Published on August 8, 2019.
A reposting of chapters originally published on November 3, 2018, and July 25, 2018.
This essay focuses on the fact that the Chinese and South Korean governments never informed their own people about the enormous aid Japan had provided to China and South Korea, and questions the fiction of “Japan-China friendship” and “future-oriented Japan-South Korea relations.”

2019-08-08
In such a state of affairs, it is astonishing that the political hacks and the mass media, led by Asahi, have continued to speak of Japan–China friendship and a future-oriented Japan–South Korea relationship.
This is a chapter I published on 2018-11-03 under the title, “At the same time, I am astonished by the ingratitude of Koreans, who continue to repay such great favors with enmity.”
It is a re-republication of a chapter published on 2018-07-25.
＊Just like the Chinese government, the South Korean government has told its people absolutely nothing about this obvious fact, so almost all of the people must surely know nothing about it.
Above all, I myself, a Japanese citizen, knew absolutely nothing about it until I found this article online, so most Japanese citizens must also have known nothing about it.
In such a state of affairs, it is astonishing that the political hacks and the mass media, led by Asahi, have continued to speak of Japan–China friendship and a future-oriented Japan–South Korea relationship.
I had subscribed to and read Asahi Shimbun carefully for an extremely long time until August four years ago, so I can state this with certainty: I never once read this article in Asahi’s pages, nor did I ever see it on NHK, not to mention the commercial television stations that are their subsidiaries.
I did, however, see more than enough of the theory that Japan was evil and the Japanese military was evil.＊
It is not merely that one is dumbfounded upon seeing this fact.
There must be countless Japanese people who would want to hurl the words of Jiro Yamaguchi, one of their representative players—“I will cut you down”—precisely at the stupidity of Japan’s political hacks, who continued to provide such enormous aid, and at Asahi Shimbun and the others who led them in that direction, as well as at the so-called human-rights lawyers and so-called scholars.
At the same time, I am astonished by the ingratitude of Koreans, who continue to repay such great favors with enmity.
Recently, among the words of a great figure produced by Okinawa in the Meiji era that I published, I believe the great pioneer Iha pointed out “ingratitude” as a defect of Okinawans.
There is an essay by Iha Fuyu, the father of “Okinawan studies,” titled “The Greatest Defect of Okinawans” (Meiji 42, included in Old Ryukyu, Iwanami Bunko, 2000).
There, Iha points out that it is “the tendency to easily forget favors,” and states that “this must have been caused by circumstances over several hundred years.”
The phrase “easily forget favors” here means something like following whoever is strong at the time and easily betraying those whom one had followed before.
Omission.
Iha, who majored in linguistics at Tokyo Imperial University, demonstrated that Okinawa and the mainland are of the same lineage in language, ethnicity, culture, and customs.
These form the foundation of today’s Okinawan studies.
The people of Okinawa should, under no circumstances, become people equivalent to the Koreans described below.
After all, Okinawa has continued to receive the largest amount of local allocation tax among Japan’s forty-seven prefectures.
If these astronomical aid funds to China and South Korea had been allocated to strengthening Japan’s national land, not a single Japanese citizen would have had to die in a disaster.
The same thing can be said to the people of Okinawa, and the people of Okinawa should once sit in deep thought and understand this.
ODA from Japan to South Korea ※Excluding the 500 million dollars paid by Japan to South Korea under the 1965 Treaty on Basic Relations between Japan and the Republic of Korea.
The following is a continuation of the previous chapter.