Court summon and investigate the superintendent?
The superintendent must have died long ago.
If so, does the lawsuit stand?
Let me make my argument clear.
I am not denying the plaintiffs’ claims.
Rather, I am saying that whether they are true cannot be confirmed.
That is the truth.
Although only this degree of fact is known, South Korea’s Supreme Court pursued the responsibility of Japan Iron & Steel.
Supreme Court justices are not historians.
They are nothing more than legal experts who know nothing about the actual conditions of the wartime period at that time.
If so, should they not have called related experts and heard reference testimony?
However, they were so ignorant about the reality of that time that they did not even feel the need to do so.
They did not doubt the plaintiffs’ claims, which had a strong possibility of being lies.
That, too, was because they had also received lying education since childhood.”
I am deeply moved by the conscience and courage of Professor Lee, who, under his real name, makes such a calm and fact-based criticism of an anti-Japanese ruling in the arena of speech.
Anti-Japanese Tribalism, written by Professor Lee and others with the desperate feeling that the country would perish unless they fought lies, is said to have sold out 18,000 copies in 10 days after release, with an additional 10,000 copies being printed.
Professor Lee disclosed the tragic motive for why he wrote the book Anti-Japanese Tribalism as follows.
“All kinds of lies are created and spread because of anti-Japanese tribalism.
If this is left as it is, the advancement of this country will be impossible.
Far from advancing, it will regress.
A culture, politics, scholarship, and trials of lies will lead this country to ruin.
This book is my charge, staking everything I have, against anti-Japanese tribalism, that enormous camp of cultural power.”
I want to continue watching whether the battle of Professor Lee and others in this arena of speech will change South Korean society.
This essay continues.